I don’t consider myself a defender of capitalism by any stretch of the imagination.
But if people will not play fairly with other people if they don’t have to, and will literally enslave you if they can get away with it, then devising a “legal system [with the authority to] punish cheaters” isn’t going to fix anything. Because the same built-in opportunistic adversarial advantage-taking instincts (the ones you seem to be saying are built in) would express themselves via the authority-weilders, the ones capable of punishing cheaters, and then those people would enslave us insofar as they could get away with it.
Marxism/socialist theory contains a very good critique of capitalism, but capitalism-apologists have also given a very good critique of marxism-inspired systems, especially their tendency towards a kind of tone deafness about inequality of political power as if only inequality of wealth can possibly matter.
Actually, they do trade fairly, if they want to repeat the trade.
I read about an experiment in which someone created a whole bunch of bots in a cyber-system. When they “encountered” each other, they would offer tokens to the other. Some bots were programmed to take the tokens and give nothing back. Others accepted the tokens and gave tokens in return.
If they were just randomly exchanging, the winning strategy was to take and not give. Then they reprogrammed the system so that the bots “remembered” each other. The winning strategy was to first, offer an exchange, and then, on subsequent exchanges, do whatever the other bot did in the first exchange.
The first round was socialism, and the second was capitalism. The second system was stable, because free exchange enhanced the winning strategy.
You’re thinking of the game theory experiment with Tit for Tat winning. The winning strategy was to do whatever the other bot idd on the last exchange, not the first exchange.
If by modern economists you mean people with advanced degrees in economics who work and publish in the field, there are lots of modern economists who do not reject the labour theory of value. If you mean “non-Marxist economists,” that is more accurate. They do not so much reject the labour theory of value so much as ask and answer very different questions while ignoring the questions it sets out to answer.
It may be helpful to stipulate that “markets” and “trade” are not in themselves “capitalist.” They have existed in many kinds of economies. The question is what are the social arrangements under which goods are produced? Slavery? Feudalism? Independent commodity production, such as family production? Capitalism, wherein most people are not able to own the land, factories, etc. necessary for production and so must sell their labour to the few who do own them? That is, capitalism is a way of producing goods that uses wage labour, not slaves or serfs or communal production. Whether that’s good, bad, or indifferent is of course another question entirely.
That’s about division of labor and market transactions; it’s not about capital, and not a distinguishing feature of capitalistic societies in practice. In any case, balanced transactions are not universal, and a capitalistic society as defined by Marx is full of intrinsic imbalance.
But I guess defending capitalism requires that kind of subject change.
That’s the definition of capitalism. Mods should have closed the thread here, as some of the other responses were misleading or even quite incorrect.
Ships were a major “means of distribution” long ago, and a major source of private wealth. The rise of industrial factories had a huge effect on the world. Obviously incentives due to private ownership sped prosperity hugely.
:smack: Mods, please change the slogan to “It’s taking A LOT longer than we thought.”
Technical note: You’ll read of a later tournament where Tit-for-Tat was bested. In fact several clones entered that tournament, identified each other with handshakes, and deliberately sabotaged non-handshaking Tit-for-Tat bots! (Hardly seems like exciting computer science to me, but it did get headlines.)
I agree. If you want a real world example of this, look at organized crime. The people in organized crime are capitalists looking to maximize their profits. And by definition, they’re operating outside the law.
And you’ll see that organized crime does not support the free market. Freed of any regulatory oversight, they divide up into territories which each organization holds exclusive control of. They certainly do not allow competitors to work in their territory for the sake of their customers.
There’s no reason to think other businesses wouldn’t follow the same principles if they were able to do so by a lack of regulation. A free market is not a natural result of a capitalist economic system. It has to be imposed and maintained by forces outside of the capitalist economic system - like the government.
Oh, I misunderstood the gadget/widget exchange as between a gadget-maker and a widget-maker. Gadget-making expertise and widget-making expertise resting in different persons and different factories is a function of division of labor. But you’re apparently talking about an exchange between two persons of the same skill set, neither of whom could make either a gadget or a widget if their lives depended on it. So you have a definition of capitalism where the actual laborers and resources without which gadgets and widgets would not exist are not even contemplated except as a source of derivative products to trade.
That’s defective economic philosophy. But at least you have managed to purge yourself of any “shit” ideas about the nature of production, in favor of the incorruptible pure pureness of a market with entirely found objects and no imbalance of inherited wealth, investment capacity, or manufacturing expertise. It’s pretty, it’s idealistic, and it’s completely useless in the real world.
Of course it is, since it is the model by which countries deal with one another.
But your organized crime model is a rather poor one. The reason they shoot each other is to eliminate free exchange, because smaller operators keep moving in and underselling them. That’s about as far from a free market or an exchange between equals as can be imagined.
I think the OP has it right. The essence of capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, with said production being organized primarily to maximize the profits being made by those private owners.
There have historically been many different varieties of capitalism, and much variation in how the system works in various countries. Weavers in 14th century Florence and Monsanto may both fall into the category of “capitalists” (defined as an owner of means of production, not as an ideological believer in the virtue of the capitalist system), but they have very little else in common.
Although capitalist markets have proven to be extremely efficient producers of wealth, the history of capitalism demonstrates that its natural tendency is to concentrate more and more of the wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and the chance that a person not born into an elite family can rise into that strata by his or her own merits becomes less and less. Another flaw of capitalism that is becoming more urgently relevant in our time is that there is no economic incentive for any producer to take the environmental damage its production does into account; this is known as “the tragedy of the commons”.
So, the challenge is to find the correct balance of policies that enables reasonable growth of the economy while also preventing environmental degradation and preventing wealth inequality from becoming greater than we collectively decide is morally appropriate.
