Psychiatric-industrial complex and development of ideas that could help combat resurgence of fascism in modern capitalist societies (plus some unfinished projects)
Polska wersja
For-profit psychiatry
My predictions from previous post realized the same day it was published and I was locked in psychiatric “hospital” for almost 5 months (I was released on February 10, 2023). Polish government spend 54 005 PLN (about 11 173 PLN per month, while minimum wage during that time was 3 490 PLN) to keep me unproductive and isolated from society. This quite substantial amount of money was obviously not spend on providing good conditions for the patients, as there was no access to washing machines, amount of food provided was much bellow my caloric requirements (but frankly, I personalty had access to fresh clothes and additional food provided by family, others were less fortunate). I was sleeping witch 5 other men in a room that had no tables and chairs and not enough cabinets for everyone. Strict policy of the “hospital” meant that you weren’t allowed to wear a belt or freely charge electronic devices (which were allowed, but just the small ones that allowed you only to consume, being productive was prohibited). Those restrictions on usage of long, elastic objects were there supposedly to prevent suicides, but keeping people who never exhibited suicidal behavior on suicide watch is kind of pointless (nevertheless, there is money in it!). While conditions for patients were quite despicable, “doctors” were driving expensive cars and having a great time administering unnecessary and harmful “medicines”. Wrongdoings of for-profit psychiatric “hospitals” in the US and in the UK are well-documented. Situation in which employees of healthcare system could be deliberately hurting patients in order to earn more money is not unthinkable, as we had in Poland the “Skin Hunters”, a group of paramedics and doctors who killed patients so that they could get bribes from the funeral homes (some of the money obtained by this process was funneled into Solidarity trade union, more on this pro-capitalist organization later).
I did not notice any helpful effects from cocktails of drugs that I was forced to take, on the contrary, after injections of haloperidol I experienced extrapyramidal side effects for example. Other drugged “patients” had it much worse, as they sometimes weren’t able to speak or make any coordinated movements for prolonged periods of time (sometimes weeks). Neo-Nazis masquerading as medical professionals (probably they were inspired by the deeds of Dr Irmfried Eberl) also fed me clozapine, a poison that claimed 23 609 lives from 1989 to 2023 in the US. Many of those deaths resulted from the suppression of immune system, but gastrointestinal hypomotility (I experienced a lot of it, the “cure” recommended by the fascists was “drink more water”) progressing into necrosis of the bowels actually has quite high mortality rate as well. Some time after release from Konzentrationslager Koberin I experienced severe testicular pain and I was diagnosed with inguinal hernia. My theory about cause of this event is that months-long constipation caused by “hospitalization” progressed into a more serious condition (according to this source it can happen). To be frank, constipations stopped right after the release from KL Koberin, when I was still taking my “medications”, so they were also caused in part by psychological trauma of being imprisoned or other environmental factors like food or prohibition on physical activity. Additionally, hernias get worse with increase of the intra-abdominal pressure caused by visceral fat and clozapine causes weight gain.
On another note, clozapine can make you unable to ejaculate and psychiatric “hospital” is not a place where you can partake in any sexual activity (unless you enjoy raping other “patients”). According to The Mass Psychology of Fascism, sexual repression is used by authoritarians to instill obedience. Previously mentioned drugs were used to “treat” so-called “negative” symptoms of the supposed schizophrenia, but in reality their efficacy is not clinically significant. Some researchers suggest that antipsychotics may even exacerbate those “negative” symptoms.
When I asked my “doctor” what change she wanted to to achieve with those “medicines”, what is the objective of the “treatments”, the answer was silence.
Most likely justification for putting me in this concentration camp was the fact that I was not earning money. I was never quite good at being obedient and efficient proletarian (or a wage slave if you prefer). Nevertheless, when I work with the means of production that I own, from which I am not alienated, I am able to produce quite proficiently (I am judging myself here). I am a great fan of open-source economics and commons-based peer production. I like developing projects which are freely shared with the rest of the wold at their completion. While impact of my projects on the society was for now extremely limited, I am still learning and developing new ideas. While there are extremely hard working individuals that are able to work for the bourgeoisie in the day, and produce digital commons in the night, I am not one of them. I spend a lot of time getting acquainted with the works of culture or researching ideas that are new to me. It leaves me with little time do actual productive work and I would prefer to have maximum control over it. It places me at the economic disadvantage, with comparison to the regular proletarians, who just do as they are told by their capital-controlling masters.
