I’ll bite. Until we have machines doing most things, communism is unlikely to work, especially in post agrarian societies. We need to first fully realize not just post scarcity, but post work. In theory it seems like things like anarcho syndicalism and basic communism should work, but I don’t think they really function at a large scale. Socialized democracy and worker owned cooperatives within a capitalism system gets the closest to solving the problems imo. I like the idea of anarcho syndicalism the most, but I just don’t see how it can survive in todays world.
With all systems the same problems crop up. Powerful people seek to exploit ANY system to their benefit, and unmotivated people seek to do the least to get by. Who cleans toilets in a equitable communist country, who picks up the trash? Do we force people into job roles to fill the need? Without economic incentives I don’t see how the system stays healthy. Removing class barriers to some jobs does not always make them desirable enough to fill the need. Capitalisms structure inherently results in people that are strongly incentivized into those roles, because the wage will usually rise to meet the demand for employees. (Low educated citizens seeing opportunity in jobs that make a living wage.)
Currently the biggest problem we have, imo, is really that people with power expend tremendous resources on controlling the flow of information, and that has left a lot of people very misinformed. No matter the system, those same people will be fooled into voting for things that benefit the powerful to the detriment of the rest of us. That’s not so much a capitalism problem, but an information problem. That’s a problem we have no solution for. It has been an issue with humans since civilization has existed. We can’t individually know everything, so we rely on others to fill in the gaps in our thinking and assumptions, and many of those people have a motive to only give you the information that benefits them, or worse off just lie. A lot of peoples anger towards capitalism, is a result of unbridled capitalism in a world where most people have incomplete information to make good decisions at the voting booth. We only have unbridled capitalism because of misinformation, not because capitalism is inherently bad.
I AM left wing, have read about many social theories in my life all over the spectrum. There isn’t much one can do to distill that down to one post. Not one of the solutions to communisms problems I’ve seen in my lifetime are ever very fair or realistic. It comes with all of the same problems as capitalism as it pertains to power and it is infinitely less agile than capitalism. You can get to nearly the same place that communism wants to get, by adapting socialist ideals into capitalism while keeping capitalisms agility in the marketplace of needs.
If you’ve read Marx, why do you think people are advocating paying sewage workers the same as office workers? There are even methods that suggest working fewer hours for the same pay with regards to how strenuous it is.
Who manages that? Who decides what resources goes to who and how much time people work? There are a lot of answers to those questions, often solved with central planning that can’t possibly keep up with ever shifting needs. This gets directly into your 4th question, whether you’ve realized it or not.
How can you consider yourself left wing if you reject Socialism in favor of Capitalism? That’s just a centrist or right-winger.
Its one of the silliest things on the left, that a lot of people like you think that everyone to the left of them is an extremist and everyone to the right of them is a right-winger or Nazi. It’s exhausting to say the least. Most of my political understanding drives me towards socialist mechanisms within a capitalist system. To call that right wing is to be intentionally obtuse and ideologically ridged to say the least. Certainly the USA, where I am, is further right than most places, but even in the most left wing countries I would still be on the left. To call that “centrism” or “a right-winger” is just trying to be willfully ridged to move the goalpost to exactly where you stand. It’s an entirely semantic argument of your making, but it’s not in line with how people generally view the political spectrum.
How does Communism “come with all of the same power problems as Capitalism” if Communism is fundamentally democratic, and Capitalism fundamentally anti-democratic?
Powerful people have exploited every system the world has ever created, including the half assed attempts at communism. You are living in a dream world if you truly think that powerful people won’t exploit their decision making authority to drive the conversation to their benefit under communism. It’s one of the primary reasons communism could never get off the ground. Because people opted the quick way of trying to arrive at it by force and centralizing power in the hands of the few. But even if we try to get their slowly, the same thing will happen. Powerful people will exploit their power to prevent progress to their benefit. Power, and the ability to obtain it, objective negates the ability to create true communism.
How is Capitalism more agile than Communism?
