I didn't watch all of it, too long, but I did try to get a gist and seeked out stuff that I think is missing in the argument. It was better than I expected, but: He seems to attribute the 50s...
I didn't watch all of it, too long, but I did try to get a gist and seeked out stuff that I think is missing in the argument. It was better than I expected, but:
He seems to attribute the 50s economic boom solely to economic policies, neglecting the once in a lifetime economic circumstances after the end of WW2, together with favorable demographics and other external effects, which together likely affected the 50s more than any economic policies could. This is mentioned in the notes in the video description, but that's not enough - he's building a thesis while omitting possibly the biggest counter-argument of one of its parts.
And unless I missed something, he fails to do the most basic sanity check for many of his interpretations of economic and social changes: compare how Europe was doing the whole time. It's not only the post-WW2 situation, different parts of Europe were doing things quite differently from the US - western Europe always had a more regulated economy and the regulation usually kept increasing, UK pre-Thatcher was ricidulously overregulated in some areas with a deregulation shock afterwards, eastern Europe brought over many economic regulations even after getting rid of communism and soviet influence etc.
And yet some of the things that are happening in the US have been happening in many of those countries as well. And others were not. Unless you ask how well the generalization that you made from observations in the US fits in other contexts, you cannot know how wrong some parts of it may be.
I think the main thesis of this video is that a capitalist system, once captured by capital, makes life worse for everyone. I don't think that's controversial to virtually anyone. What I don't...
I think the main thesis of this video is that a capitalist system, once captured by capital, makes life worse for everyone. I don't think that's controversial to virtually anyone.
What I don't understand from that thesis is how we get to the title. That is, how is that the death of American capitalism?
It seems just as likely that the situation can continue indefinitely, or at least a few more generations. Things can just be shitty for the average person without the entire system collapsing and being replaced by something else.
To take an example from the video, fuedalism existed in strong showing in Europe from roughly the 7th century until the 15th century until it gradually completed the transformation into capitalism by the 17th century.
For roughly that entire 800 year history, life as the average person (a serf) was terrible by modern standards. Life being terrible for serfs isn't what caused the emergence of capitalism though, new technology is.
So then why would things becoming terrible for the average person under capitalism mean it's end? The stated thesis doesn't follow from the videos presented thesis. As far as I estimate, there's nothing stopping giant corporations from continuing to use sophisticated methods to extract as much possible value from each worker and consumer as possible, and doing so indefinitely until resources are depleted.
The idea that capitalism will eventually collapse under it's own weight and be replaced by something better is pretty much a core tenant of Marxism. The issue I have with that idea is the same issue I have when this video presents it.
Namely: why? Because we want it to? Because we wish that was the case? The communist manifesto never answers this question satisfactorily, and the same goes from the video here.
It seems like capitalism won’t end ever. Or at least, the drive to compete and control others in a greedy and harmful way. And yes it will be altered by technology in ways that are hard to predict...
It seems like capitalism won’t end ever. Or at least, the drive to compete and control others in a greedy and harmful way. And yes it will be altered by technology in ways that are hard to predict other than the fruits of labor won’t be distributed fairly.
James Burke, who had very famous shows since 1978 like “Connection” and “The Day the Universe Changed” has a recent update from last year. The second episode of that new series is The end of scarcity. Presumably we’ll all have 3d printers and we’ll be able to sit at home with all our needs met and we won’t need money anymore.
Yeah I’m sorry Mr James Burke but that is the most incredibly naive view of the world possible. Because we are already virtually in a post scarcity world now (at least with respect to food and probably poverty) and still have poverty and oligarchs and wars and all that because a certain number of people are greedy and immoral and sociopaths and must hoard and control at all costs.
I think there is a race by oligarchs to make workers unnecessary through various tech. Also armies. So it seems easy to believe that most people will be left to die, or exterminated Terminator-style. But we won’t need Skynet for that, we’ll just have a few oligarchs controlling that. Maybe Skynet would be better.
I think your comparison to feudalism is apt. Feudalism was clearly fairly stable as an economic system; it persisted over at least a dozen generations if not more. I think the difference between...
I think your comparison to feudalism is apt. Feudalism was clearly fairly stable as an economic system; it persisted over at least a dozen generations if not more.
