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My hope would be that we can transition peacefully to a hybrid model with the rising power of unions, gradual emergence of worker cooperatives, and increased demand for socialized health care and affordable housing.
However, I think it's more likely that things will have to collapse first. Especially with violent accelerationist types doing their thing. Unfortunately, it's far easier to destroy systems than it is to repair them.
You probably know it, but just in case that you (or anyone reading this, who might agree with you) don't: give the texts of The Fabian Society a check. They're rather close to what you're proposing with a peaceful transition; I have my criticisms against it as a Marxist strictu sensu, but I bet that you'll have a blast with it.
Care to explain why?
I'm proposing to check their texts out because it's a good way to get theoretical background to back up your beliefs, if you believe in a peaceful transition. (Here's a link to a good one, by the way.)
It's also useful for Marxists, given that Marxism always interacted with other left-wing trains of thought. So by reading this stuff you get a better historical context on why Marxism defends some policies instead of other policies.
Yea I wasn’t doubting you, I just wanted for your to add some small explanation/context as to what these texts had
"Defeated" implies being stopped by an external force, I don't see that happening.
It will collapse under it's own weight in less than a century.
Let’s hope it’s the next too big to fail/stock market crash.
It seems as if capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction. Not saying I know a better way per se but its in there all the same
Edit: to put it in Pokémon perspective: capitalism is Ghost type and its super-effective against Ghost type
What are some examples of capitalism destroying itself?
Capitalism, minus a strong guiding hand as described by Adam Smith, invariably leads to monopolies, or near enough. When that happens, either through a single strong monopoly or a small group of companies, the market doesn't work and price gouging rises. You don't have to look further back than the past couple years at inflation. Every study I have seen blames inflation almost completely on price gouging and market failing to work for consumers. Think record prices (and corresponding record profits) of companies across the board. If you want specific examples, check out the long history of Walmart and the negative effects its stores have on local competition and local earnings. Or the profit taking of gas companies. Or super market chains. Or....
People who love Capitalism always seem to have missed high school history/econ and have this ignorant belief that laissez-faire is the best. Even though proven to be shitty. This belief in trickle down bullshit has resulted in 50 trillion dollars going from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. If that's not capitalism destroying itself, I'm not sure what else to say.
Or as Leonard Cohen sang so succinctly,"The poor stay poor, the rich get rich / that's how it goes / everybody knows."
The concept of enshittification.
Granted, the concept applies specifically to platforms, but the idea is basically what capitalism is:
Late-stage capitalism is when shareholder wealth is maximized at the expense everyone else. So you have 3 billionaires with 50% of the wealth of all humanity or something, the middle class squeezed into oblivion, and a roiling undercurrent of pure fucking rage ready to sever heads like watermelons from a vine.
Applying the concept from the micro (enshittification of the platforms) to the macro (enshittification of the economic system) is brilliant.
What's true of the lesser must be true of the greater
So why isn't my glass of Campari drifting randomly across the table, under Brownian movement??? [/shitty drunkard joke]
Serious now. On economic matters I think that you're right.
I think you can say that’s immoral. I’m not sure you can say it will destroy the whole system or that this is an inevitability of any capitalist system.
Is there actually any record of this destroying the capitalist system though? To my knowledge, every time this happens, its just replaced with more extreme and violent capitalism.
Why would you want it defeated?
The most successful and happiest countries in the world are the Nordic countries, which are capitalist economies.
I think it's because people see capitalism as one thing, while in reality they are implemented very differently.
The nordics are not successful only on their capitalism. It's because it is regulated, and because the money is distributed more fair than in other countries.
The Nordic countries are also on Earth, which we are destroying. Some of their wealth comes directly from that destruction. Norway is the 5th and 3rd largest oil and natural gas exporter, respectively, making their happiness the result of good social policy that makes up for capitalist inequality which is directly funded by destroying the Earth and fueling capitalism elsewhere.
Even setting the climate aside (a ridiculous thing to do, really), the Nordic model isn't possible to sustainably replicate elsewhere on Earth on capitalism's own term, because we can't make every country a net exporter of the most desired commodities for obvious reasons, or the beneficiary of complex historical circumstances, like neutrality during ww2 (Sweden), or a long-time colonial power (Denmark).
Put another way, there is no Nordic model available for Bangladesh, whose workers work six days a week in factories to make the cheap clothing that happy Norwegians wear. Norways needs Bangladeshes to keep their standard of living.
In a previous job, I spent a good amount of time in a Bangladeshi garment factory. That specific factory in which I worked had been on strike a few years prior, requesting a raise to dozens of dollars per month. That's not a typo -- per month!. The police fired into their picket line, killing and wounding hundreds. This fall, Bangladeshi garment workers went on strike again, demanding a tripling of the minimum wage from its current ~75USD per month.
The urban poverty that makes my life possible, so far away, out of sight and out of mind, is an absolute fucking disgrace. We should talk about it daily. When they go on strike, as those garment workers are now, every single westerner ought to strike in solidarity, even if motivated by nothing but shame. Instead, we don't even know that it's happening, at least in the anglosphere.
I've since become convinced that there''s only one path to a just and verdant world -- international solidarity. Communists and anarchists have filled libraries with ideas for what that might look like. I've read some tiny sliver of that corpus. If you actually want to know why some of us want capitalism defeated (beyond the anecdote that I just relayed), or if you're curious how much better some of us think the world could be, I'd be happy to point you towards books that spoke to me.
