Capitalism has been good at producing broad prosperity during a time of historically unprecedented productivity that might be going away. A fundamental principle of Marxism is that the second economic productivity slows down corporations have to make hard decisions about where to cut costs to increase profit they will pick labor every ti…
Capitalism has been good at producing broad prosperity during a time of historically unprecedented productivity that might be going away. A fundamental principle of Marxism is that the second economic productivity slows down corporations have to make hard decisions about where to cut costs to increase profit they will pick labor every time, and if you have strong political forces marshalling them not to do so you are basically forcing them to operate under conditions that will make them not profitable, at which point they won't be competitive anymore and will collapse.
We've been seeing a little of this in the conversations professional economists have been having about the trade-offs between high wages and high costs for basic goods, right now we are managing to balance on that knife edge (although plenty of people are still unhappy), but you can imagine if people stop buying inflated goods, then the only way to prevent a massive recession is to either allow massive lay-offs or wage decreases, neither one of which really sings "broad prosperity" to me.
In a capitalist economy, even a "massive recession" is historically unlikely to result in widespread famine. The same cannot be said of Communist supply controls.
Many of the wage issues that you address are actually the result of globalism—which is a political choice—rather than capitalist principles, which can, and should, be reigned in by good governance.
Oh, they are absolutely capitalist. Capitalism is all about efficiency. Taking advantage of cheap labor and reduced construction costs in a distant country by offshoring because the reduction in costs to create more than offsets the costs to ship the finished goods is all efficiency. There are political issues at stake too, but the impetus is 100% capitalism.
Sure, and perhaps I worded poorly; my suggestion was that Capital Markets are subject to their governments; it's why we couldn't just "make" the USSR, or Vietnam, or Cuba, or China, or Venezuela adopt capitalist ideals, even through war, and more than we could just "make" Afghanistan and Iraq into democracies.
It's why food and tech companies can't do in the E.U. what they get away with in the U.S. Surely the capitalist impulses of Google make it want to operate the same way in Germany—to say nothing of China—as it does in the U.S., but the governments of those nations will not permit it. The globalist effects of capitalism *in the United States* are political, regulatory, and trade problems, not economic ones.
It's like nuclear power vs nuclear bombs. If you can place systems, constraints, and controls on the raw power of something, you can yield incredible results. If you don't, you get destruction. But that's not the fault of the power itself! It's a reckless failure to harness the incredible potential at hand.
Decisions about production made under politically-captured command economies are also all about efficiency - they're just optimizing for different types of efficiency. Capitalism solves for the largest delta between production cost and public demand. Political economy solves for the largest social benefit to the person making the decisions (e.g. benefits to clients, personal enrichment, etc.) You'll notice that the former depends on things continuing to get made in order for profits to keep coming in. The latter is entirely disconnected from production at all - in fact, it almost works better if the messy business of actually making things is entirely disconnected from the status-games. Hence, things getting run into the ground and shortages.
I don't know how to take seriously the claim that global trade and outsourcing aren't natural consequences of capitalism, otherwise IDK what you mean by globalism.
Also, I don't dispute the communist famines, but you should read "Grapes of Wrath" sometime to see what people went through in this country vis a vis famine and hunger during thr Great Depression. They don't teach us in school how many people died of malnutrition, but I'm betting a quick Google search will show that it definitely happened to hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And let's never forget, the decision to feed people who can't afford it is fundamentally not a free market one.
I have read The Grapes of Wrath, twenty-two years ago. It was incredibly formative to my politics.
I also had a maternal grandfather who grew up during the depression, in a part of the country (Southern Appalachia) that did not see any of the resources of more urbanized parts of the country. Then Pearl Harbor, Marines, Okinawa and Peli Liu. I had the opportunity to both live with and care for him late in his life, as well as formally interview him for middle-school "Greatest Generation" projects in the Nineties. It was subjective, of course, and localized, but I have a quite intimate view on the effects of the Depression in the U.S.
