22 ms·

Capitalism, Alone

89 points by ubac 7y ago

bryanrasmussen 7y ago
"The fall of communism, in a strict Marxist view of the world, is an abomination,..." Ok, but would Marxism understand the societies that have called themselves communist as being such - my understanding is the common argument is that they are not truly communist and that no, Marx would not have considered them as such. As this post doesn't seem to even address that argument I find it highly suspect, as well argued as it would otherwise appear.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  I'm someone familiar with 20th c. and 21st c. Marxist literature. Academic Marxists today do not, in general, view the fall of Communism as an abomination, and in fact many of them celebrate it - and use it as a learning guide for avoiding such collapse. Peter Hudis, for example, speaks of the irony of the USSR falling into what Marx himself described as a situation in which the equality of wages creates an "abstract capitalist" of society. Moishe Postone, perhaps one of the most influential Marxists critical of the Soviet (and Soviet inspired systems) chastises "traditional Marxism" for similar reasons. The Japanese Marxist schools have their own criticisms in turn, as does the Frankfurt School (focusing on the similarity between forms of domination in the West and the USSR in the 60s). The fact that the USSR and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism are associated so strongly with Marx himself is in my view an intellectual tragedy. But you won't find such associations made by professional modern theoreticians. The author writes, >But Marxist view is entirely powerless to explain 1989, the fall of communist regimes, and hence unable to provide any explanation for the role of communism in global history. But this is wrong. The figures I have named above actually use a Marxist lens to explain the fall of communism and its fall in global history. Herbert Marcuse goes further in investigating the role of the Nazis is history in Hegel's idea of progressive development of freedom. Why was the USSR not a socialist state? What lead to it being the way it was? Why did Stalin effectively admit as such in Economic Problems of the USSR? There are papers by Marxist historians, philosophers and value-theoreticians alike. Here[0] is one by Chattopadhyay, a respected figure in Marxist philosophy. From Peter Hudis: >This is in many respects a remarkable passage, for it anticipates the problems with many of the social experiments that will be carried out (ironically enough) in Marx’s name in the twentieth century. Two points are worth noting from this. First, wages, like property, are results of human activity. They are made necessary by the existence of alienated labor. To ignore alienated labor while altering wage and property relations through the elimination of private capitalists does not undermine the necessity for a ruling class to impose forced labor on the workers. Society has a whole now becomes the “abstract capitalist.”One form of oppression is ended by instituting an ever more egregious form of oppression. Second, if everyone is paid the same wage, labor becomes treated as a uniform abstraction. Treating labor as an abstraction, however, is precisely the problem with alienated labor. [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/25769087?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/25769087?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    What would it take for you personally to say that Marx was wrong (not about his critique of capitalism, but about his solution)? What are you waiting to see tried before you are willing to say that Marxism failed? You have replied with strong knowledge of the literature, but it still sounds a great deal like "No True Scotsman" to me. For every approach, you can find a scholar who says that approach is wrong, so it can never be definitively disproven, because there's always a great Marxist scholar who says "No, that approach was wrong". But from where I sit, the following things seem to be true: 1. No nation-level Communist regime has ever been instituted organically, that is, without vanguardism. 2. Vanguardism has been tried, but produced something that was worse than capitalism - worse both economically and in terms of freedom. That leaves... what? What are you, personally, looking for that you think would work? If it is tried and fails, will you say "they didn't do it right", or "I was wrong, but Marx wasn't; this other approach is the answer"? Or will you say that Marx does not give a viable answer on how to fix capitalism in a way that actually makes things better?
    - claudiawerner 7y ago
      >1. No nation-level Communist regime has ever been instituted organically, that is, without vanguardism. On the same token, no nation-level Communist regime has ever been instituted with vanguardism. They never claimed to bring about Communism, only that they were "socialist states". Nevertheless, it is important to distinguish Leninism as incorporating ideas from Lenin from Marxism-Leninism, an ideology created around Stalin's systematizing as a state ideology. The truth is that I don't know what it would take, especially in today's world. I'm pessimistic about the possibility of workers as a whole uprising, and in the case that they did, succeeding. As David Schweickart wrote on his essay on Sartre's Marxism: >Moreover, the democratic process, our best hope for relatively peaceful social change, is, increasingly dysfunctional, due in no small part, to the fact that, since the mid-70s, there has been a coordinated, beneath-the-radar, well-financed, largely-successful, ongoing effort, not only to keep “Democracy in Chains,” but to tighten those chains more and more so as to shield the wealthy from democratic discontent. Not good news for Marxists hoping to “win the battle of democracy.” At the same time the prospects for a violent revolution by progressive forces (as opposed to a right-wing military coup) are essentially zero. (A successful storming of the White House? A guerilla army swooping down from the Appalachian Mountains?) But the point is this: by going through an intellectually lazy route to say that Marxism died with the collapse of 20th c. Communism, we are already shutting down discussion of what Communism could be. The hypothesis, from my point of view, has not been refuted. It is less a matter of teasing out Marx's vision of a future society (which is lacking, because of his philosophical commitments) but rather trying to see what a future society would look like based on the critique. Unlike the diagnosis from a doctor, the features of a socialist society flow from the critique of capitalism, indeed, I would say they are already within it. I am no dogmatist. If we find that Marx's critique must be reformulated or even abandoned, then so be it. But I think this is less and less the case when Marx's framework is being fruitfully used today for apparently modern phenomena, from McDonaldsisation to the neoliberal state. So to answer your question: For Marx to be wrong on the solution to capitalism would, for me, necessarily entail that his critique is lacking or wrong. Since we are more able to access the latter than the former, we can sort things out from there. This is actually a weak claim - because I admit that Marx's vision of socialism depends on his critique. A stronger, dogmatic, claim would be that even if Marx was wrong about capitalism then his socialism would still be the answer. I don't think that's defensible.
- deleted 7y ago
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- smacktoward 7y ago
  It's kind of a half-and-half situation. On the one hand, Marx anticipated communism rising up through society organically from the proletariat, whereas in most communist countries it was instead imposed in top-down fashion by a so-called "vanguard party" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism). Vanguardism was a feature of the Leninist approach to communism, and Lenin had not-terrible reasons for preferring it -- namely that by the 20th century, people had been waiting more than 50 years for communism to bubble up organically the way Marx had predicted it would way back in the 1840s, and it never seemed to, you know, happen. Lenin argued (in What Is To Be Done?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F) that Marx was wrong in this regard, that the only way the working masses would ever embrace communism was if a narrow, elite activist class first educated and agitated them. Vanguardism worked, in the sense that it resulted in the creation of formally communist governments, which waiting for Marx's prediction to come true had never (and still never has) done. But it also tainted those governments (which were of course staffed top to bottom with members of the vanguard party) with a strong sense of their people as cattle who needed to be herded by their betters, which then made it easier to abandon democracy, shutter the free press, and murder lots of people whenever they got in the way of the next five-year plan. On the other hand, complaints by communists that existing communist governments weren't practicing Real Communism™ always had a whiff of no-true-Scotsmanism about them. Most countries with these governments were pretty miserable places to live, so they weren't exactly great advertisements to people who lived elsewhere for the idea that they should embrace communism themselves. So people who advocated for communism had to somehow find a way to assure people that the communism they were preaching wasn't the same thing as the system down the road that couldn't feed anyone and was riddled with secret police. Accusing the folks down the road of deviationism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviationism) was a useful way to do that.