The local population in countries that export bananas typically eat different varieties grown primarily by small farmers. The ones for the Americans and the Europeans, Cavendish variety bananas, are grown in huge, monoculture plantations that are susceptible to disease. The banana industry consumes more agrichemicals than any other in the world, asides from cotton. Most plantations will spend more on pesticides than on wages. Pesticides are sprayed by plane, 85% of which does not land on the bananas and instead lands on the homes of workers in the surrounding area and seeps into the groundwater. The results are cancers, stillbirths, and dead rivers.

The supermarkets dominate the banana trade and force the price of bananas down. Plantations resolve this issue by intensifying and degrading working conditions. Banana workers will work for up to 14 hours a day in tropical heat, without overtime pay, for 6 days a week. Their wages will not cover their cost of housing, food, and education for their children. On most plantations independent trade unions are, of course, suppressed. Contracts are insecure, or workers are hired through intermediaries, and troublemakers are not invited back.

Who benefits most from this arrangement? The export value of bananas is worth $8bn - the retail value of these bananas is worth $25bn. Here’s a breakdown of who gets what from the sale of banana in the EU.

On average, the banana workers get between 5 and 9% of the total value, while the retailers capture between 36 to 43% of the value. So if you got a bunch of bananas at Tesco (the majority of UK bananas come from Costa Rica) for 95p, 6.65p would go to the banana workers, and 38p would go to Tesco.

Furthermore, when it comes to calculating a country’s GDP (the total sum of the value of economic activity going on in a country, which is used to measure how rich or poor a country is, how fast its economy is ‘growing’ and therefore how valuable their currency is on the world market, how valuable its government bonds, its claim on resources internationally…etc), the worker wages, production, export numbers count towards the country producing the banana, while retail, ripening, tariffs, and shipping & import will count towards the importing country. A country like Costa Rica will participate has to participate in this arrangement as it needs ‘hard’ (i.e. Western) currencies in order to import essential commodities on the world market.

So for the example above of a bunch of Costa Rican bananas sold in a UK supermarket, 20.7p will be added to Costa Rica’s GDP while 74.3p will be added to the UK’s GDP. Therefore, the consumption of a banana in the UK will add more to the UK’s wealth than growing it will to Costa Rica’s. The same holds for Bangladeshi t-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana…it’s the heart of how the capitalism of the ‘developed’ economy functions. Never ending consumption to fuel the appearance of wealth, fuelled by the exploitation of both land and people in the global south.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

Good writeup. Maybe I'm too dumb to comprehend the answer, but I do wonder why bother with predictions markets instead of just letting people vote on what they want?

Say you get 100 votes and can allocate them across different desires/outcomes proportionally to how much you want them ("I want more free time", "I want more of good X/Y", "I want faster public transport") which could be used by planners to determine total public preferences and provide an outline of a resource/labor budget. For example, if the majority of people strongly favor shorter commute times, planners could calculate the necessary labor time and resources required for R&D of new vehicles, transit software, etc. Then the budget would be put before public comment and approval. As a result, people would be committing to an actual expenditure of their time, labor, and resources rather than trying to play a game of signalling, like @brazenautomaton mentioned.

Do you think that the only thing sufficient to decrease the commute time is just to decide to commit resources to it? Nobody has a guaranteed way that will work. Nobody really knows enough to make that guarantee. Instead we have a bunch of people who want to do different things that could be described as "decreasing commute time" that all act on different things in different ways and have different tradeoffs. Which tradeoffs? Who takes the hit if someone has to take a hit? Do the planners have their balls close to the bandsaw, does failure have immediate negative consequences? If not, then they're not going to do effective things, they're going to affirm their group identity by advocating for the Type Of Thing Good People Should Want instead of what's likely to work. If the phrase du jour is 15-minute cities, they'll pursue those even if they aren't actually plausible. If they are plausible in general, they'll pursue it in the most emotionally flattering way, not the way that leads to the outcome.

In fairness, this is pretty much how public works and urban planning work already anyway, but you want it to work like that for more stuff, including the things that are dictated by revealed preferences, the only possible source of accurate information.

Costs can't easily be predicted for every decision, true, but arguably a lot of costs can be estimated with a fair amount of accuracy for straightforward production decisions. I feel confident in our ability to predict how many more cows, farmers, and milking machines it would take to double milk production. But yes, the cost of innovation is hard to estimate. I guess the cost of uncertainty/confidence could be factored into calculations- "we can (with 100% certainty) achieve a 2x increase by simply working twice as hard for cost x, or we can double output by funding a bunch of new research which could cost anywhere between .5x and 5x, with probabilities/confidence values for each scenario."

You're right that this would be an inherently political process, even in a post-class society I would expect the different parties involved (SOEs, coops, scientists, laborers, etc) to have differences of opinion, and to support the budgets that favor them. As naive as it sounds, I would hope that any disputes about costs and tradeoffs could be resolved through boring old debate and compromise. I don't envision the planners' role as binding; their only job is to present accurate information so that the public can make an informed decision. They can't dictate to the public, and I wouldn't want to prevent the public from trusting someone else's calculations, if they had lost faith in the government's ability (although hopefully the professional planners would be a reliable institution.)

So I think we agree about revealed preferences: whatever the system, let people buy/vote for what they want, and let the firm/state provide a quote. If people agree to the cost but balk at the price afterwards, maybe the planners could factor that into their calculations ("plenty of you talked a big game about reducing transit times by working double overtime shifts at the railyard, but from the timecard data you seem to value your free time more. That will be our assumption on future similar projects.")

I think this vision of socialism is actually quite conservative, in a way- by shifting the important allocation decisions from an elite few to the public at large, it forces them to take responsibility for their own decisions, inputs, and outputs.

Every feedback mechanism you propose and every decision making mechanism you propose passes through, and is inherently dependent on, a layer of Serious People whose job it unavoidably will be to determine what the people "really" want and what they "should" want.

I would try to design enough formal feedback channels (besides voting) so that public opinion could be inferred without a doubt. We already live in a time where people can yell at BART officials on Twitter directly about poor service; I don't think any official who ignored or willfully misinterpreted those demands would last very long in office. And again, the public would ultimately need to approve an economic plan, and could freely reject any that doesn't reflect their interests. This doesn't solve the tyranny of the majority, but it should prevent tyranny by the planners.

Exactly, what if people could propose what they want on the ballot via referendum, then the planners could crunch the numbers and come back with costs for the most popular choices? They could try to pull a fast one and say "actually bars and strip clubs will cost 10 million labor hours each; pick either booze or hospitals but not both" but I think the public would push back against that estimate. If the government's estimates are compromised, people could recall planners (or perhaps a new group of planners could be chosen randomly by sortition) and ultimately vote for any plan that seemed desirable and attainable, regardless of the source of the plan. If Jim Bob from Duluth has had better success in predicting costs than the professionals, there would be nothing stopping people from voting for his proposal instead.

On your point about labor discipline, this is kind of one of socialism's basic arguments: when capitalist states (or historical socialist states) suppress labor movements and protests, not only is it immoral, but it also denies the government the opportunity to solve the public's problems or inefficiencies. If the public is unhappy with working conditions, then their rights to free speech, protest, and even to prevent production via striking must be protected- not only because it is morally right, but because their dissent is the only means of epxressing their real preferences to the planners and society at large. Ultimately, control of production (and of enforcement, to whatever degree necessary and practical) must belong to the workers, because otherwise they are at the mercy of whoever really calls the shots and can set the narrative (whether that is a capitalist state or state socialist planners.)

Finally, about the market: the market primarily allocates goods depending on peoples' ability to pay, not their willingness. The working class is kept in a state of debt (and in some places, literal) slavery and fear of absolute poverty. Those with vast wealth can artifically and disproportionately skew demand towards their own interests. Thus markets often fail to capture accurate demand, and we end up with outcomes that are bad for the majority but benefit the owning class (privatized health insurance, private cable monopolies, etc.) On the supply side, goods and services are overproduced and wasted (food, unsold vehicles) or are underproduced/overpriced due to regulatory capture (such as laws forbidding direct sale of vehicles by manufacturers), poor policy (either the result of upper class interests, or of government attempts to compromise between opposing classes, such as rent control). Even when production of goods adjusts to market signals, it is slow and imperfect. What if we could just decide to produce however much we would likely need to satisfy a certain goal or demand, plus a bit extra?