Absurds of capitalism
This state of affairs saddens me deeply. Capitalist system incentivize people (for example smart programmers) to work on closed-source and for-profit projects. People who deliberately restrict access to their work only for paying customers are paid more than those who make their work accessible for everyone. There are companies that restrict capabilities of hardware with software, so product bought by poorer person is worse than the one bought by someone who is richer, while both products were physically identical and their cost of manufacture was the same. Planned obsolesce is common and capitalist manufacturers instead of focusing on providing their products for widest possible group of customers try to make a profit by selling the same product for the select group of people over and over again. Media outlets instead of providing unbiased content that would enrich intellectual lives of their viewers/readers, bombard them with ads and sponsored material.
When you use free or pirated software all you need to to do before using it, is to complete installation process. When you are a paying customer of digital goods you are required to fill the form with details of of your payment card, register an account, type long product key and in some cases you must be always online to use offline functionality of product you purchased. Videos on DRMed streaming services can disappear or be modified at any time, so ability to make local copies of various content should be a basic right that ensures survival of cultural heritage. Bourgeoisie class is also trying to make lives of of people buying physical goods in brick-and-mortar stores harder by the day. Self-service is more common than ever, but now owners of the stores are not happy with buyers having to just scan barcodes of all the products they purchase. When visiting Auchan hypermarket recently I placed receipt printed by a self-checkout on the bottom of my bag and I wanted to leave the store. But the gate was installed at the exit that requires you to scan the barcode on the receipt to activate it (no warning about it was shown). I had to place all of the products purchased on the floor (no other surface was available), search for crumpled piece of paper, flatten it, pick up food from the dirty floor and arrange it in the bag once again. So while privately-owned temples of consumerism are portrayed as a heaven for buyers, it is just an empty propaganda. In a true communist society (getting there is a long-term project) you can just take what you need and no one asks you any questions or stands in your way.
Problems with socialism of the past
While I am anarchist at heart and I would like people to be in the state of highest possible freedom, I do not think world is ready for it yet. It is orthodox Marxist view (it is an idea of Engels actually) that capitalist state should be replaced with another, better form of a state, that then withers away when it served its purpose and is no longer needed. While socialist states of the past had sometimes been successful in improving lives of their citizens, at least in some respects (for example Cuba in 2017 had 81.9 doctors per 10 000 population, highest amount in the world, while capitalist Poland in 2016 had only 23.998 doctors per 10 000 people, source [other sources claim that Poland might be in a slightly better situation]), they were often authoritarian and poor.
I recommend reading Stanisław Lem’s Dialogs, a book that extensively criticizes all of the wrongdoings and failures of early socialist states, while still maintaining that capitalism must be replaced with something better. Lem argues, that while general idea of socialism is good, management in this economic system was very flawed and that developments in cybernetics (control systems based on feedback loops) should be able to alleviate those problems. Social and economic systems can be viewed as systems with feedback loops as well, so when one has access to great information processing capabilities, great things can be achieved. One of the most famous positive feedback loops in economy are capitalist boom and bust cycles. During those cycles, when macroeconomic situation starts to worsen, consumers reduce their spending, manufacturers reduce production and fire workers, so that consumer spending is further reduced and it goes on and on. Eventually prices are so low that investors that still have some money, can start spending it. I think that this graph representing car production (light cobalt blue bars, in thousands of units) in Poland over the past few decades illustrate this concept well. In 1999 and 2008 there were huge spikes in production, while in 2002 and 2021 production dropped back to pre-1989 levels. During years 1981-1990, when economy was somewhat socialist, production, while quite low, was stable. Lem writes that socioeconomic system should be designed in a way that reduces oscillations, preferentially with minimum input from the humans that are in charge. Living organism is able to keep its homeostasis even when its brain is very small or non-existent. It is possible to stabilize social system with the use of force (I am not a fan of this solution). Fascism seems to be just a desperate attempt to preserve capitalism with violence (more on Nazi economy in later paragraphs). Capitalism can also be stabilized by increased government spending during the depressions (Keynesian economics), but one has to be wary of shifting Phillips curve and stagflation. In a world in which resources available to an average person are diminishing (world population is increasing, while available land and oil reserves are not), and automation is progressing rapidly, it is harder and harder to justify dominance of capitalism.
