So deep. So profound.
> Logistics is the filmic annihilation of capitalist relations to time by a force of ultra-cinematic space. Logistics isn’t a feat of temporal duration, it’s a feat of spatial presence.
Such overwrought prose. Such "forcing everything into a Marxist framework."
Leonard A. Read talked about the pencil and how no one person could possibly make one, in 1958: https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl.html?chapter_n... and he wasn't the first, either.
The supply chain expands, but the principle stays the same.
One of the reasons Marx is so popular is that his writing is vague enough that people can read a very wide range of meaning into the words. Religious leaders and politicians often follow the same playbook to great success.
Stalin had only read scraps of the first volume, the one that divides people into good and evil, the one that doesn't actually try to find the underlying problem, it was only natural that he was doomed to failure. Imagine being wrong while fully believing your cause to be infallible.
The problem with Marx isn't that he is vague, it is that you have to read 2700 pages of difficult to read text which nobody, not even the staunchest supports have done. Why? Because it would take more than 160 hours to both read and understand what he has written. You may have to reread it twice because the third volume gives you a new context for the first and second.
Marxism is doomed due to bounded rationality.
I don't think this is true, and I say this as someone who's read Marx (almost) back to back. The ambiguities are sometimes mathematical, and there are debates as to meaning in some places, but the overal thesis and critiques are anything but vague, whether you agree with them or not.
For those interested, I recommend Michael Heinrich's biography of Marx ('Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society'; volume 1 covers the young Marx up to the end of his studies and delves deep into the intellectual and political context of that time in Germany and Europe. Very informative.)
His 'An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital' is on my to-read list:
https://files.libcom.org/files/Karl%20Marx%20and%20the%20Bir...
https://files.libcom.org/files/Michael_Heinrich,_Alex_Locasc...
I imagine the same city folk laughed at all the things country rubes like my grandparents didn't know. Of course, one being the child of an immigrant and the other immigrating as a child, and quite poor to boot, they would have faced plenty of derision for that as well. IIRC they also didn't get indoor plumbing and toilets until the early 1950's, so they probably would have been laughed at for that too.
A farmer be forgiven for believing that their fertilizer is made from manure and not petrochemicals made thousands of miles away?
Speaking of the latter, there's one related phenomenon on TikTok which I never see talked about, but is quite interesting / educational. Some production workers set up a TikTok live feed at work so you can see their part of how things are made or shipped. I've seen factory workers in Vietnam, farmers from all over the world, loggers, construction workers, and too many craftsmen to count. Once had insomnia and ended up watching a 5 AM livestream of a sawmill worker methodically turning various sized tree trunks into uniform planks. That was oddly relaxing and fascinating.
"Computer, 1 whole of chicken please. Roasted."
Every week at least a few end up in the trash, because they turned black and no one wants them anymore
So some dude, thousands of kilometers away, grew his bananas, put them in a boat, for a weeks long trip to Europe, followed by hundreds of kilometers in a truck, to end up in my office trash
This is a simple example
It's not about what was possible before, of course we've been shiping stuff world wide for a long time, it's about the scale and banality of it and the scale and banality of waste that comes with it. Nothing is measured with the "absurdity" scale, everything is measured with the "money" scale. A lot of what we now consider normal is complete madness
Along with millions of other bananas that got eaten. You're arguing against economies of scale here, and you'll need to show your work rather than dismissing long-distance trade as "madness".
So long before they turn all black, they're taken to the food bank and given away to whomever wants them at their central location. If a banana does make it all the way to black, it means someone bought it and then didn't eat it.
There is actually competition among the food banks for supermarkets' unwanted food. One will go to the supermarket manager and ask for their unwanted food and get told "Sorry, we're already giving it to Second Harvest."
It isn't only produce. The gleaner regularly fills up his car with breads, milk, and lots of other stuff.
I eat plenty banana and almost never throw any away. And when I do, the reason is never "because I didn't eat it in time".
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13166586-the-fish-that-a...
Capitalism is absurd, what it makes humans do is absurd. It's also useful and has some worthwhile properties.
Instead, they’ve decided that minimum wages at home need to be X $£€ and X/100 everywhere else, so they can offshore everything. Nobody is forcing the West to make shoes in China!
If no one, including you, has read it, then how can anyone, including you, possibly know whether or not it contains "the good answers"?
> That extends to most people that make things; they know who it goes to and how it gets there, but the person who gets it doesn't know where it came from and how it got to them.
People who make things seriously, at least. People who think groceries come from the store and haven’t thought past that will still be able to cook a meal while a more serious home cook or a good professional chef knows more about where their ingredients come from. But this only goes a couple levels deep at most. The chef might know where the farmer’s fertilizer comes from (I think that’s part of what’s implied by “organic food”) but the farmer will definitely know. But for petrochemical fertilizer, there’s a whole petrochemical supply chain before that which the fertilizer manufacturer will understand even better than the farmer.
Life isn't a race to consume everything as much and as fast as possible
Human beings are greedy and shortsighted, and they especially want to have more than the people they surround themselves with. Any sustainable solution will need to take this into account.
