I think it's possible to critique both systems; the American (capitalist) system in which you need to pay huge amounts for education in order to have the mere chance to get a job that's above sustenace wage, the system screwing over especially those who can't afford to pay back debt; the Cuban system in which your training is free of charge but you cannot apply your skills such that you receive above sustenance wage. Considering the doctors who are able to get into well-paying jobs alone, the American system seems to work better.
Another commenter remarked that the Cuban system is set up to keep the people at the top in power, the American capitalist system less obviously so. I wonder what other methods of Socialist organisation may be explored other than the capitalist wage-labour system we see in both Cuba and the US. The idea of labour vouchers has always been interesting to me.
> the American (capitalist) system in which you need to pay huge amounts for education in order to have the mere chance to get a job that's above sustenace wage
You do realize that wasn't true until about 15 years ago, right? You should be asking what happened (hint: it wasn't Capitalism, it was the US Government's inflationary student loan program). Until the mid 1970s when the US Government nearly destroyed the dollar, you could pay for a Harvard education with a part time job. As recently as the late 1990s, the US had very little in the way outstanding student loans compared to the size of its median income (thus the epic student loans increase that everybody can't stop talking about, ie that's why it's a headline now, because it wasn't expensive before).
It should take you about 15 minutes to do some research and compare the price of a college education prior to the year 2000, versus incomes at the time. Pick any decade prior to 2000 and do the comparison. What happened after 2000? The Bush years wars & spending hammered the dollar, which also sparked the big commodity bubble.
College tuition & fees costs climbed 500% from ~1990 to ~2010. I wonder if that was spontaneously caused by Capitalism; you know, just out of the blue prices suddenly skyrocketed because of Capitalism; or if it was something the US Government did to cause it.
Another hint: how were college costs able to completely disregard income growth and all other restraints for two decades?
The costs of university increase on a purely free-market basis because of incredibly expanding demand for a university education, now poor students can't afford to go to school. The government steps in and assures their loans so poor students can attend. Now since these loans are guaranteed capitalist institutions begin seeing just how much they can bilk students for and thus our dilemma. Our problem is the free market. Government intervention to this point has transformed one free-market problem (school only for well-to-do) into another (school for anyone but loaded with debt) because we haven't had enough government intervention. Just make it free and our problem is solved.
That's not what happened at all. The US Government didn't step in to assure the student loans of poor people. The US Government backed student loans for everyone, on a perpetually increasing basis.
You fail to address the most obvious problem with your claims:
How college costs were able to skyrocket in complete disregard to the ability to repay those loans. The lack of the ability to pay back a loan is a normal check against irresponsible lending, unless you have a printing press backing said loans and can afford to disregard defaults. The lack of responsible lending, courtesy of the US Government, is what enabled the universities to perpetually raise their costs against the lack of any economic restraints. You fail to recognize the broken core to the system: there were no cost inflation restraints, because the US Government made it possible for there to be none.
The fundamental you aren't dealing with, is what enabled the cost inflation to be so extreme, radically beyond any reasonable standards of lending or potential to repay.
The lack of a free market in education is precisely what caused the hyper cost inflation. The US Government created a system of lending backed by its ability to print dollars, which stands completely apart from normal economic reality.
Another hint: guess who is making nearly all the money off the student loans? Yep, the US Government. They're yielding tens of billions per year in interest profit, courtesy of their ability to magically make dollars appear and to put an entire generation into vast debt. The US Govt is earning about 20 times what the private sector is making off of student loans.
No, I think you're not really grasping what I'm saying. Here:
(1) College is cheap, only the few and the wealthy go.
(2) More people start to attend college.
(3) Supply and demand kick in, increasing costs, ensuring that still only the few and the wealthy go to college.
(4) The government doesn't like that poor people aren't able to afford college so they guarantee student loans.
(5) Poor people can go to school now, but price spirals out of control.
This is my timeline.
>The lack of the ability to pay back a loan is a normal check against irresponsible lending, unless you have a printing press backing said loans and can afford to disregard defaults.
You're totally right. The problem here is that it's "irresponsible lending" to give a student loan to a poor student, a black student, and especially say a poor, black student who wants to study history. We as a society though want poor students to get more education and we as a society don't want certain fields limited to just those who are already rich. So we guarantee student loans. Then a bunch of capitalists see that we've broken the loan system, pull out their Gordon Gekko hats and start robbing us blind.
>The lack of a free market in education is precisely what caused the hyper cost inflation. The US Government created a system of lending backed by its ability to print dollars, which stands completely apart from normal economic reality.
