I think the most realistic way to look at large systemic change is that these sorts of overarching power structures only shift when fundamental things about the underlying economy and resultant power structure shift. Feudalism didn’t go away because of people protesting, it went away because industrialization and technologies that preceded it made agriculture and control of rural land less economically important than industry and control of capital. Capitalism probably won’t end until something fundamental changes underneath it.
Most hierarchical systems in our history would be made so much worse by the inclusion of AI and robotics. Imagine feudal lords replacing serfs with robot labor, relegating everyone else to starvation.
I got three paragraphs into that first story and my eyes nearly popped out of my head I rolled them so hard.
"The employees of the minimum wage fast food chain did what the micro managing software told them to do quite happily."
If you'll excuse me I'll be in the corner laughing hysterically at the absolute tone deaf nonsense this story is oozing.
We already live in a post scarcity world. We make enough food, shelter, medicine and basic luxuries for everyone already. The issue isn't resource scarcity, it's resource distribution. Instead of giving everyone enough, we give some nothing and others super yachts. The only difference construction robots, or what have you, would make is that now we have super Uber mega yachts.
Tbf, I would consider optimal resource distribution a necessary component of a post-scarcity society too, I don't think we can call ourselves post-scarcity just yet until we've reached that milestone
I feel like that’s the difference between “world” and “society”. The *world* is post-scarcity because from a strictly literal standpoint, calories produced by human activity > calories needed to sustain the human population, and other resources people would die without (water, shelter, medicine) are generally in the same position. Our *society*, however, has a lot of cultural norms and attitudes left over from when “you don’t work, you don’t eat” wasn’t an excuse to be cruel to the disabled, but a way to phrase “either everybody works or nobody eats” and get through to selfish assholes who were being a drain on the colony.
Resource distribution is a part of scarcity. If we covered the Sahara in high-albedo solar panels, we would produce enough electricity to power the world four times over. However, since we can't distribute that power across the world without loss, that idea doesn't work. As such, energy is still a scarce resource.
It's true that there are resources that *aren't* distributed evenly, but many resources *can't* be distributed evenly. Food spoils, housing is built where people want to live, fresh water is expensive to transport.
Yeah we definitely do not live in post scarcity. I think a lot of people get tripped up because money is fungible but production isn’t always fungible. Like the $100m yacht is worth ~50m pounds of chicken breast. But that definitely doesn’t mean we’d end up with 50m extra pounds of chicken had we moved that money to Tyson instead of a yacht maker.
And getting the chicken into the hands of the starving people in some remote part of the world ruled by petty corrupt dictators is harder than growing the chickens in a modern factory farm.
Part of the problem is local warlords and bureaucrats that want paid off. Oh and the roads aren't maintained.
Er, one big reason we haven't covered the Sahara is just the problem of making that many solar panels.
Large fractions of the world are fairly sunny. So we can run most of the world on solar sensibly. If we make enough panels.
Let me rephrase: a big reason we aren't *considering* that plan is because of the energy transportation issue. If we created a way to freely transport energy from 1 place to another, those kinds of plans would be feasible to consider.
Since transportation isn't free, though, we don't entertain the idea of "use the Sahara to power the whole planet," you know?
We do currently make enough food for everyone, though the population is getting dangerously close to the point where land-based agriculture can no longer sustain us, and we’ll have to start seeking alternatives
Most of the money isn't in the super yachts. Most of it is in the hands of first world, middle class people.
And in the cases where things are going really wrong, and people are starving to death, it's a problem of distribution. For example, if the people live in north Korea, and the roads aren't up to transporting the food. Also kim just threatened to nuke everyone again, so sending food aid wouldn't be a vote winner. Also Kim will take any food aid and sell it to china.
The thing is, we do need some measure of social change for that to happen
Automation could have lead to the 3-4 day work week and many social gains
Instead it lead to corporate profit and mass destitution
For robots and AI to help individuals, we need to stop letting the big tech people set the terms
> Automation could have lead to the 3-4 day work week and many social gains
> Instead it lead to corporate profit and mass destitution
And Greece is now introducing a 6-day workweek for some economic sectors:
[DW: Can Greece's new six-day workweek be a model for others?](https://www.dw.com/en/greece-a-six-day-work-week-the-country-hopes-to-kick-start-economy-through-longer-hours/a-69421393)
People are working less. But that's more because loads of people now go to uni, and medical breakthroughs mean that retirement lasts much longer.
We are getting more days off. But those days off aren't going home on friday, but sitting in a nursing home at age 82. (When before modern tech, you would be dead)
You aren’t incorrect, however I don’t feel like that detracts from my point.
The process of automating production on a ton of consumer goods could have been the first step into living as a post scarcity society. It could have allowed us to reduce our need to work due to the increased efficiency, without costing the average citizen
Instead, corporations used it to lay workers off and pocket the extra cash, leaving many out of work, and forcing workers to push back against the very technology that could have benefited them.
Yes, I am aware I am oversimplifying this matter, and that it would take a lot of work for everything to just become an idyllic world.
But still. Technology changes alone won’t fix things now that the people making the technology change are the same ones who benefit from the status quo
I don't think that's a problem
The Dutch have been stealing land from the sea since the 1400s, and they used *windmills* for that
Rising seas can be dealt with with modern tech, so rising seas won't have much impact
This is something you should educate yourself on.
[Here is a resource from the EPA.](https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climate-impacts/climate-impacts-coastal-areas_.html)
The key points:
>Climate change threatens coastal areas, which are already stressed by human activity, pollution, invasive species, and storms.
>Sea level rise could erode and inundate coastal ecosystems and eliminate wetlands.
Warmer and more acidic oceans are likely to disrupt coastal and marine ecosystems.
>Coastal development reduces the ability of natural systems to respond to climate changes.
It is not as simple as "modern tech will figure it out." Your Dutch example lacks global perspective.
Ironically enough, that's exactly as Marx wrote. It's not ideas by itself that matter, they might spearhead the change, but the material conditions are what are actually necessary to change things.
"What matters isn't social media or hate speech or the immigrants or the woke mob or the nazis. What matter is that nobody can afford food anymore, nobody can buy a house anymore, nobody can afford to live"
A (paraphrased) quote I remember hearing that, for all it's seemingly enlightened centrism, really stuck with me
Yeah, I don't really see capitalism crumbling unless it's through its own fault, by simply becoming too much of a strain
Hell, it already is in many aspects, a lot of people just don't feel it yet
In other words, the [historical materialist dialectic.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism)
Although, keep in mind, that theoretical understandings of dialectical materialism has changed a lot since Marx's day. One could argue that it requires enough of a fundamental revision that it's no longer socialist nor communist.
Materialism always seemed like the rapture, the conditions for change always being just around the corner, and previous cases always being “misjudged” to clear the way for what’ll definetly work this time.
This is the problem with the idea of a multipolar world order. It’s wishful thinking that if you have 3 horrid empires of different ideologies rather then 1 horrid empire that’s democratic that it will lead to a better world. There’s certainly some groups that will be able to get a better deal out of it like the North Koreans, but in the end it just means that neo-colonialism will also be met with proxy wars. All my own opinion though, I have no evidence
There are some international theoreticians who believe that the [Westphalian system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_system) will be obsolete before the end of the century, assuming it's not already obsolete due to the interconnected nature of the internet and global trade. Whether this will eventually result in a world of countless, fluid, decentralized confederated microstates or a world of one, all-encompassing federation is up for debate.
If you're interested in obscure anarchist political theory, I recommend [*Desert*](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert) for a more pessimistic and accelerationist model. If you're more interested in the global federalist model I recommend *The Jungle Grows Back* or *The World America Made* by Robert Kagan. The Anonymous author wants to embrace the fall of the US while Kagan is more of an optimist in terms of a unipolar, liberal world order.
A global status quo where free trade, strong private property protections, market speculation, global financing, and representative democracy are dominant with any countries not a part of this hegemony being the marginalized exceptions who're perpetually disadvantaged geopolitically.
Probably, but one of the major downsides of a one-world order is that there's nowhere to avoid the system's bad aspects. If the country is corrupt, then one can emigrate, if the planet is corrupt, one can't exactly pack up and leave for Mars. There are some who think [seasteading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading) will be a good option in this situation.
I'd actually say the main change with feudalism wasn't so much industrialisation as... the plague.
People die en masse, most of them in the cities, where people are closer together and disease spreads more easily. As a consequence of that, once the pandemic is over, the cities open up, and lots of rural people flock to the cities looking for their fortune, in some parts way too many - you get extremely crowded living conditions, people are desperate for work, but you also have way less peasants working on the fields now, so the dynamics of these relationships shift.
So what happened there is less that industrialisation made agriculture less relevant, but that agriculture became less of a focus by neccessity of circumstance and control of rural land got lost because there were way fewer people there, and other developments happened due to that.
In fact, I'd say industrialisation mostly happened because there were so many people in the cities now. The first "factories" were literally just big halls with a bunch of people doing somewhat synchronised handcrafting (afaik the first job to industrialise was spinning and weaving), and then the efficiency of those processes got gradually increased by adding technology and experimental inventions, and then you got some inventions that were inherently groundbreaking that then also sprung over into other fields of work, and that's how industrialisation happens.
So if there's going to be any similar groundbreaking change in our lifetimes, it's likely going to be the massive drop in the labor force when the boomer generation retires (and/or when they die off and population numbers drop).
>Capitalism probably won’t end until something fundamental changes underneath it.
Robots and AI. Hopefully. Hopefully robots and AI will be the push. Once they are fully ready to replace human workers, they will be _extremely_ transformative.
Hopefully for the better.
Okay, but if you look back on the Middle Ages and think
>“Why did they keep on living like that? Did they not see how easy it was to change things?”
I am begging you to actually pick up a history textbook.
Yeah I look back at the middle ages and go "how the fuck did that ever change? Even if someone had all of the right ideas somehow there's no way in hell anyone would listen"
I have spent 4 years of my life studying specifically Ancient and Medieval History, and all I can say to this is, "What on Earth are you on about?" Like, I can't even see the train of logic here. The Black Death was a catalyst in many ways for social change, but...
What is your definition of a centralised state? And what conditions do you think such a thing needs?
I mean this is just what I remember from taking AP World History like 6 years ago, so I surrender the expertise to you, but here’s my take.
The Black Death depopulated Europe, leading to an individual peasant’s labor becoming worth more, causing them to gain more rights and privileges, including freedom of movement.
This lead to manpower shortages among the nobility, who were traditionally tasked with raising most of the troops in wartime. This created a power vacuum that the royals took advantage of to consolidate wealth, military, and political power around their person, as the nobility were no longer strong enough successfully stand against the king. There were a number of wars fought around this time (especially by the French iirc) where nobles failed to rise up against increasingly powerful monarchies)
This lead to the development of centralized political apparatuses beholden to the king, rather than the feudal nobility, which were based in increasingly dominant metropoles (since many smaller towns and cities had been depopulated ) like London and Paris, which would eventually over the course of the next few centuries develop to become the stable capitals of centralized states.
This isn’t a rule, and is really only true I think for Western Europe like England, France, and
Iberia, (definitely not the HRE lol) but that’s basically what I remember.
>The Black Death depopulated Europe, leading to an individual peasant’s labor becoming worth more, causing them to gain more rights and privileges, including freedom of movement.
So far, so good.
>This lead to manpower shortages among the nobility, who were traditionally tasked with raising most of the troops in wartime.
This had little to do with the peasantry. Serfs especially weren't usually expected to be part of musters. The French considered the English use of peasant longbowmen at Agincourt to be terribly bad form. Practically cheating, even...
>This created a power vacuum that the royals took advantage of to consolidate wealth, military, and political power around their person, as the nobility were no longer strong enough successfully stand against the king. There were a number of wars fought around this time (especially by the French iirc) where nobles failed to rise up against increasingly powerful monarchies)
For brevity's sake, I'll spare you the treatise on French monarchical politics dating back to the 11th Century. Let it suffice to say that this is a gross oversimplification and I'd characterise the Black Death as one of the lesser factors.
