OP, I’m curious what capitalist billionaire doesn’t donate? Do you know of any? Last I check, the charity donation loophole is utilized by the wealthy.
Is donating to charity worth the tax deduction? By using the proper tax planning strategies, charitable contributions can reduce three kinds of federal taxes: income, capital gains and estate taxes.
So… wtf is the problem? They’re donating. Why aren’t you happy?
Philanthropy doesn’t actually do anything to address the issues in tangible terms. Not only that, but the problems that it’s meant to address are actually caused by the very people using philanthropy as PR for themselves. news.stanford.edu/…/the-problems-with-philanthrop…
People will always suffer. There’s a multitude of variables as to why people around the world suffer.
Let’s take a step back. Why does the majority of people suffer under capitalism? Because they have to live in a world where they don’t get good, free healthcare, don’t have a right to a house, don’t earn nearly enough to live comfortably, don’t have enough vacation, can’t afford to take a trip, don’t have time to enjoy their lives, are alienated from their work, have shitty jobs, work too much, etc, etc, etc.
That creates a necessity for charities for all the basic stuff everyone should have, but doesn’t currently have. If we give free good healthcare for everyone, the need for charities to threat people disappears. If we give everyone a home, the need for charities for homeless people, disappear.
Okay, so how about they don’t donate to charities… no more technical advancement in medicine, so people can be poor and die from disease.
What??? You do know that most breakthrough advancements doesn’t come from the private initiative right? It comes mainly from public, government expending, into research. This idea that private entities advance society is just a liberal propaganda lie that is peddled to us all the time since birth.
Charities isn’t something you enforce or eliminate. It is a free choice to give. Mandate it and you’re just legalizing theft by the authority.
I’m not talking about making charities illegal, I, like every other communist in the world, am talking about solving the issue at it’s roots, eliminating capitalism, and that requires eliminating exploitation through labor and eliminating the rich and insanely wealthy as a class.
You need to purchase a vehicle from the dealership. Tell me exactly how you’re going to get that vehicle into your possession.
You need to think these things through, create a detailed scenario of this vision, how will it be implemented and how can it successfully work. I’ve tried this thought exercise, what you’re asking for… it’s impossible. There now has to be a medium (currency) to trade with. Or the world gets a reset button and we have to start from scratch again - that’s the only way bartering is going to work as a socioeconomic norm across the globe. Or maybe on a microlevel, a civil war that takes down the entire banking industry and we’d have to start from scratch in this country.
There’s no bartering; that’s stupid. We simply take care of one another. This seems like the obvious way to run a society. But instead we have people that can’t imagine it this way thanks to the brain rot capitalism provides.
If you trust Kamala can do anything positive, especially for the economy, including her stolen-Valor-VP… that’s not even gullibleness, that’s just hypnosis. She’s had 3-4 years to do something. Ain’t seen chit, partner. She can’t even manage the ONE major task/project, the borders. If I hired someone to manage a project and they did nothing but sit around, they would be fired within the first 3 months.
At least with Trump I was able to line up interviews and have multiple job offers, I had the upper hand. Best of all, in choosing the company that paid incredibly well, I was able to quickly save up for a 20% down payment on a comfortable home and overall property. Not only that… after Biden won and I had to transition to another organization because COVID got me laid off, I had enough savings not only for that down payment, but survive on said savings for another 8 months without income because it took 8 cot damn months to get another job and now I make 40% less than what I did back from 2018-2020. Couple that with the chit show economy we call, “bidenomics”.