Capitalisms core mechanism is supply and demand, that applies to workers as well. If a job needs to be filled, the system adjusts to fill that demand. If no one wants to pick up trash, wages have to go up to meet demand. That’s effectively what unions do, they put pressure on the supply and demand curve by striking and removing the supply of workers. The same thing happens with products themselves, if the market is missing something, then it gets expensive, causing a strong incentive for people to make that thing, which after the market adjusts and creates more products, causes the price to go down and availability to the masses to go up. Some of the things we produce are imperative to survival, like food. Capitalistic markets handle that naturally by adjusting quickly to those demands. People want to make money, so they put their effort towards the highest demands and the largest profitability. Communism is entirely supply based, and demand is centrally planned by some person making well educated guesses on how much of x the market needs. This is functionally not agile, it requires bureaucracy to manage demand and have a flawless picture of exactly what the demands are day to day, it’s impossible to be as agile as a system that adjusts as fluidly as capitalism, imo, and it is the biggest downside of communism. Central planners can literally make one mistake and the whole country starves to death.
How can you say Capitalism can nearly get to a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society when it depends on all 3 to exist?
At no point did I state that this was my goal, and you know that.
Stateless societies are functionally impossible in the modern world. If we press reset on the world today and removed nationhood, within a decade those with power will have grabbed up most of the land in the world, through massive bloodshed. This is why any stateless society can’t work, it creates a power vacuum that will necessarily be filled, and it will be filled by people that don’t care if you are alive or dead. Whether we like it or not, power exists, and some of those that wield more of it will always use that power to grab what they can. Nationhood is the assurance of less war. Despite all of the things wrong in the world today, we have the lowest portion of our society dying from wars in world history since we drew clear borders everywhere, a fairly modern thing. Borders used to be very fluid, and sometimes some areas were basically a collection of city states with undefined borders shifting every day. As much as the news seeks to tell you otherwise, this is the safest point in human history. stateless, classless, and moneyless societies would be the most vulnerable societies to power. Welcome to mad max express edition.
How can you “adapt Socialist ideas into Capitalism” when Capitalism and Socialism are mutually exclusive Modes of Production?
Capitalism and socialism are not mutually exclusive, whoever told you that is a next level moron. Both exist on a continuum. Additionally, capitalism is an economic system, while socialism is both an economic and political system. Social democracies are a blend of systems.
Worker cooperatives are an inherently socialist ideal and function perfectly well under capitalism. Social programs that seek to redistribute a portion of the wealth to those most in need are also socialist in nature. The fact is there are some things central planning does a better job at and there are other things that markets do a better job at. I certainly think that more central planning is good for specific things. Like the fact that we pay for internet is moronic, it should be entirely socialized. But centralizing food production would likely result in mass starvation eventually. And even if by some miracle it didn’t, it would greatly reduce choices. But I don’t need choices for electricity, water, sewer, etc. I just need them to exist and function properly. For internet, I want it to be fast, but a nationalized system could probably build that out generation to generation if collective society deems that necessary.
You can’t tell me the Great Purge is something a left-wing person would do. He thought Hitler was “a great man”.
I’m far from an expert in political history, but if we were to look at controversial figures on the left, Guevara and Castro are probably the “worst” I can think of that still clearly had left-wing ideals in mind.
I mean, it’s not an absolute, but Wikipedia defines Left-wing politics as “the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy as a whole or certain social hierarchies”.
Stalin actively repressed and killed ethnic minorities during the Great Purge. That’s absolutely not egalitarianism. I don’t know much of his politics but if he was trying to be a communist, his government was not really a “Dictatorship of the proletariat”. He could’ve written anything, actions speak clearer than words.
Get into anarcho-syndicalism. Form and join existing anarcho-communist worker’s associations. The only sustainable way for us to end capitalism is if we start collectively associating and operating outside the framework of capitalism today.
Who literally says that? Capitalism is the only system that allows people to dig themselves out of that hole. Know any Cubans? Socialism works awesome…says nobody crushed by it.
Maybe there’s a sweet spot in between Capitalism and Communism. They are basically the 2 extremes of the political spectrum after all. Surely there’s a spot on the spectrum that embraces worker’s rights while also incentivising commercial enterprise. Checks and balances are always necessary, even in a utopia.
