Tiresia comments on marx didn't give the capitalists hell. he just told the truth and they thought it was hell

[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 6 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

So if I don't own anything and I'm hungry so I eat some food from a garbage bin, and someone says they have a paper that says they own the food in the garbage bin and courts agree with them, then what happens?

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[–] FishFace@piefed.social 0 points 3 months ago (1 child)

Depends. Do you think OP's description sounded like commie propaganda, or that it wasn't accurate?

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[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

I think it's not an explanation. They use technical terms from the ideology (private property, markets, ownership) and rephrase them into each other, but that doesn't explain what actually happens.

This would be the equivalent of me "explaining" a nuclear reactor by saying it extracts potential energy from the strong nuclear force, and then clarifying that by saying the strong nuclear force is mediated by gluons.

For reference, I would go:

Capitalism is a social system where everything is 'owned' by someone (or something, we'll get to that later), which means that they are the only ones who are allowed to decide what gets done with it even if they haven't used it and don't have plans for using it. There are people that go around beating people up or dragging them into cages for using stuff without permission of the owner, even if they need it. So if you don't own anything you can't survive except if an owner keeps making you the owner of what you need to survive, but most owners will only do that if you work hard to make the stuff they own better for them.

This is why people go around beating people up for using stuff they don't own; owners give them the stuff they need to survive and some extra so they can live a nicer life than other people who don't own stuff. I also think they like it because they get to be bullies rather than victims.

Over time, owners that make people work the hardest get to own more stuff that they can use to work more people harder. They can also fight other owners with violence or by cleverly using ownership of specific things to make the other owner have to give them lots of stuff to keep some stuff. Like if you 'owned' the back half of a cave and I owned the cave mouth, then I could make you give me stuff each time you want to get to the back half of the cave to use the stuff you own.

Another way for owners to get more stuff was to trick other owners into owning stuff they want to get rid of. If an owner says "I own everything that is in this field", then a different owner can put some rotten garbage on that field and now the owner of the field has to get rid of it.

Owners didn't want to spend as much time fighting each other, so they had the people that work for them to beat people up work together as long as the owners agreed to behave in ways the other approved of. Though as I said, the strongest owners are the ones that are cleverest at getting more stuff, so they aren't kind to each other, so they needed to write down their boundaries at which point they would no longer work together or even have their people try to beat the other owner up. With lots of owners working together this became a whole complicated set of commonly-agreed on boundaries called the legal system. Different alliances of owners had different legal systems, and the stuff each alliance owned was called a 'country'.

Now, some of these alliances/countries agreed to write a law that people can say there is a thing that owns things, called a 'legal entity'. This legal entity has laws of its own, so there can be people who say that the legal entity gave them stuff who don't get beaten up because other owners agree it's according to the legal entity's laws ('employees'), and other people who say the legal entity gave them stuff who do get beaten up. Interestingly, the only way a legal entity does anything with the stuff it owns is because there are employees that say the laws say other employees should do with that stuff what that employee says. Those employees are called executives.

One of the most important legal entities is a corporation, which is a legal entity that is owned, which has laws of its own that say to get as much stuff for the owners. Because executives can get beaten up if they take stuff the company owns while the company's owners say the executive is not following the company's law of getting as much stuff for the owners, these executives can get very ruthless in what they tell other employees to do to get more stuff.

The other most important legal entity is the state. Most countries (alliances of owners) have a single state, which usually doesn't have an owner. In many countries, the executives of the state do most of the saying when {people that {beat people up for {using stuff owners say they don't own}} can get food without getting beaten up}, and those executives also say when {people who say {they've interpreted the laws of the country to come to a decision who to beat up and how much}} get food.

And yes, the predictable feedback loop does tend to happen here: executives give food to people that interpret the laws in their favor and give food to people to (not) beat people up in their favor. This means the society will act like the executive of the state has increasingly more power, and the executive can also make themself owner of more stuff. This can get so bad that what the executive wants is more of a determining factor than what the laws say.

Some countries' laws say that who the executives of the state are is chosen regularly by the people, this is democracy. In others the exective of the state has laws that agree that the executive should be all-powerful, this is dictatorship. If the state is owned by a single person it is a monarchy, though a state can be "owned" in a more ceremonial sense when the laws of the state says the "owner" doesn't get to make important decisions while the executives make the real decisions. A state with a single person as a ceremonial owner is called a "constitutional monarchy". If the state is owned in such a ceremonial sense by the entire population while the executive is all-powerful, this is called "dictatorship of the proletariat".

