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Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

100 points by anarbadalov 8y ago

stolson 8y ago
Unchecked capitalism and barely regulated monopolies? Absolutely. But that's a less flashy headline.
dragonwriter 8y ago
Capitalism isn't a threat to democracy since the main distribution of power is by capitalist elite rule with democratic institutions constrained by capitalist economic power structure, and has been for the whole history of modern democratic political institutions. The article might more properly ask the question “is capitalism with fig-leaf democracy inherently unstable”?
eximius 8y ago
No, but greed is.
- dqpb 8y ago
  That's like saying the massive amount of written content is the biggest threat to search engines. No, search engines are the solution to massive amounts of content. Greed isn't the biggest threat to democracy. Democracy (or any other form of government) is the solution to whatever set of behaviors are undesirable in the ungoverned.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  Can you even have capitalism without greed? Greed is just a pejorative term for self-interest, which is a core assumption in the treatise of capitalism. It can't exist without it. It just needs to be limited. You can't have lassis-faire capitalism forever because the people who are most successful will change the initial conditions and it will no longer be lassis-faire. So you need some kind of control outside the free market. The free market alone is not corruption-proof in any way.
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    > Greed is just a pejorative term for self-interest Greed is a correctly pejorative term for pursuing power and wealth beyond what people actually need to live well enough. Self-interest prior to reaching that point is not greed. Capitalism is defined as private ownership of means of production and core resources. It doesn't inherently require greed. I agree with your second paragraph, btw.
snappyTertle 8y ago
Democracy is a threat to capitalism.
major505 8y ago
Well, I will not subscribe to the new yourkers for just an article, but my anwser wold be hell no. Intervencion of govern in the free market.... maybe.
- monocasa 8y ago
  You can open it in archive.is, in an incognito tab, or from a Google search and see the whole article.
- pjmorris 8y ago
  I'd argue that the primary interventions of government in the free market involve the creation and support of currency, and the provision of property rights. It's hard for me to imagine a market of any significant size without those things. The absence of government intervention may not be what capitalism wants.
  - major505 8y ago
    I'm ok with govern creating a small set of rules and enforcing them. But as litle as possible. Specially in types of business that aren't vital to population. I can understand certain rules like in insurance companies of some types of banking services. I'm not ok with intervencions, like the banks bailout of 2008, the the goverment just save banks that should have break. This kindo f intervention isn't fair form most of the market, and should be avoided.
    - krapp 8y ago
      >This kindo f intervention isn't fair form most of the market, and should be avoided. Even if it means a global market collapse and depression?
- TACIXAT 8y ago
  I've gotten downvoted for mentioning paywalls as well. I think this is a very valid call out though. While there are workarounds, I don't want to spend more than 2 seconds opening an article (most the time it isn't worth going to google cache, some archive, or doing the fb redirect). I dislike that it is effectively a dead link for many people and that it is being shared on the front page of a major aggregator. It is poor user experience to be opening dead links and really trains me against visiting certain sites. I would absolutely pay 5 cents to read an article. There is no feasible way to do this small of a transaction with our current payment systems. I will absolutely not subscribe for 5 dollars a month.
2RTZZSro 8y ago
Seizing the means of the people to rebel is the real tyranny
mindcrime 8y ago
Simple answer: No. More nuanced answer: not exactly. Not Capitalism per-se anyway. But clearly you can see an unhealthy degree of commingling of big government and big business, in a way that is damaging to society at large. But to my mind: a. that's corruption, not capitalism b. that's an argument against big government, not an argument against capitalism
- ShorsHammer 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- gameswithgo 8y ago
  In the absence of big government, big corporate will become defacto government even more easily.
  - misja111 8y ago
    I guess you mean in the absence of any government. Neither big government nor anarchy is good for democracy, but there is a whole range in between.
    - rjbwork 8y ago
      Along that logic could we say that absolute private property rights nor the complete absence of exclusive use of capital goods is good for democracy, but that there is a whole range in between? It's not immediately obvious to me that either is true in terms of producing viable societies, but as these are the primary axes which determine how a society is going to function, it seems they ought to both be or neither be.
      - erikpukinskis 8y ago
        You’re right it’s either/or at a given scale. But if you think in terms of multiscale, the difference between systems stops looking so qualitative and looks more quantitative: Either you have an absolute property law system, and a limited commons forms on top of that through land trusts, etc. Or you have an absolute communist system, and a limited free market forms on top of that, within a system of exceptions and exemptions. Technically you could implement identical 50/50 socialized/private systems in both of those schemes. In practice scale matters so which system runs which scale will affect the outcome. But the long term outcome will inevitably be “the right things are socialized and the right things are privatized”... the two systems each do experiments and make concessions when they lose. They’ll end up being quite the same, although in the short term they are quite different. And we need both to exist to run all the experiments.
ghouse 8y ago
Unregulated capitalism, perhaps. However, I don't think the US has capitalism (well-regulated or otherwise) today. Today we have a system where gains are privatized, losses are socialized, and market-participants can coerce their elected officials to tilt the market in their favor. This is not capitalism.
- yosito 8y ago
  Why do you say that's not capitalism? I'm no expert but a lot of the socialists I've talked to see capitalism as privatization of gains. Socialized losses are just the other side of that equation. Coercion of elected officials is corruption and it happens in both capitalism and socialism. Edit: Downvotes but no answer to the question?
- acdha 8y ago
  The end of your comment sounds exactly like the guys who defend communism arguing that it’s never really been tried. I think this is capitalism but that that recognition leads to the understanding that it comes in more and less healthy varieties. The U.S. version has oscillated over the years and we can see the results of the better and worse eras. (This is similar to the way some people use “socialism” to mean something like the Cultural Revolution and completely ignore the existence of e.g. European and especially Scandinavian examples)
- rascul 8y ago
  Capitalism is simply the private ownership of resources and production for profit. We have that. We could certainly do it better, though.
- s2g 8y ago
  Sounds like capitalism to me. Corporations have just managed to leverage it for long enough to create what we have now.
gimmeDatCheddar 8y ago
For anyone who doesn't have time to read the whole article, the conclusion is pretty much "No, as long as we have a strong social safety net." IE capitalism with some elements of socialism to preserve individual liberties and dignities when economies slow down. Which sounds reasonable to me as a capitalist but also as a human being.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  > For anyone who doesn't have time to read the whole article, the conclusion is pretty much "No, as long as we have a strong social safety net." Well, then the answer is "yes". The whole issue being debated here is whether capitalism inevitably leads to a concentration of wealth which can then be leveraged into political power to create more concentration of wealth in a positive feedback cycle. The theory goes that after a couple iterations of that cycle, the wealthy will dismantle the social safety net entirely so they can cut their taxes. Which is exactly what we're seeing right now.
  - gimmeDatCheddar 8y ago
    1) When competition is allowed to enter the market, we eventually have an equilibrium where the right number of competitors is producing a good or a service at the best price and highest quality possible. That is capitalism. When concentrations of wealth are leveraged into political power, you have cronyism in the government. That's not a fault of capitalism itself. 2) The wealthy cutting their taxes does not necessarily mean the social safety net has to be dismantled. You can have lower taxes and a high safety net. It all depends on what your tax revenue is and where you spend it. The US has trillions in tax revenue coming in every year, and yet we had something like 60 billion dollars of medicare fraud in a single year, exorbitant spending on useless military ventures, etc. If we slashed wasteful spending and fraudulent activities at the governmental level, we could afford a lot more safety net with less tax revenue. The issue is that cronyism in government results in government only ever being satisfied with getting by with more funding and more budget, and never less.
    - spiralx 8y ago
fallingfrog 8y ago
Of course it is! That's like asking, is monarchy a threat to democracy? Capitalist corporations are basically just little kingdoms.
- fallingfrog 8y ago
  I mean the very first corporations weren't even little kingdoms, they were big ones like the east India trading company, which operated as quasi sovereign states. And they still operate that way, just on a smaller scale. If you think we are currently living in an age of democracy right now you're crazy or just not paying attention.
- deleted 8y ago
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- fallingfrog 8y ago
  The assumptions of monarchy-ish corporatism have gone deep enough at this point that we are starting to see ourselves as monarchies of one, rather than equals in some kind of community. That's where you get these sovereign citizen people and also the point of view that every employee is a contractor.
rayiner 8y ago
Jonah Goldberg has a good take on this in his new book.[1] His basic theory is that capitalism and democracy is not self-perpetuating (kind of like gains at the gym). Societies constantly have to defend and justify it in the face of new challenges and humans' innate tendency toward tribalism. [1] https://www.weeklystandard.com/adam-keiper/in-suicide-of-the-west-jonah-goldberg-defends-capitalism-in-a-big-way https://www.weeklystandard.com/adam-keiper/in-suicide-of-the...
