/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

first you can create self-replicating robot, it isn't that hard, just less useful today (maybe more useful on the moon or in space)

you can read about RepRap project (thats where modern affordable 3d printings stems from b t w, but that was only a research project originally)

most of modern 3d printers come from RepRap designs (like prusa)

larger machines are not so different

>They can't make profits through direct exploitation of these bots, because they are after-all just embodied labor of human workers.

what if the robot was assebmled/created either by other machine, or human work force was minimal (connecting three wires ?)

you don't understand some thing it seems, no machine or technology or even nuclear reactor is profitable if it works lot very long term. reactor is useless and pointless to build if works less than 40 years (you again need to build it first), bridge pointless (if it collapse in a week), housing pointless, any machine is too, they're only profitable if they work 50 years. tram is also pontless but it can work nearly without maintance for 100 years.
robot is just the same it works 24/7 in dark cold room don't need anything and just a piece of metal and software, so its competitive. yes works for some 20 years minimum, with minimum service. it they will turn profit very easily because it is simply superior to human.

>humans can do anything any work

yes and no.
theres cooking books with great recipes, but how many people read them or can cook even ? very limited number.
you see its because people are idiots.

any instruction they will fuck up and/or do anything wrong, this is why they need supervisors or engneers (and quality control) who at least know how to do at least something (or less retarded).

if they were so smart they could long ago get some instruction on how to produce ak47 and defeat capitalists, but its probaly happens less than supernova explosion, less often. for some reason.

marx actually meat a little bit different thing i suppose, so i think he's misinterpreted, he just meant that its a sum of labor. more mathematically.


cockshott is a bit nuts, he's too much into soviet shit that doesn't exist
whats possible in soviet union obviously not possible today, you first need to build soviet union

>>466441
>first you can create self-replicating robot, it isn't that hard
Really ?
Please show an example.

>>466441
>but how many people read them or can cook even ? very limited number.
you see its because people are idiots.
Technically cooking means heating protein until it coagulates, probably close to 100% of people are capably of doing that.
Capitalism is imposing time constraints on people that makes it very difficult for people to prepare their own meals, but you can't derive a judgement about their intelligence from that. It seems very contrived, like something one would say in order to slander people to make them seem inferior to a imagined class of superior people.

>>466442
well rep-rap project is literally about that (its self replicating 3d printer)

theres also universal factory project (by derpa) thats uhm producess ibm keyboards now or something
its a bit more complex (a universal factory… (they don't even have lighting, nor people there…)

it was thought to be a factory that can be turned to produce just about anything (for wartime for instance, when you have your supplies brocken, and you want slightly different version of m16 - an impossible task now (or just very long and painful; but very easy for such factory))
it just adjusts any processes (in dynamic way sort of)
and reconfigures itself…

well rep-rap probably needs some input from humans, but it was basically designed with it in mind (so you can even build some models of it from literal wood planks (it basically can be built from anything))

you can see more at reprap wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RepRap
https://reprap.com/wiki/RepRap

they also want to use robot factory on mars or mood or something, and probably on space-stations
acutally it isn't quite important who builds it on earth

then again if you don't have 100 % self-replicating machine you can just use another robot to built it or do the assembly (and then replace that robot with new one if needed. because it can be built in a similar way)
(thats called bootstraping)

>>466443
my mom will ruin any ingridients and any recept that you will give to her (and the has plenty of time and do it all day)
and other ppl are just like this, at least modern generation
that why we have cooks who can actually cook or design something or run some restorant (me mom will go bancrupt in a second)

your theory again not working… (you're oversimplifying things)

and if you really need a heat up machine thats a 20 euro device can do better than my mom again

*recipe

no flood tho

Et consectetur et vel dolorem sed. Tempora laudantium doloribus dolores est distinctio adipisci et. Ad autem harum inventore.…

>>466444
>rep-rap project
It can only print the plastic parts, not the servo-motors or the control-logic-microchips, and it can't do it by it self it needs a human to operate it.

It's a very nice project, so i don't want to speak ill of it. You are perhaps misinterpreting their goals, it doesn't look like their ambition is to create a robotic life-form.

>theres also universal factory project (by derpa)
i couldn't find anything about it, but it sounds interesting.
can you provide some links, please

>>466445
Some people don't want to learn how to cook =/= some people are incapable of learning how to cook.

Consider that perhaps this person you mentioned, who ruins all the ingredients, does it on purpose to avoid getting tasked with preparing food.

Most people are capable of being clever, industrious and inventive people, but their motivation for harnessing that potential is often frustrated by society or the economic model.

also funny the machine don't care in what environment it is working
soviet train in america would just work like soviet train in america and vice versa

and its simply a rule that you can prove mathematically if you like (or w/e)
its also called universalism (philosophy)

so a robot as a devices don't care, it stays literally the same

>>466448
most pepole are hilariously bad at cooking nowdays

yes you can send them to reeducation camps but its sounds familiar …

>>466449
i mean it doesn't care if capitalists produced it

maybe economy cares but in grand scheme of things that can even be irrelevant

so yeah whatever system, it dosn't have advantages or w/e

>>466449
>soviet train in america would just work like soviet train in america and vice versa
No, they have different rail track width
Russian track gauge is 1520mm
USA track gauge is 1435mm

>funny the machine don't care in what environment it is working
That's also not true, most machines have a very demanding set of environmental parameters.
You could even say that machines can go on strike if they aren't treated well enough: For example if they overheat and the thermal-switch shuts them down, or if they don't switch on if there isn't enough electricity.

>>466450
>most pepole are hilariously bad at cooking nowdays
it seems that late stage capitalism has that effect on people.

>yes you can send them to reeducation camps but its sounds familiar …
It doesn't sound familiar at all, none of the socialist countries send people to prison to make them cook. Seriously please avoid repeating anti-communist lies from the cold war.

The communist countries just build very affordable housing that had kitchens and then people cooked food all by them selves.

Okay, this is a complicated topic but it's an important one to understand. First off, you have to get that Marx is not pulling this out of his ass or declaring something from on high. He is repeating a claim made in classical political economy by Smith and Ricardo, and contained within are the caveats that both made about this statement, in addition to a number of other caveats particularly to Marx's conception.

"Economic value" must be understood not as an essence in the universe, but something we created to manage our affairs. The name "economics" says what it is - management of the household, or management of affairs by a person. It is presumed that this value is sought by someone who wants to appropriate it, rather than something truly in the world that is inalienable.
In Marx, he is describing the situation in capitalism, or general commodity production. It is well understood that workers are paid wages, or are provisioned in a way that is equal to wages. The primary of gold and finance over landed property is a distinction of capitalism over prior modes of production, where land ownership and title to slaves or serfs was considered the most valuable thing, and coinage could come or go with the wind. The development of exchange in early capitalism made it clear that even if someone wanted to go back to trading serfs or land, this was not possible, because finance and capital had a number of advantages over land ownership. In a way, "capitalism" has existed in some form, in that there has been money and banking establishments for a very long time, but the dominant labor relations were slavery and serfdom, with freedmen being sort of like today's wage workers - a class that was subordinated and expected to continue working, but that had a lot of privileges and whose children were freeborn.

It is not because "human labor is universal" or any such garbage that makes human labor truly valuable compared to some other kind of labor. We can see human labor as slave labor which is a very different type from wage labor, which is a different type from the salaried bourgeois professional who must work to maintain his property, but who is independent of the most onerous conditions of the working class. Human labor is sought because humans are the only ones who will appear to market themselves and sell themselves. Horses do not participate in the market, nor do computers in their own right. Inherent to the labor market is the RIGHT to sell yourself, which implies you are free to do so. Slaves cannot offer themselves freely on the market. There were masters who rented out their slaves for wage work, and slaves in the American South could earn money to purchase their freedom, a path that was sometimes taken. It was one of the carrots common to slaveries to allow slaves to buy their way out of their status, but this was always contingent on masters allowing the slave to work, and the slave would work at a clear disadvantage against free labor. Given a choice between slaves who can be disciplined by the master and have no rights and freeborn men who have rights, an employer would choose to employ slaves, and degrade the status of the free to de facto slaves. This is not always possible, and the ability of a slave to purchase freedom had to be part of the incentive to motivate the slave to work at all. Once freedom is attained, the slave will piss off and get the fuck out of the South. This sounds like a rosy picture, and it was the exception rather than the rule. The masters in the South were acutely aware of what a large free black populace would mean for the slave institution, and how much they were invested in slavery, and if slaves were manumitted too often, there would be no new supply. So, the masters had little incentive to allow this, and near the end slavery became extremely onerous, moving from exploitation to outright extermination as the preferred solution to the "Negro problem". Certain of the abolitionists had no problem with this "final solution", but it was so over the top evil that even some of the Southrons thought it was fucked up to actually do that. The only people who have been strident exterminationists are the eugenists, who have never seen a war or death cult they didn't like. That has always been the eugenic creed - exterminate everyone they don't want. They maintain that stance to the present day. It is helpful to have an understanding of labor relations as Marx would have understood them, as this was a time where slavery was still widely known and people knew what slavery entailed. When you say shit like "human labor is universal", you're assuming the values of liberal democracy always existed, but that was not the case for classical political economy. Adam Smith was certainly aware of this, and for him, the labor theory was about the management and command of labor rather than its generative force. For Ricardo, when he places this on what he considers sound mathematical ground, he is aware he is making a violent assumption, and that complex economies do not actually function in this way, but he must do it.
So far as Marx is making a point, he is making a point about human labor compared to other types which is largely fixed, and so the labor of animals or machines is not independently relevant to Marx's thinking on surplus value. The moral status of humans is not entirely relevant to Marx's claim, since in Marx's time, there were many humans who were dehumanized. "Human" at this time had yet to be reduced to a purely biopolitical concept of race, and carried its spiritual connotations, which Marx is invoking.

