Klaus wrote:

y va marquer wrote:

Are you working class Klaus? Do you have working class people in your family? Do you count working class people amongst your close friends (if you would even think to label friends like that)? Do you live in a working class area?

Yes to all questions, except I guess I’m permanently unemployed now.

I didn’t say people aren’t capable of empathising with others, but empathy doesn’t cost anything. It's just a simple observation that there is a strong discrepancy between the discourse I’m seeing on social media and forums and the one I’m seeing among friends and family who earn a modest paycheck and live outside big towns or cities.

We don't even have a lockdown here, and the only people I know who are going to be okay six months from now are those who are higher educated and working as economists or academics. I know people who have attempted suicide because they’re going to lose their family homes, and we have a pretty wide welfare net here. I can't begin to imagine what it's like living somewhere with stricter measures and less social security right now. I'm sparing a thought for those people. That a moron like Elon Musk is among those voicing opposition towards extensive lockdowns for his own disingenuous reasons doesn't change the fact that there should be a much bigger debate about this, rooted in research and science rather than political point-scoring.

I'm sad to hear you have lost your job Klaus.
How are you managing day to day?
That anyone you know would try to take their own life because of a fear of losing their home must be difficult to deal with.

I understand that it seems like a swathe of the online community are unaffected financially by the pandemic, and that may be the case, but I don't believe that this is representative of the experience of the majority of people in real life and frankly most of the online discourse that I've encountered 
suggests that people have no interest in actually listening to each other or gaining insight into how different people are experiencing and coping with what has been inflicted upon all of us.

I think the bigger debate has started, I would love if I trusted that those who run the country are humble, wise and brave enough to make the decisions that will lead us onto the least painful path, but they're not.
If we're lucky they'll manage to keep us from unmitigated disaster.

I think firstly  it's going to be up to those of us with means within our own families to support other family members financially, and then  extend that financial support to our own local communities.
Buying online from local shops, restaurants, supporting local charities, there's tonnes of GoFundMes here locally, you could support as many as you can per week.
Another group has started a "Lean on Me" initiative which allows you keep local businesses afloat by paying for future services.
I know that all sounds very twee and simplistic but it can make a real difference to people.

The solution is actually quite simple. Cancel the assets of the rich and redistribute them as cash directly into people's bank accounts.

Is there a set limit for "rich"? And do you honestly not believe there are any complications with communism?

You can’t do all that. LOL. You just need to start from scratch. Can’t go and take people’s money. Tyrants do that. What you do need to do is fix how capital is allocated throughout the business cycle. You need to give strength to regulatory institutions so that companies cannot exploit monopoly power to earn outsize rents. You need manage the relationship between companies and workers so that the latter have more rights in decision making. Etc. We need to fix basics rather than vilify the rich

Claudius wrote:

I'm not sure Elon has the same incentives as you, Klaus.
I agree with you, by the way that lockdowns have to be lifted. But I would rather listen to considered public health advise, even if experts in the field might differ on approach for how to stage it. Musk's motivations are political and economic, and I think that we need to put life first, especially if we can afford to fund it.

The conversation would be different in a much poorer country. In South Africa, people lined up for 4km in a Joburg suburb yesterday for food parcels. And that's because South Africa is trying to fund. Even then, it's difficult to see people having to stay in the sun all day because the economy has ground to a halt. The rest of Africa should not even consider extended lockdowns. They don't have the money or capabilities to feed or fund their populations. Those countries are 90% SME and informal. Folks will need to work at risk of getting sick.

It does feel like US shit the bed a bit. They could've gone aggressive shut down like New Zealand or China, and been preparing for easing restrictions. Or they could've kept it light all along like Sweden. But they've gone for a messy hybrid with lots of front loaded deaths they might have to explain in 2021.

Why would a "hybrid solution" be a bad thing? It's not as if countries have either chosen an aggressive shutdown like New Zealand or a more moderate model like Sweden. Most countries are somewhere in between, with a varying number of deaths. If you look deaths per capita, several countries (Belgium, UK, France, Spain, Italy etc) are "doing worse" than the US.

But I think it's far too early to compare costs and deaths. This pandemic is not over. 

Claudius wrote:

You can’t do all that. LOL. You just need to start from scratch. Can’t go and take people’s money. Tyrants do that. What you do need to do is fix how capital is allocated throughout the business cycle. You need to give strength to regulatory institutions so that companies cannot exploit monopoly power to earn outsize rents. You need manage the relationship between companies and workers so that the latter have more rights in decision making. Etc. We need to fix basics rather than vilify the rich

Nah, we have no need whatsoever for private property. It's not a freedom, it's a curse. It exists only to withhold from those who need, and fabricate idiotic ideas like "supply and demand" and other such mumbo jumbo. We don't need businesses, we don't need property, we don't need capital.

The rich are villains, no need for us to vilify them. They're destroying the world, literally. I don't think we should throw them in jail, I don't think we should kill them, I just think we should make them not rich.

Quincy Abeyie wrote:

Is there a set limit for "rich"? And do you honestly not believe there are any complications with communism?

What exactly do you think communism is? That we should live in a classless society where all people access and participate in the means of production collectively is not problematic or complicated, no. Justice is not a complication. The debate should be about methods (or, in my own case, against method), process, frameworks, and organization. What does it mean to be organized such that we can struggle against forces that take, and create social circumstances that modulate to collective human needs, not private desires.

The question isn't "how can we make capitalism work?" It's "how can capitalism be withdrawn gracefully, without a catastrophic collapse that sees billions die?" We're currently being held hostage by capital, redistribution would only be one step in eliminating it from our societies, it would have to be followed up by radical dismantling of our institutions while building a new, better world alongside it.