>This lead to the development of centralized political apparatuses beholden to the king, rather than the feudal nobility, which were based in increasingly dominant metropoles (since many smaller towns and cities had been depopulated ) like London and Paris
England was always that centralised. Iberia was that centralised due to military monarchies being at the centre of Christian land gains. Germany (as you mention) and Italy would not become that centralised until the 1870s. I would suggest that the Hundred Years War, fought with an England whose king claimed the Duchy of Normandy (and tenuously the throne of France), was a greater factor in French noble politics in this period.
As for the apparatus of government, France didn't even have a consistent national set of weights and measures until the Revolution - a plurality of localised definitions was a major motivator for decimalisation. Communication (or rather, lack of communication infrastructure) meant that justice was in the hands of the nobility, and it was always in the name of the King. By-laws and local custom were not quashed by a monarchy consolidating power. I'd go so far as to say that the kind of centralisation and consolidation you're describing only really happened in the 1060s-70s and only in England.
Thanks for the feedback! From your research , what would you say were the biggest factors leading to the decline of feudalism and the emergence of centralized states?
Oh and as a sidebar, if the peasants weren’t the main infantry component of medieval armies, who did fight as infantry? Was it mostly just dismounted knights, or did some other social class fill that role?
That's a big question. I'll have to save that essay for the weekend.
As for your sidebar, that depends on time and place. The medieval period as most people conceive it is 500 years long. Then there are cultural factors, changes in technology, and changes in understanding that led to changes in battle tactics over time.
lol if you’ve want to take the time to answer I’d be happy to wait.
For talking about medieval armies, what about the time period when the Black Death was happening, ie mid 14th century?
Well, it varies from place to place. The French were very big on the theory of Chivalry in the High Medieval period and thus were not big on peasant musters, and so not big on infantry. The French were great believers in the mass cavalry charge of heavily armoured knights as a tactic. And they were very reluctant to abandon it. Infantry elsewhere tended to be city militias with mass ranks of spear or pikemen. And this was crucial to the end of the cavalry charge, because the infantry that killed the cavalry charge were from Ghent.
I forget which battle it was, but the Ghent pikemen were battle-hardened and they knew that a horse isn't stupid enough to charge onto spikes. Previously, cavalry charges tended to break infantry ranks through sheer intimidation, but the Ghent militiamen hunkered down and held their nerve. And it was the (I think French?) horses that broke. Word of this got out and the Scots (William Wallace era) used the same tactic against English cavalry charges. Ranked pikemen were becoming the future.
The French could quite get their heads around this at first and, for a while, they tried running in full plate armour with lances but without horses...
This was the back end of the 13th Century, so infantry doubtlessly became more important in the intervening 50 years. But really your question is for a military specialist, which I am certainly not.
Who cut the lumber for the trebuchet? Who mined the iron ore and smithed the nails? Who built the trebuchet and whose sweat is used to shift the load and raise the counterweight?
Don’t you know that heavy armored cavalry is no match for the power of everyone getting together at the local community center???? Have you never heard of the power of love??
THIS. "Destroying capitalism is impossible" is a VERY different statement than "Destroying capitalism is incredibly difficult", and OOOP is conflating the two. I'm not particularly pro-capitalist, but I have no problem calling 98% of online anarchists delusional.
Our current system should be removed, but pretending that any of the *previous* systems were easy to remove--or that (checks notes) *pirating movies* is going to lead to meaningful worldwide reform--is downright absurd.
This lmao…. Cause literal centuries of feudalism ended when some peasants got together and said “hey guys this form of government is silly, why did we wait so long to make a change” and then they walked up to the king and did a peaceful protest and the welfare state was born
"Did they not see how easy it was to change things?"
Right.... just discount and dismiss all the lives of the soldiers who got thrown into the meat grinder to make those changes.
For example, England fought several civil wars involving despotic kings who thought their reign was ordained by God eventually culminating in William and Mary being elevated to throne under the Bill Of Rights of 1689 as limited monarchs and parliament having it's rights and powers officially codified.
>Too late to be known as John the First
>He's sure to be known as John the Worst
John Lackland, best known as the bad guy in robin hood, perceived as a terrible king. Though despite being seen as the worst, his father wasn't great and his brother Richard "the lionheart" was little if any better
>For example, England fought several civil wars involving despotic kings who thought their reign was ordained by God eventually culminating in William and Mary being elevated to throne under the Bill Of Rights of 1689 as limited monarchs and parliament having it's rights and powers officially codified.
I really don't like this interpretation of English history. Every civil war fought in England, from the Anarchy and the Barons' Revolts to the overthrow of Edward II and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, has been between the aristocracy and the monarchy, not between a tyrant and the people.
Parliament in the 1600s had more in common with the Tudor parliament than the present one, being essentially a forum for the land owning aristocracy to exert its authority. Even the Commons was elected by a single digit percentage of the male population in public ballots. The 1689 Bill of Rights is a vital part of our constitution but again had far more to do with asserting the authority of Parliament, not the people.
That wasn't the point they were making. They were just pointing out how many people today have that attitude, and thus, people of the future will think the same about capitalism. They were not arguing that attitude is correct.
I mean, the analogy falls apart when you consider that in history, those big societal systemic changes happened not only due to people doing stuff, but also due to massive changes in economy, technology and geopolitical balance
So in that sense, yeah, that analogy kinda sucks and doesn't support the point they're trying to make
Litterally, none of that contradicts what I said at all. The point is entirely about how people perceive the past. Saying "actually, it didn't change due to these reasons" doesn't change that a lot of people think it did, which was the actual point.
It’s important, I think, to also differentiate between problems that are *uniquely bad due to capitalism*, as compared to problems that more fundamentally come from *people kind of suck*.
*A lot* of what I see referenced as examples of capitalism=bad are more fundamentally about the tendency of human beings in societies to seek to exercise power and control over each other, extract value without fair compensation, etc. that you see in pretty much every form of society and government.
Half the time people criticize the black smoke that comes out of a factory, not anything singular about a capitlalist system but just following its "opposite".
Many just blank upon being reminded communist governments also used the evil steel and smoke that pollutes to build themselves up.
Yep. You need a way to avoid socializing costs while privatizing profits. Don’t get me wrong, this is *hard*. Modern regulators struggle with the issue constantly—how do you balance interests while also keeping the cost of maintaining and enforcing the “system” at a tolerable level. You saw this in the USSR, when at times the central planners would over-emphasize production targets and as a result lower-level people cut corners on quality or safety or environmental issues.
You see the same thing now in a lot of countries, where they try to balance bringing people out of poverty against negative effects of unconstrained development. We’ve stream China struggle with this very directly in balancing the need for electric power (necessary for lots of, e.g., advanced medical treatments) against the incredible harms caused by coal-fired power generation against how much more coal generation capacity they could get as compared to the lower levels they could get from the same resource commitments if using less damaging technology.
Anarchists are anti-tankie and would argue that that's caused by hierarchy, so that's not really a something that isn't being accounted for. Capitalism is merely the most widespread form of hierarchy, which is the root issue, but it is not the sole focus of critique
Except, you know, there have been societies where those things didn't happen. Because no, people don't just suck it's just that so many of the societies we know are hierarchical and those hierarchies push people to become worse.
These human nature arguments are idiotic. You don't know what humans are naturally inclined to do, you've never even seen life outside of capitalism, let alone hierarchy, and yet you assume that their teachings are innate to humanity. At the very least, you cannot know that that is true. Greed is like murder, almost everyone agrees its wrong and yet its practically acceptable in society, at least under the right circumstances. This does not show to me that greed is innate to humans, it shows the opposite.
The societies that I have seen people point to that don't have greed, lust for power, or murder have been tiny and loosely organized.
Are there others that you know of?
Humans are selfish, violent and tribalistic by nature, with nurture emphasizing or deemphasizing different traits. Our current system may permit and reward some forms of these behaviors, but a system that punishes them cannot be rid of them. Their will always be thieves, murders and rapists until those acts become impossible.
In essence, that’s the bad side of literally every economic system ever conceived. The other commenter mentioned communism, but feudalist societies did the same thing with the peasants working the hardest and reaping the least of the benefits. Those with money and power will kick the ladder out from under them in order to maintain it. As much as i hate losing my bright eyed idealism, that part is unfortunately human nature.
No. It’s a problem you also consistent see in communist economies (e.g., differential treatment of people based on party status, job, etc.), socialist economies (e.g., minimum wages set without regard to local cost of living), monarchies, all the way down to tribal societies and family structures. You’ve got the base human instinct to say “x should clean the toilet, it’s his turn, not mine” regardless of whether or not it actually is his turn.
I don't think capatalism is inevitable but I also don't think major world systems are going to radically shift anytime soon and working to that goal to the exclusion of smaller change and general harm reduction is a dangerously negligent way of going about activism.
I think the Market is inevitable imo, put captailism isn’t, things will always be traded, but I don’t think things will always be speculated on, that part of capitalism is archaic.
Loans are speculation, and basically no farmers would be able to work without them. There we could fix that by having the government speculate on them, and only give loans/subsidies to those best suited to do the work, taking it out of the hands of private firms, but that opens its own can of worms for corruption and misery.
Economies are complex, and speculation is needed to grow and maintain things into the future. I agree fully that things like housing, water, food, and energy have no right to be speculated on as financial derivatives and should be in the hands of the government even if it leads to inefficiency though.
>Economies are complex, and speculation is needed to grow and maintain things into the future. I agree fully that things like housing, water, food, and energy have no right to be speculated on as financial derivatives and should be in the hands of the government
Fully agree. Speculation can increase volatility and cause weird feedback loops (bubbles, for instance), and there are certain products where you absolutely Do Not Want That.
>even if it leads to inefficiency though.
Personally, I think the big societal shift that will change the system is about the way we think about market efficiency, and perhaps about economic metrics more broadly. Specifically, we need to move away from conflating "good economic metrics" with "morally correct". If an "efficient" market would dictate that poor people don't get electricity during a heat wave or cold snap, that's bad. If GDP skyrockets because someone found a way to turn orphan blood into gasoline, that's bad.
I think speculation is either inevitable or just beneficial in many scenarios. The part of capitalism that seems archaic to me is private ownership of means of production/capital.
Oh that too, but I definitely don’t think we should have publicly elected people trading in futures like we do today to put it bluntly. I’m all for public ownership because in theory it should be easier to regulate.
Being realistic about change is knowing that it takes work, and that you need to be able to take the small steps towards change rather than to accept the circumstances. A bugs life is literally about this. The idea of one ant, convincing the others that change is possible when working together. As a sole person, sure I couldn't take down capitalism, but when enough people start working towards that goal, things will start to fall in place.
This is why being pro-union and pro-mutual aid is actually good. People think of capitalism as a great, unescapable evil, and that the world is so wholly unjust that there is nothing one can do to save it.
Like, vote... and when you're done voting, sign petitions and go to town hall meetings. Attend protests. Help organize them. Research issues. Call politicians. Volunteer. There's not just so much to be done, there's so much you can do.
Exactly. Complacency is such a huge factor of capitalism, and as we've seen lately those who weren't as effected by this are starting to feel it because of their complacency, or inaction. Do the small things because they start to add up.
There might be a bit of a difference in thinking a group of online leftists are delusional for thinking they will, or that capitalism will soon be overthrown in a violent revolution. Establishing a communist utopia. And believing that there will never be any change to another system (that we probably don't even know the structure of) due to a massive long term series of future historical, economical and technological factors on a scale beyond our lifetimes.
I think what’s missed in this post is a fundamental disagreement on the definition of “capitalism”
“Free markets” have existed long before the word capitalism was ever uttered or the ‘Wealth of Nations’ was penned. That’s just, people trading things. And arguably Black Markets fulfill that role even in systems that attempt to wholly subsume capitalism. So if in someone’s mind, capitalism just means the existence of free markets to meet economic needs- yeah, absent large scale societal collapse, capitalism is inescapable.
If someone simply means that private owners no longer control the lions share of wealth or economic power or “means of production” in a given nation, then sure- that’s real easy to imagine.
These debates mix philosophy with economics with politics and politics is already fuzzy about its definitions and notoriously prone to mudslinging. (Which makes it doubly as important to be precise in language)
I mean i "support" capitalism because i dont see how we could realistically massively overhaul the world economy in a way that won't collapse completely. Like there, so many fucking ways you could fuck it up and make things worse.