The lack of a free market in education is precisely what gave lots of kids who would never have otherwise had the opportunity to attend college that chance.
>Another hint: guess who is making nearly all the money off the student loans? Yep, the US Government. They're yielding tens of billions per year in interest profit, courtesy of their ability to magically make dollars appear and to put an entire generation into vast debt. The US Govt is earning about 20 times what the private sector is making off of student loans.
Sure, I don't like this either. College should be free.
The very fact that we are talking about student loans, inflation, destroying the dollar and income (wage-labour) means that we are talking about capitalism; though other actors within a capitalist economy by virtue of having more military or property power may influence a capitalist economy, it does not change the fact that it is a capitalist system nevertheless.
Nowhere did I claim that "free market" policies led up to this point, nor did I claim that government intervention didn't lead up to this point. However I did claim it was due to the capitalist mode of production and so far I haven't been refuted on that point.
> The very fact that we are talking about student loans, inflation, destroying the dollar and income (wage-labour) means that we are talking about capitalism
We're talking about government abuse of and intervention into a former Capitalist economy (which is now a heavily regulated, heavily taxed mixed economy). The US isn't even remotely close to being a free market system and hasn't been for decades. One quick check at the regulation count, the taxation system, the government involvement in every industry and segment, easily makes that point (further, take a look at the expansion of those things over the last 50 years). Where's the free market part?
>The US isn't even remotely close to being a free market system and hasn't been for decades.
Where exactly did GP claim that it is? And why is regulation incompatible with a capitalist system? You are making the confusion that capitalism means "free market", when it doesn't.
Capitalism is inseparable from a free market system. They are in fact the same thing and have been regarded as such for a century across all the writings of every modern proponent of free market economics. From Hayek to Mises to Friedman.
To the extent you have regulation, is the extent to which you lack a Capitalist economy. All systems opposite to Capitalism make use of extreme State control of the economy through various regulatory means. Whether we're talking rudimentary Socialism or its derivatives, including Fascism and Communism. It's an inversion. You can either have market-based economic levers or you can have State levers, or you can mix them and get a mixed economy to the extent you do so. Regulation is antithesis to Capitalism because it imposes State control over the economy. The more regulation you add, the less market freedom you must inherently have; the regulation removes possible action and decision making by free actors in the economy, it places those decisions into the hands of the State (ie out of the bounds of Capitalism to dictate).
>Capitalism is inseparable from a free market system.
No, it's not; there exists market Socialism, for example. There also exists mutualism. I don't know where you're getting this from other than the idea that authors in favour of capitalism also tend to prefer free market economics.
>Whether we're talking rudimentary Socialism or its derivatives, including Fascism and Communism.
Communism is actually the complete lack of state control but also the lack of commodity production and therefore the market.
>Regulation is antithesis to Capitalism because it imposes State control over the economy.
You have still failed to explain why lack of regulation is central to capitalism other than to name Hayek, Mises and Friedman who were in favour of free-market capitalism. Other authors who sought to describe capitalism prior to them didn't include "free market" as a core principle of capitalism.
There is no denying that the epitome of capitalist production is completely unencumbered by a State, but there is also no denying that the state must intervene in a capitalist economy to protect property rights on a large scale. There is also the idea that the the State itself cannot be a capitalist actor which is totally false; we see the State engaging in the employment of wage-labour and selling on the national and international market. This makes the state as capitalist as Microsoft or Google.
If the Cuban government is making those decisions it's not communism, it's state capitalism. In socialism, workers own the means of production collectively, and have voting power and representation in their workplace.
state capitalism is an oxymoron. NO capitalist leader/think thank/literature advocates it and they are explicitly anti socialism - which is what it is.
American medical system is not capitalist but mercantilist. It's illegal to offer services without explicit permission of the medical guild. It has the exact same effect all historical guild systems had: price gouging and reduced supply. Taxi licenses are another good example.
Capitalist medical system would mean the value of a particular medical certification would be set by the market, ie. everyone would be able to sell medical services. Historically free market has always resulted in a much better quality in addition to lower prices.
>American medical system is not capitalist but mercantilist.
This distinction is made on the fallacious idea that "capitalism" is equal to a totally free market. This is a common confusion but false nevertheless. There is no reason I see why a capitalist system cannot include intervention by the government, and indeed it must deal with this to uphold property rights as even libertarian authors tell us.
Capitalism is the predominant employment of wage-labour, the private ownership of social means of production and the goal of accumulation of capital.
