MischievousMonkey
Gor bu dëgër
Capitalism and its fervent defenders just aren't realistic. The principle is unsound.
Glad the Socialism/Anti-Capitalism trend is dying down
- Thread starter RickyDiBiase
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levitate
I love you, you know.
dikk suck corporations, brehs…
levitate
I love you, you know.
nikkas make $75k and turn pro capitalism.
This sort of nonsense pretty much sums up the quality of anti-socialist discourse. It's the equivalent of that conservative mantra, "If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain." Just a smug contentless assertion meant to position the speaker as superior without actually having to demonstrate or defend their positions.
The vast majority of what I understand and believe about socialism has been built in the nearly two decades since I turned 24, and it's been built via engaging on a very practical street level with the largest issues of our time both in the USA and across the world, trying to work through the root causes of those issues, and then engaging with brilliant thinkers both in person and through history to see what they thought of it.
On numerous occasions I have highlighted the fundamental issues with modern capitalism on this board, how the very basis of capitalism ensures constant pressure to transfer resources from the poor to the rich, to force overconsumption even when it is against personal happiness and welfare, and to exploit the environment and resources to the point of no return. And when I have made those arguments in deep detail, not once has a single pro-capitalist engaged the actual underlying arguments. They either just toss out another catchphrase and insult or they disappear.
for example, see:
Capitalism is the root cause of bad mental health.
Notice in every conversation, when we actually get into the details of what is wrong with capitalism, all the pro-capitalists can respond with are cliches and insults. It's clear that not a single one of them has engaged seriously with the root issues of capitalism in their entire life, all they know are the public debates on a superficial level, and so all they repeat are the spin doctors rather than the people actually trying to solve these problems.
The most intelligent people I meet in my everyday life are far more likely be socialists than the average person. The most intelligent people I read are far more likely to be socialists than the average person. The people who spend their lives engaging with the biggest issues in society are far more likely to be socialists than the averae person. If you spend your times with intellectuals, with serious students of history, and with social activists, civil rights activists, and social/community workers either in USA or abroad, you're far more likely to be spending your time with socialists. Thus the claim that it's just something naive, inexperienced people think who don't know anything about the world is ridiculous nonsense on its face.
You're surrounding yourself with people who choose to sell themselves to capitalism, and then assuming that must mean capitalism is all there is.
I'm interested to know what ignorance or lack of experience you think W.E.B. DuBois, Hubert Harrison, Paul Robeson, Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, etc. had that made them all anti-capitalist and so unenlightened like yourself that they would be reduced to college freshman babble. Not to mention George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Julius Nyerere, Modibo Keita, Leopold Senghor, and so on. The majority of Black intellectuals and civil rights leaders from the 1800s and 1900s both in the USA and throughout the diaspora were either socialist or at very least anti-capitalist, and for very good reason. I'd add that capitulation to capitalism is in large part a major reason why gains have stalled in recent decades and any sort of lasting progress in actual quality of life changes appear quite difficult.
End thread
Fill Collins
Able to get note from doctor
I'm essentially a Social Democrat, modern American capitalism is not good at all
BigBlackSea
All Star
One clerical error at the bank to stop the direct deposit, and alot of them would be swapping the temper pedic for concrete in a weeknikkas make $75k and turn pro capitalism.
This is always a red herring because no one outside of the extreme fringes is arguing for "pure capitalism" or "pure socialism". Those aren't even real terms to describe anything.
What we're against is capitalism as it exists now. Don't need a boogeyman of "pure capitalism" when the shyt going on RIGHT NOW is destroying humanity and the planet we live on. What I'm against is money creation via loans at interest, the ability of people to profit off of other people's work merely because they're richer, the elevation of profit motive above all other concerns, and the rationing of human rights like basic health, education, and justice based off how much money someone makes.
And there are dozens of different socialist systems, so I don't know what "pure socialism" would even mean. I'm in favor of a libertarian socialism, is that impure socialism? I'm not against buying and selling things, but I'm against deliniating all power and wealth based off of how much power and wealth a person already has, and the constant-growth model that's destroying the world.
This is a circular argument. Capitalism gets credit for "creating" innovation because capitalists have the vast majority of the resources. It's like saying that White people are responsible for most inventions - well, yeah, if they have most of the money and resources then that will be true. But considering the massive degree of innovation that has been created in government labs and universities without meaningful profit motive, or just by people fukking around because they liked to fukk around and not because they were trying to make a buck, and I find it strained to claim that capitalism is responsible for "creating" all innovation.