Overall, I feel like we're talking past each other somewhat, and I also think I could give you any number of policies, whether practical ("planners could be recalled at any time by the public") or ridiculous ("people could humiliate planners in the street to discourage them from acting too arrogant") and your response would either be (understandably) skepticism, or some variant of "the Serious People will always be around, and will find a way to exploit any system or rule to their own ends and/or to enable bullying". I don't expect to change your mind, especially with nothing but hypotheticals, but I don't think it would be productive to continue the dialogue. But nevertheless, I have appreciated the opportunity to clarify my thoughts and beliefs via answering your questions, and I am sincerely appreciative that you have asked your questions with civility, given how bad other leftists seem to have treated you. I hope I have extended you the same courtesy.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

Good writeup. Maybe I'm too dumb to comprehend the answer, but I do wonder why bother with predictions markets instead of just letting people vote on what they want?

Say you get 100 votes and can allocate them across different desires/outcomes proportionally to how much you want them ("I want more free time", "I want more of good X/Y", "I want faster public transport") which could be used by planners to determine total public preferences and provide an outline of a resource/labor budget. For example, if the majority of people strongly favor shorter commute times, planners could calculate the necessary labor time and resources required for R&D of new vehicles, transit software, etc. Then the budget would be put before public comment and approval. As a result, people would be committing to an actual expenditure of their time, labor, and resources rather than trying to play a game of signalling, like @brazenautomaton mentioned.

Do you think that the only thing sufficient to decrease the commute time is just to decide to commit resources to it? Nobody has a guaranteed way that will work. Nobody really knows enough to make that guarantee. Instead we have a bunch of people who want to do different things that could be described as "decreasing commute time" that all act on different things in different ways and have different tradeoffs. Which tradeoffs? Who takes the hit if someone has to take a hit? Do the planners have their balls close to the bandsaw, does failure have immediate negative consequences? If not, then they're not going to do effective things, they're going to affirm their group identity by advocating for the Type Of Thing Good People Should Want instead of what's likely to work. If the phrase du jour is 15-minute cities, they'll pursue those even if they aren't actually plausible. If they are plausible in general, they'll pursue it in the most emotionally flattering way, not the way that leads to the outcome.

In fairness, this is pretty much how public works and urban planning work already anyway, but you want it to work like that for more stuff, including the things that are dictated by revealed preferences, the only possible source of accurate information.

Costs can't easily be predicted for every decision, true, but arguably a lot of costs can be estimated with a fair amount of accuracy for straightforward production decisions. I feel confident in our ability to predict how many more cows, farmers, and milking machines it would take to double milk production. But yes, the cost of innovation is hard to estimate. I guess the cost of uncertainty/confidence could be factored into calculations- "we can (with 100% certainty) achieve a 2x increase by simply working twice as hard for cost x, or we can double output by funding a bunch of new research which could cost anywhere between .5x and 5x, with probabilities/confidence values for each scenario."

You're right that this would be an inherently political process, even in a post-class society I would expect the different parties involved (SOEs, coops, scientists, laborers, etc) to have differences of opinion, and to support the budgets that favor them. As naive as it sounds, I would hope that any disputes about costs and tradeoffs could be resolved through boring old debate and compromise. I don't envision the planners' role as binding; their only job is to present accurate information so that the public can make an informed decision. They can't dictate to the public, and I wouldn't want to prevent the public from trusting someone else's calculations, if they had lost faith in the government's ability (although hopefully the professional planners would be a reliable institution.)

So I think we agree about revealed preferences: whatever the system, let people buy/vote for what they want, and let the firm/state provide a quote. If people agree to the cost but balk at the price afterwards, maybe the planners could factor that into their calculations ("plenty of you talked a big game about reducing transit times by working double overtime shifts at the railyard, but from the timecard data you seem to value your free time more. That will be our assumption on future similar projects.")

I think this vision of socialism is actually quite conservative, in a way- by shifting the important allocation decisions from an elite few to the public at large, it forces them to take responsibility for their own decisions, inputs, and outputs.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

Good writeup. Maybe I'm too dumb to comprehend the answer, but I do wonder why bother with predictions markets instead of just letting people vote on what they want?

Say you get 100 votes and can allocate them across different desires/outcomes proportionally to how much you want them ("I want more free time", "I want more of good X/Y", "I want faster public transport") which could be used by planners to determine total public preferences and provide an outline of a resource/labor budget. For example, if the majority of people strongly favor shorter commute times, planners could calculate the necessary labor time and resources required for R&D of new vehicles, transit software, etc. Then the budget would be put before public comment and approval. As a result, people would be committing to an actual expenditure of their time, labor, and resources rather than trying to play a game of signalling, like @brazenautomaton mentioned.

“Jim Arroyo, leader of the Yavapai County Preparedness Team… vehemently rejects accusations that the Oath Keepers are in ny way anti-government.

“That’s completely stupid,” he told Gris. “We are the government.”

I mean, he appears to be right.

The name “Oath Keepers” is based on the oath to protect the American constitution.

In the Obama administration, they believed that at any moment the President would call on them to violate that path and herd their fellow citizens into concentration camps, and government workers needed to be prepared to reject unconstitutional orders, which would only be possible with a network of support from other government workers and concerned citizens.

That’s why, in 2020 when a sitting President began a campaign to overturn an election in flagrant contravention of existing law, and based on the shabbiest evidence of fraud imaginable the Oath Keepers immediately joined forces with leftist protestors to protect the integrity of-

Wait, they sided with the President and were really excited to help him gut the constitution?

Well that’s odd.

These people aren’t “anti-government”; rather, they believe that the government *may* be co-opted by an international foreign conspiracy (aided and abetted by people with American citizenship) or it *may* work against that conspiracy.

Although there is intense focus on their rhetoric about the tyrannical nature of the tactics used by this enemy conspiracy, those tactics are *only* illegitimate because they are directed against Americans, a group of people who should not in any way be confused with legal citizens, who may or may not be American.

To employ those same tactics against non-Americans may be regrettably necessary to prevent the Anti-American, globalist conspiracy from achieving victory over Americans.

I read the linked article, so I realise this is a bit tangential. Forgive me for derailing.

A couple of years ago, there was a news programme about a certain right-wing paramilitary group in a rural part of REDACTED. That group was affiliated with a certain far-right political party, but they had recently switched up their tactics. No more baseball bats and jackboots. They were doing community outreach. They provided a space where children (of the correct ancestry) could get a hot meal after school and do their homework under supervision. They drove old people to the dentist, physical therapy, or their regularly scheduled dialysis appointments.

It wasn’t a big operation by any means. It was something that the owner of a local used car dealership and construction business could fund without too much pain, and staffed by volunteers. It wasn’t the kind of thing that needs too much training.

You could easily imagine a youth club or a sports team, something that just needs some space and adult supervision, or some kind of meeting place or club house that is open to anybody, or a hotline that is staffed for three hours per week.

Except those guys weren’t the local chapter of the Red Cross Society, they had runes or some shit like that on their shirts.

You obviously what to nip that in the bud before one of them starts a neighbourhood watch.

Turns out this is difficult. The first thing you need to do, if you don’t want those people to score an easy win from this, is to understand why existing institutions failed. The state, local and central government, the church, civic institutions,charitable organisations - why couldn’t they solve the problems? The demand was there.

If you crack down on right-wing ”mutual aid“, you don’t only hand them a PR win, you also continue a situation where there is a unfilled demand for assistance for unemployed people/the elderly. So of course, when such a thing happens, everybody goes out of their ways to agree that the right thing to do is to strengthen liberal, democratic, civic institutions, and give the people what they need to thrive without having to resort to relying on a right-wing used car salesman and his goons.

And then, after all that throat clearing, they crack down on the unlicensed meals on wheels when the cameras aren’t rolling.

Still, it would have been a good idea to analyse these situations. Why did the state fail? Why doesn’t help from other groups arrive?

Possible explanations:

There are other considerations: Do those fascists actually want to help, or is this a ploy? Does it make a difference? Will a crackdown on fascist aid organisations deal splash damage to left-wing or unpolitical aid organisations, in addition to leaving racist grandpas without meals on wheels for a couple of months?

Ok, back to the article: Giving FEMA more resources seems like an uphill battle. They currently aren’t doing a good enough job, and some people are suspicious of them. It may be construed as "throwing good money after bad”.

The smart move might be to give more money to NGOs that support FEMA.

"Faced with devastating declines in government services, many have stepped in to provide basic social services and natural disaster training. This is particularly notable in rural counties in states like Oregon, where the combination of long-term collapse in timber revenue and dwindling federal subsidies has all but emptied the coffers of local governments.

In this situation, the Oath Keepers began to offer basic “community preparedness” and “disaster response” courses, and encouraged the formation of community watches and full-blown militias as parallel government structures.

While filling in the holes left by underfunded law enforcement in Josephine County, for example, Patriot-affiliated politicians were also leading the opposition to new property tax measures that would have allowed the hiring of more deputies.

