But at least we only spent a trillion dollars on it, right?
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But, you have to understand what capital actual is. It's not money. Money is a loose proxy for capital, but that's all. Really, capital is control over economic resources. Raw resources, sure. Big industrial machinery, sure. Networks of transportation and communication, yes. And labor.
Money is kind of the exchange medium for all of that. But capital isn't the money, and it's not the resources. It's the power to distort how those resources are used and applied to suit your own interests, at the expense of the other people involved.
@jenniferplusplus equating "capitalism" with "trade" has been one of the biggest coups of discourse - you get people sincerely believing "well without capitalism would we just barter???" and now we must start everything by explaining that no, money was invented in 3000 BC, in fact Jesus was overturning moneylender tables 1500 years before the Dutch East India Company, etc
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@jenniferplusplus isn鈥檛 it that for instance the ancient Egyptian pyramids can be seen as similar efforts? Maybe a way to funnel excess wealth into sth that has zero value and is of no real world use.
@zeank There's historians who would argue that the pyramids had value, just indirect ones. In most of such historians' telling, the value is in establishing methods for herding large numbers of workers. A major piece of the alleged supporting evidence is, a lot of the people who worked on pyramids seem to have worked on them for a limited time, and possibly, in times when other economic activity was on a downtrend.
The GenAI craze has only partial possible counterpart to those: the "balancing the downtrend of other economic activity" detail.
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@jenniferplusplus @zeank There will not be a future tourism benefit for far future generations wanting to see data centers.
@linuxandyarn @jenniferplusplus @zeank lmao. that's a good point. they could at least make them aesthetically pleasing and not as noisy.
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That's part of what makes a capital strike non-obvious, if you don't already know what it looks like. It's not just sitting on the money and refusing to spend it. Because that's the one thing you literally can't do with capital. If you leave those resources idle, especially labor, it just goes and does its own thing. You lose control over it. If you just fire everyone, they eventually start working for themselves.
So, to conduct a capital strike, you have to direct the capital toward useless things. Or actually destructive things, if you can manage it.
And thus, AI had "basically zero" effect on the GDP. Because it's economically worthless activity for the purpose of keeping all the resources occupied so they can't be put to any other use.
@jenniferplusplus @ireneista
I don't know, calling it a "strike" gives this practice more legitimacy than it deserves.. makes it sound like a tool to achieve (mostly) legitimate/understandable goals -
@jenniferplusplus @ireneista
I don't know, calling it a "strike" gives this practice more legitimacy than it deserves.. makes it sound like a tool to achieve (mostly) legitimate/understandable goals@jenniferplusplus @ireneista
if I just silently refuse to work and maybe embezzle my employers resources without any communicated goal that wouldn't be called a "strike" either -
@jenniferplusplus @ireneista
I don't know, calling it a "strike" gives this practice more legitimacy than it deserves.. makes it sound like a tool to achieve (mostly) legitimate/understandable goals@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus sure, point taken, suggestions welcome. this is terminology that has existed for a while, and we do think it's worth knowing it for the sake of finding previous writing on the topic, but if there's a better word, we see the case for changing it going forward.
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@ireneista @jenniferplusplus
ok, never heard it before.
FWIW, the analysis is spot on.
But calling it "strike" in the end strengthens capitals strategy of discrediting labor strikes as lazy/greedy/...Not sure what a better term would be - sth about "starving/pauperizing the 99%"?
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116126552546349967
But at least we only spent a trillion dollars on it, right?
@jenniferplusplus When Goldman Sachs thinks your grift is bad, yeesh. I cannot fathom the depths of this bar.
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@ireneista @jenniferplusplus
ok, never heard it before.
FWIW, the analysis is spot on.
But calling it "strike" in the end strengthens capitals strategy of discrediting labor strikes as lazy/greedy/...Not sure what a better term would be - sth about "starving/pauperizing the 99%"?
