What do you call it if I don’t like capitalism, but also don’t think it’s even possible for any governing body to remain both competent and non-corrupt for long enough to make a centrally managed system work?
Socialism doesn’t have to be centrally planned.
Anarchist, mayhaps
If you’re in favor of a balance between a free market and regulation to cover capitalism damages on people, you may be social democrat, like Bernie Sanders and most of the left in EU.
Which is still capitalism
There is absolutely no way that a complete move away from capitalism will ever take place. Even the so called “communist” countries are just state driven capitalism.
Number one most tiring aspect of politics on Lemmy is the delusional level of “the o my way to improve lives is the complete destruction of capitalism”
Hold on, no, you don’t get to just make such a huge broad sweeping claim as no one will ever move away from capitalism like it’s an universally agreed upon truth.
Ok, I’d love to hear of a modern example of a system that isn’t based on some form of capitalism. If the broad statement being thrown around that capitalism in any form is inherently evil, what is the alternative?
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - What Is To Be Done?
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Horkheimer & Adorno - Dialectic of Enlightenment
Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
John Holloway - Crack Capitalism: How can we rebel against the capitalist system? John Holloway argues that by creating, cracks, fractures and fissures that forge spaces of rebellion and disrupt the current economic order.
S.D. Chrostowska - Utopia in the Age of Survival focuses on resisting that kind of political cynicism and defeatism, attempting to address humanity’s existential challenges, the most totalizing and dominant of which being capitalism.
And yet none of these systems exist in any modern country in the world… maybe because they are all good on paper, but impossible to implement in the real world because they won’t work.
And really, you’re linking Lenin? Communists are just naive. It will never work in real life, and every time it’s been tried, it fails, or is perverted to be CINO.
There is a difference between possible and will the state allow it. Not only is it possible. It’s happened several times. But no the state will do everything in it’s power to keep its power. Regardless of who suffers.
You don’t need central management. You just need to have workers keep the proceeds of their labor instead of uninvolved shareholders and “owners”.
Central management is still needed to make global plans, like in production or healthcare etc.
Why not local communities that feed up into larger representation groups?
hiw would you call the largest representation group? Isn’t it central management?
I wasn’t imagining something that just makes decisions that are handed down. They collate and evaluate the decisions and input from below.
anarchist.
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We actually do have a term for that. It’s called capitalist realism.
I haven’t read that book, but it sounds like he’s taking the starting point of my opinions, and then going way too far with the conclusions.
I think part of the problem is that people seem to view these systems as absolutes that that we have to go all in with and apply to everything. I think they should be thought of more like tools. You apply the right tools to the right situations.
Dangerously nuanced thought that….
Like a capitalism tool? Or a capitalist realism perspective tool?
For the latter I agree, good to have many lenses to look at things through.
It doesn’t include attempts to move beyond capitalism.
You need to learn the difference between market economy and capitalism. And not to mention anti capitalism doesn’t automatically mean centrally managed. You are making a false dichotomy/straw man
Market socialism used to be a thing.
Ngl, this desire to flatten the entire range of human political thought into a single dimension is pretty right-wing
Well, thats more of a general thing for extremists. That happens to be independent of left or right. Just watch Lemmings down vote brigading.
That being said: generally of anybody tries to break any complex problem down to a simple answer you should be very careful what you do next. Thats how scams work and long existing political problems like right wing populism still exist for a reason. Yes, its complicated. A guillotine won’t solve that. Yes I’m taking to you… ;)
“Eating the rich” won’t help either, but taxing the shit out of them might do away with some of the problem for some time, so this would be better than doing nothing and letting people get so angry they fall for the populist scam.
I interpret “eat the rich” as a call for a 180 attitude change on the oligarchs: to view with extreme distrust anyone with a country-sized capital, especially if they leverage it for political power.
Admittedly that’s my interpretation, I’m sure many call for literal guillotines.
It’s more of a problem of having no base definitions on which everyone agrees upon. So anything goes and no one ends up knowing what they’re talking about.
Nagle no.
No True Scotsman can be a capitalist either, they said
There’s little I detest more than when someone makes an absurd yet completely sincere claim and just doesn’t elaborate whatsoever.
I guess I should go to Mars or something since that seems to be the norm among our species
I tried to find the absurd claim, can we get a hint?
There’s no necessary object of my sentiment, so I’ll let you be the judge ;)
That’s cap. You can be pro-capitalism in some form and still be on the left wing of politics.
But of course, this is extremely subjective.
You can be pro-capitalism in some form and still be on the left wing of politics.
Pro capitalist and socially progressive is just called liberal.
The problem here is that part of the left deny that liberals are on the left.