There was never socialism in Asia or Eastern Europe. At no point have the workers seized the means of production and had a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Ghodsee, an acclaimed ethnographer and professor of Russian and East European Studies, spent years researching what happened to women in countries that transitioned from state socialism to capitalism. She argues here that unregulated capitalism disproportionately harms women, and that we should learn from the past. By rejecting the bad and salvaging the good, we can adapt some socialist ideas to the 21st century and improve our lives.
Anarchist Capitalism is a delusion. You’re always going to have someone with a bigger gun telling other people what to do. That’s a de facto state whether Peter Thiel and Murray Rothbard want to admit it or not.
Once you sever democratic control of capital and allow landlords the freedom to raise rents, the ball only continues to roll downhill. People will keep looking for chinks in the regulatory armor (or create them through brute force) until the market system collapses. There is no “regulated capitalism” that endures continuous contact with the corruptive influence of the profit motive.
The very nature of capitalism facilitates concentrations of power, which will utilize that power to accumulate even more in any conceivable way. The system is fundamentally flawed and needs to be replaced if we care at all for basic human rights and a future for this species.
Concentrations of power is made from the greed of people. Honestly, I beliefe that any sufficiently large society will eventually fall into capitalism, and the other way around, capitalism encourages border-less states, making effectively bigger communities.
However, with the current economic trend of de-globalization, things may eventually change.
I’d agree, but I think public sentiment for globalization is souring. Right wing populists have been gaining in elections the last 10 years because of this, running largely anti-immigration and economically protectionist. I think they’re predicting a future reduction in globalization based on this.
The very nature of capitalism facilitates concentrations of power
No. Capitalism is one thing and one thing only: the private ownership of the means of production. The very nature of private ownership, means private citizens have the freedom to own what’s theirs, and trade it with whoever. The nature of capitalism, meaning its logical end state, is a free market in the truest sense. This is the opposite of concentrating power, because the means of power are completely disunited. In less favorable terms, the logical end state of capitalism is anarchy or chaos
Socialism is the common/public/collective ownership of the means of production. Holding the means of power in a collective is another way of saying it’s being concentrated. The logical end of socialism is the concentration of everything.
Of course, I don’t think we need to take either extreme too seriously. They both have faults, clearly, and they both devolve into something that more resembles the other with time. Capitalism adopts regulations or develop a state to concentrate their power against and enemy. Socialism reduces state power when civilians want more freedoms.
Point is, your characterizing of Capitalism seems misinformed, and it’s incredibly silly to think a fundamental replacement of our current system is in order, as if there’s some perfect ideology we can obviously replace it with
If you own the source of wealth, you can buy more in a positive feedback loop, thus concentrating wealth and therefore power. Them being private actors means they are accountable to nobody.
I feel like you are both arguing different things. The simple fact of ownership isn’t the concentration of power, it’s the fact that we don’t put limits on that ownership that causes concentration of power. People always argue for or against systems by taking those systems to their absolutes instead of arguing how they should be in practice. If we put a high tax on anyone with a high net worth, high yearly earnings, high estate value, etc., and also take anti-trust laws seriously, then we can largely solve much of that and still operate under capitalism. The problem is more how we are currently operating under capitalism more than capitalism itself, imo.
There’s always people in power, there is no other way. Either citizens can be empowered, or only the gov’t. Those are the only two options regardless of the system.
I’m not a fan of any overarching system, however capitalism is the one I, and I suspect most of the people reading this, live in. Therefore the best way of addressing the problems our society faces is to do so using the tools that our capitalistic system provides (such as regulation and oversight) rather than twiddle our thumbs waiting for some grand revolution to fix everything.
Claiming that the only way to improve our situation is to completely overturn the system does nothing but promote inaction.
Sitting my kids down and telling them that the only way to send them to college is to keep buying scratch-off lottery tickets.
Angrily insisting that the only other alternative is to tear up the entire higher education system. Its either gambling on scratchers or doing a bloody uprising. No other alternatives.
Depends heavily on the career path. You can’t really be a registered nurse or a professional engineer or practice law without higher education. The service sector is a complete dead-end. Sales jobs are increasingly miserable and scammy. So much of the economy just… sucks. The jobs that aren’t completely soul-sucking tend to be the ones you need a degree to pursue.