>Historically free market has always resulted in a much better quality in addition to lower prices.
It has also resulted in much higher rates of exploitation, as the workers of countries with more lax or unenforced labour laws suffer greatly for it.
>There is no reason I see why a capitalist system cannot include intervention by the government
You're attempting to redefine the meaning of words to create a strawman where 'capitalism' can have any property you want, which then allows you to misrepresent an attack on a $random_negative_thing as an attack on 'capitalism'.
A system with state intervening in the market is called a mixed economy.
>It has also resulted in much higher rates of exploitation, as the workers of countries with more lax or unenforced labour laws suffer greatly for it.
The more protected against 'exploitation' people in a particular country are, the more likely they are to risk their lives trying to escape their socialist utopias.
If you weren't a hypocrite you would renounce your citizenship and relocate to a 'better' place, like Cuba or Venezuela.
>You're attempting to redefine the meaning of words to create a strawman
Isn't this exactly what post-Marxian authors did? By the time Marx was writing, it was clear what capitalism was - the predominant employment of wage labour, private ownership of social means of production, and accumulation of capital. The idea that a state which owns all or most of the productive capacity of society cannot be "capitalist" for some reason is outstandingly silly.
>The more protected against 'exploitation' people in a particular country are, the more likely they are to risk their lives trying to escape their socialist utopias.
This is a very ignorant statement; there exist heavy protections against high exploitation in the EU, but the EU is not a Socialist organisation nor are many people trying to escape it for its labour laws. There has not existed a Socialist society as of yet aside from the Paris Commune and Catalonia (which I must note, very few people tried to escape); before you reply that this is an NTS fallacy, I must say that the Socialist mode of production rests upon the abolition of the law of value (i.e commodities are not produced) and the working class as a whole hold ownership of the social means of production, and the functions of private property have been done away with. This was not observed in the regimes of the USSR, Soviet satellite states, Cuba or Venezuela.
>If you weren't a hypocrite you would renounce your citizenship and relocate to a 'better' place, like Cuba or Venezuela.
No. Cuba and Venezuela both operate the capitalist mode of production, and in fact Cuba is in very direct violation of the principles of non-alienated labour. How can a Socialist country be opposed to fair working conditions? This suggests to me that it is not Socialist at all. You must also note that I have not shown any appreciation for the economic models of either Cuba or Venezuela. The idea that I must support any country which calls itself "Socialist" is as absurd as saying that as a democrat I must support any country which calls itself "democratic", including the DPRK.
Plumbers and electricians make great money and they aren’t incurring debt to do so. Plumbers, especially self employed ones, make more than your average “marketing assistant” or some other job that requires a degree.
Plenty of people go to school and don’t rack up tens of thousands in debt.
The question we should be asking is why does education cost keep expanding so quickly: cost inflation is much higher than even healthcare. It isn’t “capitalism” it’s actually the he fact that student loan availability distorts the market. Eliminate student loans and costs will drop like a rock to a level the actual market supports. Don’t blame capitalism because capitalism would never support the artificial cost inflation caused by government intervention.
If Big Macs were subsidized as much as universities, they’d cost $100 because McDonald’s knows that if you can’t afford it, the government will be there to help.
>Don’t blame capitalism because capitalism would never support the artificial cost inflation caused by government intervention.
What is capitalism other than the system of predominant wage-labour, private ownership of socially productive property (supported by the state), capital accumulation and class society? The idea that capitalism cannot be blamed for the fact that people are required to obey the whims of speculators in the market, to tailor their ambitions such as to maximise wage rather than to pursue enjoyment and the replacement of relations between people with relations between commodities is absurd.
Capitalism "supports" whatever will make a profit; in this case, student loans turn profits. Why would this system of student loans not occur under government intervention? There clearly exist private loan agencies.
To be clear I'm not speaking in favour of the Cuban system, so please don't assume that I am.
I'm posting right now on what is by and large a forum hostile to anti-capitalist thinking; this is the very opposite of me being in an echo chamber.
Many "decent" jobs require at least a university degree, which almost always entails taking out a loan. So while you don't have to "pay" large amounts of money, you may need to loan it and then pay it back later.
Edit: since we asked you to stop using HN primarily for ideological battle and you've been battling up a storm since then, I've banned this account. Because we're serving our capitalist masters, you say? The mask slips, you say? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571118) Nope. It's
just lame and off-topic.
There's no intellectual curiosity in ideological battle—they are two different games. In one the goal is to learn, in the other to smite enemies. Football and chess don't mix, either, and tackling your opponent's bishop is off topic.
