/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Yeah, no shit

>can be sold as a perfect generic clone

Yeah no, thats where electronic payments come in. If they control it they control who can sell what.

You are counting failures instead of counting successes, which is the better comparator. A society that tries 1000 bad ideas to find 50 good ones will advance much faster than one that tries 5 good ideas and 10 bad ones!
Relative to feudalism, the private sector is remarkable at innovation - because it allows all the stupid failures. You can't tell in advance what will work, so letting people willing to risk an L gamble on a new idea is a pretty good way of doing it!

Think more seriously. You don't have to like the private sector, but hate it accurately. Aim to surpass it rather than just slander it with nonsense.

>>2792578
Doesn’t happen under monopolies and cartels who prefer recycling old content and just outlawing competition and new ideas

>>2792578
>A society that tries 1000 bad ideas to find 50 good ones will advance much faster than one that tries 5 good ideas and 10 bad ones!

that's the dumbest sentence i've ever read in my life and i'm not even going to dignify it by trying to argue with the retarded pseudomathematics you just pulled directly from your asshole

the private sector doesn't care about advancing society, they care about capital, quick and easy right-now capital. real innovation requires looking very far ahead, not thinking about stuff that pays off right now but stuff that might pay off 20, 30, 40 years from now, stuff that the inventor probably won't even live long enough to personally benefit from.

an innovation like the internet could never have come from the private sector, it began as a public sector military project in 1969 and absolutely no one outside of the public sector was interested in it or saw its potential, it wasn't until nearly three decades later that private sector took an interest in the internet, and when they finally did decide to invest in it they went crazy with rampant speculation and investor fraud and turned the whole idea into a sleazy pump and dump and caused the dotcom bubble and a market crash that burned trillions of dollars and bankrupted nearly every tech company on earth.

>>2792766
The transformer architecture was made at google and quantum computing while not originally from the private sector has had major improvements from google/microsoft.

Here is a map of countries by public sector size

>>2792766
the private sector is only efficient if you strong-arm it into doing things, otherwise it's just a worse version of doing something with government money

>>2792548

Life expectancy and quality rising is almost entirely because of new technologies. The Capitalist may say this only strengthens the private sectors case but I say whether or not the public sector can advance technology fastest is second to it's ability to use the technologies to help the people without focusing on just the most profitable areas.

Charts showing countries metrics improving always show the periphery at the end, we need to help everyone and the private sector will never succeed at that.

Even the most "generous" or "worker friendly" private businesses only are so for profit. Give some money to charity, help employees retire, pay above minimum wage and everything else is forgotten! Genuine help and modernization of the suffering is a Frontier they won't ever cross.

>>2792548
Yes. patent trolling, planned obsolesence, destruction of productive forces for price-gouging… these are the main "innovations" of the private sector

in the USSR, Genrich Altshuller actually developed a scientific method of innovation and invention, called TRIZ, which is now used by capitalist firms all over the world. This is how they actually innovate when they need to: by using Socialist methods!

>>2792548
It's more as if innovation becomes perverted by the private sector. Captialism's one and only goal is profit. Profit (theoretically) is driven by demand–although in practice it can be decorrelated with consumer demand immensely, financialized, market sentiment etc: this is well accounted for in marxist theory (he is often underappreciated for anticipating financial capital through his essential concept of "fictitious captial"). Innovation that serves demand is the "good case" for capitalism, but this ignores how marketing can manufacture demand, and moreover, how capital can produce its own demands, such as various bubbles where the metric becomes the target, i.e Goodhart's law (companies get invested in because they were invested in, products get developed because a certain set of capital commitments are chasing other captial, etc). Private innovation best for mostly frivolous or secondary inventions, rarely anything that addresses pure social need, for related reasons.

>>2792826
>(he is often underappreciated for anticipating financial capital through his essential concept of "fictitious captial").
financial capital already existed which is why he writes the entire chapter on fictitious capital in volume 3, to describe what already exists.

