"from a private third party" where? A (non-foolish) socialist would advocate for rules against renting people, just like we're not allowed to buy people right now.
That would mean there would be no private third parties that are renting out factories of rented workers.
If what you're saying is "from a private third party outside the socialist space", then that's a problem for all kinds of socialist spaces. We can't control productive forces outside of the space we have domain over.
It sounds like the market socialists you've been talking to haven't been socialists if they're in favor of private property, that's strictly a capitalist position. They're probably just welfare capitalists.
An actual market socialist is against private entities owning the means of production, they're owned communally by some mechanism (be it some democratically run cooperative, the state, etc .) It wouldn't be a group of stakeholders that are a separate, private entity disconnected from the workers (though the state arguably is an entity like that, and that's where the line between state socialism and state capitalism gets blurry).
I'm a huge anti-capitalist/socialist, and often times I find it useful to use this mix-up of markets and capitalism in my favor.
When people say "but we need capitalism because the alternative to markets is so bad" I say plainly that I'm not advocating against markets, I'm advocating against classes. The vast majority of self-described capitalists aren't trying to defend massive corporations or employer exploitation, they're defending markets.
If all those pro market capitalists became market socialists, dismantling capitalism would be far easier, then we could have much more interesting discussions about the merits of markets and when to use them versus centralized planning, without a leech class exploiting wage slaves or scalping houses.
If you're not going to spend the 60 seconds it takes to read my comment, don't bother responding. Nobody mentioned a conspiracy to cull the population, the millions of people who are dying a year from hunger or entirely curable diseases like TB aren't dying because of some deep state conspiracy, they're dying because it's what's logical in a capitalist economy. These people have no economic power, so they get no resources.
Similarly, as the economy gets further automated, workers lose economic power, and we'll be treated with the same capitalist logic that anyone else in the world is treated with, once we have no economic power we are better off dead, and so that's what will happen.
The position that "alternative industries will always exist" is pretty foolish, humans aren't some exceptional supreme beings that can do something special artificial beings cannot. Maybe you're religious and believe in a soul, and you think that soul gives you some special powers that robots will never have, but you'd be simply mistaken.
Once the entire economy is automated, there will still be two classes, owners and non-owners, instead of owners and workers. Non-owners will either seize the means of production or die per the logic of capitalism (not some conspiracy).
Suggesting an alternative industry as an escape from AI doesn't work. The media tried this with the millions of truck drivers, pushing them to go into software development 5-10 years ago, as we started conversations around the impending automation of their careers.
The thought at the time, and this seemed like an accurate forecast to me, was that the tech industry would continue to grow and software engineers would be extraordinarily safe for decades to come. I was already in this profession, so I figured my career was safe for a long while.
Then a massive AI boom happened this year that I hadn't anticipated would come for 15ish more years, and similarly AI experts are now pushing up predictions of AGI by literally decades, average estimates being under 10 years now instead of 30 years.
At the same time, the tech industry went through massive layoffs. Outsourcing, massive increases in output with generative AI automating away repetitive copy/paste programming or even slightly more complicated boilerplate that isn't strictly copy/paste, amongst natural capitalist tendencies to want to restrict high value labor to keep it cheap.
Those people who shifted away from truck driving and towards software engineer 4+ years ago, thinking it was a "safe path" and now being told that it's impossible to find a junior dev position might become desperate enough to change paths again. Maybe they'll take your advice and join a trade school, only to find in 4 years we'll hit massive advancements in robotics and AGI that allows general problem solving skills from robots in the real world.
We already have the tech for it. Boston dynamics has showcased robots that can move more than fluently enough to be a plumber, electrician, etc. Now we just need to combine generative AI with senses and the ability to process information from those senses and react (this already works with images, moving to a video feed and eventually touch/sound/etc is a next step).
While everyone constantly plays a game of chicken, trying to move around this massive reserve army of labor, we'll see housing scalpers continue to raise rents, and cost of living becoming prohibitive for this growing class of underemployed or unemployed people. The reserve army of labor, when kept around 5-10% of the population, serves as an incentive for people to be obedient workers and not to rock the bed too much. That number growing to 20-50% is enough to rock the bed, and capitalists will advocate for what they've already advocated in the third world, a massive reduction or total annihilation of welfare, so millions more can starve to death.
We already have millions of people dying a year due to starvation, and nearly a billion people are malnourished due to lack of food access. Raising this number is a logical next step for capitalists as workers try to fight for a share of the automated economy.
We have 3 paths forward:
I'd advocate for the socialist one, it sounds like you might be more in line with Tucker Carlson's thinking here?
My alternative to a fascist America is a non-fascist one. Fascists are reactionaries, they see the writing on the wall and they come out of hiding.
As boomers die off, the percentage of bigots in relation to the total population will continue to drop. Instead of giving them safe refuge in another country, we actively combat these fascist ideologies, and also allow their main proponents to die off naturally.
