Is worldwide "communism" inevitable?

[foolsguinea]

@Werekoala

The only way that we can reach that level of advancement is for at least SOME of the rich to “win” - factory workers and dirt farmers don’t invent replicatiors. You want to just roll over and say “tea, Earl Grey, hot” and have it appear? Then somewhere in the belly of that machine are parts invented, made, and sold by some corporations, somewhere.

Star Trek is claptrap fantasy. But your point is confused. “The rich” are not co-extensive with “the inventors” and technology is not the same as corporate power.

And let’s not get into the whole “well once you have ONE replicator, you can make as many more as you want” argument. Even then, someone will have control over the power that runs them, and so at the very least you’ll still have someone at the top of the pyramid selling you the power for you to enjoy your miraculously produced morning spliff.

So in the far future of near-Communistic bliss, those who have the power will have the Power.

Yeah, most likely. (Or it would be, if replicators were physically possible, which they’re not.) If we get a huge infusion of energy from say, a Dyson Ring, we may well go back to state capitalism or feudalism or something. Someone has to administer society as a whole to achieve optimum production; the union of religion, state, and property ownership is a logical approach. And that might look sort of “communist” to an individualist, I guess.

[Werekoala]

@foolsguinea

Yeah, most likely. (Or it would be, if replicators were physically possible, which they’re not.) If we get a huge infusion of energy from say, a Dyson Ring, we may well go back to state capitalism or feudalism or something. Someone has to administer society as a whole to achieve optimum production; the union of religion, state, and property ownership is a logical approach. And that might look sort of “communist” to an individualist, I guess.

Well if you have replicators (for the sake of argument) that can produce everything you need to survive, even to the point of luxury items and whatnot, you don’t really need “production” as such. So would you even need a government to oversee it?

[foolsguinea]

I’m assuming the power is collected in off-planet installations, built by a grand cooperative effort, that have to be carefully managed and maintained.

Maybe, once a ring of solar power collectors is in place, we could do that in a less obviously regulated way for a little while, before the whole thing falls apart and becomes space junk. But building it is going to be a big mission.

[del]And absent a Dyson Ring, power will be scarce post-petroleum, and control over it will make men kings, then gods. We live in a sophisticated age, where boss, landlord, ruler, and god can all be different. That’s not necessary. It’s not necessarily normal.[/del] Eh, never mind, typing that out I see my fallacy. Yes, the sophistication of “freedom of religion” may continue, all that nonsense. Humanity loves this kind of invented social complexity.

[eburacum45]

@Der_Trihs

Or, in such a society the government can simply provide the energy and basic feedstock for the replicators. It’s not like classic communism where the sheer complexity of running an economy was too much for a government to handle well; rationing out energy and a few feedstocks is far simpler.

I’d like to think that will be the case, but in the near term replicators (read 3D printers) will require expensive feedstock (read specially prepared 3D printing materials) which will be supplied in painfully tiny quantities just like printing ink is today. To successfully manufacture things using 3D printing requires the feedstock to be prospected, mined and processed in a very expensive fashion.

To get a real post-scarcity economy we need not just replicators but automatic feedstock foragers, which will probably need to be remarkably sophisticated devices. Once we start relying on ultra-sophisticated automation to base our imaginary economy on, we have to start thinking about whether we need to start compensating those ultra-sophisticated automatons in a suitable fashion.

Basically the next step will be ‘equal pay for feedstock forager robots’, and we are back to square one.

[BrainGlutton]

@John_Mace

Now, “a better life” is certainly subjective, but I don’t think the rest of that is.

Put it this way, then: If the working poor have to work more and take two jobs each just to avoid homelessness, they’re getting poorer. If a middle-class family needs both spouses to work to maintain the same lifestyle a one-earner family could have a generation ago, they’re getting poorer. If you have to run a Red Queen’s Race, faster and faster just to stay where you are, you’re getting poorer.

