I CRAVE THE FLAME

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
discoursedrome
discoursedrome

i have a dim attitude to the genre of leftism that treats welfare-before-socialism as obviously imperalist and extractive in itself, but something people do need to keep in mind when they talk about stuff like UBI is that strong welfare is fundamentally and inescapably opposed to wide-open immigration policy, unless immigrants join a separate social class ineligible for the welfare. The state (or whoever is responsible for administering your social program) has an inescapable existential need to avoid adding a large number of people who are net beneficiaries of the program, and the only real approaches to this are "reduce the benefits that most people receive" or "don't let people come on board very often." This is a very general problem that applies to any form of cost- or risk-sharing arrangement!

I don't think this insight recommends a particular course of action; you could start from there and take it in many different directions. But I do think you need to start there, because if you're just trying to make the best society you have with what you have on hand, this is one of the big constraints!

rustingbridges

yeah this is an issue that many people choose not to engage with (because a person engaging with politics as a social tool or hobby doesn’t need to! this issue only matters for actual rulership or honest intellectual endeavors)

anyway this is why my preferred immigration policy is something liken million new employment / study / whatever visas per year, sold at auction, with people renewing visas getting an increasing discount per year until they’re eligible for permanent residency, plus whatever number of at cost visas for family members of citizens, plus some number of free visas for humanitarian reasons. this policy is perfect and flawless despite my only having spent a few minutes thinking about it. dont @ me

togglesbloggle
togglesbloggle

“Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”

– Patrick Colquhoun

I started reading some of Orwell’s nonfiction essays recently.  “The Spike” isn’t my favorite so far- that honor probably goes to “A Hanging”, although I’m still reading- but it got me doing a Wikipedia dive about British workhouses and that in turn gave me the quote.

It struck me mostly because it’s one of most direct and blunt ways I’ve seen this argument made in the first person.  That is, one often sees this point of view imputed to people that hold capital in the modern era, but it’s always shocking how explicit people could be about it during the early industrial revolution, around the era that gave Polanyi his “Great Transformation.”  Near as I can tell, this isn’t a weak-man argument; the belief in poverty as load-bearing was common enough to express itself in legal policy, and possibly even correct to boot.

The other thing I learned from the Wiki dive is that workhouses themselves (or at least, the system of legal obligations that would mature into them) date from a similar attempt to control and channel human skill at the expense of the skilled:

“The Poor Law Act of 1388 was an attempt to address the labour shortage caused by the Black Death, a devastating pandemic that killed about one-third of England’s population. The new law fixed wages and restricted the movement of labourers, as it was anticipated that if they were allowed to leave their parishes for higher-paid work elsewhere then wages would inevitably rise… The resulting laws against vagrancy were the origins of state-funded relief for the poor.  ”

That is, in response to growing wages, a law was created to keep skilled workers in their place both figuratively and literally.  Relief for poverty was a knock on; not strictly necessary, but if you won’t let people leave to find work, it’s probably smart to give them food at least.  The balance of power eventually swung back towards the nobility, but the workhouses themselves just persisted from century to century, reinventing themselves with new justifications well in to the 20th century.

A friend of mine grew up in a town with an old workhouse that had been recommissioned as an old folks’ home.  When she was a child, she’d run as she passed it- the shadow of the building was bad luck.

No thesis I think, but I want to write it down.  Catch some of these feelings in amber before I move on to Orwell’s other essays.

king-of-men

I do wonder if the connotations of the word poverty have changed, here? It seems to me that Colquhoun is not describing what we think of as poverty, but rather the state of not being a rentier. There is no contradiction between being upper-middle-class in terms of material possessions and lifestyle, and having no investment income and thus being ‘forced’ to work as Colquhoun outlines. But a software engineer who spends all his income is hardly poor, modern sense. (Not very smart, obviously, but that’s a separate issue.) Yet in Colquhoun’s sense he is indeed living in poverty, while being far wealthier than anyone alive in Colquhoun’s time!

And in this sense it does seem to me that the ‘poverty is needed’ argument is stronger. You still cannot make absolutely everyone a rentier. (With present technology, that is.) There just aren’t enough resources for a livable UBI for everyone, even in the US. (Yet. Growth mindset, by all means.) You might be able to arrange things so everyone can retire on their investments after a certain age, but you’re still going to have someone doing the work that generates the real income those investments are a claim on.

togglesbloggle

Ran across this comment again after I think like two years? So this is not a reply so much as an opportunity to think out loud, and keep putting pressure on these ideas in my head and see how they shift. In particular, I think the big thing that changed since I wrote the OP and read this reply last time is that I started reading a lot more Henry George, so take that for what it’s worth.

In any case, I think this comment is very on-point in that Colquhoun, above, is absolutely equating 'not being a rentier’ with 'being impoverished’. Likely, I think, because he was only writing at the very beginning of the industrial revolution, and an educated/specialist middle class basically didn’t exist in 1800. But I don’t think you can say the connotations of 'poverty’ have changed all that much; rather, what’s changed is the idea that a laborer could achieve anything other than subsistence, with any real surplus just being extracted by rentiers and capitalists. (That is, by holders of capital, not in the ideological sense.) Remember that this is the same era in which Malthus lived and theorized!