>>466452
yes also differnt electric frequency and power
but thats not means anything, and in fact it can operate on a line built for such train (and power network…)
(actually happened in history, at least spain has several gauges)
also trains often can work in various energy networks (like french TGV that crosses border to the UK)
various pieces of network are differently electrified (or even not electrified)

that doesn't change the fact that all systems are the same

theres in fact soviet train that works in finland that was never soviet

>environment
you again don't really understand
they're structurally the same (for instace usually have the same components, have the same work cycle etc, they can only be adapted to outside environment (like you can add localized labels… that doesn't change anything, they're still 99% the same, work the same etc))

so again if i have an m16 you will never quess where it was actually produced (lest say i faked the 'made in' label that now says
"hitlers' nazi germany")

theres something ppl don't understand

>>466453
im talking about current time
what happened in communism again not very relevant (see cockshott, what i said about him)
literally no empire in history was rebuilt in some fashion… renaissance actually wasn't again a full copy of ancient greece or something too; it was just selected ideas and overall thinking that current medieval europe is retarded (that was true actually, it was retarded. in about 1000 years they built like nothing)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Yvc0MHR3R0

this happens but this is highly trained ppl that do absolutly minor thing

at ford factory ppl would to far less (only a simple task)

if you just grab a bunch of retards from street they will never assembly anything
especially not anything functional, you'd need to send ppl to reeducation camps again

So Marx is not making this up as a true claim, but recapitulating the claim of Adam Smith, which he must do for his critique. Adam Smith makes a similar claim about human genius in his example of the pin factory, rather than humans being a beast of burden or a robot. Whether humans independently possess this is irrelevant to capital's management of that labor. If not for their own interest, the manager has to think in terms of what is profitable and only has his wits to organize the deployment of his capital, or the capital he is assigned to manage. The slaves can think whatever or be whatever, but they're competing in a condition of general commodity production. The working class proletarian would be treated more like a slave than a human, and independent thought of the proletarian wage worker was not expected nor appreciated. The whole society, up to now, is premised on beating down the wage worker.

As for why robots aren't going to replace all humans - it's because humans are cheaper. Robots require a large supply chain to build and maintain, and it's a lot of work simply because you hate the idea of paying humans or think certain humans are too stupid to live. The entire automation argument is really an argument about eugenics. The jobs don't exist because of a deliberate policy of shrinking the wage fund, because the capitalist doesn't exist to give the worker a fucking thing. If capitalism were oriented towards a goal of full employment - and capitalists once upon a time aimed for something approaching that - then it would make sense to put out of work people to productive work, even during an economic downturn. This is how capitalism could avoid major crises for 30 years, although how much this was "capitalism" is debatable, as during this time socialism was ascendant on the world stage. Much of what Americans thought was normal during the 50s and 60s was the product of socialist thinking, because the government had to live in a world where the ideas of Soviet-type planning were proven to work. The original plan was to do what is being done in the past decade back in the 1930s, and to have a true cull and purge on a massive scale. That's what the eugenists always wanted, and what they haven't stopped wanting the whole time. Starting in the 1990s, these people couldn't shut up about what they wanted to do to us, and in 2020 they dropped the mask. It's not some future event where the mask comes off. It's off now - that's what COVID is.

COVID really shows what side of the war you're on. If you're still mystifying about COVID, you're on the evil side. Everyone else correctly regards that what has happened since 2020 has been a disaster for humanity and anything we would consider good, and that has extended to the normie world by now. No one wants more lockdowns or another bailout of the rich, and I doubt we will see that. What we will see instead is the great enclosure and the marking-down of those selected to die, and lockstep enforcement of the segregated society. You're either on the side that mystifies and pretends it isn't happening, or you are fighting for your life now and not stopping until this eugenics shit is dead forever. That will take a very long time, but those selected to die do not have the option of submitting to this.

>>466454
I disagree with your theory that the value of human labor is only derived from administrative categories.

human labor power really is universal, it can do virtually any task, and for the time being there is nothing like it.

>>466457
Value in a true moral sense can be anything. Value in the sense that it is relevant for Marx's critique is built on a particular definition of value's root in labor, and that isn't something that needs to be relitigated. Anyone who is familiar with classical political economy knew what Adam Smith and David Ricardo were referring to, and it was later bad economics writers who mystified this. Marx assumes you're smart enough to get what was originally referenced.

Marx hiimself suggested what is valuable is that which is useful - i.e., that we would do what we actually wanted to do in the first place, rather than what pursues the most money tokens. This is different from the later utility theory of value, but is instead of a moral judgement of what we would have wanted out of society in the first place, if we had the choice. This is no less true of the bourgeoisie. They didn't invent wage labor because they wanted it to exist now and forever, but because that was the situation as they saw it.

>As for why robots aren't going to replace all humans - it's because humans are cheaper. Robots require a large supply chain to build and maintain,

you will be surprised how much it costs to build and operate 20m city full of commieblocks and subway lines (compared to robot)

i don't know the point of text t b h

>>466455
I don't understand what you are trying to say.

Machines do need a proper environment to function, just like Humans do.

The only reason you have people that qualify as "a bunch of retards from the street" is because society isn't build well enough to produce an environment where humans function well.

Most people are not enabled to realize their potential.

>>466463
machines need only electricity
have you even seen a video of modern tractor factory or something, its all robots (even if provincial)

there are 10 ppl working them

no robot needs advanced surgery and literally nothing from state other than powerlines
its just how things supposted to be, using human is a hack
the machine beat human

>>466456
>Whether humans independently possess this is irrelevant to capital's management of that labor.
This is only half-true, material reality does matter, even capitalism can't create idealism that can ignore the underlying material reality.

I agree with many of the things you are saying but the worsening of conditions during Covid was the ruling class using a crisis to wage more class war. The crisis are interchangeable, the conditions also got worse during the crisis in Ukraine.

As far as the cost of robots vs the cost of humans goes, i agree with you, if we are talking about robots that truly can replicate universal human labor-power. Those are at the moment unobtainium.

>What we will see instead is the great enclosure and the marking-down of those selected to die, and lockstep enforcement of the segregated society
This is the basic reality for a class society.
That's why it's called class-war and not class-friendly-match.
Ruling classes get people killed via structural violence.

>>466466
"Structural violence" is a way of mystifying the direct hand to ensure that the death continues. Getting ganglords to kill each other is not automatic nor cheap, nor is the inundation of propaganda.

COVID wasn't an "accidental crisis". It was the plan. So too is Ukraine, like any war - it's not like the global system is reacting to a foreign threat to it, or that Putin wouldn't do what he did without a greenlight that this is how the arranged war would go.

>>466464
Technically humans are also a type of machine, a biological machine, but still.
What sets it apart from all the other machines is the ability for universal labor-power.

All the other machines need humans to exist.
Humans (specifically the proletariat) are what reproduces the existence of all the artificial machines.

There isn't really a conflict between humans and artificial machines. The machines and the proletariat have a symbiotic relationship. The conflict is between capital and the proletariat.

It's a class struggle.

>>466468
>Sour winter child ?
i don't know that expression

>>466467
>"Structural violence" is a way of mystifying the direct hand to ensure that the death continues.
The intent is not mystification, but rather precision, they use societal and economic structures to harm or kill people, that's why it got labeled structural violence.

>COVID wasn't an "accidental crisis". It was the plan.
There were scientific studies that predicted fairly accurately what Covid was going to become. Something like 7 to 5 years in advance. These studies could have been overlooked and it was but incompetence, but there was a real chance they knew the shit was going to hit the fan and decided to not act on preventative counter-measures, with the intent of causing mass death by neglect. We don't know for sure but there could be revelations in the future.

>So too is Ukraine
Yes it's no secret that neocons were working hard to provoke this war. They published Think-tank papers about it.

>or that Putin wouldn't do what he did without a greenlight
I don't think that the Russian president conspired with US neocons to make this war happen. Nor do i think that Moscow seeks approval from Washington.

I think you are saying this because of the internal political battles in the US, where different political factions accuse each other of "collaborating with the enemy". It probably derails the liberal-imperialists when they are equated with "their arch enemy". I guess that it makes sense in that environment.

