Decades of totalizing propaganda, along with merciless suppression of alternatives.
Because capitalists can afford all of the bot farms and media adds.
It really makes you actually understand the whole, “the revolution will not be televised”
In the US specifically, capitalism has been taught as the only way towards success. This has happened for decades, at least. It is deeply engrained in that society.
When capitalism fails, as has been apparent so many times lately, it is blamed on something else. And as the excuses run out, the scapegoats get more and more inventive.
That’s one reason why the current administration wants to you blame immigrants for everything: because it buys more time for the capitalists to make more money and shift the narrative again.
Capitalism is easy to understand. You do something and you get something - even if you cheat by “outsmarting” someone else. The reward is tied to your actions. Like doggy treats. At no point is it revealed that your effort might be worth more than you get. This doesn’t matter because it appears as a direct transaction. Work = pay. It’s not though, but that’s what it appears like to anyone who doesn’t think further than to getting their paycheck.
Socialism disconnects the transactions. Roughly put, the work that everyone puts into the system is used to pay out to everyone. You’re no longer working directly for the hand that feeds you.
Like many places elsewhere, Denmark has social security system that sort of works like this. Everyone pays taxes and the pool of money is distributed to those who needs it, based on all kinds of things other than what people paid into the system themselves. It disconnects the effort and the payout.
This has good and bad effects in comparison to capitalism. A bad thing is that people who don’t understand the larger picture will still look at it from a transactional point of view. Suddenly they think they deserve to get free money, and start making up their own explanations of why. They’ll also look at it as a zero sum game, where they believe that if anyone else gets something then they must also have the same or else they’d feel that other people take more than they deserve. All kinds of racism and fasicm grows in those capitalistic arguments when applied to a social system.
The good thing though is that they’re actually right in saying that they deserve more even if they don’t contribute. Everyone deserves more than nothing from a system. It’s possible, because it’s not a zero sum game. It raises the lower bar, and keeps more people healthy and thus capable of producing more.There’s this quote “a greatness of a nation can be measured by how it treats the poorest”. It’s a mis-quote, but it’s true. Capitalism can not achieve the same when there’s no lower boundary to poverty. It will still have the costs of sickness, homelessness and poverty even if it tries not to pay for it by closing their eyes. A socialist system is the key the solving this. So maybe we do sometimes pay people who doesn’t deserve it, but it’s still cheaper than to have to pay for the costs of the problems in capitalism.
Socialism is not welfare, nor is capitalism any form of doing something in favor of a reward. Your metaphor, I feel, does a disservice to understanding each.
Go ahead then. Tell like it is. In words that people understand.
Capitalism is a system where capital owners dominate the state and the commanding heights of the economy, socialism is a system where workers dominate the state and the commanding heights of the economy. Any confusion of welfare for socialism implies that systems where capitalists are the dominant force is still socialist if it gives welfare, but existing social democracies that follow this model depend on exploiting the global south to prop up this welfare while maintaining capitalist profits.
I was born into the US and was a liberal for most of my life. I can explicitly tell you why so many of my countrypeoples defend capitalism:
Because they have the political education of an infant. You are told from a young age by everyone you trust that communism is bad and you never EVER get told the truth. There is absolutely no grand structure for learning about politics that isn’t reactionary in nature.
What’s left is an infinitesimal number of people with both the requisite curiosity and social opportunity to break out of liberal thinking. Most people are ingrained and never challenged their entire lives.
The incentives for supporting capitalism and rejecting communism are powerful and alluring in this country. But it is not an excuse. The books are out there. You absolutely must read.
Three big reasons:
-
Capitalism thrives on the promise of social elevation. You can become billionaire too, you know, you just have to put in the work and be smart. And many are willing to sacrifice their living standards for the hope of making it big, however unlikely the latter is.
-
Capitalism is a current economic system in the majority of places, and most people are afraid of the change. They’d rather maintain the status quo - this is why, for example, socialist countries had majority of the population supporting socialism - not because they got enlightened to its potential, but because they already lived under it.
-
Privately owned media. Most people get their information from the corporate platforms, which, being owned by wealthy individuals benefitting heavily from capitalism, obviously downplay the horrors of capitalism and exacerbate issues of socialism. It is them who propel the “hope” narrative (see point 1) and thwart any serious attempts to popularise socialism. Even if you manage to host socialist media on socialist platforms and outplaying the algorithms, good luck getting corporate funding to make quality content with high level of reach when your platform is anti-corporate.