Interesting about TikTok. But all the content niches are so segregated now due to algorithm recommendations, I'm not sure if these are being watched by only the interested, or are they watched by "everyone" in general?
I took a single banana as an example, now think about the millions of animals we slaughter every year which end up straight to the bin etc.
It's like cars, a single car is fine, 1.4 billion cars are not, I think most people just don't comprehend the scale of it all
In trivially provably less efficient ways.
Economists and market fundamentalists keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.
Ideally, it's better not to overproduce and overbuy. But I'm suggesting making the best of a situation where the bananas can either go to the landfill or still be of some use.
Some things cannot reasonably be produced domestically.
Some things are about attempting to shrink labour costs.
It’s cheaper for Britain to send its shellfish to China to be de-shelled by hand, then send it back than it is to pay some folks to do it in the UK (or mechanise the task).
This is an extreme example (and a real one) that highlights what the parent is talking about.
Even when accounting for the human, fuel, cooling and spoilage cost of shipping around the world it’s “cheaper”, but that doesn’t make sense to me because at the end of it there is much less fuel and much less fish than it would have otherwise been.
There’s also not a strong reason to buy shoes made in China except for economic reasons, and more recently supply chain ones.
We can weave fabrics and we have domestic cotton. However, the economics (pushed cheaper by dirt cheap freight) are emphasising a global supply chain where one isn’t needed in most cases.
I’m picking on China a bit but it applies to basically everything where the labour is cheaper and the supply chain bends itself in a more inefficient path (everything else being equal) to capitalise(heh) on the lower labour costs.
This is a tiny fraction of a much bigger picture. The shellfish do not get their own private ship. It's cheap because the UK is already importing so much that when the ships return to China empty, they might as well pick up some shellfish on their way home. Then, the de-shelled shellfish is valuable enough to get a spot on the next full ship heading out again.
Not nearly as crazy sounding.
And yes, of course there's always one more step that leads you to where you got in the end. Nobody established a new shipping route and built a new dedicated ship just to start de-shelling in China.
It's like when you look at some complex software that has a batshit crazy architecture, spaghetti code, 5 different code styles, hacks and is half procedural half OOP, and whatever else you consider a crime. But then you look at its history, how it's almost 30 years old, started procedural on a different OS, how its requirements vastly changed and extended over the decades in ways nobody could possibly anticipate, and suddenly, most of the crazy things don't seem so crazy anymore if you know the story behind the individual "crimes" committed. But thst still doesn't mean that looking at the whole picture can't reveal a batshit crazy codebase that you wouldn't touch with a 5ft pole if you can avoid it.
Is the implication then that the space would be completely vacant?
How can you be certain that there's never been a ship commissioned because the demand became too great and thus more ships needed?
Even if it wasn't just shellfish, there's a million different things that ship back and forth and it shouldn't be necessary, it's enabled by cheap freight and cheap labour: but those things are an equivalent burden to the planet and our sum-total of ecological resources. So it's very wasteful when you think in those terms and not in our faux-scarcity monetary terms.
And you say this from your vast expertise in global economics?
Things evolved this way because a whole globe full of individual actors thought they made sense, based on prices. If they cease to make sense, those same actors will start doing something else because the prices they see will change.
It could take a while, but so would having another meeting of the Global Planning Committee.
But it’s kinda funny you said this:
> And you say this from your vast expertise in global economics?
Because I actually have a masters degree in international economics (with a focus on China) from Lund university in Sweden.
Environment, living and working conditions, resources and materials being taken from non-renewables sources, all of those are unimportant under capitalism, all of those are unimportant with capitalism and are the reason why no one asks themselves whether it's really worth shipping fruits from the other side of the world. Sometimes even by plane.
Doing stuff causes other stuff to happen. People die in car accidents, but a lot of death is prevented because we have cars, but then people also die because of pollution or get depressed because of noise pollution, and it keeps goin from there. It's hard. Let's be empathetic with each other, and good, and also think a lot about what is going on.
Price systems work by simplifying and transmitting information relevant to production and consumption decisions. If the price goes up, consumers who can go without the thing can stop buying it and producers who can make more of the thing can start making it, and they each have the incentive to do so.
When it comes to externalities with the environment, these can be incorporated into the price system. That’s how a carbon tax would work. It turns out that the intuitions of would-be central planners are often completely wrong.
The truth is, lots of people do ask themselves if it’s really worth it to ship bananas from Latin America to Europe. They work for the fruit company and their decision is based on the costs and benefits. If there are costs that they aren’t considering, then the solution is to incorporate those costs into the price system, not to have some banana commissar decree that oceanic banana shipping is banned because, in his enlightened gut feeling, it’s “absurd”.
> The problem isn’t capitalism; it’s the imperfection of humanity. No economic system in history has eliminated waste.
The fact that no economic system yet implemented at scale has eliminated waste does not necessarily imply that waste is unavoidable; we'd need to convincingly show that no such economic system could be possible. Similarly, I don't believe we can conclude that capitalism minimizes waste among all feasible, stable economic systems.
As far as balancing exploration and exploitation goes, it might be argued that we should focus on reaping the benefits of our current economic system and deprioritize the exploration new economic systems, but it's too much at this point (imo) to assert that exploration is futile.
