That makes sense, and I’m inclined to agree.
I also think most revolutions are bad ideas because the revoluters are more focused on what they want to get rid of than on what they can workably put in its place.
Capitalism, in the sense of exchange of goods, will probably always exist.
Laissez faire i.e. unregulated capitalism, basically doesn’t exist anywhere any more, and I would argue that it shouldn’t. (I’d also say that the closeness of the US to this “ideal” might be responsible for some of the dissatisfaction of the OP, though that might take us into politics)
Capitalism is not just “trade.” It is producing and selling for profit, with the aim of constantly increasing profits. It is also a system in which most people have to work for someone else, must take orders from them while at work, and have little say in how work is done.
This is manifestly different from feudalism, ancient Sumer, and other societies, though those societies had hierarchies in which labour surplus to actual subsistence was appropriated by a small class that did little productive work.
Capitalist economies are particularly innovative because capitalists compete with each other and seek to reduce the cost of production to compete by offering lower prices. Thus they always look for ways to increase productivity and lower labour costs.
This is to say much “innovation” is of little real use to people, as it is not aimed at meeting the needs of people but the needs of the capitalist, who seeks only more profit. Who knows how innovative people could be if they had the opportunity to change work and production to make lives easier and fuller?
The collapse of the top-heavy nation-states and capitalist economies might well usher in new possibilities for societies. I note that with the collapse of the western Roman Empire, many communities developed and had higher standards of living than under empire. Given the amazing place we might start from today, there is reason to be hopeful we could indeed do much better.
Indirectly, what we’re doing is collectively deciding that we love watching pro sports enough that we’re willing to pay someone who is really good at it 30 million dollars a year. If absolutely no one gave a rap about football, football players wouldn’t have large salaries any more than bean bag toss is particularly lucrative.
Sports, art, music and video are careers that only contribute to human happiness intangibly.
Capitalism was major step up from monarchy system in a big way but not system you find in Star Trek of no money, wealth and classes society.
You need some thing like Star Trek replicator to end Capitalism. We have some 3D printers but nothing like Star Trek replicator.
And the 3D printers are mostly for parts and modelling now and very new. We still have long ways to go before we have advance 3D printers or Star Trek replicator that could end Capitalism.
This only works for entertainers due to the internet leveraging their labor. Let’s use the example of an NFL player and a public school teacher.
Fort the NFL, here are the relevant figures.
Number of players = 1,696
Average salary per player = roughly 860,000 per year
Total for all players = 2.9 billion rounded to the nearest hundred million
Total viewership per NFL season (most recent) = 4.5 billion rounded to the nearest hundred billion
Ignoring the amount paid by those attending a game in person, this works out to 64 cents per viewer per year. Even someone who watches 5 games per week every weak is only contributing $60.
Now let’s look at teachers.
Total number of teachers in US = around 3.2 million
Average salary = between 42K and 71K per year, based on Glassdoors figures. Lets’ take 50K to make it a nice round number on the lower end of this range.
Total teacher salary in US = around $ 15 billion
Total US population over 18 = roughly 260 million
Let’s assume all those 260 million are taxpayers who contribute to their local school districts, whether by property tax, sales tax, income tax, etc. This also works out to roughly $ 60 per person.
Looked at this way, the value placed on a teacher and an NFL player are roughly equal. It’s just that we need way more teachers because teachers can only teach to a double digit number of students per year, while NFL players, and entertainers in general, are unlimited in the numbers of people they can reach (again ignoring those who pay to see an entertainer in person, which is likely only a small portion of all the money in the entertainment business, but even then, a huge stadium can fill a lot more people than a school classroom).
IMHO we lose sight of the true problem when we focus on entertainers who make 8 or 9 figure salaries. They aren’t the problem. If we somehow forced them to take a smaller salary, all that would mean is the sports team owners, movie studio owners, record company owners, etc. would make an even larger profit than they currently do.