All of these are states, and so they are all societies where everything is owned by someone or something, where someone will get beaten up for using something they need that nobody else was using. Capitalism is often defined more narrowly - around legal entities or corporations or around ownership by non-state entities or around there being a large diverse set of owners that follow the rules of the country - but the core of the rot lies there.

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[–] FishFace@piefed.social 0 points 3 months ago (1 child)

I'm not going to read the entirety of this extremely long explanation, because I don't need to read an extremely long criticism of capitalism pretending to be an explanation. I've read many criticisms of capitalism (and agree with at least some of them).

I got as far as your first two paragraphs before I had a serious issue with it as an explanation. We can discuss that if you really want, but I think your issue is not a valid one. Recalling OP's explanation:

Capitalism is a system of distribution of goods with a basis of private property and competitive markets. In the past it has been praised for high rate of innovation and low costs of goods compared to older systems such as feudalism and aristocracy where small states subservient to a crown owned and managed industry.

So the terms they used are:

system of distribution of goods
private property
competitive markets

So, it is explaining capitalism in terms of those, which are simpler and more likely for anyone reading to understand. I would say in particular that everyone reading should understand the first term, that "private property" is understood by almost everybody, and that "competitive markets" is the least likely to be understood, but can be explained further. None of them is comparable to "gluons".

No matter how many explanations of capitalism there are that make it sound really bad, it only takes one that doesn't sound too bad to contradict the main post. So you need to focus on why that one is inadequate, rather than making your own explanation.

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[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

"Other people know what this means" is not an explanation either. It has been used throughout philosophical and scientific history to fake-explain lots of stuff, from the Platonic Ideal definition of a human to ethnonationalism, but you don't get any knowledge from that either. It relies on people's tendency to feel too dumb to vocalize uncertainty about "obvious" unspoken assumptions.

So please, can you explain "private property"? Without simply rephrasing it ("ownership", "possession", etc.) or referring to an authority ("the courts will mediate and the outcome of that mediation depends", or other ways to dodge explaining something? I have given an example of how to do it.

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[–] FishFace@piefed.social -1 points 3 months ago (1 child)

An explanation of a concept is a rephrasing of it in different terms. Your standards for explaining something are impossible to meet. Your example is just a very long rephrasing, but it still relies on further concepts you assume your audience understands.

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[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 3 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

Even if that were true, that wouldn't mean any rephrasing is an explanation. The "simply" in my comment was load-bearing, as you would acknowledge if you were arguing in good faith. But I am quite confident in my being able to explain terms such as "beating up" without using terms. I might even be able to use my long-ass comment as a guide for how to explain private property using no terms other than ones derived from term-free explanations.

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[–] FishFace@piefed.social 0 points 3 months ago (1 child)

The only requirement for an explanation to work is that it take something its target audience does not understand, and make them understand it (correctly). For that specific target audience, the explanation is therefore simpler than the explained concept.

However:

This is not a universal standard; an explanation that works for one person may not work for another
This is not absolute; there is no specific level of "simplicity" that needs to be reached in order for an explanation to "count"; it only needs to do the job of explaining.

In the case at hand, the explanation should for a general audience who has not studied economics, but it cannot work for everyone - there is always an audience in mind. It is perfectly acceptable to assume that, like the vast majority of educated adults, the audience will understand the term "private property". I think "competitive markets" is on shakier territory there.

You refer to a "term-free" explanation. What is the definition of a "term", and how would an explanation every be free of them?

Here's how I'd explain capitalism to a ten-year-old:

Capitalism is a system where goods are produced by groups of people deciding independently what to make according to what price they think they can get for those goods. Those individual groups need to own things in order to produce goods, which themselves need to be paid for. Since a new or small group might not have enough money, capitalist systems have a mechanism where groups can ask people to give them money for a project and in return promise to pay those people a little bit of the money they hope to make doing the project.

Capitalism is different from the most common system that came before it, where this mechanism did not exist. It is different from some other systems, where instead of individual groups owning the means of producing goods (like a factory), a country as a whole might own such things. Since a whole country has a lot of resources, it doesn't really need to buy a factory - instead it can organise the building of a factory without money changing hands. In this system, the country as a whole decides what needs to be produced, rather than the individual groups. Since countries have different priorities than smaller groups, this results in different things being produced different quantities between these systems.

