6 ms·

'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism'

abdullahkhalids 3y ago
> We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Ursula K Le Guin [1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-awards-speech https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-k-le-gu...
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  I was literally just thinking of this quote 15 minutes ago. Weird to see it at the top of HN. Capitalism seems to work better than the systems we've tried in the recent past (communism and feudalism are obviously worse in my eyes due to reduced freedom and the huge amounts of life lost in both Russia and China under these systems) , but it's obviously far from perfect. I'm not sure what could be done better, but Le Guin reminds me it's possible to think of alternatives. Speaking of alternative ideas..Chesterton was critical of both communism and capitalism. He proposed something that was intriguing and involved focusing on smaller local communities. I'm not sure how it could work towards technological advancement though which in my eyes is important. It seems to have had some popularity with certain Christian movements in the past century. The concept that ownership of the economy shouldn't be concentrated into a small group of people or corporations makes sense to me, but I don't see a way to make that work economically in modern times. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism Regardless, I'm really interested in these kinds of niche ideas if anyone has others to share.
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    If you're into christian anarchists, consider Tolstoy.
    - 7thaccount 3y ago
      I'm not religious myself anymore, but try to keep an open mind to alternative ideas. My assumption is we still haven't figured out an optimal system...and may never escape bouncing from one idea to the other.
    - krapp 3y ago
      "Christian anarchist" seems like a contradiction in terms. "God" is the ultimate coercive authority and the Church the ultimate hierarchy, and most of the evils of government have been done in the name of both.
      - 082349872349872 3y ago
        It's been a while since I read him, but I believe Tolstoy, like Jesus (or for that matter, Brian), was pretty anti-Church. I mentioned him specifically because his justification for anarchism was all the love & peace & everything in common (or at least eye of the needle?) hippy biblical stuff. The Buddha was also anti-Church, I believe. (and St. Francis was fonder of animals than his fellow clerics?) There's an excellent conceit in Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) in which the diagnosable mental disorders have their corresponding roles in society: the paranoid form the military, the narcissists the political class, etc. Hebephrenics provide their religious prophets.
        sickofparadox 3y ago
        Jesus was not anti-church, he founded the early Christian church and established Peter as its leader. Catholics are often heard saying to Protestants that God did not give his people a book, but he did give them a church.
        082349872349872 3y ago
        My google-fu is poor; I'm not coming up with any hits for that. Do you have any references? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple doesn't seem to me to be the act of someone who is in favour of combining spiritual with temporal power, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_1st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_1st_centur... looks like a muddle from here.
  - UncleOxidant 3y ago
    Yes, I was just thinking of Distributism in this context. Communism says the means of production is owned by the state, Capitalism says the means of production is owned by those with capital (so in practice that means in a few hands). Distributism says let's distribute the means of production as widely as possible. I recall an article in Make magazine about 15 years ago on distributism - they made the case that things like 3D printers could be the technological enabler to allow distributism to work.
  - fao_ 3y ago
    > Distributism views laissez-faire capitalism and state socialism as equally flawed and exploitative This is also termed "anarcho-communism" within the academic literature and grassroots movements, just FYI (A common misconception of anarchism is that it is a 'lack of law and order' -- it is merely the lack of centralization). The Bolshevik implementation of Communism was called State-Capitalism for a long time by Lenin himself, and many Communist thinkers (I'm thinking of Tony Cliff, who was exceptionally progressive for his time) disagree with the Bolshevik implementation of Communism.
    - 7thaccount 3y ago
      I'm not knowledgeable enough to debate on Communism. I was somewhat aware that many of the proponents have pointed out that the major failings were partially because they were implemented incorrectly. The common counterargument is that despite the very real and good intentions that they would all end up the same as an elite group perverts the goals and makes the entire system self serving. Is that too simplistic though? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
      - 082349872349872 3y ago
        > all end up the same for which, see Goldstein, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (appearing in [Orwell49]) > "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." —EAB
        keybored 3y ago
        A state of affairs totally unlike the ones we have in the West, to be sure.
      - notarobot123 3y ago
        > ....an elite group perverts the goals and makes the entire system self serving That sounds about right. Any system that concentrates power seems to go the same way in a generation or two.
  - keybored 3y ago
    > communism [is] obviously worse in my eyes due to Death squads, Banana Republics, indefinite US embargo and coup attempts, Pinochet & the Chicago Boys, risking the US military invading you in order to avoid the Domino Effect. > Speaking of alternative ideas..Chesterton was critical of both communism and capitalism. Distributism as described in that article is socialism modeled on the ideal of the small-time craftsman or whatever of that time. That would probably be called naive by normal socialists (certainly by communists like Leninists) but it has some similarities with socialism. On the other hand it seems to outright reject anything like the modern capitalism that we are dealing with in the present. > Regardless, I'm really interested in these kinds of niche ideas if anyone has others to share. Riffs on socialism, an idea which is over two-hundred years old and has adherents all over the globe. Fought against and repressed is not the same as niche.
    - 7thaccount 3y ago
      I'd lean pretty heavily towards capitalism in a contest with communism or any other authoritarian system strictly based on personal liberty. It may suck at times, but I do have a choice. I'm thinking about Hayek's well known road to serfdom here that explains how well meaning systems like communism inevitably end up. I think you may be splitting hairs with regards to terminology. I said niche as in unpopular and not well known. I think it and many other systems match that description and are interesting to talk about.
      - keybored 3y ago
        > I'd lean pretty heavily towards capitalism in a contest with communism or any other authoritarian system strictly based on personal liberty. Freedom to form death squads, Banana Republics, establish indefinite [US] embargo and coup attempts, help out Pinochet & the Chicago Boys, freedom to invade countries just because they are communist.