What books spoke to you?
Going to give a wide range of answers based on topic, so you can pick up what interests you. Happy to give more if none of these appeal to you.
If you work in tech, Stafford Beer's Designing Freedom. It's very short, accessible, and full of so many big ideas about what computers are for that it exposes the tech industry's absolute fucking poverty of vision.
If you're interested in deep dives on more technical topics, David Graeber's Debt. It's a fucking tome, but it's also amazing. So much of what we take for granted in our world is completely arbitrary and made up, but no less powerful, and there's nothing quite as arbitrary and powerful as the concept of debt.
If reading a cinder block based on an internet stranger's recommendation is too much for you, maybe try Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, or his The Utopia of Rules instead, depending on which topic interests you more. Graeber is a great place to start because he's accessible but also his mind isn't limited by the confines of capitalist realism in a very special way. He was truly one of our best.
If you want something that's extremely light and fiction, I recommend William Morris's News from Nowhere. It's extremely cringe in a way that only 100-year-old socialist utopian fiction could be. It's excessively sincere, even naive, in a way that rings hollow to our cynical modern selves, but it's such a short read, and it's so adorable. I like the way that he challenges the concept of work. I think that the modern left should revive that line of criticism. I also enjoyed that you can see early versions of things that we associate with more modern movements in his utopian vision, especially degrowth and reforestation/environmentalism, not just for "the environment," but with nature as a part of and inseparable from the human experience.
Finally, if you like philosophy, and you want in depth analyses of capitalism, and don't mind something that's maybe less accessible, I recommend Adorno and Horkheimer's essay The Culture Industry. It was written in the 1940s, and it reads prescient today. They saw the rise of capitalist mass media as more than just a threat to independent thought, but a pacifying, homogenizing, almost all-consuming force. If you want something longer than The Culture Industry, and probably slightly less accessible, I recommend their Frankfurt School colleague Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man. He basically argues that capitalism, and more specifically what he calls "technical rationality," has conquered our culture and our very ability to reason, at scales big and small.
Do you own theluddite.org?
Yup!
Cool! I love your site!
Aww thanks so much friend 💖 I'm so glad to hear that!!
This answer right here chief 👆
Gens Y, X, Z, and soon A are being taught by conservatives that capitalism can't be reformed, and therefore are digging capitalism's grave with their own hands.
You want reasonable restrictions on firearms? Conservatives say that can't be done because of the 2nd amendment. They're basically teaching gens Z and A that the 2nd amendment needs to be eliminated and those generations might actually have the numbers to do it eventually.
It will be the same with capitalism. You want reasonable regulations and taxation to reign in the abuses of the rich and corporations? Conservatives say you can't do that because the free market must be supreme.
Conservatives will dig the grave of capitalism by continuing to fight against any reforms that would make capitalism more livable for future generations.
Climate change or nuclear war wiping out humanity
There's currently no external forces that can defeat capitalism.
We have to do it on our own. Eat the rich. Guillotine the techno-feudal lords. Confiscate and coöperativize their infrastructure resources.
After mother nature kills every last human being.
Capitalism is still preached in Usa, like socialism is preached in North Korea.
But capitalism is dead and gone.
Today we have neo-feudalism, or some call it techno-feudalism.
It's unlikely to happen without some kind of apocalyptic event. Communist societies works very, very well on a small scale; you can have communes with maybe as many as a few hundred people, because everyone is connected to everyone else. That all falls apart when you start talking about anything bigger. Capitalist societies don't seem to need that direct relationship in order to function.
I think that the best we can hope for is some kind of reform that blends parts of capitalism with socialism, and sharply constrains that rights of the capitalist class.
I don't think that we'll even get that though; I think we'll get Cyberpunk 2077.
I think society will collapse first, likely due to mass displacement and migration due to climate disasters which will make more people willing to accept fascism.
Destruction of Earth.
When we start talking to each other again without paid influence.
The troubles facing us all, middle class and below, are the same troubles. We need to practice working together locally to build something bigger before major movements are likely to work out. How do we rebuild community nonprofit hubs?
When 99% or less of the population can’t work or make any money. What I mean by this is the economy mainly driven by robots/rudimentary AI. The too 1% will be angry and try to keep it as is, but as history has taught us humans really like the guillotine in such situations
The huge difference now is these disgustingly rich fuckheads don't live in any type of proximity to their workers anymore.
I honestly think it'll implode in a few decades. The wage gap will continue to grow, we'll get charged more for less, and the minimum wage won't go up much at all. Conservatives will continue to blame everything on anyone else they can (like immigrants). And I think at some point things will just... break. I'm not sure what it'll look like, but I think it's going to be ugly. Things will get much worse before they get better.
I'm normally a pretty upbeat, positive guy, but I'm not sure how else this could realistically go down.
With thunderous applause.
When we are filling the vent shafts for the last billionaire bunker with dirt and rocks.
Through abundance it will defeat itself by working too well. Approaching full automation the only way for capitalism to survive is via UBI, otherwise there will be no consumer markets. When we have enough productive capacity and sufficient UBI that everyone is wealthy without having to work, a society like the Federation from Star Trek becomes possible. When everyone has enough wealth that hoarding it becomes meaningless, we might achieve something like a communist society.
When the poor have more money than the rich and are willing to give it up.
