CaptainSwing

8 ms·

1.
by CaptainSwing 5y ago
You saying all politicians, even the aweful ones, should get participation awards, while us plebs should just know our place and shut up?
2.
by CaptainSwing 6y ago
Underfunding and neoliberal management. There's a fair chance the government is hollowing it out to undermine public perception of the institution so they cang et away with doing away with it completely.
3.
by CaptainSwing 6y ago
While I agree, there are plenty of poor sources getting too much uncritical attention in the press, even by China's own accounts there are a large network of education facilities, trying to hammer in a strong sense of national identity
4.
by CaptainSwing 8y ago
I'm disappointed (though not surprised) to see Marx so marginalised. In particular, Schumpeter was in massive debt to Marx, as is quite clear from reading Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. The whole idea of creative destruction, for
5.
by CaptainSwing 8y ago
The socialist getting the most attention in this article is actually William Morris, who tended towards more libertarian ideas of socialism, though not as anti-statist as Goldman. Morris and Orwell were probably fairly close to eachother in
6.
by CaptainSwing 8y ago
> ultra left wing ads That might be pushing it a bit. We're talking Jeremy Corbyn here, not Amadeo Bordiga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-leftism
7.
by CaptainSwing 9y ago
Important to remember that, despite jokes like these, Oscar Wilde remained a committed (if ideosyncratic) libertarian socialist.
8.
by CaptainSwing 9y ago
I guess schumpeters point with creative destruction was the rupture required to replace one paradigm with another (Incidentally, he got this straight from marx). Technology, and markets, move in fits and starts as conservative tendencies me
9.
by CaptainSwing 9y ago
Jeremy Corbyn (current leader of the labour party) released a very interesting 'digital democracy manifesto' during his leadership campaign, though it isn't officially labour party policy (and probably will never be). There&#
10.
by CaptainSwing 10y ago
Yeah, I guess 'cut the crap' was maybe considered a bit crude. Thanks for the response.
11.
by CaptainSwing 10y ago
The source code (data sets, license, etc) is one thing, but the actual physical robot is something else.
12.
by CaptainSwing 10y ago
If 'the 99%' owned the robots it could help
13.
by CaptainSwing 10y ago
10/10 would back this
14.
by CaptainSwing 10y ago
You're right that it is tricky. Many social anarchists and communists use the phrase 'voluntary cooperation' to describe the social order in a communist society (in the sense of a society without either capitalism or the sta
15.
by CaptainSwing 10y ago
it may be 'true' within the set of axioms on which it rests, but 'wrong' in that those axioms (rational self-seeking behaviour, etc) don't hold in reality. More, those axioms themselves could be reflections of capit
16.
by CaptainSwing 10y ago
I think that this is a really interesting concept, but dislike the name. All social anarchists (anarchist-communists, anarchist-syndicalists, even mutualists etc) would see anarchy as a social process rather than a purely individualised &qu
17.
by CaptainSwing 10y ago
Going by usernames we should probably be friends Mr Winstanley
18.
by CaptainSwing 10y ago
I agree with the criticism that you're making, but I think your police force comparison contains fallacies. Human institutions cannot be told from the assumption that we all began as isolated individuals and arrived at the solution of
19.
by CaptainSwing 10y ago
beautiful text but, as with others, I take issue with the conclusion. What about the internal hierarchies of the firms involved? Who was freer, the owner of the pencil factory or the men in Sri-Lanka working for pennies to mine the graphite
20.
by CaptainSwing 10y ago
A wage relationship, or a pensions deal, is not an individual problem, it is a collective problem of the whole workforce. Sorry, I don't know this movie/book, but I will check it out.
21.
by CaptainSwing 10y ago
This is a bit like saying "the government is corrupt so lets we'd be better off without it". Better with union representation than without, though better with unions who actually represent their members than corrupt unions. T
22.
by CaptainSwing 10y ago
> Trying to force an employer that does not value you like they should to behave otherwise instead of finding one that does is masochistic. I think that you overestimate the ability of workers to exert an influence by switching jobs, but
23.
by CaptainSwing 10y ago
That moment when tech workers realise that they have been working class all along
24.
by CaptainSwing 11y ago
I get the hype. It IS amazing and we shouldn't forget that. I too am sometimes swallowed in the euphoria of what we have created and what we will create, the possibilities open to us, and those others just around the corner. And I mean
25.
by CaptainSwing 11y ago
Sorry for my glib post. (I deserved the down vote) I am not convinced that the bigger problems to the world have answers which can be provided by a 'start up', and feel that the tendency toward "X-is-broken" type start u
26.
by CaptainSwing 11y ago
"Uber is removing a cartel and replacing it with a single-company monopoly" This sums up the uber situation very well. I think that, regarding the HN libertarian "wealth creator's" topic,(to try and be as sympathet
27.
by CaptainSwing 11y ago
I'm happy that somebody has raised this point. David Harvey gives a particularly good analysis of the concept of monopoly as it relates to rent here: http://www.socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/
28.
by CaptainSwing 11y ago
The bourgeoisie
29.
by CaptainSwing 12y ago
Thanks for a great post! I'm a big fan of Le Guins fiction, as well as her commentary and critique of literature as commodity. Another great (anti-capitalist) novelist who I admire, China Mieville, touched on some similar topics in his
30.
by CaptainSwing 12y ago
Why should we have to choose between low paid, dangerous, uninteresting/soul destroying work or unemployment and poverty? The question about automation, for me, is one of how we can more sensibly organise the necessary work so that we

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