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The Millennial Socialists Are Coming (NYT opinion piece)
- Thread starter sphagnum
- Start date
You what? Capitalism has been the major driver in reducing global poverty for the last 50+ years. There are now less people starving, less people dying all preventable illnesses, less people living in poverty etc. Inequality has been falling.
I'd say freedom of press, human rights campaigns, and technological and government accountability have been more effective than economic factors overall. You have a minor point, however.
A lot of the places that have seen the largest benefits don't have those things, though - but they do have fundamentally market based economies that sillys demand elsewhere in the works.
I mean, socialism weakening markets is correct if you think abolishing is a form of weakening. I think you and Giant Panda might be debating the impacts of socialism without having a shared definition of what it is you're debating, so you might just be talking past each other.
Citation needed.
Citation needed. Do you also wanna specify those 'externalities'? I'm sure that once again they'll be independent from capitalism.
This is some nonsense alright. After decades of climate destruction due to unchecked capitalism, your argument is that capitalism is climate's best chance. Thanks for the laugh. The only reason we are still struggling to deal with this problem is because of capitalist interests. In a society where profit is not the driving force, the incentives to implement non profitable but altogether beneficial solutions grow exponentially. Relying on the market to impose limits that stunt its growth is infantile.
You will have to explain what is melodramatic about my examples. You seem to be under the impression that these systems exist outside of the influence of capitalist systems. They don't. The reason why there is no healthcare system worth its salt in the US, why the infrastructure is crumbling, why education has been destroyed, why the democratic system is all but eroded is capitalism and the overbearing power it exerts on all facets of US society. When profit is the driver of every decision, you end up with mass prison slavery, bounty hunters prowling the streets, crippling student debt, completely insane healthcare costs, etc. I could spend the entire night giving examples of shit that just doesn't work because of capitalism.
You know what's a truly bad thing? Not knowing if you'll have a job next week and wonder if you'll have to be forced to live on the street. Having to work slavish hours on shitty jobs for pennies that won't even pay the rent. Be in the servitude of people like Bezos and co.. Living an entire life in the service of enriching some fuck you'll never know and dying in misery. The more capitalist a society becomes, the less rights the workers have and the more latitude corporations have to just do as they please. Even to buy legislation to benefit them. There are hundreds of millionaires and corporations that contribute absolutely nothing to society. They are merely leeches sucking the wealth derived from the labor of the plebs. This is capitalism. Accumulation of wealth is the end game.
You seem to both have a misunderstanding of the actual effects of capitalism on a macro scale and a lack of imagination regarding the possibilities and advantages of a society centered around socialism. A society whose purpose is to take care of all its members on equal measure, instead of leaving it in the hands of this imaginary 'free market' that has never and will never exist. Socialism puts its resources at the service of all society, capitalism not only permits but incentivizes greed and accumulation of resources. Socialism breeds community and promotes equality. Capitalism breeds and promotes psychopathy. Capitalism is a failed system for the majority of the population. And it gets worse the longer it goes. The inequalities will only grow.
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These kind of posts always conveniently ignore the thousands of years of human and social evolution that happened before the idea of capitalism was even conceived, while assuming that none of the benefits that arose under capitalism would arise (and have arisen) under any other system, and also gloss over the specific problems that capitalism did bring us.
Even the poorest of Trump supporters think "I want more help, but I deserve more help than THEM."
This is a seesaw, not a tide that raises all people.
You can take the bolded, invert all of those arguments to their opposites, and now you have America. This is the problem: we are expanding relative poverty while tackling absolute poverty. One can argue these may in fact be opposing forces. The poorer nations have waves of people having improved lives, while the richer nations get the opposite, especially if they enact neoliberal policies.
Well if we're going to play the citation needed game, then I could just as easily say citation needed for any of your assertions. Clearly there's no convincing each other. I only hope your ideas never get power.
