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I think it's human nature under capitalism. I think before the 1800s there were loads of different societies that valued things like community and mutual suppor

I think it's human nature under capitalism. I think before the 1800s there were loads of different societies that valued things like community and mutual support over "got mine". This is the fundamental assertion of anarchism -- people generally like helping each other and like feeling useful. If basic needs were covered, we'd use most of our time doing things that felt meaningful, and those things would make everyone's lives better.

photonthug 2y ago
I mostly agree but propose another amendment: this is human nature under late-stage capitalism. Capitalism is pretty great in the beginning / middle, and can go on for a very long time in such a way that the interests of corporations, consumers, labor, and governments are all basically aligned. Late-stage is a very different game in all respects though. One risk we are facing now is that when most of the people alive have only seen the perversions of unregulated and unapologetic late-stage capitalism, they will think this is what it always has to look like. The impulse to switch to a polar opposite or burn everything down is ill advised but becomes hard to ignore.
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  So many modern problems can be traced to 1971. [1] That is the year that the US defaulted on our obligations under Bretton Woods effectively ending the system and causing currencies to become completely fiat, enabling governments to effectively print unlimited funny money. This perverts capitalism so hard because you now end up with tens of trillions of dollars being dumped into the economy in horribly inefficient ways and so behaviors that make one likely to get some of this become far more economically relevant than just making the best product. Our current economic system is obviously completely unsustainable at this point and may well end up being one of the shortest lived economic experiments ever. That's particularly ironic because, as you alluded to, for most of everybody alive today this is just how it's always been! [1] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com https://wtfhappenedin1971.com
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > So many modern problems can be traced to 1971. [1] That is the year that the US defaulted on our obligations under Bretton Woods effectively ending the system and causing currencies to become completely fiat, enabling governments to effectively print unlimited funny money. Correlation != causation. Yes, the end of Bretton-Woods certainly played its part, but there are other independent causes for most of the things that can be seen in the graphs - first and foremost, the oil crises of 1973 and later and the impact of the policies of Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher, as well as simple but massive technological progress that made the economical shifts (such as the decline in agriculture and industry as a share of the economy) possible in the first place. Automation and IT in general are the largest drivers of the latter - more efficient and powerful diesel engines made a lot of farm labor all but redundant, and IT enabled constructing and orchestrating ever larger and larger things, all the way from machines to global sized corporations, and the resulting efficiency gains of scale were mostly looted by the rich elites.
    - ANewFormation 2y ago
      There is one straight forward causal mechanism - excessive money printing sends the monetary supply skyrocketing and directly drives inflation. It's not hard to deal with inflation for the wealthy. You will generally have substantial wealth invested in inflation resistant appreciating assets, businesses can pass the inflation on to the customer, and so on. But for labor it's a different story. Not only do you suffer far more from price increases with little in the way of offsetting assets, but inflation allows wages to 'secretly' grow stagnant or even decrease. What I mean is that since e.g. 2020, the CPI has increased by 18%. So if you're not earning at least 18% more, you're more earning less than you did in 2020. Without inflation this doesn't work. Workers' raises would actually increase their real earnings. It's not hard to see how this single issue causally drives much of what happened in 1971 (and beyond.) Notably the excessive money printing began somewhat before 1971 which is what caused the default that eventually happened in 71.
      - camgunz 2y ago
        Everyone agrees inflation is bad; what we don't yet really know is if it's worse than unemployment. The way the existing system works is if inflation starts to rise, the Fed raises the interest rate, hiring slows and people get fired, and this constricts the existing supply of money thus reducing inflation. But if you don't do that, and instead just put up with inflation, people get and keep jobs, so all you then have to do is make sure wage growth meets or exceeds inflation. Politically this ended up not working (no pun intended). People explain this by saying losing a job affects that person whereas inflation affects everybody, but personally I put it down to the right demagoguing inflation as the sign of an incompetent government (it turns out it was transitory and the result of supply shocks--maybe not a good reason to throw millions of people out of work). We'll never know the counterfactual, but the US managed this economic environment better than any of its peers, so honestly I don't know what a good faith criticism would even look like.
- zanellato19 2y ago
  Since the beginning of capitalism involved owning slaves, I find that very hard to believe. This romanticization of early stage capitalism is awful. What is late stage capitalism? Because civil rights and women rights have been pretty recent in the grand scheme of things, so in that sense Capitalism was upheld and had most of its lifetime in a scheme that crushed the majority of its people I find the theory of: > Capitalism is pretty great in the beginning really hard to swallow.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    In the early days of capitalism there was plenty of authentic scarcity for it to work against. Its problems probably weren't any less, but the juice was plausibly worth the squeeze because the alternatives were terrible. Now, most of us are working to maintain artificial scarcities, rather than mitigate authentic ones, and there are a lot more of us. So the a randomly chosen effect of our system is more likely to be negative because it's being chosen in a context that's very far from that long lost age when capitalism seemed necessary. I think that's what makes it late-stage, when it's found to have more side-effect than desired effect. Like a yeast which started turning sugar into alcohol at a prodigious rate but then later the alcohol concentration is toxic to it and more effort is spent trying to filter it out than anything to do with its original purpose.
    - error_logic 2y ago
      Capitalism is still necessary, we just forgot what it took to save capitalism from itself during the great depression and have opened ourselves up to turning into modern Russia.
  - isk517 2y ago
    Not a die hard defender of capitalism by any means but this is a gross over simplification. If you look at all of the alternatives during the early stages of capitalism the vast majority had oppression as a built in feature. It didn't bring about utopia but it did offer the best advantages over the competition, up until the competition all went under.

photonthug 2y ago

I mostly agree but propose another amendment: this is human nature under late-stage capitalism. Capitalism is pretty great in the beginning / middle, and can go on for a very long time in such a way that the interests of corporations, consumers, labor, and governments are all basically aligned. Late-stage is a very different game in all respects though. One risk we are facing now is that when most of the people alive have only seen the perversions of unregulated and unapologetic late-stage capitalism, they will think this is what it always has to look like. The impulse to switch to a polar opposite or burn everything down is ill advised but becomes hard to ignore.