yathern 8y ago
The subtitle: > The idea that authoritarianism attracts workers harmed by the free market, which emerged when the Nazis were in power, has been making a comeback. Makes me disappointed for the state of discourse that occurs today. The article itself is better than the subtitle made me infer - ending essentially with a nuanced 'No'. But these transparent attempts to make you form an emotional response to an issue by eliciting images of Nazi Germany I find borderline disrespectful.
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platz 8y ago
for all it's ills, capitalism is very anti-fragile in the sense that regions that that fail (perhaps even because of capitalism) become cannibalized and therefore stabilized by the greater system. It may not provide much security for individuals, but it is very effective at self-perpetuating the scheme.
Jamerson 8y ago
This reads like an onion article. I'll take free market capitalism and any government over socialism. These people represent a kind of "democracy" that wants to threaten Capitalism, which is the real danger.
vollmond 8y ago
"Is freedom a threat to democracy?" is another way to word the headline.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  No. But democracy is a threat to freedom.
  - yosito 8y ago
    It's only a threat to the freedom of the privileged, but it protects the freedom of the vulnerable.
    - s2g 8y ago
      OH god no. Democracy is a system which can easily trample on the freedoms of the vulnerable. It's why you need to engineer your actual system of government to give representation to the vulnerable that is hard to ignore.
      - yosito 8y ago
        Democracy is a system designed to give representation to the vulnerable. I suppose you're saying that it's possible to have a poorly designed democracy such as one that gives representation to the majority at the expense of the minority, which I agree with.
        monocasa 8y ago
        Pure democracy can be described as three wolves and a sheep deciding on what's for dinner.
        yosito 8y ago
        Ha! That's funny. :) But not entirely accurate. The word "democracy" comes from the word "deme" which essentially a group of individually weak people who band together to make sure that they're all represented against other groups.
whataretensors 8y ago
Anti free market hit piece disguised as an article using questionable interpretation of history. This is propaganda for the middle and upper class.
- s2g 8y ago
  > This is propaganda for the middle and upper class uh, how would this not be propaganda against the middle and upper classes?
  - lajhsdfkl 8y ago
    Do you think poor people read the New Yorker?
  - whataretensors 8y ago
    Look at the vocabulary and reading level used to determine the target. It pushes a narrative right out the gate and uses a story format with fancy fonts to reinforce it.
roymckenzie 8y ago
A good book that demonstrates how hyper-capitalism is inconsistent with Democratic rule is The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.
dsr_ 8y ago
According to many economists, yes. Capitalism does not appear to have a stable mode with a low Gini coefficient. Power that derives from wealth becomes concentrated, which is clearly anti-democratic. Democracy is only viable as a decision-making process in societies where everyone is more or less equal. When people gain power at the expense of others, the result is that the system may remain nominally democratic, but becomes more and more of a plutocracy. In Marx's view, the abuse of the 99% by the 1% would inevitably lead to revolution, violent or otherwise. He then tried to come up with a method of economic organization that could be fair and stable after that revolution. It's not clear that this method has ever worked on a scale larger than a kibbutz or cooperative, but it's also clear that most families are run as communes, though this is rarely discussed. Somewhere in the trek from startup partnership to corporation there is a shift from commune-like organization to dictatorial/plutocratic organization. I don't know if anyone has done an organized study.
- yosito 8y ago
  > it's also clear that most families are run as communes Interesting observation. I'm not saying I disagree but growing up in an Evangelical religious culture (which describes much of America), this was definitely not the case. Men, specifically husbands/fathers were considered superior than other members of the family.
- dharma1 8y ago
  I think programmatic organisational structures with economics and voting built in are pretty interesting. We're building tooling for something like that with https://aragon.one https://aragon.one It's still pretty early days but right now you can create your democracy based DAO in a couple of minutes with no programming. You can issue tokens, vote and and tie in any action of a dapp to another action (like transfer of tokens to the result of a vote). I think it's an interesting vision of a future where you can very easily create programmatic cross-border organisations that can have economic value creation attached to them, and operate based on how the token holders vote.
- spiralx 8y ago
  > but it's also clear that most families are run as communes Hunter-gatherer groups also operate on a cooperative basis where food sharing is an integral part of their social organisation. The trouble is whether this sort of model scales beyond Dunbar's number, something that few political models seem to take into account IMHO.
yosito 8y ago
I'd answer this question by asking another: Is it profitable to destroy democracy? If so, someone is going to try it. That doesn't mean capitalism is any less compatible with democracy than socialism or any other system. But if we value democracy we need to defend against economic forces that threaten it.
- juliangoldsmith 8y ago
  I'd agree with this, and take it further: if there is any person or group of people who stand to gain something by destroying freedom or democracy, you can assume they will do so. To repeat the quote commonly misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
- nickik 8y ago
  It is not profitable to destroy democracy complitly. But it is profitable to undermine democracy so that in your particular case you get an exception to the rules everybody else has to follow. If enough people get that change of rules, democracy is pointless.
_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
Capitalism and free market are two things. I wished people would be more specific with words. Many things happened together so things were conflated. The core idea of capitalism is that ownership of companies is based on invested capital not people. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company I think it's better to discuss individual things like private property, capital ownership of companies, monopolies, free markets, consumerism, imperialism (along the lines of Standard Fruit Company) etc. on their own merit, not throwing everything on one pile - even if things interact, influence and lead to each other.
- deleted 8y ago
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david927 8y ago
I, for one, am looking forward to the nuanced, subtle discussion that will ensue here. For the love of all that is holy, please don't comment unless you've read the article and want to discuss what it is trying to say.
- yosito 8y ago
  If I see one more comment that starts with "Short answer:"... (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
- faizshah 8y ago
  I just don't understand why people think they can refute an argument that's been fleshed out into a book by writing a couple offhand sentences in response to a long form article on the book. Presumably the author would address popularly held assumptions to the contrary of his provocative argument in the book.
- isaiahg 8y ago
  I wish there was more data on the subject of alternatives to capitalism to make comparisons. Really it's most likely any conclusion is in vain with only half of the picture. The best we have is china and the soviet union and those are faulty sources at best considering none of them actually had a socialist economy. Any other systems come from small societies without known large nation scale examples. Maybe democracy is a fragile construction at its core or maybe all political systems have an inherent fragility to them.
ancorevard 8y ago
"Is the freedom to choose what to Sell and what to Purchase a threat to the freedom to choose political leadership?" No. In fact, you cannot have the one without the other.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  And what if you are free to purchase that political leadership and use it to curtail the freedom of others? And use it to skew the system and hoard wealth so nobody can ever buy it back? Hm? I swear, an-caps just don't consider the actual consequences of their ideology. Just once I wish y'all would think something through all the way to the end and consider the possibility of non-ideal situations.
  - moate 8y ago
    No such thing as anarcho-capitalists. Just Neo-Feudalists. The State no longer controls the means of violence, those with the most money become de facto lords capable of hiring their own mercenary protectors and creating small states. Everything becomes monopolies through consolidation or destruction of competition using stronger economic force by exploiting the lack of regulation. The 1300's come back in vogue.
shmerl 8y ago
Capitalism - no. Greed and lust for money - yes.
hapnin 8y ago
"Is [Abstraction A] a threat to [Abstraction B]?" No. Human beings who put money and control of land and resources over and above the welfare of other human beings are a threat to us all and always have been. I wish sociopathic hypergreedy control freaks were viewed the same way we perceive pedophiles instead of being rewarded.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  I'm confused as to why you think that just because two concepts are abstract they can't interact with each other. How do you explain that logic? Do we claim that capitalism cannot produce hyper-greedy sociopaths? Because I would argue that it distills those people better than most systems. We need some form of modified capitalism which has some checks and balances. We did have that system for a long while, but the controlling agencies got captured by private interests and we can all plainly see the risk involved there. But it's pure capitalism. People who say pure capitalism would have an even playing field discount the possibility that the winners on that level playing field would change the playing field to benefit them forever. What is keeping the playing field level? Not the market. The market doesn't limit systemic drift.
  - hapnin 8y ago
    My point is that abstracting practical human evil to an "ism" removes responsibility from the actors who commit the evil.
- ksk 8y ago
  Capitalism self-selects for those hypergreedy people. Thankfully, a lot of humans are social animals interested in welfare of other humans, and society at large. A Welfare component is required to offset people harmed by the excess of capitalism.
Stranger43 8y ago