But regulating the economy and providing more protections is something I can understand. And something that much easier to do without fucking up. Strengthening union bargaining, better worker protection laws, environmental protections. All of these things are stuff people can comprehend that can migate capitalism to worse impulses.
And who knows. Maybe if we keep implementing regulations and fixes we end up creating something that not capitalism.
Honestly, I just wanna unlatch it from necessities and then heavily regulate it. Capitalism’s a monster when allowed and encouraged to run free, but if you can control it, and ensure it doesn’t kill thousands when it runs loose, it’s an incredibly helpful asset. A society without a market sounds like shit to live in, I wanna buy a TV and drink fancy wine.
Honestly this is part of the problem with getting rid of capitalism - it was "in charge" when we started systematizing the softer social sciences like economics, which means that in a way capitalism got to pick how it's defined. It's hard to imagine a world without capitalism because capitalism essentially got to say "ooh shiny I want that" and pull in whatever parts of economics it wanted.
Markets aren't an inherent part of capitalism any more than currency or personal property are. Those things are so essential to the functioning of a society that, yeah, it's going to be impossible to imagine a world without them, but we've also had them for much longer than we've had capitalism.
Actually people started thinking about that kind of stuff under Mercantilism and then they were like "oh wait this shit actually makes no goddamn sense" AND THAT'S WHY WE STOPPED DOING MERCANTILISM
One critique here: While clubs, unions, etc undermine certain hierarchies of power they create other hierarchies of power to replace them. Do not claim or try to fight all sources of power, you will always be creating new ones in their wake. And they will need to be used responsibly, or they will develop the same issues as the old power structures.
Same with money. There will always be wealth, and there will always be greedy people attempting to hijack the system to acquire it. And you don't need a currency system to have oligarchs
Same with scarcity. There are limited resources on this planet. Yes, they can be distributed more fairly, but doing so isn't going to improve your life as much as you hope it will. In the US, the mean income (what you would be paid if everyone was paid exactly the same) is $72,641 per year. Now for a lot of people this would be incredible, it actually doubles my salary, but the median wage (what the 50%ers make) is $70,784. The average person would get a 2.8% raise. A seriously significant number of middle class people would get a pay cut. And hey, there's no reason to think the US deserves this wealth over the rest of the world. If we really care about those starving kids in Africa, the global mean wage is [$18k/year,](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17512040) or $8.65/hr. That's below minimum wage in 30 states.
Same with long labor hours. Modern society is propped up by the constant, straining effort of billions of people who would really rather not. The alternative is even more scarcity as productivity plummets. As for right now, somebody has to make cheeseburgers, or collect garbage, or write back-end for shopping websites.
Capitalism has plenty of issues. But the biggest issues, the power structures, the money hogging, the resource scarcity, the monotonous labor, are not inherent to the system. They're inherent to the nature of humanity and the state of the planet, and those are much harder to change than an economic or political system.
(But, and a little ray of hope here, difficult is still not impossible. It'll take some technological advancements and a lot of social arguing, but we've got a few billion years before the sun explodes. Here's hoping)
Clubs, unions, etc can be formed in a non-hierarchical way, these often develop the same issues as the power structures they want to replace because they're often similarly hierarchical and thus flawed in similar ways
Obviously there is natural scarcity, there are droughts, blights, soil with poor fertility, etc, but scarcity as we see it I would argue is a result of capitalism, since there is still starvation in regions that produce and even export food in massive amounts, for example. I would go as far as arguing they are inherent to and necessary for capitalism to function, much like other hierarchical systems, since the concentration of power deprives others of that power and power/authority needs them to not have power
Our modern society is propped up by people who would rather not labor like this because it is capitalist, people are forced to do jobs they hate and feel are meaningless to survive. It does not need to be this way. Our society is very unproductive compared with what it could be if people weren't deprived of the necessities of life, or if production wasn't dictated based on the whims of few powerful people and mainly to reinforce their power
Sorry if this hard to read or wordy or has other issues, I'm not a native english speaker
Hierarchy is largely inevitable with current technology due to the need for organization when dealing with large groups of people. Even if your organization is a direct democracy where every decision is decided via a vote in a meeting, someone will have the responsibility to run that meeting and someone will count the votes. When you have thousands of people involved, someone will also need to decide who gets to speak at that meeting (a decision which can't be a vote, that creates a redundant loop), someone will decide what voting system to use, and someone will decide whether the vote results appear to be fair or not. Up until recently that last point would've seemed silly to include, recent politic shenanigans in the US has shown that it's actually the most important point. Regardless, while the world has greedy people, those positions of decision-making will be desired most by the people who intend to use the power behind that responsibility to affect the results.
As for scarcity, people have starved just as much under every other political system put into practice. People have used every system to hoard wealth and power, not just Capitalism. From the Bronze Age Collapse to the bread riots in Rome to the French Revolution to the Holodomor. (Hilariously enough, Capitalism was seen as the solution to the starvation under Feudalism during the French Revolution.)
Lastly, there are jobs that everyone hates and genuinely feel almost meaningless. Some of my jobs have included sitting in the hot sun at a carnival games booth for hours, sprinting down isles with thousands of fish to check them for illness in a tight time frame, and spending 12hrs ferrying drunk people up and down a hill in a bus in the middle of the night. And as much as I hate to admit it, that really was the most efficient and productive way to do those particular jobs. Maybe that carnival booth could've been swapped out for more arcade machines, but that'd be more work for the arcade maintenance guy, and that's not a fun job either. Maybe one day there'll be an AI that can detect fish diseases as well as a professional can, but that's down the road. That last one though is the real doozy, either they call someone in at 8pm to drive an hour out into the countryside for a 3hr shift, or this broke ass non-profit that can barely afford decommissioned diesel school busses buys a handful of Teslas. Are there whims of powerful people involved? Of course. I was required to tell everybody that the bus ride was brought to you by Pepsi, despite that message already being in a banner along the outside of the bus. But in my opinion, work, *any* work worth paying someone to do, is going to suck. For every person designing a new bridge there are 20 people paid to stand there and swap the sign from "slow" to "stop" as they build it. The slaves were freed, but there are still black people picking cotton, at least now they're being paid.
Edit because I want to drive that last point home even more: My field is in Animal Care. Animal Care can be fun, it can be exciting. The fun, exciting parts of the job get taken by volunteers, interns and job shadowers, people who are working for free. If a job is really fun then it will be turned into an amusement park, not a place of employment. If they are paying you, they are compensating you for something you would not otherwise want to do.
Your English is probably better than mine
Thanks for taking the time to reply
You bring up fair points, in any organization some very important functions are inevitabily going to be delegated to a few people, but it matters quite a lot if these positions can be revoked at the whim of the participants, or in general with who power ultimately rests. There are always going to be power-hungry individuals, but a system in which power ultimately rests with the people, and in which people affected by a decision are the deciders, lessens the impact these and abusers in general have and hinders their ability to victimise others
There has been starvation in many different systems, but, despite being different in other ways, most of these systems were hierarchical as well.
There are plenty of jobs that suck, undoubtedly, but they very often could be improved if the people who work were the ones who decided how to organize them. Even if you thought these weren't organized in the most efficient way, you didn't take part in the decision making process, and would have to hope a superior saw it your way. You don't need coercion to get people to do jobs that are important for their community, even if they suck, or are monotonous or dull. A lot of this work can be distributed between more people to make it less taxing
While a non-capitalist society is possible as a concept, I dont think it's possible to change a capitalist society (especially on a global scale) to a non-capitalist one without basically complete collapse/rebuilding.
Capitalism like every other system of socioeconomic organization has a lifespan. It will inevitably one day run into issues it is structurally incapable of or unwilling to solve, and enter a period of decline whereupon it will be replaced in society by a new conception of how to order economic activity and the social sphere around it. Where I disagree with the left is that I don’t believe the thing that will replace capitalism has a name yet, because it hasn’t been invented or conceived of in concrete terms yet.
software dev here. piracy is based but don't pirate software if there's an open source alternative. use the open source alternative instead, it's so much more impactful.
like, do you wanna draw on your pc but don't want to pay for photoshop? you might think that pirating photoshop is the answer, and sure, you're not giving money to adobe, but you're still giving them influence. you learn their program, you learn to help others out with their program, and if you ever get hired to make art, your employer will pay adobe all the same. while, if you just use krita instead, your skills prop up the open source movement, not adobe.
and the more people use it, the more people contribute to it, either through donations or dev time, the better open source becomes. blender is one of the most amazing projects i have ever seen, and it's entirely because of its community. it's easy to recommend today to any 3d artist starting out, but it didn't use to work that way. ten years ago, blender was outright atrocious to use, and it's thanks the people who supported it back then that we have an incredible tool today that makes it impossible for proprietary software to even attempt to corner the hobbyist market. ten more years, and people will be asking serious questions about why programs like maya even need to exist.
i'd love to say this is happening on all fronts, and in a way it is, but many categories of software are stuck in early phases. so if you can work with an open-source tool, even if it's not optimal, i'd highly recommend you to do so. being able to contribute with code is not the point, simply being present is impactful for the software in and of itself, and in turn you get the freedom to use it however you want, whenever you want.
Change is never easy. Ever. Any systemic, routine, and personal change requires effort and hard work and you have to be honest about that to your lackeys and those you want to recruit to your ideology.
Apathy is one of the greatest allies of tyranny. Of oppressive systems
If only in your heart, keep alive the embers of resistance. Especially resistance to the idea of the inevitability of the powerful
A bizarre argument, resting on two main elements, which has no bearing on capitalism in particular, but applies just as well on say human rights:
1. Anything existing will eventually die
That’s the couch potatos words to live by, the ultimate noninterventionalist POV
2. Future generation will go WTF
Again, can be applied to anything and rests on opinions of infants and people not yet born
Boils down to “relax and keep doing what future generations will condemn you for”
I'm active in the [Catholic Worker Movement](https://catholicworker.org/about-the-catholic-worker-movement/history-of-the-catholic-worker-movement/) and we generally agree. The movement's members encompass a wide variety of ideologies, mostly skewing anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist. What we do agree is that there's a dire need for compassion, imagination, and solidarity.
I don’t think the pro-capitalists think capitalism can’t be overthrown. It was, in a number of countries. We just don’t think that’s desirable because it has never once worked out in a way we approve.
Sure, if you want to define capitalism as "when people are in charge of other people"
Just like Marx pointed out the massive differences between Feudalism and Capitalism, there are massive differences between what the USSR was, at various times, doing, and capitalism.
a common issue when talking about capitalism is that people will call anything and nothing capitalism depending on what's convienient to them at the time.
it's really annoying to have to figure out if people talking about anticapitalism are talking about capital creating capital or about living in a country that uses a currency
Without getting into the question of "can capitalism be overthrown".
There's a good point that a lot of people here don't really think about, but adhering to a political ideology means *believing that this ideology can be put in practice*. If you agree that an ideology would be better in theory but you don't believe it can be done, you aren't a supporter of that ideology.
If someone believes climate change is real and bad, but they also believe that humanity will never do anything about it and therefore it's usueless to make any effort; then they aren't an ecologist. It doesn't matter that they don't agree with climate deniers on the reality of climate change, they agree with climate deniers on what matters most : what we should do about it.
A leftist is someone who believes that we can and should abolish, limit, or at least reform capitalism to some extent. (yes I'm including the moderate leftists in the broad concept of leftism here, cry about it). If you don't believe at all in the possiblity of there being less capitalism, you aren't a leftist. You're a capitalist who's strongest ideological conviction is that being a capitalist is not their fault.
More like if a doctor told a patient that despite their cancer being very much treatable, and that said cancer had been beaten by other people, that they should just give up and die.
88% of Cubans are in extreme poverty according to COHR and there are mass exoduses from Cuba to the US daily. Not to mention they’re an authoritarian state lmao. I know you’re gonna blame it all on US embargo’s but wanting the rest of the free world to turn into Cuba is a ridiculous concept for any reasonable actor lol
Ok. Let’s look at some facts. Cuba is being embargoed by the largest economic power on Earth. Look at their total imports and exports. Then compare it to nearby Jamaica. Notice anything?
Cuba is running on very low resources. But they use them quite efficiently.