>>2792781
yeah no shit in a capitalist system the capitalists poach researchers and use publically funded research to then implement products and services to sell to acquire more capital. are you fucking stupid?

>>2792829
Maybe "anticipated" is the wrong word, but he certainly explicated it. He understood that it would become an increasingly dominating factor in capital relations.

>>2792834
Yes, agreed on that point.

another important thing to remember is that a lot of seemingly private sector research firms that made important discoveries were not really private sector. the famous bell labs for example, was run by at&t, but from 1934 to 1984 at&t effectively functioned as a state-sanctioned monopoly, the government let at&t have sole ownership of the entire country's telephone network and ban any competitors or third-party devices from connecting to the network in exchange for fcc regulation of their pricing. since there were no other telephone companies the american public essentially were paying a telephone tax and at&t was guaranteed a fixed stable revenue stream no matter what they did, so they didn't need to worry about quarterly profits or growth, uncle sam gave them a blank check they could blow on all kinds of expensive high-risk long-term r&d projects like transistors, lasers, solar cells, unix, c, etc. the ironic downside of all this though was the actual telephone network itself - the thing the telephone company was supposed to care about - was an exorbitantly overpriced outdated unreliable pile of shit.

>>2792766
The steam engine, Britain's railroads, and the airplane came from the private sector. In the case of the railroads there was even a wild speculative bubble ("railway mania") where a lot of bad unviable railways were built.

It should also be said that railways are an excellent example of where meddling can go wrong. Making a railway profitable as a railway is difficult, so a lot of people are biased towards seeing this as an anti-market argument. The reality is more nuanced: railways work best in the private sector when they're a branch of a property investment firm. Build a mall on top of the station and houses along the line and the losses from running trains will pale in comparison to your property revenues… But we don't like letting people do this anymore.

Moreover your public/private dichotomy is a false one. The US state is a capitalist state, US state innovations are capitalist innovations. "The private sector only innovates if you make it!" does not inherently translate into "you'd have more innovation if you abolished the private sector"
(Though it should be noted: leftypol is private sector!! The US government built the network, but it would never in a million years have "innovated" a communist imageboard! WorldCom was surely a small price to pay for leftypol.org at its peak!)

>>2792920
can you go shill neoliberal capitalism somewhere else?

>>2792928
No, because that's not what I'm doing. Nothing undermines socialism and communism more than bad arguments that are easily refuted, that indeed are refuted by the very website you're posting on!
You'll note I let >>2792581 off because that's a much stronger argument and I'm happy to leave to implication that the status quo constitutes such a situation, or that capitalism invariably trends in that direction.
There are partial counterarguments. For example: monopolies like to create perfectly competitive/innovative markets in complementary sectors. e.g. Microsoft helped PC clone manufacturers commoditize away IBMs PC monopoly because more, cheaper pieces of computer hardware = more DOS/Windows sales, so while they frustrated OS innovation they helped hardware innovation.
But that's getting much more abstract and much less likely to come up because even status quo defenders and neolibs barely research such phenomena (preferring bad arguments of their own), so it's unnecessary to touch on. The idea that you can cast aside the entire industrial revolution because we're in a software bubble, on the other hand, is risible.

>>2792928
is he shilling it if he's pointing out factual contributions of private capital towards economic and technological developments? should we not understand the gains of these things, yet also their failings?

>>2792920
>Build a mall on top of the station and houses along the line and the losses from running trains will pale in comparison to your property revenues… But we don't like letting people do this anymore.
Why should we? And who is we faggot? Railways that tend to work are essentially run like state run monopolies more often than not, since there is essentially no competition.

>>2792963
the point is that the private sector does innovate despite not necessarily being good, and that denying this fact just makes you foolish for no reason

the private sector innovates but still requires gov money and bailouts.

>>2792963
because doing it that way you integrate public transit with housing and shopping and you build nice walkable places to live, and you do that even though the company only cares about making money. Much of London and Japan were built this way.
Meanwhile, a huge amount of state subsidy went into creating American style nightmares that make owning a car mandatory.