The problem is of cause that capitalism is a fiction that have never existed in the real world, with the "movement" that calls itself capitalist being captured by the mercantilist it was supposed to oppose as soon as it started. And mercantilism which is what most economist is promoting as capitalism is basically feudalism by economic means and as such pretty much inconsistent with democracy the second you have a zero sum economy(which the west will for the foreseeable future be facing), especially when you remember that feudalism rose out of the concept of hereditary property not divine right(that came much later) as most textbooks state. Weather capitalism is compatible with the real world is a much bigger question that few economist dare to ask because the last one to do so ended up founding communism as a response to the complete failure of Smiths actual ideals to survive in the real world.
trumped 8y ago
The fact that lobbying/bribes are legal in the USA is a bigger threat to democracy. Companies being considered people whenever it's convenient is not really helping either.
eruci 8y ago
No! At least not in the sense that its alternatives are.
mychael 8y ago
Short answer: No. You can't have political freedom without economic freedom.
- Stranger43 8y ago
  The problem here of cause is that economic freedom being linked to real world property is a limited good that can be owned and inherited. And if a good can be owned and inherited it can be used restrict other peoples access to said good, And if economic freedom can be used to restrict freedom it can be a tool of oppression. When Marx talked about how property was the inevitable bane of Smiths ideals he was not just hallucinating but basing his critique on the failed attempt to create equality and freedom through capitalism he was living in. The problem is of cause that while Marx got the criticism right Engels failed to get the solution right.
noir-york 8y ago
Is capitalism a threat to authoritarianism? The Chinese Communist Party certainly was worried that capitalism would pose a threat. Turns out the Party is doing just fine. "capitalism", i.e., a market-based economy is flexible and can be harnessed to serve whatever purposes a society desires. So, no capitalism is not a threat to democracy, or communism for that matter. Let's not forgot that capitalism is a recent invention. Kings and emperors were imposing their rule on their poor subjects without the help of free market economies for most of human history. Right wing resurgence is back because the parties of the left forgot who gave birth to them - the working class. "Working class" is anachronistic now. The children of the working class became middle class. The new working class is now the middle class, increasingly being hollowed out. What's to stop authoritarianism: 1. remove proportional voting. Coaltions allow parties to divide up the electorate. On the other hand, forcing parties to win 50%+1 of the vote forces parties to take broad-based policies that appeal to wide swathes of the electorate. 2. Invest in a social safety net. Education, healthcare and affordable housing promote social mobility, and more importantly, give peace of mind to those in the middle class who are afraid of losing the gains made by their parents. 3. Campaign finance reform. Its easier to turn out the vote and raise funding when parties turn to identity politics because nothing is more personal - and fires one up more - than appeal to one's identity. Identity politics is cancer on democracy. Both left and right play the game and identity politics should be banned in a liberal (the John Stuart Mill kind) democracy. 4. Ban targeted political advertising. A liberal democracy needs a shared public space, and a discussion among all voters. Targeted political advertising breaks up that public space into millions of shards. Another option could be to force parties to post publicly all political adverts for everyone to see. I ought, indeed, need to know what a party's policies are regarding pensioners or education even though I am neither a pensioner nor have children. Why? Because my taxes will be funding such items. 5. The left needs to be remember its origins. Sounds simple eh? 6. Finally, we need to drop the left-right way of identifying policies. It reduces policies which impact people and society into a basic for/against divisive manner. There is a better way. Enough for today :)
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petraeus 8y ago
The only way to fix democracy is to make voting mandatory, but the elites in power have no motive to change the system. In fact they have all the reason to keep the status-quo. The current version of democracy is a treat to democracy itself.
- debacle 8y ago
  It's an interesting question, and it's commonly debated in the US whether voting should be mandatory. It's been debated since the 1700s whether all eligible voters should be forced to vote. But there are systems in place where voting is mandatory. Wouldn't studying the political knowledge of these countries in comparison to countries with similar socioeconomic demographics allow you to determine if mandatory voting leads to more effective democracies?
debacle 8y ago
Are there any capitalist systems that don't tend towards hierarchical structures? Corporations are hierarchical to a great degree, but what would a system look like that incorporated the benefits of democracy into a capitalist entity? In a democracy, people are in theory given a level playing field through voting that means that Bill Gates's vote is just as valuable as anyone else's. In capitalism, people are given the ability to create value to their fullest extent. A single individual could find him or herself creating value outstripping that of thousands of people. Even on small teams, there are great deviations in contributed value. Capitalism is highly volatile, and I would argue the stronger and more natural system as compared to democracy. Both democracy and capitalism are capable of generating evil and tyranny. The intent of democracy is to create a foundation for a stable society in situ. I think it's very possible to create a democracy that does not progress. On the other hand, capitalism is innately progressive via market competition and trade. Technological progress and social progress seem to have an odd dance. The goal of technological progress is to create more fit capitalist entities which compete better in markets, but individual consumers are the end route fitness function. The goal of social progress is to elevate the standard of living for individuals, but it might not be easy to prove that democracy is the best known system for raising that standard of living, because so much of one's standard of living is defined by technological progress. I would argue that capitalism is a more natural system than democracy, and thus more durable. A healthy democracy is an artificial system of good, and a perfect democracy cannot exist in the real world. Again and again, democracy has shown itself flimsy during difficult times.
- spiralx 8y ago
  > In capitalism, people are given the ability to create value to their fullest extent. In capitalism people have the ability to create value to the extent they have the capital to do so, a requirement which excludes most people from achieving what they could.
  - debacle 8y ago
    I don't mean to sound dismissive, but that's a knowledge problem. Many people have no idea how to procure capital, nor what capital procurement even entails. There are few viable routes to becoming an entrepreneur, and most people would agree that the most viable route is learning from other entrepreneurs. For me, learning how to operate a business required a lot of reading, failure, and bad decisions. For someone who has easy access to the knowledge that I had to work hard to attain, becoming successful has a much shorter path. For someone who doesn't even have a map (many people in poor or socially disadvantaged communities), it requires a level of tenacity and drive that is very rare. So while I agree with you that most people are excluded from maximizing their potential, I think the root cause is not a lack of capital, but a lack of knowledge about how to interact with capital.
kazinator 8y ago
> Basically there are two solutions,” Polanyi wrote in 1935. “The extension of the democratic principle from politics to economics, or the abolition of the democratic ‘political sphere’ altogether.” In other words, socialism or fascism. This article is predicated on using democracy as a synonym for constitutional representation, which it isn't. Democracy literally means rule by the people: majority rule. If you can't get married because you're gay, that is democracy at work: the majority doesn't like some aspect of your life, and that's that. Democracy can be de facto a form of fascism.
- noir-york 8y ago
  Indeed, which is why modern democracies, or at least Western ones, don't describe themselves as democracies (except only as shorthand), but republican liberal* democracies. * liberal here meaning political liberal (JS Mill liberalism), and not what is understood by "liberal" in US politics.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    The UK is a western democracy and does not describe itselg as a republican anything, though opponents to certain elements of the current constitution describe themselves that way. There is an overlap between democratic republics (or, to use the less common phrasing, “republican democracies”) and limited representative democracies, but they aren't the same.
    - noir-york 8y ago
      The UK is what is called an aristocratic republic* as it retains the Roman Republic's setup: - Sovereign / House of Lords (Senate) / Lower house. The US Founding Fathers copied England, and Rome's model but replaced the sovereign with a President. Representative democracies are necessarily republics - although some, like my country, skip the upper house. Rome introduced consuls / republican model because the population was too large, unlike the Greek polis, to be politically manageable. Rome of course was not a democracy. *or monarchic. I am away from my books so cannot confirm exactly the term. Sorry.
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neuralk 8y ago
An article with a title like this, people are only responding to the question (which is rhetorical anyway). The OP submission has only been up 1 hour at the time of this comment and the vast majority of the 100+ comments here are addressing only the title question or reactions to it. None mention Polanyi and few discuss the author's most salient points at the end of the article.
- noir-york 8y ago
  Polanyi as a thinker isn't frankly particularly imaginative or interesting: for someone who read British economic history, it appears he missed Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments, political liberalism, and the rise of a parliamentary labour movement in England (as opposed to a revolutionary party). If Polanyi had considered the above he wouldn't have come to the conclusion that the two possibilities are either socialism or fascism. The prescriptions - social welfare, etc - at the end of the article are known. The question is why they haven't been implemented in the US (they have in most other Western counties to various degrees). I address other points in another comment below.
