The issue is not [...] but the processes of capitalism itself.
In which case I suggest that “anti-capital” is a misleading term, especially when accompanied by “pro-labor”. There is a meaningful opposition between labour and capital (meaning, roughly, the people who work and the people and institutions that tell them what to do) but not between labour and capitalism; one is a class of people and the other is a process or ideology.
(For the avoidance of doubt, by “opposition” there I don’t mean that the two have to be enemies or that their interests are always opposed; I mean that they are two things of somewhat the same kind, which might sometimes come into conflict, and for which one can meaningfully ask “which do you favour?”.)
it’s a human-unfriendly optimization process
Yes, it is—but, just as with the prospect of AI, I suggest that the question to ask might not be “how can we defeat this powerful hostile thing?” but “how can we stop this powerful thing being hostile and make it act for our benefit?”. The answer might turn out to be that we can’t—that no broadly capitalist system can really produce a society that works well for anyone other than the favoured few. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Not least because the actually-existing societies that seem to do best at providing a decent life for most of their people are broadly capitalist, with various mechanisms attached that try to fix raw capitalism’s tendency to screw over all but the wealthiest.
no broadly capitalist system can really produce a society that works well for anyone other than the favoured few.
It’s worse than this. Capitalism only even works for the particular capitalists on a temporary basis. As the system works, the class of people owning any capital at all is narrowed, which Marx called “proletarianization” (to wit: owners of small shops are pushed out by, say, Wal-Mart, and thus forced to become wage-laborers instead). To the extent that capitalism is doing something decent for humans, this is fine; to the extent capitalism is just a big societal paper-clipper, we vitally need to stop it.
just as with the prospect of AI, I suggest that the question to ask might not be “how can we defeat this powerful hostile thing?” but “how can we stop this powerful thing being hostile and make it act for our benefit?”.
I disagree slightly: AI is far more beneficial than capitalism ;-). AI is a blank optimization process, so to speak, an AIXI implementation doesn’t come with an unfriendly utility function built-in, you have to add one and then unleash it yourself. With AI there at least exists the possibility of specifying Friendliness and getting it right; the “evil by default” behavior isn’t some cosmic force that hates us, it’s just that we only like a tiny subset of possible universes.
Not least because the actually-existing societies that seem to do best at providing a decent life for most of their people are broadly capitalist, with various mechanisms attached that try to fix raw capitalism’s tendency to screw over all but the wealthiest.
I think we need to speak seriously about the varieties of social optimization processes.
I agree that social democracy has produced the best observed results for human beings, and in fact contains explicit mechanisms (ie: democratic participation in allocation of the means of production) for ensuring human-friendliness. I also wish to note that markets should be considered a mere component of capitalism, and that pro-capitalist ideologues who focus primarily on markets are, essentially, rather like mechanics who focus on getting the greatest horsepower rather than on what the engine is for. So we can assume that the category of human-friendly economic systems contains at least social democracy, and also probably cooperative-based market systems, syndicalism, possibly democratic state-socialism, commons trust-based systems, and many others.
However, there are many variables that go into a market system. What we currently have is neoliberal financialized capitalism: liberalism level = state compels labor but subsidizes capital accumulation, definition of money to be accumulated = virtual credit-money rather than industrial production, allocation of the means of production = private profit-maximizing companies, donation-funded NGOs, state agencies, and almost nothing else.
Slavoj Zizek said in 2011, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. David Graeber has characterized neoliberalism as an ideology which, when given the choice between making capitalism seem the only possible economic system and making capitalism a long-term viable economic system, will always choose the former. It is not enough to simply rail on behalf of “free markets” or “workers’ revolutions”, we need to be rationally unpacking the variables that make social optimization processes function one way or another, and determining what values for those parameters result in something we actually like.
It is not enough to scream, “Another world is possible!” Dozens of other worlds are possible, which is why it’s imperative to stop pretending that this is the only or ideal world despite the fact that so many don’t like living here.
I think what you go on to describe is part of what I meant by “[doesn’t] work[] well for anyone other than the favoured few”. Indeed, the identity of the favoured few changes over time—though typically the really favoured are quite safe for a good while.
AI is far more beneficial than capitalism.
AI, at the moment, isn’t anything. (Or, rather, it’s a term that’s sometimes applied to a wide variety of things, mostly beneficial but nothing to do with what we both mean by AI in this context.) If and when “real” AI arrives, it has the potential to do either a lot more good than capitalism or a lot more harm or both.
AI is a blank optimization process
No. “AI” as such doesn’t say what’s being optimized, but any actual instance of AI will be optimizing for some specific thing(s) (or acting in some specific ways, or whatever; it might be an optimization process only somewhat metaphorically). A genuinely blank optimization process wouldn’t actually do anything.
I agree that more details of the merit function are built into the term “capitalism” than into the term “AI”. But I bet that a randomly chosen merit function is a lot worse than capitalism’s. Capitalism isn’t a cosmic force that hates you any more than AI is. You’re just (if I may repurpose an aphorism of Eliezer’s) in possession of dollars it can use for something else.
If you’re reasonably content with social democracy then I don’t see how you can both hold that capitalism is intrinsically disastrous and hostile and agree with Žižek that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism. The end of capitalism might look like turning everywhere into Sweden. That might be difficult to achieve, but it’s not harder to imagine than the end of the world.
