It's hard to square that with the fact that the wealthiest societies are also the most free, the most liberal, that capitalism has lifted a billion people out of poverty over the last half century.
If money was a poison, the west should be dying. Instead living in rich societies has isolated us from the realities of life in the underdeveloped world, and from our own past of just a few generations, that 'first world problem' has become a persistent joke.
Money can be toxic. Look at the awful social and political problems so many petro-states suffer from. Productive work is the great cleanser though. My wife is Chinese and grew up in a hut with no running water heated by a stove. Since I started visiting her hometown in 2001 it's been transformed beyond recognition, and not by a poison.
> the most liberal, that capitalism has lifted a billion people out of poverty over the last half century.
I often hear this about capitalism, but why do same people never attribute the genocide of American natives, enslavement of Africans and Indians, to capitalism? The earliest emergence of stock companies, lay waste and devastation to an entire sub-continent.
When the sixth mass extinction is underway, ecological disaster on a global scale, and yet "it be as it be", but this is not attributed to capitalism?
Capitalism: it sits to bask in every glory, and all its failures expelled, literally explained away
> Capitalism: it sits to bask in every glory, and all its failures expelled, literally explained away
True to its very mantra: socialize the losses, privatize the gains! At least you can't blame it for inconsistency.
Also, it isn't really capitalism that lifted people out of poverty, it was a very resource-intensive exploitation of fossil fuels on an unprecedented scale.
In the scope of just 1 century, we probably burned at least ~10 million years worth of accumulated energy in fossil fuels. It would be ridiculous if this didn't lift people out of poverty.
BTW, it's not like communism didn't lift people out of poverty. Compare the wealth and possessions of an average citizen of USSR in, say, 1925 and 1975, half a century later.
I think one need to understand that those kind of things have been said about western capitalism/society for a long long time, even under appalling injustice, segregation etc. Its purpose is to comfort the privileged, not necessarily to be true.
The underlying pattern has been there for even longer of course, e.g. Bertrand Russell wrote this in 1932:
In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges.
Thanks for replying.
I didn’t know where to start with a reply. I wasn’t sure he knew what he was talking about. Or if he lives on the same planet... And my alien is not very good.
> ...why do same people never attribute the genocide of American natives, enslavement of Africans and Indians, to capitalism?
Because:
- Slavery and genocide predate modern market economics. They are not unique to capitalism. It would need to be shown that they are more prevalent (tough, given Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, etc.).
- The slavery and genocide you are probably referencing comes from mercantilism and imperialism, not free market capitalism.
- Slavery, violence, and murder are not features of free markets. Property rights aren't exactly established if people and land can be taken by force without compensation or agreement, not that people are property anyway.
The thing is that every system is multifaceted and may effectively have "phases" when it was beneficial and later winds up detrimental and surplanted when a better adapted solution occurs and displaces it. Take the ancient basics of kings - ruling and becoming rich on extortion essentially but a monopoly on force kept violence in check. Later warrior elites ended up losing power to merchant elites - especially with the industrial revolution. Merchants were once above only Burakumin in the Japanese caste system - they later won the right to wear one sword.
I believe that writing off large debts for effective titles were involved.
Capitalism like everything else must adapt or die when circumstances change. As for attribuitable to capitalism a dirty secret is that the USSR was worse environmentally without the greed. It might excaberate some but it is fundamentally the wants and needs that drives consumption.
Haiti's poverty is why their border can be seen from space via deforestation. Humans hunted megafauna to extinction back in ancient times and they weren't exactly morbidly obese.
Ecologically the Soviet Union was the largest human caused disaster in the planet's history. More humans killed in pogroms and unnecessary famines in Soviet Union/China/Cambodia than those caused in all modern warfare.
The mercantilist form of capitalism lead to great abuses and problems, but as always capitalism is the a horrible economic system- but its better than all the alternatives.
The Spanish conquistadors were feudalists, not capitalists. Spain actually had one of the most rigid and statist economies in all of Europe. The sort of tribalism (of the European colonists) that lead to the destruction of native societies in the Americas, both North and South is it's own thing and exists independently of the economic system of those practicing it.
In fact Capitalism says very little about politics though. All it takes for it to operate is a functioning legal system and respect for property rights, and that's about it. Capitalism is simply about the freedom to own and raise capital, make investments and earn profits. That's about it. People have been doing that for thousands of years, it's simply the degree to which it is taken that makes the difference. What makes a system non-capitalist is really the degree to which freedoms to invest and practice economic activity are restricted or reserved, and the degree to which property, profits and investment can be appropriated.
Capitalism has very few ideological requirements. A such you can layer over or under it almost any other political ideology. Just look at China with it's Communist political system, statist public sector but burgeoning capitalist economic sector. Is the persecution of the Uighurs down to capitalism?
One problem with capitalism is that it makes a society dramatically more efficient and wealthy, making it a lot more capable of prosecuting whatever other political, racial, cultural or religious agenda the society might have. Just look at the wealthiest nations on earth. They are either capitalist, or they are resource rich such as the petrostates, or in the case of China have re-branded capitalism as 'Chinese Characteristics' and used it to fund the statist side of their agenda. Russia is failing precisely because it has been unable to establish a functioning capitalist economy and relies on oil and gas money instead.
