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

Great Debates
21

This is a common position but it’s mostly wrong.

The real problem with communism is central direction of the economy. It is fraught with problems, the primary one being that is is extremely ineffective at setting prices. Price setting generally works really, really well in a free market, and setting the correct prices for things is absolutely, critically key in having an efficient and functioning economy. Free markets aren’t perfect because you have externalities, but it’s way, way better for a government to just direct its means of control at those specific things (pollution, for instance) than it is for the government to try to control all prices.

22

Capital as a power all out of proportion, as we experience it in the modern age? The opposite would be laborism, with workers holding sway. But before we get all misty and humming the Internationale, consider the prospect of buggy whip workers demanding that they be kept at their useless craft, as opposed to the current system where the investors direct resources into where the economy is really going. Except that so often its chimeral prospects like “e-buggy whips,” or “AI-buggy whips.” And the economy goes from boom to bust.

The end of Capitalism would hopefully result from the rise of personal technology: workers would have control of the means of production. They’d hire their managers, have a say in innovation and expansion decisions, and mergers with other employee-owned businesses, etc. Technology could frees them from the immediate treadmill of their own jobs.

(Of course, technology was supposed to usher in Democracy. We remember all those Egyptians and Syrians on their cell phones organizing flashmob protests during Arab Spring. Not a shining success for technology after all)

The problem with the current call for labor unions to return is that it gets its history wrong. The 8-hour day, collective bargaining for wages, etc. However, during the great age of labor unions, annual workplace fatalities were in the thousands. After OSHA was passed in 1970, that dropped to the hundreds. That was the government, not labor unions.

My point being that labor’s best friend should be good government, put in power by educated voters. Its no secret that our current system favors Capital, the investors, and upper management way, way out of proportion.

Cite: years experience in middle management, watching upper management concerned not a smidge about labor unions, but dreading like Hell tort lawyers, government inspectors and auditors.

23

I would consider middle to upper middle class part of that 1% or 2% doing well in the capitalistic system. Whatever might be considered middle class in America is still largely wealthier than most other peoples of the world.

24

So basically it’s a rewards vs punishment system (capitalism). If you do “X” then you get rewarded with “X”. If you don’t do “X” then you will be punished.

So the key in life is to learn how to just do “X” well?

Seems reasonable to an extent. But isn’t there more to existence than just being good at “X”? That’s my direction.

Another great example is this: someone spends 50 years becoming an expert and master at physics or medicine and their works does immense benefit to the life of the planet and the people in it, yet they can only get paid 100k a year or 200k a year vs someone who spends zero time, but instead plays basketball very well and makes 50million- 100 million a year. Becoming a doctor or physicist or scientist is not learning how to do “X” the best. Clearly people who play pro sports or do what the Kardashians do have learned how to do “X” better than nobel peace prize candidates and winners. To go really extreme, some 19 year old youtuber or tiktoker just dancing or doing pranks can earn more money in a single year than a medical doctor can in his/her entire lifetime. Doesn’t this seem unusual? But that’s capitalism. It doesn’t care about how to save the life of the planet or benefit human life on it, it only cares who knows how to generate the most revenue possible.

25

@Velocity I agree. I do think right now it is the best system overall, not because it is the best, but because it is the only thing best able to give us a reasonable way to live the most. A better system of course would be beyond capitalism but we as a world and people are not ready to handle it.

@bob_2 “rewards for those who add some value to the whole” is the problem. Who determines what is value and not value? Who determines what is more valuable than another? The definition itself is corrupted and therefore the entire system will be corrupted. If we value more girls undressing and dressing in youtube videos more than doctors finding the cure for cancer, well then rewarding those girls more over life saving doctors/scientists doesn’t seem to make any sense and thus the model of capitalism fails in my opinion.

