There’s a lotta people that also think using a system of currency is all capitalism is and is what they want to be rid of. But you can still have money without capitalism.
I knew someone once who thought capitalism was basically all forms of commerce. Like there was no trade before capitalism i guess. Don’t understand how they thought the world worked for most of the last few thousand years.
Course a distressingly number of people in this thread seem to think similarly. Which makes me sad for the world.
Unfortunately the center-left - the socialist democrats, the most popular faction on the left - does not reject capitalism, rather they want to builds on it. The “I can fix her” league.
These are also the guys most prone to be provoked into cultural war by the right, completely abandoning the class war.
Gauche caviar. They are not socialist, they would call themselves the democratic socialists if they were, but that would require of them to completely abandon any loyalty to the current system and focus on eating the rich that fund them.
I feel there are many as well who know capitalism needs to go away, but also understand that sudden change will cost many lives and violent revolution doesn’t guarantee that you’ll end up any better off, and as a result are trying to go for a “soft landing”. Downside is that takes a lot of time and needs to have successively more progressive governments and policies in place each election cycle. Given the “tick-tock” pattern of switching between D and R administrations, this simply does not happen.
Always odd when people are more concerned with potential damage caused by change than the massive amounts of damage caused everyday by the current reality.
There’s little I detest more than when someone makes an absurd yet completely sincere claim and just doesn’t elaborate whatsoever.
I guess I should go to Mars or something since that seems to be the norm among our species
I tried to find the absurd claim, can we get a hint?
What do you call it if I don’t like capitalism, but also don’t think it’s even possible for any governing body to remain both competent and non-corrupt for long enough to make a centrally managed system work?
Socialism doesn’t have to be centrally planned.
maybe you’ve got anarchist sensibilities.
Im also not dumb enough to think everyone will play nice when states no longer exist.
No one, certainly no anarchist suggested they would. So that’s a really weird thing to assert. Just completely irrelevant, non sequitur. Hardship and tragedy will always occur even without the existence of a state. But if you want atrocity, mass oppression/suppression you need the state.
Yes there is the argument that the state is theoretically capable of being a net benefit. The problem is the reality where the state struggles to even stay net neutral. Generally outright oppressive corrupt realistically. Even the best states.
But if you want atrocity, mass oppression/suppression you need the state.
Any sufficiently large gang, left well enough alone for long enough, will become the de facto state.
Your own local anarchist conclave may all be friendly and would never do such a thing to their neighbors. But if the next one down the road decides they need your land and resources, and if they outnumber and outgun you, then you’re just done for. No one will come to help defend you. No one will arrive to mete out vengeance afterward.
The state holding an implied monopoly of violence is what enables said state to enact their atrocities, but is also what prevents smaller groups from falling into the same trap.
We don’t have territory wars within the US states because if you start shooting at your neighbors, the police arrive. They are a higher authority that can compel punishment for your crimes. Say what you will about the cops (trust me, I’ve got a lot to say, and most of it ain’t nice), but the threat of the police compels civil behavior from people who would be otherwise disinclined to it.
Another key part of that, is that the police force is effectively inexhaustible. There may be, factually, a limited number of cops that exist in America, but in practice, if you just start blasting at them, you’ll never see the end of it. You’ll be hunted by police and feds and SWAT teams until you achieve death.
In smaller, more localized communities, none of this remains true. You may have local peacekeepers, folks in your community that serve the same function that police would in a different environment, but they aren’t going to be numerous enough or authoritative enough to combat an outside threat. When a bike gang rolls up with a dozen shotguns, and you have, say, five peacekeepers in your commune, the bike gang is getting whatever they want, one way or another.
And here we have the primary argument that prevents me from supporting anarchism as a realistic political standpoint. We can all chant “Abolish the state!” all we want, but when the state is gone and someone takes advantage of their absence, we return to the “might makes right” era of human history, which has, historically speaking, brought about many of the very worst times to be a living human being.
Any sufficiently large gang, left well enough alone for long enough, will become the de facto state.
Again this is kind of non sequitur. No one argued that they wouldn’t. States are definitionally just gangs that have been legitimized.
Your own local anarchist conclave may all be friendly and would never do such a thing to their neighbors. But if the next one down the road decides they need your land and resources, and if they outnumber and outgun you, then you’re just done for. No one will come to help defend you. No one will arrive to mete out vengeance afterward.
