Submitted by Maxwellsdemon17 t3_ymq8z6 in philosophy
Reply to comment by TheManInTheShack in "A socialist society has no room for parties or trade unions. [...] The struggle is for the simultaneous abolition of both market and production relations, [...]for the abolition of the differences in the working class brought about by the capitalist division of labor." by Maxwellsdemon17
You say that capitalism is a basic economic form of competition, but capitalism is a fairly recent economic model in the timeframe of civilization. I don’t deny that from the Bronze Age and before that commerce was a regular aspect of life, but commerce and markets ≠ capitalism.
The basics of commerce is fair trade. You value A as “= 1” and I value B as “ =1” so we agree in our trade that A = B, boiling it down to a zero-sum game. Capitalism is not zero-sum but rather focuses on profit so it must extract surplus value either from an imbalanced trade or from value which does not currently exist such as paying a low wage to produce a valuable product in the case of the former or buying property that is projected to increase in value for the latter.
On the value and virtue of competition, I agree with the other commenter of the higher value of cooperation. Competition could prove useful areas for certain areas of personal or even societal growth, but it might not be the best for solving problems. Especially in such an interconnected society that we have today, the actions of one can have repercussions, many significantly negative, that can be felt across a whole scope of locales that the original perpetrator of the action could not hope to respond to and alleviate. It could be environmental damage, the devaluation of other nations’ currencies, recessions, etc.
Competition itself could become stagnant when a player becomes too large that they could hinder their competitors and keep them low on the ladder, thus turning a game of “making sure I win” to “making sure I lose.” Your example of instability driven by those who hold onto power is precisely an example of this, since holding onto power can be the end result of competition. Why would someone who already obtained the end goal give it up for the others they had always been competing against? Also, what political instability causes is that cooperation breaks down on the National level, and it turns everything into a competition of resources where the other cannot be trusted and thus it isn’t until everyone comes to cooperate again that they can come out of the rut
> The basics of commerce is fair trade. You value A as “= 1” and I value B as “ =1” so we agree in our trade that A = B, boiling it down to a zero-sum game.
But it’s not zero sum. Each party trades to get the best deal they can. It’s impossible to determine equality when trading corn for a good axe. I might be a good hunter but terrible at making axes. We can’t be good at everything. This is where capitalism comes in. I decide to specialize in making axes or farming because by specializing, I can create something of value more efficiently than someone who doesn’t specialize. That extra efficiency is my profit.
We do sometimes have to cooperate rather than compete when the resources are such that we can’t monopolize them (clean air for example) or when the risk of competition is just too great for all involved.
Generally speaking however, competition produces the best result.
Hi, appreciate the reply!
You're perhaps right that exact equality is hard to determine, so I should have been more specific and said "≈1" instead of "=1" for the example, however while a perfect equality in trade might be outside of human scope, we do take it as a standard by which we judge a trade. Supply and Demand runs on this equilibrium.
Of course I do not deny that specialization of labor is good, however, such specialization predates capitalism and specialization itself does not ensure profit. No matter how efficient I am at making a product, making more of that product means nothing if there is no more demand for it, and if there is demand, it might not be consistent. Basically increase in supply does not necessarily mean increase in demand. People get full, so they don't need an abundance of corn. Enough trees are cut down so that axes are no longer necessary. A scythe is used only for the harvest and afterwards lays idle. Capitalism's solution in this case would be to introduce planned obsolescence in a product, use cheaper material or labor to make the product, or employ heavy propaganda to convince buyers that they need to buy more even if their needs are already met.
The fundamental difference here is that we have a built-in survival instinct. So we are going to work to ensure that we best we can. Profit creates a buffer so that we aren’t constantly right at the very edge of survival. As long as there’s an economy, there’s going to be a profit motive. And there should be because profit drives people to create things they their people want.
I just don’t think we should be trying to tell people how to live. That’s never ended well. We can educate but we shouldn’t be mandating.
Circumstances and values change over time. I’m sure if we could leap ahead 500 years there would be things we’d recognize and things we wouldn’t. We would be comfortable with some of how society works and very uncomfortable with other parts.