It's idealistic, it's not going to happen (anytime soon), and the scenario where billions die is far more likely, with a progressively more tyrannical organization of society to grow from it. Especially if we can't even accept that what we've got isn't ever going to be good enough. But without working towards it, despite it's futility, we won't even have a shred of a chance, as a species, to ever live as well as we might.

I'm willing to fight a losing battle, because the winning ones see everybody losing anyway.

"A theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs."

Your proposal of taking rich people's money means that their property does indeed belong to the community since it can be taken from them and your proposal to give it to others is, I assume, to make sure people receive it according to their needs.

I've worked as a cashier and my training was one day. I'm not sure you will get enough people to do the jobs that require years of studies if everyone's supposed to earn the same. Not that I think capitalism is great either, I don't know if anything is.

The idea that the only motivation for doing work is to get paid is a capitalist lie. Work is integral to a fulfilled life. Everybody works in one way or another. Any system I advocate for would probably not have a lot of the absurd luxuries we take for granted. There's joy in simpler things, and we'll find it. We don't need most of what we make, and maybe we'd stop making it (stop with ridiculous extractive industries, stop having so many blood children, stop large-scale factory farming, etc.).

The world we take for granted is malleable. It feels like it can't change because we are oppressed. Liberation is the freedom to change, to eliminate the need for cashiers altogether, to stop building battleships, to end rampant resource extraction and our reliance on fossil fuels, to abolish the entire notion of "employment".

See Coombs you've got more in common with Capitalism than you think, they're trying to eliminate the need for cashiers too!

This forum might not be a great place to ask these questions because I get the feeling that a lot of people who post here don't struggle with money and have the kind of jobs that could easily be handled from home with a phone and a laptop, but for a lot of working class people, losing their businesses, jobs and income will end up ruining their lives completely. Mounting debt will bury their children and force them to sell their family homes.

The main issue with this frame of thinking - not that it doesn't describe reality - is that the only way of restoring people to stability is returning them to work.

Almost all arguments about the secondary, economic impacts of lockdown are considered "all else being equal" where the "equal" of the status quo ante is capitalist realism. So the "solution" to people losing their jobs, losing their housing, and going broke is to put them back to work regardless of all else. And what's more, this is presented as "freedom" as Musk puts it forward, and lockdown is framed as causing suicide, domestic violence and so on - but these negative impacts come about because of the overarching domination of the wage relation.

We absolutely do have the capacity - here in Australia at least - to ensure every person is fed, sheltered and safe, for a very long time, without undergoing undue hardship. We've already passed economic measures that achieve a lot of this, in a matter of a couple of weeks. We could have protected the jobs of the casual workers now dropped into precarity or joblessness, or set our society up so they weren't so vulnerable in the first place. We just didn't.

Coombs wrote:

The idea that the only motivation for doing work is to get paid is a capitalist lie. Work is integral to a fulfilled life. Everybody works in one way or another. Any system I advocate for would probably not have a lot of the absurd luxuries we take for granted. There's joy in simpler things, and we'll find it. We don't need most of what we make, and maybe we'd stop making it (stop with ridiculous extractive industries, stop having so many blood children, stop large-scale factory farming, etc.).

The world we take for granted is malleable. It feels like it can't change because we are oppressed. Liberation is the freedom to change, to eliminate the need for cashiers altogether, to stop building battleships, to end rampant resource extraction and our reliance on fossil fuels, to abolish the entire notion of "employment".

And what about innovation, invention? Isn't capitalism one of the more fertile grounds for those relatively? 

innovation and invention of what? new ways to oppress and slaughter millions, and then use the spoils to develop pharmaceutical products to exploit the sick?

fuck. that's it. I'm moving to bhutan.

Coombs wrote:

innovation and invention of what? new ways to oppress and slaughter millions, and then use the spoils to develop pharmaceutical products to exploit the sick?

But people are getting healthier, living longer, have more access to food, education and shelter than at any previous point in history despite that. That isn't to pretend things are perfect because the world we live in has come at the cost of natural resources and the environment but claiming that nothing good has come out the current system is also untrue. Of course that isn't to say we need to accept the status quo but any better option needs to keep whatever advantages people enjoy now otherwise there's never going to be any support for it.

Klaus wrote:

This forum might not be a great place to ask these questions because I get the feeling that a lot of people who post here don't struggle with money and have the kind of jobs that could easily be handled from home with a phone and a laptop, but for a lot of working class people, losing their businesses, jobs and income will end up ruining their lives completely. Mounting debt will bury their children and force them to sell their family homes.

Rumours were going around over here that it might be announced later today that construction would start back next week. All my friends who work on sites and in supply shops don't want it, they want to stay home for another while.  In fact the people I hear who don't like the lock down are middle class office types who don't like working from home or people who own their own businesses.

Mirth wrote:

Coombs wrote:

innovation and invention of what? new ways to oppress and slaughter millions,  and then use the spoils to develop pharmaceutical products to exploit the sick?

But people are getting healthier, living longer, have more access to food, education and shelter than at any previous point in history despite that. That isn't to pretend things are perfect because the world we live in has come at the cost of natural resources and the environment but claiming that nothing good has come out the current system is also untrue. Of course that isn't to say we need to accept the status quo but any better option needs to keep whatever advantages people enjoy now otherwise there's never going to be any support for it.

The creation of new medicines etc isn't exclusive to markets though or even capitalist countries. Much of it comes from state funded university research in the west and communist countries like Cuba and China create medicines too. There was plenty of invention in the USSR too. The idea that invention is a by product of capitalism and not something that happens within all systems has always struck me as absurd.

If Coombs wants to take away my Playstation I'm not listening to him.