Philosophical Research:MDem/4.3r/2370 layers

23-7

I think we made a mistake in inventing the concept of the "petty bourgeoisie"

what we did is lump together a number of different things that seem superficially similar, but are actually separate

it was an easy mistake to make because a lot of the time the model /almost/ works. all these different layers actually do behave very similarly in a given time period where we have observed them and grouped them.

but if we actually trace each layer through history we will find that the different layers actually came from different things before the capitalist period, and will become different things after capitalism.

before capitalism began there was an artisan class defined by both production and operating a business territory when manufacturers appeared, the artisan class was eventually displaced by corporations — the entire corporation structure including capitalists and workers.

if a former artisan type could take the hit to their pride in having exclusive skills, they could in theory take up an available capitalist job and continue having something to sell. alternatively depending on the conditions of the time and place they could try to quickly bail out of their business, selling what assets might be usable to someone else and taking what household money they have, and become an investor in a rising capitalist industry. if the artisan type is transformed to a capitalist without going bankrupt in the middle, there is an actual change in the scope of the business. today's "small businesses" easily become larger than medieval shops without being able to maintain the size of an enduring institution-like business or a chain of businesses connected under the same brand.

[it would be nice to have a couple historical examples of small shops similar to the guild period transforming into capitalist businesses. I think it's not terribly hard to find a few. businesses do love to pretend this is how all businesses start]

at the same time, proletarians could also be created from the trash class of European towns

this means that there are already potentially two layers of proletarians, although the people in them may turn over as capitalism goes on privileged proletarians similar to the artisan type of medium fortune can bail out of one job and go to another, trash proletarians always exist with some amount of precarity it is never obvious from the beginning whether a trash proletarian will become more likely to resist or more afraid to resist

peasants as artisan types

how the artisan type peasant separated into the "kulak" and the farm worker what happened to original peasants?

remaining artisans

independent art - transformed into corporate media industry worker, magazine serial writer, retail artisans on platforms like Steam marketplace problem: many of these don't fully transform the artisan to a proletarian, record labels etc are just a highly exploitative retail artisan relationship

the short period of "shareware", and "commercial computer applications" made by tiny or individual producers; virtual musical instruments, other forms of market artisans

unexpectedly Free Software appeared and showed that artisan products and capitalist jobs are not that different and any of them are simply work that can be done by anybody to have it already done and the Job displaced by just anybody Free Software represents a weird sort of fightback from artisan types to exact revenge on capitalism, by creating work for nothing solely so capitalists that put them out of business cannot hold the business territory they took

23-7?

in the end there is not even as much distinction as we'd like to believe between petty bourgeoisie and /the proletariat/

there is a certain process of "Artisanization" which occurs in a Market Society where because every business and every worker must /compete/ for Job Slots, every worker is slowly transmogrified back into an artisan. it doesn't happen quickly; it may take several years to transform each worker all the way to the point of literally becoming an old-style artisan with an individual workshop or office and everything related to their work stored within the economic territory of their own household.

think about how everyone in the United States always talks of having to go get another college degree to get a different "skilled job" as if this is totally normal — and as if this does not require huge amounts of household capital to accomplish in the form of money, a personal vehicle, and other such substantial "exit fees" to pay before being able to work. this is not training proletarians that go to any workplace and learn the job in a couple weeks, this is teaching people artisanal skill that other workers cannot replicate so that "regular" people will be pushed out of Job Slots and the artisanal college-educated worker will be pushed in.

in his 1934 interview with H.G. Wells, Stalin puts aside "middle strata" of technical workers and engineers who "work, but are not poor" — specifically in the context of claims that technocratic guidance from industry experts can reorganize the economy and bring social change. instead he points to the decisive role of "the toiling masses", teaching a model where there is simply a wide mass of proletarians that can slot into unskilled jobs but cannot be exploited forever.

there is not much wrong with this model in a country where unskilled workers really do form the foundation of the economy, working for instance in large Ford-style factories. but in the United States, the primary form of "struggle" is for people to attempt to graduate from the proletariat in order to better struggle against everyone else in the economy including other workers. the distinction between workers, artisans, and petty bourgeoisie is more of a continuum, where the only reason everybody does not become the petty bourgeoisie is the inherent instability of every business. the end result is that through competition with each other a large swath of workers accumulate ridiculous amounts of skills and education but simultaneously end up without a business as their potential business collapses and they end up back at work, competing for slots /inside/ big businesses. workers are always in a graph struggle of household against household as the only way to accumulate social services for their families and communities, all privately paid by family members or nonprofit or religious "neighbors" inside someone's individual household.