There’s a lotta people that also think using a system of currency is all capitalism is and is what they want to be rid of. But you can still have money without capitalism.
I knew someone once who thought capitalism was basically all forms of commerce. Like there was no trade before capitalism i guess. Don’t understand how they thought the world worked for most of the last few thousand years.
Course a distressingly number of people in this thread seem to think similarly. Which makes me sad for the world.
I knew someone once who thought capitalism was basically all forms of commerce.
Here’s the problem: if capitalism is essentially just a remix of mercantilism and industrial manufacturing, then it’s not something fundamentally new. If it’s not something fundamentally new, then it is not itself going to lead to anything else fundamentally new; that is to say: the belief in a future utopia DEPENDS on a history being an arrow instead of a circle. The more you tie capitalism back to earlier eras, the more you erode the belief that there is something better coming after the Bell riots.
But you can still have money without capitalism.
All major organized society from the 20th century onwards used some form of currency, be it fascist, liberal or socialist. This isn’t really debated.
North Korea has markets nowadays where currency is traded for goods, even if they also have government rationing and almost total government control of the economy. China does not only have markets where currency is traded for goods but also has the whole stock exchanges and billionaires thing. The democratic socialist states of northern Europe also follow capitalism, even if the government is heavily involved in both the economy and is giving out large amounts of welfare. Capitalism is very broad. You can absolutely be left wing if you live in the USA and want capitalism to work more as capitalism works in the Nordic countries. In a way you can therefore be pro capitalist and left wing. However I kinda get what the guy in the post means but I still want to be clear that you can be left wing and not want to abolish currency at the same time.
Currency, and this is going to be astonishing to hear, isn’t capitalism. Capitalism is the system of economics where owners of capital control the profits from that capital, even if they can’t get those profits without the labor of others. It has fuck-all to do with literal currency which has existed since far before Capitalism and will exist far after it as well.
Neither socialism nor communism are incompatible with currency cause that’s just a way of expediting the exchanging of goods. Instead of social debt, people exchange currency instead for goods or services. Makes keeping everything straight quite a bit easier. Hoarding it is problematic in any system, since the whole point of currency is to, again, aid in the exchange of things.
Still according to your definition we still have capitalism in the Nordic countries and in China. Both allow for private ownership of companies and have their own stock exchanges. So my point still stands.
And when do you mean we didn’t have capitalism? Since the dawn of agriculture it has been possible to own farms where the owner of the farm profits off the laborers of the farm and the land itself, the means of production. Isn’t that capitalism then?
It’s not his definition that’s the definition. Your definition is so absurdly broad as to be meaningless. No since the dawn of Agriculture capitalism has not existed.
Hell since dawn of agriculture it’s been very rare that farmers have owned their own land so your entire premise is absurd.
Capitalism is the part where having money makes money. Markets are a different thing.
Yes I’ll admit I was thinking of market economy. Nevertheless both the Nordic countries and modern day China are places where having money makes money. That’s still capitalism. Only north Korea would be out.
China is a capitalist state in all ways but officially now. It’s closer to fascist than it is communist at this point. Enterprises are not owned by the people, capital is owned by individuals who are beholden to the state.
People need to realize that the end goal of capitalism is to own the world and space as a monopoly, ravaging the earth to the point of no vegetation so that they control all the food and water and resources, without competition.
No it isn’t. Capitalism doesn’t even really have a goal because, unlike Socialism which was consciously invented as an ideology, Capitalism arose by accident and is subscribed to be wildly disparate people with wildly incompatible beliefs. But most of those people don’t want to “own the world and space as a monopoly and ravage the earth to the point of no vegetation” because that’s insane.
How did it arise by accident? It’s a system of imposing its will and subjecting others to its will and monopolizing the resources, it’s been around for ages and ages. It’s no different that colonialism/imperialism. People who push for capitalism are insane monsters without morals and a lot of them rape children
I guess he means organically as opposed to led by ideologists like the Soviet Union.
Well, whatever point they were trying to make was shit
Or you’re just so extremely in love with your ideas that you’ve become completely uninterested in basic facts that vaguely conflict with your vision of reality.
Who invented Capitalism?
You can make a very good argument that it was Adam Smith, with Wealth of Nations.
It was influential, but capitalism had essentially already come about in a limited form.
And his stated goal was competitive markets forever, not absolute monarchy with more steps. People dunk on conservatives by quoting that book.
Ah, so nothing of substance in response so I can chalk this discussion up to bad faith on your end.
You’re so far off the deep end that it doesn’t make sense trying to rebut you, so I ask questions that have easy answers to try and discuss something more productive. As usual with folks who think they’re very smart though, you don’t want to answer because it’s not on your terms.
Take a class in politics. Or hell just read a book.
