Do we sieze the alien's means of production?
Do they also get human rights?
Yes
Are we allowed to seize their means of production?
Depends on whether their working class has already seized it, and if not, whether they'd like some help doing so.
If they aren't humans can they be an exception to the no exploitation rule?
I'm going to assume this is a sex thing
and if not, whether they’d like some help doing so.
This would very quickly become the same issue as China supporting revolutions would become right now. It would mean a cold war between Earth and the bourgeoise alien planet.
I think there are aspects to consider as well such as whether their species is even capable of communism. No contact or interference until the species is interstellar seems like a safe option.
There's also the question of what kind of aliens are they, most people imagine a human-like alien but this could mean pretty significant differences. They good be gestalt hives, they could be fish people with a completely different set of ethics to us even if they are collective, they could be deeply species-ist but ontologically capable of collective cooperation solely within their own species, etc etc. There is a real question of "what is the nature of this alien" to answer before deciding for absolutely certain that they should be treated like humans because ultimately they might be a real and dangerous threat. I advocate for peace but I wouldn't hug a shark and expect it not to bite me, understanding them is important first.
Yeah I was definitely thinking that. Thing is the aliens could be completely beyond our comprehension, what if they're a fucking sentient gas cloud or something?
While I'm all for human nature being communist-compatible I definitely don't believe that literally all aliens might be, the ethics of an ant hive might not be particularly compatible with humans. Or they might be? But we need to study and work that out before we get ourselves killed. Blundering in and assuming friendliness and compatibility is an amateur mistake.
whether their species is even capable of communism
well if they're somehow entirely incompatible with communism then that's just more reason we gotta do something about them innit
if you just mean stages of development or whatever
cool, we can speed them up then, that seems like it'd be pretty trivial at that point????
Yet it is abundantly clear how capitalism would react to an alien encounter
the same way it reacts to everything else
Capitalism's official position on alien life is "The Dark Forest". Just ignore the fact that people keep choosing "Cooperate" in the prisoner's dilemma no matter how much game theorists mald about it being illogical.
I've never understood people who think of civilized aliens as any different from humans as far as ethical question go. Just a fundamentally different way of viewing the universe I guess. Every ethical question regarding aliens could be solved by answering the same question regarding humans from an undiscovered landmass. Should we exploit them? No. Should we conquer them? No.
These questions are not difficult.
Yeah seems obvious anything intelligent should be immediately treated as an equal.
I would consider any sufficiently advanced AI to be equal to a human. I think sapience might have been the word I was looking for?
Okay I'm embarrassed for not knowing, but is Posadas like meme tier or actually worth reading?
Both at the same time:
Ignore the dolphin stuff.
the nuke stuff while not exactly wrong is him being doom pilled and overly optimistic about nuclear winter at the same time. Shades of mark fisher using nukes as a standin for capitalist realism.
the alien stuff (as far as I interpret it) isn’t meant to be taken entirely literally). IE an inter system (yet alone intergalactic) alien species can only exist if they fix the capitalism problem first ergo they must be socialist at minimum and if they exist and arrive here they’ll be comrades. More of a way of demonstrating that until we move past capitalism we can’t move past being doomed to die with and on our cradle planet.
CW: sectarian
He’s also a trot so take that as you are already biased towards or against.
The nuke thing was just the average trot take during the height of the Cold War, they called it "nuclear realism". They saw a nuclear war between the USA and USSR as absolutely inevitable, a semi-logical conclusion of their "neither Washington nor Moscow" position where they recognized the US as genocidal capitalist ghouls, but also perceived the USSR and all other AES countries as what trots call a "deformed workers' state". That's a fairly hopeless outlook, so the doomerism shouldn't surprise anybody.