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    >So people who advocated for communism had to somehow find a way to assure people that the communism they were preaching wasn't the same thing as the system down the road that couldn't feed anyone and was riddled with secret police. This is a very cynical view, and does a disservice to the spirit of intellectual pursuit in normative social theory. The idea that the only reason why they would oppose such examples of communism is out of embarrassment doesn't fit well with their actual criticisms and reference to Marx himself. Thorough examination of Marx's notebooks and ancillary works only began in the 60s in English language literature. Your suggestion makes even less sense when one considers that the modern left critique of capitalism (usually focusing on concepts such as domination and totality) could be (and were) equally applied to the USSR. This takes a much different form to deviationism. Deviationism is a result of party politics. It isn't a result of theoretical work. For example, many of the criticisms I mentioned in my other comment in this thread have not come from Trotskyists, Maoists, Titoists or any other "-ist"!
- rolltiide 7y ago
  > my understanding is the common argument is that they are not truly communist and that no the concept of the state is intended to be a temporary fixture that gets dissolved, and no communist state has ever been able to make that transition pushes for decentralized finance aim to do the same thing under a strict private ownership and capital appreciation method, with egalitarianism sprinkled in so it is interesting that these parallel ideologies are propelling towards the same zenith
antiutopian 7y ago
Interesting article. I don't agree with a lot of it, one point I think is straightforward to respond to as a Marxist: "Marxist interpretation of the 20th century is much more convincing in both its explanation of World War I (imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism) and fascism (an attempt by the weakened bourgeoise to thwart left-wing revolutions). But Marxist view is entirely powerless to explain 1989, the fall of communist regimes, and hence unable to provide any explanation for the role of communism in global history. The fall of communism, in a strict Marxist view of the world, is an abomination, as inexplicable as if a feudal society having had experienced a bourgeois revolution of rights were suddenly to “regress” and to reimpose serfdom and the tripartite class division. Marxism has therefore given up trying to provide an explanation for the 20th century history." It's true that the dogma of the official communist parties has no explanation for this, but their theory degenerated and became distorted by the need to justify all the twists and turns of USSR foreign and domestic policy. A genuine Marxist view of the 20th century is that the world revolution began in 1917 in Russia, the "weakest link" of capitalism, but was not able to be completed in the industrial centers. There were a number of reasons for this, for example the growth of reformism in the German SPD, but the result is in reality a failed revolution that won a few outposts and held on to them for 70 years. As a useful example, the Paris Commune is another example of a failed revolution, although it only held out for a few months. It's not a Marxist view that a single country can "go socialist" in a world dominated by capitalism. So there was no "regression" back to capitalism.
- spaceheeder 7y ago
  It's literally not possible for one economic system to simultaneously "take over" the entire planet, so if a socialist or communist revolution ever took place there would absolutely be a first single country or group of countries to "go socialist." The USSR and its allies were, at the time of their existence and the height of their influence, recognized as being fundamentally communist in nature by communist scholars. Whatever deviations from that ideal caused them to fail are no greater in magnitude (or relevance) than the deviations current nation-states have from capitalism that libertarians use to No-True-Scottsman actually-existing-capitalism. If communism 2.0 is a better system and wouldn't fail for the same reasons that the USSR did, then talk about those differences. When talking about communism 1.0 (and the many, many socialists/communists living today who basically have not deviated from the mindsets of the revolutionaries of the past), drop the special pleading and take the L.
yboris 7y ago
Branko Milanovic is one of my favorite researchers. His "Elephant Curve" is well-know. His book "The Haves and the Have-Nots" is excellent. I used his dataset to replicate his results to show inequality in an interactive form here: https://income-inequality.info https://income-inequality.info
- ubac 7y ago
  This is great. I still remember seeing his India top ventile vs US bottom ventile chart ten-ish years ago, absolutely blew my mind.
  - NTDF9 7y ago
    This is so true. The upper middle class in India would probably be lower middle class in the US. However, let's not kid ourselves. Cost of living in India is equally or ever more cheap. $1-$2 for lunch a day? Rent is only $200/month? My god that's cheap for people earning $20,000/yr as opposed to someone even in Mississippi. The real losers anywhere are the bottom quintile in a highly unequal society.
    - ubac 7y ago
      I know this will sound unbelievable but I believe the comparison is done at purchasing power parity, so it's adjusting for food and rent as well. Here's the graph I remember, though it unfortunately doesn't confirm or refute my memory that the comparison is at PPP: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/08/15/this-chart-might-make-you-feel-better-about-american-inequality/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/08/15/this-...
      - godelski 7y ago
        The graph makes me suspicious about the PPP component (it looks like normalized to US dollars?). I mean if it is completely adjusted for cost of living and everything (rent, food, etc) this seems off. Half the world is at $2k equiv? I don't know how you could live in the US if you just made $2k/yr. Even if rent was entirely free. I'm a grad student and eat a lot of lentils, rice, eggs, and beans. $2k a year is pretty easy to blow through on just food (That's $167/mo, which is doable but not reasonable). What am I missing that is being captured here? I literally don't know anywhere in the US (I've lived in some pretty cheap and desolate areas) that you could do $2k for just rent in a year. I mean the poverty level is like $12k and you have to find really really cheap housing and eat a lot of lentils and rice to survive on that. What am I missing? Is 50% of the world that malnourished? Are things like food and rent not being explicitly bought and thus not included? Combinations?
goda90 7y ago
>The economic system and the system of values are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Our system of values enables hyper-commercialized capitalism to function and expand. It then follows that no change in the economic system can be imagined without a change in the system of values that underpins it, which the system promotes, and with which we are, in our everyday activities, fully comfortable. But to produce such a change in values seems, at present, to be an impossible task. It has been tried before and ended in the most ignominious failure. We are thus locked in capitalism. And in our activities, day in, day out, we support and reinforce it. But can capitalism expand endlessly? It seems to me that capitalism will expand itself to destruction.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > But can capitalism expand endlessly? There's no limit to the value one can add. Consider computer software - there's no limit to how good one can make software. There's no limit to making better art, better movies, better houses, etc.
  - krapp 7y ago
    There are always limits. Time, resources, energy, entropy, bandwidth, intelligence, cultural norms, the bounds of the law, physical stamina, what the market will bear. Value is subjective, so claiming that there is no limit to anything to which "value" can be applied in a capitalist marketplace is meaningless. Unbounded infinite progress only exists in the realm of pure math.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      In the extremely limited universe of a chessboard, there are still an infinite variety of games one can play. Just think of the "chessboard" of all the molecules that make up the earth. I do agree, however, that a great many people seem to have very limited imaginations, and that this limits their lives.
