Communism, Marxism, Socialism, Capitalism, What are your thoughts?

[Crezth]

I'm not sure what you're saying. TL;DR, our societies are all too capitalist to be called communist? Sure. But bailouts, counter-cyclical spending, and bankruptcy laws help prevent the capitalist failure mode while still retaining the benefits of bankruptcies. Every economy needs a mechanism to get people to stop doing unwanted labour in order to prefer wanted labour.

Yeah, no, I understand what you're saying, it's just that's not really what's happening. Bailouts don't prevent the capitalist failure mode, they merely prolong it or change the nature of it. The 2008 bailout saved the economy only in the abstract financial sense. Both the liquidationists and the bailer-outers are trading one mode for another at cost. If you take say a Keynesian policy plan, you can argue that's constituent to a far more robust failure mode, but we also observe those policies didn't really retrieve the depression although selling weapons and the stimulus of the war in general did.

I'm just not so clear that the unwanted labor transition actually has anything to do with these hypothetical capitalist policies per se. It's not unwanted labor that's the problem, anyway, it's the flow of money. Only abstractly can we say it's unwanted labor: the actual failure modes don't reveal which is the unwanted labor.

 

[Lexicus]

I'm not sure what you're saying. TL;DR, our societies are all too capitalist to be called communist? Sure. But bailouts, counter-cyclical spending, and bankruptcy laws help prevent the capitalist failure mode while still retaining the benefits of bankruptcies. Every economy needs a mechanism to get people to stop doing unwanted labour in order to prefer wanted labour.

Bailouts are under the umbrella of "counter-cyclical spending." The problem is, depending on how we define "bailout" here, "bailouts" actually lock-in unwanted labor at the expense of wanted labor. At least, the bailouts in 2008 had that effect. They, in effect, rewarded the bankers for perpetrating some of the largest frauds in history and also said: if you do it again you can expect to be rewarded again.

 

[stinkubus]

I'm with Crezth. "Unwanted labor" is a value judgement that is outside economic theory. Since my own value system does not allow for the concept of an unwanted human there is no such thing was unwanted labor.

Framing the problem as "unwanted labor" shifts blame to the people hurt by the catastrophe. It's a moral judgement against them that's back doored in by using scientific jargon to describe their current plight and make it sound inevitable.

 

[aelf]

I think it's just shorthand for "unwanted by capitalists", since it's business that sheds jobs. The average person does not vote or make decisions on who gets made redundant.

 

[Crezth]

Yes, it’s precisely unwanted by capitalists. This is the proximate effect of the ultimate problem of money flow. Most of the jobs wiped out in a readjustment are still socially necessary, but without money paying for those jobs they have no choice but to cease. Capitalists individually make choices in this situation that collectively have this systemic effect: I am pulling my money out of the market to keep it safe. That on top of money destroyed by failing debt and you’re in trouble.

 

[El_Machinae]

"Unwanted" is unwanted by the customer, in the discussion regarding the utility of low-boil bankruptcies. The last thing we want is people toiling for stuff that isn't appreciated. Either they're working for themselves or they're working for others. Working futilely or (worse) destructively isn't what you want.

The concept of 'unwanted human' is going to exist in any economic system that contains people and we're going to take great pains to prevent it from happening or in reducing the damages from when it happens. But you also, regardless, have unwanted labour that needs to be pivoted away from using whatever signalling the economic system provides.

Spinning this into a moral discussion, in order to disagree, just kinda misses the point. Bankruptcy regulations are one of the tools for preventing the failure mode of capitalism, where everything just wanders to the top

Yeah, no, I understand what you're saying, it's just that's not really what's happening. Bailouts don't prevent the capitalist failure mode, they merely prolong it or change the nature of it. The 2008 bailout saved the economy only in the abstract financial sense. Both the liquidationists and the bailer-outers are trading one mode for another at cost. If you take say a Keynesian policy plan, you can argue that's constituent to a far more robust failure mode, but we also observe those policies didn't really retrieve the depression although selling weapons and the stimulus of the war in general did.

I'm just not so clear that the unwanted labor transition actually has anything to do with these hypothetical capitalist policies per se. It's not unwanted labor that's the problem, anyway, it's the flow of money. Only abstractly can we say it's unwanted labor: the actual failure modes don't reveal which is the unwanted labor.

