The Impending Death of Modern Capitalism
Let's make sure we're all on the same page on the definition of capitalism.
It's basically a system in which private owne
There isn’t that much volcano in the U.S. if my memory serves me well .
But problematic insurance coverage is it seem .
Fed Reserve Chairman Powell says that we're approaching the date when the mortgage market will collapse in certain areas of the country.
Fed Reserve Chairman Powell says that we're approaching the date when the mortgage market will collapse in certain areas of the country.
I don't have statistics to back up my claim here, but my guess is that most of the homes in my area are being sold cash only. Almost every one in my neighborhood is being sold for land value now.
I don't have statistics to back up my claim here, but my guess is that most of the homes in my area are being sold cash only. Almost every one in my neighborhood is being sold for land value now.
If it’s to upgrade from 1 little house to an upgrade Plex , we seen it a lut up north lately .
Immigration + debasement of money .
To those asking for actual, concrete solutions:
We have them. We essentially have technological, political and economic solutions to all of the problems within our global society, but a) yall won't like them very much, because they require a shift from current political knowledge, understanding and praxis and b) those with control of the levers of power in the global north are not in favour of any change in political direction that lessens their power.
The technological solutions are beyond the scope of this discussion. The political and economic are essentially the same in that they require a reorientation of our economic system from:
a) capital
b) property rights
c) growthism
to:
1) genuine democracy
2) communal ownership of communal goods
3) living within the means of our society and the planet
We can and should dive deep into all of these topics. It should be clear that, with capital as concentrated as it is, and capital and power being largely interchangeable (we have seen Elon go from 'acquire power' mode to 'use power' mode recently), our democracy is a rigged sham. With how little effective representation the people in america have today, many represent less than 3/5s of a vote. We could talk about the common owners of the dems and repubs, or their shared commitment to war and wall street and growth, media ownership, the complete failure of government to listen to the majority on basically *everything*, the use of violent repression on peaceful protestors; we could also look at countries around the world that do listen to the people, have safeguards against media and capital concentration, promote well-being.
The second category is the more clear socialist / capitalist divide. A situation whereby a small minority controls the means of production and enforces effective slavery over the majority, with incentive to hasten the rate of wealth transfer from working class to ruling class, will always, without pressure or effective resistance, write that into the logic of capital. Homelessness and joblessness are promoted within capitalism as a form of discipline. The logic of capital is such that full employment and zero homeless represent threats to the power of capital, so it takes steps to keep people out of work and on the streets, using both economic and political power to do so. Again, we can see in many other places around the world the evidence that no one has to suffer just so some get to be heavily on top. And it is worth considering that neither socialism nor capitalism need be seen as absolutes. They exist on a gradient, or spectrum, and my socialist utopia includes money, markets, investments, and gambling. Money is not in and of itself evil in the same way that a hammer is not in and of itself evil. In my socialist utopia, money, markets and power become tools for human welfare, rather than the ends in themselves.
The last category could be considered the head vampire. A commitment to perpetual growth will simply strip the host of its resources until it has too few for us to keep on expanding. If we were having this argument 150 years ago, we'd be less hasty in demanding change faster. I hope the nature of our impending collapse is not lost on any of us, whether you see it in 10-20 years as I do, or our children's lifetimes. Any industry committed to expanding profits and nation committed to increasing GDP must do so by increasing productivity, cutting costs, finding new revenue streams, and enclosing more and more commons. The rate at which our natural environment is being destroyed for profit is staggering and appears to be going up, rather than down. This is because of a fundamental ideological commitment to maximising growth at all costs, without a sufficient horizon. This logic is overwhelming and removes the possibility for even stakeholder capitalism, as we see the water being poisoned and heavily polluted in Flint and even where I live in the south west UK. This is a commons - our waterways - being stolen. That water should not belong to anyone to abuse, not when we all rely on it.