ThomPete 8y ago
Yes it is but that's a moot point. Democracy is also a threat to capitalism and if we don't have the right check and balances in place democracy is a threat to minorities. As the saying go, democracy is the worst kind of system besides all the other systems. No system is perfect but a democracy based on capitalism is as good as we know how to make a system because it handles "irrational agents" fairly well. The right way to approach this is to look at how is capitalism a threat to democracy and then make sure we have the proper mechanisms to deal with that.
forapurpose 8y ago
It's not at all an academic argument but a critical issue being resolved right now; the preference for capitalism over democracy is openly argued and put into practice: * You may recall Peter Thiel's argument that democracy and "freedom" (i.e., his freedom to act as a capitalist) are incompatible, and therefore we should limit the former. Thiel is close to the U.S. president, and his people are advisors in the White House and other branches. https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio... * Also, the recent U.S. Secretary of State, as well as other members of the administration, openly said the U.S.'s foreign policy should prioritize "economic interests" over democracy and human rights. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tillerson-pushing-human-rights-abroad-creates-obstacles/story?id=47190743 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tillerson-pushing-human-righ... * Finally, as much as HN doesn't like to discuss this issue, we also can't bury our heads in the sand: The nationalist and racist politics in the U.S. are also anti-democracy,[0] and by devaluing democracy they open the door to capitalism-over-democracy. Probably not coincidentally, the nationalists and the capitalism-over-democracy people (like Thiel and Tillerson; let's call them oligarchs) ally in the coalition that supports Trump and the GOP. For example, the GOP actively works the limit voting, the foundation of democracy, by people they don't like. That coalition, of the nationalists/racists and the oligarchs, are a threat to democracy in the U.S. (and probably elsewhere). It's only an anecdote, but a wealthy person whom I had respected intellectually told me, 'I voted for Trump and I'd vote for him again - I'm a businessperson and business is good'. Their argument is implicitly framed around the idea that capitalism is all that matters. And I'll add that it's very short-sighted: You only need to look around the world and see that democracy breeds economic prosperity like nothing else in the history of humanity. The democracies are all the wealthiest countries in the world; the corrupt oligarchies are all poorer, and had been for millennia before democracy. In fact, the wealth of corrupt oligarchies today comes from selling to wealthy democrats and profiting on the peaceful international order and world trade established by the democrats. The world of corrupt oligarchies (and monarchies, etc.), before democracy, was poorer by orders of magnitude. ... [0] Why are nationalism and racism anti-democracy? The necessary foundation of democracy is universal human rights; for example the founders of the United States made it the basis of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ... That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men". On a practical basis, if the other person doesn't have rights then neither do you; if it's ok for someone to take away their vote then why shouldn't they take away yours? Nationalism and racism say that rights are not universal at all, but that they depend on nationality and race.
nickik 8y ago
This is interestign article, but sadly I must say that I have some very large problmes with it. The article is to large to go threw all the historical details. I would argue the article is very nice example of what is sometimes called history as popular myth. Many historical periods or events have many different interpretations and one is favored depending on politics. This piece nicely collects all of these and makes a nice overall story out of it that then perfectly leads into the politcal system favored by all non-communist modern leftist, scandinavian capitalism. How could anybody disagree with this logical chain? On thing that bugs me is that recessions are only blamed at those in power during the recession, while ignoring structural problems that existed before. It all only went bad in 1973, before that it was awesome, nothing happened before is responsable for the problems. Also calling the economy of the 60s 'Keynsian' is just a slightly strange leftists phrase that is not really used by econnomists. Keynsianism has perticular technical defnition, it does not mean big government with regulation. Many this about this version of the 60s and how the left loves to call it 'Golden Age Capitalism' and then follows it up with 'but it was actually Socialism, look at the marginal tax rate'. This is a highly stylised version of events works thanks to selective selection of metrics. Most economist agree that the Great Depression was caused by central bank mismangment. We know know this quite well, and people like R. G. Hawtrey (worlds most well known economsit back then) prediced the Great Deflation pretty exactly, with the correct explaition that we still use today. It had nothing to do with free markets, or the evil small government polices of the 20s. Much the same argument could be made about 2008. Again, one can not take account of the whole article in single comment, but I would just point out that there are many different interpretations of these events. One could easly turn it around and tell a equally convincing story with the opposite point.
jrs235 8y ago
Why do so many people put democracy on a pedestal? Majority rules scares the shit out of me. We don't need what the majority wants. We need protection for minorities. The greatest minority being the individual. So long as a person isn't physically harming others leave them alone and let them be. Mobocracy, a majority without limits, is worse than a relatively steady and stable dictator.
- quadrangle 8y ago
  Democracy means rule by the people. It does NOT require that majority-rule be the mechanism (that is itself about the worst mechanism for democracy, second only to minority-rule).
  - jrs235 8y ago
    Thank you for replying. Thank you for clarification and correcting my defaulting to "Democracy is sometimes referred to as "rule of the majority".
dredmorbius 8y ago
I'm disappointed in this thread. Not the post itself, but the discussion, most of which seems 1) utterly divorced from the article, 2) largely (and on several sides) reduced to ideological rhetoric and axe-grinding, singularly both uninformed and uninformative, 3) voluable (approaching 200 comments as I write) and far more noise than signal. It's about whaat I'd expect if you'd asked a diverse group of 1550s Europeans to civilly diiscuss Catholocism vs. Reformation. (I've spent a fair bit of time researching the history of the notion of free speech. Among northern Europeans, there's generally been a specific carve-out against free speech to Papists, as they were frequently referred to....) There are only four references to the key individual within the article, Karl Polanyi. Three of those reference the lack of reference to him. (I've just added a fifth reference, though also of a nonproductive meta-commentary.) There are several likely reasons for this. One is that "capitalism" and "democracy" are themselves both poorly defined, and cultural shibboleths: signifiers of group affinity far more than semantically functional terms. I'd read economics myself ay uni and would have been pressed to give aa coherent definition until relatively recently. Even now, that's more by calling up a definition, or set of definitions, than something that comes readily to mind. E.J. Mishan was a Chicago-trained, though very much not a Chicago-scool, economist of the 2nd half of the 20th century. He examined, and questioned, many fundamental precepts of economics, including the meaning and definitions of "free market". (Close to though not identical with "capitalism".) Mishan notes that "free market" may refer to one or more of the following: 1. The private ownership of capital, or productiive (nonhuman) assets 2. The private management of economic enterprise 3. The decentralization of economic enterprise 4. Competitive enterprise 5. A price system 6. A market system He also notes that these definitions my either rely on, or oppose, one another. E.g., pricate ownership (1) tends to centralisation, opposing decentralisation (3). http://booksc.org/ireader/28521331 http://booksc.org/ireader/28521331 https://doi.org/10.1080/00213624.1975.11503319 https://doi.org/10.1080/00213624.1975.11503319 Other authors, of late Naomi Wolf in Shock Doctrine, have pointed out the affinity of free-market advocates, Milton Friedman in particular, with authoritarian and genocidal dictators. Similar parallels were drawn in the 1930s with fascist Italy and Germany, and you can find similar sentiments in the works of J.S. Mill and Adam Smith. But for discussion, HN can and should do far better.
tobbe2064 8y ago
Tldr; The premises of the article is that the free market is to cruel for a democracy and that when it demands a sacrifice to greate people will tend to vote for populists There is nothing in the article concerning corruption or propoganda.
badrabbit 8y ago
Would I get downvoted if I said democracy is a mere target a country can only use as it's goal? What I am saying is, there is no truly democratic country. To my best knowledge, in every supposed democratic country there are groups or individuals that yield far greater power than the average citizen when it comes to influence over the political process. Imperialism has feudals,communism has party members, totalitarianism has oligarchs (and friends of the leadership) where as democracy has the 1% and their cronies. Corruption is not an ideology but a moral and ethical failure. One can maintain an uncorrupt conscious a character of integrity (when it comes to politics at least) regardless of the system of government. Money,power and a sense of security are all deceptively corrupting vices. Corruption is prevalent in any government that tolerates people who have failed to overcome those vices as politicians and public officials. It's not capitalism or lack of it that is corrupting but rather a society that tolerates what it knows to be vile and filth in exchange for a bigger picture or in pessimistic complacency towards the ruling class.
jimmywanger 8y ago
Democracy is a threat to capitalism. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC0ZB2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC0ZB2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... Basically, it explores how democracy and rule of law are fundamentally not reconcilable, especially when ethnic/religious tensions are inflamed. If an ethnic immigrant minority somehow gets influence (economic or political) people get rapidly irritated. Look at Jews and Chinese. The tyranny of the majority is not compatible with the rule of existing laws, when the existing laws can be changed with the majority.

