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!
Capitalism is just diversified feudalism.
Instead of owning 100% of a district and everything the peasants on it produce, the aristos worked out that they could diversify their portfolios and thin out the risk.
So now they own a thousandth part of the product of a thousand districts instead.
Now if plague wipes out a village or six, you don’t have to care, you’re only losing a tiny chunk of your income. Now the welfare of the peasants isn’t your problem, because they’re not, like :douchebro sniff: exclusively your peasants.
The rich produce nothing, they add no value, they perform no labour. It’s just predatory rent-seeking: the poor still do all the work, produce all the goods and provide all the services, but now somehow 99% of the value they generate goes to some smirking freeloader instead, who can just plough it into acquiring more and more peasants. They only thing they ever provided was a chunk of startup cash, which they got from exploiting other peasants in the first place.
And of course, none of that cash goes to the people whose income it supposedly buys. It’s not a fair trade, it’s not a trade at all, they aren’t a party to it. Workers are just bought and sold over their heads, like dairy cattle. They get milked just the same, and some other fat bastard gets all the cream.
The whole system is rigged to concentrate power and wealth into the hands of the super-rich, stripping it away from everyone else and leaving them struggling to survive - and keeping the ladder well and truly pulled up so nobody else gets into the treehouse.
Libertarian types like to claim that taxation is theft, but taxation is a spit in a hurricane compared to the industrial-scale looting that goes on every day. Take the profits of any corporation, and divide that by the total salaries of the workers that actually generate revenue. Theft? You don’t know the meaning of the word. What percentage of the value you generate goes in shareholder pockets? How would you feel about taxation at that level, funding not roads and schools and hospitals, but yachts and mansions and private jets for a bunch of one-percenters?
How are you not angry?
I’d like to add to this that enough ‘value’ is left with the masses to keep them comfortable enough or close enough to breaking out of the pits that they aren’t willing to rock the boat too much.
Many of us have been afraid to lose what little we have had in life. And if you don’t prioritize making money, a made up concept, you cannot get out of the pits in this society.
May I introduce you to the concept of sick systems?
Is not seen that so blatantly laid out. Yes, that is capitalism. It’s pretty gross.
Serfs got to keep more of the fruit of their labor than today’s wage slaves do.
Also, obligatory: Libertarianism was originally and should still be thought of as a left-wing movement, but it doesn’t mean to let the oligarchs run the show - it means to allow us to tear them down, and to ideally rid ourselves of currency and private property which enable these exploitative systems. I’m a bit of a libertarian socialist myself, you see.
lol
Rothbard is the reason we associate Libertarianism with the Right. He’s the one that suggested calling themselves Libertarians and Anarcho-Capitalists. Before him, Libertarianism was a Socialist thing and had little to do with Capitalism.
Basically, modern Libertarians stole the term from the Left to re-brand themselves as something they weren’t and to create this guise of pretending to care about people’s liberty and freedom—which they also don’t because Rothbard supported and advised Fascists and had no problem with slavery or indentured servitude.
The Right loves to steal and re-define terms used on the left.
The anti-capitalist left should steal the term classical liberal from them: https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Article-from-ReclaimingLiberalismEbook.pdf
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Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Ayn Rand. Go together like PB and J, mhm.
Marx - Libertarian with a tendency for statist apologia (laid out foundations of socialism as a means-to-an-end), envisioned communism as a stateless society with no hierarchies to oppress the people. A society without any power structures or hierarchies that enable an individual’s agency to be denied is a perfect libertarian state. That’s the basis for Marx’ criticism of religion.
Lenin - Statist and literal leader of a state, more or less socialist in the traditional sense of using a state to bring about a post-state communist society. In the eyes of a radical libertarian, he sold his soul to the devil by compromising with statism for a short-term advantage. And sure enough it led to the not-libertarian Stalinism.
Ayn Rand - Peak neoliberal. Thinks that market-based economics should not only dictate commodity distribution, but everything up-to-and-including sexual identity, eugenics, and the evolutionary fate of humanity. Allows little-to-no opportunity for the individual to pursue their own ambitions, find their own purpose, or to exert agency unless they are of the exceedingly few monopoly-winning elites. The kind of economics that led to monarchies in past eras. The antithesis of the tenets that libertarianism was coined to represent.
So no, they don’t go together at all. In fact they are three perfect examples for demonstrating the libertarian-authoritarian continuum.
Preach on, Brother!!! Mmmmmmhhhhmmm. I know that’s right.
This feels closest to the response I would have written. I would perhaps add, that one of the consequences of this system is, that money insulates you from having to improve. Someone like Trump will never go to a therapist to fix whatever mental illness made him turn into who he is, precisely because he doesn’t need to. Money can prop up the most evil, stupid, useless people for generations and generations. If they had to live examined lives, they’d stop being evil. The only ways to fix this, that I can see, are all utopian sounding, but shouldn’t be. Wage ratios for example. As CEO you simply shouldn’t be able to hold more shares or earn more income than, say, 10x that of the lowest paid worker in your organisation. And that needs to include subsidiaries and 3rd parties. This system would have to be implemented globally. Never going to happen though. We can fight a pointless global war on drugs, but we definitely won’t reduce CEO income.