My other thoughts:
• "Capitalism or central planning" is a false dichotomy; there are economic systems besides capitalism that have free markets.
• The goal of capital holders in a capitalist system is not efficiency (in the colloquial sense), but profit – planned obsolescence is perhaps the perfect example of this.
• I agree with you that central planners can be catastrophically wrong, and my current opinion is that incorporating externalities into the pricing system (through taxes) is a good idea. It can be difficult to correctly identify, distinguish, and price externalities; I wonder if a benefit of more local economic systems is that there are fewer externalities (by which I mean, actors experience more of the effects that they cause and impose fewer incidental effects on third parties), which would reduce the number of things we need to manually identify and correct.
This myth has been proven wtong again and again. It assumes that everything is available through a market; if my city doesn't have good cycling infrastructure, where do I put money so it improves ? Where do I find a more efficient justice system and how is its price ?
It assumes that all decisions are taken rationally based on a thorough analysis of the situation. The mere existence (and efficiency) of advertising, and the luxury sector, show that a not insignificant part of decisions are not taken based on self-interest.
It assumes that everyone has enough money to "vote with their wallet". I don't need to tell you how out of touch this assumption is when there is a whole class of people considered poor, aka not able to buy whatever they want/need.
> When it comes to externalities with the environment, these can be incorporated into the price system.
If you take into account how much a system like planet Earth provides and give it a realistic cost you realize it doesn't work. Take the ISS: it's cost around 100 billion dollars and provides the bare minimum for ~10 persons. That means that planet Earth costs at a minimum 10 billion dollars per capita, and that's far from covering it all.
The only thing you can do is have a central system that puts limits on capitalism, by introducing taxes and such. Which exactly means it's not able to handle everything.
> not to have some banana commissar decree that oceanic banana shipping is banned because, in his enlightened gut feeling, it’s “absurd”.
I hope the arguments people are giving are not making you believe that the only alternative is a central authority acting on feelings. That would be a complete misconstruction of the opposing POV.
Or eating locally grown stuff that doesn't need to be shipped form the other side of the planet, but when you say that people think you're the mad man... I'm telling you, the whole system is mad, you're just too deep into it to realize, the dissonance would be too strong
Economies of scale means individual suffering turns into statistical noise.
What I can say is that on a more local scale, the non-capitalist systems I've had experience with have been much more pleasant than the ones where a small set of people held most of the power over production.
For example, the government sector makes up a third of New Zealand GDP. https://www.statista.com/statistics/436523/ratio-of-governme...
Also if you look at how you “spend” your own time you might find that a lot of it is not on purely capitalist hours, but instead time is spent on hobbies, sports, children, friends, family and other pursuits that would be regarded as non-capitalist.
Edit: I would be regarded as a capitalist within New Zealand (I am a successful founder, I don’t much believe in agricultural/industry subsidies), but I would be regarded as on-the-left in the US (I’m generally supportive of government health systems and social equality).
If there’s an ecological cost that isn’t being accounted for, the solution is to adjust policies so the cost is reflected, e.g. via a carbon tax. And I’m sure if we had a carbon tax, we would eat more locally grown food because it would be more cost effective. On the other hand, different parts of the world vary widely in terms of what can be grown there and how efficiently it. It’s a complicated problem that can’t be solved top-down, and certainly can’t be solved by some armchair hippie going “the whole system is mad, man!”
Just because there is even more out there to miss out on doesn’t make missing out on bananas less of an issue.
I assume you can just stop to eat altogether, because you’re not consuming the vast majority of food out there.
I don't have to try "the vast majority" of other stuff to enjoy the banana.
The result is airliners often flew nearly empty.
Once that was deregulated, a titantic shift occurred, such as the emergence of the hub-and-spoke system. Airplanes have been packed since then.
The FAA bureaucrats proved incapable of efficiently setting routes, schedules, and fares.
In the 1970s, the Energy Department decided a gas station's gas allocation. They did this for every gas station in the country. The result was simultaneous gluts and shortages of gas. Reagan deregulated that with his very first Executive Order, and the gluts, shortages, and gas lines disappeared literally overnight.
Planned economies just don't work.
People argue against land value taxes and carbon taxes. These policies are intended to reduce externalities and reduce the amount of force necessary to live a good life. Imagine all the wars fought because we have inefficient land allocation schemes or all the damage caused by climate change leading to loss of soil fertility in specific countries and the following refugee crisis. In a hypothetical free market wars would be pointless because you can always get what you want through mutual agreement, for a fair price and without any violence.
The very word "externalities" and the state of the global environment don't inspire much trust in the efficient management of "externalities" through capitalism.
Pointing this out doesn't mean that I am a socialist ot communist, I don't like this this kind of black and white thinking.
Wouldn't "efficiency" mean that we use natural resources sustainably?
That's not happening as far as I see.
The government, of course.
Technically yes, though that’s because I’m working in tech.
I think you’re being sarcastic, though but you should understand that my education is not esoteric.
30 people in my class. Countless classes of the same curriculum in the same years. Countless years that this has been a thing.
I’m not sure what your problem is. That someone knows something with regards to global economics? That despite understanding economics I gave an argument from the ecological perspective?