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[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

Okay, that explanation is better, but you're still leaving some genuinely complex terms dangling there. Ownership still isn't explained beyond the declaration that is is necessary to make stuff. Price and Money have no introduction at all.

I skipped money and price in my explanation, so here:

People that owned stuff they didn't use had a problem where the stuff would decay and rot and they would no longer have as much stuff. So they were willing to give others stuff that rots in exchange for stuff that doesn't rot, and ideally that didn't take up much space. Gold and silver proved to be ideal; inherently useful as a plate or goblet that lasts forever and doesn't poison you, compact, and easy to store forever.

Because the owners that own most are ones that were ruthless in getting more, owners very reliably wanted gold and silver. People that made stuff were willing to take gold and silver instead of the stuff an owner had because they knew other owners would be willing to give them stuff in return that the owner that gives them stuff doesn't have.

A downside of gold and silver is that they can be mistaken for other metals owners didn't want as much, so owners started giving people gold or food to check if the gold and silver were pure, and to stamp a promise that it's pure and how much it is into it. A convenient way to make this stamp fraud-resistant is to make it as big as the lump of gold or silver, to make the lump flat, thin and a certain width, and to stamp both sides. This is called a coin. This way it was very hard to remove any gold or silver from the coin without it showing as the pattern of the stamp being broken.

At this point, the gold and silver were pretty useless in their own right - you can't eat off a coin - but people still expected owners to want them because those owners would probably expect other owners to want them. They were wanted because people expected others to want them. Coins and this commonly held expectation of their worth was called a currency.

This went wrong as often as you might expect - owners convincing certifiers to lie (debasing te currency), people finding lots of gold causing people to be able to get less stuff for the gold they have than they expected when they accepted the gold (inflation), and more - but in the end the expectation came back because the owners that owned the most kept being the ones that wanted to own the most.

Eventually, owners had so much stuff that it became a hassle to carry all their gold and silver around, so they started writing notes promising to give whoever held the note gold, and offering those notes to people instead. These notes are called 'money'. The more gold owners had, the more reliable it was that they could make good on that promise, so when states came along their notes became the most reliable.

States started threatening to beat people up if they did things or give things without publicly announcing what amount of money they would be willing to do that for and always doing it if someone offers them that money (except in state-outlined exceptions). This announced amount is called the price of the thing.

Then they said they didn't want to give people gold for money anymore because the promise to get something for a price was reliable enough instead. This is called "fiat currency". Then they started printing money whenever they felt like it.

It is perfectly acceptable to assume that, like the vast majority of educated adults, the audience will understand the term “private property”.

There is a difference between understanding the term "computers" and understanding computers. I can explain the former but not the latter. Most people understand the term "private property", but their understanding of private property is barely functional.

Perhaps that's where this conflict is coming from. The OOP asserts something about explanations of capitalism, and you want that to apply to explanations of terms or to barely functional shallow explanations.

Of course I can explain something deceptively if I do a bad enough job. That's an ambiguity in the phrase "can explain", I suppose. Like saying you "can run a marathon" if you can hike 42 km in four days. If you're looking to argue in bad faith I could see how that would be an in for you.

You refer to a “term-free” explanation. What is the definition of a “term”, and how would an explanation every be free of them?

(figurative) demonstrations can be term-free explanations.

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[–] FishFace@piefed.social 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

Everybody who lives in modern society understands what money is, and what prices are. You don't need to explain those to explain capitalism.

You want the OOP to be accurate, so you want "explanation" to mean something that it doesn't normally mean. Your attempt doesn't even succeed by your own criteria:

What does "rot" mean?
What is "stuff"?
What is a "threat"?
What is "writing"?

and so on, ad infinitum.

(figurative) demonstrations can be term-free explanations.

An example is not an explanation. If it were though, I could "demonstrate" prices and money by taking you to a shop and showing you how buying something works. So I don't think you have a coherent idea of what terms are allowed in explanations, and hence what an explanation actually is.

The reason, I would guess, that you are content with your explanations, is because they have got to the point where they claim something that you consider a critical feature of capitalism, namely some form of violence. If you claim: "You can't explain X without Y" and your criterion for an adequate explanation is that the explanation contains Y, then sure, you've stated a tautology. But it's just the same kind of self-congratulatory claim like, "you can't explain communism without it sounding dystopian" and having as an (unstated) criterion for an explanation to be adequate, "'explain' the 'necessary' oppression of a communist system" (scare quotes deliberate), then complaining that every explanation offered is inadequate.