In hindsight, :doomjak:
At least if they were right America wouldn’t exist anymore. Now we have hellworld where America continues and the USSR is dead
This guy's post history is fun
Hopefully I've accumulated enough capital by then, I've made good headway so far and am pretty secure at the moment. I encourage everyone who doesn't want to be made redundant to accumulate land and capital now because when the dust settles there will be nothing left for those who haven't yet
they probably expect that any particularly oppressive government that the US further morphs into would be run on the behalf of the land owning classes and petty bourgoise in a reaction to growing socialist sentiment among the public
land buyers before the collapse: hell yeah look at all this land I own
land buyers after the collapse: stop shooting me I have a DEED this is MINE
Forget the government, what's to stop the richer, more deranged guy whose property is next to yours from forcibly annexing you into his :libertarian-approaching: kingdom as soon as there are slightly fewer rules?
Say what you will about them, but I always found Georgists to be the more consistent libertarians. So many ancaps may preach about how they will gladly leave everyone alone, but I found that they will try to kill you if you even make them mildly uncomfortable or you have something they want (at least their theft is conquest, not taxes). At least our take on property rights is that seizure of the means of production is the more humane way to stop exploitation rather than [redacted], like disarming an opponents weapon rather than going for the final blow.
Ancaps tend to be consistently silent on this. Also, why should I trust someone who things altruism (and therefor honor) is for suckers, yet says that the honor system will be enough to stop people from killing each other?
because when the dust settles there will be nothing left for those who haven’t yet
Yet another "wants to hunt the poors for sport after le zombie apocalypse" bazinga. :sus-soviet:
I remember digging deep into online right wing prepper types and they think that zombies aren't a fantasy virus thing that you can ethically blow the head off of with an AR but an apt and real description of the hungry and oppressed after The Collapse, horde and all (and also still allowed under their ethics to blow the heads off of)
the oppressed masses would have in that scenario violated naptime
This is funny because in the OG zombie movie the zombies just represent an abstract catastrophe of inexplicable origin, and in the sequel zombies represent mindless consumerism. The modern thing where zombies are basically stand ins for poor and minority people who are socially acceptable to kill as part of your survivalist power fantasy came later.
When the dust settles, the piece of paper saying you own that land is less than worthless
When the dust settles what's going to matter is who has the most friends who have guns, just like it always has at every point in history.
For all their talk about their superiority, what they see as their big contribution to society, and thus their justication for their superiority, is to simply have stuff and do nothing else. Yet they call others lazy and/or moochers.
lmao I love how this dipshit assumes after the "dust settles" he'll still be alive or in any position to keep his so-called "accumulated" capital and land
Yes, we've seen how capitalism would deal with aliens in famous documentary They Live
Alien and Aliens are about corporations sacrificing working class people so they can capture an incredibly horrific alien creature because they have some bazinga idea that they can make a profit off it.
Too drunk to read all that but Aliens are already communist and would collaborate, next question
Seriously. Aliens would never say "take me to your leader" - they would ask to address the people's congress and ask if we humans of earth would allow them to give us the technology for interstellar travel.
If an advanced extraterrestrial civilization arrived here and saw how the "international rules-based order" worked they would have a serious internal discussion about the prime directive before ultimately deciding to help socialists overthrow capitalism.
How do you know so much about our anatomy?!
Their. I meant "Their anatomy".
You wouldn’t? What if they’re hot? Even if they aren’t, wouldn’t being the first human to fuck an alien be worth it?
Or garak or the based terrorist or Bashir (space humans are aliens, fite me irl jk)
Even Odo? I don’t think that’s what we mean when we say “fuck cops”
I do enjoy a silver fox…. And the shapeshifting….
Enjoy the buzz comrade, I’m drinking Fris (danish vodka) rn. Hbu
A lot of wine and coke which will be a regret in the morning but that’s tomorrow me’s problem
Lmao I pregamed with what was left of my boxed cabernet sauvignon and value brand diet cola.
Terrible hangover yesterday when that was the main event. That’s why I like vodka, very clean hangovers.
Shoutout to the Germans, thanks for inventing such a silly yet delicious combo. Like, it’s tasty af and goes down smooth. But how the fuck does someone go “wine? Yeah let’s add some fucking cola”
But how the fuck does someone go “wine? Yeah let’s add some fucking cola”
German here, i always thought that the wine-coke combo was an atrocious idea until i was at a festival where the only booze we had left was a big box of absolutely undrinkable red wine. It was so awful that we tried to trade with other people on the campground, give them some of our drugs and get beer or vodka or w/e in return, but it was a psytrance festival, so while it was no problem to find LSD everywhere, nobody had any alcohol left after the second day ... so we ended up giving the wine-cola mix a try and it turned out to be pretty good actually.