Honestly. Get over yourself, you’re not as smart as you think by trying to drag people down.
I mean. For christs sake if not a person with a masters degree in this topic, then who on earth can weigh in with an opinion do you think?
Who on earth? Someone with skin in the game -- someone who actually makes business decisions about shipping and manufacturing things. As opposed to studying them and teaching about them.
Cool.
I’m CTO at a company of 150 people.
To be fair, we make video games.
I’m sure you’ll find a way to disqualify me from having an opinion in some other way.
No. You've got skin in the game. Calm down.
> They write that, “Four years later we found ourselves on the largest container ship in the world on our way from Sweden to China.” As per the trip: “We had started the journey by truck to Middle Sweden, then by freight train to the port of Gothenburg, and after four weeks at sea, we filmed from a truck again, this time from the port of Shenzhen to a factory in Bao’an.”
The idea of following a single, real object from point of manufacture to destination--documenting all the transfers and hiccups along the way--is interesting to me. Presenting it in reverse chronological order is an artistic decision I'm ambivalent about. But it doesn't sound like that's what they did. They didn't track a pedometer; they just took freight vehicles along a path that maybe the thing went on, without following the actual transfer of the item from box to container, from truck to ship, etc.
I'm disappointed. I was ready to actually watch the whole thing. But it's contrived.
I wonder what were they importing on that ship.
Disclaimer, I cut this clip.
Feel free to ask us anything!
official site is logisticsartproject.com
A container ship is sailing through a water highway, docks. The containers are getting unloaded/loaded.
I don’t see any info on their page either https://logisticsartproject.com/
I wonder how large (in file size) the final cut was and what codecs were used. Such slow moving footage probably compresses well, but at 857 hours of footage it’s probably still big.
The original film is around 10TB of mpeg2 1080p 25mbit/sec 25 frames per second.
We later transcoded to h264, it now clocks in at about 2TB.
It is extraordinary but then again it's just "the container will be here in three weeks"
International trade is not the same thing as capitalism. International trade existed before capitalism, and if capitalism disappeared tomorrow, short of everyone simultaneously adopting anarcho-primitivism, we would still have trade between nations.
And in any case, that's mostly orthogonal to capitalism. Capitalism is far from the only economic system where people keep secrets.
If I wanted to strawman marxists, yes; that is what they believe ;)
To be more real, eh... if you look at how soviets did their planning they really did attempt to have everything "within 15 minutes." While that probably doesn't apply to something as specific as a pedometer... they do tend to extend that philosophy as far as it will go... reasonably or not.
Bit of a stretch. Would anarchist shipping take less time or be less boring somehow?
Someone wants a pedometer, and magically, or not so magically, one appears on a shelf near them, or on their doorstep.
If you ask me though, based on this paragraph they did actually find the world's longest horror film! As for the anti-capitalism hints in the article, try watching an 857 hour film without starving in a non-capitalist economy!
"There came a point about three weeks into my viewing where the maddening, non-Euclidean shape of Logistics fully formed in my mind. I had an unnerving migraine. I could barely get myself together, let alone watch a boat not move for nine hours. I thought about quitting or taking a few days off, but then it occurred to me: the crew of the ship couldn’t quit, and the filmmakers couldn’t take a day off. I was now a part of this filmic thing, and I couldn’t stop until it was done."
we get it, the film is an art piece making a point about how capitalism compresses time and space into inconsequential objects. it was a big undertaking schedule-wise. you don’t have to say this backwards and forwards 5 times
compress your article space and time-wise
this isn’t to say you’re wrong to enjoy it, or that my impressions were correct, just that I felt differently. I’m also extremely aware of the irony of complaining about the length of an article about the experience of watching an 857 hour film, but c’est la, as they say
*i.e. how it is an art piece about capitalism compressing time and space into innocuous objects; and how much of a time and schedule commitment it was for him
>> Logistics may have been birthed into this world in 2012, but the past few years have given the film a second life, with the pandemic laying bare the fragility of just-in-time logistics.
I so hoped we got past that already... JIT had nothing to do, as a root cause that is, with the supply issues the world is facing since the pandemic. I hate this meme so much.
That being said, I live the film project! Even if I would never watch 35 days plus on part of my day job, the idea is great so!
At the core of the current problems are the demand and aupply shocks caused by Covid and lockdowns early on in the pandemic. You can think of it as the same thing that impacted toilet paper, just on a global scale across all industries. Tgen we had the mess of containers not being where they should be (again, due to covid lockdowns and shipping disruptions) which made a recovery from the lockdown induced disruptions difficult. On top of that we have the war in Ukraine, which cut of Ukraine and Russia from flobal trade. While it seems that everything is coming from Ukraine at the moment, it is true that some things do, especially food stuffs and automotive parts. That happened while global supply chains still coped with the effects of Covid disruptions.
What JIT did, again not as a root cause, was to make these disruptions being felt much faster due to lower inventory levels. Not that any JIT was in place between suppliers in China and customers in, e.g. Europe so. With that long trabsportation lead times JIT is just impossible.