More aspects of government controlled by citizens
I believe that the role of democratically elected government is to empower citizens in their creative pursuits and to satisfy the needs of widest possible group of people. Those two goals go hand-in-hand with each other, as what modern society need most are free-thinking people who develop software and other digital goods, and designers of robots, computers and other hardware that reduces drudgery experienced by people.
I developed an idea for a new form of government that would, at least in theory, pave the way for building a true communist society. While in contemporary Poland only president and two houses of the parliament are directly elected by the citizens, the prime minister and his cabinet, along with National Council of the Judiciary are not. It places major portions of government power outside of citizens control. Control of economy and production is the hands of bourgeoisie class, making enterprises an assemblage of small authoritarian regimes, that lay outside of any democratic control. I propose that this system should be replaced with a collection of small councils (each consisting of 10 members, but this number could be changed to suit the needs of particular council). Each council would be responsible for controlling particular sphere of society, economy or government. Members of the councils would by directly elected by the citizens. Initially this system could be made up out of 10 councils, with elections to one of the councils coming 5 months after elections to the previous one, making term length of each councillor 50 month long. Here is the list of 10 initial councils:
- Resources Council (controls mines, lumber mills, steelworks, energy production, agriculture, etc.)
- Manufacturing Council (controls factories, shipyards, distribution of final goods, etc.)
- Culture Council (controls production of high budget movies, series and video games, as well as TV stations an other large media outlets)
- Research Council (controls research institutes, universities and education)
- Social Council (controls welfare, punishments for crimes, legality of drugs, status of same-sex marriage, traffic laws, etc.)
- Emergency Council (controls healthcare, fire departments and military)
- Policing Council (controls courts and police)
- Foreign Affairs Council (controls country’s trade agreements, military alliances, distributes foreign aid, etc.)
- Government Supervision Council (checks if councillors adhere to standards of the current form of government, basically a constitutional court)
- Government Transformation Council (changes form of government, so that any existing inefficiencies can be addressed)
List above is only a rough draft, which requires much more precise definitions of each councils competence borders. I will try to clarify my conception of those boundaries a little further. For example I stated that that a lumber mill should be controlled by Resources Council while it is a facility that processes raw resource (logs) into much more usable product (lumber). This product however is not a completely finished consumer good (furniture for instance), so it falls into jurisdiction of Resources Council, not the Manufacturing Council. Councillors should be elected not only on their ability to improve efficiency of the processes that they directly control, but also on their ability to cooperate with other jurisdictions. Lumber mills will require saws produced in factories controlled by the Manufacturing Council, those factories will require energy and steel produced by the enterprises controlled by the Resources Council. Everything in economy and society is interconnected and councillors should be able to comprehend the big picture.
I suggest that decision by each council should be made only after at least 70% of the councillors agree upon it, forcing the councillors to reach consensus that would satisfy majority of citizens which they represent.
Additionally, local elections have to be held, so that urban or rural planning is a democratic process addressing the needs of the inhabitants of the given area.
I imagine that the country on the path of improving itself should concentrate on for-use production that is based on resources and their efficient allocation. Nevertheless, in the initial stages of this process, I do not think we can just eliminate money altogether. Some sort of central bank should exist. I do not think this institution is important enough to warrant separate general elections to the council governing it, so delegates selected by the each of the directly elected councils making up government could control the bank, along with representatives selected by the bank employees.
What I propose is mostly planned economy, at least for the physical goods produced at the large scale. This economy would be controlled mostly by the democratically elected Resources and Manufacturing Councils. Despite that, it is important that the workers of the enterprises owned by the whole society had some say in how their workplaces are run. Directors (or the councils in the cases of larger entities) of enterprises should be democratically elected by the workers. Right balance between autonomy of the enterprise and the requirements of the central planners (which should reflect the needs of society) must be found, most likely by the method of trial and error, but maybe someone smarter than me can make a computer simulation of the processes involved. On the one hand, information flow between manufacturers and customers through central planners is inefficient and slow, but on the other hand, large projects like mass production of nuclear reactors require backing of extremely powerful organizations such as governments. In my opinion enterprises should be highly independent, and horizontal flows of communication/command should be prominent. This paper hypothesizes that reliance on rigid hierarchical organization of manufacturing lead to the collapse of USSR (on top of that they didn’t have enough robots). Another paper blames vertical structures for impeding innovation in Soviet Union. Government should act as a democratic investor that represents society and intervenes only when it really is necessary.