Yes, you’ll have to constantly fight against that, but you’d have to constantly fight against greed and corruption in any system. The fact is that they wouldn’t be trying to overturn regulations if they didn’t exist in the first place.
I am a fan of using ignored and undervalued resources, the unemployed (aka exploitation) in order to give people employment and a stepping stone into better jobs while also providing cheaper products for the ‘working class’.
You can’t have it. It simply does not work like that. We saw what happens when you try that and it’s the world we’re living in. And when I say ‘the world we’re living in’ I mean exclusively the west. This kind of thing gets you and your entire town killed if you try it where the US is allowed to set off bombs.
Yes, with corruption, we can’t have anything. So what I need to do is become the most powerful man in the universe and be loving and kind, but with fair and swift judgment. There is no I ther way. No way possible. OR, we can keep trying.
Adam Smith even said: “every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.”
So, we need to constantly keep fighting against corruption and harm towards other humans. If not, you are the problem. Instead of always saying how that will not happen, maybe come up with an answer. I mean, since humans keep causing problems, maybe we should get rid of humans? Right?
Yours is a failure of imagination. There’s no alternative between the current order and god from heaven coming down to smite the bad people? Because I say a strategy that was tried in the past didn’t work, and has observable and learnable outcomes, that saying it’s not the path to achieving what you want is the exact same as saying we should kill off the human race? Right?
Batshit reply. Not sure what the Adam Smith filler is for.
So is anybody that’s actually sane. I love all the make believe “links” made with the anti-capitalism crowd. Keep in mind those are the same ones that are highly educated, went to good schools, worked their way up the corporate ladder so they could have their big house and nice cars… but against Capitalism LOL. It’s all talk.
Yes yes you love the idea of people being taken advantage of by the very nature of the system and think anti-capitalism means communist, we know your types, it’s tiresome.
Wrong, commerce does that, but to do that you need companies investing tons of money upfront, market research, development and a very substantial up front investment or there’s no product to sell, and then no commerce. If money can’t be made either by the companies or the people behind them, theirs no drive to do it.
Where are the socialists standing with their commerce vs capitalism?
China has almost 1.5 BILLION people vs the US’ couple hundred million, so it’s not size or numbers.
Lot of rambling and blaming Capitalism for things you can’t back up, so where are these Socialist countries with better commerce/business and as a result higher GDP?
Honestly I think capitalism works so long as you can make sure greedy people can only satisfy their greed through productivity rather than insider trading and buying companies that are competitive or implementing micro transactions into fully priced games infact that’s the reason why I’ve been against stock markets just like how are these people improving life for others
I’m a fan of capitalism with tight regulations and checks on corruption, personally
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Of the two, one is still far more realistic than the other.
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I’ll bite. Until we have machines doing most things, communism is unlikely to work, especially in post agrarian societies. We need to first fully realize not just post scarcity, but post work. In theory it seems like things like anarcho syndicalism and basic communism should work, but I don’t think they really function at a large scale. Socialized democracy and worker owned cooperatives within a capitalism system gets the closest to solving the problems imo. I like the idea of anarcho syndicalism the most, but I just don’t see how it can survive in todays world.
With all systems the same problems crop up. Powerful people seek to exploit ANY system to their benefit, and unmotivated people seek to do the least to get by. Who cleans toilets in a equitable communist country, who picks up the trash? Do we force people into job roles to fill the need? Without economic incentives I don’t see how the system stays healthy. Removing class barriers to some jobs does not always make them desirable enough to fill the need. Capitalisms structure inherently results in people that are strongly incentivized into those roles, because the wage will usually rise to meet the demand for employees. (Low educated citizens seeing opportunity in jobs that make a living wage.)
Currently the biggest problem we have, imo, is really that people with power expend tremendous resources on controlling the flow of information, and that has left a lot of people very misinformed. No matter the system, those same people will be fooled into voting for things that benefit the powerful to the detriment of the rest of us. That’s not so much a capitalism problem, but an information problem. That’s a problem we have no solution for. It has been an issue with humans since civilization has existed. We can’t individually know everything, so we rely on others to fill in the gaps in our thinking and assumptions, and many of those people have a motive to only give you the information that benefits them, or worse off just lie. A lot of peoples anger towards capitalism, is a result of unbridled capitalism in a world where most people have incomplete information to make good decisions at the voting booth. We only have unbridled capitalism because of misinformation, not because capitalism is inherently bad.