Yeah I’ll take Trump over ANY democrat the DNC selects. In fact, what… economic policy does Kamala have? Other than the one she stole from Trump, eliminating taxes from tips.
lol @ people downvoting this. Yo, legit. I lived in the east bay of California. In a tiny two bedroom (think it was 690sq ft) apartment with my wife and daughter. My neighbor was hanging by a thread until the gas prices hit just over $6/gallon. This is where my neighbor finally hit a brick wall. The gas was so expensive he couldn’t afford to fill his tank of gas to have gas enough for the week to get to work. I gave him $30 so that he was able to get some sort of groceries to feed himself. He had to re-evaluate his groceries in order to have a full tank of a gas to allow him to drive to and from work Monday-Friday. Had I not given him that money he would have legitimately gone at least 1 day if not 2 days without food. This is thanks to the shit tier job the Democrats do year after year, every time they’re in power. And you don’t even give a fk how it impacts others, even yourself. You gaslight yourselves and it’s maddening to witness it.
I bet most of you mfkers are so young you have mommy and daddy to depend on. You don’t have actual responsibilities so you’re clueless about what it is to be an adult, especially a married adult with children.
psssst your down votes don’t hurt my feelings, just shows you have deprogramming to experience.
So… wtf is the problem? They’re donating. Why aren’t you happy?
It’s another way billionaires are taking away power from the common people. They are donating money and reducing their taxes by doing so. What it effectively means is that instead of the democratically elected government deciding on what causes that money is spent on, the billionaires get to decide instead.
More like billionaires donating ‘charities’ that push a certain agenda, e.g. the NRA, instead paying taxes that can be spent on things likje public schools or libraries.
Or they just create their own ‘charity’ that supports whatever political goals they have.
I’m honestly not trying to get a rise out of you… but I don’t see a problem with this:
The National Rifle Association (NRA) Foundation donates to charities through its grant program. The NRA Foundation’s grants support organizations and programs that promote safe and responsible firearms ownership, shooting sports, and hunting safety. The grants also fund education and training programs, community outreach, and research into firearms safety and marksmanship. The NRA Foundation’s State Fund Grant Program provides financial support, supplies, and equipment to local groups and programs that serve youth, women, veterans, law enforcement, the disabled, and the general public.
The problem is that the billionaires get to decide how the money is spent, instead of ‘we the people’. You are basically giving them control over how that tax money is used.
I think AI art is comparable to photography. Photographers do a lot of work behind the scenes to get everything set up, the equipment, lighting, angles, lenses, etc, But at the end of the day, the only action they’re taking to capture the art is they press a button, it’s not nearly the same amount of work that a painter or a musician puts into their art. So I think the idea of “capturing” art is still a valid thing. Sometimes a photographer can capture an award-winning masterpiece with a spur-of-the-moment photo on some shitty disposable camera. Maybe it took them 1000 bad photos to get that one photo, but they still just captured it from somewhere else, they didn’t create the work.
Similarly with AI, a person may have to work with the AI software to setup and craft the prompt that will eventually generate the art, then there may be dozens of iterations of that and fine-tuning to get the result they’re imagining, and even after that there may be some photoshopping involved to get it to where they want it. They’re capturing artwork from a source that may not be their own creation, just the same as photographers. I think AI art is just as legitimate as other forms of art, it’s just open to a wider range of people that can participate because many of the physical hurdles (equipment, space, time, lighting, etc) are not as much of an issue.
I think what you’re describing is more like 3d rendering.
IMO using AI is more like directing in a film. You’re not the one creating the art, and the level of control you have is restricted to providing guidance and retrying.
Agreed, the process is very non-artistic. There are too many layers that remove the creator from the process of creating. It’s more of a science than an art, and unsurprisingly an artistic spirit is usually lacking from it.
The results are better when in the hands of artists, but many artists don’t enjoy using the tools because they are so removed from an artistic work flow and are such a black box most of the time. It’s not artistically fulfilling to press a button and see what comes out.
Just my 2 cents as an artist who has experimented with the tools quite a bit and still doesn’t love them.
How far can the artist be removed from the art, and still be considered the artist?
And is it even important to ask “is this art” if art is inherently subjective? It’s probably more important to ask “who is this helping?”