-
People use the word “capitalism” to mean different things.
If you ask someone “Should someone who doesn’t do any work get money from people who do?”, a lot of people would say no. And they’d probably think you’re talking about welfare or communism. But that’s capitalism. The guy who “owns” the company can sit at home and watch netflix while all his office workers make stuff, and he keeps the profits. If you frame it right, you can get people to agree with you or suffer some cognitive dissonance.
But none of that is what some people are thinking of when they think capitalism. They think “free markets” and “competition”. They often don’t really think about how that trends towards monopolies or cartels. Either because of magic, or “the government will prevent monopolies.” But not too much regulation. There’s got to be a few decades of suffering before an intervention, typically.
There’s also a lot of binary thinking. Either capitalism, or total state ownership and oppression.
Total state ownership isn’t oppression for most people, though, assuming it’s a worker-run state. It’s also a necessary step towards building a fully classless society.
Also, it’s really funny how people think that private ownership by a small percentage of the population is somehow better than state ownership. It’s peak temporarily embarrassed billionaire mentality.
People confuse private with independence and state with dominance because they don’t see the state as a product and tool of class struggle.
Precisely, Anna Louise Strong puts best it in This Soviet World:
Yep, almost done reading this book too!
it’s so good, I just love how full of optimism it is
Yep! My biggest problem with it is that the language surrounding national minorities is… Dated… But beyond that, it’s an excellent look at the Soviet Union!
conditioning
Short answer: people are dumb and gullible
Hi, I am probably one of the few right-libertarian capitalists on Lemmy (I love FOSS!). I’m also a former employee of the Foundation for Economic Education, one of the oldest libertarian institutions dedicated to explaining capitalism. I will do my best to give a big picture answer to your question, but it’s such a huge topic so feel encouraged to ask follow ups (in good faith please).
First of all, different people define capitalism different ways. When it’s proponents defend it, what we mean is a system of free markets and free enterprise based on a system of property rights. An essential part of this is the allocation of capital through investment, with profit and loss signals directing this capital. We don’t mean rich people trampling on the property rights of poor people; we would call this “corporatism” or “crony capitalist.” The current United States economy has capitalism in some areas, but corporatism in many others.
We believe that capitalism leads to the best possible outcomes for the most people. This doesn’t mean that its outcomes are perfect, or that there are zero people who get left behind (there certainly are), but that compared to all other existing possible systems, it is the best on a relative basis. Yes the rich get richer, but the poor also get richer relative to where they were in generations past (and, on average, over the course of their own individual lifespan). We also believe that capitalism is the most moral system in that it respects individual rights, or which a core part of this are their property rights. Systems that initiate force against peaceful people to take from some and redistribute to others violate people’s individual rights. This doesn’t mean that we oppose charity or don’t want to help people, we very much do, but that we see the initiation of force as a moral wrong in that pursuit.
We believe that capitalism is the only system that can lead to a consistent and rising quality of life for the masses for many reasons, but perhaps the biggest is the free price system. Prices being allowed to move through supply and demand, rather than being set by central planners, are necessary for the efficient allocation of scarce resources to their most needed ends. Without this, economic dysfunction is inevitable. (This is known as the Economic Calculation Problem or the Knowledge Problem, and the landmark essays in the history of economics that discuss it are Ludwig Von Mises’s “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” and F.A. Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”)
We know this to be true on a theoretical basis, but empirically looking historically and cross-culturally, we see that societies with more capitalism consistently outperform those with less capitalism. We see China’s economy dramatically advance by switching to an overwhelmingly capitalist mode of production, and economies that switch to socialist/communist mode of production stagnate and induce starvation and suffering. We don’t see the authoritarianism of communist nations as merely an accident of history, but as the necessary result of trying to force an impossible economic system to continue through its failure.
Capitalism, as we see it, requires a legal order that protects property rights (whether this legal order must come from government or not distinguishes “anarcho-capitalists” from “minarchists” who believe a small limited government is necessary). We do not believe that companies should be allowed to pollute other people’s property or cause damages to them, yet in a proper legal order we do not believe regulation is necessary to achieve this either. Instead, a system of common law and torts require damages to be paid to those whose rights are violated, with these damages to outweigh the benfits to corporations from taking such actions, thus incentivizing them not to engage in the rights violations to begin with. In our current system, corporations work with governments to regulate themselves out of such liability (this is called “regulatory capture”), which we oppose.
