That's basically capitalism in a nutshell. The expropriation of the product of labour by a capitalist class, carried out under threat of starvation.
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Communism?
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That's basically capitalism in a nutshell. The expropriation of the product of labour by a capitalist class, carried out under threat of starvation.
Ideal capitalism is a classless society, every single person can qualify to meet the demands of being a burgeois. They just have to accumulate enough money to and it is done. It extremely hard without the starting capital and the connection, but as a theoretical concept it is possible.
In feudal (i.e. caste system) society class change was no way possible as a result only of your own action (if you saved the life of the king in a battle he usually promoted you to the nobility, but it was not automatic).
Ideal capitalism is not a classless society, because for there to be some who own, and other who labour, you have to have a division between an owning class and a labouring class. The issue of social mobility among those two classes is a secondary issue, and does not make the society classless.
It is certainly true that capitalism allows, in principle, for more mobility than a feudalism which insisted that you were born into a class and stayed there forever. But the difference should not be overstated either way; there was more de facto mobility in feudalism than it theoretically permitted, and there is less mobility in capitalism than it theoretically allows. Because after all, the whole point of profiting from a capitalist enterprise is to pay less for the labour that creates your product than you can get selling that product; i.e. the whole process of waged labour under capitalism makes the rich richer.
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I own a life insurance and some strange virtual investment stock, but I also earn money through labor (the vast majority of my earnings come from labor). Who I am, a 5% capitalist 95% proletar? There are no classes because the distinction between the owning class and laboring class is diffuse whereas in a feudal society you are either noble or not. The definition of classes therefore are real in a feudallike society while arbitrary in a capitalist one.
If the price of the labor grows faster than the price of capital, than the richer lose comparative advantages. Being richer does mean nothing, we have a more or less monotonous economical growth, in order to move upwards in the social ladder you have to beat the Joneses. If your income has increased by less than 3.43% in 2014 (on PPP basis) you have become poorer, because that's the baseline to compare with (the world GDP growth rate). Till the 60s-70s the rich-poor gap closed while nowadays (at least in the First World) it is again increasing. It is a point to debate that in a FIAT money system what is the price of capital (the system was designed exactly in order to avoid supply side problems for investments) but it is not how the ideal capitalism works, but deviations because humans cheat the system.
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"You're wrong but I won't say why or how."
Great contribution there
.You: In a similar manner, it could be argued that all attempts to overthrow monarchy and form Republican societies were doomed to failure
Me: You can argue that, sure. I won't, because it's pretty clear from observation that as a hypothesis it's just plain wrong.
How can you not say it's wrong? Monarchies have been successfully overthrown and replaced with republican societies, and those republican societies have lasted generations in the case of the USA. See the USA, or Germany, or France (repeatedly...). Now, maybe they won't remain republican forever, but that's a different issue entirely.
Then enlighten me.
Hail Comrade Stalin?
Wait what? If it says how society is to be governed then it de facto is a "theory of government". Marx posited a stateless society, remember? A revolution that would lead first to a dictatorship of the proletariat, which would see the state eventually wither away into a communist society.
Read what I said again. You basically subscribe to a legal system under anarcho-capitalism. You pay Judge Brown a regular fee, and he'll work to enforce his legal system's property laws (if any) over your property. If someone violates your property rights, his job is to bring them to justice.
Now, I'm not saying such a system would work in reality (it's bonkers, IMHO), and as I noted, David Friedman does point out that, if nations still exist, then a rump government would seem the least bad way of ensuring national defence (basically the Department of Defence + tax collectors + nothing else)... but honestly it seems as stateless as Marx's communist utopia.
Well how would you describe capitalism at heart then? I mean, let's consider the two big, diametrically opposed economic systems, and a third which I suppose merits mentioning:
Capitalism: free exchange of goods & services, usually for a common medium of exchange, with property rights and all that.
Communism: free exchange of goods & services, but without money, and property rights only for "personal" items.
Subsistence: free exchange of goods & services, but without money, property rights vague at best, the great majority of all economic activity is necessary for mere survival.
Now granted, there are degrees of each, but... haven't we in most (all?) cases moved from subsistence to a degree of capitalism in history?