And? None of these are gotchas of any sort. Even that case is still preferable to the state doing it. If the state does it does that make it better/more acceptable. And at that point wouldn’t that group be a burgeoning state anyway? This is why anarchist are strong advocates of arming the populace.
The state holding an implied monopoly of violence is what enables said state to enact their atrocities, but is also what prevents smaller groups from falling into the same trap.
Smaller groups are capable of less total violence at scale. That’s like saying, more violence is justified, otherwise we would effectively have less violence. It doesn’t make the sense you seem to think.
Oh and there is also a huge difference between the state acknowledging that it is at War for territory. And not being at war for territory. In the United States my people are constantly at war with the state to preserve what little territory we’ve been left. Let alone get back what the state stole. But it’s okay because the state did it therefore it’s okay. Otherwise some roving gang might have gotten much smaller section of it. And that would be so much worse than losing nearly all of it as we did.
And no community is an island. You keep mentioning “my community” as if that is all there is. Or that having neighbors and allies is impossible. All you arguments realistically just boil down to “we need the state, or else the state”. Classic circular reasoning.
But if the next one down the road decides they need your land and resources, and if they outnumber and outgun you, then you’re just done for.
Which is different from states invading their neighbours how?
we return to the “might makes right” era of human history
We never left it. The might just calls themselves governments and CEOs.
So in political science broadly and especially foreign policy, the default is to assume that states themselves exist in an otherwise anarchic environment with no supernatural rules. Only responses to their own behavior, to the extent that another state can actually impose that on them, exist to potentially ‘govern’ them.
States are literally an abstraction, the fundamental reality is anarchy.
States also tend to not play nice with each other, nor with their own subjects.
thanks for the input, but also, im not sure who you are or why you’re worried about seeming intellectually superior to the next person
Did they say “everyone else?”
no, i dont think so. did i?
Mu. You’re accusing someone worried about everyone being a dick, as if they think the problem is only other people. It’s a rhetorical attempt at reversing a nonexistant grasp for superiority - and it’s a non sequitur. Even if someone believed they, themselves, would act decently, they could be right to worry about other people, and only mistaken in forgetting they are other people.
appreciate the thorough explanation, but unfortunately it seems completely irrelevant to the actual words i said, or any meaning, intent, or purpose therein.
anarchist.
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There’s market socialism for that. Socialism/communism just means the workers own the means of production, you can do that in a market system with a bunch of competing worker owned cooperatives. No giant Soviet state required.
IMO you need a mix of markets and state planning though. State planning for industries that are necessities with natural monopolies that require mass coordination like healthcare, infrastructure, basic food/housing, with markets with cooperatives for everything else.
Anarchist, mayhaps
You don’t need central management. You just need to have workers keep the proceeds of their labor instead of uninvolved shareholders and “owners”.
Central management is still needed to make global plans, like in production or healthcare etc.
Why not local communities that feed up into larger representation groups?
hiw would you call the largest representation group? Isn’t it central management?
I wasn’t imagining something that just makes decisions that are handed down. They collate and evaluate the decisions and input from below.
If you’re in favor of a balance between a free market and regulation to cover capitalism damages on people, you may be social democrat, like Bernie Sanders and most of the left in EU.
Which is still capitalism
There is absolutely no way that a complete move away from capitalism will ever take place. Even the so called “communist” countries are just state driven capitalism.
Number one most tiring aspect of politics on Lemmy is the delusional level of “the o my way to improve lives is the complete destruction of capitalism”
Hold on, no, you don’t get to just make such a huge broad sweeping claim as no one will ever move away from capitalism like it’s an universally agreed upon truth.
Ok, I’d love to hear of a modern example of a system that isn’t based on some form of capitalism. If the broad statement being thrown around that capitalism in any form is inherently evil, what is the alternative?
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - What Is To Be Done?
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Horkheimer & Adorno - Dialectic of Enlightenment
Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
John Holloway - Crack Capitalism: How can we rebel against the capitalist system? John Holloway argues that by creating, cracks, fractures and fissures that forge spaces of rebellion and disrupt the current economic order.
S.D. Chrostowska - Utopia in the Age of Survival focuses on resisting that kind of political cynicism and defeatism, attempting to address humanity’s existential challenges, the most totalizing and dominant of which being capitalism.
And yet none of these systems exist in any modern country in the world… maybe because they are all good on paper, but impossible to implement in the real world because they won’t work.
And really, you’re linking Lenin? Communists are just naive. It will never work in real life, and every time it’s been tried, it fails, or is perverted to be CINO.
