What should replace capitalism?

Great Debates
161

Capitalism (privately-owned means of production operated for profit) *should *be replaced by public ownership of all property and a removal of greed as an economic motive.

This will happen shortly after the Sun goes Red Giant, given current socialisation of the population and relative inequalities of resource availabilities.

I hold out high hopes for implementation of post-scarcity economic models on smaller scales once fabrication becomes commonplace, even in my lifetime, but this will not replace capitalism while private property, profit and oligarchy are entrenched in society.

162

A weak government strengthens the plutocracy.

163

The British set up parliamentary systems of government for their colonies before granting them independence. It worked for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India. It did not work in Africa.

If you want to see what two centuries of black majority rule lead to look at Haiti.

164

How does one remove greed as an economic motive? Humans are, by nature, motivated by greed. Not all the time. but plenty of the time. That sounds to me about as feasible as removing love as a sexual motive.

165

By removing profit as a reward for greed.

166

:rolleyes: Naturally, the American occupation of Haiti and later interference had nothing to do with it, right?

167

Oh. You mean by driving it into the underground economy, and pretty much stifling innovation in the mainstream economy. I see.

I guess I thought we were designing an economic system for human beings. I didn’t realize we were designing one for ants.

168

Well I’m afraid greed is a little vague. I wouldn’t call someone who wants a reasonable return on their investment greedy. However I would call someone who wants to shaft, exploit, and abuse other people to increase their return greedy, let’s look at the results of greed as purely the motivator.

Let’s say a company has two possible labor sources. One workers who’d make a living wage, at what we consider reasonable hours and one that uses the first group’s children working 18 hours a day on sewing machines.

Let’s say the child route saves more money than it’d lose from consumer ill will.

Using greed as purely the motivator, which would the company choose?
Protip: any executive in a company that’d choose the child labor route should receive a crippling beating.

169

ENOUGH!

Diogenes, if you cannot be bothered to lay out a coherent thesis for your “ideas” that actually develops the ideas and lays a foundation for anyone else to consider them, then you need to stop posting to this thread.
Your one-liner responses with their "nu uh"s and “douchebags” look a lot like trolling from this corner.

Rand Rover, you will stop following DtC around taking your one-liner pot shots. You have your heels just behind the line of personal insults with your toes hanging in the air over it and you are out of line. Contribute or stay out.

Everyone else: if a poster will not engage with you in good faith, your efforts are pretty much wasted, so ignore such posters and engage those posters who are contributing.

[ /Moderating ]

170

Eventually humans will develop a pill, an operation, or a genetic procedure, that will allow the removal of greed (ie replace the “me” drive with a “we” drive). When that happens, we can all come back here and reconvene for further discussion.

People wouldn’t have to be forced to take this pill, since I suspect that societies that voluntarily take it will be more productive than those that do not. Lot’s of resources are currently wasted through the duplication inherent in competition. Such a society would have no such waste.

An analogy of human society to a pool of bacterial goo, and a comparison to a more complex organization of cooperative (instead of competitve) cells like those in the human body, is appropriate here.

edit: Ants are also suitable.

171

Driving what into what underground economy?

We’re designing one that serves human communities rather than serving to simply concentrate wealth in the hands of a tiny overclass.

172

Social engineering.

I disagree. It’s an artifact of our societies.

Notice, I’m not talking about a desire for a reasonable return on investment here. There’s nothing wrong, IMO, with saying “I put in more effort, I should get more out”. I’m talking about the elevation of profit above any other concerns, especially social ones. Greed =/= desire.

Plenty of sex happens without love. Plenty of business happens without profit. Material gains are also not the only accruable motivator. Altruism flourishes just fine in the modern world, and so do slightly less-altruistic, but still non-profit reputation-based economies.

173

I have to disagree with this assertion. I think greed is a motive because our system is designed in such a way that those who are greedy are often successful, and those who are most successful have the most control over the system; therefore, it selects for that nature. But I think there’s plenty of examples of individuals who are not greedy; in fact, I think the majority are only greedy because of the way in which the system is currently designed.

The fundamental issue, I think, is that we as a society tend to judge success based upon wealth rather than upon job satisfaction and contribution, and that there is not a direct correlation between those two factors and wealth is what I think compels people to be greedy. Of course, that leaves us with more questions than answers, in how to encourage people to do what they are driven to do and to contribute to society, but still ensure that all the necessary functions are still done. I don’t think that is a problem we can solve with current technology and infrastructure.