[Der_Trihs]

@eburacum45

To get a real post-scarcity economy we need not just replicators but automatic feedstock foragers, which will probably need to be remarkably sophisticated devices. Once we start relying on ultra-sophisticated automation to base our imaginary economy on, we have to start thinking about whether we need to start compensating those ultra-sophisticated automatons in a suitable fashion.

Basically the next step will be ‘equal pay for feedstock forager robots’, and we are back to square one.

That doesn’t seem likely. We already know the minimum intelligence it takes for resource extraction from raw material; the intelligence of a tree. Such resource extractors may need a sophisticated design, but that’s not the same as being smart.

[HoneyBadgerDC]

I would like to see the goverment go into serious competion with 3 industries, healthcare, education and housing. Employ those who have had a hard time finding decent employment and then be forced to compete to stay alive. All three industries to be big into training and employee development.

[John_Mace]

@BrainGlutton

Put it this way, then: If the working poor have to work more and take two jobs each just to avoid homelessness, they’re getting poorer. If a middle-class family needs both spouses to work to maintain the same lifestyle a one-earner family could have a generation ago, they’re getting poorer. If you have to run a Red Queen’s Race, faster and faster just to stay where you are, you’re getting poorer.

Put it this way: Are you saying that the average American had it better 50 years ago? If so, I’d like to see a cite, not a hypothetical.

[Sitnam]

@WillFarnaby

The only form of communism that is both productive and not tyrannical is extremely localized. So no, international communism is far from inevitable, but most likely impossible.

I consider the modern corporate world and most businesses paying salaried employees essentially communism in action, at least in how they deal with their employees.

Give everyone the prescribed vacation time. Assign a general fixed salary that rarely changes above cost of living adjustments. Provide benefits like healthcare and retirement sponsored and indeed determined by the health of the company. Capitalism only happens for the common joe when they apply for a new job.

No one reading this working in a cooperation not owned by them is getting paid what they’re really worth, it’s a boon to half and detriment to half…more or less.

[Trinopus]

@John_Mace

Put it this way: Are you saying that the average American had it better 50 years ago? If so, I’d like to see a cite, not a hypothetical.

Better off in some ways, but still having a smaller share in the country’s overall wealth, income, and product. Fifty years ago, we were bigger “shareholders.”

Lately, we’re moving more in the direction of sharecroppers.

There was a brief period, in the 90’s and ought’s, when it looked like pension plans might be becoming the majority holders of all stock market shares. That would have been an interesting approach to “The workers owning the means of production.” However, the transfer of wealth away from the middle class effectively scotched this.

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

@foolsguinea

Hahahahaha no, OP. We are going in the other direction.

As scarcity increases pressure on the population, even the level of civil rights enjoyed by the previous generation will come to seem utopian. In the face of massive privation, elites will push the excess population into ruin and into war in the faint hope of holding onto their own comfort.

Considering wars between great powers are disaster to neoliberal capitalism, I doubt it. Its not in their self-interest

You can’t repeal the laws of political nature.

…OK, I’d like to be wrong. But with the RCC pushing high birthrates, I’m afraid it’s only getting worse right now.

[/QUOTE]

And increasingly Roman Catholics, listen to the Church of Rome’s proscription on birth control.

@Der_Trihs

Except that under capitalism the people who create wealth don’t profit from it; the people with capital do.

People with capital create further wealth by taking on the risks associated with the new ventures. And in most cases innovators and such are well rewarded by capitalism.

Capitalis is anti-social reform. The ultimate goal of any good capitalist is a society of masters, slaves, and forced consumers. They want goods produced at a minimal cost for themselves, to be sold to people who have to buy them at the price the capitalists demands. Company towns and slave plantations and the like. And the “structural change” in question is the rich diverting more and more wealth to themselves and making themselves more and more above the law.

:rolleyes:

[eburacum45]

@Der_Trihs

We already know the minimum intelligence it takes for resource extraction from raw material; the intelligence of a tree. Such resource extractors may need a sophisticated design, but that’s not the same as being smart.