There is a difference between possible and will the state allow it. Not only is it possible. It’s happened several times. But no the state will do everything in it’s power to keep its power. Regardless of who suffers.
You need to learn the difference between market economy and capitalism. And not to mention anti capitalism doesn’t automatically mean centrally managed. You are making a false dichotomy/straw man
We actually do have a term for that. It’s called capitalist realism.
I haven’t read that book, but it sounds like he’s taking the starting point of my opinions, and then going way too far with the conclusions.
I think part of the problem is that people seem to view these systems as absolutes that that we have to go all in with and apply to everything. I think they should be thought of more like tools. You apply the right tools to the right situations.
Dangerously nuanced thought that….
Like a capitalism tool? Or a capitalist realism perspective tool?
For the latter I agree, good to have many lenses to look at things through.
This is exactly the line of questioning that originally led me to look into anarchism
I agree with that sentiment and I consider myself to be either an anarchist, or at the very least, heavilly lean towards anarchism.
No True Scotsman can be a capitalist either, they said
Ngl, this desire to flatten the entire range of human political thought into a single dimension is pretty right-wing
Ok, guess I (a social democrat) am a right winger. Which makes me exactly as bad as people defending Israeli genocide, anti lgbt people, anti imigration people and so on.
Because you can’t fucking understand that there is more to politics than just economic policy. And that there is more to economic policy than just capitalism x socialism.
Type of brain dead take that adds 0 value to the world. Lmao.
I don’t think you can be a Social Democrat and be a capitalist at the same time. A Social Democrat is someone who understands that capitalism is a destructive system and needs Band-Aids otherwise it’ll destroy us all. They understand the capitalism is a rabid dog that needs to be muzzled. They understand that we should replace it they just don’t have any better ideas at the moment. But certainly I don’t think you can be a real capitalist and a Social Democrat the same time.
But certainly I don’t think you can be a real capitalist and a Social Democrat the same time.
Please define capitalist.
One who practices or advocates capitalism.
Then I’m a radical capitalist because regularly I participate in capitalist activities such as purchasing food, renting an apartament, making money off of my services, etc. Hell, I even have my own company which is a sole proprietorship. A business person, that I am!
And here I thought I’m a Marxist. My bad, I guess I should join Peter Thiel’s secret circle of evil!
Well corporatism and capitalism are heavily linked they are not the same thing. Lot of people own their own company it doesn’t make them capitalists. You can have a company which is you mowing lawns but I wouldn’t say you control the means of production. You’re just providing a service. And certainly no one’s dumb enough to think selling your labor makes you a capitalist.
But then what about the corporations that rely on selling labor - outsourcing, software houses, even finance to some extent. Are they not capitalist?
One can argue that it’s the labourers that’s the resource, or it’s the information that’s the resource. But then why labor per-se isn’t? Or knowledge, the expertise.
Is the resource being finite the major factor? But a man can practise in his field only for so long.
What on Earth are you talking about?
None of that is capitalism.
I think the better way to describe yourself is poorly read.
Ah yes, sir I’m never wrong if I’m using some extremely broad terms and explaining them using even broaded terms
Brother you just equated capitalism with the concept of being able to purchase things. You really think you have any grounds to talk about using broad terms? I mean honestly?
As Americans we got so fucked by Fox News propaganda, that we have new generations growing up thinking they have to be communists if they want nationalized healthcare and affordable groceries, that it’s the same thing.
Right wing people believe it, and now some left wing people believe it, and they’re thinking they’re socialists just because they don’t want to go bankrupt due to a health issue… The rest of the fucking western world is not communist, yet they still have free healthcare and take a month or two off a year.
I have been saying for a long time, there’s a lot of people here that hate capitalism and think they’re communist because they’re just suffering a uniquely American version of capitalism, and we’d be so much fucking better off with literally just nationalized healthcare. We just don’t want to be terrified all the time, and feel like we’re seconds away from death and poverty. This is uniquely an American capitalism and it’s usually not this fucking bad.
North Korea has markets nowadays where currency is traded for goods, even if they also have government rationing and almost total government control of the economy. China does not only have markets where currency is traded for goods but also has the whole stock exchanges and billionaires thing. The democratic socialist states of northern Europe also follow capitalism, even if the government is heavily involved in both the economy and is giving out large amounts of welfare. Capitalism is very broad. You can absolutely be left wing if you live in the USA and want capitalism to work more as capitalism works in the Nordic countries. In a way you can therefore be pro capitalist and left wing. However I kinda get what the guy in the post means but I still want to be clear that you can be left wing and not want to abolish currency at the same time.
