The Quote

[Lord Zentei]

Lord Zentei: There is room for disagreement, but to say it's "simply nonsense" goes way too far. There are a number of very highly regarded philosophers who take the same stance, including, as I've said, many who self-identified as communists. And frankly, the words of the Communist Manifesto itself are pretty indisputable.

IMHO, it only goes too far if you're looking principally at the outcome rather than the intent. You could make a case that Marx should have been able to foresee that attempts to implement his system wouldn't lead to the result he desired. It is possible to criticize his approach: the functionality of his socioeconomic model, and the expected outcome of its implementation - not his actual intentions to increase freedom.

You can criticize his formulation of the freedom concept as being incomplete. For example, his emphasis on the social aspect of mankind-as-producer at the expense of the freedom of the individual vis-a-vis his fellow men. But his ideas of freedom were at bottom concerned mainly with the provision of the citizenry with the material goods necessary for the good life, and on the control by the rational and socialized man of the environment and production necessary for the goods and services required that end. In other words, his ideas of freedom were all about allowing humans to govern economics, rather than to allow economics to continue as a blind force governing humans. So it was idealistic enough in that capacity, regardless of completeness or feasibility (and as an aside, several ideas of his have achieved mainstream acceptance, such as the limits on the hours of the working day). Thus you cannot reasonably claim that his philosophy was "anti-freedom"; as far as intentions were concerned, the whole point was achieving freedom, regardless of what you might think of the results.

PS: I'm trying to be as fair as possible here. I am not a fan of Marx.

[NoXion]

Taken on it's face, the quote is clearly wrong in my eyes. Before civilisation, the liberty of the individual, while relatively free from the interference of other humans, was also significantly circumscribed by the demands of survival and the indifference of nature. But then civilisation came along, and with that came the potential for people to be more than just hunter-gatherers, enabling them to create things like the Sistine Chapel and the Hubble Space Telescope.

I have more knowledge available at my fingertips than my ancestors in Africa ever did. I have access to a vast variety of entertainment, I can eat of foods from across the planet and best of all I don't have to fight off animals or other humans to have these things.

How is that not a situation of more liberty?

[Formless]

Power =! freedom, dude. And worse, all those things you have came from somewhere, and that somewhere is ultimately power inequalities that let you live in a first world country and not a former colony of that same first world country. In most of those countries you don't have time to consume your Hollywood movies and other shitty western entertainment, because you are too busy making iPods for those who do. In other words... you.

That is how its not a situation of more liberty.

[Bakustra]

Taken on it's face, the quote is clearly wrong in my eyes. Before civilisation, the liberty of the individual, while relatively free from the interference of other humans, was also significantly circumscribed by the demands of survival and the indifference of nature. But then civilisation came along, and with that came the potential for people to be more than just hunter-gatherers, enabling them to create things like the Sistine Chapel and the Hubble Space Telescope.

I have more knowledge available at my fingertips than my ancestors in Africa ever did. I have access to a vast variety of entertainment, I can eat of foods from across the planet and best of all I don't have to fight off animals or other humans to have these things.

How is that not a situation of more liberty?

Your hunter-gatherer ancestors required only a twenty-hour workweek for the basics of survival. You require around three times that for the equivalent basics of survival. That is (also) why it is not a situation of more liberty- you have more wealth but less freedom in the way you live and what you can do with that wealth. Everything has tradeoffs- my broader point earlier was that societies have to decide for themselves how they allocate rights and freedoms, because a number conflict in ways that can't easily be resolved.

[NoXion]

Power =! freedom, dude.

Indeed, which is why I have all these things and yet be ruled over by a government that is actively hostile to my interests and the interests of many like me.

And worse, all those things you have came from somewhere, and that somewhere is ultimately power inequalities that let you live in a first world country and not a former colony of that same first world country.

Of course they had to come from somewhere. But that doesn't change the facts that those things are there, and weren't there for our ancestors.

In most of those countries you don't have time to consume your Hollywood movies and other shitty western entertainment, because you are too busy making iPods for those who do. In other words... you.

That is how its not a situation of more liberty.

Sounds like the fault lies with capitalism, rather than civilisation. It's not as if the current way we do things is the final say on the matter.

Your hunter-gatherer ancestors required only a twenty-hour workweek for the basics of survival.

And the rest of the time? How did they avoid dying of boredom, aside from the fact that they didn't know any better?

[amigocabal]

And the rest of the time? How did they avoid dying of boredom, aside from the fact that they didn't know any better?

Combat, either to defend their own food supplies, or take food supplies from another band.

[Formless]

"The fault lies with capitalism"... are you fucking kidding me? The idea of division of labor would not exist without civilization. Egypt was a proto-communist/socialist civilization, as were many of the first civilizations. Guess who invented this thing called "slavery"? Idiot.

Indeed, which is why I have all these things and yet be ruled over by a government that is actively hostile to my interests and the interests of many like me.

Would you mind telling me which country you live in, so that I may properly laugh at you? (or not, I guess there are a few places you might be from where that attitude isn't necessarily a predictor for Right Wing whinging about taxes and shit)

Of course they had to come from somewhere. But that doesn't change the facts that those things are there, and weren't there for our ancestors.

