Competition even in theory:
I won the competition, now buy my linen at 10x its value. Btw it costs 1,000 years of the average salary to start up a competing business, good luck lol
No, it doesn't even work on paper. We don't need to build two competing factories to see what is best. We invented science. Somebody can just make a graph. It's that easy
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I dunno.. even on paper the idea of infinite growth in a system of limited resources doesn't seem to work ..
capitalism only works if you just really hate feudalism but also want to keep the rich people in charge which is what it was designed to do. In much the same way that the united states of America was only really created to form a singe legal entity to be responsible for sharing the debt of the revolutionary war accross the states and everything since is just mission creep
which is a large part of why the American constitution is so messed up and such a dysfunctional and stupid legal foundation of a country, the country wasn't really designed with maintainability or long term existence in mind from the start
keep the rich people in charge which is what it was designed to do
Under capitalism didn't the monarchs that were formally in charge lose power to the new capitalists though? For one, King George losing the colonies. I'm guessing a lot of the founding fathers probably were descended from feudal lords though.
Well George Washington wasn't poor. The american revolution isn't a great example though as on top of being a bourgeoise revolution it was a break away of a colony. Added to that the fact that British society was at that point primarily capitalist with feudalism having been gradually whittled away by enclosure.
Britain in general is not a good example of this as the transition from feudalism to capitalism didn't happen in a clean one then the other switch but by a more gradual process and Britain still has feudal elements like the land largely being owned by the aristocracy, a monarch, and a legislative body with a power over which laws are passed with heritable seats for members of the aristocracy. That said the aristocracy weren't what they were and many are flat broke. Britain is a complicated case study for my point here
The French revolution is a much better example as it was one group of rich people overthrowing the aristocracy and abolishing the traditional rights of the aristocracy because they were ideologically motivated to by liberalism and then proceding to establish a capitalist economy
(the socialist movement is in many ways recognisably older than liberalism for example the preaching of John Ball in the 14th century and was opposed to feudalism so in the french revolution and english civil war was noticably present in the anti feudalism movement but the movements themselves weren't socialist) - like how socialists also revolted against the shah but the movement ended up being islamist not socialist
The same is true of many implementations of communism. The problem isn't the system, the problem is people, and people try to corrupt the system to their benefit.
How has what I said got anything to do with liberal ideology? If anything, the implication of what I said is that we need more authoritarianism, in order to stop people fucking around.
So... you're a fascist?
Communism provides a solution to capitalism by being a more democratic system, both politically, and economically. Not by being more authoritarian.
No I'm asking how what I said had anything to do with liberal ideology. Can you stay on topic?
Most communist nations have not been very good when it comes to democracy. Not that they couldn't be, but it obviously isn't an inherent property.
The belief in "human nature" that people's ideas and beliefs and nature shape the world, and not material conditions is a core part of liberalism
yup. Human nature as an absolute and static thing is garbage philosophy. Marx had it right in Theses on Feuerbach and Capital. https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch04.htm
[T]he human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.
The same is true of many implementations of communism. The problem isn't the system, the problem is people, and people try to corrupt the system to their benefit.
People everywhere have always been exactly the same since the dawn of time. Mitochondrial Adam and Eve were literally McDonald’s franchise owners. I am extremely intelligent.
I mean, not to be glib. It does look like we are functionally then same as our recent ancestors. Like, hundred thousand years ago on the plains of Africa the homo-sapians there would be indistinguishable from any person off the street today after a wash and shave.
It's not a question of of similarity in terms of how we look, or our intelligence. It's a question of whether "human nature" is an immutable thing that exists. Marxists say that it doesn't, it's merely a consequence of material conditions, and that changing material conditions would change what people call human nature
I mean, we do have some nature. It just isn't as pronounced as people like to talk about. And it specifically isn't what capitalism calls it.
No, that wasn't invented till like the 1600s. There were signs of extensive and complicated trade networks as far back into prehistory as we can look. They simply didn't form the moral basis of society like we see in capitalism
People everywhere have always been exactly the same since the dawn of time. Mitochondrial Adam and Eve were literally McDonald’s franchise owners.
Nothing to do with what I've said, but ok.
I am extremely intelligent.
Yes, you are!
