If Mort Divine ruled the world

[CiG]

White Europeans didn't create slavery in Africa, they just exploited it.

I mean, that is true and furthermore is it Europe's fault that Nigerians were enslavement-happy?

Yes, and choose to support it. The point is that I don't think they should support such business practices even if it results in a higher profit. These are the types of choices the high-paid execs are responsible for making, but of course padding their pockets is more important than providing humane working conditions. Nike is culpable because they perpetuate the situation.

Sure, they're culpable and they should actually address such practices. I'm not sure whether they should pull out of those markets though because what else do those workers have in terms of choices?

IMO what needs to happen is they need a labour movement.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I mean, that is true and furthermore is it Europe's fault that Nigerians were enslavement-happy?

It's Europe's fault for buying slaves, continuing to hold slaves, and enslaving their slaves' children.

fwiw I'm not saying that using sweatshop labor is necessarily a bad thing. Use of cheap Chinese labor by wealthy Western corporations has certainly helped to enrich China. Free, open markets are some of the best ways of redistributing wealth and empowering the poor. But they still are morally culpable in any abuses that may happen if they are either aware of them, or if they intentionally choose to be ignorant to said abuses.

 

[CiG]

Sure, but all I'm saying is that even if Nike completely pulled out of Indonesia, the practices of basically destroying any attempt to start a workers' rights movement would still exist in Indonesia. Not that Nike should be let off the hook for exploiting and perpetuating a situation, but only that they didn't create that market that won't allow workers to collectivize against exploitative workplace conditions.

 

[rms]

Workers' rights interfere with optimum efficiency.

not necessarily. asian labor forces can be treated like shit only because of the surrounding context. tech companies do the opposite here

 

[rms]

IMO what needs to happen is they need a labour movement.

there's a lot of articles about how increased pay/rights for these overseas companies working in asian countries would be a detriment

 

[CiG]

Sure but they will need to start somewhere or they'll be basically slaves forever.

 

[rms]

I think it's too late, first world countries only care about tourism in these non developed countries. With India and China providing all the necessary 'smart' labor to the first world, how does anyone else stand a chance?

 

[Einherjar86]

Oh, agreed. That doesn't mean we can't have a capitalistic society that is operated intelligently. Capitalism unrestrained is like anything else, this is why I would probably call myself a social liberal in terms of policy preference. We can have workers' rights, capitalism and social programs while trying to curb the negative aspects and excesses of all 3 things.

Indonesia's problem isn't capitalism.

The way I see it, capitalism is a system and rather inhuman in its machinations. The problem is unfettered capitalism, and things like workers' rights are merely checks on an ultimately dehumanizing process. I'd say that operating a capitalist system "intelligently" means you force it to act less-than-completely capitalistically, so to speak. The same goes for any institutional organization comprised of human actors.

Capitalism gravitates towards efficiency of achieving profits. Efficiency alone means nothing without means and ends.

Agreed, but it's not black and white. The system needs labor, but that doesn't mean capitalism is at its most efficient when its labor force is treated humanely. At very small, local levels this might be true, but it's certainly not true at multinational levels. It's an irreconcilable contradiction that drives the system forward. In order to work at its most efficient, the system would need to severely exploit its laborers; but laborers don't appreciate this, and so they push back. There's no ideal efficiency, only a system that sacrifices optimum efficiency in order to facilitate continual functionality.

The idea that individual (i.e. workers') rights and optimum efficiency go hand in hand is a myth rewritten back over the history of capitalism as a way to correlate the two. It's not built into the system itself.

not necessarily. asian labor forces can be treated like shit only because of the surrounding context. tech companies do the opposite here

I disagree because this, to my understanding, assumes that there's a fixed level of optimum efficiency that can be achieved materially; but that's not true. Capitalism by its very function is always striving to produce more and to produce more efficiently. So the bar of optimum is always just out of reach, materially speaking but also theoretically. At any point in time, capitalism is never functioning at its optimum capacity.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Businesses want the most work for their employees' bucks, employees want the most buck for their work. Both of those equations are matters of efficiency and both are vital components of capitalism. Finding the exact equilibrium that both parties can agree to is arguably the greatest efficiency.

 

[CiG]

 

[rms]

I disagree because this, to my understanding, assumes that there's a fixed level of optimum efficiency that can be achieved materially; but that's not true

just saying efficiency in a marketplace isn't defined as "the closest to human uprising as possible"

 

[CiG]

Lithuania is urging U.S. retail giant Walmart to stop selling clothing with Soviet hammer-and-sickle symbols, which it says insults victims of Soviet-era persecution.

"You wouldn't buy Nazi-themed clothing, would you?" the Baltic state's foreign minister, Linas Linkevicius, tweeted on September 7. "We trust @Walmart's moral stance & call to withdraw products with the symbols of mass murders."

Walmart sell commie gear? I had no idea, that's pretty funny and weird.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I don't have an issue with Walmart selling whatever, but I would love to see Eastern European countries throw leftist virtue-signalling techniques back into the left's face.

 

[CiG]

I doubt it will work by virtue-signalling alone, the left are shameless, especially when it comes to communism. Only way Walmart will bend is if there's a significant backlash which results in a loss of profits.

 

[Einherjar86]

Businesses want the most work for their employees' bucks, employees want the most buck for their work. Both of those equations are matters of efficiency and both are vital components of capitalism. Finding the exact equilibrium that both parties can agree to is arguably the greatest efficiency.