I have a pretty wide definition of art, so I hesitate to say it can’t be art flippantly. I do think that for something to be art it must contain the voice of the artist, though, and for many AI generations I don’t think you can see that voice, even if a lot of work went into creating it. Maybe that will change as the tools become more sophisticated and easier to get what you want out of them.
I agree but I don’t think that has to do with AI necessarily. There are people who create images without soul, no matter the medium and tools used.
I think that people who make soulless art are just drawn to AI generators because it allows them to make something aesthetically passable without hours and years of tedious practice (which they otherwise wouldn’t be willing to do since they obviously have no care for the art).
I’d say it’s a grey area, like AI prompting
You’re not the one implementing the final result, you’re just providing guidance to other(s) who produce the final piece of art.
If there is artistry in that, it seems like it’d apply equally to directing as it does to prompt engineering.
I don’t necessarily disagree.
The style of a director is the common set of guidance that they provide to the artists who do the work of making the film (eg the actors, the grips, the editors, the lighting, the markup, etc).
Likewise someone who uses AI to make art can have common things they seek in all the AI images they generate. Common things they include in their prompts to push the images to appear in a particular way.
They’re not the same but there is enough commonality that criticism of one mostly applies to the other.
Photography is capturing something real in the physical world. Even if the action can be boiled down to “push a button” the photographer needs to have at least some presence where the real event is taking place.
AI art is not a depiction of a real event and requires no physical presence. It’s also not being brought to life by the person taking credit for it. That’s not to say AI generated images can’t be cool or useful but I don’t think they are art. If your definition of art is loose enough to apply to AI generated images then the I think the artist credit should belong to the AI itself or the team that wrote the software, not the person typing in prompts.
I think, where the real conflict comes from, is that most traditional artists are passionate about their craft and need to be able to sell their commodity art. Most people are empathetic of that and therefore not a fan of other commodity art competing with these passionate artists.
Photography was also controversial when it first appeared, because it meant traditional artists could hardly sell portraits and realistic paintings anymore.
I think, it also took a while for people to learn of and believe that some people are actually genuinely passionate about photography, too.
And well, AI is now the new thing, but it’s also kind of worse. Because it’s not just certain kinds of paintings that are affected, they’ve literally been trained to replace all commodity art.
And they’re stealing off of those traditional artists (someone snapping a photograph of the Mona Lisa and trying to sell it as art will also get heckled).
And it’s going to be hard to convince people that typing words into a box is something to be passionate about.
It’s a tool in a box. Maybe an artist can use it get some inspiration and not actually use any of the generated images. Or generate a backdrop for their portrait drawing. Or generate a composition they like and then draw over it.
But at the end of the day, the only action they’re taking to capture the art is they press a button.
Wut? Are you serious? You’re just going to boil down an entire artform to that? That’s an unbelievably reductive opinion.
Anyone can take a photo, sure but making art via photography is incredibly complex. I’m not a photographer at all and even I can understand that. It’s the photographer’s tastes and years of learning and practice that ultimately creates an impactful photo. You must think playing drums is just hitting tubes with plastic lids with sticks then, right?
I struggle to believe that you have put any thought into this opinion of yours.
Anyone can take a photo, sure but making art via photography is incredibly complex.
I think that’s exactly the point. Anyone can use AI, but that doesn’t make then all artists. But there is a place for AI in art, like many other tools. Same as for other tools, jusy knowing how to use them doesn’t make you an artist. Just look at all the bad Photoshop stuff everywhere. Does that mean that using Photoshop makes you a talentless hack? Or just that a lot of hacks use it to pretend they’re artists? Same for AI.
Wut? Are you serious? You’re just going to boil down an entire artform to that? That’s an unbelievably reductive opinion.
That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? People might spend a lot of time learning the different AI tools, how to supplement them with post processing and manual edits, how to combine them and how to nudge them in the direction they want, and then spend countless evenings trying to get the result they want. And people are going to say “they just AI generated it, they are not artists”, just like people might say photographers are not artists, they just take a photo.
