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46 comments
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Don't get me wrong I'm all for a better system but it's not that simple.
Like communism sounds nice, but if you don't do it on a global scale you still have the problem of other countries trying to influence elections or referendums, wars would still be started etc.
Capitalism with a lot or guard rails seems like the most realistic option. Maybe a mix of systems could work, where people that work for a company automatically become part owner or something.
A system where the government has full control over everything is going to lead to authoritarianism.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We can probably make some positive changes with better democratic systems. For example no 2 party system, but a combination of coalitions and ranked voting.
I'm not an expert in any way, but just saying capitalism bad, without any real alternative isn't going to do anything.
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We have a real alternative. Check which comm yore in and the rules in the sidebar
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I knew what community this was, but what real alternative do you suggest? How is anarchy going to actually work?
Hmm I just found this https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works
I'll give it a read tomorrow as my kids will wake me up in 6 hours...
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America itself is a mixed economy (or at least used to be)…
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(Not that I’m necessarily a fan of the heirarchical organisation of Ancient Egypt, but sharing cuz shows ur point)
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I mean, they built a... thing that benefited absolutely nobody, so it doesn't help the (still obviously true) point that you can do big and useful things without capitalism.
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They used slaves, so not too far off from capitalism.
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I think “technically” it wasn’t slavery, atleast as envisioned in modernity. But there was definitely coercion involved so it probably amounts to what anarchists would call slavery. So yeah not something to take inspiration from. But an easy “gotcha” for people saying without capitalism there is no progress.
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Does anyone think capitalism is getting anything done? Construction is pretty much non existent in the US and we have a housing crisis with no signs of it getting better. People profit more off of not producing housing, keeping it scarce. It feels like we're at the stage of artificial scarcity for profit
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Kind of reminds me of when people are like "If you don't believe in hell why aren't you raping and murdering people?". It says a lot about the speaker
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So I recently learned my... Inclination to reject authority based on authority alone is related to ASD and I'm way more neurospicier than I understood (though everyone around me knew)
But I know I can respect authority when there is reason to do so.
Was wage-dependance created as a way to squish bugs like me who would otherwise laugh at authority for preposterous demands?
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Ok, capitalism bad, but are we actually pretending that feudalism isn't worse?
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we also created farms and art before feudalism. feudalism is also a capitalist structured society. capitalism did not come into existence when adam smith described it, he was just discussing how feudalism gates access to the commons through access to power. capitalism has existed for 12000 years, at least, we only started calling it capitalism in the 1700s. the key features of capitalism are owners of wealth generating resources, and workers who are paid to generate wealth using these wealth generating resources. in the age of feudalism, the wealth generating resource was the land itself, and how the ownership class acquired it was through their access to violence.
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Feudalism isn't particularly far removed from capitalism. Even its natural shift to what is often called cronyism is a basically feudalism without the titles.
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it's such a pity that the first humans to invent the wheel or writing didn't patent it
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There is nothing wrong with capitalism. There is something wrong with unbridled unchecked all dictating capitalism.
Capitalism works fine with a healthy dose of socialism and a government that sets proper boundaries for capitalism.
But if you keep thinking that socialism is communism and you don't want government regulations....
Well you get what you asked for, don't complain now, this is what you wanted and now you have it.
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Capitalism has fundamental contradictions that lead it to crisis, contradictions that government intervention can't handle.
You have monopolies naturally occurring due to snowball effect that get recreated even after government break ups, inherent overproduction that happens due to the nature of commodity production, wage labor and surplus value extracting ensuring that it's physically impossible to buy everything that we make, and so on. This shit causes wars, crises, etc
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There's nothing wrong with capitalism he says and then goes on to talk about how capitalism is inherently so wrong it has to be bridled controlled and limited. This Pitbull is perfectly gentle, sure I have to keep a muzzle on him and always has to be on a very strong tight leash or in a cage securely and if he's not he'll go on a killing spree but he's perfectly gentle.
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No one system will work you dumbass. Every system on its own will fail, you need to cherry pick from several systems.
Is it really that hard to understand, but if you think your Pitbull analogy is even remotely correct then yes it's obvious you went through the American educational system.
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Compare North Korea and Cuba after years without capitalism.
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And remember that theres still an embargo against Cuba preventing a lot of stuff coming into it from other countries.
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Compare Haiti and Yemen after years without communism. shrug
It might be worth recalling that North Korea was the industrial end of the country, prior to the Japanese occupation and subsequent post-war division. Following the Bodo League Massacre, Northern Communists flooded across the border to aid their comrades to the south. Their industrial advantage made short work of the Southern capitalist-backed military, which was quickly rolled back almost to the sea. Only UN intervention prevented the South Korean Capitalists from suffering the same fate as the Chinese KMT.
