You know, just for kicks, I want to take a singular post out of that thread and utterly break it down to demonstrate just how out of touch these people are. They think they understand how Marxists think, but actually completely don’t. They think this “understanding” gives them the capacity to rebut the arguments of the left, but actually completely don’t. And they prevent themselves from coming to the realization that they don’t, by essentially dismissing people who are Marxists as “too far gone and ideological” who should not be engaged with at all. Thus, they become trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of ideology, where they themselves cannot evolve their own understanding of the system they support.
Post in full:
spoiler
Ask them to define capitalism. See what they say. Ask if they have a broad flexible neutral view of the word (a market economy based on private ownership that can have a lot a little or no social safety net) or a more negative one (a greed based economy!). Then try to get them to see how, academically, capitalism is a much broader term and there are many flavors of capitalism. Steer them to seeing capitalism as this broad term. Then ask them if they are ideologically opposed to capitalism or practically opposed to it. If they are ideological, don’t waste your time with them. If they are practically opposed, as in they think capitalism ruins quality of life, just admit that different flavors of capitalism, or any economic system, have good and bad points and you have to choose the right combination of policies that best leads to your end goal. For me that end goal is: An economic system that improves the quality of life for the most number of people, but taking special consideration for the poorest and vulnerable. See if they agree if that is a good ongoing goal. If they do, then you’ve got a starting point.
At that point tell them you want to drop the term capitalism, socialism, liberal, conservative, progressive, etc. etc. Talk about individual policies and aspects of life. Most people will agree with things like private property and doctors making more than janitors, and some sort of social safety net. Find areas you disagree on: maybe trade, then explain comparative advantage and how starving children in a poor country benefit from trade … it’s not like impoverished people are forced at gunpoint to go work in factories for 50 cents/hour, they are doing it on purpose because it’s better than what they had before, and if we made a global minimum wage, companies wouldn’t build their factories in poor countries, they’d just move them to the middle income countries that had better infrastructure but didn’t get the cheap labor before the wage increase. Boom, that’s an aspect of capitalism .
Or you could point out that the broad definition of capitalism doesn’t negate affordable universal healthcare, a social safety net, universal K-12 education and affordable college. If they dig in, and demand you use their definition of words, then say you aren’t going to debate semantics, but you understand. Tell them that you hate greed too, etc. etc. and that you agree an economic system should improve quality of life, and it is more about picking the best policies. Here you can find other things you agree on. Maybe an estate tax to prevent consolidation of economic power, a progressive income tax, free trade, open borders, taco trucks on every corner.
They might have a knee-jerk reaction to try to say, “those are socialist” or “capitalism is just greeeeeed!” and again, don’t try to tell them they are wrong, just say, “Academic definitions are usually different, are we debating semantics? Or policy?” Try to stick to policy and show how good capitalism works really good, and just admit that bad capitalism (like bad socialism, mercantilism, or communism) sucks.
In the end, you might be talking about definitions just as much as real policy. This is honestly an important part of framing the debate so don’t worry. Don’t make excuses for bad capitalism, just defend good policy and show how good policy happens to also be good capitalism.
Ask them to define capitalism. See what they say. Ask if they have a broad flexible neutral view of the word (a market economy based on private ownership that can have a lot a little or no social safety net) or a more negative one (a greed based economy!). Then try to get them to see how, academically, capitalism is a much broader term and there are many flavors of capitalism. Steer them to seeing capitalism as this broad term. Then ask them if they are ideologically opposed to capitalism or practically opposed to it. If they are ideological, don’t waste your time with them. If they are practically opposed, as in they think capitalism ruins quality of life, just admit that different flavors of capitalism, or any economic system, have good and bad points and you have to choose the right combination of policies that best leads to your end goal. For me that end goal is: An economic system that improves the quality of life for the most number of people, but taking special consideration for the poorest and vulnerable. See if they agree if that is a good ongoing goal. If they do, then you’ve got a starting point.
Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, and the use of capital to reproduce and accumulate more of itself. This is done through the appropriation of surplus value from the masses of workers, who are forced into a proletarian class status by complex and extremely violent historical processes known as “primitive accumulation”; through which great masses of people were driven off their lands, driven into the cities, and deprived of access to both means of subsistence and means of production. They are coerced by natural processes into seeking employment by a capitalist, and then produce more value than they are paid in wages. Capitalists then utilize appropriated surplus value to circulate their capital in a series of continuous cycles for the sole purpose of accumulating more capital. This system elevates the pursuit of profit to the sole overriding moral imperative at the expense of all other priorities (including human extinction and public health) and is predicated upon endless compound growth.
What this person has done is internalize a significant number of ideological memes, most notably that capitalism is trade, capitalism improves the quality of everyone’s life and decreases poverty, and that capitalism now is merely perverted and can be managed with the right number of “sensible, evidence-based policies” and regulations. Note in particular how their personal definition of capitalism is not grounded in any sort of material analysis or terms, but is merely an extremely ideological phrase. Ironically, despite hanging out in a subreddit explicitly named after the ideology of neoliberalism, this person is not consciously ideological. They have embraced a false consciousness, as extreme as the most deluded ultraliberal/“right-libertarian” CHUD.
A lot of /r/neoliberal users are like this. They don’t understand their own ideology, but think they do. This manifests as essentially in supporting neoliberal free trade, means testing, etc but also New Deal-type welfare state policies. They will often express contradictory support for the Keynesian interventionist liberal state and the neoliberal free-trade market fundamentalism, because essentially they’ve identified both as “good” but want to be “practical”, but since they don’t understand their own beliefs when put on the spot they will support contradictory positions at different times. This is also manifested elsewhere on the liberal spectrum with self-identified “progressives” who rhetorically support “progressive policy” like raising the minimum wage and Medicare-4-All, and are also woke af supporting “diversity”, LGBT rights, and BLM, but then when the chips are down end up being just woke neoliberals.
then explain comparative advantage and how starving children in a poor country benefit from trade … it’s not like impoverished people are forced at gunpoint to go work in factories for 50 cents/hour, they are doing it on purpose because it’s better than what they had before, and if we made a global minimum wage, companies wouldn’t build their factories in poor countries, they’d just move them to the middle income countries that had better infrastructure but didn’t get the cheap labor before the wage increase. Boom, that’s an aspect of capitalism .
This person has accidentally discovered dialectical materialist analysis, but of course doesn’t know it because they’ve mystified their definition of capitalism through neoliberal ideological obsession with free trade, conflating trade with capitalism.
One of the more bizarre “debates” that I’ve seen happen between online leftists and /r/neoliberal types is the sweatshop debate. That vast majority of rhetoric that went back and forth on this subject is between babby leftists who haven’t read much theory and are still making moralistic arguments against capitalism, and falsely conscious neoliberal types like the poster in question. This is where the incredibly obnoxious troll meme of “Oh you hate sweatshops? Why do you hate the global poor?” comes from. They’ve convinced themselves that hyperexploitation of the poor in the Global South is actually eradicating poverty and good for workers.
The problem is approaching the question of sweatshops from a moralistic rather than a Marxist, dialectical materialist perspective. Sweatshops are indeed a necessary aspect of capitalist development. Rural peoples are violently displaced from the countryside and driven into the cities. They are forced to take exploitative jobs. It is the earliest stage of capitalist development - sweatshops are often involved with textiles, one of the most primitive capitalist industries.
But this is not “eradicating poverty”. It is merely moving it around geographically.
Capital constantly seeks new spaces into which to flow, to maintain its rate of profit and growth and accumulate more of itself. Historical class struggle in the Western world produced an organized working class that forced the capitalist class and bourgeois state to come to the table, to bargain with them collectively, to grant concessions of high wages, good benefits, and a welfare state. Certain geographic regions became strongholds of working class power, ie the Steel Belt in the US, Northern England industrial centers, the Paris Red Belt, the Ruhr, etc. But the rate of profit is continuously falling, and capital has to maintain its ability to circulate and be valorized in order to accumulate more of itself. World War II destroyed an immense amount of fixed capital investment. It reduced almost every advanced economy, save one, to complete ruins. Capitalism itself was forced to change itself, to include organized labor and heavily plan the economy, in order to respond to the strains of war. This reopened spaces for renewed capital investment by the untouched advanced economy, the United States - the Marshall Plan, the postwar boom that was the Golden Age of capitalism.
