No absolutely, I talk about capitalism because that’s the current rule of the world, but this exploitation predates capitalism by millennia, you’re right. The specific aspect of capitalism or feudalism, or any such form of exploitation, is that power doesn’t represent the population’s interest (even though of course we pretend to live in a perfect representative democracy). If the state protects private ownership by law, and that private ownership gives you incredible power itself (being in control of production, but also media and culture more broadly), you end up with the self reaffirming loop of protecting owners, and not the population.

As an individual, you can have power over me if you hold a gun to my head, but it’s virtually impossible to point a gun at an entire nation when it’s that same nation that must hold the gun. Capitalism today is a massive ouija board, where anyone doubting the mystical forces is shamed, ostracized, or worse (of course this was much more literal under God’s mandated monarchs). But at the end of day, this still requires wide consent, even when enforced militarily.

Another way to put it is that while we often center the conversation around the “conflict of interest” that accompanies power, we ignore what that interest is. If exploiters or their defenders are systematically put in power, they expectedly defend exploitation. The scary communist motto of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is about recognizing the origin and importance of power in the short-term, and giving it to those whose interests are emancipation. I fully agree with you, personal gain doesn’t automatically go away if you get rid of profit, but thinking about this not in terms of conflicts of individual interests, but conflict of class interests allows us to dispel the misleading scary and brutal image of power wielded in any other way than the liberal democracy. The goal of course is a real democracy, one where workers, instead, defend their interests. The expected outcome is the dissolution of that exploitation through the dissolution of class, and eventually the dissolution of the state itself.

None of this magically protects you from acts of corruption or abuse, this is why the communist approach is not to flip the table over and bring a new ouija board except this time with “the good spirit” inside, but to create class consciousness, to dispel the lies and manipulations (because we’re not naive and pliable, the manufacturing of consent is a massive global industry), and to continue collectively educating ourselves as we progress so we don’t get fooled when someone brings a tipping table.

I swear I’m trying to be brief 😭

That’s interesting but I think you’re making a couple of crucial mistakes.

First as others mentioned, production and consumption are obviously intrinsically linked. A bigger country doesn’t automatically mean bigger quality of life despite having more workers, Switzerland is not richer because it’s smaller when it’s got roughly the same population as the poorest country on earth. But if talking proportionally, more workers per capita means more production per capita, which means more consumption per capita.

Second, to kinda go in your direction and in part because of the contractual nature of employment, the market pressure on workers wages is not a product of the number of workers, but the number of available workers. For working (not unemployed) people, the quality of life does increase as that number gets lower, but this means less unemployment, not less workers. This fact is the reason why unemployment is not a side-effect of capitalism (or the lazy nature of people or whatever else), but a necessary feature of capitalism, since capital relies on this perpetual supply drive (buyers market) for profit.

edit: This isn’t to talk about immigration, this is a more nuanced subject. Immigration has been defended on progressive basis (often not genuinely, but to benefit from cheap exploited labor) and attacked on reactionary basis (surprisingly also often non genuinely, e.g. France making massive anti-immigration propaganda in the 20th from one hand while asking border to let through illegally half a million of Portuguese workers with the other, against Portugal’s demands).

There’s countless invaluable Jewish voices in the anti-zionist movement of course, but what Jewish homeland could you support that wouldn’t be an ethno-state? /g

Our economy is organized around exploitation, I understand the point that someone in power might use this power for their own good if unchecked, but in an economy of exploitation like ours, power is organized around said exploitation. The worst of people go to the top not because bad people inherently do (or as you say, because power incentivizes bad action) but because this system is structured around exploitation, being ruthless and clamping down as hard as possible on those below you.

I don’t believe that power generally incentivizes bad action. Outside of the structure of a company or a capitalist state, it’s merely a factor to account for, like any other conflict or human element (and is usually handled fairly expeditiously). In my experience in non profit organizations, usual “human issues” are of course presents, but corruption and power abuse only ever rear their heads when the rubber hit the profit road.

This confusion also isn’t a mistake, it’s a misdirection, perpetually maintained to depict the constant corruption of states and companies worldwide as a mere “unfortunate reality” of human organization, while minimizing scrutiny of the structures this corruption exists in. When Trump, Elon and friends are waging a crusade against corruption, you would think this misdirection is at its absolute stretching limit, but somehow it still holds strong even (and especially) in those critical of them.

Sorry for stupidly long reply, in a word, I think we shouldn’t mistake “profit incentive”, for “power incentive”.

I wouldn’t expect anyone to deny the existence of corruption or abuse of power, but I think the corrupting influence of power is often used to justify in retrospect the acts of people put into power to do exactly that. It might sound pedantic to say that CEOs or state officials aren’t really “corrupt”, because they rarely ever intend to represent the interests of the workforce or population, but really it’s a total inversion of causality. They don’t “betray” because they got in power, they got in power to “betray”.

On an interesting sidenote, it also goes against the common misconception that any form of authority ultimately leads to corruption, since those same CEOs and officials seem to stay pretty loyal.