By providing material incentives that guarantee stability, combined with threats of coercion for those who oppose them, such groups become capable of making the population complicit in their rise, regardless of ideological positions...often many in a population can’t be said to have any deep-seated ideological commitment in the first place. Instead, support follows strength, and ideology follows support."

-Phil Neel, Hinterland

one of the things that’s been lost in the recent “let them buy electric” kerfuffle is that there’s a sort of feedback mechanism at work where americans can’t estimate distance correctly and companies see this and are unwilling to put the electric cars that might serve them well on the market. the go-to cheaper electric car on the north american market is the $30k+ nissan leaf. one thing i’ve often found in twitter threads discussing it is americans who say that its 150 mile range simply isn’t big enough for their needs. however, if you’re commuting an hour each way to work, 150 miles is enough to stop in somewhere and pick up groceries. few americans even drive 50 miles a day for work. meanwhile, in europe and china, much cheaper options exist. the dacia spring sells in france for 17,000 euros, or under 20,000 usd, and has a range of 143 miles. the hongguang mini sells in china for the equivalent of 5000 usd and has a range of 100 miles. for many americans, either of these cars could easily replace their current vehicle, especially for those who live in cities, if companies were willing to bring them over. you can see the proof in sales of electric bikes, which now outpace electric cars and have the sort of price and range needed for <10 mile trips (not to mention, some have cargo compartments for grocery rides). however, given the high profit margins on SUVs (as well as america’s addiction to the idea that bigger cars are always safer), it’s unlikely that companies will want to undercut themselves with efficient smaller electric vehicles.

People are so fucking stupid it’s insane when it comes to the economics of car ownership.

They’ll buy enough car for 2% of their driving instead of half as much car, which can cover 98% of their driving, and renting something bigger or otherwise more capable for those 2%. It’s beyond ridiculuous to have such poor utilisation of capital. It’s the perfect use case for renting!

Eat the bugs, live in the pod, rent the electric car.

You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. 😉

You can own an e-bike, and sure you can own a car but you’re going to pay what it actually costs and you will not like that

Also the ridiculous idea that you cant ‘get gas’ aka recharge an electric car on the drive. Yeah its not as fast as a gas fill, but modern tech easily has it at 30 minutes.

So its not “i need a gas car for the 1% of trips requiring distance” its “i need a gas car so that 1% of my trips can be done about 10% more time efficiently”, a value add i could measure in like pcoket change yearly.

“I am going to mortgage future propserity by accelerating global warming and enable an axis of autocratic/theocratic petrostates to flourish across the globe and invade their neighbors so when I drive to Albany biannually to listen to my shitty inlaws rant about how The Jews are responsible for rising gas prices I can get there 20 minutes earlier” speedrun challenge

So much awful American car discourse could be avoided if we simply RetVurned to Tradition and built big beautiful trains from sea to shining sea.

wait till i tell "i don't dream of labor" crowd about pavel korchagin who became soviet national role model for basically working himself to multiple disabilities to save town from freezing in the winter during russian civil class war. he wrote autobiographical novel while already blind for which he became famous. and in it there was a scene where anyone who refused to work in those terrible conditions were asked to give up their communist card. because you can't claim to call yourself a communist without being ready to put in as much work as you can. and that wasn't just him ussr was able to withstand these critical first years thanks to selfless underpayed work put by it's people towards rebuilding country's wealth. getting rid of feodal lords and capitalists was enough motivation imagine that! the fact so many people who call themselves communists on here seem to be proud of flaunting their individualism and complete lack of proletarian morals is an insult to all revolutionary workers of the past. go call yourselves libertarians or something.

Communism is when you do a lot of unpaid overtime and are expected to be grateful for the privilege, apparently.

There were many incredibly hardworking peasants and workers in the USSR who achieved astonishing things in service of the revolution, but the fact that they had to make such extraordinary sacrifices is itself a tragedy, and should not be celebrated.

The individual referred to in OP's post was actually named Nikolai Ostrovsky (Pavel Korchagin was the main character of his fictionalized autobiography). He lived a short life full of hardship and sacrifice and died at 32. I think the best way to honor his memory would be to create a world in which such sacrifices are no longer necessary.

If you want your elites to behave like gentlemen, you have to give them the status and the security of gentlemen.

If you make a project of keeping your elites scared and on their toes -- if you work to convince them that they have to scrabble for every advantage and that they're always in danger of falling into the abyss -- then you will have elites who act like frightened, grasping strivers. Which is what you have. Do you like it?

I've made this point like a dozen different ways by now. Perhaps someday I'll actually write the essay, instead of tossing off yet another few frustrated paragraphs.

No ruling class has ever acted like gentlemen, precisely because rulership rooted in exclusive rights and privileges (property, literacy, religion, rank, prestige, etc) requires and incentivizes constant paranoia to ensure that the non-elite don't get too uppity.

As long as conflicts of interest exist between leaders and citizens, the ruling class will consist mostly of frightened, grasping, strivers, and almost nothing can be done to produce gentlemanly conduct from them.

"we're both atheists, I just believe in one god less than you" is rarely a good argument.

it is never a good argument when used to compare a pagan idol to the Lord.

There is a reason why neopaganism comes at a time of uncertainty and rests on either the reinvention of paganism or on irrationalism.

It's like telling a die-hard Trotskyist, "Well, you're an anti-communist as well, with regard to Lenin, Mao, Kim, Che Guevara, and a thousand others. Our only difference is that I reject one more communist than you do."

It's a sophism which rivals "Who made God?" in its stupidity, and should have been left to rot in the 2000s if not earlier.

I think it's pretty clear that kirch is using the line for reclaimatory nostalgia toward the glory days of fedora r/atheism, rather than because of anything he thinks about its actual potency as an argument

It *is* a good argument; the point is to force the theist to acknowledge that their god is just one among thousands, none of whom have any persuasive evidence for their existence. What argument can Catholics offer me for the existence of God that are any different that that of a pagan and their "idol"?

I also think the analogy with Communist leaders is telling: regardless of your thoughts on Mao, Lenin, Che, etc., there is indisputable proof (often video evidence) that they all existed and said/did the things their followers claim they said/did. Rejecting them is a matter of political opinion, not denial of their factual existence. The second poster assumes the same of God; the facts are not in dispute, atheists are simply *rejecting* God, whose existence is as certain as Leon Trotsky.

Now I'll freely admit that I'm ignorant of Napoleon beyond some broad strokes. I would assume that, as a European gentile in the eighteenth century, he had antisemitic sentiments. But like, this seems insane:

Letting Jews out of the ghettos and removing the barriers to their participation in broader society is roughly the exact opposite of antisemitism, surely. If this is an accurate summary of Napoleon's policy towards the Jews then he was in fact a great champion of Jewish freedom, and a model for gentiles to follow rather than a cautionary tale.

you're missing the point here; 1) Napoleon was hoping that that would eradicate the  jewish culture and cultural independence, which is antisemetic 2) they arent even arguing about his antisemitism, they are pointing out that your plan for a utopia where religion will not be needed was once implemented and failed 3) this one is from me:  antisemitism isnt just locking jews up in ghettos, sending them to deathcamps etc.  antisemitism can have many forms, one of them is genocide, another is trying to assimilate them into another culture. there are more things that are antisemitic and arent what natzis were doing.

It seems absurd on its face to say that Napoleon was even trying to achieve what I want to achieve. I've been very explicit on multiple occasions that one of the prerequisites of religion fading away is the end of oppression, whereas Napoleon sent troops to Haiti to try and reintroduce racial slavery.

Did Napoleon try to force Jews to integrate (which would obviously be antisemitic), or was it "literally the entire plan" to remove barriers to participation, i.e. to directly combat antisemitism?

A quick Google would seem to indicate that Napoleon also:

-Forbid Jews from migrating within France

-Heavily restricted their ability to engage in moneylending

-Cancelled all debt owed to Jewish lenders

-Forced them to adopt surnames

-Conscripted them into the army

All of which are far more anti-Semitic than the modern policy of building a welfare state and offering people the choice to leave their religious communities.

Nope. You're the one that explicitly mentioned chocolate easter eggs as the example of cultural practices you have no problem seeing continue. Meanwhile, you were saying that my own Jewish culture needs to assimilate and go away.

i think you'll find I also gave other examples of cultural practices remaining with historical links to religion, in the post-religious utopia I want to help bring into existence:

Easter eggs are an example of a practice clearly historically rooted in a religious holiday, but which I think has been drained of much actual religious content. Very few people are considering the crucifixion of Jesus Christ when they buy chocolate eggs for their kids, just like the the faddish pork-dodgers of the twenty-second century won't be engaging with any sort of covenant with God or whatever.