Look at the middle east. Israel is easily the most capitalist society in the region and, even though it faces up to some of the wealthiest nations on the planet, if there was a war between Israel and say Saudi Arabia even, there's no doubt who would get humiliated. That's how terrifyingly effective capitalsim can be. It's the reason Japan rose from being a miserable medieval backwater to dominating all of Asia, even though it retained it's feudal hierarchy. That's how flexible capitalism is because it's not really an ideology, it's just about basic economics.
The double standards, lack of historical context and nuance, the surgical separation of capitalism from the power concentration it creates and its consequences (inequality, skewed democracy etc), the euphemisms (usually using the word freedom), and the reflexive assumption that critics want Stalinism and so on, all these things are just too infuriating and requires too much effort to step by step reply too, hence my downvote.
Slavery and genocide didn't suddenly appear at the same time as capitalism as you and I would recognize.
Capitalism means free markets. Free markets means freedom to buy, sell and invest. Freedoms must be protected, and the freest markets have the strongest protections for person and property. Freedom and security go hand in hand.
If capitalism is responsible for slavery and genocide, then it's also responsible for eradicating slavery and genocide within its sphere.
Alternative economic systems don't magically promote human rights. Let's discuss the gap between rich and poor in China or Cuba. Or ethnic suppression and genocide in the USSR or China. Or endemic racism in Cuba. Or systematic impoverishment of millions of people in oligarchies across Africa and South America.
I'm still waiting for socialist systems to make a billion people freer and happier, instead of dead, impoverished or imprisoned.
No, it's a model of property rights. “Free markets” are a slogan, but not even a particularly coherent concept much less a concrete thing that is present in capitalism.
yeah, it does sound a bit like that, but when you factor in the reasons why a free market has never (and in my opinion should never) exist there starts to be a difference. Things like regulatory capture, monopolies, and exploitation of any possible resource are all systemic effects of capitalism. When capital (power) begets more capital (power), it should be no surprise that tactics that are underhanded but ultimately grant more capital (power) are the ones chose and that the system tends towards a consolidation of power in those that have more of it already. It's not saying anybody with money or power will automatically do those things, just that the system is set up to encourage that, so somebody probably will at some point.
To me, it's similar to looking at a voting system like first past the post and identifying that the system tends towards two parties as a fundamental nature of the system. Underlying motives and strategies of individuals within the system will produce this effect.
I'm not commention on the validity of the "no real communism" statement here, just the comparison of it to the "no real free market"
Here's the problem with your reasoning, via an example. American prosperity is as much an outcome of capitalism as poverty, repression, and murders in Central America are.
You see, capitalism indeed works great for the people who "win", yet to keep a relatively high standard of living at home (I'm talking about America since it's the wealthiest country in the world), much suffering has been inflicted in other faraway places: labour is exploited, natural resources are pillaged, brutal control is effected, either directly or by more dissimulated means... This is what people don't talk about then they mention the "joys" of capitalism, they don't mention the repression and murders in Guatemala and dozens other countries, they don't mention slavery and the genocide of natives, they don't mention how multinationals exploit resource-rich countries and siphon that sorely-needed wealth back to the privileged West, etc.
> American prosperity is as much an outcome of capitalism as poverty, repression, and murders in Central America are.
ANY sort of inherent human greed capitalizes on suffering. It doesn't magically disappear with another system. There is always a pareto distribution of wealth. The differences are in which metrics are the primary leverage for accumulation and the scale of the differentials (wealth disparity) along the curve.
Was capitalism responsible for the wars waged in that region by the Aztecs? Was it responsible for the massive losses of life in the USSR and Mao's China? You can't just say that because X country is capitalist, everything that happens in it is because of capitalism. It's just an economic system, that's all. Projecting it's effects beyond the realm of economics requires some justification.
Capitalism didn't originate the concept of resources, or politics, or even money. How can you justify blaming Capitalism for things that happen just as much, if not many, many orders of magnitude more in non-capitalist societies?
Conversely I think it is justifiable to attribute the enormous economic gains of that billion people to capitalism directly. It's an economic system and we're measuring economic gains directly attributable to investment, often replacing decidedly un-capitalist systems.
I'm not sure you can call what is in Central America actual functioning capitalism. A random individual in that area can't easily raise capital and start a business. They are subject to extreme levels of crime and cronyism. A lot of Central America is more like a set of fiefdoms with a king rather than what would reasonably be called some kind of western capitalism.
Consider your favourite successful startup and move it to Central America. Now consider what additional factors it needs to take in to simply operate. Take security as an example: Private guards acting with high aggression (machine guns) are a basic requirement in some areas. Compare that to New York (Hand gun).
>I'm not sure you can call what is in Central America actual functioning capitalism.
You're missing the point. The United State's functioning capitalism is a major cause of your hesitancy to call Central America's countries functioning capitalistic societies.
capitalism turns this motivation to accumulate more than others (greed) into a drive to produce goods and services. This has good and bad qualities, and focusing on one or the other doesn't paint a complete picture of its effects. This mechanism also breaks down in some ways when you can generate money without providing anything, which is becoming more prevalent nowadays.
If money was a poison, the west should be dying. Instead living in rich societies has isolated us from the realities of life in the underdeveloped world, and from our own past of just a few generations, that 'first world problem' has become a persistent joke.
Money can be toxic. Look at the awful social and political problems so many petro-states suffer from. Productive work is the great cleanser though. My wife is Chinese and grew up in a hut with no running water heated by a stove. Since I started visiting her hometown in 2001 it's been transformed beyond recognition, and not by a poison.