Any given railway line is basically a monopoly (though the EU has open access laws that provide some competition), but if you force a railway company to only operate trains you put them at a huge disadvantage against cars, buses, and airplanes. If you're going to attack the blunders of private sector investment and praise the federal government building the railways, sanity demands you recognise the federal government also spent a fortune creating highways and with that, subsidising car-centric suburbs and low density single family homes with it, an outcome the market could've beaten.

>>2792959
>private capital towards economic and technological developments?
<private capital lol
the innovative power of hedge funds and private equity, who didnt know
>The private sector only innovates if you make it!" does not inherently translate into "you'd have more innovation if you abolished the private sector"
(Though it should be noted: leftypol is private sector!! The US government built the network, but it would never in a million years have "innovated" a communist imageboard! WorldCom was surely a small price to pay for leftypol.org at its peak!)
Great example where the "private sector" takes credit for something it didnt make nor build. Railways were built often under state contracts and where money and risk where not considered an issue, military contracts are lucrative for a reason. That the private and public spheres are false dichotomies is true, like how in the Soviet Union the space race and other achievements were cut short because they actually believed competition produced better results.

>>2792975
>Much of London and Japan were built this way.
Explains alot.
> If you're going to attack the blunders of private sector investment and praise the federal government building the railways, sanity demands you recognise the federal government also spent a fortune creating highways and with that, subsidising car-centric suburbs and low density single family homes with it, an outcome the market could've beaten
very true indeed. first pic is the result of the market. in other words, the federal government should have massively invested in public housing aka the soviet union, i agree

>>2792989
second pic what housing could and should look like

>>2792990
Looks too road centric to me still

>>2792983
"Often" is a nonsense weasel word. Yes, obviously, the state built some railways - but did it build the first railway? No! Did it build the bulk of London (indeed, of Britain's) network? No! Did it build the bulk of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_companies_in_Japan#Major_private_railways ? No! You can't side step by that going "um, yes, but the Japanese state bankrupted their state-owned railway company by mandating it build lines to nowhere to help LDP politicians get elected"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_and_Manchester_Railway
I mean read this: merchants and land speculators!
(The act of parliament did not fund the railway in any way, shape, or form, it merely gave approval to build it. During the subsequent mania, a number of technologically impossible lines were approved - thank god no state capital was at risk!)

>>2792990
Replace the road with a railway and allow dense development and it could happen under any modern economic system.

>>2792794
wtf bros nobody told me there were so many aes

>>2792828
Yeah 👍

>>2792794
>looks at map
wait so the free market is a myth?

>>2792920

yeah railways work best under the private sector that's why america's railway system is the best in the world and everybody in america uses it all the time today

>>2792920
>Moreover your public/private dichotomy is a false one. The US state is a capitalist state, US state innovations are capitalist innovations.

?????????????????

>>2793015
>>2793036
Take it with a grain of salt because I got my information from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_sector_size
If this is true it is crazy that China is more privatized than Israel and Vietnam is more privatized than America.

>>2792973
>the private sector innovates
chiefly using soviet methodology (TRIZ). see >>2792822

>>2793187
wait until he finds out that the capitalist state uses soviet methodologies like TRIZ and foreign students from socialist or formerly socialist nations to do most of their research.

>>2792983
> competition produced better results.
competition also produces monopoly, and monopoly produces lack of competition, and lack of competition produces price fixing and lack of innovation. So capitalism continually falls into these crises which is cured by the government intervening in different ways: in Teddy Roosevelt's time, trust busting artificially reintroduced competition after winners had already emerged. In Franklin Roosevelt's time, a few crumbs of social democracy were given in the form of a New Deal. In our time, the government simply bails out the banks and the monopolies because they are "too big to fail" and they ought to be subsidized even when they are not profitable (like the tech industries) or their rate of profit is low because of a crisis of overproduction, which they handle by destroying their own productive forces even while being subsidized. The US has even been known to subsidize farmers to NOT grow crops. So it seems stagnation is subsidized just as much as production under capitalism.