This answer is so dripping in Cultural Christianity and a tacit admission that my original comment was dead on--that you view everyone's culture as cute things to be colonized and treated as entertainment, and done solely for religious purposes--that I basically consider my point proven. You want the cultural practices of Judaism and every ethnoreligion to be treated basically as entertainment--essentially insulting theme park versions--while the people to whom those cultures belong to will be extinct in your ideal world. And you treat this as a positive, and don't understand how deeply rooted this entire perspective is in a Christian worldview?

Yeah, my point is proven; you're beyond hope in trying to teach basic empathy for people who are different than you, when you view us dying out as a good thing.

I have losely followed this discussion and ... and I am just appalled.

@evilsoup reread your exemples. Take the time, carefully reread them, try to put yourself in the shoes of the people to whom these cultural and spiritual practices belong to.

You are basically arguing in favour of using cultural, religious and spiritual practices as fashion accessories. As some kind of social instagram filter. You are so incredibly flippant with the cultures of other people that you took three incredibly important spiritual elements and decided they would be better as hollowed out fashion accessories, stuff you can just clip on your social personna to look quirky and special.

When you say that Kosher food will just be a "fad diet" in your ideal world, do you not realize how horrifying you sound to Jewish people? How what you say sounds exactly like the words of Christian totalitarians? How you are basically saying your ideal world is one where there are no Jews left to defend their cultural practices inherited from millenia of tradition? Do you really not see how your "ideal world" implies or necessitates the death and pillaging of their entire culture and identity? Just because a culture is suffocated in its bed "peacefully" doesn't make its murder any less tragic.

The Hajj is THE central pilgrimage of Islam, a religion that severely limits the consumption of alcohol (to limited social settings with only people the practitioner trusts) in its most liberal interpretations, and outright bans it in most interpretations. And you want to reduce it to a fucking Spring Break typical american drunken bender. Do you really not see how utterly and unrelentingly insulting and disrespectful that is? That is your ideal world? Cultural practices maimed, hollowed out and grossly stuffed with your personnal interpretation of a good time, with no regard for the people that hold these practices dear? Or do you consider that would be OK because they would all be dead?

And the concept of reincarnation, one that is central to SEVERAL of Humanity's oldest spiritual systems, reduced to "fodder for light-hearted social media quizzes". The entire spiritual and philosophical context of some of the oldest texts of philosophy should be, in your eyes, a fucking buzzfeed quizz. I have no words for just how wrong, horrifying and violent your "ideal world" is.

I am Breton. My culture is a minority in France. It has been maimed, deformed and largely reshaped by Christianity and France over the course of the last two millenia. I have zero doubt that my culture would be seen as archaic and counter-revolutionary in your "ideal world". I have zero doubt that this urge to homogenize everything would spill out of the spiritual realm. Whether you like it or not, whether you think it or not, you are advocating for the death of all Human cultures as they currently exist, all so they can be replaced by, like @the-library-alcove said, insulting theme park versions that can be consummed at leisure.

And you think that, just because your prefered method of cultural murder is slowly increasing the heat, you are right and good and justified in turning your kills into gruesome trophies you can wear as fashion accessories. THAT is how you come off.

Yes, exactly right.

No it doesn't. Religion is organised Cope; change the bad conditions that people need to cope with and you'll render religion unnecessary, so it will hold appeal only as a source of aesthetics.

The rest of your post is just noise without meaning.

Wow, you really are the epitome of the Culturally Christian Atheist, who thinks all religions are just reskinned Christianity.

Ironically, you're completely blind to the fact that it's your atheism that's just reskinned Christianity: strictly monotheistic, orthodox (you Must Belive Correctly), and proselytizing.

The cruelty in their last answer speaks for itself.

This person sounds exactly like a Nazi and somehow thinks they’re in the right.

This is why atheists get a bad name.

Louder for the people at the back.

Where have I called for anything to be suffocated? Like, quote me. It's freedom, not oppression, that I propose will bring religion to an end.

"Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse."

-Christopher Hitchens

Once again begging anti-theists to realize that to get to a world without religion you’d have to commit cultural genocide. So maybe you shouldn’t push for that

Wait what?  We’re seeing a decline in Christian belief here and now without anyone getting genocided, what exactly are you on about?

I think what op is trying to say is genocide is bad and people should not want it to happen. Hope this helps!

op is clearly saying a lot more than that..? The idea that getting rid of religion would require genocide is silly -- once we create conditions of general abundance and abolish all forms of oppression (both of which are well within reach) there will be no need for religion to fill its role of coping with these things and it will disappear of its own accord. Maybe some cultural practices will remain, chocolate eggs on Easter or whatever.

Oh my god! I’m Jewish Judaism is a ethnoreligion if you got rid of religion you get rid of Jews. Religion and culture are connected for Jews. You may not want to kill us but you want to eradicate our culture

I've often seen it written on this site that there's no problem with Jewish people being atheists, that atheist Jews still count as Jews. If this is the case then the religious aspect is clearly not necessary for Jewish culture to exist.

In any case, what I want is to get rid of antisemitism, the form of social oppression that creates the need for a separate Jewish culture. With that gone, the separate culture would gradually lose its separateness and merge into the general culture. I think it's wrong to call this "genocide", and it's not even really a call to eradicate a culture -- more to change the oppressive conditions that give rise to the need for a separate culture.

Thats just antisemitism what the fuck is wrong with you

where in any of this have I expressed hatred for Jews as Jews, or any desire to oppress Jewish people, or indeed any desire to oppress anyone? The post your are directly responding to is literally a call to get rid of antisemitism.

You want Jewish culture eradicated. Antisemite.

I explicitly don't "want" that, I just think the gradual voluntary mixing of all seperate cultures into a generalised world-culture is a natural long-term consequence of the international socialist world that I want to help bring about. I'm equally fine with the voluntary self-abolition of Britishness, Europeanness, etc.

If you don't want it then why argue for something that isn't going to fucking happen unless you force it *with genocide*? Culture does not just magically disappear and neither does religion. If your socialism brings genocide then it should be abandoned. Work out how to do socialism without being evil.

it absolutely is going to happen without genocide or indeed any force used to suppress religion per se, assuming it's actually possible for the working class to take power and fundamentally change society.

Culture changes all the time based on the underlying material conditions of society. In a society of plenty, without oppression, and in which all members have an equal voice in the discussion of how to run things, I just think there will be an ever-dwindling number of people who will find anything attractive about religion, so they will all eventually die out. Maybe they will stick around in the sense that the sayings of Marcus Aurelius stick around, but this is a pretty different thing from what we normally mean by "religion", which generally has a community aspect.

Now, all religions I know of also contain falsehoods about the nature of reality (God/gods, reincarnation, spirits of things, some kind of intrinsic moral order or meaning embedded in nature and society (caste, great chain of being, etc)). I think it's bad for people to be systemically deceived into believing false things, and I think it's bad that religion ties useful social functions (coping with death, community celebration of intimate relationships and of births, etc) in with belief in falsehoods. People will ultimately live better lives when religion has faded out of existence.

Very few believers will seriously claim that morality can only come from religion anymore (that argument seemed to die with the religious debates of the early aughts) but they've seemed to switch tactics recently to claiming that culture and religion are inseparable. This strikes me as an even worse argument: arguably, religion *destroys* culture by suppressing full human thought, creativity, and exploration of ideas- often other religions!

a very harrowing article. i had not realised just how far authoritarian tendencies in ukraine had progressed under zelensky over the course of the war: dissent and freedom of the press have been massively curtailed, opposition parties banned, and bills introduced to suppress religious freedom. accusations of treason are bandied about for the mere voicing of dissent, and due process for those accused is routinely curtailed (both within and without the official justice system). perhaps most stomach-churning was hearing that chesno, an ngo currently running a blacklist of alleged traitors, received 42% of its funding in 2021 from ned and ndi (at us taxpayer expense)

i strongly recommend reading this for anyone inclined to simplify the war into a contest between liberal democracy to the west and autocratic authoritarianism to the east

Leaving aside, for a moment, the outrageous hypocrisy of an organisation called “Jacobin” criticising supposed authoritarianism (for those who do not know, the Jacobins were the bloodthirsty zealots who went on an insane beheading spree in late eighteenth-century France), this is common for a wartime government.

Look at the USA, a nation founded on ideals of freedom. During their Civil War, both the Union AND the Confederacy suspended Habeas Corpus, resorting to rule by force in lieu of conversation or compromise.