100 points by anarbadalov 8y ago

Unchecked capitalism and barely regulated monopolies? Absolutely. But that's a less flashy headline.

Capitalism isn't a threat to democracy since the main distribution of power is by capitalist elite rule with democratic institutions constrained by capitalist economic power structure, and has been for the whole history of modern democratic political institutions. The article might more properly ask the question “is capitalism with fig-leaf democracy inherently unstable”?

eximius 8y ago

No, but greed is.

dqpb 8y ago
That's like saying the massive amount of written content is the biggest threat to search engines. No, search engines are the solution to massive amounts of content. Greed isn't the biggest threat to democracy. Democracy (or any other form of government) is the solution to whatever set of behaviors are undesirable in the ungoverned.
vertexFarm 8y ago
Can you even have capitalism without greed? Greed is just a pejorative term for self-interest, which is a core assumption in the treatise of capitalism. It can't exist without it. It just needs to be limited. You can't have lassis-faire capitalism forever because the people who are most successful will change the initial conditions and it will no longer be lassis-faire. So you need some kind of control outside the free market. The free market alone is not corruption-proof in any way.
- quadrangle 8y ago
  > Greed is just a pejorative term for self-interest Greed is a correctly pejorative term for pursuing power and wealth beyond what people actually need to live well enough. Self-interest prior to reaching that point is not greed. Capitalism is defined as private ownership of means of production and core resources. It doesn't inherently require greed. I agree with your second paragraph, btw.

snappyTertle 8y ago

Democracy is a threat to capitalism.

major505 8y ago

Well, I will not subscribe to the new yourkers for just an article, but my anwser wold be hell no. Intervencion of govern in the free market.... maybe.

monocasa 8y ago
You can open it in archive.is, in an incognito tab, or from a Google search and see the whole article.
pjmorris 8y ago
I'd argue that the primary interventions of government in the free market involve the creation and support of currency, and the provision of property rights. It's hard for me to imagine a market of any significant size without those things. The absence of government intervention may not be what capitalism wants.
- major505 8y ago
  I'm ok with govern creating a small set of rules and enforcing them. But as litle as possible. Specially in types of business that aren't vital to population. I can understand certain rules like in insurance companies of some types of banking services. I'm not ok with intervencions, like the banks bailout of 2008, the the goverment just save banks that should have break. This kindo f intervention isn't fair form most of the market, and should be avoided.
  - krapp 8y ago
    >This kindo f intervention isn't fair form most of the market, and should be avoided. Even if it means a global market collapse and depression?
TACIXAT 8y ago
I've gotten downvoted for mentioning paywalls as well. I think this is a very valid call out though. While there are workarounds, I don't want to spend more than 2 seconds opening an article (most the time it isn't worth going to google cache, some archive, or doing the fb redirect). I dislike that it is effectively a dead link for many people and that it is being shared on the front page of a major aggregator. It is poor user experience to be opening dead links and really trains me against visiting certain sites. I would absolutely pay 5 cents to read an article. There is no feasible way to do this small of a transaction with our current payment systems. I will absolutely not subscribe for 5 dollars a month.

2RTZZSro 8y ago

Seizing the means of the people to rebel is the real tyranny

mindcrime 8y ago

Simple answer: No. More nuanced answer: not exactly. Not Capitalism per-se anyway. But clearly you can see an unhealthy degree of commingling of big government and big business, in a way that is damaging to society at large. But to my mind: a. that's corruption, not capitalism b. that's an argument against big government, not an argument against capitalism

ShorsHammer 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
gameswithgo 8y ago
In the absence of big government, big corporate will become defacto government even more easily.
- misja111 8y ago
  I guess you mean in the absence of any government. Neither big government nor anarchy is good for democracy, but there is a whole range in between.
  - rjbwork 8y ago
    Along that logic could we say that absolute private property rights nor the complete absence of exclusive use of capital goods is good for democracy, but that there is a whole range in between? It's not immediately obvious to me that either is true in terms of producing viable societies, but as these are the primary axes which determine how a society is going to function, it seems they ought to both be or neither be.
    - erikpukinskis 8y ago
      You’re right it’s either/or at a given scale. But if you think in terms of multiscale, the difference between systems stops looking so qualitative and looks more quantitative: Either you have an absolute property law system, and a limited commons forms on top of that through land trusts, etc. Or you have an absolute communist system, and a limited free market forms on top of that, within a system of exceptions and exemptions. Technically you could implement identical 50/50 socialized/private systems in both of those schemes. In practice scale matters so which system runs which scale will affect the outcome. But the long term outcome will inevitably be “the right things are socialized and the right things are privatized”... the two systems each do experiments and make concessions when they lose. They’ll end up being quite the same, although in the short term they are quite different. And we need both to exist to run all the experiments.

ghouse 8y ago

Unregulated capitalism, perhaps. However, I don't think the US has capitalism (well-regulated or otherwise) today. Today we have a system where gains are privatized, losses are socialized, and market-participants can coerce their elected officials to tilt the market in their favor. This is not capitalism.

yosito 8y ago
Why do you say that's not capitalism? I'm no expert but a lot of the socialists I've talked to see capitalism as privatization of gains. Socialized losses are just the other side of that equation. Coercion of elected officials is corruption and it happens in both capitalism and socialism. Edit: Downvotes but no answer to the question?
acdha 8y ago
The end of your comment sounds exactly like the guys who defend communism arguing that it’s never really been tried. I think this is capitalism but that that recognition leads to the understanding that it comes in more and less healthy varieties. The U.S. version has oscillated over the years and we can see the results of the better and worse eras. (This is similar to the way some people use “socialism” to mean something like the Cultural Revolution and completely ignore the existence of e.g. European and especially Scandinavian examples)
rascul 8y ago
Capitalism is simply the private ownership of resources and production for profit. We have that. We could certainly do it better, though.
s2g 8y ago
Sounds like capitalism to me. Corporations have just managed to leverage it for long enough to create what we have now.

gimmeDatCheddar 8y ago

For anyone who doesn't have time to read the whole article, the conclusion is pretty much "No, as long as we have a strong social safety net." IE capitalism with some elements of socialism to preserve individual liberties and dignities when economies slow down. Which sounds reasonable to me as a capitalist but also as a human being.

Analemma_ 8y ago
> For anyone who doesn't have time to read the whole article, the conclusion is pretty much "No, as long as we have a strong social safety net." Well, then the answer is "yes". The whole issue being debated here is whether capitalism inevitably leads to a concentration of wealth which can then be leveraged into political power to create more concentration of wealth in a positive feedback cycle. The theory goes that after a couple iterations of that cycle, the wealthy will dismantle the social safety net entirely so they can cut their taxes. Which is exactly what we're seeing right now.
- gimmeDatCheddar 8y ago
  1) When competition is allowed to enter the market, we eventually have an equilibrium where the right number of competitors is producing a good or a service at the best price and highest quality possible. That is capitalism. When concentrations of wealth are leveraged into political power, you have cronyism in the government. That's not a fault of capitalism itself. 2) The wealthy cutting their taxes does not necessarily mean the social safety net has to be dismantled. You can have lower taxes and a high safety net. It all depends on what your tax revenue is and where you spend it. The US has trillions in tax revenue coming in every year, and yet we had something like 60 billion dollars of medicare fraud in a single year, exorbitant spending on useless military ventures, etc. If we slashed wasteful spending and fraudulent activities at the governmental level, we could afford a lot more safety net with less tax revenue. The issue is that cronyism in government results in government only ever being satisfied with getting by with more funding and more budget, and never less.
  - spiralx 8y ago

fallingfrog 8y ago

Of course it is! That's like asking, is monarchy a threat to democracy? Capitalist corporations are basically just little kingdoms.

fallingfrog 8y ago
I mean the very first corporations weren't even little kingdoms, they were big ones like the east India trading company, which operated as quasi sovereign states. And they still operate that way, just on a smaller scale. If you think we are currently living in an age of democracy right now you're crazy or just not paying attention.
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fallingfrog 8y ago
The assumptions of monarchy-ish corporatism have gone deep enough at this point that we are starting to see ourselves as monarchies of one, rather than equals in some kind of community. That's where you get these sovereign citizen people and also the point of view that every employee is a contractor.

rayiner 8y ago

Jonah Goldberg has a good take on this in his new book.[1] His basic theory is that capitalism and democracy is not self-perpetuating (kind of like gains at the gym). Societies constantly have to defend and justify it in the face of new challenges and humans' innate tendency toward tribalism. [1] https://www.weeklystandard.com/adam-keiper/in-suicide-of-the-west-jonah-goldberg-defends-capitalism-in-a-big-way https://www.weeklystandard.com/adam-keiper/in-suicide-of-the...

yathern 8y ago

The subtitle: > The idea that authoritarianism attracts workers harmed by the free market, which emerged when the Nazis were in power, has been making a comeback. Makes me disappointed for the state of discourse that occurs today. The article itself is better than the subtitle made me infer - ending essentially with a nuanced 'No'. But these transparent attempts to make you form an emotional response to an issue by eliciting images of Nazi Germany I find borderline disrespectful.

