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 Just Tony wrote:
I remember that one time in the 90's when capitalist industry managers said "Hey, lets completely eliminate our customer base!"

Remember that time when capitalist industry managers said "we don't need these employees, but lets keep paying them anyway so that maybe we can get back some of their paychecks from sales of our products", and didn't immediately realize that paying someone $X so that maybe they'll give you back part of $X in exchange for goods/services is less profitable than just keeping the entire $X and firing the employee? Yeah, I don't think that ever happened. If sales to your own employees are a significant percentage of your revenue you're almost certainly doing something very wrong and your company is about to die.

(Granted, we did get kind of close in the US car industry, where union contracts made it almost impossible to fire anyone and employees got paid to sit at home, but that nearly killed the industry and fixing that mess required throwing out the union contracts in favor of something more reasonable.)

Oh, that didn't happen? Probably right, because a capitalist economy operates off of three tenets: supply, demand, and profit. If there's no demand, no profit is to be made, so no supply will be created. Pretty basic. On the same tenet, however, no supply will be made if there's no profit. BOTH of those conditions are created with complete automation.

You are making the mistake of assuming that capitalism works as some kind of unified whole, and that companies will agree to keep people employed to create customers for each other. In reality company X doesn't give a if replacing all of their workers damages the customer base for companies Y and Z, they can improve their profit numbers for the quarter by slashing labor costs and let someone else worry about paying workers and creating customers. And if company X doesn't do this one of their rivals almost certainly will, putting company X out of business. It's the prisoner's dilemma, even if there's some theoretical perfect world for everyone the selfish incentive to cheat is too powerful and you can never reach the ideal outcome.

The popular thought on here is that the manufacturing industry will keep happily pounding out products while simultaneously getting most of their income fleeced by the government to give to people so they can buy the products being produced. In most cases, the people producing their goods will wind up losing money in the process. You've just eliminated any incentive to produce goods.

So let me get this straight: if you can only make $1 million profit per year instead of $10 million because of taxes you'd rather make $0 per year and close your factory? Doesn't sound like rational behavior from a profit-focused capitalist system.

That isn't a caste system but ok i see what you mean.

I'm saying, (I think) they will try to turn it into cast system, so they can cut off from the lower people. Like Rotshilds marrying only Rotshild. Same as nobles married only nobles, so peasants had no chance to step upper. Or, as example - Harry Potter "If you are not of special ancestry, then you will not become great".

Feudalism is not synonymous with aristocracy

Prices, dukes, lords, knights - all feudals. What's the difference?

bourgeoisie didn't chop the heads of aristocrats. The bourgeoisie had their heads removed by proles. Unless the terms used to mean something different during the French Revolution and bourgeois didn't always mean an oppulent and affluent class. Again, I see where you're going, it's just the terms that confused me.

They could not always cut their heads off, but always changing the system from feudal to bourgeois was accompanied by blood and an attempt to shift the aristocracy from the elite/rulers role. But now new aritocracy is formed and some changes are coming

 Freakazoitt wrote:

Feudalism is not synonymous with aristocracy

Prices, dukes, lords, knights - all feudals. What's the difference?

That one is a system of social organisation and one is a demographic. It's like saying millionaires and capitalism are the same thing. Sure, one is usually at the top of the other, but they're not the same thing and the former can exist outside of the latter. There are still thousands of aristocrats in Europe but there's no feudalism.

bourgeoisie didn't chop the heads of aristocrats. The bourgeoisie had their heads removed by proles. Unless the terms used to mean something different during the French Revolution and bourgeois didn't always mean an oppulent and affluent class. Again, I see where you're going, it's just the terms that confused me.

They could not always cut their heads off, but always changing the system from feudal to bourgeois was accompanied by blood and an attempt to shift the aristocracy from the elite/rulers role. But now new aritocracy is formed and some changes are coming

I think you've misunderstood me. You said the bourgeoisie beheaded aristocrats but the bourgeoisie were the aristocrats. I'm not sure what you are referring to when you talk about changing a system from feudal to bourgeois - the latter isn't a system, it's another demographic.

