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I often hear this about capitalism, but why do same people never attribute the genocide of American natives, enslavement of Africans and Indians, to capitalism? The earliest emergence of stock companies, lay waste and devastation to an entire sub-continent.
When the sixth mass extinction is underway, ecological disaster on a global scale, and yet "it be as it be", but this is not attributed to capitalism?
Capitalism: it sits to bask in every glory, and all its failures expelled, literally explained away
The underlying pattern has been there for even longer of course, e.g. Bertrand Russell wrote this in 1932:
In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges.
Because:
- Slavery and genocide predate modern market economics. They are not unique to capitalism. It would need to be shown that they are more prevalent (tough, given Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, etc.).
- The slavery and genocide you are probably referencing comes from mercantilism and imperialism, not free market capitalism.
- Slavery, violence, and murder are not features of free markets. Property rights aren't exactly established if people and land can be taken by force without compensation or agreement, not that people are property anyway.
I beg to differ. Slavery, violence and murder are inherent properties of an unjust relationships which follow from unequal distribution of wealth.
If you can show me a society which used property but did not have those effects, feel free to correct this point.
But on other hand, I can show you societies which did not have concepts of property, of trade, and did not have slavery and other forms of oppression.
Capitalism means free markets. Free markets means freedom to buy, sell and invest. Freedoms must be protected, and the freest markets have the strongest protections for person and property. Freedom and security go hand in hand.
If capitalism is responsible for slavery and genocide, then it's also responsible for eradicating slavery and genocide within its sphere.
Alternative economic systems don't magically promote human rights. Let's discuss the gap between rich and poor in China or Cuba. Or ethnic suppression and genocide in the USSR or China. Or endemic racism in Cuba. Or systematic impoverishment of millions of people in oligarchies across Africa and South America.
I'm still waiting for socialist systems to make a billion people freer and happier, instead of dead, impoverished or imprisoned.
No, it's a model of property rights. “Free markets” are a slogan, but not even a particularly coherent concept much less a concrete thing that is present in capitalism.
To me, it's similar to looking at a voting system like first past the post and identifying that the system tends towards two parties as a fundamental nature of the system. Underlying motives and strategies of individuals within the system will produce this effect.
I'm not commention on the validity of the "no real communism" statement here, just the comparison of it to the "no real free market"
Capitalism like everything else must adapt or die when circumstances change. As for attribuitable to capitalism a dirty secret is that the USSR was worse environmentally without the greed. It might excaberate some but it is fundamentally the wants and needs that drives consumption.
Haiti's poverty is why their border can be seen from space via deforestation. Humans hunted megafauna to extinction back in ancient times and they weren't exactly morbidly obese.
True to its very mantra: socialize the losses, privatize the gains! At least you can't blame it for inconsistency.
Also, it isn't really capitalism that lifted people out of poverty, it was a very resource-intensive exploitation of fossil fuels on an unprecedented scale.
In the scope of just 1 century, we probably burned at least ~10 million years worth of accumulated energy in fossil fuels. It would be ridiculous if this didn't lift people out of poverty.
BTW, it's not like communism didn't lift people out of poverty. Compare the wealth and possessions of an average citizen of USSR in, say, 1925 and 1975, half a century later.
The mercantilist form of capitalism lead to great abuses and problems, but as always capitalism is the a horrible economic system- but its better than all the alternatives.
In fact Capitalism says very little about politics though. All it takes for it to operate is a functioning legal system and respect for property rights, and that's about it. Capitalism is simply about the freedom to own and raise capital, make investments and earn profits. That's about it. People have been doing that for thousands of years, it's simply the degree to which it is taken that makes the difference. What makes a system non-capitalist is really the degree to which freedoms to invest and practice economic activity are restricted or reserved, and the degree to which property, profits and investment can be appropriated.
Capitalism has very few ideological requirements. A such you can layer over or under it almost any other political ideology. Just look at China with it's Communist political system, statist public sector but burgeoning capitalist economic sector. Is the persecution of the Uighurs down to capitalism?
One problem with capitalism is that it makes a society dramatically more efficient and wealthy, making it a lot more capable of prosecuting whatever other political, racial, cultural or religious agenda the society might have. Just look at the wealthiest nations on earth. They are either capitalist, or they are resource rich such as the petrostates, or in the case of China have re-branded capitalism as 'Chinese Characteristics' and used it to fund the statist side of their agenda. Russia is failing precisely because it has been unable to establish a functioning capitalist economy and relies on oil and gas money instead.
Look at the middle east. Israel is easily the most capitalist society in the region and, even though it faces up to some of the wealthiest nations on the planet, if there was a war between Israel and say Saudi Arabia even, there's no doubt who would get humiliated. That's how terrifyingly effective capitalsim can be. It's the reason Japan rose from being a miserable medieval backwater to dominating all of Asia, even though it retained it's feudal hierarchy. That's how flexible capitalism is because it's not really an ideology, it's just about basic economics.
You see, capitalism indeed works great for the people who "win", yet to keep a relatively high standard of living at home (I'm talking about America since it's the wealthiest country in the world), much suffering has been inflicted in other faraway places: labour is exploited, natural resources are pillaged, brutal control is effected, either directly or by more dissimulated means... This is what people don't talk about then they mention the "joys" of capitalism, they don't mention the repression and murders in Guatemala and dozens other countries, they don't mention slavery and the genocide of natives, they don't mention how multinationals exploit resource-rich countries and siphon that sorely-needed wealth back to the privileged West, etc.
Capitalism didn't originate the concept of resources, or politics, or even money. How can you justify blaming Capitalism for things that happen just as much, if not many, many orders of magnitude more in non-capitalist societies?
Conversely I think it is justifiable to attribute the enormous economic gains of that billion people to capitalism directly. It's an economic system and we're measuring economic gains directly attributable to investment, often replacing decidedly un-capitalist systems.
ANY sort of inherent human greed capitalizes on suffering. It doesn't magically disappear with another system. There is always a pareto distribution of wealth. The differences are in which metrics are the primary leverage for accumulation and the scale of the differentials (wealth disparity) along the curve.
Consider your favourite successful startup and move it to Central America. Now consider what additional factors it needs to take in to simply operate. Take security as an example: Private guards acting with high aggression (machine guns) are a basic requirement in some areas. Compare that to New York (Hand gun).
It's not a reasonable comparison.
You're missing the point. The United State's functioning capitalism is a major cause of your hesitancy to call Central America's countries functioning capitalistic societies.