Capitalism is the most efficient system possible for concentrating the wealth in hands of as few people as possible.
@yogthos Scandinavian one, really?
@kravietz Sweden is an interesting case study https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/08/the-social-democratic-road-to-socialism
I think capitalism has a fundamental problem that it accumulates the wealth in the upper class. Then this class starts using this wealth to influence policy in their favor creating a downward spiral. So the setup seems like it's inherently fragile.
@yogthos If both USA and Sweden have capitalist economy, and in one the accumulation happens, and in the other it doesn't, then the capitalist economy isn't the root cause. Let's just apply some scientific thinking here.
@kravietz the article shows that the more capitalist Sweden gets the worse life becomes for the average person though. Socialism and democracy keep capitalism in check, but the capitalists continuously work to undermine socialist policies. And it's an inherently asymmetric relationship because capitalists are the ones with the wealth.
@yogthos Because market economy generates wealth in general. Then it's only matter of redistribution. US does it poorly, Scandinavian countries - much better.
Marxian economy is economics of shortages, for everyone and arbitrary redistribution by the ruling party.
@kravietz the distribution of wealth is precisely the problem, and I think it's an inherent problem. Scandinavian countries are in a fragile balance right now, and Sweden example that I linked shows that the balance is eroding.
And I don't really understand what you mean by this to be honest:
Marxian economy is economics of shortages, for everyone and arbitrary redistribution by the ruling party.
@kravietz another issue that you have to take into account is that ALL capitalist countries, including Scandinavia, are built on top of exploitation of third world countries where majority of the goods are manufactured. That has to be considered as part of the overall system.
@yogthos And the notion that outsourcing production to poor countries is "exploitation" is quite absurd. In 80's in Poland you could buy a pair of shoes for maybe month's salary. In France - for two hours salary. When joint ventures started to open in late 80's everyone dreamed of working there (eg IKEA) because this guaranteed not only high salary but also reasonable working hours and that the salary will be actually paid on time.
@kravietz it's not just "outsourcing" work to poor countries. It's active subjugation of poor countries at the barrel of a gun. Take a look at all the wars, coups, and dictatorships that US is responsible for around the world. All of that traces back to capitalist economics of needing a large cheap labor force.
Capitalism is a system that works on gradients. You need to produce goods cheaper than what you sell them for. This creates an inherent incentive to exploit.
@kravietz furthermore, capitalism requires growth to function. This translates into consumerism which is what's killing our biosphere right now. There is a very real possibility that capitalism will make us go extinct as a species.
@yogthos Somehow it were capitalist economies that reduced emissions of ozone-depleting gases and saved Earth's ozone layer. USSR at the same time caused the largest nuclear disaster so far in 1986 and hundreds of smaller yet catastrophic environment pollution incidents.
@kravietz look up how many people died total in Chernobyl disaster and compare it to oil industry disasters in the West.
@yogthos Look how much it costs today to clean up and put safety cover on Chernobyl and who pays for it: Ukraine and... the West. Not USSR.
@kravietz well yeah since USSR doesn't exist anymore, who's paying for all the damage US fossil fuel industry is causing? Who's going to pay for the fucking climate disaster capitalism is responsible for that might well kill us all.
How does the free market solve this problem please do explain?
@yogthos In market economy BP had an insurance and paid for cleaning up Deep Water Horizon from their operational profit and reserves. And we knew about the disaster from the first minute. USSR denied Chernobyl disaster for a week, just as it covered Kyshtym, Andreev Bay and other nuclear incidents you never heard of.
@kravietz I find the amount of vitriol you have towards USSR really interesting in the context of all the hand waving you do when it comes to discussing the same problems you decry under capitalism. It's as if you're just fitting things into a narrative that fits your worldview.
@yogthos USSR was not only ineffective, authoritarian and oppressive towards its own citizens. It was also exploitative and imperialistic towards its neighbours, which I have personally experienced. This gives me many reasons to dislike it.
In market economy I have built my career, significantly improved my economic status and - most importantly - I'm free to go wherever I wish at any time, rather than being effectively a prisoner of my own country, as I was under communism.
