Will there ever be a time without capitalism and what would it look like?

Great Debates
1

Money is great, if you have it. Those on the wrong end of the system might feel like capitalism is greed, manipulation, and unjust for various reasons. Those who have mastered the system are at the top of the heap and enjoying life and love capitalism as the best and only way to exist.

If capitalism is ever extinguished and becomes obsolete, what would it look like? How would the world function and our own lives look like? Is Star Trek’s capitalism-free future a mere fantasy or a real possibility?

I feel like it’s similar to the oil industry. Those who have oil and profit well off it, don’t want to get rid of the oil industry and turn to renewable energy because it would drive them out of business/money. Same with capitalism…those benefiting and controlling it would not endorse or want to see it end because they would be the ones losing out the most whereas the those struggling in a capitalistic system would gain and benefit to be rid of that system.

2

There was a form- sorta- of Communism for about a century. Still in China, sorta, kinda.

Of course Communism, being contrary to human nature has only worked (and that poorly) under a dictatorship, as a form of national government. Some small communist societies survived and did well- until in most cases their charismatic leader died.

Capitalism has been around and working since the first civilization, and perhaps before that.

3

Why is not possible for civilization to live for the betterment of all life and humanity where each person contributes much like the idea behind Gene Roddenberry’s utopian future Star Trek?

My reason behind it was because humans are inherently corrupt and immoral and such a system based on altruism would fail because too many people would cheat and not carry their own weight. With the fast development of AI and it’s ever increasing complications and implications that will come with it, some way somehow I foresee ai can bring an end to capitalism. It will virtually be obsolete somehow. Money is based on having something that other’s dont have. That’s why trade exists and exchange of services, goods, knowledge etc. But with ai, eventually everything will be at the tip of everyone’s fingertips. There is nothing one can have that another won’t have that ai can’t do for you. Now I am oversimplifying it yes, but in general, the concept / principle behind what ai represents basically will lead to a time when nobody will be able to command money over another since ai will make that advantage completely obsolete. That’s why I wonder if we’ll ever see a future where money and capitalism will be gone since it will be irrelevant.

Then again, corporations and those that hold the wealth and power right now will regulate ai so that it is monetized and only some will have access to it and others limited thus still maintaining the need for capitalism. But if free ai exists for all, I don’t see how money and capitalism can survive. We’ll be existing for a new purpose, different purpose, since we no longer are based on commerce and needs, but simply based on other pursuits in life.

4

If the intent behind the money system is to make sure everyone carries their own weight and doesn’t get any goodies they aren’t entitled to by having participated in the chores, well, it isn’t working. So a system based on voluntary cooperation is allowed to do at least as bad as that and still not have that thrown down as a reason why it can’t work.

Meanwhile, we have a system that intrinsically promotes adversarial competition and you’re surprised to see so many people behaving other than altruistically? Seriously?

People in a system where their reputation as a giver and a sharer and a cheerful participant is what makes other people more inclined to pitch in and help them in return do have a systemic reason to be good voluntary cooperators. Not because they’re intrinsically altruistic but because they essentially get paid to. We’ve had such economies, in various places and at various times. “Big chiefs” whose social position both depends on and is expressed by their largesse in sharing and doing nice things for others. That doesn’t mean we should run out and try to implement their social systems now, but it does mean that, yes, the competitive adversarial system we know is not the only one possible.

5

You’re poisoning the well by insinuating capitalism only works for the “top of the heap”. There are lots of folks, me for instance, who have their own business, are successful at it, but only to a middle-to-upper middle class lifestyle. Capitalism works for me yet I’m anything but super wealthy. And there are millions like me, successful and happy. Your alternative would not deliver that.

6

IMHO, capitalism is extremely hard-wired into human nature. There’s a reason that even the most communist nations in the world, like North Korea, still have huge income inequality and a thriving black market. It’s just the natural way.

Capitalism could only vanish in the most science-fiction-ish, high-tech’d type of society that only exists in Isaac Asimov-ish novels, I doubt we’ll ever get there.

7

To my mind, what will replace free-market capitalism is a highly regulated capitalism, which has already happened to a small degree. I know conservatives like to complain (in general) about too much regulation, but if corporations could be constrained from many more of their most egregious excesses by stringent (and enforced) laws, we could see many of the advantages of socialism with few of its problems.

