Hi all,
I’m seeing a lot of hate for capitalism here, and I’m wondering why that is and what the rationale behind it is. I’m pretty pro-capitalism myself, so I want to see the logic on the other side of the fence.
If this isn’t the right forum for a political/economic discussion-- I’m happy to take this somewhere else.
Cheers!
You’d like Marxism. The whole point is that Capitalism is our dominant ideology because it was more efficient than feudalism, but now e have the tools to build a system more efficient than capitalism and we should build that instead. Capitalism is the most efficient system we’ve built so far, but it’s very obviously not the most efficient system we can build.
I don’t see how that’s obvious. Can you give me the rationale for this other system?
The rationale for capitalism is, essentially, the information problem. Basically, no one person has enough information to decide where a society’s resources should be distributed. An analogy I’ve heard is: how should society decide whether they should build a bridge or a tunnel (one takes more wood, the other takes more steel)? The answer is extremely complicated, depending on society’s capacity for producing wood and steel, people’s desire for either a bridge or tunnel, and future expectations of the need for wood or steel. The answer is given by prices, which encode this information and incentivize making the right choice.
If wood is cheaper, it means there’s more wood available and no one expects a huge need of wood to pop up soon. The same for steel, labor, land, and all the other resources that go into building a tunnel or bridge. Society is incentivized to build it for the lowest cost, which also happens to be the most efficient way to do it.
Is there a system which can do better? Would love to hear about it.
And also, I’m very scared when people suggest “down with capitalism!” because it’s a pretty decent system and I worry about tearing society down unless we have very good reasons to believe it’ll be better for it.
This is a great rationale for markets and prices, but it isn’t a rationale for capitalism per se. It is possible for non-capitalist systems to use markets and prices.
I am not a Marxist.
There is a different philosophical rationale for what is wrong with capitalism and why an alternative is necessary. I can provide links to the comments in this thread where I try to explain it if you are interested. I am on Mastodon, so I have a character limit to deal with
Other than the decent system ruining our future, because a preventable catastrophe has been left to unfold because of corporate greed, the analogy is senseless from a pure logical sense. Of course you aren’t just gonna pick the cheapest option when deciding to plan a tunnel or a bridge, you go with the option that makes the most sense. The information problem is of course more about how we knoe the desires to be fulfilled, but even there, don’t you think, that most desires, that capitalism fullfills are nothing more but artificial. Nodoby would desire a bigger car, if a bigger car would not exist. And while it is true that former socialist countries had that problem, of not meeting peoples desires, new forms of socialism could utalize the internet to have a democratic edge on that for example. I would highly recommend you, to step out of your neoliberal bubble, and read Thomas Piketty’s “A quick history of equality”, and look up PlasticPills on Youtube, he has some really interresting videos on how capitalism forges us.
How would that system work and how would it account for minorities? Should people be allowed to do as they see fit even if the majority determines it to be a waste of time or resources? The second you start getting into areas of central planning is when the oppression starts. If your proposed system is more smaller communities, that is when the famine starts.
I know it seems old to say that this has all been tried before but it really has. The USSR started as a unity of small communities (soviets) and they found that they could not run a society that way so they centralized planning. Racism played a part with the Holodomor, literally taking food from the most fertile region in the USSR and ensuring that Russians had enough. Anyone who was not Russian was worse off under the USSR which is why you see the eastern European former Soviet block countries be so anti-communist and so anti-Russia. It is also why you see the Russians remembering it fondly. They were the benefactors as the majority in the system. They also left the USSR rather than be in a majority Muslim USSR as Eastern European countries split off.
So, that’s all fine and well you might say but that’s not true Marxism because they centralized planning. The Chinese agreed with you which is why they refused to centralize for decades causing huge famines. They too eventually centralized planning. They too have used this economic power to oppress minorities.
You can argue that Marxism is more of an ideal that you are striving towards (and Marx himself did argue that) and that is the current CCP argument. They have a mixed economy like any other but they do not allow any party other than themselves which provides no check on power at all. It begrudgingly allows businesses but has no checks on their power until it endangers the efforts of the state. As long as the state, people, and businesses align in efforts, they are more efficient…and we’re unironically at the definition of National Socialism.
I think these conversations died a long time ago so people forgot how to have them and relate to them in a way that they can understand. I also think that way too many people view socialism as a catchall for forcing through the changes they would rather see in society instead of doing the groundwork to actually change society. Giving more economic power to the majority won’t make it less racist, you just gave the racists more power.