[quote=@catchamber] If that's true, count me out. I'm deeply opposed to violent political change, for various reasons.[/quote] Politics is a violent business. I agree that vengeful or unnecessary violence should be avoided. But sometimes the most violent thing is to do nothing. To decide whether or not violence in a revolution is worth it, you have to compare it to the violence of the status quo. If you see the current system as theft from the working class, than you see a crazy amount of violence built into the current system, and the violence necessary to break out of that system is justified. [quote]FarmBot Incorporated isn't providing handouts, but open sourced technology that can feed the world. You still have to create or purchase the machines. We don't have to automate all food production, as that's a dangerous form of industrial centralization and overspecialization. Either way, what's wrong with mass producing food for everyone? If food is cheaper, people can reinvest in themselves and other industries. FarmBot Incorporated is basically giving workers collective ownership and the fruits of their labor, because anyone that builds or buys the units doesn't have to pay royalties. [/quote] Because that's not how capitalism approaches automation. It won't stop and say thats enough. Once it becomes cost effective, food production will be completely automated. The reason for this is that farms that aren't automated won't be able to compete. If automation allows you to sell a box of food for $1 a pound, and the pre-automation mode at $3 a pound, than any food produced using pre-automation methods will cost three times as much as the automated food. If there is a difference in quality then you will be able to sell the pre-automated stuff as a luxury good, but as the quality becomes equal, the pre-automated food increasingly becomes a cottage industry. If there are no health, quality, or ethical concerns of the automation process, then pre-automated food will become such a small industry as to be irrelevant when talking about employment. Also, reinvestment in a post-automation world becomes tricky if things get automated too quickly. Shit, the United States is insanely unready for this problem, since here we still require an arm and a leg just to get the necessary education to reinvest, making it very difficult for working folk to move from one industry to another. [quote]From the looks of it, Joe Davis’s boy is putting the needs of themselves and their family above their own people, and is ignoring the future possibility of being replaced by a machine that can guide the tractor without human input. So, he's a mentally incompetent tribalist, and the rest of the community would be well within their rights to ostracize him and boycott the company he works for.[/quote] Now you are thinking like a Marxist. Of course, they can't ostracize him very well because he is the propertied individual in this scenario. [quote] That's not true, because FarmBot Incorporated provides an open sourced technology that can feed the world. Plenty of technical data is publicly available online, and the resources needed to create new technologies are widely available at relatively low prices.[/quote] About FarmBot specifically, there are a few problems regarding it's effectiveness. First, most people who have problems accessing food do not have either the money or the property to manage it. Second, a single person needs at least an acre to produce enough food to feed themselves (I googled this, the numbers vary, but an acre seems to be the most common average). Four working class people living in an apartment do not have the resources to use a farmbot, even if they can spring for the $3000 upfront cost of the equipment itself. [quote]We both agree that many managers and CEOs are overpaid. My advice would be to draft legislation that forces them and their subordinates to be paid more fairly, or to limit your economic support to companies that already do this voluntarily.[/quote] Income caps are talked about enough, especially now that there is a group of modern economists who are worried about the twin-problems of wage stagnation and the wealth gap between the aristocracy and the working people. If a political movement got going to push this issue, I would support it. And for the record I do limit my economic support to especially heinous businesses as much as I can afford to. The problem is that we are talking about problems that are almost universal. Sometimes you cannot shop with your dollar because there isn't a good choice. [quote]Had I lived in such times, I would've argued that slavery, let alone "partus sequitur ventrem", is a despicable legal doctrine that has no place in American society. Frederick Douglas did violate the law, but I wouldn't just sit back and accept the status quo. I'd be protesting, networking, and building economic systems that negate the need for human slavery.