At the same time we can maaaaaaaybe start pushing back on all of the "capitalism is not the problem" and "capitalism is the least worst of all available options" memes?
The problem with capitalism is that something like it (concentrated power begetting additional power at the expense of most of the populace) is nearly guaranteed to crop up in a society which doesn't burn resources actively fighting against it. When fishing for alternatives then, you have to consider:
1. What fraction of our resources do we want to burn while eliminating which of the worst parts of capitalistic tendencies?
2. How do we preserve diffuse power distributions in the face of actors who will actively work against that goal?
Not to trivialize it too much, (1) is just a policy decision. Being completely hands-off is probably sub-optimal. Burning 100% of resources fighting fraud and other abuses isn't ideal either. It's a reasonable framing though for comparing strategies. There's no free lunch, so if somebody sells you a governmental structure which eliminates the worst parts of capitalism without _some_ cost, it's likely snake oil.
Point (2) is the harder one. The majority of people wouldn't mind a little extra power and a few extra resources. If that's possible, it's also (usually) possible to create sub-populations which together have much more power than other groups and thus subvert the goals of your anti-capitalist strategy. How do you create a system that's robust against most individual participants (potentially inadvertently) working against it?
So, sure, let's do away with capitalism. What do you replace it with that's both better and won't revert back?
Yes this is the key point imo - power begets power in any system.
However diffuse power distributions aren’t a panacea either imo. As an example, I hold no particular power over the other tenants in my building, and they hold none over me, the building owner has significant power over all of us. It’s easy to imagine a future with no landlord, and the power over the plot of land being diffused among the current tenants. But then I would have some degree of power over my neighbours, and they over me, and all sorts of abuses and nastiness are possible there.
An uncomfortable possibility we should take seriously is that there might not be a perfect distribution of power in human societies. That whether power is concentrated or diffuse, it will be used for good and for ill.
I am not claiming that I know the answer, or that today is just the best that we can do, but I am pretty sceptical that we can wave away these fundamentals, or that we can design or plan societies like this.
This isnt really about using "resources" to fight fraud. None of this was illegal and it was all very profitable - it was encouraged.
This is about us consenting to capital being put at the very heart of society's locus of control, which is what drove this kind of parasitism to be encouraged rather than discouraged.
It is a unique feature of western (especially American) society - something which actually isnt represented in other power centers.
China has "private equity" for instance, but it's not really private - it operates like all financial institutions as an arm of the state (not run by capital) and has no real incentive to destroy healthy and valuable companies for profit.
All of the same human dynamics will be present under socialism or communism or whatever you prefer.
Under capitalism, a boss might try to persuade you to work hard harder than you might otherwise for dubious or illusionary future reward.
Under some form of collectivism, there will still be pressure to attend some sort of goal, even if it is non-financial in nature. That pressure will ultimately come in the form of a leader of some form, and one of the tools they will have to achieve that (possibly collective) goal will be to persuade you to work longer and harder than you might otherwise for some dubious or illusionary future reward. Perhaps this future reward won’t be in money, but that won’t change the underlying dynamic.
You could equally argue that there is no point making murder illegal because "all the same dynamics leading to murder" will still happen. They will. Society exists to either curtail or encourage our instincts for a collective purpose.
This is not about that.
This about an institution being rewarded and operating entirely within the law which takes a valuable asset, systematically disenfranchises the people who made it valuable before parasitically sucking it dry for material gain.
That is a pretty unique capitalist dynamic, actually.
First, we were talking about an outcome – exploitation of workers.
Your claim, if I understand you correctly is that this outcome is inevitable under capitalism, (perhaps solely possible under capitalism?) and then under some other system you prefer, it would no longer happen, or perhaps be impossible.
My contention is the incentive to exploit exists in all socioeconomic systems, even collective ones. This doesn’t mean there’s no better system, or that we should stop caring, or that we should have no laws regarding it. But if correct, it means the arguing that your preferred system cannot or will not have this outcome, is weak and unconvincing.
Instead of engaging directly with the claim, you pivoted to implying that my argument was that we should not have laws against bad things.
Under capitalism:
Both murder and worker exploitation should be illegal.
Both murder and worker exploitation will likely occur to one degree or another.
Under collectivism:
Both murder and worker exploitation should be illegal.
Both murder and worker exploitation will likely occur to one degree or another.
If you want to argue that collectivism is better for other reasons - go nuts! But if your argument is that there will be no power hierarchy, no pressure to achieve goals, and no incentive to exploit then I just don’t think you’re serious.
We werent talking JUST about an outcome, we were talking about a process triggered by private equity that destroys value AND exploits workers and rewards the people who do it.
It's not like there are good options out there. USSR showed what state-controlled socialism looks like, and the picture is not pretty. A most damning example is that it was impossible to leave USSR during the most of its existence, and people had to do crazy things like jump off cruise ship and swim many miles [0] just to get out of country.