It also ignores the fact that capitalism often stifles innovation. There is a long history of corporations submarining technology that would harm their current profits, from refusing to fund lines of research to buying up threatening startups to directly influencing government legislation.
Basically, we get capitalist "innovation" when it will make money for a certain company even if the innovation harms the public, but we get anti-innovation if it will mess with someone's profits even if the innovation helps the public.
Vandelay
Life is absurd. Lean into it.
We're talking past each other. I don't call for pure anything either. However it's intellectually lazy the way capitalism is framed in this thread as the root of all evil. I want a social democracy driven by capitalism.
Capitalism creates incentives unlike any other economic system to create productivity and innovation. I think the US needs to have more socialist elements, but outright overthrow the existing system is ill-advised.
Every economic system has the ability to innovate. Feudalism had innovation. Merchantilism had innovation. It's about which economic system creates the most social benefit. You can't sit here and say the steam engine, the light bulb, the automobile, skyscrapers, the green revolution, the standardized time system, and literally a million other inventions, all would've manifested in rapid succession like they did under any other economic system.
Only tiny fractions of society experienced anything other than poverty and life expectancy greater than 35 years old prior 1750. Even the well-off had little beyond the products that had been available in ancient Rome. Capitalism has increased life expectancy and pulled per capita populations out of poverty.
There's a helluva a lot to still improve and I would argue the rate of innovation occurring is faster than society can tolerate, but many in this very thread are calling for a complete teardown of the existing system. I'm saying we can revise the existing system and make it better for everyone.
ignorethis
RIP Fresh RIP Doe RIP Phat
We have a mixed system and both sides suck
I always say how is China doing socialism and capitalism better than the USA
I'm pretty sure I understand your position. "Driven by capitalism" is the whole fukking problem. The reason we don't have social democracy is because of Capitalism. The reason that even a social democracy wouldn't prevent the world's environment from continuing to collapse is because of capitalism. Capitalism being the "driver" of society IS the problem.
And I think that's boilerplate rhetoric and unjustified. Capitalism creates incentive to profit, it doesn't create incentive to be better. You claim it incentivizes "innovation", and yet capitalism is the #1 reason that we're still reliant on dinosaurs like fossil fuels, cars, industrial meat, etc. even though they're wrecking the basis of the ecosystem that supports us.
The very existence of "planned obsolescence", one of the most evil corporate terms out there, is purely the product of Capitalism. What kind of bullshyt innovation is that, where you purposely design products to fail or become unusable solely so you can sell more of them? Yet it's perfectly accepted in almost every industry and has become the norm even as it tears apart the planet's resources. How will your social democracy stop that?
There have been some important innovations made at corporate think tanks - often the same few spots are responsible, like Bell Labs or General Electric. But compared to their resources, government and university researchers have been FAR more productive in terms of real innovation. Nonprofit sectors spend much more of their energy actually trying to innovate, while the vast majority of capitalist corporations spend very little on real R&D other than figuring out what kinds of superficial exterior design and packaging and advertizing will get their product sold.
Also, your statement assumes that "productivity" is some sort of inherent good, even though it means that we're destroying people with overwork and destroying our resources with overproduction and overconsumption. Profit Motive and the basis of money creation via loans-at-interest have ensured that "productivity" must constantly increase no matter what it ruins. How is that a good thing, and what will you do to ever stop it?
Look at nations like Guatemala, where 70% of kids are malnourished even as the country has become a net exporter of beef, because regular people's farmland they need to survive is being taken over by rich beef ranchers who make far less food but can ship it overseas for far more profit. In capitalist terms, they've "increased productivity" by paradoxically becoming less productive in terms of calories produced. Because the only thing they actually want to increase is profit, not public good. The US turning into a social democracy wouldn't solve that.
You're confusing correlation with causation. Most of the gains in life expectancy were downstream impacts of the increases in both scientific knowledge and human rights that appeared as a result of the Great Enlightment, and those didn't have jack shyt to do with capitalism. Let's list some of the greatest factors that led to that increase in life expectancy.