Tge alternative so, having huge buffer stocks, would have helped neither. Simply because one component shortage can bring supply chains down. Holding ebough stock of everything to buffer those global issues would require so much inventory that nobody can afford it, or the resulting products. High inventory has its own challenges so, and not per se resilient.
In the puplic mind JIT is associated with zero inventory (JIT aims for the minimum inventory which is never zero in reality). The current issues are, in the publics view, easily explained by insufficient inventory (which they are not). So it is easy to combine those two and blame JIT for everything.
Would you watch a real time "movie" of the countless man-years it took to design and develop the infrastructure that made it possible for you to "watch", write and publish about this? I thought so.
This is what the submission redirects me to, a 1x1 image the browser says: data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==
This is meaningless bullshit. The fact you can purchase, for an hour's wage, a digital pedometer than was built on one continent from raw materials from another and then shipped to a third is a breathtaking triumph.
Either you're working or you're watching a movie. I know people who claim they do both at the same time, but I don't think they're actually doing either.
the progression of my career has looked like this:
- need total quiet: no music, no talking.
- some music is fine: it can’t have lyrics though and it’s best if it’s more textural.
- i can listen to (and process the lyrics to) hip hop and rap and still type.
- i can listen to YouTube educationals and catch about a third of the content.
- i can rewatch movies i’ve seen before and keep up with the important plot parts.
sure, for the parts of the day where i’m working out differential equations or solving circuits and such, i go back to silence. but if 90% of your work is just plumbing values from one place to another… if you’ve progressed anywhere along that sequence i listed then i think it’s naive to take that simple “either/or” view of things.
I find neither particularly enjoyable though.
The stream is live now at https://www.twitch.tv/logisticsartproject
The article makes a big deal out of finally seeing a person. Is that person aware of the movie?
Sounds like an interesting film, thanks for answering questions about it.
Yes he is aware that the camera is recording, he needed to wash the windows on the bridge.
I suppose it would be nice if you could view a map with the current position while watching the movie.
What was the easiest?
Any advice for other film-makers?
It was comparatively easy to design the concept, it then took a very long time to implement.
We are not professional filmmakers, but something that helped us was to be stubborn.
It brings me to a story from two years ago about Norwegian (...) fish - branded as "environment friendly" - is sent from Norway to China for filleting, and then back to the market. About 25% of all the cod sold by one of the biggest companies in Norway has endured this trip.
It's worth mentioning that the fish in question comes from "all over the world", but still.
Google translation: https://www-nrk-no.translate.goog/norge/miljomerka-torsk-ver...
Please do tell us where we can see the full work / where it is available.
> "Money isn't bounded by time nor space"
Wha? Money is not a constant of the Universe. Expressed as currency, it's explicitly limited to particular regions and eras. I cannot use Finnish markka in the US (bound by space) nor even in Finland (bound by time).
It's literally bounded by time and space, like everything. Seriously, anti-Capitalist rhetoric relies on these sort of poetic images, but cannot level any kind of effective critique.
I've been a fan of Matt Stoller's work on monopolies for some time. He's a bit aggressive, but I find his analysis interesting. What do you think of the argument that monopolistic concentration makes issues like this worse? E.g. as put forward in this article https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/too-big-to-sail-how-a-leg...
> In other words, mega-ships like the Ever Given are a new phenomenon that are tied not to economic logic but to the consolidation of ocean carrier lines and their ability to offload risk onto counter parties. As Jensen observed, without the consolidation, “ships would likely not have grown above 12,000-14,000 TEUs [twenty-foot equivalent units].” So we’ve moved from a grid with lots of different size ships owned by different lines that could dock in lots of ports, to one dominated by hundreds of mega-ships that can only go to certain ports, all controlled by a de facto small cartel. The game in the business is to acquire market power and then use mega-ships to offload costs onto others and block new entrants.
And calling container lines a cartel is strong claim. In fact, for years prior to Covid container rates were so low that companies were barely profitable. There can be the argument made that those low rates contributed to the bankruptcy of Hanjin. Cartels usually don't result in low prices.
That being said, the container issues, and there were a ton of those prior to Covid, during Covid and now that need to be solved, are a logistics issue. Serious enough to have impacts on supply chains, but not enough by themselves to screw things up to the degree we see right now.
>> The game in the business is to acquire market power and then use mega-ships to offload costs onto others and block new entrants.
That sentence could use detailed explanation, because as it is it doesn't make any sense to me.
We did livestream it on Youtube back when you could opt out of commercials. And in a way a livestream is our preferred way of showing the work but doing so from home forces us to make sure the stream is running 24/7 for 37 days...
Before their problem with content ID last month, their stream had been uninterrupted for two years.
What is "in isolation"? I'd honestly be shocked if the majority of people buying this pedometer were buying it due to an ad of any sort. Seems more likely they simply needed a pedometer. They needed one because they wanted to count steps... etc, etc, eudemonia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Ministers_of_the_So...
This may provide some insight. I don't want to claim to be a USSR historian, I've just done some light research on another topic that crossed paths and I fell down a well for awhile lol.
The problem was that they were so centralized, it made innovation incredibly difficult. Simply put, if there were problems, even if people had solutions, it was damn near impossible to get anything implemented.
