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this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Showerthoughts
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We don’t just use capitalism to distribute information. There are free libraries all over the U.S. It’s possible to learn most of what knowledge-workers need to know for free. Then you can seek employment for using what you know and not your physical labor.
But also, economists consider humans to have infinite wants. Certainly society as a whole has infinite wants. So no matter what resources we extract from the environment, society always wants more, which creates scarcity, which creates markets, which, in a free society, creates capitalism.
Markets and currency have existed for thousands of years. Capitalism has existed for barely more than 200 years. Markets don't create capitalism. However capitalism destroys markets.
Unregulated agriculture also destroys land. Just because something has negative effects over long-term unregulated use doesn’t mean it should be abolished despite the positive effects. Just because a system is older than another doesn’t mean it’s superior. Or do you yearn for serfdom?
What positive effects has it had?
The only reason I pointed out the age is that markets and currency often are, and were being confused/conflated with capitalism.
I actually advocate for a system 100 years newer than capitalism. And even then I push for a version of it that has been modernized to fit current realities.
Well, the device you are reading this on is a product of capitalism. Whether it’s a phone or a computer, it has hundreds of chips made at hundreds of factories in at least half a dozen countries, all the parts had to be brought to a place and assembled, then brought to another place and sold to you. And you likely didn’t even have to pay for it in advance before it was assembled and ready for you to use!
Did you eat food today that wasn’t grown near where you live? “That’s just trade” you might say, but it took a significant investment of capital to set up the system of trade that got it to you, at the very least the ship or the train it was transported on, if not the equipment used to grow and harvest it. If you ate a banana or chocolate and you don’t live in the tropics then you only ate those things thanks to capitalism.
Are you wearing shoes? Are they completely hand-made by an artisan, did you commission them to be made and come back in a year to pick them up, or did someone invest in capital so you could buy them in a store?
Did you go to college? Did you pay to have the school built and the teachers hired to teach you, or did someone raise and donate a bunch of capital to create it? Did it own a farm you had to work to pay for its operation, or does it have an endowment it can invest as capital to raise money to pay for some of your education? Just because it’s (hopefully) a non-profit institution doesn’t mean it would exist without capitalism.
Just look at the improvements in the living conditions of a huge portion of the planet over the last 200 years when we had capitalism, then look at the improvements for the 200 years before that. Haven’t there been more improvements in more people’s lives since capitalism than before it?
Look I know it’s not a perfect system, it needs regulation, and it’s not the right tool for every situation but generally it blows mercantilism and feudalism out of the water, and it’s done better than every planned economy so far.
No it isn't. It's a product of human ingenuity. People invented things before capitalism. And they continue to invent outside it. In order for things to be a product of capitalism, you have to show how they couldn't be made outside of it. And yet those very same phones are made outside of capitalism today. Not to mention their precursors were made even in Soviet, Russia in the '70s and '80s.
The one that truly unique thing you might be able to attribute as a product of capitalism. Is the unavailability of affordable housing in general.
Wow! And the rest of your spiel. It's like you have no idea what you're talking about. Trade went on for thousands of years before capitalism. Things were manufactured in Russia all throughout the 19th century without capitalism.. oh now I remember your name. You posted this exact same heavily debunked bullshit response in another reply to me once before. Well I'm sure you post it to a lot of people. I was going to say no one could be as hilariously wrong as you are without trying to be that wrong. And it turns out I was right. You are trying to be wrong.
OK then, what has socialism produced? Remember you have to show what it produced can’t be made under capitalism, or any other economic system.
Anyone can tell someone they’re wrong, but if you can’t explain why, why should they believe you?
Economic systems themselves don't produce anything. They're economic systems. That's the whole point. Anything produced under capitalism could be reasonably produced under socialism, etc. It is simply a different way of doing things. But you do make a good argument against your own argument.
Yes, tools don’t make things, people using tools produce things. And capitalism as a tool has been used to produce a lot of things, a lot more than socialism. But like any tool, you don’t want to use the same one all the time for everything. Economics is about incentives, and different systems put the incentives in different places. You don’t want to run a prison on capitalism because it incentivizes imprisoning people. But if you’re running a country on a planned economy it’s difficult to incentivize people to work harder just because the government said so, even if it was a democratic decision that people should work harder.
Markets aren't Capitalism. You can have non-Capitalist markets, such as ones made up of Worker Co-ops.
You can have a market-based economy without exploitation a la Capitalism.
Fine. Factories are capital. If you want manufactured goods and the freedom to get a job you want more than you want to work in a factory then you want capitalism.
Capitalism keeps people from the jobs they want. Literally. If the job you want can't meet your basic needs. Capitalism falsely posits that it's because the job has no value. Rather than the value of it not being generally understood or valued by others.
Capitalism is still good at making menial valueless work to under pay you for however.
I’m not saying it gets you the job you want, I’m saying no one can make you do a job you don’t want to do. People can incentivize you, with money. And I think collective organizing and bargaining is important to make things fair. I hear German firms have a union representative on the board, that seems pretty smart.
And it needs to be regulated. The government needs to force firms to pay to mitigate harmful externalities as well as incentivize positive externalities. And there should be social programs to take some of the edge off market fluctuations, like free or cheap training, help finding employment, cushioning some of the effects of market fluctuations for the average person.
I'm struggling to see what alternative you are envisioning here, but maybe I'm misunderstanding you. People and companies pay for the work they need done. When not enough people do that work, the salaries paid for it will increase. When there's a large pool of people willing to do a job but not enough people and companies who need that job done, the salaries drop. The capitalist job market, from a theoretical perspective, seems to regulate the job market such that people choose jobs that are desired by society.
