Rojava isn't even a country yet. It's just a de facto autonomous region. Calling it successful is like calling a fetus a successful person.
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If the Point of Capitalism is to Escape Capitalism, Then What’s the Point of Capitalism? (Essay)
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Rojava isn't even a country yet. It's just a de facto autonomous region. Calling it successful is like calling a fetus a successful person.
That paper is all the explanation I need. Commodity production, private property, ownership, markets, jobs, exchange, money.
Capitalism
Just wanna say that bourgeois is masculine so it should be petit bourgeois and haut bourgeois.
No, medieval lords were looking for money as a means of attaining power, which they used as protection from other medieval lords who would seek to obtain their power by force. The amassment of wealth was both to present a theatrical depiction of themselves and to have the means to physically defend themselves from others.
While people poke holes in non-capitalist means of structuring society, no one addresses the root of all the issues with capitalism in any meaningful way. What is it, you ask?
HIERARCHAL POWER.
If the capitalists at the top of the chain were merely just the owners of the means of production, that would be fine. But with the way capitalism is constructed, all that capital gives power. And when you give power, it's used. And abused. Any system that gives power to a small subset of individuals that can't be retracted or provides the means to preserve it unjustly is what causes them to collapse.
THAT is the reason real-world examples of communism failed, because they baked in tyranny to a system that didn't require it and it falls apart when you do that, because it provides a power structure hierarchy that (in my mind) was not intended when communism was first proposed.
Yet when we look at capitalism, the same power structure that is inexorably baked into capitalism (and the reason their favourite punching bag failed) is never addressed.
I'm not going to put the past on trial, capitalism has done a great many things that can't be taken away from it. But when viewed for the future, it cannot remain for the same reasons that our real-world examples of communism couldn't.
I don't think I need to explain all the ills of capitalism and the things that are hold-overs from feudalism that it also shelters. Everyone here knows what they are, they're frequently discussed on this forum.
So what is required is to implement a system that is free from hierarchal power and/or tyranny. When people advocate for socialism or other similar -isms, THAT is what they're advocating for. And beating them down for wanting a socio-economic system that removes the access to power from the pyramid or removes the pyramid altogether is both unhelpful and a supreme fallacy when it ignores that capitalism is as much about the means of obtaining power as feudalism and tyrannical communism/socialism are, with the only distinction is how it randomizes who gets to wield it instead of it being by bloodline or self-imposed authority.
It's not about status, it's about power. You are right, people like a higher status, but tangling that up in wielding power over others is what was wrong with all of them.
Democratic technocracy, for one. But you're not looking for better systems, you're likely looking for easy targets to knock over to justify the current system instead of actually addressing its failings, as is the case with most people who retort with that response verbatim, like it comes out of a handbook.
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Not my job to figure shit out, thanks though. Maybe some day I'll be that guy.
"Marxism is an inherently violent ideology, unlike capitalism."
"Touch my stuff and I'll fucking kill you!"
I've read the thread and am aware that this is either deliberate or the ranting of someone in good need of a lie down still felt compelled to point it out.
Where has democratic technocracy been implemented successfully and why is it a better alternative to our current system? By the way, I never said our current system is perfect, but thanks for attacking me anyways.
Don't bother contributing to the discussion then?
No political or economic system in human history has ever been fully outlined before its implementation, let alone fulfilling the logical impossibility of it being implemented "successfully" to serve as an example to justify its implementation.
Why so touchy? I'm allowed to make a post. I am not required to write an essay. You are not the arbiter of discussion. You are a mere forum user, just like me. Neither better, nor worse. I expressed my opinion, and I absolutely do not need to have an alternative solution in order to think capitalism is extremely fucked up (especially in its current state). You clearly have a problem with my opinion. Oh well?
Shall we keep going back and forth or is this enough for you? I ain't got a problem with you, but I don't understand why you felt the need to attack me like this.
Nah, human society has advanced out of "poverty" (the concept you are using is capitalistic in itself) due to technology, not due to capitalism. And most technology advances of the last century were thanks to centralized research, vs the laissez fair approach of recent years that seems to go towards stagnancy (pharmacology comes to mind).
love having the freedom to choose between obeying my employer and landlord or being unemployed and homeless
You can't get around the simple fact that life requires work. If no one works, no one eats.
You think you don't have to be an employer under communism? You obey the dictates of the commune.