Gosh if we can't even agree on what kind of echo chamber we're in, how will we ever manage to make convincing fallacious arguments?
I think the echo chamber AT spoke of was not HN. The point is that in the US there are a plethora of options for low cost high quality educations/degrees which absolutely can help you earn a very decent living. They may not be famous name-brand cliques which guarantee a plush job right after graduating, but it is a fundamental pillar of Americanism that opportunity is there for those willing to put in the time.
The echo chamber you're in is your understanding of 'decent jobs'. No, you don't need to go to university to have a decent job. There are tons of self-made people with no university education, working in the trades or by starting a small business.
Your definitions of Socialism and Communism are almost entirely false and lacking in any reference to the founders of the movement, their usage in the disciplines of philosophy, political philosophy and sociology, and historical meaning.
Socialism since its inception was never about redistribution of capital gains, it was about the ownership of society's means of production by the working class, i.e those who survive mostly or entirely from the sale of their labour-power. This definition stretches back to even before Marx, as does Communism. Your definition of "Socialism" is what it is thought of in the US, i.e Socialism is where the government spends money on social programs which it acquires via heavy taxation. This, as many point out, is actually social democracy, a form of economic management practiced most notably in Scandinavian countries.
So if what I have said is true, you may ask: What is the purpose of the word "Communism"? The truth is that 19th century authors used the term "Socialism" and "Communism" interchangably; this can be seen in Marx and Engels, Bakunin and Oscar Wilde's works. Although they were separated into higher and lower stages, the practice of calling the lower stage as "Socialism" is an invention of Vladimir Lenin who sought to describe his country as "state Socialist" in an effort to convince people of the idea that the means of production were communally owned by the working class.
Communism is further not about party control; the idea of the vanguard party again originates from Lenin; but here we must make a distinction - Lenin did not seek to modify what his theoretical predecessors meant by "Communism", he sought to create a model of praxis, that is, to ask and answer the question of: How is Communism achieved? Lenin's own idea to this was the usage of the vanguard party, which is a group of highly educated Communist intellectuals which guides the masses of the working class toward revolution and Communism.
You are conflating Communism with praxis (thus making a category error) and further conflating that specific Leninist praxis with Communism in general. The evidence that this is a conflation rests in two facts: there exist and have existed through history democratic Socialists who not only used the terms "Socialism" and "Communism" interchangably as I have already mentioned but who sought to establish Communism not via representation of the working class themselves but via the normal methods of parliamentary democracy. An example of this praxis in use is various Socialist parties which compete in local and national elections in Europe and elsewhere. Further, there exist today several varieties of Communism, within academia the meaning of Communism can be stretched much father than you may have anticipated; Badiou writes, "where there is a State, there is Communism to oppose it". This is known as the Communist hypothesis.
On to the definiton of capitalism, the main factor is the private ownership of social means of production. By this I mean that the majority apparatus used to produce goods which society exchanges and uses are owned by individuals who seek to make a profit. This is echod by Smith, Ricardo, Marx and Keynes. Other factors which contribute to the definition include the predominant usage of wage labour and the goal of capital accumulation.
Thanks for clarifying what seems to be a pernicious confusion about the meaning of these terms. Sadly I think many people would have to abandon their pet prejudices in order to speak of these terms with the appropriate precision and historical nuance you've provided.
One of the most neglected aspects of Marx is that he thought that capitalism was an inevitable, natural development of industry. He also thought that it was a system full of contradictions and deduced that those contradictions would eventually cause it to transform into another system, communism. Communism was already a wildly popular movement by the time Marx started writing. What he set out to do was explain why there was a conflict in which one side was called capitalism and another was called communism and how that conflict would play out.
Marx's biggest failing was that he did not consider a third possibility: fascism. Such a populist movement was inconceivable to Marx, the epitome of an enlightenment thinker.
I think your analysis is correct; regardless of one's personal sympathies it's important to get the terms correct when discussing these issues. I think the image of what Socialism is has been corrupted based on misinterpretations of its meaning, especially in my judgement in the US. The fact that some people are downvoting my comment perhaps shows how ingrained biases are, and I am very far from perfect having only read the major Socialist authors, so it would be nice to be corrected if anyone has such a correction - though I doubt I will be; HN and Reddit are similar in that "drive-by" downvotes are common.