I think the difference between feudalism and capitalism is that feudalism was almost entirely a function of force. Lords controlled the land by paying armies with the rewards of that land (at least in my simplified understanding). States maintained power if the kings politically aligned themselves with enough lords.
Our modern global political system is not. Wealthy people do not pay private armies. Money is more efficient than force. States generally have a monopoly on violence, and so states have a disproportionate level of power. The courts resolve disputes because of that monopoly on violence (feudalist courts are more comparable to modern arbitrators).
Our modern political system is also not necessarily capitalist. The USSR had and the CCP has substantially more control over the allocation of resources than any private oligarchs. Legal ownership of companies (the definition of capitalism) is useful, but it’s just a legal concept and not enforced unless the state wants it to.
Why? Because we want it to?
I do not think capitalism is nearly as stable as something like feudalism because of the abstraction of force into the legal system. I also think historians would probably argue feudalism was not as stable as you describe, but I’m not educated enough to make that argument.
At the end of the day, power structures are just methods of human self-organization. Viewed through the lens of evolution, all we can really claim is that our current system is the most stable we have right now, but if a better system emerges, it will quickly outcompete other systems. We constantly live through this; the Cold War was the competition of the USSR and US, and now we’re likely seeing a transition into a new competition, with (at least) China and the US playing major roles.
It really depends on what you mean by "capitalism". There is no consistent answer. So to avoid using the word which no one agrees on, I'll talk about systems where the majority of resource...
It really depends on what you mean by "capitalism". There is no consistent answer. So to avoid using the word which no one agrees on, I'll talk about systems where the majority of resource allocations occurs by market and to which private ownership is mostly respected.
I think that can and will continue, and has in the past. It's common when there is sufficient infrastructure and power consolidation such that a government can enforce rules of law. In the context of European feudalism, you saw it before and after.
While it would be highly anachronistic to call the economies of rome the "C" word, you had systems where a fairly large number of wealthy citizens had rights to private ownership, and where markets did much of economic planning (not all, certainly). You had magnates like Crassus, you even had economic bubbles like the land crisis of 33 AD, or smaller economic bubbles around, say, the overproduction of wine after rampant market speculation.
And saw it afterwards, as well, as feudal governments became authoritarian societies, when monarchies consolidated power and there was room for excess and room for the merchant class to grow. It's even more visible in Japan, where the merchant class, ostensibly at quite literally the bottom of the social pyramid - below peasants, even - became arguably the most powerful as Japan had centuries of peace.
History has shown that humans like owning things and they like trading things. I think that will continue.
You’re absolutely right: nobody can agree on what capitalism means. My (loose) definition is one where one can own and freely trade shares in corporations. (I think) Any economic structure with...
You’re absolutely right: nobody can agree on what capitalism means. My (loose) definition is one where one can own and freely trade shares in corporations. (I think) Any economic structure with that capability approximately reduces to the current global economic structure, and any structure without it seems meaningfully different.
Hopefully, my perspective makes sense with that context. I certainly believe market economics and ownership are broader than just capitalism, has persisted throughout history, and will persist throughout history.
That’s not a definition I’ve ever heard before. The one I was taught in school was “Capitalism is a system where profits are reinvested into enterprise to prioritize growth”. The one leftists use...
That’s not a definition I’ve ever heard before. The one I was taught in school was “Capitalism is a system where profits are reinvested into enterprise to prioritize growth”. The one leftists use is “Capitalism is a system where there is an ownership class and a working class. The workers are paid less than their labor is worth and the owners use their outsized share to maintain the system.”
Personally, the definition I'd use is roughly what Wikipedia's first two lines are: That's four wildly different "definitions" of capitalism in 3 posts (although, the "leftist" one is laughably...
Personally, the definition I'd use is roughly what Wikipedia's first two lines are:
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. It is characterized by private property, capital accumulation, competitive markets, commodification, wage labor, and an emphasis on innovation and economic growth.
That's four wildly different "definitions" of capitalism in 3 posts (although, the "leftist" one is laughably loaded), which is why I think it's beyond pointless to talk about "capitalism" in the abstract. It just causes people to talk over each other, while thinking that they're talking about the same thing.
The funny thing is that I consider the markets the least defining aspect of capitalism. Simply because all markets trend toward monopolistic collapse unless stopped by regulation. That tells me...
The funny thing is that I consider the markets the least defining aspect of capitalism.