There are still thousands of aristocrats in Europe but there's no feudalism.

They are remnants of feudal era. I heard, in UK new lords are still nominated. But, it not provided with land and slave-peasants, so mostly it's just tradition.

bourgeoisie were the aristocrats

But they are traders, owners and artisans without special origin and they did not have rights under the old regime. So, they are not aristocrats (people with special rights of their origin).

 Freakazoitt wrote:

There are still thousands of aristocrats in Europe but there's no feudalism.

They are remnants of feudal era. I heard, in UK new lords are still nominated. But, it not provided with land and slave-peasants, so mostly it's just tradition.

They still aren't synonymous. Yes there are still new Lords in the UK. They aren't awarded lands but they do get lifetime membership (and associated expenses) of the House of Lords.

bourgeoisie were the aristocrats

But they are traders, owners and artisans without special origin and they did not have rights under the old regime. So, they are not aristocrats (people with special rights of their origin).

They were (and are, if you believe bourgeois is still an appropriate term) overlapping groups. And they were beheaded by a group that did not overlap with them.

You just muddled terms. It's fine, you don't need to argue your way out of it.

EDIT: In any case, we're talking off-topic semantics. I don't really buy a return to feudalism nor a caste system as a result of automation - at least not until we've reached our far future dystopian hell.

 Peregrine wrote:
So let me get this straight: if you can only make $1 million profit per year instead of $10 million because of taxes you'd rather make $0 per year and close your factory? Doesn't sound like rational behavior from a profit-focused capitalist system.

I mean... that's exactly the logic that killed my local companies so he's certainly not wrong in it's what they believe.

But funny how they never seem to notice or care that such a low marginal tax rate massively rewards the corporate raiding and active destruction of long term value in exchange for personal liquidity. Higher tax rates mean it's less rewarding to the individual to liquidate corporate value and actually causes better long term behavior within capitalism.

That said, if we're legitimately talking about a largely post scarcity world in terms of needs, why are we still discussing capitalism? Capitalism is all about who gets to eat, when that's no longer the question we're going to be faced with managing society at large so we don't force ourselves back into that situation. We need to consider post capitalism, what comes next and how much does it take from what we know. Or do we totter on pretending that we can't help those people because there isn't enough profit in it?

An aristocracy is a government of a hereditary class of nobles -- the aristocrats.

A number of European countries still have hereditary nobility but they aren't actually in control of the government because we've all transitioned to representative democracies of various shades.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
An aristocracy is a government of a hereditary class of nobles -- the aristocrats.

A number of European countries still have hereditary nobility but they aren't actually in control of the government because we've all transitioned to representative democracies of various shades.

Articles matter.

Broadly, the aristocracy is the highest class of individuals in a class-based society whereas an aristocracy is when these people hold power.

That said, obviously the UK is no longer an aristocracy but certain aristocrats do continue to inherit and hold meaningful political power (whilst others have symbolic political power, and others have neither).

What tends to happen in Britain is that people who achieve high positions of political power get co-opted into the aristocracy, e.g. Lord Mandelson, etc, in the various Honours lists.

It's arguable if this gives these individuals more power than they already have thanks to their history and connections. It certainly gives the Prime Minister a power of patronage.

However I'm getting a bit off the topic of robotisation.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
I remember that one time in the 90's when capitalist industry managers said "Hey, lets completely eliminate our customer base!"

Remember that time when capitalist industry managers said "we don't need these employees, but lets keep paying them anyway so that maybe we can get back some of their paychecks from sales of our products", and didn't immediately realize that paying someone $X so that maybe they'll give you back part of $X in exchange for goods/services is less profitable than just keeping the entire $X and firing the employee? Yeah, I don't think that ever happened. If sales to your own employees are a significant percentage of your revenue you're almost certainly doing something very wrong and your company is about to die.

(Granted, we did get kind of close in the US car industry, where union contracts made it almost impossible to fire anyone and employees got paid to sit at home, but that nearly killed the industry and fixing that mess required throwing out the union contracts in favor of something more reasonable.)