I wonder if this is the flip-side of something Cory Doctorow apparently said earlier today. Cortez has said that the reason the polls might have been wrong is because she energized people that normally don't come out to vote. Doctorow contended earlier today that it wasn't that Trump and/or Fox turned average Americans into racists, so much as Trump and Fox energized racists into going to the voting booth, while everyone else, confident in a Hillary win, figured momentum would carry her, and they didn't need to do their part.
If we're in a situation now where all those millions of people that sat out the 2016 election are ready this year, then the Blue Wave might just be possible. But I guess, like Cortez said, it's a matter of making people the polls would ordinarily ignore, come out and make the difference that upsets the polls.
Seriously. We've left healthcare to the free market for decades, and all we've got from it is pure shit. What are we seriously going to lose by trying an option that's been proven to work elsewhere?
The pace of civilization, technology and human capability is what has been driving these general reductions (poverty, mortality rates) since the dawn of man. To look at it through 50+ year lens and claim capitalism is a clear driver is honestly very reductionist of the rest of human history. Capitalism itself has barely been managing along--it has simply found itself in practice at a time in our history when technological capability is increasing rapidly. That technological rise cannot be attributed solely to capitalism--there's no way you can argue that honestly.
And now it's already bursting at its seams, the way we practise it. Its flaws are glaringly ubiquitous in a way that implies that it cannot be the primary or sole driver of our socioeconomic consideration for the future. Rather its role requires some moderation and correction, particularly with the concerns around income inequality, loss of jobs to automation, and ensuring the subsystems exist that can support further agency and democratization for the populace at large.
I mean you're the one making incredibly wild claims as fact, insulting other members by implying they "don't understand economics" (where a large part of economic science DOES suggest many forms of socialism are highly desireable) and applying incredibly general statements that could apply to literally anything in order to make your point. All without providing any type of source. Expect to get called out on it if you want your arguments to be taken seriously.
You are correct, that's why I was probing them to specify what they're talking about. Much of that critique stems from an incredibly outdated view on eastern bloc communism as if there has been no progress made within the realm of socialism since then. That is a preposterous claim that IMO stems from people being completely blinded by living under exclusively capitalist dogma.
For some reason, people think all socialists consider Marx infallible when plenty of his ideas are clearly a product of their time and there's nothing wrong with recognizing that, taking the good parts and moving on.
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But it doesn't assume that. What it *does* assume is that the distribution of work is done in the most effective way, rather than for the benefit of pursuing other goals (central planning, specifically giving people jobs etc). As globalisation continued, lots of production and industry that used to be done in the west was outsourced to Asia and South America. This gave the people in these places significant boosts in wealth because they were now making goods in far greater numbers than their own domestic markets could fuel. Meanwhile the west gets cheaper goods and enabled their economies to graduate to high quality service economies, in turn making them generally richer too. If you can tell me of another economic system that would have a) driven technology towards the ends we have now and b) would have lead to this distribution, I'm all ears. Usually at this point, though, people decrying capitalism point to some sort of internationalist socialism which has absolutely no grounding in reality, or otherwise point to Scandinavia as though that isn't an example of capitalism working wonders.
The person I was quoting was talking about "the planet" so I - perhaps foolishly - thought they were talking about the planet.
I'm completely behind the movement and ready for the takeover. However, we have to come up with a better title because the majority of the population will never be able to get beyond the word socialist (hell, even the word millennial) no matter how many times you explain to them that they're already fans of socialist programs/ideas. People are really that dense (which is no surprise to anyone here I imagine).
This line of thinking is what i meant when i regarded the other poster as having a lack of imagination. I have noticed that the people who are hardcore capitalists do tend to see absolutely everything under the light of capitalistic ideals while ignoring what those ideals entail.
You talk about the effectiveness of work distribution. It's true. Capitalism is indeed the most effective way of tackling that issue. For the benefit of those who control the means of production and its product. And to the detriment of the actual workers. The former reap all the benefits and are free to do as they please. The latter are nothing more than indentured servants, whose destiny depends on the whims of their owners. You might see that as a good thing. I don't.
