4 ms·

Capitalism is too broad a term to be useful in these conversations. At it’s core capitalism just means that private individuals can own property, instead of th

• agentultra 4y ago
  It’s absolutely not critical or essential for a free society. It’s only essential for capital owners to maintain their wealth and power.
  • JieJie 4y ago
    Markets are probably essential. Ownership is a term that is loaded and the argument between socialism and capitalism is actually not really helpful. For instance, if we removed the concept of capital and implemented socialism, there would still be a concept of "responsibility for". So if there were community bicycles, individuals would still have responsibility if they threw the bicycles in a lake. The community officially "owned" the bicycles, and the individual acted against the community's best interests. Capitalism as written about by Adam Smith seeks to solve the same problem by putting the "ownership" in the hands of the individual, so that the individual is given incentive to care and maintain the bike. These are both potentially-effective systems that seek to solve the problem of "who's responsible for this bicycle". There are trade-offs for each. When we simplify complex market-based problems into choices between either capitalism or socialism, we have created nice ways to describe the problem, but neither of them serves as an effective solution to the problem. For the solution, we have to dig deeper and that means not being beholden to ideologies that can prevent us from seeing good solutions.
    • imtringued 4y ago
      The problem with ownership is that it isn't that easy. With land people don't own the land itself they only have exclusive usage rights for a specific period of time. Once that time is over they are no longer responsible. Thus even with private ownership you still can have the tragedy of the commons problem, it is just divided over time instead of space. The most common example is soil depletion from industrialized agriculture. If you wanted to solve this problem you would need a regulatory body that inspects the quality of the soil and fines people who degrade it. Governance becomes essential to balance the micro and macro economy.
• HyperSane 4y ago
  The concept of property has been warped to include the value of shares of a corporation, whose value is generated by the labor of its employees. This is the primary way the richest people steal wealth from labor.
  • satvikpendem 4y ago
    Only if you believe in the Labor Theory of Value, which most don't. If I own a ship that's going on some expedition (as how shares originally started), I raise capital and reduce risk by issuing shares that people can buy. I have to, well, share my wealth but I have more money now to do the expedition. Corporations are just bigger versions of the same idea, they're still run by people, any of whom can decide not to work there anymore, for better or worse.
  • cambaceres 4y ago
    What you and other students of Karl Marx always ignore is the fact that if company owners was not allowed to earn profit then there would be no companies founded, meaning that the workers would not have jobs.
    • agentultra 4y ago
      I think the idea is that the workers would profit from their labour and control what gets produced. I’m not sure that means companies wouldn’t be started and everyone would sit around doing nothing.
      • satvikpendem 4y ago
        They can do that, nothing stops people from setting up co-ops today, I've been in one as well in fact. But at the same time, if I'm making something lucrative, I'd want to profit from it. That other people I hire are willing to work for the wage I give them is their problem, since if they don't like the wage, they can always go elsewhere (given that they are skilled workers, not workers who can find no other job in some company town or something).