"The Tree of Liberty will get its manure..." [Was Re:]

[xorcist at sigaint.org]

> On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 08:30:55PM -0700, Razer wrote:
>
> You cannot eliminate human nature.
>
> Greed and lust for power are tendencies of human nature.
>
> But perhaps it is possible to commoditize politics, rather than have
> politics be a tool for the wealthy and powerful?
>
> (How? Good question - time to hack concepts.)
>

I agree completely, Zen.

Greed is a fundamental problem of Capitalism. It is also a fundamental
problem of Socialism. The Soviet chiefs in the Politburo weren't standing
in the bread lines with everyone else.

Any reasonable political theory must account for this, and provide some
strategy to mitigate it.

How, of course, is the question. I suspect Syndicalism would work, and if
combined with a new theory of value might work quite well. Bootstrapping
it is the problem.

Power, is a whole other animal. I'm not sure anyone has really figured
that one out.

If the society has "money" .. and if "money" is, in some sense, a
mechanism for motivating and organizing labor, then quite literally, the
wealthy have more power, right down to the sense that the term is used in
physics, that of the rate of doing work.

I suspect that there is no way to create a truly egalitarian society in
the presence of money. Those that have it, will have an advantage in
negotiating with those that don't. You've created a power dynamic as soon
as you print the stuff.

Now, on the other hand, if basic goods and services were free, if you were
assured a basic standard of living, and food to eat, perhaps in a communal
house or public studio apartments, so that one did not HAVE to work for
money, but would only want to work in order to get access to better goods,
services, bigger apartment, etc, that might be enough to take the edge of
the implied power dynamics.

But it still doesn't stop the fact that a wealthy person can afford to pay
bunches of people to help get him political power, and that political
power allows him to become wealthier; and then the deafening feedback
begins.

The solution is to create a structure that doesn't utilize money, at least
not in the way we know the concept.