Ian wright wrote an interesting article

https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/10/why-machines-dont-create-value/

>>466462
>you will be surprised how much it costs to build and operate 20m city full of commieblocks and subway lines (compared to robot)
commieblocks? cages will suffice

look at foxconn, they build communal flats for their workers right near their factories

>Marx says the source of all economic value is because human labor is universal.
That means that is a fundamental component of all commodity production. A commodity definitively cannot be produced without labor-power.
>I want to go one step further and say that human universality also rests on the ability of producing new humans.
Nah, not really. In economic terms, reproducing humans is not central to the flow of capital. Reproducing labor-power of given types is, and that requires a given number of humans.
>From an economic theory perspective: if a capitalist bought those robots, they would count as embodied labor power
Hell no. They would only be constant capital, means of production. The total output of their value would trend toward precisely what the value of the cost to produce them is as multiple capitalists acquire the same robots. Consider that there would be no reserve army of robots. They could not be alternately attracted and repelled the way that human workers are by the capitalist system. They would be produced to perform specific functions, they would perform only those functions, and when they are not needed they would only deteriorate–precisely as is the case with the means of prodcution. They would not require wages, so they could not be underpaid. Of course, that means that they could not produce surplus value.
>The robots aren't able to generate economic surplus until they can reproduce them selves. Basically the robots do work to produce new replacement bots and do extra work beyond bot manufacturing and that counts as surplus, and that might be a potential source for capitalist profits. Mind you that those robots would also need the artificial mental capacity that allows them to design them selves. Those would have to be fairly intelligent and the practicality of enslavement is doubtful.
They would also need a reason to produce more robots. The only way to do that would be to program them to seek to do such. Of course, the obvious problem there is that goal becomes a function of their creation which must be initiated by capitalists in the process of capital production. Hence, all the subsequently produced robots would be is C'.
>All that said the most prominent reason why capitalists won't be able to replace workers with robots is because…
…they would cost an epic shitton to produce and then procede to rapidly drive down the rate of profit for every industry that employs them until those industries exist no more.

>>466457
You gave away the meaning of value - that it is the managerial ability to do anything, rather than something inherent to individual people as something sacrosanct. If human thought can be reproduced by machines, or machines can be used to impose command and control, then those machines - and those who control them - are effectively like humans in that regard. This is exactly why computerization was pursued - because it reproduces a task we would do by rote, and eliminates the thought process of the line worker entirely. The worker is reduced to an animal, and if you understand cybernetics, there's a reason it was called "communication in command in the animal and the machine".

>>466514
>Hell no. They would only be constant capital, means of production. The total output of their value would trend toward precisely what the value of the cost to produce them is as multiple capitalists acquire the same robots. Consider that there would be no reserve army of robots. They could not be alternately attracted and repelled the way that human workers are by the capitalist system. They would be produced to perform specific functions, they would perform only those functions, and when they are not needed they would only deteriorate–precisely as is the case with the means of prodcution. They would not require wages, so they could not be underpaid. Of course, that means that they could not produce surplus value.
This reply really had me confused for a while, because i categorized robots as an intermediate commodity, but i guess it's more correct to consider it as constant capital.
Because capitalist companies aren't as vertically integrated as they use to be.

>They would also need a reason to produce more robots. The only way to do that would be to program them to seek to do such. Of course, the obvious problem there is that goal becomes a function of their creation which must be initiated by capitalists in the process of capital production. Hence, all the subsequently produced robots would be is C'.

While technically from a theory point of view this is correct, i still would say that self-reproducing robots become an artificial life form and if capitalists could extract surplus value from it, wouldn't that mean they proletarianized robots and by extension they proletarianized capital it self ?

I think that capitalists would loose control over self-reproducing robots. Identical copy "Robot-cloning" would still suffer from a type of inaccurate copy mutations that will undermine even a perfect control scheme. And obviously self-improving robots would improve the control shackles into non existing control shackles.

>…they would cost an epic shitton to produce and then procede to rapidly drive down the rate of profit for every industry that employs them until those industries exist no more.

That's true, if you plug in self-reproducing robots into the capitalist accounting tables, at first they show up as huge capital expense, and a few economic cycles down the line they show up as self-expanding capital that make money and capitalism poof out of existence.

>>466531
>You gave away the meaning of value - that it is the managerial ability to do anything, rather than something inherent to individual people as something sacrosanct.
??
You have a value-theory based on "the managerial ability to do anything" ?
the managerial theory of value ?
This is the first i hear about this, consider me intrigued and slightly horrified.

>If human thought can be reproduced by machines, or machines can be used to impose command and control, then those machines - and those who control them - are effectively like humans in that regard.
Machines can also be used to undo control, this isn't a one-way street

>if you understand cybernetics, there's a reason it was called "communication in command in the animal and the machine".
Socialist cybernetics focuses on automating away the price-setting-task that capitalists perform where they "receive market signals that they convert into commodity pricing" with sub-optimal guess work. I don't see how that's reducing people to animals. Capitalists suck at estimating prices, they almost never hit equilibrium pricing, and on top of that it's tedious optimization work. Why the fuck wouldn't you want a computer program where you plug in all the data from production and then have it reliably spit out the correct price, for 99.99% of the time.

>>466533
Reread Adam Smith. He's very clearly referring to the command of labor as it is employed by capital - that is, money is the command of labor rather than the labor itself, and this is important to everything Marx writes. If money is not commanding labor - if people are not made to work for a wage as an incentive - you're dealing with a very different situation. This is the basis for prices in the first place, and why labor times are socially necessary and labor in the abstract can be traded. If you were just managing resource inflows and outflows, the economic task is much simpler, but money is not intended to be an optimization tool. It often works against such optimization.

If you generalize the command of labor to command of the machines, which do the same tasks humans do, what is really being traded is the manager's willingness to pay for labor output, rather than the output itself. If the manager simply doesn't want to produce anything - if he would rather hoard his wealth or extract rent - then he won't purchase labor on the market, and labor would likely not be seen as worth paying for. This is what happens now, with large swaths of the labor force permanently unemployed. Labor is not always valuable, nor is it actually morally equivalent from person to person. Much of what a manager does involves discriminating against labor. This determination of different laborers' value to the manager requires the manager to assess humans as if they were machines, rather than assuming that labors are actually morally equal to the manager's point of view. Labor in the abstract has to be equalized as the default assumption, but no manager treats all of his workers equally, and capitalism has been marked by discrimination of different workers and different people. When Ricardo is assuming labor values per worker are equal, he is by his own admission making a violent assumption. All things being equal, without examination of workers, it isn't possible to gauge precisely what would make one worker different from another. There is nothing truly essential about one laborer that is different from another in the abstract, unless a theory which suggests human quality is inborn and fixed is advanced. This is one reason why eugenics was crucial to the imperial project - it declared human inequality to be natural, permanent, and determined purely by heredity and by the judgement of a tightly controlled group around Francis Galton. This is of course absurd if you think about what humans are for any length of time, but the important claim in eugenics is the principle. Eugenics must seek to violently create the conditions where it can be practiced in the first place, and eugenics can never actually attain the purest form of those conditions. To do so would require an absolute dictatorship beyond anything yet known. That is implied by eugenics, and it is why eugenicists get a hardon for tyranny, while they annihilate any concept of authority in the original sense. Eugenicists don't want to actually command people - they want to assert what people are and don't give a shit about what is actually produced. What is morally worthwhile from a eugenic perspective is selecting who lives and who dies. It is no surprise that large sectors of the economy exist purely to dictate who lives and who dies, rather than produce a good for sale. No one needs a health care bureaucrat or a public relations expert, or all of the professions that explicitly exist to harm people. Hilariously, many of these harmful professions are described as "helpers", in a perverse moral philosophy.

So if you want to optimize prices in a market setting, you can do that. It's not something that requires a super advanced algorithm or computerization at all, though having a computer does eliminate the human element and a lot of tedium. Ultimately though, you are optimizing the moral incentives at the heart of capitalism. What is the moral incentive that is truly at the heart of capitalism? Adam Smith describes labor as the toil and suffering of the worker - that is, he does not consider work to be morally virtuous in of itself, for the purposes of free trade thinking. This makes sense to the capitalist very much - the capitalist does not have respect for workers, and couldn't actually do so. If he did, he would have to recognize the moral failings which Adam Smith himself recognized in capitalism. Smith certainly isn't saying "rah rah rah, capitalism is a perfect system". You can see why cybernetics produces a lot of fear - the thing being optimized is human suffering, and so a moral philosophy that is turned into an engine to maximize that suffering becomes the correct solution, so long as the moral calculus at the heart of capitalism is accepted. You would want to make workers suffer as much as possible, and be as alien as possible from their product. Ultimately the capitalist sees the worker as a beggar and a fool, rather than an honorable and right worker. If the worker thinks work will set him free, there's a concentration camp with those words written that will remind him of the truth.

>>466534
If you produced for use - which is one of the things Marx is saying because it's pretty fucking obvious - you operate with a different moral calculus than the utilitarian imperial one, where only the manager's utility is considered.
Put another way, if institutions did what we wanted them to do, we would probably see the price system as unnecessary or a burden. This is exactly what a number of reformers were saying during the interwar period, and the claim of the communists. It's one reason you see "abolish the commodity form" - commodification in a market sense sucks if you want to produce the thing you, ordinary worker guy, wanted out of this society. You'd much rather have the thing your money ostensibly pays for then money itself. In a capitalist society though, you have to take money, because payment-in-kind is unreliable, and you need money to pay things like rent and taxes. No worker would accept payment in kind and especially won't accept chits when he could have real money. Paying chits is what the company town was, and workers remember that shit.

Whether you need money is a different question, but money exists because there are states and institutions issuing it, rather than any natural origin. The money that people make for themselves is something different from the uses and meanings money has in a capitalist society. Capitalism would be impossible if money were no different from an economy of cowry shells.