this in turn affects the structure of big businesses. in Stalin's perspective the big businesses are expected to create a wide swath of low-paid jobs and exploited workers who will rise up against the business territory and create an economic republic where businesses will be controlled by democracy. however, in places like the United States, Japan, and South Korea, businesses instead begin an arms race to get the best technical experts so that they only compete with other businesses on proprietary territory itself and not in a contest to supply the same item across the world the most effectively.

as well, we are currently seeing a phenomenon where businesses are searching for expertise in artificial intelligence, which becomes a trap where artisanal workers have to design new and better artificial intelligence to maintain business territory in which anybody can successfully earn money from AI. if AIs simply "stopped" and became a widely-replicated easy-to-use technology, they could theoretically create highly productive unskilled workers all operating AI tools and open up more jobs. however, the competitive structure of the economy means that AI designers are always trying to prevent AI from being widely available so they can extract more money from people who do not yet have access to that particular new AI model or powerful mainframe. even for regular workers, the All-vs-All contradiction means that once everyone is able to use a cheap and widely-available AI, nobody will necessarily pay them instead of simply using the AI themselves. whenever a tool is available to everybody, Jobs and wages evaporate entirely. its next transformation can only be turning into a retail store chock full of cheap stock with the store owner making a tiny margin, or turning into a large corporate service continuously extracting fees, in either case a situation where the only labor left is storing or providing giant quantities to the public. the job becomes maintaining giant economic territories over time and making sure the component vendors do not disappear or products go to waste before every product is connected to a buyer. [this is to say, workers successfully completing their task to create great amounts of things can create worrying patterns where workers become obsolete but capitalists don't.]

in this royal mess of rampant competition and evaporating Jobs, we cannot simply shove aside "skilled workers" the way Stalin's party did. if we do this, vast numbers of regular people will feel like Marxism is not properly aiding them in their struggle to outcompete the rest of society to feed their families, and most likely all politics will shift to considering Marxists irrelevant. it is the easy route to tell all the suburban white parents to "learn to code" and speak of skills and expertise and technological innovation. it is the easy route to build a campaign on creating more "local" or "independent" small businesses and slashing more taxes so Black people, Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Latinos can privately pay for private healthcare and private education and purchase more Media Representation to ostensibly educate everybody against racism yet likely just produce more graph struggle as people squabble about which groups particlar Media was and wasn't made to Represent or should have been made to represent. it is the easy route to tell everyone that their chunk is suffering because they did not correctly outcompete or reprogram the other chunks, and an Existentialist-Structuralist theory about uncovering biases in large chunks against small chunks can certainly fix it.

fundamentally, what we have to do is to get all the workers together to build a stable system where they can go to work each week and to shun the paradigm of trying to outcompete other workers. everyone should consider possibilities like going to an unskilled job instead of getting a second degree, or improving the same local businesses as worker-turned-expert instead of trying to graduate from entry-level business to middle-rank business to elite business. this may be painful in the case of minority demographics trying to pick up skills to survive a society where they will always have a limited support network and are always pushed to be more self-reliant. but it still needs to be done if minorities would like to no longer be in an eternal uphill battle against other chunks of society that could mobilize their greater territory in hateful ways at any moment. a paradigm that accepts capitalism and competition essentially becomes segregationist, asking people to leave chunks of "mean" people and blob over to more powerful chunks of "nice" people if they want to be happy, but in doing this essentially asking Black people to go back to Louisiana and Chinese-Americans to go back to California. outlets like PragerU would like to tell us all about how "The Left" has supposedly tossed away racial integration, yet the biggest driver of "cancel culture" is capitalism; every time neoliberal racists get mad about taxes and inclusion efforts they expel a marginalized person from their community into a competing "segregated" community.

a non-obvious consequence of this is that labor organizations are in a contradiction against universities. today "free college" is a common talking point for social-democrats, but this may actually be something of an error. the correct strategy may look more like realizing universities are now gatekeepers of knowledge and value generation in the current state of capitalism, and labor organizations need to struggle to redirect people away from unnecessary degrees and get people as many skills and as much knowledge as possible without relying on paying university tuition, until the day universities can be nationalized properties and no longer operate as competitive chunks. this must not be a campaign against "intellectuals" or subjects like the arts and humanities, but rather, a campaign to make it extremely easy to read about subjects like art history and art criticism in small towns for those who wish to. it is fine to create more intellectuals than ever before, as long as all people learn that their goal is to stop competing against each others' households through credential-collecting and create unions for teachers, animators, social workers, serial writers, library workers, the clerk that knows encyclopedic amounts of Existentialism, and every other ordinary worker.