Well to be fair, I did just provide an example of an alternative, possibly better system one page ago.
One doesn't need to think something is perfect for defending it.
As A More Normal Bird mentioned, implementation being used to discredit it is not a good play, so I won't re-iterate his great contribution.
One example of a democratic technocracy was outlined by Howard Scott and Marion King Hubbert (one of the men responsible for the "peak oil" theory) as a solution to the hardships of the Great Depression (they started in the 1910s, so they were working to stop the Depression from happening and were far too late). It was meant to address the wastefulness of the capitalist system and supposed an energy accounting system in lieu of the price system to resolve it. Keep in mind, it was proposed at the turn of the century.
Naturally, the beginning and aftermath of wartime saw things improve for capitalism and people were more enamoured with the "New Deal", along with political ideology of the time putting the ideas out of fashion with the majority of North America. So capitalism ended up resuming and it didn't get much traction. In addition to that, it was difficult to wrangle the data they needed to make informed decisions in the 1920s and 30s for proper implementation.
To put it simply, a democratic technocracy involves a deference to science and fact to guide ALL economic decision making through elected officials. This would likely be performed by electing a House to represent regional interests and a Senate composed of experts in all vocational fields to ensure that decision-making is guided by facts, verifiable data and scientific principle.
While it's not a perfect example, the Technocratic movement's energy accounting system would resolve the economic function of capital, where items are priced based on the energy/resources required to produce them and all citizenry would be allocated a equal proportion of spending power based on the amount of finite resources available and the population volume, which would be a guaranteed minimum AND maximum income. In such a system, the only way to amass power through purchasing power is to eliminate population growth. GDP growth would be measured by the means with which energy expenditure to manufacture goods has shrunk.
There's a huge amount of finite detail I could go into about how all of this functions, if you'd like to know more about it.
Fair enough, I should've re-worded my question to ask whether there were alternate systems with better tradeoffs in use today that we could use
I mean all you did was drive by post? What's the point of a discussion if you don't bother providing evidence for your claims? It doesn't take any thought to simply say capitalism sucks, it implies you haven't considered the tradeoffs or thought deeply enough on how we can fix things.
Must've misquoted, wasn't directed at you!
Oh interesting, thanks for the information. I'm an engineer, so a democratic technocracy sounds like my ideal for of governance, but it sounds like this system would just be elevating technocrats to positions of power over people with different backgrounds.
What a foolish person you are.
You Nazi and rape comparisons are fucking offensive.
Or Nazi one.
it doesn't require employers or landlords, though
oh okay i guess the current system of coercion is fine then
This.
This is truly the reason why capitalism never worked and will never work.
People who deny it are simply lying to themselves.
But without wealth (and thus, power) to be earned, the only gain from being in decision-making positions is notoriety, so many of the ills we identify as coming from "power" become extremely lessened.
As well, the system is still a democracy, with a House elected that is essentially the same as it is now (albeit with less socio-economic manipulation to get them there and no one being able to be bought into having a policy position) and giving a stronger role to a Senate that represents all socio-economic vocations. This would essentially create national elected unions for all fields of work, voted into a Senate position based on who each vocational union believes is the most-respected in their field and best represents all of their interests. They will then be the counter-point for legislation proposed by the House that affects their services or industry, which they would propose based on what their constituencies have indicated to them. Both are elected (one regionally, one vocationally) and both serve as a check and balance for the other in equal measure.
With automation at the level it is now, a lot fewer people would be required to work in non-capitalist socio-economic systems, were automation permitted to roll out as far as technology is able to provide. We are on the precipice of being able to automate white-collar jobs through machine-learning developments, but that could never be implemented on the scale we would be capable of doing because it would cause the capitalist economy to fall apart. Unless you introduce the socialist concept of guaranteed minimum income, but that will assuredly never happen at the sort of scale that would be needed to maintain capitalism and automate the workforce to our fullest capacity to do so.
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There are no employees or employers under communism because there is no "work", as in the institution of work, only labor, which is up to the individual.
What if you need stuff? Like equipment, or space?
Well, the decentralized part is very against many anti-capitalist schemes, which involve lobbying either collectives or a centralized state for resources.
And isn't lending with return the absolute main principle of capitalism? It's the thing that causes the greatest problems - people making money just by lending and living off interest.