Economic freedom for everyone (in socialist sense)
As I said before I do not want to dispense with money altogether (at least initially). Nevertheless, money should not be used to enslave people and force them to do things against their own will. I propose that full basic income must be established. It would allow citizens to freely allocate their time towards betterment of themselves (learning and training). Steven Pinker states in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined that in modern society “children are not expected to be economically productive until their fourth decade”. In early industrial societies things were different. According to Karl Marx’s Capital: “Before the labour of women and of children under 10 years of age was forbidden in mines, capitalists considered the employment of naked women and girls, often in company with men, so far sanctioned by their moral code, and especially by their ledgers, that it was only after the passing of the Act that they had recourse to machinery.”. And so the machinery arrived, got better over the course of two centuries. Now almost any manufacturing processes can be automated, just look at how a modern car is made.
Of course human labor is still needed in factories. But modern factory worker is not just anyone willing to perform the same task for 8 hours a day, but an incredibly knowledgeable engineer that maintains and designs robots. Acquiring skills necessary for modern job takes time. Modern worker needs to know engineering principles that were used a century ago like mechanics, hydraulics and thermodynamics, and on top of that more modern developments like electronics, programming and AI. One way to learn necessary skills would be studying at polytechnics, but my personal experience with this kind of institution is rather a bad one. You need to lose your precious time on moving between buildings and and places. I do not see in what way a lecture seen in person is better than the one viewed over the internet (especially the lecture that was recorded, stored and made freely available to potentially millions of interested individuals), how a physical textbook is better from the one downloaded from the internet. Institutionalized education forces you to learn at the pace prescribed by some distant bureaucrat, often about things that are of no interest to you at the given time. This satire from the movie Meltdown illustrates absurdity of institutional education. Paying teachers instead of just reading books is stupid. This movie is part of Grand Theft Auto V, a game that had a development and marketing budget of 265 million dollars and 180 million copies of it were sold, meaning that cost development and marketing per copy was $1.47. Current cost of this game on Steam is $29.99 (small part of the price difference is cost of distribution and taxes). Collectivization of video game industry is a moral imperative.
While I am not a great fan of university education, it is worth noting that in Soviet Union most of the students received monthly payments and higher education was tuition free (source). In my my opinion responsible government should treat everyone as a potential learner, creator or innovator. In today’s world those functions can be performed by anyone that has access to food, shelter, and a networked computer. Providing those basic necessities should not not be too labor intensive, with all of the robots and automation that already exists. So I will state this once again: full basic income is essential for proper functioning of society. I would also like to see a reduction in economic inequality. I propose that people working in enterprises should not be able to earn more then the amount they receive from the basic income (some form of compensation for increased responsibility and discipline should nevertheless exist). The levels of income inequality that are present in Mondragon’s cooperatives (up to 9:1 ratio between wage of executive and factory worker) are simply not acceptable. The ratio of 2:1 between richest and poorest member of society is the maximum that I could personally tolerate, and it should be decreasing with time.
Inverted totalitarianism
For somebody that lives in a western “democracy” my propositions may seem radical. This kind of thinking probably stems from from the fact that members of those western “democracies” actually lived for centuries in totalitarian regimes. Let’s take United States for instance. This particular country was established by slave owning white supremacist colloquially known as the Founding Fathers. While it was long time ago, capital of United States still bears the name of Washington. It is almost as if capital of Germany today was called Hitler. In the beginnings of this totalitarian state, voting rights were mostly restricted to the males of the “master race” who owned land. While the slavery was eventually abolished (but not quite [more on this later], also, it happened 32 years after it was done in the British Empire), strict racial segregation policy was put in place (Jim Crow laws). During the the Space Race actual Nazi war criminals like Wernher von Braun were allowed to be in the prominent positions of the American space program (NSS gives Von Braun Award to this day, it seems that killing slaves by the thousands sometimes pays off). While blacks make over 10% of total population of the United States, and they made around 0% of the population of the Soviet Union, the first person of African descent that traveled into space was send there by the Soviets (it was a Cuban called Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez).