@Stanislaus agreed. We are not anywhere close to AI being at the level that I imagined in my scenario but then again, the time it takes for us to reach that point is not fixed and it will get faster and faster exponentially. Eventually after any of us are still alive, world population will decline to such a state that will not benefit capitalism anymore. Capitalism needs growth, it needs bigger markets, growing markets, well if humans are in decline and ai lives are increasing, ai doesn’t need to consume as many things as a human life does, thereby suffocating capitalism out of existence. If the world is populated by more ai minds/lives than humans, the need for food, clothes, toys, houses, thousands of other industries will shrink. I also foresee food becoming a luxury in the distant future because it won’t be necessary any longer to have grocery stores, eat food at the table etc., that will be a luxury for the wealthy to enjoy. The rest of society will be put on a system to feed the body sustenance at a much more efficient and healthier way than the consumption of food (kind of like how ai won’t need to eat at restaurants…but if you want to just for fun they can, like Data on Star Trek didn’t require human food but was capable of ingesting human food as a luxury somehow lol).There will always be some variation or form of capitalism I suppose so long as hierarchies exist right? It’s kind of like the oil industry again. If less and less cars require oil/gas and all other things that need it, then the oil industry will not survive as there will be almost no market for it. In the same way, there will be no more need for advertisements and marketing once neural link is full blown and connects all minds on the planet into one hive mind where information is instantly sent to every mind on the planet. It will kill the need for an ad industry, marketing etc. So while it’s still so far a way for us, I see it going in this direction.

26

In any discussion of economics you need to start by defining whether you’re talking about all of humanity, all of the “wealthy” world, or just a particular country. They are three mostly separate universes with three mostly different realities.

A remarkable fraction of the human populace really doesn’t participate in what we call the modern economy.

27

The difference is that the girls on YT are currently rewarded in proportion to the number of views, while the doctors are rewarded on some scale, depending on where they work.

Maybe it would take an AI to evaluate the relative value.

28

Apologies if anyone already mentioned this and I missed it (I did read and skim as diligently as time will permit). Capitalism could go away if humans become extinct, or are vastly reduced in number.

Whilst a post-apocalyptic world might still have some trade and profit and such going on, it’s a lot more feasible for non-capitalist societies/groups to remain non-capitalist (or mostly so) if they are small and the odds are generally stacked against them.

In the ‘extinct’ variation, what it would look like is: whatever living organisms still exist going about their business of trying to eat each other and make more of themselves, without being eaten.

In the humans-become-rare variation… tribes living in fortified camps, people do what the community needs done, rather than what they desire to do; people get to eat whatever is available rather than what they would like to eat, etc. Maybe they do so autonomously and collectively, or maybe a man in a shiny hat forces them to do that.

It’s difficult to imagine that some sort of notions of property, bartering, then currency, profit etc wouldn’t just arise naturally all over again, but if things remain really tough, that might limit it.

29

We survived for decamillennia without it. This is not even wrong.

30

It’s easy to imagine a society without wide-spread, large-scale capitalism – we’ve had many of them throughout history. What’s hard for me to imagine is real technological progress without capitalism. It can happen (and obviously did, for the various inventions prior to recorded human history), but without the possibility of great profit, many and probably most innovators just wouldn’t have the same motivation to develop new technologies.

Maybe something else could replace that. But in my understanding of human history, we’ve never had any sort of sustained technological development, at least with any sort of speed (i.e. like the last few hundred years), without the elements of capitalism that provide the possibility of great personal profit for inventors.

31

I both agree and disagree. For the first part, about rewards and punishment for doing X well, that would be the ideal. The problem is that we have a corrupt capitalism, not an ideal one. There are people who do things well who don’t get rewarded, and others who do things poorly or not at all who do get rewarded.

As for the second part of your post, you list various types of entertainers. Yes, Steph Curry, Taylor Swift, and Kim Kardashian earn more than probably any medical doctor in the United States. But that’s not a matter of doing things well or not well, it’s a matter of technology. An entertainer can entertain billions of people all at once. A doctor (with very few exceptions) can only treat one patient at a time. Looked at another way, as a physician I make maybe 100,000 times as much as an entertainer per person served ($40 vs fractions of a cent per person served). It’s just that they serve 10s or 100s of millions more people than I do. I don’t begrudge entertainers their money.

It does, however, illustrate the problem if you look one step up the ladder from those entertainers. The typical NBA player does actual work, and does it well. They aren’t the problem. It’s the team owners who profit from sitting on their ass doing nothing but signing a check that are the problem.

Taylor Swift works, and does her job well. It’s the people who own the rights to her music, like Scooter Braun, who get paid for owning things but don’t actually work that are the problem.

The same goes for almost every other profession I can think of. The owners who sit on their ass and write checks get the bulk of the profits for nothing more than providing capital, which isn’t a skill.

32

Too late to edit. Even at that, this is the best case scenario when a business is just starting. Once it’s running, the owners of a large business are basically just the overpaid middlemen in between the customers and the workers.