There was no famine in the U.S. during the depression. There was, infact, *over* production, and the birth of federal grain subsidies. The malnutrition that was experienced was driven by poverty, not scarcity. It would take another 30 years for LBJ's "War on Poverty" to start putting in place the social guardrails (SNAP, EBT, etc) that we see today.
So you are agreeing that people can starve to death under capitalism, its just not because there isn't enough food. Those social guardrails you are talking about, to a lot of people *that* counts as communism, because its the state interfering with a free market outcome,which is that people starve. You're correct that a good part of capitalism is that we tend to produce plenty of food, but we also end up throwing a lot of that food in dumpsters, which we then lock, so that poor people don't get golroceries for free and screw up the economy. That's not as bad as famine, I'll admit, but its not a great advertisement for our prosperity.
We're going a little out of bounds here. Of course people can starve under capitalism. People can starve in Beverly Hills, if they are denied sufficient calories, and that denial doesn't require an economic system in order for it to take place; captivity and abuse alone are more than capable of starving someone, no government needed.
And yes, the uninitiated may call regulation "socialism", but we are initiated, aren't we?
I'm not talking about regulation, I'm talking about food stamps, which I'm pretty sure does count as socialism, albeit market-based socialism. But the government is redistributing people's wealth to give others more access to food. I think that's amazing, but my point is that even people who are pro capitalism should be honest about its potential failures, one of which is that it has no mechanism to address resource inequality as long as the market stays in equilibrium. We have to go outside it to do that. Its totally fair to sau that communism seems "too far" outside the market, but then you have to articulate exactly where the line is, and also, you have the undenviable task of demonstrating that capitalism can still function with all these adjustments for taxes and social programs and all the stuff that makes living under capitalism not an absolute nightmare. Because a lot of data suggests it may not be possible, long-term, to skim off the top of the market and somehow still leave it functional enough to grow at a pace where it doesn't collapse.
People can starve to death by walking off of a trail in the woods and getting lost. You aren't merely stretching a point equating communism with "interfering in a free market outcome, which is that people starve", you are breaking it. Western liberal capitalism 'interferes' with the market routinely, beginning with enforcing contracts, imposing minimum wage, OSHA, limitations on who can work at what age, mandatory social security and about a million other ways. Respectfully, the farther one goes on the Progressive spectrum, the more tendentious and less tethered the logic and reasoning becomes.
As a final note, kindly provide one example of any element of 20th or 21st century American society standing by and letting people starve in the name of the free market.
So we have to start in the 20th century after huge campaigns by leftist organizers and labor leaders pushed for comprehensive reforms? We aren't going to start in 19th century England, or any other period since industrial capitalism became a thing? Because I guarantee you people starved, and died, because their labor wasn't considered valuable enough to warrant feeding them.
I don't really care what you think of my logic, but the way in which you get to cherry pick both what is and is not communism and also what is and is not capitalism.
Well, I'm pretty sure we *were* talking about relatively modern times, but maybe not. I missed the "huge campaigns by leftist organizers and labor leaders". When was that? And what was accomplished?
What was accomplished? The 40 hour work week? The end of legalized child labor? Basic safety improvements in coal minds and the end of company towns? The basic right to form a union without your boss sending in a private fucking army? What's your explanation for where these things came from? Ever heard of Mother Jones (the person, not the magazine)? What about Eugene V Debs or the West Virginia coal wars?
The first child labor law was proposed in 1906 by a Republican senator. The 40 hour work week and age limits on work were passed by congress in 1938 (Fair Labor Standards Act). Yes, unions were, and mostly are, of the left. Like most movements, there is good and bad and in between to be found. On balance, where the left got it right (notice the pun?): equality in law and in fact for women, non-whites and gay people. That was then, This is now and what was once a solid and salutary movement has overplayed its hand.
The curious thing about The Grapes of Wrath is that story was a favorite of the Soviet propaganda machine. So much so that when made into a movie, it was shown in the USSR ... until the inmates discovered the poor in America actually had trucks! The movie was quickly pulled after that.
The Depression and the Dust Bowl were not the direct result of a command economy visiting hardship on its population out of ideological rigidity. Moreover, whatever death by famine occurred during the Depression is microscopic compared to good times visited upon people by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and their copycats.
