Unpopular opinion: Capitalism is a better ideology than socialism or communism because greed is a more tolerable emotion than fear/envy
I'm someone who typically leans on the left of center on political spectrum but today, I realized something intrinsic to human nature and its emotions that made me consider shifting my compass towards right of center (capitalism).
The core thought process here is asking yourself this fundamental question of which human emotion or tendency gives rise to these ideologies.
Capitalism is primarily driven by human greed, be it the greed to put tasty food on your table or better your living standard by getting a new equipment or acquire more stocks in some limited company. Greed for more resources is the motivation here.
On the other hand, the Communist and Socialist ideologies are primarily driven by much darker emotions of fear and envy. The envy is that the "rich capitalist" has a lot more resources than I have, and/or the fear is that the wealth inequality may increase even more due to inflation and my resources will naturally decline over the due course of time.
Despite the world being an unfair place and such fears even having some validation in economic data, I want to still insist that even though both emotions are roughly in the same realm of darkness (and beneath the realm of positive spiritual emotions like love and compassion), greed is way more preferable than fear/envy.
We can understand this with the help of an often used analogy of Would you rather your Foe be an X or Y?:
If you're lost in a forest, would you rather be chased by a Lion or a Cheetah?
I remember reading this anecdote or puzzle many years ago somewhere. Most people would answer Cheetah here as it would seem a less ferocious animal than Lion. However, when you consider that Cheetah can climb trees while Lions can't, you might reconsider that answer as you might get lucky if there is a tree around which you can use to climb and save yourself. However, what really makes Cheetah more ferocious is that it kills just for survival. Cheetah doesn't care if it's hungry or not, it sees you as a threat to be eliminated just due to some innate tendency (fear?). On the other hand, a Lion is more likely to kill you only if it's hungry (greed for meals?).
Would you rather your foe be a ruthless capitalist or a ruthless communist?
A ruthless capitalist is the Lion in above example. They might come after you but only if the cost-benefit analysis of coming after you makes sense and they materially gain something like money, wealth, data, etc. But a ruthless communist, on the other hand, would come after you regardless and blinded by the ideology just because you own more resources (or fall in a higher income strata than them). A ruthless communist will always try to shame you while reminding you of your "privileges" regardless of who you are because their ideology is powered by fear.
If we talk about religious ideologies like Christian Supremacy, Zionism, Islamist, Hindutva, etc, they also roughly fall in this same category as Communist/Socialist, they're also primarily driven by fear. As you climb up the wealth ladder, the fear of blaspheming your religious doctrine declines and the fear of losing the already acquired wealth increases - which is very much a positive fear because this fear doesn't harm anyone, it merely seeks to preserve and protect.
We know there is massive wealth inequality in this world, it isn't just or fair in any manner. But the way towards betterment is using the path of higher emotions like love, compassion and even positive greed and not the darker emotions of fear and envy. Wouldn't you agree?
I reject the notion that wanting others to have the same as I have is based in fear and envy instead of sympathy, empathy, and kindness.
It can work in text book but it doesn't work that way in practice. I can cite you several communists like Che, Fidel Castro, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, etc. who caused death to several blinded by fear. Can you cite even one communist who was successful with empathy and kindness?
On the contrary! While it’s a common meme to just say “those weren’t socialism”, that is the case, to some degree. Most of these regimes weren’t driven by the core goal–economic democracy–but rather conquest, war and (funnily enough) greed.
Consider an implementation of socialist policy in a progressive country like Finland. A universal basic income (we can’t abandon currency because of the international community), healthcare and housing for all, an equitable society that encourages artistic pursuits and volunteering– it could work. Most studies on pilot projects with these goals yield positive results because especially in the modern age, the societal consciousness (at least in Europe) has most definitely shifted towards “we should make sure no one needs to suffer unnecessarily”, which certainly wasn’t a concern of Mao’s or Pol Pot’s.
I don’t think most people realise that you don’t even have to change much to arrive at a socialist society. Yes, currency would still exist, as would competition, the market economy, everything we know and (partially) love about capitalism, but it wouldn’t be our primary concern anymore. Everyone’s provided for on a base level, and everyone’s encouraged to help one another. Would this mean high taxation? Sure, but I’d sleep soundly knowing my income is helping those that would help me in a heartbeat if I ever was in a bind.
I think we're all right to be very skeptical of basic income experiments unless the goal really is:
There have to be extremely strong incentives for everyone to work in ways that produce the resources and goods society needs. There has to be a large economic downside to just following your dream, unless that dream clearly provides benefits to society.
The standard of living and resources demanded to not be considered "poor" in the West have hugely expanded over the last 80 years. People need to produce values.
The huge flaws of these basic income experiments are that they cannot be designed in ways to:
What is this "base level" that we can sustain?
I'd go so far as to say that some countries do have universal basic incomes today. Like the Scandinavian countries.
Norway and Denmark are reckoning with a lack of workers in the health sector because no-one wants to do those jobs where they're needed.
Sweden is reckoning with issues of unemployment being several times the rate in foreign-born adults than Sweden-born adults. That's closely tied to a right to getting what you need. Issues of integration and immigration follow.
Norway struggles with lower participation of young people in the labor force as more and more people get permanent disability benefits at an early age (around 35k USD a year). The whole economy is struggling with much higher inflation and a weaker economy than the rest of Europe, despite gigantean oil and gas gains with high prices the last couple of years. Unemployment is very low, and a lot of places not getting people to do jobs is the issue.
With aging populations, we need people to work. Not just work, but to work specifically with taking care of the elderly. That's a matter of dignity, helping one-another and seeing the reality of the future for what it is.
People aren't lining up to do these jobs. We're headed for a future where fewer people can follow their dreams full time, not more. That's a demographic reality based on the number of elderly per the number of working-age persons.
Unless we just don't give old people the care they need to live dignified lives.
I believe the direct opposite is true to what's being said in the comment above.
These expectations manifest in part as fewer people finding partners (because of demands, time and self-realization. They manifest in fewer of the smaller number of couples choosing to have children, especially more than one child.
There are serious, serious limits to what we can get out of universal basic income. Those limits lie in the area of "social security net for all".
In many places that's a far cry from today. But in other places these rights of universal standards of living for all have been more than fulfilled. Other systems still need to deal with issues like homelessness, mental health and others who end up needing more help despite having the safety-net there.
I don't think I'm qualified enough to talk about your other points, but when it comes to the "who will do the dirty work" question, studies have shown that the opposite is the case. When a UBI is enacted, unemployment counterintuitively goes down, and no evidence suggests that the "dirty work" is not getting done. After all, the incentive to work is still there, because suddenly your labour becomes a lot more valuable if it's on top of a base income, rather than the sole source. It's a bonus, and you're encouraged to work more and harder to make your entire income–basic and laboured–better.
Again, I don't trust the studies for the reasons above.
I live in Scandinavia, an where there is practically no unemployment (at least in Denmark and Norway), where I'd argue we (at least in Norway) in practice have universal basic income (at a reasonable base threshold), and where we do have serious issues with shortfall of labor, especially in public services like health care, child care/schooling.
The people are demonstrably sitting at home, not working and not registering as being underemployed as the labor force participation rate is around 66% (a clear declining trend, as there's been no culture of stay-at-home parenting for a couple generations).
That is because they'd rather do other things with their time than work.
Why is the problem automatically an issue of people being lazy or unwilling to work? Maybe the issue is that society has become overdependent on "make money, or you'll die" as an incentive to ensure people are willing to put up with shitty work conditions. Once "survival" is met, people are less willing to endure abuses. Rather than bemoan people not working, we should focus on why people find those jobs unfulfilling or not worth the extra money.
It's not an issue of people being lazy. I'm certainly not arguing they're lazy. They have other things they'd rather do with their time than work. That's completely rational.
If you had all your basic needs met, what kinds of behaviors are most giving in the short term? What do people end up doing in their free time today? Do they do self-realizing things or do they scroll on social media feeds, watch junk etc?
If you don't need to work. Why would you choose to contribute to society when you could selfishly do things that are fun, spend time with family, travel and other parts of a balanced life?
Why in the world would there be an expectation that people wouldn't spend time on their hobbies, volunteer on their pet projects and all sorts of other great things? But these aren't the things that society necessarily needs to get done, like we need people to wash old people who can't do it themselves, and all sorts of other jobs that are meaningful, sure, but that too few would willingly do if they could choose otherwise.
What do retired people do with their time? Why would we expect those who aren't retired, but are taken care of the same way to choose differently than them? How many retired people choose to stay with the grind?
The entire premise here that people choosing not to work is because jobs are unfulfilling or people are "lazy" doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
The reality is that we get paid to work because we're doing things people otherwise wouldn't. Only a small minority get paid for doing things they'd otherwise do, where the money doesn't matter but is purely a bonus. I'm in that position. It's a tremendous blessing.
In mainstream views of our human needs, self-realization, self-actualization and so on are only things we deal with after our other basic needs are met. How many people happen to have needs for self-realization that match the needs of society?
There's absolutely no reason to expect the needs and people's wants match.
Just on this point.
Social media feeds exist to make a profit in a certain way.
If we lived in a society where people had enough to live and thrive, social media would not be what it is today.
The need to make addictive stuff on social media, the nature of social media itself, preys on the desire to "succeed".
It is wrong to assume that in a totally different society with different values, things would be the same only in specific situations.
We have a culture that is encouraged by the system we live in. Your wants are manufactured.
Most people do what they do because it is what they are teached.
If you talk to any Cuban citizen, you can see how they are policitally educated and know a lot about history.
While here in Brazil simplification and scapegoats runs rampant. It is a project to keep things this way.
The problem with this is that it's nothing but speculation, several layers of speculation in fact. It is not possible to predict what is going to happen even in drastically smaller changes in society. Almost all, even the smallest and most well-made laws have side-effects, for example. The idea that we can predict what would happen in such a huge change in society with any accuracy is absurd.
I live in a post-communist country. That experiment on radically changing how society functions also started with good intentions. It took probably about 5 years to see that it was a terrible mistake, but by then there was no realistic way to reverse it, so when we finally switched back to a sane social-democratic capitalist system 40 years later, the damage done was immense.
Imo, such radical changes may only be warranted in the most extreme situations, and this is not it.
Which country?
My coworkers make approximately $453 USD a day as a baseline. We also receive $45 a day for meals, a very generous dental/health/optical/drug plan and approximately $30 a day for using our personal vehicles as work vehicles, as well.55$ a mile for gas. There is also the Canadian equivalent of a 401k match.
On top of all of this we recieved daily bonuses for running increasingly difficult equipment. These bonuses range from $50 a day to $300 a day additional to the original $453 a day base, as long as you are willing to put in the extra work for the harder jobs.
All this is to say we are paid very well. On average my co-workers will bring home 4-5x the average Canadian yearly. The argument of "work a shitty job or you'll die" does not apply to us. We are very well incentivized.
And despite this approximately 75% of my coworkers are the stereotypically lazy employee. They refuse to perform the bare minimum of work required to not get fired. They refuse to do any work to get ahead or be prepared for future eventualities. They are constantly doing the work late, costing the client hundreds of thousands to millions, because they can and it never blows back on them. They refuse to work with the more difficult equipment to make the bonus money. The paper work is done poorly. They refuse to learn anything extra about the job. The equipment is poorly maintained. The refuse to ever do extra. Most of them will work 2 weeks a month and then refuse to work take a call for the last two weeks.
People are lazy, and it doesn't matter how much you offer them. Some people are hard workers, some people work hard if it's a passion project and the majority will never do more than the bare minimum.
Call it an anecdote if you want. I have had relatively well paid jobs in various industries and it has always been the case. No amount of monetary incentivization alleviates lazy in the majority of the working population. Either the system finds another way to incentivize participation or we simply work without the full participation of the species.
Personally, I see it as perfect evidence on why to provide a UBI.
Let the lazy people opt out. Let the motivated people get stuff done without the lazy people standing in the way. I've certainly been in a position where the work would have been done better by me solo than having to deal with some lazy slob half-assing it.
There would almost certainly be growing pains in transitioning. But I think moral will improve across the board.
That sounds like a great way to kill morale more than anything. There’s no reason to be productive if we’re not going to get anything for it. Not to mention that the workforce is declining in most of the world, you guys can’t afford to have people opting out of working. Even sub standard work is better than nothing.
People whom work under a UBI get much more money than people whom don't. But it means people whom don't want to work will have a lot more options at their disposal.
And as @Loire pointed out...sometimes substandard work isn't better than nothing. It can be actively harmful. I'd rather not have a doctor than have a doctor that can't read blood draw results (has happened).
And there's a lot of wasteful jobs out there. I'm betting we could handle a solid 30% reduction in the overall workforce with minimal problems.
This seems to be predicated on the idea that what the market will bear in terms of wages is an accurate proxy for what contributes to society, and nothing I’ve seen or experienced in my life leads me to believe that’s true.
Most of the jobs I’m aware of that actually keep society running are woefully underpaid, and many, many of the highest paid are either self-perpetuating consumerism or actively harmful. Taking a step further in, whether or not a given job is good or necessary for society, I’ve seen nothing to suggest the 40 hour, 5 day work week is optimal, and many studies pointing to the idea that office workers are actually productive for half that or less.
On top of all that, productivity per worker has been rocketing for over a century, jobs are being automated away, and the global population keeps on growing. Even if we needed everyone working full time at some point in the past, it seems highly unlikely that we need it now.
I agree that following your dream might well not contribute to society, and that the tough, necessary work needs to be incentivised. I just don’t see the current system doing that in any reasonable way either.
I would argue there is one big difference with Norway and a UBI: the money has strings attached. I can't give specific examples for Norway, but in the Netherlands you get unemployment benifit when you don't have a job and you need to apply. This sounds good in theory but in practice this means people don't have to think what they wan't because they are forced to apply. Another problem is that benifits decrease sharpely once you do start to work again which means that the net benefit is a lot smaller than with a UBI. You could even argue that it fits in your frame: if people are greedy, would they start working with the current system where you get less rewarded for getting a minimum wage job or with a UBI system where you keep your benefits?
P.S: This discussion is a perfect example of what I love about Tildes: thoughtful and respectful discussions.
But Finland is a capitalist country. The reason why they have the money for their social-democratic policies is capitalism. I understand there's a need to discern between libertarian ideas of capitalism and nordic or western european reality of capitalism, but conflating welfare capitalism with socialism seems even more nonsensical. It completely dissolves what socialism actually is.
Even under a socialist system, someone has to produce the goods that sustain standards of living. Maybe people are willing to lower their standards of living, but, until all labor can be automated, someone needs to do grunt work.
I'm actually in favor of a supplemental UBI and strong social safety nets. I just find it incredibly unlikely that currently unpopular jobs could be fully staffed without some form of incentive.
I think you're greatly confused about what communism and socialism actually are. And as a result, you're acting as if the only examples of them we can point to are totalitarian/authoritarian communist/socialist States... which are/were typically not even communist/socialist, but actually oligarchies instead, since the political elite controlled the means of production. Whereas workers controlling the means of production is what communism and socialism are fundamentally all about, which is not necessarily incompatible with liberal democracy, or unable to exist under current capitalist economic systems.
And we have plenty of successful examples of that to point to in the form of worker cooperatives, with Mondragon Corporation being the largest at €12Bn in annual revenue. As well as plenty of liberal democracy State-owned enterprises which are essentially collective citizenry owned, such as Canada's many Crown Corporations. As well as all the countless Credit Unions around the world.
And socialist governance is also not necessarily incompatible with capitalism or liberal democracy either, hence all the countries that are currently (or have been) labour/social democrat/democratic socialist party led, as well as all the Socialist International and Progressive Alliance affiliated parties there are in the world.
Wow, I had never heard of Mondragon Corporation before - that's a really inspiring example for me. A worker cooperative/humanist corporation with decades of success!
Thanks for sharing.
No I can't. But does it matter? I don't see any empathy and kindness from the richest of the rich in the world today either, and if rising above others in a capitalist system means standing on a pile of skulls I'll happily pass.
It rather seems like kindness is irrelevant of the system it comes from, but I do feel people in general will be more kind towards each other if their differences were smaller. At least, for me, it comes from a place of wanting people that have less to have more, to have the same chances and opportunities I have, and our current system is incompatible with this idea.
Note that I'm not necessarily a communist, but I do think that the way we're currently practicing capitalism is way out of bounds and has changed from rewarding innovation to a ratrace where you siphon as much as you can from someone or somewhere else so you end up on top. How is the latter in any way kind to anyone but the wealthy themselves?
I want people to want less, and I want people that need more to need less. And I think the balance is severely off kilter. This can be fixed without needing to shrug off our existing systems entirely, I like to think I'm not a radical in this.
I would consider their massive philanthropic foundations to be an expression of empathy and kindness. By most estimates they have easily saved millions of lives. Many have given billions of dollars, and that's only for people who publicise their donations widely. While I do think that perhaps much of this wealth should have gone to governments in the form of taxes they avoided, they still have given these sums uncoerced, and may have done so in ways which are potentially more efficient than if governments had done so.
Being billionaire is only possible though a lot of exploitation and crime, so...