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platz 8y ago

for all it's ills, capitalism is very anti-fragile in the sense that regions that that fail (perhaps even because of capitalism) become cannibalized and therefore stabilized by the greater system. It may not provide much security for individuals, but it is very effective at self-perpetuating the scheme.

Jamerson 8y ago

This reads like an onion article. I'll take free market capitalism and any government over socialism. These people represent a kind of "democracy" that wants to threaten Capitalism, which is the real danger.

vollmond 8y ago

"Is freedom a threat to democracy?" is another way to word the headline.

linuxftw 8y ago
No. But democracy is a threat to freedom.
- yosito 8y ago
  It's only a threat to the freedom of the privileged, but it protects the freedom of the vulnerable.
  - s2g 8y ago
    OH god no. Democracy is a system which can easily trample on the freedoms of the vulnerable. It's why you need to engineer your actual system of government to give representation to the vulnerable that is hard to ignore.
    - yosito 8y ago
      Democracy is a system designed to give representation to the vulnerable. I suppose you're saying that it's possible to have a poorly designed democracy such as one that gives representation to the majority at the expense of the minority, which I agree with.
      - monocasa 8y ago
        Pure democracy can be described as three wolves and a sheep deciding on what's for dinner.
        yosito 8y ago
        Ha! That's funny. :) But not entirely accurate. The word "democracy" comes from the word "deme" which essentially a group of individually weak people who band together to make sure that they're all represented against other groups.

whataretensors 8y ago

Anti free market hit piece disguised as an article using questionable interpretation of history. This is propaganda for the middle and upper class.

s2g 8y ago
> This is propaganda for the middle and upper class uh, how would this not be propaganda against the middle and upper classes?
- lajhsdfkl 8y ago
  Do you think poor people read the New Yorker?
- whataretensors 8y ago
  Look at the vocabulary and reading level used to determine the target. It pushes a narrative right out the gate and uses a story format with fancy fonts to reinforce it.

roymckenzie 8y ago

A good book that demonstrates how hyper-capitalism is inconsistent with Democratic rule is The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

dsr_ 8y ago

According to many economists, yes. Capitalism does not appear to have a stable mode with a low Gini coefficient. Power that derives from wealth becomes concentrated, which is clearly anti-democratic. Democracy is only viable as a decision-making process in societies where everyone is more or less equal. When people gain power at the expense of others, the result is that the system may remain nominally democratic, but becomes more and more of a plutocracy. In Marx's view, the abuse of the 99% by the 1% would inevitably lead to revolution, violent or otherwise. He then tried to come up with a method of economic organization that could be fair and stable after that revolution. It's not clear that this method has ever worked on a scale larger than a kibbutz or cooperative, but it's also clear that most families are run as communes, though this is rarely discussed. Somewhere in the trek from startup partnership to corporation there is a shift from commune-like organization to dictatorial/plutocratic organization. I don't know if anyone has done an organized study.

yosito 8y ago
> it's also clear that most families are run as communes Interesting observation. I'm not saying I disagree but growing up in an Evangelical religious culture (which describes much of America), this was definitely not the case. Men, specifically husbands/fathers were considered superior than other members of the family.
dharma1 8y ago
I think programmatic organisational structures with economics and voting built in are pretty interesting. We're building tooling for something like that with https://aragon.one https://aragon.one It's still pretty early days but right now you can create your democracy based DAO in a couple of minutes with no programming. You can issue tokens, vote and and tie in any action of a dapp to another action (like transfer of tokens to the result of a vote). I think it's an interesting vision of a future where you can very easily create programmatic cross-border organisations that can have economic value creation attached to them, and operate based on how the token holders vote.
spiralx 8y ago
> but it's also clear that most families are run as communes Hunter-gatherer groups also operate on a cooperative basis where food sharing is an integral part of their social organisation. The trouble is whether this sort of model scales beyond Dunbar's number, something that few political models seem to take into account IMHO.

yosito 8y ago

I'd answer this question by asking another: Is it profitable to destroy democracy? If so, someone is going to try it. That doesn't mean capitalism is any less compatible with democracy than socialism or any other system. But if we value democracy we need to defend against economic forces that threaten it.

juliangoldsmith 8y ago
I'd agree with this, and take it further: if there is any person or group of people who stand to gain something by destroying freedom or democracy, you can assume they will do so. To repeat the quote commonly misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
nickik 8y ago
It is not profitable to destroy democracy complitly. But it is profitable to undermine democracy so that in your particular case you get an exception to the rules everybody else has to follow. If enough people get that change of rules, democracy is pointless.

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago

Capitalism and free market are two things. I wished people would be more specific with words. Many things happened together so things were conflated. The core idea of capitalism is that ownership of companies is based on invested capital not people. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company I think it's better to discuss individual things like private property, capital ownership of companies, monopolies, free markets, consumerism, imperialism (along the lines of Standard Fruit Company) etc. on their own merit, not throwing everything on one pile - even if things interact, influence and lead to each other.

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david927 8y ago

I, for one, am looking forward to the nuanced, subtle discussion that will ensue here. For the love of all that is holy, please don't comment unless you've read the article and want to discuss what it is trying to say.

yosito 8y ago
If I see one more comment that starts with "Short answer:"... (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
faizshah 8y ago
I just don't understand why people think they can refute an argument that's been fleshed out into a book by writing a couple offhand sentences in response to a long form article on the book. Presumably the author would address popularly held assumptions to the contrary of his provocative argument in the book.
isaiahg 8y ago
I wish there was more data on the subject of alternatives to capitalism to make comparisons. Really it's most likely any conclusion is in vain with only half of the picture. The best we have is china and the soviet union and those are faulty sources at best considering none of them actually had a socialist economy. Any other systems come from small societies without known large nation scale examples. Maybe democracy is a fragile construction at its core or maybe all political systems have an inherent fragility to them.

ancorevard 8y ago

"Is the freedom to choose what to Sell and what to Purchase a threat to the freedom to choose political leadership?" No. In fact, you cannot have the one without the other.

vertexFarm 8y ago
And what if you are free to purchase that political leadership and use it to curtail the freedom of others? And use it to skew the system and hoard wealth so nobody can ever buy it back? Hm? I swear, an-caps just don't consider the actual consequences of their ideology. Just once I wish y'all would think something through all the way to the end and consider the possibility of non-ideal situations.
- moate 8y ago
  No such thing as anarcho-capitalists. Just Neo-Feudalists. The State no longer controls the means of violence, those with the most money become de facto lords capable of hiring their own mercenary protectors and creating small states. Everything becomes monopolies through consolidation or destruction of competition using stronger economic force by exploiting the lack of regulation. The 1300's come back in vogue.

shmerl 8y ago

Capitalism - no. Greed and lust for money - yes.

hapnin 8y ago

"Is [Abstraction A] a threat to [Abstraction B]?" No. Human beings who put money and control of land and resources over and above the welfare of other human beings are a threat to us all and always have been. I wish sociopathic hypergreedy control freaks were viewed the same way we perceive pedophiles instead of being rewarded.

vertexFarm 8y ago
I'm confused as to why you think that just because two concepts are abstract they can't interact with each other. How do you explain that logic? Do we claim that capitalism cannot produce hyper-greedy sociopaths? Because I would argue that it distills those people better than most systems. We need some form of modified capitalism which has some checks and balances. We did have that system for a long while, but the controlling agencies got captured by private interests and we can all plainly see the risk involved there. But it's pure capitalism. People who say pure capitalism would have an even playing field discount the possibility that the winners on that level playing field would change the playing field to benefit them forever. What is keeping the playing field level? Not the market. The market doesn't limit systemic drift.
- hapnin 8y ago
  My point is that abstracting practical human evil to an "ism" removes responsibility from the actors who commit the evil.
ksk 8y ago
Capitalism self-selects for those hypergreedy people. Thankfully, a lot of humans are social animals interested in welfare of other humans, and society at large. A Welfare component is required to offset people harmed by the excess of capitalism.