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Not really. Capitalism is a purely economic order - it doesn't say anything about social classes etc. Granted it requires certain things to exist (like property rights, and presumably some means of enforcing them), but that's all. It's not an all-encompassing ideology, nor a utopian one.
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Not really. Capitalism is a purely economic order - it doesn't say anything about social classes etc. Granted it requires certain things to exist (like property rights, and presumably some means of enforcing them), but that's all. It's not an all-encompassing ideology, nor a utopian one.
Economics freedom is inherently part of capitalism. Otherwise Medieval France can also be considered as a capitalist society.
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It's not hard to figure out; are you dependent on selling your labour, or not? By your own account, you are: if you did not work, you would starve. Therefore you must work, but your potential employers, being in possession of capital, are not in such an urgent situation. Therefore you are dependent on those who own capital, in exactly the same way that a feudal peasant was dependent on lords who owned land. Because you are dependent, you have to give the product of your labour away to your employer/lord in exchange for subsistence. You will work your whole life and struggle to accumulate anything, while your employer/lord will accumulate all the wealth that your labour has accumulated.
As already pointed out, the question of social mobility is a separate one; the real issue is why there is a social ladder at all. Especially when it it is ladder defined by those who own wealth they did not create.
All this stuff about fiat money is a red herring by and for people who do not understand what money really is. It is irrelevant.
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It is not anymore an issue of subsistence. If I will not chose to work I can have a life which I would call miserable, but I already have more wealth than quite a few Third World people would earn throughout their whole life, so I have the choice to move to despicable rathole and have no starvation issue for the rest of my life. Though I have to work if I want to have that stupid BMW or that tropical vacation. Am I forced to sell my labor?
Thats where red herring about FIAT money comes in, namely what is the cost of capital. Is capital truely represent delayed consumption? That case it quite natural that you can inherit the capital too. The capital Rich Robert has is the value of the work of his great-great-great grandfather which has just so much more value nowadays. If money is created out of thin air however this is a completely different story.
"You're wrong but I won't say why or how."
Great contribution there
I don't have the time or inclination to write you a treatise. It's all available online, you can learn for yourself if you want.
The point was that they were EVENTUALLY overthrown, but every failed peasant rebellion for the previous thousand years was taken as proof of the god-given immutability of the feudal order. I'm suggesting you are making the same mistake those nobles did, assuming that merely because it hasn't happened yet it can never happen.
Well, you know, time and place and all that. There are political boards that would be better venues. I'll make some comments, but I can't offer a fully sourced and supported formal argument; if you want that, you'd be best off going to the original materials.
I'm in the camp that would regard the USSR under Stalin as State Capitalism, so no, not really.
But it does not say HOW the proletariat are to govern themselves, or to structure society. There is no text laying out how what a communist society should look like, because none of us can imagine that any more than someone in the bronze age temple economy could imagine how societies in the iron age would be structured. What we do have are lessons learned from the process of revolutionary praxis and the self-organisation of the working class, but even they were conducted under conditions dominated by capitalist structures and ideology.
I do understand what you are saying. In actual fact, this has sort of already been done; the Code of Hammurabi was in a sense an advert detailing how this particular local authority conducted its business. My point remains, if you have a DoD, then you are divided into separated groups, and if you have tax collectors, you have to be able to enforce collection, and if you protect property, you have to have a distinct armed body capable of applying violent coercion. If you abolish private property, you have no need of any of these things.
I would describe as mostly feudalism stripped of it's mysticism and magical thinking.
Yes, absolutely. I'm not denying the historical trajectory at all; the argument is that with the advent of scientific industrialism, it is no longer necessary - that a post scarcity society has no need of property rights, tax collectors, or armies. Back when atomic power was new, its proponents argued that it would be "too cheap to meter"; that is, the cost of administering a system of charges and collections would be higher than the cost of production. And while that did not quite work out, that was precisely the sort of thing that Marx was anticipating, and is still on the cards - after all the amount of free energy falling on the planet from the sun is vastly in excess of any forseeable human consumption.
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Although you were addressing someone else, this is what I mean by feudalism stripped of its mysticism and romance, if you will. All that is left is the cold distinction of those who live by their property, and those who live by selling their labour. This is however definitely still a class system - or do you really believe the ordinary citizen has as much ability to influence policy as a wealthy donor to political parties?