[/quote] That all happened, but it ended in violence anyway. When abolitionists figured out they could move to Kansas Territory and use their vote there to make it a free state rather than a slave state, they did that. When it was clear they heavily outnumbered the Pro-Slavery people, Pro-Slavery politicians in neighboring Missouri responded by crossing the border and straight up murdering Free-Staters. "Si vis pacem, para bellum." If you want peace, you gotta be ready for war. This is as true with social causes as it is with geopolitical ones. [quote]Just because something has always happened a certain way, doesn't mean it'll always happen that way. I believe your argument is an appeal to tradition.[/quote] It's an appeal to evidence. It would be an appeal to tradition of there was no tangible connection between violence and revolution. Needless to say, the connection between violence and revolution is so tangible that the two are practically synonymous. [quote]I don't believe they exist, because I find the idea to be a horrendously vague, double-edged sword that can be used to justify oppression. The "upper class" will use it to scare the "middle class" into obedience, and lure the "lower class" into providing them political support. Meanwhile, the violent revolutionaries will use it to mobilize the "lower class" for their purposes, then turn around and take their property after the revolution is over. We can sit here all day and argue about definitions, but I'd rather spend my time providing everyone with the means to survive and prosper without relying on the rest of society.[/quote] The problem is that none of the things you mentions would be efficacious if the classes didn't exist in some tangible form. They are vague in the same sense that race is vague, but none the less they exist. Like I said before, if you can draw a circle around a group of people and say they have more or less access to their society than another group of people, you have a class. [quote]No person is an island at present, but modern technology is advanced enough to make people self-sufficient. It's relevant, because many political struggles are based on the majority of society lacking what they need to survive and prosper.[/quote] I don't actually think this is true. Even with your robots, the idea that you have to purchase self sufficiency from another person is kinda funny tbh. [quote]However, it's possible that allowing modern capitalism to function without hindrance can lower productivity growth. Some employees recognizing their expendability will become lax, due to a morale loss. Some investors becoming very wealthy will refrain from supplying the market with ever-increasing capital, due to bubble risks. As for the impracticality of requiring Wall Street to research ethical codes, I'd rather such a task be done by those that are actually concerned about their malpractices.[/quote] I actually agree, yeh, you do have to intervene, because capitalism has all the intelligence of hungry dogs jumping at a carcass. You just have to be insanely tactical about it because, just like intervening with the dogs, it's very easy to screw up. [quote]Regarding the Marxist revolutionary scenario, how does one impartially prevent capital from reaccumulating into the hands of a few? Also, without the forces of supply and demand to gauge value through evolutionary means, how does one impartially ensure everyone receives exactly what they put into the system?[/quote] By not recognizing the legal status of capital. Most forms of property require the law to recognize them, elsewise everything is by right of conquest. The Syrian Kurds have this system right now where the community is allowed to vote on the allocation of property. The effect being that you can build up capital if you wish, but if your community decides that your private pool of capital is bad for the community, they can vote to redistribute it. In the west, property is held up as a sacred right in all forms, so we tend to think of even the redistribution of something as abstract as capital as being theft equal to burglary. If we could vote on the allocation of capital though, perhaps we wouldn't have the problems we currently have. [quote]For the most part, I agree with you. However, I believe it's in the best interest of all people that every person and mutualist system has the means to survive and prosper without reliance on the rest of society. That way, should one portion of the gestalt falter, the remainder can simultaneously repair the damage and operate with little-to-no loss in productivity.[/quote] It sounds nice, and maybe automation will do this, I just really doubt it. Just taking the farmbot alone, someone will figure out that it's more practical to specialize in one form of produce and trade with their neighbor. This process will move up and down the line because this form of sharing surplus is the way all human societies, from tribalist to capitalist to socialist, create the abundance that makes our species so much more impressive than the animal kingdom. We are inevitably a social species, and we will create social constructs that, if taken away, would make our lives poorer. If society fell right now, people would still live. It would just be a harder life than we are used to. Likewise, if that automation society collapsed, the farmbots would eventually wear down for some people, and we would be back down to square one.