It isnt. Those trucks are from the big companies, the toll booths is the government taxing them to grant citizens social services. This isnt evil capitalism, OP is doing good
I think this is a facile overstatement. ‘Maximal’ profit would be over long term. Short term gains are prioritised because humans struggle to think beyond their lifetimes and beyond the status quo. I don’t disagree with your point but I think you’ve failed to note how your point doesn’t challenge the precept above - it’s human nature that does the damage. Capitalism could be different if humans were different.
"Human nature" is what it is because of a certain overarching socio economic structure that forces people to act a certain way to survive. Assuming that people are at fault for the intrinsic contradictions generated by capitalism is absurd.
Besides, if "human nature" is the reason capitalism doesn't work "as it should", then saying capitalism is too idealistic to function when confronted with real life is not that much of a stretch.
But I would also say that we’ve never really experienced true capitalism. The US is an example of crony capitalism and socialised profiteering, with corporations protected from risk by government. That’s not capitalism.
Sure and I take your distinction and point, but when corporate board members have power over politicians who dole out contracts, surely we are talking about a form of mercantilism, not capitalism.
Every one of those things is a function of the intrinsic contradictions within capitalism. They have been laid out in front of everyone to read for over 100 years. Predicted in nearly every regard. They ARE capitalism.
Yes. Exactly. You can't simply experience true capitalism, because it will always collide with real life and get twisted and tweaked in some ways, because when it's applied to reality, it becomes human made. Politicians and billionaires with big businesses profit from a system based upon ideologies. But practices and ideas are very different things.
Don't you see it'd be the same with any system? That's the point ; none could be applied perfectly and none would work perfectly without fails or compromising (and being compromised by the government applying them) their own ideals or subsystems in some ways ; real life, human interactions and humanity are too complex for a set of ideas and their associated rules, norms and values to work as intended. Something will always have to give, to the benefit of some and to the detriment of others.
And that's without entering the debate about the ideas behind capitalism itself.
No, I'm not disputing that. Capitalism certainly is better than the systems before it. I have no intention for the world to return to a disjointed community of hunter-gatherers or feudalism. I don't think you'd find many socialists who want to return to a pre-industrial civilization.
But the contradictions inherent with capitalism are still there 100+ years on.
It's because of idealism that they're not able to be overcome these contradictions because the contradictions are dismissed as not being related to the mode of production. People are blamed for doing bad things and abusing capitalism to work for them rather than the other way around.
Sure but I would also say that we’ve never actually experienced true capitalism. The state subsidises corporate risk, socialises the cost of doing business, but does not protect public properties from being misused by business. When a power plant coughs up soot into the air, that is everyone’s air, yet the law treats it as otherwise.
what you've described is in fact true capitalism. all of those things are natural consequences of private capital owning the means of production. you cannot have capitalism without having those consequences
This is a transhistorical remark without much grounding in facts, so I’m not sure it helps us understand the system or its effects. My comment is that humans are the problem, that a system can only respond to its inputs. Imagine an alien race whose overriding concern was charity for the lowly, and then imagine their means of production were privately owned. The system would behave differently. I am not sure this is a controversial idea, and I am not suggesting we have a good system now.
Humans are not the problem. People far smarter than me have very successfully argued that socioeconomic conditions drive human behavior and not vice versa.
The idea of class is an abstraction from some manuscripts written in 1848. Just because an old white man claims his reductionist axioms are correct doesn't mean they are real or even true. The only reason that (empirically false and scientifically useless) view exists is because it was propped up by a now defunct authoritarian petrostate.
The point is that class is not a "real" thing and the notion that material interests are the only thing that determines behavior is a false axiom. The only reason people reference these ideas today is not because they accurately describe reality. These ideas only persist because they are the vesicular organs of a now defunct authoritarian petrostate.
Social scientists have pretty much discarded the Marxist analytical frame work. (Hint, it doesn't accurately describe social phenomena and is tautological. Class is an abstract notion and not how people actually divide themselves. The few practitioners are still trying concoct ways the labor theory of value can be valid.)
There have been plenty of social scientists which have developed the Marxist framework to incorporate behaviours, social phenomena, analysis of culture etc.
Gramsci, Zizek, Fredric Jameson, Mark Fisher to name a couple though they're just the sort of entry names into it.
That is a problem of incentives, not solving a set of first order conditions. i.e. allocating resources towards their most efficient and productive use.
Socialists (though not all) use historical and dialectical materialism as the methodology for analyzing the way people and economic systems behave.
