this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
870 points (94.8% liked)
Political Memes
5428 readers
2415 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It, unfortunately, is an efficient distribution of labor, at least relative to other systems. Not because wasting food for profit isn't fucking heinous, but because the mobility of investor capital and responsiveness of market prices is less inefficient than reciprocal economies or central planning.
However, we are at a point in human society where raw efficiency is no longer the bottleneck for our quality of life. Capitalism was an ugly solution to a real problem, but we can probably bid it farewell at this point, if only we can dislodge the elites who benefit from perpetuating it.
All we need is something that could realistically replace it, and a complete rewriting of all of our laws to allow for it to happen.
Easy enough.
Market socialism, ez. Shame about the whole "entrenched powers that be" bit.
Seems like you could get most of the way there by just keeping the current system but adding a social dividend which would form a basic income for everyone. If the dividend is pegged to economic growth then it should also be fairly resistant to inflation.
This Swedish Market Socialism plan was somewhat similar to that, unfortunately it got scrapped at the last minute for being too radical.
And that loops back around to the "powers at be" problem.
We don't even need to go that far (although it would be nice). We could just make it illegal for stores to throw out perfectly good food and instead force them to donate it to food banks. They can even get a charity write-off as a treat.
The owner class will never willingly give up power, their actions are why capitalism is a religion.
Of course. Hence "dislodge" rather than "ask nicely".
I tend to lean more towards 'consume' and 'mulch', myself. Though I understand why others would find that distasteful.
Has to happen every few hundred years it seems, slave uprisings. When the owner class gets too fat and cruel towards the hands that make their wealth, those hands have to pick up some stones sometimes to remind them why noblesse oblige was once not considered optional.
I dislike dividing people into owning and worker classes. If the workers save up their earnings to make their living in the old age, does it make then "owner class"? Should they stay penniless in your world vision? It's the utopian world you propose
I'm not arguing semantics or gradients, eat/compost the rich to save the planet. Period.
I'm not proposing a utopian world, those are words you are shoving in my mouth.
I"m proposing a world where the global temp is slowed down enough that our grandkids have a chance at a life on a planet that isn't an ecological disaster.
It's not semantics as you try to portray. It's the real life case that simply negates your "solution" if any.
The old couple sitting on 2 mil and pacing it out so they can enjoy their retirement are not owner class.
The shitstain owner of the local car lot that is using his friends on the city council to change local zoning laws so he can force his competition out and buy their land is EXACTLY the stripe of shitstain I want to mulch.
And it doesn't negate any solution, history has proven the effectiveness of slave uprisings.
So it means you never lived in communist or socialist countries. I did
They can go in the mulcher too, everyone who abuses others to increase their own personal wealth and power. IDGAF what their government or economic label of the decade is, every power structure becomes toxic when abusers are shielded from justice.
Postcapitalist systems can use market prices and, in principle, be Pareto optimal on non-institutionally described states of affair
@politicalmemes
As I said, we can probably bid capitalism farewell at this point.
Uh... No. I feel like half the fucking western world works on finance, which is quite literally just maximizing the revalorization of capital for the few at the top. Besides, how can be the only system in history to have millions of people unemployed, be efficient at distributing labor?
This is empirically false. You can't provide a scientific source for this because it's wrong. Central planning is the most efficient tool, that's why Amazon and Walmart (extremely centrally planned systems which have power to control their supply chains at will) systematically outcompete all other businesses. Amazon doesn't outcompete other stores being "a competitive market of warehouses", it's a digitalised, centrally-planned behemoth that can so much as smell when a customer is going to conceive making a purchase, and generate all the immediate responses in the supply chain from manufacturing to distribution to optimise the whole thing.
If you wanna talk about countries, please explain how the transition from planned economies to free markets plunged the entirety of Eastern Europe into a deep crisis that killed millions and ruined millions more of lives, to the point of many countries like Belarus, Russia or Ukraine not really having recovered from the impact in 30+ years. So much for the efficiency of capitalism, amirite? A centrally planned economy is what brought the USSR from being a poor, backwards-ass agrarian country in 1917, to defeating the Nazis and being the second power of the world by the 60s.
Read some theory, buddy. Marx in particular. I know he's probably a capitalist pig by your estimations, but it might do you some good.
Dude I'm a Marxist-Leninist. Saying that Amazon is a centrally planned behemoth of efficiency amounts to saying that the capitalist will sell us the very rope with which they'll hang them, you're misunderstanding my comments
Also, where does Marx talk about the efficiency of markets and inefficiency of central planning????
Not really, though. I mean, if you want to stick to looking at the last 2000 years, we still have cities that were fed in a feudal rather than capitalist system. Not that those systems were better or more efficient mobilizing labor, but the problem you're referring to wasn't really there.
That's not to mention at least several examples in the anthropological and archaeological record of large scale societies that did not rely on what we define as capitalism to feed their people.
I think it's a pretty crazy oversimplification to say capitalism just popped up as a solution to a problem.