33

I suppose I’d rephrase what @Velocity meant as something about like:

Selfishness (a excess of which versus current local social fashion is called “Greed”) is hard-wired into humans. Once there is excess anything from whatever sort of production system or economy exists, most everybody will want to horde the excess for themselves.

Some of those people will be more, and indeed much more, successful than others. Capitalism (or royalty) is what happens when those folks are able to keep the excess. Which they will fight tooth and nail to be able to do.

IMO the various forms of landed gentry, feudalism, the Kings of ancient Egypt, and all that stuff all flow directly from the same instincts that drive capitalism today.

In that sense, kind of the contrapositive of what @iiandyiiii said, as soon as there’s an economy, there will be unequal capital accumulation. Any tech beyond poking at termite mounds with found twigs like chimps do will (in the catalytic presence of human selfishness) necessarily produce capital accumulation for somebody, not everybody. Capitalism isn’t a prereq for tech progress as he suggested; Instead it’s a consequence of it. For my own, admittedly wide, definition of capitalism: the unequal control over the means of production.

34

Still not even wrong. The existence of various more-or-less egalitarian and/or gift-economy societies in the past gives the lie to the idea that it’s innate.

What it is, is powerful. It allows for things like warrior elites and military might.

But it very much is a manufactured state of affairs, not the default or natural state of all human existence.

Once again going to recommend The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. Graeber’s Debt is also of relevance here.

35

I can’t help but notice how a lot of big innovation: the internet, cell phone technology, aviation, even a lot of gadgets that were originally developed by the navy of submarines, was innovated by the government, and later turned over to the private sector; where it was fenced off by our glorious billionaires for themselves. Innovated with taxpayer funds, then sold back to them for as much as the market can bear.

The fact is that innovation is not encouraged by any system, be it the USSR or US Steel. A lot of you have seen this first hand when you brought a great idea to your boss, and if you were lucky still got to keep your job. Big corporations influence innovation-killing regulations, or publicize vapor-ware, to kill innovation. For all the buzz about venture capital, “intrapreneuers,” and “imagineers,” the reality is cannibalistic private equity firms and self-protective hedge funds.

Nobody with a working brain is crying “property is theft,” but a reasonable idea has been calling for Commerce to be conducted in the public interest first, and for the benefit of the shareholders second. They aren’t going to just stuff their money in mattresses if they’re not allowed to make bank off the next opioid crisis, and bring the economy to a halt.

36

I think my wife read that recently. Whatever it was she read, one of her takeaways was the silliness of the “pay for your shirt with two chickens” narrative of pre-currency societies.

Societies without currency don’t say, “WE MUST ENGAGE IN FREE MARKET TRADES OF APPROXIMATELY EQUAL VALUE AND O NO IF ONLY WE HAD COINS”. Instead, it’s more like, Betty over there is a good goat farmer, and you can rely on her for wool and milk, and Lars makes excellent cheese from Betty’s milk, which he provides to folks, and Alan has been slacking off and is likely to get his ass kicked if he doesn’t start carrying his weight, and everybody loves Maria because of the comfortable clothes she weaves from all that mohair.

Greed might be hard-wired into humans; but so is a longing for social acceptance. Societies without currency often have very tight social networks, and providing for the group is a surefire way to strengthen you bonds with other members of the group.

(I had these conversations some time back, so any errors are mine, not my wife’s).

37

There’s never been a purely altruistic society. Yes, in small-scale societies people rely on social networking and mutual trust, and don’t insist on tit-for-tat nickel and diming. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t unconsciously assign worth to relationships and transactions. Think of the calculations people put into Christmas presents for example: who’s worth how lavish a gift and so forth. This can only work up to a Dunbar's number - Wikipedia of people. Beyond that, one has to deal with the anonymous mass of humanity on a strict quid pro quo basis, with maybe a small amount of benefit of the doubt.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: whatever their moral worth as human beings, some humans are materially and economically worth very little. The phrase “for love or money” highlights the orthogonal nature of the two. Economics is the “Cold Equations” of materialism, and the incident with the loaves and fishes was maybe the last recorded instance of love directly affecting the material universe. Now one can have charity for the truly unlucky- physical, mental or circumstantial- but then you get into a slippery slope of who’s needy and who’s greedy.

38

Property is theft.

I’d prefer if we could conduct the thread without direct insults like this at one entire thread of political thought.

39

Dunbar’s number as usually portrayed isn’t a real thing.

40

Nonetheless, I believe that the proposition stands that you can’t personally judge the contributions of thousands of strangers, that some impersonal measure like barter or money is necessary.