>>2793168
The US public sector fucked US rail by subsidising highways and imposing various planning and ownership barriers to having them being an integrated part of real estate companies. This is literally in the same thread you're in. ( >>2792975 ) Learn to read!

P.s. the US freight railway network is incredible! It's the biggest and most profitable on earth, so even with those caveats: YES

>>2793221
If this was true it would prove nothing. The USSR died, while the private sector of the capitalist world took all it's good ideas, and this is supposed to convince anyone that the private sector is bad at innovation or at adopting innovations no matter their source?
Think, anon! Think!!

>>2793256
>P.s. the US freight railway network is incredible! It's the biggest and most profitable on earth

that was a nice little clever move of the goalposts there, we were talking about railway networks in general and now you're talking solely about freight railway networks. what's the point in even talking to you if you're just going to resort to these kinds of bad faith debate tactics to defend your obviously contrarian troll position? what is the point to you as a person? why are you even alive?

>>2793263
I touched on passenger rail before doing so you illiterate moron. You ignored literally everything but the postscript.

board desperately needs another capital reading group holy shit

>>2793276
Richard Scarry would be above the average poster's reading level.

>>2793270

you said the us government ruined us rail by subsidizing highways instead of railroad companies, which completely undermines your whole point about how the private sector is better at innovation than the public sector, then in the next paragraph you say the us rail system is incredible and is the best rail system on earth. is the rail system in the us good or bad? did privatization help or hurt the us rail system?

also railroads aren't even relevant to this topic - railroad networks are infrastructure, not innovation. we already know that the private sector is not good at infrastructure and is completely incapable of doing things like laying railroads and highways and electrical cables and pipelines across thousands of owned property lines (or unincorporated territories full of hostile indigenous natives) without the help of a government, that's already a given and there's no point in even arguing about that.

what we are talking about is innovation, i.e. technological discoveries, new ideas. before the modern era, technological innovation was a lot cheaper than it is now - two guys running a bicycle shop could use some of their profits to build a crude airplane in their garage and patent their invention. and then of course, instead of allowing this new technology to flourish and spread, they initiated a long patent war and sued everyone else who tried to build airplanes and stalled the development of us aerospace technology until the government finally stepped in and put a stop to the patent war so that they could use the technology for world war 1, but by then american airplane technology was so far behind that the us military ended up using european aircraft in the war.

but anyway, the days of small local businessmen tinkering in the garage trying to build some mechanical contraption to patent are long gone now, now we are in the modern age of semiconductor research and huge complex software projects and quantum physics and nuclear magnetic spectroscopy and fda-approved clinical trials, modern r&d is extremely high-tech and expensive, not something an individual or a small business can do in their off hours, only trillion dollar corporations and national governments can do any real innovation now. but the same old dynamics are still very much in play - the private sector's research projects are entirely self-serving and focused on short term profits and attracting venture capital, patenting something and sitting on the patent and hoarding knowledge as intellectual property so that nobody else in the world can use it or develop it any further and holding back technological progress, while countries like china where the state enforces a competition of ideas are rapidly closing the gap and eating our lunch.

>>2793256
>The US public sector fucked US rail by subsidising highways and imposing various planning and ownership barriers to having them being an integrated part of real estate companies. This is literally in the same thread you're in. ( >>2792975 ) Learn to read!

P.s. the US freight railway network is incredible! It's the biggest and most profitable on earth, so even with those caveats: YES
Kekek

>>2793246
>competition also produces monopoly, and monopoly produces lack of competition, and lack of competition produces price fixing and lack of innovation
holy circular argument, competition was the sole reason why the USSR lacked behind in the space race

>>2793263
ignore him, he literally uses profitability as a sign that something is successful

>>2793396
>le argument le circle
please consider that feedback loops actually exist especially in a system like capitalism which is founded on unsustainable feedback loops
>the USSR lacked behind in the space race
imagine believing this
also go back and read the rest of the post.