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I AM left wing, have read about many social theories in my life all over the spectrum. There isn’t much one can do to distill that down to one post. Not one of the solutions to communisms problems I’ve seen in my lifetime are ever very fair or realistic. It comes with all of the same problems as capitalism as it pertains to power and it is infinitely less agile than capitalism. You can get to nearly the same place that communism wants to get, by adapting socialist ideals into capitalism while keeping capitalisms agility in the marketplace of needs.
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Who manages that? Who decides what resources goes to who and how much time people work? There are a lot of answers to those questions, often solved with central planning that can’t possibly keep up with ever shifting needs. This gets directly into your 4th question, whether you’ve realized it or not.
Its one of the silliest things on the left, that a lot of people like you think that everyone to the left of them is an extremist and everyone to the right of them is a right-winger or Nazi. It’s exhausting to say the least. Most of my political understanding drives me towards socialist mechanisms within a capitalist system. To call that right wing is to be intentionally obtuse and ideologically ridged to say the least. Certainly the USA, where I am, is further right than most places, but even in the most left wing countries I would still be on the left. To call that “centrism” or “a right-winger” is just trying to be willfully ridged to move the goalpost to exactly where you stand. It’s an entirely semantic argument of your making, but it’s not in line with how people generally view the political spectrum.
Powerful people have exploited every system the world has ever created, including the half assed attempts at communism. You are living in a dream world if you truly think that powerful people won’t exploit their decision making authority to drive the conversation to their benefit under communism. It’s one of the primary reasons communism could never get off the ground. Because people opted the quick way of trying to arrive at it by force and centralizing power in the hands of the few. But even if we try to get their slowly, the same thing will happen. Powerful people will exploit their power to prevent progress to their benefit. Power, and the ability to obtain it, objective negates the ability to create true communism.
Capitalisms core mechanism is supply and demand, that applies to workers as well. If a job needs to be filled, the system adjusts to fill that demand. If no one wants to pick up trash, wages have to go up to meet demand. That’s effectively what unions do, they put pressure on the supply and demand curve by striking and removing the supply of workers. The same thing happens with products themselves, if the market is missing something, then it gets expensive, causing a strong incentive for people to make that thing, which after the market adjusts and creates more products, causes the price to go down and availability to the masses to go up. Some of the things we produce are imperative to survival, like food. Capitalistic markets handle that naturally by adjusting quickly to those demands. People want to make money, so they put their effort towards the highest demands and the largest profitability. Communism is entirely supply based, and demand is centrally planned by some person making well educated guesses on how much of x the market needs. This is functionally not agile, it requires bureaucracy to manage demand and have a flawless picture of exactly what the demands are day to day, it’s impossible to be as agile as a system that adjusts as fluidly as capitalism, imo, and it is the biggest downside of communism. Central planners can literally make one mistake and the whole country starves to death.
At no point did I state that this was my goal, and you know that.
Stateless societies are functionally impossible in the modern world. If we press reset on the world today and removed nationhood, within a decade those with power will have grabbed up most of the land in the world, through massive bloodshed. This is why any stateless society can’t work, it creates a power vacuum that will necessarily be filled, and it will be filled by people that don’t care if you are alive or dead. Whether we like it or not, power exists, and some of those that wield more of it will always use that power to grab what they can. Nationhood is the assurance of less war. Despite all of the things wrong in the world today, we have the lowest portion of our society dying from wars in world history since we drew clear borders everywhere, a fairly modern thing. Borders used to be very fluid, and sometimes some areas were basically a collection of city states with undefined borders shifting every day. As much as the news seeks to tell you otherwise, this is the safest point in human history. stateless, classless, and moneyless societies would be the most vulnerable societies to power. Welcome to mad max express edition.