I’ve written a lot but only just touched the surface. With more narrow questions, I can provide more specific answers.
There’s a lot that’s fundamentally wrong with this comment, but I think I can hit the core pretty narrowly. You cannot disentangle capitalism from the state, the capitalist state is not outside of capitalism but is instead a core function of it. Corporatism and cronyism are not in opposition to capitalism, they are a later stage in capitalist development, as compared to earlier capitalism when markets are highly underdeveloped and instead very decentralized and anarchic.
You also have a deeply moralist analysis, not a materialist, logical analysis. There is nothing inherently good about private property rights, and justifying the theft of surplus value on the basis that it is already common practice and would require violence in the form of revolution to change it is a moralist argument. It is just as easy to say that the everyday violence of theft of surplus value is a violent attack on working people, who create all new value. We must make scientific, materialist arguments, not simply rely on emotional soundbites.
You also ignore imperialism as a function of capitalism as it develops. The expansionist nature of capitalism causes it to dominate developing countries, where a share of the spoils are used to uplift the imperial working class. This is why the poor often get richer in developed capitalist economies, not because capitalism lifts all, but because developed capitalist economies shift their greatest contradictions to the international scale.
When you move on to socialism, you are entirely wrong. For example, the marketization in China is found in their developing industries, where markets do play a progressive role. However, in their developed and critical industries, China uses central planning. This is because planned economies overtake marketization when production advances to the national and international scale. It isn’t a binary planned/market distinction that socialists advocate for, it’s instead looking at the level of development of the productive forces and using the correct method accordingly.
Monopolies are an inevitable result of capitalism, because as technology improves, it requires more input to maintain. We cannot simply break up monopoly without inefficiently destroying productive forces in the process. This is where cronyism and corporatism, as you describe it, come in. Socialism and planned economy solves these problems by using the developed productive forces according to scientific planning, which is far more efficient at this scale (and is why China is doing so much better than capitalist economies).
Even more totally planned economies like the USSR saw some of the most rapid economic growth on the planet. They did not introduce starvation, they took overwhelmingly backward societies and brought them at and beyond their peers in rapid time. Life expectancy doubled between Tsarism and socialism in a matter of decades. Famine, while common in Tsarist Russia, was eliminated by 1935 outside of wartime. GDP growth was extremely rapid, all without running into crisis of overproduction or falling profitability:
You write a lot about what you “oppose” about capitalism, but without a coherent understanding of the totality of the system, you are reduced to unactionable moral platitudes, rather than concrete actions that can be taken. You remove the state from the economy and pretend it can be made to work both in the interests of the people as a whole while also shrinking, despite the fact that capitalists prop up and dominate the state as a co-evolutionary process.
The solution is socialism. Planned economy for developed industry, marketization limited to developing industry, and as all industry develops, transition to full planning to a collective and scientific aim.
Hi. It is hard to give too much of a response to this, because you have ignored the definition of capitalism that I stated and instead responded based on a different one. If you wanted to argue that the definition of capitalism I stated inherently leads to imperialism, cronyism, and all the rest of what you’ve posited, so be it, but you have not actually made an argument for why it does so, and I certainly wouldn’t agree that it does.
A couple points though:
-
My argument presumes a moral position that individuals have rights that should be respected, a position that can be argued on either deontological or consequentialist grounds. It also presumes that society getting more prosperous is a good thing. I think 99% of people agree with both these claims. I can suggest many philosophers who have made the argument that there is something “inherently good” about this perspective at length, all with differing justifications. You can look at Michael Huemer (The Problem of Political Authority), Hayek (Law, Liberty & Legislation, and Consitution of Liberty), Murray Rothbard (Ethics of Liberty), Ayn Rand (many books), Robert Nozick (Anarchy, Statt, & Utopia), and there are many more.
-
The entire Marxist argument falls apart for me as soon as you say “Surplus Value.” There is no such thing. The concepts assumes both the false Labor Theory of Value, which is accepted by virtually no modern economists, and also assumes that there is no value provided via entrepreneurship and capital allocation, which is false. Entrepreneurship and capital allocation are both vital to a prosperous functioning economy in which all classes of people gain wealth, and are economically rewarded as such.
-
Imperialism is directly at odds with capitalism how I have defined it, which is how advocates of capitalism see it (when I say “advocates,” I don’t mean some random Republican politician or voter trying to make things that don’t fit together fit, but serious economists and philosophers who understand and support capitalism). It is inherently a violation of property rights, which is essential to have a system that can be called capitalist. If it is imperialist, it is by definition not capitalism.
