Questions for the surprisingly far right CFC population

What I'm saying is I think it'll be fewer people than those burned every day by capitalism itself.
When I go to design something. I get to choose from a tens of millions of parts all designed, manufactured, and distributed by hundreds of thousands of companies. These companies are rapidly innovating and coming out with newer and better products. This means I can make far better stuff that helps more people do more things.

I don't see a non-capitalist system able to create the sort of supply chains necessary for the modern economy. And I think anticapitalists underestimate how phenomenally useful it is.
 
The state existed 6000 years before the invention of capitalism. States have existed without capitalism throughout all of history, including today. So what has capitalism got to do with the state?
You don't think that the state has changed in any significant way in the last four hundred years?

I don't see a non-capitalist system able to create the sort of supply chains necessary for the modern economy. And I think anticapitalists underestimate how phenomenally useful it is.
People used to be pretty dubious that you could build a complex social structure around commerce. The mistake which both capitalists and anticapitalists make is that these things tend to happen despite our expectations, rather than because of them.
 
Which is the whole problem. You don't like X. So let's abolish Y, and that will get rid of X. There are always a lot of ??? assumptions built into that.
That's what King George thought about the United States, as I understand.

History is fully of people who were convinced that deep social or cultural change was impossible, that history has reached its effective end and all that remains is consolidating the achievements of the past. All of those people have turned out to be wrong; it's not obvious why it should be any different today.
 
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I think the language you use here is kind of funny. When you say "laws protecting corporate commercialization" isn't what you really mean "the absence of laws restricting corporate commercialization"?
That's quite an interesting and important distinction, but I think the former is more accurate than the latter. Corporations only exist in law, i.e. they are constructs of the state. Thus, the privileges enjoyed by corporations are reliant upon a grant of power by the state. In other words, a corporation can only engage in a particular activity, because it has been granted a right to do so by the state. One such privilege or activity might be the privilege or activity of commercialising necessities. Preventing a corporation from exercising that privilege or undertaking that activity therefore isn't about an absence of law, but about the presence of the laws upon which every privilege exercised or activity undertaken by a corporation is reliant.

(The major flaw in the argument, then, seems more about what makes the commercialisation of necessities by corporations any worse than commercialisation by any other business - the word 'corporate' seems fairly redundant).
 
So then you essentially agree with what I've said here then? You just think that the benefits offered by capitalism outweigh its problems?

well, sort of...perhaps not so much that the benefits of capitalism outweigh the bad consequences, as the benefits of capitalism (combined with a reasonable* social democracy) outweigh the benefits to societies compared to other systems so far in terms of balancing human needs and human rights.

*we may disagree wildly about what this means of course.

History is fully of people who were convinced that deep social or cultural change was impossible, that history has reached its effective end and all that remains is consolidating the achievements of the past. All of those people have turned out to be wrong; it's not obvious why it should be any different today.

certainly true but IMO, the issue is not black and white, it's not necessarily "static"=conservative vs "advancement"=progressivism....it is also a matter of timing. there is certainly a possibility that humanity will some day greatly benefit from eugenics and communism*, just that the efforts so far have been less than satisfactory :cringe:

*defined in a way that is pleasing to you.
 
We're getting a bit off base but I'll try and discuss briefly the way that the state is an instrument of capitalism.

If we're in agreement that economics is the primary driving force in the development of human structures, then we're in agreement that it also drives political structures. Now I agree that modern capitalism is a modern development (obviously) but that doesn't mean that preceding political structures developed independent of economic systems. For example, would you contend the statement that the monarchies of the European Middle Ages were in essence puppets of the feudal economic relationships?
 
People used to be pretty dubious that you could build a complex social structure around commerce. The mistake which both capitalists and anticapitalists make is that these things tend to happen despite our expectations, rather than because of them.
Didn't happen in the USSR...

Only happened in China when they started to allow capitalism...

I think the empirical results favor capitalism.
 
certainly true but IMO, the issue is not black and white, it's not necessarily "static"=conservative vs "advancement"=progressivism....it is also a matter of timing.
And I'd hardly argue as much. Read Marx on the birth of capitalism; he praises it's dynamism, it's energy, but he also condemns its ruthlessness, says that it comes into the world "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt". Things mostly just happen, and people make of them what they can.

All I contend in this thread is that every human construction is temporary. Liberal capitalism has no more chance of lasting forever, simply because it is rational or efficient, than some ancient Mesopotamia dynasty could expect to reign forever because they claim divinity.