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Maybe you do, but if you really do, you;d have to have a lot more wealth than the overwhelming majority of Western workers, who are barely in the black in the end of the month. Even if you, individually, could do this, the entirety of the Western working class could not; so it fails to address the nature of social structure and class division.
No it doesn't, is the short answer. As Adam Smith put it, ""Nevertheless, the 'real value' of such a commodity produced in advanced society is measured by the labour which that commodity will command in exchange."... that is, a product that required X amount of labour to produce is equivalent for, and exchangeable with, a different commodity embodying an equivalent quantity of labour. But as David Ricardo pointed out, ""The value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not as the greater or less compensation which is paid for that labour." Which is to say: a commodity is as valuable as the labour it embodies, rather than the price that was paid for that labour. Capitalist accumulation rests precisely on this point: short changing workers of the value they produce. All capitalism is a process by which those with capital steal the wealth created by those who are so poor as to need to sell their labour.
So no, it has nothing to do with deferred consumption; it's about expropriation and exploitation. And in order to maintain this dependency of workers on capitalists, capitalism, which is vastly over-productive, must manufacture artificial scarcity. Thus, capitalism is choking the prospect of post-scarcity in its cradle because this is in the interest of those who have power over society. The dead hand of capitalism, having fulfilled its historic role of overthrowing feudalism, is now holding humanity back.
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Note that I did not wrote that I can live a life I wish if I stop working. I can live a life similar to a poor worker in Bangladesh (and I have to relocate to Bangladesh), which is above starvation level. To have a nice middle class life i have to work however. Am I forced to aim middle class living standards?
Now lets see the labor productivity for some European countries from Eurostat
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table.do?tab=table&language=en&pcode=tsdec310
Apparently a German laborer produces 42.8 € value per hours worked while a Bulgarian 4.9 €. Are German laborers 8x as intelligent/strong/dextrous than their Bulgarian counterpart (should have been corrected by PPS and have to be done in a sector by sector comparison... qualitatively it would still be same, maybe a factor of 3 instead of 8)? Or the infrastructure (capital investment) where the German and the Bulgarian worker works plays some role?
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Yes but my point was about social classes remember.
So what if they were eventually overthrown? You said that all attempts to overthrow a monarchy & replace it with a republican society were doomed to failure. Nowhere did you mention or hint at the fate of the republican society.
As far as communism goes, my position is that it the utopian kind can't happen so long as humans are still human, and that human nature has remained fundamentally unchanged for the last several thousands of years at least.
That does of course mean that it could happen, but you'd need to radically alter a lot of basic human nature first. Maybe that'll happen.
I wouldn't worry. We've managed 12 pages without descending into HoI forum behaviour apparently, so I guess the mods are looking kindly upon us here
.Well okay, mostly that was sarcasm though. More seriously, what I meant is more like this:
1. Human nature is incompatible with far-Left ideals.
2. Far-Left types ignore human nature in their quest for Progress.
3. Ergo, Far-Left types ignore reality.
We can make educated guesses though. A state typically has some kind of law-making body for example, so a stateless one would presumably not have such a thing. So how do things get done? Well the most obvious answer that springs to mind is social networks and the idea of the spontaneous emergence of order. If a factory needs repairing, people will notice it and get together and fix it, for example. Further, we can posit long-distance social networks because we can allow for telephones, the internet and such, so in theory quite large operations could be mounted without any directing intelligence.
In the realm of the military stuff, then yes anarcho-capitalism requires a state. But in the same way you criticised me for talking about nations in the same breath as communism, let's consider the anarcho-capitalist ideal - that is, a whole world living under the anarcho-capitalist system (insofar as it can be called a system when you can choose which legal system to live under, if any...). That would be as stateless as the communist ideal, no?
Hmm. I mean, under feudalism you had a hereditary nobility with legally recognised special rights and privileges. Serfs were legally tied to their land, except in specific circumstances (like living safely in a city for a year or whatever). Even the concept of wage slavery doesn't equal serfdom after all.
Fair enough. However...
