[ExI] commies vs marxists was: RE: chinese fires, was:RE: book review

[sjatkins]

​The "means of production" are, and have been for some time, the human mind. All systems based on collectivism, including Marxism and all forms of communism, are collectivist and seek to both by ideology and force own by idealistic means and by force the human mind and control its products. They seek to subsume the individual and thus lessen the free play of this means of production. Not, mind you that the more free and democratic parts of the world don't try to do much of the same by other means. Established industries and yesterday's financial winners work quite hard to blunt the threat of new upstart innovation and competition.

It is rather strange that so many Western countries hold up China as some role model. Of course they did much the same when the USSR was the country to extol the purported virtues and shining future of. It is a great question why so many supposedly democratic country elites extol their theoretical opposites. Perhaps the desire to control the individual mind and its outputs is far more extensive than some guess.

China can't be doing Zero Covid because of health concerns. Anyone with elementary knowledge of virology knows that most viruses so widespread become endemic in a population that largely but not perfectly has herd immunity to at least most of the variants seen to date. A virus is not impressed by lock downs or the ravings of tyrants. You will never get to no cases even if the abuse of PCR for general population screening was trustworth - which it is not. Lock downs were considered primeval unscientific nonsense before COVID. Well except for Bush Jr entertaining the idea in studies from around 2006 much to the horror of many acknowledged experts at the time. They weren't really about health, much less "following the science" anywhere. But I think China is playing a different game. Its economy is screwed in many ways. Too much top down command and control misallocation of funds for far too long including the blowup of the housing industry more central to Chinese than our anxiously watched stock market. I am guessing Zero Covid is about cooling things off in their own markets and a bit of economic kicking the West when it is down from its own COVID actions and the sanctions. But that is guesswork.

-samantha

------- Original Message -------
On Thursday, December 1st, 2022 at 5:56 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> …> On Behalf Of Will Steinberg via extropy-chat
> Subject: Re: [ExI] chinese fires, was:RE: book review
>
>>…That's another thing that kinda bugged me, Spike--the way you were talking about Marxism made it seem like you were conflating it with authoritarianism…
>
> No worries Will. Given sufficiently independent Marxist governments, most with populations of one to five, the scenario you describe works just fine and always have.
>
> Times have changed, a lot. Now we no longer rely on human labor to manufacture stuff very much. A really good example is the Tesla factory up the street. There are workers there, but most of them are overseeing manufacturing equipment. It is nothing like the Ford factory that was there 30 years ago where lines of actual biological units made and assembled the cars. Henry Ford was such a primitive savage that way.
>
> Now our biological units are mostly from India and write software to control the construction of the cars. They have the option of owning the tools, by buying up stock in their own company. Those who followed that practice in Tesla are in great shape now. They generally have a very low collective opinion of Marxism, while simultaneously practicing it in their homes, to eaching and from eaching with their spouses and children.
>
> Plenty of workers today are software developers, in which case they already do own the tools. More workers are moving toward that professional paradigm all the time. That whole gathering in a factory renting the corporation’s tools business that vexed Marx (and his four brothers) is really much diminished.
>
> I can easily foresee that Marxism (and every variant of communism) steadily losing popularity, considering the current experience in China, where the population would prefer to not have the exits welded shut because of covid. This expediency for slowing the pandemic carries its own risks, such as making emergency egress physically impossible when the damn building catches fire. The Chinese proletariat disapprove of this as much as we would. The big difference of course is that our asses are heavily armed and we intend to stay that way, lest we suffer the same fate as the Chinese.
>
> spike
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