And I wasn’t saying dollar voting was talking about policies or political leaders, you idiot.
I was saying that more money = more power and influence because it’s not just products you can buy, and not just a handful of consumables for personal use. The more wealth inequality, the fewer people make the largest impacts on the economy, meaning it matters more economically what just a few people do with their money. If the good favours of these people are lost, a great many people can be made to know about it. And it’s not just supply chains, capital, credit etc. that they can influence - they are able to access all the best channels to changing laws in their favour. And if any State is involved that doesn’t appeal to them, the richest people can essentially hold them to ransom until they do. Even if these richest people have avoided paying any tax at all (they end up mixing and networking with all the other richest and most powerful contacts, and can afford all the best accountants as well as all the best lawyers) the amount of people that their decisions affect who do pay taxes is not insignificant that you can risk. The larger the wealth disparity, the larger the collateral fallout of the decisions of the wealthiest.
And all from “voting for preferred products through paying more”, with initially the best or at least most popular pulling away (early Capitalism is healthy) - recognised as the capitalistic goal/the definition of capitalistic success - the richer you are, the more resources you have available to you to become more rich (and vice versa for the poorer). The effects of Capitalism working properly run away with themselves, and we see this with or without a State for the reasons laid out above. The tumor becomes malignant and Capitalism working properly leads to fewer and fewer people developing very real executive powers, tending towards the point of essentially becoming unofficial de facto leaders (not chosen by explicit decmocratic election) - but under Capitalism their business is “private” so can continue to spiral out of control behind the scenes. And the effects pass down through generations, traditions, friend circles - none of these richest people are completely islated from the others. With all their privacy and the corresponding lack of accountability that this affords, “illegal” collusion can easily go off the record, and they can buy all the smartest people to put on the payroll to facilitate it all. Stupid people think there’s secret underground Commie moles infiltrating all the most powerful institutions - no, it’s simply Capitalism working and increasingly we are suffering the effects of it working in its mature form.
I’d like to see one too.
I would be willing to sacrifice zero people at most for the cause.
So your “one dollar = one vote” is not relevant to the conversation except to say that people will no longer have any influence in what products they can buy. Communism does that. You get what we give you and you had better say that you like it.
Your fantasy version of communism that sounds so wonderful requires some indication that it could probably work. So far all evidence implies the reverse. Idealized communism appears to be a fantasy utopia and not worth the death and destruction required to attempt it (similar to the Green New Deal in the US). How could the world ever get evidence favoring its reality without endangering people with even an experiment?
Seattle tried the experiment and it failed very quickly. What wasn’t scientific about their experiment?
Find me the scientific papers behind Seattle’s careful plans for structured experiment and controlled variables, and then let’s discuss what’s scentific about their experiment.
Since we both know the complete opposite approach was taken, I suggest you at least attempt to gain some education on what science actually is because you’re quite clearly oblivious. And I don’t mean read a couple of internet articles and maybe a Wikipedia paragraph or two - actually take an official course and see if you can even get to high school level with your lazy suggestions about what constitutes a scientific experiment.
I have no “fantasy version of Communism”, just an understanding of the theory that I want to be sufficiently tested before it’s ruled out. I even expect a significant probability that it’d be really hard to establish sufficient conditions to enable a working model to function viably. This notion that you think I’m lost in some dream world where Communism is the heavenly utopia that we can all discover if we all believe in ourselves like some fucking Disney movie is your own god damn imagination. Get real and stop spreading all your misinformation.
And “Dollar voting” is perfectly relevant to the converstion.
“One dollar = one vote” means more and more dollar disparity equals more and more inequality in purchasing power, and due the sheer extent of this inequality in current purchasing power there are small numbers of individuals who have the purchasing power of whole countries. And they are not operating in isolation, and the legions of employees and the collateral effects of their decisions are gigantic. The executive power that they have between them is akin to that of de facto leaders.
No Communism required, this is literally what happens when Capitalism works properly for long enough.
