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It's worth noting that a critique doesn't need to have a positive element to be a valid critique, nor does a critique necessarily prescribe a particular method

• darawk 8y ago
  > It's worth noting that a critique doesn't need to have a positive element to be a valid critique, nor does a critique necessarily prescribe a particular method of action; the critique of capitalism has inspired various ideas for post-capitalist society, each stemming from the exact nature of the critique itself. That is literally true of course, but in order to be actionable it's got to have plausible alternatives. A critique without an alternative can be interesting, but isn't very useful on its own. > I do not think that a post-capitalist society would be capable of producing with the efficiency of the capitalist system, but I also don't think that such a level of production is necessary or even desirable if we must also balance efficiency and productivity with a happy society. In particular, it's up to us to decide which are false needs and which are true needs. Marcuse critiqued the nature of technology in capitalism as using the worker (i.e the worker is merely an appendage of the machine) rather than being used by the worker, and the fact that the benefits time-wise are captured by those who own the machines, not those who are replaced by them. I agree with this in principle, but it raises the question: When is that time? The thing about production is that when more stuff gets made, people get lifted out of poverty. When food gets mass produced and cheap, hunger starts to disappear, for instance. For instance, suppose we were to freeze growth in the present instant. Hold world GDP constant for the rest of time. If we take all 80 trillion dollars of that and spread it evenly over the current human population, that's about $11,000 per year per person. Certainly, an enormous step up for many, or even most, people. But do we really want to stop there? Is that 'enough' material well-being for everyone to be content with? > On the other hand, technology is continually improving, and a post-capitalist society must necessarily be placed (if it is to exist at all) at a later point than capitalist society, and capitalist society carries with it a great many inefficiencies, such as the multiple reproduction of research due to firms holding trade secrets, Bitcoin mining, cycles of overproduction etc. Indeed there are major inefficiencies in decentralized systems. This is why 'firms' form even inside of capitalist economies. A firm is a command-and-control micro-economy inside of a market economy. They form because of the transaction costs of markets. Unfortunately, for large scale coordination, most other systems haven't seemed to work very well. > I also don't think it's merely an issue of equitable distribution; the critique of capitalism isn't focused on what's "fair", since as Marx pointed out, doesn't the capitalist or liberal say that the current distribution is fair? The issue seems to be much more with ownership of productive capacity in society and the qualitative nature of the production process, in particular concerning abstract labour. I'm not personally too concerned with 'fairness' either. I think it's a concept that can be massaged into saying almost whatever the person proposing it would like. What I do see though is the growth produced by capitalism lifting a very large number of very real people out of poverty, even though it may be unfair that a small number of people are made hyper-wealthy in the process, that doesn't negate the fact that a very large number of people are, in absolute terms, better off than they were before. It seems to me that many critiques of capitalism are arguing over the relative size of the pie slices, while ignoring the fact that in absolute terms, everyone has a bigger slice than they would under other systems. And while there are quasi-reasonable arguments for pure concern with inequality (e.g. that people derive their sense of self-worth from their relative position), i'm not sure I buy them as governing principles of a large scale polity. > As such, I think I'd go with (b), but there are elements of (a) and (c) is worthy of consideration because perhaps "wealth" in the terms we'd think of as comparable with capitalism (ownership of money, individual ownership of capital) would not be good measures of "wealth" in a future society, especially given the current crisis of [capitalist] wealth at the cost of ecological damage. Just to clarify, the definition of 'wealth' i'm using is more in the sense of purchasing power. In other words, when walmart cuts the price you have to pay for a chair in half, that increases your wealth, even if the number in your bank account is unchanged. The standard capitalist answer to issues like ecological damage is externality pricing. That is, you should treat the environment as a public good and charge people money commensurate with the damage they do to it. Is there a reason you think that isn't a viable solution?
  • claudiawerner 8y ago
    >The thing about production is that when more stuff gets made, people get lifted out of poverty. When food gets mass produced and cheap, hunger starts to disappear, for instance. The first part of the statement only makes sense if you take the second part; people are lifted out of poverty not because more stuff is being made, but because with more stuff being made, more people can afford it. I'm not talking about eliminating growth, I'm saying that the way society operates at the moment (which I view as through exploitation and coercion) has given us such a vast product, but the issue isn't of needing to "grow" at the rate we currently are to solve issues such as hunger, it's to allocate resources according to who needs them rather than the profit that can be made from them. Nobody, not even Marx himself, would doubt the quantitative number of people that capitalism has brought out of poverty, but neither would anyone really doubt how many then-slaves in the Roman Empire were rescued from wretched conditions of not even being able to get by. The question is not whether capitalism is "good" or not, it's whether we can acheive the same or better advances in other systems which come without various negative qualitative aspects for society, culture and ecology. The issue was never that some people are getting hyper-wealthy, the issue was that capital enables this to happen only from the exploitation of others. Everyone is better in absolute terms, but the absolute terms don't tell the whole story, nor does capitalism show signs of improving the lives of many in the third-world other than by a dogma similar to "the ends justify the means" - continue working in a sweatshop, for one day your country will be as rich as mine! Again, the issue isn't that some people have big pie slices and others have small ones, it's that some people are deprived of access to social means of production, and with that they are reduced to a relation that depends on someone else to provide them with access. This social relation still persists regardless of the pie slices, because we're talking about one person who owns raspberry pie and the other a horrible pear pie. I don't think externality pricing would work very well in the long term where such large sums of money can be amassed that the tax won't matter very much (so damage continues) and I doubt that sufficiently large taxes could come about in a democracy controlled by capital rather than "the people" - a people who still prefer the luxuries (i.e perhaps even false needs from Establishment ideology) so would be unwilling to restrict their supply.
    • darawk 8y ago