Wasn't price setting one of the huge problems the communist blocs were unable to overcome? Setting prices based on cost involves setting quotas and properly anticipating demand. Furthermore, all pricing is blocked based on a single governing body's (or maybe some number of bodies divided by industry?) throughput. What if they reach a deadlock due to factional conflict? Meanwhile, the price of a newly abundant commodity is fixed high.
I am not against some of the ideas there, like having an elected body composed of experts. I'm one of the people who would currently benefit under such a scheme. But the power imbalance is moved to power within a subset of people (those who are qualified to elect experts) instead of the population as a whole. I don't think it's an obvious win.
No worries. If you're interested in probing a bit more into this, most (all, really) left wing philosophies are focused on the role of the social and economic environment in shaping people's perceptions of the world. Consequently, critique becomes paramount and the idea that people can readily create or even fully imagine alternatives from whole cloth is considered unrealistic. Of course this is expressed or put into practice to varying degrees and in varying ways which is why all organised left-wing groups hate each other.
On the other side of things, the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott argued that all knowledge was in some way technical, or specific to its field (with the partial exception of philosophy, which was self-critical and based around eliminating prior assumptions). Advocacy of social change would therefore be based on some mixture of prior assumptions and context-specific understanding and the end result of putting it into practice couldn't be accurately foretold. This bears some (somewhat superficial) similarities to left-wing/critical theory but Oakeshott had quite different conclusions: a crudely simple example might be that revolutionaries are skilled at revolting but not at governance (similar to Burke's account the French Revolution).
User warned: hostility
What a foolish person you are.
You Nazi and rape comparisons are fucking offensive.
Or Nazi one.
Anyone who defends Marxism is fucking offensive. It should be a bannable offense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge_Killing_Fields
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union
But of course, you're probably some privileged moron who has never lived under a communist government.
I always found it weird how young people seem to glorify communism these days. At least in online communities.
Anyone who defends capitalism is fucking offensive. It should be a bannable offense.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_in_Pinochet's_Chile
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_colonialism
This is dumb.
Who in here has defended those events ?
Unlike you, who has defended white supremacy.
And if you have a problem with my post. THEN FUCKING REPORT ME.
What are you talking about?
I never defended white supremacy in my life. It's disgusting and anyone who does isn't worthy of respect.
Just like anyone who defends Marxism, one of the most disgusting ideologies that has ever afflicted mankind.
Even if you use the most aggressive estimate, Pinochet's death count is about 0.01% of Stalin's.
If you are a Marxist, you should reevaluate your life.
The problem with technocracy is shown in the European project. Technocrats make bad policy makers because the problem with saying "we'll use *science* to come up with the best outcomes" is that you've still got the sticky question of "best outcomes." Who determines that? Do the technocrats, as was the case in Europe when the Union left countries like Greece out to dry because they refused to follow the harsh austerity policies that German economists considered to be the best outcome?
Or does the democratic override the technocracy and you end up with a bunch of quack scientists spewing whatever's most popular to get ahead?
The core tenets of liberalism acknowledge a role for socialism of sorts. The need to care for the vulnerable in society was bought into even by many right-wing thinkers like Friedman or Hayek. The basic tendency of capitalism to be grossly inhumane is widely understood even by militantly pro-capitalist thinkers as long as they're intellectually honest, because folks like Friedman understood that a society of serfs to powerful capitalists is an unfree society, even as they claimed that too much government power would also be serfdom of a different kind.
Capitalism's built great wealth and abundance. All we need to get on is making sure that it is *shared* in a sustainable way. If you take 90% of a billionaire's assets, that's still $100 million which is plenty of incentive to work. Then you could give $90,000 to 10,000 households.
Colonialism in the 20th century alone has been attributed to 50 million deaths. But colonialism happened for around 5 centuries, with the bulk of those years being under capitalism. So if your metric is "which system has the highest death toll", capitalist democracies still eclipse Mao, Stalin, Lenin and Hitler COMBINED. But using a death toll as a scoreboard is grotesque, especially when you're trying to shame someone for an opinion on a theoretical socio-economic system, since non-tyrannical communism is still very much a theoretical concept.
I consider this to be a soft apologist argument for it.
This simpleton response says so little on the side you're proclaiming, but so much on what you're not.