Communism, in fact, would work in the exact opposite direction to control this fiasco from spiralling even further out of control by taking “private ownership of the means of production” out of the equation - which is the means by which surplus value is extracted from the labour of the working class. Under actual Communism, as in the actual literature, the working class are those doing the giving and the taking, not some oppressive totalitarian government regime that merely claims to be communist, and you’d have just as much free speech as ever to say what you think of it all with just as little consequence for doing so. The aim isn’t to end up like China, it’s to solve the inherent economic crises that late-stage Capitalism has been bringing about, without resorting to Totalitarianism or any other corrupt form of government.
Stop telling Marxists what they’re aiming for, and trying to make out like it’s the exact opposite of what they’re aiming for.
You can tell all of them how much you don’t think it’ll work until you’re blue in the face, and it won’t affect the results of legitimately scientifically controlled attempts to try and see if there’s a realistic and safe way of successfully bringing attempts to make things better into fruition.
So since you have nothing but Doomsaying and pessimism to offer, kindly cease your misinformation and shut up until you actually know what you’re talking about so that people who do can have a decent on-topic conversation. You’re being a dick.
Things need to be known as true before they can be relied on to be “true things”.
How many times has humanity thought something to be true, only for it to be revealed as less true than some other explanation?
That’s what science does - it takes what you thought to be true and tests it, and improves it. Correctly approached, it never espouses things to be absolutely true (people did at one point thing physics was “finished” - how wrong they were).
Turns out the best way that we’ve come up with so far to evaluate the empirical, which is seemingly always vulnerable to the “problem of induction”, is the scientific method. That’s just the current state of Epistemology. Without it we just have “claims”, and anyone can say anything that comes to mind that they think to be true and call it true (as they do here on this forum far too often). And the gains resulting from this improved epistemological approach are quite apparent (e.g. technology).
Who needs or wants saving from their humanity?
Humanity is something kinda hard to shake for humans (being human and expressing humanity throughout human life basically tautologically…)
And science is an expression of humanity - far from counter to it.
We’re the only species on earth to practice it, setting us apart from anything non-human for a start.
The urge to alleviate fear seems to pervade the animal kingdom, though most species have simply have to make do and live with fear as part of their daily life - benefitting from its somewhat effective physiological reflexes, but humanity has done much to conquer the fear of this kind of existence through understanding. The ability to abstract patterns from life and act accordingly does much to evade scary situations, it provides confidence and the ability to create one’s own life in a way of one’s own choosing: freedom. The ability to control for our environments has allowed us to stand far apart from all non-human species - as distinctly humanity. And we do all this through Epistemology, which has progressed into the Scientific Method - it’s nothing more than an expression of the human desire to know life and enhance life, and we have much to show for it that could not have been achieved had we been unable to advance Epistemology into the Scientific Method. If anything, science saves humanity!
Without science we are left with hasty, imaginative, cobbled-together guesses that amount to little more than personal claims of knowledge that are not necessarily shared unless imposed by force or trickery, diminishing freedom for all who are not successfully imposing such guesses - leading to much war, power squabbles and suffering, as litters our “human” history with a veritable lack of humanity. Who would choose these backward existences over the world of today that science has won for us, by us. Any remnants of the old way are simply dying echoes that periodically retreat into ever smaller gaps left in the wake of continual scientific successes, and the modern world that continues to be won in this way is so successful in spite of any clinging to the old ways - not at all because of it. The results of the old ways without science are apparent from the millenia before enlightenment times, and can only be justified with a lack of appreciation for what’s actually been affording our far richer contemporary standards of living. The kind of thinking required and praised of the old ways is in exact opposition to the Scientific Method: believing on lack of evidence instead of based on evidence. Turning one’s back on science is what “saves you from your humanity”, by diminishing it back towards the much more inhuman civilisations that came before.
Hi Dan! I have been attempting to start a similar conversation in other threads, when lo and behold the conversation I sought was right here all along!
Not sure if your OP is tongue and cheek or if you are playing devil’s advocate, but the problem as if you have portrayed it seems like a caricature. Capitalism is a spectrum, not an all-or-none proposition. Our system in the USA used to be designed to extract and redistribute more of this wealth, and it seemed to have a net positive effect vs. the opposite. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