Now there's obviously some downsides to this, because the gap between income levels is way too large in my opinion. Regulation is required so the CEO's don't earn like 200 times as much as the cleaning people. But in the end any system that exists needs to make sure that people do work that benefits society. And certain jobs are just more desired by society than others. Not everyone who likes drawing can become an artist, because in the end society just doesn't need many artists. So any system should penalize people who try to do a job that society simply doesn't need at that moment and incentivize jobs that have shortages.
The alternative is simple. But again obscured by saturation of capitalist propaganda. To start we, in the US especially, need to move towards social democracy. Single player health care, Austrian style public housing, etc.
If we provide people with a basic level of food and shelter. They will be free to work or not. And if you aren't free enough to be able to choose not to work, you aren't actually free. And here's the kicker. Even though people wouldn't have to work, they still would. Only now capitalist wouldn't be able to use starvation and homelessness as a stick to beat people over the head with. In order to get them to accept traditionally bad capitalist deals.
Better still, entrepreneurs would be able to chase any business ideas they had. Artists would be able to persue their art. Musicians able to persue their music. If you wanted to spend your days gardening and landscaping a public plot. That capitalist deemed had no value. Just for your own enjoyment and the enjoyment of others. You can do that.
Pretty simple actually. Capitalists have pushed for the better part of a century to stop or demonize any progress towards communist evolution. And the other group, the revolutionaries have done nothing but give it a bad name.
No.
All tools are Capital. If Workers collectively share ownership of industry, there is a free flow of labor to where you wish to apply it. Are you under the mistaken impression that Socialism is when someone picks where you can work? You sure you aren't talking about Capitalism?
I’m quite sure we’ve outlawed the direct ownership of people so, yeah, in capitalism no one tells you where to work, they pay you to work. There is a job market. In planned economies, someone tells you where to work. Planned economies are an expression of socialism. On the scale of individual firms, capitalism doesn’t require them to be organized in any particular way. If you want to run a business as a cooperative, where the workers own the company, you can certainly do that in the United States if you want. But if a collective tells you where to work, then someone is still telling you where to work. Please explain how you’d do socialism without anyone telling anyone else where to work.
In Capitalism, Capitalists ultimately decide where you can work, as opposed to being democratically decided by the Workers. Pointing to something that can happen in both Socialism and in Capitalism, ie Planning from a state, is not the dig against workers collectively owning the Means of Production that you think it is. In Socialist systems, you can absolutely choose where you want to work, explain the opposite, why you think they can't. That's an unfounded claim with nothing backing it.
Why do you think it's better that Workers have no say, as opposed to having democratic ownership of industry? I personally value freedom and power to the people, not to people focused on enriching their own personal lives well beyond that of normalcy, so I support leftist organization.
Workers do have a say. They own their labor. If they are educated and organized enough they can bring a corporation to its knees, because corporations can’t do anything with their capital without labor. Just because I’m arguing capitalism has merits doesn’t mean I don’t think there should be strong unions, or shared ownership of companies, or regulation of markets.
I don’t want to do a job I don’t want to do just because the majority voted that I should do it either, really. I can count on people to vote for their own self-interest, but I can’t count on them to vote for mine.
Unions are inferior to direct ownership, and your only argument against direct ownership so far seems to be that you can't count on people to vote on your interests, yet for some reason you ignore that Capitalists exclusively have their own interests at heart and don't care about workers.
No, I completely acknowledge capitalists largely care about their investments in capital and don’t really care so much about workers as long as they are working. But at least I know where their incentives are, what they’re trying to do. It’s difficult to predict how people are going to act if you don’t know what their incentives are, and if you can’t predict how people are going to act then your life is less stable.
And “direct ownership” meaning like a co-op or whatever, nothing wrong with that. Collective ownership of a business is totally fine within a capitalist economy. There’s still a concept of ownership. I wish more businesses were run that way. Well, a lot of start-ups kinda are now that I think about it. People get some pay in stock options and the like. I think unions should own more shares in a company so the incentives of both the union and management are aligned to make the company money, but it’s hard to get the right balance.
Workers will act in their own self interests, only this time everyone is a Worker.
Direct ownership can look like a co-op, yes, that's a Socialist entity. It can also look like state run industry, or a network of Mutual Aid, or a structure like FOSS.
It’s a socialist model of organization, but if it’s operating in a capitalist economy, it benefits capitalism as a model to run an economy, not socialism.
Also no, not everyone is a worker. Not everyone is equal. Someone (or a group of someones) has the power to hire/fire, or dock pay to discourage poor performance, or grant promotions to incentivize superior performance. Someone has the power to alter the distribution of resources, because once a group of humans reaches over 150 or so they form hierarchies because it’s just too difficult to keep peer relationships with more than about 150 people. So someone is given power to speak for more than oneself, they speak for the group, and therefore have more power than a person who speaks for only oneself. That person is not a worker, now they are a politician, or a bureaucrat, or a manager, or a chieftain, or something, they are not like the others, they have more power.
It doesn't matter what it benefits, it's still Socialism at work.
Secondly, you have no real concept of what constitutes a Worker vs an owner. Someone with power to give promotions is still a worker, the difference comes from unequal ownership. Even if they have more power as elected, the other workers can overturn them.
Is someone with the power to grant promotions or dock pay not a representative of the owner, who has all those powers? Sure if the workers all own shares then they are also owners, but hiring and firing are actions performed by owners or their representatives. Workers perform labor.
You're off.
In Capitalism, we refer to the managerial class as Labor Aristocrats, they often side with Capitalists to keep their lifestyle but are ultimately still laborers and not owners.
In Socialism, a democratically accountable manager or HR representative is just that, democratically accountable. Even though they are involved in managing, if they do a bad job, the Workers can oust them, or even do away with the position entirely.
Ownership entirely changes the power imbalance.