>>466534
For someone in the 18th century, humans were seen as unique because there wasn't a theory of the mind, and Smith is operating in the realm of moral philosophy rather than science. For Marx, he makes statements about human uniqueness that aren't really defensible, but again, humanism for Marx is not describing a quality of a race or a type of animal, but a spiritual quality about us that has been stripped away ideologically.

>466533
>This reply really had me confused for a while, because i categorized robots as an intermediate commodity, but i guess it's more correct to consider it as constant capital.
Because capitalist companies aren't as vertically integrated as they use to be.
Even beyond that, every individual instance of the means of production excepting the land was a C' in another capital.
>self-reproducing robots become an artificial life form and if capitalists could extract surplus value from it, wouldn't that mean they proletarianized robots and by extension they proletarianized capital it self ?
There are a dozen fatal flaws in that theory. Let's start with the first thought. If robots could be entirely self-reproducing, they would require resources with which to reproduce. Those resources already exist as commodities and only as commodities unless you also plan to gift the robots the Sierra Nevada Mountains, an oil derrick, and an oil refinery. Robots cannot acquire commodities, as they own no money and have no labor-power to sell. Such reproduction is thus impossible in a capitalist world.

The second flaw is the notion that a capitalist could extract surplus-value from such robots. When a machine is utilized as means of production, as it produces it adds a portion of its own value to the commodities that it produces. Making it work faster or for a longer duration only accellerates the rate at which it transfers its own value to the created commodities. Maintainance of such machines must come in the form of new capital investment, another M-C. This is different from human labor-power which can produce value in excess of its own value, because its exchange value is independent of the humans who provide it–socially-necessary labor time.

For robots to become proles, they would require wages that cover the cost of their means of subsistence. Why would any capitalist ever invest in such a thing? Sure, he might be able to pay it less than he would his human workers, but the problem with wages drastically falling is that they take commodity consumption down with them, as we have seen throughout the whole neo-liberal era. The proletariat is most of just about any capitalist's customers. It's that back-door thievery aspect to capitalism–the proles make what the proles consume, and the capitalists pocket the difference in the values. Producing such robots would amount to cooking the goose that lays the golden eggs.

>>466538
>Reread Adam Smith.
For clarity's sake, I would point out that Smith's labor theory of value was fundamentally different from Marx's. In fact, it is probably incorrect to call Marx's theory a "labor theory of value" at all. More rightly, it would be a "labor-power theory of value." Neither human labor nor the prole who performs it is a commodity in Marx's model. Rather the socially necessary labor time of a given type in a given place is. That is a huge distinction to make when talking about where surplus-value comes from.

>>466546
Marx is specifically critiquing the Smithian view of labor as something commanded, and points out that the workers really do have authority over their own body at the end of the day, and that what actually happens in production is something different from what happens in the abstract. This is where Marx emphasizes the distinction between abstract and concrete labor, which is one of the inventions Marx claims as his big contribution to political economy. So yes, Marx is not strictly lifting Adam Smith, but the basis for surplus value is that we have money or some suitable token that is utilized by a capitalist, rather than utilized by some other interested party like say a socialist planner. So, the model concerns abstract labor and exchange, because the model is a critique of political economy rather than a grand description of what economics actually is. What economics "actually is" would be something altogether different, and one of the best ways to understand Marx's argument I've heard is that Marx is describing political economy as a pseudoscience. I don't agree that political economy was a pseudoscience, since it would have to be a science in the first place to be a pseudoscience, and the pseudoscience only really got going with the really awful inheritors of political economy after Ricardo but before Marx. Marx suggests that economics could be an open question, rather than suggesting "this is how capitalism works now and forever and no deviation is possible". Obviously the capitalist could envision models in response to Marx's critique, and did exactly that (though the new models were not purely a response to Marx and they were not reactive but a proactive advance of the ruling interest towards their true goals).

So far as you're dealing with money and the incentives of free market liberalism though, you're still dealing with labor commanded rather than labor as a concrete force. Even if you replace the price system with full on scientific management, it is still labor commanded and managed, and the management of labor abides similar moral considerations - that is, workers are still alienated from their product and eat shit from their bosses. It could turn out that a planned economy can maintain the appearance of money, while the actual market is planned to produce minute changes in the qualities produced. This is basically what happened - after WW1, capitalism of the old type was dying, and it was put to bed in 1929, never to return. The going out party was an orgy of rampant speculation and everyone pretending the system worked, while the real plan was worked out behind the curtain. We're living through a similar transformation, and have been since 2000, but this time it is much more meticulously planned and there are far more losers in this go-around than last time. Depopulation is a deliberate policy rather than an accident, as if something they talked about all the time just sort of happened. Depopulation would be implemented through the market mechanism, rather than trying to work against it. All that would be needed would be to incentivize those behaviors that would feed into a contempt for humanity - that is, the managerial conceits that had long been understood to be the true failure of the capitalist way of doing things. If you had perfect paragons operating in a perfect market with perfect information, capitalism might work as described, but if you have such a situation, you are far beyond the need of a market mechanism as a moralizing or disciplinary force, or you have segregated completely humanity into two camps, one reduced to abject slavery and the other living decadent lives as managers. This is what the Austrian Schoolers wanted - a serfdom run by petty-managers and idiots like them, that appeals to their lizard-brain instincts. It's hard to tell which is worse, the Kraut retards or the Fabian retards, but the two would tag team to make humanity suffer as much as possible when push came to shove.

One of the really bad critiques of Marx is that a liberal claims Marx invents surplus value out of nothing, not understanding the argument Marx is making - and anyone who understood Smith's thinking would understand what Marx is saying, once the German philosophy was rendered into something comprehensible so that Marx's nuances aren't lost. Surplus value exists in the real world, but to a capitalist, he sees the worker as a resource to be managed, and all of his strategies and deployment of capital are made with that in mind. One of the conditions of capital employed in productive work is that the capitalist must, whatever he believes, abide the reality that somewhere, an actual worker creates an actual product that is sold to an actual person, through an actual vendor, and this obligates the capitalist to accept that he is not actually a god. It is not surprising that the liberal myth of the past three decades is that liberal victory will make a group selected to live into veritable gods, and this is where the liberal starts wanking and capitalizing "You" and "Our" like they're in a d/s relationship with the worker. Yes, this is really how the hardcore liberal ideologues think in their echo chamber. They've been fed a diet of this shit and I've seen it up close. Liberal smug is real. If you want an example of it, the last wave of science fiction pushed this idea of technology as god or divine revelation, giving to technology a Luciferian quality. You see this in some of the late 90s science fiction, and this shit is more common than you might think. It was the darling of the liberal intelligentsia, and many people caught up in Obamamania were true believers in this shit.

Anyway, there is no getting around the use of money for moral purposes and an incentive, but what money "is" may be completely different. People will assign a value to the things money represents morally, like debt and property. No alternative system eliminates that in full, and certainly won't bulldoze over individuals' objections. If someone individually feels and thinks the institutions are there to fuck him, he will behave accordingly. The way to cooperation has always been through the individual, to suggest that we really don't have to compete to the death in an endless struggle for life or a race to rule the world. That would in the end just lead to our ruin, individually and collectively. The high-minded goal of not killing each other over stupid shit is a far away dream even if you attain socialism, but you could mitigate the most obvious injustices and stupidities very easily. Rather than do that though, certain people decided they would amplify everything bad about capitalism and make a regime of unmatched faggotry.

>>466549
>Surplus value exists in the real world
I know someone is going to quotemine this and I faceplant sometimes, but by this I mean - surplus value is recognized as the result of concrete labor being actively worked harder for the same pay, in the way Marx describes. Basically, Marx is affirming that the root of this system is exploitation and suffering. The exploitation part is clear enough to everyone - of course a capitalist exploits workers, that's the point of the arrangement. The suffering this entails, and the cycle leading to some very obviously bad moral outcomes, is often lost by the crowd that believes in being amoral turbolibs. It's not that Marx is a simpering idealist or afraid of people hurting, but the suffering reaches crises in which much of the population dies for no good reason, and the result of this suffering only benefits a few really rich people. The climate of suffering and deprivation in capitalism becomes not just a fetter on producing something useful, but a clear and present danger to the struggling middle class, who risk being thrown into the ranks of the workers. One of the patches to capitalism post-1929 was to basically guarantee that members of the middle class never truly leave the middle class, even if their wealth and status and dignity are taken every day. There is a great bias towards retaining social class status even when the wealth no longer exists, and formally shunting a member of the middle class to the working class is a ritual of humiliations and shame. Strictly speaking, someone bumped down from middle to working classs always carries an air of superiority, because the middle class knows what they did to us. The march of shame and humiliation for petty-managers, when it's time for them to be fired, is to demote them to workers. I saw this happen to one manager and she was horrified at wearing the uniform I wore every day, and the small modicum of humiliation she got was nothing compared to the level of disdain the common peons faced every day of their lives, on and off the job. The demotion, and the particular needling of her former comrades, produces a suffering of a different sort. They might invent the story that because I'm a peon, I never will know better, but the middle class did know better and knows that once they are truly marked for demotion - when they are no longer able to easily enter management positions or the positions of their assigned rank after high school - they don't get to go back to being workers. Usually middle class demotion is accompanied by the status of legal insanity and a stay in the loony bin, which marks someone as a different sort of underclass. Even here, the educated and the former middle class are reluctant to give up that lump of horseflesh and the reminder that they are better than us. I've seen the lowest shits brag that at least they weren't me, and these were some bitch-ass punks. So goes the Satanic cycle - they will fight to the bitter end for that petty distinction, just as they were trained. That is what was weaponized in the 20th century to great effect, so that people will pay a premium for nothing more than vanity. Meanwhile, the actual work being done, what little is done, is made to suffer for the worst pay, while great expense is paid to those whose job is to make us suffer, and make the world suffer. Many of these people aren't really happy themselves, but the logic of depopulation and eugenics insists on it. The sole beneficiaries are a few creeps who love the torture and the thrill for some spiritual reason, and should we really sacrifice our lives for them?