Capitalism and socialism are not mutually exclusive, whoever told you that is a next level moron. Both exist on a continuum. Additionally, capitalism is an economic system, while socialism is both an economic and political system. Social democracies are a blend of systems.
Worker cooperatives are an inherently socialist ideal and function perfectly well under capitalism. Social programs that seek to redistribute a portion of the wealth to those most in need are also socialist in nature. The fact is there are some things central planning does a better job at and there are other things that markets do a better job at. I certainly think that more central planning is good for specific things. Like the fact that we pay for internet is moronic, it should be entirely socialized. But centralizing food production would likely result in mass starvation eventually. And even if by some miracle it didn’t, it would greatly reduce choices. But I don’t need choices for electricity, water, sewer, etc. I just need them to exist and function properly. For internet, I want it to be fast, but a nationalized system could probably build that out generation to generation if collective society deems that necessary.
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One was implemented and is actively ruining the planet.
The other was only used as a façade by dictators that didn’t feel like labeling themselves as right-wing.
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You can’t tell me the Great Purge is something a left-wing person would do. He thought Hitler was “a great man”.
I’m far from an expert in political history, but if we were to look at controversial figures on the left, Guevara and Castro are probably the “worst” I can think of that still clearly had left-wing ideals in mind.
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I mean, it’s not an absolute, but Wikipedia defines Left-wing politics as “the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy as a whole or certain social hierarchies”.
Stalin actively repressed and killed ethnic minorities during the Great Purge. That’s absolutely not egalitarianism. I don’t know much of his politics but if he was trying to be a communist, his government was not really a “Dictatorship of the proletariat”. He could’ve written anything, actions speak clearer than words.
Wish we’d see that someday
Get into anarcho-syndicalism. Form and join existing anarcho-communist worker’s associations. The only sustainable way for us to end capitalism is if we start collectively associating and operating outside the framework of capitalism today.
Exactly. No revolution occurred because everyone wished really hard it would happen but still played by the oppressor’s rules.
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I’m a fan of pragmatism: real solutions to real problems.
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Yeah, but I don’t think communism is a bulletproof solution either. Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses.
The real issue is that people think the disparity in wealth should grow instead of shrink.
Who literally says that? Capitalism is the only system that allows people to dig themselves out of that hole. Know any Cubans? Socialism works awesome…says nobody crushed by it.
I think you’re projecting your tribalistic tendencies onto literally everyone else on the planet.
Sure…sure…
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Maybe there’s a sweet spot in between Capitalism and Communism. They are basically the 2 extremes of the political spectrum after all. Surely there’s a spot on the spectrum that embraces worker’s rights while also incentivising commercial enterprise. Checks and balances are always necessary, even in a utopia.
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Human nature is a mf though
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I mean im Canadian and it sure keeps going that way anyway
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This is the essence, corruption.
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I think many of the socialist states of Asia and Eastern Europe are or were ridiculously corrupt. How democratic those were is of course questionable.
There was never socialism in Asia or Eastern Europe. At no point have the workers seized the means of production and had a dictatorship of the proletariat.
You can apply this No True Scotsman logic to capitalism, too. Its biggest fans say True capitalism has never been tried, either.
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I meant that it wasn’t really very resistant to corruption.
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I’m not sure even that is true. Not sure how you can even really measure that. Or do you mean it could theoretically be?
Not a fan of the genocide though
I read the demands of the Communist Party of Germany and I didn’t see Marx saying anything about that.
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I’m a fan of monogamy with multiple sexual partners.
Gotta be able to get one sexual partner first bud
Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence
That’s some copium if I’ve ever seen it
shrug
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Scientific journal? The description on what was linked very specifically says it’s an op-ed, which means it’s an opinion piece.
No, Sex Wasn’t Better for Women Under Socialism
The Historical Struggle to Rid Socialism of Sexism
You cite an opinion piece out of Reason magazine and another written by a CATO fellow?
Come on, dude. Do better.
That’s not a rebuttal.
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What am I rebutting? You linked to an opinion piece and a slander.