The ship may be full of empty containers.
Since eggs go bad and produce is heavy, maybe we could invent a durable “value storage” or “token” or “fiat” to trade instead. Storage and transmission of this value store could become useful trades in their own right.
This sounds like a very natural thing to do, almost like it would arise on its own without anyone having to _force_ this on anyone, as opposed to literally every other economic system, including your definition. In your “anarchism” how do you enforce the non-ownership of the means of production except by force? Do you force the farmer not to grow anything?
No, thats not capitalism but trade. You need to read up on what actually is capitalism and how accumulation of useful resources (wheat, cocoa, spice) is different from accumulation of money. Basically: it only makes sense inasmuch as you can consume the accumulated stuff, so a million ton of wood logs won't matter as much as one million ton of coins.
> This sounds like a very natural thing to do, almost like it would arise on its own without anyone having to _force_ this on anyone, as opposed to literally every other economic system, including your definition.
You're still thinking in a capitalistic world and you don't seem like you can't get out of it. The whole point of alternative economic systems is to produce enough for everybody. Such that needs are provided by the community. If everyone has what they need, why would there be a price on anything ? Why would more-than-enough wheat trade against more-than-enough wood ? It doesn't make sense. Trade happens because it's a way to solve scarcity, but the whole idea behind anarchism is to understand what is needed and make sure there is no scarcity there.
> In your “anarchism” how do you enforce the non-ownership of the means of production except by force? Do you force the farmer not to grow anything?
In anarchism, all decisions are taken by everyone. No one forces anything on anyone. I know, it's a hard concept to grasp, but communities can think and decide what's best for them.
The farmer can grow whatever they want, but if it doesn't benefit the community then they are on their own. It's all about what is good for the group and what makes us go forward, together.
Will everyone really always have what they need, or is that a theoretical state that is actually very unlikely to be achieved? Also, is it in human nature (in general, discounting outliers) to be entirely satisfied and not want more, especially in relation to the people around you?
> The farmer can grow whatever they want, but if it doesn't benefit the community then they are on their own.
What happens if more than just one farmer opts out of the anarchistic lifestyle, they embrace capitalism, and outcompete the anarchists? Could that ever reach a point where it would be necessary to stop them by force in order to preserve the anarchistic society?
Basically I’m curious how things would shake out in reality, compared to theoretic models that presupposes that everyone acts in the best interest of society as a whole (given that they can all agree on what that is), and not themselves in particular (which I think is more realistic, on average).
What? That isn't capitalism. Where is the obsession over owning all the land, all the farms, all the factories? These people aren't interested in capital, they just want to trade.
>Since eggs go bad and produce is heavy, maybe we could invent a durable “value storage” or “token” or “fiat” to trade instead.
Egyptians simply deposited grains at grain banks and obtained something akin to clay tablets. Those clay tablets had an annual storage fee because grains spoil. They had no capitalism because the nature of their money made them willing to trade without charging any extra fees that come from the superiority of money over goods.
The fact that we started with a system like that and had almost no trouble for thousands of years means the modern capitalist is more ignorant about the nature of money than even people 4000 years ago.
Or rather the opposite is the case, people are fully aware of the nature of money and how making it superior over eggs gives the money capitalist the ability to extort concessions from the farmer. Since money is necessary as a medium of exchange, the money capitalist can always refuse to trade until the economy is about to collapse because all the spoiling goods in the economy are going bad and producers refuse to replenish their stock until the people are suffering from starvation and then become ready to accept debt under even worse conditions. To prevent this from happening, you are going to pay that fee ahead of time, you are going to constantly borrow new money into the economy.
>This sounds like a very natural thing to do, almost like it would arise on its own without anyone having to _force_ this on anyone, as opposed to literally every other economic system, including your definition.
The government declares a single currency to be legal tender, that is effectively a state enforced monopoly. I honestly can't comprehend how people like you stick their head in the sand.
>In your “anarchism” how do you enforce the non-ownership of the means of production except by force?
Grains spoil, so that just means money must spoil and the easiest way to make money spoil is by eliminating the zero lower bound cash, either by abolishing cash which was introduced by force through the government so undoing it requires no additional force, alternatively the government can issue cash with an expiration date, which again just dials back the amount of force being used to issue risk free, perfectly liquid and costless cash.
>Do you force the farmer not to grow anything
Why the hell would I need to tell anyone to do anything? Telling the farmer to not grow anything is what the money capitalist does because that is how he gets to extort the farmer and break his spirit.
By the way, by money capitalist I mean anyone holding money liquid and immediately spendable without paying for that privilege and for the harm they are causing to society at large
I am honestly frustrated by comments like yours. Abolishing capitalism requires no force, no revolution, no deaths, no jealousy, no redistribution, merely a free market that actually lives up to that name, not a capitalistic market labeled as free market. In fact, capitalism itself leads to the abolishment of capitalism, hence the only problem that we need to solve is, once capitalism ends itself, how do we keep it that way instead of it devolving into a depression or another world war?
What’s the argument against capitalism/international trade in this context? Trade increases the cost of war, which is a good thing, right?
