It's easier to remove a king because a king is a single person, easily identifiable, tangible and living.
An establishment is none of those things, it's murky and unclear, it's lots of different people and nobody all at once.
king has never been a single person that was easily identifiable. it is was a huge extended family, distant relatives, lords with no blood relation, central army of the king and multiple armies of many lords, huge institutions that manage every aspect of life on behalf of the king. it was never about getting rid of a single, individual king. there were literally hundreds of people in line at any given time. it was just like today, and it seemed just as impossible.
This is more about removing the system than the individual. People believed that the right of kings was divine, and when you believe that, it’s hard to argue for anything else.
Capitalism, to some degree and in some form, is also a byproduct of scarcity. You can't really "depose" it without eliminating scarcity. You can just seek to use government action to remediate the ill effects of the process.
Modern "capitalism" (not really what Smith would recognize, if we're being honest) has found plenty of ways to manufacture scarcity. In fact, artificial scarcity and pipeline inefficiency is now the heart or where "wealth" is produced.
- Financial organizations who create wealth by moving 1s and 0s on paper
- Marketing and sales institutions who create wealth by fabricating demand
- Lobbyists who who buy scarcity through techniques like trademarks and anti-competitive regulations (some of which are GOOD regulations used for ill)
The agricultural industry is the perfect example of bullet point 3 gone so wildly out of control it'd make you scream. We produce so much food that the government subsidizes farms backing off on food production for valid conservation reasons. And yet 12.8% of Americans still fall under a category called "food insecurity", where they can not consistently afford/access a healthy diet.
You can remove a king, but can you remove the concept of a single person ruling over a territory?
Kim Jong Un isn't a king, but he is a single individual ruling over North Korea. Putin isn't a king, but he has the powers of one. Then there are examples from history like the Roman Republic, and the Weimar Republic.
IMO governments are basically a hierarchy where if things become "stable" enough, you can replace one with another one higher up the hierarchy. But, without work, they'll eventually collapse into something lower down the hierarchy.
At the bottom of the hierarchy you have violent anarchy, where nobody is in charge and various groups are all vying for power. If things become stable enough, one powerful person (or small group (often headed by one person)) can take charge, and you get an autocratic / dictatorship type system. If the dictator is removed, you will often descend back into violent anarchy. But, if things get stable enough, sometimes you can replace that dictator with a kind of republic, either something like a constitutional monarchy, or a democratic republic. The former dictator might become a figurehead while power is held by a medium sized group who is elected by the public. If you don't take care, that kind of system can devolve into an autocratic one, where one person holds absolute power. You might still have elections, but they don't really change anything.
So, even though the "divine right of kings" is mostly gone, that was just window dressing on an autocratic system. And, we can easily get back to that kind of a system now. In fact, many supposedly democratic places are backsliding towards that right now.
P.S. I think there's probably other forms of government higher up the hierarchy than democratic republics / constitutional monarchies. We should be trying to get there, instead of assuming that a democratic republic is the best possible system in the world. But, at the same time, we need to guard against allowing a democratic system to backslide into becoming an autocracy.
Kim Jong Un is definitely a king, whatever he calls himself.
He's the hereditary ruler of a state that maintains its grip with the personal loyalty of the military.
Guy Debord captures the problem best in his The Society of the Spectacle (1967).
In theory, you could probably go against it. Problem is that the Spectacle (capitalist ideology visually manifested) is tautological and self-reinforcing. Even to critique it you have to make the critique a spectacle, which immediately undermines that very same critique (think of any YouTube video critiquing YouTube).
So no, it's no the same. The odds are insanely stacked up in favor of keeping the structure in place—unlike breaking away from said belief in the divinity of kings.
OK, how?
Refuse to buy things? Live in a cardboard box?
Supply and demand. Either reduce the demand or increase the supply and costs go down. Now target the things people need to survive and the cost to exist goes down.
Then they downsize workers and further erode merchantability while jacking up prices. Capitalism is a race to the bottom, and those at the top have made sure they will literally be the last to fall. You want to get a billionaire to sell their 4th yacht, it'll only cost us a million people going hungry.
There are ways out of capitalism, but the only fast ones are violent and worse than capitalism themselves. We should be working on moving towards incorruptable governance and social expansion. It happens in slow steps. The millionaire tax in MA managed one of those steps recently, despite some pretty dramatic opposition by the ultrawealthy.
Realistically? Only successful and subsequent revolutions will resolve anything.
Absolute monarchy and feudalism ended after the bourgeoisie revolutions of the 17th and 18th century. Only after then.
Organizing politically.
While private ownership of production is in place, there's no amount of boycott we could reasonably do too make changes. As you've noted, it would end up starving people and making them homeless.
On the lowest effort end. Using the power we currently have; we should vote for the least fascist of the two party members. This will not save us, but it will slow the decay and give time to others who are more actively working to solve the problem.
People with more time and effort, should organize. Push for getting rid of the first past the post voting systems and replacing them with less broken voting systems. Try to create leftist candidates and get them elected locally. Spread leftist ideology to public.
Any politician that thinks we shouldn't be allowed tools of our own ought to be ridiculed until they go away for good.
Step 1: Think of a viable alternative.
No-one has yet achieved step 1, which makes subsequent steps harder. It's easy to get your hands on people who will answer with magical thinking, but a system that will actually work and isn't capitalism has yet to be invented.
Seize the means of production!
Paraphrasing and bastardizing Gödel, all sufficiently complex systems are either inconsistent or incomplete. Gödel used recursion to reveal an inconsistency within typographical number theory. Programmatic restrictions on what one can do within a system (jails and sandboxes) can generally be escaped by finding and using a reference to the parent system.
