That's somewhat of a misrepresentation of what Marx wrote.
When Marx lived in 19th century England, he saw first hand the effects of laissez faire capitalism: workers working themselves to death, workers dying by the score in industrial accidents, children working and dying in mines, etc.
He predicted with certainty that this trend would continue and lead to a revolution of the many (workers) against the few (capitalists), after which the world would become a classless society free from oppression and exploitation.
Except that never happened.
Workers gained many rights, like limits on work-hours, social insurance, free education for their children (who were banned from working dangerous jobs). Most governments creates successful interventionist policy that "de-fanged" the worst parts of capitalism. I would venture a guess that 19th century workers would kill to live or at least send their children into the 21st century. I presume even terrible jobs today would look positively heavenly for someone who was forced to inhale coal dust and destroy his body for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Marx's "theory" was proven wrong by the events that took place since his times. Nothing he predicted came true. This even became apparent during the 19th century, when pro-worker reforms were being introduced in Britain, which caused Engels, Marx's sponsor, to first explain this away by pointing out that Britain's riches originate from its colonies, making Britain "the burguoise of the world", and then blame Britain itself for not going along with his and Marx's grand theory: "It seems that this most bourgeois of all nations wants to bring matters to such a pass as to have a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat side by side with the bourgeoisie."
(I can almost hear him getting more and more upset at the unruly masses who, instead of misery, revolution, and utopia, chose reforms and democracy).
It must be said, at least, that Marx was coming from a place of good. His heart went out to the suffering masses he lived amongst. His writings are full of compassion. But we must be fair and accept that he was wrong in his theories and predictions.
Now, because I know this will come up, as it's a popular doomer trope: there is suffering in the world. Children sew tshirts in 3rd world sweatshops. Factory workers jump from roofs working for Apple, the world's most valuable company. Numberless people live lives of quiet desperation. Without a doubt, all of that is true.
But, comparing the world of Mar'x lifetime and the world of today, it would take some hardcore rhetorical maneuvering to ignore the fact that more people than ever before live comfortable, safe lives with plentiful opportunities for self-actualization.
This can be interpreted in many ways. For our discussion, I want it to serve as evidence that we shouldn't give Marx's writing more credibility than they deserve.
Personally, I chose to interpret it in a way that means that we're simply not done yet. We've made great progress. But our work is far from done--there are still many humans out there that enjoy the most meager fruits of this progress. This must be remedied.
> Workers gained many rights, like limits on work-hours, social insurance, free education for their children (who were banned from working dangerous jobs). Most governments creates successful interventionist policy that "de-fanged" the worst parts of capitalism.
Why do you think that happened? The creation of well fare state was a direct consequence of the existence of the USSR, the presence of socialist/communist/workers parties in democracies everywhere else and the threat it posed to the status quo. Better give some rights and postpone a rupture.
Just notice that after the fall of the USSR, workers rights didn’t improve anymore, in fact it gets worse by the day: any attempt at unionizing gets crushed, wages don’t increase with productivity, and the economy is turning into an “app economy” where workers are not formally employed and live in an even more fragile situation.
So, categorically stating Marx predictions were “wrong” can be a premature conclusion; the alternative is that we have not lived long enough to see a rupture yet, but the rope has been visibly stretching in the past decades.
At a certain point this kind of stuff becomes unfalsifiable, but the steady erosion of hard won worker rights and laws, as well as wages still fits in pretty nicely with his theories about end stage capitalism.
He certainly did not foresee the rise of the welfare state, but that doesn't mean the end of capitalism is going to be much different, its pretty easy to see how things are following the same trajectory in the end.
This idea was completely alien to me until I experienced it first hand. The F in FAANG puts emphasis on putting things like weekly/monthly status reports, incident investigation (even minor ones), and other useful information into 100-500 word posts. This has created a wealth of historical documentation about projects and problems that always helped me debug problems. What's more, it made discussing plans easier because participants had hours/days to think things through and shape them into paragraphs.
I've heard that Stripe and Amazon have writing coded into their cultures as well. I wish I knew more companies that did this because it's absolutely a different level of communication that helps ease so much friction (at a small price of reading/writing).
This is why I get my general news from the likes of Reuters and Associated Press. I've found that these have more facts and much less opinion.
Then, when I want someone's take on something, from someone I trust, I get it from substack. Eg. Matthew Yglesias on policy, Noah Smith on finance/economics, etc.
In contrast, most big newspapers seem to me to be pushing opinion masked as fact. They never actually lie, but they are selective in what they represent and imply connections where there are none.
Local media is suffering but substack isn't solving that. Axios is actually trying interestingly enough.
I still read NY Times as my default. They have a lot more soft news than they used to but their reporting is still top notch. They've taken a turn for being more direct in their language and not tap-dancing around political double-speak but I think it's appropriate. My other go-to is NPR and local NPR affiliates.
You picked a small fragment of the OP's argument and turned it into a strawman. For example, you dropped the whole "making an informed assessment of the risks" part, which is pretty important to the whole message.