8

Lots of SF writers have tried to imagine an altruistic society where everyone has some basic income, but there are rewards for those who add some value to the whole. This would usually be somewhere where all the basic stuff like agriculture, manufacturing and services are sufficiently automated to require little human input.

The problem seems to be that there will always be people who are bigger, stronger or more cunning and prepared to use their ability to enhance their own situation to the detriment of their fellows. This gives rise to the need for policing and punishment/re-education.

A few years ago there was a British TV experiment, where they put a number of people on an island and left them to see how they managed. After a few episodes, it became clear that the idea they had that all decisions could be made by the group as a whole simply did not work. They might have been successful if there had been a leader with authority and the means to enforce it.

9

Human societies face a collective action problem. If we want to do or make stuff, like food, or art, or medicine, or Tik-tok videos then this going to require a) a decision to do or make that particular stuff and b) the organisation of c) the relevant resources and labour sufficient for the doing or making.

Capitalism is by and large our answer to point b) and c). Capitalists (i.e. investors) provide resources - mostly in the shape of money, but if you own land, or a factory, these are perfectly good resources in their own right, for example. Some of the money resource is used to hire both workers to do the labour and managers to organise it.

The prior question a) - how do we decide what to do or make - is currently answered by the operation of free markets, mostly. Strictly, this isn’t completely integral to capitalism. You can have - as the Allies did in WWII - command economies where decisions on what to make and do are in the hands of government, and private investors and labour are assigned accordingly. But free markets - i.e. societies in which what is made and done is largely an emergent property of (constrained) individual preferences - tend to march alongside capitalism quite happily.

If we’re not going to use capitalism and/or free markets to decide what we’re going to make and do and how we’re going to make and do it, then we need some other system. We’ve variously tried communism, feudalism, despotism, theocracy, Big Chief, Wise One, plus others. Some of these have been pretty successful by their own lights - you don’t build the Pyramids or the Great Wall or the Tsar Bomba without being pretty good at directing and organising labour and resources. None of them, post industrial revolution, have been as successful as free market capitalism over the long-term.

But - and not to get too Marxist - these relations of production are very much bound up with productive forces. I.e. how we organise our society to do and make stuff depends a great deal on the means by which stuff can be made and done. A society which produces things based on human muscle power alone is different from one which produces things based on human and animal power, which is yet different from one which has steam engines, oil, electricity, etc. A society where information is controlled by a small elite has different economic arrangements from one where everyone is literate, or one where everyone is literate and has a smartphone. Ditto for other technological progress in e.g. financial sophistication or the ability to transport people and stuff.

So what if anything replaces capitalism will in many ways depend on how we do and make stuff in the future. Will abundant energy, automation, and increasingly sophisticated AI mean that we as humans basically no longer have to worry about organising resources and labour? It’s a nice idea, but maybe a bit too utopian. Will accelerating climate change and the resulting societal breakdown push away from the freedoms necessary for free-market capitalism and return us to some form of neo-feudalism? Let’s hope not, eh?

But generally, I think your vision of what replaces capitalism, or how capitalism evolves, will be dependent on your view about how social change - often driven by technological change - will alter the options for economic organisation.

10

Excellent post. Here’s a different take.

As long as humans value the well-being of their immediate family over that of someone half a world away, they will act in a manner that pulls resources and comfort towards themselves. Even with no malice towards others nearby or distant, the net result is the others will suffer relatively. When substantially all of humans do this to the degree they can, the net result will be inequality and “haves” and “have nots”. It cannot be otherwise.

As @slicedalone said neatly, we already have a lot of regulation which reduces the worst of the severity of this competition, at least within single countries. It is therefore possible to imagine society choosing to move farther towards more egalitarian arrangements, both intra- and inter-country. But it very critically requires a larger and larger fraction of society to think more about the good of the whole than the good of themselves, and also to think more of the good of the long term future than of short term gratification.