Please have a look at the socialists Thomas Sankara and Evo Morales. Both lifted up the people of their respective countries, drastically reduced poverty, improved literacy, and rejected the capitalist paradigm of exploitation.
After the socialist revolution in Cuba, everybody became literate and have free health care. Before they were living under Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship under the wings of USA. (he lost the election and did a coup supported by the USA)
It's funny people from USA calling other countries a dictatorship when they are the biggest imperialist country in the world.
Laos is a socialist country that did nothing against the USA (people in the USA don't even know Laos exist) and yet they bombed them so much to prevent the Vietnam socialist revolution that there are stores selling bomb pieces there.
People really don't know history. It is frustrating. Every leader did wrong things everywhere.
We have to account for everything when analyzing these things.
USA has private prisons (prison for profit is absurd) and is a racist country. Ask the black poor people if USA feels like a democracy for them.
Just look how many wars and invasions the USA started and financed because the country needs war to survive. This is democracy for who?
I understand well.
Imposing your will through war with the excuse of bringing "democracy" on other countries makes the USA a dictatorship in my eyes. Not to his own people, but to the whole world.
It has the most military bases around the world.
That's an empire, to throw in with the pedantry party.
Yes.
And USA just bombed Yemen.
There’s plenty of valid criticisms of US foreign policy, but the most recent series of air strikes in Yemen seems like an odd one? Free passage to the Suez is a benefit to most countries.
If you want to have a norms-based discussion of geopolitical ethics, I am not the person to get into it with.
Suffice to say, the global benefit is not relevant to the injustice inherent to the capacity and willingness of the US to perform such actions.
Edit: this comment was the result of a misunderstanding on my part.
I'm not looking for a discussion of geopolitics with you either; I was curious as to why @crdpa chose that example. Not that its particularly relevant, but in my view, of all the evils of a military that can deploy across the globe, keeping a vital international shipping lane open by striking a few missile platforms ranks pretty close to the bottom of the list. Mostly though, I was hoping for crdpa to expand on their comment, as I'm not quite sure what it is meant to suggest or add to the discussion, given how short it is.
I was just using as an example that the USA can and will impose their will and think that they have the last word in everything. Saying No to the USA is a dangerous thing to do.
They may be doing a good thing here and there and it could be the case in Yemen, but I side with history here and the USA was never a good country.
They helped the military coup here in Brazil.
I see. Thanks for clarifying!
There's a 1985 essay by influential sociologist and political scientist Charles Tilly called War Making and State Making as Organized Crime, in which Tilly argues that the nature of the state is fundamentally similar to that of organized crime, or a protection racket. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I wonder if your line of thinking is similar, in that all states are worthy of the criticisms you mentioned?
The state exists only to enforce private ownership and it can only do that because it has the monopoly on violence. That is the reason the state was created.
I'm a socialist so yes, every government is a form of dictatorship. What matters is who it works for.
In capitalism, it is the bourgeoisie.
We workers have to take control of it and put an end to the bourgeoisie as a class.
As someone who otherwise agrees with you 95% of the time on these things, it's just not productive to shoehorn in such specific uses of words with concrete definitions. You can say it's oppressive and violent and inhumane without equivocating between vastly different structures.
So is the Marxist term "dictatorship of the proletariat/burgeoise" wrong?
I mean, yes. It's audacious and attention-grabbing, and so memetically useful. But it's an oxymoronic phrase used specifically to drive at the point you are making, and not an accurate description of the structure of a coherent communist government. Rhetoric is one thing, but once people are arguing with you about actual semantics, it's best to be clear over exciting.
It's a dictatorship in the sense that you mean, but since nobody else hears it that way, what good is insisting on it? It's just a word. The important thing is that the people are not exploited, not that they call themselves a dictatorship.
You are right. Thanks for clarifying. Sometimes I get lost in my own head.
I very much understand the trials of thinking in jargon, no worries lol.
I read it as a gotcha predicated on the assumption that the pushback on "dictatorship" was driven by moral outrage rather than sheer semanticism. Couldn't say more than that.
I just realized that was not a reply to my comment, apologies! The formatting in these deeply-nested threads gets ambiguous, but I hadn't gotten so mixed up before. Sorry for the tone.
No worries, happens to the best of us; the 'reply to above comment' thing can be a bit confusing. A trick I use is to use the 'parent' button to make sure I'm replying to the right comment.
Yup. Empires are evil.
Is it possible the concept you wish to express is hegemony rather than dictatorship?
The right word for the USA is imperialism.
From the link I provided for further information about hegemony:
And from the link for further information about imperialism:
If I’m wrong I apologize, but I fear you:
The USSR had 40 hour workweeks over 10 years before the USA. Women only had the right to vote for 2 years when the USSR was formed. In less than 20 years there would be a fascist surge like no other, with the USSR suffering heavy casualties. I daresay if they didn't industrialise under socialist rule, at a breakneck pace that had economists declaring the end of capitalism, the Nazis would have won WW2 because they would have steamrolled the Eastern Front.
That's not to say the USSR was flawless by any stretch, but it does give a bit more context to what the state of world was like back then.
The USSR went from being a wasteland to space in what? 30 years. It is astounding.
And yes, let's not forget who defeated the nazi. USA loves to brag they were responsible, but it was the USSR who did.
USA didn't really have a problem with nazi ideology until it threated them
And it who work with Nazi to invade Poland again?
True, without USSR the western allies would suffer more casualty until US nuke them. The lost USSR suffer is horrendous but let not pretend it they who won WW2
Oh yes. But British and French leaders embolden Hitler via a decade of appeasement policy that ceded more and more land from other countries to Germany, and allowed them to re-militarize. If you're counting "plot to divide other people's land" as an evil, almost every country in existence has at least some blood on their hands.
You'd also remember that the USSR tried to ally with England and France during this policy of appeasement, but were rejected. Would they have done better to just ignore the growing threat? No they acted in self-interest and signed a non-aggression pact. That bought them several more years than many other countries. Hitler lost, more than any other reason, because he opened a war on too many fronts. The USA rolled in at the last minute, and was pretty much trying to not get involved for the majority.
Again, this is not an endorsement of Stalin...he was a despot little different than Hitler whom co-opted the period of turmoil to seize his own power. I firmly believe that if Lennin had survived 10 more years, Stalin would not have been able to perform the maneuvers he did and the USSR might have had a much better trajectory than it did.
Nukes didn't exist without Nazi scientists. Remember that? The nukes we dropped on Japan were a calculated bluff. We had only a small handful of nukes. They thought we had 1,000's. If they knew we only had a few the war might not have ended.
Uhhhhh, what? The Manhattan Project was mostly active before the end of the European theatre, no Nazi scientists were involved with it.
Heisenberg was a big figure in physics, and did work for the Nazis as one of the main scientists in the Nazi nuclear weapons program, but during the war there wouldn't be any crossover in research between them. The nuclear program under the Nazis was a huge failure that was nowhere near close to being useful to apply to anything, and most of the research he had done that would contribute to the American development of a bomb would have been before the war, when afaik, he was not affiliated with the Nazi party.
By the numbers, there's probably way more scientists who were persecuted by the Nazis or feared persecution and fled or stopped their research than there were scientists who worked with the Nazis on particle physics.
Framing the development of the nuclear bomb as not being possible without Nazi scientists is a bizarre framing and I'm not sure why you would do that.
There was only enough material for two bombs after trinity at the time, but the next set of nuclear tests was in 1946, Crossroads, with 2 devices fired, after that 1948 with Sandstone, another 3 devices fired. That's enough material to devastate most major Japanese cities or infrastructure. The Japanese was also facing heavy shortages of materiel for the war, including oil, kind of the main reason behind the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbour? The US embargoing exports to Japan of crucial materials they would need for the war?
I don't think saying that the Japanese only stopped fighting because they thought America had 1000s of nuclear bombs (which would be a tremendous overestimation by them, considering the difficulty in manufacturing fissionable material in 1945). Even if they knew the 2 devices ready in 1945 was all America could produce at the time, firebombing campaigns in Japan already killed 100,000s of civilians and devastated their cities and industrial output. Facing a shortage in materiel for the war, devastation of cities and civilians, and knowing the Americans are now not only way beyond the Japanese Empire's military industrial capacity, resource availability, and now technological capabilities, and knowing that the next nuclear bomb may not be that far away -- i.e. 1 year for the next series of tests, and that could be a bomb exploding over Tokyo -- I don't think it would have taken much more for them to end the war.
Needing 1000 nuclear bombs as a threat to stop the Japanese Empire seems like a bit much.
While Heisenberg and other Germans contributed to nuclear physics pre-war, others also worked on fission and neutron propagation. The Nazis did not work on nuclear weapons themselves (they had a modest reactor program).
As for Japan, there was no nuclear bluff. By the time the bombing of Nagasaki occurred, we had a third pit ready for assembly into a weapon. Fissile material was the limiting factor; Hanford and Oak Ridge were putting out 3.5 bombs worth of material each month by that point. That’s around 15 additional weapons that would’ve been ready by the end of 1945 alone. Depending on which casualty figures you use, and which cities would be targeted, you could be talking about a million more Japanese dead from nuclear weapons employment alone by the end of the year.
I'm trusting the person called "nukeman", sounds like they know what they're talking about :p
Thank you! I actually work in spent fuel storage and love the history, science, and engineering of the nuclear age.
And said policy of appeasement came from weariness of the great war, you can't convince the population whom still held antisemitism idea that going to war again German was a good idea then. Not to mention the state of their land forces. The appeasement did bring crucial time for British rearmament.
The Eastern front can't happen later because both political realities, resource/oil and the fact that USSR also building it own force. If he was smarter in the year earlier leading the war then all France, British and USSR would happily be sitting out (until USSR messing with Poland, it had been a sore point since interception of USSR).
I would not put any stock on Lenin, simply because he is the one throwing the election result and the one who forming the secret police. And let not forget that Lenin want Trotsky and not Stalin to be in charge, which mean 5 years plan still happened, and a more antagonist West because of USSR meddling. Which mean there potential USSR is the one that got in war with the Nazi first, due to USSR try to nip the problem and oh boy look at that, a common enemy for Europe to unite again.
Who? The nuke we drop on Japan were a bluff, yes, but complete naval blockade was another consideration for the Japanese. And France like it or not was far more easily to invade naval wise compare to Japan (of which was considering only has two place). The war will be won with the Western allies alone, German has not enough naval force to invade and keep a foothold on British, and US can outproduce, outgun and outbomb the Nazi war machine.
(Also US going to have much more bomb in 1946 to start planning to use it tactically)
I think it could be reasonably argued that the USA never had a problem with Nazi ideology, depending on what your definition of "USA" is (the government, the societal standards we all agree to, the collective views and feelings of the people society deems important, the collective emotions of everyone in the country, something else, etc).
It comes across as smug to automatically compare your side to scientists and your opponents to conspiracy theorists, especially in a subject that is so difficult for anyone (even experts) to fully comprehend. There's no scientific consensus on the best economic system. When it comes down to it, we're all just speculating, working off of imperfect information, dealing with our own personal biases. Even if you have strong convictions you should always be willing to consider the possibility that you are wrong.
Also, I think you are missing the point of using Castro, Mao, or Stalin as an example. You seem to think that these examples are irrelevant, when the real issue is upholding 'basic human decency'. But this is something of a category error - you are trying to fend off results with intentions. In fact, the political movements that led to Castro, Mao, and Stalin were, at least initially, all justified with the same promise of upholding basic human decency. This isn't to say we shouldn't strive for basic human decency, but rather that we should judge the merit of a political system by its results, not its intentions. And when it comes down to it, most instances of socialism have had bad results, compared to capitalism and social democracy (viz. 'capitalism lite').
I think you are underestimating the difficultly in distinguishing between these two possibilities. Intention is opaque - we can never really know what a person's (or a movement's) intentions really are, especially before we get the benefit of hindsight. Maybe by now it's apparent that Mao was more interested in gaining political power than promoting human flourishing (though there are many tankies who would disagree with that, of course). But as China's cultural revolution began, think of how many people really believed that Mao was the genuine article, a noble, well-intentioned leader who would lead them to prosperity.
What we can judge more reliably than an ideology's intentions is its results. Instead of relying on the prognostications some politician's pet ideology, we look at the closest examples of that ideology in history. There is a sort of unavoidable subjectivity in any analysis of politics/economics, but we can at least try to be somewhat scientific.
Again, the controversy isn't about the preferred outcomes. Pretty much everyone, no matter their political beliefs, wants affordable food, housing, education, etc. The question is about how, in practice we can achieve these things. Saying 'just give people what they need' invites the question of 'how?'.
I also want to point out that social security, workers rights, child labor laws, etc. are not socialism. Socialism is the state or community ownership of industry; what you're describing is capitalism with welfare, or 'social democracy'/'social market economy'. It's unfortunate that the word 'social' is utilized by both of these concepts because they are quite different.
Because you end up debating these things whether you like their names or not.
Wanting everyone to have that is what socialism is about.
There is welfare in capitalism, but it will clash with what the people in power want.
Yeah. Trump killed lots of people out there with antivax rethoric. People in Saudi Arabia are stoned to death. Checkmate capitalists!
Vasili Arkhipov?
My want for socialism is squarely focused on providing better material conditions for the weakest in society at the expense of moderately better comfort for the strongest. It's insane that op is saying that a motivator for socialism/communism is fear.
I also reject the idea that human nature is somehow inherently greedy or trends towards greed.
We've found the remains of early humans with skeletal deformities and injuries that mean they would not have been able to fend for themselves, either temporarily or ever.
I don't think human nature is any one thing, but empathy has evidently been with us for a very long time.
Definitely not any one thing, but one of the reasons why humanity has been so successful has been our intellect paired with our ability to specialize, and thus work together for a common goal
There was a discussion recently about whether Tildes was "very left leaning" - that claim seemed "bizarre" to some. And yet, to me, even the post that starts with "Unpopular opinion: Capitalism is a better ideology than socialism or communism..." feels so extremely left-leaning when I consider the most basic assumptions it is built upon that I actually laughed when I was reading it.
I grew up in a communist totalitarian country. Luckily, those dark times are long gone and nowadays, there is nothing "unpopular" here about the opinion that "capitalism is a better ideology than socialism or communism". By the absolute majority of the people, it is considered one of those truisms that aren't even discussed. Kind of like whether it's better to be young and healthy or sick and old. And it is not based on some abstract theories, it is based on hard-core experience.
I say right now - I am not going to discuss the details here. I think am not going to respond to comments and I advise you to stop reading right now if that bothers you. I just feel that this is just too much internet for me and I need to take a break (at least from Tildes).
But if you are interested - do not theorize, try it! Try it on a small scale - like a group of friends or a class. I was reading about one funny school experiment - students were convinced that sharing and empathy were better than selfish self-interest so the teacher made them a deal - for every test, instead of being each graded individually, they would share the average result of the whole class. You might look up the results, but honestly, I cannot comprehend how anyone could expect anything else than the collective grade slowly descending towards F and classmates getting more and more pissed at each other. Perhaps because I lived in that experiment, except on a much bigger scale with the whole country being ruined.
EDIT: it was pointed out to me that the school story is false. It does not change my point - I used that school story just to make it less abstract and closer to experience of people who have not lived in a communist country.
When someone says "greed", people imagine something nasty. But there is nothing nasty about trying to get the reward for your work to make life better for you and your family. On the other hand, sharing and empathy sound nice... until you are forced to share the results of your efforts with lazy parasites who actively try to make your life miserable, instead of sharing it with your wife and kids.
And that's the fundamental problem with communism and socialism - people care about themselves and people they love or at least like more than they care about people they don't know, and especially people they don't like. I invite those idealists who talk about greed vs empathy to imagine the group of people they dislike the most... and now imagine that you live with them, everything you create gets put into one bucket and they can take from that bucket no matter how much they themselves put in (or not). That does not remove greed, that makes it stronger!
Honestly, I don't get it. Socialism/communism has been tried and tried again and it always failed... how is it possible that some people still have not figured that out? When you think about whether life is better in Denmark, Ireland and Switzerland, or the Soviet Union and North Korea, do you really question whether we should abandon the model that sustained the most successful countries in the world and switch to the model those hellholes tried?
Or my insignificant East-European country - certainly not the greatest country in the world, but so much better off in capitalist times compared to the communist/socialist times. And I am not even talking about the oppression that inevitably comes with communism - let's just talk economy. I personally remember the times when stores were so empty that you could not buy the most basic things. Those of you dreaming about communism... did you ever have to stand 2 hours in line to buy 5 bananas? And that was your lucky day because at least you could buy bananas - many had to go home empty-handed. Did you ever have to bribe someone just so they would sell the one bicycle they had in store that month to you instead of the other guy, so your kid could enjoy it instead of some other kid?
Let me make one thing clear - life is not just and it sucks working hard and still being poor when someone else is rich. But the crucial thing is - the poor in capitalist countries are still much better off than everyone (except the few that are "more equal than others") in the communist countries.