In particular, the violence you want to be in any explanation is not a definitional part of capitalism. That is, even the harshest critics of capitalism don't say that it's part of the definition and initial objective; if it is inseparable from capitalism, it is an emergent property. If you think an emergent property of some system is so important that it must be mentioned in any explanation of the system, you need to make a very strong argument.

There is a difference between understanding the term “computers” and understanding computers.

It sounds like you're just talking about explanations with different levels of detail. But in those terms, the fact that you haven't given any coherent way of determining when an explanation is adequate translates to not having given any coherent way of determining when an explanation is sufficiently detailed.

Note that emergent properties are only going to come up in more detailed explanations. An explanation of computers which omits the emergent property of how they may suffer from deadlock or thrashing is perfectly fine for most explanations. The more detail you aim to give, the more likely you need to cover such things, but it would be complete nonsense to dismiss an explanation lacking them as "not an explanation".

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[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

In particular, the violence you want to be in any explanation is not a definitional part of capitalism. That is, even the harshest critics of capitalism don’t say that it’s part of the definition and initial objective; if it is inseparable from capitalism, it is an emergent property.

Violence is foundational to ownership, just as it is foundational to "personal boundaries". Violence is not inherently wrong, it is behind any limit we set. I don't think how you can think that violence is emergent from capitalism.

I could “demonstrate” prices and money by taking you to a shop and showing you how buying something works.

Yes! Going to a store and showing someone paying the price, paying more than the price, or paying less than the price and showing the consequences of that would help explain prices. Only doing it "right" doesn't really explain things; you need to show where the boundaries are.

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[–] FishFace@piefed.social 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

Violence is not inherent to personal ownership. In society with a concept of ownership, if I find that you stole from me, the consequence might simply be that I'm no longer your friend and won't help you when you need it. Ownership is a concept that means I think you shouldn't take what I own, but it does not specify any practical consequences to that "should not". Indeed, there may be no tangible consequences - to say that there must be would be to deny the is/ought gap.

This is the problem with phrasing criticisms in such obtuse, "gotcha" ways as in the OP - the actual point of contention is buried so deep it takes a dozen comments and multiple accusations of bad faith to uncover it.

Obviously since everyone in the target audience knows what happens if you try to take something without paying the price the seller wants, this does not form a necessary part of an explanation to that audience. If you want to draw attention to alleged violence in the concept of ownership, you can just say that directly, and then people who disagree can directly see what you're saying and present their disagreement, and have a more productive discussion. Hope this helps in the future.

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[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

if I find that you stole from me, the consequence might simply be that I’m no longer your friend and won’t help you when you need it.

But that isn't capitalism, is it? Good luck hoarding capital if all you're going to do to prevent someone from living in a building you own but don't use is no longer be friends with them. Good luck preventing workers from using the means of production for their own ends if you're just going to be angry that they're not giving investors a cut.

More semantically, what you describe is called "belonging", not ownership. Likewise ownership without any consequences for violation is called "association". Generally speaking I am fine with using words broadly, but when you are weaseling your way out of the violence underlying capitalism then it is important to note that capital ownership is not merely capital belonging to someone or capital being associated with someone.

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[–] FishFace@piefed.social 1 point 3 months ago

No, capitalism is what I already explained. That was an explanation of ownership.

I don't know what situation you're imagining where someone is forced to be violent to keep what they have. Presumably though it's one where someone else is using violence to try and get it off them, because otherwise simply keeping your stuff in a locked box and not willingly giving anyone the key is sufficient to protect it.

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[–] FiniteBanjo@feddit.online -4 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

then what happens?

You go to a food pantry or similar distribution network, and you support those facilities and offices politically so that everyone can have their basic needs met.

Unless you mean for me to tell you the court outcome? Honestly IDGAF how the judge rules, for your own sake you really shouldn't be eating trash in the first place.

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[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 4 points 3 months ago

Honestly IDGAF how the judge rules

And thus you didn't explain anything.

Also I've eaten trash lots of times, it's a great way to save money. Because corporations are hostile to people, they need far stricter rules of what constitutes "safe food" than people who want to find and make healthy food for their friends. So corporations end up throwing out lots of perfectly healthy food.

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