1. Property rights: Aside from where and how you draw the line between private and personal property (to use the usual split people here seem to like), property rights make so many things so much easier. Who owns Buckingham Palace? Queen Elizabeth II. I am not Queen Elizabeth II. Therefore I would be committing an injustice against her if I were to attempt to, say, take Buckingham Palace from her without her consent.
2. Tax collectors: So long as there is legitimate government business, it'll need to be funded somehow. And I can't see a future in which there is no such business.
3. Armies: So long as there are irreconcilable differences of opinion, there will be a need for armies, or at least police.
On the subject of legitimate government business, I have one simple question: are people ever motived by non-material reasons?
If the answer is "yes", then you need a legal system of some kind. For example, suppose I want to rule other people, because I like personal power. Suppose I then find people willing to share in my plan to secretly build a robot army and take over the (post-scarcity) world. Who stops me?
I suspect a lot of that is in fact used one way or the other. Paving the Sahara with solar panels might be great for our energy needs, but it might also do bad things to the global climate
. Or good things of course. Still, got to be careful - I'd rather my unlimited solar energy come from orbital collectors.+ + +
This is where I think the misunderstanding comes in. Capitalism is an economic order, but communism is a social order - ie it is not just limited to economics, but also a lot more besides (eg class systems, government (if any), etc).
Point is, you can't just live by capitalism, because life is more than just economics. Instead of one ri- erm, ideology to rule them all, you have several. You can be an evangelical Christian capitalist or a who-cares-agnostic capitalist. You can believe capitalism & democracy go hand in hand, or that national government (but not the economy) is best left in the hands of the enlightened few.
Instead of a one-size-fits-all kind of ideology, it's a mix-and-match world over here on the right wing
.Most of the time, sure the wealthy donor will have more influence (though it seems most of them are opposed to the Trump, unlike the people, which is amusing
). Then again, capitalism doesn't promise equality of outcome, or even of opportunity. It works well with equality before the law (guess why I support legal aid for the poor), but remember it's not much about government.- 3
Youtube channels doing Starcraft 2 coverage and live plays of various games, aren't starving though nor are they under threat of starvation. If anything, they prefer it to lacking money for their content creation and access lists. A very different image than what people think is real. The reality is different than the idealistic dreams and nightmares born of propaganda and mind control.
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"You're wrong but I won't say why or how."
Great contribution there
You: In a similar manner, it could be argued that all attempts to overthrow monarchy and form Republican societies were doomed to failure
Me: You can argue that, sure. I won't, because it's pretty clear from observation that as a hypothesis it's just plain wrong.
How can you not say it's wrong? Monarchies have been successfully overthrown and replaced with republican societies, and those republican societies have lasted generations in the case of the USA. See the USA, or Germany, or France (repeatedly...). Now, maybe they won't remain republican forever, but that's a different issue entirely.
Then enlighten me.
Hail Comrade Stalin?
Wait what? If it says how society is to be governed then it de facto is a "theory of government". Marx posited a stateless society, remember? A revolution that would lead first to a dictatorship of the proletariat, which would see the state eventually wither away into a communist society.
Read what I said again. You basically subscribe to a legal system under anarcho-capitalism. You pay Judge Brown a regular fee, and he'll work to enforce his legal system's property laws (if any) over your property. If someone violates your property rights, his job is to bring them to justice.
Now, I'm not saying such a system would work in reality (it's bonkers, IMHO), and as I noted, David Friedman does point out that, if nations still exist, then a rump government would seem the least bad way of ensuring national defence (basically the Department of Defence + tax collectors + nothing else)... but honestly it seems as stateless as Marx's communist utopia.
Well how would you describe capitalism at heart then? I mean, let's consider the two big, diametrically opposed economic systems, and a third which I suppose merits mentioning:
Capitalism: free exchange of goods & services, usually for a common medium of exchange, with property rights and all that.
Communism: free exchange of goods & services, but without money, and property rights only for "personal" items.
Subsistence: free exchange of goods & services, but without money, property rights vague at best, the great majority of all economic activity is necessary for mere survival.
Now granted, there are degrees of each, but... haven't we in most (all?) cases moved from subsistence to a degree of capitalism in history?
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Not really. Capitalism is a purely economic order - it doesn't say anything about social classes etc. Granted it requires certain things to exist (like property rights, and presumably some means of enforcing them), but that's all. It's not an all-encompassing ideology, nor a utopian one.
