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Valendale — Capitalism
Published: 2013-09-16 19:15:13 +0000 UTC; Views: 3893; Favourites: 28; Downloads: 9
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Because we fucking say so.Related content
Comments: 51
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You can replace CAPITALISM with many other words.
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Yes because absolutely never has any Communist system been enforced by a murderous police state.
Wait a minute...
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Every capitalist country is a repressive, terrorist and genocidal state. The clear example is the United States and the countries of Europe. In no capitalist country does it repress the rich, because the bourgeois state defends the bourgeoisie and attacks all workers. Therefore it is a capitalist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. If you have not realized it, it is because you are a stupid person who thinks that he lives in a "democracy" or in a false "freedom".
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>talks about the need for repressing people based on their wealth
>bitches about so-called 'false freedom' and how capitalism is repressive
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You should go live in any failed communist shithole ever if capitalism is so awful
or are you one of those who blame the CIA for everything?
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The only failed system is the capitalism that every year generates capitalist crisis that leads to poverty, misery and hunger to billions of people. And this is suffered by more than 3700 million people who are extremely poor and the wealth of these 3700 million people have the 23 richest people in the world. Only a total imbecile would support capitalism.
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What you call a crisis in capitalism, socialist countries call normal LOL
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Why are you so fucking butthurt about Capitalism? Are you a socialist?
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While I agree this poster is cheap meme trash, you should know what the ideology you stand is, "NS" = National Socialism. Hitler's idea of socialism wasn't like standard Marxist-influenced conceptions but he made many anti-capitalist speeches condemning the economic system for plutocracy, poverty, unemployment, and war profiteering.
What you've said here indicates that you are either a hypocrite to your own ideology or are completely ignorant of what it stands for.
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Communism is based on Rousseau's state-theory, the idea that humans are naturally good and do not want to harm others. That is simply not true. There are always people who abuse these systems to gain power and wealth. Planned economy is also unable to react to sudden drastic changes. These are the reasons why communism can't really function. The underlying ideas are just wrong...
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Actually communism is based on the theory of collective communal ownership. In Marxist theory that involves a state as a transitional tool and agent of the masses but there are plenty of communist anarchists and the ultimate goal of communism even in Marxist theory is a classless stateless society in which the masses control the means of production and produce for the good of the masses. Council Communists for instance doesn't even call for a state as an intermediate agent, but rather seeks to replace it with communal councils based on very anarchist principles.
Also the point that humans aren't naturally good is a point against capitalism, people can't be trusted with private ownership of the means of production, and people can't be trusted with millions of dollars. Capitalism inherently creates the 1% through the profit mechanism and has no inherent means to resolve the inequality, it simply grows until it destroys the carrying capacity of the economy and causes a severe depressions.
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I was talking about the underlying view on humanity not the idea of collective ownership. In communism people are expected to be content with their equality, which is an idea of Rousseau, when in reality they will never be. Take a look at the parties that ruled over communist states, what are their members if not people trying to have more power, influence and wealth than their fellow citizens? This is why communism fails. It denies humans fulfillment of basic desires and expects them to like it, while at the same time giving immense power to a selected few and turning the state into a dictatorship in the process.
But how can a government control production and money? I mean they are people too. In the current situation everyone can buy food. In planned economies there were food shortages and people starved. Because well, the millions of people who form a state can control money and production means while one ministry filled with maybe 500 people can't.
Capitalism isn't perfect. It often abuses the ones that can't help themselves. But communism has just as many problems. The answer lies somewhere in the middle. There should be an economy that is social, so that no one is denied their basic needs, but isn't overly controlled either.
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Have you tried Mutualism?
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Guy's this is getting ridiculous. This is the last one I'll answer to, because I don't really have time to research State/economy theories, I got finals coming up!
So Mutualism means everyone can borrow money without interest and use that to produce something. A law dictates how much said product is worth and then it can be sold to anyone. There is no such thing as a state and you only have small producers, no big companies. But people can form groups based on similar beliefs.
First, there would be no global trade in this system. The fact that the prices don't change makes it nearly impossible. They wouldn't import products, because they will have different prices for, let's say wood, than the price other countries would export wood at. That means the country has fewer products. Inability to import something would be bad for most countries because there would be a lack of resources.
Second, how is trade inside the country supposed to work? Say a woman wants to sew 3 blankets. The price for one blanket is 5 dollars. She needs to buy 15 balls of wool. One ball is 3 dollars. That means she has to spend 45 dollars but if she sells the blanket she'll only get 15 dollars back. And if you adjust the law to so that she wont loose money another scenario won't work anymore. It's impossible to calculate a fixed price for everything.
Third where to the banks how lend the people money take it from, if they don't take interest. Do they just print the money they need? That would lead to inflation.