>>2793373
>innovation, i.e. technological discoveries, new ideas.
thats not what innovation is but rather the neoliberal definition. and its simply wrong. innovation is taking already existing technologies and combining these to create novel things, discovering is something you do in nature. any "innovation" you can think of, it applies. cars, the iphone, internet etc… the first cars were literally horse drawn carts without a horse but an engine, the engine itself a product of the same concept

>>2793405
>imagine believing this also go back and read the rest of the post.
I dont, i was talking to the neoliberal shill. But yes, competition (there was no single centrally planned unit like under nasa) was the sole reason why the USSR werent the first at the moon. I dont consider that to important of a goal but the USSR did try.

>>2793276
I'm just going to add to this point because I think a lot of anons are getting lost in the weeds with capitalists *cant* innovate. I don't think this is a dialectical reading.

Yes of course the general intellect is the mass of social knowledge brought into production, but the way that knowledge is used in production is innovative because of the capitalists need to revolutionize production. You can nit-pick that this is 'fake' innovation but that argument to me just smacks of moralism.

"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. "

"The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? "

Manifesto

"Hence there is immanent in capital an inclination and constant tendency, to heighten the productiveness of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and by such cheapening to cheapen the labourer himself. "

"Modern industry never looks upon and treats the existing form of a process as final. The technical basis of that industry is therefore revolutionary, while all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative. By means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it is continually causing changes not only in the technical basis of production, but also in the functions of the labourer, and in the social combinations of the labour-process."

Capital

So on the one hand capital fetters and encloses scientific knowledge while also mobilizing it within production to destroy previous relations. I would call that fairly innovative!

>>2793434
i said unit but what i rather meant was state directed agency, ogas had an even worse fate because of it. corn man fucked it up

it's kind of beaten into everyone's heads in the west that capitalism and free markets are the same thing, but that's not really the case at all. capitalism is exactly what the name says - capital-ism, a single-minded devotion to accumulating capital, nothing more and nothing less. capitalism isn't about free markets or competition or individual liberty, it's about acquiring capital by any means necessary, such as building a system where private monopolies can control the market and eliminate competition and infringe upon the liberty of others by way of judges and the court system, i.e the state. if you try to develop some kind of product or technology and someone else is sitting on the patent, you will be taken into court and a state appointed judge will rule against you and the patent holder will take every penny you own. that's not a free market, that is a state run protection racket.

>>2793444
this is just libertarianism - crony capitalism isnt a serious theory.

>>2793457
>this is just libertarianism

what is libertarian about the state being used as an instrument of technological repression? seems like the opposite of libertarianism to me.

if people like the wright brothers or thomas edison relied solely on their own resources to monopolize their technology, like they paid hired goons to go murder all of their potential competitors and smash up all their machines and steal all their plans and blueprints, then that would be a truly free market.

but even in a world with no laws at all they obviously could not have had the resources to do something like that, at least not without having the same thing also being done to them. the only way they could have maintained their monopoly is with the help of the state and patent law and the court system that sided with them and against their competitors.

>>2793483
Ick need to fix it
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch10.htm#:~:text=that%20private%20economic%20and%20private%20property%20relations%20constitute%20a%20shell%20which%20no%20longer%20fits%20its%20contents

But yeah read Lenin and Hilferding.

>>2793436
>I would call that fairly innovative!
Marx wasnt talking about the modern (neoliberal) definition of innovation, which is purely idealist metaphysical nonsense. How can you read that and think this is what he meant? The cheapening of labour was also "innovative"? His whole point is that it was "revolutionary" when compared to the previous mode of production so it logically follows that the socialist mode of production will also be revolutionary compared to capitalism and eliminate most of the forces that hinder further social development.

>>2793495
Except for the quotes about how its revolutionary within the current form of social production too. The Grundrisse really hammers this point too.

Entire thread is just moralism that capital can't do nuffin. It's retarded and isn't Marxism.

