In his work “What Do Bosses Do?” Stephen Marglin observed that capitalist owners had to awkwardly insert themselves as managers in workers’ efforts in order to justify their extraction. Many tasks, he argues, are hyper-specialized not because this is more economically efficient, but because it artificially creates the role of the capitalist as a coordinator of tasks.

Where this *didn’t* happen is in industries where the resources in use were fixed, concentrated, and easy to register with the state and hence police. So, for example, in mining, Marglin found that early capitalists found it unnecessary to insert themselves as bosses. Instead, they allowed teams of miners to manage themselves, waiting outside the mine to collect the revenue from sales without having to get their hands dirty.

What were the miners going to do, steal the mine? Take it with them and set it up somewhere else? Of course not. There was nowhere else for them to engage in their trade on their own. The frontier is closed.

9/10

I’ll close by noting how important concepts like asylum and guesting once were to nonstate and weakly hierarchical societies.

Many Indo-European societies encoded an obligation to host strangers in their religions; think Odin wandering in the guise of an old man or the Ancient Greek principle of xenia, or hospitality, to honor Zeus. The Pashtuns have melmastya, hospitality, and nenawate, asylum, as two key principles of their traditional social code.

In “The Dawn of Everything,” Graeber and Wengrow go so far as to argue that the freedom to abandon one’s community *and expect to be welcomed in another* is a core human freedom that we have lost:

“A North American 500 years ago could travel from the shores of the Great Lakes to the Louisiana bayous and still find settlements—speaking languages entirely unrelated to their own—with members of their own Bear, Elk or Beaver clans who were obliged to host and feed them.”

Without this freedom, we are trapped. Every state border, every checkpoint, every property line hems us in. But we’re surrounded by historical examples of societies in which people committed themselves to hosting and welcoming total strangers, with the understanding that if they themselves ever needed to leave, they too would be free to do so.

10/10

They just…said it. Out loud, as it were. Explicitly. If you can control people through wages, that’s cheaper than controlling them as slaves, and you still get work out of them. That’s how capitalism works, folks. It is a transformation of slavery, not its replacement.

In her 1965 work “The Conditions of Agricultural Growth, Ester Boserup made a similar observation:

“Where population is sparse and fertile land abundant and uncontrolled, a social hierarchy can be maintained only by direct, personal control over the members of the lower class. In such communities therefore, both subjugated peoples and individual captives of war are kept in personal bondage. Bonded labour is a characteristic feature of communities with a hierarchic structure, but surrounded by so much uncontrolled land suitable for cultivation by long- fallow methods that it is impossible to prevent the members of the lower class from finding alternative means of subsistence unless they are made personally unfree. When population becomes so dense that the land can be controlled, it becomes unnecessary to keep the lower class in personal bondage; it is sufficient to deprive the working classes of the right to be independent cultivators.”

5/10

IRS audits of high earners are incredibly effective at raising tax revenue and reducing deficits.

New research shows that for each $1 spent on an audit of a high income individuals, the audit recovers $2 in tax revenue immediately, and then another $10 over the next 14 years as audited individuals voluntarily pay more in taxes due to deterrence effects

https://policyimpacts.org/research/67/a-welfare-analysis-of-tax-audits-across-the-income-distribution

wow. watched this "The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper" doc on "What Happened to San Francisco?" and it was a complete propaganda piece.

No sourcing any of the data, uncritical in every way. Painted anyone who wasn't on the side of criminalizing homelessness and policing the poor as obviously wrong.

Whole time watching I was like, car break ins? @mekkaokereke has a thread on that!

Basically the entire doc's unstated premise could have been refuted by his years old threads.

And another thing… If you’re a white person who refuses to acknowledge that #Native nations are sovereign political entities with self-determination and critical cultural knowledge, not simply racial groups, you shouldn’t be allowed to raise #Indigenous children. Period.

@majorlinux 7200RPM or 5400RPM? 5400RPM could be highly, uh, entertaining? I guess?

The game looks amazing, but it’s Bethesda, so I’ll wait until its many glitches have been patched before jumping in.

Buffalo Soldiers represent the triumph of Black soldiers in the face of adversity. Their contributions spanned military achievements, nation-building, & the advancement of civil rights. Whereas, exact origins of the term, “buffalo soldier” is debatable, by the 20th century, through both world wars, “Buffalo soldier “ was a term of honor used to describe all Black Americans enlisted in the military.

1/9

#Soldiers #BlackHistory @blackmastodon@a.gup.pe
@BlackMastodon@chirp.social
#BlackMastodon 
#histodons #History

Once you hit "stop seeing this ad" you get a choice of why you'd like to stop seeing the ad, but it doesn't really offer super on-point options, like, say, "This advertiser is a grifting prick working to make people stupider and overthrow the republic in favor of a feudal dictatorship," so just click whichever approximates it best.

Now, you could be done, but if you want to go a step further and really mute fash motherfuckers from your feed forever...

Now, I don't agree with everything the NAACP does, the response from the White House is a giant "Fuck you!" to Black Americans everywhere!

But Democrats (along with their Republican colleagues) are just slaves to capitalism no matter how many people get hurt out in these streets!

#BlackMastodon @blackmastodon@a.gup.pe @BlackMastodon@chirp.social

I give EU regulators a hard time for being too conservative in tech regulation but I’ll always give them credit for at least understanding the problem space.

The real AI risk is discriminatory algorithms not Skynet becoming self aware and dropping nukes.

US regulators on the other hand are either mouthpieces of lobbyists or regurgitating viral tweets

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65881389

@chockenberry The main difference being that weather prediction algorithms aren’t trained on god-knows-what content vaccuumed up in bulk from, say, Reddit. The algorithm in the abstract isn’t so much the issue; it’s how much of the model was trained on garbage and nonsense, categorized in whatever way by wage slaves working in terrible conditions. We need something better curated and structured than the brute-force approach we use now.

"Oh wait, I checked, the Middle-east is now a pacific cluster of efficient and equitable republics and everybody is happy. Good call on that one. You are very smart and many people should listen to you."

Love and prayers to families of the innocent victims of the Covenant mass shooting.
•Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9
•Hallie Scruggs 9
•William Kinney, 9
•Cynthia Peak, 61
•Katherine Koonce, 60
•Mike Hill, 61
Each deserved life. How many more deaths will it take? #GunReformNOW

We should seriously have a law on the books that the medical industry has 30-60 days to bill you, and that's it.

A lot of us make fun of people who like Triscuits but they'll be laughing pretty hard when society collapses and they can snack on pretty much any old fucking thing they find in an abandoned barn.

When people say gun violence is a mental health problem question them about their strategy to provide mental health care for every American

Three children and two adults were murdered today in a school shooting in Nashville. Here are the gun laws in Tennessee:

NO state permit required to purchase

NO firearm registration

NO owner license required

NO permit required for concealed carry

NO permit required for open carry

NO background checks for private sales

And the state can preempt local laws.

I have to say that I’m beyond tired of apologetic qualifiers like “late stage” or “end stage” for capitalism. It’s capitalism, full stop.

Learn more about the training facility and the diverse movement opposing it here: https://unicornriot.ninja/unicorn-riot-coverage-of-the-movement-to-protect-the-atlanta-forest/