Karl Marx and the Steemit Meta-Scene
What does the father of communism have to do with the Steemit community? A lot if you take the time to look a little deeper. Both make statements about economics and about the people affected by those economics. Both seek out solutions to flaws within their respective situations. Both parties propose solutions and both make the mistake of assuming the superiority of the alternative proposal.
Karl Marx, the father of communism
The first thing to realize is that both entities deal with imperfect economic systems. Marx criticized capitalism and many of us Steemians have criticized different elements of the distribution of Steem to the community. But the fascinating thing is how similar some of the criticisms of two systems are. Which shouldn't be much of a surprise since Steemit resembles a capitalistic system.
The alienation of the worker from their work and the exploitation of the worker by the owning class was one of Marx's main criticisms. That is very similar to the alienation of the minnow from the fun of social media and the exploitation of minnows by whales via the rewards system, vote bidding, delegation, etc.
Now, there are clear differences between the two. But the underlying notion of making the system fairer for the smaller users and making a system where people could work on what they enjoy is clearly a desire shared by Marx and a lot of the Steem community. And the criticisms are fair criticisms. I get that a lot of people shit on Marx for communism, but his criticism of capitalism is fair and one of his greatest contributions to society.
The issue with Marx and the issue with all of these meta posts proposing solutions to the Steem blockchain and the surrounding ecosystem is that they make the mistake of assuming the alternative is better than the present solution. That is not to say that the systems in place don't have problems. They certainly do. The issue is that in proposing solutions people tend to view the pros of their solution while comparing those pros against the cons of the system in place.
Such comparisons lead to unintended consequences and potentially more problems. Many communist and socialism governments try to tame the randomness that capitalism allows. For example, being born into poverty versus being born with wealth. That's random. Rather than to build a system that goes with the flow of randomness, they sought a system that controlled some of the downsides of randomness are created.
Unfortunately, such structures are inherently fragile due to their objective of control. Some power hungry assholes then leverage the control of the system and use it for their gains and the system that was designed to help the people is now used against them. The problems of the previous system return, but now are magnified now that those in control can now use the government to manipulate rather than just the market to manipulate.
So, communism sounds good on paper, but is fragile is nature. And unexpected conditions tend to break fragile systems and unleash devastating consequences on the people they were meant to help. While capitalism is not perfect and has it own problems, the system is at least robust to unexpected conditions. But Marx couldn't see this. He saw the cons of capitalism and could only see the pros of a communist revolution.
So what about the different proposals going around system? The first off is that we should be very skeptical of change in the first place. Blind change never leads to prosperity but often misery. Just look at the French Revolution. Overthrow the king, and instill a reign of terror. Nice one.
The second thing we should is evaluate all proposals with a balanced perspective. We need to look at the cons of the alternative and the pros of the current system in addition to what we currently do. As much as the current iteration of Steem is not perfect it easily could be worse and we should try to avoid moving things in that direction.
So, that's it I guess. Don't be so quick to start a minnow revolution or something like that. Sure things are not ideal, but they could be worse. I mean you could be on Facebook posting dumb content for free and burning your brain cells.
I don't agree with everything you say about Marx making a fair criticism of capitalism, but you draw some interesting parallels with Steemit.
Which parts do you disagree with?
Marx was wrong with his labour theory of value, but the biggest issue I have is that he conflated land with capital so as to attack capital. His opponents also conflated land with capital, but they did it to defend capital. Would you agree that land, capital and labour are three completely separate factors of production? If so, then you can see where Marx was making an unfair criticism.
Looking into it further, I think you're right that Marx made some unfair criticisms of capitalism. Land, capital, and labor are indeed separate. That being said his initial criticism of the system was in the name of "improvement" and although he was wrong about several things, the proposal in itself had some value in that it has inspired critical thought on the subject.
The same goes for those on Steemit proposing new ideas. The point of the post was not to fall too in love with one's ideas with Marx clearly did and Steemians have the potential of doing via premature hardforks.
It seems like people are far more willing to just start from scratch instead of leveraging highly effective process of iterating. I agree...I think Steem is doing a great job of navigating a complex set of incentives. After all, this is an experiment and we're all participants in helping to create the future.
I think iteration is important and experimentation is important too. Rather than try new ideas out on Steemit, however, I would like to see new ideas in other applications that way exploration happens concurrently rather than linearly. Because Steem allows for this (on non-hardforking sorts of issues) that is what makes the platform powerful.
That makes sense -- those side experiments can then be incorporated into Steemit "core" if they prove themselves worthy & necessary. I'm still feeling really new to Steemit and don't yet have a clear view of the ecosystem. I imagine it could work similarly to other blockchains, where there can be apps, layers, sidechains -- with varying degrees of interoperability (depending on what makes sense).
Does Steemit have the equivalent of Facebook stock shareholders who can pressure the direction based on short-term gains?
Steemit, Inc. as far as I'm aware is a private entity and even then they have to get the approval of all of the top witnesses to push changes to the blockchain since the blockchain is open source.
SMTs seek to act as very limited versions of smart contracts and Steem's version of ERC-20 tokens. These will be built on top of and use the Steemit blockchain. So it works similarly to other blockchain with its own flavoring. That being said SMTs could prove to be useful experimental grounds that STEEM borrows from. Similar to how Litecoin is a more experimental version of Bitcoin (it adopted SegWit first), but different in that both SMTs and STEEM run on the same blockchain.
I haven't looked too deeply into the actual implementation of how this is all going to work, but the framework is there to do interesting things on the Steem blockchain without having to change the underlying blockchain first.