But we know it’s far from “just” taking a photo or “just” generating it with AI. Sure, you can “just” do both, but the result will be far from real art without all the preparation and extra work.
But it’s easy to take a random shitty AI image to laught at, just like it’s easy to take a random shitty photo.
AI “art” is theft. Doesn’t matter how much time they spend setting up the perfect prompt. It’s not their viewpoint. It’s not their aesthetic or style. They made no decision to go one direction or another. It’s an aggregate of someone ( or many someones) else’s work.
While I think it's extremely overhyped, looking at some "AI" art communities it's clear that at least some put a lot of effort on it, going over many many iterations and tweaking the program and the results.
And anyway art is "made" by the observer, not the artist, even the results of natural processes can be art.
(AI in quotes because these tools don't deserve the name, at best High Coherence Media Transformers)
I like to think that anything that CAN be art, if it can be meaningful for someone.
A pebble might be ignored by most people, but a geologist might be fascinated by it, I think that becomes art.
Even in something worked-on at the very least the artist is the observer, and they will put into it the meaning they perceive in it, and if they never share with anyone it's still art.
AI “art” isn’t art. It’s just a trash bag of pieces pulled from real work that was sucked up into the model to learn from without any consent from the originators of said art. It’s fun to work with if you need inspiration to actually create art from, but it’s trash otherwise. I don’t mind people showing it off, but if you think you’re a genius because you typed a handful of prompts into a tool that far smarter people than you created, you’re on par with NFT and crypto folks. They seek the shortest route to success because they don’t want to put in the work. Art is organic and rooted in the emotion and experiences of living beings. It’s grounded in reality and understands that a human hand should have 5 digits on it and why.
It’s insanely complex and I don’t condemn the tech or the smart folks that create it, but what it generates is missing all of the organic factors that give art life. It’s being harnessed by capitalists to shut the human artists out, when it should instead be used by those artists as a tool to make their work easier.
Source: I’ve used multiple generators and have built software that uses ChatGPT and DALL-E. I’m also a digital artist.
It’s sterile as fuck. It looks like every single image I see AI blogs pump out for clickbait articles. It has no sense of lighting and the smiles are Uncanny Valley territory.
Edit: Guy on the right has the wrong number of fingers.
I feel like that applies to most art.
Effort and feeling rarely show in the final piece, because most people aren’t good artists and even good artists don’t usually produce good art. Even what’s “good” here is subjective.
I tend to agree that AI art isn’t art in the way that we usually mean it, but also this is turning into a big grey area because people are using AI for touchups and stuff. Mixed media and photomontage artists have a field day I’m sure.
It really shines in things like photo retouching. The fact that you can tell it to simply erase an object is mind blowing. That’s something I had to spend hours doing manually years ago. It makes filter effects when doing digital art a breeze. That’s why I say it works better as a tool the artist collaborates with, vs making entirely from scratch. That coupling has been the perfect balance.
I use GitHub Copilot on a daily basis and it makes repetitive tasks much easier to work through. I don’t want it to write my code for me; I want it to make my work easier. The same applies in other disciplines.
This article explains it well. Marx’s theory was that the advancements of technology and manufacturing should be things that the worker maintains and works alongside with, vs a replacement for the worker. That’s where capitalism chimes in and is ruining the AI movement. It wants to eliminate the human aspect, which then removes any life. Cranking out hotel room art with AI serves a far different purpose than someone making paintings to be sold in a gallery.
Art is always going to be subjective, but part of what makes art is the sentience of the beings making it. The mass-produced AI imagery we’re seeing today is just a mix of corporate-driven plagiarism.
If AI output is or isn’t art isn’t an important question; what we should be asking is “does AI help artists and individuals realize their intent, or does it help the shareholders/owners take an even bigger slice of the pie?”
