I will be stepping down in ~7-14 days any suggestions on how to find someone that could take care of this community better than me? Thank you.
During the pandemic I watched grocery stores buy poison to dump on their trash, which they paid armed people to guard. They then paid other people to haul it away. All this to prevent poor people from taking it away for free.
Capitalism is on of the worst thing happening to humanity. :( It promotes greed and punishes people who aren't greedy. It makes more problem than it answering problems.
And yet people are saying that the system isn't the problem but people. When it's the system that creates and promotes those people.
The gains from capitalism have dropped the costs to produce foods to previously unheard of levels. The productivity of a modern farm is incredible compared to farms of 25, 50, 100 years ago. The amount of labor and land needed to produce the food humanity needs has dropped considerably.
I realize these are not the statements that people posting here want to read, but that's reality. Take the good with the bad because regular capitalism is not bad. Unfettered capitalism is the problem.
But that's not because of capitalism, that's because of technological advances. We have centuries of technological advances in agriculture before we even had proto capitalism. There's no reason to believe those advances wouldn't have happened under any other economic system.
It is because of capitalism. Capitalism includes price competition, necessity to update farming tools and adopting technology in timely manner for every farmer, reducing worker numbers by replacement with farming tools, free labour movement, meaning less people being stuck being farmers. Tech development competition and tool production is its own capitalistic dynamic too.
Other forms aren't necessarily centuries behind in effectiveness but they would require very microscopic management and preplanning, hopefully competent leaders and selfless participants.
Agriculture is in most societies already heavily regulated and intervened by governments and politicians bc of its importance. So even in capitalistic nations, agriculture is never pure capitalistic
All you're saying is that you cannot comprehend a world without capitalism. Let me give you a quick hypothetical that you can hopefully relate to. Imagine you could do something about your work that makes your work easier and also take less time, but the wage your being paid doesn't change. Would you do it? I'm sure you would because even if you don't get more money out of it you get more energy (as less is spent on work) and more free time to spend that energy. There are other ways to motivate technological advancement than just pricing, primary being the desire to do as little work as possible. It's actually superior to pricing because it's not externally driven. If you're able to assert a dominant market position you no longer need to innovate because you're going to make a profit anyway. But unless we're in full automation (where you never have to work again) there's always motivation to innovate to do less work.
And now the other part of this hypothetical. Assuming there is something that could be changed to make your work easier and take less time, could you actually change that? You brought up how other forms aren't as efficient as they require microscopic management and preplanning with competent leaders. But if you're a worker in a capitalist company the change you would want to make gets bogged down by those same things. A competent leader might implement your change, but for them to even hear your suggestion you have to get through all the levels of management. Now, imagine if you worked in a company where you and your co-workers can decide together that this is a great idea. Compared to a capitalistic company would you consider that slower or faster, and do you think it would be more likely or less likely your innovation gets implemented?
Well, those yield gains are from capitalism subsidized with government-sponsored ag research at hundreds of college campuses, and subsidized by intellectual property protections for patents and copyrights, and government price supports, and government crop insurance, and government land-bank programs to pay farmers to not overuse the land, and ag labor subsidized by special exemptions for minimum wage and citizenship verifications, as well as tight border controls and political vilification of the immigrant labor force to keep the wages low.
But yeah, when society throws enough money into capitalism and soaks up the external costs, it sometimes delivers results.
In short, modern US agriculture is hardly a good example of either unfettered markets or unfettered capitalism. Big US ag is privatized profits and socialized losses, like a lot of other US industry, albeit with much better PR than (for instance) the banking industry.
Take the good with the bad because regular capitalism is not bad. Unfettered capitalism is the problem.
The thing is, unfettered capitalism is basically regular capitalism brought to you by Adam Smith & his successors. Bernard Mandeville, who arguably also described capitalism prior to Smith, called it out for its faults and said that it may only be to the public benefit through careful regulation, whereas Smith thought that greed would somehow regulate itself.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Smith is the one more may have heard of today over Mandeville.
Smith described capitalism, he didn't idolize it.
He's often misquoted, but skim through the wealth of nations. It most certainly does not say unregulated capitalism just works out magically.
It describes how capitalism works, and heavily implies the situations where it doesn't. It's not subtle about it either
Can confirm. I'm on disability and cannot afford food and medication and bills at the same time. My Internet will be cut later this month because I did the crime of paying for my medication so I didn't want to kill myself. I am starving but at least I didn't feel like my soul was being drained.
It's just depressing that if I want to feel slightly okay I have to not eat for days so I can justify getting my medication. Or dumpster diving to supplement food, which I'm gonna be doing in a couple hours.
