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Comment by olefoo | Hacker News Reader

This is the natural evolution of the privatized prison. To treat an ever growing segment of the population in a carceral manner in ways large and small. Degrees of citizenship is now a thing in America. You can be graded on your credit, your connections, your history; the color of your skin or the shape of your face.

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degrees of citizenship has always been a thing, but you're correct that it's an evolution of the carceral state, and by extension capitalism

> by extension capitalism

In communist states, you get degrees of citizenship. For example, are you a party member or not?

I don't see them mentioning communism anywhere.

Don’t be obtuse.

I'm not being obtuse: you are implying that we cannot ever criticize capitalism because that means a request for communism. This does not follow. It also shuts down criticism completely, which is never something you want, even for a good system.

If I criticize Agile, does that mean I propose Waterfall?

If you criticize something that’s known to happen both under agile and waterfall, you have to give some sort of a persuasive argument for how it’s actually caused by agile and not something more deep-rooted. Otherwise it’s just a particularly cheap cum hoc ergo propter hoc.

No, I don't, since it was never my interest to begin with to say that Agile is the original mover of all software problems, just like I'm not interested in saying that capitalism is the original mover of all human problems.

Criticism of a system has nothing to do with original causality and everything to do with "the system is not accomplishing the goals well enough". It can be done on any system in vacuum, and should be done in vacuum, because dealing with deep rooted causes is part of the package and is one of the reasons we devise systems in the first place.

Surely it is ridiculous to say that we can't criticize the US government structure because human corruption is older than the Constitution? Yet this is basically what your argument path is implying. There's nowhere to go from here but doing nothing because, news flash, the deep rooted problems are here to stay, and if we're going to excuse every system from those problems we can as well pack our bags and go back to Feudalism.

No, the original commenter threw in ”because capitalism” in a context where that causation is clearly not obvious, and failed to give any justification for the claim. They got justly downvoted for a poor argument.

wasn’t really an argument in the first place, but it seems to be quite obvious given that capitalism aims at the maximization of profits, and that slavery is a form of labor that extracts the most wealth from its subjects

I’m not the person you were talking to previously.

centralized state power tends towards authoritarianism, shocking. certainly not a compelling defense of capitalism though.

People tend towards authoritarianism. Our tendencies toward finding heirarchies and joining them is essentially an evolved organizational strategy. Communism was an early attempt at flattening it.

> people tend towards authoritarianism

points like this read like pure lickspittle to me when considering the many varied forms of communal life that had to be exterminated through massive amounts of violence in order to establish a basis of capital.

At the time when this really mattered, everyone was a party member as not being one meant not being to find a job and be practically outcast.

What mattered much more, was: are you related to a high-ranking party member or not?

Your experience might be different to mine, potentially from a different communist country perhaps? But in communist Poland you could very much not be a member of the party, and still function fine. It's just that any sort of "better" job was inaccessible to you(to be a teacher you had to have party connections for example) - but not having party affiliations was far far away from being an outcast.

I guess it depends on the country, but in former Czechoslovakia, it wasn't true. There was about 1 million party members to about 10 million adults. Whether you needed to be a member depended on the nature of the job.

But you're correct that family relations played a big role, the nepotism was rampant.

I stand corrected, seems like different “socialist” countries had different amounts of slack :)

Every single criticism of capitalism is NOT an endorsement of communism. The world is not so freaking black and white. There are degrees of capitalism, degrees of socialism, good use cases for capitalism and bad ones.

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