      - krapp 7y ago
Animats 7y ago
I've made this point before on HN, from a slightly different angle. Part of the problem with capitalism is that it's a monopoly. From about 1930 to 1980, communism was a serious ideological competitor. Capitalism had to deliver a better standard of living or risk being overturned by vote or revolution. That kept capitalism honest. This was a mainstream position. It was accepted that companies had to do well by their employees and the larger society, or something would be done to them by governments or unions. This was accompanied by boasting about "the American way", and that boasting was backed by reality. Things we view as acceptable behavior today, such as huge increases in the price of medicines, were not even considered. Mergers to the point of creating monopolies were rarely attempted and usually rejected. But by the 1980s, it was clear that the USSR's system just wasn't working out. Capitalism had won. That's when it started acting like a monopoly, able to set the rules. This started in a big way with the deregulation of the 1980s and 1990s. This was justified by faith in a "free market". But businesses didn't want a free market with many competitors. That keeps prices down and doesn't allow enough control. What resulted was repeated mergers, until most industries were dominated by a very few number of companies. This was promoted as desirable.[1] The US now has three big banks, three big drug-store chains, and three big cellular phone companies. None of those industries used to be that centralized. So we've ended up with not only capitalism as a monopoly, but monopoly capitalism. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536 https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...
- shantly 7y ago
  > That keeps prices down and doesn't allow enough control. What resulted was repeated mergers, until most industries were dominated by a very few number of companies. This was promoted as desirable. From the point of view of a single state, it can be desirable, provided said state keeps those companies on a tight leash to ensure the benefits are, to a high degree, captured for their own country. Internal competition eats into money for R&D and international competition. A big part of post-war Japan's success involved this sort of strategy: let a small number of large companies capture the domestic market, keep foreign competitors out, then set them loose on foreign markets while ensuring they cooperate where possible (R&D especially) for greater efficiency.
- 7y ago
stupidcar 7y ago
Interesting piece, but there seems to me to be contradiction in its thesis: If people have become so devoted to monetary success alone, how can all these industries that rely on vice exist? Indulging a vice is inherently wasteful. It costs time that could be spent working, and money that could be better spent on self-improvement, or invested or saved. And while we may have accepted greed to the point that there is nothing distasteful about saying one desires a better car or house, or a better paid job, in practice most people do not work day and night, spurning all other opportunities, to make it happen. In practice, most people make decisions every day that place other desires, both traditionally "good" and "bad", above the simple pursuit of more money. So to say that people have internalised capitalism to the exclusion of all else seems incorrect. I have a different take: The development of capitalism and commodification had a mutually reinforcing relationship with the fluidity of labor and the fungibility of goods. Many "traditional" bonds between individuals and communities were really a consequence of local monopolies: There was only one local doctor, shopkeeper, school, etc., and a small pool of potential employers. As such, relationships were inevitably more personal. As technology, law and institutions allowed civilisation to become more mobile, it allowed the possibility of markets in many areas of life where it was previously impossible. This is unavoidable. Even if you personally choose to stand still, the people around you move, meaning your relationships and interactions are nonetheless more transitory and impersonal. In such a world, commodification emerges not as the consequence of internalised capitalist ideology, but because it is the only way to manage constant interactions with strangers. So it is commodification itself that has become internalised, not capitalism. Indeed, most modern society isn't arranged around acquiring capital and leveraging it or maximising its value, it's about the consumption of things and experiences—driven by materialist, emotional and spiritual instincts—using money as a points system used to ration them out. Most people approach their work in a simple way: they want to earn enough points to meet their basic needs, and indulge their desires to a point of equilibrium between effort and general satisfaction, after which they don't work any harder or longer.
- faitswulff 7y ago
  > If people have become so devoted to monetary success alone, how can all these industries that rely on vice exist? Indulging a vice is inherently wasteful. It costs time that could be spent working, and money that could be better spent on self-improvement, or invested or saved. Simple: people are not perfectly rational economic actors. I believe the study of irrational economics is called "behavioral economics."
microcolonel 7y ago
Communism, aloner. There is a cost to socialism, if it ever becomes established, it is state socialism, and state socialism is inherently violent. You are free to associate with more people, to change your relationship with work and consumption, you are rich. Your problem is that you have chosen to be alone, and you blame society for not forcing you to be at least superficially engaged.
- Ar-Curunir 7y ago
  Capitalism engenders the same violence, only behind a mask of "free will".
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    Mask how? Yes, people are convincing, but that is in no way comparable to force. The fact that many people are convinced to do things that suck for them in no way justifies a switch to deliberate, overt state imposition of what is supposed to be good for them. If people are being convinced of unwise or unreasonable things, you have an obligation to do your own convincing.
    - claudiawerner 7y ago
      The mask is as follows: firstly in a particular ideological and political conception of freedom as the freedom to buy and sell whatever you want (including your own labour), along with some things given by the liberal egalitarian state, secondly in the liberal construction of "free will" as the opposite of coercion. Marx criticized liberalism for its narrow conception of what it means to be free, and before that, Spinoza outlined why it is meaningless to talk of "coercion" and "consent" as proponents of negative liberties tend to talk about them. It is not enough to be free, freedom lies, as Zizek says, in the freedom to define your own idea of freedom outside of the ideological context in which it is given to you, whether that's a Western capitalist ideology or one given to you by the CCP.
      - microcolonel 7y ago
amelius 7y ago
One dimension not addressed is how individual people join forces as companies and effectively turn against other groups of people. What would happen to the economy if we'd only allow companies of 1000 people, of 100 people, or perhaps even of 1 person?
- originalvichy 7y ago
  Other such limits are welcome. An umbrella organization should be allowed to only partake in a certain number of categories of business, and in a limited number. Barely anything is being done to control the power equity has over the system many deem as "competetive". But this won't change. You can't change the system to protect others from greed, when people defend greed. One day they might gain from greed.
- agitator 7y ago
  This is a fascinating concept! On one hand it would keep companies from completely vertically integrating or expanding to encompass many verticals. Which would stimulate the economy in one way because more people would be exposed to the profits at the top or near the top of the market. Also the increased competition might result in the improvement of various small aspects of technology that would result in better efficiencies across the whole. But on the other hand, limiting the size of companies would make us less competitive on a global scale because of the inherent cost in being forced to buy components, as opposed to vertically integrating. Also product costs may increase, which could negate any increases in wealth among the people.
  - godelski 7y ago