Perhaps surprisingly when it comes to breaking the echo chamber and having diverse political points of view and approaches (on subjects like identity politics, intersectionality, geo politics, organization building, strategy…etc) I’d say even ML circles have a lot more of that than just vaguely leftist safe liberal stances (at the very least they might have novel ideas and no orange man bad meme).

If you want more diversity of opinions you can expand in different directions, but I hardly see what good would be a place that has both fascists and anti-fascists for example and most of us are tired of picking internet fights. I suppose as long as you’re aware of which kind of discussion you’ve more tolerance for you’re good, but whether it’s tolerance for the occasional black crime rate statistic or an esoteric graph of the falling rate of profit, you’re not likely to find a space that has both.

In general I’d go with Cowbee’s recommendations though (for something that’s still obviously fairly leftwing)

It’s funny that they did all that and open-sourced it too. Like some kid accusing another to copy their homeworks while the other kid did significantly better and also offered to share.

Wait I somehow never thought about this, does the one china policy really dictates that they have to apply tariffs across the strait? I assume it’s in jest since I’m pretty sure they regular import/export on a smaller scale yet (like ban on Xinjiang imports), but I’m curious

Are you running a quantized model or one of the distilled ones?

The funny thing is that I would realistically only care about, for example, the Russian government collecting my data if their oligarchy collaborated with my government’s oligarchy against my and the population’s interest (which I guess in this case is significantly more likely than China)

Sorry I wasn’t very clear, thanks for pointing that out! I’m referring to the arguments opposing nationalisation in the mainstream discourse and not the actual obstacle to it happening (I wouldn’t accuse the Labour Party of acting in good faith).

Within the liberal ideology you often here things like “who’s gonna pay for it” or “it’ll be too expensive”, I’m saying that those arguments are surprisingly false even within the frame of liberalism. They pretend that it’s impossible due to some cold accounting reality in order to deflect conversation away from the core idea, but this opposition is actually ideological too (it’s just more of an uphill battle to defend keeping water in private hands than most other commodities).

As a matter of fact all neoliberal “theories” crumple under their own weight surprisingly fast (EU’s flavor in ordoliberalism with it’s 3% deficit to GDP and 60% debt to GDP ratios being dazzling examples of idiocy) so you might be onto something, perhaps it’s because they’re not the product of rigorous research but instead attempts to justify something that is already there 🤔

Is that really the case though?

Nationalisation would of course be supported by debt (just like any public investment), so it would only be a matter of comparing the interest rates to the cost of renting. Well most private companies are supported by debt (as they should), so part of the cost is directly paying for the companies’ debt. The state will always have lower interest rates (Since the BoE base rate shot up to 5% in the last 2 years you might have to take into account the maturity of different obligations but this would settle as debt gets refinanced), and taking the first company outlined, “Wessex Waters”, their financial report show a cost of debt of 5.2% for 22-23, with a debt-to-equity ratio of about 4 if my maths are good.

What this means is that for Wessex Waters, even if we completely ignored profit margin in the form of dividends (5.4% yield), overhead cost of private business (extremely high leadership salaries, bonus, lobbying…etc) and the fact that interest rates are only gonna rise, it would still be profitable in the very short term to nationalise the company.

Don’t be mistaken, what’s opposing nationalisation and public ownership is and always has been purely ideological (market is more efficient, national debt is somehow a problem), there is absolutely no financial argument against it.

BONUS: Because if I had to skim Wessex Waters strategic report, might aswell chop up some of the Chairman’s foreword:

The high quality of our customer service was again recognised, […] however, we were extremely disappointed that we failed to maintain our record on environmental performance.

Our financial health has always been, and remains, robust.

I thank the Lord Jesus for his constant grace and guidance and pray that we will be able to rise to the challenges we face.

I remember stumbling on some videos of him as I was being radicalized, he was talking about trans issues and generally having interesting, or at least thought-provoking things to say. I’m sure I learned stuff (and he was a brief part of my radicalization whether I want it or not), but not too long after, I started getting some pretty odd vibes. Couldn’t quite place what bothered me then because I just wasn’t educated on a lot of the western leftism shortcomings and knew way too little of colonial and imperial history and such, but some interventions were still eyebrow raising.

When he started (in my exposure to his content, no clue about how his positions evolved) really drilling into his disdain for religion, defense of “anti-white racism”, and spending way too long hating on other leftists I fully dropped out. I honestly can’t remember a single content creator where my falling out was so brutal especially without being exposed to any outside critique. I’m sure he’s still got some good points to make on some subjects, but there are voices that do it better and without all the weird reactionary takes.

I would generally recommend people to steer clear from those “debate bro” types. Most of us probably had a period of falling into the trap of viewing good rhetoric, aesthetic and entertainment value, as something more than it actually is, hell most of us still struggle with that today. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment in the sphere of “political” media, but you should stay critical of people that spend too long just beating on anyone to the left of them. Even the “tankies” I follow have very civilized and respectful conversations with anarchists, trostkyists or socdems because they realize that very few of them have nefarious intentions and it always makes for something way more interesting than namecalling and gotchas.

I don’t know about CP or horse cocks or whatever, honestly this seems like exactly the kind of braindead drama I try to steer away from, but personally that had nothing to do with what really rubbed me wrong about Vaush.