*Whoosh!* Guess what that sound was? spoiler warning-- the point sailing over your head.

This doesn't change the fact that these things are symbols of wealth and power, not freedom. Nor does it change the fact that your wealth and privileges are built upon the labor and hardship of third world nations whose people toil in sweatshops and whose air is as polluted as your colon after digesting three straight meals of Taco Bell Beans and LardTM. And it doesn't change the fact that people like you and I make up a small percentage of humanity overall. And this setup is demonstrably a result of our civilization's construction and history.

Hell, you don't even need to go out of your own country to see how arrogant this shit is. Does your country have McDonalds or other fast food joints? Just ask the grease monkeys how they like living on minimum wage sometime.

Really, this is as douchy as a seventeenth century French aristocrat talking about how awesome it is to have his choice of fifty different dishes for dinner prepared by servants he never talks to in person grown by peasants he actively turns his nose up at on those occasions when he has an excuse to take his horse drawn carriage out for a spin-- all of whom have their choice of three different forms of gruel for dinner. And to top it all off, those foods were made possible because the aristocrat owns land he only uses for hunting which the peasants can't set foot on or they lose their head, and his farms have these newfangled crops called tomatoes and peppers that came from this place called Mexico, and god bless Cortez for crushing all the natives under foot and bringing all this and more back to Europe! Such a nice guy.

Point is, you may think of yourself as being free-er than your ancestors... but that is not representative of the human condition by any stretch of the imagination. You are, in fact, in the minority on that account.

And the rest of the time? How did they avoid dying of boredom, aside from the fact that they didn't know any better?

At this point any ignorance on your part is just par for the course, isn't it? Its like your understanding of per-agricultural people comes entirely from cartoon caricatures a la Gary Larson's The Far Side. Tribal people from all around the world had and have no shortage of games, stories, festivals, sports (Lacrosse was invented by the North American tribes, for instance), crafts, art (gotta have lots of free time to master your freehand cave painting skills), music, socializing, religion, and the prototypes to basically any and every goddamn leisurely activity in existence. Oh, and of course, sex. Lots of sex.

Moron. Have you ever thought about how people even one century ago passed the time back before the invention of the microchip? Its not nearly the kind of drab existence you think it is.

[Akhlut]

Your hunter-gatherer ancestors required only a twenty-hour workweek for the basics of survival.

And the rest of the time? How did they avoid dying of boredom, aside from the fact that they didn't know any better?

Appreciating natural beauty, fucking, music, hunting, games, stories, educating children, creating art, making tools, spending time with loved ones, and doing stuff we'd call "hobbies." In fact, for a lot of people, activities that we'd associate more with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle are done in free time as hobbies (gardening, hunting, arts and crafts, music, jogging, hiking, sports, etc.).

So, boredom likely wasn't a problem for our hunter-gatherer ancestors and, in fact, most boredom felt by modern humans relates to the fact that we don't do many activities related to our hunter-gatherer past. Do you know how many people take vacations to do stuff that would have been part of daily life for a hunter-gatherer tribe? Hiking is a very popular past time throughout the world, for instance.

[K. A. Pital]

Hunter gatherers didn't know a vast majority of activities were even accessible. Like e.g. nuclear engineering.

[Akhlut]

Hunter gatherers didn't know a vast majority of activities were even accessible. Like e.g. nuclear engineering.

So? That doesn't mean they'd necessarily be bored, just that certain activities wouldn't be done by them.

Also, it seems a lot of humans are interested in how the natural world works or how to build rudimentary tools, which our more advanced skills/activities are merely offshoots of. What is the fundamental, qualitative difference between learning the habits of a deer and organized science?

[Surlethe]

Here's an interesting thought I had.

As cited earlier, your average hunter-gatherer had to work ~20 hrs/wk to basic subsistence. Presumably, they filled the rest of their time with eating, sleeping, talking, fucking --- all the things that people do. We can probably boil all of those (non-sleeping) things down to three big categories of behavior: seeking sex, seeking status, and personal fulfillment from other behaviors.

In the modern US, less than 0.7% of the economy is devoted to farming, i.e., production of subsistence. That is, agriculture makes up less than $350 per person, every year. Even at minimum wage, that amounts to just a little more than 45 minutes per week. It's even less at median or average incomes. So we spend maybe half an hour, maybe fifteen minutes a week on the equivalent of subsistence living. What do we do with the rest of our time? Seek sex, seek status, and seek personal fulfillment. How do we get sex or status, or much of personal fulfillment? We have to buy things to get those, and to buy things we need money, and to make money, we need to create things that other people value, i.e., that other people want to get sex, status, or personal fulfillment.

So we spend a half hour a week on subsistence and devote the rest of our time to sleeping or pursuing sex, status, and personal fulfillment, as opposed to spending 20 hrs a week not starving and then devoting the rest of our time to sleeping or pursuing sex, status, and personal fulfillment.

