
Capitalism, Alone - ubac
http://glineq.blogspot.com/2019/09/capitalism-alone-four-important-but.html
======
yboris
Branko Milanovic is one of my favorite researchers.

His "Elephant Curve" is well-know. His book "The Haves and the Have-Nots" is
excellent.

I used his dataset to replicate his results to show inequality in an
interactive form here:

[https://income-inequality.info](https://income-inequality.info)

~~~
ubac
This is great. I still remember seeing his India top ventile vs US bottom
ventile chart ten-ish years ago, absolutely blew my mind.

~~~
NTDF9
This is so true. The upper middle class in India would probably be lower
middle class in the US.

However, let's not kid ourselves. Cost of living in India is equally or ever
more cheap. $1-$2 for lunch a day? Rent is only $200/month? My god that's
cheap for people earning $20,000/yr as opposed to someone even in Mississippi.

The real losers anywhere are the bottom quintile in a highly unequal society.

~~~
ubac
I know this will sound unbelievable but I believe the comparison is done at
purchasing power parity, so it's adjusting for food and rent as well. Here's
the graph I remember, though it unfortunately doesn't confirm or refute my
memory that the comparison is at PPP:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/08/15/this-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/08/15/this-
chart-might-make-you-feel-better-about-american-inequality/)

~~~
godelski
The graph makes me suspicious about the PPP component (it looks like
normalized to US dollars?). I mean if it is completely adjusted for cost of
living and everything (rent, food, etc) this seems off. Half the world is at
$2k equiv?

I don't know how you could live in the US if you just made $2k/yr. Even if
rent was entirely free. I'm a grad student and eat a lot of lentils, rice,
eggs, and beans. $2k a year is pretty easy to blow through on just food
(That's $167/mo, which is _doable_ but not reasonable). What am I missing that
is being captured here? I literally don't know anywhere in the US (I've lived
in some pretty cheap and desolate areas) that you could do $2k for just rent
in a year. I mean the poverty level is like $12k and you have to find really
really cheap housing and eat a lot of lentils and rice to survive on that.

What am I missing? Is 50% of the world that malnourished? Are things like food
and rent not being explicitly bought and thus not included? Combinations?

~~~
salty_biscuits
I too am suspicious. I think it would depend very heavily on what the basket
of goods contains used in the calculation. Also purchasing the same things is
not at all representative of living a standard lifestyle in each country
(trivially consider a country that has religious prohibitions on certain
foods, or course the prices will be wildly different). Or different
expectations of what constitutes shelter, etc, etc. That said though, in my
experiences traveling, it has been shocking to me how desperately poor people
can be in some countries.

~~~
godelski
> That said though, in my experiences traveling, it has been shocking to me
> how desperately poor people can be in some countries.

This I fully believe. But also having lived under $15k/yr, I can't fathom how
that placed me in the 93(ish) percentile. I could understand being in the 70th
percentile just by merit of things like having a cellphone and internet but
half (48.9%) the world's population is on the internet (up from 36.6% in 2013)
and 35% of people have smartphones (66.5% have mobile devices). So there's
something that I'm really missing. I do know that internet and cellphones
weren't as ubiquitous in 2013, but if that's what's accounting for the
different then there's been a huge and rapid shift but I'd also argue that
something is wrong.

Clearly there's something I'm missing here. Because with my past experience
this suggests to me that living paycheck to paycheck and being malnourished in
the US(living in the <13th percentile in the US) still puts you over the 90%
mark (world). I assume this would be similar in Europe. I mean I know we have
a _SIGNIFICANTLY_ higher quality of life here, but this suggests to me that
80% of the world has to be extremely malnourished. Lines like this confuse me

> Almost a third of the people had less than $1,000 to spend for the whole
> year, that's less than $3 per day on average!

Because I can understand that if you're in India or southeast Asia and those
are $3 US. But I literally cannot figure out how that would be possible in the
US. Assuming everything you have and eat is coming out of your pocket.

I'm really just curious. I'm going to go ahead and assume the economists know
more about economics than me. I'm legitimately just trying to make sense of
this.

