5 ms·
Without capitalism, we'd be writing letters to each other.
by javert 13y ago
Without capitalism, we'd be writing letters to each other.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago.. about how happy we are, what with the eradication of poverty, waste and hunger!?
- kbolino 13y agoThe mistake that Marx, like you, made was in thinking that inequality was a product of capitalism, when in fact inequality is the inherent state of mankind, and moreover of all living things.
- dkuntz2 13y agoI don't think it was a mistake, and I don't think it's a static state. I believe that a group of people could come together and form a community founded on equality. The problem, to me, is more of a logistics problem, because once you get more than ~100 people in an organization, you start losing the immediate connection with them, which means you care less about their well being, because you don't know them. The issue is managing people, and meaningfully punishing ne'er-do-wells.
- kbolino 13y agoWhat you are essentially saying is that people can create a community with the intent of making everyone equal, but they will invariably fail because people are, in fact, not equal. Liberalism and Leninism are two consequences of this axiom. The former tries to provide the weaker but more feasible guarantee of equality of opportunity. The latter tries to make people believe they are equal by getting them to ignore inequality.
- dkuntz2 13y agoNo, because communities are small scale. History has proven that communities can exist in such a state. Societies need to have intent behind them. No society has ever existed without intent behind it. Leninism worked, we know for a fact that it worked, at least until Stalin took over and made it something worse that ultimately didn't work.
- kbolino 13y agoHistory has proven no such thing. Every community has its leaders, and those leaders enjoy a privileged position. Indeed, Leninism is quite successful: at establishing a party of elites, whose job it is to convince everybody else that they're equal and to teach them to ignore the obvious contradictions. I did not say that "society [should] exist[] without intent behind it"; I said that intentions don't matter if the results contradict them.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago>thinking that inequality was a product of capitalism // I don't think that [nor am I inclined to think did Marx]. I think capitalism exacerbates it drastically to a markedly negative effect (though not so negative as say malevolent dictatorship). Moreover I don't perceive inequality as detrimental, it's a truism that none are equal after all. However I do certainly have communist beliefs about the best forms for society to adopt.
- kbolino 13y agoAnd what of those who dissent to your "best form for society to adopt"? It takes intelligent and productive people (as in, it takes intelligent people, productive people, and people who are both) to make such a society work. When you provide no incentives for intelligence or productivity, because those incentives create inequality, then such people will complain (upsetting the balance), leave (gutting the society), sabotage (undermining the society), or simply stop caring (grinding the society to a halt). What then?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- antihero 13y agoThe problem is that capitalism only seeks to enhance the positive feedback system of inequality - having money gives you more power to make more money and thus have more power. Being poor gives you less power to make money and thus it is much harder to become richer.
- kbolino 13y agoThe problem with redistribution (aside from its inherent immorality as theft backed by force) is that you simply shift power from the people who had wealth to the people who are doing the redistributing. At no point do the vast majority of people ever become more powerful. In the new system, power is obtained by currying the favor of party officials. Even contrasted against the most egregious Marxist caricature of capitalism, how is this any better?
- simonh 13y agoI don't know about eradication but the millenium goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015 was achieved in 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals#Progress http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals#Pr...
- fhd2 13y agoFrankly, if the internet had been driven by the desire to make profit in the early days, we wouldn't have TCP/IP, the web, email or any other open protocol for that matter.
- wmf 13y agoI don't know why fhd2 was downvoted. Hippies created BSD and TCP/IP; suits created Compuserve and X.whatever.
- minor_nitwit 13y agoYes, but it wasn't until the internet was opened up for commerce that it became widely adopted.
- vacri 13y agoYes, but without the open nature of network protocols, it would not have been able to have become widely adopted.
- lmm 13y agoYeah, 'cause ARPA was definitely a capitalist agency.
- marshray 13y agoYou mean a capitalist aggressor agency, according to the Soviets.
- antihero 13y agoThis is such a load of nonsense. Did Curie, Feynman, Einstein, Turing, Berners-Lee, and the inventors/scientists behind 99% of human history do it for the money? No. Of course not. How absurd and insulting to cheapen the wonders of their invention and minds with the banality of money. In fact, imagine how far we'd be if great minds weren't restrained by having to pay rent, or work around mainstream stupidity, or having to use cheap equipment, or facing patents and other laws created to protect the captalists. Just because we've never seen a working communist country, it doesn't mean it could never work - to think otherwise would be luddite and ignorant.