No, there are some governments that hold that certain principles are self evident and that derive from nature and cannot be infringed upon. The government is understood as the protector of those inherent rights, as opposed to the grantor of those rights. — Hanover

You're just spewing ideology but missing the point. Those same governments that place restrictions on government to protect individual rights also have laws that give the state vast powers over individuals, and these powers are enforceable with violence. Some of these powers are biopolitical: the ability to determine matters of life and death and to regulate life. If the state has these powers, somewhere in its legal corpus it is maintaining the state's "supremacy over the individual" in some domain of life or another. Somehow you are under the illusion that this is entirely unique to 'communist governments'.

Your original claim was that communist charters involve setting up a 'supremacy of the state or collective over the individual', and it is this feature that necessarily leads it to totalitarianism. Yet clearly Western capitalist states have this feature. If you hold that a capitalist government can have this feature yet protect individual rights, then mutatis mutandis communist governments can. You haven't established why, in principle, communist forms of government necessarily cannot protect individual rights. I suspect this is because you don't know what you're talking about, and haven't actually read any Marxist political theory.

This characterizes Marxist governments as nothing other than protectors against capitalism, as if they have no proactive goal of their own. — Hanover

Fair enough, and that may be a limitation of my wording. But I figured "Marxists want to create a system" implies some proactive goal. The founders of the U.S. system 'wanted to create a system that protected individuals (actually white, property-owning, men) from the whims of arbitrary aristocratic tyranny'. Even if it sounds like an entirely negative formulation, it implies the creation of new political forms to provide such protections.

It's hard to coherently speak of self-determination when you suggest it doesn't exist. If I voluntarily choose a job that requires behavior that I find oppressive, then one must ask why I chose it unless I find the pros of that job outweigh the cons, which simply means I've made a rational choice. If you're suggesting that I was forced to take that job because I was forced not to have adequate skills to find other employment, then I don't know what you mean by choice or self-determination. That is to say, if you don't like wearing a hair net at McDonalds because it makes you look silly, then don't work there. — Hanover

I'm not sure what you mean at all. How can we not speak coherently of self-determination when it is suppressed?

Well, for the vast majority of McDonalds workers, that isn't a 'free choice', in the sense that a choice is a 'free choice' only if it happens under non-coercive conditions. If they decide they don't like working 60 hours a week at McDonalds and forced to wear stupid attire and flair and quit their job, then they're threatened with the prospect of going homeless, racking up debts and hurting their credit score, and not eating. And if they have children then those things are over their heads too. They are coerced into hierarchical forms of labour. The point is that there is a power relation embedded in the relationship between capital and labour. There are owners that get to decide matters of life and death for the majority of people. By your reasoning, slaves have self-determination and freedom of choice because if they don't like working for their masters then they can just try to run away or just stop working all together. Of course that's absurd, because we know it's not 'free' because such a choice is not happening under non-coercive conditions, i.e. they're likely to get flogged, beaten, or lynched.

And please don't give me the predictable crap about how wage-labour is not the same thing as slavery. Look at the point I'm trying to toy out with the comparison.

Oh, yes, nothing like a single government media outlet to get your news from. Although I understand that you don't really care about the market force of demand, maybe ask yourself why the trail of immigrants moves from Vietnam to the US and not the other way around. — Hanover

Oh the 'market force of demand' is alive and well in Vietnam.

As if the shitty corporate media in the US owned by a handful of conglomerates provides a vibrant democratic interchange of journalistic integrity. Get a grip man. And actually foreign news outlets are readily available just a couple of clicks away with your television remote. I'm not saying totally state-owned news channels is great and fantastic, just these condescending orientalist narratives coming from the West are deeply hypocritical and missing a sense of proportion. Yeah the news outlets are owned by the state, but there also aren't ghettos with an occupying militarized police force shooting blacks and latinos either.

They move to the US because that's where the wealth is. It doesn't matter if it was a vibrant democracy here, many are still poor. And the rich Viets like going to the West so they can buy up property to avoid taxes and launder money, a corruption that the West is more than glad to reinforce and partake in. Also the West is constantly glorified in the media, that is mostly Hollywood movies and such. As per the boat people, enforcing an embargo on a poor country that already endured decades of war certainly didn't help (the US dropped four times as much tonnage in explosives on this region than that used in all of WWII), and it's demonstrable that if they didn't have the subsidy system, a desperate situation would have turned into a humanitarian calamity. It also coincided with the war with the Khmer Rouge and the Chinese invasion. Do people also want to move because of the government and corruption? Yeah sure, but it's really naive and simplistic to pretend like this vast change in society to a capitalist market system has nothing to do with it. You point at governments here and say 'bad!' yet you defend the very systems and structures that make it worse.