Oh, that didn't happen? Probably right, because a capitalist economy operates off of three tenets: supply, demand, and profit. If there's no demand, no profit is to be made, so no supply will be created. Pretty basic. On the same tenet, however, no supply will be made if there's no profit. BOTH of those conditions are created with complete automation.

You are making the mistake of assuming that capitalism works as some kind of unified whole, and that companies will agree to keep people employed to create customers for each other. In reality company X doesn't give a if replacing all of their workers damages the customer base for companies Y and Z, they can improve their profit numbers for the quarter by slashing labor costs and let someone else worry about paying workers and creating customers. And if company X doesn't do this one of their rivals almost certainly will, putting company X out of business. It's the prisoner's dilemma, even if there's some theoretical perfect world for everyone the selfish incentive to cheat is too powerful and you can never reach the ideal outcome.

The popular thought on here is that the manufacturing industry will keep happily pounding out products while simultaneously getting most of their income fleeced by the government to give to people so they can buy the products being produced. In most cases, the people producing their goods will wind up losing money in the process. You've just eliminated any incentive to produce goods.

So let me get this straight: if you can only make $1 million profit per year instead of $10 million because of taxes you'd rather make $0 per year and close your factory? Doesn't sound like rational behavior from a profit-focused capitalist system.

You tried this false equivalency crap the last time this discussion happened. You are completely misrepresenting what I'm saying. IF there is no customer base at all, then NONE of the manufacturers will be producing anything. At all.

I think it's time to give you a better explanation.



In the beginning, the concept of property came to be, and with it came the concept of wealth and wealth disparity.

From that moment, the drive of people in general has been to pursue property and the acquisition of wealth. The only question was: how do we get wealth and property? Well, if someone else OWNS that already, you can either A: exchange goods or services for said wealth and/or property, B: flat out take their stuff, usually killing them in the process, C: Use governmental taxation to take it and trust the government to redistribute that wealth evenly across the populace, or D: convince them that they nobly need to simply give their stuff out for free to the world directly.

Capitalism is option A, and is also the only one in this process that actually GENERATES wealth, and is why even the highly vaunted "socialist" governments like those found in Scandinavia use it to generate the wealth they seek to spread around.

Option B is the tenets behind communism and the forty seven different versions of anarchy, apparently. These generate no wealth without a violent regime to keep the workforce "motivated" to contribute, and the lower classes don't see that wealth at all.

Option C is what the new blood US liberals are pushing, and the same thing that's killed more than a few economies. European countries flit around the periphery of this, but are closing in on it with due haste. In this, wealth is still generated, but pressure on the manufacturers and the wealthy coupled with other nations that DON'T operate like this tend to draw the manufacturers away so that suddenly you are generating LESS wealth, and eventually NO wealth.

Option D exists solely in the minds of people who think it's the responsibility of the wealthy to carry them through life, and shouldn't even really be considered as "the feels" is about as far from any governance/economic model as you can get.


Of those options, automating all or nearly all of the workforce would make ALL them untenable. You wouldn't plumb someone's apartment complex without compensation solely because it's the "nice" thing to do, nor would you do that much work for the pay equivalence of 4 hours behind a gas station register. Take THAT principle, and extrapolate it out on a larger scale. Instead of plumbing a house, insert producing shoes or some other necessary commodity. Eliminate the motivation for producing the shoes, and nobody will produce the shoes.


NO manufacturer wants their base gone, so they are quite unified in keeping things running to where there's a profit to be made. Robots may one day be good enough to eliminate the workforce (A LONG way off, there are still far too many jobs that a robot can't manage to do) but it would do no good to implement it wholesale. Without someone to buy the goods, nobody will be incentivized to produce the goods. Since goods nowadays are componential in nature, you're looking at SEVERAL steps in the chain to make one item. NOBODY in that chain would benefit from wholesale automation. It's a pipe dream to use for leverage to attempt to utilize Option D above, and it falls flat.

There's nothing I love more than 'how dare you misrepresent what I'm saying about capitalism! Here's a caricature of communism mediated through the lens of Joseph McCarthy'

Communism is a caricature.

...err.

.. no politics folks.

Ut sementem feceris ita metes