I absolutely understand where you're coming from, and the negative emotions and memories that living under communist totalitarianism stirs up in you when this subject is discussed. But much like OP I think you're confusing communism and socialism with totalitarian/authoritarian communist/socialist States... which are/were typically not even communist/socialist, but actually oligarchies instead, since the political elite controlled the means of production. So I think this portion of my above comment applies to you equally as well:
And I think the examples of worker/government/member owned companies that I listed, as well as all the labour/social democrat/democratic socialist parties in power speaks to the fact that totalitarian/authoritarian communist/socialist States are not the only or inevitable outcome of those political philosophies.
p.s. It's also kind of funny that you mentioned Denmark as an example of a model European country, since they actually have one of the oldest and most successful social democratic parties in Europe. See: Socialdemokratiet, which was founded 1871, is the leader of a coalition, and current Prime Minister's party. And I would argue a major reason Denmark have been so successful is precisely because of the social democrat party having such strong support, and having been in power so many times over the years. And similar could be said of all the Nordic countries, who also have well established social democratic parties. Ditto for Switzerland too, BTW... where 2/7 seats of the Federal Council are currently occupied by leaders of another social democratic party established in the 1800s.
I had written a paragraph that addressed this... but my post already felt too long so I scraped it.
However, since you mention it - no, I do not confuse communism and socialism with totalitarian/authoritarian communist/socialist states. I am convinced that there is no way to implement communism and socialism without it resulting in totalitarian/authoritarian states because totalitarianism is the inevitable result of fundamental flaws that those ideologies have, specifically misunderstanding human nature and motivation.
I tried to hint at it in my previous comment - there is always going to be a large portion of people who only work when they can benefit from it. You might call them selfish if you want. If they can take from the common bucket, they contribute as little as possible and take as much as possible. There are always people, who would be willing to help other people... but there are very few people, who would be willing to ceaselessly contribute to people who make no effort themselves, and even fewer people who would contribute to those people at the expense of their own families. So the bucket gets smaller and smaller and smaller...
The result is that there are two options left. 1) you have to abandon the common bucket and accept that everybody works in their own self-interest or 2) force people to continue to the common bucket - this is why totalitarianism is inevitable. And forcing people never works well - they contribute the bare minimum... which is why the system always collapses in the end. The worse the oppression, the longer you can postpone the inevitable, but the collapse is inevitable. Even North Korea will collapse one day.
People who believe in communism/socialism are dreamers who live in "if" world. Wouldn't it be great if all people shared things and worked all together... yeah, not gonna happen. Unless you come up with a way to "cure" selfishness and laziness, communism will never work. Just like perpetuum mobile.
What makes me sad is that I believe some experiences are not shareable, you have to live them. I guess what I describe to you sounds like an abstract theory. You don't have the grandmother who grew up on a farm with beloved horses, and suddenly that farm was "common", so people who contributed nothing came and took away the horses, and then other things, and at the end of the regime after 40 years, there was nothing left, just a piece of land overgrown with bushes with a few crumbled walls left where my grandmother was born.
I am trying to imagine what my grandma would say to you. She hated communists (including everyone who even slightly defended them) passionately until she died. She had to live 41 years of her life under their rule and lived through some pretty fucked up things. I'm really grateful that she lived to see the revolution and the collapse of communism.
And BTW, social democrats are not only in Denmark - in my country too. And they are in no way anti-capitalist. They are trying to implement some "social" things, like social safety net, but they are not trying to dismantle capitalism. There is nothing inherently anti-capitalist in general health care, paid vacations and maternity leave, or unemployment support. Nothing inherently anti-capitalist in reasonable taxing of the rich. If you happen to be from the US - the fact that your system is so harsh is not the result of capitalism. It is what you voted for.
Again, I actually do understand where you're coming from (I have several friends here in Canada that escaped from communist totalitarian rule in Yugoslavia and Romania), and I do value your, and your family's experiences and perspectives. And maybe I totally am being a hopeless optimist by believing in social democratic ideals. But have you considered that living under communist totalitarianism has caused you and your family to assume the absolute worst about the underlying political philosophies that were taken advantage by those in power in your country, and about human nature in general, when that's potentially not entirely true to reality either?
I gave plenty of real world examples that run contrary to your belief that socialism must inevitably end up as totalitarian, but you never addressed any of those. And as for human nature, if you're interested in hearing why I believe the opposite as you on that front too... that people are fundamentally good and most would be willing to work towards the collective benefit of everyone (if their basic needs were taken care of)... I would be happy to continue this conversation with you, and explain why, based my own experiences. But I also don't want to upset or make you even more uncomfortable here on Tildes either, so I am perfectly fine with ending it here if you don't want to continue.
All the examples you provided are within capitalism. As I said, I have zero problem with social democracy, or some social safety net, or generally social things. That is not the same discussion as communism/socialism vs capitalism as ideologies, which is what the original post was about. There is no need to discuss the fact that within capitalism, not everything is driven by capitalist principles - hell, the core of society, the family unit, is not. But that is not what this discussion is about. Context matters.
But the fundamental core of the ideology (workers controlling the means of production) is shared by all of them. So why is it not appropriate to point out the successful examples of that ideology being applied to various entities and institutions, even if those are under a currently capitalist system?
Especially since, I would argue the reason for totalitarianism arising in communist/socialist states is not due to a fundamental flaw in underlying ideology itself, or due to human nature inevitably corrupting that system, as you believe. But rather due to the method those who ended up in power went about achieving those ends. IMO, violent revolution and coups causes only the most power hungry individuals to eventually take over, and then remain in power, not the underlying communist/socialist ideology they took advantage of to stir up support.
And also IMO, were society gradually reformed so that eventually all entities were cooperatives with workers controlling the means of production, you would not see that same outcome. I think this is especially true if we can ever manage to achieve a post-scarcity society, which I believe we're actually not too far away from due to recent developments in AI, robotics, 3D printing, and other forms of automation... so long as we don't allow the capitalists to be the sole beneficiaries of them, that is.
Anyways. Thanks again for sharing your perspective. I've genuinely enjoyed this conversation so far. And sorry if anything I said upset you in any way. That was genuinely not my intent.
First of all
Not upset at all, I am enjoying this... too much I am afraid, I should do something else.
About the fundamental cause of totalitarianism, I guess we will have to agree to disagree. Your explanation does not seem convincing to me; the systemic flaws I could observe seem like a much better explanation to me (and it's not like I am the only one who observed it - I am no expert but I know economists have written extensively about systemic flaws of socialism/communism) - and not only because of the personal anecdotes I remember - I think that systemic explanation also explains why it keeps repeating with every country that tries that. And BTW, in my country, communists actually won democratic elections in 1946 and only grabbed the power in a coup d'état when they became deeply unpopular and it was obvious that they would lose the next election - so not all countries fit your explanation.
I think that islands of something that could be described as socialism can work pretty well inside capitalism... but that's important - inside of capitalism. One of the things that matter is having to compete with the capitalist parts. Like those state-owned companies - they are somewhat "socialist" but they are under pressure because for example their workers can always quit and go work in a normal capitalist company next door. When socialism is the driving principle of the whole country, this is not possible.
I did specifically mention coups. ;) But I also think it's difficult to use the actions of communist governments of the past to predict or determine potential outcomes of similar ones in the present or future, since so much has changed about the nature of everything since the 1940s, with our now much more deeply interconnected and technologically advanced world.
The democratization of practically everything (knowledge, design, manufacturing, etc) is already well on its way thanks to the internet, affordable professional grade production equipment/software, and things like home 3D printers, laser cutters, and compact tooling like lathes, CnC routers, etc. So in a very real sense, control over the means of production is gradually moving into the hands of the workers regardless of whether anyone votes for communists, socialists, or social democrats. And if things continue along the same trajectory, I can foresee a time when humanity will do away with capitalism just as a natural consequence of our continued technological advancements, and the decentralization, abundance, and power that can provide every individual... even if capitalism never officially gets abolished by any governments. That could also just be my hopeless optimism rearing its head again though. ;)
I'm totally fine with agreeing to disagree too though. And I probably should go focus on something else as well, LOL. I enjoyed this though. Thanks for the stimulating conversation! :)
I agree with your arguement, but I would disagree with your line about how everything has changed since the 40s. We have seen changes in society and technology, but people have for the most part remained the same., and that is the most important part of a society.
I mean yeah, people are important. But I think we have changed. Or rather, we've been forced to change precisely because of our technology making everything and everyone more interconnected now, and the more free exchange of information across almost the entire globe. Information (bad and good) travels a lot wider and faster now than it ever did in the past. And I think it was much easier for people to remain completely oblivious and totally ignorant then than now because of it... which is what allowed for more and larger atrocities to occur without consequences for the perpetrators.
I disagree. The only thing that has changed is people's habits. I don't think that having access to all this information has made people smarter, it just demonstrated that a lot more people were willfully ignorant and closed minded about certain things than we had thought. I've read a lot about how people have lived in the past or in different cultures recently, and for the most part humanity doesn't really change in significant ways. We're all just dumb animals with superiority complexes
Yes, but after the policies did not work, not before :)
I have to resist the temptation to spend even more time here. There are things I have to do.
About that optimism, you mention - another thing we can agree on. I can imagine something better comes along than capitalism - that old thing certainly isn't flawless. Something new that sends capitalism to that place where feudalism is now resting.
Right back at you :)
Voting never changed anything this deep.
The elite won't simply give away his power. Salvador Allende is the perfect example of this. He was socialist, elected, had enough support from people and yet got murdered (surprise... with support from the USA).
Having the ability to buy a 3d printer does not mean anything. We are talking about billionaires who have political power, not a store owner.
Capitalist is someone with capital enough to have political influence. You can have a mean of production, it does not make this socialism. We need to have the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Steel mills are measured in square miles (or square KMs, but "miles" sounds more poetic). Home CNC machines will never be commercially competitive at producing anything particularly big or small, e.g. cars or microchips.
It'll definitely enable some level of high-tech decentralization that hasn't been possible previously - as long as you don't compare yourself to the outside world, which is kind of hard to do when you're inevitably dependent on it for e.g. steel.
If people's basic needs -- food, shelter, medical care, childcare, elder care -- could be taken care of, that would allow people to live with dignity. If people want more -- the ability to afford nice clothing and go on vacations -- then they need a job. Thus, work would still be desirable, but here's the thing -- people wouldn't need to chase the highest-paying jobs anymore. So, stuff like fast food or even garbage collection that could be done part time would become pretty desirable in this situation.
Socialism doesn't mean money just disappears, or that everyone has to wear the same clothes or work the same kinds of jobs. It just means the government does what it has been saying it does, and works for the people. Currently, the government works for corporations, and that isn't working very well.
There are two issues with this:
Co-ops are possible under capitalism, there is no need to switch the political and economical system. There are reasons why they don't happen too often: usually starting a business needs a disproportionate amount of work and risk and often know-how provided by one person or a few people, and these people naturally don't want to equally share with people who came in later with very little risk and work. It's really difficult to find a whole company of people who are able and willing to do the work and hold the responsibility (and my own experience confirms this). But they are possible and sometimes exist.
All of those social democratic countries that actually work are strictly capitalist in their core. They incentivize entrepreneurship and gaining profit and then use the income from taxes to fund their social systems. I don't think it makes sense to call this socialism.
I have a question: Did the students also have the opportunity to collectively take the test together? I'm betting if the whole class could work on tests collectively the results would be very different. They could have voted on results, have debates about correct or incorrect answers.
Could the students vote on the method chosen for the collective result? Why couldn't they choose to share the result of the highest score? Could they chose to exclude low performers, flunking them out before they flunked the class?
The idea that averaging individual test results is equivalent to testing empathy and sharing is absurd. You've described a totalitarian approach to sharing, where the teacher dictates the terms to a captive audience.
Which is why democratic socialism is a very different beast from totalitarian socialism.
Let me repeat what I said - don't argue about it, try it!. It does not have to be school and grades. Make a deal with your friends who believe in socialism too. Take all the money you make and put them into one bucket. Everyone can take based on their needs (or split it equally, I'll leave that up to you). Let me know the results.
Dude you are arguing in bad faith. It is not only here but every thread you just ignore every one point and keep insisting in your absurd idea.
You even ask the person to not argue, just to accept it.
What you are saying is not socialism. How many times people need to tell you this?
You want it to be to be right, but it isn't.
You are twisting my words. I am not saying not to argue it just to accept it, I am saying not to argue it and try it. I am not asking anyone to accept anything. I just believe that some things that cannot be conveyed through words can be conveyed through lived experience.
I also believe that in this discussion, I am one of the few people who has actually tried to live in communism. Figure out a way to try it on a little scale that can be tried without overthrowing the country and tell me what you learned. I believe you will learn a lot more than from theorizing about it.
He’s saying that intellectual posturing must be subservient to empirical evidence, not “arguing in bad faith.”
It's a type of bad faith argument to imply that a political ideology is meaningfully tested by a small number of friends living together and sharing incomes. If that's the standard, then you can basically argue for anything. Because communes do exist, have existed, and a core tenet of most communist ideology is that global capitalism places external pressures on any enclave of communism.
"Oh, you think we should stop exploiting slave labor? Then why don't you build your own phone using ethically-sourced materials?" is basically the same argument. Their intuitions based on living in a failed communist state are not inherently more accurate than those of us living in failing capitalist ones just because they've seen two different forms of abusive governments and the newer one is more functional. This is an ideological argument, premised as such, and appealing to secret knowledge is not meaningful for anyone else unless we were to take them as The Arbiter of Truth in general.
We do that, it's called splitting the tab at a dinner.
We don't itemize to insure everyone is paying exactly what we owe. We all chip in an equal amount to cover the whole bill + tip.
If somebody always orders surf and turf while everyone else orders salads without voluntarily giving more...they stop getting an invite.
The same principle would apply to said paycheck splitting (though this would work better if it was discretionary spending, not full wages because of pre-existing commitments). If somebody was taking too much from the pot, I'd put forth a vote to kick them from the pool.
Nice quip, I chuckled.
All metaphors have limits. The things you mention are the limits of my metaphor. When you live in a communist country, you split the bill with everybody and not just friends, every food you eat and not just on special occasions, and you cannot un-invite anyone. You can try to escape over the barbed wire while waiters are shooting at you.
And if you want to experience it a bit, choose something that matters. Even in capitalism, you don't behave capitalistically all the time - you don't charge your friends for dinner. But that does not negate the point I was trying to make. I liked the school experiment because grades matter to a certain degree - enough that you care if you are losing. When you pay for dinner, you don't care, it's too little.
And in capitalism, if you can't afford the bill, you either get sent to prison to be slave labor or starve and die alone in the cold while the waiters tell you that none of this would have been an issue if you had just worked harder.
I am sorry but I seriously doubt that.
In my country, some people were actually shot when trying to overcome the barbed wire. I just googled the stats and found out that 282 died - some shot, some from electricity in those wires.
In your country, are people actually either get sent to prison to be slave labor or starve and die alone in the cold because they can't afford the bill? Because in the capitalist country where I live that does not happen, like ever.
My wife was homeless from 4 until they were 13, and only got to eat when the food banks in rural Texas had enough to go around, which was rarely to never. They have chronic health issues directly caused from prolonged starvation, as well as severe PTSD and an eating disorder. They only got out of that situation because their father stole metals like copper from abandoned houses. And all that bought them was a rented roof over their head and barely enough food to feed them all. For the first 6 months of our relationship, I had to use the money I was making as a recent college graduate to help them cover rent and food costs. The only reason that stopped being the case was because their father died and so they moved in with me.
I have had 3 friends die while rationing insulin because they were too poor to be able to afford it, and the system does not give a shit how necessary a medicine is for someone to survive, it only cares if they can pay what the pharmacy is charging.
To get away from personal anecdotes, yes. Yes, in the US, if you are poor you are abandoned and left to die if you can't afford food or shelter. If, in desperation for the survival of yourself or your family, you commit a crime to make the money you need or do something like steal food or live in an abandoned house, you will be arrested and sent to jail where you will be (mostly) unpaid labor. Being homeless isn't directly a crime, but loitering is. Living in a tent under the bridge is.
You can seriously doubt that all you want. It doesn't make it less true.
What a lot of people fail to see is while some decisions and politics are not directly pulling the trigger, it does not mean it is not happening.
Brazil is racist, but Brazil ended slavery so it must not be racist anymore, right? Now black people are free and can work like anybody else.
Sure, in theory.
Slavery ended and the slaves were just released. No house, no job, no land, no nothing.
Were did they go? They formed ghettos/favelas.
Slavery ended centuries ago and those black people are still in ghettos. Even with progressive and inclusive laws.
The drug war here in Brazil only goes to ghetto's to fight and kill black people selling drugs. When the rich white drug lords are caught somewhat, they get a fair trial and are found not guilty or get a slap in the wrist while black people are being shot and arrested every day.
Sure Brazil does not have slavery anymore (it has, we still find business who uses slave labor and they just get a fine), but we can sure call this country a dictatorship from the black people's point of view. We can say it's an apartheid. In theory everybody has access to the same things, but in practice...
Let me be clear, I do not doubt horrible and sometimes deeply unjust things happen. The part that I doubt is that capitalism is the cause.
