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This is kind of an old article, but I still have to say this: I can't get over how people on this website don't understand capitalism and its business practice

This is kind of an old article, but I still have to say this: I can't get over how people on this website don't understand capitalism and its business practices. Is it that hard to grasp that an economic mode that is centered around the accumulation of capital engages in savage competition? That this savage competition exploits minds, throws consumers interests under the bus or can even start actual wars. Or that it's whole production process is centered around extracting value from exchanging goods, not quality, not usefulness, goodness, etc? It's not that hard to grasp. We live it everyday.

kazinator 5y ago
Capital means multiple owners pooling together; I don't believe that's a requirement for savage competition. Every-man-for-himself type situations can also foster savage competition. Individuals can be savagely competitive. Capital rather enables anti-competition: eliminating the need to compete by eradicating competitors through monopolistic power, and gentlemen's agreements regarding pricing and territory. Whenever two people pool their resources together to form the capital base for a business venture, they cease to be potential competitors. From that alone we can suspect that capitalism is more about savage accretion and acquisition rather than competition.
- Atlas667 5y ago
  But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly. Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system. If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Such a definition would include what is most important, for, on the one hand, finance capital is the bank capital of a few very big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist associations of industrialists; and, on the other hand, the division of the world is the transition from a colonial policy which has extended without hindrance to territories unseized by any capitalist power, to a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been completely divided up.
  - threads2 5y ago
    For anyone interested in further discussion of this topic, I highly recommend "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" by Lenin (1917).
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, That's...not really true in any substantive sense. Capitalist imperialism co-developed with capitalism the whole time the latter was developing from pre-capitalist systems. The only way you can say either came later is if you artificially construct both as binary rather than continuous transitions and then draw the arbitrary binary line one each to make that ordering work.
    - Atlas667 5y ago
      Read the book, that's exactly what he's saying, and that way of thinking is a fundamental aspect of dialectical materialism. The semantic and conceptual differences come when these small changes accumulate and a new way of describing the phenomenon is necessary.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  You're describing corporations, not capital. While corporations require capitalism, you can easily have a capitalistic society where there is no corporate shield. Everyone could be a mom and pop shop.
stuu99 5y ago
"It's not that hard to grasp. We live it everyday. It is, the human mind doesn't see reality as it is, see the science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ&t=9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ&t=9s
Gollapalli 5y ago
Two things: 1) The people who own a publicly-traded company no longer own the social consequences of what that company does. Neither do the people who run that company. Neither do the people who actually control it. 2) The people who actually control a publicly-traded company, the board and large institutional investors, really representatives of investing as an institution, have one incentive structure, the stock price, which is driven by a balance sheet, which cares not a whit for your social consequences. Say what you will about the bourgeois capitalism of Ford and Carnegie, they were men who invested in their country and their communities, and in their workers as well. Their ruthlessness was the ruthlessness of the powerful, but the managerial capitalism which replaced it carries the ruthlessness of the inhuman.
- Atlas667 5y ago
  You're making a fetishizing an era of capitalism. There are chapters in Marx's Capital where he thoroughly studies early capitalism in England by official govt reports and it was absolutely horrible. The govt was forced to implement social welfare programs in order to preserve some social wellness, like obligatory school for the youth because of overwork, which were immediately curbed by the capitalists. This is the development of all of society. With capitalists controlling a countries production, society does not get better with the interests of the majority in mind. It fits capitals interests. That was true in 1870s as well as 2022.
  - Gollapalli 5y ago
    You're not wrong about early capitalism, but you need to read people after Marx. Try Burnham. >With ̶c̶a̶p̶i̶t̶a̶l̶i̶s̶t̶s̶ elites controlling a countries production, society does not get better with the interests of the majority in mind. It fits ̶c̶a̶p̶i̶t̶a̶l̶s̶ the ruling elite class's interests. The rule of elite classes is an iron law in history. It long predates the development of banking in renaissance Italy. It will exist in whatever system you naively presuppose to overthrow it.

kazinator 5y ago

Capital means multiple owners pooling together; I don't believe that's a requirement for savage competition. Every-man-for-himself type situations can also foster savage competition. Individuals can be savagely competitive. Capital rather enables anti-competition: eliminating the need to compete by eradicating competitors through monopolistic power, and gentlemen's agreements regarding pricing and territory. Whenever two people pool their resources together to form the capital base for a business venture, they cease to be potential competitors. From that alone we can suspect that capitalism is more about savage accretion and acquisition rather than competition.

Atlas667 5y ago
But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly. Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system. If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Such a definition would include what is most important, for, on the one hand, finance capital is the bank capital of a few very big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist associations of industrialists; and, on the other hand, the division of the world is the transition from a colonial policy which has extended without hindrance to territories unseized by any capitalist power, to a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been completely divided up.
- threads2 5y ago
  For anyone interested in further discussion of this topic, I highly recommend "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" by Lenin (1917).
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, That's...not really true in any substantive sense. Capitalist imperialism co-developed with capitalism the whole time the latter was developing from pre-capitalist systems. The only way you can say either came later is if you artificially construct both as binary rather than continuous transitions and then draw the arbitrary binary line one each to make that ordering work.
  - Atlas667 5y ago
    Read the book, that's exactly what he's saying, and that way of thinking is a fundamental aspect of dialectical materialism. The semantic and conceptual differences come when these small changes accumulate and a new way of describing the phenomenon is necessary.
HWR_14 5y ago
You're describing corporations, not capital. While corporations require capitalism, you can easily have a capitalistic society where there is no corporate shield. Everyone could be a mom and pop shop.

stuu99 5y ago

"It's not that hard to grasp. We live it everyday. It is, the human mind doesn't see reality as it is, see the science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ&t=9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ&t=9s

Gollapalli 5y ago

Two things: 1) The people who own a publicly-traded company no longer own the social consequences of what that company does. Neither do the people who run that company. Neither do the people who actually control it. 2) The people who actually control a publicly-traded company, the board and large institutional investors, really representatives of investing as an institution, have one incentive structure, the stock price, which is driven by a balance sheet, which cares not a whit for your social consequences. Say what you will about the bourgeois capitalism of Ford and Carnegie, they were men who invested in their country and their communities, and in their workers as well. Their ruthlessness was the ruthlessness of the powerful, but the managerial capitalism which replaced it carries the ruthlessness of the inhuman.

Atlas667 5y ago
You're making a fetishizing an era of capitalism. There are chapters in Marx's Capital where he thoroughly studies early capitalism in England by official govt reports and it was absolutely horrible. The govt was forced to implement social welfare programs in order to preserve some social wellness, like obligatory school for the youth because of overwork, which were immediately curbed by the capitalists. This is the development of all of society. With capitalists controlling a countries production, society does not get better with the interests of the majority in mind. It fits capitals interests. That was true in 1870s as well as 2022.
- Gollapalli 5y ago
  You're not wrong about early capitalism, but you need to read people after Marx. Try Burnham. >With ̶c̶a̶p̶i̶t̶a̶l̶i̶s̶t̶s̶ elites controlling a countries production, society does not get better with the interests of the majority in mind. It fits ̶c̶a̶p̶i̶t̶a̶l̶s̶ the ruling elite class's interests. The rule of elite classes is an iron law in history. It long predates the development of banking in renaissance Italy. It will exist in whatever system you naively presuppose to overthrow it.