    This is a super complicated topic and I'm not sure it could practically be done. Vertical and lateral integration usually result in huge cost savings. It also reduces complexity. But this is also a feature that monopolies (or monopoly like companies) exploit. I don't think it would be competitive enough if all players weren't playing by this rule. Competition is good, but so is size (think like Bell Labs [0] and how much Google can do). This is all completely a guess though. But monopolies aren't inherently had, they just usually are because they exploit that power to hinder innovation. Monopolies can actually have huge benefits. [0] Bell Labs was an agreement that Bell could have the monopoly (to reduce wiring and because of the network effect that they could take advantage of to connect the US with telephone lines) but there was also heavy regulation done during this deal that I'm sure others here are much more informed about and can correct/add to my comment with. [^] I don't think there's ever been a "free market" nor do I think there ever could be. The US's largest economic growth happened in a "free market" in name only (propaganda a lot for the Russians) but was heavily regulated.
lanevorockz 7y ago
Capitalism is nothing more than giving everyone power to do whatever they want. The alternative is Communism which is giving a few government elites the power over everyone. Obviously, these extremes can NEVER be implemented so we will forever live in a middle ground between these two. Each country will take steps in the latter and natural selection will find the best middle ground between this two. The big problem here is the Tyrannical aspect of Communism and the tendency for global wars. Want it or not almost every moral war was started on this envy stereotype that radical leftists have. Don't forget, Hitler was leader of the National Socialist Party.
- cairo_x 7y ago
  Congratulations: You, along with most of the people here, have no fucking clue what Capitalism is. Capitalism is when the person who put up the capital gets ROI plus the surplus wealth created by the workers, and the workers themselves get a small fraction of said surplus called a wage minus any say over reinvestment of surplus. The alternative does not have to be a state system of communism at all. https://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2012/jan/04/social-enterprise-blog-co-operatives-and-mutuals https://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2012/j...
jeffdavis 7y ago
Historically, free markets and private property protections would give rise to capitalism. But it seems like, in modern times, those two same ingredients give rise to something else. This "something else" is partially capitalistic, but the word seems to fit less and less. Traditionally, a capital investment means something like a tire factory. The right factory in the right place gives the owner an advantage until the market changes or a new supplier makes an even better factory. Putting things like software, a set of customer relations, a brand, or other modern business advantages in the same bucket as a tire factory just seems wrong.
- CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
  A nice deep dive into that thought is the book “The Wealth of Networks” by Yochai Benkler https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks It’s main focus is on what he calls Commons Based Peer-Production and how the default capitalistic model of private property doesn’t fit that mode of production
godelzilla 7y ago
Capitalist ideology alone. This guy thinks capitalism is based on free labor? SMH. Read a history book.
rland 7y ago
The term capitalism is meaningless now. For example: the Japanese mode of lifetime employment, low salaries, high intangible benefits to employment, an almost exclusively age based hierarchical system is labeled the same thing as the American model, where every individual is a capitalist and a sole individual's brand determines their compensation and worth. The two models are called "capitalist", but they share almost nothing. If everyone is a capitalist, why aren't all of the world's markets integrated? Why is it so hard to strike a trade deal? Why is trade still organized into ideological blocs? We have always had global trade, but we've never ever had a shared definition of what "a capitalist society" actually means. And then of course the term is used extensively as an ideological cudgel. Saying things like "Capitalism is the only means of production in the world" or "Capitalism is inevitable" has no meaning at all. Do a find and replace with "Human Nature" and this makes a lot more sense.
- kennywinker 7y ago
  It sounds like you're describing historical social differences between countries, rather than a different implementation of capitalism. capitalism is the economic system that "lifetime employment, low salaries, high intangible benefits to employment" exist within. I.e. the concept of employment and salaries are part of capitalism, how they are used is up to the specific society. Based on my experience I would would argue that capitalism influences the structure of society so that the world is getting more homogenous, and differences like the ones you describe are getting less and less. But that's a different issue from the ubiquitousness of capitalism.
  - rland 7y ago
    So, maybe it will help to look at what is Not Capitalism. In say some midecentury communist country, the workers owned the capital, right? In practice, though, someone who called themselves a worker (a party secretary) with political power had de facto control over how and where the capital was allocated and spent. Sounds an awful lot like private ownership. Also, it resembles some parts of the US, like defense, where single bid contracts go conveniently to the friends of lawmakers. It's the taxpayer's capital, right, not privately owned? The capital in these cases is not explicit in a spreadsheet, but it undeniably exists and is owned. My example of the Japanese salaryman is similar: if my boss at Mitsubishi is the division leader of heavy industry, my paycheck comes in large part from being able to give his name on the phone with someone when asking for a favor. I'm not paid that, but I own the privilege -- the capital -- if I get high enough up at Mitsubishi. I can even pass this intangible owned thing along to my children, through my family name. These are all of my cut-and-dry examples, but there are many which are more muddled. The spending of huge companies on lobbying--is that Capitalism? Or some perversion? Depending on what point you're trying to make ideologically, these situations are all either Capitalism OR Not Capitalism, OR somewhere in between. So what the hell is capitalism anyway and why is it even useful to talk about it like the way the OP talks about it? That is my point.
lootsauce 7y ago
My frustration with the arguments for communism and or socialism vs capitalism is that they are surface arguments on ideological basis. I see socialism and communism as dressed up authoritarianism. A massive hand-over of power to a few in government is not an improvement over capitalism where a much larger group vie for power in a dual reinforcing and opposing system of government and corporate interests. To hand the economy over to the government creates a far more centralized system of power and all the discussion of supposed benefits we could attain by such a system does not nullify the massive threat to freedom by that kind of system. Capitalism is a horrible system but its the least horrible one we know of. A better discussion is how do we get to a better regulatory regime.
- jmcqk6 7y ago
  The problem is as you state: discussions between ideology are not productive when at least one side is completely entrenched in that ideology. Instead of focusing on ideology, focus on specific problems, and don't let the discussion occur in terms of ideology. This can be done by forcing specifics as much as possible. Ideology is almost by definition, highly abstract. It's nice to talk about things when they're highly abstract, because their incredibly malleable. But the problems we face in the world are not abstract. It's completely clear at this point that an ideological approach to solving problems will not work. But perhaps changing the discussions to be smaller and focusing on real issues in specific detail might be better. I could be wrong. I've been unable to have a productive conversation with ideological opposites from me, but I seem to get closer when I talk about specifics instead of abstractions.
RestlessMind 7y ago
> Capitalism, in order to expand, needs greed. Greed has been entirely accepted by us. Any system which does not take into account inherent human traits like greed, envy or laziness are bound to fail. That seems one reasons why Capitalism prevailed over Communism, since the former had fewer "wrong assumptions" about the human nature.
rohanshah 7y ago
"Marxism has therefore given up trying to provide an explanation for the 20th century history... The reason for this failure lies in the fact that Marxism never made a meaningful distinction between standard Marxist schemes regarding the succession of socio-economic formations (what I call the Western Path of Development, WPD) and the evolution of poorer and colonized countries. Classical Marxism never asked seriously whether the WPD is applicable in their case." In fact this was/is an active area of research, namely Post Colonial Theory and Subaltern Studies, which has been heavily criticized and reified with a more classic Marxist analysis since. Post Colonial Theory and the Specter of Capital [1] is perhaps the most accessible such critique. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_Theory_and_the_Specter_of_Capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_Theory_and_the_Sp...