Life is suffering and I'm tired of it.
If you're in the US, the Affordable Connectivity Program is available to low income families and it covers $30 a month off your existing internet bill.
PCsForPeople (not sure if I can provide links on Lemmy) offers a free mobile hotspot plan with unlimited data that you can use as home internet, if you qualify for the ACP.
Just an FYI, since there are programs that help, but not everyone is aware of them.
It’s not a bug that capitalism is based on greed, it’s a feature. It works (relatively speaking) because it leverages humanity’s shittyness.
Communism has failed to operate without corruption or authoritarianism, because it depends on people actually giving a shit about each other long term.
They both fail, but the problem isn't the system. The problem is people. People try to put themselves into positions of power, retain their position of power and exploit that position of power. Capitalism and communism are simply attempted solutions, however unfortunately they don't adequately deal with the human problem.
With capitalism, people exploit the value exchange. They lie about how much something costs to source or produce, then lie about how much someone else should pay for it, and also about how much a worker's time is worth. Such that you end up with people doing a lot and getting nothing and people doing very little if anything but getting lots.
With communism, people put themselves in positions of power to decide how things should be distributed, then vigorously quell and dissenting voices that ask whether things are being distributed fairly. The end result is more or less the same as capitalism - a small portion of people getting a large portion of wealth.
Any solution must take into account human tendencies to abuse the system, and make efforts to prevent it. However quite often perfection ends up being the enemy of progress - we don't try new things because they might be abused, and end up sticking with the current system which is definitely being abused. This only benefits the abusers. Rather, we should aggressively try new social systems, but also regularly review and either reverse or continue to improve upon them. If nothing else, the changing system will disrupt abusers, as they have to constantly develop new methods.
I think it is interesting that when talking about systems designed to organize people, their labor, and what to produce, that you are blaming people. It's kind of like blaming water for flowing down hill when you want it to go up into your kitchen sink. Maybe use pipes and pressurized water instead.
If these systems don't work, the issues are with the systems and not with the people.
this is like playing poker with someone and blaming the game when they exploit their position as dealer to slip themself an ace off the bottom of the deck.
that said, i partially agree. the systems shouldn't encourage greed or authoritarianism. we need a middle way and a system that accounts for peoples' less wholesome tendencies and doesn't reward them while encouraging wholesome behavior like sharing and generosity.
burning man culture does an interesting job of this with decommodification and gifting principles.
I feel like you're misrepresenting or misunderstanding what communism is. You might base your opinion on the soviet union but they never actually achieved communism, and some would even say it was state capitalism and not even socialism. In fact it's unlikely we'll ever see what an actual communist society would be because it's very much a vague utopia, and just a goal to strive towards.
Communism by definition actually isn't very clear because Marx never actually got into the details of how a communist society day to day life would look like. But he did postulate the primary idea of communism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." One idea of communism is that it's stateless and classless, meaning there literally couldn't be a small portion of people getting a large portion of wealth. Marx himself actually said that future communist institutions should be designed to be decided democratically by the people.
Has capitalism operated without corruption or authoritarianism?
In a way: when you legalize the most common forms of corruption and gaslight people into thinking of your favorite kinds of authoritarianism as normal and necessary, suddenly you don't officially have a problem!
That's how the US and many other supposedly free and uncorrupted capitalist nations do it, anyway.
Relatively speaking, I’d say yes.
The communist systems I’m aware of have failed hard on these due to not having built in outlets for negative human characteristics.
Seems like your understanding of communism comes from cold war propaganda
Part of the issue with this take is that communism isn't a system for organizing government, but rather that of labor and resources. It is not true that communism has failed. Rather it is true that communism under totalitarian regisms has failed. True Communism requires that the people have the power, which in turn would require a true Democracy
Anyone care to argue against generic opinions generated by bots? If so, you are in the right place.
This is part of the reason that the governments pay farmers to grow various crops etc.
we need food it needs to be as cheap as possible
They also pay farmers not to grow crops if they're afraid a surplus will negatively affect the market.
Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
From my experience my government likes to play with how this money is distributed and gets a good media coverage without media mentioning problems with how things are done.
A note: Most countries subsidise their farmers because those countries realise that leaving food security up to the market is a bad idea.
Little Bobby made a full, coherent sentence, amazing!
Capitalism is the greatest expression of human greed.
Dangit bobbi
Just speaking logically, the last sentence doesn't follow from the first. It's just a statement on its own with no justification.
Who is the blue space man and where can i find his books?
A community for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.
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Date Created: June 15, 2023
Date Updated: July 17, 2023
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