        Sabinus 3y ago
        Do you think a communist government with the same power as the US would refrain from the above?
  - int_19h 3y ago
    "Communism" is not like the others in one important sense: all regimes that have been or are called communist derive from the same one source, namely the Russian Bolsheviks. Of all the people who called themselves communist, only they have succeeded in taking power and holding it long enough to entrench. Consequently, every subsequent communist revolution elsewhere was largely bankrolled by them, and they made sure that everyone they supported adopted their ideology - even if there were later breaks over detail, the fundamentally authoritarian core of Bolshevism always remains. This is, of course, quite different from capitalism, which has evolved organically in many places in parallel. (It should also be noted that whether "feudalism" is even a thing that can be meaningfully defined is contentious, and many modern historians consider it a largely nonsensical retroactive attempt to fit very diverse systems and patterns into a single category.) In general, look up "libertarian socialism" - it is an umbrella term for left anarchists of various stripes as well as more moderate socialists who don't shy away from some degree of centralization but still place a lot of emphasis on avoiding any kind of authoritarianism as crucial to success of any such political system. I would particularly draw attention to Murray Bookchin and his "libertarian municipalism", not the least because Le Guin herself did in later prefaces to her books. For real-world examples, something along these lines (but less, shall we say, theoretically pure - which shouldn't come as a surprise!) has been practiced for a while in the Chiapas in EZLN-affiliated communities, and more recently also in AANES (Rojava). As you rightly note, the real question there is how well it all would scale to a modern industrialized society - Chiapas are pretty rural, Rojava somewhat less so but still hardly comparable to what first-worlders are generally used to. It's also interesting to note that the Rojava take on it is a milder version where e.g. cooperatives are encouraged but there are still plenty of privately owned businesses.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  One of the advantages of reading older authors is the sensation of cognitive dissonance inspired by their taking it for granted that monarchies are superior to oligarchies. You'll find a lot of this pre-1914, but also pre-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory#:~:text=According%20to%20Polybius%2C%20who%20has,ochlocracy%2C%20oligarchy%2C%20and%20tyranny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory#:~:text=Ac....
- rexpop 3y ago
  > Dialogue cannot be carried on in a climate of hopelessness. If the dialoguers expect nothing to come of their efforts, their encounter will be empty and sterile, bureaucratic and tedious. Paulo Freire [0] 0. Pedagogy of the Oppressed - https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire...
StefanBatory 3y ago
Perhaps because it's the best system. We've had communism in my country, never again.
- logicprog 3y ago
  Fortunately the options aren't merely some form of marxist communism or capitalism! There are whole branches of (anarchist/federalist) socialism that actually predicted what would happen in the Soviet Union while Marx was still alive and writing and had very different plans themselves (Bakunin and Proudhon), and there were also distinct forms of socialism that predated Marxism, and forms that came after it, so even if we were to restrict ourselves to socialist schools of thought that have existed for round about 200 years (a very narrow slice of economic systems), there are a lot more options to try than "bureaucratic oligarchy, with a top down centrally planned economy and a fundamentally authoritarian ideology" and "a system designed to give some power over others via absentee property ownership, and facilitate the concentration of that power through the concentration of property due to the right of increase and profit."
- adrian_b 3y ago
  Capitalism appears to have worked optimally around the 1960 to 1990 time interval. After 1990 a consolidation process became more and more obvious and it has accelerated greatly after 2000. The long sequence of mergers and acquisitions has resulted in the fact that most markets have become dominated by quasi-monopolies, which some times resemble more the monopolies that existed in the industries of the countries dominated by communists than the multitude of competing companies that existed in USA or in Western Europe a half of century ago.
  - aebtebeten 3y ago
    Before 1990* there was competition; capitalism without competition doesn't seem to slice the pie as well as it did with? * Danke, Gorbi!
082349872349872 3y ago
compare "...And Then There Were None" https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/9555488 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/9555488
pookha 3y ago
I'd love to take a 70 year old Chinese victim that lived through the great-leap-forward and culture revolution and to get their honest perspective on this. They managed to live through starvation and wide-spread Maoist violence to witness the end of capitalism only to see the same bozo's re-introduce capitalism forty years later in the form of crony-capitlism...And if they try to speak about any of what they'd learned to their grand kids they're likely to get hauled off to a gulag while their grand-kids bytedance and chow down on Kentucky Fried Chicken.
- bllguo 3y ago
  an amusing fantasy. I'd love to see your western biases shatter when you do just that. do you think it's at all hard to find a 70yr old Chinese person?
- melagonster 3y ago
  actually, this is the description of chairman Xi.
jokethrowaway 3y ago
Because unregulated capitalism is just property and trading. Hard to imagine sentient beings without the concept of property and trading. You have to kill all humans to end capitalism. What everybody hates is crony capitalism where business leverage their government connections to screw everyone - but that's just socialism with extra steps.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  It's a massive error to conflate capitalism and commerce like this. Capitalism describes a specific structure of organizing ownership of productive resources and allocating their surpluses. Capitalism is not the only thing that exists nor is it inevitable. It's not hard to imagine systems with property and trading that use another method of allocation. In fact such systems do exist both in history and currently.
- thefaux 3y ago
  I don't think capitalism and the concepts of property and trade are synonyms. It is also not clear that historical understandings of property or trade or universal amongst human civilizations and I'd be wary of dismissing other civilizations as having been made up of unsentient beings.
- keybored 3y ago
  What is water, the fish asked.
- int_19h 3y ago
  Property and trading existed for most of the history of humanity, but capitalism is a much more recent phenomenon. Capitalism specifically requires private property rights on capital (i.e. means of production) - hence the name. And it requires those rights to be unrestricted in a sense that anyone can freely trade capital, and thus it is possible to amass and concentrate it, thereby creating a class of those who have it distinct from those who do not, which in turn allows the former to collect economic rent from the productive work of the latter.