I am really sorry that those things are happening to you and your close ones. And to be quite frank, I would not want to live in the US. This is weird because when I visited in 2001 and 2002, the US was still way ahead of us. It seems to me that while we made tremendous progress since 1989 (the year of our revolution and the switch from communism to capitalism), the US has gone backward. No offense, just my $0.02.
Anyway, I happen to live in a country that is capitalist. And generally speaking, it is a good place to live now (knock knock on wood) - one of the safest in the world, with not too much inequality, a decent safety net. Sure, we are not rich if you measure that by the number of $ billionaires, we are not rich compared to Switzerland, but we do OK. Being homeless from 4 until they were 13 - I'm very sure that this is pretty much impossible here. And my father has diabetes - insulin is free for him. People dying because they cannot get insulin - also impossible here. In a capitalist country.
Why am I saying all this? To explain why I am inclined to believe it is not capitalism that is the problem. It is the US.
I really wish the problems you suffer from could be solved. But they will not get solved if the cause is misidentified. And I believe that attributing those problems to capitalism is incorrect because many capitalist countries manage those problems as well as can be expected in a world where there is always room for improvement.
I agree with you that they can be solved within a capitalist system. But just because a solution can exist within a capitalist system does not mean that the problem isn't caused by or made worse by capitalism. Nor does a solution being possible within capitalism mean that the solution is a capitalist solution. On the contrary, they often implement socialist ideas in limited or small-scale ways.
Oh I don't think they can be solved in a capitalist system at all.
I'm a communist.
As I mentioned elsewhere, context matters. I agree with what you have just written. What I write in this discussion, is in the context of capitalism vs communism/socialism as general ideologies - in that old sense like from those times when ideologies clashed (I am a cold war kid).
I am generally a pretty left-leaning person and normally, with friends, I promote what I would call "social" or "socially sensitive" solutions - however, I feel this is not needed here on Tildes. But providing some counter-balance to those "late stage capitalism" people might be useful.
BTW, when I talk about this "social" stuff, like social benefits or something, I would never use the label "socialist" - after growing up in The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, that word gives me the creeps (and literal Marxist terms even more).
Also, I think that only Americans label things like social benefits as "socialism" - I would say that this is not that common in other countries, am I wrong? The welfare state (in my native language it is literally called "social state") does not equal socialism. I just wanted to emphasize that.
Czechia?
Yep. Did you recognize that number?
Well spotted.
Nope, the fact that y’all had a border with the west, and that electric fence remark was the giveaway clue.
What might this look like when applied to the world? It's easy enough to uninvite someone from lunch, but how do I uninvite someone from society?
Typically jail, or kicking them out of town.
When Bolivia implemented socialist policies, their literacy rate went up, pregnancies went down, and quality of life went up for everybody.
It got killed by capitalists who didn't want to see people flourish.
The story about the teacher who used their class grading methodology to teach about socialism/communism is false, according to fact checkers: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/social-injustice/
Also, according to politifact: "[The story] was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. There are Facebook posts recounting the same story from 2012. Snopes wrote about this story being attributed to many colleges across the country in chain emails as early as 2009. In 2011, a post from an Australian business blog claimed this "bogus" story of "social loafing" had been circulating for 15 years before it became a chain email. Confusion about this story has long percolated online with commenters on this post going as far as to congratulate the professor."
We searched Nexis news archives and found no reports about any such episode at any real-world institutions of higher education. Our searches did turn up a 2011 article from a conservative website that features this story in non-specific terms. The writer presents it as a parable with "five morals" as opposed to something "real-world."
Hmm, interesting. However, I am still convinced that this is what would happen if tried. Any teacher here willing to try?
I think another good example would be group projects, where the group members are randomly assigned by the teacher - something I'm sure many of us have had to deal with. In my experience they were kind of a crap shoot. If you're lucky, all your group members would be hard workers, or friends (who you can compel to work hard with social obligation). But just as often you'd get saddled with slackers, and you'd have to have to bear the burden of a large project by yourself. Given this possibility, I think most people would prefer to be able to pick their own group members in these kinds of projects - analogous with capitalism, where we are free to exclude those who don't contribute. I think it's easy to see how if you scale up the group size, the chances of there being slackers increases. At the level of a whole population, the free rider problem is pretty much inevitable.
That is a good example. I think it would change a lot if the group was big. In small groups, the social pressure can take care of things - like when all three other members of the group are pissed at me that I did not do my part one time. Bug in large groups, you might not even know who the slacker is. And it is easier to rationalize that "I am kind of tired but there are 60 other people that will certainly work and my impact is so small that no one will notice". And now imagine that group is the whole school, like 2000 people.
Well, like someone said before, properly try. Are students allowed to take the test together? Is there a system for determining correct answers? Because I've certainly taken group tests in University, and they weren't exactly unpopular.
The point of this exercise is to serve as a mini-simulation of a communist country, so you have to ask yourself if it simulates at least some aspects. For example, I would ask if it was just a single test or if the whole semester was tested like that. Because any system can sustain freeloaders occasionally, but long-term, that is a different matter. If you work hard and someone else doesn't, does it matter to you that they get one grade just like you? Does it change if it's all grades of the year? What social dynamic will this cause? When someone observes that the reward for working is the same as for not working, will they change their behavior over time? Will the number of hard workers and freeloaders be the same after 3 months? 6 months? 6 years? How much tiredness would it take for me to say one night "nah, I am gonna watch TV instead, the reward will be the same anyway".
Honestly, I struggle to understand why this is clearly hard to get for many people. I am sure that sometimes people work just because they like it (I was given examples like "but I help my friends in the garden for free and I enjoy it"), but pretty often, don't you work hard because there is something in it for you? Like a better job, better future, better things for your kids, things you like? If you received the same reward no matter how hard you work, would you do all-nighters? Would you work hard for ten years? Would you work if you could see that the things your hard work produces get split equally between those who work and those who don't?
I lived in a country that worked in a regime close to my description for 41 years... and in the end, everybody (except like 5 people, generally considered to be insane) was doing the bare minimum. The country was falling apart. And I mean that literally - buildings that nobody properly maintained for decades were falling apart and a piece of plastering would fall on your head when you were walking home. You know those stereotypically gray and depressing movies, when some spy visits the Eastern bloc? It actually looked exactly like that. Roads falling apart, everything rusty, empty stores... the first time I could travel behind the Iron Curtain after the revolution, I could not believe my eyes how maintained, clean, colorful and ultra-rich Austria seemed. And we were ahead of them before the whole 4-decade experiment started.
I can honestly said that I take no pleasure in doing all nighters for money. I've stayed up reading a book, practicing a language, talking to my then girlfriend when we lived long distance.
I work for a public agency. I intentionally take a pay cut because I'd rather work for the people than for a corporation. So yes, I would work hard for a lesser reward, and indeed I do. I'd happily vote for tax increases for myself if it meant people in my society didn't go hungry. Like you, I also honestly struggle to believe that this isn't something you'd want.
Of course, money is not the only possible reward and people try to strike the right balance according to their values - I was never claiming otherwise. And I was certainly never talking about the pleasure of all-nighters for money. And I actually did happily vote for higher taxes and people in my society do not go hungry.
None of it is relevant to the point I was trying to make. The point I was trying to make is that both extremes are bad. Ultra-rich people with 30 Lamborghinis in a country where people go broke because they got ill is a bad system in my opinion. But a country where economic incentives are so severely reduced that the whole system is not sustainable is also bad.
And it's not like I am making up some crazy theories here - did you not see any documentary about it? Or a movie? Why do you think all those systems collapsed and turned to capitalism (with exceptions like North Korea or Venezuela, which are not exactly the best advertising for communism or socialism)?
I am arguing exactly for that thing you also seem to want - reasonable taxation so that no one has to starve, a healthy work-life balance, that sounds great and I am all for it. But communism was not that.
I think it might help if you had the term "mixed economy" available. Most Western nominally capitalist nations have greater degrees of Keynesian state market control than is commonly acknowledged, as well as redistributive policies. This is the mixed-market economic and political "Liberal" position in U.S. discourse, lately degraded and demonized by reactionaries.
There are mixed social economies where capitalism and non-state worker-owned social enterprises exist side-by-side, but as you say, capitalism is the prevailing economic ethos, more-or-less regulated. At the pragmatic level, though, the U.S. is a failing capitalist state because the capitalists have seized political power from the working masses to the point that workers have little ability to change the system for general benefit. Other Western nations are in danger of falling into the same trap.
For any economy to succeed, there must be a balance of political power between those who control capital, and those who make it productive.
Thank you, that is useful. I have a lot of personal observations, but not so much knowledge of theoretical concepts and terminology (and the knowledge I do have is severely rusty).
I just read up on this stuff at the hobbyist political economy level, and don't claim to be an expert or pedagogue. I welcome your personal insight on the failures of state socialism. My perspective is different, having witnessed the decades of U.S. mixed economy deterioration after competition from state socialist models declined. Politically, I'm on the fence between social democracy and democratic socialism. My experience of democratic unions and cooperative labor is much more positive than yours of authoritarian socialism, but I can see the free-rider and inefficiency problems you and others complain about.
Out of curiosity, what do you think my perspective is?
I have stated multiple times in this discussion that I think there are serious problems in the US. I would not want to live in the current US. I was trying to explain why I think communism/socialism is not the way and that capitalism per se is not the cause - that's all, and yet people react to me as if I am some kind of a right-winger.
If you are curious about my actual perspective... my country switched from socialism to free market capitalism in 1989 and was lucky to observe 35 years of more or less stable progress (with problems along the way, obviously - especially the 90s were pretty wild).
What we have now happens to pretty closely match what I think we should have - so my perspective corresponds to our version of capitalism. By European standards, we are not rich country. Compared to the US (GDP per capita), we are poor.
We have:
I hear stories about Americans working 60+ hours/week. I am kind of lower-middle-class (I had a pretty shitty job with pay below average until recently) and I do not know anyone here who does that. One of my brothers has one of the lowest-paying jobs there is and he does not need to do that either. Actually, I do not know anyone who works over 40 hours (that's the legal limit for overtime and companies avoid that because they would have to pay more - it is better to hire more people) - doctors and nurses might be the exception because currently there is not enough of them.
This is roughly what capitalism looks like in a shitty ex-Eastern Bloc country that is still limping far behind Switzerland or Denmark. It could certainly be improved, but what we have is generally what my perspective is. Capitalism with a safety net. This is what I vote for. And BTW, all of this while our current government is - by local standards, certainly not by American ones - right-leaning.
Do you still think our perspectives are that different?
I think you've interpreted my words in a way that I didn't intend. I meant to indicate that the U.S. circa 1970's had a comfortable mixed economy such as Czechia enjoys now, and that it's degraded to what you describe. I'm not sure how you understood me as suggesting you're a right-winger?
No-no, by that I did not mean you specifically, I was referring to my general impression from this discussion - people replying to me with arguments that would only be relevant if I was suggesting some absolutist version of capitalism that permeates every aspect of society, does not allow things like coops, collaboration, etc.
I guess what I would say is that I don't live in a country where there's no economic incentives for anything, and I do live in a country where a singular human can own 30 lambos, but other people don't have enough to eat. So I don't have to deal with the theoretical problem of people being too equal, I have to deal with the real problem of economic inequality, poverty, lack of housing, etc.
I mean, for every leftwing brutal military dictatorship you can use as an example, I can use brutal rightwing military dictatorships imposed by the US, like Argentina and Chile. The left doesn't have a monopoly on murdering their own citizens.
In your country, you have a memory of communism destroying your society. In my country (and region) I've seen capitalism gut and destroy everything, and leave society a husk.
In my native language, we have a saying about "invoking Evil to get rid of the daemon". Idioms are hard to translate but I guess the English "out of the frying pan into the fire" is somewhat close.
Sure, you have a lot of problems in the US. But I encounter more and more people who seem to think that the solution would be to get rid of capitalism and try communism. We had the same idea in 1946. We have already tried it and it was horrible.
I liked the US. I met lovely people there and I wish good things to the Americans. This is why I am trying hard to convey our experience to you so you will not make the same mistake. However bad you think capitalism is, communism is much worse.
I do not get your argument about right-wing dictatorships, because I am not proposing you implement a right-wing dictatorship. I am proposing you fix your country instead of blaming capitalism for your problems.
There are many capitalist countries where life is pretty good. Those right-wing military dictatorships are the exception, capitalism does not necessarily lead to dictatorship. With communism, it is not the exception, it is the rule. There is no communist country where life is decent. There never was in the entire history. Not a single one.
I have lived in both systems. Have you? Learn from the mistakes of others. Do not get out of the frying pan into the fire. Just fix the broken pan.
There are very very very few capitalist countries where the populace is happy. I'm not American, I live in New Zealand. On paper, the 4th best country in the world to live in. In practice, we have a housing crisis (because of capitalism), homeless, rising cost of living, inflation and increasing poverty.
I have lived in the US, and that's a collapsing society, no wonder they want literally anything else. I think you're severely underestimating how bad things are for people not born into the middle class, which is is the same attitude that leads to people like Trump, Milei, Bolsonaro. People are fucking desperate because life is going badly.
A better one in this case would be "The ends justify the means."
It's why, to the USA (state, not people), civilian causalties don't matter so long as they get the bad guy. We support democracy, unless said democracy doesn't align with US interests, then installing totalitarian dictators is great.
To be fair, most of us aren't saying to replace our entire governance with totalitarian authoritarian state (though the right is actively trying in practice). Most of the far-right governments also tend to be the most capitalist these days, because money is power.
Socialism and communism, the economic models, have little to do with the governance models they are most closely associated with.
Capitalism and Communism are purely about private or public ownership of economic activity. It has nothing to do with governance. It has nothing to do with free marketplaces. Those things are seperate. There are plenty of totalitarian capitalist societies. There are plenty of socialist/communist organizations within democratic societies.
When the vast majority of us talk about socialism/communism, We're talking about workers owning the means of production, preferably with only enough state to facilitate that. And what we're seeing, almost universally, is that when the workers own the companies they work for, or the buildings they rent (co-op housing), conditions are better than the privately-owned, free market alternatives.
Another example is natural monopolies. Having a NGO (non-government organization, usually a non-profit owned by the government but not directly voted in) run utilities like electricity, water, and internet access are almost always cheaper, and better operated than privately-operated, for-profit alternatives.
In my calculus class, our professor had us pair up and share work. It worked pretty well. In real life, math is extremely collaborative.
Another example: linux, which powers most of what we call "the cloud". It was designed collaboratively.
I think it would be wise to add a note in your original comment that the anecdote is not a real world example. It is misleading to leave it as it is.
Good idea, I added the note.
As par for the course the (far) right always appeal to this kind of thing and never fact check anything.
To be fair, capitalism has and still is failing a lot of people too, it's just that the worst parts of it have been moved elsewhere to become someone else's problem while we reap the benefits. Many people ignore the externalities of the capitalistic system as it exists today - the environmental destruction, the forced/child labour, the animal cruelty at a massive scale, the oppression and killing of people in the fight for resources required for growth. Have we forgotten that colonisation and imperialism were also spurred by capitalistic greed among other things? To be clear, I'm not saying everything would be better under socialism or communism, but to say there are fewer casualties under capitalism or as a consequence of capitalism than those systems is a bit naïve. Maybe at the local/national scale, but globally? It might not affect you as negatively, but it's claimed and continues to claim many casualties.
I would not attribute this to capitalism, because communist countries (or should I say one country) did this as well. I am not sure why people feel reluctant to treat colonialism by The Soviet Union the same way they treat for example US colonialism. We were one of those colonies, we were invaded, subdued, and exploited to benefit the imperial power, and that power was not capitalist - so why talk about it as if colonialism was about capitalism?
Colonialism at its base was (among other things) about extracting resources and exploiting native populations to drive economic growth. It was after all a major enabler of the industrial revolution and market expansion. Ask yourself, who benefitted the most from colonialism? It certainly wasn't about workers owning the means of production and the equal distribution of resources.
It is only fair to compare capitalism in practice with socialism/communism in practice. And in practice, the USSR, probably the most salient example of the latter, had a huge empire, where they extracted resources and exploited native populations in central Asia and eastern Europe. Russification was (and still is! - see Ukraine) at least as brutal as western colonial practices.
Oh I agree with you, though I think very little can match the cruelty certain African peoples lived through because of western colonial practices, the consequences of which are still felt today. In all cases it boils down to the wealthy and powerful exploiting others to amass power and wealth, regardless of the system in place. In any case, my main point is we shouldn't act like capitalism hasn't also been at the root of mass suffering and oppression while professing that communism and socialism have. Like I said, I don't particularly think communism or socialism are inherently better (or worse). I'm neither a communist nor a socialist. But let's not act like capitalism isn't also an oppressive system. -We- may be living it up under capitalism, but it's not a victimless system. Most of us would just rather ignore that aspect because we're perfectly comfortable with the status quo.
Thank you.
The whole point of capitalism is allocating resources effectively through competition. That's based on the basic idea that planned economies do not work. Things are much too complicated for us to plan things out. Things also change that plans cannot and should not account for (waste if they don't happen).