Yeah, it’s not the subject matter itself; it’s the way that subject matter is being bastardized. I would be a total jerk to dismiss AI as a whole. I know people that have worked with it for years in the LLM space, and they are far and away more brilliant than I could ever wish to be.
Calling pieces where an artist used an “AI” to do things like touchups “AI art” is like calling a piece where somebody used the magic wand tool “Magic Wand art.” Because that’s what the magic wand is - an algorithm written to identify similar elements and isolate them. That’s essentially the beginning steps of an LLM. “AI” has been used in this regard for decades now, it’s only that AI has become a buzz word for companies looking to replace worker skills with a cheap fascimile so that they don’t have to pay their workers that has led to the concept of “AI art,” by which it can be safely assumed is referring to generated images.
And I believe the word that OP was looking for is intent. As Adam Savage put it, AI art lacks intent. Whether a piece is good or bad doesn’t matter, you can feel what the artist had in their head and what they wanted to express with a piece, and that’s what he cares about when looking at a piece of art. When a 6 year old draws a dog, it doesn’t matter whether that dog is a stick figure or a work comparable to the Mona Lisa - you know that they wanted to express that they like dogs. AI has no intent. It simply combines pieces of its data set, transforming art created with intent into a pile of different details that no longer have their original context.
I disagree that you can feel the intent in the painting of a 6yo more than you can feel the intent behind the prompt in an AI generated image. The person making the prompt has intent.
If the intent of a painting was evident, then there wouldn’t be so much backlash against abstract art, and debate about what art means.
All I was trying to say is that “AI assistance” has become a sliding scale all the way from simple tools like intelligent select tools, to complete image generation, and all kinds of points in between (eg: smart-erase, uncrop, in painting to add entirely new things) so it’s difficult to draw a clear line between what is and what isn’t “AI art”
They don’t really care, they think they are “innovating” by doing this. I mean, this is a genuine question: why are they so amazed by an algorithm like this when they never did any art in their life? Aren’t they busy coding or “X’ing” with their checkmarks?
That’s fine, but ai “artists” act like their prompts(and even the images they didn’t do shit to make) are things they put their heart and soul into and get so mad that they have any people calling them out
Personally I haven’t seen any of that, just a lot of people butthurt (or scared for their livelyhood) that others can now make pictures with little effort.
Also some of these generated pics are the result of hundreds of trial-and-error attempts changing up the dozens of parameters and running multiple pieces of software in sequence to get the AI to spit out the wanted result.
The “Anti-AI” crowd tends to be completely ignorant on how this stuff actually works.
And some people have turned this AI stuff into their hobby, so they get defensive when you shit on them (“calling them out” as you word it)
Yeah, misconstruing my comment in one sentence and slapping on a clown emoji thinking that is a genious comeback is hard work that requires years of training
It’s fine to have AI stuff as a hobby but I’m sorry; AI generated art has no business in an art gallery with human art.
Rent/host your own spaces, open your own galleries, hold your own events. No one is saying that people can’t engage with AI art. What they’re saying is that the effort to legitimize AI art as an equal to human art is incredibly damaging and cancerous.
After the 1986 attack on Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III there was a conversation concerning who would do the restoration of the painting. Despite the work provoking a lot of anger in museumgoers due to its simplicity, the painting was incredibly intricate, and experts knew that it would be nearly unattainable to complete a faithful restoration. Although the work was mostly just an expanse of the color red, both the shade and technique Newman used were difficult to replicate. Prior to the slashing, it was almost impossible to see brush strokes on the work with the naked eye. Additionally, one of the cardinal rules of restoring paintings is that everything done to the work should be reversible, something that would be very difficult to do with such large cuts through the body of the work. The painting sat damaged for many years because no conservationists wanted to touch it.
The dude who did eventually volunteer to restore it more or less went over the entire painting with a roller and red paint, and you can tell immediately.
The parallels to film directing are uncanny. Idk why people consider that an art either. Not sarcasm, film directing isn’t art for the exact same reason AI images aren’t art.