Last but not least. Are there no laws other than the price law? Then who protects the weak? Who keeps these "groups" from blackmailing smaller businesses? Or just plain from forming their own state?
No, really with the others I at leas understood how they were supposed to function but this one?
Anyway it was nice discussing this with you, but I'll have to end this here. Let's just agree to disagree and move on!
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What do you think of Council Communists?
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Pretty much the same thing. If I remember correctly, then in council communism every large company hat its own ruling council, right? Well then you still have "states" and the exact same problems, only in a smaller scale. You have fewer people controlling everything their citizens need and more responsibility on fewer shoulders most of the time means more screw ups. Also there would be logistical and ideological problems, because each council would come to its own conclusions on the communist ideology. If things go really astray, the councils could start fights over which "communism" is better and you would end up with a council war. Not to mention that such a "non-country" could never take part in international politics and is very vulnerable to attacks.
So sorry but no, council communism isn't the answer either, if anything it has even more problems...
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"in council communism every large company hat its own ruling council, right"
No, Council Communism advocated that every Workplace should be run by it's Workers through a Participatory Democratic Assembly, or Worker's Council as it's called. Yes, there are large scale Councils for Large Scale Decision Making, but these are made up of Delegates (Elected from their respective Workplaces) who don't have that much power to begin with, other than just carrying out the Decisions the Workers made, as well as that they can be recalled at any time by the Workers that elected them. "Such bodies will perform the functions of coordination, collection of vital data and information, and will see to its dissemination in a simple and comprehensible form. They will not be planning bodies. This crucial function of planning will be performed by the workers as a whole, who, because of the dissemination of the necessary information in understandable form, will make all the vital decisions which their delegates will then make known to the central councils, who will then have them publicized.
"The councils are no politicians, no government. They are the messengers, carrying and interchanging the opinions, the will of the groups of workers . . . . Thus they are the organs of social intercourse and discussion .""(Peter J.Rachleff)
It's similar to Anarcho-Syndicalism or Class Struggle Anarchists, apart from being Marxist and having a more critical view of Trade Unions.
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The democratic assembly is what I meant by "council" and by "large company" I meant that small businesses, like a bakery with two bakers would not have a council.
So basically you have a much more direct democracy. The ideological and economical problems stay. Also you now have the added problem of work-time loss, because the workers have to vote over stuff all the time and even slower reacting ability, because these elections take time.
Plus, you still have people in higher positions than normal workers. The people who, " disseminate necessary information in understandable form" alias the people who decide what information the workers are given. They control the workers opinions and as a result the elections. That's like the first rule of propaganda right there.
So, sorry but still no. But thanks for giving me the correct definition, the one I knew about had holes.
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So what do you think about Anarcho-Communists?
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These guys exist in Russia and China, even back when the countries weren't fascist.
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What the shit does a group of riot police have to do with capitalism?
You're projecting your displeasure with the free market onto something that has nothing to do with it.
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The police are the enforcers of capitalism, any time capitalist property is challenged they're called in like the King's Knights to suppress the upstart workers
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You're right! It has utterly nothing to do with rioters destroying private property that is in no way connected to the thing they're protesting against, beating people to death or otherwise causing misery to ordinary people! Nor does it have anything to do with dealing with criminals which include rapists, pedophiles, murderers, thieves and CORPORATE en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_sc… CORRUPTION at all.
Jesus Christ, you damned tool... Socialism doesn't need you. It just needs a tape recorder filled with cookie cutter Communist and Socialist platitudes.
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Zucca it useless to reason with PC leftists
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Capitalist notions of property are legal fictions supported by the threat of police brutality. If workers have so much as a sit in, the police come in like the King's Knights to disperse them.
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Then the rise in insurance premiums are just imaginary then?
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They aren't material and aren't a law of nature, but they are legally enforced and coercively applied.
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Thank god for the free market: free from government
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I noticed you quoted the picture yourself. Are you saying you're a capitalist? or a riot-officer?
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I'm sorry, but I'm not seeing anything to do with capitalism in this picture.
Are you sure you don't mean collectivism?
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Capitalism is a form of collectivism in which people who have property rule over people who don't to the collective enrichment of the property owner.
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Funny, but no property owner ever forced me to work for him, and I certainly profited from the work I did for them. They all had to offer me what I felt was a fair trade for the use of my time and energy, and if I didn't like what they offered, I was more than free to go elsewhere.
And where, pray tell, did the property that those folks own come from? They certainly didn't wake up one day and have it appear out of thin air.
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You were forced by an economic system through which your subsistence depended on subordination to an institutional hierarchy based on legal fictions of property that function like royal titles, an illusion and trick to conflate institutions with personal possessions and make all the products of an institution the personal possessions of an elite class of property owners who rule to enrich themselves until it is no longer possible.
