The Trouble with Capitalism
edwardfeser.blogspot.com
edwardfeser.blogspot.com
> Again, the problem is not riches per se, but the fixation on riches.
The desire for riches is not problematic if the majority of people are willing to cooperate to acquire wealth, and seek income from increasing the mastery of humanity over the environment rather by obtaining at the expense of others. Effective cooperation requires distinguishing between income which is positive sum, which adds to the aggregate stock of wealth, and income which is zero sum, which merely transfers existing wealth from others.
Both types of income are mixed together when capitalized into asset prices. Effective cooperation requires individuals to devise methods for distinguishing between the two and communicate these methods with others.
Capitalism vs socialism debates tend to prevent this from happening because they emphasize either productive income or unproductive income without advancing the practical arts and sciences for distinguishing between the two in manner which allows the majority of individuals willing to engage in cooperative production to do so more efficiently.
Isn't this a problem with the nature of individual humans not the structure of human society?
No. It's a problem of excessively-corrupt, under-regulation of individual greed that only a professional, more "angelic," functional, legitimate, ethical, and sensible human social structure (government) can and must limit fairly to prevent a few individuals from hoarding treasure and destroying others. When a few rich individuals effectively own the government in all but name, they own enough power to make it do their bidding and block anyone else from challenging them. They will never relinquish such power willingly because they "need" it to protect themselves and their greed and entitlement makes them believe it's theirs alone. Revolutionary communism probably isn't the answer, but revolutionary sensible something else might be. There is no other way except extremely clever chicanery to remove the influence of billionaires.
Nothing has changed in the principles or human nature; only the culture, fashions, laws, power, technologies, income, and wealth distribution... and especially that nearly all of the controls have failed pertaining to the regulations of gaining and amassing excessive wealth (taxes and such), and purchasing influence (campaign finance reform, etc.). Thankfully, there is not yet an Emperor who decided to not leave after their term, so some controls on power related to government are operating as designed (but for how long?)
Revolutionary communism or similar without full control would simply assassinate one billionaire after another until they understood the message clearly: that their personal survival depends on them returning a large fraction of their looted treasure and all control back to a government independent from corporate influences.
The issue is the drug of absurdly-profund, narcissistic entitlement, beyond greed, married with power it affords and corrupts creates a vicious cycle of vampiric extraction and unlimited desire for even more than is necessary for one or a million people. They then strangle and squeeze millions of people in multitudes of ways and destroy the planet for the self-righteous, vainglory, insular belief in one's omnipotent and omniscient destiny. Meanwhile, their thinking exists in an extremely narrow filter bubble divorced from reality of the existential threats their empires and systems create, risking ecocidal, omnicidal, and suicidal collapse for vaults of accumulated, stolen, and hoarded treasure.
" What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic"
Unless I am to read this fragment to mean "gratifying one's superficial fetish for frivolous novelty", why wouldn't this article satisfy this criterion in a general sense? Feser offers an analysis of what he takes to be the moral hazards of the material prosperity, etc of capitalism. If that can't be said to be a topic of interest, then I'm sorry, but IMO, that's an indictment of the accuser, not the article.
I read articles on HN every day that are far less substantive or original than this blog post. Plenty of posts are off-topic if we go by the description above. And articles on the subject of capitalism have been featured on the front page just these last two days which is why I thought this article's publication was especially opportune.
I don't wish to make accusations, but it's difficult not to suspect prejudice.
What do they think socialism is? Even the most radical Marxists define it as “democratic worker ownership of the means of production.”
And fwiw the USSR did not even consider itself a socialist state. That’s why it decided on using the term communism instead, and Marxists tend to agree it was not deserving of that name either, deeming it state capitalist.
I'm attempting to say this in the least confrontational way I can. So please know that my questions come from genuine ignorance.
Is there a practical way to administer democratic worker ownership, without centralized control?
Is it also possible to do this on smaller scales than entire countries?
I fear socialism as I understand it. Only because I want people to be as free as is practically possible. I equally fear monopolistic control from large corporations. The only way I know to offset this control is competition. If people could freely move between small socialist societies I'd see no loss in freedoms. I've only really hear people advocate for socialism on look large scales.
There may be significant holes in my thinking but this is where I am today.
Commonly called anarcho-communism or relatedly anarcho-syndicalism (this being actually more of a mechanism to get to anarcho-communism)...
Anarcho-syndicalism looks like you form a union, that union then builds companies that are their own "entity" but pool resources/revenues. Workers, and consumers of the companies are linked to the overall union, and can petition for things like medical bills, etc to be paid. The union could grow and grow maybe it builds a total Amazon competitor, maybe walmart too, and convenience/gas stations.
All proceeds belong collectively to all in the union, all Top level staff might have a max salary of 500k or better yet, 10x the average worker salary, so keeping worker salaries high increases wages.