But this was never going to last. Capital was already responding to the threat to its profit margins. For thirty years the class war of position was maintained. The unions grew complacent, growing fat off the unprecedented boom in which they shared the proceeds for the first and only time. But deindustrialization was already happening. Starting in the 1950s, industrial jobs were gradually being shifted out of the strongholds of organized labor. First to suburban towns, then to the Sun Belt and the US-Mexican border. In the 1970s, the class war of maneuver began in earnest. Bourgeois political power mobilized heavily to destroy the Keynesian regulatory and New Deal welfare state. In the 1980s, offshoring began in earnest - first to Mexico, then to East Asia, then (and now) to South Asia. Finance capital became the hegemonic interest dominating the US and European economies.
This has resulted in the ruination of certain geographic regions. The Steel Belt became the Rust Belt. Scotland and Northern England became hollow shells. The Ruhr is a shadow of its former glory. The shift is highlighted by the famous “Elephant Graph”. The industrial labor aristocracies in the Global North have been destroyed as productive development has shifted to the south. This is not “eradicating poverty” as the Vox article this very graph is attached to would have you believe, it is merely moving poverty around geographically and vastly polarizing income and wealth inequalities. This polarization can only get worse. The only way it can be controlled is through the conscious action of a proletarian dictatorship, such as China or Vietnam, who tightly, tightly control the political influence of their emergent bourgeoisie as well as the financial regulatory powers of the state. Already, however, the development of China’s economy has reached such a point that it itself is circulating capital investment into other geographical regions, such as South Asia, Central Asia, and Africa.
They might have a knee-jerk reaction to try to say, “those are socialist” or “capitalism is just greeeeeed!” and again, don’t try to tell them they are wrong, just say, “Academic definitions are usually different, are we debating semantics? Or policy?” Try to stick to policy and show how good capitalism works really good, and just admit that bad capitalism (like bad socialism, mercantilism, or communism) sucks.
The question is not greed. Liberals prefer to avoid confronting a systemic critique of capitalism by deliberately focusing on individual moral failings. “It is not the problem of a broken system, but of bad actors within the system. We can resolve this through ‘sensible, evidence-based policy’ and regulation that eliminates the influence of bad actors.” Needless to say, this is pure ideology. Greed, individual moral failing, is not the problem. The problem is that the entire system of capitalism is predicated upon profit as the sole overriding moral imperative. The bourgeoisie must be ever-greedier, because they must maintain their rate of capital accumulation vis-a-vis rivals. Greed is good because it allows one to maximize their capital accumulation, and the sole purpose of capital is to accumulate more of itself. It cannot be any other way, anything hindering this is merely temporary, either an accident of history or the conscious mobilization of the organized working class in class struggle.
Neoliberals gripped by false consciousness can never understand this, and they have preemptively inoculated themselves against self-critique or engaging with arguments outside their bubbles. Noticeably, the actually ideologically-conscious neoliberals always tend to be the most psychotic and amoral, because like ideologically-conscious and trained Marxists they understand that the class struggle and evolution of systems of political economy are not questions of morality but of power. And they have come to terms with selling out to the hegemonic system of the day, to advance their material interests within it, and to maintain it by any means necessary. This indeed does manifest itself in /r/neoliberal, where users of certain flairs (for example, NATO and Friedman) tend to be the most obviously psychotic.
EDIT: I also of course didn’t even touch upon the Reserve Army of Labor and why keeping a large and significant portion of national and international populations in perpetual poverty or precarious employment is 100% necessary for the functioning of capitalism, as new armies of idle hands are required to be thrown into the gaps as the economy continues to expand. This directly relates to deindustrialization and the death of the New Deal consensus, because Keynesian full employment policies were indeed unsustainable in the long term and this was recognized by Marxist economists as early as the 1940s. The USSR itself maintained full employment policies because it maintained a proletarian dictatorship consciously interested it maintaining that, and it did indeed cause problems of its own near the end of the Union’s life.
EDIT2: If someone who doesn’t care about brigading is invested in hopping over there and reposting this saying it’s from off-site, I would be amused to see how that sub might react. Most likely just a ban and removal but w/e. For my part I won’t go near that cesspit.