Our planetary boundaries are, if not fully understood, well-enough understood to see the ways in which we are breaking them right now. We know that we can live within those planetary boundaries - all of them, in fact - and in a way that provides a better standard of living for everyone on this planet and more. This is achievable in a number of ways that are remarkably easy in theory, if not for the practice that those in power cannot countenance a reduction in their profits and power. Currently, waste is incentivised by the system. Capitalism operates under the twin logics of manufactured scarcity and overproduction (as we see in the job and housing markets). If we could produce no more than what we need, and provide to everyone, there would be no waste. While no waste and everyone comfortable is clearly a pipe dream given where we are today, we should still try to head in that direction.
In order to remain on this planet with a reasonable standard of living, this growth motive will be gone one way or the other. Given the direction we're heading in right now, that removal seems like it's going to be quite violent. It doesn't have to be, or, at least, we can try to reduce that violence where possible by transitioning to a set of common axioms around representation, fairness, and rejecting the illogic of perpetual growth within a finite system.
Now, I promised solutions. I'll do some low hanging fruit. Citizens United obv needs repealing, as do any other rulings or legislation that serve to equate capital with human agency. Instead, look to countries like
and others that equate nature with human agency. I don't see much appetite for campaign finance reform from either party right now, and the USA seems pretty smug about its legal system and much-vaunted 'checks and balances' that reveal themselves to be paper tigers. I don't know much in the way of details about how to prevent concentration of media ownership but the wikipedia article looks like there's a number of ways to go about it. Lobbying is obviously a gigantic form of leaglised corruption and the swamp sure needs to be drained.
Solutions need to come in more than one form - we identify the problem, we propose a short-term solution, and we indicate the direction we want to go instead. The above low-hanging fruit are just those short-term solutions and we have to offer something beyond quick fixes, i.e. describe the world we'd like to build. So that means actively building towards a representative democracy. To imagine what this representative democracy would look like, we can look at countries with less overt capitalist policy and build into that, and an economy and society that validates and supports participation. They may be hard to imagine right now, but only because our current system is so decrepit and seemingly entrenched and intractable.
While the second solution seems intractable too, we start small, with the low hanging fruit. A moratorium on the theft or otherwise exploitation of all commons. I've called myself a Marxist before, but I'm not even of the opinion that seizing the means of production is the only or best way to go about saving our civilisation. It may be a necessary step to a sudden revolution from capitalism to communism but the revolution we're looking for will necessarily be a more gradual one. We're essentially asking for those with all the property and power to please just give us a little bit of your property and power back that you've stolen from us, and if we ask for it all back now, well, that's less likely to work than if we say 'you've got 10 years but we will need this all back eventually, please don't force us to stop asking nicely'.
A moratorium simply says no new private ownership and exploitation of commons. That's all. Sounds simple and easy, of course, before we take into account this solution runs up against the head vampire of growthism.
What all these solutions have in common is that they're targeting false consciousness - the belief that, for example, we can simply tax carbon, or find a new tech, that allows us to continue growing indefinitely. The staggering amount of false consciousness, found both between the ruling and working classes, about how capitalism and money work, the nature of all the lies and false promises, is the main obstacle to any positive change right now. That's why I celebrate Luigi Mangione - not because he took a life, but because he has taken a small step towards some unification of the american political thought away from the simple left right divide into a more clear conception of an up down divide. Left versus right is largely just window dressing. You don't need to be left or right to recognise that perpetual growth on a finite planet is insanity; and if you're up and smart and care about your children's generation, you'll see that the dogma around growth at all costs must be undone and replaced with an ideology that factors in our limits and the welfare of all.
As a selling point to the general solution of reorienting from growthism to living within the means of our society and planet, we still get to do things like travel. It's the actions of militaries and ~100 companies in the world causing 71% of the emissions that are the main culprits of all of these planetary boundary issues. I haven't taken a flight in ~3 years and haven't done transatlantic in ~6, but the great feature of these solutions is that we all get to have pretty high standards of living, just without the insane waste and planetary degradation. I'd quite like to go back to Costa Rica one day.
