Capitalism
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Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, or ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets. |
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| wikipedia:: Capitalism |
- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
- Adam Smith
- Politics
- Economics
- Max Weber
- Thorstein Veblen
- Karl Marx
- Currency, Money, exchange transaction
- Market
- Laissez-faire
- Labor
- Regulation
- Relation
- Accumulation of capital which creates asymmetries based on the power and effects of that accumulation - leverage, Social Capital, etc.
- Finance capital - investment, etc.
- vs Feudalism, Socialism, Anarchism, Anarcho-syndicalism
- Casino capitalism
Socialism, democratic, Human-centered concepts can be added, but can still be a form of capitalism
E.g. European countries like Sweden, etc
Democratic socialism
Labor union
Regulation
Welfare
Social safety net
Participatory economics
Criticism & Issues
Most of the working population is still forced by what Marx called the “dull compulsion” of economic necessity to spend half their waking hours, most days of the week, following orders from unelected bosses.
Working class
Social class
Class struggle
Crony capitalism
High-frequency trading
Externalization
Marginal Utility
Contractarianism as a fake choice
Workers can go work for some other capitalist, but the basic shape of the deal will be the same. If they want to have a job and not beg for change on the streets or go on welfare for as long as they can or live in the woods, they have to consent to this arrangement.
The relationship is: Rent yourself, your labor value, out to owners so that they can make money with your surplus production and in many cases without working at all via investment, capitalization, etc. You don't like this arrangement? Work for someone else with the same essential arrangement? Can't find any alternative? Beg on the street, etc.
Where humanity has occasionally achieved positive reforms within capitalism, they are under constant attack by capitalists and capitalism and often get rolled back or neutered.
where important reforms have been achieved in the past, they’re eroded or even reversed by the efforts of the politically powerful capitalist class. As the Marxist theoretician Rosa Luxemburg once put it, reforms are important, but a workers’ movement whose long-term horizons are limited to reform ends up being like Sisyphus in Greek mythology — perpetually rolling a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down.
Annotation - Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale
Economic Inequality
Thomas Piketty
Oppression
Exploitation of labor
- Iron cage
Iron Law of Wages
Externality, Climate Change, Pollution, Existential risk - Noam Chomsky
- Issues arise from the fact that workers produce a surplus that goes to the owners
- Essentially, as in fundamentally non-Democratic
#form/thought/analysis Best benefit of capitalism, is less about capitalism and more about the use of markets to help automatically align user preferences/needs/wants/etc. with incentives to satisfy them by organizing the means to produce those things. Contra the difficulty in centrally or bureaucratically attempting to do this at scale and over time. This appears to be the only thing that we don't for sure know how to do without market mechanisms.
Why not have, for example, a system where the “institution” that “provides capital to those who want to launch a new business” is a state-owned bank, and it only provides capital to internally democratic workers collectives? This would still provide market mechanisms where they are needed. Meanwhile, the “commanding heights” of the economy — like energy, finance, and transportation — could be taken into public ownership. Sectors like health care and education could be taken outside of the market altogether and provided as public goods, free at the point of service — as indeed they already are, to one extent or another, in actually existing social democracies.
Comparison of socialism to examples like North Korea, Soviet Union, etc.
The most obvious objection to the societies she lists, or broadly structurally similar examples like the Soviet Union, is that they were or are politically authoritarian. One of the main values that has inspired socialists over the generations is a desire for more democracy than exists under capitalism. We like democracy so much we want to extend it to the workplace, and to large-scale economic decisions of the kind currently made by wealthy CEOs only accountable to their shareholders. In countries like the USSR, workers had no more institutionalized say in what happened in factories or offices than their counterparts in the capitalist West, and large-scale decisions were made by unelected bureaucrats.