Didn't happen in the USSR...
It absolutely happened in the USSR: the last thing that anybody expected was the whole system to crashing down overnight, but that is exactly what happened. That change may not have been the sort prescribed by Marxist-Leninist notions of historical progress- but that is entirely my point, that theories do not dictate history, do not decide whether things stay the same or change entirely, they only describe and predict, and on the latter count are very usually mistaken.
 
By didn't happen I don't mean complex societies, but the dynamic supply chains necessary for a 21st century economy. I don't see planned economics being able to act quickly enough as seat-of-the-pants capitalism.
 
By didn't happen I don't mean complex societies, but the dynamic supply chains necessary for a 21st century economy. I don't see planned economics being able to act quickly enough as seat-of-the-pants capitalism.
I don't either. The permanence of liberal capitalism is not guarantee by a failed experiment in central planning. The failure of the Soviet model only proves that the Soviet model was not build to last forever, not that liberal capitalism is.

What is absurd about the modern world is that we think we have reached the end of history, while knowing full well that our predecessors believed the same thing. They naively assumed that all historical societies more or less resembled their own, to a more or less perfect degree depending on the rhetorical intentions of the chronicler; fundamental social change seemed impossible because there was no sense that it had ever occurred before, at least, not since a time when gods and heroes walked the earth. But we today know full well that societies change, that the only constant rule of human society is change, but we imagine that this rule no longer applies to ourselves, that through our cleverness and efficiency we've opted-out of history, and whatever change there is left in the world will be deliberate, rational and pre-mediated in accordance with existing expectations and values. This is absurd on the face of it.
 
The exception list is probably a bit longer than that.

And really, a burn-it-down approach to the problems of capitalism is gonna just result in people getting burned.

Who said anything about burning anything down? The biggest problem with liberal politics of "progressivism" and "reform" isn't so much that politely asking for exploitation and oppression to end is absurd and demeaning and pointless - even though it is all those things - but that in practice, liberal "reformers" hardly reform anything, and when they do, those reforms are very quickly repealed, sometimes by people of the same political party and ideology as the original reformer! It is the politics of professional white collar cronyism. People are coached and educated to appear a certain way and say certain things, and are absorbed by a party apparatus (or rather, multiple party apparatuses) that needs and can use people who fit that certain mold. While ultimately at some level there are people like us - "the chattering classes," "plebs" - who look at this process from the outside-in and may object to the policy it produces, the campaign slogans, the rhetoric and the party platforms are designed not to make good policy but to cloak this process in legitimacy and professionalism. Cuz otherwise it'd be very quickly recognized for the culture-wide circlejerk that it is :nono:
 
But isn't that an underlying tenant of conservatism? That many/most things should stay the way they are, and/or go back to the way they used to be?
I dunno. That's different than saying history is at its end and change is impossible though.

Who said anything about burning anything down? The biggest problem with liberal politics of "progressivism" and "reform" isn't so much that politely asking for exploitation and oppression to end is absurd and demeaning and pointless - even though it is all those things - but that in practice, liberal "reformers" hardly reform anything, and when they do, those reforms are very quickly repealed, sometimes by people of the same political party and ideology as the original reformer! It is the politics of professional white collar cronyism. People are coached and educated to appear a certain way and say certain things, and are absorbed by a party apparatus (or rather, multiple party apparatuses) that needs and can use people who fit that certain mold. While ultimately at some level there are people like us - "the chattering classes," "plebs" - who look at this process from the outside-in and may object to the policy it produces, the campaign slogans, the rhetoric and the party platforms are designed not to make good policy but to cloak this process in legitimacy and professionalism. Cuz otherwise it'd be very quickly recognized for the culture-wide circlejerk that it is :nono:
It's easy to criticize the system we have, but what's your alternative? You say it's not burning anything down, so what is it then?
 
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but that in practice, liberal "reformers" hardly reform anything, and when they do, those reforms are very quickly repealed, sometimes by people of the same political party and ideology as the original reformer!

And why do you think that is? Maybe it has something to do with idealist reformers instituting policies that look good on paper, but utterly fail when put into action.

It's easy to criticize the system we have, but what's your alternative?

I'd be interested in hearing the alternative as well. That's probably my biggest problem with all the various "social movements" out there today. They all do a hell of a lot of complaining and protesting about all the flaws of our society, but we never hear many realistic solutions from the complainers (key word in that statement being "realistic").
 
That's probably my biggest problem with all the various "social movements" out there today. They all do a hell of a lot of complaining and protesting about all the flaws of our society, but we never hear many realistic solutions from the complainers (key word in that statement being "realistic").
"Why don't you people have any have constructive ideas?"
"We have lots."
"I meant ones that I already agree with."
 
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