Work is more than jobs. The fact we've even divided this is a source of immense trouble. First, it overlooks all work as work; work on yourself and your own misery is optional, but working at McDonald's is primary because that's "real work". But what if it pays poorly? Shitlords love to then say "get a real job", so then one should be looking to find...real real work? This is a division of a division. This gets us into rabbit holes of what counts as "real" work and allows us at the same time to normalize precarious situations or difficult aspects of living as secondary, avoidable, or only for the "unlucky."
Further, that statement itself is a form of violence, because the future of labor production relations is the negation of the need for human capital as the center. What do you do when people, through no fault of their own, are exiled from employment? The current answer is to let them starve, and this is the position of sociopaths.
Assuming you post on this forum and that assumes you're a Millennial, you will very likely live in a world where nearly one in three Americans are exiled in this way. That "simple fact" is going to have to change or you will see real-time collapse. Don't think I'm barking up a spooky tree: this is a national security issue.
who's going to do this? are billionaires going to let it happen?
Except there are extant, positive examples of capitalist democracies. Whereas every time people have tried to set up a communist nation, it's turned into a horrific authoritarian shithole. And when those countries move away from communism, they become less oppressive.
Well, sure, but "My political ideology only fails when you try to use it in the real world" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
Demand of what precisely?
And as stated, in one such example, price is determined by accounting for energy expended to produce. For a physical resource, its energy price is based on the cost to replicate that physical resource, including things like petroleum (we can technically fabricate crude oil, but it takes a lot of energy to do so at the moment and has an energy expenditure cost to remove its harmful effects from the planet). So improvements in the economy would be based on reducing those energy expenditures to expand purchasing power, using technologies we have now that the communist blocs were not able to fathom when they were in operation, such as renewable sources of energy. For food, it's dependent on arable land for certain crops to flourish, available water, etc. Such a system is designed to reduce wastefulness, and when you reduce wastefulness, you come closer to abundance, which reduces the absolute necessity to measure demand so long as abundance is maintained.
The communist blocs were isolationist, which is why they annexed other nations, because they could not meet the needs of the people with their small chunk of land and took someone else's. But this is the modern world, where we have things like the European Union. And while it's not an ideal view of what is envisioned (I'll get into that a bit more later), it's an example of solving the problem in a more responsible and democratic way for an economic bloc with which to pool resources from and manage. North America and Greenland have enough resources amongst all the associated countries to essentially form a similar economic bloc.
Technocracies (and communism, for that matter) do not function on price systems very well, which is why alternate means of prosperity distribution are required.
Everyone has a skillset, so everyone would have someone to elect vocationally, so the "population as a whole" has something to say. For example, law enforcement and the military would have a voice, as civic protection is a technical skill. As another example, firemen would have a vested interest in ensuring that people who have practical expertise AND scientific knowledge to have a voice on issues of public safety, to make their jobs significantly easier and reduce their on-the-job fatalities.
College-age adults would elect based on field of study, those not working would either elect someone to a technocratic Senate based on their last vocation or elect people to the House to represent their non-technical concerns and reap the benefits of expertly-guided social well-being. I do not advocate for only experts in power, I advise wholeheartedly against it. But SOME elected experts is better than the system we have now where NONE are and we get people in power who are the best bureaucrat or able to whip up social anxiety alone for the benefit of their paying donors.
The EU is not a democratic technocracy. They are not elected and have nothing to counter-balance their enacted governance. A true democratic technocracy involves full elected positions and can review things at both the micro (regional) and macro (vocational) level.
That being said, the EU has its major issues and, despite the word bandied about, it's arguable that it's even a technocracy at all. But when you look at the politicians and pundits who vociferously detract from it like Nigel Farage, it's difficult to see it as worse for the public good than what we have in North America. But yes, it's far from perfect, primarily because its grip on being a technocracy is tenuous at best and because, if it actually is one, it operates within capitalism, which is ill-suited to it.
If you're forcibly taking assets to re-distribute them, one could argue it's not capitalism anymore.
Besides that, good luck getting that to happen, when they have so much capital that they can buy and sell the politicians you would elect to force them to do so. What do you think lobby groups are, if not the wealthy using their power to assuredly deny you access to the capital they are supposed to share sustainably?
Basically...
This.
Thankfully, it's not mine. I do not endorse or advocate communism personally, as all my posts in this thread indicate. And I don't think others here have, either, given what started this dialogue in the first place.
That being said, I don't ascribe to the belief that just because something hasn't existed in practice doesn't mean it never can or never will. You seem to and openly admitted as much.
