Under capitalism
Under capitalism
105 comments
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A note: Most countries subsidise their farmers because those countries realise that leaving food security up to the market is a bad idea.
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It’s not a bug that capitalism is based on greed, it’s a feature. It works (relatively speaking) because it leverages humanity’s shittyness.
Communism has failed to operate without corruption or authoritarianism, because it depends on people actually giving a shit about each other long term.
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Has capitalism operated without corruption or authoritarianism?
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has any economic system ever operated without corruption?
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In a way: when you legalize the most common forms of corruption and gaslight people into thinking of your favorite kinds of authoritarianism as normal and necessary, suddenly you don't officially have a problem!
That's how the US and many other supposedly free and uncorrupted capitalist nations do it, anyway.
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Relatively speaking, I’d say yes.
The communist systems I’m aware of have failed hard on these due to not having built in outlets for negative human characteristics.
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I feel like you're misrepresenting or misunderstanding what communism is. You might base your opinion on the soviet union but they never actually achieved communism, and some would even say it was state capitalism and not even socialism. In fact it's unlikely we'll ever see what an actual communist society would be because it's very much a vague utopia, and just a goal to strive towards.
Communism by definition actually isn't very clear because Marx never actually got into the details of how a communist society day to day life would look like. But he did postulate the primary idea of communism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." One idea of communism is that it's stateless and classless, meaning there literally couldn't be a small portion of people getting a large portion of wealth. Marx himself actually said that future communist institutions should be designed to be decided democratically by the people.
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I think it is interesting that when talking about systems designed to organize people, their labor, and what to produce, that you are blaming people. It's kind of like blaming water for flowing down hill when you want it to go up into your kitchen sink. Maybe use pipes and pressurized water instead.
If these systems don't work, the issues are with the systems and not with the people.
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Thanks for the thought provoking reply!
My impression is that all systems fail long term and need to break down and be renewed after crisis. Once it becomes entrenched, I think odds are heavily against being able to try social systems.
Have you seen a system like you describe, where a structure to continue change and experimentation is built in? To me capitalism with strong controls seems the most stable and successful (assuming your benchmark is population qualify of life not just GDP), e.g. some European systems.
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Part of the issue with this take is that communism isn't a system for organizing government, but rather that of labor and resources. It is not true that communism has failed. Rather it is true that communism under totalitarian regisms has failed. True Communism requires that the people have the power, which in turn would require a true Democracy
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Im14andthisisdeep
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During the pandemic I watched grocery stores buy poison to dump on their trash, which they paid armed people to guard. They then paid other people to haul it away. All this to prevent poor people from taking it away for free.
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Capitalism is on of the worst thing happening to humanity. :( It promotes greed and punishes people who aren't greedy. It makes more problem than it answering problems.
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And yet people are saying that the system isn't the problem but people. When it's the system that creates and promotes those people.
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Those people are correct. Capitalism is a reflection of our collective misery. Look at how many people are on anti-depressants today, how many are suffering from mental health issues. Our ability to engineer the world to our advantage is not the problem here, that is something human beings are extremely good at. The problem is that we lack the ability to engineer ourselves.
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Anyone care to argue against generic opinions generated by bots? If so, you are in the right place.
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under communism, food is only produced because the central planning committee set a quota for it. unfortunately, distribution requires resources the central planning committee did not account for and the foodstuffs rot in the fields.
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The gains from capitalism have dropped the costs to produce foods to previously unheard of levels. The productivity of a modern farm is incredible compared to farms of 25, 50, 100 years ago. The amount of labor and land needed to produce the food humanity needs has dropped considerably.
I realize these are not the statements that people posting here want to read, but that's reality. Take the good with the bad because regular capitalism is not bad. Unfettered capitalism is the problem.
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But that's not because of capitalism, that's because of technological advances. We have centuries of technological advances in agriculture before we even had proto capitalism. There's no reason to believe those advances wouldn't have happened under any other economic system.
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Absolutely false no matter how much you want to believe otherwise. Capitalism brings about the motivation to improve efficiency unlike anything else.
