this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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Competition kills competition. To the victor go the spoils. Bigger war chest, bigger army. Etc.
The reason I defend capitalism is not because I like the outcome. I just have good reason to be extremely skeptical of the alternatives (judging by history). Systems that don’t take into account people’s natural competitive instincts are doomed to catastrophe.
For anyone who hates hierarchies and dreams of a flat system (some form of anarchism), I would invite them to read The Tyranny of Structurelessness by feminist Jo Freeman.
Really interesting link, thanks for sharing.
Anarchism does not (necessarily) call for a total lack of organisational structure, first and foremost it calls for the abolition of unjust hierarchies. I think a lot of anarchists would broadly agree with the main points of that article.
If you think there is no viable alternative to captitalism, I'd highly recommend the book "Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fisher, which tackles that very subject :)
Capitalism doesn't need defending, even if alternatives are worth critiquing. A system alone will never be enough. No matter what, conscious effort must be taken to prevent suffering and total collapse of the social contract. Efforts to better the public good are more prudent than ever with humanity being so powerful and dangerous.
I think it does. If anything, capitalism is in grave danger right now. It seems to be getting closer and closer to slipping back into feudalism. I’m talking about a world with zero economic mobility and a rentier class that owns all the land.
If you don't realize that feudalism is the natural course of capitalism, I don't know what to tell you. Really, capitalism is just collective feudalism, with the state enforcing rule for the large nobility. Capitalism trends towards monopoly, with power funneling info fewer and fewer hands.
It requires a conceited effort of the state and the public to prevent or stem this. The government can't just take power from the wealthy for itself, but redistribute that power to the people for their independent use. That's more democratic socialism than social democracy, and it certainly does not represent capitalist mechanisms. It can only work in spite of capitalism.
All social systems require concerted effort to maintain. There’s no such thing as a magical system that runs perfectly forever as soon as you set it up. There will always be antisocial people who constantly work to undermine any system.
What capitalism does (that other social systems struggle with) is to give many types of antisocial people a productive outlet, at least for a while. They can exhibit their competitive drive and produce new products which benefit society. But when they become anticompetitive we need a functioning antitrust system to kick in and break up their companies. We used to have one but it was dismantled. Now Lina Khan is trying to rebuild it.
This is not even exclusive to people. Look at nature. Nature is full of parasites. Countless species of them. Take for example cuckoo bees which infiltrate beehives and consume honey while reproducing but doing no gathering work of their own. If the worker bees don’t destroy the cuckoo bees their population will grow so much that the hive will collapse due to excessive food consumption and lack of corresponding production.
Other systems (feudalism, Stalinism) allow antisocials to reach the highest levels of government where they can inflict enormous damage to the country by engaging in corruption. This is akin to letting the cuckoo bees run rampant in the honeycomb. In particular, the legacy of the Soviet system is now the murderous kleptocracy of the Putin regime. I’ll take any western capitalist liberal democracy over that, any day of the week.
Yes, capitalist democracies can also have corrupt people reach the highest levels of government. But that doesn’t give them absolute power over the economy the way other systems do. So the damage they can deal is greatly limited.
From the article:
Evenly distributed power is a lack of hierarchy, isn't it? How does that article support your point that a flat system doesn't work?
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/cathy-levine-the-tyranny-of-tyranny
Survival of the fittest is not a defense of capitalism as a public serving economic system. It's an explanation of how capitalism pushes us towards authoritarianism, then autocracy, then jungle law, where the public are left to the elements and parasites.
My first paragraph was not a defence of capitalism, it was a description of how competition inevitably leads to lack of competition and then the death of capitalism (and return of feudalism with a rentier class).
This is not an ideology by the way, it’s a law of nature. Since wealth accrues to wealth (wealth is an attractor in the system), we have that wealth distribution follows a power law. This is sometimes known as Pareto’s law or the 80-20 rule, but it generalizes to many natural phenomena such as rain puddles or the sizes of craters on the moon.
So it’s not capitalism that pushes us towards authoritarianism and autocracy, it’s human beings playing follow the leader (and taking shelter under the largest tree), just as they did under feudalism in the Middle Ages or during the Roman Empire or the despotic civilizations of the Bronze Age. Likewise, we saw totalitarianism in all of the communist regimes of the 20th century.
With perhaps a few exceptions, the only major systems where we saw proper freedom and human flourishing were with the autonomous indigenous civilizations of the past and under the capitalist liberal democracies of the 20th century. In the former case, those indigenous civilizations failed to defend themselves against colonization by autocracies (the Romans in Europe, the Mongolians and the Chinese in Asia, the Russians, the Mayans and Aztecs in central/south America) due to small size or they survived long enough to be colonized by Europeans in the age of sail.
Those indigenous systems are often held up by anarchists as evidence that anarchism without domination can work. However, for any system to succeed it must be able to withstand and defeat attacks both internal and external. The assumption that all people will fully believe in a system and only work toward upholding it is naïve Utopianism. After all, why do we need any system at all if you can just assume that everyone agrees to cooperate?
So then it should be obvious that capitalist liberal democracy where the spirit of free enterprise and wealth mobility are kept alive is extremely worthy of being protected. The present situation marked by wealth consolidation and a slide towards authoritarianism is not the inevitable outcome of capitalism, it’s the result of a concerted attack against the system by autocratic forces.
This attack has been made possible by a steady erosion in trust for institutions, many of which were accidents of history. For example, loss of trust in the mainstream media (newspapers etc) is an outcome that resulted from technologies such as the internet and social media. The internet first destroyed the classified ad business via sites like Craig’s list, forcing newspapers to cut journalism costs to stay afloat (and beginning a downward spiral in trust) and then social media gave rise to click bait, heralding in a new era of yellow journalism. This loss of trust in the media is one of the biggest contributors to the rise of trumpism and far right populism, and a big reason why things have gotten so precarious now.