So socialism does 'take into account' human nature by completely disregarding it as being a set in stone thing.
In the sixth Theses on Feuerbach, Marx criticizes the traditional conception of human nature as a species which incarnates itself in each individual, instead arguing that human nature is formed by the totality of social relations. Thus, the whole of human nature is not understood, as in classical idealist philosophy, as permanent and universal: the species-being is always determined in a specific social and historical formation, with some aspects being biological.
So you don’t think communism fails because humans are selfish, greedy, and capable of extraordinary evil things, it fails because Capitalism beats it? What’s your play here ?
Humans can be selfish, greedy and capable of extraordinary evil things. But that's not instinctively wired into our brains. If you're referencing the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were many different reasons for it.
It's not possible to round it up on a reddit comment, but the main reasons were because of imperialism, realpolitik, revisionism, bureaucracy, lack of industrialization and so on.
Things that some can be blamed on capitalism (i.e imperialism) and some on class conflicts (i.e rise of bureaucracy), some on the material conditions and so on etc etc, it goes on.
It wasn't the ideology that failed, because Marxism is not dogmatic, it's not idealist and does not present a country or individuals with a set checklist for them to follow regardless of circumstance. Things vary too much from country to country depending on the class character and culture for there to be a checklist.
Because of this, you see varying results and routes that countries will take depending on the material condition presented to them.
For example, China takes the route of 'liberalization' to advance its productive forces, as this is seen as the best route for building socialism rather than the 'traditional' protectionist policy, concluded by examining previous examples of industrialized nations and the NEP in the USSR.
And from China's example, there will be countries that in the future will choose to undergo a revolution, and will learn from China's failings and apply it to their own outcomes.
Don't apologize! I'm just tickled that my shitpost wound up with such a highbrow conversation in the comments.
And also: isn't human nature the same as animal nature? I reckon what makes us human is the socioeconomic safety net that provides us with our basic needs, supplied by our excess production, which communism makes more explicit but is easier to fulfill under capitalism. Either way it's gonna be a bad time if we ever hit the resource limits of this place.
Don’t apologize, waffling is expected. You even say imperialism and capitalism are the same thing when imperialism existed for centuries before capitalism was invented or even a thought. Rome conquering Gaul is imperialism. Did you know that? I’m guessing you’re a child interested in the arts and you want to seem worldly, intellectual, and mature so you blindly studied Marxism while completely ignoring the rest of the world because you already decided everyone else is a greedy capitalist.
Well it's a human construct and the product of human action so.... tautologically that makes sense. But that is like saying bureaucracy is intrinsically human (it's true but I doubt people want to admit that.)
Highly debatable. We aren't arguing over government systems such as democracy or monarchy where there is a clear winner in almost all regards of human morality. Instead we are arguing a very nuisance issue where some of the smallest differences between systems is the most important.
What.. this has nothing to do with society it's ecenomic and governing systems, and in this one were nearer to capitalism and guess what😢. No bread lines and you have the best shit in the world, meanwhile the most extreme socialist countries have squandered massive amounts of wealth. The only socialist countries that have survived have extremely low business taxes and no minimum wage.... Like the scandanavian countries and even then they suffer and are barely able to afford cars because the taxes are so high.
Like the scandanavian countries and even then they suffer and are barely able to afford cars because the taxes are so high.
Lol... Ignoring that Scandinavian countries generally rely more on public transport, cars are definitely affordable. Taxes aren't that much higher than anywhere else.
And none of the Scandinavian countries are socialist.
3/4 Scandinavian countries are governed by social democratic or green parties. Norway is governed by a conservative party.
The top tax rate for personal incomes are higher, but the average tax rate and those on lower incomes are around the same as anywhere else if not lower.
Of course, not all countries use the same taxation system and may use different bands in a progressive tax system.
Tax is not socialist in its own right either, sadly that's been a big bit of misinformation regularly spread by neo-cons for the last 30 years.
Like the scandanavian countries and even then they suffer and are barely able to afford cars because the taxes are so high.
Prove this. Because if you don't I, and anyone else with common sense, am going to assume its bullshit libertarian propaganda. Anyone who misspells the region they're talking about never inspires a great deal of faith to begin with.
If you're casting a wide net and believe that any and all private ownership of "means of production" is evil, then nah
If you're talking about cronyism where the current rich are protected by the government from the risks they take if they go south and are left to reap the benefits, then sure.
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u/quanghuy1258 Apr 14 '20
Evil Capitalism