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technology advances because people in power pay for it. it doesn't passively increase.
societies eventually stagnate without capital investments into technology.
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It is because of capitalism. Capitalism includes price competition, necessity to update farming tools and adopting technology in timely manner for every farmer, reducing worker numbers by replacement with farming tools, free labour movement, meaning less people being stuck being farmers. Tech development competition and tool production is its own capitalistic dynamic too.
Other forms aren't necessarily centuries behind in effectiveness but they would require very microscopic management and preplanning, hopefully competent leaders and selfless participants.
Agriculture is in most societies already heavily regulated and intervened by governments and politicians bc of its importance. So even in capitalistic nations, agriculture is never pure capitalistic
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Well, those yield gains are from capitalism subsidized with government-sponsored ag research at hundreds of college campuses, and subsidized by intellectual property protections for patents and copyrights, and government price supports, and government crop insurance, and government land-bank programs to pay farmers to not overuse the land, and ag labor subsidized by special exemptions for minimum wage and citizenship verifications, as well as tight border controls and political vilification of the immigrant labor force to keep the wages low.
But yeah, when society throws enough money into capitalism and soaks up the external costs, it sometimes delivers results.
In short, modern US agriculture is hardly a good example of either unfettered markets or unfettered capitalism. Big US ag is privatized profits and socialized losses, like a lot of other US industry, albeit with much better PR than (for instance) the banking industry.
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Take the good with the bad because regular capitalism is not bad. Unfettered capitalism is the problem.
The thing is, unfettered capitalism is basically regular capitalism brought to you by Adam Smith & his successors. Bernard Mandeville, who arguably also described capitalism prior to Smith, called it out for its faults and said that it may only be to the public benefit through careful regulation, whereas Smith thought that greed would somehow regulate itself.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Smith is the one more may have heard of today over Mandeville.
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Smith described capitalism, he didn't idolize it.
He's often misquoted, but skim through the wealth of nations. It most certainly does not say unregulated capitalism just works out magically.
It describes how capitalism works, and heavily implies the situations where it doesn't. It's not subtle about it either
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Can confirm. I'm on disability and cannot afford food and medication and bills at the same time. My Internet will be cut later this month because I did the crime of paying for my medication so I didn't want to kill myself. I am starving but at least I didn't feel like my soul was being drained.
It's just depressing that if I want to feel slightly okay I have to not eat for days so I can justify getting my medication. Or dumpster diving to supplement food, which I'm gonna be doing in a couple hours.
Life is suffering and I'm tired of it.
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If you're in the US, the Affordable Connectivity Program is available to low income families and it covers $30 a month off your existing internet bill.
PCsForPeople (not sure if I can provide links on Lemmy) offers a free mobile hotspot plan with unlimited data that you can use as home internet, if you qualify for the ACP.
Just an FYI, since there are programs that help, but not everyone is aware of them.
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Alas I am not American, but I appreciate it.
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This is part of the reason that the governments pay farmers to grow various crops etc.
we need food it needs to be as cheap as possible
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we need food it needs to be as cheap as possible
I agree that we need food. Why do you say it needs to be as cheap as possible? The cheaper it is the less value people will give it and the more food will go to waste.
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Under capitalism there is so much food that most people are overweight. Under communism on the other hand, people can’t afford food and subsequently starve to death.
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Lmao, gotta call all the people living in the street and starving to death in capitalist countries that it's their own fucking fault, they probably havent noticed they are in a capitalist country and not in a communist one i guess.
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Under modern food production systems that are entirely for profit we have had less famine in the world than any prior generation and especially far less famine in the world than in any communist nation that has tried to go and produce food without profit motives.
Ideas like this one will lead far more people to starve.
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You’re spot on. Furthermore, under socialism/communism countless millions have starved to death due to governmental incompetence. The op has obviously never studied history.
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Dangit bobbi
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It costs money to produce food.
The more people you want to feed, the more money it costs.
Food production is not free. Food distribution is not free.