89 points by ubac 7y ago

"The fall of communism, in a strict Marxist view of the world, is an abomination,..." Ok, but would Marxism understand the societies that have called themselves communist as being such - my understanding is the common argument is that they are not truly communist and that no, Marx would not have considered them as such. As this post doesn't seem to even address that argument I find it highly suspect, as well argued as it would otherwise appear.

claudiawerner 7y ago
I'm someone familiar with 20th c. and 21st c. Marxist literature. Academic Marxists today do not, in general, view the fall of Communism as an abomination, and in fact many of them celebrate it - and use it as a learning guide for avoiding such collapse. Peter Hudis, for example, speaks of the irony of the USSR falling into what Marx himself described as a situation in which the equality of wages creates an "abstract capitalist" of society. Moishe Postone, perhaps one of the most influential Marxists critical of the Soviet (and Soviet inspired systems) chastises "traditional Marxism" for similar reasons. The Japanese Marxist schools have their own criticisms in turn, as does the Frankfurt School (focusing on the similarity between forms of domination in the West and the USSR in the 60s). The fact that the USSR and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism are associated so strongly with Marx himself is in my view an intellectual tragedy. But you won't find such associations made by professional modern theoreticians. The author writes, >But Marxist view is entirely powerless to explain 1989, the fall of communist regimes, and hence unable to provide any explanation for the role of communism in global history. But this is wrong. The figures I have named above actually use a Marxist lens to explain the fall of communism and its fall in global history. Herbert Marcuse goes further in investigating the role of the Nazis is history in Hegel's idea of progressive development of freedom. Why was the USSR not a socialist state? What lead to it being the way it was? Why did Stalin effectively admit as such in Economic Problems of the USSR? There are papers by Marxist historians, philosophers and value-theoreticians alike. Here[0] is one by Chattopadhyay, a respected figure in Marxist philosophy. From Peter Hudis: >This is in many respects a remarkable passage, for it anticipates the problems with many of the social experiments that will be carried out (ironically enough) in Marx’s name in the twentieth century. Two points are worth noting from this. First, wages, like property, are results of human activity. They are made necessary by the existence of alienated labor. To ignore alienated labor while altering wage and property relations through the elimination of private capitalists does not undermine the necessity for a ruling class to impose forced labor on the workers. Society has a whole now becomes the “abstract capitalist.”One form of oppression is ended by instituting an ever more egregious form of oppression. Second, if everyone is paid the same wage, labor becomes treated as a uniform abstraction. Treating labor as an abstraction, however, is precisely the problem with alienated labor. [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/25769087?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/25769087?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  What would it take for you personally to say that Marx was wrong (not about his critique of capitalism, but about his solution)? What are you waiting to see tried before you are willing to say that Marxism failed? You have replied with strong knowledge of the literature, but it still sounds a great deal like "No True Scotsman" to me. For every approach, you can find a scholar who says that approach is wrong, so it can never be definitively disproven, because there's always a great Marxist scholar who says "No, that approach was wrong". But from where I sit, the following things seem to be true: 1. No nation-level Communist regime has ever been instituted organically, that is, without vanguardism. 2. Vanguardism has been tried, but produced something that was worse than capitalism - worse both economically and in terms of freedom. That leaves... what? What are you, personally, looking for that you think would work? If it is tried and fails, will you say "they didn't do it right", or "I was wrong, but Marx wasn't; this other approach is the answer"? Or will you say that Marx does not give a viable answer on how to fix capitalism in a way that actually makes things better?
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    >1. No nation-level Communist regime has ever been instituted organically, that is, without vanguardism. On the same token, no nation-level Communist regime has ever been instituted with vanguardism. They never claimed to bring about Communism, only that they were "socialist states". Nevertheless, it is important to distinguish Leninism as incorporating ideas from Lenin from Marxism-Leninism, an ideology created around Stalin's systematizing as a state ideology. The truth is that I don't know what it would take, especially in today's world. I'm pessimistic about the possibility of workers as a whole uprising, and in the case that they did, succeeding. As David Schweickart wrote on his essay on Sartre's Marxism: >Moreover, the democratic process, our best hope for relatively peaceful social change, is, increasingly dysfunctional, due in no small part, to the fact that, since the mid-70s, there has been a coordinated, beneath-the-radar, well-financed, largely-successful, ongoing effort, not only to keep “Democracy in Chains,” but to tighten those chains more and more so as to shield the wealthy from democratic discontent. Not good news for Marxists hoping to “win the battle of democracy.” At the same time the prospects for a violent revolution by progressive forces (as opposed to a right-wing military coup) are essentially zero. (A successful storming of the White House? A guerilla army swooping down from the Appalachian Mountains?) But the point is this: by going through an intellectually lazy route to say that Marxism died with the collapse of 20th c. Communism, we are already shutting down discussion of what Communism could be. The hypothesis, from my point of view, has not been refuted. It is less a matter of teasing out Marx's vision of a future society (which is lacking, because of his philosophical commitments) but rather trying to see what a future society would look like based on the critique. Unlike the diagnosis from a doctor, the features of a socialist society flow from the critique of capitalism, indeed, I would say they are already within it. I am no dogmatist. If we find that Marx's critique must be reformulated or even abandoned, then so be it. But I think this is less and less the case when Marx's framework is being fruitfully used today for apparently modern phenomena, from McDonaldsisation to the neoliberal state. So to answer your question: For Marx to be wrong on the solution to capitalism would, for me, necessarily entail that his critique is lacking or wrong. Since we are more able to access the latter than the former, we can sort things out from there. This is actually a weak claim - because I admit that Marx's vision of socialism depends on his critique. A stronger, dogmatic, claim would be that even if Marx was wrong about capitalism then his socialism would still be the answer. I don't think that's defensible.
deleted 7y ago
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smacktoward 7y ago
It's kind of a half-and-half situation. On the one hand, Marx anticipated communism rising up through society organically from the proletariat, whereas in most communist countries it was instead imposed in top-down fashion by a so-called "vanguard party" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism). Vanguardism was a feature of the Leninist approach to communism, and Lenin had not-terrible reasons for preferring it -- namely that by the 20th century, people had been waiting more than 50 years for communism to bubble up organically the way Marx had predicted it would way back in the 1840s, and it never seemed to, you know, happen. Lenin argued (in What Is To Be Done?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F) that Marx was wrong in this regard, that the only way the working masses would ever embrace communism was if a narrow, elite activist class first educated and agitated them. Vanguardism worked, in the sense that it resulted in the creation of formally communist governments, which waiting for Marx's prediction to come true had never (and still never has) done. But it also tainted those governments (which were of course staffed top to bottom with members of the vanguard party) with a strong sense of their people as cattle who needed to be herded by their betters, which then made it easier to abandon democracy, shutter the free press, and murder lots of people whenever they got in the way of the next five-year plan. On the other hand, complaints by communists that existing communist governments weren't practicing Real Communism™ always had a whiff of no-true-Scotsmanism about them. Most countries with these governments were pretty miserable places to live, so they weren't exactly great advertisements to people who lived elsewhere for the idea that they should embrace communism themselves. So people who advocated for communism had to somehow find a way to assure people that the communism they were preaching wasn't the same thing as the system down the road that couldn't feed anyone and was riddled with secret police. Accusing the folks down the road of deviationism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviationism) was a useful way to do that.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  >So people who advocated for communism had to somehow find a way to assure people that the communism they were preaching wasn't the same thing as the system down the road that couldn't feed anyone and was riddled with secret police. This is a very cynical view, and does a disservice to the spirit of intellectual pursuit in normative social theory. The idea that the only reason why they would oppose such examples of communism is out of embarrassment doesn't fit well with their actual criticisms and reference to Marx himself. Thorough examination of Marx's notebooks and ancillary works only began in the 60s in English language literature. Your suggestion makes even less sense when one considers that the modern left critique of capitalism (usually focusing on concepts such as domination and totality) could be (and were) equally applied to the USSR. This takes a much different form to deviationism. Deviationism is a result of party politics. It isn't a result of theoretical work. For example, many of the criticisms I mentioned in my other comment in this thread have not come from Trotskyists, Maoists, Titoists or any other "-ist"!
rolltiide 7y ago
> my understanding is the common argument is that they are not truly communist and that no the concept of the state is intended to be a temporary fixture that gets dissolved, and no communist state has ever been able to make that transition pushes for decentralized finance aim to do the same thing under a strict private ownership and capital appreciation method, with egalitarianism sprinkled in so it is interesting that these parallel ideologies are propelling towards the same zenith