Racial segregation is still omnipresent in the United States, as black people often live in poorer neighborhoods (ghettos), where access to good education and healthcare is hard to come by. It often forces humans living there to be violent criminals. One of the most well known failures of American socioeconomic system is Baltimore, a city with population of almost 600 000, where over 60% of its population is African-American and 335 homicides were committed in 2020 (in comparison, Japan, a country of 126 million people, had 318 homicides in the same year). TV series The Wire nicely portraits what hell capitalist system can become.
Homicide rate in the US black community was 22.8 deaths per 100 000 population in 2016, 7.82 times more than for the whites (source). It was mostly intraracial violence. Similar problem exists in the United Kingdom, as blacks there are five times more likely to be killed there than the whites, and perpetrators of those killings are also mostly other blacks (source). Those statistics obviously should not be interpreted as existence of some “genes” in the people of Sub-Saharan descent that make them more violent. There are predominantly black societies in which homicide rates are exceptionally low. Best example is the country of Senegal (ruled in years 1960-2000 by a socialist party), where homicide rate is only 0.3 deaths per 100 000 inhabitants. Even Haiti has much lower homicide rate than US black community, at 6.7 murders per 100 000 population. Here you can find list of homicide rates by country.
Number of incarcerated Americans increased from 0.6 million in 1980 to to 2.3 million in 2008 (source), then it dropped to 1.8 million in 2020. There is a correlation between number of African-Americans living in a given state and a incarceration rate in this state.
Another great example of evil capitalist regime based on racism was South Africa during the rule of National Party. Anti-communist white supremacists implemented apartheid there and banned works of Marx and other socialist thinkers. Nelson Mandela, laureate of both Nobel and Lenin Peace Prizes, was imprisoned for 27 years after CIA tipped their despicable authoritarian friends about his whereabouts (source).
Slavery still exists in the US, in the form of forced labor employed by for-profit prisons (prison-industrial complex). The more members of society can be classified as criminals, higher are the profits of the bourgeoisie class, higher is the number of slaves they control. Current American system of slavery closely resembles the one that existed in Nazi Germany, where “undesirables” from concentration camps were leased by Waffen-SS to the privately-owned companies. It is important to remembered that in the Third Reich means of production were owned by the bourgeoisie, and that NSDAP organized large-scale privatization when it came to power. So while we mostly associate statesmen like Bormann, Göring, Himmler and Goebbels with the Nazi crimes, role of capitalists like Flick, Krauch, Schmitz and Krupp was just as enormous. Nazi economy was based mostly on government handing over contracts for manufacture of military equipment to the privately-owned enterprises. Production of consumer goods was neglected, so for instance a promise of a People's Car for the worker was not realized under Nazi regime (Volkswagenwerk GmbH only produced military vehicles during the war).
This is similar to how military–industrial complex works in the US. Government there wages wars (for example the one in Iraq, which resulted in more than 600 000 deaths), purchases weapons and owners of armament factories receive fat paychecks. If monadic democratic peace theory is true, then United States are not a proper democracy. Wars are good for businesses, because they can be used by arms dealers as marketing campaigns (the one organized by Rostec in Ukraine nevertheless backfired). Major wars result in increases of arms manufacturers’ stock prices. In Russia, weapons manufacturing is actually quite honest business. Defense sector is state-owned, so portion of the net revenue may or may not go to the government budget, while rest of it is defrauded by Sergey Chemezov and used to purchase luxury yachts. In United States ownership of military–industrial complex is clandestine. RTX and Boeing corporations are owned by financial institutions that are too big to fail such as The Vanguard Group or State Street Corporation. Information about clients of those institutions is confidential and complex web of mutual dependencies is established. General public has no right to know who actually receives major portions of $858 billion defense budget financed by taxpayer money. US has 1 388 000 solders that earn on average 43 707 dollars per year, so 60.6 billion dollars are spent on soldiers wages. If we assume that defense industry employs the same number of people and they have the same salary as soldiers and assume that cost of materials, energy and equipment from outside sources is twice as much as all the wages in defense sector, then only 242.8 billion dollars are spent on running the military and 615.2 billion USD is skimmed by capitalists. I wonder if skimmed money is lent to the government so that deficit spending can continue and an interest can be added to the revenue of the plutocrat.