If you have an alternative to capitalism, I'm open, but you can't just stamp your feet and go "but it should be free!" It's not, someone has to pay for the seed, irrigation, fertilization, equipment fuel and labor involved in production and distribution.
p.s. Is it just me or is it the same people wanting $20+ hour minimum wage who also think food should be free?
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It does however get considerably cheaper to produce more food when production is scaled up. If enough people got together on the "free food" they could potentially do it cheaper than what capitalism provides.
The issue however is that capitalism has already made food really fucking cheap. It's actually too cheap. And that is because someone else is paying the true cost of providing it. Obviously the animals who sacrifice the their lives, but also the human workers who also sacrifice their lives, just to bring food for everyone. Everyone eats, nobody gets paid, except for the owners who also do none of the work.
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On a per capita basis, yes. But the Doritos that sell for $6 a bag come out of a multi billion dollar organization (Frito Lay, part of Pepsi).
Individuals coming together to produce a single bag of Doritos aren't going to be able to do it for $6. They need the infrastructure of that multi billion dollar corporation to get there.
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Yes, you are correct, food is not free. So does that mean it is good (per your morality) that people starve? The military is super expensive, but that hasn't stopped us from deciding all Americans need protection and making that happen.
Capitalism has done some good stuff, but it has also done some bad stuff too. It's not an all or nothing proposition. I think if the majority of us agree everyone should have access to food, money should be a detail to solve, not a barrier.
The question is, do you think food should be free? Have you ever thought about it seriously?
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Morality doesn't enter into it. If you want something that somebody else puts effort into producing, they need to be compensated for their effort, materials, etc. etc.
I guess you could phrase that as a moral demand. You don't have free access to the results of someone elses effort.
You want to eat without paying someone? Grow your own food. Nothing stopping you. Oh, but you'll have to pay for the land, seed, water, fertilizer, animals. Learn how to slaughter and butcher on your own because you can't pay someone else to teach you those skills. You could learn to hunt, but then you'd have to make your own weapons because even re-loading supplies cost money.
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"Our labor has conquered scarcity"... Bro they've conquered scarcity now? I didn't even know! If someone has conquered the universal reality of scarcity they can ask whatever they want as minimum wage. 🤣
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It costs money to produce food.
The more people you want to feed, the more money it costs.
Food production is not free. Food distribution is not free.
Then it should be a task of the State, as "feeding people" is, quite obviously, a task Too Big to Fail. And, as such, the State can (and should) just automatically print the money needed to reward the work done. Feeding the hungry should not depend on a "budget". A budget is basically putting a price on human lives.
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Great, you just caused hyperinflation for everything else and destroyed the economy.
https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/business-strategy/hyperinflation.shtml
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Under socialism food isn't produce.
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In your fantasy maybe
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Name just one socialist country that have produce any :)
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And history books
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Without capitalism, what motivates farmers to do their work? It's miserable work that has yet to be automated, so they certainly aren't going to do it just for fun.
So no, we haven't conquered scarcity. Not yet, anyway.
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If it's not profitable for a company, another one comes and fills the market gap. Howerever in socialism if it's not profitable, they just let people starve
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Yikes. Capitalism has its flaws but food production is far from one of them.
105 comments
I will be stepping down in ~7-14 days any suggestions on how to find someone that could take care of this community better than me? Thank you.
I've enjoyed your memes the past couple weeks!
I think that I will maybe stay as a head mod just in case and will just respond to repots and such. But I don't see myself as a person capable of steering the community in the right direction because I don't have any deep knowledge about how society works. All I know is that the current society is not a good place for non-capitalists (people that don't own assets that generate money). I just want for the world to be a better place for everyone, this is why I created !antiwork@lemmy.fmhy.ml, !fuckcars@lemmy.fmhy.ml and !righttorepair@lemmy.fmhy.ml. I'm still going to actively work on the other 2 subs but !antiwork@lemmy.fmhy.ml is something beyond my capabilities. I'm still very happy that I managed to create this community and kicksart it. If it goes actually mainstream I will even be in a postiton where I could brag that I'm the one that started it here. Something like that doesn't happen often haha.
But I'm totally going to still post there, even if I step down.