@kravietz yes, I understand that you personally benefit from capitalism. However, my point is that you're benefiting at the cost of many others who are not.
Capitalism is necessarily an asymmetric system where the wealth accumulates at the top. This was my original point that you replied to. You just happen to be in a comfortable place on that gradient.
The reason you're there is simply because you won the birth lottery.
@yogthos The difference is that modern capitalist economies can be, and are, changed without the use of oppression. USSR couldn't change on its own because of the inflexible Marxian ideology that has driven it. And this is why it eventually collapsed.
One of the few countries driven by similarly inflexible ideology is USA and I have similar attitude towards neocons as I have towards Marxism. Levels of personal freedom and rule of law are still much higher though.
@wbtd Russia didn't either - it's a very popular catch phrase there "democracy, freedom of speech and rule of law didn't work", like they ever had one! It's because market economy is orthogonal to democracy, which I'm for quite a while trying to demonstrate to @yogthos Plus, both of them are spectra rather than binary states.
@kravietz what are you talking about. Modern capitalism is utterly and completely rooted in oppression. Perhaps you missed the ongoing protests in France and the brutal suppression there. Remember what happened to the occupy Wallstreet movement. That got put down pretty fast.
While USA does most of the dirty work, every Western country benefits from the countries it subjugates.
@kravietz also since you keep bringing up Poland as an example, I don't see how the situation was improved by capitalism myself https://borgenproject.org/top-10-facts-about-poverty-in-poland/
@kravietz again, the problem with that is the gap between the rich and the poor becoming much more significant. What that chart shows is that some people become rich while others starve. This sort of inequality is precisely what USSR avoided.
@yogthos Avoided? With rich CPSU nomenclature shopping at "ΠΠ΅ΡΡΠ·ΠΊΠ°" ("Pewex" in Poland) and the rest living three families in single flat and waiting in overnight queues to buy basic supplies?
@kravietz address the article that I linked then, because it doesn't paint a pretty picture
@kravietz my view is that the society should provide everybody with the basic needs unconditionally, and there shouldn't be a large gap between the rich and the poor.
Capitalism has created a world where 1% of the population controls over half the resources in the world. These people are driving us all towards extinction. This is not the kind of world I want to live in, and I think that's far worse than anything that's happened under communism in USSR.
@yogthos And I 100% subscribe to the first part of your statement.
@kravietz the second part of the statement is what precludes the first part from happening under capitalism.
@yogthos So, to summarise, Poland is still recovering from the poverty left by real socialism, but on the right track.
At least in terms of economy, because the current national-populist government is a separate topic...
@kravietz that's not what the numbers show at all though. The numbers are showing that the upper class in Poland is actively exploiting the poor to get ahead.
I guess if you're ok with having a comfy lifestyle at the expense of exploiting those who were unlucky to be born into poverty then it's a pretty fantastic system though.
@yogthos It's not true. Here's the graph of Poland's Gini index (higher=more inequality) from 1800 till 2019. As you can see inequality has fallen significantly in the beginning of 20th century (II Rzeczpospolita), then inequality started rising (!) after Soviet occupation and communist Poland, further increased during 90's and then started falling again after 2000. You can play with the graph here https://bit.ly/2lOgFLn
@kravietz that seems quite different from the numbers here that show a huge increase in poverty after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and around 18% of the population being below the poverty line today. That's a staggering percentage of the population.
@yogthos Again you post something that actually disproves your point.
At the end of real socialism in 1990 there were 24% people living below the poverty line. This 24% is the socialist Poland's closing balance (not to mention collapsed pension system and 48 billion dollars of foreign debt).
Even your graph shows that it never returned to the "socialist" levels of poverty.
If you more detailed data you can see it's falling down all the time (green=changes in law)
@kravietz USSR collapsed in 1991, and the period after was total hell. I lived through it personally. The 1993 levels of poverty are not the socialist levels of poverty.
@yogthos If you lived in Moscow or St Petersburg, you might have only experienced this in 90's. Most of Soviet province and satellite states (like Poland) were living in this hell at least since 70's.