You said that communism can’t work because of human nature, thereby implying that everyone everywhere has always been exactly the same, ignorant of the fact that the concept of private property was invented about five thousand years ago in a few isolated places. For hundreds of thousands of years and for the vast majority of people who have ever lived, they never knew anything about private property and probably would have considered the idea absurd (which it is). No private property = communism. If we can say that anything is human nature (nothing actually is, since human nature changes depending on context), it would actually be communism. Capitalism is not only collapsing right now because it’s a terrible idea, it’s collapsing because of its fundamental contempt for human beings and even nature itself.
I didn't say that communism can't work. I'm just saying people try to fuck it up for their benefit, whatever it is.
Maybe people will get better over time and be less likely to do that. Really though I think it's just something we have to account for, by developing robust social systems that can't easily be abused, not without being caught.
People are self interested yes. Eliminating rent seeking behavior that is enabled by private property makes the social system harder to game for helping themselves at the cost societal good. Communists want to eliminate private property for this reason. Does this mean that all anti social behavior will be eliminated? No, but most crime is committed due to lack of economic opportunity. Politicians not doing what is in the interest of the people that elected them is often due to capitalist funded lobbying firms. Not having private property addresses those problems and other problems that are caused by those problems.
Marxism has an answer to the idea of people getting better. "Human nature" as you see it is a result of material conditions. If we change the material conditions we change "human nature"
I didn't say that communism can't work. I'm just saying people try to fuck it up for their benefit, whatever it is.
The same was true of capitalism when it was getting started in rural late medieval England, but here we are.
Maybe people will get better over time and be less likely to do that. Really though I think it's just something we have to account for, by developing robust social systems that can't easily be abused, not without being caught.
Democracy in every home and workplace (also known as communism) should take care of this.
“Maybe people will get better over time”—it’s certainly a choice people have. We can kill ourselves with capitalism or build a better world for everyone with communism.
People, particularly the wealthy, try to fuck things up for their benefit because capitalism has so deeply engrained in them a sense of rabid and egocentric individualism, and has taught them that having more than others makes them good, and if they have more than others it’s because they’re good.
The poor are “abusing” social systems because many of those systems lock them into poverty, where they’re forced into a game of economic limbo, which withholds any/all benefits if they earn too much (which is still not enough to live on), or they do things to receive more support than what the state says they are owed with the goal of having an acceptable standard of living, if they can even achieve that.
Neither of these problems will be solved by people “getting better over time”, and in fact, we are all observing these things getting worse and worse. Reforming social safety nets can maybe provide a solution to the latter problem, if they’re drastic enough. But, imo, communism provides the solution to both.
The same is not true of implementations of communism. Socialist states at their best implement systems that encourage the natural human drives for cooperation and compassion, and in the two largest cases, China and the Soviet Union, it led to the fastest gains in quality of life in history
Socialist states at their best
And capitalism at its best does not distort the value of everything. Yet the people problem is so endemic that the value of everything is distorted.
Which state current or historical shows capitalism at its best in your opinion?
The USA? Netherlands? Colonialist Britain?
To look at its best you'd have to look at individual moments. Just like looking at the successes of communism you'd have to look at individual moments, rather than the overall state of the country now. The people problem is endemic everywhere, so instances where things haven't been twisted are rare.
Yes, that's why I mentioned historic as well. Which country in which period of time would you say best exemplified capitalism at its best?
1980s social democratic Sweden? 1990 miracle of Han South Korea? Current Singapore?
I don't really have an opinion of any country being the best example. You'd probably be better off looking at individual transactions to find good examples - Capitalism is all about transactions at the end of the day.
An example of things working as they should could be found in microprocessors. ARM design almost all of the processors in our phones, but they don't actually manufacture them. They license their IP to Qualcomm, Samsung and others who use and modify the designs to create the devices we buy. The end consumer price of the phone is definitely over-inflated, but the supply line transactions for those components work in a novel yet reasonably fair way.
Granted, there are many more examples of things not working as they should. That's because people fuck around and do things they shouldn't, because it benefits them somehow. Capitalism doesn't prevent that, but it isn't the cause of that, people are.
Just jumping in here to say, look up the concept of 'commodity fetishism'. The value of everything is distorted because capitalism is commodity producing society. This is explained in the first three or four chapters of Capital Volume I.
Lmao, I literally read this exact same "argument" from a different user in a different thread five minutes ago.
You guys really need to come up with some new material.