Percentage of Americans living in extreme poverty (income below $1.90 per day in 2011 prices, $2.47 in 2022 dollars) in the years 1974-1996 was 0.5%. Later, poverty headcount ratio in the US steadily increased and achieved 1.2% in 2014, 2015 and 2017. In comparison poverty headcount ratio in Mongolia in years 2016 and 2018 was 0.5% (source, another one with slightly different numbers). It seems that administrations of William Clinton and his successors have made a strategic decision that advancements in science and technology can only be used to create stock market bubbles and that the poor should get even poorer. Some would say that that poverty is a result of laziness or other negative traits of low-income individuals, but in reality only 3% of Americans living in poverty are not in the labor force, not disabled, not a student, caregiver, or retired.
I think that this piece of satire from The Simpsons illustrates well the problem with American politics. There are two two large parties, hellbent on preserving capitalist system, and voting for third-party candidates means that you lose vote. While one of parties sometimes might have slightly better idea on how to patch the economic system that was antiquated back in the nineteenth century, no real alternative is actually proposed to the average voter. Despite obvious flaws of the democratic process in the US, “exporting democracy” is often cited as the reason for their involvement in the affairs of the other countries. It often had quite disturbing consequences.
Poland’s transformation to capitalism
Let’s take a look at the Fall of Socialism in Poland for instance, in which US government was heavily involved. While this particular regime change had some positive implications, there is a darker side to it too. In Polish People's Republic workplace democracy existed at least to some extent in enterprises (here you can view an interview with an elected director of Fabryka Samochodów Rolniczych). After Solidarity trade union managed to destroy socialism, regular capitalism was reintroduced, where workers have no say in how their workplaces are run.
Initially after reintroduction of capitalism Poland suffered economic recession similar in scale to the Great Depression. Many factories closed, for example Zakłady Wytwórcze Lamp Elektrycznych im. Róży Luksembur. Other companies were sold at a minuscule fraction of their value to foreign “investors”. For example FSM, a car manufacturer worth 3 billion dollars, was purchased by an Italian corporation for $450. While foreign overlords actually increased capacity of the factories (over 600 000 cars in 2009), they later moved production of popular Panda to Italy, so in 2018 FCA Poland (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles) produced only 260 000 cars.
Czechoslovak Škoda was sold to Volkswagen Group, a multinational corporation where descendants of Ferdinand Porsche have a majority voting right (Porsche was a friend of Adolf Hitler, a person responsible for termination of Tatra 97 production and a few other crimes). Austrian–German bourgeoisie actually does not operate extermination camps nowadays, but it likes to bathe proletarians in the acid rain and to force them to inhale deadly pollutants from time to time (TDI engines met NOx emission standards only during testing, not in real-world driving). I do not believe that Škoda Auto a.s. pays many taxes, as it is 100% owned by Volkswagen Finance Luxemburg. Luxembourg is a tax haven with effective corporate tax rate of 3% (I do not actually have access to the financial records of this particular corporation, as they are stored inside “Palisade Bank”).
Former USSR was hit much harder by the policy of economic atavism. GDP per capita dropped there by over 60%, while in Poland it was less than 20%. It turns out that giving control of the means of production to the few select oligarchs was not the brightest idea ever.
Exploitation of labour in contemporary Poland is extreme. Let’s take a look at summer camp industry. Parents of children sent to the camps have to pay around 2 700 PLN for 11 day stay. One supervisor earns 1 600 PLN (before taxes) and takes care of at least 10 children. So per supervisor 27 000 PLN is payed into the company organizing the camp. If we assume that 1/3 of that sum is taxed and 60% of the rest goes into transport, infrastructure, housing, food, clothing and some necessary office work, 7 200 PLN is left (I think that this is quite reasonable assumption that even was detracted by surplus-value for other capitalists). So the surplus-value is 5 600 PLN and the rate of surplus-value is 350%. Karl Marx likes to give rate of 153.8% as typical value for 19th century cotton spinnery in Manchester (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 9: The Rate of Surplus-Value). I would like to stress that we are talking about a job that requires you to be in the workplace 24/7 (children supervising, not cotton spinning).