[Bakustra]

I don't think that holds up without stretching the definition of subsistence- people need more than food in order to survive in modern society, and poverty was a minimal factor in hunter-gather societies, and so we should probably compare time investment for similar standards of living, in which case this rosy progress myth suddenly becomes a lot less rosy, as in order to live close to the median of society, you need to spend three times as much time on the basics of living (optimistically, as this includes all your housework and upkeep) in order to live at the same relative standard as hunter-gatherers did. Even if we take away the standard of living and just go with survival needs, then housing, transportation, fuel, clothing, and food all added up certainly require a lot more than 45 minutes. Honestly, I don't get why so many people feel the need to argue that society has been a continuous progression from bad to good- what's so terrifying about the idea that society involves tradeoffs that need to be managed carefully?

[Surlethe]

People need more than food? Really? Shelter, maybe, but I claim you can find shelter roughly comparable to that of hunter-gatherers in a modern society --- homeless people do it all the time. Some shelter from the wind, dirt beneath your head, and several layers of clothes. So no, I think time investment for a similar objective standard of living, in terms of a simple material comparison, is in fact drastically smaller in modern society.

Maybe the difference here is that I classify everything beyond subsistence as pursuit of status, sex, or personal fulfillment. Many of those things you listed --- clean apartment, transportation, clean clothes --- these are status, not subsistence. They're what our illustrious, foraging forbears all spent the rest of their time getting, if my reading of the statistic is correct. When you're computing the cost of these other things and comparing them to a median standard, you are really computing the cost of relative status. It may be reasonable to say that moving upward in relative status is harder now than it was when we were hunter-gatherers -- more on that in a sec.

So maybe I agree with your last point --- I don't think that the march of civilization has been an entirely continuous progression from bad to good. We are unquestionably materially better off, we have sanitation and health, and fucking awesome technology. But there are also a lot more of us, so competition for status and sex is probably much greater, which is why we all work so much more. But on the other hand, when we compute that 20 hrs/wk and compare it to a 40 or 60 hour workweek, we're not including all the jockeying for status and the politics and drama and courtship that our ancestors did, especially since as I've established most of that 40-hour work week goes toward earning resources to increase status, make us better mates, and so forth.

[Bakustra]

I think we should compare relative standing to relative standing, as objective standing quickly becomes pure silliness.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Even if you're just looking at production of food alone, is that .7% just farming itself or does it include the production of electricity, fuel, fertilizer, machinery, and all the things we make that allow farmers to be a tiny minority?

[Surlethe]

Bakustra: It becomes silly for exactly the reasons I described.

Jogurt: It's % of GDP, so it includes all of the input goods as well.

[Thanas]

So Surlethe, what exactly are you saying here? That despite being forced to work more, we are more free?

How do you reconcile that with the concept of freedom being that you do not need to do something and do not have to fear the consequences?

[Surlethe]

Oh, not sure. I'm not saying anything about freedom, I think, although I could connect it back --- this was a tangent related to hunter-gatherers. Maybe it should be split.

I guess I'm saying a couple of things:

(1) If we want to compare the work week of a hunter-gatherer to the work week of a modern human, be sure to compare apples to apples. If those 20 hours are spent providing basic sustenance, we should compute how much time a modern human spends on basic sustenance.

(2) Based on that, I think we should ask why we work more than is required for basic sustenance, and compare those reasons to the activities that occupied hunter-gatherers in the rest of their time. My contention at the moment is that we work for basically the things that hunter-gatherers did with the rest of their waking time: group status, sex, and personal fulfillment. That work is a tool to pursue those other things, not to stay alive.

Does that look about right?

[Thanas]

No, not really. I still do not understand how you can just say "well, work today is more, but as you get more status out of it, this makes it more voluntary".

But even if we just go along with it, it does not follow. A person back then could have up to 80% free time. How much free time do you have today?

[Surlethe]

By "voluntary" I mean "you won't die if you don't do it." And I'm not sure what you mean by "free time," either - do you mean time spent not dying, or do you mean time spent not working? Since, by the definition of "voluntary" I'm giving, I'm really choosing to spend a lot of my free time working.

[Thanas]

By "voluntary" I mean "you won't die if you don't do it." And I'm not sure what you mean by "free time," either - do you mean time spent not dying, or do you mean time spent not working? Since, by the definition of "voluntary" I'm giving, I'm really choosing to spend a lot of my free time working.

I don't think a 30+ hour weekday mandated by a contract is voluntary, for you incur penalties if you do not. Freedom is the abscence of such penalties, the abscence of force. Go tell your employer that you do not want to work today. What will happen then?

[Surlethe]

I'd get fired. But I wouldn't die. More to the point, why did I agree to the contract in the first place? It was a voluntary (i.e. won't die if I don't) decision, because I want money to get more status and have nice things for personal fulfullment, and I want to the status that goes with having steady employment.

[Thanas]

I'd get fired.

Bingo. That is why it cannot be freedom, as it has a negative consequence attached to non-working.

[Surlethe]

Why "it" cannot be freedom --- what cannot be freedom? Anything with negative consequences is an impingement on freedom?

[Thanas]

Why "it" cannot be freedom --- what cannot be freedom? Anything with negative consequences is an impingement on freedom?

Anything with negative consequences as dictated by an outside, man-made force, yes.