Stranger43 8y ago

The problem is of cause that capitalism is a fiction that have never existed in the real world, with the "movement" that calls itself capitalist being captured by the mercantilist it was supposed to oppose as soon as it started. And mercantilism which is what most economist is promoting as capitalism is basically feudalism by economic means and as such pretty much inconsistent with democracy the second you have a zero sum economy(which the west will for the foreseeable future be facing), especially when you remember that feudalism rose out of the concept of hereditary property not divine right(that came much later) as most textbooks state. Weather capitalism is compatible with the real world is a much bigger question that few economist dare to ask because the last one to do so ended up founding communism as a response to the complete failure of Smiths actual ideals to survive in the real world.

trumped 8y ago

The fact that lobbying/bribes are legal in the USA is a bigger threat to democracy. Companies being considered people whenever it's convenient is not really helping either.

eruci 8y ago

No! At least not in the sense that its alternatives are.

mychael 8y ago

Short answer: No. You can't have political freedom without economic freedom.

Stranger43 8y ago
The problem here of cause is that economic freedom being linked to real world property is a limited good that can be owned and inherited. And if a good can be owned and inherited it can be used restrict other peoples access to said good, And if economic freedom can be used to restrict freedom it can be a tool of oppression. When Marx talked about how property was the inevitable bane of Smiths ideals he was not just hallucinating but basing his critique on the failed attempt to create equality and freedom through capitalism he was living in. The problem is of cause that while Marx got the criticism right Engels failed to get the solution right.

noir-york 8y ago

Is capitalism a threat to authoritarianism? The Chinese Communist Party certainly was worried that capitalism would pose a threat. Turns out the Party is doing just fine. "capitalism", i.e., a market-based economy is flexible and can be harnessed to serve whatever purposes a society desires. So, no capitalism is not a threat to democracy, or communism for that matter. Let's not forgot that capitalism is a recent invention. Kings and emperors were imposing their rule on their poor subjects without the help of free market economies for most of human history. Right wing resurgence is back because the parties of the left forgot who gave birth to them - the working class. "Working class" is anachronistic now. The children of the working class became middle class. The new working class is now the middle class, increasingly being hollowed out. What's to stop authoritarianism: 1. remove proportional voting. Coaltions allow parties to divide up the electorate. On the other hand, forcing parties to win 50%+1 of the vote forces parties to take broad-based policies that appeal to wide swathes of the electorate. 2. Invest in a social safety net. Education, healthcare and affordable housing promote social mobility, and more importantly, give peace of mind to those in the middle class who are afraid of losing the gains made by their parents. 3. Campaign finance reform. Its easier to turn out the vote and raise funding when parties turn to identity politics because nothing is more personal - and fires one up more - than appeal to one's identity. Identity politics is cancer on democracy. Both left and right play the game and identity politics should be banned in a liberal (the John Stuart Mill kind) democracy. 4. Ban targeted political advertising. A liberal democracy needs a shared public space, and a discussion among all voters. Targeted political advertising breaks up that public space into millions of shards. Another option could be to force parties to post publicly all political adverts for everyone to see. I ought, indeed, need to know what a party's policies are regarding pensioners or education even though I am neither a pensioner nor have children. Why? Because my taxes will be funding such items. 5. The left needs to be remember its origins. Sounds simple eh? 6. Finally, we need to drop the left-right way of identifying policies. It reduces policies which impact people and society into a basic for/against divisive manner. There is a better way. Enough for today :)

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petraeus 8y ago

The only way to fix democracy is to make voting mandatory, but the elites in power have no motive to change the system. In fact they have all the reason to keep the status-quo. The current version of democracy is a treat to democracy itself.

debacle 8y ago
It's an interesting question, and it's commonly debated in the US whether voting should be mandatory. It's been debated since the 1700s whether all eligible voters should be forced to vote. But there are systems in place where voting is mandatory. Wouldn't studying the political knowledge of these countries in comparison to countries with similar socioeconomic demographics allow you to determine if mandatory voting leads to more effective democracies?

debacle 8y ago

Are there any capitalist systems that don't tend towards hierarchical structures? Corporations are hierarchical to a great degree, but what would a system look like that incorporated the benefits of democracy into a capitalist entity? In a democracy, people are in theory given a level playing field through voting that means that Bill Gates's vote is just as valuable as anyone else's. In capitalism, people are given the ability to create value to their fullest extent. A single individual could find him or herself creating value outstripping that of thousands of people. Even on small teams, there are great deviations in contributed value. Capitalism is highly volatile, and I would argue the stronger and more natural system as compared to democracy. Both democracy and capitalism are capable of generating evil and tyranny. The intent of democracy is to create a foundation for a stable society in situ. I think it's very possible to create a democracy that does not progress. On the other hand, capitalism is innately progressive via market competition and trade. Technological progress and social progress seem to have an odd dance. The goal of technological progress is to create more fit capitalist entities which compete better in markets, but individual consumers are the end route fitness function. The goal of social progress is to elevate the standard of living for individuals, but it might not be easy to prove that democracy is the best known system for raising that standard of living, because so much of one's standard of living is defined by technological progress. I would argue that capitalism is a more natural system than democracy, and thus more durable. A healthy democracy is an artificial system of good, and a perfect democracy cannot exist in the real world. Again and again, democracy has shown itself flimsy during difficult times.

spiralx 8y ago
> In capitalism, people are given the ability to create value to their fullest extent. In capitalism people have the ability to create value to the extent they have the capital to do so, a requirement which excludes most people from achieving what they could.
- debacle 8y ago
  I don't mean to sound dismissive, but that's a knowledge problem. Many people have no idea how to procure capital, nor what capital procurement even entails. There are few viable routes to becoming an entrepreneur, and most people would agree that the most viable route is learning from other entrepreneurs. For me, learning how to operate a business required a lot of reading, failure, and bad decisions. For someone who has easy access to the knowledge that I had to work hard to attain, becoming successful has a much shorter path. For someone who doesn't even have a map (many people in poor or socially disadvantaged communities), it requires a level of tenacity and drive that is very rare. So while I agree with you that most people are excluded from maximizing their potential, I think the root cause is not a lack of capital, but a lack of knowledge about how to interact with capital.

kazinator 8y ago

> Basically there are two solutions,” Polanyi wrote in 1935. “The extension of the democratic principle from politics to economics, or the abolition of the democratic ‘political sphere’ altogether.” In other words, socialism or fascism. This article is predicated on using democracy as a synonym for constitutional representation, which it isn't. Democracy literally means rule by the people: majority rule. If you can't get married because you're gay, that is democracy at work: the majority doesn't like some aspect of your life, and that's that. Democracy can be de facto a form of fascism.

noir-york 8y ago
Indeed, which is why modern democracies, or at least Western ones, don't describe themselves as democracies (except only as shorthand), but republican liberal* democracies. * liberal here meaning political liberal (JS Mill liberalism), and not what is understood by "liberal" in US politics.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  The UK is a western democracy and does not describe itselg as a republican anything, though opponents to certain elements of the current constitution describe themselves that way. There is an overlap between democratic republics (or, to use the less common phrasing, “republican democracies”) and limited representative democracies, but they aren't the same.
  - noir-york 8y ago
    The UK is what is called an aristocratic republic* as it retains the Roman Republic's setup: - Sovereign / House of Lords (Senate) / Lower house. The US Founding Fathers copied England, and Rome's model but replaced the sovereign with a President. Representative democracies are necessarily republics - although some, like my country, skip the upper house. Rome introduced consuls / republican model because the population was too large, unlike the Greek polis, to be politically manageable. Rome of course was not a democracy. *or monarchic. I am away from my books so cannot confirm exactly the term. Sorry.

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neuralk 8y ago

An article with a title like this, people are only responding to the question (which is rhetorical anyway). The OP submission has only been up 1 hour at the time of this comment and the vast majority of the 100+ comments here are addressing only the title question or reactions to it. None mention Polanyi and few discuss the author's most salient points at the end of the article.

noir-york 8y ago
Polanyi as a thinker isn't frankly particularly imaginative or interesting: for someone who read British economic history, it appears he missed Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments, political liberalism, and the rise of a parliamentary labour movement in England (as opposed to a revolutionary party). If Polanyi had considered the above he wouldn't have come to the conclusion that the two possibilities are either socialism or fascism. The prescriptions - social welfare, etc - at the end of the article are known. The question is why they haven't been implemented in the US (they have in most other Western counties to various degrees). I address other points in another comment below.

