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Why People Say Capitalism is Violent
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
524 points (80.3% liked)
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Ok I'll bite. God help me.
My employer bills me out for $400/hr and I make about $100/hr. I wouldn't be able to make that much on my own because I don't have the resources and infrastructure my employer has: admin, IT, expertise, manpower, marketing, legal, and so on. I have zero interest in being self employed. So this is a good arrangement for me.
My clients are happy paying those prices because we provide good service at competitive rates.
My employer is happy because they usually net about 30% profit margin so the partners walk away with $120/hr after paying me and other overhead.
It's the very definition of capitalism doing exactly what it is supposed to do: providing valuable goods and services to people who want to buy it from people who want to sell it, and everyone walks away happy from the transaction.
I fail to see how this is a violent and exploitative war on civilization itself. Fuck everything about this comic. Why is it even on my feed? Gah.
Upvoting for good faith engagement, even if a little frustrated. I encourage other leftists here to do the same.
The situation you describe is capitalism working smoothly. Marx himself spoke highly of aspects of capitalism many times. The problem comes when your company's owner, who has the power to abuse that ownership, does.
By analogy, monarchies are bad, even if your king is good. You can have a fair, just, wise philosopher king. It sounds like you're lucky in having a good job with a reasonable owner, but your owner could sell to a private equity company tomorrow, who will lay you off, outsource your job to lower costs, bill out the same rate even when lowering the quality, and pocket the difference. They'll do this for a few years until the brand's value has been mined, then they'll scrap your company and sell it for parts.
Socialists like myself argue that because the system can be abused, it inevitably wil be abused. It's a structural argument, not an argument about each specific case. We argue that democratic control of our jobs is a good thing, in the same way that we got rid of kings to replace them with democratic control is a good thing, because we think that system is more just and fair.
Does this imply that you have a system that can't be abused? Or more probably the level of possible abuse is "less" in some way?
I agree that while well informed democratic control is great, there still needs to be elected representatives in some capacity just for practicality's sake (not everyone has the time or energy to research and make decisions for every topic and problem) and then we're right back at the abuse problem. The idea of assigning some people's votes as having more weight can be necessary to avoid a tyranny of the majority deciding things outside of their knowledge set too...
If there was a way of guaranteeing fair, just, wise, philosopher Kings then wouldn't that system be the best one? Like an AI would find the perfect leader through mass surveillance and that would be who would rule.
Obviously not.
I make no claim about the level of abuse. Society will always have problems. The question is how we solve them. I think that political and economic democracy are necessary to give people a fair say, in many ways. Without economic democracy, we have the situation we have now: A democracy in name only. Economic power is too easily converted into political power.
What kind of democracy has people spend most of their life working for undemocratic institutions, which they depend on for food, clothing, house, etc.? Is it really a democracy if say you're in west Virginia and your only opportunity to earn a living is to work in a coal mine? Your material reality necessitates voting in the interest of your employer, and against your own. How free is that voter to really, meaningfully participate in democracy, as we understand it?
I'd also argue that economic democracy is even necessary for a well informed public. Poor people send their kids to shitty schools. It won't be until there isn't generational poverty that we'll fix that.
What would "economic democracy" look like, and how would we facilitate a change like that?
It looks something like "from each according to their ability, and to each according to their needs."
As to how we get there, and what the specifics of it look like, the short, honest answer is no one person knows, and that's okay. Much like a medieval peasant would've struggled to imagine modern elections, electric tea kettles, or the welfare state, it's really hard to live in the present and imagine a radically different future. The thing is that a radically different future is coming for us, whether we like it or not. Our current lives are not ecologically sustainable. That is going to force change upon us, probably the hard way, and it's going to hurt.
That said, this is a very active area of scholarship and (mostly) healthy debate. There is a wonderful and expansive socialist scholarly tradition, going back centuries, all trying to answer what you asked me. Economists, philosophers, computer scientists, political scientists, and so on have put a lot of really good work into imagining such a future. Some, like Stafford Beer, or Paul Cockshott, have written a lot about how modern digital technologies could enable such a transformation on the large scale. Others, like David Graeber or Rebecca Solnit, have thought deeply about what a human society even is and what we want from it. Still others, notably Mark Fisher, have written about why capitalism feels so inevitable to so many who live in it.
There's one thing we do know: The first step is enough of us agreeing that we want a more just, fair, and equitable future. Many people, especially but not exclusively those with so much of the wealth, don't want that at all.
The difficult step is getting around or past the concept of private property.
Except for altruism, how do we effectively remove "property" from people who create it but don't need it. Most arguments I have seen or read end up back at basic capitalism.