We seem to have drifted rather a long way from the original point at issue, namely whether being politically on the left requires one to be “anti-capital”. I haven’t seen anything so far to change my opinion that it doesn’t. Opposed to some important features fo neoliberal financialized capitalism, by all means. Opposed to capital (especially in the sense in which that’s naturally contrasted with “labour”), not so much.
In which case I suggest that “anti-capital” is a misleading term, especially when accompanied by “pro-labor”. There is a meaningful opposition between labour and capital (meaning, roughly, the people who work and the people and institutions that tell them what to do) but not between labour and capitalism; one is a class of people and the other is a process or ideology.
(For the avoidance of doubt, by “opposition” there I don’t mean that the two have to be enemies or that their interests are always opposed; I mean that they are two things of somewhat the same kind, which might sometimes come into conflict, and for which one can meaningfully ask “which do you favour?”.)
Yes, it is—but, just as with the prospect of AI, I suggest that the question to ask might not be “how can we defeat this powerful hostile thing?” but “how can we stop this powerful thing being hostile and make it act for our benefit?”. The answer might turn out to be that we can’t—that no broadly capitalist system can really produce a society that works well for anyone other than the favoured few. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Not least because the actually-existing societies that seem to do best at providing a decent life for most of their people are broadly capitalist, with various mechanisms attached that try to fix raw capitalism’s tendency to screw over all but the wealthiest.
It’s worse than this. Capitalism only even works for the particular capitalists on a temporary basis. As the system works, the class of people owning any capital at all is narrowed, which Marx called “proletarianization” (to wit: owners of small shops are pushed out by, say, Wal-Mart, and thus forced to become wage-laborers instead). To the extent that capitalism is doing something decent for humans, this is fine; to the extent capitalism is just a big societal paper-clipper, we vitally need to stop it.
I disagree slightly: AI is far more beneficial than capitalism ;-). AI is a blank optimization process, so to speak, an AIXI implementation doesn’t come with an unfriendly utility function built-in, you have to add one and then unleash it yourself. With AI there at least exists the possibility of specifying Friendliness and getting it right; the “evil by default” behavior isn’t some cosmic force that hates us, it’s just that we only like a tiny subset of possible universes.
I think we need to speak seriously about the varieties of social optimization processes.
I agree that social democracy has produced the best observed results for human beings, and in fact contains explicit mechanisms (ie: democratic participation in allocation of the means of production) for ensuring human-friendliness. I also wish to note that markets should be considered a mere component of capitalism, and that pro-capitalist ideologues who focus primarily on markets are, essentially, rather like mechanics who focus on getting the greatest horsepower rather than on what the engine is for. So we can assume that the category of human-friendly economic systems contains at least social democracy, and also probably cooperative-based market systems, syndicalism, possibly democratic state-socialism, commons trust-based systems, and many others.
However, there are many variables that go into a market system. What we currently have is neoliberal financialized capitalism: liberalism level = state compels labor but subsidizes capital accumulation, definition of money to be accumulated = virtual credit-money rather than industrial production, allocation of the means of production = private profit-maximizing companies, donation-funded NGOs, state agencies, and almost nothing else.
Slavoj Zizek said in 2011, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. David Graeber has characterized neoliberalism as an ideology which, when given the choice between making capitalism seem the only possible economic system and making capitalism a long-term viable economic system, will always choose the former. It is not enough to simply rail on behalf of “free markets” or “workers’ revolutions”, we need to be rationally unpacking the variables that make social optimization processes function one way or another, and determining what values for those parameters result in something we actually like.
It is not enough to scream, “Another world is possible!” Dozens of other worlds are possible, which is why it’s imperative to stop pretending that this is the only or ideal world despite the fact that so many don’t like living here.
I think what you go on to describe is part of what I meant by “[doesn’t] work[] well for anyone other than the favoured few”. Indeed, the identity of the favoured few changes over time—though typically the really favoured are quite safe for a good while.
AI, at the moment, isn’t anything. (Or, rather, it’s a term that’s sometimes applied to a wide variety of things, mostly beneficial but nothing to do with what we both mean by AI in this context.) If and when “real” AI arrives, it has the potential to do either a lot more good than capitalism or a lot more harm or both.
No. “AI” as such doesn’t say what’s being optimized, but any actual instance of AI will be optimizing for some specific thing(s) (or acting in some specific ways, or whatever; it might be an optimization process only somewhat metaphorically). A genuinely blank optimization process wouldn’t actually do anything.
I agree that more details of the merit function are built into the term “capitalism” than into the term “AI”. But I bet that a randomly chosen merit function is a lot worse than capitalism’s. Capitalism isn’t a cosmic force that hates you any more than AI is. You’re just (if I may repurpose an aphorism of Eliezer’s) in possession of dollars it can use for something else.
If you’re reasonably content with social democracy then I don’t see how you can both hold that capitalism is intrinsically disastrous and hostile and agree with Žižek that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism. The end of capitalism might look like turning everywhere into Sweden. That might be difficult to achieve, but it’s not harder to imagine than the end of the world.
We seem to have drifted rather a long way from the original point at issue, namely whether being politically on the left requires one to be “anti-capital”. I haven’t seen anything so far to change my opinion that it doesn’t. Opposed to some important features fo neoliberal financialized capitalism, by all means. Opposed to capital (especially in the sense in which that’s naturally contrasted with “labour”), not so much.