Human nature puts a real speed limit on how fast we can change and how far we can go. As a Progressive, I do not believe we have hit the potential limits yet. I do believe that only a thoroughgoing revamping of the entire educational system of humanity will permit much further gain. As long as we permit short-sighted selfishness to rule the education of the young, and we limit the provision of quality education to a small fraction of all humanity we are doomed to social semi-stagnation not far from where we are now.

11

I don’t think this is necessarily true. There will always be a significant number of ppl struggling no matter what economic system they are living under.

12

Money, or currency, is nice even for people like me who don’t own a yacht. Instead of carrying 10 bushels of corn to the grocery store to exchange it for Coca-Cola and, oddly enough, corn chips, it’s much more convenient to use a medium of exchange like money. You’ll find money/currency used it a wide variety of economic systems including communism but it dates back to the ancient civilizations like the Sumerians. So money and capitalism aren’t synonymous.

Were 12th century nobles, merchants, and peasants participating in a capitalist economic system? Were Romans circa 30 BCE capitalist? Is any system where individuals own the means of production capitalism? We haven’t always had a capitalist economic system and I won’t assume we might not have a different system 500-1000 years from now. I don’t know what form that would take though.

Star Trek’s economic system is poorly defined fantasy. While there won’t be any scarcity of materials thanks to replicators, you still need people to do things. i.e. Have jobs. And there are going to be unpleasant jobs nobody will want to do without some sort of incentive. You aren’t going to find too many people who want to unclog space toilets beause they find it personally fulfulling. Then there’s the matter of real estate. Even with replicators, space in places like San Diego are going to be limited. Everyone can’t live on the beach. Captain Sisko’s father has a restaurant in New Orleans (I think) that serves real (non replicated) food. Where does that food come from? Are there servers at the restaurant, and why do they work there? Who decided the space in the building should be used for Sisko’s restaurant? We don’t really know how any of that works which is fine because that’s not what Star Trek focuses on.

13

Of course not. But the OP’s use is the colloquial one, where “having money” is slang for “having relatively lots of income and/or assets”. Obviously “the moneyed class” is not talking about possession of simple currency.

We’ve all gone around the bush umpteen times here on the Dope about the question the OP was really asking: How much economic equality or inequality is not enough / too much / just right? And how do we organize the economy / society to accomplish that outcome?

Which implicitly places equality / inequality as one of the economic measurements we’re managing to. As opposed to raw unfettered capitalism where equality / inequality is 100% an emergent outcome to be ignored, not a (the?) primary goal parameter to be managed.

14

All economic systems seem to have one thing in common, and that is a small percentage of people control the vast majority of wealth, and everyone else just tries to get as much of what’s left as they can. So, if “Capitalism” disappeared, it would just basically being a name that disappeared, not the way humans do business. So, in my opinion, it would look the same. It would just be called something different.

15

We have never solved the problem of rent seeking in capitalism. Rent seeking is an effort to continue to extract gains that were earned by others that may be long since dead.

For a true fan of capitalism, inheritance would seem to be the optimum point to redistribute property in order to give new capitalists a chance. This seems to not happen. Because it’s a “death tax.” Well, dead people cannot own anything, I don’t really think the dead people themselves are worried about taxes or anything else.

So the problem of inherited wealth and rent seeking is sort of an uneasy truce. Capitalism and society requires some individual ownership. But not too much. How much is battled over. I actually understand the mindset and fears that lead people towards conservatism and libertarianism on these points. Ironically, breaking down the walls of discrimination and other reasons for aligning yourself with groups tends to make these forces stronger. It is a social paradox.

16

But moneyed class isn’t synonymous with capitalism either. You can see social stratification in most ancient civilizations.

17

I recommend The Dawn of Everything for a fascinating portrait of the complexity and diversity of different civilizations even in close proximity to each other. It is fallacious to think there is anything special, much less intrinsic, about capitalism.

18

Quite right. My quibble was with the rest of that paragraph which seemed to be arguing about the definition of “money”, or about the OP’s understanding of “money”.

Overall your post I replied to was spot on.

Sorry to be sorta confusing or take issue with a side track of a side track.

19

From Ferengi farmers, imported all the way from Ferenginar? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

20

Thank you for making that point. Further, if it is intrinsic to human nature, then why is The Wealth of Nations such a big deal?