And I choose to go even further beyond
WOLFSKULL wrote: ↑Thu Nov 27, 2025 8:52 pm
A hypothetical scenario where human labor is made obsolete and people no longer have value to exchange would also mean that capital owners would have no use for their autonomous machines, since there would be no profit to be made by producing stuff anymore.
As I've stated with my technist theory, the moment human labor is made obsolete is likely the moment capital owners themselves also become obsolete.
We very badly extrapolate what "general intelligence/superintelligence" actually means in practice.
In actuality, basic market pressure will inevitably lead to future generalist AIs having more control over the economy
So much more in fact that it's unlikely that even billionaires will be able to maintain control of anything for long
You already see hints of this with automated stock trading, but humans are still heavily in the loop for this because we lack any sort of artificial general intelligence, and no matter how advanced current AI seems, AGI is a step beyond anything we have.
This is why I created John Henry Vyrd as a libertarian character eventually calling for socialism, or at the very least declaring it possibly inevitable
Of course the end result is not really the traditional conception of socialism
In fact I've long said that socialism fundamentally requires AI and robotics to work (funnily enough, Marx's own writings defend this very point, and he wrote that in the mid 19th century)
The fundamental problem with socialism comes down to what it's supposed to be fixing.
In Marx's case, workers produce products that are then sold, and instead of the profits going back to reimburse the workers for their actual labor, the excesses go to the owners.
Of course then you run into questions of how exactly do you calculate what an average worker "deserves" to earn based on their labor, or whether commodities in general are just exploitation
Personally I find Marx's read of history to be too recent. History of humankind truly starts with the first tool forged by the first ancestor, and our evolution has been directed by the axiom of "getting more from less work." What we call class struggle is just a side effect of specialization and unequal management and ownership. Obviously the man who figured out how to cultivate plants was going to grow wealthy enough to entice people to do more cultivation but wouldn't give them the same amount he'd take for himself. That dynamic is what bothers people and why socialism won't die off like Fascism did for a time— if you see people starving, and you see a fat jolly family with plenty, well it's just innate to the hominin brain to think "something's not right here."
Hence why socialist revolutions have been fairly standard since 1871.
Yet ironically, most of the successful revolutions occured in the states Marx would have said were least ready for socialism.
Socialism is, despite all the hoopla around it, fundamentally an ideology about transferring ownership of production to the industrial workers actually producing things so that a few owners aren't able to get rich off the labor of the masses of society. In order for that to work, you actually need an industrial working class to begin with. And not a tiny one. Coincidentally, point to just about every socialist country in the 20th century and you'll find a country that's either deeply agrarian, bombed out by war, or a single-resource economy. Sometimes all three. Not exactly conducive for growth or prosperity even with capitalism.
But getting to the point, the reason why socialism was anticipated to come from the industrial workers was because they'd produce an excess that simply wasn't going to themselves, and often would begin being replaced by machines to do the labor cheaper and faster. So Marx's prediction was that the workers would instead seize the machines for themselves, since if you're already feeling you're being robbed, why respect the thief's property rights? At that point, to the workers, it sounds more like a thief told you they can take everything from you, but if you even think of taking from them, you're the real criminal.
Ideally that's what would happen
But that rarely ever has.
Instead the workers just keep working to stay alive, and the business owners just keep operating to stay afloat— after all, most corporations have very thin margins and most goes to labor already.
There have been a bunch of revolutions in the past year alone, and none of them have been workers seizing the means of production. One even happened in a country run by Maoists (though it wasn't an anti-communist revolution)
Plus how does a Marxist explain self employment? What about outsourcing— technically, the USA is LESS ready for socialism than we were 50 years ago because we sent so much of our industrial production overseas to China. Does a computer count as the means of production? Why exactly does it have to be the workers running things rather than a more corporatist technocracy? Why should workers produce anything for non-workers? How do workers manage to produce goods but also manage operations and governance so well that the state vanishes?
A lot of problems build up with socialism the more you study it. Socialism as welfare capitalism or corporatism (like Norway or China respectively) seems to work well, with some drawbacks that aren't dealbreakers. Generally the corporatist nature of socialism is simply saying that, much as a person can be supported by their community, society in general can do that for everyone. Whether that's possible in our scarce economy is unknown.
It can't be denied that there fundamentally is no such thing as a true meritocracy— someone whose parents were successful has a cushion to fall back on that you as a lower class man won't have sans perhaps a single loan, hence why the wealthy can try multiple ventures or investments, but anyone not from the capitalist class basically has just a single shot and that's it.
But here's the thing: strange things start happening when you add advanced automation to the mix.
Bottom up or top down, it doesn't matter. The existence of parhuman or superhuman economically productive agents throws everything out of whack so supremely that I literally had to create a term ("technism") to describe it.
https://www.deviantart.com/yuli-ban/art ... 1214996827
Just repeating what I wrote here but a bit more coherently:
This is why Marx claimed all history is class struggle— in many ways, history is the story of those with access trying to gain more or stabilize what they have in the face of scarcity. To Vyrd, it runs deeper than just rich against the poor— it is struggle against the other rich, even struggle against nature who is just as ravenous for the same resources.