You bring up "your freedom to swing your fist, etc." - how does this apply to lockdown measures that were proven to be ineffective, such as cleaning surfaces[0]? We've poured a lot of money and people's time into cleaning surfaces even while knowing early on that this is a very minor source of transmission. These resources could have been invested in proven measures, such as getting more people more N95 masks.
The way I understand OP's argument is that it's against how heavy-handed and inflexible these lockdown measures have been, limiting individuals effectiveness in dealing with the pandemic. Turning surface cleaning into security theater is one example. Another is the initial official messaging that people should not wear masks because they are not proven to be effective against COVID[1].
These restrictions made it harder to respond to the pandemic in an effective way. People wearing masks early in the pandemic or those choosing not to drown themselves in disinfectant did not, in fact, "pollute the air you breathe."
If we are to face similar disasters in the future, we have to be honest about these things so we can act better next time.
It seems to me that, if negotiation leverage is the crucial factor here, then wouldn't the US and EU be in a similar spot?
The EU's economy is roughly the same size as the US's[0], but the EU has roughly a little over 445 million citizens compare to the US's ~330 million.
I would imagine that EU countries paying for the healthcare of 445 million citizens would be considered as quite a large "customer" for pharmaceutical companies and could strike a good deal.
How does the US get an edge in negotiations over the EU? It feels that military power wouldn't factor here, but I'm having trouble coming up with other ideas. What else could it be?
> I currently work at Google, previously I worked at Square. Of the two, I generally prefer the OSS and off-the-shelf tooling at Square.
I wrapped a 2-year stint at Facebook recently and my experience was similar to yours.
Some tools were amazing and cool and I really appreciated how they evolved over time to manage huge amounts of resources. But most were subpar when compared to OSS tooling - outdated, deprecated functionality, very little documentation, very few people working on them. The common approach was to learn about "the duct tape" way to make something work, then pass it on to new engineers.
An example would be tool X for working with diffs (PRs). It's the latest and greatest, except that it only covers 75% of its predecessor's, tool Y's, functionality, so you end up learning both. Tool Y has been "deprecated" for the past 3-4 years. Some of its features don't work, but you'll only know when you try and execute them.
You have to make some allowances for first movers. The designs of new tools are often ill conceived because they have no templates to steal ideas from. But the emotional investment often keeps them from switching to better tools because We’ve Always Done Things This Way.
The thing that bugs me most about my company’s tools are the ones that are enough younger than OSS solutions that someone either didn’t look very hard, or didn’t want to find anything (so they could write their own). Other priorities come along and those tools eventually can’t keep up with OSS alternatives, but the apologists take over.
You will not continue to get accolades for tools you wrote three years ago. The only “value” you derive is the time and effort it saves, offset my the effort expended. The time and effort expense of external tools are often lower. And, when the tools are annoying, you can commiserate with your coworkers instead of being the target of their criticisms. Which is often under-appreciated.
> Also, why is US hegemony a good thing? What good is it for the 96% of the world that is not the US?
To paraphrase Churchill: "The US hegemony is the worst hegemony for the world, except for all the other hegemonies."
The US retreating into isolationism would likely open up a vacuum eagerly filled in by less, well, liberal-minded states. The globalization you describe was pushed by the US-EU-(Japan/India/etc.) alliance, with the US's armed forced being the big stick in case someone would object. At least this is my current understanding.
>"...with the US's armed forced being the big stick in case someone would object..."
Yup having big stick lets one tell the rest of the world to shut up and do what the're told to do. Nice example of democracy and mutual respect in action.
> Nice example of democracy and mutual respect in action.
Is that supposed to be a back-handed way of making a point? I don't understand what those things have to do with global stability.
Someone will be the de facto world police by force, now that the technology to utilize energy is so efficient. This situation has nothing to do with some sort of (USA-centered) Politically Correct philosophy. This situation is the eventuality of our time.
The laws of the world are enforced through violence. It's the ultimate power when it comes down to it, so yes, if you want maintain peace then you must also have the capacity to engage the most violence.
This is how peace is kept, regardless of how you feel about it. More importantly, power fills a vacuum, and the choices in the absence of the USA are not exactly better for the world.
>"The laws of the world are enforced through violence. It's the ultimate power when it comes down to it"
And the sky is blue. Everyone including my cat knows it. Of course one with the biggest club gets to write the laws and to ignore those when it suits. Just stop pretending to be a knight in a shining armor. And being not as shitty as some others is not a reason to claim high moral ground.
I believe America is the best country in the world with the strongest ideals. American is not only not as bad as others, it's also better.
You're free to believe something else of course, but then again most people have no perspective or experience of the suffering and violence in the world while they throw out these casual statements about how terrible America is.
America has many things I admire. And yes it is better than many countries. And some countries are better than the US. The US had also done a lot of awful things to other countries and killed/maimed/made destitute/etc way too many people. I do not see what is so casual about this.
