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And "slavery" and "private ownership of the means of production" are similarly orthogonal. If the means of production were owned by the government, and the gov

• jahaja 6y ago
  > On the other hand, capitalism can only really function in a world where all transactions are bilaterally voluntary That condition has not been true at any time in the history of Capitalism. Since that's only possible if the two parties are perfectly equal, which obviously is almost never the case, and certainly not a state of affairs that the proponents of Capitalism wants or have ever wanted. In reality, unless born into property/wealth, one is not a voluntary party of such a transaction, and its voluntariness decreases in proportion to the socioeconomical situation of the party at that time.
  • bhupy 6y ago
    Of course, nobody is credibly arguing that we are anywhere close to the platonic ideal of a capitalist system — in the same way that at no point in the history of humanity have we had a truly communist or socialist system. If your argument is that the inverse relationship between "voluntariness" and socioeconomic status is anathema to capitalism, that reinforces the idea that literal slavery is even further from that platonic ideal. As an aside, capitalists love UBI for this reason: it gets us that much closer to truly universal voluntary transactions, because when one is no longer worried about starving to death, they can rationally participate in all economic transactions in a free society. But the point remains the same: slavery (or more abstractly, involuntary servitude) is orthogonal to the underlying economic system. It can exist in any economic system. Most of the developed world today is largely capitalist, and without slavery. Conversely, some of history's most well known efforts in installing Marxist communism also notably featured forced labor camps where people were compelled to work involuntarily.
    • jahaja 6y ago
      As I've said in another comment in this thread; each system is defined by the incentive structure it sets up. The Stalinist structure is set up to be ripe for corruption, abuse of power, etc. That is what it will be rightly remembered for. The Capitalist structure is set up to be ripe for exploiting whatever there is to be exploited at that particular time to accumulate capital. That both slavery and Colonialism flourished under such an incentive structure should not be a surprise. We can see the same pattern today; exploiting whatever is possible until the moral outrage hurts profits too much or may land the execs behind bars. > As an aside, capitalists love UBI for this reason It's a very big assumption that a capitalist UBI would be little else than removing social security and then go on devaluing the UBI year by year. Once again, the incentives suggest exactly that. You're somehow imagining an altruistic capitalism that primarily looks for true voluntary transactions while still concentrating power and privilege in the hands of the few.
      • bhupy 6y ago
        > That both slavery and Colonialism flourished under such an incentive structure should not be a surprise. But that's factually untrue, slavery held back the accumulation of capital. American agriculture became MORE profitable after slavery was abolished. Once the actual cost of manufacturing had to be factored in, planters were forced to find more productive crops to grow. That process led to: 1. the decimation of the economy of the South, where slavery was rampant. The South had to quickly learn to industrialize to keep up 2. the steep increase in market capitalization of agricultural businesses once capital was forced to be more efficiently allocated, resulting in the agrarian revolution of the Great Plains, which remains one of America's dominant agriculture centers Slavery quite literally does not allow the incentive structure, by your own words, to flourish.
        • jahaja 6y ago
          That's outrageously ahistorical. The former slaves weren't suddenly "free" and unexploited in the US after the civil war. In many aspects they were still enslaved through various direct and indirect means. If you're interested in not just regurgitating propaganda you can read this book: "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II". Furthermore your entire premise is false, even if we accept what you suggest is true, which is highly controversial, the result is not what we're talking about, but the incentive structure and what outcomes that will produce. Of course people searching to accumulate capital will endorse and proliferate low labour costs if it's possible and currently acceptable. You do realize that both slavery and wage slavery have a cost of manufacturing right? Both needed to compete with that on the world market. What's the reason to exclude that even a slave-owning South wouldn't have switched to a more profitable produce?
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > On the other hand, capitalism can only really function in a world where all transactions are bilaterally voluntary That depends on whether by “capitalism” you mean “the real-world economic system which emerged through the relentless pursuit of class advantage by the mercantile class as they displaced the feudal aristocracy as the ruling class and which was named ‘capitalism’ by it's critics” or “the aspirational ideal that defenders of that real world system rationalized it as striving imperfectly toward to distract from the characteristics of the real world system itself in a perpetual game of ‘No True Scotsman’”. For the former, no, it relies almost entirely on economic coercion by denying practical freedom of choice for most of the population to serve the ends for which it was pursued by the class that relentlessly advanced it, and the form of commodified chattel slavery which with it replaced the patriarchal slavery of the feudal era fits well within that. For the latter, sure, slavery is incompatible with that rationalization. But so is literally everything because the ideal is incoherent.
  • bhupy 6y ago
    > For the former, no, it relies almost entirely on economic coercion by denying practical freedom of choice for most of the population to serve the ends for which it was pursued by the class that relentlessly advanced it, and the form of commodified chattel slavery which with it replaced the patriarchal slavery of the feudal era fits well within that. Nearly every single modern first world country, from Canada to Singapore to New Zealand to Switzerland to Sweden...all operate on capitalist systems where the majority of industries are privately owned, and operate for profit. They also happen to have robust safety nets where the exact sort of economic coercion is difficult to carry out. To argue that slavery is somehow inextricably linked to the dominant economic system of these countries is plainly absurd, in the same way that it's plainly absurd to claim that slavery is inextricably linked to communism/Marxism just by virtue of the practical manifestation of it we've seen in the 20th century, and not the theoretical ideal as posed by Marx. The whole point here is that slavery is orthogonal to the economic system, not an underlying prerequisite for it. > in a perpetual game of "No True Scotsman" > For the latter, sure, slavery is incompatible with that rationalization. But so is literally everything because the ideal is incoherent. You either need to compare the platonic ideal of communism to the platonic ideal of capitalism, or stick with comparing the empirical outcomes of capitalism as it has been tried all over the developed world today with communism as it has been tried in the real world. You appear to be trying to compare the platonic ideal of communism with the empirical manifestation of capitalism, and then balk when I counter with my own platonic ideal. Compare apples to apples.