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After Capitalism?

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Re: After Capitalism?

#81

Post by 1stop »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #59
1stop wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is echoing a pretty well trodden train of thought on the ultimate conclusion of capitalism. Which no one has seriously been able to refute. Wasted time is a bit harsh. Catchy one liners "Wealth creation through creativity" might help you sleep at night, but seriously, our creative endeavours have never produced anywhere near the amount of capital the resource sector has... What happens when we either get…

"our creative endeavours have never produced anywhere near the amount of capital the resource sector has..." http://www.forbes.com/global2000/ Only four of the top 20 could reasonably be described as "resource" companies (oil companies, in every case).

Are you suggesting banks are creative endeavours? I like the connotation.

Re: After Capitalism?

#82

Post by 21echoes »

skrebbel wrote: post #49
21echoes wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Several crashes later, the gloom has returned, and the signs of autumn are once again most recognizable in the pronouncements of free-market capitalism’s erstwhile boosters. > I tried to read this sentence 3 times now, and I still do not know what it means. The same holds for entire paragraphs. Is that sentence really that hard to read? I mean, it's definitely overly flowery, but it means almost word-for-word "Af…

I didn't know an "erstwhile booster" is a person. Therefore, I thought "pronouncements" referred to something legal, instead of just a complicated word for "opinions". My best guess at the meaning of the sentence, therefore, was something completely different and nonsensical. The whole article is like this. Misunderstand one flowery phrase, misunderstand the entire sentence, misunderstand the whole paragraph. It's li…

https://www.google.com/search?q=define+erstwhile

https://www.google.com/search?q=define+booster

/shrug If those are familiar words to you, then I think it's a little harsh to say that they "hate convincing people" because they use them. Totally agree that a good author edits out rarer words to reach a broader audience, but I think that's a very weak vector of critique for the article as a whole.

Re: After Capitalism?

#83

Post by Turing_Machine »

1stop wrote: post #81
Turing_Machine wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"our creative endeavours have never produced anywhere near the amount of capital the resource sector has..." http://www.forbes.com/global2000/ Only four of the top 20 could reasonably be described as "resource" companies (oil companies, in every case).

Are you suggesting banks are creative endeavours? I like the connotation.

Certainly. A bank is just a collection of ideas. It's a bunch of magnetic domains on hard disks that get reconfigured based on a set of rules.

It certainly isn't a natural resource like oil or iron ore.

What would you call it?

Re: After Capitalism?

#84

Post by ectoplasm »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #83
1stop wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting banks are creative endeavours? I like the connotation.

Certainly. A bank is just a collection of ideas. It's a bunch of magnetic domains on hard disks that get reconfigured based on a set of rules. It certainly isn't a natural resource like oil or iron ore. What would you call it?

Your mind (the rational part) is just a collection of ideas. One of them is called oil.

Re: After Capitalism?

#85

Post by simonh »

eevilspock wrote: post #68
vixen99 wrote: 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.

You take it as a given that capitalism was the savior. What if The Enlightenment, mathematics and science, egalitarian laws and democracy were actually greater contributors to lifting humans out of poverty? All the greatest advancements in law, mathematics and science don't appear to be profit driven, while exploitation of people has always been driven by profit. And even if capitalism did deserve much of the credit,…

I don't think of Capitalism as being a political agenda or agency in that way. I think of it more as a law of nature. You can't say that Capitalism deserves credit for anything, or saves anyone any more than you can say that gravity or Newtons laws of motion deserve credit for anything. In this account, political ideologies or principles that attempt to replace or supersede citalism end up just reorganising it. So communism doesn't get rid of capitalism at all, it just harnesses it to the party in the form of state capitalism.

Looking at it this way, you're quite right that The Enlightenment, science, egalitarianism and democracy deserve the credit because they are choices we make. They are motivating and organisational forces we have control over and so can be credited with achievements. When an Engineer builds a bridge we celebrate the skill of the engineer and the educational and organizational forces that made the project possible, not the laws of physics.

In this way of thinking, there is no such thing as an end to capitalism. Anyone talking about the future in that way is simply asking the wrong questions. They can't see the wood for the trees.

Re: After Capitalism?

