I’m not an expert or an economist, mind you. I’m also jaded after America’s change in power. It’s a noble idea and a step up from capitalism. But while capitalism ends in mass surveillance and police states so the wealthy can profit, communism is similarly likely to lead to centralized identification, albeit with benevolent intentions. Allocating resources from the top down requires a system of administration, which is a hierarchy and an unchecked power. But Classification is the first step to genocide, and we’ve seen multiple times now that any country can fall to fascism in the span of 15 years. Just because you have a wonderful benevolent communist government now doesn’t mean it’ll always be that way.
Maybe there are ways around this. Part of me wants to say that only names and dates of birth (not race, gender marker, country of origin, income level) should be recorded, but even names in many cases can reveal a person’s gender and sex at birth, which is itself a form of classification. Maybe you could have a single-blind ID system, only including a name and DOB, where only citizens have access to their IDs, and governments do not store that data centrally. The hope being that if people’s needs are taken care of that the incentive to steal another person’s identity goes away. There are flaws, I know.
Again, maybe there are ways around this. I’m more partial to anarcho-syndicalism because it can more easily exist without a centralized ID system. Having traditional government functions decided democratically among and between the worker-run syndicates also helps stop fascists because if any one syndicate goes fascist, they get cut out from everyone else’s resources and get starved out.
However, if a communist government can exist without collecting data, then I’m potentially in favor of it.
DOB opens you up to ageism, but I agree that it’s probably the least problematic item. A lot of other trans spec people do NOT like hearing that they should avoid changing their sex on their ID / other documents unless passing is an immediate safety concern. I’m already highly uncomfortable that the government knows what genitals I had as an infant. I have no interest in giving them any more information on how I currently dress or how that might or might not be related to my current genitals. They just do not need to know. It’s proprietary information.
I do think there needs to be some kind of granular way to educate people on how to identify and disrupt abusive power structures. The problem is that society changes so rapidly that however abusive power structures are described is quickly adopted and DARVOed¹ by the person already in power to describe people they don’t like. The second you start talking about wokeness and cancelation they start wordspamming it into (hopefully just) meaninglessness.
This fight has gone on since before written history and will probably continue until long after we are dead. It’s the same way a niche anti-establishment death cult became a major world religion by just becoming a new oppressive regime. The message got taken and twisted to the ends of the powerful like all such messages do. No one has yet figured out a way to unambiguously preserve that meaning over time. If it’s even possible, it won’t be happening soon.
I’m not an expert or an economist, mind you. I’m also jaded after America’s change in power. It’s a noble idea and a step up from capitalism. But while capitalism ends in mass surveillance and police states so the wealthy can profit, communism is similarly likely to lead to centralized identification, albeit with benevolent intentions. Allocating resources from the top down requires a system of administration, which is a hierarchy and an unchecked power. But Classification is the first step to genocide, and we’ve seen multiple times now that any country can fall to fascism in the span of 15 years. Just because you have a wonderful benevolent communist government now doesn’t mean it’ll always be that way.
Maybe there are ways around this. Part of me wants to say that only names and dates of birth (not race, gender marker, country of origin, income level) should be recorded, but even names in many cases can reveal a person’s gender and sex at birth, which is itself a form of classification. Maybe you could have a single-blind ID system, only including a name and DOB, where only citizens have access to their IDs, and governments do not store that data centrally. The hope being that if people’s needs are taken care of that the incentive to steal another person’s identity goes away. There are flaws, I know.
Again, maybe there are ways around this. I’m more partial to anarcho-syndicalism because it can more easily exist without a centralized ID system. Having traditional government functions decided democratically among and between the worker-run syndicates also helps stop fascists because if any one syndicate goes fascist, they get cut out from everyone else’s resources and get starved out.
However, if a communist government can exist without collecting data, then I’m potentially in favor of it.
DOB opens you up to ageism, but I agree that it’s probably the least problematic item. A lot of other trans spec people do NOT like hearing that they should avoid changing their sex on their ID / other documents unless passing is an immediate safety concern. I’m already highly uncomfortable that the government knows what genitals I had as an infant. I have no interest in giving them any more information on how I currently dress or how that might or might not be related to my current genitals. They just do not need to know. It’s proprietary information.
I do think there needs to be some kind of granular way to educate people on how to identify and disrupt abusive power structures. The problem is that society changes so rapidly that however abusive power structures are described is quickly adopted and DARVOed¹ by the person already in power to describe people they don’t like. The second you start talking about wokeness and cancelation they start wordspamming it into (hopefully just) meaninglessness.
This fight has gone on since before written history and will probably continue until long after we are dead. It’s the same way a niche anti-establishment death cult became a major world religion by just becoming a new oppressive regime. The message got taken and twisted to the ends of the powerful like all such messages do. No one has yet figured out a way to unambiguously preserve that meaning over time. If it’s even possible, it won’t be happening soon.