After Capitalism? • Hacker News Board

Re: After Capitalism?

#71

Post by aninhumer » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 6:00 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #61

ersii wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All three are basically the right of ownership, isn't that practically exactly what capitalism is? Could you please elaborate on how the world would look like without these three concepts?

No, it's not the right of ownership it's the right of enforcing a monopoly . If I copy something you own, you still own it, I'm not taking anything away from you... It would be amazing! Basically what we have now, but (1) noone would go to jail for piracy, and (2) all research would be shared much sooner, and you wouldn't need to worry which spurious patents your original research is infringing.

>it's not the right of ownership it's the right of enforcing a monopoly.

Ownership is a form of monopoly as well.

Just because a resource is rivalrous doesn't mean more than one person couldn't be permitted to use it, particularly when you're talking about capital goods.

Re: After Capitalism?

#72

Post by aninhumer » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 6:04 PM UTC

ersii wrote: post #58

tomp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

All three are basically the right of ownership, isn't that practically exactly what capitalism is? Could you please elaborate on how the world would look like without these three concepts?

>All three are basically the right of ownership

They are not "the" rights of ownership, they are a particular set of rights of ownership.

Once upon a time people were included in the set of things people had a right to own, and ideas weren't. These things can change. The rights we have now are just those we currently think of as most correct.

Re: After Capitalism?

#73

Post by aninhumer » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 6:12 PM UTC

puredemo wrote: post #64

bildung wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Point being, markets are inherently capitalistic. Would you disagree with that?

Markets don't necessarily have to involve property, which is generally considered a key element of capitalism.

You could imagine (as a quick, not particularly explored example) a society where there's only a market for labour, and the state leases all durable goods, and sells or provides all consumables.

Re: After Capitalism?

#74

Post by patrickaljord » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 6:17 PM UTC

JDDunn9 wrote: post #67

patrickaljord wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haiti is more of a crony capitalism as it's one of the most corrupted country http://www.heritage.org/index/country/haiti

Corruption is highly correlated with poverty. If you play the "no true Scotsman" fallacy with capitalism, where only the least corrupt countries are capitalistic, then by definition they will be wealthier as well.

The USSR was capitalist too, it's just that the government held all of it. You have various kinds of capitalistic models, there is no "true capitalism" so I'm not claiming that all. You have mixed economies like France, Germany or the US where capital is shared between the private sector and the public one, then you have more free market oriented capitalism where capital flows more freely such as Switzerland or Singapour or Hong Kong where public sector holds much less capital. Note that mixed economies also have a decent amount of free market depending on the country. Crony capitalism is when most of the capital is held by the government and its cronies almost exclusively, this is probably one of the worst kinds of capitalism second only maybe to the Soviet model (and yes, they all have elements of cronyism but mixed and free market have much less).

tl;dr: the freer the market the better capitalism works. Just have a look at the top freer economies here, they're also the wealthiest http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

Re: After Capitalism?

#75

Post by ilaksh » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 6:33 PM UTC

The way forward is not techno-communism. The problem is not over-competition or over-coorperation but over-centralization.

We can get the imagined benefits of techno-communism by getting better at systems integration through wider adoption of improved common technology platforms. For example, what if web assembly had a registry and semantic versioning like Node.js, and that became the standard for integrating B2B, government, and IoT? This would be a programming-language agnostic system. Systems for things like digital democracy, smart contracts, etc. could be easily deployed, integrated, and evolved.

See http://www.reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization and http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage

Re: After Capitalism?

#76

Post by bildung » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 6:46 PM UTC

puredemo wrote: post #64

bildung wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Point being, markets are inherently capitalistic. Would you disagree with that?

> Point being, markets are inherently capitalistic. Would you disagree with that?

Yes, absolutely. For a system to be capitalistic, you also have to have at least capital intensive means of production (hence the name), a real labor market and more or less free access to the market both as a consumer and a producer. Capitalism only started existing with the onset of the industrial revolution.

Reductio at absurdum: A Greek citizen in 200 BC is buying fish from a fisherman, with coins, at freely decided prices. Thats the market at work, but no capitalism at all.

Re: After Capitalism?

#77

Post by bildung » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 7:03 PM UTC

puredemo wrote: post #65

bildung wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 quantif…

I'm not sure b) is generally included in the definition of democracy. Could you reference something that implies that?

> I'm not sure b) is generally included in the definition of democracy. Could you reference something that implies that?

Its in most political science textbooks, and even on wikipedia, hidden in point 2 of the 4 point definition at the top.

Have a look at most socialist eastern european countries in the 1980s. You had multiple parties, and you could vote. But surly we both wouldn't describe that as democracy. What was missing? Formally, there wasn't much of a difference. Sure, you often had compulsory voting, but Australia has that too.

The missing part was the lack of an independent civic sector. You had no politically relevant NGOs, no independent unions etc. You couldn't simply create a new political party at will. The government was the only actor able to meaningfully influence the political landscape.

Re: After Capitalism?

#78

Post by lifeisstillgood » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 9:03 PM UTC

21echoes wrote: post #15

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #2

I tried, honestly I tried. I tried to read it. I wanted to see the arguments because this is an area of interest to me. But I can't write a tl;dr - it would not sink in my brain. Part overview of the area, part, something else, I really have no idea what the author was trying to say Please enlighten me

TL;DR: The article is lamenting the inability of the modern, technocratic left to offer compelling paths forward out of the current economic stagnation. * The editors point to previous boom/bust cycles, and the tendency of strong workers movements & chains of strikes/riots/unions to emerge during the bust periods and demand an economic shift towards greater workers rights / less control by capitalists. * They then po…

Thank you. This is not new though is it?

" The old divisions of left and right seem to be falling apart and we don't know what's going to replace it yet"

The right is now collapsing into isolationist farce (Trunp being the epitome of what has happened across the Western world), the left is, well we aren't sure what. I agree with the final ideas - utopia is not destiny.

Thanks

Re: After Capitalism?

#79

Post by jedharris » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 11:47 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #56

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…

It's trivially easy to refute the conclusion in fact. Fortunately history has already provided the refutation, dozens of times, and history will continue to prove that Capitalism is the only system that works long-term. All other systems rot and collapse, requiring constant reform back towards Capitalism (see eg: Sweden since the 1980s, UK since 1970s). There isn't a single example in world history of Socialism, Fasc…

So Sweden, Denmark and Norway have stagnated and declined? Can you be more specific?

More generally, Malthus had much more historical support for his thesis (that population would quickly grow to consume all the food available). But the rules changed.

Re: After Capitalism?

#80

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Dec 13, 2015, 1:59 AM UTC

creshal wrote: post #43

Zirro wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you've already brought it up as "blabbing" - why do you dismiss basic income as a solution?

Because it seems to imply a post-work, not a post-full-employment society. We're still going to have a lot of jobs in the mid-term, probably even long-term. 70%, 60% of the working populace in the mid-term maybe, and not too few of those in menial/blue collar jobs. We still need to fill these jobs, and a generous basic income would make these jobs highly unpopular. So we can either set a basic income that is not high…

[deleted]