in some ways the transition from competing artisanal-worker households to a proletarian movement inherently involves creating some of the structures and patterns of Replicated Production. the hypothetical struggle against university territories and credentials presented here would involve moving toward a Replicated Production of knowledge, where instead of enclosed artisanal organizations discovering and putting out knowledge and levying various fees, a particular "standard" commons of knowledge is built up and it is made available across every town and every group of workers that may find it useful. the reconstruction of local industries and unions would involve a kind of Replicated Production of worker training, in an age where businesses have become unable to afford it and practically the only way to accomplish it is to remove the artisanal wall and get wide areas of people to do it.

if there is a contradiction between supply of goods or services and worker wages, then how can we both widely spread things in Replicated Production and compensate workers? the simple answer is that human beings always want supplies. in any city or town, people always find themselves in search of groceries, materials for hobby projects, and useful services. this means that there is always something to supply to others, and if there is something to supply to others, there is the potential to exchange it for other things. there should always be time to transition from a marketplace in which people worry about the prices of goods and services and how many their enterprise sold to a system which is more voluntary and involves less worry about how much products sell for.

there is already a small amount of real-world evidence for this. in North Korea, the Workers' Party of Korea underwent efforts to fill towns with cooperatives and ensure all the industries in the town were connected together to supply each others' workers. it was reported that this was somewhat successful and there were periods where people could obtain basic needs very inexpensively.

it should be noted that the WPK did not actually do this along the same logic as in this text. Juche socialism is designed for countries at very early stages of development, and has operated around a concept of designing the whole society as a single system so that each piece serves the others; by contrast, what is proposed here is that capitalist societies tend to go through a certain period where they sacrifice functional towns for competitive productivity concentrated in exclusive "skilled" Job openings, but once that period of creating productivity is sufficiently complete, it is time to break down the artisanal walls and replicate knowledge and techniques widely across society in order to put towns back together. the end effect should be somewhat similar to the phenomenon of well-connected towns in North Korea, but with the ability to maintain them more stably in a time of large-scale production.

one important question that remains is imperialism. if the United States somehow proceeded along its transition to Replicated Production, rebuilding all its towns and stocking them with supplies, what about the Third World and the vendors there that may be providing as much as half of those supplies or more? this is inherently a complex question because imperialist capitalism and retail empire are complicated structures. first of all, we should consider the meaning of "supplies". by defining towns as being partly made of providers of supplies and customers — among all the other daily interactions one could think of — we can begin to properly integrate the transition to Replicated Production with anti-imperialism.

although there is a very important step in the United States of breaking apart Artisanization, once that has properly begun and people are becoming collectivized into enterprises as proletarians, the difference between a United States enterprise and a Third World vendor will narrow. United States workers may begin to think of themselves as just another kind of vendor, which supplies such things as recycled trash items that were already strewn across the United States instead of new production in another country; if people want paper, they could buy de-inked paper from the United States, or wheat-straw paper from India. this convergence then might result in the ability to coordinate efforts across countries, assuming that they already have a strong movement or a workers' state. knowledge about Replicated Production could perhaps be "replicated" across China or India to build local industry while building the struggle for worker rights and against all the world's capitalists. the overlaps between the efforts in each country could be a point at which to coordinate the Marxist parties of each country and smooth out competition between them. at some point, the process of deciding how to put together supply chains inside the United States and supply chains inside India could simply merge into the process of deciding whether to build supply chains between India and the United States. in a few cases, it might make sense to ship unique products out of India to other countries, while in other cases with easier-to-produce products it might make more sense to separately replicate production within the United States and within India, based on the guidance of some shared body of knowledge and standards. regular paper made from recycled paper or wood can simply be replicated, as can certain kinds of foods made in India which can also be made in the United States. some items like the tamarind fruit may not be easy to separately replicate in the United States — although one might be surprised how many items replicate in the other direction, such as pineapples successfully growing in India.

23-7?

Artisans are like, the ultimate loophole in capitalism, the ultimate scam

an Artisan can be chosen to design a product, paid a bunch to do it, and bring in a whole lot of revenue that justifies the extra expense, instead of having to hire many proletarians and potentially be stuck with a close, dangerous margin between expense and profit in addition, while proletarians have trouble creating more business territory, Artisans' main ability and purpose is to create business territory. they will happily create new exclusive business territory for a capitalist, forever hand it over and leave it behind, and skip off to create some more. an Artisan never necessarily has to feel the pain of handing over business territory and then not being able to generate value and survive. an Artisan is one good solid business-territory-producing machine.

the problem that then comes up is Artisans have a similar effect to automation. although they are living human beings, they can obsolete huge numbers of Jobs with their exclusive skill. large amounts of generated value become split between small numbers of "skilled workers" and smaller numbers of capitalists, with average workers blocked off from either accessing more than a very narrow slice of social life that money can reasonably afford, or making use of so-called "intellectual properties" to generate more value for their own use.