The ideal that everyone would be altruistic and give up all superfluous labor seems far fetched.
Most leftists distinguish between personal property and private property. You get to own your favorite mug, your toothbrush, and even your house, but not a company that controls the labor of others, or someone else's house. I don't know where you've come across these arguments you've read, but, again, there are literally centuries of socialist scholarship, none of which is just advocating for capitalism with some window dressing. There are many "socialism 101" lists out there of how you can get started. I seriously recommend that you give it a shot. It's actually really fun to read smart and imaginative people trying to make an outline for a new, better world.
I love how knowledgeable you are on these topics! Please, I very much invite you to make a post about this analysis. I became a mod of this community specifically for dialogue like this
Aw thanks! I'm trying to spend less time writing on social media, not more! If I may be so bold, if you like reading what I have to say, may I suggest The Luddite? It's me, and a few others, writing about tech from a leftist perspective.
I'll have to give it a look! I'm an organizer in tech, so that would be extremely relevant to me. Your articles will likely get some extra posts in this community!
Oh shit! I write code for a living and I'd love to connect outside Lemmy. DM me or email me (email on the site) if you're interested!
Fair
Surveillance
Pick one
If everyone is under surveillance, that's fair is it not? It's plenty of other things too, but not unfair.
This might be the first discussion I've had on Lenny in good faith as you say, so thank you for that.
My position summarized is that we definitely have massive issues with inequality, injustice, lack of rights, etc. But these are issues of legislation, corrupt government and leadership, enforcement, corporate governance, media disinformation, and so on. As you said any system can and will be abused. Swapping capitalism for any other -ism won't change anything. (What would that even look like?)
Some of my meandering thoughts for potential solutions include controlling media disinformation, campaign finance reform, term/age limits, and ranked voting. It would be great to somehow change corporate governance to require leadership to prioritize stakeholders and not just shareholders, but I don't really know how to do this. Maybe a requirement that all public companies be owned at least maybe 10% by non-officer employees, enough to get a seat on the board of directors.
It's extremely complicated and there's no clear solution. I'm not saying capitalism is perfect, I'm saying it's overall ok and it's very childishly naive to make a shitty comic about swapping it for another -ism to solve all of our problems. I really don't want to argue about it though or get into a flame war, I just can't handle the vitriol on this forum.
That's a very shallow analysis, parts of which socialists have already responded to since Marx himself. First, it's a little silly to just wave away changing the -isms, as you put it. It would change things a whole lot if we changed from capitalism to feudalism. Likewise, I suspect you do not actually understand how radical a change many socialists actually want, otherwise I don't see how you can possibly think this.
Second, your implied distinction between politics and the economy is one that we on the left generally reject, and have for centuries. Marx wrote about the "political economy," recognizing that the two are actually inseparable, despite the neoliberal proclivity to pretend that they are. Put another way, many of the policy suggestions you list are actually very popular, and yet they don't happen. Researchers have measured this phenomenon.. The policies that wealthy people want correlate with what actually happens, whereas those that are popular have no correlation. Quote from that study:
Your suggestions will not happen so long as there is a class of people who own most of the things. That is the realistic analysis of our political economy. That's the analysis we on the left bring that you're missing -- an explanation for why, in our supposed democracy, we have decidedly undemocratic outcomes. We will never legislate away the problems of capitalism because the capitalists have more power than we do.
Finally, you have this baseline assumption throughout your comment that things just fundamentally are what they are, and slapping a few labels won't realistically change them. We have a term for this too! The late great Mark Fisher used the term "capitalist realism" to describe your attitude, famously saying that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism." That's what you're doing. Even when talking to people who are explicitly proposing an alternative to capitalism, you are just... dismissing it? Waving it away? You're definitely not engaging with it.
I hope that learning that Fisher wrote a whole book about what you're doing, or learning that you're making arguments writers from the 1800s were already critiquing, or even that I took the time to write this whole thing out to you, piques your interest in actually looking into what leftists have to say. Like actually, meaningfully engaging with it, not making a comment that is obviously the beginning of an argument, only to end the comment metaphorically throwing your hands up, which you've now done twice. We write about, think about, and try to organize around these ideas because we want the world to be better. It's something I personally take seriously. I encourage you to take it seriously too, even if you don't agree.
Thanks for the reasonable response. I'll admit part of my attitude displayed is because i feel so beaten down here on lemmy from so many interactions with people at a level of toxicity strong enough to kill a bull. I'm surprised at how many downright reasonable comments there are in this thread for the most part. I'll read more in depth and respond another time.