Simply because all markets trend toward monopolistic collapse unless stopped by regulation. That tells me that it is the composition of the rest that defines capitalism.
I personally stick to the definition I learned in school. I think we need to make major changes, and giving capitalism a definition that demonizes it makes it harder to implement those changes....
I personally stick to the definition I learned in school. I think we need to make major changes, and giving capitalism a definition that demonizes it makes it harder to implement those changes. This way we can talk about socialism without it being an opposition to capitalism. It’s rather an evolution. We simply move from reinvestment into enterprise by small groups of owners to reinvestment from the workers themselves.
I'm not really sure how you would characterize that wikipedia definition as "wildly different" from the definitely tea learned in school. They barely even differ. Even the "loaded" Marxist...
I'm not really sure how you would characterize that wikipedia definition as "wildly different" from the definitely tea learned in school. They barely even differ. Even the "loaded" Marxist definition pretty clearly agrees with that wikipedia quote that capitalism is primarily characterized by private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit in order to accumulate capital -- even if you don't agree with the negative way this is framed by Marxist theory, the things it describes are all in your wikipedia quote.
While this does a surprisingly good job of boiling down the basics of the Marxist definition of capitalism into a short and simple definition, I think I would re-word the end to say "the owners...
The one leftists use is “Capitalism is a system where there is an ownership class and a working class. The workers are paid less than their labor is worth and the owners use their outsized share to maintain the system.”
While this does a surprisingly good job of boiling down the basics of the Marxist definition of capitalism into a short and simple definition, I think I would re-word the end to say "the owners take the surplus value of the workers' labor and use it to accumulate capital". This is both a pretty important part of the Marxist conception of capitalism and the part that corresponds directly to the definition you were taught in school -- "profit" consists of this surplus value and reinvesting it constitutes accumulation of capital.
It's also important to note that wage labor being how the ownership class extract surplus value from the working class is an important component. Imo this is captured by the "workers are paid less than their labor is worth" portion of your definition, but the working class as a class of free laborers who work for wages is one of the most obvious ways capitalism differs from the earlier feudalist system.
And even in a socialist system, the surplus value is used to further build capital...it's just that the capital is collectively owned and thus is for a public benefit rather than for the further...
And even in a socialist system, the surplus value is used to further build capital...it's just that the capital is collectively owned and thus is for a public benefit rather than for the further enrichment of an individual.
That's why co-operatives where the workers own the means are a compatible path to a communist economy.
It's an interesting watch, but I'm not really sure what to do with this information? I also found it funny that at the end he pitches essentially two subscription services. The video is basically...
It's an interesting watch, but I'm not really sure what to do with this information? I also found it funny that at the end he pitches essentially two subscription services. The video is basically about digital sharecropping - and offering his own version at the end made me laugh.
I've been thinking for years that we're past the point of late-stage capitalism and accelerating rapidly into end-stage. This is definitely a worthwhile watch for those who can spare ~40 minutes.
I've been thinking for years that we're past the point of late-stage capitalism and accelerating rapidly into end-stage. This is definitely a worthwhile watch for those who can spare ~40 minutes.
Well "Late Capitalism" was coined by a Marxist in 1928 to describe the emerging systems. Marxist economists are dismissed as heterodox for a reason. While Marx made contributions to economics in...
Well "Late Capitalism" was coined by a Marxist in 1928 to describe the emerging systems. Marxist economists are dismissed as heterodox for a reason. While Marx made contributions to economics in his day, we've learned a lot more in the 100+ years since Das Kapital was published.
I didn't watch all of it, too long, but I did try to get a gist and seeked out stuff that I think is missing in the argument. It was better than I expected, but:
He seems to attribute the 50s economic boom solely to economic policies, neglecting the once in a lifetime economic circumstances after the end of WW2, together with favorable demographics and other external effects, which together likely affected the 50s more than any economic policies could. This is mentioned in the notes in the video description, but that's not enough - he's building a thesis while omitting possibly the biggest counter-argument of one of its parts.
And unless I missed something, he fails to do the most basic sanity check for many of his interpretations of economic and social changes: compare how Europe was doing the whole time. It's not only the post-WW2 situation, different parts of Europe were doing things quite differently from the US - western Europe always had a more regulated economy and the regulation usually kept increasing, UK pre-Thatcher was ricidulously overregulated in some areas with a deregulation shock afterwards, eastern Europe brought over many economic regulations even after getting rid of communism and soviet influence etc.