>>466549
>the basis for surplus value is that we have money or some suitable token that is utilized by a capitalist, rather than utilized by some other interested party like say a socialist planner.
There is no difference between the two. When commodities are being produced, it doesn't matter whether or not the capitalist is an actual person. The person of the capitalist is completely irrelevant; a fictional entity like a state agency or a corproation or a co-operative is every bit as capable of performing the capitalist function. No matter who or what serves in the role of the functioning capitalist, he/it is compelled by necessity to extract surplus-value from a productive process.
>So, the model concerns abstract labor and exchange, because the model is a critique of political economy rather than a grand description of what economics actually is.
That doesn't follow at all. The model concerns abstract labor, because he made the positive claim that labor-power is ultimately the basis of the value of all commodities.
>I don't agree that political economy was a pseudoscience, since it would have to be a science in the first place to be a pseudoscience, and the pseudoscience only really got going with the really awful inheritors of political economy after Ricardo but before Marx.
The best definition of "pseudoscience" that I can think of is "a supposed discipline that claims the mantle of science without adhering to the tenats that define science."
>Marx suggests that economics could be an open question, rather than suggesting "this is how capitalism works now and forever and no deviation is possible".
How capitalism works is an entirely different question than what capitalism is. Capitalism may change the way that capital flows, but it cannot change its fundamental nature.
>So far as you're dealing with money and the incentives of free market liberalism though
Liberalism is just an affectation of the state, a false front, a prop. As with every other governmental structure that facilitates the flow of capital, it can only ultimately follow the dictates of capital, since the ruling class that controls it are so beheld.
>It could turn out that a planned economy can maintain the appearance of money, while the actual market is planned to produce minute changes in the qualities produced.
I do not understand what you are trying to say here. The gold standard was still effectively in place in most of the world in 1929.
>This is basically what happened - after WW1, capitalism of the old type was dying, and it was put to bed in 1929, never to return.
Eh, I would say that it kept going until after WWII when the old empires finally collapsed and global capitalism began to take shape.
>The going out party was an orgy of rampant speculation and everyone pretending the system worked, while the real plan was worked out behind the curtain.
For the capitalists, sure, but that always happened when a depression was beginning. Command economies taking shape at the time showed that nobody in charge thought that the status quo was sustainable, and if you read the literature of the time, John Q. Public was of a similar mindset. Everyone knew that shit had to change.
>We're living through a similar transformation, and have been since 2000
No, this one is different. Last time, capitalism was saved by the effective death of the empires and the global integration of capital. This time, capitalism is already global; there is nowhere for it to grow, nowhere that has not already had its role in the capitalist system stamped into every aspect of its society. Capitalism is dying. Yeah, that sounds an awful lot like when Lenin said the same thing a hundred years ago, but his prediction was predicated on his concept of imperialism being "the highest stage of capitalism," and it's just not. Global capitalism is, just as Marx said that it would be.

Now, that said, I wonder if capitalism might again stave off its own demise for a while yet again by eliminating land rent, effectively un-enclosing the commons. It would mean giving a tremendous power to the proletariat, and it would require the sacrifice of capitalism's cruelest whip–poverty. Have the landlords been integrated too much into the bourgeoisie to allow that sacrifice to occur? Will the lure of high profits from rent be too great to abandon in an environment of low profit rates on actual capital? Time will tell.
>Depopulation is a deliberate policy rather than an accident
Ha! The capitalists are losing their shit trying to stop that trend. All of the social programs that keep their states functioning are pyramid schemes that are predicated upon an ever-growing labor pool. Furthermore, capital cannot grow without labor-power growing with it. When that shrinks, things get real bad real quick for capital. Just look at all the crazy shit that they do now to encourage parenthood. The tax code is a goddamned giveaway to parents. Mothers are given free financial rides and every opportunity to stay home and take care of their little bastards. The bitch of it is that subsidizing the next generation is self-defeating–it costs as much as the little shits will ever be worth. So they just import them from places that still have one foot in the agrarian epoch and thus too many children.
>If you want an example of it, the last wave of science fiction pushed this idea of technology as god or divine revelation, giving to technology a Luciferian quality.
Technology gets treated the same way in popular myth that magic was treated in past epochs–a thing that is not understood that can produce supernatural results. It goes with pomos thinking that they are literal wizards who just haven't learned to control their powers yet.
>Anyway, there is no getting around the use of money for moral purposes and an incentive
Sure there is. Morality doesn't matter for shit. It always justifies the statud quo, whatever that status quo may be. Morality will just conform to how money has to flow at the time.
>If someone individually feels and thinks the institutions are there to fuck him, he will behave accordingly.
The real kicker is that he won't. He will do what he has to do to get by regardless.
>The way to cooperation has always been through the individual, to suggest that we really don't have to compete to the death in an endless struggle for life or a race to rule the world.
I don't care if we cooperate or not, frankly. Cooperation is a means, not an end.
>The high-minded goal of not killing each other over stupid shit is a far away dream even if you attain socialism, but you could mitigate the most obvious injustices and stupidities very easily.
That depends on what you consider to be "stupid shit." When someone kills another person, it's usually because it seems like a good idea at the time, even when that idea is not one that truly benefits the killer.

>>466562
Agencies are corporations are comprised of people and only exist because people exist. If you didn't have managerial intent lording over you, you wouldn't have any money or debt tokens or this cargo cult economics.

I don't think you're capable of comprehending this argument due to basic faults in thinking.

>>466562
Also, your view of the world and humanity is premised on multiple myths and lies that create a just-so story. There's no getting through that if you're convinced the narratives hold more power than the people or the actual things at work. You still think capitalism exists. Money hasn't been "money" since the 1930s - the US abandons the gold standard then, and then fully makes the switch in 1971. Most of the world follows suit, because the monetary system was long ago no longer a national but a global decision.

>echnology gets treated the same way in popular myth that magic was treated in past epochs–a thing that is not understood that can produce supernatural results. It goes with pomos thinking that they are literal wizards who just haven't learned to control their powers yet.
You're huffing the eugenic myth about technology rather than what technology is. Technology is not magic and never was.

I know your heart is Satanic and this is a lost cause for you, but I don't think you understand that no one has any reason to follow your system.
If you want to lord over people in this imperious way, for the thrill and celebration of your own ignorance - if you wish to subordinate the world to a lie - then that will destroy itself in the long term. The eugenic system is destroying anything useful in it. All that remains of it is this Satanic urge to destroy everything in sight. Unfortunately, that is all they need to do - destroy, ruin, rape, and make the people ever-weaker with every generation, until the torture and thrill is mazimized and eternal. Ingsoc is becoming real. Thanks a lot, asshole.

>>466575
>I know your heart is Satanic and this is a lost cause for you, but I don't think you understand that no one has any reason to follow your system.
>If you want to lord over people in this imperious way, for the thrill and celebration of your own ignorance - if you wish to subordinate the world to a lie - then that will destroy itself in the long term

You know you're dealing with a deranged person when any attempt to reason with them is interpreted as more evidence that they're right. And you know you're dealing with a schizo when they literally describe you as part of some malevolent force just because you won't nod your head along to their unending ramblings

>>466579
Well, you are part of a malevolent force. You know what my argument was regarding humans and agency, because I've said it multiple times and I don't need to spell out every fucking thing for you. You refuse to understand it because you have this narrative version of history in your head, due to faulty philosophy and an ignorance of what humans are and what societies and thus any institution would be. If you are speaking of a mechanistic society, the agent in question is a willful human, rather than some essence of humanity that you would prefer to replace the actual flesh and blood animal that does these things. Every law of society you can imagine is premised on the belief that humans are aware of the society they live in, and the only way to maintain command and control of your sort is through forced ignorance. Humanity would become absolutely retarded in these schemes where you cajole humans forever. A small minority would become a "brain bug" caste mind controlling the rest of the race, and that is the endstate of humanity. It's an ugly situation and you're disgusting for advancing it. It won't work though, and it will just leave the world and our conditions worse in the end.

That's been the point I've made all thread - that these value judgements and economics exist because humans place moral value on survival and being connected to the real world, rather than some ineffable force that compels humans to obey a thought leader. If there is a pedagogy suggesting blind obedience, there is a method by which it is imposed. If there is freedom, then that freedom includes the potential of humans to oppress each other. These are not absolutes unmoored from the reality of the world. The world is the sole absolute, and our conceits about it don't mean a thing. I don't think this concept is admissible in your world-system, because you've made it clear you will always pick the side of tyranny and imperium over anything we would have wanted.