Your quote tags are wrong and attributed to the wrong person.
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Alright, for all of you that say Stalin was more State Capitalist than communist, let's go back before Stalin.
Do you remember Lenin? Well he recognized that their economy was going to trash under the communist system and so implemented the New Economic Plan, which added capitalism back into it. Notice the theme so far? Every communist revolution started off as being as close to communism as possible, but eventually started to go slowly back into capitalism?
Do you remember Lenin? Well he recognized that their economy was going to trash under the communist system and so implemented the New Economic Plan, which added capitalism back into it. Notice the theme so far? Every communist revolution started off as being as close to communism as possible, but eventually started to go slowly back into capitalism?
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A post-scarcity communist nation would be better in turn.
It was too early. It requires certain technological innovations to be feasible.
So did feudalism and patronage
Lots of things are "evident" that are not so.
Communism has some fundamental issues that prevent a human society from enacting it properly. Would you say that people are different from one another? Because if you do, that one fact (and whether you say it or not, it is a fact), means that communism will fail. Lets say that you have a communist revolution that actually makes an honest try at establishing "true" communism (whether or not that is feasible in the first place is highly debatable, but for the sake of argument lets say that it is). They go about redistributing property, eliminating the people who fight to retain what is theirs, and successfully make everyone equal in terms of material wealth. Now the government that has accomplished this, by necessity, violent and painful readjustment on society dissolves itself. What happens then? Some people are smarter than others. Some are harder working. Some are far more capable. Even absent a system that favors those traits (and most successful systems favor those traits) they will still rapidly begin accumulating more than their lazier, dumber, or more incompetent peers. What now? Short of a massive government apparatus designed to repress those more capable people, to force them into mediocrity, you will rapidly see inequality develop again. So now you've got two choices. You can keep a massive, repressive government to force mediocrity on your population (which will inevitably develop its own preferences and class system where some people have power and others do not), or you can let the new systems grow out on their own, in which case they will benefit the people who created them. The whole concept of "mankind lived thousands of years without structure or class" is a non-starter. A tribal society where your groupings are an extended family only really needs the family structure to really function. Societies with millions and hundreds of millions of people require more complex systems to exist, and whether you care for it or not, that is the world we live in now.
Communism is impossible. It cannot work with humans being as they are, and a system that attempts to change human nature, as opposed to human behavior (New Soviet Man anyone?) will eventually exhaust itself trying. With aliens, the species would have to be biologically geared for it to work... they would have to be all the same. Same intelligence, same level of motivation, same capability set. If those things are universal to the species, then yes... communism is theoretically possible. Without that biological baseline though, it simply can't happen in the way that a long dead German philosopher wanted it to.
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I agree with most of what you have said, however I disagree with this. Capitalism and communism are both "political economies." Neither communism nor capitalism exists in a vacuum, and each exists in a spectrum. Capitalism requires laws supporting it's facets to effectively function, and changes dramatically based on what those laws are. Corporations are an artificial structure created by law, however have an enormous impact on how modern capitalism functions, and are just one example of how political economy shapes both, albeit in different ways.
The reason why communism is a bomb is because of the people who made it up and used it as a weapon to put themselves on top.
It's just a tool of totalitarian societies, the same way youtube has become a tool of Live Play content creators and ads. It certainly works, but that doesn't mean it's a good goal. It depends on people's perspective and preferences. The goal of Totalitarian cultures and leaders is to change the world, so that slavery and equality becomes feasible. It is not the goal of changing or improving the self, the individual, at stake. But changing the world, so that the individuals don't have to change. As you mentioned, the human species would have to change to make communism into a good and just goal.
I'll grant you that capitalism requires certain political things to function - like property rights etc - but I think it's hard to go beyond that. Capitalism doesn't care what kind of government you have for example, or whether you have social classes, whereas communism (at least the Marxist version) has a political vision - a classless, government-less society. You can have a capitalist economy under a dictatorship or a direct democracy, and you can have capitalism with or without slavery, etc etc etc.
That's what I mean when I say it's an economic order and not a political one. I mean, it tends to be associated with liberal democratic countries and all that, but the two don't have to go hand in hand (hi modern China).
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