The unions could as it grows seek to buy up hospitals, and other parts of healthcare systems, and run them like a normal company just with different organization. It'd basically be like Kaiser Health where it's the insurer and hospital and pharmacy and maybe even manufacturer of drugs.
The insurer part could even build out programs to basically make states Medicare/Medicaid easier to manage...
So all these related/syndicated/union companies are non-profit, extra proceeds would go towards: expansion of syndicates, mutual aid, and left over would be paid out to workers/consumers. Each worker would get a share, each consumer spending over 1000k per year would get a share. Workers could get 2 shares by being a worker and consumer... Shares would grow, so longer-loyalty === more shares.
The share is your % of revenue from the pot, so say 33% goes to expansion, 33% goes to mutual aid and 33% goes to UBI type payout, you'd get a percent based on shares you own. Philanthropic people who don't need the money could opt-out as well if they did acquire shares so their portion could be re-distributed to those who have more need.
This creates a situation where healthcare is ran by a central/quasi-power structure aka the syndicate, but it's separate from the government and it's worker-owned with shares also being used like shareholder votes on things...
It's basically a non-statist form of socialism. Another term is libertarian socialism, or left-libertarianism, but it's totally different from anarcho-capitalism or right-libertarianism.
You'll find a lot of people who might lean left or be DSA would really support this... I think a weaker central govt is good, maybe even making states have their own militaries that the fed "conscripts" when there's mutual agreed threats, and the governors would be the senate.. the fed would just govern international stuff, and interstate commerce. States would be more in control, and even cities would have more power than states and majority of taxes would go to county, state, then federal... maybe like 50%, 30%, 20%.
That's how my ideal society would look. Eventually the healthcare union syndicate program could roll out nationally for everybody, and maybe be subsidized some by the government for those who aren't officially "customers" but as we grow we'd have so many competing businesses it'd hard not to be a customer for one of them...
Yes, worker cooperatives.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
2. Is it also possible to do this on smaller scales than entire countries?
Yes, worker cooperatives.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives
Thank you for pointing this out.
What is the S in USSR then?
And not the “Soviet” one, the other one.
> That’s why it decided on using the term communism instead,
No, they used “Communism” as well as, not instead of, “Socialism” for the same reasons as Marx did the same thing: “Communism” described the ideology and the goal state, “Socialism” the immediate mechanism.
(Now, Leninist Communism radically departed from Marxist Communism.on other points, to be sure...)
That said, Marx was also less consistent on the definitions than some suggest.
Regardless, “communism” was the term decided on shortly after the civil war ended. It was confusing and a poor choice but there was certainly no confusion as to how well it correlated with the idea that communism was a final stage. Nobody believed the USSR had reached a final stage of anything.
Yeah, my comment history has plenty of rants about the difference between Marxism and Leninism and how the phrase Marxist-Leninist is oxymoronic. But the claim I took issue with was not the (true) claim that the Soviet system was very much not Marxist, but the (false) claim that the Soviet union didn’t view its own system as socialist and, in fact, adopted “communist” in place of “socialist” for that reason. Leninists did (and they and their ideological descendants do) see their system as socialist and use the terms socialism and communism together in a similar way to the way that Marx and non-Leninist Marxist do, or at least did (non-Leninist Marxists now avoid “Communism” a lot because of association with Leninism, and use “Marxism” in its place.)
False advertising. By the same logic, East Germany was more democratic than West Germany because it had "Democratic" in the name.
Sure, that’s how non-Leninist socialists (including Marxists) see it. But the upthread claim was that the USSR did not use the term “socialist” but instead invented the term “communist” because it did not view its own system as socialist. In fact, the USSR used the pair of terms “socialist” and “communist” together in much the same pattern (if, arguably, a somewhat different understanding of the precise meaning of the two terms) as non-Leninist Marxists did (its worth noting that one of Marx’s well-known works, with Engels, was The Communist Manifesto.)
How does that manifest itself if not by the collective management of these means of production? I don't see how you can have "democratic worker ownership" of anything without institutionalized decision-making.
However it's a disingenuous to claim that Marxist political philosophy doesn't imply extreme centralization in practice. You're substituting the Marxist political projects of today (and yesteryear) with a hypothetical as-of-yet-unobtainable Marxism of the future.
I'd be a Marxist if all its problems suddenly disappeared and we were left only with the upsides. Who wouldn't?
Marxists are for organizing society to serve the needs of the working class which reproduces society.
Marxists are progressive as they don’t deny the progress of history, which moves in one direction and cannot be turned back. Marxists understand capitalism as a necessary stage in the development of society but one that can only be temporary.
The problem with that is there are essential human needs that should be taken care of without trying to optimize profits but currently it doesn't work and people suffer needlessly.