-
Neither China or the United States is purely capitalist/socialist or centralized/decentralized, both are mixed economies, but China is drastically more capitalist and decentralized then it was a few decades ago, a period of time in which the nation moved from famine to prosperity. See Ronald Coase’s book How China Became Capitalist which discusses the specific capitalist reforms China undertook and how those directly caused increased standards of living for Chinese people.
-
I believe you are simply wrong about the ability of planned economies to function. Please see Ludwig Von Mises’s Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth for the canonical argument on this. It’s a short easy read, and available for free from the Mises Institute. Yes the Soviet Union had a period of industrialization which led to a strong increase in wealth, but this period did not last, and to the extent that period succeeded it required the ability to piggyback off the prices set in the West in free economies. Without that, any functioning central economic planning at all would have been impossible.
You misunderstand, just because you can describe something does not mean that it’s a useful or accurate description. Debating the correctness and accuracy of how we define systems and structures is core to socioeconomic debate, because without definitions that accurately describe the world and its processes, we are left with fantasy. I explained why your definition was incorrect, and responded to these weaknesses. Nevertheless, I’ll address your points directly.
-
Moralism is not a base for scientific consensus. I already addressed the inherent failures of this form of argumentation. You even open yourself up for counter by saying “society getting more prosperous is a good thing,” when it is capitalism that is holding back common prosperity by funneling the wealth of society into the hands of a few. We must make our analysis based on materialism, on scientific fact, not the vague idea that stopping wage slavery is wrong because it requires force.
-
You are taking an incredibly eurocentric and chauvanist claim by saying “no modern economist believes in surplus value.” Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, and many more economists vehemontly disagree with you. Some of the most respected economists on the world stage are Chinese, such as Cheng Enfu. At best, your point is purely ignorant, at worst it’s racist. In any case, management of capital is labor, but ownership itself does not create value. All new value comes from labor, be it managerial or not, and the portion of the day workers labor for means beyond their own wages is the surplus that forms the basis of profits.
-
This is, frankly, naive. The version of capitalism you advocate for is not a real thing, and does not exist. You are moving from the realm of fact to the realm of utopianism. Just because you are uncomfortable with the inevitable consequences of marketization and private property relations does not mean you get to hide by defining them away. It is a simple, proven fact that in the real world, when markets progress, they trend towards monopolization. When they reach the boundaries of the national scale, they seek new markets internationally, which allows them to leverage their advanced position to exploit developing countries. This is capitalism as it actually exists. Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism is a short article going over how this system came to be and evolved in the modern day.
-
China did not take on “capitalist reforms.” China marketized underdeveloped industries, as the material base of marketization is decentralized production. For industries of a national scale and critical importance, China maintains dominance and planned economy. This is Marxist economics. See Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Concise Guide for a basic, entry-level explanation that requires no background in Marxist economics. China is a socialist economy, in the primary stage. The US is a capitalist economy as it is dominated by private capital even at the national and international scale. See the aforementioned Cheng Enfu’s handy diagram:
- Mises is a clown that was disproven the second socialism began outperforming capitalist economies. The Soviet Union, despite being largely a siege economy, was again one of the most rapidly developing countries in history. Trying to attribute their successes to pilfering from the west is, again, chauvanist at worst and ignorant at best, and in any case would require an enormous level of proof on your part that you neglected to provide. Soviet economic planning avoided the crisis of overproduction and the crisis of profitability that shook the capitalist world, proving that they were independent from their problems. The economic calculation problem was invented by a clown, before the invention of computers. For an explanation, see Towards a New Socialism, which explains potential economic planning beyond price. You could even skip the book and just read Cockshott’s WordPress article on socialist computation.
Overall, I’m disappointed. You presented yourself as something of an expert, but you don’t even pretend to entertain essential functions of traditional debate like discussing definitions, you just take the definitions as a given. This is hardly taken seriously even by mainstream liberal economists.
(Side note on Cockshott, massive transphobe, unfortunately. His work on cybernetics is valuable, but his overall Marxist knowledge should be taken with heavy grains of salt due to his fundamentally incorrect understanding of dialectical materlaism).
-
-
I have to admit, Lemmy is so politically uniform that I kinda welcome something else.