Capitalism has been good at producing broad prosperity during a time of historically unprecedented productivity that might be going away. A fundamental principle of Marxism is that the second economic productivity slows down corporations have to make hard decisions about where to cut costs to increase profit they will pick labor every time, and if you have strong political forces marshalling them not to do so you are basically forcing them to operate under conditions that will make them not profitable, at which point they won't be competitive anymore and will collapse.
We've been seeing a little of this in the conversations professional economists have been having about the trade-offs between high wages and high costs for basic goods, right now we are managing to balance on that knife edge (although plenty of people are still unhappy), but you can imagine if people stop buying inflated goods, then the only way to prevent a massive recession is to either allow massive lay-offs or wage decreases, neither one of which really sings "broad prosperity" to me.
In a capitalist economy, even a "massive recession" is historically unlikely to result in widespread famine. The same cannot be said of Communist supply controls.
Many of the wage issues that you address are actually the result of globalism—which is a political choice—rather than capitalist principles, which can, and should, be reigned in by good governance.
Oh, they are absolutely capitalist. Capitalism is all about efficiency. Taking advantage of cheap labor and reduced construction costs in a distant country by offshoring because the reduction in costs to create more than offsets the costs to ship the finished goods is all efficiency. There are political issues at stake too, but the impetus is 100% capitalism.
Sure, and perhaps I worded poorly; my suggestion was that Capital Markets are subject to their governments; it's why we couldn't just "make" the USSR, or Vietnam, or Cuba, or China, or Venezuela adopt capitalist ideals, even through war, and more than we could just "make" Afghanistan and Iraq into democracies.
It's why food and tech companies can't do in the E.U. what they get away with in the U.S. Surely the capitalist impulses of Google make it want to operate the same way in Germany—to say nothing of China—as it does in the U.S., but the governments of those nations will not permit it. The globalist effects of capitalism *in the United States* are political, regulatory, and trade problems, not economic ones.
It's like nuclear power vs nuclear bombs. If you can place systems, constraints, and controls on the raw power of something, you can yield incredible results. If you don't, you get destruction. But that's not the fault of the power itself! It's a reckless failure to harness the incredible potential at hand.
Decisions about production made under politically-captured command economies are also all about efficiency - they're just optimizing for different types of efficiency. Capitalism solves for the largest delta between production cost and public demand. Political economy solves for the largest social benefit to the person making the decisions (e.g. benefits to clients, personal enrichment, etc.) You'll notice that the former depends on things continuing to get made in order for profits to keep coming in. The latter is entirely disconnected from production at all - in fact, it almost works better if the messy business of actually making things is entirely disconnected from the status-games. Hence, things getting run into the ground and shortages.
I don't know how to take seriously the claim that global trade and outsourcing aren't natural consequences of capitalism, otherwise IDK what you mean by globalism.
Also, I don't dispute the communist famines, but you should read "Grapes of Wrath" sometime to see what people went through in this country vis a vis famine and hunger during thr Great Depression. They don't teach us in school how many people died of malnutrition, but I'm betting a quick Google search will show that it definitely happened to hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And let's never forget, the decision to feed people who can't afford it is fundamentally not a free market one.
I have read The Grapes of Wrath, twenty-two years ago. It was incredibly formative to my politics.
I also had a maternal grandfather who grew up during the depression, in a part of the country (Southern Appalachia) that did not see any of the resources of more urbanized parts of the country. Then Pearl Harbor, Marines, Okinawa and Peli Liu. I had the opportunity to both live with and care for him late in his life, as well as formally interview him for middle-school "Greatest Generation" projects in the Nineties. It was subjective, of course, and localized, but I have a quite intimate view on the effects of the Depression in the U.S.