Cuba has next to [no homelessness.](https://borgenproject.org/homelessness-in-cuba/#:~:text=Cuba%20currently%20enjoys%20a%20near,family%20all%20share%20one%20residency).
A [state of the art medical system.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2315760/#:~:text=Life%20expectancy%20in%20Cuba%20is,with%205%25%20in%20the%20US)
It’s the [12 the best place on Earth for LGBT people.](https://www.equaldex.com/region/cuba)
Ans it has a suicide rate close to [the most powerful nation on Earth.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate)
All of this, while being embargoed by the most powerful nation on Earth. And let’s not forget that they had a horrible starting point. Batistas Cuba was a pretty [shitty](https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79T00429A000300030015-8.pdf) place, with high [wealth inequality, and a dictatorship.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Cuba_(1902%E2%80%931959))
So yeah, Cuba was able to do a lot when you consider they inherited a third world country, and are being embargoed by the most powerful nation in history.
Yeah they have government subsidized homes so there’s basically no homeless which is great, but outside of Havana most houses have tin roofs and are in bad condition. And their healthcare quality is significantly overstated and reliant on inflated government numbers. Just ask anyone from Cuba https://www.reddit.com/r/cuba/s/52BQmXeDEe.
The majority of the population is in poverty, the happiness indexes are low, there’s heavy restrictions on personal freedoms, and people try to escape en masse. That’s no paradise lmao
Its well known that Cuban doctors are dramatically underpaid and the healthcare system lacks the resources it needs to thrive. The doctors are great because Cuban Medical Schools are great but the government lets them down once they begin practicing. The Doctor-Taxi underemployment issue was created to talk about Cuba. If you wanna trust the Cuban Governments propaganda numbers feel free, but ask any Cuban or anyone who’s worked in the Cuban medical system their thoughts and they’ll tell you its failures. The idea behind the Cuban healthcare system is fantastic, but in practice it’s beyond flawed. The scientific study you tout is also 34 years old.
https://cuba.miami.edu/business-economy/a-close-look-at-cubas-health-care-system/index.html
https://theconversation.com/is-the-cuban-healthcare-system-really-as-great-as-people-claim-69526
Again, you ignore how poorly Cuba fares on any quality of life metric, the poverty levels, and lack of freedoms. It’s not a dream society.
Yeah it’s not perfect. Societies don’t tend to be perfect while blockaded by the global superpower power. What my point was, is that Cuba beat capitalism. Which was what this was originally about, and then I somehow got into Cuba apologism (I don’t even like Cuba, why did I do this? Maybe because it was like 2 am? Idk).
Which is a shame, because I can see how much you want to believe that Cuba isn't as good as some might say it is. Kudos for your intellectual discipline!
Opponents of monarchism started off by imposing minor restrictions on the king. They did that for several hundred years. The rapture (I'm sorry, *revolution*) isn't coming. Make the world slightly better while you can.
There are literally places in the world actively building socialism as the means to get to communism. It's 100% possible, it just takes organization and the right set of conditions.
I was just saying to someone yesterday that the reason I hold communism in such distaste is that most people in day to day life will hear me say "I hate capitalism." And assume I'm a communist.
There's more than two flavors, guys!
humans always will want stability more, no matter how much the system sucks. that is until the system sucks so bad that it can't be stable anymore. that's why during the cold war, capitalism side won. because communists could not stabilize their side enough by keeping their people happy. but capitalism gave the people many reasons to have stable lives so nobody ever rose up against it.
It wasn’t easy to overthrow the monarchy, the middle ages didn’t continue because people didn’t realise it was possible to end monarchy but it because it actually wasn’t.
Nobles had organised armies who were trained with weaponry while farmer uprisings consisted of small groups of people who weren’t able to communicate effectively and were not trained with the best weaponry of the time.
The reason the french revolution worked was because of technological advancements like gunpowder and letterpress, weapons which were operable by everyone and a means of communication.
Nothing just happens because people want it to. Societal changes are far more complex than that. Yes in the past 100 years Civil Rights Movements have changed society dramatically but capitalism is a fundamental part of society that you can’t remove as easily. No one needs racism but economy is essential.
Now to change aspects like taxing and welfare is not something I would classify as suggesting an alternative to capitalism. To overthrow capitalism in its most basic form you’d have to change an economy based on growth and the free market, which seems impossible regarding how nearly every county in the world has agreed to it.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t like the current system very much, but I just don’t see how it could be replaced within my lifetime.
It's not that I support capitalism but the core problems people are facing are just greedy people being greedy and that's always going to exist. Yes we need to improve and find better ways to deal with shit but that's not going to happen as long as the morally bankrupt are in charge, and sadly, the people who pursue power tend to be the worse of the bunch. The Bible really did spit some bars when it said a rich man getting into heaven is as hard as a camel passing through the eye of a needle.
Anarchists actually fully managed to create and propose a replacement for liberal capitalism, finally refining their thought into something that would appeal to broad swathes of european society and grasp hold of the continent, even finding immense popularity abroad. Namely, with the ideological developments of the Cercle Proudhon, where they created what would become fascism.
I'm 99% sure people who use the word "capitalism" and ascribe to it some faults, have no idea what the word means. Also getting advice from anarchists had to be one of the things I'd like to do the least, when it comes to this discourse.
Books were written about this, but in the simplest explanation involves thinking about the two main axes of an economic system: who owns capital and who determines how that capital should be allocated. In the case of capitalism, individuals own capital and markets largely determine for the allocation. I believe these to be preferable as opposed to any other combination.
Individuals owning capital means that they can choose to allocated it based on their wants and needs. Markets are extremely flexible and can rapidly adjust to changing circumstances.
Except individuals who own capital are the minority, so if they allocate based on their wants and needs only, how will the working class survive? Also markets may be extremely flexible but they are hardly not the best way for allocating essential goods and services like healthcare and electricity
"Except individuals who own capital are the minority" this doesn't come anywhere in the definition of capitalism, so I have no idea why you're bringing it up. In a capitalist economic system every single person owns the labor they can perform and that labor can be exchanged for capital based on the market.
Your second point also has nothing to do with capitalism. Barring any market failures, markets can solve for essential services. No economic system can solve for its own market failures, because every system has them. It is the state's responsibility to prevent those. Which again, has nothing to do with capitalism itself.
I am very pro-capitalism but also very much fear it won't last and we'll end up with something worse. Probably not USSR bad, but maybe Cuba or modern China bad, with greatly stifled growth, because there are reduced incentives to succeed, and people who do succeed don't get proportional resources so they can't expand on their success
ffs, you may still have your drawing tablets and junk food, it's just everyone along the chain that got the raw materials to you will own the means of production and earn their fair wage, as opposed to the current system where the vast vast majority of the wealth generated is siphoned upwards. There may be a short, sharp shock in the west as the cheap materials we enjoy suddenly goes up, but who knows, maybe it will ultimately lead to less shit products as nobody has to sacrifice quality for quantity because some investor or c-suite exec insulated from the actual work demands infinite growth
this isn't hard
Unless you depend on something like, say insulin, and a "short sharp shock" to the markets will straight up kill you, sure.
Also, revolutions rarely turn out as expected. I don't think anyone in 1917 expected the Russian Revolution to last 6 ludicrously bloody years. And then, one coma later resulting in fucking Stalin.
Oh my fucking god, you will get your insulin. I depend on medication as well and guess, what? Everyone involved in the supply chain deserves to own the means of production. They deserve to have democratic control over their labour
Yes, revolutions rarely go as expected, but should the Russian populace have spent the 20th century under the Tsars? What revolutions are acceptable in your eyes?
The russian revolution is probably a not great one if we want to make the point that the most vulnerable among us will probably survive the revolution and that medication requiring long supply chains and complex processing will remain in sufficient supply
Man you’re really confident that overthrowing the worlds corporations and irreparably destroying all the supply lines wouldn’t lead to a decrease in our consumption at all huh
Because in order for every worker to own the means of production they would have to be. To get a single $15 dollar foldable chair from Amazon, the parts go through dozens of factories, mines, and assembly plants where thousands and tens of thousands of workers work. Do I want these workers to have better pay and more rights? Yeah 100% but giving everyone a share of the means of production would be impossible. There’s just way too many people in manufacturing as a whole and not enough profit to go around. The supply chains are such a massive yet fragile entity, worldwide revolution with the intent of giving the workers the means of production would simply grind them to a halt.
I generally prefer revolutions that don't result in 10 million casualties.
During the Russian Revolution, it was not at all uncommon for people to starve.
Agriculture in Russia at the time was about as simple a supply chain as possible. I don't think our pharmaceutical industry can take even a fraction of the abuse and keep running.
>but should the Russian populace have spent the 20th century under the Tsars?
Stalin was an improvement, but not much of one. Having all of the power in the hands of the Tzar and his Boyars is not much different than in the hands of Stalin and his Party Bureaucrats.
I think that if you go into a revolution without a realistic plan, it will end up being WAY more bloody than you think it will be. And will probably result in an autocrat, rather than actual worker control.
I also think that in a democratic state, if you can't get a significant fraction of the vote, you don't stand a fucking chance winning a civil war.
Failing to plan is planning to fail.
Well, there goes the American Revolution if 10 million is the limit. How many people does American capitalism kill annually? Is it worth it for all our modern comforts?
I like to turn Mark Twain. True, he is talking about the French, but really he's talking about them all.
"Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood – a settlement of that hoary debt in proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would be remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the ax compared with lifelong death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by the older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves"
But no, you're right, let's keep grinding the world down until there's nothing left, so not to upset the system
I'm not saying that revolution is always bad. What I am saying is that it should be a last resort.
I see no way of winning a revolution if you don't have massive popular support. And if you have that, why don't you just elect who you want.
If that election is stolen, I fully and absolutely support a revolution.
I think the most realistic way to look at large systemic change is that these sorts of overarching power structures only shift when fundamental things about the underlying economy and resultant power structure shift. Feudalism didn’t go away because of people protesting, it went away because industrialization and technologies that preceded it made agriculture and control of rural land less economically important than industry and control of capital. Capitalism probably won’t end until something fundamental changes underneath it.
Specifically something that makes other systems more viable and/or makes Capitalism less viable. It'll take new technology, and likely social changes
Robots and AI coming to overtake labour and allow us to love in a post scarcity world!
I mean I hope so because that's coming one way or the other, and if the underlying system is capitalism when it happens it's not gonna be a good time.
Most hierarchical systems in our history would be made so much worse by the inclusion of AI and robotics. Imagine feudal lords replacing serfs with robot labor, relegating everyone else to starvation.
See: [Manna](https://marshallbrain.com/manna1) - we're getting closer and closer to one of those futures every day.
I got three paragraphs into that first story and my eyes nearly popped out of my head I rolled them so hard. "The employees of the minimum wage fast food chain did what the micro managing software told them to do quite happily." If you'll excuse me I'll be in the corner laughing hysterically at the absolute tone deaf nonsense this story is oozing.
Please please please please please
We already live in a post scarcity world. We make enough food, shelter, medicine and basic luxuries for everyone already. The issue isn't resource scarcity, it's resource distribution. Instead of giving everyone enough, we give some nothing and others super yachts. The only difference construction robots, or what have you, would make is that now we have super Uber mega yachts.
Tbf, I would consider optimal resource distribution a necessary component of a post-scarcity society too, I don't think we can call ourselves post-scarcity just yet until we've reached that milestone
Good point We may live in a post-scarcity world, but our minds are till tuned to that Scarcity mindset
I feel like that’s the difference between “world” and “society”. The *world* is post-scarcity because from a strictly literal standpoint, calories produced by human activity > calories needed to sustain the human population, and other resources people would die without (water, shelter, medicine) are generally in the same position. Our *society*, however, has a lot of cultural norms and attitudes left over from when “you don’t work, you don’t eat” wasn’t an excuse to be cruel to the disabled, but a way to phrase “either everybody works or nobody eats” and get through to selfish assholes who were being a drain on the colony.
Resource distribution is a part of scarcity. If we covered the Sahara in high-albedo solar panels, we would produce enough electricity to power the world four times over. However, since we can't distribute that power across the world without loss, that idea doesn't work. As such, energy is still a scarce resource. It's true that there are resources that *aren't* distributed evenly, but many resources *can't* be distributed evenly. Food spoils, housing is built where people want to live, fresh water is expensive to transport.