And yet some of the things that are happening in the US have been happening in many of those countries as well. And others were not. Unless you ask how well the generalization that you made from observations in the US fits in other contexts, you cannot know how wrong some parts of it may be.
I think the main thesis of this video is that a capitalist system, once captured by capital, makes life worse for everyone. I don't think that's controversial to virtually anyone.
What I don't understand from that thesis is how we get to the title. That is, how is that the death of American capitalism?
It seems just as likely that the situation can continue indefinitely, or at least a few more generations. Things can just be shitty for the average person without the entire system collapsing and being replaced by something else.
To take an example from the video, fuedalism existed in strong showing in Europe from roughly the 7th century until the 15th century until it gradually completed the transformation into capitalism by the 17th century.
For roughly that entire 800 year history, life as the average person (a serf) was terrible by modern standards. Life being terrible for serfs isn't what caused the emergence of capitalism though, new technology is.
So then why would things becoming terrible for the average person under capitalism mean it's end? The stated thesis doesn't follow from the videos presented thesis. As far as I estimate, there's nothing stopping giant corporations from continuing to use sophisticated methods to extract as much possible value from each worker and consumer as possible, and doing so indefinitely until resources are depleted.
The idea that capitalism will eventually collapse under it's own weight and be replaced by something better is pretty much a core tenant of Marxism. The issue I have with that idea is the same issue I have when this video presents it.
Namely: why? Because we want it to? Because we wish that was the case? The communist manifesto never answers this question satisfactorily, and the same goes from the video here.
It seems like capitalism won’t end ever. Or at least, the drive to compete and control others in a greedy and harmful way. And yes it will be altered by technology in ways that are hard to predict other than the fruits of labor won’t be distributed fairly.
James Burke, who had very famous shows since 1978 like “Connection” and “The Day the Universe Changed” has a recent update from last year. The second episode of that new series is The end of scarcity. Presumably we’ll all have 3d printers and we’ll be able to sit at home with all our needs met and we won’t need money anymore.
Yeah I’m sorry Mr James Burke but that is the most incredibly naive view of the world possible. Because we are already virtually in a post scarcity world now (at least with respect to food and probably poverty) and still have poverty and oligarchs and wars and all that because a certain number of people are greedy and immoral and sociopaths and must hoard and control at all costs.
I think there is a race by oligarchs to make workers unnecessary through various tech. Also armies. So it seems easy to believe that most people will be left to die, or exterminated Terminator-style. But we won’t need Skynet for that, we’ll just have a few oligarchs controlling that. Maybe Skynet would be better.
I think your comparison to feudalism is apt. Feudalism was clearly fairly stable as an economic system; it persisted over at least a dozen generations if not more.
I think the difference between feudalism and capitalism is that feudalism was almost entirely a function of force. Lords controlled the land by paying armies with the rewards of that land (at least in my simplified understanding). States maintained power if the kings politically aligned themselves with enough lords.
Our modern global political system is not. Wealthy people do not pay private armies. Money is more efficient than force. States generally have a monopoly on violence, and so states have a disproportionate level of power. The courts resolve disputes because of that monopoly on violence (feudalist courts are more comparable to modern arbitrators).
Our modern political system is also not necessarily capitalist. The USSR had and the CCP has substantially more control over the allocation of resources than any private oligarchs. Legal ownership of companies (the definition of capitalism) is useful, but it’s just a legal concept and not enforced unless the state wants it to.
I do not think capitalism is nearly as stable as something like feudalism because of the abstraction of force into the legal system. I also think historians would probably argue feudalism was not as stable as you describe, but I’m not educated enough to make that argument.
At the end of the day, power structures are just methods of human self-organization. Viewed through the lens of evolution, all we can really claim is that our current system is the most stable we have right now, but if a better system emerges, it will quickly outcompete other systems. We constantly live through this; the Cold War was the competition of the USSR and US, and now we’re likely seeing a transition into a new competition, with (at least) China and the US playing major roles.
It really depends on what you mean by "capitalism". There is no consistent answer. So to avoid using the word which no one agrees on, I'll talk about systems where the majority of resource allocations occurs by market and to which private ownership is mostly respected.