------
amelius
One dimension not addressed is how individual people join forces as companies
and effectively turn against other groups of people.

What would happen to the economy if we'd only allow companies of 1000 people,
of 100 people, or perhaps even of 1 person?

~~~
agitator
This is a fascinating concept!

On one hand it would keep companies from completely vertically integrating or
expanding to encompass many verticals. Which would stimulate the economy in
one way because more people would be exposed to the profits at the top or near
the top of the market. Also the increased competition might result in the
improvement of various small aspects of technology that would result in better
efficiencies across the whole.

But on the other hand, limiting the size of companies would make us less
competitive on a global scale because of the inherent cost in being forced to
buy components, as opposed to vertically integrating. Also product costs may
increase, which could negate any increases in wealth among the people.

~~~
godelski
This is a super complicated topic and I'm not sure it could practically be
done. Vertical and lateral integration usually result in huge cost savings. It
also reduces complexity. But this is also a feature that monopolies (or
monopoly like companies) exploit. I don't think it would be competitive enough
if all players weren't playing by this rule. Competition is good, but so is
size (think like Bell Labs [0] and how much Google can do). This is all
completely a guess though. But monopolies aren't inherently had, they just
usually are because they exploit that power to hinder innovation. Monopolies
can actually have huge benefits.

[0] Bell Labs was an agreement that Bell could have the monopoly (to reduce
wiring and because of the network effect that they could take advantage of to
connect the US with telephone lines) but there was also heavy regulation done
during this deal that I'm sure others here are much more informed about and
can correct/add to my comment with.

[^] I don't think there's ever been a "free market" nor do I think there ever
could be. The US's largest economic growth happened in a "free market" in name
only (propaganda a lot for the Russians) but was heavily regulated.

------
Animats
I've made this point before on HN, from a slightly different angle. Part of
the problem with capitalism is that it's a monopoly. From about 1930 to 1980,
communism was a serious ideological competitor. Capitalism had to deliver a
better standard of living or risk being overturned by vote or revolution. That
kept capitalism honest.

This was a mainstream position. It was accepted that companies had to do well
by their employees and the larger society, or something would be done to them
by governments or unions. This was accompanied by boasting about "the American
way", and that boasting was backed by reality. Things we view as acceptable
behavior today, such as huge increases in the price of medicines, were not
even considered. Mergers to the point of creating monopolies were rarely
attempted and usually rejected.

But by the 1980s, it was clear that the USSR's system just wasn't working out.
Capitalism had won. That's when it started acting like a monopoly, able to set
the rules. This started in a big way with the deregulation of the 1980s and
1990s. This was justified by faith in a "free market".

But businesses didn't want a free market with many competitors. That keeps
prices down and doesn't allow enough control. What resulted was repeated
mergers, until most industries were dominated by a very few number of
companies. This was promoted as desirable.[1] The US now has three big banks,
three big drug-store chains, and three big cellular phone companies. None of
those industries used to be that centralized.

So we've ended up with not only capitalism as a monopoly, but monopoly
capitalism.

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-
for-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-
losers-1410535536)

~~~
shantly
> That keeps prices down and doesn't allow enough control. What resulted was
> repeated mergers, until most industries were dominated by a very few number
> of companies. This was promoted as desirable.

From the point of view of a single state, it _can_ be desirable, _provided_
said state keeps those companies on a tight leash to ensure the benefits are,
to a high degree, captured for their own country. Internal competition eats
into money for R&D and international competition. A big part of post-war
Japan's success involved this sort of strategy: let a small number of large
companies capture the domestic market, keep foreign competitors out, then set
them loose on foreign markets while ensuring they cooperate where possible
(R&D especially) for greater efficiency.

------
bryanrasmussen
"The fall of communism, in a strict Marxist view of the world, is an
abomination,..."

Ok, but would Marxism understand the societies that have called themselves
communist as being such - my understanding is the common argument is that they
are not truly communist and that no, Marx would not have considered them as
such. As this post doesn't seem to even address that argument I find it highly
suspect, as well argued as it would otherwise appear.

~~~
smacktoward
It's kind of a half-and-half situation.