Next you talk about the globalizaton of production pipelines. Again, under capitalistic ideals, this is a wonderful way to effectively bring the production costs down and the profits up. But on the downside, you have entire regions of the world subservient to a few countries, producing goods they can't afford, in slave like conditions. All the while having their natural resources plundered by multinational corporations with the assistance of mercenary armed forces. I mean, just take a look at the illegal wars that Bush started in order to expand business. Or what America has done to South and Central America throughout the last decades, so American corporations can thrive. See the effects of capitalism exploits on rainforests, what it has done to the soil with fracking. How it has negatively affected the climate on a global scale on its pursuit of effectiveness and profit. You can't just exalt the effectiveness of capitalism without acknowledging the effects that those pursuits have. Something something about shareholders profit as the world dies meme.
It's the whole problem with capitalism itself. It's just not sustainable. Infinite growth is not sustainable. Tying all societal evolution to shareholder whims is not sustainable and actively harmful. I would even argue against the notion that capitalism is the most effective in every area here. Areas that are not exploitable for profit simply do not thrive under capitalism. Professions that are absolutely fundamental for the betterment of humanity, like teaching and nursing, are sidelined and derided, while some people make millions kicking a ball and taking selfies. We should value education, not fucking Instagram. But capitalism decided that literal idiots who contribute nothing to society are more valuable than those who educate our children to tackle the future.
Capitalism in and of itself has no interest in matters of distribution of work or its effectiveness. The only goal for any entity under capitalism as we practice it is to make profits for shareholders. History is littered with capitalist endeavors that have just awful efficiency problems and garbage solutions to problems, but win out because the bottom line (profits for shareholders) is the real driver. This is the big flaw in your championing of capitalism--the history just doesn't match these claims of efficiency and positive outcomes that are being made.
Are there examples of good, efficient designs and outcomes? Of course, there are many. But there are as many examples of things just going horribly. And when they go horribly under capitalism, there is no inherent fallback or support structure. That's it. Whole industries have died out, leaving entire trained workforces unemployable, and there was no recourse of fix for those things. Instead, these problems are left to fester in society, creating extremely damaging feedback loops of disenfranchisement that most affect those who are not at the highest rungs of the capitalist socioeconomic pyramid.
Ignoring this deficiency in capitalism--not that it doesn't solve for failure well, but that it inherently isn't interested in the problem of solving failures it creates--is what has led us to where we are now. The capitalist drive cannot be the sole (or even primary) consideration if we are to break these damaging feedback loops that it leaves in society.
Any social outcomes have been the result of battles hard won (and lost) as workers demanded more. Outsourcing began as a response to workers demanding higher wages and better working conditions after squalid situations in the post-industrial capitalist-driven economy. In that very story you can see capitalism breaking at its seams as a paradigm for improved social and humanitarian conditions.
We're not talking about replacing capitalism, so there isn't any point in trying to imagine a 'what-if'. What we are doing is pointing out real flaws in capitalism that cause us to consider taking it down from it's 'throne' and implementing new changes into society that temper the capitalist drive with something that can take into consideration and operate upon the issues it does not.
But there are examples of effective and efficient productivity, often far surpassing that achieved through capitalism. I would like to point out to you the Open Source Software effort. Millions of developers daily work completely outside of any capitalist context (although often alongside it) to produce technology that is used by all of us. Crucial technology. Stuff we "cannot live without". And it's thriving. So much so that it would not be outlandish to make the claim that open source software development is often superior to efforts made by private companies/corporations.
That is where we are now. Technology has taken us to a place where it is possible to run effective enterprise outside of the boundaries of traditional capitalism. It is possible, because of technological advances, to democratize much of what traditional capitalism currently keeps close to the chests of shareholders and high-level executives. As saenima says above, the issue with capitalism is that it is rather non-democratic in terms of who has agency in its practice. Agency is held at only the highest rungs, the rest of the population are considered little more than 'workers', with minimal effort to rectify it.
As saenima says: