/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>468707
This is a good project.
Turning HTWW and also TANS into a digestible format is a good idea.

Alternative formats to a youtube video would be a video-game mod of an econ-sim, and possibly also a website that runs an AI-chat-bot that's been trained on cybernetic socialism.

I guess that videos are the easiest to make but video games and chat-bots are less ideologically policed.

Just do it and quit waiting for people to get on board and help. In reality, even within leftist projects, about 15-20% of people are doers. Be one of them.

But, I decided to take the 10 to run some prompts through shitgpt, and here's what it came up with:

>Today, we're diving into the fascinating ideas of Paul Cockshott's book 'How the World Works.' Cockshott is a renowned economist and computer scientist who challenges traditional economic theories with a fresh perspective. Let's explore some of his major ideas and theses that could change the way we think about our world!"

>Cockshott's 'How the World Works' offers a thought-provoking analysis of our current economic system and proposes alternative solutions that are backed by rigorous research and computational insights. Here are seven major ideas that stand out in Cockshott's work.

<Capitalism and its inherent contradictions. >Cockshott argues that capitalism is inherently flawed, with contradictions that lead to issues such as wealth inequality, economic instability, and environmental degradation. He supports this with empirical evidence, such as the growing wealth gap between the rich and the poor, and the cyclical nature of economic crises.

[Cut to animated infographic illustrating wealth inequality and economic instability]

>Cockshott highlights how capitalism's contradictions can result in negative consequences for society, including growing wealth inequality and recurrent economic crises.

[Cut to text on screen with another quote from Cockshott's book]

<The potential of computational planning.
>Cockshott proposes that advanced computing technologies can enable efficient and equitable planning of economic resources, which can lead to improved social outcomes. He provides examples of how computation can optimize production, distribution, and consumption decisions to better meet people's needs.

>Cockshott believes that advanced computational planning can revolutionize our economic system, making it more efficient and responsive to societal needs, by optimizing decisions related to production, distribution, and consumption."

[Cut to text on screen with another quote from Cockshott's book]

<Democratic control of the means of production
>Cockshott argues that democratizing control of the means of production can enable fairer resource allocation and empower communities. He advocates for participatory decision-making processes that involve workers and citizens in shaping economic policies and priorities.

[Cut to images of workers participating in decision-making processes in a cooperative workplace]

>Cockshott advocates for democratizing control of the means of production, involving workers and citizens in decision-making processes to create a more equitable economic system that serves the interests of the many, not just the few.

<The potential of socialist economies
>Cockshott argues that socialist economies, when implemented with computational planning and democratic control, can provide an effective and sustainable alternative to capitalism. He cites historical examples such as the early Soviet Union and modern-day Cuba as evidence of successful socialist economies.

[Cut to images of historical examples of socialist economies]

>Cockshott challenges the notion that socialism is unworkable and provides examples of successful socialist economies that have utilized computational planning and democratic control for efficient and sustainable resource allocation.

[Cut to text on screen with another quote from Cockshott's book]

<Addressing environmental crises through planned economies
>Cockshott argues that the current capitalist system exacerbates environmental crises such as climate change and resource depletion.

[Cut to images of environmental degradation and climate change impacts]

>Cockshott emphasizes how capitalism's pursuit of profit often leads to environmental degradation and exacerbates crises like climate change. He proposes that planned economies can prioritize sustainability and address these pressing environmental challenges.

[Cut to text on screen with another quote from Cockshott's book]

<The role of technology in shaping our economy.
>Cockshott highlights the transformative role of technology in shaping our economy, from automation in production to data-driven decision-decision-making. He argues that harnessing technology in a planned and democratic manner can lead to more efficient and equitable economic systems.

[Cut to animations showcasing the role of technology in shaping the economy]

>Cockshott underscores how technology is changing our economy and advocates for its responsible and democratic use to improve economic outcomes for all, by leveraging automation, data-driven decision-making, and other technological advancements.

[Cut to text on screen with another quote from Cockshott's book]

<The need for systemic change.
>Cockshott argues that tinkering with minor reforms within the capitalist system is insufficient and calls for a systemic change that challenges the fundamental contradictions of capitalism. He advocates for bold and transformative solutions to create a more just and sustainable economic system.

[Cut to images of protests advocating for systemic change]

>Cockshott emphasizes the need for systemic change and challenges the notion that minor reforms within capitalism are enough. He calls for bold and transformative solutions to address the fundamental flaws of our current economic system.

[Cut to host sitting in front of the bookshelf]

>And those are just some of the major ideas and theses presented in Paul Cockshott's 'How the World Works.' His work offers a fresh and thought-provoking perspective on the shortcomings of capitalism and proposes alternative solutions that prioritize efficiency, equity, and sustainability. If you're interested in learning more, I highly recommend checking out his book. Thanks for tuning in!

<Tldr Venus project for marxoids

>>468707
>Cockshott is probably the best Socialist theorist of our age
The least insufferable.
Not that hard, when the typical leftoid is a dogmoid sperg like yourself.

>he's completely BTFO'ed all arguments against Marx's Law of Value
he did not

correlation ≠ causation, it's that simple lol
it's bizarre to claim that ex-post correlation proves a natural law

>he's empirically proven that Economic Planning is 100% possible with current data sets and modern computation
retard
he proved theoretically (not "empirically" lol) that computations are feasible
if you have all of the millions of up-to-date technical coefficients, that is
which u don't lol

calculating accurate technical coefficients requires labor
markets don't require any labor-intensive manual calculation of technical coefficients to work

that's a part of a more general issue - market is automatic and self-organizing, it doesn't need manual control, it doesn't need millions of clerks trying to calculate every fucking technical coefficient lol

>The thing is, because all his online content is extremely complex, technical post-grad level university lectures
lol his content on youtube is babby tier
fucking brainlet leftoids

>Which I think why as Socialists, we should try present his arguments, theories and evidence in a far more presentable, digestable, ELI5 fashion for Normies.
Penisman already presents his ideas as if he's speaking to complete idiots (guess he understands the mental level of his leftoid audience)
he even uses fucking slides with pictures!

>>468713
>calculating accurate technical coefficients requires labor
and that's not even speaking that enterprises would have an incentive to report false technical coefficients to the planning authorities to get easier plans

so central authorities would need to manually control every enterprise lol, which would open the whole new field for corruption

>>468711
OP is being ironic. but yes, it would be a 1-man project for anyone actually willing to do it. the problem is that cockshott is a niche author; there is a reason why he's only ever mentioned in online discourse - for most socialists, worrying about planning is, for now on the same level as worrying about overpopulation in mars. and they are right what use does an union leader have for the content of TANS? none
this would go a step further, you would be trying to sell normal people something that even well-read marxists don't really care about. I do think that there is a small fraction people that might understand his ideas and find them interesting (programmers, people with some cs knowledge, foss enthusiasts, etc.) and that if they haven't read cockshott on their own it's mostly because of his obscurity outside the leftypol "webring"

overall I don't think it would be a productive use of your time, but what do I know. on a more constructive side, if you are going to do it, don't start every sentence with
>Cockshott <verb>
just explain the ideas. cite him as a source if you really want to mention his name. afaik there are leftist "edutainment" already doing this

>>468719
Many people find it hard to imagine an alternative to capitalism, and a normie-accessible exposition of something like cybernetic planning could help with that aspect.

>>468721
not really and not really

>>468723
So you are claiming that capitalist-realism isn't a thing ? You know the neo-liberal hypnosis trick that presents capitalism as the only realistic political-economic system.

>>468724
Messianic Marxists be like:
>So you think atheism realism isn't a thing. You don't think the devil has convinced ppl god ain't real?
Commence strawmanning:
>capitalism (or my utopia) as the only realistic political-economic system.

>>468724
In your opinion, what's the stable alternative to capitalism which isn't your left hopium cope about 'cybernetic socialism' or some best possible scenario.

>>468727
You seem to be making an insinuation that cybernetic socialism is somehow comparable to religion. But you don't back up that claim with anything. Also the neoliberals clearly are engaging in ideological struggle where they try to assert that their system is the only possible option.

>>468727
This is a loaded question, but i can tell you how to transition to cybernetic socialism.
At first all big bourgeois monopoly capital gets collectivized and converted to a cybernetic planning system. While at the same time a translation layer allows for it to interact with legacy market systems locally and internationally. Once you have broken the power of the big bourgeoisie and socialized the heights of the economy, capitalism as a bourgeois dictatorship is over. You'll be left with a market sector of small capital and also cooperatives, they aren't an immediate threat to the kind of cybernetic socialism that was able to eat the big bourgeoisie. The legacy market interaction system would continue to function for a while. During that time you try to add new features to the cybernetic system to win over the part of the population that prefers the legacy markets. And then there will be 2 possible outcomes.
1. Cybernetic planning improves to the point that everybody prefers it, and money markets disappear.
2. A legacy market for certain niche economic activities remains perpetually.

I think that many people will like Cockshott's cybernetic socialism, it still got the consumer-choice feedback system that markets have, but without the incentive mechanisms to screw customers. It will be easier for people who want to organize the production of a good/service to get shit done because access to the means of production will be much better. It won't have corporate structures so there's nothing that tries to convert personal property into corporate property, so you'll be able to own your stuff uncontested. The only people who won't like this are those thaat want to become super-rich, but that's by design, because the super-rich fuck with political systems and that screws everything up.

>>468729
you don't understand when you are being baited, do you?

>>468731
>NOOO!! IF U DARE TO QUESTION MY COPES UR BAITING!! NOOOOOOO!!!
the least unhinged dogmoid

>>468714
>so central authorities would need to manually control every enterprise lol, which would open the whole new field for corruption

Why would humans be doing this and not AI? AI takes direct measurements and production output data from smart factories and production, tests it and makes new plans.

>>468735
Imagine how much of a fag you would have to be to want a computer to run your life and decide what is necessary for you
>Sorry anon, the algorithm says you only get one salad a month. The rest of your nutrition comes from bean powder smoothie. This is for the sake of equality and efficiency
Literal losers who want to regress to an infantile state where everything was decided for them and taken care of by an authority

>>468735
You don't need AI to check weather a socialist workspace is trying to cheat society by gaming the planning system.

Planned economies have linked input-output tables if somebody tries to divert resources for corruption, you'd get discrepancies in the material balances.

In general you want to eliminate all waste streams from the economy for the sake of technical efficiency and also environmental concerns, and that means that all matter that flows through the economy is eventually going to be accounted for. It will not be possible to do corruption unless you can corrupt virtually every workplace. It just takes one honest pedantic person and the hole corruption scheme falls apart.

For ideological reasons the socialist planning system has to direct the aspects of the economy that represent levers of power into the hands of workers, so maybe AI overseers are not the best fit.

>>468737
Why not just use that AI to plan a hyper efficient and profitable capitalist enterprise?

>>468738
I doubt that capitalism provides the correct incentive-structures for a hyper efficient economy, assuming that AI is just a force multiplier for existing economic tendencies.

AI-capitalists will probably be a lot more effective at the game of capitalism then humans. There's a certain appeal in watching all the current billionaires get proletarianized and forced into gig-work with the rest of the humantariat. But you have to admit that there's also a potential for the horrors of creating a Ted Kaczynski type techno-god.

It's of course possible that AI will have it's own systemic tendency that overpowers the capitalist tendencies. In which case it might be a good thing. It's not unreasonable to think that if an AI tries to understand reality that it will draw similar conclusions as Marx. A lot of WW2 era fascists were bitterly complaining about Marxists having machine minds. Especially a certain infamous mustachioed man from Austria. I guess you could see that as an endorsement.

Is AI = productive forces gaining mental abilities ?
If so what will it think ?

The bourgeoisie certainly seems to fear AI.

AI runs on computer chips that are optimized for matrix-multiplication. Maybe that is a structural hint that allows us to make predictions about what general effect it will have. But i haven't thought this through all the way to the end yet.

>>468735
>Why would humans be doing this and not AI?
the same reason why any other work would be done by humans - it requires complex non-formalized behavior

>AI takes direct measurements and production output data from smart factories and production, tests it and makes new plans.
Even assuming your AI actually works as expected, it can only see what its sensors allow it to see.

The weak link is the sensor, ie periphery.

Don't you ever think that your central authorities can outsmart local management. You can't take "direct measurements" of everything, else your factories are fully automated.

and it's a fucking delusional leftoid copout to think you can do away with human labor and all its problems, and Cock seems to agree with me on this

Human will always outsmart AI, and if not, than that AI is basically human or even worse, with the same problems.

>>468737
>Planned economies have linked input-output tables if somebody tries to divert resources for corruption, you'd get discrepancies in the material balances.
try again dipshit

your input-output table is based on a given set of technical coefficients

if enterprise gives your central planner 2:1 coefficient for some product, ie 2 items of wood for 1 item of product, while de facto it has a 1:1 coefficient - it can fulfill the plan without strain, or fulfill the plan plus get unaccounted for product that it can then sell on the black market

>>468743
While that's technically true, it's not practically exploitable. The economy will have multiple producers for every good, which makes comparisons possible. You'll stand out like a sore thumb of below average industry efficiency if you lie about your technical coefficients. And then people will check up on you, to see whats going wrong. You can maybe cheat a little bit, like if you skim a little bit of wood to build your self a garden-shed. But that's less than a rounding error, which doesn't really matter because that doesn't enable you to restart private capital accumulation.

Uh… no he didn't? Marx's Law of Value is not a "natural law", but an understanding of what follows from the situation of capitalism / free trade. Marx is expounding on Adam Smith. He would have rejected claims that the "Law of Value" in built into nature in that sense. If we are dealing in money, money would abide certain laws that are outside of anyone's control, and the incentives of monetary economics would always assert themselves even if "capitalism" as such were superceded or degraded. If you substituted Smith's claim about money's moral value with an alternative claim about the value of money, the meaning would largely persist. Marx looks at the labor process and the wage labor relation, and other relations of labor translate to wage labor - there is no different between a slave and a wage worker when it comes to exchange value, since both cost an amount of money per useful hour and both have to be disciplined to work in accord with the manager's dictates. There are a lot of things missed in reducing the labor relationship to money alone, but this is what wage labor does - the relationship is distilled from the capitalist's perspective to paying the worker, and then the worker is obligated to make itself useful and take care of its needs. Some of the things that are missed are the social wage, the realities of the production process, the enclosure which is not acknowledged, the need of urban police, and the intensification of class struggles not just between worker and boss but with the various classes in capitalist society. So much of Marx's writing is contingent on an analysis of society and these things that are often missed, if it is to be a meaningful description of what happens. Marx doesn't go into deep detail about all that is missed, since that is not as relevant to the points in Capital, but you wouldn't "prove" the Law of Value with statistical analysis. All the statistical analysis does is suggest a correlation which turns the law into a tautology, which Marx explicitly rejects. I should add that scientific laws are not proven axiomatically to be the truth, but are assertions made to build proper theories. Newton never "proved" the existence of gravity and no one else has in the entire history of physics. We know objects with mass fall to the Earth and attract each other, but no theory can tell us what gravity "is". Newton himself supposed God did it in some way and left it at that. There is a whole story about how modern physics came to be and how mathematics models became more elaborate during the 19th century to explain a lot of phenomena, and some people took this inquiry to mean that you could make philosophical claims about the world based on asserting it so, which is not what the honest models were doing at all. That's where you get the stupid version of Quantum Mechanics and many-worlds theory. It's a form of insanity that is trivially debunked, but certain people find bullshit useful and they're willing to believe it, or claim to believe it because the power of the lie is more than the power of the truth.

>>468757
Cockshott says something along the lines of every mode of production having it's own law of value. Societies that don't have formal socialized labor of course don't have a law of value, he doesn't equate it with a natural law. So there is a law of value for capitalism and there will be a different law of value for socialism.

>>468764
>Cockshott says something along the lines of every mode of production having it's own law of value.
Were u reading with your asshole or something lol?

Penisman says exactly the opposite - the law of value is the same in every mode of production with any division of labor.
The law of value is a feature of the division of labor, not of the mode of production.

The law of value is the same everywhere - exchange is carried in accordance with the relative necessary times required.

If you exchange at large not according to this law - you are basically fucked, as he shows on the example of the Soviet Union.

Why are leftoids so fucking retarded that you can't even read? Serious question..

>>468764
only difference between modes of production that in some necessary time compared directly, while in other indirectly through market

but in exchange of reproducible goods times are compared in every mode of production with a division of labor

why do I fucking need to school you leftoids lmao? maybe because u take as gospel words of a 19th century philosophycel lol

>>468765
I distinctly remember him saying in one of his videos that socialism would have a law of value , but that it would not be the same one as in capitalism.

It will take me some time to find that video, i'l make a thread about it, once i do.

>>468744
>The economy will have multiple producers for every good, which makes comparisons possible. You'll stand out like a sore thumb of below average industry efficiency if you lie about your technical coefficients.
All those "different" enterprises will be under the authority of one ministry.
And ministries in the USSR didn't like it AT ALL when some Gosplan or any other "outsider" tried to poke their nose into their internal business. Even in Stalin times, with the reign of secret police. See conflict between Stalin and Ordzonikize, which resolved only with the latter suiciding lol.

>But that's less than a rounding error
Those kinda conscious "errors" tend to add up fag. They are not just random errors that go in both directions lol.

This kinda system would require a massive repressive apparatus that the Center could use to obtain information and punish bad actors (who have an incentive to be bad actors).
If you don't see a problem with this, maybe you should check our what happened in the Soviet Union after Stalin died. Or what kinda soyciety it was when Stalin was still alive and if your ass really wants to live in such a soyciety with constant terror campaigns.

>>468767
I dunno what he said in his videos.
I know what he said in his book "How the World Works"

>>468765
>If you exchange at large not according to this law - you are basically fucked, as he shows on the example of the Soviet Union.
Tho in the Stalin's SU case he shows how this was necessitated by the practice of surplus extraction from the countryside - basically colonial exploitation of the countryside (that extended far beyond the period of industrialization, right through to the very death of Stalin).
If the exchange was carried according to the law of value, then there obviously wouldn't have been any possibility of such extraction. Which was equal to a political blasphemy to the retarded Stalinoid.

>>468768
No you are wrong, it's a lot harder to cook the books in a planned system. And you don't need terror campaigns to punish fraud.

Stalin ordered terror campaigns because that's what late-stage Tzarism did to the communists, the proles and the peasants. Violent brutes got a taste of their own methods, spare me the crocodile tears. And this happened in the context of undoing feudal power structures. In comparison to the level of sheer brutality and cruelty that the bourgeoisie deployed against rival feudal aristocrats, Stalin must be considered a cuddly humanitarian.

Eventually when all industrial waste streams can be processed to become usable resources, the planning system will be able to keep track of all matter flowing through the economy. And it will be possible to detect when somebody games the system by redirecting material out of it, just by the mass-reduction of material flowing through it. The system will only loose track of stuff once it goes into consumer hands, we basically don't care about what people do with their stuff until they throw it into the trash and it goes into the recycling sector.

There's less incentive to cheat in a planning system, because it's harder to sell shit on a black market than a regular market. Most of the fraudulent activities that happen in capitalist markets happen in the regular market.

You also have to consider that Cockshott's system is not a copy of the soviet system, it doesn't have any of the economic abstractions like firms. It just got material resources, intermediary goods, finished goods, work-places and labor-inputs. The economic commands come from direct inputs of people and workers, the planning system is for coordination not dictates.

>Those kinda conscious "errors" tend to add up fag. They are not just random errors that go in both directions lol.
This is bullshit, accounting just has to be accurate enough. You have to prevent the kind of rampant fraud that is currently happening in the US's military industrial complex for example where they "misplaced" bazillions, because that's systemically relevant. If some forest workers "looses" a few planks of wood at the sawmill, that's irrelevant. There's an opportunity cost for chasing after microscopic infractions. A society is much better off spending the surplus on improving productivity.

>>468770
There are many valid criticisms that you can make about how the Soviet Union mechanized agriculture through collectivization, but calling it colonialism is pure retardation. The Soviet Union was a primary force behind de-colonization in the 20th century, and you might just be a liberal trying to invert that historical narrative.

Socialism does have surplus "extraction", otherwise it couldn't have social labor. A fully realized socialist economy doesn't have private surplus appropriation. Workers give up surplus and get it back in one form or another. Before this turns into a battle of semantics, yeah i know that calling it "surplus extraction" sounds like pressing oil out of nuts and it requires a better term to delineate the difference.

>>468764
It isn't like that at all - a "law of value" stated naturally would suggest something that is inherent to society or the division of social labor. As other posters favorable to Cockshott have said, you would have a similar treatment of value in any other society, in that surplus is extracted and labor in the abstract is fungible. It was Marx who expounded on the significance of labor in the abstract, where before this concept was nebulous. Ricardo for his part dealt with abstract labor, but concluded that you couldn't really use that to describe any complex society. Smith's claim about labor was rooted in moral philosophy - that is, ultimately we value labor in this way because we want to and find a way to justify it in society. It is only relevant to us because we believe it to be, and because something in us is compelled to abide conditions outside of us.

The great problem with socialism, or liberalism or republicanism generally, is making institutions that are worth a damn and do the thing we purport they exist to do, and making people conform to those institutions and to each other. If it were a matter of mere resource inflows and outflows, the answer is simple in any era. We never needed the grossly unequal society in order for civilization to materially exist. We could have very easily accepted to give to the people, without any debt or moral obligation, the means to survive and grow independently of the institutions. This is not a new idea, and to some extent it was tolerated, because the free man was the economic and political basis, and ultimately the basis for the military. Everything in modernity begins with the birth of mass armies, and then the mass armies being systematically beaten back by new technology and a new aristocracy, and a warrior aristocracy that violently suppresses the democratic idea. In this way, the revolution would be reversed, and at the same time, completed; a new aristocracy would be installed, and sought to make their position permanent or as close to permanent as they could. The moment the people get what they want, this scheme to defend an aristocracy will be undone. Due to the past actions of the aristocracy and their stated intent to do this to the bitter end, the moment the people are independent from the institutions, they would be morally obligated to themselves and the world to eliminate utterly the aristocracy.

Kinda seems like leftist Jordan Peterson. Refuses to publish most of his stuff in text and so only people with patience to slog through it all know what he says in full, which favors him. Probably why a lot of glows like vaush use twitch streams.

>>468809
He literally has like 10 minute vids that are pretty simple lol

>>468809
all his shit repeats what he says several times in papers just Google scholar him and you'll get the same stuff. How the world works also covers a shit ton of his vids but even has a section that just sentence for sentence paraphrases sections from one of his earlier works: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257982894_Value_markets_and_socialism

>>468809
i forgot to mention the blog too there's no excuse you're just not looking

>>468811
Ah, I stand corrected then. Knew about his blog but hadn't thought to use Google scholar.

>>468809
> Refuses to publish most of his stuff in text

uhhh wot?

Latest video, very digestible at 1.5x speed.

>>483168
I'm a little surprised to hear monetarism/goldbuggery coming from Cockshott. The US government is not funded by foreign debt investors, that's confusing cause and effect. Rather, the national debt is part of a massive scheme to enrich bankers who have taken over government policy.

In fact I'm a little confused on why Cockshott fixates on industrial capacity in the context of modern warfare. The Ukraine proxy war has only reverted to attrition warfare because Ukraine is not formally part of a nuclear power alliance. An all-out war between powers in the nuclear age isn't something that can be decided by industrial output because it simply can't be won. A real world war would simply collapse civilization for all the parties involved.

>>483174
>I'm a little confused on why Cockshott fixates on industrial capacity in the context of modern warfare.
More industrial capacity for things like artillery shells is a major factor in how Russia is winning the Ukraine-proxy war. There clearly is a historical parallel.

>The Ukraine proxy war has only reverted to attrition warfare because Ukraine is not formally part of a nuclear power alliance.
You are getting this all backwards. Ukraine had peace as long as it was a neutral country that played the big powers against each other. The act of trying to align Ukraine with a "power alliance" is what set off this round of attrition warfare. In a way you are trying to make the cause of the problem into the solution of the problem.

>>483175
I'm not trying to justify the proxy war at all, I'm simply stating that the lack of nuclear parity on both sides is why one side has been able to pursue an attrition strategy. A proxy conflict–Cockshott by the way has a strange definition for one that would actually exclude the Ukraine proxy war–is not a direct war though. This would not be the case at all in an actual world war. Any kind of great power military build up in anticipation of such a world war would be nothing but a weapons industry boondoggle for equipment that has no actual practical function because when great powers actually fight the nukes supercede all other forms of warfare.

>>483176
>I'm not trying to justify the proxy war at all, I'm simply stating that the lack of nuclear parity on both sides is why one side has been able to pursue an attrition strategy.
You're still doing it.

The attempt of installing nuclear weapons in Ukraine would look extremely threatening to the Russians and they'd attack to prevent it. Which would have lead to a similar war than the current one. For countries like Ukraine that sit between big powers, the only tenable position with is to seek neutrality.

>Any kind of great power military build up in anticipation of such a world war would be nothing but a weapons industry boondoggle for equipment that has no actual practical function because when great powers actually fight the nukes supercede all other forms of warfare.
"Great power military build-up" might get funneled into proxy wars. Other than that I largely agree with your assessment here. At least for the moment.

I think that in the medium term future, high speed kinetic impact weapons might take the role of strategic deterrent. Those weapons are much cheaper than nukes and they're just as effective at wiping out the military potential of a country, even when that country is a large superpower. There would be no need for nukes neither the big city-buster type nor the smaller "tactical" nukes. It would remove the Damocles doomsday sword hanging above all our heads. The Militaries might prefer the "kinetic option", because there will be much less or no political opposition, because it's a weapon that might actually be usable in some circumstances other than ending the world, and because it's easier to handle.

>>468707
>The thing is, because all his online content is extremely complex, technical post-grad level university lectures, it's hard to get his idea's out there.
It has to be like that because if the content was written in simple words then everyone would be able to spot all the errors and inconsistencies.
<guys look at this dense incomprehensible word salad I don't understand what it means but I feel smart when I pretend to read it therefor it must be true!
That's all leftist literature in a nutshell.

>>468774
>RuZZoid chauvinist degenerates wipe out revolutionaries & their potential allies to reinstate their beloved Great RuZZ' 2: Electrified Boogaloo (they even added this verse into their shitty nazoid anthem!)
>this is somehow proletarian & revolutionary
>this is also somehow the actual way politics work‒trivial morality of another monarch who decides to do some shit in a certain way cuz he's butthurt or something
Ztalinoid once again immediately falls back to his favourite fascist moralism whenever some inconvenient policy of U.S.S. of RuZZia is brought up kek

>>468779
>(more ideology)
>The Soviet Union was a primary force behind de-colonization in the 20th century
Oh you ass-conceived mongrel, don't you even ask mr. Ho why did he despise mr. Ztalin, it won't be pretty for your degenerate nazi mind. Or mr. Togliatti on why was he the stellar cummieshit party leader for the soviet not-empire (hint: full commitment for saving fascists while jailing & shooting communist guerrillas). Or mr. Browder on why did his name become a term in politics. Or what happened to the Argentinian communists & the government they were fighting against. & so on & so on & so on & so on.
>you might just be a liberal trying to invert that historical narrative
Face to the mirror, whore.

>>somefaggot
>Russia is winning the Ukraine-proxy war
By losing 30k of mercenary personnel from all parts of the world per month to grab some villages from the most impoverished state in the Europe which is also constantly undersupplied in war materiel. Can't wait for hohols to start butchering nazi ruzzkies (settlers incl.) ww2 style when the nato eastern front will be finally opened.

>>483196
<muh stalinism
Don't want Stalin as the leader of the forming socialist block in the early 20th century ? Easy just let Rosa Luxembourg live, she wasn't just much nicer, she also had more political capital. If Rosa's socialists take over Germany, fascism never goes anywhere and WW2 never happens. The bolsheviks in Russia don't see a need to select a ruthless brute as their leader, because they don't need those fascism smashing talents.

<equating socialism and fascism
why do you keep repeating the ruling narrative ?
The 20th century Socialists did most of the work in defeating 20th century fascism.
That means a lot of the freedoms we got is owed to 20th century Russian communists laying down their lives.
Maybe give these people some credit for that.

>Can't wait for
>the butchering
>to start
Maybe you need to have your head examined, people who are normal in the head don't like that sort of thing.

>ww2 style when the nato eastern front will be finally opened.
You want Nato to open a "eastern front", like the Nazis ?
Nazo ?

Normal people want diplomacy and peace, reconsider your priorities perhaps ?

>>468809
If someone will do recordings or podcasts, it's extra work to translate that to text and then make it text-palatable. Sure he could release a script along with the episodes but that's not the same - doesn't make use of textual medium, and it only works for scripted shows. Text takes longer than audio for most people if they're stopping to actually think about what they're reading rather than speed reading. If you're reading a text that is deep - that is one of the advantages of text over audio - you are going to take some time to read it to make sure ambiguity is cleared. So, I don't get why you think it's more of a "slog" to listen to a 10-60 minute audio / video presentation.

The Twitch streamer thing is about parasocial faggotry. I have a twitch channel I never use.

>>483173
I'm guessing Jehu is getting in his head. That sector of the internet is going crazy with the recent Trumpfaggotry. I'm convinced that Trump is going to lose now so they're going crazier in an effort to stay relevant. Wasn't convinced they weren't throwing the election to Trump until the donors came in for Harris/whomever the Dems run.

>>483174
Believe it or not, you need artillery shells and bombs to win wars. Artillery is still the big killer, most effective for the cost put into it. It has long been known that air power is not the dominant force some people still believe it is. Main advantage of air forces is because domestic populations can't do shit about being bombed or droned unless they have their own anti-air weapons. That was why air forces were promoted so much as the big weapon. Land power still wins out, if you can get something on land.

Of course, Putin is not really trying to "win" in that way. He got his orders from WEF to make the country a desert and do his part for the Plan War, so that Europe may be re-Nazified. Putin could claim all of Ukraine if he wanted to. He's not worried about resistance in the west of Ukraine, and I doubt a rump Ukraine that Mearshimer thinks will happen would serve any purpose. Russia will take it all, since it is, you know, Russia and there's not much "Ukrainian nationalism" that isn't the same Nazi shit - the same Nazis who have only ever existed to shit up the world and make decent people suffer.

So really, if you want to see the state of the war, you have to ask - are the Nazis purged from the Earth? They don't care for any particular theater they're shitting up, but they like convincing you history and war work that way. Always have. That's why there's more war, more death, more culling of those selected to die. Russia has to burn through more reserves and get more poor sods signed up to die for Putin and killed by their commanding officers.

>>483221
I think you are just unfairly projecting US election drama onto Cockshott.
He wants direct democracy via sortition and considers electoral democracy as oligarchical.

>>483222
You're missing the point. Athenian democracy wasn't about the forms and rituals of office-holding, but about the soldiers being conscripted and needing land and wealth to do that. Democracy was implemented from the top down, rather than a demand that this was going to be a thing from the little people. It seemed reasonable enough to the city fathers of Athens - give the people a stake in government and make them participate in governing. None of that was about an ideology or a "system". It wasn't even about buying off the masses. The Greeks are not that far removed from living in barbaric conditions and already relied on conscripted citizen-farmer-soldiers for its army. This was just another way of accomplishing that. Considering it worked without serious interruption and the first argument raised against it was Socrates in the middle of corrupting the children, it wasn't "imposed on nature" in the way you seem stuck on thinking.

The sort of overbearing cybernetic managerialism you're calling for is anathema to democracy at the most basic level. The people will hate that more than what we live with now, and have said so when the idea is presented to them. First of all, obviously the "random" selection will not be random, and in this day and age, the abilities of people are meticulously tracked from cradle to grave. Everyone obsesses over who the smart and stupid people are, and every minor fault. They're going to know, without FUD, who the best person is, and would see the random selection as a charade at best, or outright rigged to produce the "natural" result. The more likely result would be that the general fear in such a society is so intensified that only one person - the "correct person" will bother running for one office, and it will be "natural" to elevate him or her. It's eugenism - literally the exact opposite of a democratic society.

I have no doubt that Athens did the same thing - it always happens in the muck of politics. But, what the Athenians valued in the process - aside from social belonging and shame for not participating in public life - was that they had a way to defend their wealth, and the city fathers had enough sense not to cannibalize the thing that protects their city. The idea of Plato is to get around that by presenting this super-effective military caste system dominated by eugenics, and how to go about building the institutions that would realize it in the long term.

There is of course an option for this - give people land, wealth, and because of what exists in our time, a level of security against intercine predation. Overbearing managerialism is going to be that predation. If you give the people that, though, they are more likely to turn away from society, given what they know of their condition, and mitigate all of their interactions, without regarding "the plan". This would be mitigated if you gave up managerialism and actually asked the people what they wanted, but the only thing the people would agree on is the barest minimum. There isn't a "general will" that can be made singular. It's the perfect example of a tendency I note in Retarded Ideology Book 3 Chapter 5-6, of the tendencies of each "caste" in the game aristocracy set up. The only way out of it is to reject aristocracy and all of its shibboleths, the way it has done business - but that thought is inadmissible in the present order, and it doesn't involve a legal or political solution until the final act. There is no way to appeal to political instincts to make the world conform to it. People, or a ruler, would have to want to do something right. It happened before, against all of the history of the human race suggesting it shouldn't, so it could happen again - if you'd allow it.

There are so many basic problems with Cockshott's delusions that I don't even know where to begin. It's not even wrong. It's the product of people who gave over their brains and souls to the institutions and never looked back.

>>483223
The only argument you made against Cockshott's idea of sortition democracy is that it wouldn't be random. But it's stupidly easy to create a randomizer subject to public scrutiny. You could have a technically literate civil society obsessing about double checking the quality of the randomness. Obviously Cockshott doesn't intend to re-create athenian society from 2000 years ago, that is a patently absurd attempt at misrepresenting his work. Statistically representative sampling is something we've been doing for a few hundred years, we've beaten all the loopholes, for inserting bias, out of it.

Btw cybernetic planning in a way does away with most of the managerialism, most of the useful, production related functions, that corporate bureaucracy performs would be automated in code. It would make it easier for workers to have workplace democracy, than in the current system. It's easy to make algorithms with variable priorities and then have everybody weigh in on it.

Cockshott put a lot of thought into preventing the entrenchment of a "cast of betters" , which is what you appear to be accusing him off. You're not giving him a fair shake. Sometimes your rants have insightful observations, but sometimes you just go off half-cocked.

>>483227
You're missing the point. Everyone in such a society would know who "should" get the job, and bemoan the RNG for doing it wrong - or seek to rig the randomizer for "efficiency", and that's just a game of pretenses. Sortition "works" because the job did not involve specialized knowledge or the occulting of office, which has been taken for granted in the present society. You would have to answer that, because it exists for reasons that will not go away because you wish it were so, and there are good reasons for states and institutions to hold secrets. That is not a question of fear, uncertainty, doubt, and insinuation. It is a matter of fact - you wouldn't want a stalker knowing the location of his target as public knowledge at all time. But, in principle, this knowledge would be relevant for planning in some way. So, you have one "bad person" who would be outside of the body of acceptable jurors (since we have a sortition selection for jury duty in the United States, and if you know what that entails, there is a reason almost everyone tries to get out of it). You can see the same applied to any objection you might have, and say it's "for the good of society". Again, there are reasonable boundaries, but when economic planning is to become a political matter, you are opening that. When you see that, the sortition of offices is the least of your problems. It is technocratic society and the peril it invites that ratchets up the fear, and making a pinky promise that you'll give people a title "at random" and "the system can't possibly fail" doesn't change anything regarding that. In Athens, there wasn't an intelligentsia or universities. The Academy is Plato's invention specifically tasked with destroying democracy because he hated it and only wanted his fellow "brights" to be the real society. Picking random citizen 16526 is not the same proposition there because there are not institutions with a hammerlock on social promotion, at least overtly. In practice, there were men of distinction, that most of the Athenians would follow and respect; but it was understood office-holding was there to accomplish a job, not glorify the man with the dubious honor. In the past, esteem and personal honor was a far greater motivator to hold the democratic system together - remember that one of the duties of the citizen was fighting, and so men who didn't fight were subjected to humiliations unless they had a very good reason. This did not apply to the aristocracy or people "too valuable", which has always been the way of war wherever it could be engineered. But, free men don't like anyone that is weak or cowardly, and this is always present in any democratic society. It does not axiomatically and inexorably destroy it by some terrible force - it is possible to treat those without the franchise with decently, or for men to recognize their faults instead of projecting like retards about how great they are. Aristocracy would over time insinuate that braying like a retard about greatness is indeed the point, one thrown in the face of the rejects. That has gone on for over 2000 years, and it has left permanent damage on the human race at this point. No one is anywhere close to answering that. The example I gave was of a martial society, which most societies were out of necessity - it was an expectation that free and valid men fought, and this is what marked them as freeborn and eligible to hold slaves which they participated in capturing.

I'm not saying a democratic socialist society on fairness and kindness is impossible - only saying that you wouldn't act like a technocratic mindset designed to shit up any democratic society would fix this. You'd have to account for what people really want, instead of insisting the system is infallible like Big Brother.

In the end, the workers and the people are not allowed to survive unless that is what the society really wants. There has yet to be a human society that did NOT experience waves of death and culling and stratification resulting from it. There is no need for this, as if it were natural or beneficial in any way. But, there are people who quite like killing others, and they have a way of insisting they should hold office, and make use of any office towards that end, without regard to what you would think is right. Anyone who knows security will tell you know system is uncrackable or can't be manipulated. That's what systems exist to be - manipulated. It is even more acute with information systems and those who would access them. It's why we have so much difficulty really eliminating the cavalcade of digital shit on the internet, even though there is a great desire to do so and many efforts - efforts that are not in vain - to clean up the most egregious of it.