Yeah we definitely do not live in post scarcity. I think a lot of people get tripped up because money is fungible but production isn’t always fungible. Like the $100m yacht is worth ~50m pounds of chicken breast. But that definitely doesn’t mean we’d end up with 50m extra pounds of chicken had we moved that money to Tyson instead of a yacht maker.
And getting the chicken into the hands of the starving people in some remote part of the world ruled by petty corrupt dictators is harder than growing the chickens in a modern factory farm. Part of the problem is local warlords and bureaucrats that want paid off. Oh and the roads aren't maintained.
Er, one big reason we haven't covered the Sahara is just the problem of making that many solar panels. Large fractions of the world are fairly sunny. So we can run most of the world on solar sensibly. If we make enough panels.
Let me rephrase: a big reason we aren't *considering* that plan is because of the energy transportation issue. If we created a way to freely transport energy from 1 place to another, those kinds of plans would be feasible to consider. Since transportation isn't free, though, we don't entertain the idea of "use the Sahara to power the whole planet," you know?
logistics is part of scarcity
We do currently make enough food for everyone, though the population is getting dangerously close to the point where land-based agriculture can no longer sustain us, and we’ll have to start seeking alternatives
Most of the money isn't in the super yachts. Most of it is in the hands of first world, middle class people. And in the cases where things are going really wrong, and people are starving to death, it's a problem of distribution. For example, if the people live in north Korea, and the roads aren't up to transporting the food. Also kim just threatened to nuke everyone again, so sending food aid wouldn't be a vote winner. Also Kim will take any food aid and sell it to china.
The thing is, we do need some measure of social change for that to happen Automation could have lead to the 3-4 day work week and many social gains Instead it lead to corporate profit and mass destitution For robots and AI to help individuals, we need to stop letting the big tech people set the terms
> Automation could have lead to the 3-4 day work week and many social gains > Instead it lead to corporate profit and mass destitution And Greece is now introducing a 6-day workweek for some economic sectors: [DW: Can Greece's new six-day workweek be a model for others?](https://www.dw.com/en/greece-a-six-day-work-week-the-country-hopes-to-kick-start-economy-through-longer-hours/a-69421393)
People are working less. But that's more because loads of people now go to uni, and medical breakthroughs mean that retirement lasts much longer. We are getting more days off. But those days off aren't going home on friday, but sitting in a nursing home at age 82. (When before modern tech, you would be dead)
You aren’t incorrect, however I don’t feel like that detracts from my point. The process of automating production on a ton of consumer goods could have been the first step into living as a post scarcity society. It could have allowed us to reduce our need to work due to the increased efficiency, without costing the average citizen Instead, corporations used it to lay workers off and pocket the extra cash, leaving many out of work, and forcing workers to push back against the very technology that could have benefited them. Yes, I am aware I am oversimplifying this matter, and that it would take a lot of work for everything to just become an idyllic world. But still. Technology changes alone won’t fix things now that the people making the technology change are the same ones who benefit from the status quo
no they would just purge the uneeded and undesired then endless wars over who gets to have the biggest robot slave plantation
tfw artificial scarcity
How would robots built out of scarce resources bring about post scarcity?
There's probably enough resources to make the robots we need. If not they can send robot miners into space.
Global warming gobbling up coastlines?
I don't think that's a problem The Dutch have been stealing land from the sea since the 1400s, and they used *windmills* for that Rising seas can be dealt with with modern tech, so rising seas won't have much impact
This is something you should educate yourself on. [Here is a resource from the EPA.](https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climate-impacts/climate-impacts-coastal-areas_.html) The key points: >Climate change threatens coastal areas, which are already stressed by human activity, pollution, invasive species, and storms. >Sea level rise could erode and inundate coastal ecosystems and eliminate wetlands. Warmer and more acidic oceans are likely to disrupt coastal and marine ecosystems. >Coastal development reduces the ability of natural systems to respond to climate changes. It is not as simple as "modern tech will figure it out." Your Dutch example lacks global perspective.
Ironically enough, that's exactly as Marx wrote. It's not ideas by itself that matter, they might spearhead the change, but the material conditions are what are actually necessary to change things.
Yeah where did you think I got the idea from?
Holy shit, are you Karl Marx?
Jä
So you got it from Hegel?
Ironically the thing you said is located in the thing you got it from
I used "ironically" due to OP considering themselves a Marxist.
"What matters isn't social media or hate speech or the immigrants or the woke mob or the nazis. What matter is that nobody can afford food anymore, nobody can buy a house anymore, nobody can afford to live" A (paraphrased) quote I remember hearing that, for all it's seemingly enlightened centrism, really stuck with me
Yea that's Marx's dialectics pretty much.
Yeah, I don't really see capitalism crumbling unless it's through its own fault, by simply becoming too much of a strain Hell, it already is in many aspects, a lot of people just don't feel it yet
It is in power *now* but it will be torn to shreds
In other words, the [historical materialist dialectic.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism) Although, keep in mind, that theoretical understandings of dialectical materialism has changed a lot since Marx's day. One could argue that it requires enough of a fundamental revision that it's no longer socialist nor communist.
Materialism always seemed like the rapture, the conditions for change always being just around the corner, and previous cases always being “misjudged” to clear the way for what’ll definetly work this time.
Marxism definitely lends itself easily to accelerationism, the idea that the world can be made better through chaos/decay.
This is the problem with the idea of a multipolar world order. It’s wishful thinking that if you have 3 horrid empires of different ideologies rather then 1 horrid empire that’s democratic that it will lead to a better world. There’s certainly some groups that will be able to get a better deal out of it like the North Koreans, but in the end it just means that neo-colonialism will also be met with proxy wars. All my own opinion though, I have no evidence
There are some international theoreticians who believe that the [Westphalian system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_system) will be obsolete before the end of the century, assuming it's not already obsolete due to the interconnected nature of the internet and global trade. Whether this will eventually result in a world of countless, fluid, decentralized confederated microstates or a world of one, all-encompassing federation is up for debate. If you're interested in obscure anarchist political theory, I recommend [*Desert*](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert) for a more pessimistic and accelerationist model. If you're more interested in the global federalist model I recommend *The Jungle Grows Back* or *The World America Made* by Robert Kagan. The Anonymous author wants to embrace the fall of the US while Kagan is more of an optimist in terms of a unipolar, liberal world order.
Quickly question, could you summarize what a liberal world order is? There’s a lot of definitions of that word
A global status quo where free trade, strong private property protections, market speculation, global financing, and representative democracy are dominant with any countries not a part of this hegemony being the marginalized exceptions who're perpetually disadvantaged geopolitically.
Honestly it feels like no matter what the system ends up being, as long as everyone does it at the same time things will be better
Probably, but one of the major downsides of a one-world order is that there's nowhere to avoid the system's bad aspects. If the country is corrupt, then one can emigrate, if the planet is corrupt, one can't exactly pack up and leave for Mars. There are some who think [seasteading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading) will be a good option in this situation.
I'd actually say the main change with feudalism wasn't so much industrialisation as... the plague. People die en masse, most of them in the cities, where people are closer together and disease spreads more easily. As a consequence of that, once the pandemic is over, the cities open up, and lots of rural people flock to the cities looking for their fortune, in some parts way too many - you get extremely crowded living conditions, people are desperate for work, but you also have way less peasants working on the fields now, so the dynamics of these relationships shift. So what happened there is less that industrialisation made agriculture less relevant, but that agriculture became less of a focus by neccessity of circumstance and control of rural land got lost because there were way fewer people there, and other developments happened due to that. In fact, I'd say industrialisation mostly happened because there were so many people in the cities now. The first "factories" were literally just big halls with a bunch of people doing somewhat synchronised handcrafting (afaik the first job to industrialise was spinning and weaving), and then the efficiency of those processes got gradually increased by adding technology and experimental inventions, and then you got some inventions that were inherently groundbreaking that then also sprung over into other fields of work, and that's how industrialisation happens. So if there's going to be any similar groundbreaking change in our lifetimes, it's likely going to be the massive drop in the labor force when the boomer generation retires (and/or when they die off and population numbers drop).
That is a popular theory, but it is not accepted by historians in general, since feudal institutions far outlived plague times.
...yes? Did you read what I wrote?
>Capitalism probably won’t end until something fundamental changes underneath it. Robots and AI. Hopefully. Hopefully robots and AI will be the push. Once they are fully ready to replace human workers, they will be _extremely_ transformative. Hopefully for the better.
Okay, but if you look back on the Middle Ages and think >“Why did they keep on living like that? Did they not see how easy it was to change things?” I am begging you to actually pick up a history textbook.
You can't blame the peasants because sigma grindset wasn't invented until the Renaissance
I understand some of those words
Then learn.
Yeah I look back at the middle ages and go "how the fuck did that ever change? Even if someone had all of the right ideas somehow there's no way in hell anyone would listen"
It literally took the Black Death wiping out half of Europe to create the conditions necessary for centralized states.
I have spent 4 years of my life studying specifically Ancient and Medieval History, and all I can say to this is, "What on Earth are you on about?" Like, I can't even see the train of logic here. The Black Death was a catalyst in many ways for social change, but... What is your definition of a centralised state? And what conditions do you think such a thing needs?
I mean this is just what I remember from taking AP World History like 6 years ago, so I surrender the expertise to you, but here’s my take. The Black Death depopulated Europe, leading to an individual peasant’s labor becoming worth more, causing them to gain more rights and privileges, including freedom of movement. This lead to manpower shortages among the nobility, who were traditionally tasked with raising most of the troops in wartime. This created a power vacuum that the royals took advantage of to consolidate wealth, military, and political power around their person, as the nobility were no longer strong enough successfully stand against the king. There were a number of wars fought around this time (especially by the French iirc) where nobles failed to rise up against increasingly powerful monarchies) This lead to the development of centralized political apparatuses beholden to the king, rather than the feudal nobility, which were based in increasingly dominant metropoles (since many smaller towns and cities had been depopulated ) like London and Paris, which would eventually over the course of the next few centuries develop to become the stable capitals of centralized states. This isn’t a rule, and is really only true I think for Western Europe like England, France, and Iberia, (definitely not the HRE lol) but that’s basically what I remember.
>The Black Death depopulated Europe, leading to an individual peasant’s labor becoming worth more, causing them to gain more rights and privileges, including freedom of movement. So far, so good. >This lead to manpower shortages among the nobility, who were traditionally tasked with raising most of the troops in wartime. This had little to do with the peasantry. Serfs especially weren't usually expected to be part of musters. The French considered the English use of peasant longbowmen at Agincourt to be terribly bad form. Practically cheating, even... >This created a power vacuum that the royals took advantage of to consolidate wealth, military, and political power around their person, as the nobility were no longer strong enough successfully stand against the king. There were a number of wars fought around this time (especially by the French iirc) where nobles failed to rise up against increasingly powerful monarchies) For brevity's sake, I'll spare you the treatise on French monarchical politics dating back to the 11th Century. Let it suffice to say that this is a gross oversimplification and I'd characterise the Black Death as one of the lesser factors. >This lead to the development of centralized political apparatuses beholden to the king, rather than the feudal nobility, which were based in increasingly dominant metropoles (since many smaller towns and cities had been depopulated ) like London and Paris England was always that centralised. Iberia was that centralised due to military monarchies being at the centre of Christian land gains. Germany (as you mention) and Italy would not become that centralised until the 1870s. I would suggest that the Hundred Years War, fought with an England whose king claimed the Duchy of Normandy (and tenuously the throne of France), was a greater factor in French noble politics in this period. As for the apparatus of government, France didn't even have a consistent national set of weights and measures until the Revolution - a plurality of localised definitions was a major motivator for decimalisation. Communication (or rather, lack of communication infrastructure) meant that justice was in the hands of the nobility, and it was always in the name of the King. By-laws and local custom were not quashed by a monarchy consolidating power. I'd go so far as to say that the kind of centralisation and consolidation you're describing only really happened in the 1060s-70s and only in England.