And for the people like you who happen to live in the new Fascist America, fuck them? Fascism is not a joke you can just quarantine, it's hyper militaristic and imperialistic. If the country split, and one half was fascist, we'd be at war within a decade.
Authoritarian state capitalism is different than liberal capitalism, I wasn't trying to say they're the same as the U.S, and you correctly outlined some differences that I agree with.
As for beliefs, I also recognize many Chinese people believe they have socialism, just like many Americans believe that we live in a free democratic first world country. The similarity here is that both these takes are just state propaganda that have been successfully fed to the masses.
China has successfully reverted anything remotely socialist about the country over the last 40 years. Like I've said previously, I recognize one day they might flip the switch, eliminate all the landlords & business owners, seize the means of production, and dissolve the State. I don't believe this will happen though, and they've made no indication of even moving vaguely in this direction.
If/when the day arrives that the workers own the means of production and are no longer wage slaves to a bourgeoise class, they will have successfully installed socialism. Before that day comes you can't just execute a few billionaires and claim you have socialism, if you're at all concerned with the true state of things.
This was essentially our approach for slavery, but it's fundamentally flawed. Allowing exploitation and bigotry in some other location isn't a fix.
I didn't tell anyone how to run anything, I pointed out how they're an entirely capitalist nation that pretends to be socialist. Maybe the current authoritarian regime will suddenly revert all the market reforms they've implemented over the last 3-4 decades, seize the means of production, and then dissolve the state when it's no longer needed.
I don't believe this will happen, and I don't think many people do. Most of the "socialists" that support China are more than happy with the bourgeoise class existing and exploiting working class people "for the betterment of the State". This kind of thinking falls much more in line with Mussolini than Marx.
"core values of socialism"? Like reintroducing landleeches after they were outlawed? Like allowing the bourgeoise to own the means of production and exploit the over a billion working class Chinese people in horrible conditions? Using the profit motive to "incentivize entrepreneurship"?
China is the epitome of SINO, they're an authoritarian capitalist regime.
On this note it's crazy there are people who will spend over $100 on a Windows license, when all they do is use a web browser or simple productivity apps like spreadsheets or word.
I can get if you're using some adobe products, or some game that hasn't been updated to the Linux compatible EAC, but for the vast majority of people paying over $100 (or having that cost passed onto you from the manufacturer if Windows is preinstalled) is crazy.
Capitalism hit a massive roadblock with the dawn of the internet, information has a tendency to want to be free and easily accessible, but corporations need to own our productive output to maximize profits. In the age of the internet, our productive output more and more becomes our ideas and thoughts manifest into code or other forms of digital information.
Capitalists somewhat fought off the first wave of this, but AI will be a second and more challenging wave to overcome. I hope the capitalists fail and we don't restrict the learning and power of AI so corporations can maximize profits again, but I recognize there's a world where they successfully slow down or even entirely hault these learning systems and stop the technology from developing.
We already see people like Tucker Carlson calling for bans on AI because it'll put people out of work. Of course, we should be trying to reduce the amount of work needed, but the natural tendency of capitalism in this environment is to maximize efficiency in favor of capital owners. Once workers aren't needed anymore, the best thing (from a capitalist perspective) to do is let them starve in the streets instead of "giving them stuff for just existing". We already live in a world where millions of people die from hunger a year, and almost a billion people are dangerously underfed, because global capitalism dictates these people don't deserve enough food.
People should separate the quality of the products, produced by the workers, from the batshit insane politics and mindset of the owners. I have a Tesla, and I recognize Elon is a protofascist dick, but the CEOs of other companies are just better at maintaining their image, they're part of the same parasitic class that Elon is a part of.
I bought a Tesla for the power, infrastructure, etc. but I don't generally recommend Teslas. If you don't care about 0-60 time, and you can hold out until 2024/2025, lots of EVs will adopt the NACS standard and be able to use almost the entire supercharging network. Other vehicles will likely be better and/or cheaper.
Mostly agree, but the "incentive" focus is a misnomer. Humans don't just sit around and stare at walls when they're not "incentivized". Incentives in sociopolitics is just a rebranding of coercion, getting people to do things they don't want to do. People are incentivized/coerced to work at McDonald's because otherwise they'll live on the streets, the housing scalpers will make sure of it.
FOSS exists and isn't at risk of dying. Yeah, it's ideal if the people working on FOSS things don't have to also work a soul crushing day job, and yeah maybe when their soul is crushed they'll lose interest in the things they enjoy doing, but we shouldn't frame that as them getting jaded towards FOSS projects. It's actually just depression, and it impacts other hobbies too.
All that being said, I'm all for donations to people who do FOSS work so they can escape and do the things they love, it means better FOSS products and happier developers.
Over 85% of Mozilla's income comes from their Google search deal. Google is keeping Mozilla alive to prevent antitrust issues. If Mozilla rocks the boat too much, Google will fund a more obedient alternative.