@kravietz I think part of the issue here is that Poland was an a vassal state of USSR. And that would be comparable to places like South America that US currently subjugates. And quality of life there is a lot worse right now.
If we're going to compare the two systems fairly, then we have to compare them in that context. We have to recognize that Western lifestyle is dependent on exploitation of the third world.
@yogthos You could just as well say that Astrakhan was a vassal state of Moscow and St Petersburg. There are huuuge income gaps between these two and the rest of the country even today (or maybe especially today), just as there were in Soviet times.
@kravietz this is a more detailed analysis that's more meanignful btw http://www.roiw.org/2006/2006-21.pdf
@yogthos Now, this is really good and in-depth article. Just remember that communism in Poland ended in 1989 so the "closing balance" is 1990. Now, if you go to page 8:
"income poverty and expenditure poverty incidence startedto decrease after 1994 and 1995, respectively, reaching levels much below the1990 values by the end of the decade"
Page 9 gives absolute values - the closing balance of socialism is indeed 23.8% below social minimum line.
@yogthos It briefly rises to 28% in 1995 but quickly falls to 17% in 1999 and then continues to decrease.
Also note that people losing income from collapsing enterprises in 90's is not the "fault" of market economy. It was direct consequence of their often absurd ineficiency resulting from applying Marxian economy. They were only able to function as long as the party was receiving Western loans.
@kravietz I don't think what Poland or USSR had was anything even remotely like Marxist economy though.
Marxist economy would be running worker owned coops as opposed to state level planning which is clearly Leninist.
@kravietz failure to embrace Marxism was the real problem with USSR in my opinion. What they created was a state run capitalist system.
@yogthos You don't know much about Marxian economy then. Marx and Engels had a few very outright directives: first violent revolution, then dictatorship of the proletariat and nationalisation of means of production, central planning, prices based on (rather bizarre) labour-value theory. USSR did everything correctly from the theory point of view.
These elements like the cult of the Plan or regulated prices survived to the very end of USSR.
@kravietz I don't understand the term "dictatorship of the proletariat", it seems self contradictory to me. Proletariat is the majority of the population, and a "dictatorship" of the majority is commonly referred to as a democracy.
Meanwhile, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having central planning, and it's necessary to do any large scale projects efficiently.
Incidentally, this is similar to the system China currently has where the state governs a capitalist market.
@kravietz and once again the core of the discussion is how socialism stacks up against capitalism.
My claim is that far more exploitation and inequality happens under capitalism when you look at the system as a whole.
My second claim is that inequality is inherent in capitalism by design because it requires a gradient to function.
We can agree USSR had tons of problems, but it's absurd to discount socialism based on that. You clearly don't think we should discard capitalism based on US.
@yogthos There's a fundamental problem with central planning: it assumes planners have perfect knowledge of consumer needs and their changes. If you apply planning to *everything* from production of toilet paper, food and steel, it will never work.
All countries in the world apply *some* economic planning to strategic sectors, like energy. This works, but nobody applies it to all sectors like Marxists did.
@kravietz how do you reconcile that claim with the fact that pretty much every megacorp like Amazon and Walmart is centrally planned?
@yogthos "Contradictory"? Oh, welcome to the world of Marxism! It's full of contradictions.
Here's what Bertrand Russell (a British philosopher and socialist) said after visiting Soviet Russia in 1920:
@kravietz once again that has nothing to do with Marxism, and describes the problem with abandoning Marxism in favor of creating a ruling party which is state capitalism.
@yogthos Bolsheviks did everything correct:
"A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon β authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists." (riedrich Engels, On Authority)
@kravietz you have to remember the context of the time here. We're talking about peak capitalism following the industrial revolution.
However, I don't see any fundamental problem the idea of the people's party that represents the workers.
The first thing bolsheviks did was dissolve the local soviets if you recall. That goes completely against Marxism.
@yogthos Do you mean dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in 1918 and arrests of SR and Menshevik?
Oh, that was easy from ideological point of view. They just said that only Bolsheviks properly represent the interests of proletariat and the Revolution, and the others don't and are actually reactionary and counterrevolutionary. And throw a few citations from Marx & Engels.
