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No, Jacob, the fate of the lumpenproletariat and the nature of distribution and utilization of community property is not incidental.
That's not the right way to go about it, though. Just as the ELR's wages can serve as effective minimum wages for the respective jobs (there's debate on one wage vs. multiple wages in the program), its workweek can also serve as an effective maximum workweek. That and more conventional reductions in the workweek (statutory labour law) combine to form a better way to reduce hours worked and (for Red Tory Tea Girl) encourage the proper lumpenproletariat and the lumpen to move into the legal workforce.
And we want to encourage people to move into the legal workforce, as opposed to working on their own projects and concerns, such as parenting, or gardening, because...?
For exactly the same reason we ask everyone in the house to pitch in for cooking, cleaning, etc., for at least part of their time - rather than pursuing their own projects 100% of the time.
It's because in a society, we should all share in serving the needs of everyone. The fact that some employment creates no value for people is a problem that should be solved, not a condemnation of what you call "legal" work as a whole.
We feed, clothe, and house kids even if they absolutely refuse to do anything for the common good. We feed, clothe, and house adults who can't do what others can. But it's not clear to me what obligation is owed to those who refuse to participate in the productive process, by "society" - that is, by those who do participate.
The fact that we do none of these things well is due to the exploitative and oppressive nature of our social, economic, and political system. But I can't imagine a society where sharing the pain is purely optional, while sharing the gain is a matter of entitlement.
How much work do you think is required of each human to contribute to the productive process enough to generate sustenance and basic needs for him or herself, given a more egalitarian distribution of the benefits of the productive process? 5, maybe 6 hours a week, if you want to live a frugal life? And even less will be required in the future as technology continues to render more human labour obsolete. And there will always be those who will gladly work extra hours, for more compensation which they should of course receive. So, in practical purposes, ya, the amount of work actually required from any given individual is close to nil.
@ Red Tory Tea Girl
Gaian asked you if you were a Denier of climate change and I quoted what I thought was your response to him . Seeing as your response was not a Yes or No and I was skimming through your debate ,I cried Denier . Since , I have reread your response and I see you did answer him . I reiternate that the Bla bla bla remark was not intended for you personally but as an overall feeling of helplessness and a feeling that there is more talk than action here . I keep coming back because I am learning alot , and that is good .
toochewed, I'm glad you're getting something out of this. My apologies that there tend to be a lot of complex and emotionally evocative arguments happening all at once.
Gaian, climate change is happening, human driven, and barring an economic catastrophe that kills more people than climate change would, we're going to hit the 2 degree tipping point that makes it rather difficult to avoid centuries of precambrian temperatures.
Do you understand that you and I agree on this? That you're preaching to the converted and you sound eerily like Vic Toews trying to assert that those who are against his vision of telecommunications are coddling kiddie diddlers?
What we don't agree on is the ability of society to continue to improve economic outcomes over the long-term. I believe we can, and that we will come through this crisis having spent decades improving the productivity of land, not so much through transgenics as through infrastructure. That doesn't mean I'm saying, "By all means, pollute full-bore, because it'll all work out in a century or so." Rather, we could probably bust out of this depression we're in by engaging in a war on emmissions and energy scarcity. The two, we are finding, do tend to go hand in hand.
Climate change is going to be a global catastrophe, sending food security backwards by decades. And industrial solutions are the only way it doesn't make the Irish Potato Famine look like a wee fast by comparison.
@RTTG
I have to admit I was a little bit lost upon coming here . Thank you for your patience
@revolutionplease
lol
Gaian: Desalination, solar powered, both photo-voltaic and simple thermal radiation, essentially creating more sources of green, i.e. saltless, water... on a massive scale. 10 percent of our cropland currently produces 40% of our food supply. That 10% is irrigated. Also there are greenhouses, which quintuple yields, and which can be built around cities to both provide a greenbelt to hinder sprawl and ensure greater local food security.
Surely you're not going to argue that peak silicon is emminent as well. That we're running out of sand?
As to land reclamation?
We have to do this, fuelled by the water that we desalinate.
You can get arable soil from desert. Not tomorrow, but over years, decades, and that soil in the short term is going to be dependent on cover crops and light grazing to build itself up.
As to a GAI and what it does for that crisis? Very little on its own. It does improve income security and that does reduce certain costs and environmental impacts associated with income insecurity. By making work not an urgent necessity, it eliminates what is, in essence, mandatory vehicle ownership for much of society, and removes the political hurdles to introducing a carbon tax.
Also? Takes away one of the greatest canards thrown up in opposition to foreign development spending: "As long as we have poor people here..."
And early 20th century America was faced with a potential collapse of civilization: A self-induced liquidity trap that did about as much to total production as climate change will do. We built our way through that great depression, eventually, but there was mass suffering along the way and there will be again.