On the one hand, Marx anticipated communism rising up through society
organically from the proletariat, whereas in most communist countries it was
instead imposed in top-down fashion by a so-called "vanguard party" (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism)).

Vanguardism was a feature of the Leninist approach to communism, and Lenin had
not-terrible reasons for preferring it -- namely that by the 20th century,
people had been waiting more than 50 years for communism to bubble up
organically the way Marx had predicted it would way back in the 1840s, and it
never seemed to, you know, _happen._ Lenin argued (in _What Is To Be Done?_ :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F))
that Marx was wrong in this regard, that the only way the working masses would
ever embrace communism was if a narrow, elite activist class first educated
and agitated them.

Vanguardism worked, in the sense that it resulted in the creation of formally
communist governments, which waiting for Marx's prediction to come true had
never (and still never has) done. But it also tainted those governments (which
were of course staffed top to bottom with members of the vanguard party) with
a strong sense of their people as cattle who needed to be herded by their
betters, which then made it easier to abandon democracy, shutter the free
press, and murder lots of people whenever they got in the way of the next
five-year plan.

On the other hand, complaints by communists that existing communist
governments weren't practicing Real Communism™ always had a whiff of no-true-
Scotsmanism about them. Most countries with these governments were pretty
miserable places to live, so they weren't exactly great advertisements to
people who lived elsewhere for the idea that they should embrace communism
themselves. So people who advocated for communism had to somehow find a way to
assure people that the communism they were preaching wasn't the same thing as
the system down the road that couldn't feed anyone and was riddled with secret
police. Accusing the folks down the road of deviationism
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviationism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviationism))
was a useful way to do that.

~~~
theseadroid
>Vanguardism worked, in the sense that it resulted in the creation of formally
communist governments, which waiting for Marx's prediction to come true had
never (and still never has) done.

Would you consider that the Nordic countries are growing communism organically
albeit how rudimentary it is?

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Sweden and Finland saw peak socialism decades ago. Neoliberal governments have
rolled back many policies for workers and these countries are not so much
different than other Western European states now.

------
rohanshah
"Marxism has therefore given up trying to provide an explanation for the 20th
century history... The reason for this failure lies in the fact that Marxism
never made a meaningful distinction between standard Marxist schemes regarding
the succession of socio-economic formations (what I call the Western Path of
Development, WPD) and the evolution of poorer and colonized countries.
Classical Marxism never asked seriously whether the WPD is applicable in their
case."

In fact this was/is an active area of research, namely Post Colonial Theory
and Subaltern Studies, which has been heavily criticized and reified with a
more classic Marxist analysis since. Post Colonial Theory and the Specter of
Capital [1] is perhaps the most accessible such critique.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_Theory_and_the_Sp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_Theory_and_the_Specter_of_Capital)

------
stupidcar
Interesting piece, but there seems to me to be contradiction in its thesis: If
people have become so devoted to monetary success alone, how can all these
industries that rely on vice exist? Indulging a vice is inherently wasteful.
It costs time that could be spent working, and money that could be better
spent on self-improvement, or invested or saved.

And while we may have accepted greed to the point that there is nothing
distasteful about saying one desires a better car or house, or a better paid
job, in practice most people do not work day and night, spurning all other
opportunities, to make it happen. In practice, most people make decisions
every day that place other desires, both traditionally "good" and "bad", above
the simple pursuit of more money. So to say that people have internalised
capitalism to the exclusion of all else seems incorrect.

I have a different take: The development of capitalism and commodification had
a mutually reinforcing relationship with the fluidity of labor and the
fungibility of goods. Many "traditional" bonds between individuals and
communities were really a consequence of local monopolies: There was only one
local doctor, shopkeeper, school, etc., and a small pool of potential
employers. As such, relationships were inevitably more personal.

As technology, law and institutions allowed civilisation to become more
mobile, it allowed the possibility of markets in many areas of life where it
was previously impossible. This is unavoidable. Even if you personally choose
to stand still, the people around you move, meaning your relationships and
interactions are nonetheless more transitory and impersonal. In such a world,
commodification emerges not as the consequence of internalised capitalist
ideology, but because it is the only way to manage constant interactions with
strangers.

So it is commodification itself that has become internalised, not capitalism.
Indeed, most modern society isn't arranged around acquiring capital and
leveraging it or maximising its value, it's about the consumption of things
and experiences—driven by materialist, emotional and spiritual instincts—using
money as a points system used to ration them out. Most people approach their
work in a simple way: they want to earn enough points to meet their basic
needs, and indulge their desires to a point of equilibrium between effort and
general satisfaction, after which they don't work any harder or longer.