They’re both articles making arguments. The fact that you don’t like who the arguments came from isn’t very persuasive nor particularly interesting.
anarcho-capitalism is not the only form of capitalism that exists
Anarchist Capitalism is a delusion. You’re always going to have someone with a bigger gun telling other people what to do. That’s a de facto state whether Peter Thiel and Murray Rothbard want to admit it or not.
Once you sever democratic control of capital and allow landlords the freedom to raise rents, the ball only continues to roll downhill. People will keep looking for chinks in the regulatory armor (or create them through brute force) until the market system collapses. There is no “regulated capitalism” that endures continuous contact with the corruptive influence of the profit motive.
The very nature of capitalism facilitates concentrations of power, which will utilize that power to accumulate even more in any conceivable way. The system is fundamentally flawed and needs to be replaced if we care at all for basic human rights and a future for this species.
What is your proposed alternative? I struggle to think of any system that doesn’t inevitably result in concentrations of power
Social Democracy. Commerce is key to strong economies, not capitalistic wealth hoarding.
Is there a country that you’d consider a good example of this?
as a solution to capitalism i propose capitalism (but you get 20 euro of ubi once per financial quarter)
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Concentrations of power is made from the greed of people. Honestly, I beliefe that any sufficiently large society will eventually fall into capitalism, and the other way around, capitalism encourages border-less states, making effectively bigger communities.
However, with the current economic trend of de-globalization, things may eventually change.
Trend of de-globalization? If anything things are more global then ever…
I’d agree, but I think public sentiment for globalization is souring. Right wing populists have been gaining in elections the last 10 years because of this, running largely anti-immigration and economically protectionist. I think they’re predicting a future reduction in globalization based on this.
Hmm, to me it seems like the populist wave has been dying out. At least in the US where they have been getting shit on for the last couple elections
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/01/deglobalisation-what-you-need-to-know-wef23/
so what is needed is a system that doesn’t allow the concentration of power into one entity that is using this power for personal benefit.
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No. Capitalism is one thing and one thing only: the private ownership of the means of production. The very nature of private ownership, means private citizens have the freedom to own what’s theirs, and trade it with whoever. The nature of capitalism, meaning its logical end state, is a free market in the truest sense. This is the opposite of concentrating power, because the means of power are completely disunited. In less favorable terms, the logical end state of capitalism is anarchy or chaos
Socialism is the common/public/collective ownership of the means of production. Holding the means of power in a collective is another way of saying it’s being concentrated. The logical end of socialism is the concentration of everything.
Of course, I don’t think we need to take either extreme too seriously. They both have faults, clearly, and they both devolve into something that more resembles the other with time. Capitalism adopts regulations or develop a state to concentrate their power against and enemy. Socialism reduces state power when civilians want more freedoms.
Point is, your characterizing of Capitalism seems misinformed, and it’s incredibly silly to think a fundamental replacement of our current system is in order, as if there’s some perfect ideology we can obviously replace it with
You recognize how that itself is a concentration of power, right
No, disunited private actors are not a concentration of power
If you own the source of wealth, you can buy more in a positive feedback loop, thus concentrating wealth and therefore power. Them being private actors means they are accountable to nobody.
I feel like you are both arguing different things. The simple fact of ownership isn’t the concentration of power, it’s the fact that we don’t put limits on that ownership that causes concentration of power. People always argue for or against systems by taking those systems to their absolutes instead of arguing how they should be in practice. If we put a high tax on anyone with a high net worth, high yearly earnings, high estate value, etc., and also take anti-trust laws seriously, then we can largely solve much of that and still operate under capitalism. The problem is more how we are currently operating under capitalism more than capitalism itself, imo.
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There’s always people in power, there is no other way. Either citizens can be empowered, or only the gov’t. Those are the only two options regardless of the system.
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I’m not a fan of any overarching system, however capitalism is the one I, and I suspect most of the people reading this, live in. Therefore the best way of addressing the problems our society faces is to do so using the tools that our capitalistic system provides (such as regulation and oversight) rather than twiddle our thumbs waiting for some grand revolution to fix everything.
Claiming that the only way to improve our situation is to completely overturn the system does nothing but promote inaction.
Sitting my kids down and telling them that the only way to send them to college is to keep buying scratch-off lottery tickets.