I remarked elsewhere that the art of dialectic was at some point lost; in Plato's dialogues the method was used to free the other person's soul from contradictions by advancing questioning of their assumptions and models. On mass platforms this cannot arise, as one's reputability (which should be irrelevant) comes into question via the usage of downvotes, and further the downvotes do not advance the dialectic, they aim to put a halt to it. It were as if there were, in the time of Socrates, a man sitting at the table during a diologue who did not engage but merely remarked "That's wrong!" or "I disapprove!".
Pretty much any political discourse has to start with definitions because these terms have become so encumbered with propaganda and double meanings as to be almost meaningless otherwise.
Yes, mentioning our taxes always seem to scare people from the US :)
Had a look at my own and it's ~53% (total tax) which I would guess is more or less normal, Denmarks is higher I think. We do get a lot for it though..
This leaves me to think why it is considered best practice to separate work and friendships. It's certainly not frowned upon in most places to make friends with your coworkers, to go for drinks after work or to meet up on weekends.
Separating work from friendships makes frequent job-hopping much less painful. People in general care less emotionally about their work because the companies show absolutely no loyalty to the workers. When most people leave in less than two years, there's less of a reason to expose yourself.
Then there's risks involved in exposing personal opinions to people at work. If you two have a falling out due to different political ideologies, religions, hobbies, etc., that can make continued work more difficult.
Finally, it has the potential to foster a workaholic culture at the job. Why leave work when your "family" is there? But when that is the norm of the company, workers can feel compelled to work ridiculous hours, like Japan's work culture.
Interesting, the concept of dialectic stretches all the way back to Plato, even though Hegel (and later Marx) are most known for it. The Socratic dialectic operates by the principle of questioning, and through questioning internal inconsistency is shown. The most important part here however is that this dialectic wasn't a debate, it was conducted for the purpose of improving the "opponent"'s soul by freeing them of contradictions.
Whether this is possible now, I don't know, but I think it should be fostered. In the same way, I think attachment to views is the cause of many arguments, which I am guilty of engaging in.
The concept of dialectic is so powerful it was applied to many processes, usually as thought experiment. For example, Engels wrote:
>Species of grain change extremely slowly, and so the barley of today is almost the same as it was a century ago. But if we take a plastic ornamental plant, for example a dahlia or an orchid, and treat the seed and the plant which grows from it according to the gardener’s art, we get as a result of this negation of the negation not only more seeds, but also qualitatively improved seeds, which produce more beautiful flowers, and each repetition of this process, each fresh negation of the negation, enhances this process of perfection.
I agree that "capitalist democracy" is an oxymoron, but I come from the exact opposite side from Thiel; I believe that a democracy cannot function within capitalism when politicians can be bought off, and there is no democratic control over the economy, the economy being half of the societal coin; we accept democracy in matters of politics, but not in matters of economy, the economy having just as much if not more effect on our lives.
It can and does function. It's just that buying off a politician means they use the money to buy off or fool voters. Voters still make the ultimate decision about who's in power. American voters have a tradition of refusing to vote for any candidate that isn't enormously wealthy. They somehow equate advertising spending with "will do what I want". That's their own mistake though, and they experience the consequences themselves. That's the attractiveness of democracy, people get what they ask for so they won't be angry when it doesn't go their way.
Quite often people don't get what they ask for; if they did then my point about politicians taking money would be completely moot; this is why direct democracy is gaining traction; having a direct democracy with rotating or random delegates seems to be a much better plan for democracy as it helps to rid ourselves of this problem.
Voters rarely make decisions as to who is in power; they are forced to select from a small group of candidates which have come so far already, and then a committee choses which candidate is best and makes them compete for election. I do not think that a system based on the agency of people rather than the agency of ideas is a good system.
Sometimes the voters don't actually get their say; a national organisation overrides their will. Sometimes the democratic pathways are blocked by media misinformation. These are problems of the situation in which democracy is placed, and they have been recognised at least as far back as Marcuse wrote in the 1960s. The problem is less to do with whether people get candidates in power, it's more to do with how well people are informed as to the true nature of their reality. It may sound as though I'm saying "people don't know what they want", but my intention is to advance to the super-democratic status of "people must obtain the information they need".
Marcuse puts it better than I ever could:
>The liberating force of democracy was the chance it gave to effective dissent, on the individual as well as social scale, its openness to qualitatively different forms of government, of culture, education, work--of the human existence in general. The toleration of free discussion and the equal right of opposites was to define and clarify the different forms of dissent: their direction, content, prospect. But with the concentration of economic and political power and the integration of opposites in a society which uses technology as an instrument of domination, effective dissent is blocked where it could freely emerge; in the formation of opinion, in information and communication, in speech and assembly. Under the rule of monopolistic media--themselves the mere instruments of economic and political power--a mentality is created for which right and wrong, true and false are predefined wherever they affect the vital interests of the society.