Trees are very slow at doing what they do; if we want resource extraction on a scale that could satisfy the demands of a world-wide post-scarcity economy, we’ll need a world-wide forest of these artificial trees.

A vast undertaking, and one that will need a large workforce of forest management experts. Seems likely that the post-scarcity future won’t be a life of leisure, after all.

The ‘artificial trees’ idea is, of course, already out there, and shouldn’t be dismissed as a wonky metaphor; see, for instance BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | 'Artificial trees' to cut carbon

The ultimate aim is to produce a broad range of commodities from ambient sunlight and other power sources, with little or no cost to the consumer. Note that we already have a free supply of oxygen on this planet, which has been manufactured by self-replicating devices called plants over the last half a gigayear or so. There is no reason to expect that oxygen is the only commodity that could be manufactured by self-replicators in this way, but it seems very likely to me that this process will still need quite a bit of hands-on management by human foresters or the equivalent.

[John_Mace]

@Trinopus

Better off in some ways, but still having a smaller share in the country’s overall wealth, income, and product. Fifty years ago, we were bigger “shareholders.”

Is that really true? Certainly the very rich have seen their incomes rise substantially more than everyone else, but has the wealth gap between the middle class and the very rich kept pace with that? Remember, the middle class are largely home owners, and home values have skyrocketed in the last 50 years.

Lately, we’re moving more in the direction of sharecroppers.

Now, that is simply ridiculous.

There was a brief period, in the 90’s and ought’s, when it looked like pension plans might be becoming the majority holders of all stock market shares. That would have been an interesting approach to “The workers owning the means of production.” However, the transfer of wealth away from the middle class effectively scotched this.

Again, is the middle class less wealthy than it was 50 year ago? If not, then nothing has been “transferred away”.

[RedFury]

@John_Mace

…Again, is the middle class less wealthy than it was 50 year ago? If not, then nothing has been “transferred away”.

World’s a complicated place, John and often times things happen w/out you (or me) being aware of them. Want to keep the conversation "local’? Sure, we can do that.

But yes, indeed, the American ‘middle class’ is less wealthy than it was 50 years ago:

Income inequality in the United States

Income inequality in the United States has grown significantly since the early 1970s,[1][2][3][4][5] after several decades of stability[6][7], and has been the subject of study of many scholars and institutions. While inequality has risen among most developed countries, and especially English-speaking ones, it is highest in the United States.[8][9][10]

Studies indicate the source of the widening gap (sometimes called the Great Divergence) has not been gender inequality, which has declined in the US over the last several decades,[11] nor inequality between black and white Americans, which has stagnated during that time,[12] nor has the gap between the poor and middle class been the major cause—though it has grown.[13] Most of the growth has been between the middle class and top earners, with the disparity becoming more extreme the further one goes up in the income distribution.[14] Upward redistribution of income is responsible for about 43% of the projected Social Security shortfall over the next 75 years.[15] The Brookings Institution said in 2013 that income inequality was increasing and becoming permanent, reducing social mobility in the US.[16]

– much more at source.

Sure, science (and let’s not forget Pharma) have given us longer life-spans as you correctly wrote before – but living longer doesn’t mean living better. In fact ten more years of barely getting bye might be just be a prolonged sentence to many of those that get them…the extra decade I mean.

[BrainGlutton]

@Chief_Pedant

Well, see; that’s just the problem. If we don’t go there (to the fact that human beings are functionally unequal) we won’t get anywhere stable.

When we create societal constructs based on incorrect assumptions, attainment of equality for things like financial or workplace success becomes impossible.

Suppose that I decide men and women are functionally equal. I make no provision for an average difference. The job in question is fighting fires. I can lower my physical standards for all, and have a bunch of weaklings get equal opportunity to lug my hoses up stairwells, or I can say there are two standards–one for women and one for men–and then find roles that women can (on average) still perform in the firefighting business.

An unwillingness to accept that we are all unequally endowed from one another by accident of birth is a tremendous blockade to creating a society where everyone has a shot at participation. Our moral and ethical obligation is to help the weak; not simply pretend that everyone is equally strong.