Consider that 500 years ago there were very few professions. Most people were farmers. Today we have an countless things people do to earn a living. It would seem like magic to someone from 500 years ago. It will almost certainly be true in 500 years as well.
I know many are pessimistic about mankind’s future. I’m not. We will adapt and we will wait until a problem is pretty bad before we resolve it but we will resolve it. People are terrible at predicting just about anything long term. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to take climate change seriously for example. We do. But the people who thing we won’t survive to 2100 should study history better. We’ve survived ice ages, the black plague, pandemics (prior to vaccines), wars and more.
It won’t be easy but we will survive.
I agree that we’ve had a decent track record of solving problems. But a history of success is not a predictive model of the future. The overwhelming majority of species that have existed are extinct. We’ve failed to solve many problems but it just takes one apocalyptic event to break the trend.
Absolutely agree. Either way we can’t know which outcome it will be. All we can do is the best we can and hope that’s enough.
Too many marxists here on Reddit - which is surprising knowing what we know about the communists states of the 20th century.
One can both critique capitalism and not espouse communism.
Individualism vs collectivism is the political spectrum. What you prefer is somewhere along the gradient from one extreme (anarchy) to the other (communism). Liberalism is critiqued by Marxism and I guess anarchy. So, yeah, you could espouse being an individual bandit also.
Indeed. Every time I say anything pro-capitalism I get downvoted despite the fact that it’s the reason we are no longer hunter-gatherers.
Communism is the worst of both worlds because those in power become corrupt and optimize around themselves. At least with capitalism, everyone has a shot.
> At least with capitalism, everyone has a shot.
except that, exactly like communism
> those in power become corrupt and optimize around themselves.
Thats just the reality of social and economic systems. Basic human greed means there will always be people wanting to take advantage of the system to benefit themselves, and will twist and manipulate the system however they can in order to do so.
Monopolies, price fixing, buying politicians, etc
and now that much of the western world has moved from capitalism into corporatism, where the assets available to those in power are so massive that the general public have zero chance to really compete against that manipulation of the system.
That basic human greed is the result of being shaped by evolution to make sure we survive and reproduce.
In the US 50% of Americans work for small businesses. If you want to work for yourself and you’re willing to do whatever it takes, you can. It’s not easy. I have worked for myself 32 of the 38 years of my adult life. There were times when I was working 16 hour days for weeks at a time.
Having said that, we need to overturn Citizen’s United. Corporations are not people. They are not allowed to vote for example. Given that they can’t vote they shouldn’t be able to donate to political campaigns. They are part of the reason our politics in the US are so divisive.
Yes, basic human greed has been a survival mechanism.
However now that humanity has transformed from hunter gathered tribes into a globally connected society, it has become a massive liability to that society
I’m not so sure. It’s also part of the reason we have our modern society. I certainly would not want to go back to living as a hunter-gatherer.
Which system sounds more shelfish to you:
One person owns everything
Or
All persons own their share?
Given that they are to decide before the existence of any rules. Measured in Paretian terms.
why do they need to decide before the existence of any rules ?
Clearly thats never going to happen, any tribe, society or group is always going to have rules of some sort. There is absolutely no reason why a society can't decide on a reallocation strategy at any stage of their existence to try and make the allocation of resources more equitable (if they think they can do that without destroying their society in the process).
And, during that period, those with more will scream about being made worse off as reallocation occurs. And, compared to their previous position of wealth, that may be true, but compared to the rest of their society, is almost certainly untrue in real terms.
Before rules is the moral apriori viewpoint for the inductive process of discovering a coherent set of rules. Also only such a system can truly be voluntary, something the libertarian and the capitalist would agree on. If you start from an existing set of rules that would be illogical potentially. It is like assuming that the moon is cheese and building the rest of the theory regarding the cosmos in an incorrect manner around that assumption.
indeed, however "before rules" assumes a blank slate, which is, sadly, as far from reality as one can get. It does provide an interesting academic exercise, but very little else of value.
and developing a "coherent set of rules" without a viable mechanism to move from current state, to the idealized state, is also meaningless, and ignores the reality that all societies are transitory, evolving and changing over years, decades and centuries, and your coherent set of rules rarely caters for that reality.