How far does the artist have to be removed from the art before they’re no longer considered an artist?
Is it even meaningful to ask if something is art, when anything can be art and art is subjective? It seems more important to ask who a given tool is helping.
I’m not suggesting that the director has full responsibility for the art. They are part of a team, and the creative style of a director heavily influences the finished product. You can tell who directed a movie just by watching it. There are very important creative decisions and directions that point the team of more specialized artists in the right direction.
This is not analogous to AI art. That would be like the director of a movie telling a team of interns to cut together clips of other movies as best they see fit, within a general outline of the script. A person using AI to generate art isn’t part of the creative process in the same way; they tell a machine what to do, and decide whether to rerun or tweak the prompt after seeing the result. This takes some small modicum of creativity, but it isn’t creating art. It’s fine for fun, or to use as a stand in tool, or to mock-up designs, but it will never have the creative direction of a human being, or stand on the same level with true masters, regardless of how well it can copy their style. It can’t understand the art.
Directing is an art form of its own. The cinematography, the pacing, the set design, acting, and so much more is all influenced by the director’s decisions. It would be like saying a conductor or a music producer isn’t an artist. Easy to say if you don’t have an understanding of the art form, but dead wrong. There are a ton of creative choices at all levels made by directors, and there’s a reason we’ve been using them in one way or another since we first started performance art. I’ve worked under and beside directors in the past, and I have only the utmost respect for what a good director can do for the art.
they tell a machine what to do, and decide whether to rerun or tweak the prompt after seeing the result
Replace “machine” with “film crew”, “rerun” with “do another take”, and “tweak the prompt” with “provide notes”. If they’re giving notes to a computer or a person doesn’t really change the nature of their work, only the language they use to provide those notes.
Just like there are bad directors, there are bad AI artists.
And just like I’m sure there was a surge of bad directors when digital video made lowered the skill and cost bar to film making (see: YouTube), so to is there a surge of bad “artists” now that AI has lowered the skill and cost bar for aesthetic image creation.
I don’t think that some AI art produced by some random idiot is really art, just like I don’t think that making a backyard YouTube video makes you a director. But I don’t want to automatically discount something as art just because it was fully or partially made using AI.
But like I said, I don’t actually think this is an important question. If something is art is a question that everyone has to answer individually, and there will simply be no demand for things that people don’t view as art.
Instead the question is about who does AI help? Does it help people who might otherwise be unable to bring their creative ideas/vision to life? Or does it help a bunch of corporate overlords lay off a bunch of creative staff so that they can get big bonuses and pay their shareholders big dividends?
Replace “machine” with “film crew”, “rerun” with “do another take”, and “tweak the prompt” with “provide notes”. If they’re giving notes to a computer or a person doesn’t really change the nature of their work, only the language they use to provide those notes.
is what a director does? You have no clue what you’re talking about. They’re far more involved in the creative process on every level than you understand.
Your question about who AI helps is a valid one. I agree that that’s what’s important about AI use. I use AI in my work, but not to replace human beings, but as a tool to make easy mock ups or test ideas. I find trying to replace human creativity in a way that replaces jobs or the human spark that makes art, art, abhorrent. AI art cannot exist without humans to train on, so humans cannot be fully replaced, but I hope to never see a day where AI takes the positions of well compensated artists leeching off the work of unpaid or underpaid humans.
I mean, I was reductive wrt what a director does in the same way that you’re reductive about what crafting a prompt involves. Do I think they involve the same level of effort? Absolutely not, directing is at a way larger scope and scale. But it’s a matter of degree rather than kind. They’re involved with the creative process at a remove, by providing instruction to others so that they may change the end result to fit what the director (prompter) envisions.
I think we have a powerful new tool, and in the hands of artists it will make art, and in the hands of the laypeople it will make soulless images devoid of meaning. The power of this tool has simply attracted a lot of laypeople because it gives them access to something they never had before, and as a result we get a flood of non-art.