Perhaps you are simply too privileged to understand that millions of people suffer daily in this system, faced with the choice between submission and obedience to often draconian bosses for poverty wages, or sacrificing the incomes they need to survive and feed their offspring.
"And where, pray tell, did the property that those folks own come from?"
That depends on the property. If land, it was likely seized by force from the commons during the enclosure of the commons, or seized by the royal government through force while the aboriginals were being exterminated and quarantined into concentration camps and "reservations", or by the royal government as unclaimed property (unclaimed meaning the government could establish a monopoly of force to use it), later to be leased out to tenants.
If machines, or a building, someone built it, typically someone other than the capitalist.
In either case the capitalist holds a royal title which entitles him to a violently enforced monopoly, not only over the property, but also over the social institutions which, through the investment of human capital, produces a surplus value for the capitalist. This surplus value is accumulated in order to expand control over property, the more the subordinate workers produce the more the capitalist can acquire and thus property is accumulated into fewer hands over time, until an oligarchy of private capital controls pretty much everything.
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Give reality my regards when it kicks you in the ass to wake you up.
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I'm not the one who has to deny the reality of exploitation or the violent coercion of the capitalist system. You are.
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As a long term student and disciple of economics, logic and philosophy I must respectfully disagree on certain aspects of the critique offered by the above meme.
The police are a state-funded monopoly, which according to dictionary.com is socialism...
dictionary.reference.com/brows…
noun
1.
a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.
2.
procedure or practice in accordance with this theory.
3.
(in Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism, characterized by the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles.
No ifs, ands or buts. State monopoly control is socialism. That makes the military and court systems examples of state socialism too.
Hooray for dictionaries!
On the subject of exploitation;
tomaszkaye.liberty.me/2015/01/…
The Marxian thoery of exploitation - the difference between a worker's wages and the total revenue of their employer - is actually quite easy to explain away. Either it exists, in which case the onset of the worker's paradise won't help anyway since workers will still demand pay in order to pay for the necessities of life. Or it doesn't, due to wages representing the different time preferences of the workers versus the employer. The wage payments are made monthly to keep workers sweet as if they had to wait for revenues they'd be paid only rarely and erratically and not at all whenever their syndic ( see, I know what I'm talking about ) didn't make a profit.
Speaking of which, once you've abrogated everybody's property rights, how are you going to continually convince an entire population of humans to live in squalor? And yeah, that'll be the result, QED Catalonia and Yugoslavia.
I look forward to your rebuttal!
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"The police are a state-funded monopoly"
That violently enforce private property and capitalism. Furthermore, it doesn't matter, because a privately financed police force is just as bad, and often times worse. We've seen what private security and paramilitary groups do when companies hire them.
"State monopoly control is socialism"
No it's not, defining every state monopoly as socialism fails to understand the basic concept. According to this theory, Tsarism would have been socialism.
In a capitalist society the police are not controlled by the community, they are used to control the community, so your arguments fails by your own definition. If you're going to try to make an Argumentum ad Dictionarium at least try to properly apply the definitions you're using.
"is actually quite easy to explain away"
Oh yes I'm sure you have no shortage of rationalizations to explain away treating workers so badly and paying them so little that nets have to be placed around buildings to prevent them from jumping to their deaths, while the capitalists make billions of dollars with sociopathic disregard for the suffering of those who do all the work.
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OK so we're going to go down this road.
You're a slippery one, I'll give you that, but you're not actually engaging with the points I'm making.
Re socialism - anything single-payer is socialism by the definition above - eg the National Health Service in my native UK. The next step down from that is socially owned organisations that still engage in exchange when providing goods or services ( like shops in entirely socialised societies like pre-collapse Somalia, Ethiopia during its famines, or Cuba, Laos and North Korea now ), and since the 20th Century already debunked it as a sound economic model I am trying to understand why you're playing word games every time I offer an argument. The model is older than the idea. The Byzantine Empire employed an effectively socialist economic model to its trading fleets and agriculture.
Re definitions - you evidently find the difference in words between the dictionary definition and my assertion that "state monopoly control is socialism" distasteful or inconvenient. But have a close look at definition 1, and state monopoly is a category of social ownership. Hell in most of the socialist works I read the terms were synonymous. Now if you're an anarcho-socialist then, sure, there can be a bit of a distinction since states would go away and big huge corporations owned by their employees and families would be the units of socio-economic organisation, and all humans on Earth would be members of a mega federation where they would use direct democracy to command and control everything. That's 7 billion people so probably 5 billion old enough to take part in the constant white noise of votes. Bear in mind how many would be needed every day to set schedules and priorities for every single factory, trucking station and florist on Earth, and maybe you start to see why economic planning didn't work out historically. Also, if that alternate world that sounds a bit like the Borg, congrats, you have a soul.