I realized after posting that just describing capitalism as trade was a bit oversimplistic and would get pulled up. Yes it’s trading for profit and other characteristics.
But the way you are describing it, it’s as though it’s inherently exploitative, and I don’t agree that’s the case. There’s nothing inherent to capitalism that it’s zero tax or zero regulation. Those are separate tweakable factors.
I didn’t want to hijack too much into politics but I think Americans have been sold the idea that capitalism means all the government protections possible for corporations and little to none for the little guy. But no, that’s one flavor of capitalism only, and I’d argue, a suboptimal one.
Right—and similar analyses apply not just to teachers but to doctors, nurses, auto mechanics, and lots of other people who do jobs that are more necessary than, say, NFL players but don’t scale up the same way.
It is inherently exploitative.
That’s not how it’s exploitative.
Capitalism is founded on exploitation in the form of theft and violence - at home, in the form of enclosure of the Commons, and abroad, in the form of colonialism. These form the basis for the capital initially accumulated.
Yes. My point is that while this applies to doctors, nurses, auto mechanics, and so on, it doesn’t apply to the owners of the major hospitals and insurance companies, the owners of the auto manufacturers, and so on. IMHO it’s those owners and the money they take out of the system who are the source of the problem, not Taylor Swift, Robert Downey Jr., Patrick Mahomes, or any other big name entertainer.
What would things look like if those owners weren’t able to take those profits out of the system? Ideally some combination of the workers getting an increase in their pay or the customers paying a lower price.
Labor theories of value ignore that the willingness and ability to work are meaningless without opportunity. I’m retired now but during my working years I was happy to work for wages because my ability to be self-employed would have been virtually zero. The class that anti-capitalists constantly complain about are in fact the opportunity creators. And people have repeatedly tried to devise various types of co-op business organization but they either fail or else fall to the Iron law of oligarchy - Wikipedia, and you get Animal Farm.
Was founded. The origin of something is not its definition.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on that one 
…and continues to be exploitative. Colonialism and associated inequalities didn’t go away after a few years, nor did the class divisions brought in by the rise of the bourgeoisie disappear. And that’s just about people, I haven’t even touched on how it relies on resource exploitation.
Capitalism relies on inequality - of opportunity, of generational wealth, of access to political power. It was born in exploitation, it remains exploitative, it’ll go out kicking and screaming in an orgy of destructive exploitation.
They don’t all ignore it. They merely point out the inherent unequal nature of that opportunity.
Happy, or content?
…because they are the ones with the resources. Which they (as a class) got by theft.
Aah, yes, I remember when the rank-and-file membership of the ICA rose up and slaughtered the decadent leadership in a bloody coup…
Co-ops are doing just fine. They have over a billion members worldwide. They’re especially valuable in the Global South. But even in the wealthy nations, co-operative banks weathered the last financial crisis way better than others, and retail co-ops are the market leaders in several countries.
For pretty much of all recorded history we have had some form of capitalism.
Before that, we have little information on which to base such a claim, as nothing was recorded.
So, yes, that was wrong.
Thats nice. But it is based upon supposition and is biased, and is highly criticized. A
wiki- The historian David A. Bell, responding solely to Graeber and Wengrow’s arguments about the Indigenous origins of Enlightenment thought and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, accused the authors of coming “perilously close to scholarly malpractice.”
IN FUNDAMENTAL WAYS INCOHERENT AND WRONG
In sum, the work of scholars in many fields makes it possible to put forward a coherent picture of a human adaption to a particular ecological niche evolved over two million years and led to the emergence of humans some 200,000 years ago. Yet apart from brief disagreements with Sarah Hrdy and Christopher Boehm, Graeber and Wengrow deal with this impressive range of new material by ignoring it.