That’s awesome! Wir wollen wir trinken? Wine and coke motherfucker
Implying that if they had exoskeletons or something you wouldn't? Coward.
Look you need to come to the terms with the fact that lots of people are going to try to fuck one, and they're going to succeed, and there are going to be blogs about it.
I want to make one thing abundantly clear to the aliens:
We as a species are DTF
Is it weird that the general premise of "how would you ethically deal with a weaker alien civilization as an interstellar socialist power?" is actually something I think about multiple times a week?
I think the most general answer is you'd use high-tech surveillance drones to study the local languages and culture to the point that clear and coherent communication becomes possible and you have a general understanding of the local political situation. If there's no socialist-equivalent power then you carefully engage with the regional powers with policies that favor peace and materially providing for the broader public (so improving local agriculture and providing agricultural industrial capital, building infrastructure, building housing, building schools and subsidizing public education, providing medical supplies for local doctors and working with them to advance medical technology for their species, etc all contingent on these being things that have to be freely available to the populace) over an immediate redress of systemic grievances or the forcible institution of a socialist government, operating with the premise that a system cannot be violently reformed from outside without causing more suffering and conflict than it would solve. Even providing amnesty to the erstwhile ruling class in exchange for a peaceful transition of power would be worth it, as long as they were defanged and removed from public life in the process.
If there is a local socialist power then you do the same thing but more explicitly ally and work with them and materially defend them from the threats they're sure to be under, enforcing an armistice while still trying to deal with the reactionary powers to improve the lives of their populace and generally mitigate as much material deprivation and suffering as possible.
I think the ComIntergalactic, when encountering a Pre-Socialist world, should simply set up shop inside the capitalist system and outcompete the local tycoons and barons with their far superior technology and planning :deng-cowboy:
- Bribe whoever can be bribed for an in to the market. Offer them a life-line of relocation to a pleasure-dome on Theseus V if they ever face consequences because of it.
- Start small, play the long game. Ingratiate yourself with the local ruling class by demonstrating your skills in the art of profit.
- You can literally never go bankrupt, because you have a line of credit with a pan-galactic post-scarcity techno-utopia.
- Become the largest employer on the planet because you provide free healthcare and education for anyone that wants it, and people don't need to work themselves to the bone like in the other corporations.
- Monopolize entire sectors, any capitalist that resists the giant payday from your hostile acquisitions gets the choice of pleasure-dome or lead-to-the-dome.
- At all stages, you've been fostering worker democracy, and any worker uprising around the globe gets funding and equipment from a series of anonymous cutouts. Imagine an alien Karl Marx with a mech suit, the collected works of Lenin and Mao and ZERO carbuncles. :marx-guns-blazing:
- Once you either have total monopoly or the burgeoning workers movement has done some cool shit, you can dissolve private property relations.
I think something like that would be part of dealing with a reactionary industrial civilization, yeah. You make treats for their privileged classes in automated factories elsewhere in the system, and use the profits to pay all the local workers you'd need for the infrastructure projects, schools, hospitals, etc and to hire anyone displaced by the changing economy. I think overall mitigating the harm to sapient beings wherever possible would be the best way to go about it, since you have such a clear power disparity at work.
Like, you don't have to worry about reactionaries attacking your offworld facilities, you have to worry about them attacking their own species, you don't have to worry about material limitations and a lack of capital, you have to worry about the cost in life and wellbeing that would come from not deploying it everywhere it's needed. You're effectively the hegemonic power as soon as you enter the system to such an extent that you have to be careful and precise to avoid harming the locals more than you need to figure out how to materially overcome their ruling class. And after seeing to their species' immediate needs you then have to think about how they can be integrated into the communist interstellar in a way that preserves their agency and dignity instead of just turning them into a new species of human so to speak.