To quote Solas from Dragon Age: Inquisition: Trespasser

This is not me defending Zelensky, but comparing him to peactime governments is fundamentally an unreasonable approach. Is he unusually authoritarian by comparison to other wartime governments? I assume not

(I haven’t read the article, and I do not intend to, That’s what headlines are for)

Setting aside that these incursions on civil liberties go well beyond anything I have seen in all my years living in the US at war (to take just one example: as bad as the paranoia about Muslims got during the bush/Obama years, at no point was there serious national legislation floated to ban Islam in America), one might think that this is reason to try to bring the war to a peaceful end sooner rather than later. A project which the foreign policy apparatus of my country has dedicated all its powers to tarring with allegations of putin-sympathising and war crimes apologism

The tarring is entirely deserved, not least because Russia has quite explicitly said that its goal is destruction of Ukraine as a nation, and has shown no interest in settling for less. The "pro peace" position is "back off of Russia while it continues committing mass atrocities in the territories under occupation, and give it time to rearm so it can take more territories and do more of the mass murder, rape, and kidnapping there."

Also, in the Soviet period, the priests of the Orthodox church were KGB. The Patriarch in Moscow (who is holdover from this time) is de facto an agent of the Russian state, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate remains subordinate to him. I think that anti-Muslim sentiment in the US would have been very different if US Muslims were explicitly taking direction from Khamenei.

I confess that from the beginning of the invasion I've never understood the rhetoric around peace between Ukraine and Russia.

On the one hand, I really fail to see the alternative to some kind of peace treaty. Is the plan to conquer Russia and depose Putin? That seems deeply unlikely.

On the other hand, it's equally obvious that the Ukrainian government is going to be very suspicious that "peace" is a euphemism for "Allowing Russia to take a breather and then come back for a second invasion" and the Ukrainian government has a very legitimate interest in preventing that outcome and their actions will reflect that.

Honestly both of these things have seemed really obvious to me the whole time but a really shocking proportion of English language dialogue about it seems to act like this *isn't* obvious for reasons I don't quite understand.

Also, here in the US we haven't had a country invade us and mount a credible threat of conquering and deposing our government since the 19th century so I'm not sure comparisons to US war policy really show much.

Nobody is really clear on what the negotiating positions are, it's not even clear that a cease-fire at the current border is acceptable to Russia.

Absolutely cannot trust anything coming from Russia, Ukraine, America, or anyone else on what the hard conditions are, everyone is going to lie their ass off.

Authoritarianism is bad in any context, but surely at least some of the blame for an authoritarian turn in a country being actively invaded must lie with the invader. Invasion and civil war are two of the most classic cases of governments panicking and turning to authoritarianism, right up there with terrorism. I would push back strongly against any attempt to create moral equivalence between the Russian and Ukrainian governments here--one started this war by invading its neighbor in 2014, because it did not like its domestic political developments, and then drastically escalated the war last year. One did not. One of the fundamental reasons wars of aggression are so reprehensible is because they engender so many other crimes, on both sides of the conflict.

I don’t think it serves attempts to understand the world or to elucidate justice to treat the object of aggression as somehow difficult to distinguish from the agent. The opposition isn’t “liberal democracy vs authoritarianism,” it’s “do not invade your neighbors and start killing people vs wars of conquest”!

American authoritarianism during wartime is pretty well documented, but I think for comparable examples you should look to the Civil War and the World Wars, not to (what are in the larger scope of American history) wars that involved much smaller numbers of forces against much weaker opponents. Most notably, America interned a huge segment of its population for the crime of being Japanese during a war with Japan, which I think is a pretty important comparison point for how bad authoritarianism can get during wartime in American politics!

I’m not defending Ukraine’s government; I think American authoritarianism during wartime is also deeply wrong. But it’s it’s not exceptional; indeed, most countries AFAICT have some kind of emergency law that lets them explicitly suspend normal constitutional and legal procedures in the event of an invasion.

This rhetoric really bugs me because it treats the condition of war as something that exists in a context-free vacuum, that if only people had the right attitude we could all sit down around a table and hammer out a compromise that at least stopped the shooting.

And I think that’s wrong. I think it’s pretty obvious that there are no conditions right now that will get the Russian government to stop prosecuting the war on its end; it has explicitly declared its sovereignty over land controlled by Ukraine’s government, and so probably won’t stop fighting until either it controls that land, or the cost of attempting to do so becomes too high.

Ukraine could of course surrender; but indications seem to be that surrendering, even to save lives, will likely result in more deportations and mass killings, and (I think there is good reason to believe) would encourage further military aggression by the Russian government in the future. In short, they might be trading people getting killed on the battlefield and in bombings now, for getting killed later, possibly in different and equally horrific ways.

If you’re a committed pacifist, the answer to the problem might be simple, however unpleasant--you can choose to turn the other cheek, whatever may ensue--but most people are not committed pacifists, and it would be unreasonable as a matter of both politics and ethics to expect them to act like they were.

Never, anywhere, in any manner or for any reason have I denied that putin is grossly culpable for prosecuting this war. Nor—outside of some elements so fringe as to be unworthy of consideration—have any other Anglo leftists i have encountered. Nothing in what I have said suggests otherwise, unless you interpret all criticism of ukraine and American intervention on its behalf as eo ipso a defence of putin. But in the west this is a dead horse. Nobody needs to hear my denunciations: the case against Vladimir putin in the western court of public opinion has been prosecuted about as vigorously and extensively as humanly possible. Criticism of Ukraines conduct, otoh, is given much less of a hearing

I also do not believe—and I am aware of nobody with any influence who believes—that bringing this war to a peaceful conclusion is simply a matter of the right “attitude.” I don’t want an attitude shift: what I want is for this country to stop forking over ungodly quantities of public money in arms and support for the most repressive political elements in Ukrainian politics; for sanctions on Russia to be drastically curtailed or, at a minimum, given over to ukraine as a negotiating chip; and for the foreign policy fiends in Washington to stop rebuffing all Russian overtures for negotiation as self evidently absurd and continually escalating the declared stakes of the conflict

That last point is particularly salient. A lot of the pro-war crowd I interact with take it that putins bluster about overthrowing kyiv should be accepted at full face value, discrediting any possibility of diplomacy. But the western declared victory conditions themselves have grown increasingly aggressive! There are several announced nonnegotiable criteria for peace that, if taken seriously, would require regime change in Russia. Little wonder the regime is unwilling to yield, if the war has been made a referendum on its continued existence

The comment about pacifism is inapposite. I am not a committed absolute pacifist, nor are most of those publicly opposing the US’ current level of involvement in the conflict (or situating the invasion itself in the context of US/Nato actions in the lead up to the war). The bar for opposing all killing, ever, for any reason is immensely higher than the bar for opposing 40B$ in US military aid. In fact, the allegation of pacifism reminds me very powerfully of a perennially relevant Anscombe passage:

Unless I'm mistaken, Russia's demands have been self-evidently absurd, constituting effective defeat (ceding of the occupied territories/breakway republics, which have already been declared part of the Russian Federation) and regime change ("demilitarization", "de-Nazification"). If Russia finds American demands for regime change unappealing, they may end the war at any time by simply withdrawing to their pre-February 2022 borders.

Additionally, why should we be required to be chartiable/discerning towards Russian state speech, while Russia is allowed to assume the worst of US/NATO's intentions? American calls for Russian regime change are "referendums on its continued existence", whereas Russian calls for Ukranian regime change are merely "bluster".

Both sides are blustering of course, but the difference is that whereas the US (no matter how bloodthirsty our politicians' speeches may get) is not going to put troops on the ground in Ukraine to try and overthrow Putin, Putin's promises to sieze Kiev are actually possible and probable due to the hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers trying to achieve that goal at this moment- all the more reason to take him at face value and assume that his motives are what he says they are!

It's so funny to see a lot of western leftists who are so disgusted by the idea of marxism-leninism that all they can conceive of is like... so long as we can have a high minimum wage here and free healthcare and affordable housing everything will be fine, as if that is all that matters because these people don't actually care about the global south and the fact that those benefits are imperial in nature lol

love this genre of leftism that's like "remember, if you live in the imperial core, anything that improves the quality of life of your country's poor or marginalized population is actually anti-leftist imperialism". this is definitely a winning proposition. you want to take people who are desperate for relief of basic life-or-death social problems and tell them that not only are solutions to those problems not a part of the leftist project but are incompatible with it and then act surprised when this does not foment, like, global class consciousness

like the general idea here of course is that the real revolution will be in the "global south", which will triumph over the "imperial core" and dominate it or at least establish itself as free of it, and thinking about anywhere else is a waste of time. which is obviously alluring, but like, this tendency of viewing nations as being the central organizing group of leftism, of class as being a property of nations rather than people, can only produce fruit of an essentially nationalistic character, which presumably you don't want since that's the entire thing being criticized here. if you just want a nationalist revolution that's respectable in its own way, but that's where empires come from, so it's always going to be only incidentally rather than intrinsically leftist

more generally there's a tendency here that you see in a lot of places to criticize the self-interest of the privileged while valorizing the self-interest of the marginalized, which makes sense insofar as "work toward the interest of the marginalized at the expense of the privileged" is what you want to do on a purely abstract ethical grounding, but the majority of people acting in their own self-interest are not doing it on an abstract ethical grounding, they're doing it because people are self-interested and they aren't going to stop doing that if they eventually win hard enough that their interests stop being relevant, and which is apropos because you do in fact need to win pretty hard, as a military and economic power, to be able to sustainably defy the US bloc.

