capitalism will live forever as a component of whatever it is the chinese do
Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it
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Re: Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it
#12He's indicting the Chicago school and rightly so because the academic priesthood condoning vampiric, unrestrained, hyperindividualist capitalism sleepwalking civilization into existential threats of collapse is broken. Strong regulation, collective bargaining, employee ownership, and more nonprofit social ventures in lieu of for-profit so-called "public private partnerships" are some of the paths that must replace unrestrained, unregulated externalities being dumped on others because it's more profitable than doing the right thing™.
One of the most pressing problems is private equity with too much money and too much power buying up everything and anything in order to rent it back to us for more money because they can and because of said too much money and too much power and nowhere else to park it.
Re: Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it
#13> Approximately 80% of the income of traditional capitalist conglomerates go to salaries and wages, according to Varoufakis, while Big Tech’s workers, in contrast, collect “less than 1% of their firms’ revenues”.
This doesn't sound right to me, but if it is Varoufakis has a point.
Our contract, such as it is, with traditional capitalists is they employ many, produce some sort of value and keep as much profit as they can manage after labor and expenses.
If the Amazons and Googles of the world can generate their enormous revenues (and profits) without dispensing much of it to labor, essentially just collecting large rents in perpetuity, both traditional capitalists and workers are in serious trouble. That is a big shift.
Techno Feudalism, indeed.
Re: Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it
#14[flagged]
Re: Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it
#15The Amazon case in this article seems to fall flat in the same way the Apple as Monopoly argument does. It works only if you ignore the fact of categorical choice (Android in the case of Apple). No seller is forced to sell on Amazon, as demonstrated by the thousands of Shopify and Etsy-hosted sellers out there. Yes, within the world of Amazon, Amazon sets the rules, but if the users leave, so will the sellers.
Shopify, Instagram, TikTok, Magento and the dozens of other ways to sell goods online offer an alternate path, and while Amazon may dominate today, tomorrow is never certain.
(Edit: spelling error)
Re: Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it
#16I'm not sure about Italy, but capitalism is alive and well in the US for better or worse. Our political, economic, and social systems are all largely driven by an end goal of creating and hoarding capital for the sake of capital. We may not have free markets anymore, but we have capitalism in spades.
Pretty much this, capitalism seems to have won out most everywhere. Not sure we really had free markets, free ish maybe. It's the ish that causes warping such that countries tends to put in place control levers. But they tend to be clunky patches and things change and adapt faster than we can legislate... what we need is better frameworks that capitalism can live inside of.
Re: Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it
#17Who takes this guy seriously? He's been going from one rant to another over the years.
Re: Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it
#18> Approximately 80% of the income of traditional capitalist conglomerates go to salaries and wages, according to Varoufakis, while Big Tech’s workers, in contrast, collect “less than 1% of their firms’ revenues”. This doesn't sound right to me, but if it is Varoufakis has a point. Our contract, such as it is, with traditional capitalists is they employ many, produce some sort of value and keep as much profit as they…
He probably doesn't include stock compensation which is a huge part of compensation for workers in tech.
Re: Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it
#19This whole dichotomy stops us from having productive conversations. Organic price setting is better and more effective than central price setting, monetary coercion is the lesser of two evils compared to coercion by force, which as long as there are shit dangerous jobs like mining and being an electrical lineman to do will there WILL be some kind of coercion. These are good things about "capitalism". But capitalism is organic, it's amoral, it's also vulnerable to systemic disease like all organic systems. If we can do medicine on our bodies, we can and should do medicine on the economy. Our moral definition of "thriving" should be allowed to trump the natural outcomes of the free market. To think the outcomes of the free-market are automatically desirable is to make the naturalistic fallacy.
Re: Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it
#20Conversations about capitalism have become pointless... I'd rather eat mud. When people start arguing one way or the other about the goods or ills of capitalism, both sides inject definitional or theoretical aspects that include an entire mountain of pre-supposition, that I barely understand what anyone is talking about. It would take hours to unpick what the hell they mean by the term... which I thought generally should be quite simple: the right to own property, and to trade it without coercion.
So when someone claims that capitalism is dead - what the hell do they actually mean? I can still own property and trade it. The vast majority of people in Western countries can.
No - they think capitalism is something more, some ideal that we had and lost presumably. What that ideal is I have no clue.