But I think we agree wrt the ethics, which is by far the more important discussion.
Yup. That’s why I’m skeptical of directors are artists.
Or, more accurately, I don’t think you can get a clear black and white answer about if someone is an artist or something is art.
It’s probably more like a grey area, a sliding scale.
I think we’re looking at this question wrong anyways. Anything can be art, this is just a tool and in the hands of an artist it will contribute to the creation of art.
The question is: is this a net benefit for society? Is it helping new/hidden artists create art that they otherwise couldn’t? Or is it making the life of the artist harder by fucking up the job market? Both?
It’s like asking someone to make you a sandwich and then stipulating what you want on the sandwich then, once the sandwich is on a plate in front of you, you proudly exclaim “Wow, I’m quite the chef, aren’t I?”
The sandwich maker in this case is just not a person, it’s a computer.
Looking at it a different way, that would be like a photographer taking a photo of the sandwich and proclaiming “I’m an artist” or a director telling a chef what to make, telling a cinematographer/camera operator how to shoot it, and an editor how to cut it to create a short film of a sandwich and proclaiming “I’m an artist”. Art can be made from a series of creative and purposeful decisions that result in a piece of expression. It might not be good art, it might not be effortful art, it might even be unethically made art, but it’s not not-art.
AI “Artists” are idea guys. They don’t care about the process or the knowledge or the experience of creation, only the Content that gets produced that they can consume. They’re middle managers claiming the work created by the skills of the workers under them as their own effort. Image generators simply allow them to do a corporation and avoid paying people for those skills or putting in the effort to learn themselves. It’s just a new form of coloring books, only created using ethically dubious methods because the companies creating the programs are likely violating fair use laws.
Edit: This isn’t to say that people who use coloring books are inherently bad or anything, but when you’re trying to pass your page from a coloring book off as a gallery-worthy exhibit and the book was made by a company tracing artwork and using it without permission to make a profit? Yeah, then you’re a bad person. Especially if you go on to talk down to artists because you made yours so quickly, etc.
One thing for danish people is the “online government id” (MitID) everyone has and needs to use for online purchases and logins to banks and various other things.
I really wish Mozilla would focus on these missing bits and bobs like WebUSB and this one you mentioned instead of whatever the fuck it is that they’re doing now
I’m currently reading a book which argues that “most people, deep down, are actually pretty decent”. It’s really good, highly recommend to anyone. It’s called “Human Kind” by Rutger Bregman
Both egoism and altruism are human nature. We are capable of both (for the most part). Currently, we have a socioeconomic system that rewards and encourages primarily the former. Why not try it the other way and see where that brings us?
I wonder how well a system would work where you get more money, the more you help people/help solve problems (with problems i mean like pollution or something)
It definitely would be nice if that were the case, but i think the best way to incentivice people is to reward them. Better yet make a competition out of it. Just gotta reward actions that benefit other people.
Like let people be millionaire’s but to get there they need to help like ten thousand people or something
I’d like to point out the viability of cooperatives to accomplish this. A co-op is defined by the seven Rochdale Principles. Among those is open and voluntary membership, democratic member control, cooperation among cooperatives, and concern for community.
Its a stateless form of socialism that gives workers ownership to the means of production and doesnt have to necessarily negate private ownership. They can simply be incentivized by the state similar to how tax breaks and subsidies currently work or by providing workers the framework for which to purchase a company in the case of failure (like after the 2008 financial crash - when competition, greed, and capitalism failed).
Just what ive decided might be the best, or quickest, path to achievement. Wishful thinking, idealist, idea worth spreading. I see cooperatives as a form of peaceful revolution, but how best to achieve a cooperative economy when so few are aware of what it means? One way, I suppose, is for elected officials to advocate for it. Its hard but not impossible to imagine. I suppose there are multiple steps in between that would make that more tangible, and one of those is awareness. There’s already a lot of us in support of socialist ideas where one of the biggest criticisms is for a planned economy, so why not advocate for a stateless form of socialism that expands, rather than possibly, or arguably, restricts, individual and collective freedoms?