What does allocating resources effectively though competition mean?
That depends on what values and what regulatory frame-work society chooses. A capitalistic system can disallow advertising to children, can set price-caps on medicines, exclude all for-profit companies from healthcare (and have strict limits on what a company can do to be non-profit), can demand that journalists have to own news outlets for them to be independent, or lawyers having to own law firms, or extremely strict environmental/emission limits. All sorts of things.
Then within those restraints, there needs to be incentive to do the best things possible, to innovate, to provide what society actually needs.
That's what the market can provide that planned economies cannot. Given the right, and substantial legal regulatory framework to push the market in line with our ideals.
Except ... under capitalism, which in theory relies on competition to set market prices, market everything, what actually happens is money is used to cheat. Perhaps that's part of "competition", but in practice what happens is once an entity is wealthy enough to have sufficient resources, they begin using those resources to tip the scales in their favor.
They buy out competition, rather than competing on price or quality. They pay off any sort of controls (government, inspectors, police, whoever) to not bother or interfere with their activities. They use the money to ensure they don't have to play fair. Corporations do this. Businesspersons do this. Criminals do this. They utilize money to cheat the system of supposedly fair competition.
People are the problem in most systems.
Communism in theory is a pretty fair and equitable system. It just so happens, in most (all?) of the examples we have from history, corrupt power hungry assholes harnessed communism to ensure they got to sit atop the pile.
Capitalism, again in theory, dictates competition across the market will arrive at the most efficient and "best" solutions to any sort of problem. Which doesn't happen when corrupt power hungry assholes harness initial success to cheat, ensuring they continue to sit atop the pile. Which, again, history shows us they always do.
I've lived my life seeing what greed does. It's destroying the world. The desire for more is basically evil if left unchecked. Capitalism, by design, doesn't check greed. And what checks there are, those with money simply pay off to leave them alone. Under capitalism, laws are for little people; while the rich do whatever the fuck they want as long as they understand what their money is for (to enable them to do whatever the fuck they want) and apply it appropriately.
Someone else in the thread pointed out a complicating factor with how people are more willing to cooperate collectively when they're taken care of. When they know their basic needs are covered. Their vulnerability to the evil excesses of greed is dramatically heightened when they have little or no confidence in their basic life situation being supplied.
Capitalism is built, entirely, upon a large segment of the population having no confidence in that base provision being available at all. One of the most common arguments, by capitalists, against socialism, is "why would people work if they didn't have to?" The capitalist rarely sees the irony in that plea. How it's built on the fundamental assumption that people have to be afraid of starvation and homelessness, in being left completely bereft and without, to function "correctly."
That's using resources as a stick, not a carrot. It assumes greed and fear are the only motivators, and that a populace safely guarded from going without is unmotivated.
In truth, what it means is "we won't be able to abuse and take from workers." Which rightly terrifies capitalists. They fear being unable to offer limited opportunity at low pay and lacking benefits, because a shit deal will be refused by people with other options. Capitalists, by design, only ever offer shit deals since the fundamental greed of the system encourages them to take for themselves.
Meaning they take from others. Which is evil. We'd recognize it as evil if they used a sword or gun, but when they use paper and pen somehow it becomes okay? It's amazing how people can lie to themselves, and just about everyone else, simply because they managed to hide the violence in a contract or a law rather than across someone's neck as the sword cuts.
You're arguing against only the strictest kind of capitalism as a straw-man for all capitalistic systems. Like the ones actually employed in most liberal democracies today.
At the same time you're giving communism all the benefits of the doubt, because the historical examples in practice all show it doesn't work.
It is not reasonable or fair to argue these two things at the same time when contrasting the two systems.
Capitalism, by design, certainly can check greed by strong regulations. Capitalism is more than unfettered, unregulated market-decides-all. That reality isn't how modern countries run.
A capitalist system, can and should have robust guardrails and regulations against anti-competitive behaviors, consumer rights, monopolies or large market-share companies and so on.
At the same time you're arguing against this strawman, you're overlooking the historical evidence of the same basic human values that you ascribe to capitalism rather than human nature itself.
In the most basic terms, doesn't it make sense that for survival, individuals look out for themselves (and their small unit), and how much they can get with as little effort as possible? Isn't that what we'd expect evolutionarily from people as we do with all other animals?
At what point would you admit that a feature of communism is that "corrupt power hungry assholes harnessed communism to ensure they got to sit atop the pile" ? That something that works in theory is betrayed by the realities of human nature?
Society benefits from people working and making contributions to the society they live in. That has nothing to do with "exploiting workers". It has to do with society wanting people to contributing reasonably to the community to the best of that community.
In my community, where the state essentially guarantees around USD 35000 to adults, these adults collectively choose to work next to nothing.
These aren't theoretical arguments that "when people have the basics surely they'll work!". These are systemic realities in the Scandinavian countries, where social trust and community homogeneity are among the highest in the entire world. These are the very places we'd expect universal basic incomes to work the best. Yet they aren't.
Like communism, I wish UBIs had amazing effects and were good solutions. It sounds so amazing in theory. In practice they do not work at scale over culturally significant periods of time.
While that may hold true in your specific community or potentially be a bias you hold, studies on unconditional cash transfers overwhelmingly support the conclusion that they improve basically every measure for the individuals, including education and workforce participation.
Here's a few metastudies, reviews, and research on this subject 1 2 3 4
In poor, underdeveloped countries with low levels of education, poor infrastructure, a weak public sector, countries marred by corruption, child labor, ravished by conflicts and/or hunger, UBIs seem effective ways of providing aid and trying to keep people alive where that is a significant concern. And a "base level" of wellbeing within reach og government to supply, aided by international contributions.
In this setting, concerns over capitalism or socialism seem much less relevant. Large scale aid and issues of asserting statehood take precedence in much more basic ways.
This is very, very different to suggesting that UBIs are relevant tools in any of our societies, as we sit here on tildes on our phones or computers.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that UBI be placed somewhere that everyone can live a lavish life. It's meant as a means of social support, thus should be targeting people in the lower brackets, with costs recouped from the upper. It's a means of reducing wealth disparity. You were talking about a group of people who are not receiving a lavish amount of money and their desire to work - these studies are absolutely applicable to this population.
Most of the people on Tildes would be only mildly affected by UBI, especially those who make good money. The goal of an effective UBI program is to provide a basic income, one to ensure people have enough means to not worry about food, shelter, and so on. Not so much money that they can purchase whatever they want, go on whatever vacation they desire, etc. Theoretically speaking, it's the desire to live a more fulfilling life that should cause most of these individuals to pursue education and the workforce, and practically speaking that's exactly what studies on the effectiveness of UBI confirm.
I would benefit from a reasonable UBI, as a relatively well-off person. Namely, because even at a just-above-poverty level of about $12k per person, that would provide $24k of base income, which provides a much stronger safety net which would enable me to risk starting a small business without saving up $500,000 first.
There are definitely people in the USA for whom this is a significant concern. I am pro-UBI, but only as a way of dealing with what amounts to the humanitarian crisis of poverty. There are a lot of people who want UBI to provide them a comfortable, easy life without having to work, which is unrealistic nonsense, but don't let this sour you on the idea of UBI in general. It should be the most minimal payment necessary for a person to eat and have a place to live, nowhere near 35k USD. I'd also prefer it be a temporary measure in hopes of the market (unemployment/disability insurance) taking over the role of welfare in the long run.
One of the merits of UBI over other forms of welfare is that it requires the least government intervention in the economy. When you start nationalizing health care or housing and such, you introduce all the inefficiencies and bureaucracy of government into the equation. With UBI, the main benefit of capitalism (pricing as a reflection of supply and demand) is preserved.
Based on how the market handled retirements thus far, I do not have much faith. Also how the market handles healthcare, regular insurance, and pretty much anything that requires putting people's need over profits.
I'm betting it looks much like our prison system: If you need welfare, you go to the special housing provided for you and work for 18 hours a day at minimum wage.
I think a lot of the problems with health insurance (for instance) these days can be traced to anti-competitive legislation, such as the exemptions built into FDR's wartime wage and price control legislation. By making employer contributions to benefits non-taxable, it strongly incentivized people to rely on employment for health insurance, and made individually purchased health insurance comparatively more expensive. Now insurance companies have less incentive to cut prices or increase quality on individually-purchased insurance plans. Furthermore, these laws incentivized the use of health insurance to pay for non-emergent, budgetable health expenses - kind of like if you were using your car insurance to pay for gasoline and oil changes. The whole concept of insurance is built around defraying rare high costs with common low payments, so overusing insurance to pay for trivial things ends up making it untenably expensive.
Another legislative blunder for health insurance was the HMO Act of 1973, which subsidized HMOs and forced employers to offer an HMO as an option. There are also quite a few anti-competitive laws that affect non-insurance aspects of healthcare, such as 'certificate of need' laws implemented on a state level. So it becomes very difficult to pin today's healthcare woes on the free market, when the government is screwing with our existing market at every turn.
I find the argument/preferences around socialism/communism vs capitalism to be similar to the US political landscape. People are never happy with the current system, so they grow attached to the idea that the "other" system will be better for them. But we have really short memories, so we don't remember/know/care how the "other" system didn't solve the issue, or introduced new/different issues.
This is one of the reasons that modern US elections sway from victories for the left to the right and back almost every election (with the somewhat-exception of second-term elections). It's why Trump, despite the atrocities he committed during his first presidency, has a real chance of winning again. It's why people who feel oppressed by capitalism want to go to socialism, and people in socialist/communist societies want capitalism (or sometimes just end up practicing it without knowing).
People often have a utopian, and unrealistic view of what a specific system will offer them. They think that the majority of people will act altruistically. Personally, I don't think that this is realistic. But I will recognize that I'm also purely a realist, and not a dreamer.
What constitutes left and right can vary a lot from place to place.
We (Brazilian left) don't think there is left in the USA. Just two shades of right. Bernie Sanders is the only leftish your country can at least consider.
Lula is considered pretty left here in Brazil, but his actual government is not. It's the actions that defines it.
Sure, that's fair. When I say left vs right in this context, I mean within the lens of voters and the political landscape of their country/government. In the US, Sanders is so far left that he's never made it to the presidential ballot. At the end of the day, most people are voting (in their minds) for a party, not a person.
Sorry but I really want to correct the lion/cheetah analogy. First of all they would be chasing you through a savanna not a forest. And you should definitely choose the cheetah to chase you because it most likely won't, they're not aggressive towards humans and have a reputation for being the scaredycats of the wild. They are built for speed not strength so they have one of the weakest bites among the big cats. They are usually bullied by the other big savannah predators. A lion might come after you not just out of hunger, it might just be feeling territorial or you might trigger its prey drive by just moving.
I recommend choosing something else for your analogy, this is such an injustice for the poor cheetahs 😂
As a citizen of a developing country that was ruthlessly colonized by multiple foreign powers for almost five centuries, I'd have to disagree that greed is necessarily better than fear or envy.
I was thinking the same thing with the Cheetah comment, all I could think about was this video 😄
They're often described as giant, tick-infested, house cats.
Yes! I was thinking about this one that talks about cheetahs in captivity needing emotional support dogs to help with their anxiety 🥹 https://youtu.be/6vKWk6tc2zY?si=lUuxVz1tYUjB08l6
It's actually kind of a perfect analogy as they don't understand cheetahs or communism.
Tildes is slowly derailing into reddit lite.
People thinking being progressive and social democratic is almost socialism. People using the example of sharing grades in class like it's communism.
It is the same rethoric used by Bolsonaro supporters in Brazil. It is just parroting things they listened from anti-communist propaganda.
They never studied anything serious about socialism/communism.
I felt a little bad making that comment originally and wish I'd put a little more effort into it, or that I could flag my own comment as noise, but I think I stand by it. There's such a dearth of understanding of the topic that it's difficult to know where to begin correcting it. I find myself hoping that OP is very young and exploring ideas that are relatively new to them.
I posted a long comment and in the end just removed because it is too much of a mountain to climb.
You can see this when they say communists are blinded by ideology. They really don't understand the world. They see capitalism/liberalism as neutral and natural and not a strong and entrenched ideology. This is exactly being blinded by it.
Communism never lies about being an ideology. Everything is.
It's like Mark Fisher said: it is easier imagining the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
At least Brazil is decades ahead in this regard than USA, but it is not much better too.
The vast majority of the comments are completely disagreeing with OP's premises, and overall being rather thoughtful (even the ones I disagree with), IMO. So I think Tildes is still doing okay compared to reddit. Especially since if this topic came up anywhere on reddit (other than maybe /r/ChangeMyView or /r/AskHistorians), it would definitely be an absolute shitshow.
Yeah, I may be exagerrating, but it is frustrating to see this kind of far right rethoric here.
I don't think I would personally classify this as "far right" rhetoric, per se. Even though this general sort of opinion is far more common on the far right, unfortunately, plenty of progressive conservatives (center-right), and more economically center-leaning liberals hold similarly negative opinions and beliefs about communism and socialism too.
You are right.
I think it is even worse coming from the ones you say because they at least should be more open minded and willing to educate themselves.
Also, lions can climb trees, probably slightly better than cheetahs depending on the population. Cheetah claws don't retract fully (one of many reasons cheetahs are cat software on dog hardware), meanwhile some lions have learned to be quite proficient at tree climbing, suggesting that it's more about the local trees and whether it's worth it for the lion population to learn
I disagree. I am not a communist because I'm envious of "rich capitalists" who have more than me. I'm a communist because in this capitalist system, those "rich capitalists" being rich is built on other people being poor and oppressed, and because I think that everybody should be able to enjoy the best standard of living that we can give them, rather than a few people taking all the good things for themselves.
Why don't you also make a resolve in life and become rich and wealthy using the way of capitalism? If everyone does that, wealth inequality will decline. Consider how those you call "rich capitalists" built this system in the first place? They must have also struggled with resource economics like you at some point, right?
I can't tell if this comment is serious, but a lot of the rich capitalists of today were either born into money, incredibly lucky or had very good connections (often through family). The true "self made millionaire/billionaire" that got to that point through hard work alone is extremely rare.
Edit: you also shouldn't discount the fact that looking back and even today a lot of that wealth has been made by exploiting those who are weaker, be it people or the environment.
The people at the top of the capitalist pyramid have worked to pull the ladder up after them. Reaching those heights requires either luck (right idea at the right time in the right place while also already having the resources to implement it) or being born into it.
It's impossible for everyone to just "work hard" to become that rich when so often working harder means you're just enriching the people above you.
The suggestion that if you want to become successful you should just make a resolve to work to exploit and oppress others is gross.
The way capitalism is structured makes that impossible. This attitude is what the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" was invented to mock -- it's simply not possible. Moreover, capitalism as a system relies on wealth inequality. It is not incentivized to get rid of poverty because the poor are necessary for it to function.
Also, capitalism as a system was not built by rich capitalists. It was built by former feudal peasants, who in an era of declining populations had more power to demand wages in exchange for their labor than prior generations had. Most communists are aware of this and will acknowledge that capitalism is superior to feudalism. They just believe that, like feudalism, it will be (and should be) supplanted by a better system.
Feudal peasants largely didn't want wages in exchange for their labor - the feudal lords did. Feudal peasants were almost entirely self-sufficient (and were almost entirely subsistence farmers), and didn't want to provide labor to anyone.
Feudal lords wanted peasants to pay them in coin, because coin is easier to transport long-distance (food is bulky to transport, and when transported overland the mules ate food to transport the food) and therefore is much more useful for paying soldiers and waging war, as well as for engaging with the king.
I'm mostly cribbing this from the amazing blog A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantries, BTW. It's probably in part 2 or 3 of that collection, but I recommend the whole thing because it's amazing.
I'll definitely take a look at that blog! Without having done so yet, though, I do think you're painting a picture of feudalism that's a bit too rosy for the peasants. I probably oversimplified things too much in my comment as well, though, so I'll try to elaborate/clarify here.
While the advantages of coin you mention are a thing, using coin instead of crops isn't the decising factor of whether it's feudalism or not (at least not as far as I'm aware). Rather, it's the ability of peasants to "shop around" with their labor rather than being strictly beholden to one lord without any control over the matter. This is not strictly good for former feudal lords, since they now have to compete with in a market economy for labor. This is why labor shortages due to plagues and the like were such big factors in the rise of capitalism, as I understand it, because labor shortages necessarily make individual laborers more valuable and give them more power in such a market. The feudal lords were still by and large the rich ones, and money is power in capitalism, but it was an improvement for feudal peasants in that sense in the same way that a constitutional monarchy is an improvement over the divine right of kings, imo.
But anyway, thanks for the recommendation and I'll definitely check it out. Hopefully this comment makes my thoughts on the subject a little clearer, apologies if it's still something directly contradicted by your link, if so I might follow up after I've read it.
Why do capitalists assume that communists and socialists want to be rich? I want no one to be rich, and I want no one to be poor. I want people to have everything that they need, and some of what they want. I don't want anyone, including myself, to have so much that it is environmentally unsustainable or that it requires others to have less in order for them to have it. That's not envy.