However, I think if we refocus our priorities in a direction of energy efficiency, infrastructure, scientific advancement, and other such things, and away from a profit driven motivation, there will be more and more room for those sorts of occupations. So, I think, the biggest step is the first one where we simply have to decide, as a people, to move away from the self-perpetuating greed cycle. I don’t think it’s terribly unlike someone who is out of shape, in a perpetual cycle of poor diet and lack of exercise, where the commitment of time, energy, and discipline seems insurmountable and even like a massive waste for the first few weeks, but over time, those investments become more and more worth it, and it becomes easier and easier to maintain.

174

[QUOTE=John Mace]
How does one remove greed as an economic motive? Humans are, by nature, motivated by greed. Not all the time. but plenty of the time. That sounds to me about as feasible as removing love as a sexual motive.
[/QUOTE]
Love as a motivation for sex depends a lot on the cultural context. Historically, love came about after sex and marriage, and even then was considered optional. Sexual needs were met more through ‘commercial’ arrangements - whether brothels for the poor or mistresses for the rich. It is only recently that it has been given the priority in Western cultures.

Same with greed. But even greed is not the primary motivator. It is the means to the end - which is power. Rockefeller did not create Standard Oil out of his lust for money, but his lust for power. The same is true of the bankers today.

The problem is not the accumulation of wealth or income inequality, per se. It is that money=power. Before money, it was land, “huge … tracts of land”. Before that it was how many men one had under their control. And those means of capital were acquired for one purpose - power, not wealth.

We created republics over monarchies and aristocracies since we decided that such accumulation of power in too few hands was rarely a good thing. And smartly placed the majority of land under control of the state - then us idiots went and allowed that land to be sold to private owners. (I think Progress and Poverty is still the best treatise on that subject.)

The American system of government was never intended to be a democracy, but a plutocracy, but they developed the separation of powers so that no one oligarch could dominate the others, but they also made sure that all the oligarchs dominated everyone else.

Two hundred plus years later we are close to forming a true democracy due to the saving grace that many of those oligarchs did believe in true democracy. We have reached it in terms of suffrage and opportunity. But the true oligarchs have made sure they are still at the top. Citizens United just another measure along those lines, to ensure that money is still the deciding factor.

If we cannot limit greed (and the fact that most people do not seek to maximize their profits or income should indicate that it is not primary motivator for the majority of the population), but we can mitigate its effects. And I think history has shown that political democracy cannot function for long without economic democracy. The only feasible way to mitigate greed is to ensure its rewards do not overwhelm the political system, and that is not possible under modern capitalism.

It is the tool of the plutocrats - the ‘owners’ of the means of production, one of which is labor - if it is a cost, then it is a means. As has been stated again and again, financial and physical capital is fairly useless until labor touches it. Wage labor was the creation of a false ‘win-win’ scenario, and had to be forced on the populace as well. (cf. the Enclosure Acts of the UK.) There is no economic reason why wage laborers cannot also be co-owners. But there are strong political power reasons for that separation.

A main goal of socialism is to dissolve that separation of power, and that everyone is both a capitalist and laborer. Direct ownership seems to be the only feasible way to do so. Socialism 1.0 - communes based on barter and direct democracy was too archaic to work. Socialism 2.0 - State ownership and the non-market distribution of goods failed spectacularly since it merely shifted power from one group to another. Socialism 3.0 - Cooperatives, sole proprietorships and other methods of direct ownership have been shown to work very well. 3.0 also recognizes that any viable system has to enable innovation through free enterprise, and that the market is the best method of distribution of goods - provided the market is fair and accountable. Free is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition. Thus fair trade and total cost accounting, i.e. social accounting.

That is also what leads to the opposition of corporations which is the entrenchment of indirect owners and the board of directors. The majority of corps are directly owned, and they are rarely the problem. For those corps that are indirectly owned I would like to see at least two major reforms - the number of investors is strictly limited, say no more than 10 per employee, and mandatory representation of labor on the boards, a la the German system. Say at least one per 500 employees. Eventually I hope they are all converted to worker-owned organizations.