> We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Ursula K Le Guin [1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-awards-speech https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-k-le-gu...

7thaccount 3y ago
I was literally just thinking of this quote 15 minutes ago. Weird to see it at the top of HN. Capitalism seems to work better than the systems we've tried in the recent past (communism and feudalism are obviously worse in my eyes due to reduced freedom and the huge amounts of life lost in both Russia and China under these systems) , but it's obviously far from perfect. I'm not sure what could be done better, but Le Guin reminds me it's possible to think of alternatives. Speaking of alternative ideas..Chesterton was critical of both communism and capitalism. He proposed something that was intriguing and involved focusing on smaller local communities. I'm not sure how it could work towards technological advancement though which in my eyes is important. It seems to have had some popularity with certain Christian movements in the past century. The concept that ownership of the economy shouldn't be concentrated into a small group of people or corporations makes sense to me, but I don't see a way to make that work economically in modern times. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism Regardless, I'm really interested in these kinds of niche ideas if anyone has others to share.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  If you're into christian anarchists, consider Tolstoy.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    I'm not religious myself anymore, but try to keep an open mind to alternative ideas. My assumption is we still haven't figured out an optimal system...and may never escape bouncing from one idea to the other.
  - krapp 3y ago
    "Christian anarchist" seems like a contradiction in terms. "God" is the ultimate coercive authority and the Church the ultimate hierarchy, and most of the evils of government have been done in the name of both.
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      It's been a while since I read him, but I believe Tolstoy, like Jesus (or for that matter, Brian), was pretty anti-Church. I mentioned him specifically because his justification for anarchism was all the love & peace & everything in common (or at least eye of the needle?) hippy biblical stuff. The Buddha was also anti-Church, I believe. (and St. Francis was fonder of animals than his fellow clerics?) There's an excellent conceit in Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) in which the diagnosable mental disorders have their corresponding roles in society: the paranoid form the military, the narcissists the political class, etc. Hebephrenics provide their religious prophets.
      - sickofparadox 3y ago
        Jesus was not anti-church, he founded the early Christian church and established Peter as its leader. Catholics are often heard saying to Protestants that God did not give his people a book, but he did give them a church.
        082349872349872 3y ago
        My google-fu is poor; I'm not coming up with any hits for that. Do you have any references? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple doesn't seem to me to be the act of someone who is in favour of combining spiritual with temporal power, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_1st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_1st_centur... looks like a muddle from here.
- UncleOxidant 3y ago
  Yes, I was just thinking of Distributism in this context. Communism says the means of production is owned by the state, Capitalism says the means of production is owned by those with capital (so in practice that means in a few hands). Distributism says let's distribute the means of production as widely as possible. I recall an article in Make magazine about 15 years ago on distributism - they made the case that things like 3D printers could be the technological enabler to allow distributism to work.
- fao_ 3y ago
  > Distributism views laissez-faire capitalism and state socialism as equally flawed and exploitative This is also termed "anarcho-communism" within the academic literature and grassroots movements, just FYI (A common misconception of anarchism is that it is a 'lack of law and order' -- it is merely the lack of centralization). The Bolshevik implementation of Communism was called State-Capitalism for a long time by Lenin himself, and many Communist thinkers (I'm thinking of Tony Cliff, who was exceptionally progressive for his time) disagree with the Bolshevik implementation of Communism.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    I'm not knowledgeable enough to debate on Communism. I was somewhat aware that many of the proponents have pointed out that the major failings were partially because they were implemented incorrectly. The common counterargument is that despite the very real and good intentions that they would all end up the same as an elite group perverts the goals and makes the entire system self serving. Is that too simplistic though? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      > all end up the same for which, see Goldstein, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (appearing in [Orwell49]) > "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." —EAB