I think the fact that more companies are turning to automation challenges that equilibrium. Companies need some kind of labor force, yes; but ultimately, the bottom line for efficiency has less to with securing the labor force than it does with finding the balance between supply and demand that allows a company to charge as much as it can for products. Wages get in the way of that.

Furthermore, I don't think there exists an exact equilibrium between wages and production. In the case of small businesses, such an equilibrium may present itself (temporarily, at least); but in the case of mass production, companies will always look for way to get more labor for less wages, and workers will always look for ways to get more wages for less work. There's no equilibrium, only a tug of war, and optimum efficiency always manifests as at least one degree removed from current managerial conditions.

 

[Dak]

One problem not really covered here directly is that companies can't charge anything if people have no money. This is why there are increasing calls from people more involved in the AI/automation side for UBI. The problem though, all other economic issues aside (like where does the wealth come from for the transfer), is that this would likely only exacerbate extreme inequality. You create a slightly higher floor but an ever increasing ceiling (and that's a best case scenario minus heavy, heavy taxation....and good luck with that).

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I'm not really convinced by the automation doomsday scenario nor UBI as a solution. In such a scenario, there is obvious corporate incentive to support UBI; if you define the minimum annual income required to live, and companies define the minimum costs of selling the products to sustain life, all you're doing is creating a massive corporate welfare scheme. As long as the bulk of workers have no skills to earn additional wages, they will never manage to build wealth. I don't see how it isn't just Obamacare or for-profit college subsidies cranked to the max. I'd rather see mass nationalization of the farms and mines tbh.

I think more realistically, automation drives the costs of manufacturing way down, in large part because wage costs go way down. By the time robots are so productive that they take over virtually all non-innovative work, you should also see massive improvements in the efficiency of producing robots, meaning I don't see why the average Joe can't own a robot slave just as he owns a car. Automation and the resulting redistribution of access to labor is pretty much the key to creating a techno-agrarian Jeffersonian democracy.

I think the fact that more companies are turning to automation challenges that equilibrium. Companies need some kind of labor force, yes; but ultimately, the bottom line for efficiency has less to with securing the labor force than it does with finding the balance between supply and demand that allows a company to charge as much as it can for products. Wages get in the way of that.

Furthermore, I don't think there exists an exact equilibrium between wages and production. In the case of small businesses, such an equilibrium may present itself (temporarily, at least); but in the case of mass production, companies will always look for way to get more labor for less wages, and workers will always look for ways to get more wages for less work. There's no equilibrium, only a tug of war, and optimum efficiency always manifests as at least one degree removed from current managerial conditions.

Automation has been an ongoing process for quite some time, and has never caused significant employment fluctuations on a national scale before afaik. Equilibrium is basically always a tug of war, not sure where you're disagreeing.

 

[Dak]

I'm not really convinced by the automation doomsday scenario nor UBI as a solution. In such a scenario, there is obvious corporate incentive to support UBI; if you define the minimum annual income required to live, and companies define the minimum costs of selling the products to sustain life, all you're doing is creating a massive corporate welfare scheme. As long as the bulk of workers have no skills to earn additional wages, they will never manage to build wealth. I don't see how it isn't just Obamacare or for-profit college subsidies cranked to the max. I'd rather see mass nationalization of the farms and mines tbh.

I think more realistically, automation drives the costs of manufacturing way down, in large part because wage costs go way down. By the time robots are so productive that they take over virtually all non-innovative work, you should also see massive improvements in the efficiency of producing robots, meaning I don't see why the average Joe can't own a robot slave just as he owns a car. Automation and the resulting redistribution of access to labor is pretty much the key to creating a techno-agrarian Jeffersonian democracy.



Automation has been an ongoing process for quite some time, and has never caused significant employment fluctuations on a national scale before afaik. Equilibrium is basically always a tug of war, not sure where you're disagreeing.

I explicitly agree the UBI in the predicted scenario is simply corporate welfare. I hope you're right about a "techno-agrarian" Jefferson democracy, but I don't have enough faith in people.

 

[Einherjar86]

Automation has been an ongoing process for quite some time, and has never caused significant employment fluctuations on a national scale before afaik. Equilibrium is basically always a tug of war, not sure where you're disagreeing.

I think I'm disagreeing with your use of the word "exact" before equilibrium. That implies a stable, fixed relation between productivity and wages that doesn't actually exist if the two are always in a tug of war.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I think I'm disagreeing with your use of the word "exact" before equilibrium. That implies a stable, fixed relation between productivity and wages that doesn't actually exist if the two are always in a tug of war.

By exact I more meant precise, or definite. Certainly equilibria regularly shift according to changes in their respective variables, but for a given scenario, the market converges upon a particular value, which is close to exact within that instant, as opposed to equilibria which are independent of the variables of demand. In biochemistry, enzymatic steps involve forward and reverse reactions constantly in opposition to each other as they move millions of organic compounds from one form to another, yet despite this tug of war, the concentrations of reactants and products relative to each other remain fixed and converge upon a chemical equilibrium. The equilibrium will be maintained until some external force moves one concentration outside of its equilibrium, following which a new equilibrium (still highly active and competitive) will be found. Same thing fundamentally for supply and demand of labor (though obviously much more difficult to measure than chemicals in a test tube due to many more confounding variables).