'Labor’ here, as an economic construct, means basically a pile of undifferentiated human flesh that can be flexibly used in the same way that we’d use programmable robots today- plonked in a factory line, given basic instructions, and told to repeat those instructions indefinitely. Capital, in this equation, was the store of value from which this pile of flesh is provided shelter and nutrition- and in fact, per Malthus, this flesh-pile will in fact grow to the capacity set by capital rather than build savings as an individual might. The construct was very 'ecological’ in that way. Charitably, the Flynn effect hadn’t happened yet, so I think it was probably at least marginally easier to think this way without being a cartoon villain.

The difference is, I suppose, one of the great unanticipated triumphs of industrialism- the discovery that humans at all economic strata are in fact persons, both educable and agentic, and that Malthus can in fact go right to hell.

There are a lot of structural forces now in play that genuinely act to preserve the 'non-subsistence labor’ class, some enshrined in law and some encoded in the needs of the modern economy itself. At the same time, I think unskilled labor is still effectively in the same boat as it was in Colquhoun’s day, and the legal and economic advantages enjoyed by skilled labor aren’t strong enough to prevent Walmart shelvers and Amazon warehouse packagers from reverting over time to the most base level of subsistence possible within their host nation’s welfare system and tech level.

This is, of course, where the Georgist nugget kicks in. For all that we may not have the level of ambient wealth needed to support our entire population comfortably on a living-wage UBI, it’s undeniable that as a civilization we’re orders of magnitude more wealthy than previous generations- and by the same token, it’s equally undeniable that a shitty apartment in Portland or New York in 2023 demands a greater store of wealth from its tenants than Colquhoun himself ever laid claim to in his whole damn life. If our average rent today was “the amount of wealth commanded by a day laborer in 1800”, it would be effectively free!

The value of (especially urban) land- not improvements or construction, mind, just the price of an empty lot- grew hand in hand with the wealth and technology we created throughout the industrial revolution, as did the value of other unmodified natural resources like water, precious metals, and even sunlight. And they seem very likely to continue doing so as we fiddle our way through the full symphony of human technological progress; the greater our arts, the more opportunities we’ll see in the world around us. That created value genuinely is collective, as few other things are, and even if a UBI can’t get all the way to a living wage (yet!), then distributing those gains widely would still go a really long way towards allowing unskilled workers to escape subsistence, or (as they prefer) to work far fewer hours in order to achieve it, even if they aren’t educated specialists benefiting directly from employment in O-ring production networks. Monopolization of natural resources really does seem to be a huge contributor to subsistence poverty in technologically modern states.

In other words, my response to “you can’t make everybody a rentier,” is “sure you can! You can literally make 'everybody’ the beneficiary on rents extracted from monopolies on basic natural resources, dividing them equally and impartially among the whole population. And frankly that seems like a great plan, even if it doesn’t end the need for labor as such, because it does so much to alleviate the misery of poverty.”

rustingbridges

yeah we can absolutely alleviate the misery of poverty, and furthermore that is good to do and we should pursue that. so I mostly agree, just taking this extremely long chain as a springboard for thought. so, one disagreement:

an upper middle class lifestyle is dependent fundamentally on the existence of people whose labor is less valuable than yours

now, technology has really bridged some gaps - e.g. vacuum cleaners and dish washers and other technological marvels let a person reap a lot of the benefits of servants without any. and that’s great!

but the whole term “middle class” is a bit euphemistic - remember this is the middle class between peasants and a literal landed aristocracy. the best we can hope to do at this time is raise everyone up to what might be called an upper working class (which, to be fair, many people would call as a sort of “middle class”)

dagny-hashtaggart
dagny-hashtaggart

That category of “character that fanartists and cosplayers tend to render as blonde at least half the time even though they’re canonically not.”

The one who’s coming immediately to mind is Dulcinea Septimus from The Locked Tomb, but there are others.

rustingbridges

I’ll be honest my eyes glaze over when authors are describing characters physical appearance, I had no idea she had a canonical hair color, but I was nonetheless surprised to hear it wasn’t blonde

I just make up an appearance in head out of whole cloth probably the biggest historical gap between my mental image and reality was uh. hork bajir in the animorphs I was very surprised when I saw the video game
discoursedrome
discoursedrome

twitter's crowdsourced fact-checking feature is obviously a mess but seeing how people use it as just another vehicle to score sick burns online makes me wish we had it. we could use that! to make it worse though I'd recommend allowing people to add fact-checks to the fact-check, so it's like a thread within a thread, but have each nested layer use a progressively smaller font size

rustingbridges

classic tumblr throwback: the nesting chokes the replies to the replies in increasingly narrow columns

yes I know it still looks like this on some views dont @ me yes I know they have this on other websites dont @ me pls im begging you
necarion
necarion

Huh. You can take torn/damaged/stained clothes to Goodwill and they can recycle them for you.  Just make sure to note that they’re damaged.

rustingbridges

ime goodwill is surprisingly ok with being used as a garbage service. drop off a load of stuff with unclear value and they will sell it more likely throw it away as they see fit

makes it easier to get rid of stuff with some sentimental value tho