I see I conflated two different things: "preventing the failure mode" and "re-tasking people". I don't really disagree with anything you're saying. It's always possible to have bad counter-cyclical policies. If we want to keep going down the pathway to "bailouts don't really help in the long-run" I'm on board

 

[Perfection]

(I'm an American so this is America biased my suspicion is other areas of the world may be similar but I haven't studied it enough to know)

I think the current practice of having warring ideological camps that operate under 19th century ideological labels is a really terrible way to come up with effective solutions in the 21st century.

We are talking about the structure of society and the allocation of resources therein. Everyone wants everything but resources are finite. We want to increase production, spur innovation, reward virtue, prevent unnecessary suffering, be fair, etc. What those words mean, what they entail, and how we go about doing them is a hard problem with real tradeoffs, unintended consequences, and involve complex systems that no mortal can fully wrap their head around.

Every side of the current economic debates is too afraid of losing ground to the other side to voice a nuanced opinion. The conversation has mostly devolved into toxic political theater where too many are too afraid of being seen as wrong than to actually be seen as perceptive. The left rails against big business, ignoring the massive benefits they provide. The right rails against the government, ignoring the suffering of millions that they can help improve. There are moderate incrementalists, like Joe Biden (and Obama), but they're mostly personifications of status quo bias who make change at a glacial pace in a world that is moving at warp factor five.

The people I look towards are those who aren't afraid to cross ideological boundaries to leverage tandem private and public solutions to today's problems. I'm not going to endorse the specific platform of Andrew Yang, but that sort of synthetic reasoning is what is going to get us moving forward in a competitive world. I like Sanders as a human being, but his policy agenda treats companies like their role is to take care of their employees. The role of companies is to provide goods and services, not to protect employees. I used to work at a defense contractor. It was sitting in a fabric coated box (a coffin for the living dead) pretending that I was doing something important and sucking up taxpayer money to do it, where most of that taxpayer money was diverted to companies who sold my labor to other companies who sold my labor to the government. It was adult daycare by design. An employee there once told me the secret to defense contractor success is to make sure that the work is done in as many congressional districts as possible. I worked on obviously implausible projects, in a tremendously inefficient way. It was all such a farce, I would have been much more productive and healthy and done more important things, if the government just gave me the money and let me do what I want. We force people to do jobs out of fear that if people can live will while being unemployed nobody will work and society will collapse. I haven't seen Bernie really try to address that evil, he just wants everyone to have better health-benefits and pay while rotting in our cube-cemeteries.

I contract my electrical engineering labor out as my own business, and while I am dependent on my clients, I own my own destiny much more than an employee does. I relish the freedom to engage companies on my own terms not that of an employee. The policies that benefit me come from both aisles, Obama's affordable care act allowed me to provide my own healthcare, the Trump tax act helped simplify my business accounting (I credit Republican lawmakers for this not Trump, Trump is dumb as a sack of rocks, Republicans lawmakers are now all a bunch of sycophantic ideologies, but the legacy of a party that actually had a decent idea once and awhile very occasionally provides a small amount of utility in an otherwise bleak void). I am only lucky enough to have that because my skills are very marketable and I live in area with a large enough tech-sector to have multiple clients. But this is a freedom that should be afforded to more and more people and should be less and less dependent on the immediate marketability of their skillset.

 

[Angst]

So it's kind of off following Perfection's post here.

But I believe that if one wants to understand and save late capitalism, understanding Marx is crucial to get the basics of how wealth accumulation is a problem when trying to keep stuff afloat.

 

[Perfection]

So it's kind of off following Perfection's post here.

But I believe that if one wants to understand and save late capitalism, understanding Marx is crucial to get the basics of how wealth accumulation is a problem when trying to keep stuff afloat.

What do you mean by "understanding Marx"?

To understand physics you need to understand classical mechanics a lot of which was developed by newton, but nobody in physics needs to read a word of Principia Mathematica

 

[Crezth]

Yeah Principia Mathematica is paraphrased in classes people take about the concepts expounded within it.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I think the current practice of having warring ideological camps that operate under 19th century ideological labels is a really terrible way to come up with effective solutions in the 21st century.