Do you understand that I'm not optimistic for the short and medium term? I don't think you can grow your way out of a catastrophe like this in a generation. Things will be crappy... er. But not in perpetuity. Just like we look at the standard of living in 1940 and are surprised at what, in absolute terms, they call prosperity, people will do the same in 2090. That improvement is assured is something only true in terms of centuries, not decades.
I don't think you'd find a great many occupiers who think that a big reform package wouldn't greatly improve/save America... Though they might characterize reforms that have been designated by the ruling class as revolutionary, they are not inherently so. A 70% tax rate on incomes over $250K isn't revolutionary. A public housing corporation isn't revolutionary. Changing copyrights so that they only last 30, or 20, or 10 years, isn't revolutionary... but many of us have allowed our horizons to so dim that we assume that they are.
I don't think that we're beyond reform, but I believe the enemies of reform are inviting revolution, and revolutions don't turn out well in that short-and-medium-term you're very concerned with. I prefer them to repression, but I prefer reform to them both. Part of what makes me a tory.
And honestly, arguing that Thatcherite capitalism and Fordist capitalism are one and the same is disingenuous at best. If wages had risen 80% over the past 30 years, like production did, instead of remaining stagnant, we would quite simply not be on the cusp of revolution.
You simply cannot damn Fordist capitalism with the failures of post-Fordist capitalism. To do so is to ignore the fundamental shift in power and priorities and distribution of income that occured during the 1970s and is continuing to this day. It is disingenuous, and it is a product of your contempt for the intellectual capacities of the proletariat, your "Great Misled," Gaian.
I wouldn't mention globalism because it's part and parcel of Thatcherism. It's like saying, "why wouldn't you mention absurdist art when you mention Dadaism?!"
Saying that the entire system is rotten and cannot be reformed only completely discarded is inherently revolutionary. If you can't recognize that, well... you're confusing revolution with revolutionary violence.
Condescent is a neat portmanteau. I like it. But yeah, there's a degree of willingness that I have to listen to the limits of growth people when the limits we're running up against are microeconomic, not macroeconomic. I have, with interest, gone back and forth with my friend who has talked about the difficulty of venting excess heat created from captured energy, but again, that limit is still centuries away, and also an engineering problem more than a question of lack of energy.
And this trannydyke could care less about political correctness. Saying that people vote for the right simply because they are stupid comes from a place of contempt. I don't see how you can argue with that, but given that I've seen misogynists-masquerading-as-feminists try the same trick, I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm pissed off at the idea that some people can become the arbiters of what is and isn't acceptable dialogue here, which I have mentioned earlier in the thread, but whatever, I've had this argument before, and if people want to blunt their moral authority by restricting speech and conflating progressive for party line, good for fucking them. I'm not going to let them have the microphone regardless.
You want to know why? Simple math:
Shit I care about =/= shit other people care about.
So while I will continue to make the case that shit I care about and shit other people care about should be the same thing, I understand that they are not. I can only argue based on things people profess to care about.
Sorry, I was busy just finishing up reading The End of Food. Howabout you get yourself some The New Industrial State, and The End of Work, after getting done with Nixonland. I'll go ya reading list for reading list, pal.
Also, after that, you can get into The Roaring Nineties, The Return of Depression Economics, and Bottlemania. After that, if you're a poker player, read Harrington on Cash Games, because I don't want you to be unarmed when I take your money.
But thanks for the reading list I've put holds on them with my public library, and I'll read them both. And then I'll be sure to let you know how Gilding failed to differentiate between durable and non-durable goods, focusing on the latter, as though we can't talk about economic gains from cork flooring or Quietrock, instead it's got to be Airwick and Charmin, as well as letting you know how he avoided discussing mechanization of the service sector... And then I'll tell you about the classism of Martin, and how he invites market failure by preserving market power with the professional-and-investor classes...
Just a lucky guess.
Well that's great. The roots of the problem are, as Gilding himself says, in the last one. Ooh, also, I bet he manages to break out some fear-of-a-pink-planet talk of endocrine disruptors, doesn't he?
Translation: ZOMG, Pharma is making us all into infertile girls! Heaven forefend!
Also, Gaian, I read. A fucking lot. Almost all of it from progressive thinkers, though the occasional exposure to neo-liberals does me no harm in that it makes me more able to evaluate them. And I've never had a book that knocked the scales from my eyes, with the possible exception of Whipping Girl. The idea that we're not as well-read as you are, and that's why we haven't adopted muddling ecopessimism, is, frankly, fucking childish.
Reading should count for plenty Gaian, but intelligence and education aren't perfectly correlated with credentialing and agreeing with you.
And I point to proposition 13, passed in 1978, as the root of the problem of public finance. I pay attention, and I don't think I'm really going to be very shocked. Shareholder rights have been used as a smokescreen for managerial rights, maybe not by the people blowing the smoke, since before I was born. Really, if you think the differentiation between what improves the productivity of the share and what improves the productivity of the shareholder is going to blow my mind, you underestimate me more than I think.
Called it. I knew we couldn't talk about industrialization without a goodly dose of femmephobia.