Notes: When I talk in general terms I include the UK a lot because we suffer from a lot of the same issues, if with varying magnitude. I will probably not be refreshing this thread, for the same reason I've successfully not stepped foot in this sub for quite a while, but if I do it will be with a limited desire to debate any of these points, but more desire to provide data or references or clarification where appropriate. I apologize for such a long post - I didn't have time to write a short one.
The 3rd vampire is the tragic mistake. The left have a really good positive vision to sell if they can drop the stupid fear of a high tech high growth filurure.
The future could be awesome and we should be inspiring people to support us all going for it.
We have them. We essentially have technological, political and economic solutions to all of the problems within our global society, but a) yall won't like them very much,.
I guess one question of about 500 is that if you acknowledge that most others will dislike, resist or disagree with your opinions, how will you or whomever, go about successfully implementing these new guidelines in real life onto everyone else? And try not to sugarcoat or use metaphors or something. Just spit it out ffs.
The goods bits of Wazz's post are generally popular. This is also the meat of it.
The tragic 3rd bit is highly unpopular, people dont believe it and it isn't remotely correct.
I think if I were approaching things from that particular angle, with understanding that throughout history, power has never voluntarily redistributed itself unless forced, 3 things quickly come to mind.
1) our new govt needs to miraculously act in good faith - and they would have more reasons not to compared to a system in which they weren't acting in good faith before - unlikely but theoretically possible.
2) the public, while mostly against these changes, would have to at least temporarily and collectively sacrifice its own well being for the collective group - this seems absolutely impossible but w/e.
3)The govt or whoever is going to have to somehow manage to accomplish a similar rate of structured efficiency throughout the entire country and world to allow access to the things that people need - seems impossible but it could reach degrees of success depending on whether #2 was possible.
As hard as that sounds, we also know that it really hasn't been accomplished up to this point due to its obvious challenges in a much simpler time. Now you're stuck in a globalized world where capital can easily move elsewhere completely hamstringing you, which wont ever be discussed here. And this assumes that you are even allowing yourself the pleasure to work with capital which seems to be up for debate with the particular people interested in beginning the process. And then finally, if successful, arrive at the assumption that the world and the people living in it would live a better, more environmentally friendly life than before.
But this is all step 2. Step 1 seems much harder.
Let's make sure we're all on the same page on the definition of capitalism.
It's basically a system in which private ownership of everything prevails. It's a system which provides rewards to the people who meet the marketplace desires of consumer.
I don’t think that having public roads means that we have socialist roads. Or government-run utilities. Or a military. In theory all those things can be completely privatized.
I define capitalism more by the primary use of market-mechanics to distribute wealth, and generally there are necessary but not sufficient conditions like a monetary system, private property rights, nonindividual entities like trusts, companies, etc.
This might be contrasted against proto-capitalist economies where maybe the king assigns certain rights to a lord over the distribution of services, or skilled craftsman form guilds to distribute their services, etc.
I will define "modern" as the system of the last half century when the dominant generation (Boomers) of the dominant nation (USA) entered the workforce and decided they no longer wanted to pay taxes leading to the 49 state blowout win for Ronald Reagan in 1984 and the Democratic Party takeover by neoliberals like the Clintons (and later Obama) whose economic policies were effectively equivalent to 80's Republicans. It's a system which doesn't have a balance of power between labor and capital.
Obama and Clinton are similar in the sense that they were charismatic people who were good on the economy. They faced very different challenges during their presidency and accomplished very different things. Obama for his part brought about massive protections for people in terms of healthcare reform and the creation of financial regulations. The idea that lefties want to do of lumping everyone together into a uniparty just seems so silly to me. You have to already buy in to the ideology in order to accept the premises of the argument, rendering it uninteresting.
@wazz "we" (if by that you mean humanity all together) definitely do NOT have the resources to "fix all problems" for all people worldwide.
Global per capita gdp simply is too low to guarantee what a first world person would consider a good life to everyone. Like it should be 5-6 times that for that to be the case.