In this hypothetical, do we pay very hard working service workers and teachers and nursing home carers much better, or do we simply not have anyone doing those jobs anymore? If everyone woke up tomorrow morning and began working as hard as they were capable for as many hours as they were capable at the most lucrative thing they could possibly do and they did not stop, what do you see our society looking like a year from now?
I mean, most of the original capitalists just killed the previous owners of land, used slaves or barely-paid workers, demanding insane workweeks for their workers to afford a living. The rest were fuedal lords not much better than the dictators you mention originally.
The majority of the rest descended from them.
The abandoned farm near me that some landowner has been trying to sell for millions for decades is just lying fallow. But if I were to go fence it in and start farming on it I'd probably be arrested. I guess I could just take a lesson from the capitalists of old and just take it then shoot anybody who tells me its not mine. Relevant old comic
The problem with this attitude is that its not possible, or desirable even, for everyone to achieve staggering levels of wealth. I just want everyone to be able to live a life of dignity. Thats why capitalism is untenable and we need to move past it as a society. Capitalism depends on an underclass to exploit. That is one of its core principles. I want to move past that paradigm and deliver a better life for everyone, especially the poorest and most exploited amongst us.
I don't want to be wealthy. I want to have a normal life, and i want everyone in my society to have a normal life.
In a world where “everyone is wealthy”, who does all the dirty jobs we all agree are necessary for a comfortable modern society to function?
We all take turns. Like we should.
Nobody gets to shirk on latrine duty.
I agree with you but it’s a rhetorical question
Is it though? Not doubting you meant it as such, but it's used as one of the core arguments about why it's important for there to be unemployed poor people whom are desperate for jobs lest they starve.
is my intention really that unclear when it was in response to a person literally writing “Why don't you also make a resolve in life and become rich and wealthy using the way of capitalism? If everyone does that, wealth inequality will decline.” Does it really seem like I’m asking that question in some kind of support of such an idea?
It’s an honest question because personally I thought it was pretty obvious that I was trying to point out to an advocate of capitalism that the benefits of capitalist wealth can only exist when there are people who don’t have any.
Not vord, but yes. I understand now that I've read this last comment. Still, until that point, your only comment was the main "gotcha" everyone uses when debating communists, socialists, and anarchists to "disprove" that the systems would ever work. I was confused because your comment was phrased in a way that seemed opposed to the person you were responding to, but the words and ideas are most commonly used to support the comment you were refuting. Again, it makes sense to me now, but I don't think vord is off-base for being confused.
Look I have to say this is just rationalizing being presumptuous and ignoring context and responding emotionally rather than in good faith. There’s not really much more I could have done to make it clearer besides literally quoting the parent verbatim. Do statements that just so happen to be similar to ones made by problematic people have no rhetorical value and should be judged always stripped of all external context? I don’t really want to discuss it further so I will just leave it at this but I don’t believe it’s unreasonable for me to find this experience a bit frustrating.
And I can say the same to you. It feels like you are responding emotionally and not in good faith. I wasn't responding emotionally. I was trying to explain in good faith why vord might need clarification, using my experience of being confused by your comment as a basis. No, statements that happen to be similar to ones made by problematic people do still have value. No one said they don't have value. You decided that was my meaning.
You could, for example, explain why you were asking that question. I think you could have included your reasoning or beliefs in that comment. Asking rhetorical leading questions is a prime way to have your comments misinterpreted and is something I am working on improving myself. You're right to feel frustrated at the experience; being misunderstood feels terrible and can be extremely frustrating. That doesn't mean vord or I are incorrect for being confused.
I know I said I would leave it at what I said earlier, but I feel like i need to make the following clear:
I said I was “a bit frustrated” I did not say “I am extremely frustrated and it feels terrible”. I truly don’t understand how you could read high levels of emotional content in my words by simply expressing a mild negative sensation, and sharing with you how the experience made me feel.
Second, I really wish i could just engage in Socratic method without explicitly drawing attention to it. But again here we have me asking Socratic style questions and you have taken it to mean that I believe you think the answer to all the questions I presented you is “yes” when I just ask them because I want you to think about things more deeply. I assure you, I am not “deciding” that you mean anything in particular, by simply asking leading questions about it.
Lastly, I never insinuated anyone is “incorrect” for misunderstanding me, just that if people were more thoughtful and careful, they probably wouldn’t have, and that I don’t think anything I said was very “sneaky” at all.
In hindsight, I wish I hadn't listened to Grammarly when it wanted to rephrase that sentence. I specifically said "can be extremely frustrating" to try and address that how frustrated someone feels in response to being misunderstood depends on the individual and the situation, and intentionally tried to use language that didn't assume the extent of your frustration. The change of the word "bad" to "terrible" overrode that intention. That's my fault.
Second, I don't think your answer to every question you've asked is automatically "yes". Though, I don't understand the point of asking questions on a social media site if you're going to be hostile toward people responding to those questions.
You posted this question as a comment on a website for discussing ideas. Vord responded with their answer to the question you asked. You said it was a rhetorical question, and vord explained that while you were asking it as a rhetorical question (and acknowledged that they assumed you were asking it rhetorically), it isn't always a rhetorical question. It is an extremely common "gotcha" question when discussing capitalism vs socialism, so Vord thought there was value in answering the question from the perspective of someone who supports socialism.
I don't think anyone ever said or implied you said anything sneaky. I don't think anyone said or implied you intended to be sneaky.
Idk. Clearly, this isn't going anywhere. So I'm just going to disengage. Cheers.
Hey man - this comment isn't really in the spirit of tildes, you know? It's a bit mean-spirited. Even just saying something like "nothing really to add, but I expect this to be a controversial comment" gets the point across in a kinder way.
I can't help but feel this discussion is basically meaningless as it has started off in a pretty simplistic space and it's difficult to move past to a place where the comments won't end up being a dumpster fire. The world is a lot more complicated than reducing economic systems down to some basic human emotion.
In the modern world, being as interconnected as it is, it's basically impossible to separate countries into discrete categories of "communist"/"socialist" versus "capitalist". There is no country today that is 100% of either, and in any given country different organizations and institutions can exist that fall at different places along the spectrum. Even in extreme cases like North Korea, where the state does control most of the means of production, those resources are not equitably shared and therefore are not truly held in common. For that to be the case some degree of democratic governance is required, and typically as well a strong labor sector is required to act as a bulwark of the working class's interest against both the state and private corporations. This is part of the reason countries like China aren't truly socialist, as the means of production and resources produced therein are not equitably distributed. I think the countries that do seem to do a pretty good job of generating and distributing public wealth, like the Nordic countries, are a pretty good example of why socialism can work in practice, but of course they are not 100% socialist either and contain many capitalist institutions. The world is complicated.
But if you define socialism/communism (not the same thing, even though they're conflated here) the way you do, then I suppose you're right? But yours is a highly non-standard definition, and certainly not how most people who identify as socialist (or communist) understand their own motivations. If I believe the means of production should be held in common that makes me a socialist. Not being envious or fearful of others accumulating more resources than me. "Harnassing positive greed" is not the best way to reduce wealth inequality, redistributing wealth in a democratic way is.
I am surprised that this is gone on so long without anyone pointing out the flaw in the core argument.
Capitalism and communism are just ideas. They are not reality. There is no true communism, and there is no true capitalism. They don’t work in the real world here in the United States. There is theoretically capitalism at the base of our society, but it is heavily rained in by regulation from the government in ways that are effectively socialism. Capitalism without regulation will fall apart every time it’s the same argument that people say about communism.
In reality society needs to figure it out for itself, how it will govern itself, and how wealth is distributed. China likes to think of itself as communist but anyone who looks at it views in the context of capitalism.
The fact of the matter is that society is insanely complicated, no matter where you go. If you ever try to go to a country where you are completely unfamiliar - say it’s one that you haven’t ever heard the name of before - you will find that there is a lot more than a language barrier preventing you from participating in it. All of these arguments saying look at this country or look at that country are completely missing the fact that all of those things are true, but only within the context of those societies. Once divorce of them, they tend to have no actual meaning except by coincidence.
So, in my opinion, all of these conversations so far have been fairly unproductive. Everyone is just assuming that the things that they are saying are completely relevant universally when they are only relevant within their domain. Of course, there are some things that are, but many are not.
I wouldn't say the discussions themselves are unproductive, clearly a lot of people are taking the chance to educate each other on a bunch of thorny concepts.
But they are only useful because they're not responses to what the post actually asked for.
As I see it, a socialist is only driven by envy and resentment if he is doing socialism badly. The true core is the vision of equality and togetherness. As George Orwell put it:
The capitalist mindset, on the other hand, is driven by greed. This is not doing capitalism badly, but simply the true core. And that is not even mentioning the capitalist belief in a caste system where poor people "naturally" belongs in the bottom of the hierachy. This is explored in Always a bigger fish and at various points in A Brief Look at Jordan Peterson
One could argue that fear and envy are the emotions that keep the working classes aligned with capitalism -- fear and envy of those above them motivates them to try and become them. In this framework, communism is an explicit rejection of that fear and envy.
I bet someone smarter than me has already written about something like this though. Say what you will about communists but we've got more than our fair share of good writers.
No, the capitalist mindset is driven by desire.
There is nothing about capitalism that inherently requires greed.
When it comes down to it, political and economic systems cannot be typified by individual human emotions. Even in their idealized forms, socialism and capitalism entail a blend of emotions, motivations, beliefs, etc., some positive, some negative. Capitalism can foster greed and spite, but it can also foster self-respect and freedom. Similarly, socialism can lead to envy and conformity, but it can also produce altruism and fairness.
It is possible that one system leads to more positive and less negative features, but ultimately there is no system that cannot be corrupted by plain old human evil. So it becomes very difficult to apply these ideals - whatever your preferred system is, you should assume it will be run by your worst enemies, by assholes.
Absolutely. But there's a tendency in certain circles to incorrectly demonize capitalism, and I think it's important to push back against that.
Not to be un-tildes-like or anything but you're just arbitrarily assigning emotions as drivers of economic systems and concluding that one is better than the other because one feeling is better than the other. It's just subjective opinions piled onto subjective opinions.
Why not say "justice" instead of "fear and envy", it could be just as valid. Why not say "empathy" or "fairness"?
But I think the larger point is that economic and political systems cannot be simply said to be driven by an emotion. Would you rather be happy and content under communism or capitalism? Would you rather be in a jealous rage in communism or capitalism?
It's irrelevant, what you're after is happiness, security, contentment etc not a specific system. Hence why people have been everything on the spectrum of human emotion under everything in the spectrum of systems of governance and finance.
These are very arbitrary definitions. I live in a not-well-off place. I and pretty much every person I know work in this capitalist system, because we are primarily motivated by the fear of hunger and homelessness. My experience is directly contrary to your generalization. Who's to say which experience is more universal? Or is there even a universal experience on this topic? There's no empirical argument.
Furthermore, how you perceive the world is heavily influenced by ideology and culture. Emotions don't necessarily reflect simple material conditions. Just compare the World Happiness Report with the countries' conditions. Ukraine has a higher score than many countries that are not under invasion, and Iraq -a country devastated by a long war- has a higher score than many countries that are not in the same situation. How people interpret material conditions is, to a degree, relative.
I don't think basing ideological critique on this much arbitrary and relative lines is a good idea. If anyone is interested in more empirical approaches, Core-Econ has many good, free e-books. Its books are being used to teach economy around the world.
There's also a misconception around the word communism/socialism. What is called a "command economy" (think of the USSR model) isn't, per the original definition, communism or socialism. There's a very well prepared video by Jonas Čeika that's to-the-point and well-cited.
As @gpl said, it's not reasonable to conflate communism and socialism.
Socialism is part of every capitalist society on earth. It seems like a settled issue that pure capitalism doesn't work. The US is probably the most capitalist society, definitely the most capitalist among world powers, and we can see real world examples of capitalism failing in areas that are more commonly socialized in other countries. Privatized prisons and healthcare for example.
I agree though that greed doesn't have to be the enemy (for example greed for connection tends to result in positive traits like kindness and empathy).
And I believe capitalism is a great way to structure an economy but without some amount of socialism that economy will eventually eat its own foundations and collapse.
I don't think there's any record of a Cheetah ever killing a human, so I'll take the Cheetah. Even if it did chase me, I outweigh it and its claws aren't as sharp as the lion's :)
I think you are conflating greed and desire. Greed is almost diametrically opposed with empathy: It's about maximizing one's own wants over all others. Above and beyond what anybody needs.
The scenario you describe is narcissism. Where someone will outwardly project empathy and kindness on the surface, but it's mostly self-serving and things turn nasty real quick if things ever stop being about "them."
Desire is to want an adequate meal each day. Greed is wanting a gluttonous meal every day, even if it means taking the food from your neighbors even if they have less than you.
I disagree that the US is the most capitalist society. I think that comes from a wrong )in my view/opinion) of what is capitalism. Capitalism has as a condition well defined rules against market failures, for example, that simply don’t exist in the US. Complete free market (or almost complete) isn’t capitalism.
I don't think "the most capitalist" is a productive rank to argue about. It is undeniable that the US is extremely capitalist and less socialist than most other wealthy nations, though.
No, capitalism is one simple thing:
It is the private ownership of the assets, and subseqently the profits.
Everything else is just the system in which it operates. All these rules you speak of didn't exist until Capital fucked up and the governments intervened.
All those crypto problems used to be problems with regular banks.
I disagree. Adam Smith put it simple, the existence of well defined and enforceable rules of the game are a condition for the capitalism system. But anyway, not much relevant for the discussion here.
On top of what @pyeri said, Capitalism predates Adam Smith.
It's also not like he created stone tablets dictated by god to invent an economic system. He was describing theories and providing (sometimes falsified) examples.
Saying Adam Smith is Capitalism is no different than saying Karl Marx is Socialism. It ignores successes, failures, and horrors of both systems as they exist in real life. As well as ignoring the theories and evidence brought forth since. This applies equally to both socialist and capitalist thinkers.
Adam Smith Capitalism was the most ideal form of Capitalism. We knew it was going to backfire in practice because the whole framework of Classical Economics (of Smith, etc.) was based on a few unrealistic assumptions like:
Given these four assumptions, we would all be living in an ideal and egalitarian world resulting in natural Full Employment (as Classical Econs used to say!) and no Socialism would be ever needed!
But Keynes and others who came later proved that how these assumptions could go wrong and the Economy can indeed screw up - as it actually happened during the Great Depression of 1930s.
Yep, but my point is that “absolute” (or something close to that) free market does not equal capitalism. Those are not synonymous. I disagree that the US is unequivocally more capitalist than other countries. Again, sorry for being pedantic, not the point of this discussion.
Out of curiosity, which countries would you say are more capitalist than the US? And why?
The USA can possibly not be the most capitalistic (I think it is), but it is the worst kind. It is imperialist.
Not sure I really buy in to the fear vs greed thing. But personally I just see capitalism as being the most stable system. It doesn't require deliberate decisions by leaders, most situations self balance over time, and the ones that balance in an undesirable way can be overridden by government/law.
Meanwhile pretty much everything else either requires some miraculous collaboration and generosity between millions of people, or some extremely powerful government that dictates everything. And even then, the laws of supply and demand still exist, its just instead of using a market to work this out, it's left to government to guess how much of everything has to be made, how much it should cost, who should get it, etc.
Slowly refining capitalism through laws while still keeping most of it seems like the only viable solution.
Thats....a problematic view. The only time things "self-balance" is when there was firm, direct government intervention. While a democracy is preferable, a dictator can solve this problem just as easily.
Otherwise, things just trended towards monopolies, indifference towards collateral damage, and devolving to straight-up grifts.
Self balancing is the whole function of markets. If farmers grow too many potatoes one year, the value will plummet, which is the signal to grow less of them next year. If there are not enough people working in plumbing, the wages will rise, which is a signal that sends people to take up that job.
Unfortunately there are also some "rational market forces" that are undesirable. Such as a disabled person not being able to work, and therefor not being able to earn any money to survive. The government steps in here and overrides the market in ways we find desirable. Which is much simpler than holding a government meeting to decide how many potatoes shall be grown next year multiplied by every single possible thing you can buy/sell. Let the market work out the bulk of things, and then intervene only when we don't like the outcome.
So what you're saying is: An abundance of food is worse than a shortage of food because prices would be lower. Heck, we've seen cases where farmers till the crops back into the earth rather than give them away when that happens.
This is, frankly, an insane situation. It is a sign that profitability should be, at best a secondary consideration. Social benefit should be the primary consideration.
Price signalling is useful, don't get me wrong. But there's no reason why market economics cannot live within a fully socialist system. It's just that the benefits are socialized, not privatized.
Food in particular is a tricky one, because if everyone follows price signalling all the time, eventually a crop failure occurs then there is a massive shortage. It happened a lot more before we had lots of government meetings which analyze all the food production data and adjust reccomendations and subsidies...which is very much a thing that happens even here in the USA.
Markets "self-balance" in one sense but there is no guarantee that the balance they find is stable or beneficial to society. Sometimes the way a market balances involves things we very much do not want as a society, like swaths of people dying because they can't afford insulin.