If I have a choice between being jailed in the country and having VCs drive some companies into the ground, I'd choose the latter every time.
> USSR showed what state-controlled socialism looks like, and the picture is not pretty. A
The USSR and other Leninist-derived regimes showed what one narrow set of models of authoritarian state “socialism” looks like, sure, and its not pretty just like the pure private capitalism that was generally abandoned netween the early and mid 20th century for the modern mixed economy was not.
OTOH, Leninism and its authoritarian state capitalism (that is, featuring a narrow elite that control society via control of the non-financial means of production, just as the private capitalist class does in private capitalism) is not the only option to to the presently dominant mixed economy that reduces or eliminates the private capitalist elements.
Democratic market-oriented socialisms where the private firms still exist but the non-financial means of production are controlled (either entirely in pure forms, or simply more than in the status quo systems in forms which are still mixed economies but with a different mix) by those working in the firms employing them are possible. In fact, variations along this dimension already exist among modern mixed economies, and the ones further along it are not the limit of how far that can go.
Sweden tried to become more socialist in 1970s-80s, and it did not look pretty. (Then Mr. Palme was shot and killed.)
Venezuela... well, does not look like an enticing example either.
I would say that socialism as a state-imposed regime does not work, same as communism. BTW communism does work in communes of like-minded individuals, be it a bunch of hippies or a bunch of monks. The key is self-selecting people who subscribe to that way of living voluntarily. This can't work for a whole country.
OTOH what the TFA suggests does work, exactly because mission-driven open-source projects / foundations and non-profits attract the right kind of motivated people, while providing little to no incentive for entities seeking pure profit to take over. Debian is one example: it exists for decades in the normal capitalist economy, is going strong, and shows no signs (and no ways) of selling out.
This, to my mind, is the future. Maybe 50 years from now our grandchildren will be appalled by the fact that we kept giving our free labor and free time to for-profit entities which did not have our best interests aligned with theirs.
> The principal architect of the system was British operations research scientist Stafford Beer, and the system embodied his notions of management cybernetics in industrial management. One of its main objectives was to devolve decision-making power within industrial enterprises to their workforce to develop self-regulation of factories.
> Project Cybersyn was ended with Allende's removal and subsequent death during the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. After the coup, Cybersyn was abandoned and the operations room was destroyed.
Yeah, it's always "wrong socialism" when it's built. But the next one (after the next one, after the next one, after the next one) will be the right one and will not murder millions of people, despite the previous attempts doing exactly that. Please go away already, we had enough of suffering caused by ivory-tower theoreticians unable to perceive the reality.
It's important to remember that when the British Empire triggered a famine in Ireland justifying it using the free market, it had nothing do with capitalism.
But when Stalin murders millions with a famine, it's all communism's fault.
This is rightthink, and belief in it is the model for being a good little citizen. Wrongthink would be to consider both of these crimes to be separate from the economic system which they were committed under.
I know a number of places where you were rewarded for "rightthink" and could be imprisoned or murdered for "wrongthink". Most of them had been countries having "People's Democratic" or "Socialist" or something in that vein in their names. I'm sure that's also a pure coincidence having nothing to do with those systems. Though, to be fair, modern followers of those doctrines made a serious headway to implementing the same approach in countries which don't have such words in their names and even considered "capitalist", so I assume in a short while you'd have another excellent argument - that freedom of speech also wasn't particularly suppressed by totalitarian (which is, all of them) socialist governments, it's just something totally separate. Which always happens under socialism, but that's just a coincidence, and it was a wrong socialism anyway, under the right one it won't happen.
How about good ol' morals? We don't need to get rid of capitalism, but how about getting the proportionality back on track? Does a single person need to make billions and billions of money? Should I, as a CEO, earn millions of dollars while my workforce can barely survive with one job?
I don’t think so. This is what needs to be fixed on a global scale.
> How about good ol' morals? We don't need to get rid of capitalism,
Yes we do. Capitalism, even at the somewhat attenuated level it exists in the modern mixed economy compared to the original system of the same name, creates too strong of a reward system for immoral behavior to correct the moral problems while preserving the system.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” is a systemic, not isolated individual, problem with capitalism.
That's true to an extent but I think that problem increases as that salary (or, more likely, capital gain) increases. So just limiting total wealth increases would likely reduce the temptation to sell out.
It depends. Is your theory of change to push a welfare state, gradually increase the welfare, raise taxes to redistribute wealth, achieve UBI, fully fund public healthcare, housing, food, water?
Or is it that any day now workers are going to reach unanimous consensus and go on a national strike, siezing power from the owners of capital? Or maybe a violent revolution in which the bourgeoisie and class traitors get guillotineed alongside the capitalist oppressors?
Or is it too soon already?