I think that can and will continue, and has in the past. It's common when there is sufficient infrastructure and power consolidation such that a government can enforce rules of law. In the context of European feudalism, you saw it before and after.
While it would be highly anachronistic to call the economies of rome the "C" word, you had systems where a fairly large number of wealthy citizens had rights to private ownership, and where markets did much of economic planning (not all, certainly). You had magnates like Crassus, you even had economic bubbles like the land crisis of 33 AD, or smaller economic bubbles around, say, the overproduction of wine after rampant market speculation.
And saw it afterwards, as well, as feudal governments became authoritarian societies, when monarchies consolidated power and there was room for excess and room for the merchant class to grow. It's even more visible in Japan, where the merchant class, ostensibly at quite literally the bottom of the social pyramid - below peasants, even - became arguably the most powerful as Japan had centuries of peace.
History has shown that humans like owning things and they like trading things. I think that will continue.
You’re absolutely right: nobody can agree on what capitalism means. My (loose) definition is one where one can own and freely trade shares in corporations. (I think) Any economic structure with that capability approximately reduces to the current global economic structure, and any structure without it seems meaningfully different.
Hopefully, my perspective makes sense with that context. I certainly believe market economics and ownership are broader than just capitalism, has persisted throughout history, and will persist throughout history.
That’s not a definition I’ve ever heard before. The one I was taught in school was “Capitalism is a system where profits are reinvested into enterprise to prioritize growth”. The one leftists use is “Capitalism is a system where there is an ownership class and a working class. The workers are paid less than their labor is worth and the owners use their outsized share to maintain the system.”
Personally, the definition I'd use is roughly what Wikipedia's first two lines are:
That's four wildly different "definitions" of capitalism in 3 posts (although, the "leftist" one is laughably loaded), which is why I think it's beyond pointless to talk about "capitalism" in the abstract. It just causes people to talk over each other, while thinking that they're talking about the same thing.
The funny thing is that I consider the markets the least defining aspect of capitalism.
Simply because all markets trend toward monopolistic collapse unless stopped by regulation. That tells me that it is the composition of the rest that defines capitalism.
I personally stick to the definition I learned in school. I think we need to make major changes, and giving capitalism a definition that demonizes it makes it harder to implement those changes. This way we can talk about socialism without it being an opposition to capitalism. It’s rather an evolution. We simply move from reinvestment into enterprise by small groups of owners to reinvestment from the workers themselves.
I'm not really sure how you would characterize that wikipedia definition as "wildly different" from the definitely tea learned in school. They barely even differ. Even the "loaded" Marxist definition pretty clearly agrees with that wikipedia quote that capitalism is primarily characterized by private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit in order to accumulate capital -- even if you don't agree with the negative way this is framed by Marxist theory, the things it describes are all in your wikipedia quote.
While this does a surprisingly good job of boiling down the basics of the Marxist definition of capitalism into a short and simple definition, I think I would re-word the end to say "the owners take the surplus value of the workers' labor and use it to accumulate capital". This is both a pretty important part of the Marxist conception of capitalism and the part that corresponds directly to the definition you were taught in school -- "profit" consists of this surplus value and reinvesting it constitutes accumulation of capital.
It's also important to note that wage labor being how the ownership class extract surplus value from the working class is an important component. Imo this is captured by the "workers are paid less than their labor is worth" portion of your definition, but the working class as a class of free laborers who work for wages is one of the most obvious ways capitalism differs from the earlier feudalist system.
And even in a socialist system, the surplus value is used to further build capital...it's just that the capital is collectively owned and thus is for a public benefit rather than for the further enrichment of an individual.
That's why co-operatives where the workers own the means are a compatible path to a communist economy.
It's an interesting watch, but I'm not really sure what to do with this information? I also found it funny that at the end he pitches essentially two subscription services. The video is basically about digital sharecropping - and offering his own version at the end made me laugh.
I've been thinking for years that we're past the point of late-stage capitalism and accelerating rapidly into end-stage. This is definitely a worthwhile watch for those who can spare ~40 minutes.
Well "Late Capitalism" was coined by a Marxist in 1928 to describe the emerging systems. Marxist economists are dismissed as heterodox for a reason. While Marx made contributions to economics in his day, we've learned a lot more in the 100+ years since Das Kapital was published.