All the rest was great, but this was excellent.

 

[amadeus]

All the rest was great, but this was excellent.

Ross Perot was saying that in 1992.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Ross Perot was saying that in 1992.

It was excellent then and even better now.

 

[Angst]

What do you mean by "understanding Marx"?

To understand physics you need to understand classical mechanics a lot of which was developed by newton, but nobody in physics needs to read a word of Principia Mathematica

Marx's problem is that even if communism could maybe work, it requires conditions and practices that I never see politically competetive in the current climate. Even if one could argue it is a good way to do things, it is not possible due to crackdown. I personally don't think it is possible, but some do.

Good modern economics understand the principles of marxist critique to know where the problems might come from. This doesn't mean that marxism is a solution. But you talk a lot about the problem of using 19th century political encampments today, and having grown up in the upper class, I can attest that they dismiss that kind of stuff because socialism marxism communism whatever, even in Denmark. Marx made some pretty good foundations for understanding the problems with capitalism. Later good economists build on it and try to solve it. There are plenty of good examples in this thread.

But common capitalist ideology (common, not academic) dismiss it because of the name and the unrealistic conclusions. Again, even if you're a marxist and think it arguably possible in some abstract sense, it's just not probable in the current political climate due to power structures present. (This is not a message for you.)

Das Kapital has two functions in this sense. Trying to read it as a capitalist actually serves to understand your own problems and how to mitigate them - at a basic level. Dismissing it because of its very real problems is dismissing the state of things. There are more current books dealing with current topics more eloquently and relevantly, yes, but the whole point is to dismiss the whole MARX IS EVIL when he is the foundation to some forms of capitalist theory that are actually constructive and fruitful.

In your simile, it would be like dismissing Newton because of the problems of his own thought while building your whole worldview on it, dismissing his name in the process. Being stuck in the past or in rigid thought.

Similarly, reading Adam Smith and understand that his problems with freeloaders, something often quoted by voters of the right, was targeted at the elite, should open some people's eyes about where these thoughts come from, and accordingly, what they're actually arguing for or against.

 

[Estebonrober]

All the rest was great, but this was excellent.

Ross Perot was saying that in 1992.

It was excellent then and even better now.

Is anyone talking in these actual terms seriously? I see a lot of social democracy talk, a lot of automated luxury communism talk, and whole whole bunch of late capitalism talk, but. . . actually imply initiating a full communist manifesto program now? I'm not seeing that much.

 

[Angst]

The academic left is honestly much less dire than the common populace or the right make them out to be.

The idea about the infiltration of political correctness is similarly silly when you read the literature and talk to the teachers. There are corner cases that are really rigid and extreme, and there's one in each class that is really loud about it, but most of the discussions about problematic stuff (those that don't go viral for scapegoating) are trying to be nuanced, and there are very few damning universal declarations of evilz.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Is anyone talking in these actual terms seriously? I see a lot of social democracy talk, a lot of automated luxury communism talk, and whole whole bunch of late capitalism talk, but. . . actually imply initiating a full communist manifesto program now? I'm not seeing that much.

Few here like to talk about how to implement or what any such implementation would actually look like. It seems to be mostly anti capitalism and socialist theory.

 

[amadeus]

@Estebonrober, Perot did some 30-minute infomercials during his campaign where he detailed his platform. So I would say it was more than empty words.

 

[Estebonrober]

Few here like to talk about how to implement or what any such implementation would actually look like. It seems to be mostly anti capitalism and socialist theory.

@Estebonrober, Perot did some 30-minute infomercials during his campaign where he detailed his platform. So I would say it was more than empty words.

Well capitalism is going to be constantly critiqued since it is reigning supreme. Socialist theory in regards to that supremacy is a natural rebuttal but its not stuck in the 19th century.

I fell like you two are both so pro capitalists that you neither see the flaws as truly severe and you see socialist ideas in the 21st century as necessarily regressive. Almost as dogmatic as those your find the most bothersome in your discourse here.

. . .but of course we all comes with our biases so that's ok.

 

[Angst]

Capitalism can be ok, but it isn't, and integrating soft social democratic policies that have their roots in marxism isn't going to hurt anyone.