One might ask if such an arrangement is good for society if most people are left struggling to survive.
However this is all based on a rhetorical question: does “capitalism” the word include this arrangement of firms? Is unrestricted free trade likely to lead to this arrangement of firms? Would a different structure of firms, like cooperative ownership, alleviate some of those problems? You could still have “trade” in an economy of cooperatives. But would that still be “capitalism” or would this be considered something else?
People are divided on whether it should be called something else. But a lot of people who think we should “move beyond capitalism” do not want to eliminate free trade, just the societal norm where most firms are controlled by a small number of people.
I have never met two people who can agree on how this would actually work. Just some basic questions:
Is there still government controlled currency and interest rate? If not, how is the money supply in the economy managed? Am I allowed to print my own currency?
Is there intellectual property? If there are no trademarks, there is no such thing as counterfeit goods, so I can produce a laptop and call it macbook.
Does that mean Cartels are allowed? Is market manipulation allowed? Presumably unrestricted trade means I can run pyramid schemes and call them banks?
What happens if the seller lied about the product?
Is there adverse possession of property and planning permission? If not, can I dig down or build up as far as I want? What if I block sunlight to your solar panels on purpose?
Can I sell my kidney? If yes, can I trade in someome else's kidneys?
Can I give out loans with crazy interest rates? If yes, you just legalised debt bondage, a form of slavery.
Is there bancrupsy?
Are there air rights and rights over electromagnetic spectrum?
Any conceivable set of anwers to these question amount to rules and regulation. You can't actually function in anarchy
So, monoplies (and feudalism, and dictatorships, and pretty much any centralization of power) are bad.
The obvious solution is to have strong antitrust regulation. That leads to regulatory capture and corruption. I'm not sure what happens next. We haven't had a democracy that was also a superpower collapse yet. Rome comes to mind, but they didn't have nukes and a global for-profit surveillance network propping them up.
Anyway, we really need to start enforcing antitrust law, and get back to de facto "majority rules" in the US.
Fragility - one byte from a bat, one lockdown in China and United Kingdom runs out of toilet paper.
This works particularly well for cheap items, where raw material costs (which are mostly just the energy cost of mining and refining) and shipping costs dominate. Usually, things are shipped around so they can be processed in the most specialized/energy efficient facility available. For small items, the pollution associated with shipping via ocean freight is miniscule.
As for the second point, the current system is fragile, but compared to what? If I had to pick a pandemic to live through at any point in time so far, covid would be my first choice.
It’s all comparative advantage and win-win scenarios until you find yourself dependent on despicable foes for your food, energy, and basic necessities.
The vulnerability created in those situations may actually encourage bad actors to declare war opportunistically.
Capitalism has many problems. The video only highlights a possible advantage.
Just like our current system, there is no guarantee that everyone will have all their needs met. What differs, though, is what happens when those needs aren't met. On one side all you can do is complain and hope, on the other you get to raise the point to the community and you share the power to solve the problem.
> What happens if more than just one farmer opts out of the anarchistic lifestyle, they embrace capitalism, and outcompete the anarchists?
An anarchist society will produce enough for everybody. You can't outcompete what is already available for free through the community.
> Could that ever reach a point where it would be necessary to stop them by force in order to preserve the anarchistic society?
If that's what the society decides, then yes. It's all about the community decides for themselves.
> and not themselves in particular (which I think is more realistic, on average).
That's actually not true, the myth of the individualistic human, sold with stories of the proud family man who is the only one on earth who's able to save their progeniture, is largely wrong.
Concretely, for a collective to possess a car, they have to (by law) elect a president or whatever, to conform to undemocratic standards of corporate governance. It's literally impossible to do what you suggest in our current system.
Even if the central bank is not banning my currency, I will still have to pay taxes in the national currency, I have absolutely nothing against paying taxes but the point of the entire idea is that taxes will be paid in the new currency, if there is a constant outflow of my currency into euro or whatever, then the demurrage currency will go out of circulation very quickly. This problem isn't unique to demurrage, it is true of any non legal tender currency but foreign currency has countries where the money can be used to pay taxes which gives it a leg up over any non national currency.
So now I must go to a tax haven even though I have no desire to avoid paying taxes. Most tax havens are islands that are incredibly far away from any continental mainland. The cost of living will be much higher because of shipping costs and exporting will be prohibitive for anything that with a short shelf life and isn't priced in whole euros per kilogram.
Even if I find a tax haven, I will have to migrate there and most tax havens are incredibly expensive to migrate to, requiring $250k of investments for permanent residence. Once I am there I will need to cover my own living expenses there. This means I am going to need a remote job or work in some tourist industry as anything else is nonviable due to the extreme distances and the lack of land to be self sufficient for the island as a whole.
Even if I successfully migrate, I will now need to buy my own land and start a land trust that charges a land value tax and pays out every resident a citizen's dividend.
Once I have done all that, I am going to need to start a regular business that competes in the capitalist system, because I cannot rely on the island to immediately recognize my currency as legal tender instead I would have it start out offering payment in both the national currency and the local currency while offering 0% financing in the local currency to encourage people to use it.
All of this is incredibly difficult, it will take decades of working in the capitalistic system to escape it and then there is the very real risk of it failing.