Currency, and this is going to be astonishing to hear, isn’t capitalism. Capitalism is the system of economics where owners of capital control the profits from that capital, even if they can’t get those profits without the labor of others. It has fuck-all to do with literal currency which has existed since far before Capitalism and will exist far after it as well.
Neither socialism nor communism are incompatible with currency cause that’s just a way of expediting the exchanging of goods. Instead of social debt, people exchange currency instead for goods or services. Makes keeping everything straight quite a bit easier. Hoarding it is problematic in any system, since the whole point of currency is to, again, aid in the exchange of things.
Still according to your definition we still have capitalism in the Nordic countries and in China. Both allow for private ownership of companies and have their own stock exchanges. So my point still stands.
And when do you mean we didn’t have capitalism? Since the dawn of agriculture it has been possible to own farms where the owner of the farm profits off the laborers of the farm and the land itself, the means of production. Isn’t that capitalism then?
It’s not his definition that’s the definition. Your definition is so absurdly broad as to be meaningless. No since the dawn of Agriculture capitalism has not existed.
Hell since dawn of agriculture it’s been very rare that farmers have owned their own land so your entire premise is absurd.
Capitalism is the part where having money makes money. Markets are a different thing.
Yes I’ll admit I was thinking of market economy. Nevertheless both the Nordic countries and modern day China are places where having money makes money. That’s still capitalism. Only north Korea would be out.
China is a capitalist state in all ways but officially now. It’s closer to fascist than it is communist at this point. Enterprises are not owned by the people, capital is owned by individuals who are beholden to the state.
That’s cap. You can be pro-capitalism in some form and still be on the left wing of politics.
But of course, this is extremely subjective.
By the true definitions though, the only system that works is blended between government control and free industry.
Giving government total control over the economy is foolhardy and will always lead to a strong man dicking everyone over in any large country. But giving industry total freedom is equally unworkable. There is no total free market, nor is there any completely government controlled one to speak of.
OP is conflating free market absolutist self serving arguments with capitalism, as if socialism wasn’t still capitalist. You better fucking hope it is, you can’t have the government involved in everything, but they need to be involved in making sure the needs of society are provided for equitably. If private industry can’t do it on their own, government needs to one way or another.
I suspect your definition of “works” is a low standard.
Even in mixed economies, capital will erode personal freedoms and lead to inequality, suffering, and abuse of power.
All hierarchy needs abolished.
WTF does hierarchy have to do with allowing a mix of private business and regulation and state run business?
What do you call the goddamned government you give 100% control to in this ridiculous definition you guys are pushing?
There is no country with a pure capitalist, nor pure communist, system. Socialism is by definition a mixture of the two. It’s like talking to people that have only spoken with maga dipshits for 10 years.
WTF does hierarchy have to do with allowing a mix of private business and regulation and state run business?
Hierarchies are the underpinnings of governments and businesses. Both need to go.
What do you call the goddamned government you give 100% control to in this ridiculous definition you guys are pushing?
I call it a hierarchy.
There is no country with a pure capitalist, nor pure communist, system. Socialism is by definition a mixture of the two. It’s like talking to people that have only spoken with maga dipshits for 10 years.
That’s because anarchist societies aren’t considered countries, and their successes are intentionally buried. There are more options than just socialism and capitalism.
Socialism is not capitalist by any definition of any word ever. What an absurd thing to say.
Using identity politics to drive wedges in order to divide and conquer is unequivocally right-wing.
You think capitalism is your identity? Well that’s soul crushingly sad.
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What do you suggest for the transition? You’ve left out the most important part.
Also, stop trying to confuse left, right and the middle.
People need to realize that the end goal of capitalism is to own the world and space as a monopoly, ravaging the earth to the point of no vegetation so that they control all the food and water and resources, without competition.
No it isn’t. Capitalism doesn’t even really have a goal because, unlike Socialism which was consciously invented as an ideology, Capitalism arose by accident and is subscribed to be wildly disparate people with wildly incompatible beliefs. But most of those people don’t want to “own the world and space as a monopoly and ravage the earth to the point of no vegetation” because that’s insane.
How did it arise by accident? It’s a system of imposing its will and subjecting others to its will and monopolizing the resources, it’s been around for ages and ages. It’s no different that colonialism/imperialism. People who push for capitalism are insane monsters without morals and a lot of them rape children
I guess he means organically as opposed to led by ideologists like the Soviet Union.