~~~
faitswulff
> If people have become so devoted to monetary success alone, how can all
> these industries that rely on vice exist? Indulging a vice is inherently
> wasteful. It costs time that could be spent working, and money that could be
> better spent on self-improvement, or invested or saved.

Simple: people are not perfectly rational economic actors. I believe the study
of irrational economics is called "behavioral economics."

------
antiutopian
Interesting article. I don't agree with a lot of it, one point I think is
straightforward to respond to as a Marxist:

"Marxist interpretation of the 20th century is much more convincing in both
its explanation of World War I (imperialism as the highest stage of
capitalism) and fascism (an attempt by the weakened bourgeoise to thwart left-
wing revolutions). But Marxist view is entirely powerless to explain 1989, the
fall of communist regimes, and hence unable to provide any explanation for the
role of communism in global history. The fall of communism, in a strict
Marxist view of the world, is an abomination, as inexplicable as if a feudal
society having had experienced a bourgeois revolution of rights were suddenly
to “regress” and to reimpose serfdom and the tripartite class division.
Marxism has therefore given up trying to provide an explanation for the 20th
century history."

It's true that the dogma of the official communist parties has no explanation
for this, but their theory degenerated and became distorted by the need to
justify all the twists and turns of USSR foreign and domestic policy. A
genuine Marxist view of the 20th century is that the world revolution began in
1917 in Russia, the "weakest link" of capitalism, but was not able to be
completed in the industrial centers. There were a number of reasons for this,
for example the growth of reformism in the German SPD, but the result is in
reality a failed revolution that won a few outposts and held on to them for 70
years. As a useful example, the Paris Commune is another example of a failed
revolution, although it only held out for a few months. It's not a Marxist
view that a single country can "go socialist" in a world dominated by
capitalism. So there was no "regression" back to capitalism.

~~~
spaceheeder
It's literally not possible for one economic system to simultaneously "take
over" the entire planet, so if a socialist or communist revolution ever took
place there would absolutely be a first single country or group of countries
to "go socialist." The USSR and its allies were, at the time of their
existence and the height of their influence, recognized as being fundamentally
communist in nature by communist scholars. Whatever deviations from that ideal
caused them to fail are no greater in magnitude (or relevance) than the
deviations current nation-states have from capitalism that libertarians use to
No-True-Scottsman actually-existing-capitalism.

If communism 2.0 is a better system and wouldn't fail for the same reasons
that the USSR did, then talk about those differences. When talking about
communism 1.0 (and the many, many socialists/communists living today who
basically have not deviated from the mindsets of the revolutionaries of the
past), drop the special pleading and take the L.

~~~
claudiawerner
> recognized as being fundamentally communist in nature by communist scholars

I'm familiar with that scholarship, and no, they weren't. The main reason
being is that the USSR never claimed to be communist. The USSR based its
ideology on Marx and Lenin, and Lenin invented this distinction, that
"socialism" is a stage preceding communism, and communism is a stateless
society (etc. etc. as Marx described it). The USSR claimed to be a _union_ of
_socialist_ soviets. They used "socialist" in this sense.

By Communist party-affiliated scholars, there was some disagreement as to
whether the USSR really was socialist. By academics in universities, there was
more doubt cast on that.

------
rland
The term capitalism is meaningless now.

For example: the Japanese mode of lifetime employment, low salaries, high
intangible benefits to employment, an almost exclusively age based
hierarchical system is labeled the same thing as the American model, where
every individual is a capitalist and a sole individual's brand determines
their compensation and worth. The two models are called "capitalist", but they
share almost nothing.