antiutopian 7y ago

Interesting article. I don't agree with a lot of it, one point I think is straightforward to respond to as a Marxist: "Marxist interpretation of the 20th century is much more convincing in both its explanation of World War I (imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism) and fascism (an attempt by the weakened bourgeoise to thwart left-wing revolutions). But Marxist view is entirely powerless to explain 1989, the fall of communist regimes, and hence unable to provide any explanation for the role of communism in global history. The fall of communism, in a strict Marxist view of the world, is an abomination, as inexplicable as if a feudal society having had experienced a bourgeois revolution of rights were suddenly to “regress” and to reimpose serfdom and the tripartite class division. Marxism has therefore given up trying to provide an explanation for the 20th century history." It's true that the dogma of the official communist parties has no explanation for this, but their theory degenerated and became distorted by the need to justify all the twists and turns of USSR foreign and domestic policy. A genuine Marxist view of the 20th century is that the world revolution began in 1917 in Russia, the "weakest link" of capitalism, but was not able to be completed in the industrial centers. There were a number of reasons for this, for example the growth of reformism in the German SPD, but the result is in reality a failed revolution that won a few outposts and held on to them for 70 years. As a useful example, the Paris Commune is another example of a failed revolution, although it only held out for a few months. It's not a Marxist view that a single country can "go socialist" in a world dominated by capitalism. So there was no "regression" back to capitalism.

spaceheeder 7y ago
It's literally not possible for one economic system to simultaneously "take over" the entire planet, so if a socialist or communist revolution ever took place there would absolutely be a first single country or group of countries to "go socialist." The USSR and its allies were, at the time of their existence and the height of their influence, recognized as being fundamentally communist in nature by communist scholars. Whatever deviations from that ideal caused them to fail are no greater in magnitude (or relevance) than the deviations current nation-states have from capitalism that libertarians use to No-True-Scottsman actually-existing-capitalism. If communism 2.0 is a better system and wouldn't fail for the same reasons that the USSR did, then talk about those differences. When talking about communism 1.0 (and the many, many socialists/communists living today who basically have not deviated from the mindsets of the revolutionaries of the past), drop the special pleading and take the L.

yboris 7y ago

Branko Milanovic is one of my favorite researchers. His "Elephant Curve" is well-know. His book "The Haves and the Have-Nots" is excellent. I used his dataset to replicate his results to show inequality in an interactive form here: https://income-inequality.info https://income-inequality.info

ubac 7y ago
This is great. I still remember seeing his India top ventile vs US bottom ventile chart ten-ish years ago, absolutely blew my mind.
- NTDF9 7y ago
  This is so true. The upper middle class in India would probably be lower middle class in the US. However, let's not kid ourselves. Cost of living in India is equally or ever more cheap. $1-$2 for lunch a day? Rent is only $200/month? My god that's cheap for people earning $20,000/yr as opposed to someone even in Mississippi. The real losers anywhere are the bottom quintile in a highly unequal society.
  - ubac 7y ago
    I know this will sound unbelievable but I believe the comparison is done at purchasing power parity, so it's adjusting for food and rent as well. Here's the graph I remember, though it unfortunately doesn't confirm or refute my memory that the comparison is at PPP: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/08/15/this-chart-might-make-you-feel-better-about-american-inequality/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/08/15/this-...
    - godelski 7y ago
      The graph makes me suspicious about the PPP component (it looks like normalized to US dollars?). I mean if it is completely adjusted for cost of living and everything (rent, food, etc) this seems off. Half the world is at $2k equiv? I don't know how you could live in the US if you just made $2k/yr. Even if rent was entirely free. I'm a grad student and eat a lot of lentils, rice, eggs, and beans. $2k a year is pretty easy to blow through on just food (That's $167/mo, which is doable but not reasonable). What am I missing that is being captured here? I literally don't know anywhere in the US (I've lived in some pretty cheap and desolate areas) that you could do $2k for just rent in a year. I mean the poverty level is like $12k and you have to find really really cheap housing and eat a lot of lentils and rice to survive on that. What am I missing? Is 50% of the world that malnourished? Are things like food and rent not being explicitly bought and thus not included? Combinations?

goda90 7y ago

>The economic system and the system of values are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Our system of values enables hyper-commercialized capitalism to function and expand. It then follows that no change in the economic system can be imagined without a change in the system of values that underpins it, which the system promotes, and with which we are, in our everyday activities, fully comfortable. But to produce such a change in values seems, at present, to be an impossible task. It has been tried before and ended in the most ignominious failure. We are thus locked in capitalism. And in our activities, day in, day out, we support and reinforce it. But can capitalism expand endlessly? It seems to me that capitalism will expand itself to destruction.