By this line of reasoning, capitalism has never existed in any form where racism, xenophobia and populism didn't exist in large numbers of the general population. But I'm not about to say that having capitalism without them is impossible, either, because that would be incredibly foolish. Because correlation does not inherently imply causation.
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Edit: I'll wait to see if action is taken. Though something makes me doubt it will be.
Edit 2: Clearly we're allowed to call multiple people stupid, but we're not allowed to call people morons. Well noted.
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Obviously this is going to be pretty specific depending on a lot of circumstances, but I'll speculate a bit:
Think of how an essential business gets started now; someone goes to financial investors and asks for a loan with the promise of a return, hires labor, buys equipment, rents a space. Before the loan is given, the financial investors have a vetting process to determine whether or not they think they will get a return and whether or not they want to support this particular endeavor.
In a socialist system, the business starter would go to "the people" when they want to start producing something. They still need labor, but the labor is no longer exploited, they still need equipment which is now owned by the people as a whole, and space is now commons that the community is allocating for the endeavor. The idea is still vetted, but the priorities of the people will be much different than the priorities of private financial investors. The people will be asking whether or not the business will address their needs rather than whether or not they can make a profit for private gain.
So in the socialist method workers will be producing for themselves, no landlord is sitting back skimming off the workers production with rent, and financial investors don't own and control the entire thing for the purpose of skimming off as much as they can by lowering wages, encouraging externalities, and selling to maximize profit for private gain.
How do you do this without extreme centralization, though? In a current business, you can source resources from all around the world as an individual negotiator with autonomy. Under your system, you have to make your proposal to one or more democratic bodies, each of which will be debating your proposal against many others. It seems like it would be slow and waterlogged to me, or at the least discourage international trade (since it's much easier to propose only to your local councils, not those that may speak another language).
Why not adopt something closer to the Chinese system of the 80s and 90s, where the government owns the banks, and gives them high-level mandates for goals ("clean energy", "more food production"), but otherwise leaves individuals within banks (and competition between banks) to pick the best bets in those sectors?
Then there's the question of how is the equipment produced when you go to the people. Do they order a collective that could produce the equipment to produce it for you? Do they stockpile everything produced?
I wouldn't mind your perspective on the other part in my post about the political realities of centralizing price-setting, but I'll reply to this for now.
You can't get around predicting demand, because energy expenditure to produce is a function of demand. The difference between producing 1000 and 1000000 of a thing will significantly impact the energy cost per unit. It will also vary depending on how the materials are produced - for example, pumping oil vs destructive oil sands. You may say "use the average", but now you are also predicting supply - or do you have to instill production quotas?
Perhaps what you are describing is actually individual producers price-setting based on energy spent, and you file some sort of "energy expenditure return" to prove to the government that you priced your goods appropriately at the end of the year? This seems better than trying to predict energy cost for class of material/item (or introducing a latency to audit it).
What (if anything) motivates people to do undesirable work? The threat of scarcity ("I will farm because I worry my people will starve otherwise"), some sort of work order ("It is my turn to spend a year on the farms")?
You don't need an alternative lined up before you're allowed to recognize how fucking abhorrent the current system is.
If I had a super shitty, barely functional smartphone but had never used another, better smartphone, I'd still be very upset with how bad the one I had was.
If there weren't almost eight billion people, there would arguably be less undesirable work, and the threat of scarcity would be just enough to motivate us all to be more individually sustainable. Even now we could all easily have small indoor gardens, even in a studio apartment, that provided a reasonable chunk of our dietary intake throughout the year, but almost no one does this. We could as a society recognize that it's socially irresponsible to have multiple children, and not everyone can have the luxury of even one, but almost no one does this. And all of this is at the horrific expense of the majority of the population.
Instead I sit here banging away on my $200 milled aluminum keyboard on my iMac, working a salaried job where I push pixels around a screen and intake media for 8 hours a day while other people from less privileged areas of the world get stuck with jobs that, aside from a paltry income, almost exclusively benefit corporations and people like me.
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You've missed the point then. Nobody is arguing that the current system is perfect and we don't need to change anything, the 2016 elections were clearest expression that the current system has issues!
However, my argument is completely switching to a new model isn't the right way forward (in the United States). I'm a proponent of the idea that we should fix what's currently wrong in our system by implementing: a better tax structure, universal healthcare, and better education. Obviously we can go into details, but I'd rather we move towards those solutions than switch to an alternative model.