If everyone is a capitalist, why aren't all of the world's markets integrated?
Why is it so hard to strike a trade deal? Why is trade still organized into
ideological blocs? We have always had global trade, but we've never ever had a
shared definition of what "a capitalist society" actually means. And then of
course the term is used extensively as an ideological cudgel.

Saying things like "Capitalism is the only means of production in the world"
or "Capitalism is inevitable" has no meaning at all.

Do a find and replace with "Human Nature" and this makes a lot more sense.

~~~
kennywinker
It sounds like you're describing historical social differences between
countries, rather than a different implementation of capitalism.

capitalism is the economic system that "lifetime employment, low salaries,
high intangible benefits to employment" exist within. I.e. the concept of
employment and salaries are part of capitalism, how they are used is up to the
specific society.

Based on my experience I would would argue that capitalism influences the
structure of society so that the world is getting more homogenous, and
differences like the ones you describe are getting less and less. But that's a
different issue from the ubiquitousness of capitalism.

~~~
rland
So, maybe it will help to look at what is Not Capitalism.

In say some midecentury communist country, the workers owned the capital,
right?

In practice, though, someone who called themselves a worker (a party
secretary) with political power had de facto control over how and where the
capital was allocated and spent. Sounds an awful lot like private ownership.
Also, it resembles some parts of the US, like defense, where single bid
contracts go conveniently to the friends of lawmakers. It's the taxpayer's
capital, right, not privately owned?

The capital in these cases is not explicit in a spreadsheet, but it undeniably
exists and is owned.

My example of the Japanese salaryman is similar: if my boss at Mitsubishi is
the division leader of heavy industry, my paycheck comes in large part from
being able to give his name on the phone with someone when asking for a favor.
I'm not paid that, but I own the privilege -- the capital -- if I get high
enough up at Mitsubishi. I can even pass this intangible owned thing along to
my children, through my family name.

These are all of my cut-and-dry examples, but there are many which are more
muddled. The spending of huge companies on lobbying--is that Capitalism? Or
some perversion?

Depending on what point you're trying to make ideologically, these situations
are all either Capitalism OR Not Capitalism, OR somewhere in between. So what
the hell is capitalism anyway and why is it even useful to talk about it like
the way the OP talks about it? That is my point.

------
jeffdavis
Historically, free markets and private property protections would give rise to
capitalism. But it seems like, in modern times, those two same ingredients
give rise to something else. This "something else" is partially capitalistic,
but the word seems to fit less and less.

Traditionally, a capital investment means something like a tire factory. The
right factory in the right place gives the owner an advantage until the market
changes or a new supplier makes an even better factory.

Putting things like software, a set of customer relations, a brand, or other
modern business advantages in the same bucket as a tire factory just seems
wrong.

~~~
CuriousSkeptic
A nice deep dive into that thought is the book “The Wealth of Networks” by
Yochai Benkler

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks)

It’s main focus is on what he calls Commons Based Peer-Production and how the
default capitalistic model of private property doesn’t fit that mode of
production

------
RestlessMind
> Capitalism, in order to expand, needs greed. Greed has been entirely
> accepted by us.

Any system which does not take into account inherent human traits like greed,
envy or laziness are bound to fail. That seems one reasons why Capitalism
prevailed over Communism, since the former had fewer "wrong assumptions" about
the human nature.

------
microcolonel
Communism, aloner.

There is a cost to socialism, if it ever becomes established, it is state
socialism, and state socialism is inherently violent. You are free to
associate with more people, to change your relationship with work and
consumption, you are _rich_. Your problem is that you have chosen to be alone,
and you blame society for not forcing you to be at least superficially
engaged.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
Capitalism engenders the same violence, only behind a mask of "free will".

~~~
microcolonel
_Mask_ how? Yes, people are convincing, but that is in no way comparable to
force.

The fact that many people are convinced to do things that suck for them in no
way justifies a switch to deliberate, overt state imposition of what is
supposed to be good for them.