ANewFormation 2y ago
So many modern problems can be traced to 1971. [1] That is the year that the US defaulted on our obligations under Bretton Woods effectively ending the system and causing currencies to become completely fiat, enabling governments to effectively print unlimited funny money. This perverts capitalism so hard because you now end up with tens of trillions of dollars being dumped into the economy in horribly inefficient ways and so behaviors that make one likely to get some of this become far more economically relevant than just making the best product. Our current economic system is obviously completely unsustainable at this point and may well end up being one of the shortest lived economic experiments ever. That's particularly ironic because, as you alluded to, for most of everybody alive today this is just how it's always been! [1] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com https://wtfhappenedin1971.com
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > So many modern problems can be traced to 1971. [1] That is the year that the US defaulted on our obligations under Bretton Woods effectively ending the system and causing currencies to become completely fiat, enabling governments to effectively print unlimited funny money. Correlation != causation. Yes, the end of Bretton-Woods certainly played its part, but there are other independent causes for most of the things that can be seen in the graphs - first and foremost, the oil crises of 1973 and later and the impact of the policies of Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher, as well as simple but massive technological progress that made the economical shifts (such as the decline in agriculture and industry as a share of the economy) possible in the first place. Automation and IT in general are the largest drivers of the latter - more efficient and powerful diesel engines made a lot of farm labor all but redundant, and IT enabled constructing and orchestrating ever larger and larger things, all the way from machines to global sized corporations, and the resulting efficiency gains of scale were mostly looted by the rich elites.
  - ANewFormation 2y ago
    There is one straight forward causal mechanism - excessive money printing sends the monetary supply skyrocketing and directly drives inflation. It's not hard to deal with inflation for the wealthy. You will generally have substantial wealth invested in inflation resistant appreciating assets, businesses can pass the inflation on to the customer, and so on. But for labor it's a different story. Not only do you suffer far more from price increases with little in the way of offsetting assets, but inflation allows wages to 'secretly' grow stagnant or even decrease. What I mean is that since e.g. 2020, the CPI has increased by 18%. So if you're not earning at least 18% more, you're more earning less than you did in 2020. Without inflation this doesn't work. Workers' raises would actually increase their real earnings. It's not hard to see how this single issue causally drives much of what happened in 1971 (and beyond.) Notably the excessive money printing began somewhat before 1971 which is what caused the default that eventually happened in 71.
    - camgunz 2y ago
      Everyone agrees inflation is bad; what we don't yet really know is if it's worse than unemployment. The way the existing system works is if inflation starts to rise, the Fed raises the interest rate, hiring slows and people get fired, and this constricts the existing supply of money thus reducing inflation. But if you don't do that, and instead just put up with inflation, people get and keep jobs, so all you then have to do is make sure wage growth meets or exceeds inflation. Politically this ended up not working (no pun intended). People explain this by saying losing a job affects that person whereas inflation affects everybody, but personally I put it down to the right demagoguing inflation as the sign of an incompetent government (it turns out it was transitory and the result of supply shocks--maybe not a good reason to throw millions of people out of work). We'll never know the counterfactual, but the US managed this economic environment better than any of its peers, so honestly I don't know what a good faith criticism would even look like.
zanellato19 2y ago
Since the beginning of capitalism involved owning slaves, I find that very hard to believe. This romanticization of early stage capitalism is awful. What is late stage capitalism? Because civil rights and women rights have been pretty recent in the grand scheme of things, so in that sense Capitalism was upheld and had most of its lifetime in a scheme that crushed the majority of its people I find the theory of: > Capitalism is pretty great in the beginning really hard to swallow.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  In the early days of capitalism there was plenty of authentic scarcity for it to work against. Its problems probably weren't any less, but the juice was plausibly worth the squeeze because the alternatives were terrible. Now, most of us are working to maintain artificial scarcities, rather than mitigate authentic ones, and there are a lot more of us. So the a randomly chosen effect of our system is more likely to be negative because it's being chosen in a context that's very far from that long lost age when capitalism seemed necessary. I think that's what makes it late-stage, when it's found to have more side-effect than desired effect. Like a yeast which started turning sugar into alcohol at a prodigious rate but then later the alcohol concentration is toxic to it and more effort is spent trying to filter it out than anything to do with its original purpose.
  - error_logic 2y ago
    Capitalism is still necessary, we just forgot what it took to save capitalism from itself during the great depression and have opened ourselves up to turning into modern Russia.
- isk517 2y ago
  Not a die hard defender of capitalism by any means but this is a gross over simplification. If you look at all of the alternatives during the early stages of capitalism the vast majority had oppression as a built in feature. It didn't bring about utopia but it did offer the best advantages over the competition, up until the competition all went under.