Angrily insisting that the only other alternative is to tear up the entire higher education system. Its either gambling on scratchers or doing a bloody uprising. No other alternatives.
Silver lining, college is much less needed today than it was 10 years ago in many industries.
Depends heavily on the career path. You can’t really be a registered nurse or a professional engineer or practice law without higher education. The service sector is a complete dead-end. Sales jobs are increasingly miserable and scammy. So much of the economy just… sucks. The jobs that aren’t completely soul-sucking tend to be the ones you need a degree to pursue.
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Just ignore all those times that regulation and oversight have happened and continue to happen in capitalist systems, right?
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Yes, you’ll have to constantly fight against that, but you’d have to constantly fight against greed and corruption in any system. The fact is that they wouldn’t be trying to overturn regulations if they didn’t exist in the first place.
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Good take. I think you could apply that logic to a lot of things, that accepting only extreme change is a recipe for nothing getting done.
You’re a fan of exploitation of the working class?
I am a fan of using ignored and undervalued resources, the unemployed (aka exploitation) in order to give people employment and a stepping stone into better jobs while also providing cheaper products for the ‘working class’.
You aren’t?
Casinos have to have rules.
You can’t have it. It simply does not work like that. We saw what happens when you try that and it’s the world we’re living in. And when I say ‘the world we’re living in’ I mean exclusively the west. This kind of thing gets you and your entire town killed if you try it where the US is allowed to set off bombs.
Yes, with corruption, we can’t have anything. So what I need to do is become the most powerful man in the universe and be loving and kind, but with fair and swift judgment. There is no I ther way. No way possible. OR, we can keep trying.
Adam Smith even said: “every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.”
So, we need to constantly keep fighting against corruption and harm towards other humans. If not, you are the problem. Instead of always saying how that will not happen, maybe come up with an answer. I mean, since humans keep causing problems, maybe we should get rid of humans? Right?
Yours is a failure of imagination. There’s no alternative between the current order and god from heaven coming down to smite the bad people? Because I say a strategy that was tried in the past didn’t work, and has observable and learnable outcomes, that saying it’s not the path to achieving what you want is the exact same as saying we should kill off the human race? Right?
Batshit reply. Not sure what the Adam Smith filler is for.
No
So is anybody that’s actually sane. I love all the make believe “links” made with the anti-capitalism crowd. Keep in mind those are the same ones that are highly educated, went to good schools, worked their way up the corporate ladder so they could have their big house and nice cars… but against Capitalism LOL. It’s all talk.
Yes yes you love the idea of people being taken advantage of by the very nature of the system and think anti-capitalism means communist, we know your types, it’s tiresome.
Can you quote me saying either of those? Don’t put words in my mouth.
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Wrong, commerce does that, but to do that you need companies investing tons of money upfront, market research, development and a very substantial up front investment or there’s no product to sell, and then no commerce. If money can’t be made either by the companies or the people behind them, theirs no drive to do it.
Where are the socialists standing with their commerce vs capitalism?
China has almost 1.5 BILLION people vs the US’ couple hundred million, so it’s not size or numbers.
https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/
https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
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Lot of rambling and blaming Capitalism for things you can’t back up, so where are these Socialist countries with better commerce/business and as a result higher GDP?
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Yup, 3rd world country… Thanks for removing all credibility from yourself. Saves me the time.
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Well you’re wrong then.
Honestly I think capitalism works so long as you can make sure greedy people can only satisfy their greed through productivity rather than insider trading and buying companies that are competitive or implementing micro transactions into fully priced games infact that’s the reason why I’ve been against stock markets just like how are these people improving life for others
Why did you think a well thought out thought would get you upvotes? I mean, it did. But that’s not normal! 🤣
They’re sharing an opinion. Upvotes don’t matter.
I’m joking. Replies don’t matter either.
Actually, very little that we do is important.
But still, just try and laugh when you can (to compensate crying at night)
You’re not joking. You’re saying “I agree with you” in the most obnoxious smarmy way possible.
Thanks man for the compliment! It really means something to me :) And I’m not even being sarcastic. Just lack of attention & human affection I guess.
They currently have 9 upvotes and 1 downvote…
I literally said, ‘It did’
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