jlou

I am an anti-capitalist.

To get rid of capitalism, you don't have to abolish absentee ownership of capital. A worker coop can lease capital from third parties and remain a non-capitalist democratic worker coop. Abolishing capitalism just requires abolishing the employment contract and common ownership of land and natural resources. Without the employment contract, everyone is either individually or jointly self-employed, so every firm is a worker coop

@196

"This sentence contains 2 words" is a sensible sentence. It has 5 words, so what the sentence says is false.

The self-reference in the sentence is similar to that of the Liar's paradox. Cousins of that paradox have been used to prove major limitative results in mathematical logic such as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theorem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theorems

In usual logic, a false sentence implies every sentence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_conditional

Also, if sentence P is false, then "P is false" is true

@science_memes

It is a paradox if you believe there are omniscient beings. If there are no omniscient beings, there is no paradox. The sentence is either true or false. If the sentence is true, we have an omniscient being that lacks knowledge about a true statement. Contradiction. If it is false, there is an omniscient being that knows it to be true. This means that the statement is true, but the statement itself says that no omniscient being knows it to be true. Contradiction.

@science_memes

Self-referential paradoxes are at the heart of limitative results in mathematical logic on what is provable, so it seems plausible a similar self-referential statement rules out omniscience.

Greek gods are gods in a different sense than the monotheistic conception of god that is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Sure, so the argument I give only applies to the latter sense.

@science_memes

Capitalism and authoritarian Marxist-Leninist states are not the only alternatives. There are other alternatives like Georgist economic democracy. In such a system, everyone would be either individually or jointly self-employed while receiving their share of the value derived from natural resources

@196

If we assume that god, by definition, must be omniscient, there is actually a way to disprove the possibility with the following paradox:

This sentence is not known to be true by any omniscient being.

There are also more traditional arguments like the problem of evil

@science_memes

There are other alternatives to capitalism besides Authoritarian Marxist-Leninist states. An example would be Georgist economic democracy. Some policies in such an economy:

1. All firms would be legally mandated to protect the inalienable right to worker democracy by structuring as democratic worker coops. There would thus be no haves appropriating 100% of the fruits of the have nots' labor

2. 100% land tax and carbon tax

3. PCO for all capital

4. Guaranteed minimum income

@technology

Here is a short introduction to the core argument against capitalism based on liberal principles: https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/

@socialism

The root of the loss of community that everyone feels is capitalism's total emphasis on institutional logics of exit that make everything extremely transactional while completely ignoring the dual institutional logic of commitment, cooperation and voice. Community emphasizes the latter. We need communities based around shared property, mutual aid and collective action. Incidentally, having such communities could help solve some public goods problems in a non-state manner and be more egalitarian

I'll write one. The talk argues that employment contract is invalid due to inalienable rights. Inalienable means can't be given up even with consent. Workers' inalienable rights are rooted in their joint de facto responsibility in the firm for using up inputs to produce outputs. By the norm that legal and de facto responsibility should match, workers should get the corresponding legal responsibility, but in employment, workers as employees get 0% while employer gets 100% of results of production

You called centrists framing the debate about capitalism as one of consent vs. coercion a strawman then accepted the framing. Democratic theory requires consent. It just also requires consent to delegate ruling out consent to alienate management/governenance rights justified by inalienable rights.

Stable employee-owned firms:
https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100

A country that lets people sell voting rights wouldn't be democratic for long. Does democracy not work? Is it undesirable?

@progressivepolitics

David Ellerman's modernization of the classical laborists' argument against capitalism is significantly more powerful than modern Marxism.

Marx's claim that private property is the root of capitalist appropriation has been disproven in modern theories of capitalism's property rights structure. Private property plays a role in giving bargain power to get favorable terms, but the ultimate legal basis of capitalist appropriation is the employer-employee contract

@politicalmemes