Capitalism Cancels the Passions

That's a nice armchair theory of capitalism, but I don't know how anyone could look at how advanced capitalism has actually manifested in America and make those claims.

> central economic decision authority which controls what people can eat, drive, where they can work and travel and live.

I don't think this is accurate. There are plenty of systems one could describe as "socialist" in varying degrees in which this is not the case.

> These people are expected to do this for the good of others, yet they hold tremendous power.

Sounds like FAANG c-levels and boards?

> Such power attracts corruption and cannot be defended from it. So socialist systems always become hopelessly corrupt as the do-gooders are instantly outcompeted in the race for power by people who only care about power.

Kind of like how someone who only pursues economic incentives in capitalistic societies will usually wind up with more power and higher quality of life than someone who sacrifices the pursuit of capital for the pursuit of other things like an ethical calling, e.g. help the poor, spread the truth, etc.

> Worse, since that central authority has both economic and police power over people, there's no practical way to replace it.

Lobbying comes to mind. The recent protests in America and how they unveiled sources of police funding (surprise, often corporations) comes to mind.

> A corrupt corporation can be peacefully outcompeted or allowed to die, but the government itself cannot be - it must be overthrown with mass violence.

Interesting--what major corporations or monopolies were "peacefully outcompeted" in the history of American capitalism? As far as I'm aware all of them needed to be broken up explicitly by government intervention?

> Systems like anarchy require that individuals self-organize into collectives and work for the good of the collective instead of the good of themselves. Of course such systems become corrupt 5 minutes after scaling beyond Dunbar's number, because there's no mechanism to punish free-riders (aside from some kind of mob justice, or a hyper-invasive police authority).

Citations? Actually, the reality of open-source software itself would argue against this notion quite strongly. At its origin point OSS was largely autonomously organized groups working toward common good. It wasn't totally free of nastiness in certain corners, but it also wasn't disastrous by any means.

> Unlike socialism, capitalism is decentralized. The government doesn't need to hold so much authority over the details of peoples' lives - where they work, what they eat, where they travel - so there's nothing to corrupt.

How interesting. Here in America, the government still seems to play a pretty big role and is mostly funded by major companies where capital has concentrated. Also, when did the memo get sent out that American capitalism and global capitalism are corruption free(tm). Let's ignore things like child labor, foxconn, sweatshops, backroom deals, money laundering, lower taxes for the rich, and all the rest of the laundry list of naughties that have managed to creep their way into our pure, much better system.

> There is no center of power to corrupt, nowhere for the power-hungry to steal from the do-gooders.

Right, until you realize having one instrument of value (capital) is centralization and breeds the very things you're claiming its free of, only in more subtle forms (which makes it harder for wage laborers to even fight against the system since the mode of oppression supports gaslighting of the kind you've seem to have fallen for)

> There is only the contest to make money; a single goal which is inherently attractive since it brings status and wealth and sex, but when you accomplish this goal you also do good as a side-effect.

Sure work hard and prosper. Anyone can do it. Going from the projects to being a big billionaire CEO is no problem even though the quality of your education, your quality of life, your access to the instruments of capital, etc. is all determined by the relative economic status of your originating conditions, right? Yes it does happen in rare cases, but again we're talking about the construction of an equitable economic system, not one in which 0.000001% of the little guys manages to scrounge his way to the top through a mix of good luck and perseverance.

> So it's not democratic institutions preventing corruption in capitalism. Capitalism is inherently resistant to corruption in a way that socialism and anarchism aren't, because the individual incentives are aligned.

This armchair notion that there are "inherent mechanisms" in capitalism making it "more fair" while there are literally people laughing their way to bank while providing no actual production value to the economy (those centralizing middlemen like banks, wall street, etc. that capitalism supposedly eliminates) swarming around you is perhaps the starkest evidence that one has drank the capital kool-aid.

I don't mean to be harsh, but economic systems are not just abstract theories. They are actually realized, practiced things that we should examine empirically and theoretically and attempt to understand and change. Capitalism in the theoretical vacuum of abstraction and over-simplification does no justice to the empirical realities of capitalist systems and the inequalities they perpetuate.

Now the submission is even flagged. This reminds me of fascism TBH

As the author of linked article, I'll add 3 things to this mix:

1) For those criticizing the article for claiming capitalism is the result of intentional design, that it was "devised" rather than emerged organically from historically contingent forces, they're absolutely right.

It was just sloppy writing on my part to suggest capitalism is anything other than an emergent phenomenon from a complex stew of factors. That's not my claim, just my sloppy representation of Albert Hirschman's thesis (who doesn't claim that either).

2) But that capitalism was seen as a system that would nullify our passions by diverting attention to our interests, is not my claim, but Hirschman's. If you want to critique that, I highly recommend Hirschman's "The Passions and the Interests."

3) Why was this submission flagged? Is there such thing as the Hacker News Capitalism Defense Force, and might they actually have flagged this for its critical undertones, or did I violate some other rule?

I guess I'm having trouble separating "passions" from "interests" but it seems that there are earlier definitions of these words with somewhat different meanings than they way they're commonly used in the modern context.

Interesting article. We do need to explore what comes after neo-liberalism as we're going to need something to replace it soon. You refer to an article on mutualism - it sounds like it has some similarity to distributism.

Sure, but deriding one without suggesting there is a better alternative is unproductive. And capitalism just implies that people are allowed to own property and engage in business freely. Obviously there are still laws under capitalism; for example, laws against murder. So I think for most reasonable and informed people, it comes down to how you want to define what legal business should be.

For example, activities that cause pollution produce an externality on society, as do many other things, and in my ideal society such things are penalized. However, I don't consider these added complexities to make society any less capitalist. It still is a system built on free commerce and private property; it just has laws to capture externalities. In order for a society to not be capitalist in the strictest sense, a lot of freedoms would need to be taken away (at least one of the two core tenets: ability to own things and the ability to choose your career). So when anti-capitalists like the OP start tooting their horn, I want to make it clear what that implies. Which of those core tenets is the root of all evil, which you want to take away?