I am never going to have the mental capacity to engineer a good bridge for you. Pretending that I’m a functional equal in a mathematically-geared capacity is a recipe for disaster. Literally.

@BrainGlutton

Of course not all people are born with equal talents/abilities/potential and no one really believes they are, not even Thomas Jefferson (he meant only that all have equal rights, not abilities; or, as Thomas Paine put it, “The mass of humanity were not born with saddles on their backs, nor the chosen few booted and spurred to ride them”); but whenever you say that it sounds like pseudoscientific racialism, owing to your long posting history in that regard.

And, since this thread is about “communism,” it is important to note that inequality of native talents does not mean we cannot have a classless society. The kind of inequality you are describing is not a thing that distinguishes one social class from another, it is a thing that applies within every social class, as well as within every “race” however defined.

[RedFury]

80 Percent Of U.S. Adults Face Near-Poverty, Unemployment: Survey

Census figures provide an official measure of poverty, but they’re only a temporary snapshot that doesn’t capture the makeup of those who cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.

In 2011 that snapshot showed 12.6 percent of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person’s lifetime risk, a much higher number – 4 in 10 adults – falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.

The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.

Higher recent rates of unemployment mean the lifetime risk of experiencing economic insecurity now runs even higher: 79 percent, or 4 in 5 adults, by the time they turn 60.

By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.

By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.

“Poverty is no longer an issue of them', it's an issue of us’,” says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. “Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need.”

Clearly, something’s not right.

[Lemur866]

Communism is communal ownership of the means of production. And in practice, that means state ownership. The government owns and controls every important industry. And that means the people who control the government control production.

If we have fabricators that can make most goods, and fabricators are cheap enough that most people can have one in their house, then we don’t have communism, because the means of production will not be owned communally. They will be owned individually. Individuals will control the means of production, not the community.

Obviously there are plenty of things that can’t come out of fabricators and can’t be downloaded off the internet and can’t be created by some automated expert system. Those things will still retain some value.

But things like factories will have almost no value. Anything that could be done by an automated factory or basement fabricator or expert system will have near-zero marginal cost, and therefore the people that own or control these things will not be rich in the future.

I know it is impossible for leftists in 2013 to believe that in 2113 it won’t be possible to make money by owning a factory. But the way you get rich is to own or control scarce goods. If the capital goods in a factory are not scarce, if they are cheap enough to fit in a basement, then you cannot charge a premium for them.

And we are already seeing this today. Take the Apple products manufactured and assembled in China. Apple doesn’t own the sweatshops where these products are put together. They contract with the factory owners. The factory owners are making decent money–for third world businesspeople. But the factory owners only get a tiny cut of the vast profits from Apple’s sales. In fact they don’t actually get a cut, they get paid for piecework.

Now, working in a sweatshop, or making commodity prices as a factory owner is better than starving in a gulag, or sweating as a peasant subsistence farmer. But those jobs don’t actually pay very much. And the factory owners may be making a decent profit margin, but it’s not very high in absolute terms.

In the future, you want to be Apple, not Foxconn. Factories can be opened and staffed anywhere in the world. Owning a factory is going to generate smaller and smaller slices of profit in the future. Being an industrialist is going to generate a middle-class income. The real money will be in other things.

[BrainGlutton]

@John_Mace

Put it this way: Are you saying that the average American had it better 50 years ago? If so, I’d like to see a cite, not a hypothetical.

See here and here.

[BrainGlutton]

@Qin_Shi_Huangdi

And increasingly Roman Catholics, listen to the Church of Rome’s proscription on birth control.

Did you mean to include the comma? If not, is that a whoosh? If not, cite?

[John_Mace]

@BrainGlutton

See here and here.

Those are popular books, and the second one is not about the middle class.

However, if you care to quote specific pages from the first one that proves the average American is worse off today than he or she was 50 years, then we can start a conversation. Linking to a book as though it proves your point is about on par with linking to one of your threads as if it does same. Fact is, neither works in this forum.