WalterBright 7y ago
> But can capitalism expand endlessly? There's no limit to the value one can add. Consider computer software - there's no limit to how good one can make software. There's no limit to making better art, better movies, better houses, etc.
- krapp 7y ago
  There are always limits. Time, resources, energy, entropy, bandwidth, intelligence, cultural norms, the bounds of the law, physical stamina, what the market will bear. Value is subjective, so claiming that there is no limit to anything to which "value" can be applied in a capitalist marketplace is meaningless. Unbounded infinite progress only exists in the realm of pure math.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    In the extremely limited universe of a chessboard, there are still an infinite variety of games one can play. Just think of the "chessboard" of all the molecules that make up the earth. I do agree, however, that a great many people seem to have very limited imaginations, and that this limits their lives.
    - krapp 7y ago

Animats 7y ago

I've made this point before on HN, from a slightly different angle. Part of the problem with capitalism is that it's a monopoly. From about 1930 to 1980, communism was a serious ideological competitor. Capitalism had to deliver a better standard of living or risk being overturned by vote or revolution. That kept capitalism honest. This was a mainstream position. It was accepted that companies had to do well by their employees and the larger society, or something would be done to them by governments or unions. This was accompanied by boasting about "the American way", and that boasting was backed by reality. Things we view as acceptable behavior today, such as huge increases in the price of medicines, were not even considered. Mergers to the point of creating monopolies were rarely attempted and usually rejected. But by the 1980s, it was clear that the USSR's system just wasn't working out. Capitalism had won. That's when it started acting like a monopoly, able to set the rules. This started in a big way with the deregulation of the 1980s and 1990s. This was justified by faith in a "free market". But businesses didn't want a free market with many competitors. That keeps prices down and doesn't allow enough control. What resulted was repeated mergers, until most industries were dominated by a very few number of companies. This was promoted as desirable.[1] The US now has three big banks, three big drug-store chains, and three big cellular phone companies. None of those industries used to be that centralized. So we've ended up with not only capitalism as a monopoly, but monopoly capitalism. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536 https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...

shantly 7y ago
> That keeps prices down and doesn't allow enough control. What resulted was repeated mergers, until most industries were dominated by a very few number of companies. This was promoted as desirable. From the point of view of a single state, it can be desirable, provided said state keeps those companies on a tight leash to ensure the benefits are, to a high degree, captured for their own country. Internal competition eats into money for R&D and international competition. A big part of post-war Japan's success involved this sort of strategy: let a small number of large companies capture the domestic market, keep foreign competitors out, then set them loose on foreign markets while ensuring they cooperate where possible (R&D especially) for greater efficiency.
7y ago

stupidcar 7y ago

Interesting piece, but there seems to me to be contradiction in its thesis: If people have become so devoted to monetary success alone, how can all these industries that rely on vice exist? Indulging a vice is inherently wasteful. It costs time that could be spent working, and money that could be better spent on self-improvement, or invested or saved. And while we may have accepted greed to the point that there is nothing distasteful about saying one desires a better car or house, or a better paid job, in practice most people do not work day and night, spurning all other opportunities, to make it happen. In practice, most people make decisions every day that place other desires, both traditionally "good" and "bad", above the simple pursuit of more money. So to say that people have internalised capitalism to the exclusion of all else seems incorrect. I have a different take: The development of capitalism and commodification had a mutually reinforcing relationship with the fluidity of labor and the fungibility of goods. Many "traditional" bonds between individuals and communities were really a consequence of local monopolies: There was only one local doctor, shopkeeper, school, etc., and a small pool of potential employers. As such, relationships were inevitably more personal. As technology, law and institutions allowed civilisation to become more mobile, it allowed the possibility of markets in many areas of life where it was previously impossible. This is unavoidable. Even if you personally choose to stand still, the people around you move, meaning your relationships and interactions are nonetheless more transitory and impersonal. In such a world, commodification emerges not as the consequence of internalised capitalist ideology, but because it is the only way to manage constant interactions with strangers. So it is commodification itself that has become internalised, not capitalism. Indeed, most modern society isn't arranged around acquiring capital and leveraging it or maximising its value, it's about the consumption of things and experiences—driven by materialist, emotional and spiritual instincts—using money as a points system used to ration them out. Most people approach their work in a simple way: they want to earn enough points to meet their basic needs, and indulge their desires to a point of equilibrium between effort and general satisfaction, after which they don't work any harder or longer.

faitswulff 7y ago
> If people have become so devoted to monetary success alone, how can all these industries that rely on vice exist? Indulging a vice is inherently wasteful. It costs time that could be spent working, and money that could be better spent on self-improvement, or invested or saved. Simple: people are not perfectly rational economic actors. I believe the study of irrational economics is called "behavioral economics."

microcolonel 7y ago

Communism, aloner. There is a cost to socialism, if it ever becomes established, it is state socialism, and state socialism is inherently violent. You are free to associate with more people, to change your relationship with work and consumption, you are rich. Your problem is that you have chosen to be alone, and you blame society for not forcing you to be at least superficially engaged.

Ar-Curunir 7y ago
Capitalism engenders the same violence, only behind a mask of "free will".
- microcolonel 7y ago
  Mask how? Yes, people are convincing, but that is in no way comparable to force. The fact that many people are convinced to do things that suck for them in no way justifies a switch to deliberate, overt state imposition of what is supposed to be good for them. If people are being convinced of unwise or unreasonable things, you have an obligation to do your own convincing.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    The mask is as follows: firstly in a particular ideological and political conception of freedom as the freedom to buy and sell whatever you want (including your own labour), along with some things given by the liberal egalitarian state, secondly in the liberal construction of "free will" as the opposite of coercion. Marx criticized liberalism for its narrow conception of what it means to be free, and before that, Spinoza outlined why it is meaningless to talk of "coercion" and "consent" as proponents of negative liberties tend to talk about them. It is not enough to be free, freedom lies, as Zizek says, in the freedom to define your own idea of freedom outside of the ideological context in which it is given to you, whether that's a Western capitalist ideology or one given to you by the CCP.
    - microcolonel 7y ago

amelius 7y ago

One dimension not addressed is how individual people join forces as companies and effectively turn against other groups of people. What would happen to the economy if we'd only allow companies of 1000 people, of 100 people, or perhaps even of 1 person?

originalvichy 7y ago
Other such limits are welcome. An umbrella organization should be allowed to only partake in a certain number of categories of business, and in a limited number. Barely anything is being done to control the power equity has over the system many deem as "competetive". But this won't change. You can't change the system to protect others from greed, when people defend greed. One day they might gain from greed.
agitator 7y ago
This is a fascinating concept! On one hand it would keep companies from completely vertically integrating or expanding to encompass many verticals. Which would stimulate the economy in one way because more people would be exposed to the profits at the top or near the top of the market. Also the increased competition might result in the improvement of various small aspects of technology that would result in better efficiencies across the whole. But on the other hand, limiting the size of companies would make us less competitive on a global scale because of the inherent cost in being forced to buy components, as opposed to vertically integrating. Also product costs may increase, which could negate any increases in wealth among the people.
- godelski 7y ago
  This is a super complicated topic and I'm not sure it could practically be done. Vertical and lateral integration usually result in huge cost savings. It also reduces complexity. But this is also a feature that monopolies (or monopoly like companies) exploit. I don't think it would be competitive enough if all players weren't playing by this rule. Competition is good, but so is size (think like Bell Labs [0] and how much Google can do). This is all completely a guess though. But monopolies aren't inherently had, they just usually are because they exploit that power to hinder innovation. Monopolies can actually have huge benefits. [0] Bell Labs was an agreement that Bell could have the monopoly (to reduce wiring and because of the network effect that they could take advantage of to connect the US with telephone lines) but there was also heavy regulation done during this deal that I'm sure others here are much more informed about and can correct/add to my comment with. [^] I don't think there's ever been a "free market" nor do I think there ever could be. The US's largest economic growth happened in a "free market" in name only (propaganda a lot for the Russians) but was heavily regulated.