To hang on to their commitment to free choice, and keep their political project intact, their argument ducks and dives.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/720603
My own sense of exasperation with Dawn began right here, just three pages into the text. Personally, I think that evolutionist accounts often make the past extremely interesting; and in 40 years of hanging around evolutionists, I’ve found that they rarely agree on what their work’s political implications are, let alone whether they’re dire. But rather than go down those rabbit holes, I will concentrate in this review on Graeber and Wengrow’s initial claim, that evolutionist accounts aren’t true…My most serious disagreements with Graeber and Wengrow concern a third criterion: logic. They left me feeling far from certain that the facts are either inconsistent with evolutionary accounts or more consistent with their own alternative. From the many cases the authors offer, I will take just half a dozen, each of which seems important for Graeber and Wengrow’s thesis, but each of which, I believe, is ultimately unconvincing.
Thats only a few. The book may be fascinating and compelling, but relying it as your source for debate is feeble, at best.
Nope. Anarchy is always wrong, no matter how quotable
None of that is true. .
On a very small scale. And grocery co-ops here in America are also capitalistic. Outsiders bring in needed cash and capital to keep the co-op going. Most communes fail after the charismatic leader dies or is ousted.
Even more not-even-wrong.
Only all of the science of archaeology…
No, it is based on research.
Who said anything about anarchy?
What a truly compelling counterargument you have offered here /s
Are you saying enclosures didn’t happen? Are you saying they weren’t the foundation for bourgeoisie wealth? Are you saying colonialism didn’t happen? Are you saying the way colonialism was conducted wasn’t fundamentally capitalistic?
What, exactly, isn’t true here?
Once again - banks, grocery chains, etc. More than a billion people. You have a very different idea of “small scale” to me
That they sell things to outsiders doesn’t make them capitalistic. The system of ownership is not capitalistic.
Communes and co-ops are not the same thing. “Charismatic leader”? Did you think I was talking about hippy communes?
Just for the sake of clarity: when it comes to co-ops, I’m talking about things like credit unions and mutual banks and building societies, and retailers like S Group in Finland, or Coop Danmark. Also agricultural co-ops like the various Indian systems - Amul, especially. Also small-scale informal ones like South African stokvels and Indian microfinance initiatives.
Not a hippy sex cult that happens to sell shoddy dreamcatchers by the side of the road, or whatever strawman fantasy people are picturing.
Well it depends. Which countries are we even talking about?
Some places have been much more effective than others in erasing the unfair advantage of inherited wealth and/or never had an economy based on significantly exploiting other countries.
I am getting the feeling it’s just a rant about Capitalism. Perhaps this should be in the Pit?
This is another thing which is not actually intrinsic to Capitalism. I would say compared to exploitation though, sure, the modern-day correlation is of course stronger – bigger economies, today, usually mean more energy, more harvesting of resources, more plastic waste etc.
But it is not inherent to the concept; an economy could grow by being more efficient, by innovating services that better fulfill people’s needs etc.
This thread is reminiscent of The Simpsons, “The Crepes of Wrath”:
Homer: “Please, please kids, stop fighting! Maybe Lisa is right about America being the land of opportunity, and maybe Adil has a point about the machinery of capitalism being oiled by the blood of the workers.”
Clearly there is not even agreement here on what capitalism is. That makes discussion a little monotonous. It’s a little Pythonesque:
Man: No it isn’t!
Other Man: Yes it is!
M: No it ISN’T! Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.
O: It is NOT!
M: It is!
O: Not at all!
M: It is!
I’m off to another thread.
All of them.
Name them.
Even the ones that were at the “exploited” end of the deal developed inequities based on the colonial economy.
Fallacy of reductio ad Stalinum. Plus characterizing it as a “rant” is just ad hominem tone policing.
I’m addressing the debate, I see no need for the Pit.
However, if you need to Pit me because you have no actual debate to offer, feel free.
Capitalism’s foundational myth is that capitalists are owed their initial capital because they are the “first” to claim title to/extract/develop resources. It is very much intrinsic to capitalism.
That’s what co-ops do, not capitalists. If capitalists happen to achieve this, it’s entirely a side effect of the profit motive, whereas for co-ops, it’s the main point.