Interesting - to be pedantic (and this is the site for it) - it makes sense - in capitalism, those with capital will have the most power, which is undemocratic.
In my judgement it's not worse at all; we live in a world in which the content that actually has an impact on people is hidden no longer behind publishers but online centralised platforms; it is only appropriate that those publishers be held to a good standard by its users, as much as it is possible. But that's not the case; the situation is that the people who distribute the content are only beholden to the law and shareholders, both of which have very little to do with the largest and most socially important interest, which are the users.
Not that I support it, but if Twitter were a paid platform they would have more accountability to the users, not beacuse they have finally realised their place as a setter of massive trends and social control, but because the users hold the shareholders ransom by way of threatening to take away any profit.
That's unlikely to work. Police forensics usually work with a drive image instead of with the device itself as much as possible to avoid damaging evidence either through allowing active measures like a dead mans switch or mishandling by investigators.
Beyond that simply removing the dive and putting it in another computer would bypass any switch except one in the drive firmware itself. Are there any software out there designed to do that?
Not feasible with iPhones, as it is not possible to access the security processor memory. At least, not without some very sophisticated attack, e.g. using some sort of differential power analysis on the chip. Very expensive.
Not sure. Last time I read about these things soldered in storage wasn't really a thing. For some things where it's still largely a separate board they could probably just desolder it and attach it to another device via pogo pins or something. For monolithic boards you could attach wires directly to the chip given enough resources.
IME could maybe be useful for this but it's hard to prevent the take the drive out and attach it to another machine without having firmware or a ME-like chip on the drive to make it wipe if it's connected to a different machine.
Yes though in this [0] teardown there's a comment at the bottom that makes it sound like there's an easy connector where the SSD CPU connection can be accessed which would probably allow non-destructive imaging without involving the CPU so no userland software could protect against imaging.
> The funny connector to nowhere is the connector to tap into the SSD. When the Apple connector is mounted (as supplied) it connects the CPU to the SSD. When removed the signals for the SSD can be accessed.
Very much this, though I must also recommend his Comments on it, for the reader who has a hard time penetrating the critique. I have a short list of related books at the bottom of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15299592
>The ideas were certainly interesting, but had no real provable basis, and just seemed to be the reasoned expression of one author's individual sense of alienation - more like artistic expression than any real solution to the dilemma of civilization or consciousness.
An example to what you're referring to would strengthen your case, though my own experience has been almost exactly opposite; although many works are certainly difficult to read not only for the obscurity of the terms and the form of content used but also for their disturbing and socially challenging content, I don't think they rely on sloppy reasoning; take Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man for example; he speaks in terms the reader can identify with, not using formal logic.
For example, an enlightening passage on freedom under the idea of freedom of enterprise:
>Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. The technological processes of mechanization and standardization might release individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity. The very structure of human existence would be altered; the individual would be liberated from the work world's imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own. If the productive apparatus could be organized and directed toward the satisfaction of the vital needs, its control might well be cen-tralized; such control would not prevent individual autonomy, but render it possible.
As we can see, he uses no historical examples (at least not yet), he uses no logic or even dielactic. It's philosophy which prompts the reader to think about their own situation and what that freedom means to them.
Ultimately all action begins with the thinking subject; if we restrict ourselves to strictly empirical forms of knowledge then I think we throw out too much as it relates to how people actually live. I would much much much rather than we and academics continue to search and define boundaries, as almost everybody recognises the relevance of critiques delivered by the likes of Debord, Marcuse and Baudrillade on the social side of the Marxian coin.
That may blur the line between proletarian and bourgeois, but it does not invalidate the idea of class conflict within Marxism nor Marx's other critiques of capitalism such as commodity fetishism and alienation. Although you are very correct that Marx didn't anticipate modern financial phenomena, there has been active work within Marxian economics for the past 30 years about this, most importantly Anwar Shaikh takes it upon himself to do a semi-Marxist analysis of it in Capitalism, Conflict and Crises as does Kliman.
Another commenter remarked that the Cuban system is set up to keep the people at the top in power, the American capitalist system less obviously so. I wonder what other methods of Socialist organisation may be explored other than the capitalist wage-labour system we see in both Cuba and the US. The idea of labour vouchers has always been interesting to me.