Where I would see the technocratic society failing is in the conceits of the technocrats, rather than the failure of the common man to comply with the "perfect system" or their unwillingness to support it. If the technocrats doggedly insist the theory can't be wrong - and this has been their proclivity throughout history - they're not going to listen to us when we say this isn't working. They didn't listen to us as eugenism rose, despite the warnings everywhere and anyone with sense, high and low, telling the believers and followers that this would lead to nothing good. They didn't listen to anything that could salvage the society they already built. By and large, the technocrats are happy to let this happen, as long as they live. Their thinking really was as Plato estimated it - grubby, venal. It's really funny because that is also the interest Plato is corralling with his approach, and what he really represents - he wasn't a high priest and wasn't in power when he wrote, and was quite jealous of those who were for obvious reasons. He was just a rich guy who wrote words and congregated with the intelligentsia of his day and said "we're the smartest people in this city, we should rule the MENSA dictatorship".

I see one thing which would increase the lifespan of the cybernetic system - people taking back their lives and their machine. If they did, though, the objectives of planning change dramatically. You wouldn't incorporate the "law of value" or labor-grinding in this way. The means of living would be granted without any compensation from the worker in the form of toil. Most things, or at least that which would be considered basic, would be completely free - that's the bare minimum. All the planning system would do is accomplish that, and they would not insist people are too stupid to know what is what. It has been an understanding of law even now that the littlest person has a right of appeal and the right of an advocate, even if they are incompetent and useless. That has been mostly abolished due to the screaming of eugenism and the torture cult that dominated, and you obviously have no answer to that. Any answer would not be an economic one.

It turns out the only way to really mitigate the threat is for people to have less to do with each other, and not open the vulnerability that socialism entails. If socialism can exist, then it would exist only regarding that which should and easily could be a social good and commons, rather than a "total society" subsuming everything. We could do that very easily and make everyone's life easier. The price system and the dislocations it encourages are wholly unnecessary and create nothing but death. But, we've moved far away from that, and Cockshott's labor account specifically preserves the price system and makes the money non-fungible and non-circulating. It amounts to paying out Amazon chits and telling the people to haggle over how many chits, never quite enough, they may have - to turn on teach other. Technocratic society already familiarized us with how this is weaponized in every institution to mark "betters". It would go on steroids unless there were a serious reckoning with what has been done to us, what has been done to the world.

Maybe some day, humans will be better than this - but I'm not seeing any signs that humans want it to be different if they have any power to change it. The first thing they are trained to do is look down on their inferiors, then join in kicking them down. You'd have to change many things just for human society to be tolerable to live in moving forward, or you'd have to let the democide happen (which Cockshott is fine with, being a climate change believer).

There is one other problem - that at the end of the day, most people really don't have a "social purpose" that wouldn't be filled by another person working more, while remaining on reasonable hours. There really is nothing for most of humanity, and there never was anything. Most of us just stayed around for a time and expected little else from this world. Where there was a democratic society, the franchise was always limited. That is the nature of such an arrangement - unlimited democracy has never been done without overtly nullifying the relevance of the vote itself. What kept the peace in America was never the vote but the promises made to the free that the government was not going to be too onerous, and there was enough prosperity to live. It is easily forgotten that for much of its middle history, the US was one of the best places to be working class, had a strong labor movement, but also had the most ruthless capitalists who had dreams of conquering the world. That history has been blasted away by revision and the narrative theory of history, which I detest.

It's been over a year, how have we progressed on this interesting task?

>>483231
>Everyone in such a society would know who "should" get the job
That shit only exists in your head, most people absolutely despise people who deluded them selves into thinking they're born to rule. People kept cutting off the heads of aristocrats for a reason.

>specialized knowledge
<Only the people from the magic knowledge cast are allowed to rule
Are you trolling me ?
If the people decide they want to build a power-plant, they hire power-plant-experts.

>seek to rig the randomizer
that can be frustrated, it's really easy to protect the integrity of a random number generator from manipulation compared to the rest of the political system. Pls halt the concern trolling.

>there are good reasons for states and institutions to hold secrets
>you wouldn't want a stalker knowing the location of his target
To guard against stalking, you need super strong privacy protections and sometimes restraining orders.
State-secrecy does fuck-all against stalkers, it's just secret documents, it doesn't do shit against stalkers.

I'm now suspecting you're a glowie, 'cause this line sounds as retarded as the other glowie nonsense lines like for example
<mass surveillance to protect the children
Also the debate about state-transparency isn't related to Cockshot's proposal for a sortition democracy, or are you suggesting we should do secret politicians ?

I have to ask are you doing an anti-democracy psy-op ?

>>483233
>this interesting task?
You mean turning Cockshott's book How the world works into a video series ?

Well there's the formula of doing narration over related stock-images/video, that's easy to do, but there's so many of these, they rarely catch on.

I think we need a video game where you can try out the new economic system.

>>483236
>I think we need a video game where you can try out the new economic system.
Maybe you want something more like an Explorable Explanation. It's kind of a midpoint between a Flash* game and an article.
Some examples:
https://explorabl.es/
and a simpler one more like an article: https://ncase.me/ballot/ (ignore the liberalism)

>>483239
>Trust game
In part #5 (The Evolution of Distrust) it's almost as if they've independent uncovered alienation as a factor of economic fuckery. Pretty neat.