And that's with an industrial civilization that may or may not have a socialist-equivalent ideology already present, how do you approach an iron-age feudal society, or a bureaucratic classical empire? What if they're semi-nomadic horticulturalists with no metallurgy but scattered copper working at the most? The power disparity doesn't meaningfully change because of how extreme it was to begin with, but how one has to interact with them does. Hell, how do you approach creating medical technology for a species that doesn't have an established body of work already? There's no way to approach that that isn't messy and there are countless pitfalls that could lead to inadvertently harming them in the process (like say you can build up a perfect digital model of them by destructively scanning a few already dead bodies, which lets you test simulated chemicals to see what effect they'd have and what would be safe, only to find out after deploying the equivalent an antibiotic that it interacts with specific genetic conditions to become fatal or even just not work at all and your models just didn't include any subjects with that condition, etc).
Do you accept that some of your would-be-helpful actions will end up causing death and suffering occasionally and decide that more aggressive actions still save more lives and improve the general standard living enough to make up for it, or do you play it as safe and thorough as possible even knowing that literally every single day that you haven't converted the planet to a socialist system with advanced technology countless sapient beings die and suffer needlessly in ways you could have prevented? That's the real dilemma to this, isn't it? Because I think just rolling in with legions of robot soldiers and taking control by force would obviously save many lives over doing literally nothing, but it would cause a violent backlash and a reactionary insurgency and the process of seizing power would end up killing a lot of locals needlessly, leaving long-lasting scars that would haunt any subsequent socialist projects. So the middle ground is probably the best, seeing eliminating material deprivation for the locals as the most essential first step while enforcing diplomatic solutions to any local geopolitical conflicts, and from there working to build a socialist system tailored to their species and culture and effectively bribing their ruling class to peacefully abdicate.
You're effectively unbounded by the material constraints that plagued actual socialist projects in this thought experiment, so I don't think the sorts of concessions that they had to make remain necessary to it. If you're not embattled, you have the luxury of peace and mercy in a way that an encircled state already suffering counter-revolutionary terror does not. If you have effectively infinite advanced industrial capital, you don't have to prioritize where it gets used and can instead ensure that every farm has a tractor, that there are freight rails everywhere they're needed, that everyone can have a comfortable and safe living space in a rapidly built housing block, etc.
Also what the fuck is wrong with me, I didn't just think this up I had all the pieces ready to go in my head already. Some of the questions in this weren't rhetorical but like actual ethical questions I've thought about posing as thought experiments here because I'm unsure of my answers to them.
Do you accept that some of your would-be-helpful actions will end up causing death and suffering occasionally and decide that more aggressive actions still save more lives and improve the general standard living enough to make up for it,
absolutely, if you can't accept this you can never accomplish ANYTHING
I have a fun alternative, go to the planet with advanced technology and claim to be gods. Create a communist religion with the goal of flying to the stars to meet the space gods.
If you have spooky floating-off-the-ground tech, you're halfway there
Exactly. Assuming you're significantly more advanced than the species you're visiting you can achieve this.
the forcible institution of a socialist government
:I-was-saying:
"Actually I'm a National Socialist. I guess I should have specified in the introduction".
What the actual fuck is this? Who calls themselves a socialist but thinks it's okay to enslave workers because they a different number of heads than you or they're like starfish with a hive mind or something?
Yeah, that tracks. I've often vowed that the only way I'll ever set foot in Texas again is as part of a conquering army.
We will be greeted as liberators. Just, you know... not by everyone.
Uhhh yes there has
:hexbear-posadist: :posad: :posadas: :possadist-ufo:
How the fuck would militarily inferior aliens cross the cosmos? Surely any species with faster-than-light travel would be able to disintegrate entire planets with ease.
What if they live really long like a Galapagos tortoise or a bowhead whale, and like they were going shopping and there was construction and a confusing one-way system, and they simply got lost for a really long time
Upon arriving at Earth all they wanted was to use the bathroom, grab a hot meal and ask for directions home
you don't even need to be militarily superior in the traditional sense, if you're in orbit you can just de-orbit a big rock