There is no way I can succeed at this. Everything is stopping me. I could try to skip doing this legally by conquering my own land with military force but that isn't what I believe in.
So what I have decided to do is try my luck and see how far I can go by planning to retire in one of those locations but I have no delusions that my plans will actually happen within a lifetime if I go at it individually.
Not really? This depends on the relative price of the energy of delivery and the value of the other parts of the good. And energy is so cheap, we seem pretty comfortable wasting it.
I've noticed where I live in California most markets sell this kind of jam made in France called Bonne Maman. Not even fancy markets, but the big local supermarket chains. What is weird about this is that California is a huge producer of fruits. I can buy jam made in a nearby town at one of the fancier markets near here, but the big supermarket chain buys jam from France.
This seems like a senseless waste of energy. I refuse to buy the jam from France because it's so wasteful. There's a lot of perverse incentives in our economy, and price cannot optimize for every variable. Capitalism is not as resource efficient as some basic theories would purport it to be.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220429-the-climate-bene...
Search the page for "the climate impact of food miles" to jump to a graph that breaks down the source of CO2 emissions for various types of food. (The caption also references the source article from Science 2018.) Of the things there, the jam is probably closest to coffee or chocolate.
I'd be more worried about Bonne Maman's packaging's CO2 footprint. However, our kitchen floor is concrete, and the kids break a glass every month or so. We stopped buying glasses for them and use the (extremely low quality glass) jam jars instead. When they get older, we'll look for jam that comes in larger containers.
They were asking what comes next and what would that look like.
To the person I am responding to: I would suggest listening to some lectures from the Mises Institute on youtube. They aren't my people, but they have some nice theory if you want to know what they think. I do think that if you want to have a voluntary society, it is worth understanding Austrian economic theory.
You say you'd refer to what you're talking about as "libertarian communist." I'm not worried about this term, I'm just curious! Do you know of a resource that lays out and summarizes some of these ideas? I don't expect you to teach me them, but it sounds like you might know where to even begin. I don't even know what terms to search for right now!
I also recently enjoyed this video which explains the benefits of collective ownership as a possibility in our economy:
“Anarchism” is also a term often used to describe libertarian communism. The term has been co-opted by people who are trying to describe chaos, but the term anarchism has a rich history, explained here:
That should get you started!
First, this is a very revealing question:
> Can I give out loans with crazy interest rates? If yes, you just legalised debt bondage, a form of slavery.
For a loan to turn into slavery, you presuppose a system that can by threat of violence convert debt to forced work. In a true anarchy, there's just no way to go from debt to forced work.
Under anarchy, debt is a voluntary cooperative agreement between two people where they think one can use the pooled resources of both more effectively than they could alone, in exchange for a cut of the fruit of the labour.
Both parties enter into this agreement fully aware that those fruit may never materialise and, critically, that there is no way to employ violence to ascertain that they do.
However, a community is not made out of two people. If one person routinely dishonours their loan agreements, they will find it hard to cooperate with other vital functions of society, for example to acquire food or tools or utilities or communication.
This leads into your second misunderstanding. You seem to imagine that a person under no regulation can "build up as far as I want".
As an individual, there is only so far up you can build. Realistically, you can personally forage material and build for at most 10 hours per day and then you need to forage food and get rest. As an individual, you cannot use machinery because you cannot, as an individual, get the petroleum to drive the machinery.
If you are going to build anything of consequence, you need to enlist the help of other people. In a capitalist society, this is somewhat easy: you can convert capital into tall buildings, regardless of what the local community wants. This is why capitalism needs regulation, to account for what the local community wants.
In an anarchist organisation, you will find it really hard to recruit builders that will voluntarily ruin their own local environment.
This theme continues throughout your comment:
- if you block my solar panels and the community disagrees with your reasoning, you might find it hard to live comfortably in that community because other people will be less inclined to help you acquire your creature comforts.
- if you start a pyramid scheme and call it a bank, the community bank rating association will give it a shitty score.
- if you repeatedly lie about the items you are selling, you will get a bad marketplace rating too -- just like what happens already in less regulated markets today.
- free banking was never the disaster currency monopolists would like it to be. Sure, it had its fuckups, but so does the current system. The problems may even have been more frequent, but also of a much lower magnitude.
EDIT: never mind, I see you answered this in another comment:
> The original film is around 10TB of mpeg2 1080p 25mbit/sec 25 frames per second.
> We later transcoded to h264, it now clocks in at about 2TB.
Also https://ubu.com/ might be interested to host/distribute it and it's a great fit as well.
Torrent doesn't enable that any more than any other distribution channel.
Separate question, how do you monetize this?
Since several of you have asked how to watch the movie, we spontaneously decided to stream the first 21 hours of Logistics on Twitch. Since it will soon be night here in Sweden, we will not be able to keep track of the stream. We're keeping our fingers crossed that it works. Unfortunately we will not be able to stream the entire film this time, but hope to do so later.
The stream is live now at https://www.twitch.tv/logisticsartproject
Maybe they mean providers could offer the download in chunks? But yea, there's nothing stopping someone getting the full file and just ffwding that.