Another goal of socialism is to rein in commerce. Commerce is wonderful, but it should not be the dominant player in our lives. That should be culture - family, cuisine, the performing and visual arts, literature and music. Crafts for the sake of crafts, not commerce. The goal of commerce should not be to maximize production for profits, but to minimize the costs of sufficient production so that we can leave the office, the field or the shop floor as early as possible and actually, ya know, enjoy life (or post on message boards which I think is a rather masochistic endeavor most of the time.)

175

Yes, you make a very good point. “Greed” is not a very useful term since it isn’t well defined and loaded with a negative connotation.

No civilization that I know of had absolutely no constraints on the acquisition of wealth (except in the case of kings, who sometimes basically owned the whole country). So let’s abandon that loaded term and use something more neutral like “self interest”.

Are we really supposed to believe that humans can be “socially engineered” to put their own self interest below that of just doing what the state considers to be good in every aspect of our economic lives? I’m talking about your average Joe, here, not your odd Saint Francis.

176

If this is your answer to “Who pays the gas bill,” then you’re still incoherent. You won’t have any “investers,” whatever those are. Still waiting for how we pay teachers, cops, soldiers, and receptionists. No answer? Okay, let’s move on.

As usual, people pro- and anti-capitalism (though the anti-capitalists would yearn for its return PDQ if they ever went somewhere without it) are going back to the concept of “greed,” paining it as good or bad.

I’m sorry, but that misses the point entirely. Capitalism is not a good or bad thing because of “greed,” no matter what Gordon Gekko said. Aside from the fact that “greed” will be defined differently depending who you ask, that’s not what makes a free market system work. What makes a free market system work is that in most spheres - not all, but I’ll address that below - it allows the price of things to be set at what they’re actually worth, which in turn will drive productions and distribution to levels and areas where they are actually wanted.

That this drives hard work and innovation is absolutely true, but that’s just one of many side benefits; it also ensures that basic goods are produced and sold in the amounts people generally want them, reduces waste, and allows people a higher degree of personal freedom.

Certainly there is a place for regulating greed, if one defines greed as a degree of self interest that begins to verge on the illegal or the ridiculous. There’s no point in allowing a select few to collect everything for themselves, or letting huge financial firms pocket zillions in taxpayer dollars, though I’m not convinced that more government power helps a lot in that regard. But if you put “let’s tax the rich more” to a vote I’d happily vote yes. Nothing wrong in keeping a lid on it. But if you think a guy who scraped and borrows and puts up his house to get enough money to start a 4-employee business is “Greedy,” you have a definition of “greed” that is silly and of no use in shaping public policy.

It’s indisputably (well, there’s an idiot who will dispute anything, but…) true that the government also has a place in regulating areas of externality - pollution, law enforcement, education, amelioration of severe poverty, and such are all areas where the true costs aren’t borne by the people engaging in direct exchange, and so it’s logical and wise to have the government interfere in the market in such areas. But if you think that eliminating capitalism itself, preventing people from owning businesses, is going to work… well, you’d wreck the country. The problems with such imbecility are so amazingly vast I don’t even know where to start listing them; you’d destroy the economy more or less overnight.

177

Can you give me an example of how social engineering is accomplished? And who gets to decide what type of engineering is done?

No. Our societies are an artifact of who we are.

OK, that’s quite a different kettle of fish, although I don’t know how you determine which motivation is the highest when people are motivated by all sorts of things in all sorts of interconnected ways. Is profit elevated about any other concern in our society now?

I probably should have said “lust” instead of “love”. But you’re right-- there is lots of altruism in the world. I can’t see that humans, except perhaps in the most primitive* of cultures, have every had altruism as a primary motivating factor in the ordering of a society. The empirical evidence weighs strongly against that happening, unless we literally engineer our DNA to produce a different kind of animal than what we are today.

*Small hunter/gather bands where everyone is literally intimately tied to the life and death of everyone else in the band.

178

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=4930 There are lots of examples around the world of factories abandoned by owners who moved operations to another country. The workers have taken the factories over and began successful operations. The workers form loose confederations and share profits.
I saw a documentary of a successful one in South America. The owner says he wants it back now that it is profitable and expects the authorities to give it back to him. It will probably happen.

179

Workforce - Wikipedia’_self-management There are over 200 operations in Argentina taken over by workers. Many have been successful. The workers do all the management jobs themselves. The illusion that owners and bosses bring unique skill sets that are needed for a successful business operation has been disproved many times. American leadership…get over yourselves.

180

Good. That’s exactly what I want. I want the workers to own the means of production themselves.