iie [they/them, he/him]
this is great, really succinct, I probably will show this to people
price is more correlated with exchange value than wages, and exchange value is correlated with the amount of labor time that went into the commodity
Indirectly, isn’t this saying that price correlates more with labor input than wages? How can that be? Aren’t the two multiplicative? The capitalist pays for wages x hours.
I’ll tell you my understanding, and you tell me if it matches or disagrees with yours:
My understanding is that price correlates with labor cost (wages x hours) because competition between capitalist firms drives prices down until they are close to costs, and most costs are ultimately labor costs—e.g., metal costs money because someone had to dig it up and smelt it. Capitalists manage to profit only because competition is imperfect, due to a combination of price-fixing, oligopoly, and “consumer irrationality”—to use the dorky term for “I buy food from the place closer to my house even if the place across town sells it slightly cheaper, and there is so much variety on the shelves that I can’t always make an objectively optimal choice.”
As for exchange value… my understanding is that exchange value, like price, also correlates to labor cost. Concretely, the idea is that you can log onto ebay and sell some stuff, then use the money to buy different stuff, and when lots of people do this you start to get a consensus about the relative values of different goods compared to each other. That makes sense to me, but, ultimately, doesn’t exchange value tie back to the price charged by the original producer, which ties back to the labor cost? I don’t understand the idea that prices correlate more with exchange value than wages, I don’t see how price can correlate with one and not the other.
I’m still learning all this theory so I don’t know if I have it all right in my head
Really though, I genuinely hope so too. I am really happy with how it has been handled since lyudmila started posting.
Yeah, me too, it’s a relief to see people decompress and process things now that the action is over. I just wish we could have moved at this pace from the start.
I’ve gotten so much out of this site over the years, I hope we can keep things going here for many years to come.
No there weren’t, that’s a reductive representation… [paragraph I’m still wrapping my head around]
Sorry if I got it wrong. I don’t have a very good understanding of what happened.
That said, I’m not here to re-litigate the details of what happened. I probably shouldn’t have tried to find a real example.
My point is that the thread was not a functional discussion. People were escalating and not listening.
Following your analogy: The french revolution could have been avoided if the royalists weren’t dumbasses
My analogy is that certain situations have their own emergent properties, not that the causes of a revolution can be mapped to the causes of a struggle session. I’m talking about the chaos itself.
Struggle sessions and revolutions are both examples of situations that gain a life of their own. Emergent effects dominate over the desires of the participants. No one’s in control of the situation.
My takeaway is that we have to look at what happened and finally confront the current structure of moderation of hexbear is one that is inherently flawed.
That might well be, but I hope we can talk about it slowly and patiently from here on out.
My understanding is that struggle sessions are rarely one-sided, they’re a feedback loop of escalation, hurt, and defensiveness in which all sides contribute. In this session, for example, there were comments accusing the mods of being a cabal of power-seeking transphobes. That’s an escalation that shuts down discussion rather than fosters it.
I make the analogy that, just as revolutions tend to be chaotic and bloody regardless of their ideological content—libs conveniently forget how mess the French revolution was—struggle sessions have their own realities independent of the specific topic and specific people involved. The same unstable feedback loops arise in any struggle session.
My takeaway is that, in general, looking past this specific struggle session, we all have to work together to foster healthier discussion dynamics here.
boycotting products /groups that advertise on their videos.
and pressure campaigns against those advertisers.
I think targeting the advertisers is the big one. It would work better if MeToo still existed, but the Biden campaign killed that. Maybe MeToo can be resurrected as an offshoot of the abortion rights struggle that will be escalating in the upcoming years. Maybe campaigns can appeal to parents of daughters. “This is what YouTube is telling your daughter’s male classmates.” “This is what those male classmates are saying. [Some vile quotes]” “YouTube is profiting off of victimizing your children.”
Okay, but regardless of who started it, we fed the other half of the feedback loop, and where did that lead? Big picture, are we better off for the experience?
People are cracking jokes to ease the tension, but underneath that? Most of the site hates struggle sessions. How many people leave and never come back every time we have one? How many people waded into that thread and formed lasting personal animosities with each other that will still spark conflict months or years from now, any time they see each other in a thread? Is the site any healthier overall now than it was before? What happens to the site culture over time if we drive away people who can’t stand struggle sessions and retain people who can? Are we getting more and more terminally online every time we do this?
It’s so simple to avoid. Our site has no meta-culture about how to handle large conflicts, which is a problem not only here but in any orgs we belong to, because it makes wrecking that much easier. Apparently, in this struggle session, there was some “debatebro” alt account stirring shit, and people thought the account belonged to an admin when it didn’t. Is it really that easy to fuck with this site? All you have to do is make an alt account and fan the flames any time there’s a conflict here?
To avoid this mess, all we had to do, as a community, in this struggle session and every other one, was slow down, try to understand each other, and avoid throwing personal attacks that push people to defend themselves with more personal attacks in an endless feedback loop. Like a slow driving zone around a school, we could have seen the struggle session coming, switched gears, and slowed everything down to avoid it. I guarantee we would be better off if we knew how to do that.
“Burn pit” is a great analogy, because this was more of a fire than a discussion, jumping from kindling to kindling. TC69 got overwhelmed, saw herself mutating in the eyes of the commenters with each passing minute, and started banning people as a firebreak, which only made it worse, until eventually she locked the thread. That’s not a good result for anyone.
I don’t know how to end this comment. I’m frustrated that this community tears itself apart so easily. It doesn’t have to be like this.