Even discounting the fact that by cohercing and centrally planning, and vastly reducing incentives for the best people, total production would collapse compared to now, even if you could steer the total present production without losses toward "everyone", we would all live like the poors live in Bulgaria or Greece, which is a shitty life even if you have running water and a barebone guaranteed access to **** quality healthcare.
Given people want to live far better than that (At least those who currently are living far better than that, and those who see others living far better than that) there is no solution unless you either dramatically alter human DNA, or use constat systemic large scale violence to put everyone who would want a lot more "into place", at least until you get to the total production needed to allow every single human being to live as a household making 70k/year in suburban New Mexico.
Obama and Clinton are similar in the sense that they were charismatic people who were good on the economy. They faced very different challenges during their presidency and accomplished very different things. Obama for his part brought about massive protections for people in terms of healthcare reform and the creation of financial regulations. The idea that lefties want to do of
It was congress doing both but ok
I guess one question of about 500 is that if you acknowledge that most others will dislike, resist or disagree with your opinions, how will you or whomever, go about successfully implementing these new guidelines in real life onto everyone else? And try not to sugarcoat or use metaphors or something. Just spit it out ffs.
One in 500 is coincidentally the chances I'd give of any of this positive change happening in the next 10 years. As I said, the problem is one of political consciousness and will, and the left is too fractured and right to powerful for this to be realistic across much of the global north. So I have no good answer to that question. Next one?
with such a close vote his veto would have killed it, and it was the charge that he was some neoliberal so you’re kind of missing the point. neoliberals would be against both those things and would have vetod.
I am not sure what you mean, plenty of centrist democrats (and some republicans for financial regulations) voted for that in the senate
I am not sure what you mean, plenty of centrist democrats (and some republicans for financial regulations) voted for that in the senate
maybe we just have different definitions of neoliberalism. I don’t think being a centrist makes you a neoliberal, and I don’t think voting for a huge social safety net and regulation increase makes you a very good neoliberal.
maybe we just have different definitions of neoliberalism. I don’t think being a centrist makes you a neoliberal, and I don’t think voting for a huge social safety net and regulation increase makes you a very good neoliberal.
I mean Collins (R) voted for the Dodd-Frank act (an absolutely indispensable vote, as 60 were needed , and they got exactly 60). I think she is like THE stereotypical neoliberal, isn't she?
Give me 3 names in the senate you think are neolibs if you disagree with Collins being a very good example.
One in 500 is coincidentally the chances I'd give of any of this positive change happening in the next 10 years. As I said, the problem is one of political consciousness and will, and the left is too fractured and right to powerful for this to be realistic across much of the global north. So I have no good answer to that question. Next one?
Lets say you hit the 1-out of 500 outer.
From there...
1)If workers are not financially rewarded based on their contributions, what system will ensure that people pursue the more diffucult or the less appealing important jobs that could potentially lead to labor shortages in certain fields?
2)If we adopt a communistic system while most others remain capitalist - which even includes China or Russia in certain economic ways, how will trade be conducted with capitalist nations that operate on profit motives? Will communist states engage in global markets?
3)If a significant portion of the population disagrees with the communist system and prefers a market driven approach, will they be allowed to form alternative economic structures, or will participation in the communist system be mandatory? If mandatory, how will enforcement be handled?
4) What would the hierarchal order of power work look like in this society and how is that accomplished in a system that doesn't have majority support?
I mean Collins (R) voted for the Dodd-Frank act (an absolutely indispensable vote, as 60 were needed , and they got exactly 60). I think she is like THE stereotypical neoliberal, isn't she?
Give me 3 names in the senate you think are neolibs if you disagree with Collins being a very good example.
Before I waste my time on this, are you arguing Obama was a neoliberal a la Regan?
Ah you use the ancient label ok.
No for me reagan and tatcher are not neolib, Blair is. But yes 40 years ago the expression meant what you say it does.
So you meant something different than what i thought
Ah you use the ancient label ok.
No for me reagan and tatcher are not neolib, Blair is. But yes 40 years ago the expression meant what you say it does.
So you meant something different than what i thought
No you misunderstand, I was arguing against OP who is sloppily claiming all those people fall under the same label.