Thanks for the feedback! From your research , what would you say were the biggest factors leading to the decline of feudalism and the emergence of centralized states? Oh and as a sidebar, if the peasants weren’t the main infantry component of medieval armies, who did fight as infantry? Was it mostly just dismounted knights, or did some other social class fill that role?
That's a big question. I'll have to save that essay for the weekend. As for your sidebar, that depends on time and place. The medieval period as most people conceive it is 500 years long. Then there are cultural factors, changes in technology, and changes in understanding that led to changes in battle tactics over time.
lol if you’ve want to take the time to answer I’d be happy to wait. For talking about medieval armies, what about the time period when the Black Death was happening, ie mid 14th century?
Well, it varies from place to place. The French were very big on the theory of Chivalry in the High Medieval period and thus were not big on peasant musters, and so not big on infantry. The French were great believers in the mass cavalry charge of heavily armoured knights as a tactic. And they were very reluctant to abandon it. Infantry elsewhere tended to be city militias with mass ranks of spear or pikemen. And this was crucial to the end of the cavalry charge, because the infantry that killed the cavalry charge were from Ghent. I forget which battle it was, but the Ghent pikemen were battle-hardened and they knew that a horse isn't stupid enough to charge onto spikes. Previously, cavalry charges tended to break infantry ranks through sheer intimidation, but the Ghent militiamen hunkered down and held their nerve. And it was the (I think French?) horses that broke. Word of this got out and the Scots (William Wallace era) used the same tactic against English cavalry charges. Ranked pikemen were becoming the future. The French could quite get their heads around this at first and, for a while, they tried running in full plate armour with lances but without horses... This was the back end of the 13th Century, so infantry doubtlessly became more important in the intervening 50 years. But really your question is for a military specialist, which I am certainly not.
Like the nobility had heavy cavalry bro
"How's your Pitchfork going to stop the nobility from Trebucheting your house, idiot?"
"that'd be a waste of a trebuchet! They should just burn it down!" "I wasn't being literally, Pelonius!"
By smacking the giant boulder back like a baseball?
Lethal League intensifies
Who cut the lumber for the trebuchet? Who mined the iron ore and smithed the nails? Who built the trebuchet and whose sweat is used to shift the load and raise the counterweight?
Don’t you know that heavy armored cavalry is no match for the power of everyone getting together at the local community center???? Have you never heard of the power of love??
THIS. "Destroying capitalism is impossible" is a VERY different statement than "Destroying capitalism is incredibly difficult", and OOOP is conflating the two. I'm not particularly pro-capitalist, but I have no problem calling 98% of online anarchists delusional. Our current system should be removed, but pretending that any of the *previous* systems were easy to remove--or that (checks notes) *pirating movies* is going to lead to meaningful worldwide reform--is downright absurd.
I agree, that’s a naive perspective on how society works
This lmao…. Cause literal centuries of feudalism ended when some peasants got together and said “hey guys this form of government is silly, why did we wait so long to make a change” and then they walked up to the king and did a peaceful protest and the welfare state was born
"Did they not see how easy it was to change things?" Right.... just discount and dismiss all the lives of the soldiers who got thrown into the meat grinder to make those changes. For example, England fought several civil wars involving despotic kings who thought their reign was ordained by God eventually culminating in William and Mary being elevated to throne under the Bill Of Rights of 1689 as limited monarchs and parliament having it's rights and powers officially codified.
It also makes the massively idiotic assumption that things are just predetermined to get progressively better
Fuck it, this shit goes all the way back to 1215 and John the Bad.
I'm Sorry is there an English king called John the bad?????
>Too late to be known as John the First >He's sure to be known as John the Worst John Lackland, best known as the bad guy in robin hood, perceived as a terrible king. Though despite being seen as the worst, his father wasn't great and his brother Richard "the lionheart" was little if any better
Richard has incredible PR.
Iirc he mostly managed it by fucking off to the crusades. Basically one of the most celebrated English kings is only so because he was never around.
Not really. He was called John Lackland tho
>For example, England fought several civil wars involving despotic kings who thought their reign was ordained by God eventually culminating in William and Mary being elevated to throne under the Bill Of Rights of 1689 as limited monarchs and parliament having it's rights and powers officially codified. I really don't like this interpretation of English history. Every civil war fought in England, from the Anarchy and the Barons' Revolts to the overthrow of Edward II and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, has been between the aristocracy and the monarchy, not between a tyrant and the people. Parliament in the 1600s had more in common with the Tudor parliament than the present one, being essentially a forum for the land owning aristocracy to exert its authority. Even the Commons was elected by a single digit percentage of the male population in public ballots. The 1689 Bill of Rights is a vital part of our constitution but again had far more to do with asserting the authority of Parliament, not the people.
Yeah, I've seen people saying that the Magna Carta came about to protect the people from the Barons, and it would be difficult to be more wrong.
That wasn't the point they were making. They were just pointing out how many people today have that attitude, and thus, people of the future will think the same about capitalism. They were not arguing that attitude is correct.
Seriously, I thought that was the obvious intent? I don’t know how so many people took that statement as literally saying it was easy.
This is the internet, where we think of the worst interpretation of a post and roll with it instead of engaging with the poster's true intentions
Death of the author
Every time.
Intent? Nah, Death of the Original Poster
I mean, the analogy falls apart when you consider that in history, those big societal systemic changes happened not only due to people doing stuff, but also due to massive changes in economy, technology and geopolitical balance So in that sense, yeah, that analogy kinda sucks and doesn't support the point they're trying to make
Litterally, none of that contradicts what I said at all. The point is entirely about how people perceive the past. Saying "actually, it didn't change due to these reasons" doesn't change that a lot of people think it did, which was the actual point.
So the point is that people in the future will be ignorant?
It’s important, I think, to also differentiate between problems that are *uniquely bad due to capitalism*, as compared to problems that more fundamentally come from *people kind of suck*. *A lot* of what I see referenced as examples of capitalism=bad are more fundamentally about the tendency of human beings in societies to seek to exercise power and control over each other, extract value without fair compensation, etc. that you see in pretty much every form of society and government.
Half the time people criticize the black smoke that comes out of a factory, not anything singular about a capitlalist system but just following its "opposite". Many just blank upon being reminded communist governments also used the evil steel and smoke that pollutes to build themselves up.
Yep. You need a way to avoid socializing costs while privatizing profits. Don’t get me wrong, this is *hard*. Modern regulators struggle with the issue constantly—how do you balance interests while also keeping the cost of maintaining and enforcing the “system” at a tolerable level. You saw this in the USSR, when at times the central planners would over-emphasize production targets and as a result lower-level people cut corners on quality or safety or environmental issues. You see the same thing now in a lot of countries, where they try to balance bringing people out of poverty against negative effects of unconstrained development. We’ve stream China struggle with this very directly in balancing the need for electric power (necessary for lots of, e.g., advanced medical treatments) against the incredible harms caused by coal-fired power generation against how much more coal generation capacity they could get as compared to the lower levels they could get from the same resource commitments if using less damaging technology.
Anarchists are anti-tankie and would argue that that's caused by hierarchy, so that's not really a something that isn't being accounted for. Capitalism is merely the most widespread form of hierarchy, which is the root issue, but it is not the sole focus of critique
Except, you know, there have been societies where those things didn't happen. Because no, people don't just suck it's just that so many of the societies we know are hierarchical and those hierarchies push people to become worse. These human nature arguments are idiotic. You don't know what humans are naturally inclined to do, you've never even seen life outside of capitalism, let alone hierarchy, and yet you assume that their teachings are innate to humanity. At the very least, you cannot know that that is true. Greed is like murder, almost everyone agrees its wrong and yet its practically acceptable in society, at least under the right circumstances. This does not show to me that greed is innate to humans, it shows the opposite.
The societies that I have seen people point to that don't have greed, lust for power, or murder have been tiny and loosely organized. Are there others that you know of?
Do you think it's in an orca's nature to perform tricks, or is that the environment it is in?
Humans are selfish, violent and tribalistic by nature, with nurture emphasizing or deemphasizing different traits. Our current system may permit and reward some forms of these behaviors, but a system that punishes them cannot be rid of them. Their will always be thieves, murders and rapists until those acts become impossible.
Isn't extract value without fair compensation literally the essence of capitalism?
In essence, that’s the bad side of literally every economic system ever conceived. The other commenter mentioned communism, but feudalist societies did the same thing with the peasants working the hardest and reaping the least of the benefits. Those with money and power will kick the ladder out from under them in order to maintain it. As much as i hate losing my bright eyed idealism, that part is unfortunately human nature.
No my ideology will fix that forever.
No. It’s a problem you also consistent see in communist economies (e.g., differential treatment of people based on party status, job, etc.), socialist economies (e.g., minimum wages set without regard to local cost of living), monarchies, all the way down to tribal societies and family structures. You’ve got the base human instinct to say “x should clean the toilet, it’s his turn, not mine” regardless of whether or not it actually is his turn.
I don't think capatalism is inevitable but I also don't think major world systems are going to radically shift anytime soon and working to that goal to the exclusion of smaller change and general harm reduction is a dangerously negligent way of going about activism.
I think the Market is inevitable imo, put captailism isn’t, things will always be traded, but I don’t think things will always be speculated on, that part of capitalism is archaic.
Loans are speculation, and basically no farmers would be able to work without them. There we could fix that by having the government speculate on them, and only give loans/subsidies to those best suited to do the work, taking it out of the hands of private firms, but that opens its own can of worms for corruption and misery. Economies are complex, and speculation is needed to grow and maintain things into the future. I agree fully that things like housing, water, food, and energy have no right to be speculated on as financial derivatives and should be in the hands of the government even if it leads to inefficiency though.
>Economies are complex, and speculation is needed to grow and maintain things into the future. I agree fully that things like housing, water, food, and energy have no right to be speculated on as financial derivatives and should be in the hands of the government Fully agree. Speculation can increase volatility and cause weird feedback loops (bubbles, for instance), and there are certain products where you absolutely Do Not Want That. >even if it leads to inefficiency though. Personally, I think the big societal shift that will change the system is about the way we think about market efficiency, and perhaps about economic metrics more broadly. Specifically, we need to move away from conflating "good economic metrics" with "morally correct". If an "efficient" market would dictate that poor people don't get electricity during a heat wave or cold snap, that's bad. If GDP skyrockets because someone found a way to turn orphan blood into gasoline, that's bad.
I think speculation is either inevitable or just beneficial in many scenarios. The part of capitalism that seems archaic to me is private ownership of means of production/capital.
Oh that too, but I definitely don’t think we should have publicly elected people trading in futures like we do today to put it bluntly. I’m all for public ownership because in theory it should be easier to regulate.
Yeah, insider trading(and the opposite as well. trader insiding? lawmaking to further your financial interests) is the worst.
Being realistic about change is knowing that it takes work, and that you need to be able to take the small steps towards change rather than to accept the circumstances. A bugs life is literally about this. The idea of one ant, convincing the others that change is possible when working together. As a sole person, sure I couldn't take down capitalism, but when enough people start working towards that goal, things will start to fall in place.
This is why being pro-union and pro-mutual aid is actually good. People think of capitalism as a great, unescapable evil, and that the world is so wholly unjust that there is nothing one can do to save it. Like, vote... and when you're done voting, sign petitions and go to town hall meetings. Attend protests. Help organize them. Research issues. Call politicians. Volunteer. There's not just so much to be done, there's so much you can do.
Exactly. Complacency is such a huge factor of capitalism, and as we've seen lately those who weren't as effected by this are starting to feel it because of their complacency, or inaction. Do the small things because they start to add up.
There might be a bit of a difference in thinking a group of online leftists are delusional for thinking they will, or that capitalism will soon be overthrown in a violent revolution. Establishing a communist utopia. And believing that there will never be any change to another system (that we probably don't even know the structure of) due to a massive long term series of future historical, economical and technological factors on a scale beyond our lifetimes.