Corn subsidies made sense back when they were enacted: 25% of America was farmers with the other 70% too broke to buy food (and thus farmers also broke). It was an economic bailout little different than the unemployment boost during COVID.
The farming landscape has changed dramatically since then...and yes corn subsidies make a lot less sense now.
It's a wrong notion that govt. needs to step in always, even the capitalists have a heart and most of them aren't ruthless. To cite an example, the Adiga chain of private restaurants here in Bangalore have a stated policy to prefer disabled folks for certain jobs like cashier, data entry, etc. Of course, govt. intervention is always welcome but the private sector is often painted as bad here under the giant umbrella of "ruthless capitalists" which is quite far from realiy.
Maybe. But do they pay those cashier and data entry jobs the same as other jobs? Are disabled people also considered for other jobs?
If disabled people are relegated to lower-paying jobs, is it not reasonable to provide a benefit so that they may live as fully as someone whom is not disabled?
Otherwise, they're permanently an underclass, whom can't afford equivalent food or housing that an average person can.
Yes!
No!
That would be full on socialism. One can agree that there should be a benefit provided without agreeing that it should rise to whatever level is necessary for someone to flourish.
Why should disabled people not be able to flourish? You say that it's socialism but you don't explain why that's a bad thing.
I'm not saying they can't. I'm simply pointing out that it's possible to separate the two quoted statements and agree with the first bit without following on to the second.
At some point, to advocate for capitalism requires you to become hostile to the very concept of widespread human flourishing, and to convince yourself that it’s actually bad for everyone, regardless of how it might be achieved.
You're just giving an example of situations where workplaces deliberately seek out disabled employees, but that doesn't mean there are no longer people who are still unable to work. We definitely could (and should) improve the ability of disabled people to be accomodated at workplaces, and we should praise places making strides in that arena under our current system. But even in the absolute best case scenario there will always be some people who are unable to work. And under capitalism those people die without government intervention (which is socialism lite) or extremely high amounts of charity from their loved ones or strangers. This doesn't even require the individuals involved in capitalism to be particularly ruthless -- it's a consequence of the system itself.
I would encourage you to look into market socialism and similar topics. You can combine the best parts of capitalism with some basic concepts of socialism to end up with something that may be more healthy. You can use greed as a motivation even within some socialist frameworks. American capitalism also seems like it might be a self destroying system - a consistent focus on short term profits is damaging over time.
I also think separating Socialism and Communism with a slash and considering them the same thing is fundamentally flawed.
This is where I land as well. I have to thank Richard Wolff for that. It's long but that is one of the finest mind-expanding conversations I've ever seen on this very topic. When he lays out the history of communist and socialist thought, it's pretty clear out chief problem with socialism has been figuring out where exactly to put the socialism. It sure as hell does not work at the top of a government. America only works because we split it all up with checks and balances, then we fire them every couple of years before their heads get too big - and that seems to work less well over time.
The best answer for 'where' the socialism goes seems to be having companies that are legally owned and operated by and managed by workers. Rather than C-level executives, the union runs the company, not the board, not the executives. They serve the workers, the workers do not work for them. Every company becomes a union by default.
That places the incentive for the company to do well on the shoulders of everyone working there, with voting rights. At the least it would banish most C-level stupidity, and a non-trivial amount of other corporate issues - harder to treat them as expendable when they can vote to fire you and give themselves raises with your old salary at the same time. Bet you won't be voting to elect the jackass who will make a tweet on the corporate account that cuts the stock price in half, or voting to move your factory across several thousand miles of water either. Also a hell of a lot harder to avoid this 'voting' and 'democracy' business when it's part of your day job - people might get in the habit and that might just make them pay more attention to the voting they do or don't do outside of work.
I can see this happening in America at some point, when people are ready to talk 'new deal' style changes. Pair it up with a few UBI projects and we might find out that capitalistic systems have been idling all this time compared to what they could achieve under a healthier state of affairs. The best part is nothing prevents this now, so if one were inclined to start a business one could structure it like this already. I'd be curious to see research on companies built up this way and what happened to them. I'm sure it's been tried.
I'm very much in favor of this; this is the best way to implement change right now within the framework of our current laws and society. Unions aren't enough; we need co-ops to become the default form of business.
One of the manufacturers that the company I work for buys from was, if not a co-op, at least employee-owned. As a result of that, they made some of the highest quality widgets on the market. As it turns out, when people are invested in their workplace they make sure they're doing a good job. There's endless positive things that we could say about them; not only was their product top-notch, they also had some of the most accomodating sales reps and a warranty department that blew everyone else out of the water.
I'm using the past tense because a year or so ago they were bought up by a private company. And while the transition has been pretty good and there has been a lot of synergy^TM as a result of merging their workflow with a previous competetor, you can tell that it's been tough on all of them. There has been odd failures that we've never seen before, and when talking to them it's clear that they're a lot more tired than they were before. The people who actually built the products were probably screwed over, too, given that they moved production to a factory that is probably 1000 miles away and shuttered the old one.
If you want to see a real-world working model for worker-owned cooperatives, check out the Mondragon Corporation. It's a 70,000 person conglomerate of worker-owned businesses. More details here).
That's exactly the sort of result I was hoping to find. I wonder just how strong the signal is. If the socialist position is correct, organizations built up like this should objectively and provably and frequently out-perform their undemocratic counterparts... not necessarily in terms of pure profit, but also in worker satisfaction, less shady behaviors, quality of work, better mental health, and a more performative long-term outlook on company decision-making.
Seems less likely to get globe-dominating multinationals this way too, so it might lead to less market consolidation and diminish the power of capitalist god-kings that get there by capturing all of the value for themselves. Even Friedman disliked the multinationals, but he didn't have a market method to deal with them. This method might help push the incentives back the other way.
It's not perfect. Mondragon is still competing within the framework of globalized race-to-the-bottom capitalism. Many of their products follow the Apple model, with well-paid knowledge workers concentrated in Mondragon, and low-paid non-cooperative overseas manufacturing labor. Profitability still depends on non-sustainable environmental exploitation. The role of women workers is diminished via the influence of patriarchal culture. It's likely that Mondragon couldn't exist without relatively worker-friendly Spanish laws.
There's hope for improvement on all of these measures, but Mondragon is also exposed to the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist markets. The collective has had business failures, and there are tensions with the centralized governance model that led to splits.
I'm leading with the negatives up front because I'm old and tired of listening to unrealistic discourse about what it takes to achieve real change. I think the Mondragon model is an excellent start, and it's taken 80 years of dedicated, pragmatic effort to build to where it is now.
I do not think capitalism is destined to "win". I think it's destined to rot into feudalism/imperialism and rebirth itself cyclically in a wash of cataclysmic bloody war, in the absence of countervailing democratic socialism. Marx was a good diagnostician, if not a strategist.
The neofeudal capitalists are currently succeeding because they have taken a mostly quiet, patient, generations-long political and propaganda approach to dismantling worker alliances and protections. They've formed alliances of convenience with existing retrogressive Christian nationalist and neo-fascist groups. They don't know enough history to realize this strategy will lead to their ruin, in exactly the way that German nobility was wrecked when the Nazis turned on their bankers, and as the Russian oligarchs have discovered.
I'd love to believe we can turn our political systems away from their current course and establish the foundations for a cooperative, green, equitable socialism to flourish. But I'm losing hope of seeing it within my lifetime.
As @itdepends points out, this is a fairly arbitrary argument. First, it assumes that the propensity to provoke and benefit from fear and envy are essential attributes of socialism/communism, as opposed to common or accidental. Second, it assumes that capitalism neither provokes nor benefits from fear or envy. You ignore the non-emotional attributes of both capitalism and socialism/communism. Some of your argument relies on the behavior of cheetahs and lions, but you establish no causal link between their behavior and that of humans. It is possible to make valid comparisons like this, but there must be further elaboration, you can't just assume that one is revelatory of the other. Finally, you compare communism/socialism with religion, while ignoring that a similar comparison could easily be made to highlight religious aspects of capitalism.
You assume that capitalism and socialism/communism are two consolidated fields with no space for further distinction when in reality both capitalism and socialism/communism are highly dependent on external factors that greatly alter their presentation and impact on those living under it. That is to say, the capitalism of the United States is not the same of Russia or Scandinavia, and the socialism/communism of Bernie Sanders is not the same of Laos or North Korea. You also lump socialism and communism together, furthering the confusion.
Many other people have addressed most of the things I disagree with or think are wrong, so I will not retread those waters. I am confused by the phrasing of your title though; or maybe I just strongly disagree. Greed might be one of the main things talked about when discussing Capitalism, but fear and envy are two of the main tools Capitalism utilizes. Fear and envy have been the main emotions capitalism has brought me. My day-to-day motivation for doing things is not greed, it is the fear of getting fired. It is the fear of losing the stability my wife and I have craved and been denied by Capitalism our whole lives. It is the fear of not being able to afford food or rent and becoming homeless. A fear that is grounded in the fact that Capitalism DID force us into homelessness and near-starvation once in our lives, and nothing in that system gave even a remote fuck about it. All the greed and envy I feel towards others has been drilled into me by our Capitalist society. The way out of that situation wasn't "working harder" or any of the other bullshit hard-line capitalists always tell me about. It was from forming a small community of people who all pooled their resources to make sure everyone had their bare necessities met, and working together to help each other find solutions to their problems we otherwise wouldn't have had access to. I also wouldn't say I feel greedy when I think about my emotions and motivations in life. I would say that I envy the things others can have that I can't. It has been unlearning those lessons through socialist and communist literature (and a lot of therapy) that I have clawed any amount of happiness and calm back into my life.
I've always viewed the benefit of capitalism in being the distributed decision making. And the downside of capitalism the distributed decision making.
Think of your job. Would you rather work in a job where every decision is held by upper management, with little delegation? Or by committees? Or would you rather work in a place where prudent decision making is delegated to you and the people with the on the ground information?
I view planned economies much the same way I view unhealthy organizations that hoard decision making at the top. In that sense, capitalism allows individuals to make more of their own decisions to pursue wealth consummating transactions.
However, bad actors exploit others and common resources, creating negative externalities, costs that they don't have to bear.
I'm a strong believer in government regulation to minimize negative externalities, force corporations and people to pay their own costs, and set standards to prevent tragedies of the commons. The problem as I see it now is we have insufficient regulation.
I will also say that I believe the governments role in the market, in addition to the usual things like enforcing civil contracts, is to incentive prudent risk taking through social safety nets. You want people to make prudent leaps to start a business, invest in a project, and so on. But people take fewer risks when the consequence is starving in the winter. I also feel like our social safety nets need to be improved.
The analogy to this is the business leader who wants his VPs to take reasonable risks because overall it will pay off for the company. If individual unit heads don't because the boss punished little mistakes harshly, then no risks get taken.
I'm not really sure where we got into this capitalism vs socialism thing, because in my mind the bigger issue is capitalism verses planned economies. I think these things exist on a spectrum.
What I think people really mean is to contrast social democracy and Democratic socialism. The former aims to make markets work for the common good, while the latter aims to make the means of production a common good.
I'm for social democracy. I believe in distributed decision making with strong regulation to avoid negative externalities.
I don't know if that helps your perspective any.
As a quick sidebar, it seems like one of free market capitalism’s end states is wrecking massive global climate change, possibly ending modern human civilization entirely (while definitely wiping out most of the planet’s biodiversity). I would claim that literally any system other than that has the edge in that at least one human will be around to benefit from it.
That said, I get the impression you’re painting in broad strokes, so perhaps free market capitalism isn’t specifically what you had in mind.
Well China certainly doesn’t have free market capitalism and is helping just as much with wrecking the environment.
Governments are not “what’s the best” so much as “what’s the least awful” and the margins are thin
I think you started off with the wrong idea. It's not about fear/envy vs. greed. It's simply that in the absence of societal fear/envy, greed is a more "trustworthy" motivator to count on.
You can pretty much count on people acting on their own greed, capitalism counts on this and thus works better.
Socialism counts not on people's fear/envy, but on their kindness, generosity, and empathy, i.e. it counts on people being their ideal selves. This is a much less "trustworthy" proposition than human greed. Thus socialism tends to fall prey to human's more selfish instincts than capitalism.
Socialism/communism is more of an ideal, capitalism is just shitty reality (until/unless we reach some Star Trek style post scarcity society).
Yet another discussion on economic systems where no one bothers to mention that most corporations are internally run like the worst stereotypes of petty Party officers playing politics at the local SSR.
Nonetheless, this did bring back fond memories of the old internet. We collectively had just as inane and long-winded discussion as the nerds of the Bush years enjoyed about deconstructing theism.
To keep my own views short, people don't think about the worst case and often only the best case because they for some reason believe the issues that are inherent in the current system will disappear if you make another system. Further a system that works for one lifetime is not a system that lasts. Handling the transition of power is a huge huge problem.
People suck. Not all of them, not all the time, but they do. The kind of people who seek power and success often also happen to wind up in control, so you had better have a good answer to when they do. The whole point of modern representative democracies with capitalistic systems is that, on average, you're supposed to gain from the fact that people suck, and the system doesn't require a string of benevolent leaders to work.
Communism and socialism, as its been attempted is not true to the form it's supposed to be. Corruption has warped these systems into authoritarian nightmares on more than one occasion.
but....the same applies for capitalism and democracies. There are all sorts of examples in modern capitalism societies of things NOT being a free market or corruption and regulatory capture screwing with things (say, ISP providers, big tech, farm equipment, etc), BUT some of them are working.
There's a million factors you'll never be able to control for to really see why a country succeeds or fails. Given the same timeline of luck does the US do better or worse with communism or socialism or a dictatorship? You'll never be 100% sure. God knows there are democracies that have voted in some pretty awful people with horrific track records, and yes there have been countries that have done well that don't follow standard democratic practices (Singapore being a really interesting example as it tends to ruffle the feathers of the left and right). Hell I'd even argue there's a chance that the success of less tyrannical governments is only a flash in the pan historically, being relatively recent, and we might just devolve back to feudalism and similar styles given advancements in tech.
In the end, my personal belief is that most people don't critically look at what issues a government faces in attempting to be kind but also exist for the next 200 years. Being utopia only to be invaded by your neighbors, undermined by them, or collapse on the first transition of power is pointless. A lot of the talk around communism and socialism is"Wouldn't it be great if we did this!" and the answer is of course. The problem is how do you do that and not have it devolve, and we've got lots and lots of evidence it can devolve.
Yes, but only one ideal produces an actually functional system of government in practice, flawed or not.
I'll respond first to the OP's prompt on greed vs fear/envy, and then on capitalism/socialism systemically.
I have to disagree with ascribing those emotions to those economic systems. I know it's popular to associate greed with capitalism, and for some capitalists it might be accurate, but I think ambition or fear are probably more accurate for most people today.
'Ambitious' people under capitalism want to win, be successful, and have acknowledgement from their peers. But they and their peers exist in a world where those things are only measured by money. They are doing well enough that more money provides marginal utility and having it is just a byproduct of demonstrating success.
'Fearful' people under capitalism can be found on the whole economic spectrum.
At the bottom people are driven by very concrete needful fear. They know that if they don't make money then very soon they will not be able to provide food, shelter, or other baseline standards of living for them or their families.
In the middle people are driven by the fear that they won't have enough in the future. "Will I have enough to buy a home?", "Will I have enough money to be secure when I'm old?", "Will I have enough so that I can give my children an education?", etc.
There are probably even more emotions that drive different people, but those are the ones that I identify as being more prevalent than greed.
On the other side, I don't see fear and envy as the primary emotions of socialism either.
For fear, you talk about fear of wealth inequality. People who are well-off under capitalism and who choose/wish for socialism do not want wealth inequality. But fear doesn't seem like the right characterization for their concern. The one point I will give socialism (or rather anti-capitalism) as far as fear is for ecology. There is a very strong indication that capitalism would take the opportunity to kill us all in a generation if it meant short term returns today. And that is something that I think a lot of people fear.
People who are not well-off under capitalism have more in common with the communist revolutionaries of the past, so let's have a look at those emotions. They may have been fearful of how wealth inequality was driving their circumstances down, but it wasn't envy of what the wealth class had that led to the upheaval of those times.
It was anger. Anger is the driver of historical communist revolutions. Anger that they work hard to struggle to get by while the value of their labor goes to someone else. Not a childish envy that they ought to have something just because someone else does.
If it seems like my argument for different emotions associating with different systems is all over the place, it's because it is. People's emotional motivations are complex and you can't tie them to an economic system in such a tidy way.
On capitalism and socialism generally. Capitalism is not the system marked by a free market or market economy. It's wage labor specifically which makes capitalism what it is. In other words being paid to work a specific amount of time, rather than paid to complete a specific task. This is what enables capital return. Capitalism is "easy" because once you define what it is you can see how it works and it runs itself. Socialism is harder to talk about because the idea is loosely that "the means of production should be socialized". Exactly how that happens needs to be established and there are many ways it could happen ranging from authoritarian central planning to localized democracies.
For this reason also I think it's hard to talk about capitalism and socialism because real world capitalist economies have complicated rules around them preventing them from being pure capitalism, and real world socialist economies and organizations have a lot of unique structures defining how they operate.