Like OK this is a funhouse-mirror version of the correct observation that people are mostly interested in feathering their own nest, and that tendency obstructs left-wing organizing. but the idea that this isn't an issue in the "global south" is a mirage created by the latter's marginal position! the shared status of belonging to a subject periphery is just covering up an equivalent particularist self-interest, which is a problem since any form of success involves dissolving the foundations of that solidarity. You can't circumvent the problem of self-interest, you have to actually solve it!

While the ML's/3rd worldists are correct that the US enjoys imperial privileges, there's so much that the US could do to improve the quality of life for its citizens that would be entirely domestic in nature, or even beneficial to foreign workers. For example, taxing the domestic wealthy to fund a higher minimum wage and safer workplaces would be a massive benefit to both American and Mexican workers. Not everything is zero-sum, and I think that a lot of ML's claim otherwise as a way of rationalizing the lack of leftist policy achievements in the US; like the only reason that California can't have zoning reform is because it's somehow mutually exclusive with stationing carriers in Okinawa and thus The Powers That Be would never allow it, rather than it being a difficult and politically unpopular fight that no one really wants to wage.

Thank God the us doesn't have universal Healthcare otherwise we'd be an imperialist power

Like I'm being hyperbolic but like I don't think we should have to wait until the collapse of the US military to want idk paternity leave

The whole social-democracy/welfare state = imperialism is complete nonsense, and idk maybe the reason the western working class don't want to have anything to do with communists isn't because they're sucking off the tits of Big Imperialism but rather because communists call them racist for seeking concrete improvement to their living condiditons.

The US doesn't have much of a welfare state, but its privileged position on the world stage absolutely translates into benefits for its citizens. Government contracts to build ships, tanks, and nuclear weapons provide high-paying jobs to American workers. Arguably, the US welfare state takes the form of our military, which provides soldiers with socialized/subsidized housing, healthcare, transportation, and education. In the private sector, American firms benefit not only from unequal terms of exchange, but from America's actions overseas such as the destruction and looting of Iraq. I agree with your main point; most countries have welfare states and/or universal healthcare and aren't imperialist, but we shouldn't ignore the ways that Americans have genuine incentives (beyond the ideological) to support invasions and aggression.

Matt Yglesias’ curiosity about the rationalist movement was apparently pretty serious; he sounds more and more like us all the time.

Update: Matt discusses this extensively on the Rationally Speaking podcast.

In addition to talking about immigration and YIMBYism, Julia and Matt discuss the Iraq War, and this part is really fascinating to me.  I think of Julia as certainly being more intelligent than I am, and Matt as possibly more intelligent than I am.  But they both got it wrong at the the time, and not only did I get it right, but if you had asked me at the time, I would have given about 90% of what Matt gives as the reasoning now for why he was wrong.

(In their defense, I was already in graduate school in a foreign policy-adjacent field at the time, while they were only undergraduates, so I would have been less deferential to “a bipartisan majority of the establishment thinks this is a good idea”.)

they supported the invasion of Iraq? exactly how high were they at the time? undergraduates should be smashing metaphorical windows, not being deferential to the establishment’s opinion on committing war crimes!

In fact, one of the reasons for error they give at the time was a) not knowing where to go to find the best arguments against the war and b) hearing really stupid arguments from the metaphorical window-smashers around them.

(The Internet and social media would subsequently drub in the lesson that there is no position so obvious/correct that there is nobody making stupid arguments in favor of it.)

they didn’t know where to go to find the best arguments against the war, therefore they supported the war? how the fuck are they qualified to speak on any topic after admitting something like that? don’t you default to opposing aggressive wars of invasion in the absence of a good reason?

Yglesias is 39 years old! he was 22 in 2003! old enough to know better, and the reasons given in support for the war were surely far stupider than those opposing it.

I can understand supporting it because you’re planning a career in Washington or as a pundit given that Serious People Support Wars, but that just marks you as a craven asshole.

“you should default to opposing aggressive wars of invasion”

you should! and they did! unfortunately for them, and us, the bipartisan majority expert consensus said that it wasn’t an aggressive war of invasion, it was an attempt to free an oppressed populace who needed our help from a cruel criminal dictator who was also trying to kill us. the two of them didn’t know where to go to find arguments against it that weren’t from window-smashing idiots.

probably because the anti-war arguments at that time focused heavily on “this is an aggressive war of invasion where our country plans to loot and impoverish and oppress another nation to appease wicked corporate interests” and that wasn’t true. like we can look back on the past and see “oh, yeah, they didn’t do that.”

they genuinely believed they were going to ge greeted as liberators. they genuinely believed they were going to bring the Iraqis out of oppression and into the freedom and stability of democracy. It was a horrible fucking idea that would never ever work and they only thought it would due to gaping ideological blind spots, but chanting “No blood for oil!” doesn’t work against people who aren’t trading blood for oil. As usual, left-ish messaging of the day focused primarily (not exclusively though, there were people actually talking about what a bad idea it was, though the ones i remember most were comedy and satire people like the Onion and the Daily Show) on assuming the people that disagreed with you believed everything you did, that they also believed that the war was exchanging blood for oil and you just had to tell them not to do that.

also with all due respect the main reason the left loses so much is that y’all refuse to compromise on the language and messaging you use to speak to voters. i swear if you rebranded “defund the police” as “invest in community safety from the ground up” most white suburban moderates would be like “that sounds great” and i know that because that’s how i’ve literally reframed it to white suburban moderates who think “defund the police” means we’re going to live in a scary lawless mad max world

like maybe it comes across as mealy-mouthed and corny to people steeped in online cynicism but just to be clear, this is the country that wouldn’t eat french fries after 9/11 so we renamed them “freedom fries” and everyone was suddenly cool again. americans are not, by and large, super sophisticated about this stuff

okay, so, as a followup…. basically, i joined this “christians against trump” fb group for a work research project in 2017 and just ended up never leaving, bc it turned out to be such a great experiment in just… observing and listening and talking to people and figuring out the language that works! so like, as a basic glossary for talking to the well-meaning anti-trump moderate dems in your life about progressive policies:

the point is, as with all the rest of this, that there are a lot of people out there who are alienated by the language (because there has been a billion-dollar media propaganda machine working overtime to make the language as alienating as possible) but not by the content of the argument. the right is SO good at messaging to its base by speaking their language, dog whistles and all. but because the democratic party is a coalition of moderates and liberals and leftists, you really have to be strategic about your messaging in a way that the right doesn’t. frankly, that’s why joe biden won - he made those same broad appeals to morality and civility and unity and prosperity that people want to hear. 

i realize that everyone feels that if you have the moral high ground, you shouldn’t have to put in work to persuade people because they should automatically grasp that you’re right, but like i said above, this is america, and it doesn’t work like that. we need to talk to people, not in buzzwords or in highly stigmatized language that risks turning them off immediately, but in language that already means something to them. if you want to persuade people you have to actually make things sound appealing to them, whether that means evoking warm and fuzzy mental images or appealing to their principles and moral convictions and religious beliefs or just doing your best to sound like the adults in the room. you gotta do this stuff to build a majority instead of just a plurality within this party, because that’s just what we need to win.

If you want to see this side of the argument in action: witness Dan Price on Fox News reframing Universal Basic Income as “taking money out of the government and putting it in the hands of everyday Americans,” which is just. *chef’s kiss* Speaking as someone raised by and around conservatives, they will eat that shit UP.

I think a big moral in all of this is that you can’t expect the VAST majority of Americans to be educated or knowledgeable about these kinds of issues. I don’t even mean that as a dig, just a reality. Most people, living their lives, working their jobs, do NOT use the internet for activism. They don’t read about these issues in detail. They don’t really understand WHAT those little phrases mean or WHY they should want them. Which means IF you want to be an activist and you if you want to get those people on board- you gotta get on their level and EXPLAIN it to them without the slogans. Which is work, and you are not obligated to spend your time doing it, or doing it all the time, or doing it with radicalized Trumpers who aren’t here in good faith; but it is THE work, ya know?

See also: Republicans have mastered this in the opposite direction. They take something Democrats or liberals want, reduce it to a Scary Soundbite, and done, now people hate it.

See: critical race theory

Critical race theory is actually a law school level class about how legal systems can disadvantage people of color in the United States. It’s been around for forty years.