BTW, if you were a real cyberneticist, you would be aware of this matter of human agency - that the most important part of a cybernetic society would be the human agents and all the machinery built into them, including the faculty of reason. You wouldn't invoke this idea "hurr durr humans are like robots" unless you were invoking an essentially Satanic view of humanity. Humans are very clearly a different sort of machine, and there has been operations thought going back to the 19th century. This is one of the things Babbage was on about.

>>466438
I am pretty sure if we are imaganing an economy of non-replicating, semi-generalized robots (that, let us assume, are cheap enough to maintain), then we are just discusing a less moraly aprehensible version of Antebellum South. It would be just as unsustainable, and would create the same massive drive for expansion, as the only way to boost profitablilty would be to buy more and more bots that would be used to work in more and more jobs. For todays service-oriented world that would likely mean a Golden Circle esque urge to expand robotic labour to the Third World, as manual labour is more pronounced there. Oh and the robot manufacturies (replacing trans-Atlantic slavery in this scenario) would likely become massive "Too big to fail" monopolies.

>>466605
That's exactly how they think - they have never given up slavery and can't think of a world without it. All of this is a way of eliding what is really at work - keeping wages low, and using the threat of automation as an ideological justification. It has always been known that humans are cheaper, and that the rulers don't actually want to produce things, because an increase in product could only sit in a warehouse or be distributed by need to "unworthies". The aim of the ruling ideas is to keep conditiosn as low as they can be kept and drive them down ever further, and this goes beyond merely a quantity of stuff. We produce enough stuff, but we create a society that incentivizes deprivation and spends great effort specifically to deprive people of basic things, while allowing them empty luxuries. The liberal attitude towards automation can only imagine robots giving the liberal more pleasure points, because that is their moral philosophy. That's why I keep saying, the morality at work is essentially Satanic. There's no point trying to reason with them, because they decided a long time ago what they wanted, and put that into motion.

It has long been understood that mechanization would easily allow humans to do more, so we have more time and energy and resources to do what we wanted in the first place. It is so simple, yet great expense is made specifically to keep people down. The justification is a decision that those who won neoliberalism want to kill those who lost, and simply refuse to allow any other world to exist. Acting like there isn't a democidal program in place is the great lie that must be maintained by mystification after mystification, because if the true situation were acknolwedged, most of humanity has no reason to go along with it, including many selected to live because they can tell in the long term they're next, and the ruling ideas prohibit solidarity unless one buys in to the Satanic chanting that is obviously at the core of the ruling institutions. The naive keep thinking the institutions can be salvaged, and the opportunists see their position in the institutions as the only path to meaningful power. The entire settlement from 1914 on has been a disaster for the world and humanity, and it all started with an unwillingnesss to do what was needed to the eugenists while it was possible.

>>466574
>Agencies are corporations are comprised of people
No, agencies and corporations are fictional entities that are imagined up by people.
>If you didn't have managerial intent lording over you, you wouldn't have any money or debt tokens or this cargo cult economics.
Bullshit. Managers, though self-interested, are compelled to serve the interests of capitalists who are in turn compelled to serve the interests of capital.
>I don't think you're capable of comprehending this argument due to basic faults in thinking.
uyghur please. You aren't saying anything complicated or esoteric. What you are saying is just factually wrong and logically fallacious.
>>466575
>There's no getting through that if you're convinced the narratives hold more power than the people or the actual things at work.
Capital and capitalism are not narratives, they are descriptions of real things actually moving in reality.
>You still think capitalism exists.
In a world where capital is plainly visible and nearly all goods produced by human hands that get exchanged are commodities, only a complete fool would think otherwise.
>You're huffing the eugenic myth about technology rather than what technology is. Technology is not magic and never was.
Learn to read.
>I know your heart is Satanic and this is a lost cause for you
And the schozophrenia can be contained no longer!
>The eugenic system is destroying anything useful in it. All that remains of it is this Satanic urge to destroy everything in sight.
Gangster computer god world wide secret containement policy, made possibly solely by world wide computer god frankenstein controls, especially the constant threshold brainwash radio… quiet and motionless, I can slightly hear it. Repeatedly this has saved my life on the streets.
>>466580
>A small minority would become a "brain bug" caste mind controlling the rest of the race
Four-billion world-wide population, all living, have a computer god containment policy brain bank brain–a real brain in the brain bank cities on the far side of the moon we never see.
>That's been the point I've made all thread - that these value judgements and economics exist because humans place moral value on survival and being connected to the real world, rather than some ineffable force that compels humans to obey a thought leader.
It's a mindless and baseless point.
>because you've made it clear you will always pick the side of tyranny and imperium over anything we would have wanted.
Parroting puppet gangster slave! Now even you know I am a menace to your gangster computer god world wide gangster communism with constant protection, life-long sworn conspirators of this organized crime police state.
>>466607
>That's exactly how they think - they have never given up slavery and can't think of a world without it.
Slavery conspiracy over three-hundred years ago: ideally tiny-brained apoidic niger gangster TV gangster spy cameras with gifted with all the deadly frankenstein controls.
>Acting like there isn't a democidal program in place is the great lie that must be maintained by mystification after mystification, because if the true situation were acknolwedged, most of humanity has no reason to go along with it, including many selected to live because they can tell in the long term they're next, and the ruling ideas prohibit solidarity unless one buys in to the Satanic chanting that is obviously at the core of the ruling institutions.
So, brainwashed from birth by the computer god threshold brainwash radio, parotting puppet gangster slave, if you believe in anything, forget kneeling to abide by the high holy law long enough to say one word of pray for me for your only hope for a future!

*Remember, it is gangster Supreme Court-written high holy law: "I'll give it to you to suck. Finish him!"

>>466641
>No, agencies and corporations are fictional entities that are imagined up by people.
So people just sort of randomly coalesce into groups by some inertia, and there is no plan in cooperation, no collusion whatsoever? You are taking an absolute position as ideology to defend your claim now, without any understanding of what a firm or organization is. You are married to this belief that humans must be amoral, unthinking animals, and it does not make sense.

I don't think you have the mental capacity to make meaningful connection with reality at this point. You really don't, and you seem to actually believe what you are saying. You're trying to invoke an internet meme to discredit me, but if you get into how the liberal elite think, they actually do believe they're a cybernetic gangster computer god. Musk won't shut up about it.

So I don't know how to get this through your head that humans act as if they have agency, and this is the basis for the free market and liberal society to function as it does. If you reject that premise, then why are you speaking of optimizing price signals, unless you're some turbo Austrian Schooler? The entire point of the market is that human participants have agency and an attachment to their money. If you want to optimize resource inflows or outflows or optimize operations in labor, that solution has always been trivial. It's why planned economies are noted to grow much faster than market economies, given a political will for the planned economy to do this. The capitalists are not oblivious to this, but because firms became an oligarchy and vertical integration became normal, they could if they desired implement the same sort of planning for their own purposes. Keeping the market mechanism and accounting of labor-time as it exists was entirely about the moral function of the market, while overall objectives of the arrangement are controlled. The plan is obvious - depopulation necessitates forced ignorance, which you absolutely refuse to acknowledge because you are eugenist, and a eugenist does not respond to reason when eugenics is on the line.

>>466643
>So people just sort of randomly coalesce into groups by some inertia, and there is no plan in cooperation, no collusion whatsoever?
Yeah, if you don't admit to understanding the point you can avoid admitting that you are wrong. Take your meds, schizo.

>>466644
This is literally the only way your argument makes sense. You have to argue that humans don't actually think in order to disregard the point I'm trying to tell you, and the reason why this thread is so fucking stupid. I tried to explain this to you earlier but you doubled down and recapitulated this alternate theory which no economic writer believes.

What this really is, is a recapitulation of the idea that humans are a special and unique essence of matter - it's an absolute recapitulation of the politicized genetic myth which violently asserts itself over basic sense. Otherwise, you would have understood what is obvious to any person about the nature of human labor and why it is valuable. Replacing humans with robots does not essentially change anything, because the concept of "human" invoked here is not a biopolitical one, which you assert because you are a devout eugenist and literally can't comprehend a world where "human" referred to any spiritual concept.

>>466649
>This is literally the only way your argument makes sense.
No, it's not. Your brain is broken.
>You have to argue that humans don't actually think in order to disregard the point I'm trying to tell you
No, you don't. That doesn't follow at all. Your brain is broken.

>>466715
You're just recapitulating an empty authority now. I've explained over and over how your thinking is wrong. I'm not the only one, and there have been discussions in this thread about the nature of Marx's statement. You should read instead of recapitualting autism.

If you are not speaking of humans managing capital and the presumption of agency, you are not speaking of a market economy and so any discussion of value or exchange is meaningless. I don't know how much easier this has to be for you to understand it. Everything you write, consequently, is about nonsense or a fantasy. It elides the entire purpose of political economy and any critique of it. If you wanted to optimize a clockwork of machines or humans deployed like machines, you are thinking more of operations and the work Babbage was doing, and what Babbage writes is something that is often minimized in political economy discussions but it's actually pretty important to know. In any event, this is a very different question from capitalism from a managerial standpoint. Managing the finance side of things is a lot easier than managing the concrete labor, but the trading AIs are always deployed under the assumption that human actors' intent is the primary mover of economic decision-making, rather than a materialistic basis. The trading algorithm can't build a simulation of the world - all of those costs are delegated to the operations arm of the capitalist enterprises, and it's their problem with whatever budget they are given. Finance is at first a tool for commanding labor, before that labor encounters the productive process.