They did it all the time.
@kravietz sure, but that's why I say that USSR perverted a lot of ideas of Marx & Engles. The blame should go where it belongs in this case.
@yogthos "When society, by taking possession of all means of production and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage in which they are now held by these means of production which they themselves have produced but which confront them as an irresistible alien force." ββFriedrich Engels, Anti-DΓΌhring
There was a lot more details on LTV and planning in the "Capital"
@kravietz I'm not seeing a problem there. Are you seriously suggesting that the idea of planning is bad?
When you build a city, would you not plan things like public transit, schools, hospitals, and so on?
Workers owning their workplaces and working together to plan a common future seems like a good way to run a society to me.
The alternative is having an oligarchy that the rest of the society serves.
@yogthos I'm not saying "planning is bad". I actually said every enterprise and state *does* planning. What you mentioned - the spatial planning - is very important.
But no country except for USSR planned the production of toilet paper or wheat for the next five-year cycle with fixed prices.
It just doesn't work.
@yogthos You seem to attribute many reasonable things to Marx, who never proposed them.
Public schools and "moral economy" was proposed by Adam Smith half century before Marx. Trade unions, labour laws etc - by Liebknecht and other social-democrats, whom Marx called "renegades"
Regulation of free market in order to prevent oligarchy and monopolies - that's Friderich von Hayek.
Marx's plan was in essence to first destroy everything and then rule with the iron hand of the Party.
@kravietz I feel like you're doing the same though since you're attributing a lot of Leninism to Marx. And sure, a lot of these ideas are fairly obvious and they're not unique to Marx. However, they are present in Marxist view.
I recommend reading this essay contrasting Smith and Marx incidentally. I happen to very much agree with the conclusions it draws https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/Anderson%20manuscript.pdf
@kravietz I'd still like to discuss the original problem I outlined with capitalism that started this whole thread though. :)
I don't see how you prevent accumulation of resources at the top in a capitalist economy. Even in systems such as Scandinavia this is an ever present problem.
A system that's asymmetric in nature seems to be fundamentally unfair to me. It ends up being a birth lottery where you have to be born into the upper crust to have a good life.
@kravietz ultimately, I don't really care what the system is called or whether it's Marxism or something else entirely.
However, I don't see capitalism working for majority of the people on the planet, and I am very concerned with what it's doing to our biospehere right now. I don't see how these problems can be addressed within the framework of capitalism.
@yogthos It's a multivariate equation. You can prevent excessive accumulation by progressive taxation, property tax and inheritance tax. To prevent capital flow and informal sector economy however you need to create a system that is attractive to investors at the same time. This requires good infrastructure, citizen-friendly regulation, science-based decision making and effective administration.
@kravietz but these are all mitigation strategies, they don't solve the root problem of wealth being accumulated in the hands of a small number of individuals. All this does is slow down the process.
And people who are at the top will always push for policy that benefits them. The bigger the gap between the rich and the poor the worse the problem becomes.
@yogthos What "process" do you mean? Are you talking about Marx's "inevitability of revolution" here? But Marx predicted - and called for - "inevitable global revolution" for over 50 years and it never happened. It's because Marx's historical and economic determinism always was a pseudo-science and it failed.
When SPD called for evolutionary change (rather than violent revolution), Marx called them traitors and reactionaries. But it was SPD who was right and Marx was wrong.
@kravietz he never predicted a specific date that it would happen. However, surely you can see things unraveling. US is on a brink of a civil war, UK is in a meltdown, France has had ongoing riots for months with no end in sight.
All of that is a direct result of increasing gap between the rich and the poor. More and more people are getting left behind as the super rich continue to accumulate wealth. Surely you can see that this is not a sustainable situation. This is what Marx predicted.
@kravietz deep water horizon is an ongoing disaster, what's worse it's not even the biggest or the only one. Meanwhile, people responsible for Chrenobyl were actually held accountable, and not a single oil exec has ever had to face consequences of their actions.
In fact, show me a single instance where the oligarchy is held accountable for anything under capitalism.