There was no famine in the U.S. during the depression. There was, infact, *over* production, and the birth of federal grain subsidies. The malnutrition that was experienced was driven by poverty, not scarcity. It would take another 30 years for LBJ's "War on Poverty" to start putting in place the social guardrails (SNAP, EBT, etc) that we see today.
https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-economy/agricultural-adjustment-act
vs.
https://holodomor.ca/resource/holodomor-basic-facts/
So you are agreeing that people can starve to death under capitalism, its just not because there isn't enough food. Those social guardrails you are talking about, to a lot of people *that* counts as communism, because its the state interfering with a free market outcome,which is that people starve. You're correct that a good part of capitalism is that we tend to produce plenty of food, but we also end up throwing a lot of that food in dumpsters, which we then lock, so that poor people don't get golroceries for free and screw up the economy. That's not as bad as famine, I'll admit, but its not a great advertisement for our prosperity.
We're going a little out of bounds here. Of course people can starve under capitalism. People can starve in Beverly Hills, if they are denied sufficient calories, and that denial doesn't require an economic system in order for it to take place; captivity and abuse alone are more than capable of starving someone, no government needed.
And yes, the uninitiated may call regulation "socialism", but we are initiated, aren't we?
I'm not talking about regulation, I'm talking about food stamps, which I'm pretty sure does count as socialism, albeit market-based socialism. But the government is redistributing people's wealth to give others more access to food. I think that's amazing, but my point is that even people who are pro capitalism should be honest about its potential failures, one of which is that it has no mechanism to address resource inequality as long as the market stays in equilibrium. We have to go outside it to do that. Its totally fair to sau that communism seems "too far" outside the market, but then you have to articulate exactly where the line is, and also, you have the undenviable task of demonstrating that capitalism can still function with all these adjustments for taxes and social programs and all the stuff that makes living under capitalism not an absolute nightmare. Because a lot of data suggests it may not be possible, long-term, to skim off the top of the market and somehow still leave it functional enough to grow at a pace where it doesn't collapse.
People can starve to death by walking off of a trail in the woods and getting lost. You aren't merely stretching a point equating communism with "interfering in a free market outcome, which is that people starve", you are breaking it. Western liberal capitalism 'interferes' with the market routinely, beginning with enforcing contracts, imposing minimum wage, OSHA, limitations on who can work at what age, mandatory social security and about a million other ways. Respectfully, the farther one goes on the Progressive spectrum, the more tendentious and less tethered the logic and reasoning becomes.
As a final note, kindly provide one example of any element of 20th or 21st century American society standing by and letting people starve in the name of the free market.
So we have to start in the 20th century after huge campaigns by leftist organizers and labor leaders pushed for comprehensive reforms? We aren't going to start in 19th century England, or any other period since industrial capitalism became a thing? Because I guarantee you people starved, and died, because their labor wasn't considered valuable enough to warrant feeding them.
I don't really care what you think of my logic, but the way in which you get to cherry pick both what is and is not communism and also what is and is not capitalism.
Well, I'm pretty sure we *were* talking about relatively modern times, but maybe not. I missed the "huge campaigns by leftist organizers and labor leaders". When was that? And what was accomplished?
What was accomplished? The 40 hour work week? The end of legalized child labor? Basic safety improvements in coal minds and the end of company towns? The basic right to form a union without your boss sending in a private fucking army? What's your explanation for where these things came from? Ever heard of Mother Jones (the person, not the magazine)? What about Eugene V Debs or the West Virginia coal wars?
The first child labor law was proposed in 1906 by a Republican senator. The 40 hour work week and age limits on work were passed by congress in 1938 (Fair Labor Standards Act). Yes, unions were, and mostly are, of the left. Like most movements, there is good and bad and in between to be found. On balance, where the left got it right (notice the pun?): equality in law and in fact for women, non-whites and gay people. That was then, This is now and what was once a solid and salutary movement has overplayed its hand.
The curious thing about The Grapes of Wrath is that story was a favorite of the Soviet propaganda machine. So much so that when made into a movie, it was shown in the USSR ... until the inmates discovered the poor in America actually had trucks! The movie was quickly pulled after that.
❤️
The Depression and the Dust Bowl were not the direct result of a command economy visiting hardship on its population out of ideological rigidity. Moreover, whatever death by famine occurred during the Depression is microscopic compared to good times visited upon people by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and their copycats.