Was Lenin aware of cooperatives when he wrote the state and revolution? Its not a theoretical idea. Its already a proven and successful form of enterprise. Why do some of our representatives advocate for workers unions when their existence goes against capitalist exploitation of workers? Seems totally possible to advocate for worker cooperatives in a similar vein.
There’s already a lot of us in support of socialist ideas where one of the biggest criticisms is for a planned economy
Planned economies are good actually, there is a reason semi-feudal russia was able to go to space in 40 years after the revolution, while beating off imperial superpowers like Germany and Britain.
Was Lenin aware of cooperatives when he wrote the state and revolution? Its not a theoretical idea.
There can be no such thing as peaceful revolution, if your political movement is getting anywhere the bourgeoisie will send their dogs to destroy it, and it will be violent. You must only look to history to see how easily the mask of civility slips away and the inhuman, bloodthirsty face of capital is revealed.
I had an ex help organize an event to great success, ultimately accomplishing more than they were asking for from the powers at be. Organizers in the area tried to shut it down, or take over, however because it wasn’t how protests are typically done.
I don’t know enough about Lenin, but do we need violent revolution to advocate for cooperatives and elect officials that will help support them? With the right state sponsored incentives, cooperatives can be a great stepping stone for a peaceful transition of power giving workers ownership to the means of production. I struggle to understand how someone can argue against this idea. Maybe I need to learn more history, or maybe we need to be collectively more optimistic and united. I don’t know how to accomplish this aside from trying to feebly spread the idea here and in my own life. I’m involved and trying to be more involved in the small cooperative movement.
to advocate for cooperatives and elect officials that will help support them? With the right state sponsored incentives, cooperatives can be a great stepping stone for a peaceful transition of power giving workers ownership to the means of production. I struggle to understand how someone can argue against this idea.
So basically the state exists in order to defend capitalism from internal and external threats, and a cooperative movement growing too big is a threat that it is going to respond to violently. Hell, union struggles led to literal battles and aerial bombings, and they only wanted better conditions working for the capitalists.
Right I see. Co-ops are a threat to a capitalist that wants to exploit their workers, and if co-ops got big enough to strain the system I imagine there would be some push back from someone with money.
But co-ops can exist outside the system so it shouldn’t matter, and theyd have the power in numbers. Cooperation among cooperatives is one of the defining principles of a cooperative. So if a housing co-op gets their food from a food co-op who gets their food from a farmers co-op and they all get there energy from an energy co-op, what is a capitalist to do? Its like a free market and if the capitalist fails, that’s just competition.
All that would need to be done is for there to be more co-ops and more people that understand and want them to exist.
I mean if we want to overthrow the system violently, or reject it with violence, we can but I see an alternative here if somehow people can unite on an idea. I don’t know how to do that though.
I mean its the goal… to avoid violent revolution. If it does need to turn to that though, then what will be there to replace capitalism?
Its literally an alternative where workers own the means of production. How is that not outside the system? They already exist in pockets around the world.
Its literally an alternative where workers own the means of production. How is that not outside the system?
Because capitalism isn’t just individual companies, it is also the state, financial systems, markets, etc. If two out of 5 production systems become cooperatives the owners of the last 3 are gonna instruct the police to restore capitalist control to the two.
I kind of fail to see how a life in which all my basic needs are secured as long as I agree for them to be secured for everyone else, thus freeing me from anxiously giving my life to the futile attempt to crawl above others, is “altruistic”. Working your ass off for nothing but your crude survival and the benefit of a handful of others doesn’t seem very selfish if you put it in this perspective.
In any case, whatever is going on right now - it’s… not good, to say the least. Wanting to fix the problem with the problem is horribly naive.
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