>>2793477
>what is libertarian about the state being used as an instrument of technological repression
>technological repression
kek, what kind of definition of the state is that? The idea that its the "state" that hampers technological development is straight up a ancap talking point, i would argue child prostitution sucks however

>>2793510
>Except for the quotes about how its revolutionary within the current form of social production too
And? His whole point is that socialism would leap that a hundred times, and that it was already possible in the most advanced countries *at that time*. Meaning, most countries currently on earth are ripe for the lower phase of communism and the resulting economic development would make the USSR's and China's growth rates look like stagnation

>>2793434
>I dont, i was talking to the neoliberal shill.
but i wasn't shilling neoliberalism. holy shit read my fucking post.

>>2793516
>The idea that its the "state" that hampers technological development is straight up a ancap talking point

you know that's not what i said you reactionary dolt you even quoted the text yourself - "the state being used as an instrument" as in the state and the private company working in tandem. obviously anarcho-capitalism is a nonsensical idea not even worthy of discussion, let's not derail the thread with stupid strawman accusations.

my point is that the neoliberal capitalist system, which relies heavily on state intervention to even exist at all, also relies heavily on state intervention, i.e. the court system, to stifle competition and therefore stifle innovation, something that is often glossed over by proponents of intellectual property law and so-called "free market capitalism".

>>2793405
>>2793396
Insane, even if you want to say the USSR lost the space race. NASA was completely government owned and ran. A bunch of innovative that were later sold to the private sector came out of NASA. NASA isn't innovative anymore and the U.S is lagging behind in space technology because NASA was stripped of all its copper wiring and sold off to shit like elons SpaceX and Jeff Bezos blue origin.

>>2793540
which one of us are you replying to because that was basically my point

i think that patents and the whole concept of "intellectual property" were always bullshit ideas to begin with and the more technology evolves the more meaningless the idea of intellectual property becomes. we've already seen this happen with the advent of things like personal computers, the internet, and cheap digital storage that ushered in an era where things like music and movies and books were no longer tied to their physical formats and could be copied and distributed infinitely by anyone nearly free of charge and IP holders and the legal system have been scrambling to adapt to this ever since. IP law was built on the assumption that copying would always be time consuming and costly and scarce, and then suddenly it wasn't. and now with the advent of AI, we are approaching another new era where not only making exact copies of intellectual property is easy and fast and cheap, but also deconstructing and analyzing and modifying and re-implementing intellectual property is becoming easy and fast and cheap. IP law was built on the assumption that authorship would always be time consuming and expensive and scarce and traceable back to a single original author, now suddenly it isn't. how can the legal system possibly adapt to this? there won't be enough courts and judges in the world to handle this kind of caseload and trying to automate the judicial process with machines would be its own huge can of worms, not to mention it would simply devolve into an endless war of attrition/arms race between automated courts detecting infringement and automated infringers finding new ways to infringe without getting caught. will machine-assisted reverse engineering be the final nail in the coffin for the concept of intellectual property?

The anons in this thread have done more to win me over to neoliberalism (mostly by showing how stupid anti-neolibs are) than any of neoliberalism's own advocates.

>>2793572
it's not "bullshit" it serves a purpose: protecting the ruling class.
>>2793574
>vaguepost king quotes nobody and responds to no args

>>2793575

meaning != purpose. meaning is the "why", the rationale and intellectual significance of the idea, purpose is the "what", the actionable goals of the idea.

the idea of intellectual property has always had plenty of purposes, but in my opinion it never really had any meaning, any rational basis - the idea that information can be a form of privately owned property has always been bullshit, a nonsensical and unrealistic idea.

the only reason we were able to treat information as property is because of technological limitations that made information difficult to encode/copy/modify/transmit/etc., but as i described, these technological limitations do not last. intellectual property makes unrealistic demands of reality and reality is refusing to accommodate them. that is why it is bullshit.

>>2793606
> but in my opinion it never really had any meaning, any rational basis
for the ruling class, protecting their own class position is a perfectly rational basis, even if the tools they used to do that appear irrational to everyone but themselves

>>2793692

well if we are going to preserve our sanity and live in rational objective reality we have to refrain from internalizing the irrationality and solipsism of the ruling class, even doing it inadvertantly through careless use of language

>>2793575
and is merely a debate addict