Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

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So, I don't know that profit, extractive-value, market-value, capitalizing are really the right frame, here. Alternative systems like the Soviet Union had similar paradigms without necessarily relying on profit. These industrial processes are necessary for addressing quality of life (including quantity of labor required, lenghth of working day required, etc) regardless of whether that system is profit-seeking or not. The Soviet Union had cars, fertilizer, pesticides, plastic, lots of oil and gas, antibiotics, vaccines, sanitation, and appliances for the same reason they're profitable in the West: it actually helps people's quality of life.

That's why the essay is framed in terms of industry, not economic systems. Because that's somewhat orthogonal. (And I do think Chesterton's Fence would be a valuable point, here, too... Money and profit are tools for understanding and facilitating the efficiency of different activities, and to me the negative conditions of capitalism are a side effect of the efficiency it facilitates. If we're going to replace profit with something else, we must address how we're going to establish similar efficiencies. IMHO, a more established path than tearing down capitalism entirely would be to keep capitalism and profit, but just redistribute and rebalance, i.e. cut off the ends of the distribution to keep things from going crazy and eating itself.)

The Soviet economy borrowed technology from the market economies of the West, because it generally could not compete with the market-driven sectors of the Western economies in innovation. It had almost no ability to advance its own semiconductor sector for example.

Without a larger market-driven world to borrow from, it's doubtful it would have acquired fertilizer, factories, automobiles, etc.

The Soviet economy collapsed in the end, with millions dying in the early 1990s as the support network it administered broke down.

That it was able to last as long as it did is because it also did have a massive black market, that supplied people with much of their necessities:

https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/rees-577-fall2016/2016/...

The corruption in Russia today is a legacy of that Soviet-era black market.

> The corruption in Russia today is a legacy of that Soviet-era black market.

Not just of black market, the centrally-ran economy was corrupted to the core. Most decisions (who gets the job, who gets the apartment etc.) were routinely made based on bribes or favors.

Indeed, the latter corrupt ness is kind of a natural state of humanity in large enough groups that direct accountability isn’t feasible. Capitalism, including the rule of law that upholds it, is one fairly proven mechanism for addressing it (but it probably also relies on some culture of honesty to keep from collapsing back to corruption). Nonetheless, the Soviet Union lasted an extremely long time and I think people underestimate the effectiveness of industrialization. Industrialization meant the Soviet Union could last the better part of a century in spite of the problems you pointed out.

(Also, I think it’s a mistake to talk about the Soviet Union’s economy as purely parasitic on the market economies of the West... tons of science and engineering was done there and technology was developed. The Soviet Union’s system was super bad and shouldn’t be emulated but I think sometimes people go too far in saying how ineffective it was. It was effective enough to last a long time and provided a real scare to the West in terms of what system was more or less effective, at least for a decade or two... think the space race.)

The Soviet system was clearly inferior (say it was running at 10-30% efficiency of a market system), but wasn't completely dysfunctional.

Combine this with large population population of the Soviet block, the fact that that population was effectively used as slaves at many times and also had very little consumption goods available (most output went into building out further industrializationn to catch up to the West as well as into military and propaganda projects, such as space race) and you can see how it still managed to cough up some respectable output, at the cost of misery of the people working behind it. However, as industrial processes became more complex and reliant on specialized high-level skills (such as in semiconductors or software), it was clear that the system has reached its limits and just cannot do these things well at scale. The rampant incompetence and nepotism were just not incompatible with things like modern chip factory.

EDIT: I reread the comment above and realized I did not adequately address it and I had misunderstood some of what the commenter was saying. I revised my answer below:

I disagree that we necessarily need to have synthetic fertalizers, pest control, etc.

There are a number of methods from permaculture that does not require synthetic fertilizers, weed killers, and pest killers. The whole site is analyzed together and designed in a way there there is a cycling of nutrients back into the soil, or amendments such as biochar or mycological growth help with that. (Synthetic fertilizers actually deplete soil fertility in the long run, so you have to keep adding more and more with every cycle). Interplanting, plant guilds, and "integrated pest control" (chickens, duck, goats, and developing habitat for the pest's natural predators). The maximum yield may be lower, but designing a site this way accomplishes two things. First, it is far more resilient than the industrial agricultural method. Second, it puts fertility back into the land faster than it uses it up, and as such, it has the potential to restore the ecology. These are things people are already putting into practice around the world.

Furthermore, what the Soviet Union had was still essentially value-extraction. That value was distributed in a different way, but it is still value-extraction. It is still stuck in the same paradigm, and arguably worse -- too rigid, too unable to adapt to changing conditions.

A regenerative paradigm does not put profit first, but it doesn't necessarily dispense with it either. (In the permaculture community, that is the third permaculture ethic: Fair Share). It is as decentralized as a free-market, but is not centralized like the way capitalization tends towards aggregation of resources. One key difference between a regenerative paradigm and the value-extraction:

Free-market is driven from profit motive, the selfish actor.

Regenerative living is driven by individual's own sense of what value they can contribute to the greater whole, and developing their own personal capabilities in order to accomplish it.

So one is a value extraction and the other is a value generation or value adding (not to be confused with "value-added", which is something from the value-extraction paradigm).

Even if we were to say, ok, this regenerative paradigm works, and let's shift to that, it is not something that can be done through policy changes.

Responding to the guy who asked:

> What are you doing about it? Farming?

I started applying permaculture design to my backyard and front yard, slowly growing more food. It is not perfect and it is a work in progress. I am doing the shovel work on my landscaping to add rainwater harvesting. I am moving more towards drought-resistant white clover, or possibly developing a meadow. I am in the process of a long-term plan to develop a perennial food forest. We already have chickens. I am saving seeds and starting selective breeding for gardening varieties that will work in my local area.

I have been putting together what I experienced to help people who are interested in this stuff to get started.

I have not reached out to my neighbors and local community. I feel aversion to that, but I know at some point, it is something I should try.

I am currently deep diving Carol Sandford's work. Her podcasts, her blog posts, her books. She has been very influential in the permaculture community, but her work is mostly directed towards transforming business. Those very same principles that she has for developing employees and an organization also work for educating children. I have a son due for birth in December, and I will be trying to educate him with these things in mind.

I am trying to learn how Sandford teaches this stuff to ordinary people, so they can make a bigger impact even if it is in an non-heroic way. If I ever make the transition from an individual contributor role at work, I am going to try applying all of this.

I am putting the same kind of effort into transforming myself and how I view things as I have done with martial arts, training my body and my mind. Thank you for engaging. It is helping me articulate and organize these ideas with my own voice.

> Even if we were to say, ok, this regenerative paradigm works, and let's shift to that, it is not something that can be done through policy changes.

It doesn’t even sound like a paradigm change. Being focused on making land re-usable fits perfectly in with value-extraction. Investing in something now to get more out of it later is as old as business itself.

If it doesn’t make sense financially to take a regenerative farming approach, a policy change could very easily tax the fertilizer/pesticides/etc to a point where it does make sense.

Your broader notion about changing people to view what they can contribute instead of what value they can create/extract to personally profit is orthogonal to the entire discussion of regenerative farming because people make long-term investments over short term profits quite frequently for purely selfish reasons.

Quite to the contrary of your point, many who work on farms focused on short term maximum yield are driven by the value they are contributing to the greater whole. I know people who farm because they are “feeding society”, not because it pays well. Good luck telling some corn farmer with a few thousand acres that they are just selfish and not contributing to the greater whole because they use synthetics and deplete their soil.

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