EDIT3: Nor did I mention the very important aspect of history that ended the New Deal consensus postwar boom, how American capital investment in its Cold War bloc (Western Europe and the Pacific seaboard) became self-defeating because those rebuilt advanced economies became competitors again, which drove down the rate of profit and forced a reckoning with the 70s stagflation/full employment crisis. The Western bourgeoisies effectively faced two potential solutions to this dilemma - either flow capital investment into new sectors of the domestic industrial economy (such as green renewable energy technology, as conveniently it was at this time that the fossil fuel giants were discovering the existence and inevitability of climate change and the Oil Crisis was in progress), OR flow capital investment into new geographical regions that were underdeveloped by disciplining organized labor at home and offshoring industrial jobs. They chose the latter, for obvious reasons.
You know, just for kicks, I want to take a singular post out of that thread and utterly break it down to demonstrate just how out of touch these people are. They think they understand how Marxists think, but actually completely don’t. They think this “understanding” gives them the capacity to rebut the arguments of the left, but actually completely don’t. And they prevent themselves from coming to the realization that they don’t, by essentially dismissing people who are Marxists as “too far gone and ideological” who should not be engaged with at all. Thus, they become trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of ideology, where they themselves cannot evolve their own understanding of the system they support.
Post in full:
spoiler
Ask them to define capitalism. See what they say. Ask if they have a broad flexible neutral view of the word (a market economy based on private ownership that can have a lot a little or no social safety net) or a more negative one (a greed based economy!). Then try to get them to see how, academically, capitalism is a much broader term and there are many flavors of capitalism. Steer them to seeing capitalism as this broad term. Then ask them if they are ideologically opposed to capitalism or practically opposed to it. If they are ideological, don’t waste your time with them. If they are practically opposed, as in they think capitalism ruins quality of life, just admit that different flavors of capitalism, or any economic system, have good and bad points and you have to choose the right combination of policies that best leads to your end goal. For me that end goal is: An economic system that improves the quality of life for the most number of people, but taking special consideration for the poorest and vulnerable. See if they agree if that is a good ongoing goal. If they do, then you’ve got a starting point.
At that point tell them you want to drop the term capitalism, socialism, liberal, conservative, progressive, etc. etc. Talk about individual policies and aspects of life. Most people will agree with things like private property and doctors making more than janitors, and some sort of social safety net. Find areas you disagree on: maybe trade, then explain comparative advantage and how starving children in a poor country benefit from trade … it’s not like impoverished people are forced at gunpoint to go work in factories for 50 cents/hour, they are doing it on purpose because it’s better than what they had before, and if we made a global minimum wage, companies wouldn’t build their factories in poor countries, they’d just move them to the middle income countries that had better infrastructure but didn’t get the cheap labor before the wage increase. Boom, that’s an aspect of capitalism .
Or you could point out that the broad definition of capitalism doesn’t negate affordable universal healthcare, a social safety net, universal K-12 education and affordable college. If they dig in, and demand you use their definition of words, then say you aren’t going to debate semantics, but you understand. Tell them that you hate greed too, etc. etc. and that you agree an economic system should improve quality of life, and it is more about picking the best policies. Here you can find other things you agree on. Maybe an estate tax to prevent consolidation of economic power, a progressive income tax, free trade, open borders, taco trucks on every corner.
They might have a knee-jerk reaction to try to say, “those are socialist” or “capitalism is just greeeeeed!” and again, don’t try to tell them they are wrong, just say, “Academic definitions are usually different, are we debating semantics? Or policy?” Try to stick to policy and show how good capitalism works really good, and just admit that bad capitalism (like bad socialism, mercantilism, or communism) sucks.
In the end, you might be talking about definitions just as much as real policy. This is honestly an important part of framing the debate so don’t worry. Don’t make excuses for bad capitalism, just defend good policy and show how good policy happens to also be good capitalism.
Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, and the use of capital to reproduce and accumulate more of itself. This is done through the appropriation of surplus value from the masses of workers, who are forced into a proletarian class status by complex and extremely violent historical processes known as “primitive accumulation”; through which great masses of people were driven off their lands, driven into the cities, and deprived of access to both means of subsistence and means of production. They are coerced by natural processes into seeking employment by a capitalist, and then produce more value than they are paid in wages. Capitalists then utilize appropriated surplus value to circulate their capital in a series of continuous cycles for the sole purpose of accumulating more capital. This system elevates the pursuit of profit to the sole overriding moral imperative at the expense of all other priorities (including human extinction and public health) and is predicated upon endless compound growth.
What this person has done is internalize a significant number of ideological memes, most notably that capitalism is trade, capitalism improves the quality of everyone’s life and decreases poverty, and that capitalism now is merely perverted and can be managed with the right number of “sensible, evidence-based policies” and regulations. Note in particular how their personal definition of capitalism is not grounded in any sort of material analysis or terms, but is merely an extremely ideological phrase. Ironically, despite hanging out in a subreddit explicitly named after the ideology of neoliberalism, this person is not consciously ideological. They have embraced a false consciousness, as extreme as the most deluded ultraliberal/“right-libertarian” CHUD.
A lot of /r/neoliberal users are like this. They don’t understand their own ideology, but think they do. This manifests as essentially in supporting neoliberal free trade, means testing, etc but also New Deal-type welfare state policies. They will often express contradictory support for the Keynesian interventionist liberal state and the neoliberal free-trade market fundamentalism, because essentially they’ve identified both as “good” but want to be “practical”, but since they don’t understand their own beliefs when put on the spot they will support contradictory positions at different times. This is also manifested elsewhere on the liberal spectrum with self-identified “progressives” who rhetorically support “progressive policy” like raising the minimum wage and Medicare-4-All, and are also woke af supporting “diversity”, LGBT rights, and BLM, but then when the chips are down end up being just woke neoliberals.
This person has accidentally discovered dialectical materialist analysis, but of course doesn’t know it because they’ve mystified their definition of capitalism through neoliberal ideological obsession with free trade, conflating trade with capitalism.
One of the more bizarre “debates” that I’ve seen happen between online leftists and /r/neoliberal types is the sweatshop debate. That vast majority of rhetoric that went back and forth on this subject is between babby leftists who haven’t read much theory and are still making moralistic arguments against capitalism, and falsely conscious neoliberal types like the poster in question. This is where the incredibly obnoxious troll meme of “Oh you hate sweatshops? Why do you hate the global poor?” comes from. They’ve convinced themselves that hyperexploitation of the poor in the Global South is actually eradicating poverty and good for workers.
The problem is approaching the question of sweatshops from a moralistic rather than a Marxist, dialectical materialist perspective. Sweatshops are indeed a necessary aspect of capitalist development. Rural peoples are violently displaced from the countryside and driven into the cities. They are forced to take exploitative jobs. It is the earliest stage of capitalist development - sweatshops are often involved with textiles, one of the most primitive capitalist industries.
1/CONTIINUED
But this is not “eradicating poverty”. It is merely moving it around geographically.
Capital constantly seeks new spaces into which to flow, to maintain its rate of profit and growth and accumulate more of itself. Historical class struggle in the Western world produced an organized working class that forced the capitalist class and bourgeois state to come to the table, to bargain with them collectively, to grant concessions of high wages, good benefits, and a welfare state. Certain geographic regions became strongholds of working class power, ie the Steel Belt in the US, Northern England industrial centers, the Paris Red Belt, the Ruhr, etc. But the rate of profit is continuously falling, and capital has to maintain its ability to circulate and be valorized in order to accumulate more of itself. World War II destroyed an immense amount of fixed capital investment. It reduced almost every advanced economy, save one, to complete ruins. Capitalism itself was forced to change itself, to include organized labor and heavily plan the economy, in order to respond to the strains of war. This reopened spaces for renewed capital investment by the untouched advanced economy, the United States - the Marshall Plan, the postwar boom that was the Golden Age of capitalism.
But this was never going to last. Capital was already responding to the threat to its profit margins. For thirty years the class war of position was maintained. The unions grew complacent, growing fat off the unprecedented boom in which they shared the proceeds for the first and only time. But deindustrialization was already happening. Starting in the 1950s, industrial jobs were gradually being shifted out of the strongholds of organized labor. First to suburban towns, then to the Sun Belt and the US-Mexican border. In the 1970s, the class war of maneuver began in earnest. Bourgeois political power mobilized heavily to destroy the Keynesian regulatory and New Deal welfare state. In the 1980s, offshoring began in earnest - first to Mexico, then to East Asia, then (and now) to South Asia. Finance capital became the hegemonic interest dominating the US and European economies.