#86

Post by dragonwriter »

simonh wrote: post #85
eevilspock wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You take it as a given that capitalism was the savior. What if The Enlightenment, mathematics and science, egalitarian laws and democracy were actually greater contributors to lifting humans out of poverty? All the greatest advancements in law, mathematics and science don't appear to be profit driven, while exploitation of people has always been driven by profit. And even if capitalism did deserve much of the credit,…

I don't think of Capitalism as being a political agenda or agency in that way. I think of it more as a law of nature. You can't say that Capitalism deserves credit for anything, or saves anyone any more than you can say that gravity or Newtons laws of motion deserve credit for anything. In this account, political ideologies or principles that attempt to replace or supersede citalism end up just reorganising it. So co…

If you use the word "capitalism" to refer to some set of actual or proposed "laws of nature" (presumably, about the operation of economies) you aren't using the word to mean either what the critics that coined the term of the modern proponents of "capitalism", or basically anybody else talking about it mean by the term, which has always referred to an economic system, that is, a set of high-level policy covers about how the economy should be organized and governed. So, on this regard, you are literally not speaking the same language as any body else when it comes to that issue.

Re: After Capitalism?

#87

Post by simonh »

dragonwriter wrote: post #86
simonh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think of Capitalism as being a political agenda or agency in that way. I think of it more as a law of nature. You can't say that Capitalism deserves credit for anything, or saves anyone any more than you can say that gravity or Newtons laws of motion deserve credit for anything. In this account, political ideologies or principles that attempt to replace or supersede citalism end up just reorganising it. So co…

If you use the word "capitalism" to refer to some set of actual or proposed "laws of nature" (presumably, about the operation of economies) you aren't using the word to mean either what the critics that coined the term of the modern proponents of "capitalism", or basically anybody else talking about it mean by the term, which has always referred to an economic system, that is, a set of high-level policy covers about…

That's probably true, but many of the people I read criticizing capitalism don't actually seem to be proposing abolishing all personal property and all privately owned businesses. In fact I've been downvoted in the past for challenging critics of capitalism and characterizing them in that way as using a straw man argument.

But if capitalism isn't private property and business ownership, what is it? That's certainly what Marxists* mean by it. If anti-capitalism isn't about abolishing those things, what do it's proponents advocate? A political or economic agenda characterised purely in terms of being anti-something with no proposed alternative is just nihilism. What are anti-capitalists for? What do they propose? What is their actual agenda? I've yet to see that coherently laid out. I can understand anti-corporatism for example because that still allows for alternatives. But other than actual honest to goodness communism, what is the alternative to capitalism that it's critics want to replace it with? Some pointers on that would be greatly appreciated.

*Of course it would help if Marx had actually given an account of how he thought a communist economy would function. Other than vague pronouncements that production would be regulated by 'society' and that individuals would have complete freedom as to what pursuits they engaged in from day to day, he never to my knowledge actually gave an account of how it would function either. But at least he gave a very clear and specific account of what he was against.

Re: After Capitalism?

#88

Post by dragonwriter »

simonh wrote: post #87
dragonwriter wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use the word "capitalism" to refer to some set of actual or proposed "laws of nature" (presumably, about the operation of economies) you aren't using the word to mean either what the critics that coined the term of the modern proponents of "capitalism", or basically anybody else talking about it mean by the term, which has always referred to an economic system, that is, a set of high-level policy covers about…

That's probably true, but many of the people I read criticizing capitalism don't actually seem to be proposing abolishing all personal property and all privately owned businesses. In fact I've been downvoted in the past for challenging critics of capitalism and characterizing them in that way as using a straw man argument. But if capitalism isn't private property and business ownership, what is it? That's certainly w…

> But if capitalism isn't private property and business ownership, what is it? That's certainly what Marxists* mean by it.

Marxists (and more specifically, Marx) certainly meant more than the mere existence of private property and business ownership, he meant the system organized around a particular model of private property rights. (Both private property and privately owned business existed in the pre-capitalist feudal economy from which capitalism emerged, but under a very different model of property rights and very different economic relations between participants in the economy.) [0]

> If anti-capitalism isn't about abolishing those things, what do it's proponents advocate?

Mostly, altering the conception of property rights and economic arrangements to de-emphasize the role of profit to be captured by capital in some significant (but not always all, or even most) economic interactions, increase social control of some of the rights associated with ownership in the capitalist system (though not necessarily to the exclusion of private ownership rights) of productive capital.

Anti-capitalists are a fairly diverse lots, so the differences will be fairly stark without a lot of commonality. Opposition to capitalism doesn't mean supporting the same alternatives to it. (Strictly speaking, supporters of the modern mixed economy are a kind of "anti-capitalists" who support a particular -- and currently dominant -- replacement of capitalism.)

[0] This provides a basic rundown, though its perhaps less clear which of these elements are consequences and which defining features, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_mode_of_production_...

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