      - keybored 3y ago
        A state of affairs totally unlike the ones we have in the West, to be sure.
    - notarobot123 3y ago
      > ....an elite group perverts the goals and makes the entire system self serving That sounds about right. Any system that concentrates power seems to go the same way in a generation or two.
- keybored 3y ago
  > communism [is] obviously worse in my eyes due to Death squads, Banana Republics, indefinite US embargo and coup attempts, Pinochet & the Chicago Boys, risking the US military invading you in order to avoid the Domino Effect. > Speaking of alternative ideas..Chesterton was critical of both communism and capitalism. Distributism as described in that article is socialism modeled on the ideal of the small-time craftsman or whatever of that time. That would probably be called naive by normal socialists (certainly by communists like Leninists) but it has some similarities with socialism. On the other hand it seems to outright reject anything like the modern capitalism that we are dealing with in the present. > Regardless, I'm really interested in these kinds of niche ideas if anyone has others to share. Riffs on socialism, an idea which is over two-hundred years old and has adherents all over the globe. Fought against and repressed is not the same as niche.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    I'd lean pretty heavily towards capitalism in a contest with communism or any other authoritarian system strictly based on personal liberty. It may suck at times, but I do have a choice. I'm thinking about Hayek's well known road to serfdom here that explains how well meaning systems like communism inevitably end up. I think you may be splitting hairs with regards to terminology. I said niche as in unpopular and not well known. I think it and many other systems match that description and are interesting to talk about.
    - keybored 3y ago
      > I'd lean pretty heavily towards capitalism in a contest with communism or any other authoritarian system strictly based on personal liberty. Freedom to form death squads, Banana Republics, establish indefinite [US] embargo and coup attempts, help out Pinochet & the Chicago Boys, freedom to invade countries just because they are communist.
      - Sabinus 3y ago
        Do you think a communist government with the same power as the US would refrain from the above?
- int_19h 3y ago
  "Communism" is not like the others in one important sense: all regimes that have been or are called communist derive from the same one source, namely the Russian Bolsheviks. Of all the people who called themselves communist, only they have succeeded in taking power and holding it long enough to entrench. Consequently, every subsequent communist revolution elsewhere was largely bankrolled by them, and they made sure that everyone they supported adopted their ideology - even if there were later breaks over detail, the fundamentally authoritarian core of Bolshevism always remains. This is, of course, quite different from capitalism, which has evolved organically in many places in parallel. (It should also be noted that whether "feudalism" is even a thing that can be meaningfully defined is contentious, and many modern historians consider it a largely nonsensical retroactive attempt to fit very diverse systems and patterns into a single category.) In general, look up "libertarian socialism" - it is an umbrella term for left anarchists of various stripes as well as more moderate socialists who don't shy away from some degree of centralization but still place a lot of emphasis on avoiding any kind of authoritarianism as crucial to success of any such political system. I would particularly draw attention to Murray Bookchin and his "libertarian municipalism", not the least because Le Guin herself did in later prefaces to her books. For real-world examples, something along these lines (but less, shall we say, theoretically pure - which shouldn't come as a surprise!) has been practiced for a while in the Chiapas in EZLN-affiliated communities, and more recently also in AANES (Rojava). As you rightly note, the real question there is how well it all would scale to a modern industrialized society - Chiapas are pretty rural, Rojava somewhat less so but still hardly comparable to what first-worlders are generally used to. It's also interesting to note that the Rojava take on it is a milder version where e.g. cooperatives are encouraged but there are still plenty of privately owned businesses.
082349872349872 3y ago
One of the advantages of reading older authors is the sensation of cognitive dissonance inspired by their taking it for granted that monarchies are superior to oligarchies. You'll find a lot of this pre-1914, but also pre-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory#:~:text=According%20to%20Polybius%2C%20who%20has,ochlocracy%2C%20oligarchy%2C%20and%20tyranny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory#:~:text=Ac....
rexpop 3y ago
> Dialogue cannot be carried on in a climate of hopelessness. If the dialoguers expect nothing to come of their efforts, their encounter will be empty and sterile, bureaucratic and tedious. Paulo Freire [0] 0. Pedagogy of the Oppressed - https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire...