lanevorockz 7y ago

Capitalism is nothing more than giving everyone power to do whatever they want. The alternative is Communism which is giving a few government elites the power over everyone. Obviously, these extremes can NEVER be implemented so we will forever live in a middle ground between these two. Each country will take steps in the latter and natural selection will find the best middle ground between this two. The big problem here is the Tyrannical aspect of Communism and the tendency for global wars. Want it or not almost every moral war was started on this envy stereotype that radical leftists have. Don't forget, Hitler was leader of the National Socialist Party.

cairo_x 7y ago
Congratulations: You, along with most of the people here, have no fucking clue what Capitalism is. Capitalism is when the person who put up the capital gets ROI plus the surplus wealth created by the workers, and the workers themselves get a small fraction of said surplus called a wage minus any say over reinvestment of surplus. The alternative does not have to be a state system of communism at all. https://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2012/jan/04/social-enterprise-blog-co-operatives-and-mutuals https://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2012/j...

jeffdavis 7y ago

Historically, free markets and private property protections would give rise to capitalism. But it seems like, in modern times, those two same ingredients give rise to something else. This "something else" is partially capitalistic, but the word seems to fit less and less. Traditionally, a capital investment means something like a tire factory. The right factory in the right place gives the owner an advantage until the market changes or a new supplier makes an even better factory. Putting things like software, a set of customer relations, a brand, or other modern business advantages in the same bucket as a tire factory just seems wrong.

CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
A nice deep dive into that thought is the book “The Wealth of Networks” by Yochai Benkler https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks It’s main focus is on what he calls Commons Based Peer-Production and how the default capitalistic model of private property doesn’t fit that mode of production

godelzilla 7y ago

Capitalist ideology alone. This guy thinks capitalism is based on free labor? SMH. Read a history book.

rland 7y ago

The term capitalism is meaningless now. For example: the Japanese mode of lifetime employment, low salaries, high intangible benefits to employment, an almost exclusively age based hierarchical system is labeled the same thing as the American model, where every individual is a capitalist and a sole individual's brand determines their compensation and worth. The two models are called "capitalist", but they share almost nothing. If everyone is a capitalist, why aren't all of the world's markets integrated? Why is it so hard to strike a trade deal? Why is trade still organized into ideological blocs? We have always had global trade, but we've never ever had a shared definition of what "a capitalist society" actually means. And then of course the term is used extensively as an ideological cudgel. Saying things like "Capitalism is the only means of production in the world" or "Capitalism is inevitable" has no meaning at all. Do a find and replace with "Human Nature" and this makes a lot more sense.

kennywinker 7y ago
It sounds like you're describing historical social differences between countries, rather than a different implementation of capitalism. capitalism is the economic system that "lifetime employment, low salaries, high intangible benefits to employment" exist within. I.e. the concept of employment and salaries are part of capitalism, how they are used is up to the specific society. Based on my experience I would would argue that capitalism influences the structure of society so that the world is getting more homogenous, and differences like the ones you describe are getting less and less. But that's a different issue from the ubiquitousness of capitalism.
- rland 7y ago
  So, maybe it will help to look at what is Not Capitalism. In say some midecentury communist country, the workers owned the capital, right? In practice, though, someone who called themselves a worker (a party secretary) with political power had de facto control over how and where the capital was allocated and spent. Sounds an awful lot like private ownership. Also, it resembles some parts of the US, like defense, where single bid contracts go conveniently to the friends of lawmakers. It's the taxpayer's capital, right, not privately owned? The capital in these cases is not explicit in a spreadsheet, but it undeniably exists and is owned. My example of the Japanese salaryman is similar: if my boss at Mitsubishi is the division leader of heavy industry, my paycheck comes in large part from being able to give his name on the phone with someone when asking for a favor. I'm not paid that, but I own the privilege -- the capital -- if I get high enough up at Mitsubishi. I can even pass this intangible owned thing along to my children, through my family name. These are all of my cut-and-dry examples, but there are many which are more muddled. The spending of huge companies on lobbying--is that Capitalism? Or some perversion? Depending on what point you're trying to make ideologically, these situations are all either Capitalism OR Not Capitalism, OR somewhere in between. So what the hell is capitalism anyway and why is it even useful to talk about it like the way the OP talks about it? That is my point.

lootsauce 7y ago

My frustration with the arguments for communism and or socialism vs capitalism is that they are surface arguments on ideological basis. I see socialism and communism as dressed up authoritarianism. A massive hand-over of power to a few in government is not an improvement over capitalism where a much larger group vie for power in a dual reinforcing and opposing system of government and corporate interests. To hand the economy over to the government creates a far more centralized system of power and all the discussion of supposed benefits we could attain by such a system does not nullify the massive threat to freedom by that kind of system. Capitalism is a horrible system but its the least horrible one we know of. A better discussion is how do we get to a better regulatory regime.

jmcqk6 7y ago
The problem is as you state: discussions between ideology are not productive when at least one side is completely entrenched in that ideology. Instead of focusing on ideology, focus on specific problems, and don't let the discussion occur in terms of ideology. This can be done by forcing specifics as much as possible. Ideology is almost by definition, highly abstract. It's nice to talk about things when they're highly abstract, because their incredibly malleable. But the problems we face in the world are not abstract. It's completely clear at this point that an ideological approach to solving problems will not work. But perhaps changing the discussions to be smaller and focusing on real issues in specific detail might be better. I could be wrong. I've been unable to have a productive conversation with ideological opposites from me, but I seem to get closer when I talk about specifics instead of abstractions.

RestlessMind 7y ago

> Capitalism, in order to expand, needs greed. Greed has been entirely accepted by us. Any system which does not take into account inherent human traits like greed, envy or laziness are bound to fail. That seems one reasons why Capitalism prevailed over Communism, since the former had fewer "wrong assumptions" about the human nature.

rohanshah 7y ago

"Marxism has therefore given up trying to provide an explanation for the 20th century history... The reason for this failure lies in the fact that Marxism never made a meaningful distinction between standard Marxist schemes regarding the succession of socio-economic formations (what I call the Western Path of Development, WPD) and the evolution of poorer and colonized countries. Classical Marxism never asked seriously whether the WPD is applicable in their case." In fact this was/is an active area of research, namely Post Colonial Theory and Subaltern Studies, which has been heavily criticized and reified with a more classic Marxist analysis since. Post Colonial Theory and the Specter of Capital [1] is perhaps the most accessible such critique. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_Theory_and_the_Specter_of_Capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_Theory_and_the_Sp...