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After Capitalism?

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21–30 of 88 posts

Re: After Capitalism?

#21
post #7

Such drivel. There is no "after capitalism," unless the concept of economics disappears completely. Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree. As long as there is supply and demand (finite resources) there is capitalism. We have democratic socialism to make capitalism less brutal (read: less efficient but more humanizing) but demand is too fickle for most economies to…

What we have is welfare states, not democratic socialism.

The majority (representatives) vote a law that says we take money from some and give it to others. Democratic socialism seems like a reasonable name for it, even though it's not necessarily taking from the owners of the means of production nor necessarily giving to the working class. Though I guess welfare state is more "official".

Re: After Capitalism?

#22
post #7

Such drivel. There is no "after capitalism," unless the concept of economics disappears completely. Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree. As long as there is supply and demand (finite resources) there is capitalism. We have democratic socialism to make capitalism less brutal (read: less efficient but more humanizing) but demand is too fickle for most economies to…

> Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree.

That depends on your definition of "capitalism" and "economy".

If you use "capitalism" in contrast to Mercantilism and feudalism – which seems to be a rather unpopular view in English-speaking countries for some reason –, then it makes perfectly sense.

Although it would help to actually read it.

Re: After Capitalism?

#23
post #18

Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years - Economist Magazine. Harnessing the energy of people across the planet by letting them trade with each other has so clearly been a disaster for everyone, has it? Essentially, isn't this capitalism with all its fault lines? One way or another it can be got to work for everyone's advantage.

A fair number of those lifted out of poverty were in China. Haiti is still the poorest country in the western hemisphere, despite having capitalism forced on them. A black-and-white view of the world misses a lot. Economies wouldn't function without public utilities, roads, militaries, etc.

Re: After Capitalism?

#25
post #7

Such drivel. There is no "after capitalism," unless the concept of economics disappears completely. Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree. As long as there is supply and demand (finite resources) there is capitalism. We have democratic socialism to make capitalism less brutal (read: less efficient but more humanizing) but demand is too fickle for most economies to…

> Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree

Not really. A lot of today's capitalism is based on concepts such as copyright, patents and trade secrets, which are definitely not "natural" - in fact, they are directly opposite of "free market".

Personally, I believe that a capitalistic system where these three are eliminated or at least severely restricted would be much preferable to what we have today.

Re: After Capitalism?

#26
post #18

Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years - Economist Magazine. Harnessing the energy of people across the planet by letting them trade with each other has so clearly been a disaster for everyone, has it? Essentially, isn't this capitalism with all its fault lines? One way or another it can be got to work for everyone's advantage.

The article isn't lamenting capitalism, it's lamenting that we're leaving it behind and have no idea what to do next.

> Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years

But it has been done without generating the sort of full-time blue collar employment that is implied behind all sorts of economic policies around the globe. China has gone from feudalism to post-industrial robotization in one generation, skipping most the wealth-building industrialization phase Western Europe and North America went through in the last century.

The global creed is "you're not worth something without work", yet we are, for all purposes, running out of work. The computer revolution is optimizing away all its menial jobs already – just how much have trends like virtualization, clouds, infrastructure orchestration and so on reduced the demand for warm bodies to throw at hardware issues in the last few years? – while education systems still haven't finished ramping up the creation of more and more menial labourers. The earlier industrial revolutions have, quite soon, created more jobs than they destroyed, but this does not seem to happen any more.

We've reached the point where we have, globally, more people of working age than we can possibly need to satisfy all global needs, and this trend is not going to reverse.

And the problem is: We have no idea what to do about it. The left is blabbing "muh robots" and "muh basic income", but nobody has a consistent, practicable theory of what a post-full-employment society (which is something entirely different from a post-employment-at-all society) could look like. We're still going to need menial labour, blue collar work, white collar… but not enough. What do we do with all the excess population?

Re: After Capitalism?

#28
post #7

Such drivel. There is no "after capitalism," unless the concept of economics disappears completely. Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree. As long as there is supply and demand (finite resources) there is capitalism. We have democratic socialism to make capitalism less brutal (read: less efficient but more humanizing) but demand is too fickle for most economies to…

> Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree.

No, that's just a market. A necessary, but by no means sufficient condition to label an economy capitalist. That's why the new word "capitalism" has been introduced to describe the difference.

Re: After Capitalism?

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is strongly critiquing the notion that "there will be robots, there is basic income and it's better than what we have now, just because." He labels this notion "Accelerationism", and then the final section tears it apart (even the section discussing it is constantly pointing out its flaws). To wit, the closing paragraph: "Though the times are bad, the accelerationists presume that the state of the left will get be…

>But politics can’t get done by machines. Can't it? Democracy is simply voting, which can easily be handled by machines.

> Democracy is simply voting, which can easily be handled by machines.

Voting is simply voting. If you insist on inventing a new definition, Democracy is a specific mode of a) gathering and representing the political will of the population; and b) a specific mode of forming that political will by the civil society. Voting is just the rather banal part of making the present aggregate political will visible and quantifiable. The most defining part of Democracy happens before the vote.

Re: After Capitalism?

#30
post #26
post #18

Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years - Economist Magazine. Harnessing the energy of people across the planet by letting them trade with each other has so clearly been a disaster for everyone, has it? Essentially, isn't this capitalism with all its fault lines? One way or another it can be got to work for everyone's advantage.

The article isn't lamenting capitalism, it's lamenting that we're leaving it behind and have no idea what to do next. > Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years But it has been done without generating the sort of full-time blue collar employment that is implied behind all sorts of economic policies around the globe. China has gone from feudalism to post-industrial robotization in one…

Lower birth rates? Short term economic pain of a graying population for a long term gain.
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