There's no such thing as human nature. What you call human nature is the result of material conditions
I mean, in the the liberal west used violence to replace comunism with a right wing dictatorship. Yes.
However that isn't really a flaw in comunist theory
Yes. Basically, any time someone tries to do something nice for everyone and introduce communism, some people or other come along and fuck it all up. Then they call their fucked up monstrosity "communism" to further damage the credibility of any meaningful progress.
Those people are the same people who fuck up capitalism and distort it for their benefit. Maybe it's easier for them to do under capitalism, maybe that's just what they're used to and they don't want to change, but if all you do is deal with capitalism as the problem then you're still going to have a people problem with whatever comes next.
I think you are missing some necessary historical context to follow along with what they're saying here. Capitalists (through military, CIA, NATO etc) have routinely engaged in mass killings of communists around the world. One specific instance being the murder of 1 million+ people (communists) in Indonesia between 1965-1966 all organized and funded by the US. There's a great book about this called The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World that I think everyone who isn't familiar with the incident should read.
Cna you show me an example of where capitlaism has worked? The system has failed every time it has been tried. It is so bad that being around it is bad for other systems. If the systems they touch always fair it is time to consider why they are so toxic.
Tacit collusion is literally everywhere and completely normalized. A coworker was describing a revenue-sharing agreement but actually described collusion to set prices.
You call it collusion, we call it obeying market realities! As in, capitalists invent a reality and the people obey it.
Thanks for the term. I came to that conclusion on my own, but now I can actually look into it
the latter example there actually isn't collusion it's competition. adulteration is the natural consequence of unregulated free market competition. Everyone competes to be the bottom of the market so they can put everyone else out of business and to do so they cut costs as much as possible. And then once the market is dominated they raise prices without improving the standard of product
"Competition is good because it leads to cheaper prices for consumers", doesn't really work since it neglects the union of the state and monopolies to artificially charge higher prices for items of the same - even worse quality; while hindering competition that has the potential to change the status quo.
I mean—the US is trying to prevent the world from cooperating with China, Russia and other major economies because they know that they are incapable of competing due to their decades-long crusade of neoliberalism. Another example is the fossil fuel industry stalling for time against the wave of the renewable energy era; or the automobile industry lobbying against efficient public transportation.
The point is that the major neoliberal powers don't want competition to exist; they just want rent-seeking sectors that can earn them a treasure trove of money as fast as possible.
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or the oil industry teaming up with the US government to kill off electric transportation 60+ years ago and prior to that killing off rail transportation
No one believes me when i mention that electric cars used to be a thing >100 years ago.
Yeah but they were filled with their own contemporary brain worms. Like being presented as more feminine, while greasy... Oily... Rough... 
Excuse me. While the dirty~ mechanical cars were marketed as the prime expression of manliness. I guess these brainworms could be even found nowadays.
Thing is that it's not a static system. Competition leads to winners growng. Bigger companies enjoy advantages such as economies of scale, brand recognition, established supply chains, and so on.
This means that the initial cost for new players that want ti compete with such companies grows as well. Forx example, a scrappy startup isn't going to be able to take on Amazon.
And if a new company does develop something that gives it a serious advantage then the bigger company can just buy it out.
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I had this discussion with my brother in law while drinking one night. He was going on about the free market or something and we sort of just talked through how the market could be free like people say. Organically we both realized just by talking it through that there's no way the could be a "free market" because the rules are always backed by state violence or the threat thereof.
But beyond that, as certain companies succeed, they grow. As they grow they kill competition either by absorbing them, by out competing them, or by using vast resources to kill them through attrition.
As they continue to grow they diversity to try to gain further advantages. They begin to control their supply chains and own the resources that ensure even their would be competitors become reliant on them, essentially neutering potential competition.
They corner markets.
If there were a "free market" it would end up as a single company that owned everything. At a certain point a single company would become so integral and so powerful that it would control the government, the banks, and all the resources and it would care nothing for anyone outside of the people who keep it in power and control.
Obviously this isn't how things are though. There isn't a "free market", instead there are cabals that rig the system to keep themselves on top but none seem to gain enough advantage to kill off each other to take over entirely. There are likely many reasons why that hasn't or maybe can't happen outside of a singular perfectly seized opportunity, but the resulting situation we find ourselves in is hardly any better. It's close enough that most people in the world are deemed unimportant and expendable, if not detrimental.
Exactly, the whole free market narrative is completely nonsensical when you actually think about it.