On a personal level, I dislike capitalism for two reasons (which don't align at all with your emotions associated with socialism).
First, capital return is structured around the idea that one somehow has capital (best case it was yielded through personal labor), and the virtue of having that capital entitles one to get more capital. Whatever it was that originally created the value that got created the capital is over and done with, yet we expect that it keeps paying off forever.
Second, it goes closely with rent seeking. This flavor of capital return usually involves one person owning a finite resource and simultaneously having people pay them to use it while preventing anyone else from acquiring it for their own personal use. See housing. Landlords own property which reduces supply. Which increases ownership prices. Which prices out people on the low end. Which means those people must now rent.
Similar to what @itdepends suggests, I think its ridiculous to assign specific emotions to 50% of the political spectrum. I would say that fear specifically is a major driver of the political right. Fear of change, fear of persecution, fear of being brought down, fear of violence, fear of the other.
What I'm getting at I guess is that this is a false dichotomy fallacy. You're basically a centrist so why lean left or right based on far right and far left policy? Hitler was a far right nationalist who was also responsible for unimaginable suffering and death based on fear, hate, and envy... why isn't he on your list of reasons why the political right is bad?
You're also missing a whole dimension in terms of political thinking. Authoritarianism vs perfect democracy (or however you want to define that scale)
Capitalism is great - but it only works in a society with morals and values. Otherwise it is just as bad and oppressive as all the other ideologies.
Exactly. Good faith. Fairness. Honest competition. None of which exist in actual real-world capitalism.
John decides to start a business. He wants to build things, so he buys some heavy equipment and starts advertising for clients. After a year or two, as he's built a small reputation and gathered some experience, he begins bidding on jobs offered by local businesses. Slowly, steadily, John builds a reputation of competence as he completes the jobs and reinvests in his business.
Then John decides he's grown to the point of being able to handle larger contracts. Those offered by big business, by government. He has the machines and workers and collective experience to break ground and handle construction and succeed.
What John then finds out is Frank got there sooner. Maybe Frank inherited money and position, maybe Frank just started before John or grew faster. However it worked out, Frank has more money and more connections to corporations, government, inspectors, all of it.
Frank does not appreciate John showing up to fuck with his business. Because that's what competition is; finding out who ranks where in the grand scheme of things.
Frank likes things just how they are; with him as the Big Dog. He especially dislikes how John has come up with more efficient ways to do some of the tasks, how John can take less time or fewer machine hours so the same labor goes further. How John doesn't have as much waste in supply usage, so it requires less material cost.
Under the "rules of capitalism", Frank deserves to lose contracts to John. After all, John is competing more efficiently. John has done what the system outlines, and is a better solution when someone says "Hey, we have a construction job that needs doing; we need to find a good solution for this task."
Frank's a good real world capitalist though. He's not going to stand for John's bullshit. So Frank starts making calls and offering bribes. Frank leans on his connections to harass John with supposed violations of law, with constant inspections that delay or penalize John. Suddenly John's suppliers are reluctant to deal with him, out of fear of Frank pulling his business in retaliation. Frank offers bribes to various decision makers to take Frank's less efficient (more expensive) bids on contracts.
Sure it costs the company or government more money, but what does the contract officer care? He's getting paid, directly. Cash under the table. And if the bribee's boss notices, Frank just cuts him in too. What's a second, a third, a fifth or tenth bribe, compared to not getting these contracts? Meanwhile, John is being buried under a blizzard of harassment he doesn't have the resources to combat; because Frank has more resources and is spending some of them to ensure John never achieves equality.
Safeguarding the rest of Frank's revenue stream. And it only costs him some of it to ensure John never rises to threaten the whole. After John is inevitably destroyed, Frank goes back to business as usual. Eating his pie content in the knowledge his position is secure.
This happens every single day. At all levels. Even internationally. Large players in certain market segments are constantly finding ways to "offer incentives" to their institutional customers ensuring upstart Johnny-come-lately dreamers never have a chance to upset the apple cart. It's not just small towns, or even states, where buddies collude to ensure things stay static.
But that's not fair? Of course it's not. Efficiency, skill, talent, intelligence ... none of that matters a fuck next to position. Which comes from resources. Which offer advantage, used to crush threats before they become dangerous to the revenue stream.
In theory, strong government that sets and enforces rules (laws) is the counter to capitalism. Can harness the supposed advantages capitalism offers to contain its worst and most inefficient elements.
Except capitalism encourages greed, and thus corruption. Laws are one thing, but they're enforced by people. Find those people, corrupt (pay) them. If they (somehow) won't accept the payment, corrupt other people to control or eliminate the problematic ones who won't play ball.
The top of the chain is politicians, the ones who make laws. Suddenly they're not making good laws anymore. They ignore the need for some laws, they change others that already exist. They weaken enforcement, they remove oversight. Below them are bureaucrats who handle the day-to-day of the laws and regulations, and below them are average workers who head out into the world to observe and enforce.
All of those people are corruptible. Particularly under capitalism. After all, the entire system worships greed, so everyone under it is predisposed to want more. And most of them don't have enough anyway, another fundamental truth of capitalism.
People who have enough aren't useful to capitalism, because they might not be desperate enough to take shit jobs, or look the other way when a Big Dog wants something that's "technically wrong." Capitalism is a pyramid, ruled by a few Big Dogs and the rest beneath them with bent backs holding the apex up. The base's lack of surfeit and bereft circumstances ensures they're cooperative to the apex that controls the resources.
Never mind that innovation and efficiency doesn't play the role we assume. Research and development are gambles. Paying bribes is basically a guarantee.
Profit above all else.
Capitalism encourages this behavior. Lauds and worships it.
And, if all else fails, they buy John out. Here John, take the check and fuck off. Now we can go back to controlling things. You built your annoying company to make money right? Here's money. Go kick back on beach and stop bothering us, while we continue making more money. Good? Good.
John's story is actually real and surprisingly, you'll find that several Johns actually made it to the top instead of relenting back!
Classic example is Jeff Bezos. Today he is a billionaire and all but when he had started out with just a library or books platform, the existing hardcopy publishers lobby was all Goliath against him. Stories of him fighting out that tough battle (like John vs Frank here) are quite popular. Needless to say, he also became as brutal as them ruthlessly out pricing them one after other until he reached where he is today. Ironically, he is painted as this bad monopolist today even as the book publishing industry he is supposed to have oppressed is as old as the hills. At the end of the day, this is what human greed or capitalism is and while folks may not like it, it is also the thing that puts bread on the table.
Another example is Uber. Those connected to the grassroots know quite well that one of the toughest industries to break is the transport sector, the kind of trade unions they have can probably be seen in no other industry. It is literally filled with Franks all over. And yet, our protagonist Travis Kalanick did it just like John in your example! He founded the Uber App and rest is history.
You'll find similar examples in case of food deliveries (Zomato, Swiggy, Uber Eats, etc.), Bus and Airline Bookings and many other verticals. If you take the time to appreciate the gifts of capitalism here, chances are that you'll forget all your pessimism for a while and might even get inspired!
I don't think Bezos is the example of the self-made man you think he is. He wasn't Vanderbilt rich, but his family was far wealthier than the average American family. His stepfather who adopted him at a young age (who gave him the "Bezos" name) was an engineer for Exxon and his maternal grandfather was one of the largest land owners in Texas. His parents have him close to $300k loan to start Amazon back in 1994. He didn't exactly start from the bottom. While he was smart and worked hard, you can hardly say those factors alone led to him becoming what he is today. For every Jeff Bezos there are thousands of others who worked just as hard but don't get as far. Most because they had neither the starting wealth, luck or connections to make it.
The question you have to ask yourself is if these are actually good things that have happened. These examples are of businesses that people generally like to give their patronage to, but it doesn't come free. Amazon has many criticism and is doing a well-documented case of enshitification, and all of the businesses you named are criticized for exploitative labor practices. I certainly wouldn't describe Travis Kalanick as a protagonist, and I wouldn't describe any of these things as gifts.
There's room for improvement for sure, but at the end of the day, I do think we're better off with Amazon than we were without it. This is purely my opinion, though. I hate shopping. I hate everything about it, including driving to a store, hoping there's somewhere to park, hoping that they have what I want, paying too much for it, etc. I just want the damn thing, I don't want it to be an experience. It's just the means to an end to doing something else that I actually want to do. So being able pull out my phone, click a button, and have items show up at my door at a reasonable time and price is a huge improvement in my life.
Could it be better? Yeah, Amazon could and should treat their workers better. But let's not pretend that your old-time mom and pop retail shops actually paid their workers any more than minimum wage, or provided their staff meaningful benefits like comprehensive health insurance.
I won't knock you for your opinion. But personally, if I were a healthy young man I would much rather take the job without health insurance over the one with it that is more likely to cause me to need to use it.
That's fair, jobs that require physical labor (such as any job in a warehouse) aren't for everyone.
The thing is that the examples you list, while they did disrupt the industries they replaced, did so by behaving just as badly as their predecessors did, and in many cases worse. Should this really be listed as one of the successes of capitalism?
Edit: removed extra word
Anyone who strictly sticks to one of capitalism or socialism for all industries and in all circumstances is an idiot.
Some industries such as roadway infrastructure or medicine require socialism to work. Some industries such as restaurant and travel are much better suited to capitalism.
I believe the issue is that whatever form of government you choose can work very successfully so long as you have buy-in from all participants. Be it Capitalist, Socialist or Communist. The problem begins when you realize that humans are all different. And, on smaller scales these forms of government can be more successful. However, the more participants you introduce the more troubles you have and the more toward Authoritarianism you move. Communism/Socialism/Capitalism are not inherently bad. These are ideologies. Someone will always lose. Instead of worrying which ideology you want to base your government around you need to understand who you are serving.
I've been putting a lot of thought about what you're talking about. Unfortunately there isn't really a definitive figure in philosophy when it comes to the question of what we should do with people who refuse to take part in society. Unfortunately when you get to those questions, the fluidity of the term "society" becomes a real problem. This is true of any society with democracy, as participating in that democracy is effectively an attempt to change it.
But one thing I think about these terms - communist, capitalist, socialist - is that they aren't foundational. They are descriptive. Societies don't pop up out of nowhere and define themselves; they are made of people with a history that afffects their decisions. People don't go to those terms because they build on top of them, they figure out what works for them based on their experiences and apply whatever label works best for them.
I think this is the point of any democracy though...the ability for participants to be able to make changes to it. That is how it sets it's apart as a (supposed) bastion of freedom in the realm of governments. My assertion is that at what point is it not an actual democracy and I believe that there is a direct relationship to population and authoritarian tendencies of a society.
I certainly agree. I think that this is where I become disinterested in certain discussions that talk about which one of these ideologies is better. Societies are organic and mostly in hindsight are labeled with these terms. But, my overarching concern isn't with which ideology you choose to apply to a society/government. It's the amount of control (Authoritarianism) imposed on the participants. The larger the population the more control is required regardless of what label you place on your group.
If you find some discussions/philosophers that talk about this more let me know. Most discussions I see are Cap vs Soc/Left vs Right/etc.
The freedom to exit is the foundation upon which all other rights depend. Once that freedom is extinguished, outright violence becomes the only recourse for the malcontents. Let those who dislike society build their parallel societies—think monasteries and the Amish. Technically in the larger society but not of it. Far too many ideologues refuse to implement release valves, then act surprised when their experiment fails.
Allen wakes one morning to find that a blizzard rolled through the town over night. Seeing all the snow, he gets the idea to go door-to-door offering to shovel his neighbors' driveways for a fee. He doesn't have a shovel, but fortunately his roommate Bill does have a shovel. After explaining his plan, Allen asks Bill to borrow the shovel. Bill is hesitant, being worried that Allen will wear the shovel out on so many driveways, so Allen offers to buy the shovel outright for a price that Bill decides is fair. Bill mulls it over and agrees, but instead of selling it to Allen, he offers to let Allen use the shovel in exchange for a small cut of the revenue.
Capitalism says that Bill has a right to maintain ownership of the shovel along with a portion of revenue from Allen's labor (as long as Allen agrees to the terms). Capitalism sees this an ideal situation because not only do both Allen and Bill benefit, but the chance at higher returns for Bill gives him greater incentive to invest his shovel in Allen's enterprise, creating economic activity where it otherwise might not be.
Socialism says that Bill has no right to maintain ownership of the shovel and have a portion of the fruits of Allen's labor. According to socialism, Bill is using his ownership of an asset to exploit Allen and leech the fruits of Allen's labor. Bill may still have the right to sell the shovel to Allen outright for a flat fee, maybe even to turn a profit on it, or he may have the right to refuse altogether and leave the shovel in his shed to collect dust (different implementations of socialist philosophy can handle those situations differently), but the key difference that separates economic socialism is that Bill cannot profit off of someone else's labor strictly because he owns an asset.
That is the difference between capitalism and socialism. Things like business regulations, personal property rights, planned economies, and government entitlements get swept up into the *conversation due to the fact that capitalism (esp laissez-faire capitalism) tends to implicitly put a higher value on individual liberty whereas socialism (esp communism) tends to implicitly put a greater value on collectivism, ergo those values tend to similarly guide the policies of the governments that adopt these respective economic systems.
Which is all a long-winded way of saying that most people who argue over capitalism and socialism (*including OP) don't really know what they're talking about and are just latching onto these labels for more vibes-based arguments over individual liberty or the collective good and between tribalism or egalitarianism.
Edit: Fixed autocorrect
It's definitely a novel ideas to define the two in the terms their detractors describe them. It's an interesting angle, but ultimately I don't think it yielded any new insights. It just landed us in a place where we're trying to determine which emotion is worse, greed or fear, which is too abstract and too contextual to have a universal answer.
Socialism is not about fear or envy at all. It is about love and compassion. A socialist wants everyone to have a good life, regardless of their socioeconomic status.
Also, I feel like you're conflating socialism with communism. They are two very different ideologies.
I'm not sure that different instances of "communism" are really the same thing or that "envy" is really the right way to think about it.
In the case of Russia you had a large but undeveloped country with a particularly venial and incompetent Tsar one of whose worse misadventures was
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Japanese_War
where things went south at the very beginning of a sea journey that turned out to be as epic as The Odyssey and culminated in the fleet being wiped out in an hour of combat with the Japanese. Lenin has his own personal grudge against the Tsar as his brother had been put to death by the Tsar.
There was an idea in Leninism that "socialism in one country" was impossible so early on Russia tried to promote revolution everywhere, which had little success. Stalin saw the crisis of WWII coming and realized that Russia was going to have to become a normal country so it gave up on that goal, even supporting Chiang Kai-shek over Mao Zhedong when the nationalists massacred Chinese communists in Wuhan 1927. Trotsky still believed in permanent revolution and Stalin had him murdered with an ice pick in Mexico.
Stalin politically unified a large and diverse area. He starved his population and sold the Soviet Unions' agricultural output to the West and made deals with Western industrialists to rapidly build capital so that they could build the weapons to fight WWII. Stalin killed millions and committed other terrible crimes against his people but he also had to get credit for getting the Soviet Union through a crisis it might not have survived and made it a technological, military and cultural leader in a remarkably short time. It's no wonder that some people in countries like India could have seen the Soviet Union as a model for their own development with the hope they could get the good parts and not the bad parts.
China's story was both similar and different, its political system had broken down thanks to pressure from outside and the entire world got behind Chiang Kai-shek's KMT to "restore order", thus the Chinese talk about "100 years of humiliation." China went through a mixture of insane tragedy punctuated with spurts of development, by 1970 they did not see themselves as brothers of the Russians and soon decided they liked the United States better. Since then if anything, China seems to be trying to beat Western capitalists as their own game. Although the CCP tries to suppress any kind of alternative power structure, there seems to be very little egalitarian about today's China.
There was Cuba and a number of countries in Eastern Europe that the Soviet Union was able to dominated after WWII, none of those really had the story of explosive development and global significance ("ten days that shook the world") that Russia and China had, today Vietnam seems to have roughly the same system China has but unlike China they are a small country that can't throw its weight around so Vietnam does not challenge other nations the way China does.
What's envy got to do with that? (In the case of China in particular, I'm inclined to use the word dignity)
People also use the word "socialism" to describe the politics of Bernie Sanders, social security in the US, the national health service in the UK., etc. The right phrase for that is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
and that hasn't just had "bottom up" support from workers but has sometimes been promoted by capitalists such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Socialism_(Germany)
as it can be a practical way to keep workers productive and loyal. Henry Ford was quite willing to share wealth with his employees, he had much more fundamental objections about sharing any control. (There's a very interesting question of what motivates founders: e.g. "Rich or King", Rockefeller opposed the break-up of Standard Oil but after it happened, Standard Oil was freed from a controversy and multiplied in value.) I'd say the lust for power is much more pernicious than greed in any kind of society, though of course those run together.
Okay, so I thought there was a section like ~politics, but there isn't. Please add "politics" or something to the tags. I expected to not see posts like this since I filtered out words relating to topics like this.
Added.
Thanks :)
Wow, someone defending capitalism on social media.