1) The widespread treatment of drinking water for public consumption
2) The building of reliable public sanitation systems for treating sewage
3) The institution of municipal garbage collection
4) The requirement of official public health standards and food inspection
5) The discovery of antibiotics
6) The development of sanitation in hospital settings, especially for childbirth and surgery
7) Improved surgical techniques
8) Improved scientific knowledge of proper nutrition
9) Universal public education
10) Banning of child labor
11) Control of mosquitoes
12) Development of vaccines
13) Improvements in air quality
Those innovations had very little to do with capitalism - in fact, in several instances (like child labor, horrible quality of factory-produced food, and bad air quality), the problems that needed to be solved were CAUSED by capitalism. I can't say for sure that capitalism has had zero positive impact on life expectancy, but the vast majority of the rise was clearly other factors. Communist USSR saw the same rises in life expectancy that the rest of the world did - in fact, as of 1965 the average life expectancy in USSR and USA were almost identical, and even as of 1988 they only differed by about a year. But Russian life expectancies actually DROPPED for a decade after the USSR ditched communism.
Cubans have a higher life expectancy than the USA even though America did everything they possible could to try to destoy the country's economy and access to resources - in fact, their life expectancy in Cuba is 7 years higher than the Latin American average.
And all that is just looking at the current state. What capitalists fail to acknowledge is that the current state is completely unsustainable because you're already destroying resources across the world at an unsustainable rate. It's like a squirrel bragging about how fat it got eating all its food in the first week of winter without the slightest concern for what's going to happen in the three months to follow now that nothing is left.
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China doesn’t have cacs that out number them 1-to-3, who vote against their own interests to spite others. Also I can’t call them socialist when theh have more billionaires than we do. At this point their socialist in name only.
Vandelay
Life is absurd. Lean into it.
I don't disagree with a lot of what you said. I'm trying to argue a viable path forward.
I'm not discounting capitalism is also driving environmental destruction, but there's 8 billion of us, we were going to destroy the environment regardless of any economic system in place.
I also don't assume all productivity is good productivity, I said in my previous statement society is probably advancing too fast because we don't even understand the implications of the shyt we create.
Competition, innovation, productivity can both have negative and positive connotations. "I" think it's possible to course correct and put a sustainable system in place through the proper taxes and regulations on corporations and not allowing those corporations to get too big to fail and/or annex all of society.
Here's my other elephant that I haven't discussed, you can't really teardown the existing system without society coming to a catastrophic collapse. You can argue a collapse would happen either way, but I think it's possible to reform without destroying. Could I be wrong? Sure, but I rather pragmatically march towards a plan that doesn't involve war and significantly reduced quality of life.
This simply isn't true. The average American uses 40x as many resources as the average Bangladeshi and that's the average American, rich ones consume 10x as much as that. Rich people driven by corporate consumption are spearheading the rape of the natural environment all over the planet, they're literally burning down the rainforest and scouring the oceans to meet rich people demand. To pretend that we can ignore that because population is high is ridiculous - the high population makes it that much MORE crucial that we stop letting Capitalist Consumption drive our economy.
I already pointed out to you the Guatemala example - there is PLENTY of good farmland in Guatemala to feed their population, but the land is destroyed and poor kids go malnourished because inefficient beef production for export profit is driving their land use instead. Same decisions being made all over the planet. Rich people drive exploitation over sustainability and inefficiency of land use far more than population does.
Here's an article on the topic that came out in Biological Conservation just last month:
Smaller human populations are neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for biodiversity conservation
Human population (often treated as overpopulation) has long been blamed as the main cause of biodiversity loss. Whilst this simplistic explanation may…
www.sciencedirect.com
How will you make those "proper taxes and regulations" stick if you're keeping a system where the rich control the process at every level?
Are you going to stop issuing money via loans at interest? Are you going to stop prioritizing profit as the main goal for every corporation? Because unless you're willing to make those changes, then your "proper taxes and regulations" are just bullshyt. The main DRIVER of every corporation will still be constant growth, and thus they will figure out a way to continue to grow and exploit even more resources either by dodging your regulations or simply using them to their own advantage.
I have no idea why you're talking about war and catastrophic collapse. You can have socialism without war if the capitalists don't insist on war. But if you're saying you refuse to do the right thing because the capitalists are holding us hostage with the threat of violence if they see any sign of change, then that sounds like a morally absurd argument.
I've linked this book here before. Get a copy or read it online. He offers a way forward. I struggle to see how anyone could read this and not see that our current system is inherently incapable of taking us forward from here in a positive direction:
Read Online - Sacred Economics | Charles Eisenstein
Welcome to the HTML version of Sacred Economics. The full version is here in English, along with full and partial translations into other languages. More translated material comes on-line all the time, so check back often. Sacred Economics The full
sacred-economics.com