And such is my point: trying to declare Marxism a failure simply results in its redefinition where someone cries out "yeah, but that's not really Marxism." The claim "Marxism doesn't work" becomes unfalsifiable, meaning it is a meaningless claim — Hanover

Yet I was implying that 'Marxism doesn't work' is a meaningless claim. You're making it not me. 'Marxism' isn't a definite set of principles or a political and economic system that we can test whether or not it 'works'. It's an intellectual and political tradition. You can argue that that tradition is wrong-headed for certain reasons, or that certain ideas within the tradition were failures, but then you might have to treat them like actual philosophers and read them. Yuck.

Even getting a charitable grasp from exegeses would work.

I know, but you'll keep talking to me about it because you can't help yourself not to. It's just too near and dear to your heart for some reason. — Hanover

Hah, at this point I'm more motivated out of sense of fidelity to philosophy than Marxism. You're intellectual laziness and dogmatism is too much to be left ungauded.

You haven't established why, in principle, communist forms of government necessarily cannot protect individual rights. I suspect this is because you don't know what you're talking about, and haven't actually read any Marxist political theory. — Shevek

This is the very nonsense I've been trying to avoid. Of course anyone can sit around and hypothesize a possible situation where a Marxist government would protect individual rights. That would be a wonderful exercise I suppose. But, to the extent that economic theories can be actually implemented, the question of whether Marxist governments have been protectors of individual rights is an empirical question. It's the same old argument that's been made for decades and decades: Marxism isn't per se bad, it just happens to be every time it's been attempted.

If they decide they don't like working 60 hours a week at McDonalds and forced to wear stupid attire and flair and quit their job, then they're threatened with the prospect of going homeless, racking up debts and hurting their credit score, and not eating. — Shevek

We're all slaves under this definition. I have to eat, so I am a slave to food. Equating working at McDonalds to slave working the fields is hyperbole and a bit of an insult to those suffering slavery. We all have to work. Food doesn't fall from the sky. How you choose to work is your choice, but no one is making you work at McDonalds are in any particular job you don't want to.

Oh the 'market force of demand' is alive and well in Vietnam. — Shevek

Of course it is. Without capitalistic initiatives, Vietnam's economy wouldn't be thriving and it would be a far more miserable place to live. Capitalism is saving Vietnam from its failed communistic system. That is pretty obvious even if it pisses you off.

As if the shitty corporate media in the US owned by a handful of conglomerates provides a vibrant democratic interchange of journalistic integrity. — Shevek

The US media sucks, yet somehow everyone (here at least) seems to know it and seems to know what's really going on. That would seem to indicate that there is no control over information or opinions in the US and that media, in all its various forms, is doing its job.

Yet I was implying that 'Marxism doesn't work' is a meaningless claim. You're making it not me. 'Marxism' isn't a definite set of principles or a political and economic system that we can test whether or not it 'works'. It's an intellectual and political tradition. You can argue that that tradition is wrong-headed for certain reasons, or that certain ideas within the tradition were failures, but then you might have to treat them like actual philosophers and read them. Yuck. — Shevek

I just think you're stuck in trying to evaluate Marxism as an intellectual enterprise as opposed to looking at what has happened when it has been implemented. The proof is in the pudding, not in the recipe.

This is the very nonsense I've been trying to avoid. Of course anyone can sit around and hypothesize a possible situation where a Marxist government would protect individual rights. That would be a wonderful exercise I suppose. But, to the extent that economic theories can be actually implemented, the question of whether Marxist governments have been protectors of individual rights is an empirical question. It's the same old argument that's been made for decades and decades: Marxism isn't per se bad, it just happens to be every time it's been attempted. — Hanover

Okay, have you conducted an empirical study of 'Marxist governments' and its level of totalitarian power over the individual? What 'Marxist states' do this, have there ever been any that went against the rule, and exactly what features that are 'Marxist' lead, empirically speaking, to such totalitarianism?

The problem is that you think you're being empirical and historical, but you are in fact very ahistorical and ideological. You point at China or Vietnam as evidence, yet these are highly capitalist societies, and you isolate them from the context of oppressive states (arguably more-so) that are nominally capitalist and US allies, i.e. Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, Saudia Arabia, and so on and so on. You are unable to demonstrate, historically speaking, why 'Marxism' necessarily involves totalitarianism. On the other hand, I have shown why capitalism as an economic system, to the extent that it is actually implemented and in theory, necessarily involves unequal power relations enforced through coercive apparatuses that thwarts the will of the individual.