No you misunderstand, I was arguing against OP who is sloppily claiming all those people fall under the same label.
Well they do in some sense because the label changed in meaning across time lol. Neoliberal is probably the fuzziest label given how much it encompassed in 40 years.
These days it's almost only used by far left people to criticize moderate leftists or centrists as "friends of the enemy" though
Well they do in some sense because the label changed in meaning across time lol. Neoliberal is probably the fuzziest label given how much it encompassed in 40 years.
These days it's almost only used by far left people to criticize moderate leftists or centrists as "friends of the enemy" though
Yes that’s what I’m pushing back against. Too much equivocation. It has become like the word nazi or fascist.
Lets say you hit the 1-out of 500 outer.From there...1)If workers are not financially rewarded based on their contributions, what system will ensure that people pursue the more diffucult or the less appealing important jobs that could potentially lead to labor shortages in certain fields?2)If we adopt a communistic system while most others remain capitalist - which even include
1) Why would workers not be financially rewarded based on their contributions? I'm always a little surprised when this question comes up because it has very easy answers. In every society that remains in human history, it remained because someone did the jobs that needed to be done. No matter what the structural organisation. When I say I have a place in my utopia for markets, I mean that if, say, working conditions in one field get harder for some reason, pay goes up there. What we have today is a situation where cushy, irrelevant jobs get paid huge bucks where people actually contributing economically get peanuts. Let's just change that system. It's as simple as paying bad / hard jobs more, until there are no longer labour shortages.
2) I think we can cut through the idea of no truly communist state existing until everyone is communist as inherently immaterial. It's like setting a win condition, but it's the most utopian we seem to get. I like the idea that 'no one is free until everyone is free' but that's similarly theoretical. To be a materialist leftist means to posit solutions that can work given the world today, and the one I'm suggesting, a gradual shift down the spectrum towards more socialism, at no point within it requires that they can't trade with capitalist ones. The last ~70+ years have seen incredible cultural hostility, economic warfare and election interference by the capitalist world on the less capitalist world; stop that. You can have your deregulated markets and no minimum wage if you wish, but there is no accompanying requirement, theoretical or otherwise, to follow that up with sanctions or refusal to trade. If the handmaidens of capitalism are right, you can just trust the free market here too and expect that socialism will fail and capitalism will triumph. No need to rig the game further, just let the experiment play out. Given how capitalism has lashed out at the mere possibilities of communism, it seems more apt to suggest that no capitalist state can tolerate the possibility of a communist one.
3) I don't know, you're asking details about what methods a passenger should use to restrain, disable and unseat a reckless driver. Unless I'm slightly mistaken and you're asking about something like Partition? Again notice that I don't unseat markets, I just deprioritise them, so supply and demand still applies. I don't know whether the capitalists get Sitka and the communists get the rest, or vice-versa. We're not there yet and likely never will be. I'm sure that brighter minds than ours can work out the details. Likely some autistic leftie sci-fi writer has done that already (The Dispossessed, though not exactly)
4) The sort of hierarchy of power I'm proposing can't exist in a system that doesn't have majority support. Majority rule is a basic precept, except in rare cases (which we're essentially at) where, as above, a driver is hurtling off a cliff while carrying a willing and unwilling passenger. This can lead to problems if the majority want something that's dangerous or bad for the minority, but all else being equal, majority rule > minority rule. Where there isn't majority support for the system we're putting forward, our immediate job is to improve public consciousness in order to obtain majority support.
As to how that hierarchy looks, it's far more horizontally-distributed than vertically. It is flexible; local; representational not just of people but commons; and scientific, seeking to learn from experience and experiment and networking what works and doesn't work and why. It is flexible also in that in times of urgency, a vertical leadership structure reveals itself. In both normal and urgent times there is still leadership, but with varying degrees of agency and responsibility. A leadership structure that does not promote sociopathic levels of desire for power, because that power doesn't actually grant that much, when everyone is largely equal.
Next? Only 492 to go, we need to up our speed here
