Archives for January 2016

Universal Basic Income: A Crucial Caveat

January 24, 2016 by Admin Leave a Comment

Note: If you are not familiar with the idea of a guaranteed basic income and how popular the idea is becoming please check out the website basicincome.org for an introduction. Universal basic income is a great idea — with one caveat. Ok, maybe two caveats, but my first concern seems to be pretty widely understood and […]

How Exactly Do Robots Destroy Capitalism?

January 17, 2016 by Admin Leave a Comment

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. This sentence, taken from The Communist Manifesto (1848), is an excellent starting point for understanding the end of the capitalist system. All of the following is packed within this one succinct sentence: The […]

The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and right wrong, is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping -

Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells.

-Marx and Engels

Man today is confronted with the most fundamental choice; not that between Capitalism and Communism, but that between robotism (of both the capitalist and communist variety), or Humanistic Communitarian Socialism. Most facts seem to indicate that he is choosing robotism, and that means, in the long run, insanity and destruction. But all these facts are not strong enough to destroy faith in man's reason, good will, and sanity. As long as we can think of other alternatives, we are not lost; as long as we can consult together and plan together, we can hope. But, indeed, the shadows are lengthening; the voices of insanity are becoming louder. We are in reach of achieving a state of humanity which corresponds to the vision of our great teachers; yet we are in danger of the destruction of all civilization, or of robotization.

- Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness... It is not the consciousness of men that determines their social being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

- Karl Marx

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist....Soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

- John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money