Capitalist society: Don't have a baby unless you're financially able.
Also capitalist society: You want a liveable income so you can afford kids? Lol, no.
Capitalist society, yet again: Why aren't you having babies? We need you to produce the next generation of labour, please.
I don't want to interrupt this nice tribal "capitalism vs unicorns" rant, but...
Decline in demographic growth is primarily a threat for social pension systems, where generation n pays pension for generation n-1 from their employment taxes.
If you had 10 employee contributing to 1 person's pensions say 50 years ago, and in 50 years it's going to be 1 employee, you can imagine it won't work.
My point is that the definition of "capitalism" is so broad that any system that builds its the negation of capitalism is ultimately to end up as a parody of its own ideals. You can't build something just on being anti- something else. And this is precisely the main point of the "capitalist society" memes.
If you're trying to pragmatically build a more equal and just society OTOH, you will inevitably end up using prices and market economy in *some* areas simply because they work better than command economy.
While it *does* make a lot of sense to regulate prices of medicines and many other things, it does not make any sense to meticulously plan production and regulate prices of socks or toilet paper.
These things are better left to the market. But this is "capitalism", isn't?
@kravietz We're actually more or less on the same page here. But "markets" don't inherently mean capitalism. I actually think a lot of things can be better left to markets. But I also think the majority of firms operating in the market should be democratically managed (e.g., worker co-ops). This isn't orthodox Marxism, but it's also not capitalism.
Co-op still assumes private ownership of the company, it's just owned by people directly involved in the work.
Main difference is the "distance" between the owner and the actual production, which is pathologically distant in currently widespread neoconservative model.
But I don't think this can directly fit into any particular ideology. This is a scalar parameter, one of many and ideologies are by necessity reductionist.
@kravietz True, but an economy of co-ops would at least be more democratic within each company, which would theoretically improve things for workers. Would it change the overall structure? Not on it's own, no. It'd be bringing socialist elements into a predominantly capitalist economy. What happens next depends on a lot of factors that, I agree, can't easily be summed up by particular ideologies.
@kravietz But, in a way, this is why I feel the term "anticapitalist" is useful. Ideologies develop orthodoxies and become dogmatic (for good or for ill, but mostly the latter because they because inflexible, IMO). Merely being "anti" something isn't enough on it's own (inverted parodies, as you note), but it allows more room for flexibility and experimentation (or for falling back into the same old traps, if you believe certain Marxist tendencies). Still, you have to have *some* goal in mind.
On abstract design phase, maybe. If you leave this out in your collected works by accident, you can be sure this "anti-capitalist" will be the only thing your future acolytes will grasp from the whole lecture and will start with a simple recipe for success - "first, let's remove all capitalists" :)
I agree that "equality" and "justice" are rather abstract and difficult to define precisely. But if you say for example "we want income inequality to be not larger than 25" (rather than 200 as in US now) this makes a firm base for further analysis on *how* to implement this.
@ink_slinger I absolutely agree and I'm myself running a small infosec co-op.
The ultimate question is: why co-ops aren't more widespread if they are so good?
If companies have a natural tendency to grow through mergers & acquisitions, there's a factor - operational costs, efficiency, idk? - that somehow makes large hierachical orgs more competitive than co-ops.
"Capitalism" is extremely broad, non-prescriptive and non-binary system. If you have prices and free market, you essentially got capitalism.
Marxism on the other hand is a closed and very prescriptive ideology. When Lenin introduced (pragmatically) NEP in 20's, he was heavily criticised for non-compliance with the Scripture. Stalin fixed this :)
@kravietz "If you have prices and free market, you essentially got capitalism." Yes, but also know. Free market anti-capitalism (mutualism) is a thing, albeit kind of a niche ideology.
Today USA, Russia, Sweden and China are technically capitalist, yet they are extremely different in various social indicators.
You can't simply describe an extremely complex system such as each of these countries with a single binary parameter: "capitalist" or "non-capitalist".
@kravietz "Today USA, Russia, Sweden and China are technically capitalist, yet they are extremely different in various social indicators."
Agreed.
@kravietz Any alternative is a unicorn, I take it?
Anyway, sure, that's also a threat. I'm not exactly sure what your point is, though, in the context of what I've said.