If people are being convinced of unwise or unreasonable things, you have an
obligation to do your own convincing.

~~~
claudiawerner
The mask is as follows: firstly in a particular ideological and political
conception of freedom as the freedom to buy and sell whatever you want
(including your own labour), along with some things given by the liberal
egalitarian state, secondly in the liberal construction of "free will" as the
opposite of coercion. Marx criticized liberalism for its narrow conception of
what it means to be free, and before that, Spinoza outlined why it is
meaningless to talk of "coercion" and "consent" as proponents of negative
liberties tend to talk about them.

It is not enough to be free, freedom lies, as Zizek says, in the freedom to
define your own idea of freedom outside of the ideological context in which it
is given to you, whether that's a Western capitalist ideology or one given to
you by the CCP.

~~~
microcolonel
The thing is, only one of those spectrums of freedom is fully contained within
the other.

You are free at any moment to commit your excesses to the state, or to any
institution.

------
goda90
>The economic system and the system of values are interdependent and mutually
reinforcing. Our system of values enables hyper-commercialized capitalism to
function and expand. It then follows that no change in the economic system can
be imagined without a change in the system of values that underpins it, which
the system promotes, and with which we are, in our everyday activities, fully
comfortable. But to produce such a change in values seems, at present, to be
an impossible task. It has been tried before and ended in the most ignominious
failure. We are thus locked in capitalism. And in our activities, day in, day
out, we support and reinforce it.

But can capitalism expand endlessly? It seems to me that capitalism will
expand itself to destruction.

~~~
nostrademons
You can resolve this paradox by making a distinction between the whole & its
parts. Capitalism is not a monolith - it's a system where many competing firms
and ecosystems vie to become the dominant producer. Some of them inevitably
grow faster than others and take over the ecosystem. At that point capitalism
is redefined to mean "the winner", and all the losers wither and die off. Then
some small variation within the new definition of capitalism takes off, grows
faster than its competitors, eventually replaces them, and redefines
capitalism as itself. As a result, "capitalism" is always growing, but it
doesn't mean the same things, and most of the things that it previously meant
end up dying and being lost to history.

You can see this cycle actually happening if you look at history from the
medieval rennaissance until today. "Capitalism" initially meant the decoupling
of farm labor from manorial estates that owned the land; in the wake of Black
Death, there was a surplus of land and a shortage of labor, and so peasant
farmers were able to choose from the estates that were most productive and
gave them the best life. That spurred competition among estates to improve
farming mechanisms, which increased food productivity, which allowed some
laborers to specialize into guilds. Capitalism was then redefined as the
private ownership of the tools used for this specialized labor, which competed
to produce the best quality goods at the lowest prices.

The surplus generated by this then allowed the conquest of the New World, of
Africa, and of Asia, which opened a big new resource source and ushered in the
era of mercantilism. Those raw resource sources then created demand for more
efficient ways than the guild system, which led to the invention of industrial
capitalism. "Industry" initially referred to one specific industry, textiles;
as mass-production techniques were applied to more and more areas of the
economy, "industry" eventually became synonymous with "capitalism", and people
forgot that mercantile traders used to be the dominant corporations on earth,
or that there was a time when everyone was either a farmer or landlord. Now
software is eating the world, while software in 1975 was a tiny industry that
most people thought of as a hobby or loss-leader.

Along the way there've been plenty of losers that were destroyed. If you were
one of those peasant farmers who _weren 't_ among the most efficient, you are
now dead. If you were a cobbler, or a tailor, or a baker, or a smith, or a
weaver, you lost your specialty when industrialization came around. If you
were a Luddite, sucks to be you. If you were a Native American, you're
probably now dead too. If you were a plantation owner in the American South,
you lost most of your holdings after the Civil War. If you're a factory worker
in America, you're probably jobless. Someday software engineers will be the
dinosaurs of the future.

But all of these groups are just written out of the narrative: capitalism is
defined in terms of the winners, and the losers drop out of history.
Capitalism will expand forever, but it won't look like the version of
capitalism we have today.