I'm not necessarily advocating for completely getting rid of capitalism or switching to socialism, but the capitalism model certainly needs some adjustments to account for essential human needs (health, food, shelter etc), the environment and so forth.
Property is never really wholly private or wholly public. Deeds, titles, freeholds, leaseholds, etc all generally come with some form of public obligations to a sovereign. And in a republic the sovereign is a general government which uses its authority on behalf of the people as a whole to maximize their happiness.
> A doctrinaire laissez-faire mentality that is reflexively hostile to all governmental economic intervention
Laissez-faire was originally a progressive ideology advocated by the French physiocrats which opposed the internal tariffs and private privileges which the king, nobility, and church enjoyed under the Ancien Régime. Part of laissez-faire was the idea that governments should collect a large direct tax on landed property and raise 100% of tax revenues from the most privileged classes of society.
These capitalism vs socialism debates are never really worth having.
There's many types of capitalism and really only a subset of what is commonly referred to as capital has a material basis. These debates always oversimplify things, under-estimate the degree to which western economies are central planned by private banks, and ignore the problem of fictitious capital.
Um, try https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-... ? I would like to think modernity is better globally in strict utilitarian sense, but Hickel raises some serious issues so I'd say it's unclear.
This professor thinks he weighing in on culture war issues above the fray, but for this and many other reasons his analysis of worldly matters is quite pitifully weak. I'm in no position to critique his theology but I doubt it's much better.
On to the substantive claims, neither dispute that things have gotten a bit better in recent years. Reading the previous piece makes that clear. Hickle's main claim is a) the data for the old period up to 1981 is misleading, and 2) the recent progress isn't "worth" the bad stuff that came before / we're still net bad.
In the latter part of the thread Roser claims the GDP-is-misleading claim is wrong, which would be quite interesting, but there isn't much detail there and then it's back to ad-hominums.
See:https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts...
Is this really a problem with capitalism or with human nature?
That said, let me respond to:
> II. Capitalism has made us spiritually much worse off.
Not Capitalism's task. Economics is an external, aggregate concept. The notion that it is somehow responsible for internal, personal results is novel. Capitalism is a system, and as such is amoral. It is frequently and perhaps accurately attacked for bringing out the ugly carnivore in humans. But that seems like attacking the street for the drunk driver.
These attacks are often delivered by those favoring Socialism. I would suggest that perhaps the difficulty stems from the tendency toward aggregation, externalization, and materialism in human thinking, at the expense of the individual, internal, and the spiritual.
This part is understandable but disappointing. The concept of “private” property in this context is conflated with common usage but has a jargon meaning that’s been used to malign or misunderstand socialism and doesn’t help this article make its case.
Here, “private property” is being used to reference physical things owned by private individuals. But in the Marxist context in which it was used to describe/critique capitalism that’s not what it means.
“Private property” as used here refers to profit-driving ownership, i.e. the reference to “means of production”. It doesn’t refer to what would be called “personal ownership”, property which belongs to individuals for their personal disposal and discretion.
There is nothing in “natural law” which suggests that for people to be free some people should be protected to own things which allow them to extract competitive value. That’s a decision society makes, at whatever granularity.
One man may own a small farm to feed himself, another a small farm to make a profit. Should the ownership of the first be more virtuous than the second?
But, as I said, it can be complicated, especially if that is your goal, as can be done with anything if you so please.
But, a self-sufficient farmer with no employees is not even part of a societal economy in any modern sense. They are a mere peasant. If they are a farmer with a farm that requires no hired labor or modern technology then same thing. If they require a military to protect them and they send surplus to a feudal arrangement, they probably live in a feudalist society. If they own their land and use industrial technology and hire their own wage laborers to produce a surplus to trade it on a market to pay for all of that, they are now part of a modern economy and Marxism would have more to say about that. The latter have dependencies beyond the mere protection of their farmland, meaning the farmer now lives in a capitalist society.
The same context in which the usage was defined celebrated capitalism as a liberating development from feudalism. It critiqued capitalism as well, and certainly arrived at a moral judgment against that as a societal goal.
But in that jargon effort it didn’t make a moral point to distinguish personal versus private ownership. It expressed a set of terminology to distinguish things.
I’m not even especially intent on reinforcing the jargon. Only in clarifying when it’s being referenced outside the spirit it was defined in, so perhaps the conversation isn’t scattered around different things.
This is a blurry line as a sibling comment noted. If I want to start raising chickens on my property, do you take it away from me? What if I start selling the eggs from the hens to my neighbors, do you take it away from me then? Somebody will eventually have a more efficient production idea compared to the big government, and then they want to build it on their own property. Should their property be seized? Should they be imprisoned if they attempt it again?
All this to say: If I'm not relatively free to do what I want - barring the harm of other people - on my property, it's not really my property.