@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus to us the critical thing to understand is that it is a "negotiation" tactic, a specific step within an ongoing conflict intended to nudge things towards outcomes capital prefers
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@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus to us the critical thing to understand is that it is a "negotiation" tactic, a specific step within an ongoing conflict intended to nudge things towards outcomes capital prefers
@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus we would definitely not pin anything important on the "communicated goal" part of it; we understand the temptation, since the US legal concept of "protected concerted activity" does typically require that, but ultimately that's an attempt by capital to force dissent into easier-to-control ways such as full-on strikes.
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@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus we would definitely not pin anything important on the "communicated goal" part of it; we understand the temptation, since the US legal concept of "protected concerted activity" does typically require that, but ultimately that's an attempt by capital to force dissent into easier-to-control ways such as full-on strikes.
@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus work slowdowns, sickouts etc are not morally inferior to full stoppages, and they are safer in high-retaliation environments.
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@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus work slowdowns, sickouts etc are not morally inferior to full stoppages, and they are safer in high-retaliation environments.
@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus we would certainly say that capital's goals are illegitimate ones, but it isn't really the fact that rich asshats don't explicitly say "I am going to force you all to do what I say" that makes them illegitimate
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@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus we would certainly say that capital's goals are illegitimate ones, but it isn't really the fact that rich asshats don't explicitly say "I am going to force you all to do what I say" that makes them illegitimate
@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus this is just a nuance we're attempting to add, we're not disagreeing with your overall point
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116126552546349967
But at least we only spent a trillion dollars on it, right?
@jenniferplusplus such a shame
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@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus work slowdowns, sickouts etc are not morally inferior to full stoppages, and they are safer in high-retaliation environments.
@ireneista @jenniferplusplus
not arguing against full stoppages, but a strike without goals or demands doesn't seem very useful to me -
@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus this is just a nuance we're attempting to add, we're not disagreeing with your overall point
@ireneista @jenniferplusplus
I mean you can probably also have illegitimate labor strikes (not just legally but also morally)anyway, what about "sabotaging the civil society" or "war against the civil society"?
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That's part of what makes a capital strike non-obvious, if you don't already know what it looks like. It's not just sitting on the money and refusing to spend it. Because that's the one thing you literally can't do with capital. If you leave those resources idle, especially labor, it just goes and does its own thing. You lose control over it. If you just fire everyone, they eventually start working for themselves.
So, to conduct a capital strike, you have to direct the capital toward useless things. Or actually destructive things, if you can manage it.
And thus, AI had "basically zero" effect on the GDP. Because it's economically worthless activity for the purpose of keeping all the resources occupied so they can't be put to any other use.
@jenniferplusplus I have not heard of capital strike until now and it sounds like how retail storefronts stay empty while rents keep increasing and squeezing out small business owners.
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@ireneista @jenniferplusplus
I mean you can probably also have illegitimate labor strikes (not just legally but also morally)anyway, what about "sabotaging the civil society" or "war against the civil society"?
@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus sounds like the right general direction
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@jenniferplusplus @ireneista
if I just silently refuse to work and maybe embezzle my employers resources without any communicated goal that wouldn't be called a "strike" either@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus @ireneista The publicly stated goal/promise is to divert all the money that currently gets "wasted" on "NPCs" who need to do trivial things like eat, back into the accounts of the shareholders. IDK if "strike" is the right word here, but it's certainly about acquiring and leveraging more power over us little people.
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@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus @ireneista The publicly stated goal/promise is to divert all the money that currently gets "wasted" on "NPCs" who need to do trivial things like eat, back into the accounts of the shareholders. IDK if "strike" is the right word here, but it's certainly about acquiring and leveraging more power over us little people.
@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus @ireneista
We need to end capitalism. We don't have to end markets. We don't have to (and shouldn't) end distributed decision-making. In fact, the real problem is a dearth of these things. We already have centralized control, thanks to our current economic system's ongoing concentration of wealth.
Imagine what an economy made up entirely of cooperatives would look like. Decision-making: distributed equally among stakeholders. Profit: distributed equally among stakeholders. No more perverse incentives to exploit workers and customers for the sake of far off shareholders who don't have to see the consequences of their actions on the local community, because the shareholders *are* the local community.
How much more money, and power over our own lives, would we all have if we didn't have to pay the transactional tax known as "profit" in perpetuity for a one-time investment of capital? *We* would have the capital then!
