Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
Communism as drafted by 19th and 20th century thinkers will never work, predicated on the idea that labor is inherently undesirable and will not be performed by humans without immediate incentive.
We will need to rethink our approach towards communism with consideration for the growing spread of automation. Like it or not, automation is going to lead to the end of capitalism when the majority of jobs we have today are rendered obsolete and the unemployed masses are forced to subsist through some sort of UBI.
The goal is to keep the automation out of the hands of billionaires, however. If a society begins to approach post scarcity, which will finally render capitalism obsolete, the oligarchs will do whatever they can to re-engineer scarcity and bring us back to feudalism before they’d ever consider giving power to the people.
I would say a good argument for communism is the worsening side effects of capitalism. These problems simply cannot be fixed in a capitalist framework because they require global cooperation and capitalism is based on competition. Problems like over exploitation of natural resources (overfishing, carbon emissions) and the failure of the market to adequately provide services for which there is a fixed level of demand (housing, education, healthcare. The scale of college and medical debt is getting ridiculous). Many other problems like these.
The solution is more democracy and yes common ownership of the means of production. People are just allergic to the specific term of class struggle. but it doesn’t change the meaning - the ownership/ruling class benefits from the status quo even as everything gets worse. They will not give up control without a fight, and as you said they will use every tool, from propaganda and legislation up to direct violence to maintain that control.
They were fixed in the past. Trust-busting, Keynesian Economic Policy, taxing the wealthy.
It’s just we’ve been stuck in the Reagan’s supply side economics bullshit for decades now. The problems we’re seeing now are because of proven economic solutions being abandoned because the wealthy have confused the voting public to think that we shouldn’t go back to policies that worked for over six decades.
Automation has been going on since the dawn of the industrial revolution. You see a robot doing a job a person used to do and get excited and think it’s going to be the end of the need for labour.
But look at an a excavator. People used to have to dig everything with shovels. But an excavator can do the job of hundreds of people with shovels. Excavators have been around a long time, but didn’t lead the elimination of all work everywhere.
Yes, “the majority of jobs we have today” will be made obsolete just like how having a big crew of strong people to dig a canal (or whatever) was made obsolete. But then there were new jobs to replace those ones.
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I love the culture books too but c’mon man.
First, how do you imagine transferring power to an AI overlord would sit with the people who currently have all the proverbial guns in our current society. That’s the problem we need to solve first.
Second, who in our society would you trust to build an AI up to the task of single handedly managing world affairs? How would you even test something so superhuman? Not to mention that we’re not close to superhuman, we’re already pushing the limits of our tech building a chatbot that can’t stay coherent for more than a couple paragraphs. The tech just isn’t there yet and not within orders of magnitude.
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