US intervention in Korea came via the overwhelming superiority of air support. The Korean Peninsula suffered more bombs dropped in the next three years than all of Europe endured during WW2. North Korea - Pyongyang in particular - was flattened.
Even then, following the Chinese entering the war with MacArthur's ill conceived invasion, and the border being reset to the 53 parallel, the peace dividend favored the North. Communist economic planning with the benefit of support from the USSR gave North Koreans a significantly better quality of life than South Koreans living under the Rhea/Park dictatorship and subsisting on aid from Japan/US.
It wasn't until the collapse of the Park regime and the introduction of the tech industry in the 1980s that South Korean quality of life surged. That, combined with the collapse of the USSR cut North Korea off from at-cost agricultural supplies. The North spiraled into a horrible depression in the 1990s while the South rapidly accrued wealth from its US export businesses.
There's a ton of history you can absorb if you don't just take the propaganda at face value. The isolationism of Northern politics came with costs, relative to the benefits of being an occupied country in a tech boom. But the book is far from closed on where these two countries end up.
If the US can't keep its shit together into the next century, countries like South Korea could be faced with similar economic pitfalls while NK and Cuba are no longer locked out of global trade through a Wall Street blacklist.
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The pyramids were paid for in part by a stipend of beer. I think that's a
goodbetter system.
46 comments
There were still classes back in the day, serfdom, slavery, guilds that had similar exploitation to wage labor. There was plenty of coercion to get labor done.
Yeah, the famous neolithic serfs.
Jokes aside, coercion was always a thing, but naturalizing it as inevitable or even desirable stumps any kind of radical thought for a differenti way of things. The world is something we make, and we can make it differently
We can make it different, but it doesn't mean that we'll be able to abolish coercion entirely.
If instead of commodity production we moved past it, abolished current means of coercion (money) and instead pushed for planned economy that focuses on meeting everyone's needs, there would still be a need for some pressure to fill all the needed positions to meet all the production quotas.
It'd still be kilometers better than "get any job so capitalist extracts money from you or starve", and is radical but still coersive nonetheless.
I mean, go back and read up on The Inclosure Acts and you're going to see the real bedrock of modern capitalism.
The relationship between aristocrats and serfs was materially different than capitalists and wage laborers. The former was more a method of formalized raiding and looting, while the later never lets labor have their hands on the goods to begin with.
In the same vein, Guilds were - at their heart - a system of professionalizing a craft and passing that knowledge on generation to generation. The modern academic institutions simply don't do that. Academic students have to demonstrate a broad competency in academic skills, but they have very little exposure to the commercial applications of their labor until the start their careers. A guild apprentice or journeyman is already building a client network as part of their training, while a college student only cultivates these relationships extra-curricularly (via internships or fellowships outside of the classroom).
These are radically different systems in practice, even if you can draw some vague parallels between instances of labor exploitation.
Never said that the relationship was the same, only that exploitation still existed back then, though I must admit I worded my sentence poorly.
Granted, you're painting the guild relationships as if they were merely teaching devices, while that's far from the truth and just falls to medieval ideological propaganda. In reality, they were an early form of "capitalist exploitation" for the lack of a better term in a pre-capitalistic society, it's very similar to the surplus value extraction that we see today. The master owned the tools, workshop, guild membership, etc which constituted as means of production of that time. The apprentice sold their labor power and essentially themselves thanks to the contracts in exchange for subsistence which is literally what wages are designed to do also.
The other forms were different though, yes, but they were still exploitative. Marx didn't write "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." for no reason.
That very much depends on when and where you look in history. Many people didn't live that way at all and still lived in large communities and built things with the only coercion being the ties of community for hundreds to thousands of years.
Being a serf was apparently a lot less work and less miserable than you might think from pop culture. They worked for another, yes, but they also were looked after in return, and they didn't have to work the whole year. They also could just leave if they wanted to find a new place to live, which was a lot easier then than it is now. It wasn't the false choice of today where you work or starve.
Slavery, also, depended on the culture. In some cultures slaves were typically people who were captured or traded in compensation for a killing. But rather than be forced labor, they were treated as a sort of trial family member, and once the debt was seen as paid they would often be fully adopted as part of the community.
I recommend a book by David Graeber and David Wengrow called The Dawn of Everything, if you're interested in this sort of thing. It challenges the foundations of what we assume history was like using historical evidence, then reimagines foggy parts and builds an at least as probable image of the past in it's place.
That's literally false - serfs were legally tied to their land and lord, and the only way out was if they were either let go or escaped to some town offering freedom. This obligation was hereditary too, and getting your own land/home was pretty much impossible given how ingrained in aristocrat culture owning land was, with the sale of land being a great dishonor on your lineage and family.
Are we literally falsifying feudalism now, is that what's happening
Weren't serfs basically tied to the land? They jad to get permission from the lord to go anywhere