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The inevitable and imminent demise of capitalism, it's been "beginning" for nearly 200 years now.

by V-2 10y ago

allendoerfer 10y ago
Same issue with those kids. They are not behaving anymore and listen to terrible music. We truly are the special generation.
Bombthecat 10y ago
Exactly, and, in my own humble opinion. The capitalism thing just started.
- V-2 10y ago
  The left-wing critique of capitalism has its roots in the dated, 19th century mindset of an Engineer. It has never really moved on from the "era of the telegraph and the steam engine", as the author puts it. The core of it is the belief that social world has to be set up like a precise mechanism. The direct outcome of that was the idea of central planning, of course, but in principle this school of thought values categorizing, configuring and arranging everything, even humans. Case in point - Fourier's phalanstères (influential early socialist who "believed that there were twelve common passions which resulted in 810 types of character, so the ideal phalanx would have exactly 1620 people", and so forth). Today's musings are less naive, but the common utopian theme is still that once we arrive at the ideal order of things, we're "liberated" and all that's left is maintenance work, winding the great clock up so it never stops ticking. They conceal this sentiment better these days, but it still comes out in perceiving every system that's everchanging and highly adaptive as "corroding", "collapsing" etc. If there's no Big Project behind it, it's flawed in their eyes. Is capitalism as we know it living its days out? Of course - always.
  - jddjdbdbd3 10y ago
    That is certainly not true for all. I am on the far left, but think centralised systems tend to be brittle. What we are all looking for is a distributed resilient system that maximises some mix of our own happiness and the happiness of others. Capatilism is one such distributed resilient system. I bet that there are others. The "sharing economy" while poorly defined, may be such a system, when married to some kind of collective decision making process.

The inevitable and imminent demise of capitalism, it's been "beginning" for nearly 200 years now.

by V-2 10y ago

The inevitable and imminent demise of capitalism, it's been "beginning" for nearly 200 years now.

Same issue with those kids. They are not behaving anymore and listen to terrible music. We truly are the special generation.

Bombthecat 10y ago

Exactly, and, in my own humble opinion. The capitalism thing just started.

V-2 10y ago
The left-wing critique of capitalism has its roots in the dated, 19th century mindset of an Engineer. It has never really moved on from the "era of the telegraph and the steam engine", as the author puts it. The core of it is the belief that social world has to be set up like a precise mechanism. The direct outcome of that was the idea of central planning, of course, but in principle this school of thought values categorizing, configuring and arranging everything, even humans. Case in point - Fourier's phalanstères (influential early socialist who "believed that there were twelve common passions which resulted in 810 types of character, so the ideal phalanx would have exactly 1620 people", and so forth). Today's musings are less naive, but the common utopian theme is still that once we arrive at the ideal order of things, we're "liberated" and all that's left is maintenance work, winding the great clock up so it never stops ticking. They conceal this sentiment better these days, but it still comes out in perceiving every system that's everchanging and highly adaptive as "corroding", "collapsing" etc. If there's no Big Project behind it, it's flawed in their eyes. Is capitalism as we know it living its days out? Of course - always.
- jddjdbdbd3 10y ago
  That is certainly not true for all. I am on the far left, but think centralised systems tend to be brittle. What we are all looking for is a distributed resilient system that maximises some mix of our own happiness and the happiness of others. Capatilism is one such distributed resilient system. I bet that there are others. The "sharing economy" while poorly defined, may be such a system, when married to some kind of collective decision making process.