Republicans have conflated it with “indoctrinating children to think being white is bad and hating America.” Moral panic ensues.

The Affordable Care Act becomes “Government takeover of Healthcare.” Etc etc etc

People need to be meet where they’re at with accessible language that understands the audience or else you’ll lose them

My mother is in favor of “universal healthcare” but against “socialized medicine.” The language used for these things really matters

The whole point of this post, for those getting angry, is it’s entirely about the language used to sell these policies. You don’t actually have to change the legislation itself at all, you just have to figure out how you sell it to people. There’s no reason to get as upset as I’ve seen some people get unless you care more about lingo than you do about getting things passed.

People in advertising know this: that you can change an unsavory name of a product, or the ad used to promote it, without changing the actual product… and that can completely recover flagging sales. It’s fitting OP has a Mad Men avatar because that’s really what the left needs to do more of: stop being precious about lingo and treat politics more like advertising.

#i like to imagine myself on the joe rogan experience when i try to word things in a way thatd hit#like would rogan hear what im saying and have a million arguments or would he mostly agree? am i saying anything thatd work him up?

See, I think this is where you can fall into a trap. Joe Rogan isn’t someone who is reasonable or convincable on a lot of this; he’s a right-wing troll who is good at playing the “moderate” in order to radicalize people further right. I think it’s important to be able to tell the difference between people who are honestly on the fence and people who are doing a trolling “just asking questions” gambit. There are perils with failing to see this distinction on both ends: a lot of people on the left make the mistaking of assuming everybody is the troll, and then they alienate actual moderates (I talk about that in my follow-up post here). It’s really easy to see the problems with that, since most people you’ll encounter – especially outside of combative social media websites like Twitter – are asking in good faith. But there are problems with spending too much time engaging with the bad-faith people: it wastes your time and energy, and usually makes you look bad, but it also legitimizes them and their arguments. It gives them a platform, and it directs their followers your way. (This is something a lot of us learned the hard way during Gamergate – and that was an issue where it was really easy to dismiss the question-askers as trolls, since any truly reasonable person would take the side of the women being harassed to the point of having to leave their houses by angry gamers. But there were still a lot of people who spent way too much time trying to convince guys “on the fence” who really just wanted to waste people’s time and/or be the center of some prominent Twitter person’s attention for a bit.)

The thing is that sealioning/JAQing off is usually easier to spot than you’d think. First of all, does someone have a reputation for being a troll like that? (Which eliminates people like Joe Rogan right off the bat.) How are they phrasing their questions? When they follow up, do they seem like they are more interested in listening/understanding or in trying to win the argument/making you look bad? And where are they asking this question? There’s a big difference between someone asking “but what about sexism against men” one time, or in response to a feminist post that is actually somewhat relevant to men’s issues, vs. if they’re just doing it on every single post about feminism or every post by a prominent feminist. There’s also a big difference between someone asking it of a mutual vs. a random person. And so on.

lmao what is this shit

No, that’s false, the post calls multiple times for left wingers to shift to more right-wing policies.

The point of the call to defend the police is that American police are violent gangs with vast armouries of military surplus gear which they use to murder people.

This is a completely different policy to the mass infrastructure projects that the green new deal is calling for, one that won’t contribute in any meaningful sense to climate issues.

It comes across different because you’re saying a totally different thing and proposing a totally different policy! Climate change isn’t about “preserving resources”! Jesus Christ!

Do you honestly think that people who are squeamish about killing “babies” are going to be convinced by talk of economic growth??

This pathetic and cowardly dodging of real political differences won’t bring these people to the left, it will only drag you to the right – frankly, quite far to the right if you’re saying shit about being independent of foreigners etc.

"Finally, we gradually eliminate all words from our vocabulary. The working classes hate words. They’re all illiterate, probably; I assume they communicate in grunts and squeals. We must learn to squeal like they do. Roll around in the muck. Hide your delicate bourgeois face in a plastic snout. Lap up corn syrup from the trough. Drape yourself in a soiled flag and grunt the name of Jesus Christ. Squeal, piggy, squeal."

-Sam Kriss

[epistemic status: a bunch of semi-related thoughts I am trying to work out aloud] It has been noted countless times that reactionary politics rely on a feeling of threat: our enemies are strong and we are weak (but we are virtuous and they are not, which is why they’re our enemies!); we must defend ourselves, we must not be afraid of doing what needs to be done; we must not shie away from power generally, and violence specifically.

And there are lots of contexts–like when talking about the appeal of reactionary politics in the US before and at the beginning of Trump’s rise to prominence, or when talking about hard-on-crime policies that are a springboard to police militarization, or (the central example of all this in the 21st century) the post 9/11 PATRIOT-act terrorism paranoia that was a boon to authoritarians everywhere, and spurred a massive expansion of both control and surveillance in everyday life–where critics of reactionary rhetoric are chastised for their failure to appeal to the other side, because they come off as callous towards their concerns and their real fears and anxieties.

And while this might not be strategically correct, frankly, I think there’s a sense in which it is justified to be callous towards those concerns. Because those concerns are lies. They may be lies borne out of a seed of real experience (9/11 did happen, of course), but the way that seed is cultivated by focused paranoia, by contempt toward cultivating any sense of proportionality or any honest comparison of risk, the way it is dragooned into the service of completely orthogonal political goals (”the CIA/NSA/FBI must be able to monitor all private communications everywhere in the world, just in case it might prevent another 9/11″) chokes off any possible sympathy I might otherwise feel. American paranoia about another couple thousand lives being lost in a 9/11 like event resulted in a number of deaths literally multiple orders of magnitude larger in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the former, some years Iraq was suffering the equivalent of six or seven 9/11s a year.

So, any fear-driven policy must not (for example) say “to prevent disaster X happening again, we’re going to make it happen 270 times over to someone else.” That’s not reasonable. And “fear is a bad basis for crafting policy” is not exactly a revolutionary observation. There’s that probably-apocryphal story of a Chinese professor responding to Blackstone’s Ratio–you know, “better that ten guilty persons go free than one innocent person suffer”–with “better for whom?” Which is supposed to be this trenchant and penetrating question that makes you reexamine your assumptions. But it’s always struck me as idiotic. Better for society! For everyone! Because the law only functions well if it is seen as a source of order and justice, not as an authoritarian cudgel; because a society in which anxiety drives policymaking and legal responses to social ills is one that is in the process of actively devouring itself; because flooding the public discourse with language that dehumanizes criminals and makes it easy to separate the individual from universal principles like civil rights is an acid that destroys the social fabric.

Fear as a germ of reactionary politics manifests itself in lots of ways outside of both historical examples, like fascism, or more recent examples, like US foreign policy during the war on terror. Fear and its link to purity-attitudes, with a low level of scientific literacy in general, drives stuff like the organized anti-vaccine movement. In the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram of political tendencies, I’d argue it’s a big factor in the wellness-to-Qanon track. It’s a big part of tough-on-crime rhetoric, which in the American instance in particular also draws on an especially racialized form (cf. the “Willie Horton” ad). Fear and purity and anti-contamination anxieties are even big in opposition to nuclear power, because most of the public just has a really bad sense of what the comparative dangers of nuclear vs fossil fuel are; and because the former has been culturally salient since 1945 in a way the latter hasn’t, nuclear contamination feels much more threatening than fossil fuel waste, despite by any measurable harm the latter causing far worse problems, even before you factor in any risks from climate change.

I would like to argue in particular that true crime as an entertainment genre, and wellness culture, and fears about child abuse all contribute to reactionary politics–they are in themselves major reactionary political currents–in a way that cuts across the political spectrum because they are not strongly marked for political factionalism. A lot of the rhetoric both from and around true crime entertainment promotes the idea that violent crime exists, or at least can flourish, because of an insufficiently punitive attitude toward crime; one that can only be fixed by centering victims’ desire (or putative desire) for retribution in the legal process, by eroding the civil rights of the accused, and by giving the police and prosecutors more power. Obviously, this is just 80s and 90s tough on crime rhetoric repackaged for millennials; it centers individual experience a bit more and deemphasizes the racial component that made the “Willie Horton” ad so successful, but it posits that there is only one cause for crime, a spontaneous choice by criminals that has no causal relationship with the rest of the world, and only one solution, which is authoritarianism.

Wellness culture leverages purity concerns and scientific illiteracy in ways which are so grifty and so transparently stupid that it’s by far the least interesting thing on this list to me; its most direct harm is in giving an environment for the anti-vaccine movement to flourish, and I’m always incredibly annoyed when people talk about how the medical establishment needs to do more to reassure the public about vaccines’ safety and efficacy. Again, strategically, this may be correct; people dying of preventable disease is really bad. But doctors as a body didn’t promote Andrew Wakefield’s nonsense; doctors as a body didn’t run breathless article after breathless article about vaccines maybe causing autism; doctors as a body didn’t scare the bejezus out of folks in the 90s and then act all surprised when preventable childhood diseases started breaking out all over the place.