This has resulted in the ruination of certain geographic regions. The Steel Belt became the Rust Belt. Scotland and Northern England became hollow shells. The Ruhr is a shadow of its former glory. The shift is highlighted by the famous “Elephant Graph”. The industrial labor aristocracies in the Global North have been destroyed as productive development has shifted to the south. This is not “eradicating poverty” as the Vox article this very graph is attached to would have you believe, it is merely moving poverty around geographically and vastly polarizing income and wealth inequalities. This polarization can only get worse. The only way it can be controlled is through the conscious action of a proletarian dictatorship, such as China or Vietnam, who tightly, tightly control the political influence of their emergent bourgeoisie as well as the financial regulatory powers of the state. Already, however, the development of China’s economy has reached such a point that it itself is circulating capital investment into other geographical regions, such as South Asia, Central Asia, and Africa.
The question is not greed. Liberals prefer to avoid confronting a systemic critique of capitalism by deliberately focusing on individual moral failings. “It is not the problem of a broken system, but of bad actors within the system. We can resolve this through ‘sensible, evidence-based policy’ and regulation that eliminates the influence of bad actors.” Needless to say, this is pure ideology. Greed, individual moral failing, is not the problem. The problem is that the entire system of capitalism is predicated upon profit as the sole overriding moral imperative. The bourgeoisie must be ever-greedier, because they must maintain their rate of capital accumulation vis-a-vis rivals. Greed is good because it allows one to maximize their capital accumulation, and the sole purpose of capital is to accumulate more of itself. It cannot be any other way, anything hindering this is merely temporary, either an accident of history or the conscious mobilization of the organized working class in class struggle.
Neoliberals gripped by false consciousness can never understand this, and they have preemptively inoculated themselves against self-critique or engaging with arguments outside their bubbles. Noticeably, the actually ideologically-conscious neoliberals always tend to be the most psychotic and amoral, because like ideologically-conscious and trained Marxists they understand that the class struggle and evolution of systems of political economy are not questions of morality but of power. And they have come to terms with selling out to the hegemonic system of the day, to advance their material interests within it, and to maintain it by any means necessary. This indeed does manifest itself in /r/neoliberal, where users of certain flairs (for example, NATO and Friedman) tend to be the most obviously psychotic.
EDIT: I also of course didn’t even touch upon the Reserve Army of Labor and why keeping a large and significant portion of national and international populations in perpetual poverty or precarious employment is 100% necessary for the functioning of capitalism, as new armies of idle hands are required to be thrown into the gaps as the economy continues to expand. This directly relates to deindustrialization and the death of the New Deal consensus, because Keynesian full employment policies were indeed unsustainable in the long term and this was recognized by Marxist economists as early as the 1940s. The USSR itself maintained full employment policies because it maintained a proletarian dictatorship consciously interested it maintaining that, and it did indeed cause problems of its own near the end of the Union’s life.
EDIT2: If someone who doesn’t care about brigading is invested in hopping over there and reposting this saying it’s from off-site, I would be amused to see how that sub might react. Most likely just a ban and removal but w/e. For my part I won’t go near that cesspit.
EDIT3: Nor did I mention the very important aspect of history that ended the New Deal consensus postwar boom, how American capital investment in its Cold War bloc (Western Europe and the Pacific seaboard) became self-defeating because those rebuilt advanced economies became competitors again, which drove down the rate of profit and forced a reckoning with the 70s stagflation/full employment crisis. The Western bourgeoisies effectively faced two potential solutions to this dilemma - either flow capital investment into new sectors of the domestic industrial economy (such as green renewable energy technology, as conveniently it was at this time that the fossil fuel giants were discovering the existence and inevitability of climate change and the Oil Crisis was in progress), OR flow capital investment into new geographical regions that were underdeveloped by disciplining organized labor at home and offshoring industrial jobs. They chose the latter, for obvious reasons.