Re policing - "That violently enforce private property and capitalism. Furthermore, it doesn't matter, because a privately financed police force is just as bad, and often times worse. We've seen what private security and paramilitary groups do when companies hire them."
Private property arises naturally where no coercive force exists to cause some other system to arise. Examples include the Indus Valley Civilisation, ancient Ireland, and mediaeval Iceland under the Althingi. In fact I wrote an articles about the Indus Valley peeps which you can read here; hayden.liberty.me/2015/01/13/s…
Even the left-anarchist David Graeber attests to this when describing how individuals in pre-historic tribal civilisations would have been unable to keep and hold anything for their own because of the constant need to give gifts, which actually gives an explanation for the origins of debt; abahlali.org/files/Graeber.pdf
Of course a private security system would take in normal people to. You would get to choose what policing agency you felt comfortable with patrolling your streets or even join or set-up a local co-op. There's even an app serving a function like this in use in the United States right now called Peacekeeper; sovereigntarian.liberty.me/201… or peacekeeper.org/
Police enforce private property and capitalism? You mean they provide the teeth to persuade others not t rob, assault, rape and murder me? Oh no! Frankly if your complaint were true I'd have no truck with the police, but it isn't, QED the militarisation of police in the United States and the creeping surveillance state in the UK - here the police do most of the snooping.
You said something very interesting at the end of your comment that I am interested in analysing at some length in future.
"Oh yes I'm sure you have no shortage of rationalizations to explain away treating workers so badly and paying them so little that nets have to be placed around buildings to prevent them from jumping to their deaths..."
This is the tale of the exploited. The word can have three definitions.
1. Use of a resource.
2. Abusive use of the body or faculties of one moral agent by another. This would include chattel slavery and rape.
3. Gap between employer revenue and employee wages.
Now you made no attempt whatsoever to rebut my debunk of Marxian exploitation, so I'll assume you take my side on that matter and agree tht either it doesn't exist or if it does it doesn't matter. So you're only worried about exploitation in terms of working conditions being harsh, and the scarcity that induces those conditions being somehow invented. The scarcity matter is so childish even Noam Chomsky knows better than to go there. Scarcity is the universal reality of daily life. You have a limited position from which to perceive reality, you have limited time because sometimes you have to sleep and are ultimately mortal, and there is a limit to the resources available in human life to exchange with each other. So no basis on which to argue against scarcity.
So why might working conditions be harsh? Think really hard. Picture life before civilisation and for the first several millenia up to the industrial revolution. What was the near universal condition of humanity, and how did most of us escape it over the last 200 years? The answer is not just poverty. That term only explains the condition of a poor person. Rather societies in centuries and millenia gone by were poor as a whole. It wouldn't have mattered if the peasants stormed the palaces and dished all the wealth out amongst themselves, because all of it put together would have made a negligible difference to their spending power, and no difference to the need to work the land in order to eat.
What this subsistence speaks to is a universal problem of scarcity, a scarcity that has been beaten back, like a wolf baten back from the door, only in the last 200 or so years, by increasing division of labour and increasing labour productivity on account of increasing capital intensity. Even Marx would have found this description agreeable.
"...while the capitalists make billions of dollars with sociopathic disregard for the suffering of those who do all the work."
Capitalists come in a few flavours; lenders, investors and entrepreneurs. Since the first two are giving their stuff to the entrepreneur they are not on the hook here, so presumably it's the entrepreneur you're concerned about. Your concern is that entrepreneurs are all in on some diabolical scheme to make off with something they have stolen from someone else. But since entrepreneurs take on an mange their own and their lenders' and investors' risks they have a very different financial time preference to anybody they may offer a job. The people who take work just wanna get paid monthly, and when their upward wage pressure and the entrepreneur's downward wage pressure meet you get the market clearing wage - this is a simplification employing language from mainstream economics, but it serves to illustrate just why a factory in China might offer long hours and low pay.
The clearing wage in China is lower than in the USA or UK. A lot lower. This is because China is far poorer on account of having had far less economic development over time than the other two countries ( far less capitalism since you asked so graciously ) and so workers will accept lower pay. The fact that the conditions are harsh and unlikeable is not a moral referendum on the factory owners, but rather is a practical referendum on the economic worth of their labour. If there are three potential workers to every two jobs in a factory, then the wages are going to be lower than if the ratio is a neat 1:1.
Why this needs endless explanation in the 21st Century is beyond me.
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"anything single-payer is socialism by the definition above"
No it isn't. Single payer is a way of paying for something with taxes, it makes no provision that what's being paid for is either owned or controlled by the public.
Single payer is a lot like paying a portion of rent towards the garbage collection bill.
*doesn't read the rest*
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