~~~
andrekandre
but if at some point where scarcity is eliminated (a la star trek) and most
production is not centered around capital accumulation, or working for the
owner of capital, how could we still call that capitalism?

or is the argument that it is more of a colloquial term and people have used
it to mean whatever they want/need it to mean?

~~~
nostrademons
Capital becomes "whatever gives you an advantage". I think it's a pretty good
bet that people will continue to seek out advantages even if all material
scarcity is eliminated. (Arguably, we're there already: there's been enough
material goods to feed and shelter the whole world since the 1950s, and it's
only the continued game-playing of elites that creates scarcity.) If you've
ever observed, say, fandom, or PTA meetings, or programming language debates,
or HN comment threads, or any other situation where the stakes are incredibly
low but passions are incredibly high, you'll see evidence of humanity's
ability to create status games where none existed before.

"Capital" in the sense we usually mean it - factory machinery and the
financing to buy it - wasn't really a thing in agrarian capitalism or
mercantile capitalism. And we're witnessing this redefinition in real-time as
"data" becomes a form of capital despite not really being worth anything
before the age of computers.

~~~
claudiawerner
>"Capital" in the sense we usually mean it - factory machinery and the
financing to buy it - wasn't really a thing in agrarian capitalism or
mercantile capitalism.

This issue of capitalism changing its form, and capital not being same in one
period as another, is only caused by your own interpretation and definition of
"capitalism" which doesn't seem to be accepted by anyone else. In political
economy and political philosophy circles, capital is defined as a social
relation, not a _thing_. The things it does refer to concretize the relation,
but they are not the relation itself.

The idea that capital is "whatever gives one an advantage" seems so general
that it cannot be sensibly used to talk about the concrete historical birth of
capitalism and its expansion. A more accurate view, keeping with history, is
that capital tends to subsume things, so now we talk about "human capital" or
"information capital".

------
lootsauce
My frustration with the arguments for communism and or socialism vs capitalism
is that they are surface arguments on ideological basis. I see socialism and
communism as dressed up authoritarianism.

A massive hand-over of power to a few in government is not an improvement over
capitalism where a much larger group vie for power in a dual reinforcing and
opposing system of government and corporate interests. To hand the economy
over to the government creates a far more centralized system of power and all
the discussion of supposed benefits we could attain by such a system does not
nullify the massive threat to freedom by that kind of system.

Capitalism is a horrible system but its the least horrible one we know of. A
better discussion is how do we get to a better regulatory regime.

~~~
jmcqk6
The problem is as you state: discussions between ideology are not productive
when at least one side is completely entrenched in that ideology.

Instead of focusing on ideology, focus on specific problems, and don't let the
discussion occur in terms of ideology. This can be done by forcing specifics
as much as possible.

Ideology is almost by definition, highly abstract. It's nice to talk about
things when they're highly abstract, because their incredibly malleable.

But the problems we face in the world are not abstract. It's completely clear
at this point that an ideological approach to solving problems will not work.
But perhaps changing the discussions to be smaller and focusing on real issues
in specific detail might be better.

I could be wrong. I've been unable to have a productive conversation with
ideological opposites from me, but I seem to get closer when I talk about
specifics instead of abstractions.

------
lanevorockz
Capitalism is nothing more than giving everyone power to do whatever they
want. The alternative is Communism which is giving a few government elites the
power over everyone. Obviously, these extremes can NEVER be implemented so we
will forever live in a middle ground between these two.

Each country will take steps in the latter and natural selection will find the
best middle ground between this two. The big problem here is the Tyrannical
aspect of Communism and the tendency for global wars. Want it or not almost
every moral war was started on this envy stereotype that radical leftists
have. Don't forget, Hitler was leader of the National Socialist Party.

~~~
cairo_x
Congratulations: You, along with most of the people here, have no fucking clue
what Capitalism is. Capitalism is when the person who put up the capital gets
ROI plus the surplus wealth created by the workers, and the workers themselves
get a small fraction of said surplus called a wage minus any say over
reinvestment of surplus. The alternative does not have to be a state system of
communism at all. [https://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-
network/2012/j...](https://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-
network/2012/jan/04/social-enterprise-blog-co-operatives-and-mutuals)