You’ve done nothing but argue some pedantic point of the origin that doesn’t really have anything to do with my original point, I don’t see this going anywhere so I’m not going to waste my time with it
Your original point was a nonexistent strawman caricature of capitalism.
Me when I assign absurd motivations to anyone who disagrees with me
Pedantic structuralism is right wing. Period. If you are obsessed with any modernist philosophy, you are right wing. There is no structuralist left. That’s a polite fiction children on the Internet tell themselves as they argue about which outdated political dogma they have pinned to their jacket.
Post-structuralism is moderate left wing/left neoliberalism, period.
If you are pro-post-structuralism, you are academic new-left post-Marxist left neoliberal moderate.
There is some shared reality. Over emphasis of the subjective elements of social reality is inherent in mind body dualism of the hegemonic order that no one can understand as the contradictions of class antagonisms escalate around us
/hj I’m being cheeky
What do you suggest for the transition? You’ve left out the most important part.
Also, stop trying to confuse left, right and the middle.
I know there’s a lot of people who say “look, I know, capitalism sucks, absolutely, but it’s the only thing that works right now!”
This absolutely shouldn’t stop you from dreaming big, my friend.
Europe is great because of a huge number of fully public or heavily tax subsidised services.
It’s a stupid argument because China is socialist and is rapidly overtaking the US and Europe on every economic measure while maintaining a 90+% satisfaction rating from their citizens, and while adopting green technology faster than anyone else. Their welfare system is lagging a bit, but I would expect that to change within the next 10-15 years. Socialism obviously works.
Please explain so my European Cro-Magnon derived stupid brain can understand:
If China socialist, why so many quadri-spillion dollar multinational capitalist businesses there? If China socialist, why social welfare “lagging a bit” as you say? We in Europe think: social service priority good. Really good. We don’t lag.
Socialism is not synonymous with social welfare, it is a mode of production where capital (the means of production) is controlled by the working class, not the bourgeois.
Chinese socialism allows limited capitalist activity because capitalism is really good at developing productive capacity and China was basically a non-industrialized country before the revolution, so they had lots of catching up to do. I say limited capitalist activity because 1) China tends to nationalize control over corporations once they get to a certain size, and 2) the CPC is fundamentally a working class party and does not allow bourgeois political activity. Capitalists can make money in China, but they don’t get to decide policy, and even their ability to make money gets curtailed if they get to big so that they don’t become too powerful. In this way, China has harnessed capitalism to achieve rapid industrialization while preventing capitalists from gaining control over the working class.
Chinese social welfare is also better than I believed when I made my previous comment. Prior to 2014, urban citizens had access to government progress providing healthcare, employment, retirement pensions, housing, and education, but rural citizens were expected to provide for themselves. Since then, reforms aimed at rural welfare have lifted 100 million people out of poverty and integrated rural welfare with the national system (in the last 50 years they have lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty). Just this year, China has announced the elimination of absolute poverty entirely, and are continuing to improve the social safety net. I recommend reading the Wikipedia page on Welfare in China, they are doing much better than even I thought.
The reason China has lagged behind European welfare systems is that they were really poor and had a huge population that was living in extreme poverty. They didn’t have funds for welfare. However, they are rapidly catching up and the systems they are creating will most likely let them surpass European welfare soon.
Meanwhile, capitalist welfare systems face constant threat from “austerity” policies, and are designed to keep a portion of the population unemployed and/or unhoused so that capitalists have better negotiating power over labor.
Unfortunately the center-left - the socialist democrats, the most popular faction on the left - does not reject capitalism, rather they want to builds on it. The “I can fix her” league.
These are also the guys most prone to be provoked into cultural war by the right, completely abandoning the class war.
Gauche caviar. They are not socialist, they would call themselves the democratic socialists if they were, but that would require of them to completely abandon any loyalty to the current system and focus on eating the rich that fund them.
I feel there are many as well who know capitalism needs to go away, but also understand that sudden change will cost many lives and violent revolution doesn’t guarantee that you’ll end up any better off, and as a result are trying to go for a “soft landing”. Downside is that takes a lot of time and needs to have successively more progressive governments and policies in place each election cycle. Given the “tick-tock” pattern of switching between D and R administrations, this simply does not happen.
Always odd when people are more concerned with potential damage caused by change than the massive amounts of damage caused everyday by the current reality.
Basically every major social Democrat party in the EU has Democratic Socialism as part of their official platform.
I mean even if you believe this Marx at least suggested the benefits of industrial capital should be retained somehow. Whether that’s by fencing it in, simulating it entirely, or by disciplining capitalists directly you do realistically need some form of industrial production.
Normalize including an argument with hot takes