Although outside the whole anti-vax thing, I think there are lots of other harms that wellness culture creates. It tends to be fairly antiscientific; in order to sell people nonsense (because as a subculture it exists almost exclusively to sell people things) it has to discredit anything that might point out that it is selling nonsense. Whether the anti-intellectualism that flourishes in these quarters is a result of intentional deceit or just a kind of natural rhetorical evolution probably varies. But it is an important component of wellness culture to be able to play a shell game between “big pharma doesn’t have your best interests at heart,” “you don’t need your anti-depressants,” and “laetrile cures cancer.”

The way in which fears of child abuse are turned into a reactionary political cudgel probably actually annoys me the most; whether it’s Wayfair conspiracy theories, conservatives trying to turn “groomer” into an anti-queer slur, or just antis on tumblr, the portrayal of sadistic sexual threat aimed at children from an outside malevolent force is compelling only because the vast majority of child abuse and CSA comes from within families and within culturally privileged structures of authority like churches, and this fact makes everyone really uncomfortable, and no one wants to talk about it. I remember getting really annoyed during the Obama years when the White House wanted to talk about bullying and anti-LGBT bullying in particular, while studiously avoiding blaming parents and teachers in any way for it, despite the fact that all the coming out horror stories I know are from people’s parents turning on them.

Now, very conservative politics have always opposed dilution of a kind of privilege for the family structure; they envision a family structure which is patriarchal, and so dilution of this privilege is dilution of the status of patriarch. Very insular communities which cannot survive their members having many options or alternative viewpoints available to them, including controlling religions but also just abusive parents who want to retain control over their kids, also bristle at the idea of any kind of general society-wide capacity for people to notice how parents treat their children. But beyond that, I think our society still treats parents as having a right of possession over their children and their children’s identities, especially when they’re young, and bolsters that idea with an idea that the purity of children is constantly under threat from the outside world, and it is the parents’ job to safeguard that purity. The result is the nuclear family as a kind of sacred structure which the rest of society has no right to observe or pry open; and this is a massive engine of enabling the abuse of children. To no other relationship in our society do we apply this idea, that it should be free from “interference” (read: basic accountability) from the rest of society.

Moreover, the idea of childhood as a time of purity and innocence, which not only must be protected from but during which children must be actively lied to about major aspects of how the world works, is one of the last ways remaining to an increasingly secular culture to justify censorious and puritanical Victorian morality. It is hard to advocate for censorship to protect the Morals of the Christian Public, when nobody believes in the Morals of the Christian Public anymore; but “think of the children!” still works as a rallying cry, because of this nagging sense we have that age-appropriate conversations with children about adult topics will cause them to melt or explode.

In many ways, these anxieties on behalf of theoretical children are the ones I am most contemptuous of. Not because child abuse isn’t a serious problem–it is–but because the vector imagined for it is almost entirely opposite the one it actually tends to occur along. People who pretend that the primary danger to children is from strangers are usually woefully misinformed; people who pretend it is from media are either idiots or liars seeking a cover for their craving for censorship.

In conclusion: while it’s not possible to exorcise all our neuroses from our politics, anymore than we will ever exercise all our neuroses from our aesthetics, there are some we should be especially on guard against. A sense of threat, and anxieties which tie into concerns about purity and fears of contamination, are two big ones. These produce policies that are not only badly correlated with the outcomes they ostensibly want, but actually and severely destructive to them, in the same way that invading Iraq was actively destructive to any notion of preventing terrorism, saving American or Iraqi lives, or promoting political stability in the Middle East. And we should hold in healthy suspicion anybody whose politics seem to be driven by similar neuroses. Some merely believe very harmful things. Some are actually actively deceptive. None will achieve any of the higher aims they claim as justification for their beliefs.

When it comes to understanding migration, this needs to be taken into account: if you are in a rural area in the global south, like Honduras, you have basically no access to social services, medicine, and education. In fact, the funding for those services is actually being cut, as the social security funds have been looted by corrupt politicans appointed by a military coup. Then you have to factor in that you likely have no access to the land, and no access to credit to buy seeds, and have to sell yourself for basically pennies to an agroindustrial giant. The peasants feed the local people; the agroindustries feed the Americans. In Guatamala, there is a neo-corporate fuedalism where you are allowed a patch of land if you are willing to work, unpaid, for coffee plantations which sell their produce to the German company Ritz. If you attempt to settle unoccupied land, a local businessman will claim it is his without any proof, and the police will take his side because the Agrarian Reform Institute, which issues land titles, is controlled by coupists whose main concern is squeezing as much wealth out of the country as possible. Thugs will murder a man and his wife in broad daylight, and the judge will respond by evicting you and your family from the land.

There is nowhere else for you to go but Tegucigalpa, where you can work trying to wash car windows or selling snacks to passing cars for a handful of lempira a day. Or perhaps you could work for a few dollars a day in one of the maquila factories making textiles for the American and European market, which are set up in special economic zones called Charter Cities where the constitution and labour laws do not apply, which can close down and spirit away whenever they like to another country when they are more willing to sell their people for even less. And then you have to factor in the hurricanes that sweep through the country, destroying everything, that the rains no longer come when they used to but when they do they come in flooding torrents. Much of the north of Honduras is currently underwater; most of the banana and coffee plantations have been destroyed.

And then you factor in when you tried to change this via electing a better government in 2006, he was overthrown in 2009; when you tried to get organised and resist the coup, your friends, your loved ones, your trade union leaders and peasant resisters all turned up mysteriously dead while the military and police worked with drug gangs disguised as agribusiness like the Dinant coproration to burn down villages that opposed them. For trying to change things in the way that you were supposed to, through non violently protesting, organising, and voting for something better, you were subjected to a decade of counterrevolutionary terror and violence that the “international community” not only ignored but gave its active approval to. All of the factors listed above have not only been ongoing for the last 10 years, they’ve been intensified, hothoused by the global counterrevolutionary terror that was the response to the 2011 wave of post-financial crisis uprisings and revolutions and accelerating climate apocalypse.

And at the same time, all of this is being done so more of the country can be turned into a massive cash cow for the benefit of foreign corporations and domestic oligarchs. The wealth of your country is siphoned off and flows around the American and European financial system, benefiting them and building a consumer disneyland that looks like paradise compared to your situation. That could, even if you are worked for nothing, give you a few dollars to send home that could build your abuela in the countryside a nice home for her to live out her days. What other option is left for you and your family other than joining the exodus of people heading north, to the countries where the wealth and profits and rewards of your homeland’s suffering are being kept. And after you cross mountains and rivers which freeze you to death and sweep you away, you are faced with a massive border wall of ahte and soldiers on horses which hit you with sticks. You are faced with an immigration detention centre that will chain you to your bed while you give birth and separate you from your baby who will be given away for adoption to a white couple. When you make a charge against the border fence in Melilla, fed up with being kept in shacks with nothing while the Northerners debate what to do about the problem people their greed has forced to move, the Moroccan police will beat 35 of you to death.

And then when you get there to that golden paradise, you end up doing work not dissimilar to the work you were doing back home, working for pennies (though pennies that are valuable enough back home to buy the family that remain the tiniest slice of comfort) for an agroindustrial giant that supplies supermarkets with cheap produce picked by cheaper people. While you work in the fields, a crop duster plane will spray you with paraquat; when support organisations try to raise this with OSHA they will ask for the plane’s number, and when this can’t be provided they will say nothing can be done. In fact, inspectors are ordered to stay away from the plantations on the Texas border. A member of the Border Agricultural Workers Project says she hasn’t seen a normal child born on the border in 20 years, such is the effect of agrichemicals. If you fuck up in the slightest, have any interaction with the state, you will be deported and sent back to square one. There are a 14 million migrants in the US in the same precarious state, effectively without any way of enforcing their rights. My aunt is a Mexican migrant in California. Her son was deported because he got a speeding ticket. It was 15 years before she saw him again, other than through the bars of the border fence, when she finally got her green card.

The situation in Honduras can be repeated for almost any other country. Syria, Venezuela, Iraq, South Sudan, Libya, all the headline countries are countries that have been subjected to a severe counterrevolutionary terror. The processes of dispossession and destruction of peasant economies and communities (primitive accumulation to use the Marxist jargon) have been hothoused over the last decade by war and violence. I just wish that relatively comfortable people in the imperialist countries realised that the “migrant crisis” is the result of policies that their governments forced on others. Violence that their elites made their fortunes off. What a monstrous, barbarous way of life we have.