Is It Time to Talk About Post-Capitalism in America?
forwardblog.substack.com
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The system is fragile, but shaking it won't lead to an stable state (not in the same conditions/number of participants that we are having now) but to an unstable and/or fragile one.
And we are running out of time to make the big changes in global culture needed to derive this into an antifragile state. The ball is already rolling toward climate change, mass extinctions, ecosystems destruction and the world becoming unsustainable for most of us, and we will not be able to stop it.
Before coronavirus, we had a roaring economy, record low unemployment, rising wages, and a soaring stock market.
I think we can return to that state, let's not radically change things. Coronavirus was a 'black swan'.
Millennials have least overlap with a living example of Communism. A turning point in Orwell's life came when he visited USSR. There's no USSR for a millennial to visit and validate his/her theories, College campus politics doesn't challenge them enough.
In any case, there are living examples of socialism right now. They are small in scale, but seem to be better than capitalism. Millennial socialism is also much closer to the socialism of George Orwell in any case, because it is much more libertarian than that of the 1900s.
Venezuela never got even close to socialism due to frankly stupid economic policy, their share of private enterprise was even higher than France, and Cuba while much better than comparable South American states is not modern, nor an experiment.
Our society is like a runaway train and we can try and apply the brakes here and there, but everyday people don't have the power to say, "This is wrong, lets do something different."
If it was just a case of rich getting richer and poor getting poorer then, yes perhaps the problem is Capitalism, but there are a lot of other problems in society that we seem unable to fix.
Police brutality, Medical Insurance, College Loans. Guns. The worlds on fire and we are not moving quick enough to reduce CO2 emissions.
update: To clarify, what I was trying to say is that, if we had a functioning Democracy, we would identify that there is a problem where some people are very rich, and some very poor, and we would be able to make new laws that solve the problem. (Like taxing rich people for example.)
It's weird to want to cap somebodies worth. We need to limit how people and companies can use their wealth to exert power or make more money.
How about a rule where you can't charge more rent that what it costs to maintain the property.
How about a rule where you can't sell drugs after you have recouped the cost to develop them.
How about a rule where you can't donate money to a politician or political party.
How about a rule where employees of a company automatically paid dividends before shareholders are.
It definitely sounds weird, but seriously, why would you need more than $50 million to live a good life? At that point, you're probably imposing on other people rather than focusing on yourself.
What do you do with wealth after $50mil? You probably exercise your influence on people who would be much better off being helped by people who are closer to the problem. Those people don't have enough money? Well I bet with capped wealth, we'd see a lot more competition, and there would be an explosion of opportunities to create modest wealth. A (somewhat) natural way of spreading wealth.
The problem is that a person can work 40 hours a week for 40 years and not have anything to show for it.
And the reason they don't have anything to show is because they find themselves surrounded by vampires sucking them dry from paycheck to paycheck.
"Inequality" is not a problem that needs solving, its a symptom of a society that doesn't reward people for work, it instead rewards those that already own everything.
I don't care if Mr. Fancy Pants flies everywhere in his private plane and eats off a gold plate.
I only care if he uses his wealth to take my money from me. And in that case I would like the government to protect me. The same way they protect me from being mugged on the street, with laws.
What I'm really trying to accomplish is to not let uber rich people have unlimited power in setting or even skirting policy. Some of the uber rich don't just own private planes and eat off gold plates. They try to impose their views on the world without having to be elected. They have so much money, that they can buy anyone or anything. And when our elected officials are bought, or when unreasonable amounts of land or capital are bought, the uber rich then have stupid amounts of leverage, and aren't subject to pushback.
The uber rich don't have to worry about how much normal people complain. They can ignore everyone and suffer no consequences (unless they're doing something obviously illegal, but they're probably not so stupid as to do that).
And that’s the only point in having so much wealth.
Wages...?
Capitalism's issues are not just the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The main issue of capitalism is distribution of power. The only ways of fixing medical insurance, college loans, gun violence is to directly oppose the power structures created by capitalism. Capitalism is not to be understood as a purely economic system, it is also a political system, as it decides how power and decisions are used and taken. Politics is not just "what the government does" or "what parties do", the shareholders of your company deciding you should be fired is also politics.
In this optic, it is more easily understood why capitalism will and does frustrate any attempt of creating true democracy. Capitalism is directly opposed to true democracy, as capitalism relies on private ownership and thus private decision, which is opposed to democratic decision. This is why when trying to establish public healthcare or regulating medical insurance, you will be opposed by the system that is capitalism, either by crashing of the stock market, adverse action by drug companies, massive lobbying, peddling of lies via mass media, and so on. Same for college loans - in order to fix the root cause issue behind college loans you will need to reduce the cost of tuition massively through either socialization of education or direct opposition to the ability of the private owner to do as they fit with their investment in order to maximize their interests (capitalism).
Gun violence is really caused by underlying sociological issues which are caused by ideology (in the sociological sense of the word), and distribution of resources. Both of those are the way they are either largely or completely because of capitalism.
Police brutality is in no small part because the role of police is diametrically opposed to the interests of most. Indeed, police almost only enforces laws that maintain wealth concentration towards the rich and have very low efficacy when dealing with theft from the common man (wage theft is by far the majority of all theft in the US, and it's not even close, yet try to call the cops on your boss short-changing you), even cases of murder show incredibly high class bias. This leads to police and justice interactions being overwhelmingly negative towards people they are biased against, such as racial minorities and poor people in general.
As for global warming, this is an obvious issue of capitalism.
And, most of all, Democracy has always been biased for the owner class and against the worker class. Read the original US constitution, for an obvious proof.
Capitalism where you can't amass more personal wealth than $100M.
The only reason I would think you would need more money than that is if you wanted to push ideas that the population would not vote for.
I have much more faith in people closer to issues solving them with more good faith and efficiency than unelected billionaires being effectively philanthropic.
I would rather see more rich people relaxing with their wealth than trying to outmaneuver every last civil liberty we have for an extra dollar. Even better if they use their wealth to make their local community better. That way, there are actual human interactions between those making suggestions and voters.
Makes a good environment for natural competition as well.
Would we have a worse quality of life because of this? Important question, but my gut says no.
I'm all for civil liberties, but uber rich people can get away with weird things because they can ignore all the "no's" and essentially bribe decision makers.
The closest thing we have to market socialism right now would be worker co-ops, which do not allow massive wealth accumulation, as all wealth created would be shared equally among employees of a given firm.
(Investment would also largely be impossible, because you would not be able to own stocks in such a system. Instead, interest would have to be accumulated via financing, which is much fairer to distribution of power and prevents accumulation of wealth.)
Even Karl Marx didn't want total equality, he thought (rightly) that it was absurd.
Crucially though, the thing is that while wages are not the same, ownership is equal. Most of the wealth would be in shares of the company, not in wages, because wages are needed for consumption and because investment would be much more difficult.