Separately, it's interesting how much further away from reality this is sounding as technology continues to improve and absorb more of GDP. When the world's largest companies deliver value by writing code on laptops, and are often started by a couple kids who think 'it would be cool if this existed,' how do these restrictions on physical property fit in? How could that be equivalently taken away from them?
No. So far what you’re describing is personal property. It’s one thing to own a toothbrush. It’s similar to make toothbrushes for your neighbors for their benefit. It’s another thing entirely to capitalize on that, making toothbrushes a vector for personal gain; making people pay more for that formerly shared endeavor, compete to provide it, engage in legal disputes around who may provide what.
> Somebody will eventually have a more efficient production idea compared to the big government, and then they want to build it on their own property. Should their property be seized? Should they be imprisoned if they attempt it again?
It’s similarly disappointing that the competition you have in mind is what it is. The goal in defining private ownership isn’t to distinguish it from public ownership! It’s to distinguish it from personal ownership. The distinction isn’t between state and people, it’s between people and organizations. Nobody should be put in prison for making a more efficient machinery of any kind. They should be blocked from either preventing other people from doing so, or from depriving others from the benefit of that improvement existing.
No, the Marxist prohibition on “private property” isn’t actually a prohibition on having an ownership interest in any particular kind of thing, even if it is used for profit. It is a prohibition on the relationship by which one has a claim on the produce of others labor produced through the use of particular property.
Now, the prohibition on that relation in practice makes owning lots of things less attractive than it is in a capitalist system (and that’s very much accidental).
> All this to say: If I'm not relatively free to do what I want - barring the harm of other people - on my property, it's not really my property.
Marxist don’t view exploitation of wage labor as not harming other people.
(1) So it's okay for me to sell the eggs from the chickens on my property, as it's not using others' labor?
(2) Now if everybody likes the eggs, and I start paying a neighbor to help out with the chickens because it's too much work for me alone, would the government then take my land / take me away?
(3) Assuming the answer is yes to the above, what if I decide to automate the work instead, so I can profitably produce eggs without using anyone else's labor? Am I allowed to accumulate wealth, considering no other labor is involved, or should that be taken away?
Probably (the “on your property” bit is pretty irrelevant here, the chickens are the relevant property.)
> (2) Now if everybody likes the eggs, and I start paying a neighbor to help out with the chickens because it’s too much work for me alone, would the government then take my land / take me away?
Details of policy can vary considerably within the Marxist theoretical framework (and finding concrete examples is impossible as there aren’t any places that have really applied anything in this area of Marxist property approaches without Leninist modifications); fairly typically, in theory, the government would require the enterprise employing labor outside of the individual worker/owner (or possibly family) to be either public or collective, and contracting for labor on other terms would either be void or, I guess, might presumptively create a collective notwithstanding the surface terms. The penalty, if any, for a prohibit wage-labor contract (besides the contract itself being void) isn’t really a matter of general Marxist theory but of the praxis of the particular society in its context.
> (2) Now if everybody likes the eggs, and I start paying a neighbor to help out with the chickens because it’s too much work for me alone, would the government then take my land / take me away?
Classical Marxist theory, being conceived in the 19th Century, didn’t really concern itself with large-scale, labor-free automation, but given Marx & Engels views on taxation – favoring direct, progressive, and significant taxes on income (capital and otherwise) and inheritances, as well as significant land-value taxes, etc. — it is certainly not outlandish to suggest that one Marxist position would be that you would be permitted to operate such an individual enterprise, but that as your returns from it increased in scale that they would be progressively more heavily taxed. You could, though, accumulate wealth that way, but not without constraints.
Of course, some of those limits are present in many modern mixed economies (even with the allowance for rented labor), as tax ideas advocated by Marx, Engels, and others in the same Communist movement — very much in contrast to their ideas on property — were among their ideas that saw the widest success in the developed world in the transition from the classical capitalism that Marx critiqued to the modern mixed economy that generally replaced it.
What I read from this is that I'm unfree to even own livestock on my own property, meaning that I hardly have property of my own.
> the government would require the enterprise employing labor outside of the individual worker/owner (or possibly family) to be either public or collective ... The penalty, if any, for a prohibit wage-labor contract (besides the contract itself being void) isn’t really a matter of general Marxist theory but of the praxis of the particular society in its context.
What I read here is essentially maybe and maybe. The government would take my land and/or my chickens away because I needed help with the chickens, or at the least, the employee I choose to hire after all my labor and investment will receive half my business.
Additionally and more importantly, it's not really a concern of your theory whether I'm executed or disappeared into a labor camp. That just depends on each society, so punishment can vary. (As a Russian, I think it especially eerie you don't find this problematic or view it as a gaping hole in the theory - this is why people perish in it, and the deadly conclusion seems to logically follow from your general theory which necessitates giving the state oppressive power).