One can clearly see that supervisor working in Polish summer camp could send at max 0.59 children to the camp where they work if they spend all of the money earned there on it. In the cases of extreme exploitation by the employers it is more rational for employees to stop working in companies and produce goods and services they require on their own. This prevents formation of efficient organizations that specialize in satisfying particular human needs.
Poland is now part European Union's single market which means that while prices of most consumer goods are similar in all of the EU countries, wages for workers are much lower for newer members like Poland. Poles are encouraged to emigrate and build foreign economies. Immigrants form even poorer countries like Ukraine are then required to replace missing workers in Poland. This system resembles a Ponzi scheme, constant influx of new victims is required to keep it afloat and in the end somebody has to be screwed over. I am not against European or even global integration, but it should be realized as free association of equal partners. Current European politicians and capitalists behave just like Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin did during Yalta Conference, they plan large-scale migrations of peoples and their separation from families and homes.
Demographic situation in Poland resembles the one presented in Stargate SG-1 episode “2010”. In this episode aliens know as Aschen formed an “alliance” with Earth and provided humans with “medical treatments” that were supposed to improve health. In reality those treatments caused infertility and were part of long-term depopulation program that was to conclude with bloodless takeover of the Earth. Population of Poland is now declining at a rate of about 150 000 people per year and number of live births is constantly decreasing (total population of Poland in 2022 was 37.77 million people). In my opinion, mostly economic factors such as job insecurity are responsible for the decline, but as I stated before chemical “treatments” are also used by “psychiatrists” to sterilize population (this is actually illegal, but some animals are just more equal than others). Junk contracts are extremely widespread and simple change of labour laws will not fix anything. Owners of automated means of production simply do not need many workers and they are not going to increase production because their potential clients are poor people with job insecurity. Limited amount of Earth’s resources and environmental considerations do not permit infinite growth anyway (colonization of outer space can change that in distant future). Civil servants seek to maximize profits so for example getting a driver’s license is extremely unlikely and costly because examiners earn more money by failing a candidate multiple times.
Expansion of democracy into economy
Let’s go back to the democratic peace theory. While it is usually applied to the whole countries, devastating animosities can exist between corporations as well. While today’s corporations usually don’t have standing armies, they sometimes can influence governments to take violent actions. According to Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz (Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs in years 2001-2005), Poland helped in the invasion of Iraq because it had a “desire for Polish oil companies to finally have access to sources of commodities" (source). Even when companies are not waging wars against each other, they can be unfriendly, uncooperative and they hide their trade secrets from everyone else (and if they are friendly towards each other, it is only because they form price-fixing cartel). In an ideal world, when one organization develops a design, it should make it public, so others can help with quick adoption of the design, so that widest possible group of customers can benefit from it (this design can be, for instance, live-saving medical equipment). Because workers are also consumers (as is everyone), I expect that democratically run enterprises (or countries) would be very hostile towards any intellectual property hoarding. Democracy requires openness, whiles secrecy is a tool of the authoritarianism. We should be building a prosperous global civilization, not fight to make our small tribes more successful than the others.
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I will take a liberty to share some of my unfinished projects here. I might forget about them or something can happen to me. I criticized USA and capitalism a lot in above paragraphs, and we all know what US government historically did to the political opponents and journalists. To be clear, I am not advocating that we should support terrorists such as Владимир Владимирович Путин in the quest of ending capitalist dominance. If Путин was to restore Soviet Union, it would probably look like the vision of Pig’s Master in ATOM RPG: it would be based on capitalist free market model, but everyone would call each other comrade and state that they are true communists! 习近平 most likely has the same general idea.
Ammonia engine (ammonia_engine_pre_v2.zip, mirror, SHA256: 472387cf1d54f207eb0fee94349c60d629edf8941132ae02e17fde1a8101aac7)
Initial design of my negative emission internal combustion engine is almost finished, but I need to make some more calculations of cryogenic systems, drawings and human-readable description.
Nonimaging PVT collector and some thoughts on nuclear power
Refrigerator/HP powered by heat
Dichoptic e-reader application for amblyopia treatment
Most of the links to the sources and additional information in the text above have copies in the Wayback Machine (those made right before August 5, 2023 should contain relevant data).
Link to the expansion of the essay (it is written in Polish)
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