We're all slaves under this definition. I have to eat, so I am a slave to food. Equating working at McDonalds to slave working the fields is hyperbole and a bit of an insult to those suffering slavery. We all have to work. Food doesn't fall from the sky. How you choose to work is your choice, but no one is making you work at McDonalds are in any particular job you don't want to. — Hanover

No not really. 'Nature' isn't an authority you can appeal to, it doesn't have any characteristics of agency to subjugate you for its own self-interest. The universal fact that we have to eat to survive is just a brute fact. It's a property of our universal facticity as natural, living, fleshy animals that has no meaning in-itself. It just is. On the other hand, capitalism is a social system. Anyone that tries to argue that a social system 'just is' rooted in the natural and cosmological state of things is spewing ideology (that is, in my view, a primary role of ideology), whether it be 'the divine right of kings', the tripartite estates system, the 'natural harmony' of the Indian caste system, or capitalists justifying inequality on some grounds of 'survival of the fittest'.

We all have to eat and contribute work toward being able to eat, but that doesn't automatically mean it has to happen under hierarchical and coercive contexts. There is no 'outside' of capitalism that someone who wants to opt-out can go to, they're coerced into this social relation of a few owning everything and the rest having nothing but their labour to sell for wages. No where did I 'equate' working at McDonalds to a field-slave, but I did compare them. In my view, to write off the really-existing oppressive conditions that such workers have to endure unless they want to starve and go homeless, and to just pretend like they enjoy all of the freedoms to choose types of work that any middle or upper class person with few or no restrictions can is an insult. And yes, they are being coerced into work at McDonalds or a particular type of work. The fact that you think otherwise tells me you've never experienced being in such a position and you live in your privileged bubble where you think everyone's experience is the same as your own.

Of course it is. Without capitalistic initiatives, Vietnam's economy wouldn't be thriving and it would be a far more miserable place to live. Capitalism is saving Vietnam from its failed communistic system. That is pretty obvious even if it pisses you off. — Hanover

It's not obvious at all. Any country that is embargoed, bombed to the stone age, and invaded/attacked by its neighbors for trying to adopt some system or another is set up to fail. This once again gets to your ahistorical and decontextual narratives. In your ideological universe, you don't have to know any of the historical circumstances why something happens, just a waving-of-the-hand and saying 'because communism' suffices for you.

You don't know anything about contemporary Vietnam, let alone its history, but you still seem confident that you're equipped to opine about broad and complex matters such as political economy. Here's just a few reasons why your narrative turns out to be too simplistic upon closer inspection of the situation: while GDP per capita is increasing, that income generation is intensified into the hands of an elite class, much of the development here is happening with unsustainable levels of debt, they're deteriorating the environment and the mechanisms that would have previously enabled them to control the oncoming sea-water that is rendering much of the agricultural land in the delta useless, public hospitals are deteriorating in favour of expensive private hospitals the vast majority of people cannot afford, malls, and rich condominium developments where nobody lives but their sole purpose is for the rich to buy and sell on the market. Come to Vietnam in 50 years when a majority of their population is expected to be displaced from rising sea-levels due to climate change, another brilliant innovation gifted to us by modern capitalism. The TPP will price a majority of the population out of medicines, and scary 'socialist' programs that are a matter of life and death for many people are deteriorated by 'economic liberalisation' requirements for foreign investment. If it wasn't for the last vestiges of socialist policies, they wouldn't have universal health care and education, something that aids the poor, however low-quality that care is due to the country's lack of resources and wealth, compared to countries of comparable GDP per capita that didn't go through 'evil communism'. I suspect you're not interested in complicating matters for a better picture of reality however, especially when it contradicts your simplistic ideological narratives. I don't purport to have all the answers, and I would disagree with someone that says 20th Century-style socialism is the easy answer, but I at least try to understand the roots of the problem.

I just think you're stuck in trying to evaluate Marxism as an intellectual enterprise as opposed to looking at what has happened when it has been implemented. The proof is in the pudding, not in the recipe. — Hanover

I look at history too, but the problem is you have to actually know what you're talking about. Turns out, proving 'Marxism is a failure' might actually require knowing what Marxism is and getting a more nuanced view of history.

A few comments about the actual OP.

What is systematically forgotten in the discourse of technological advancement, is demand, the other side of the coin to supply. As swstephe, it is a lot more about economics, not just about technology itself. Because basically what technological improvements come down to is to lower the costs production, hence lower supply costs. Well, that's just part of the equation. To forget the other part of the equation is the problem we have today.