Vyrd extrapolated the development of technology and simply considered just why every generation sought to use technology and what they got out of it.
If humans were better off under a feudal economic system, why don't we return to it? Why do we put up with post-modernity? Simply it's because as miserable as modern humans can be, we've never had our hierarchy of needs so widely met. In real terms, even a very poor person in the West can easily come across food and some sort of shelter. Humans seek to satisfy ourselves and be comfortable.
This is why socialist countries tended to be unattractive, and why tankies and hardcore socialists and eco-anarchists make few friends from many of the nonwestern marginalized: if one who has little views the Soviet Union vs the United States, they'd see one is decadent to the point of degeneracy, while the other seems severe and often goes without (whether or not that's explicitly true at any given moment of time notwithstanding).
People want abundance if given the choice. And the West's abundance comes based off the labor of the masses of the world, where the entire globalist system is set up in a way that the Western core countries are essentially subsidized by the Global South.
We pay others to do things for us, whether that's provide food, services, land, whathaveyou. Transactions are the basis of the market economy. Market economies do not function with slavery in the core market, because slaves can't buy or sell goods or services. Capitalism can't function with chattel slaves. But running a business is expensive and often subsidized by the state in some way, such as through loans, grants, or other subsidies. Labor is typically one of the biggest expenses of any business. It's technically in the businessman's best interest to use slaves, but slavery will collapse the economy.
Socialism emerged out of an emotional reaction against the abuses of the wealthy owners of capital and high-level specialist workers against the poor and artisanal classes, and Karl Marx codified communism as one of the chief anti-capitalist ideologies. And yet every time communist regimes had been attempted, they always ended in some form of failure or corruption back to a capitalist system.
Vyrd identified something he dubbed "economic evolutionary pressure," which isn't necessarily a law of economics but simply an observation based on a confluence of sociological and economic dynamics that leads to certain outcomes.
He predicted that joint-stock companies would emerge in any industrializing state, even if it was not in the throes of a full industrial revolution. Lo and behold, the first such companies emerged in the earliest known industrializing state in world history— the Song dynasty in China, in the late first and early second millennium, widely regarded as the most sophisticated and advanced proto-industrial state before the Industrial Revolution occurred over half a millennium later. Though perhaps not a perfect theory, as the Mughal dynasty in India did not seem to develop any of its own joint-stock corporations despite also achieving a high level of proto-industrialization. But joint-stock companies did emerge again in early Renaissance Europe, which also existed in a proto-industrial state until England finally transitioned into a full industrial revolution. As Vyrd noted, joint-stock companies were necessary to fully exploit the benefits of industrialization via capital consolidation and risk diversification, allowing for reinvestment into new industries that mercantilism and feudalism were not equipped to handle effectively.
This hypothesis was rather malformed, but he used this to explain why socialism and capitalism seem to have such different economic trajectories.
His Economic Evolutionary Pressure hypothesis, in very simple terms, suggests that revolutionary socialism (the full abolition of private property, widespread or total nationalization and collectivization, and aggressive flattening of the classes) will grant the lower classes a great boost in the immediate term, but a combination of capital flight, poor incentives, consolidation of social mobility into a political class rather than an economic one, and an inability to invest in new private capital or reinvest in existing capital beyond a purely local arena will ultimately lead to long-term stagnation and exponentially increasing dysfunction. Ironically, inequality rises but even the elite class will become less and less well off in real terms.
Capitalist economies starting at the same year always initially lose: the situation for the lower classes will often be dreadful with low opportunities for mobility in dangerous jobs and few luxuries that don't funnel into the wealthy. However, thanks to private re/investment and increasing economic diversity, momentum builds over time that leads to greater and greater, if unequal, collective prosperity.
This pattern plays out throughout history repeatedly. Why do people still seek socialism when its failure is almost pre-baked into the very concept? Well for starters, it's largely a matter of assuaging the worst faults and abuses of capitalism, for the same reason the Enlightenment was popular and the Protestants were popular before that: whenever a ruling group grows insular, haughty, corrupt, and greedy and codifies its cronyist reign as the natural order, inevitably the human animal will seek to end the cronyism and justify why this is necessary. Economic activity, the side effect of transactions and trade, always leaves some party better off than another by its very nature in its own free space of action— the farmer who trades with the hunter requires raising more cattle and grains by necessity to even allow for a trade, and only the hunter who hunts and gathers the most can afford the most from the farmer, and this feedback loop persists. So it can be argued income inequality is natural like how some trees bearing more fruit is natural, but then again, cancer and tapeworms are also natural.
However, he did still have an odd feeling that something about socialism was actually sound, but limited by material restrictions.
Sorry if I'm rambling, this is just a rather extreme topic that is barely explored at all in mainstream or even most underground parlance