I'll keep correcting your stupidity but you'll just recapitualte autism and retreat to the echo chamber, no matter how stupid you are. That's the sad state of discourse in this place.

The universality of labor only applies in the abstract, i.e. when it is exchanged and divided into however many units a manager would allocate. This is pretty basic for Marx's critique. It is universal for that purpose, but it is not universal due to some natural force, or at least, the natural force works because nature would be the source of ourselves and the way capitalism has predictable laws of motion works through human agency and the conceits humans hold, rather than capitalism being an inexorable force that just happened one day. If capitalism is just matter in motion, it creates the impression that capitalism will always exist or is somehow imbued in the universe, which would make any plan for communism dead on arrival or something short of what was intended. Capitalism can only exist because moral philosophy suggests to us that money does have value in exchange. We could, in another society, simply take from others what we wanted without any pretense that there is an exchange. We do a lot of that, and capitalism has no problem with exploitation existing - nor does socialism or anarchism have this problem with exploitation in the economic sense. It is rather the claim of communism that exploitation of a class on a permanent basis is a really shitty foundation for society, when you could have just done the actual work we collectively wanted and let the workers have nice things. That's really the only thing socialism is suggesting at a basic level - that we don't need to kill each other over economic competition and individual greed is stupid. If the point of socialism is to imperiously lord over others, then it's worse than capitalism in every way because it becomes a political necessity to shit on others, and that can't be reasoned with at the end of the day. This would be very very fucking basic, but certain people turned socialism into their tinpot dictatorship that exists in their fantasy, rather than anything that would actually function for a day.

>>466741
To put it another way - money doesn't "know" anything about what it commands simply by virtue of being money. That's one of the problems everyone recognizes with capitalism, that money is blind to things which are actually useful or desirable, and thus the profit motive and the motive for money itself creates a number of perverse incentives. Even if you are willing to accept those perverse incentives, the money itself is not moral or knowledgeable. The money is only a measure of the manager's judgement of whatever he is willing to deploy and what he has to pay to maintain the social situation - and so the capitalist has to pay a worker, whether that pay is in the form of a money wage or the upkeep of a bonded laborer or payment in-kind. The widespread use of credit, or credit scores like we use today, was recognized by Marx as belonging to a higher stage of production than simple money; but let's say you use credit like you would use money. Fiat currency does some really wonky things to capitalism, the details of which I don't need to get into here. One advantage of fiat and credit is that it mitigates some of the perverse incentives from the point of view of the manager - just spend a deficit and make the people take out IOUs to the ruling capitalists, which is what all the public and private debt is, and you can take on a lot more debt than you could in the past, because you're banking on the promise that workers will continue working and accept the rule of those in charge, and so long as you have that, the money doesn't REALLY matter. All you need to do is engineer bailouts every so often, and guess what has been the rule in the 21st century.

>>466741
>The universality of labor only applies in the abstract, i.e. when it is exchanged and divided into however many units a manager would allocate. This is pretty basic for Marx's critique. It is universal for that purpose, but it is not universal due to some natural force, or at least, the natural force works because nature would be the source of ourselves and the way capitalism has predictable laws of motion works through human agency and the conceits humans hold, rather than capitalism being an inexorable force that just happened one day. If capitalism is just matter in motion, it creates the impression that capitalism will always exist or is somehow imbued in the universe

I don't really get this, Cockshott says that Human labor is universal because of the capacity to do any type of work. Considering that aspect of humans as "bedrock material reality" doesn't lead to those conclusions (eternal capitalism as imbued in the universe). Every previous mode of production has in one way or another sought to make use of that too.
At most this predestines humans towards some kind of economy that has social labor.

>>466743
Humans in savagery did not have any social labor as Marx understood it (this was his 19th century anthropological thinking which was common at the time). Saying humans engage in social labor is sort of like saying water is wet; in some way or another, labor is social even when we would prefer to conduct our own affairs entirely for ourselves. This is not so much a consequence of the labor itself but the conditions we must live in and the environment. We're dragged into society even if we wished to exist outside of it, and that's precisely what the role of the state is - to make people comply with society. This is not the same as saying society is total and truly inescapable - there is a world outside of social circulation, and social circulation in reality in between actual agents rather than in the abstract. Again, the capitalist manager has to see society in the abstract as potential competitors from any corner, including that which he does not know; and so stating human predestiny for social labor is really a claim about a managerial conceit about society. We can cooperate in arrangements other than the state or the presumption that we're all going to be forced into competition and centralization. Inherent to capitalism - and this is an imperative of any empire in the broadest sense of what an empire is, but it is explicitly understood by the free trade thought - is the expectation that all the people in the world will be dragged kicking and screaming into general commodity exchange, and then remain at uneven levels of development.

Humans are not unique in this capacity, and Cockshott himself acknowledges this in his own presentations - he mentions that machines replicate this rational task of management, and so the human faculty in that regard can be done by machines. The physical interactions with the environment are a problem of engineering.
Even if we were to replace humans with animals or life generally, the meaning would be the same. There are humans who are incapable of many lines of work, and specialization within the race, so this is really a statement about rational intent rather than ability.

The argument that humans are actually reducible to rationality doesn't hold up to the most basic understanding of what humans are, but in the managerial and abstract division of labor, the managerial task is all that matters. Humans are not privileged in that regard. We could just as well imagine the laws of nature animating humans like hobgoblins and remove human agency altogether and in the abstract view, you would still see those hobgoblins equally as universal as a human or anything else. So, it doesn't serve as a rational basis for why humans are special. Strictly speaking, humans aren't special, but because we are humans and don't grant non-humans the status of persons, we're not going to weep if an animal or machine is exploited. Humans present in the market either selling their labor-power or selling their whole bodies / being sold as chattel, but even as slaves, humans are capable of rebellion, while animals cannot conceive of rebelling against their confinement. You may say certain humans are incapable of such thought, but this would eliminate the universality of human labor very obviously.

The point being that capitalism is capitalism because money and the market is assigned some moral value to be money. Otherwise, money itself doesn't mean anything. Marx describes money as representative of a social relation, but what is that social relation between? It is between people, and an understanding of the arrangement is necessary for the worker and the boss alike. A slave that doesn't know he's supposed to be a slave won't be a very effective slave, and no slave was seriously convinced he was a free man just like the freeborn around him. The difference between slaves and the free is always stark, and the past century is not different even if the institution of slavery has been rebranded. Those who exist to either serve or be killed know on some level what this is, and the people selected to live and rule definitely know where they stand - it's why they are where they are, even if they feign ignorance or convince themselves temporarily it is something else.

>>466748
The reason for the universality of human labor is precisely because of humans being social agents regardless of their class, because that is how humans are integrated into a society. Those outside of society so to speak are outside of the law entirely. It's not a surprise that the liberal conceit about the workers is that workers don't exist and don't have actual thought, and this is emphasized in everything liberals suggest about the working class mind and their continual insults and abuse towards the working class. As mentioned, even a slave has social standing. The total invalid has only social standing because no one has seen fit to destroy him yet, and this is necessary for depopulation to continue. The absolute worst thing would be to humanize or understand the invalid, so much that it is morally considered beyond the pale, even though most of the invalid want nothing more than to be allowed to live. They've offered to be exploited, even enslaved, and society has said no. The best way to restore slavery is to mainstream a status even lower than it, and this was something the American slave masters understood about the slave institution and what came after.

>>466748
>There are humans who are incapable of many lines of work
I dunno about that. From my observations humans differ only in their learning speed. There is a difference between individuals in how much effort is required to teach a particular human a particular task, not what task it is.

>>466750
Hypothetically, you could graft a brain onto an animal or any object and, with enough engineering and time, transform it into a human, and have the same situation. This is the problem with relying on a biopolitical definition of human, which is why eugenics emphasized it and displaced all spiritual connotations, except for an elite caste which was presumed to possess all of the virtue. This take on spirituality is the product of intense social engineering and the perpetuation of rot.

Realistically, the capacities of humans in ability are known, and the people themselves are acutely aware of their limitations, and err on the side of caution almost axiomatically. A fool's confidence will not last long, especially in this society. Only fools of a particular type, whose stupidity is sanctioned by the ruling ideas, may persist, and these people often aren't true fools or even stupid. They know they're full of shit and simply do not care. It is not surprising that the eugenists focused on mental disability as their preferred marker of shame, rather than the workers as a whole. This was the necessary break that would start the cycle, once the moral philosophy of shaming someone for mental disability - including "disabilities" that were entirely due to the destruction of people and making sure they had no place in this society - was enshrined above all other laws. It was necessary for eugenics to denounce the idea that there was any law other than eugenics, and so the Satanic morality where one's will is the extent of the law was very amenable to eugenics and would be promoted. In a way, the Satanic view is correct - there really is nothing stopping an individual except another will, and so a strategy of deliberate transgression almost writes itself. This has been the chosen strategy of eugenics in all of its endeavors, and was the strategy of the Nazis. In another time, it would have been national and political suicide to destroy so many people, rather than find some use for them; and in the 21st century, there are throngs of people begging to be exploited because they know the consequences of living like this.