I don't think that we disagree. Because, for the reasons that you have provided, competition will produce almost-indestructible monopolies as a natural consequence, and those monopolies have a tendency to use their extensive power to destroy and buy out potential competitors and seek for quick, easy ways to accumulate wealth; notably, through rentier capitalism.
This is literally what's happening right now; at least, in the US.
People are led to believe that industrial competition is like a sports league where winners just get a trophy and the competition resets every year 😂
Until they become too big and buy every potential competition out while they are still small.
it doesn't i was just pointing out that we already have a subscription service for milk.
There used to be one streaming service. It had pretty much everything and cost half of what modern streaming services cost. Now there are several streaming services competing with each other that all have smaller libraries at higher prices. Plenty of them require paying users to watch ads. Weird.
And through all that I get any show I want completely free on Stremio. Piracy will always win.
It'd be funny when some tech bro goes a level of abstraction above and makes a service that lets you watch the shows from all the other streaming services... oh wait there are already a lot of illegal (for now) services that do it. 😂 tech industry is literally just about getting between consumers/producers (even between other mediators!) and take a cut.
Also the classic: "My enterprise is falling apart, please give me public funds so I can continue to rip people off (don't worry, I'll still claim it's all pure market forces at work)"
As with all ideas in theory, capitalism doesn’t sound terrible. But when the competition is done improving and they’ve got their audience/loyalists, it’s a race to the bottom and the only “losers” are the ones who step just a bit too far… and then they try it again in a few years and it works. Just look at micro transactions
Marx analysed the underlying mechanisms of capitalism thoroughly, and even in theory it's terrible. The only thing it's good at, as he noted, is being efficient at production.
I don't want to go out on a limb and say every serf and craftsman under feudalism would have refused capitalism if you'd told them what it was going to do to them, but the fact that there was primitive accumulation in the form of the enclosure act in the UK and similar acts in Europe shows that capitalism was far from being accepted by the people.
I think it’s more the “good side” of capitalism is appealing and is why people swear by it. The idea that working hard means you too can live “the American Dream” even though that dream was thoroughly claimed hundreds of years ago and now only the truly lucky get in. You don’t even necessarily have to work hard to do it, just be unreasonably lucky lol
The idea that working hard means you too can live “the American Dream”
at the expense of the genocided natives and on the back of slaves. there isn't and never was an American Dream that was possible except through the brutal exploitation of human beings.
Gotta love exploitation. I just want to know what “God fearing” men/women decided that exploitation was the way? Especially when the whole point of the revolution was to get away from being exploited and treated poorly under the British crown. Like, how did so few people see the mirror (and give a shit) that we ended up with slavery for so long?
slavery and exploitation where the explicit purposes of the revolution. read "The Counter-Revolution of 1776". remember that Washington's very first act as president was to go put down some farmers and workers that wanted a better deal.
Well, that's what the first economists hoped capitalism would do, but they were highly idealistic (the philosophical theory of it I mean). Smith for example tried to understand why some business owners accumulated capital and why some failed, and he could only come to the conclusion that it happened because they worked harder. It was only with Marx (the third ever economist) that we finally had an explanation for why that happened, primitive accumulation through which monopolies could form and eventually capital gets concentrated in the hands of a very few.
Of course if you tell people they can become rich like Bezos thanks to capitalism it might be considered part of its theory, but I personally consider it a lie.
I think the only people who swear by capitalism are it's winners and those who are close to being, or who are deluded into thinking they'll be, the winners.
The vast majority of ordinary people do not think the system is set up for them; they just lack the intellectual tools (Marxism) to know how to fight it, so they stay quiet or, occasionally, protest. I used to think they were just unwilling to work hard enough when they complained to me. I was very wrong.
Maybe this is different in the US. Still, I doubt anyone anywhere who is one cough, sore tooth, or grouchy boss away from becoming homeless and losing everything swears by capitalism, in theory or in practice. Those who swear by it are in a privileged position, whether they realise it or not.
I was one of those people. It blows away fast after however many unanswered job applications and however many letting agents telling you they have nowhere for you to live within your budget except a shared room. All that love for capitalism gets swept away in the first breeze.
The "theory" makes a lot of very favorable assumptions. The real theory (Marx) reveals the real usefulness/shortcomings of the capitalist mode of production, and we are way past it's usefulness.