ThomPete 8y ago

Yes it is but that's a moot point. Democracy is also a threat to capitalism and if we don't have the right check and balances in place democracy is a threat to minorities. As the saying go, democracy is the worst kind of system besides all the other systems. No system is perfect but a democracy based on capitalism is as good as we know how to make a system because it handles "irrational agents" fairly well. The right way to approach this is to look at how is capitalism a threat to democracy and then make sure we have the proper mechanisms to deal with that.

forapurpose 8y ago

It's not at all an academic argument but a critical issue being resolved right now; the preference for capitalism over democracy is openly argued and put into practice: * You may recall Peter Thiel's argument that democracy and "freedom" (i.e., his freedom to act as a capitalist) are incompatible, and therefore we should limit the former. Thiel is close to the U.S. president, and his people are advisors in the White House and other branches. https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio... * Also, the recent U.S. Secretary of State, as well as other members of the administration, openly said the U.S.'s foreign policy should prioritize "economic interests" over democracy and human rights. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tillerson-pushing-human-rights-abroad-creates-obstacles/story?id=47190743 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tillerson-pushing-human-righ... * Finally, as much as HN doesn't like to discuss this issue, we also can't bury our heads in the sand: The nationalist and racist politics in the U.S. are also anti-democracy,[0] and by devaluing democracy they open the door to capitalism-over-democracy. Probably not coincidentally, the nationalists and the capitalism-over-democracy people (like Thiel and Tillerson; let's call them oligarchs) ally in the coalition that supports Trump and the GOP. For example, the GOP actively works the limit voting, the foundation of democracy, by people they don't like. That coalition, of the nationalists/racists and the oligarchs, are a threat to democracy in the U.S. (and probably elsewhere). It's only an anecdote, but a wealthy person whom I had respected intellectually told me, 'I voted for Trump and I'd vote for him again - I'm a businessperson and business is good'. Their argument is implicitly framed around the idea that capitalism is all that matters. And I'll add that it's very short-sighted: You only need to look around the world and see that democracy breeds economic prosperity like nothing else in the history of humanity. The democracies are all the wealthiest countries in the world; the corrupt oligarchies are all poorer, and had been for millennia before democracy. In fact, the wealth of corrupt oligarchies today comes from selling to wealthy democrats and profiting on the peaceful international order and world trade established by the democrats. The world of corrupt oligarchies (and monarchies, etc.), before democracy, was poorer by orders of magnitude. ... [0] Why are nationalism and racism anti-democracy? The necessary foundation of democracy is universal human rights; for example the founders of the United States made it the basis of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ... That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men". On a practical basis, if the other person doesn't have rights then neither do you; if it's ok for someone to take away their vote then why shouldn't they take away yours? Nationalism and racism say that rights are not universal at all, but that they depend on nationality and race.

nickik 8y ago

This is interestign article, but sadly I must say that I have some very large problmes with it. The article is to large to go threw all the historical details. I would argue the article is very nice example of what is sometimes called history as popular myth. Many historical periods or events have many different interpretations and one is favored depending on politics. This piece nicely collects all of these and makes a nice overall story out of it that then perfectly leads into the politcal system favored by all non-communist modern leftist, scandinavian capitalism. How could anybody disagree with this logical chain? On thing that bugs me is that recessions are only blamed at those in power during the recession, while ignoring structural problems that existed before. It all only went bad in 1973, before that it was awesome, nothing happened before is responsable for the problems. Also calling the economy of the 60s 'Keynsian' is just a slightly strange leftists phrase that is not really used by econnomists. Keynsianism has perticular technical defnition, it does not mean big government with regulation. Many this about this version of the 60s and how the left loves to call it 'Golden Age Capitalism' and then follows it up with 'but it was actually Socialism, look at the marginal tax rate'. This is a highly stylised version of events works thanks to selective selection of metrics. Most economist agree that the Great Depression was caused by central bank mismangment. We know know this quite well, and people like R. G. Hawtrey (worlds most well known economsit back then) prediced the Great Deflation pretty exactly, with the correct explaition that we still use today. It had nothing to do with free markets, or the evil small government polices of the 20s. Much the same argument could be made about 2008. Again, one can not take account of the whole article in single comment, but I would just point out that there are many different interpretations of these events. One could easly turn it around and tell a equally convincing story with the opposite point.

jrs235 8y ago

Why do so many people put democracy on a pedestal? Majority rules scares the shit out of me. We don't need what the majority wants. We need protection for minorities. The greatest minority being the individual. So long as a person isn't physically harming others leave them alone and let them be. Mobocracy, a majority without limits, is worse than a relatively steady and stable dictator.

quadrangle 8y ago
Democracy means rule by the people. It does NOT require that majority-rule be the mechanism (that is itself about the worst mechanism for democracy, second only to minority-rule).
- jrs235 8y ago
  Thank you for replying. Thank you for clarification and correcting my defaulting to "Democracy is sometimes referred to as "rule of the majority".

dredmorbius 8y ago

I'm disappointed in this thread. Not the post itself, but the discussion, most of which seems 1) utterly divorced from the article, 2) largely (and on several sides) reduced to ideological rhetoric and axe-grinding, singularly both uninformed and uninformative, 3) voluable (approaching 200 comments as I write) and far more noise than signal. It's about whaat I'd expect if you'd asked a diverse group of 1550s Europeans to civilly diiscuss Catholocism vs. Reformation. (I've spent a fair bit of time researching the history of the notion of free speech. Among northern Europeans, there's generally been a specific carve-out against free speech to Papists, as they were frequently referred to....) There are only four references to the key individual within the article, Karl Polanyi. Three of those reference the lack of reference to him. (I've just added a fifth reference, though also of a nonproductive meta-commentary.) There are several likely reasons for this. One is that "capitalism" and "democracy" are themselves both poorly defined, and cultural shibboleths: signifiers of group affinity far more than semantically functional terms. I'd read economics myself ay uni and would have been pressed to give aa coherent definition until relatively recently. Even now, that's more by calling up a definition, or set of definitions, than something that comes readily to mind. E.J. Mishan was a Chicago-trained, though very much not a Chicago-scool, economist of the 2nd half of the 20th century. He examined, and questioned, many fundamental precepts of economics, including the meaning and definitions of "free market". (Close to though not identical with "capitalism".) Mishan notes that "free market" may refer to one or more of the following: 1. The private ownership of capital, or productiive (nonhuman) assets 2. The private management of economic enterprise 3. The decentralization of economic enterprise 4. Competitive enterprise 5. A price system 6. A market system He also notes that these definitions my either rely on, or oppose, one another. E.g., pricate ownership (1) tends to centralisation, opposing decentralisation (3). http://booksc.org/ireader/28521331 http://booksc.org/ireader/28521331 https://doi.org/10.1080/00213624.1975.11503319 https://doi.org/10.1080/00213624.1975.11503319 Other authors, of late Naomi Wolf in Shock Doctrine, have pointed out the affinity of free-market advocates, Milton Friedman in particular, with authoritarian and genocidal dictators. Similar parallels were drawn in the 1930s with fascist Italy and Germany, and you can find similar sentiments in the works of J.S. Mill and Adam Smith. But for discussion, HN can and should do far better.

tobbe2064 8y ago

Tldr; The premises of the article is that the free market is to cruel for a democracy and that when it demands a sacrifice to greate people will tend to vote for populists There is nothing in the article concerning corruption or propoganda.

badrabbit 8y ago

Would I get downvoted if I said democracy is a mere target a country can only use as it's goal? What I am saying is, there is no truly democratic country. To my best knowledge, in every supposed democratic country there are groups or individuals that yield far greater power than the average citizen when it comes to influence over the political process. Imperialism has feudals,communism has party members, totalitarianism has oligarchs (and friends of the leadership) where as democracy has the 1% and their cronies. Corruption is not an ideology but a moral and ethical failure. One can maintain an uncorrupt conscious a character of integrity (when it comes to politics at least) regardless of the system of government. Money,power and a sense of security are all deceptively corrupting vices. Corruption is prevalent in any government that tolerates people who have failed to overcome those vices as politicians and public officials. It's not capitalism or lack of it that is corrupting but rather a society that tolerates what it knows to be vile and filth in exchange for a bigger picture or in pessimistic complacency towards the ruling class.

jimmywanger 8y ago

Democracy is a threat to capitalism. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC0ZB2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC0ZB2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... Basically, it explores how democracy and rule of law are fundamentally not reconcilable, especially when ethnic/religious tensions are inflamed. If an ethnic immigrant minority somehow gets influence (economic or political) people get rapidly irritated. Look at Jews and Chinese. The tyranny of the majority is not compatible with the rule of existing laws, when the existing laws can be changed with the majority.