Prior concepts of humanism implied a spiritual foundation for the human, and the implication of social upbringing and history was necessary for someone to truly be human. This was turned into a parody by Nazi race-science theory, in which history is reduced purely to a genetic trait and something asserted by will. Democratic society, and the basis for the very market society with laws that capitalism pertained to, was dependent in part on this spiritual conception of the human, and in the 18th century, it is the spiritual conception that is in vogue. Man as a type of animal was known, but the question of being human was not about a particular type of animal or its abilities. One of the persistent arguments for charity and helping anyone out was that a society that throws people away for the most trifling thing says much about itself. Even the most regressive and cruel states did not glorify death and torture in the way eugenics did. And so, when eugenicists get on a high horse about the residuum, there are a lot of normal people who see right away what the eugenists really want, and it's nothing good for them. Killing the hated invalid was not something done for its own sake, but to affect mass behavior. It wasn't enough to kill the invalid, even - the invalid was to be made a living abortion and a symbol of the eugenic creed's eternal victory. That is the world eugenics intends for everyone, up to its core elites. That's really what people like Francis Galton are - monsters through and through, in a way that is evident to me just by reading his writings. The guy is a clear pervert, and I know something about these people and the shit they say among each other.

>>466750
It's also why the false egalitarianism / false equivocation argument is standard among internet pseuds. Equality in a political sense or in the sense of human equality was not premised on ability in any way, but in what humans did to each other and what would guide their behavior morally and ethically. Ability certainly was necessary for this moral behavior to be expected, but there would have been a sense that an invalid was still a cretin - literally, someone sanctioned to exist with some amount of pity extended to them. Further, the ability to know how to act is not something rare. Eugenics had to claim that everyone except the eugenic elite and their chosen lacked any mind to make a single decision for themselves. That is at the heart of the imperious mindset a eugenist always adopts, always insinuating and seeking to cajole and tell everyone they're too stupid to have anything explained to them. It's a system of habitual lying.

Obviously those who are not capable of exercising rights are not political equals, and it's cruel to suggest that they are or can be. The bare minimum required for a man to at least know what politics is, is not some great mark of intelligence only an initiate can possess. It was only possible to instill a sense of failure and retardation when state schooling perpetuated itself for long enough, and it took literally poisoning two generations en masse starting in the 1980s to make people fearful enough to fall victim the current depopulation project. Even with the poisoning, the plan wouldn't work without vast preparation and a preponderance of force, technology, and effort pursuing depopulation above all. We gave up the country and two generations of the world to this beast, which has only ever taken from us and gives not one thing in return. Eugenics did not make people smarter or better, even among the elite. It's made an elite of cravens and Satanic retards.

>>466752
I've seen multiple instances here where some fag argues in favor of egalitarianism

So don't try to pretend that the core value of the left is st other than equality when everything it does points in that direction. As why enough times, and the answer will always come back to some faggy moralism about equality

>>466751
>>466752
What a word salad.
Show me activity that average human can't be taught to do given enough time and effort.

>>466759
You already answered your question with the qualifier "average", which further places labor in the realm of the abstract in this concept of value… which you would understand if you knew anything at all about Marx, which has been referenced in this thread.

What do you want, for the answers to be single sentence staccato regurgitations of your feelings? You really are a utilitarian.

>>466758
I don't think you understand the argument being made, or what equality even means in any sense. If we are really for equality, why are we made to forbid any amount of happiness to those not in the know? Why would such a drive be an obsession, such that we confuse basic reality so that we can defend the war that eugenics implied?
If you think political equality is possible on an amoral basis, you're bigger retards than I thought. An amoral society would not regard human conceits at all, and whatever we suffer, we suffer. Eugenists adopt pseudo-amorality - they claim to be "beyond good and evil" but retreat to faggotry, just as Freddy Nietzsche did when he cried like a bitch over a fucking horse. It's all such overwrought bullshit because it was too much to accept that morality concerns something outside of us, and we don't get to choose what is evil. Evil in the world has asserted itself before we existed, and sadly humans choose to exemplify it rather than do the simplest things that would mitigate it, like not waging wars to get poor people killed. There are a lot of humans who see the folly of this, but the faggots who revel in pseudo-amorality are vocal and insist we have to accept them. Yet, when the rest of us dare to defend ourselves on the same terms, they're very quick to get on a high horse. It's funny how "amoral" people get on a high horse more than Christians at this point in history. Of course, that is always the habit of the Satan, and Christ is no longer the Satan of this world.

>>466761
>I don't think you understand the argument being made, or what equality even means in any sense. If we are really for equality, why are we made to forbid any amount of happiness to those not in the know?

Because equality is an impossible cope fantasy for losers, and underlying the leftist obsession with equality is an implicit moral hierarchy based on who can act like the biggest fag.

>>466761
And no one understands what tf you're saying because, in your schizoid delirium, you insist on using outrageous language and vocabulary which only you know the precise definition of - and which you can't explain without huge paragraphs.

>>466762
If your version of revolution is nakedly a coup for a few assholes, why would anyone want to join that? That is exactly what reactionaries say - that revolution is a scam, which tends to be true in the peoples' experience. The people do not make revolutionary conspiracies. They are dragged into a fight because if they don't fight, they die. If a revolutionary party has any interest in not facing an immediate counter-coup, they either have to go to the people or they go to the men with the money. Your revolutionary strategy is the strategy of the Hitlerians.

>>466763
Concepts like "abstraction" are now Eugene-specific language. It is inadmissible and I'm going crazy trying to grasp how you can be this fucking stupid and emotionally stunted, since your argument devolves to pure posturing and appeal to a false authority. It's at string theory levels of Not Even Wrong. I'm stuck spending paragraphs to explain things that are very, very basic, in order to defeat your argument on terms you should understand. You've had to resort to repeated recapitulations of a mythical retelling of the human project to defend your claim, and it's autistic at this point. You're such a crying fag that you can't stand reason, and need to recapitulate this because, as I said, you are eugenist and eugenism does not permit any concept that it can be wrong to exist. So long as you deny the centrality of eugenics, you always come back to this, or retreat to sops to buy time. It's funny how much effort is put into pretending eugenics isn't real when the ruling ideas all scream for eugenics, depopulation, sorting of the poor, and the general intercine war of eugenics.

I shouldn't have to speak like this, but I live in a world of madmen who actually think they're going to win the game of Big Brother we're all forced to play. Everyone is the star of the show in their own narrative version of history. This mystification is for the most brain-rotted of the middle class and they eat that shit up, pretending they're Batman or Thanos or whatever hero they use as their internal avatar. It's crazy how insanity is normal now.

>>466765
Touch pussy

>>466748
If I remember correctly than Marx did not say that primitive human societies lacked social labor altogether. I somehow get the impression you might be talking about abstract labor.

Your main argument seems to claim that the universality of human labor is a figment of the imagination of managers.

I have to say that my experiences corroborate what >>466750 said
<There is a difference between individuals in how much effort is required to teach a particular human a particular task, not what task it is.

If you discount the inequalities that come as a result of negative environmental factors among the able-bodied, then it really does seem to be a matter of learning speed and difficulty rather than ability.

So I would say that human labor is very universal in a material sense.

>>466770
Primitive (barbarous) and savage in that period meant distinct stages of development. The theory going was that savage man was solitary and the "nasty, brutish, and short" view prevailed.

>Your main argument seems to claim that the universality of human labor is a figment of the imagination of managers.

It's not entirely a figment of the imagination, in that you can manage labor this way even if no one thought to do it. The point I'm making is that labor in the abstract is only considered when exchanging it or managing it. If we were to judge the utility of all we produce, we wouldn't claim all labors are equal or all labors are valuable.

Arguing a hypothetical about the human subject, which relies on assumptions about a human nature that is fixed, doesn't answer the managerial task in the here and now. No manager has unlimited time and resources to train employees to their maximum potential, and managers have no interest in any thorough education or training, and definitely don't want the proles to learn independently. That's why it's the slow and stupid who always get fired first, and intelligence is primarily a measure of cunning and an ability to lie and deceive to win the struggle for life, rather than something useful in a productive sense. We have such distorted ideas of what intelligence and learning are that we value all of the wrong things. Any monkey can read a book and formulate theories or hack out code, and if we lived in a society that rewarded this initiative at all, we would have very different incentives. The incentive in this society, and especially in full eugenism, is maximal betrayal and backstabbing. The maladaptive traits of capitalism becomes absolutes and eviscerate all in their path. That's what is being defended, because eugenics won. There is only hell now.

>>466774
I think you are too doomer-pilled, you create thinking that is no longer able to recognize the opportunities for material progress, which do exist.

While it's true that eugenics is still around in some form or another, and it would be foolish to overlook it as a threat, you have basically dropped the concept of class-war waged by the ruling class and replaced it entirely by warnings about eugenics.

The lack of class analysis is worrying.

>>466776
What do you think class war meant? It wasn't about classes as essences fighting eternally, but institutions. Eugenics was class collaborationist - there were always scum willing to suck up to the ruling interest - and was offered as a way to win the class war by defining who was in and who was out. Those who ruled aligned with a middle class movement to oppress the workers, and found those of the workers and the lumpen who would be useful slaves for their world order.

This mystical treatment of social class is something that only makes sense in the 20th century. In the 19th century, social class was something everyone was aware of. If you have to ask who is a member of what class, your class analysis sucks. It's what fascists do when they argue about who gets to be white in their imagined race-theory.