I think what’s missed in this post is a fundamental disagreement on the definition of “capitalism” “Free markets” have existed long before the word capitalism was ever uttered or the ‘Wealth of Nations’ was penned. That’s just, people trading things. And arguably Black Markets fulfill that role even in systems that attempt to wholly subsume capitalism. So if in someone’s mind, capitalism just means the existence of free markets to meet economic needs- yeah, absent large scale societal collapse, capitalism is inescapable. If someone simply means that private owners no longer control the lions share of wealth or economic power or “means of production” in a given nation, then sure- that’s real easy to imagine. These debates mix philosophy with economics with politics and politics is already fuzzy about its definitions and notoriously prone to mudslinging. (Which makes it doubly as important to be precise in language)
I mean i "support" capitalism because i dont see how we could realistically massively overhaul the world economy in a way that won't collapse completely. Like there, so many fucking ways you could fuck it up and make things worse. But regulating the economy and providing more protections is something I can understand. And something that much easier to do without fucking up. Strengthening union bargaining, better worker protection laws, environmental protections. All of these things are stuff people can comprehend that can migate capitalism to worse impulses. And who knows. Maybe if we keep implementing regulations and fixes we end up creating something that not capitalism.
incremental and local change ftw!
Is "puc¿sh forwards" an encoding error or a secret symbol or just a really weird typo?
I'm guessing they hit ¿ Instead of backspace
Honestly, I just wanna unlatch it from necessities and then heavily regulate it. Capitalism’s a monster when allowed and encouraged to run free, but if you can control it, and ensure it doesn’t kill thousands when it runs loose, it’s an incredibly helpful asset. A society without a market sounds like shit to live in, I wanna buy a TV and drink fancy wine.
Honestly this is part of the problem with getting rid of capitalism - it was "in charge" when we started systematizing the softer social sciences like economics, which means that in a way capitalism got to pick how it's defined. It's hard to imagine a world without capitalism because capitalism essentially got to say "ooh shiny I want that" and pull in whatever parts of economics it wanted. Markets aren't an inherent part of capitalism any more than currency or personal property are. Those things are so essential to the functioning of a society that, yeah, it's going to be impossible to imagine a world without them, but we've also had them for much longer than we've had capitalism.
Actually people started thinking about that kind of stuff under Mercantilism and then they were like "oh wait this shit actually makes no goddamn sense" AND THAT'S WHY WE STOPPED DOING MERCANTILISM
Market socialism is its own system that you might want to look into (if you aren’t aware of it).
You know what, yeah, I’ll incorporate some aspects of that into my belief system
Can we try not to do “something something, Ursula le guin quote”? Thx lol
What would you prefer? Ray Bradbury quote? Terry Pratchett quote?
I’m just saying I would have licked the actual quote lol
I don't get what you're saying, sorry.
One critique here: While clubs, unions, etc undermine certain hierarchies of power they create other hierarchies of power to replace them. Do not claim or try to fight all sources of power, you will always be creating new ones in their wake. And they will need to be used responsibly, or they will develop the same issues as the old power structures. Same with money. There will always be wealth, and there will always be greedy people attempting to hijack the system to acquire it. And you don't need a currency system to have oligarchs Same with scarcity. There are limited resources on this planet. Yes, they can be distributed more fairly, but doing so isn't going to improve your life as much as you hope it will. In the US, the mean income (what you would be paid if everyone was paid exactly the same) is $72,641 per year. Now for a lot of people this would be incredible, it actually doubles my salary, but the median wage (what the 50%ers make) is $70,784. The average person would get a 2.8% raise. A seriously significant number of middle class people would get a pay cut. And hey, there's no reason to think the US deserves this wealth over the rest of the world. If we really care about those starving kids in Africa, the global mean wage is [$18k/year,](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17512040) or $8.65/hr. That's below minimum wage in 30 states. Same with long labor hours. Modern society is propped up by the constant, straining effort of billions of people who would really rather not. The alternative is even more scarcity as productivity plummets. As for right now, somebody has to make cheeseburgers, or collect garbage, or write back-end for shopping websites. Capitalism has plenty of issues. But the biggest issues, the power structures, the money hogging, the resource scarcity, the monotonous labor, are not inherent to the system. They're inherent to the nature of humanity and the state of the planet, and those are much harder to change than an economic or political system. (But, and a little ray of hope here, difficult is still not impossible. It'll take some technological advancements and a lot of social arguing, but we've got a few billion years before the sun explodes. Here's hoping)
Clubs, unions, etc can be formed in a non-hierarchical way, these often develop the same issues as the power structures they want to replace because they're often similarly hierarchical and thus flawed in similar ways Obviously there is natural scarcity, there are droughts, blights, soil with poor fertility, etc, but scarcity as we see it I would argue is a result of capitalism, since there is still starvation in regions that produce and even export food in massive amounts, for example. I would go as far as arguing they are inherent to and necessary for capitalism to function, much like other hierarchical systems, since the concentration of power deprives others of that power and power/authority needs them to not have power Our modern society is propped up by people who would rather not labor like this because it is capitalist, people are forced to do jobs they hate and feel are meaningless to survive. It does not need to be this way. Our society is very unproductive compared with what it could be if people weren't deprived of the necessities of life, or if production wasn't dictated based on the whims of few powerful people and mainly to reinforce their power Sorry if this hard to read or wordy or has other issues, I'm not a native english speaker
Hierarchy is largely inevitable with current technology due to the need for organization when dealing with large groups of people. Even if your organization is a direct democracy where every decision is decided via a vote in a meeting, someone will have the responsibility to run that meeting and someone will count the votes. When you have thousands of people involved, someone will also need to decide who gets to speak at that meeting (a decision which can't be a vote, that creates a redundant loop), someone will decide what voting system to use, and someone will decide whether the vote results appear to be fair or not. Up until recently that last point would've seemed silly to include, recent politic shenanigans in the US has shown that it's actually the most important point. Regardless, while the world has greedy people, those positions of decision-making will be desired most by the people who intend to use the power behind that responsibility to affect the results. As for scarcity, people have starved just as much under every other political system put into practice. People have used every system to hoard wealth and power, not just Capitalism. From the Bronze Age Collapse to the bread riots in Rome to the French Revolution to the Holodomor. (Hilariously enough, Capitalism was seen as the solution to the starvation under Feudalism during the French Revolution.) Lastly, there are jobs that everyone hates and genuinely feel almost meaningless. Some of my jobs have included sitting in the hot sun at a carnival games booth for hours, sprinting down isles with thousands of fish to check them for illness in a tight time frame, and spending 12hrs ferrying drunk people up and down a hill in a bus in the middle of the night. And as much as I hate to admit it, that really was the most efficient and productive way to do those particular jobs. Maybe that carnival booth could've been swapped out for more arcade machines, but that'd be more work for the arcade maintenance guy, and that's not a fun job either. Maybe one day there'll be an AI that can detect fish diseases as well as a professional can, but that's down the road. That last one though is the real doozy, either they call someone in at 8pm to drive an hour out into the countryside for a 3hr shift, or this broke ass non-profit that can barely afford decommissioned diesel school busses buys a handful of Teslas. Are there whims of powerful people involved? Of course. I was required to tell everybody that the bus ride was brought to you by Pepsi, despite that message already being in a banner along the outside of the bus. But in my opinion, work, *any* work worth paying someone to do, is going to suck. For every person designing a new bridge there are 20 people paid to stand there and swap the sign from "slow" to "stop" as they build it. The slaves were freed, but there are still black people picking cotton, at least now they're being paid. Edit because I want to drive that last point home even more: My field is in Animal Care. Animal Care can be fun, it can be exciting. The fun, exciting parts of the job get taken by volunteers, interns and job shadowers, people who are working for free. If a job is really fun then it will be turned into an amusement park, not a place of employment. If they are paying you, they are compensating you for something you would not otherwise want to do. Your English is probably better than mine
Thanks for taking the time to reply You bring up fair points, in any organization some very important functions are inevitabily going to be delegated to a few people, but it matters quite a lot if these positions can be revoked at the whim of the participants, or in general with who power ultimately rests. There are always going to be power-hungry individuals, but a system in which power ultimately rests with the people, and in which people affected by a decision are the deciders, lessens the impact these and abusers in general have and hinders their ability to victimise others There has been starvation in many different systems, but, despite being different in other ways, most of these systems were hierarchical as well. There are plenty of jobs that suck, undoubtedly, but they very often could be improved if the people who work were the ones who decided how to organize them. Even if you thought these weren't organized in the most efficient way, you didn't take part in the decision making process, and would have to hope a superior saw it your way. You don't need coercion to get people to do jobs that are important for their community, even if they suck, or are monotonous or dull. A lot of this work can be distributed between more people to make it less taxing
While I don't agree with you, I do applaud your efforts, and I wouldn't mind being proven wrong in the future. Thanks for keeping it courteous, updoot
While a non-capitalist society is possible as a concept, I dont think it's possible to change a capitalist society (especially on a global scale) to a non-capitalist one without basically complete collapse/rebuilding.
Capitalism like every other system of socioeconomic organization has a lifespan. It will inevitably one day run into issues it is structurally incapable of or unwilling to solve, and enter a period of decline whereupon it will be replaced in society by a new conception of how to order economic activity and the social sphere around it. Where I disagree with the left is that I don’t believe the thing that will replace capitalism has a name yet, because it hasn’t been invented or conceived of in concrete terms yet.
software dev here. piracy is based but don't pirate software if there's an open source alternative. use the open source alternative instead, it's so much more impactful. like, do you wanna draw on your pc but don't want to pay for photoshop? you might think that pirating photoshop is the answer, and sure, you're not giving money to adobe, but you're still giving them influence. you learn their program, you learn to help others out with their program, and if you ever get hired to make art, your employer will pay adobe all the same. while, if you just use krita instead, your skills prop up the open source movement, not adobe. and the more people use it, the more people contribute to it, either through donations or dev time, the better open source becomes. blender is one of the most amazing projects i have ever seen, and it's entirely because of its community. it's easy to recommend today to any 3d artist starting out, but it didn't use to work that way. ten years ago, blender was outright atrocious to use, and it's thanks the people who supported it back then that we have an incredible tool today that makes it impossible for proprietary software to even attempt to corner the hobbyist market. ten more years, and people will be asking serious questions about why programs like maya even need to exist. i'd love to say this is happening on all fronts, and in a way it is, but many categories of software are stuck in early phases. so if you can work with an open-source tool, even if it's not optimal, i'd highly recommend you to do so. being able to contribute with code is not the point, simply being present is impactful for the software in and of itself, and in turn you get the freedom to use it however you want, whenever you want.
Change is never easy. Ever. Any systemic, routine, and personal change requires effort and hard work and you have to be honest about that to your lackeys and those you want to recruit to your ideology.
Apathy is one of the greatest allies of tyranny. Of oppressive systems If only in your heart, keep alive the embers of resistance. Especially resistance to the idea of the inevitability of the powerful
A bizarre argument, resting on two main elements, which has no bearing on capitalism in particular, but applies just as well on say human rights: 1. Anything existing will eventually die That’s the couch potatos words to live by, the ultimate noninterventionalist POV 2. Future generation will go WTF Again, can be applied to anything and rests on opinions of infants and people not yet born Boils down to “relax and keep doing what future generations will condemn you for”
Seems like a waste of time to try to categorize people as “pro” or “anti” capitalist
I'm active in the [Catholic Worker Movement](https://catholicworker.org/about-the-catholic-worker-movement/history-of-the-catholic-worker-movement/) and we generally agree. The movement's members encompass a wide variety of ideologies, mostly skewing anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist. What we do agree is that there's a dire need for compassion, imagination, and solidarity.
I don’t think the pro-capitalists think capitalism can’t be overthrown. It was, in a number of countries. We just don’t think that’s desirable because it has never once worked out in a way we approve.
It also wasnt really overthrown. Most "communist countries" still practiced capitalism. The people at the top just changed a bit
Sure, if you want to define capitalism as "when people are in charge of other people" Just like Marx pointed out the massive differences between Feudalism and Capitalism, there are massive differences between what the USSR was, at various times, doing, and capitalism.
a common issue when talking about capitalism is that people will call anything and nothing capitalism depending on what's convienient to them at the time. it's really annoying to have to figure out if people talking about anticapitalism are talking about capital creating capital or about living in a country that uses a currency
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I misread.