Feudal societies are notably horrendous at efficient resource distribution, and don't get me started on the weird fetishization of reciprocity economies.
There's a reason that capitalist economies exploded in growth once the main features of modern capitalism took root, and it sure as shit ain't because capitalists are just that eager to contribute to the national good.
And those societies, much like any pre-modern societies, did not feed their people particularly reliably. Notably, when the Roman Empire united the Mediterranean under a unified proto-capitalist market, famine conditions drastically reduced (though very much were not completely eliminated, mind you). Not because the Roman Empire was particularly concerned about the plight of the poor - it very much was not. But because market economies and capitalist (or proto-capitalist) investment behaviors can redirect excess resources from Region A, to Region B which lacks them, with astounding speed and responsiveness, and with minimal additional labor or material investment (at least compared to alternative methods).
The problem was inefficient methods of resource distribution. Capitalism was the solution. Modern technology, both material and organizational, allows us other choices now, but capitalism didn't spread because it was just the chic aesthetic of the time. Capitalism spread because it is significantly more efficient than feudal or guild/mercantilist economies.
David Graeber has written two ~700 page anthropology books that pretty much debunk this entire line of thinking, one of them a collaboration with archaeologist David Wengrow. That latter includes an almost immediate refutation of the utopian egalitarian hunter gatherer bands that so many pop scientists love to idealize, the same fetishization that you're talking about. They're pretty rigorous about it.
You should really check them out. 'Debt: the first 5000 years' and 'The Dawn of Everything', if you want I can pop the audiobooks on google drive and DM you the link.
I literally just came off listening to both of them in the span of 2 weeks, which is why I see such a generalized statement as "Capitalism was a solution to inefficient resource distribution" as a bit silly, because no one just thought, "oh you know what we need? Capitalism! It will be the solution!"
It has an insanely long history originating from pre-coinage, debt-based societies, some of which had huge populations. They definitely rail against the "agricultural revolution > cities" line of thinking, noting that archaeological evidence across the globe for agriculture shows the whole process took something around 3000 years, during which, again, there were mega-sites (essentially cities) that relied on a mix of agrarian and hunting and gathering.
The second book is, granted, more about hierarchical structures in ancient civilizations and Debt is more about social inequality when it comes to money, but I really really suggest you check em out. Lmk if you want that google drive link, I just gotta upload em
We may be miscommunicating a bit here, because I don't mean to imply that capitalism sprung into being wholly formed, or that it was something that was consciously pursued; rather, that capitalism, once the main features that we would recognize came into being, put down roots and spread because it was a more efficient solution to an extant problem, or, if 'solution' sounds too final, a more efficient alternate means to tribal/feudal/guild/mercantilist economies of addressing the problem of resource distribution inherent to complex societies.
Like how traditions of banking spread because they're more efficient than allowing money to be hoarded - not because the ruling class up and says "Banking, what a wonderful idea!", but because polities whose institutions tolerate, mesh with, or allow for the innovation, ceteris paribus, end up in a superior position over those which do not, because they are in possession of a solution (to hoarding, in the case of banking) of increased efficiency than non-banking solutions, making polities which have banking or banking-like institutions the norm over time.
That being said, I've put both of those books on my to-read list, because they sound excellent.
We might be, and I'm definitely not an expert or that immediately knowledgeable (hence, why I just listened to two long-ass books in two weeks), but even your banking example doesn't really satisfy me. I get what you're saying -- not that banking or capitalism were a spontaneous solution or decision or conscious at all, but moreso that they solved a certain problem many human societies had, and therefore it was further adopted, and further, and further, an almost natural propensity to spread. In some sense, there must be some underlying force that's pushing capitalism and banking along, because otherwise we wouldn't have their dominance, today.
But that is still the core idea the authors push back against in those two books. I'd probably argue that banking didn't spread because it solved the problem (hoarding money), but that it emerged out of early hierarchical societies whose states, themselves, hoarded primitive "money" (grain) and lent it out to farmers at interest, and that the underlying force we're looking for that caused it's eventual spread is the concept of debt or becoming whole, itself. But then I am also getting into the territory of banking as some natural sociological phenomenon that was destined to be furthered and furthered , which is, again, exactly what those two books seek to dispel, especially Debt.
I'd like to continue, but this would definitely work better as an in-person conversation where we could push back and forth against ideas, but I do have to work :/
Or it's because of nitrogen fertilizers and the scientific method vastly improving productivity.
One of the two.
Nitrogen fertilizers don't date to the early 17th century, when this trend of explosive economic growth becomes apparent in early capitalist states, unless you're counting four-field rotation farming, itself only adopted because of the market-driven demands of early capitalist societies.
I tend to draw a distinction between mercantilism and capitalism, and I think you're brushing over the economic rape of half the world for that explosion of Colonial European wealth, but it's certainly true that the line can get blurry when you're discussing the exact difference between a noble offering an early chemist patronage and a capitalist paying an employee to come up with ideas he can exploit while paying them a fraction of its value.