Well, whatever point they were trying to make was shit
Or you’re just so extremely in love with your ideas that you’ve become completely uninterested in basic facts that vaguely conflict with your vision of reality.
Who invented Capitalism?
You can make a very good argument that it was Adam Smith, with Wealth of Nations.
It was influential, but capitalism had essentially already come about in a limited form.
And his stated goal was competitive markets forever, not absolute monarchy with more steps. People dunk on conservatives by quoting that book.
Ah, so nothing of substance in response so I can chalk this discussion up to bad faith on your end.
You’re so far off the deep end that it doesn’t make sense trying to rebut you, so I ask questions that have easy answers to try and discuss something more productive. As usual with folks who think they’re very smart though, you don’t want to answer because it’s not on your terms.
Take a class in politics. Or hell just read a book.
You’ve done nothing but argue some pedantic point of the origin that doesn’t really have anything to do with my original point, I don’t see this going anywhere so I’m not going to waste my time with it
Your original point was a nonexistent strawman caricature of capitalism.
Capitalism is a tool that can either be used for everyone’s benefit, or serve the elite few. When used right, it’s a great way to produce what people actually want and be harnessed with taxes and regulations to provide goods and services that shouldn’t be made for profit like healthcare and housing.
The current implementation is extremely unbalanced thanks to the corrupting influence of money in politics and the fiduciary duty to company stockholders demanding infinite growth. If a bunch of stockholders and CEOs can be prevented or severely punished for trying to buy out politicians then a lot of these problems would go away.
The entire point of capitalism is it doesn’t serve everyone’s benefit. It serves the benefits of the few. That’s literally the point.
I can brook the argument that capitalism is the only system that works, or that it’s the best system yet devised so long as we regulate it. I don’t believe them. But I can understand the argument.
But that it can serve everyone’s benefit? No. No it cannot. The system is, by its nature, contradictory. It will always leave one side with less than the other. Profit is created by paying a worker less than the value of what that worker has produced. If my boss pays me to make clocks, and I make 100 dollars worth of clocks in 1 hour, my boss cannot pay me 100 dollars per hour. There would be no money left for the boss to collect (ignoring all the other costs). In order for the boss to make any money for themselves, they must pay me less than the value of what I have created, after accounting for all the utilities and such that I am also paying for. I’ll get 20 bucks if I’m lucky, the boss will get 50, and 29.50 will go to utilities, and half a buck will go to a pizza party that will hopefully convince me that unions are evil.
Again, you can say this is fair, or the best yet devised system. But it does not benefit everyone. It benefits the owner of capital, and leaves me with less than I put in.
A worker owned factory could take that 50 that the boss gets paid and give it back to the worker who actually produced it. Or give an additional 20 to the worker, and put 30 in a relief fund for when workers encounter tragedy or unexpected expenses. Or do whatever the fuck they want with it.
The choice isn’t capitalism vs the Soviet model. The choice is capitalism vs literally everything we could possibly imagine. The possibilities are endless. Especially with wide scale computer access like we have now. I cannot imagine the absolutely incredible things Tito or Allende could have done with real access to computer modeling and the Internet like we have today. Or the horrible atrocities that would have come out of the USSR having that much information on each citizen. Major double edged sword there.
You making 100 dollars worth of clocks in an hour aren’t valued at 100 because that’s not how any of this works out. You have costs, including of other labor as part of your supply chain (sales, back office support, maintenance, etc.)
It’s delusional to think that you assembling the clock are more valued than any of the other parts of this supply chain.
Now, if you want to talk about risk vs reward or pay ratios of workers to CEO, that’s a more reasonable take.
Yes capitalism is just another imperfect economic engine with inefficiencies made up by imperfect beings. Like any engine however it can be tuned to optimize certain metrics. Executives get paid exponentially more than the floor workers? Cap their pay as a multiplier relative to entry level pay and tax the rest if they still receive too much. Use the tax money to provide free healthcare, childcare, basic food assistance, public transportation, housing, social security, and infrastructure.
Even if the pay the average worker receives may not be high their standard of living would be noticeably improved. It’s the same reason why Americans receive higher pay than Europeans but Europeans still have a much better standard of living. I’d love to see a better economic model emerge but for the meanwhile, capitalism is one of the few things driving technological and scientific innovation in a lot of fields.
Mmm slopulism.