Question: how do libertarian capitalists expect to combat corporatism? If anything, capital has a tendency to grow or die, and economies of scale along with vertical integration dictate higher survivability and profits of larger businesses vs smaller. And so, corporate structures appear again. What can be used to prevent it?
Also, if you allow me to comment on some of the key points raised…
The rich get richer, but the poor also get richer
One of the most common criticisms of late-stage capitalism is exactly that poor do not get richer anymore.
For example, here are nominal and inflation-adjusted median household incomes in the US:
Considering that inflation metrics count the whole economy, and not particularly basics like housing (which went through the roof and yet accounts for a huge share of expenses in a median and especially poor household), it’s not unreasonable to assume poor people are worse off than they were 20 years before.
Prices being allowed to move through supply and demand, rather than being set by central planners, are necessary for the efficient allocation of scarce resources to their most needed ends.
The socialist criticism is that “most profitable” and “most needed” are two different things. Suppose you made a meal, and offer it to a millionaire and a broke homeless individual. Most likely, the latter will need it more, but won’t be able to pay for it as much as the former.
We see China’s economy dramatically advance by switching to an overwhelmingly capitalist mode of production
And we see USSR economy skyrocketing after socialists came to power. And yes, extreme growth went way beyond New Economic Policy.
What we need to look for here, if we must be honest, is externalities. China switching to a more capitalist mode was net benefit because it enabled global trade as opposed to relative economic isolation. One of the main issues dragging socialist economies behind was that, being formed mostly of a few countries tilted into extreme poverty by previous regimes, they never got to access the same volume of trade and capital investment as their capitalist counterparts. When even these markets started to crumble through the Cold War, China had little other options.
USSR, on the other end, started on a low enough point that first advancements were relatively easy and investments paid off rather quickly. And, of course, there’s gulag, too.
Well, the wealth gap between rich and poor people nowadays is higher than it was a the time of the French Revolution (we still refer to Marie Antoinette’s “why don’t they eat cake” as a despicable blindness of an ultra-wealthy person to the condition of the world she inhabits, but the rich today are far, far more removed from those who try to survive without having their basic needs met and that removal its just accepted by most or even idolized by some).
How, if this is the state of the world today and as you said, the protection of property is the de facto leading legal principle of a society under capitalism, can the immense wealth that has been accumulated by all of us working (seen or unseen) in this system but is manifesting itself as the property of a select few be considered a consistent rise in the quality of life of the masses? Isn’t it true that the planet is dying because capitalism can only work in a world with unlimited resources, which is not ours? That the number of armed conflict is the highest since WW2, because this is capitalism’s answer to realizing this planet’s resources are not unlimited? That fascism is on the rise again because a society without discrimination would not work for a capitalist economy that needs people who have to do underpaid, life-threatening work or right out forced labor so that companies can join the free market with a competitive price (the holocaust btw happened under capitalism and many companies e.g. VW got big because they relied on detainees from the labor camps to give their lives working for them)? That the low birth rate in many countries puts women’s bodily autonomy in danger, because capitalism needs a stable influx of new people to join the workforce (and the military, see above) and if this is not a given, because nobody who isn’t rich can afford children and keep their current living standard anymore, measures will be put in place to enforce a stable birthrate in the future?
A rising living standard for the masses is an outdated, ideological assumption about capitalism.
Because they benefited from the exploitation of the global south
It’s a lot simpler than what everyone here is saying tbh. They don’t know what it is. Most of them think capitalism is just markets existing. Or some other random definition they made up in their head. So they’re defending the imaginary version of it that they made up, which of course they like.
In fact the Epstein class wants you to be miseducated about capitalism. They have class consciousness and want that we don’t.
It is worse, most people equate capitalism with the monetary system and get confused how they could buy something without capitalism.
It makes sense. Most people have no idea about most of it. You have stuff. You buy and sell stuff. Ezpz.
Any alternative is demonised and fought about and undermined and misinformation’d.
Propaganda and suppression of the left was successful and certain crumbs had to be given in the past decades, currently there’s still enough comfort that many will defend their current status. A comfortable person isn’t going to start asking or rocking the boat, it’s in their interest that the boat is on the steady ride.
Deflection, gaslight and disciplining of those who find themselves in the “have not” becomes a way of comforting yourself that the ride was always within your capability and not dependent on the exterior mechanisms or just plain luck to be born in the lineage of “haves”.
It feeds many.
It starves many despite producing more than enough for everyone.