The best your rules can cater for is something to handle the current situation, with an acknowledgement that they need to be flexible enough to evolve and adapt as the society and situation evolves and adapts.
Your rules may, possibly, be able to provide an adaptive framework for change, but not much else.
How is it a blank state? People would be as they are, unlike assumed in those academic thought experiments. They just need to revise their moral judgments, not pretend to be suffering from a collective amnesia which is a view from nowhere. The real problem of politics is that we know that the box of statism is not right but we don’t want to step out of it. So here we are, always carrying our blind spot of judgment.
"before rules" assumes that no rules currently exist, and hence you have a blank slate on which to build your idealized rule set.
and People clearly would not be as they are, because they currently exist within a set of rules, societal practices and pre-existing mindsets that you're choosing to completely ignore in order to build that set of rules.
> "They just need to revise their moral judgements"
Yup, they need to discard all their life experiences and societal upbringing from their entire life, discarding their current mindset and attitudes completely, in order to make the change to your new ruleset. I believe that may be semi-possible with mass brainwashing and massive propaganda campaigns, but its hardly reliable, nor achieves a consistent result across society.
People's moral judgements are based on a wide variety of things, and are specific to an individual, as shaped and molded by their circumstances, environment, upbringing, society etc.
"Revising" that in everyone in order to generate some form of conformity with your new rule set isn't a viable option by anything except force and brainwashing, because everyone's experiences are different, hence their moral attitudes are different.
Why are you not able to comprehend the difference between moral judgments regarding social justice and individual identity? This actually sums up the communitarian thinking that poses that the methodological neutral subject is both too thin and thick to make a theory. But if you deconstruct moral judgments regarding the division of property that are a political thing not part of individual belief, you don’t need to touch personal history or identity.
Although in some cases as in the idea of american citizenship some moral judgments are part of one’s identity. But this is like a poisoned well that only poisons its drinker farer and farer away from reality. Not good.
So system x is bad because it is not x or people don’t live according to its principles? I’m not much assured.
Capitalism is voluntary exchange between free individuals. I'm pretty sure he was referring to how this was also the case between tribes of humans 10s of thousands of years ago also.
In this case, I believe Capitalism is the wrong term. What you are describing is "Commerce" and I do believe there is a significant distinction. In my replies, I have stated that Capitalism is a fairly new model of structuring our economy. Before that was mercantilism, before that bartering, etc. Capitalism distinguishes itself by a heavy focus on profit by trying to imbalance the zero-sum game of commerce. Also, if you look into the field of anthropology, you will see that tribes of humans were very communal, helping each other without seeking profit. I'm not claiming that it was some utopia nor that tribes always worked well with each other, but the claim that capitalism is some sort of innate trait in human society present in our ancestors does not hold well against evidence.
This is what I get from a google definition search:
"an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state."
Anyways i don't want to spend much time arguing about this. There is plenty of that in this thread already lol
Hello again,
Yes, capitalism can be described as such, though I have seen some debate among scholars of the issue of whether or not something like State capitalism can exist such as the case with China once the precepts and statutes of capitalism are more closely looked and how china makes use of them even though their enterprise is not entirely private, but I don't know much about Deng's ideas to tell you. However, the definition you provided does necessarily reinforce your original comment.
I agree that capitalism does use the idea of free trade among free individuals, but if that were all that it entailed we would have never made another term for something that already existed. The key word would be profit. What separates capitalism from simple commerce or trade is that surplus value is generated by these transactions instead of just satisfying the needs of the two parties.
Also, although a quick definition might be a good starting point for discussion of the topic, it is also too short and simplified to capture the nuances and intricacies of an ideology that has had books written about it.
We must get back to our community based systems. The capitalist market is squeezing the collective of ppl dry. Homelessness is being criminalized as average rent in the city I’m in reaches $2500 and no, telling ppl to move isn’t the solution.
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