Put it another way, the question to ask yourself is this: Why were the Luddites wrong in the 19th Century?

In the 19th Century the vast majority of people in West were working in the agricultural sector. In the 20th Century and in this Century, it's just a small fraction of people that are farmers. We know what happened: hordes of unemployed masses didn't surface, all those that lost their jobs and their children, didn't wreck havoc to the Western society and didn't collapse our societies. They "just" got new jobs. Period. As if this just happened naturally. What this typical reasoning doesn't get here is that the technological advacement wouldn't have happened if there wouldn't have been the demand for it. People who now think that with advances with robotics and Computer science will create large hordes of unemployed people simply don't get this at all: if the people truly get poorer, there will be no technological revolution. Sure, some Nikolai Tesla could invent truly fabulous stuff, but if the demand wouldn't emerge, who cares? Who would hear about Nikolai in the first place? The most whimsical and naive idea is that somehow the ultra-rich people will compensate for the demand of the masses. No, it doesn't go that way.

We see this clearly from the example Third World. They surely have their super-rich people, but those hardly matter. And the technology is there for them to use, yet it hasn't radically transformed the poorest societies.

Now for a China to grow from an economy less in size than the Netherlands to the second biggest (or by some indicators, the biggest) in the World didn't happen because of Chinese demand, but because demand from the West. Without that demand, without the all important export sector, the Communist Party of China likely wouldn't have had any chance to get a lot Chinese out the misery that were in... Yet a lot of countries are in exactly dire situation that their people are basically dirt poor and hence there is no demand for a large service, for advanced consumer products and all what we find in a highly industrialized country. Poor countries simply don't have the means to invest in R&D and technology. They don't have the educational systems to bring out those smart new engineers and innovators. Their only economic growth comes from possible raw materials extraction, again done for the export sector. The importance of demand is just barely touched with the focus on the importance of the middle class, which is understood to be important for growth. Yet in my view the idea of the importance of a middle class simply hides the bigger question of the importance of demand. And that demand is as crucial to any technological breakthrough to be exploited as is the innovation done by some engineers or scientists in the first place.

Hence the question about techno-optimism is a lot more about economic-optimism than usually acknowledged.

Why were the Luddites wrong in the 19th Century? — ssu

The Luddites are irrelevant here. Talking about the limitation of techno-optimism has nothing to do with Luddite-ism. I'm not a Luddite. I'd love to have a robot that would be both my auto and my chauffeur (I can't drive). I think a lot of people would like that. I look forward to intelligent appliances like cooking stoves. Why can't a stove tell when something is too hot and reduce the heat? This isn't a rocket science problem -- its a matter of sensors and processors. But a smart stove or a clever refrigerator isn't a revolution.

Hence the question about techno-optimism is a lot more about economic-optimism than usually acknowledged. — ssu

Yes, absolutely. Which is why Gordon is pessimistic about techno-economic optimism. His prediction for the next 25 years is slow growth, but growth none the less--maybe 1.1% - 1.3% annual growth (and this is for the US/Europe/Japan -- not China or India). He believes that one of the 'headwinds' that will keep growth low is the highly disproportionate pile-up of wealth in the very rich that top 1, 2, or 3%. They can't and aren't going to consume enough to create a lot of demand, and they have so much of the wealth tied up under their control that the rest of the population does not have enough wealth to spend a way to higher growth rates.

There will be demand, of course, but the kind of innovations that are likely are not the kind that recast society and generate tsunamis of new wealth -- like broadcasting, railroads, electricity, telecoms, autos, and so forth did. A new car that can back itself out of the garage, drive you to the office, and then come back home to deliver children and spouses during the day (all by itself) is still a car. It's not the revolution that moving from horses and foot traffic to autos was. Yes, robot cars will require some new infrastructure, but it will be much more modest than building the superhighways, roads, streets, and parking ramps in the 20th century.

The other reason he sets a fairly low limit on growth is that it takes around 50 years for a really important innovation to mature economically. The huge innovations of the late 19th century have matured. The personal computer has matured. (It has gotten smaller too, and been integrated with telephones). The Internet is still fairly new, and there aren't any huge innovations on the horizon that are going to mature in the next 25 years. That might happen in the 25 years beyond his predictions. But then there is global warming to factor in.

I haven't finished reading his book, but I think the upshot is that both pessimism and optimism should be guarded. Holding our own in the next 25 years might be THE major achievement.