Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

What real world market economy didn't work via capitalism? You need a system that disrupts production and fires (or retrains) workers with deprecated skills to meet new demand, worker cooperatives wouldn't fire themselves because the market demand change etc, as far as I know no system except capitalism has managed this.

Real world cooperatives has shown they are happily keeping progress at bay just to make their own lives easier, only pressure by capitalist competitors or laws has worked to help give people the products they want.

In general workers has been hostile to new better methods, since they put those workers out of a job forcing them to retrain and get a new job, workers doesn't like that.

Edit: Is there another system where consumers has more say in production than capitalism? I haven't seen it. Consumers having a big say in production is really important.

View on HN

> You need a system that disrupts production and fires (or retrains) workers with deprecated skills to meet new demand

The prevailing monarchic structure of corporations is terrible at firing the people at the top. All of my friends at Google would love to fire Sundar Pichai, and yet they can't because authority in companies is structured such that it flows from the top down rather than from the bottom up. Give ownership to the employees and let them vote on the executives.

Capitalism fires the people at the top by replacing them with new companies. That ensures progress will happen, either by incumbents or by disruptors, either way we aren't stuck.

When/if Google gets bad enough or their technology gets deprecated they will get replaced. You can argue it isn't happening fast enough for your taste, but its just been a decade or two depending on how you count, this rate of progress and disruptions and replacements is extremely fast compared to any other known system.

> Capitalism fires the people at the top by replacing them with new companies.

That's common to all market economies, including ones where ownership of the company belongs to all of its employees rather than merely to its executives. Capitalism is not the only system where competition between companies is a feature.

> That's common to all market economies

No, you need a system to fund new companies, only capitalism does that naturally. The alternative to capitalism would be central planning, or that we vote to fund new companies.

So you would have to organize a vote to make a new search engine if you thought Google wasn't good enough, and without that vote there would be no new search engine funded so we wouldn't have alternatives, so people wouldn't even know if anything better could exist.

It is hard enough today to get a handful of founders and investors agree to make a company, imagine needing thousands to millions of people to vote to agree on making a new company... I don't see how that could work nearly as well.

Also I asked for real examples, not hypothetical, when you make up hypothetical scenarios like that you miss many real world requirements like what I brought up here, your system doesn't solve that. To have a healthy market you need to fund new promising ideas, capitalism does that via rich people, communism does that via central planning, how would you do it except voting? And as I said above, voting isn't good enough, voting to fund new companies would massively slow down progress.

Most wouldn't want a new company, workers doesn't benefit from it, without rich people you need hundreds or thousands of workers to risk their savings to fund a company just to most likely lose all their money and not even get paid since the company folded and they were paid profits instead of salaries, that isn't something they would be happy to do.

> No, you need a system to fund new companies, only capitalism does that naturally.

I'm not sure why you have come to believe this. Companies can start small and grow large as they need to. As companies grow and gain employees, those employees gain equal control over their company in the same way that citizens to a country gain the ability to vote. I'm not sure where this conception comes from that we need to have the entire country vote on starting new companies, that has nothing to do with this.

> capitalism does that via rich people

You appear to think that the goal of this is to eliminate wealth inequality, but that's not the point at all. You appear to be importing your conceptions about communism into this conversation, but this has nothing at all to do with communism. This is a market economy where companies are structured as democracies rather than as monarchies.

You're conflating "market systems" with "capitalism". All capitalist systems are market systems, but not all market systems are capitalist.

One of the most significant economic revolutions in all human history happened over the last few decades, under a socialist market economy rather than a capitalist market economy. Similarly, the actual industrial revolution started under mercantilist economy, before capitalist market economies in anything like their modern forms existed.

> One of the most significant economic revolutions in all human history happened over the last few decades, under a socialist market economy rather than a capitalist market economy

Where? China is a capitalist market economy, with a bit more state regulations than we have in the west, but they still have investors, billionaires, profits, buyouts, mergers, wage slaves etc. Before their economy went capitalist they remained one of the poorest countries on earth, then when they adopted capitalism that revolution happened.

State regulations are necessary for capitalism to get good results, but its still capitalism.

If you are talking about China, they have financial markets with private share ownership, a large percentage of their economy is private businesses, and their state owned companies are run for profit, with said profit retained by both private and state own companies within themselves rather than being distributed among the population in a social dividend or similar scheme, which is what people usually think of when they think of a socialist market economy.

Additionally, China doesn't have a policy of production for use instead of for profit, there is not widespread self-management or workplace democracy among companies.

Thus I argue they are state capitalism, since they do not actually have socialist policies and instead clearly are some form of capitalism with heavy government intervention.

> a large percentage of their economy is private businesses

Are these businesses actually private? Does the fact they all started teaching Xi Jinping Thought (TM) to their executives at the exact same time indicate who ultimately controls them?

> and their state owned companies are run for profit with said profit retained by both private and state own companies within themselves

If the central government can mandate those companies to invest that profit in <currently important sector>, can you really say it's theirs to keep?

> rather than being distributed among the population in a social dividend or similar scheme, which is what people usually think of when they think of a socialist market economy.

Which people? This redistribution has never happened in any socialist system that calls itself as such, only in systems like the West which one might call a "primarily private market economy with a large socialist appendage" (socialist as in social/public ownership).

> there is not widespread self-management or workplace democracy among companies.

There has not been widespread self-management in any socialist system and certainly no workplace democracy in any real sense.

> Thus I argue they are state capitalism, since they do not actually have socialist policies and instead clearly are some form of capitalism with heavy government intervention.

Why would you say their policies are not socialist? The lack of a social safety net and absence of human rights is exactly like other socialist governments. If you want to say such policies are not actually socialist, that's your prerogative. I cannot think of any Socialist government that actually existed which did things radically differently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com