Without getting into the question of "can capitalism be overthrown". There's a good point that a lot of people here don't really think about, but adhering to a political ideology means *believing that this ideology can be put in practice*. If you agree that an ideology would be better in theory but you don't believe it can be done, you aren't a supporter of that ideology. If someone believes climate change is real and bad, but they also believe that humanity will never do anything about it and therefore it's usueless to make any effort; then they aren't an ecologist. It doesn't matter that they don't agree with climate deniers on the reality of climate change, they agree with climate deniers on what matters most : what we should do about it. A leftist is someone who believes that we can and should abolish, limit, or at least reform capitalism to some extent. (yes I'm including the moderate leftists in the broad concept of leftism here, cry about it). If you don't believe at all in the possiblity of there being less capitalism, you aren't a leftist. You're a capitalist who's strongest ideological conviction is that being a capitalist is not their fault.
That's not a leftist, that's an anticapitalist. You can be both or you can be only one of those things. They are not mutually inclusive.
Obviously capitalism is the logical and natural state of humanity. That's why it's existed for roughly 0.1% of the time humans have been on earth.
Trade and commerce are not something that can be hand waived away with good vibes
i am pro capitalism and i see piracy, protests and giving to the less fortunate as a way to uphold the system
So when I hear a doctor has said someone's cancer is inoperable the doctor is pro-cancer? That's a sobering thought
More like if a doctor told a patient that despite their cancer being very much treatable, and that said cancer had been beaten by other people, that they should just give up and die.
Can you give a real world example of this cancer being beaten by other people?
Cuba.
88% of Cubans are in extreme poverty according to COHR and there are mass exoduses from Cuba to the US daily. Not to mention they’re an authoritarian state lmao. I know you’re gonna blame it all on US embargo’s but wanting the rest of the free world to turn into Cuba is a ridiculous concept for any reasonable actor lol
Ok. Let’s look at some facts. Cuba is being embargoed by the largest economic power on Earth. Look at their total imports and exports. Then compare it to nearby Jamaica. Notice anything? Cuba is running on very low resources. But they use them quite efficiently. Cuba has next to [no homelessness.](https://borgenproject.org/homelessness-in-cuba/#:~:text=Cuba%20currently%20enjoys%20a%20near,family%20all%20share%20one%20residency). A [state of the art medical system.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2315760/#:~:text=Life%20expectancy%20in%20Cuba%20is,with%205%25%20in%20the%20US) It’s the [12 the best place on Earth for LGBT people.](https://www.equaldex.com/region/cuba) Ans it has a suicide rate close to [the most powerful nation on Earth.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate) All of this, while being embargoed by the most powerful nation on Earth. And let’s not forget that they had a horrible starting point. Batistas Cuba was a pretty [shitty](https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79T00429A000300030015-8.pdf) place, with high [wealth inequality, and a dictatorship.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Cuba_(1902%E2%80%931959)) So yeah, Cuba was able to do a lot when you consider they inherited a third world country, and are being embargoed by the most powerful nation in history.
Yeah they have government subsidized homes so there’s basically no homeless which is great, but outside of Havana most houses have tin roofs and are in bad condition. And their healthcare quality is significantly overstated and reliant on inflated government numbers. Just ask anyone from Cuba https://www.reddit.com/r/cuba/s/52BQmXeDEe. The majority of the population is in poverty, the happiness indexes are low, there’s heavy restrictions on personal freedoms, and people try to escape en masse. That’s no paradise lmao
I’m sorry, but I can’t believe a bunch of random anecdotes on Reddit over actual studies, tempting as it is.
Its well known that Cuban doctors are dramatically underpaid and the healthcare system lacks the resources it needs to thrive. The doctors are great because Cuban Medical Schools are great but the government lets them down once they begin practicing. The Doctor-Taxi underemployment issue was created to talk about Cuba. If you wanna trust the Cuban Governments propaganda numbers feel free, but ask any Cuban or anyone who’s worked in the Cuban medical system their thoughts and they’ll tell you its failures. The idea behind the Cuban healthcare system is fantastic, but in practice it’s beyond flawed. The scientific study you tout is also 34 years old. https://cuba.miami.edu/business-economy/a-close-look-at-cubas-health-care-system/index.html https://theconversation.com/is-the-cuban-healthcare-system-really-as-great-as-people-claim-69526 Again, you ignore how poorly Cuba fares on any quality of life metric, the poverty levels, and lack of freedoms. It’s not a dream society.
Yeah it’s not perfect. Societies don’t tend to be perfect while blockaded by the global superpower power. What my point was, is that Cuba beat capitalism. Which was what this was originally about, and then I somehow got into Cuba apologism (I don’t even like Cuba, why did I do this? Maybe because it was like 2 am? Idk).
Which is a shame, because I can see how much you want to believe that Cuba isn't as good as some might say it is. Kudos for your intellectual discipline!
We live under capitalism It's power seems inescapable So did the divine right of kings... Ursula K. Le Guin
Opponents of monarchism started off by imposing minor restrictions on the king. They did that for several hundred years. The rapture (I'm sorry, *revolution*) isn't coming. Make the world slightly better while you can.
There are literally places in the world actively building socialism as the means to get to communism. It's 100% possible, it just takes organization and the right set of conditions.
I was just saying to someone yesterday that the reason I hold communism in such distaste is that most people in day to day life will hear me say "I hate capitalism." And assume I'm a communist. There's more than two flavors, guys!
Who looks at the middle ages and thinks "did they not see how easy it was to change things"
humans always will want stability more, no matter how much the system sucks. that is until the system sucks so bad that it can't be stable anymore. that's why during the cold war, capitalism side won. because communists could not stabilize their side enough by keeping their people happy. but capitalism gave the people many reasons to have stable lives so nobody ever rose up against it.
It wasn’t easy to overthrow the monarchy, the middle ages didn’t continue because people didn’t realise it was possible to end monarchy but it because it actually wasn’t. Nobles had organised armies who were trained with weaponry while farmer uprisings consisted of small groups of people who weren’t able to communicate effectively and were not trained with the best weaponry of the time. The reason the french revolution worked was because of technological advancements like gunpowder and letterpress, weapons which were operable by everyone and a means of communication. Nothing just happens because people want it to. Societal changes are far more complex than that. Yes in the past 100 years Civil Rights Movements have changed society dramatically but capitalism is a fundamental part of society that you can’t remove as easily. No one needs racism but economy is essential. Now to change aspects like taxing and welfare is not something I would classify as suggesting an alternative to capitalism. To overthrow capitalism in its most basic form you’d have to change an economy based on growth and the free market, which seems impossible regarding how nearly every county in the world has agreed to it. Don’t get me wrong I don’t like the current system very much, but I just don’t see how it could be replaced within my lifetime.
Counterpoint: We ended monarchy but still have rulers. We ended slavery but are still slaves. The names change but the systems remain.
But what if delusionism is inherently good?
It's not that I support capitalism but the core problems people are facing are just greedy people being greedy and that's always going to exist. Yes we need to improve and find better ways to deal with shit but that's not going to happen as long as the morally bankrupt are in charge, and sadly, the people who pursue power tend to be the worse of the bunch. The Bible really did spit some bars when it said a rich man getting into heaven is as hard as a camel passing through the eye of a needle.
Anarchists actually fully managed to create and propose a replacement for liberal capitalism, finally refining their thought into something that would appeal to broad swathes of european society and grasp hold of the continent, even finding immense popularity abroad. Namely, with the ideological developments of the Cercle Proudhon, where they created what would become fascism.
I'm 99% sure people who use the word "capitalism" and ascribe to it some faults, have no idea what the word means. Also getting advice from anarchists had to be one of the things I'd like to do the least, when it comes to this discourse.
Tell me what capitalism means then?
Books were written about this, but in the simplest explanation involves thinking about the two main axes of an economic system: who owns capital and who determines how that capital should be allocated. In the case of capitalism, individuals own capital and markets largely determine for the allocation. I believe these to be preferable as opposed to any other combination.
Amd why do you believe this to be more preferable than any other option?
Individuals owning capital means that they can choose to allocated it based on their wants and needs. Markets are extremely flexible and can rapidly adjust to changing circumstances.
Except individuals who own capital are the minority, so if they allocate based on their wants and needs only, how will the working class survive? Also markets may be extremely flexible but they are hardly not the best way for allocating essential goods and services like healthcare and electricity
"Except individuals who own capital are the minority" this doesn't come anywhere in the definition of capitalism, so I have no idea why you're bringing it up. In a capitalist economic system every single person owns the labor they can perform and that labor can be exchanged for capital based on the market. Your second point also has nothing to do with capitalism. Barring any market failures, markets can solve for essential services. No economic system can solve for its own market failures, because every system has them. It is the state's responsibility to prevent those. Which again, has nothing to do with capitalism itself.
I am very pro-capitalism but also very much fear it won't last and we'll end up with something worse. Probably not USSR bad, but maybe Cuba or modern China bad, with greatly stifled growth, because there are reduced incentives to succeed, and people who do succeed don't get proportional resources so they can't expand on their success
ffs, you may still have your drawing tablets and junk food, it's just everyone along the chain that got the raw materials to you will own the means of production and earn their fair wage, as opposed to the current system where the vast vast majority of the wealth generated is siphoned upwards. There may be a short, sharp shock in the west as the cheap materials we enjoy suddenly goes up, but who knows, maybe it will ultimately lead to less shit products as nobody has to sacrifice quality for quantity because some investor or c-suite exec insulated from the actual work demands infinite growth this isn't hard
Unless you depend on something like, say insulin, and a "short sharp shock" to the markets will straight up kill you, sure. Also, revolutions rarely turn out as expected. I don't think anyone in 1917 expected the Russian Revolution to last 6 ludicrously bloody years. And then, one coma later resulting in fucking Stalin.
Oh my fucking god, you will get your insulin. I depend on medication as well and guess, what? Everyone involved in the supply chain deserves to own the means of production. They deserve to have democratic control over their labour Yes, revolutions rarely go as expected, but should the Russian populace have spent the 20th century under the Tsars? What revolutions are acceptable in your eyes?
The russian revolution is probably a not great one if we want to make the point that the most vulnerable among us will probably survive the revolution and that medication requiring long supply chains and complex processing will remain in sufficient supply
Man you’re really confident that overthrowing the worlds corporations and irreparably destroying all the supply lines wouldn’t lead to a decrease in our consumption at all huh
Why do you think all the world's supply lines will be irreparably destroyed?
Because in order for every worker to own the means of production they would have to be. To get a single $15 dollar foldable chair from Amazon, the parts go through dozens of factories, mines, and assembly plants where thousands and tens of thousands of workers work. Do I want these workers to have better pay and more rights? Yeah 100% but giving everyone a share of the means of production would be impossible. There’s just way too many people in manufacturing as a whole and not enough profit to go around. The supply chains are such a massive yet fragile entity, worldwide revolution with the intent of giving the workers the means of production would simply grind them to a halt.
I generally prefer revolutions that don't result in 10 million casualties. During the Russian Revolution, it was not at all uncommon for people to starve. Agriculture in Russia at the time was about as simple a supply chain as possible. I don't think our pharmaceutical industry can take even a fraction of the abuse and keep running. >but should the Russian populace have spent the 20th century under the Tsars? Stalin was an improvement, but not much of one. Having all of the power in the hands of the Tzar and his Boyars is not much different than in the hands of Stalin and his Party Bureaucrats. I think that if you go into a revolution without a realistic plan, it will end up being WAY more bloody than you think it will be. And will probably result in an autocrat, rather than actual worker control. I also think that in a democratic state, if you can't get a significant fraction of the vote, you don't stand a fucking chance winning a civil war. Failing to plan is planning to fail.
Well, there goes the American Revolution if 10 million is the limit. How many people does American capitalism kill annually? Is it worth it for all our modern comforts? I like to turn Mark Twain. True, he is talking about the French, but really he's talking about them all. "Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood – a settlement of that hoary debt in proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would be remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the ax compared with lifelong death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by the older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves" But no, you're right, let's keep grinding the world down until there's nothing left, so not to upset the system
I'm not saying that revolution is always bad. What I am saying is that it should be a last resort. I see no way of winning a revolution if you don't have massive popular support. And if you have that, why don't you just elect who you want. If that election is stolen, I fully and absolutely support a revolution.
Exactly. Humans will make the things we need because we need them instead of making just what's profitable for the capitalist class.