Capitalism is a system. All systems can be broken if one chooses to do so. There's even a generic formula for doing so.
Ok, what mechanism within capitalism traps us within it? None, the mechanism isn't defined within capitalism. But we know that there is something trapping us. What about the parent system? The parent system in most capitalist countries is liberalism (enforced by state violence). It is the police of the liberal state who harass or kill you if you refuse to engage, or who otherwise enforce your starvation. It's actually the state that forces you to use money by collecting taxes.
So there's the issue. If you can figure out how to make something that fulfills the functions that you need from those within capitalism and the state, but do so without paying taxes then you can functionally escape capitalism. Ok, within liberalism there is an institution that operates similarly to the state (it collects taxes and provides services with those taxes), but does so without itself paying taxes: the church.
If you want to escape capitalism, start a religion.
New copy pasta
I love how LeGuin can take concepts and make them as real as capitalism (The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest). Is there any modern speculative authors doing this?
Cory Doctorow. He covers some stuff like this in his books. I just read "Rapture of the nerds" and am currently reading "walkaway", both are pretty good.
Coming back to this two months later. Really disagree with the comparison after reading Walkaway. It was more Ayn Rand in style than Le Guin. The characters were mouth pieces for ideologies, the story was half baked at best, and a lot of the nuance is entirely lost to "but look, they're the bad guys and it went wrong for them!"
Not sure I'll try again. Thanks for the recommendation, but my search continues!
Gary Doctorow
Cory, right? I was an avid Boing Boing reader back in the day, but I thought Little Brother was YA and that ain't my genre so hadn't been paying attention! Will go pick up some of his work.
Nothing makes me feel better about the hopelessness in America more than platitudes. (/s)
The fact here is that most people are paying triple for groceries, 30-50% more for their rent, and have to work multiple jobs to survive. They're not going to care that Trump or DeSantis are fascists. They're going to care that Trump or DeSantis aren't Biden.
Good may come of it, but not without a ton of carnage in the interim.
This isn't a platitude.
This is the eternal cicle of social democracy. Not good enough, riches getting richer and poor pooring, inevitable the fascism should arrive to give an answer that is not related with the ruling class, but an external agent.
I track my groceries very closely and I am paying about 9% more than last year.
Well it took America proving democracy works and WW1 to topple a couple of monarchies.
Ah yes, America, the first successful democratic nation Give me a break
It's not even a democracy, much less the first successful one
America proving democracy works
Lmmfao.... 🤣🤣
The truth is American "democracy" does "work", but not for the reasons, nor the people, you surely think it does (hint: it isn't you, nor the benefit of society)..
https://libcom.org/article/capitalist-democracy-illusion-choice
We'll never said their democracy works it's just theirs was the first alternative to govern a nation that the status quo of monarchies since Roman empire fell. Fuck American democracy is clearly not the democracy I wish to one day have, but it did provide stability in leadership relative to monarchies since the leaders (in theory) are chosen by a supportive people for their ability to lead and not because someone fucked had a kid with their cousin and now that kid is destined to lead.
There are many government systems out there, unfortunately some are bad, some are good but I do not know of a one size fits all.
We need WW3 and the Bell Riots to topple capitalism.
Don't forget the Irish Unification
Democratic republics existed before America mate
Also, the glaring racial inequities of America were ridiculed by contemporaries, even anti-monarchists across the world.
RIP. She wrote the best dragons
This is a nice idea. But, it’s an oversimplification. To replace capitalism, we’d need to replace it with something more powerful.
Kings were overpowered by the merchant. If we want to overcome capitalism, something new must overpower the merchant.
Capitalism is imo so hard to remove because it's a system that evolved out of our base biological nature. It's a system very close to what's "natural" if we didn't have much education or philosophy.
We have the possibility to think about better systems and ways to inhibit our base nature, but that requires effort and a willingness to do that. I think capitalism is what comes out if you don't do this.
I notice in myself all the time the impulses that fuel capitalism. To acquire more resources. To better my status. To be selfish at the expense of others. I have to work actively against them to live my life in a way that I think is right, and I still fuck up often. Unless everyone understands this and does the same, this system will stay.
Umm, no it's not "natural". I mean sure hoarding is natural, but so is taking care of each other. Disciplining or expelling greedy fucks is also natural.
The stock market is completely un-natural in almost every thinkable way.
What does removing the king look like in our deeply ingrained, hyper capitalist society?
Get rid of billionaires first as they are the #1 problem. Then go step by step.
The French did it before, so we can do the same
"We think that markets are by far the best way of organising most human affairs that involve scarce resources, because they align people’s incentives in ways that communicate where resources can be be used most efficiently, and give people reasons to come up with new ways of using existing resources."
If there exists another system that can do this more efficiently, it hasn't been discovered yet.
This is such a bullshit take. Look at the current system where we use precious resources to build dumb IoT devices. This is not efficient at all.
Tell me how shipping fruits from China to North America is more efficient than growing food locally and buying locally.
The only thing capitalism is efficient at is making more capital when you already have capital.
Nothing more. This is a scam that people gobble up.
"Tell me how shipping fruits from China to North America is more efficient than growing food locally and buying locally."
I like how this sentence shows you fundamentally don't understand how efficient shipping is. I'm not sure where you live, but where I live is some of the most economically productive land in the entire world. Wasting it to build a few pounds of a single fruit which can be grown somewhere else would be wildly inefficient.
"Look at the current system where we use precious resources to build dumb IoT devices"
Ah yes, a seller providing something people want. Classic case of inefficiency /eyeroll