StefanBatory 3y ago

Perhaps because it's the best system. We've had communism in my country, never again.

logicprog 3y ago
Fortunately the options aren't merely some form of marxist communism or capitalism! There are whole branches of (anarchist/federalist) socialism that actually predicted what would happen in the Soviet Union while Marx was still alive and writing and had very different plans themselves (Bakunin and Proudhon), and there were also distinct forms of socialism that predated Marxism, and forms that came after it, so even if we were to restrict ourselves to socialist schools of thought that have existed for round about 200 years (a very narrow slice of economic systems), there are a lot more options to try than "bureaucratic oligarchy, with a top down centrally planned economy and a fundamentally authoritarian ideology" and "a system designed to give some power over others via absentee property ownership, and facilitate the concentration of that power through the concentration of property due to the right of increase and profit."
adrian_b 3y ago
Capitalism appears to have worked optimally around the 1960 to 1990 time interval. After 1990 a consolidation process became more and more obvious and it has accelerated greatly after 2000. The long sequence of mergers and acquisitions has resulted in the fact that most markets have become dominated by quasi-monopolies, which some times resemble more the monopolies that existed in the industries of the countries dominated by communists than the multitude of competing companies that existed in USA or in Western Europe a half of century ago.
- aebtebeten 3y ago
  Before 1990* there was competition; capitalism without competition doesn't seem to slice the pie as well as it did with? * Danke, Gorbi!

082349872349872 3y ago

compare "...And Then There Were None" https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/9555488 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/9555488

pookha 3y ago

I'd love to take a 70 year old Chinese victim that lived through the great-leap-forward and culture revolution and to get their honest perspective on this. They managed to live through starvation and wide-spread Maoist violence to witness the end of capitalism only to see the same bozo's re-introduce capitalism forty years later in the form of crony-capitlism...And if they try to speak about any of what they'd learned to their grand kids they're likely to get hauled off to a gulag while their grand-kids bytedance and chow down on Kentucky Fried Chicken.

bllguo 3y ago
an amusing fantasy. I'd love to see your western biases shatter when you do just that. do you think it's at all hard to find a 70yr old Chinese person?
melagonster 3y ago
actually, this is the description of chairman Xi.

jokethrowaway 3y ago

Because unregulated capitalism is just property and trading. Hard to imagine sentient beings without the concept of property and trading. You have to kill all humans to end capitalism. What everybody hates is crony capitalism where business leverage their government connections to screw everyone - but that's just socialism with extra steps.

giraffe_lady 3y ago
It's a massive error to conflate capitalism and commerce like this. Capitalism describes a specific structure of organizing ownership of productive resources and allocating their surpluses. Capitalism is not the only thing that exists nor is it inevitable. It's not hard to imagine systems with property and trading that use another method of allocation. In fact such systems do exist both in history and currently.
thefaux 3y ago
I don't think capitalism and the concepts of property and trade are synonyms. It is also not clear that historical understandings of property or trade or universal amongst human civilizations and I'd be wary of dismissing other civilizations as having been made up of unsentient beings.
keybored 3y ago
What is water, the fish asked.
int_19h 3y ago
Property and trading existed for most of the history of humanity, but capitalism is a much more recent phenomenon. Capitalism specifically requires private property rights on capital (i.e. means of production) - hence the name. And it requires those rights to be unrestricted in a sense that anyone can freely trade capital, and thus it is possible to amass and concentrate it, thereby creating a class of those who have it distinct from those who do not, which in turn allows the former to collect economic rent from the productive work of the latter.