That’s correct. This was the only way for the world to pay for WWII and for the US to stem the tide of communism and Stalin’s Russia. Now that the Cold War is over, the US middle class isn’t sure it wants to foot the bill for maintaining this system that no longer seems to provide it much benefit and, in fact, has seemed to harm it. I think the world will see a decent amount of chaos as the US pulls back from protecting global trade routes. Unless all of the other countries of the world want to agree to a global socialistic society, I think the US will likely focus on building back its manufacturing base, opening and maintaining markets for those goods to flow to, reducing the Medicare and Social Security overhead so that this isolationist system can actually survive, and then politics will be focused on traditional values vs progressive ideas. Of course the internet will make this conversation much messier than it used to be in the pre-WWII days.
I’m interested to see how the shifting demographics affect this conversation. The three biggest things that shaped history are demographics, geography, and information flow. Two of these three are going to be significantly different since the last time the US moved towards isolationism.
> Listen, personally I would recommend you visit countries abroad for a change - like China, Russia, India or Europe (pick any they are all nice) and leave your US bubble.
Russia invaded Georgia in 2008[0]. Russia has taken over Crimea, a part of Ukraine in 2014[1]. Sweden plans to increase their military spending because of Russia's actions[2]. Estonia is upping its sea defenses[3].
I'm sure that the majority of Russians would prefer not to go to war. They have their own problems - a drug epidemic, a demographic implosion, and a quickly declining economy. Then there are the oligarchs. But, given the right carrot and stick (mostly stick), I see no reason why they wouldn't invade a neighboring country. Because, the small group of people you mention, those gangsters at the top, they have a lot of big sticks to motivate people to sign up for the army and do terrible things to their neighbors.
FYI, I've lived half of my life in Europe. Eastern Europe. The threat of Russia is always present in the back of people's heads. And they like NATO safety. No, they wouldn't prefer to welcome Russia and learn Russian. They like their life, they like their cultures, and yes, they are even so barbaric as to want to defend their life and culture with their lives by standing up to Russia.
How many wars did the US and China engage in over the past couple of decades and how many civilians were killed (in comparison)? Just curious in finding out who has the moral high ground here.
Hi, I'm Matt and I help people out with their legacy Python application problems.
I squash bugs, refactor code to increase development velocity, upgrade application components, troubleshoot performance issues, and do code reviews. In essence, I make your application work well for your users and a joy to work with for other developers.
Some things that I've worked on in the past year:
- Set up deployment and backup scripts for a web agency to use on all their projects to make their developers happy and clients safe.
- Secured a legacy Django application and its dependencies against intruders (mainly cool sysadmin stuff).
- Took over a gnarly MVP stub, refactored it, added the missing features, and deployed it to production.
You can contact me at matt+hn at mattscodecave.com
Django does have some really clean code and it is very easy to navigate. I feel like I only grokked Django after I started going through its internals.
I also highly recommend giving Tornado[0] and Bottle[1] a read. Outside of the the web stuff, Sqlalchemy[2] is good
When Marx lived in 19th century England, he saw first hand the effects of laissez faire capitalism: workers working themselves to death, workers dying by the score in industrial accidents, children working and dying in mines, etc.
He predicted with certainty that this trend would continue and lead to a revolution of the many (workers) against the few (capitalists), after which the world would become a classless society free from oppression and exploitation.
Except that never happened.
Workers gained many rights, like limits on work-hours, social insurance, free education for their children (who were banned from working dangerous jobs). Most governments creates successful interventionist policy that "de-fanged" the worst parts of capitalism. I would venture a guess that 19th century workers would kill to live or at least send their children into the 21st century. I presume even terrible jobs today would look positively heavenly for someone who was forced to inhale coal dust and destroy his body for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Marx's "theory" was proven wrong by the events that took place since his times. Nothing he predicted came true. This even became apparent during the 19th century, when pro-worker reforms were being introduced in Britain, which caused Engels, Marx's sponsor, to first explain this away by pointing out that Britain's riches originate from its colonies, making Britain "the burguoise of the world", and then blame Britain itself for not going along with his and Marx's grand theory: "It seems that this most bourgeois of all nations wants to bring matters to such a pass as to have a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat side by side with the bourgeoisie."
(I can almost hear him getting more and more upset at the unruly masses who, instead of misery, revolution, and utopia, chose reforms and democracy).
It must be said, at least, that Marx was coming from a place of good. His heart went out to the suffering masses he lived amongst. His writings are full of compassion. But we must be fair and accept that he was wrong in his theories and predictions.
Now, because I know this will come up, as it's a popular doomer trope: there is suffering in the world. Children sew tshirts in 3rd world sweatshops. Factory workers jump from roofs working for Apple, the world's most valuable company. Numberless people live lives of quiet desperation. Without a doubt, all of that is true.
But, comparing the world of Mar'x lifetime and the world of today, it would take some hardcore rhetorical maneuvering to ignore the fact that more people than ever before live comfortable, safe lives with plentiful opportunities for self-actualization.
This can be interpreted in many ways. For our discussion, I want it to serve as evidence that we shouldn't give Marx's writing more credibility than they deserve.
Personally, I chose to interpret it in a way that means that we're simply not done yet. We've made great progress. But our work is far from done--there are still many humans out there that enjoy the most meager fruits of this progress. This must be remedied.