There is a quote by Gandhi where he is talking about the Holocaust and he says: "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs..."
This is very idealist of him. And that, I find, is the fundamental problem of nonviolence. It depends on a notion of "good" existing, or that, at the very least, the people in power will care about the appearance of their policies and revert them for "goodness" sake.
This is a fundamental problem.
It is not that good cannot exist, it is that most evil is done for material reasons, and nonviolence does not take that into account. Try stopping a war, that are done for economic reasons, by appealing to "goodness". Try stopping racism, that has economic roots (profits), by appealing to "goodness". It won't take you very far.
The defining feature of this dilemma can be found right on the edge of where the definition of defense become offense.
> Try stopping racism, that has economic roots (profits), by appealing to "goodness". It won't take you very far.
When the British outlawed slavery and made their moral arguments against it, it seems to me that that worked pretty well everywhere except the US. I mean, sure, they might have had to invoke military force against other Europeans, but the idea spread within Britain easily enough, and they didn't lack sympathetic ears elsewhere (e.g. in Canada; the Underground Railroad was possible for a reason).
The reason for abolishing slavery was that it was a backwards system that prevented the super exploitation that came naturally for the proletariat.
The abolition of slavery was the proletarization of slaves. It absolutely was economic in nature. There was no economic need for slavery anymore, it didnt end racism tho, which was the ideological weapon that permited slavery.
Racism was simply repurposed for the black (and other) proletariat.
Industrialization killed slavery not morality.
Where is the goodness?
You have an idealist conception of history.
How would this allow superexploitation?
When capitalism becomes more productive than the market can handle it just shuts down the factories or when it gets more efficient it just gets rid of workers. Try doing that with slaves.
Proletarization created a pool of unemployed and a labor makret that benefited capitalists.
Englishmen who wrote about liberalism during the abolition of slavery made it very clear that it was explicitly about morality.
And industrialization enabled slavery in the US rather than killing it, thanks to the Jevons paradox; the cotton gin allowed for land previously seen as unsuitable for cotton production to be bought up by slaveowners, increasing the demand for slaves (https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/cotton-gin-patent ; see section "Effects of the Cotton Gin").
I don't recognize your concept of "superexploitation" in the first place.
I wasn't using super exploitation as a specific term, just as intense exploitation.
Slavery was not profitable in the industrial north, just the agrarian south. In the North they used cheap free-labor from Irish and German proles.
If the morality argument holds why did systematic racism not end with abolition?
The fact is that wage labor is cheaper than slave labor. Slavery was no longer required in the Americas, it was a "way of life" for the south, but unnecessary for the country economically. Especially after a global system of trade had established itself, AKA imperialism, and had placed the US into competition with India with cotton and the rest of the Americas with sugar.
My reasoning is that abolitionism only became a widely accepted moral stance BECAUSE it was no longer "necessary" for the Americas' capitalists, but the weapon of racism didn't go anywhere.
These types of cultural analysis always fails to be substantial because they rely on "losing our way" argument consciously or even on a subliminal moral level.
I think this one is kind of better because it tries to place social transformations on a material base, but it still fails to do that properly with tech.
Tech or the internet isnt a freeform thing that just exists and obeys everyones psyches and wants. Tech is something made in factories from specific industries by specific companies and organizations to fit within certain monetizeable bounds.
The early internet obeys the grasp of the early industry. Very little was monetized then.
The development of the internet follows the development of the monetization of the internet, it follows the rules of capital.
Watch the neoliberals feed off of rigid bureaucratic incompetence to pander for privatization and create for-profit bureaucratic incompetence. All with massive subsidies that citizens will pay through taxes or cutting of public services elsewhere.
I'm not gonna pretend I know about the specifics of DB, but tales of crappy public services are plenty around the world and a lot of the critique is aimed at enabling privatization.
My anecdotal evidence is that these public entities usually suffer from lack of funding or incompetence fueled by corruption, that usually takes a few forms:
- the contracting of work to a third party with kickback (incentives to continously do sloppy work)
- inaction due to lack of corrupting opportunities (leaders try but cant set up a good fraud scheme)
- nepotism that leads to incompetence
And lack of funding can and has been weaponized to cause a shitty service to then set the pretext for privatization. Usually there are private interests behind this public policy decision.
The more menial reason for lack of funding is sometimes massive spending or subsidies for capitalists elsewhere which skews the budget.
And of course also the intense bureacracy needed due to lack of democratic control. Yes, im saying people dont actually have a say and they could have a say. IE delegate democracy.
These are just universal problems of modern capitalist economies and their bourgeois politics.
Quite possibly DB suffers from these more intensely than others.
"Pariah", they've had the longest embargo on earth (which has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths), they had 90% of their whole countries infrastructure bombed by the US, and the Korean war has been called a genocide in the North by many scholars.
The world doesnt make sense if you ignore history.
They probably hack for the same reason the west does it: attack/defense and money.
Why else would they put so much money into something if not to try and get more out of it?
Capitalists' morals are driven by their social position. To them this is right becauae its rewarding. To us its an akin abomination we create that destroys us
But the problem isnt inherently tech. Its how society is structured around it that allows it to be used against us.
This is very idealist of him. And that, I find, is the fundamental problem of nonviolence. It depends on a notion of "good" existing, or that, at the very least, the people in power will care about the appearance of their policies and revert them for "goodness" sake.
This is a fundamental problem.
It is not that good cannot exist, it is that most evil is done for material reasons, and nonviolence does not take that into account. Try stopping a war, that are done for economic reasons, by appealing to "goodness". Try stopping racism, that has economic roots (profits), by appealing to "goodness". It won't take you very far.
The defining feature of this dilemma can be found right on the edge of where the definition of defense become offense.
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