artisanal producers of art are frequently contrasted against the automation of art, but this is a false contrast. in either the case of automation or the case of Artisan production, large numbers of proletarians are tossed out of work. it can be difficult to diagnose what's happening. products will be churned out and delivered everywhere, yet people will be out of work, busy _not_ performing an essential role to society as the proletariat. products will be delivered, but people might not purchase them, perhaps lacking money on hand, or simply lacking the will to feel any connection to the product as it fails to fulfill their desires or meaningfully connect them to other human beings. a certain fundamentally wrong atmosphere begins to extend across capitalism; some kind of fundamental change has occurred from the time of factories and mines. people have taken from each other the ability to be useful to others, the ability to appreciate each other's work, the ability to meaningfully socialize with others over the preemptively finished products of labor, the ability to materially interact with a town in any slot that has not already been claimed. people have genuinely obsoleted each other's existence and shrunk society to a smaller set of people, for no clear reason except to give a small portion of society greater access to material life at the cost of taking it from everyone else.

of course, this does not occur in a simple pattern. it is not as if, as it was in medieval times, there is literally a city of technological artisans and a surrounding layer of peasants who do not get to live in the city. the sorting pattern looks more like people clustering into highly specialized Industries, where Industries deliver everything anyone could want, yet they exist in the form of tiny island societies separated from having a common society and humanity with each other and instead interacting mostly through limited acts of trade. nobody may cross the trade barrier into an Industry and look at its guts or try to operate it themself. it is either take the Product or leave the Product, take the Industry or leave it unappreciated. in the process, the dialectical connection between producer and customer, between worker and worker, between human and human is weakened. workers gain an certain inherent incentive to root for other businesses to fail and other workers to be tossed out of work so that more value can be generated at the one business they are allowed to stand inside and generate value at.

something must be done to de-Artisanize Artisans so that Jobs are not as exclusive and the proletariat can be let back into society of course, the problem is that if we automate them away, we could end up exactly where we started — we could end up with exclusive, limited business territories in which labor is already performed and Products are already made without the need of large swaths of the proletariat, yet everyone still needs to go to work to make more things in order to afford the things that have already been made. each time the proletariat attempts to catch up, more value is appropriated and tossed onto the other end of the scale, leaving workers dashing to the ends of the earth to find the last unfilled Industries.

24-5

carl sagan's professors -

for the longest time I never really 'got' what was the deal with universities and prestigious universities at my school they gave us some kind of assignment to choose a university to learn how to prepare for entrance requirements. they were secretly trying to passively train us that some universities are inherently better and rarer and more elite and only for the best of the best to have any hope of getting into, but I was just really confused because the pages we had access to didn't give us much information about any of them and I couldn't see what was the point of trying to get into a prestigious university if I still had no idea what career I was good at and what would be worth going through many years of difficult training in. I wondered why any old university wasn't as good as any other one. so I turned in a report on my state university.

only when I read Sagan's book did I finally 'understand' universities. for people like Sagan, universities are this epic trek across the whole country to find the best professor like you are going up a mountain to find some old wizard. it is a unique experience that only a couple individuals can have encountering a handful of other fated individuals. the country only has so many of each of these types of individuals and we expect our civilization to function through the best individuals spontaneously migrating to where they need to go in order to learn how to lead us, while all individuals confusedly fight over a limited number of slots in universities attempting to be the best and get those exclusive encounters but likely not finding them. the entire thing is a chunk competition between the few best filaments and all the mid-quality and low-quality filaments for everybody in the best filaments to slurp up what is available to them as a group. and nobody ever tells you this. we are all falsely told that universities are expanding everyone's opportunities, but they are not. they are concentrating opportunities and concealing the lack of opportunities, because opportunities exist in arbitrary social connections, not in information, not in uniform strategies for education or doing a particular craft. opportunities exist in the connection to eager customers willing to pay for something, wherever those customers are spatially located. they exist in the connection to local residents who need services. they do not exist because people have training or because they have a bright idea. opportunities appear when you have a predictive theory of society.

Metadata

1. MDem 4.3/ "layers" (scrap) 1:(-)1:(-)1

item type

Z (wiki feature; C (pronounced C)) 1:(-)1:(-)1

[P] (pronounced [P]) alias (mis) [string]

MDem 4.3/2370 layers

MDem 4.3/2370 ends-of-earth

v4-3_2370_layers

[P] (pronounced [P]) alias (mis) [string]

v4.3 scraps/ continuous classes and socioempire

v4.3 scraps/ continuum between proletariat, Artisan types, and capitalists / "ends-of-the-earth" effect

case of [Item]

bop scrap

date

23-7-17

with context

created