The Myth of Capitalism Exposed - Sensationalist Headlines

I think it's wildly important to realize there is a vast difference between "Small business" and large businesses. I can count on one hand the "Mom and Pop" shops(as it were) that aren't "owner/operator" splits. I don't think this is true for "large business". I don't believe that an owner in that context is the same as an owner in the small business context. But it's important to make that distinction in the discussion because I'm not sure we benefit from punishing small businesses by classifying them as the same as owners of "large businesses".

You don't need to have a capitalist system to use currency. Many socialist models are still intended to use currency.

And there it is -- the 'might makes right' argument. "You don't like business owners leveraging their wealth into power? Well uh you better hope they don't do that even more! I guess! Be happy with what you get!". You never really believed in equal freedom of choice in capitalism. You've literally finished my argument for me. Having a lot of concentrated wealth gives you power, which you can exploit to protect your own wealth from competitors. Free markets left alone will concentrate, conglomerate, and choke out freedom. Money? Jesus. Having money doesn't make a system capitalist - the Soviet Union had money, for christ sake's. Money is an easily-transferable representation of value that has been agreed upon, and value exists not just in any society, but to any human.

There are two routes to create a large business: start from the ground up or birth one already large business into existence with large sums of capital. Both cases require A LOT from owners.

It isn't as certain as I let on, so my bad for phrasing it that way. It's also difficult to analyze because of the differing natures of wealth between Capitalists and the Proletariat. Most of the wealth held by the worlds wealthiest is held in assets and shares and such. Thus, it's a lot harder to look at Jeff Bezos "real" liquid income and compare it to ours. The nature of our wealth is fundamentally different. If they tried to liquidate all of their wealth into cash, the entire economy would probably crash (this is especially due to tech company owners not taking much home in liquid compensation). Even then, if we look at pure INCOME disparities, wealthy owners earn, on average, more than 312 times the income of their average employee (and that's not even considering the ridiculously cheap foreign labor they're appropriating, as far as I know.) Still, though, it's not like their wealth doesn't exist in spite of this. If we go on the opposite end of the spectrum and evaluate these people based on what they're worth (and they can and have been gradually liquidating this wealth over time. It's not like it doesnt exist. Bezos liquidates about a billion dollars worth of his shares a year), 8 people are worth more, collectively, than half of the worlds population. I just simply do not see how, in any sense, the value these INDIVIDUALS create is proportional to this extreme wealth. Maybe you could say that they do by virtue of investing that wealth into their companies, allowing them to create more value (and so on), but I just dont buy that these companies couldn't operate under a co-operative structure or with less top-heavy valuing and not be worth a more proportional amount. Essentially, Amazon wouldn't suddenly be worth 1/5th of what it is now, and it wouldn't suddenly produce 1/5th of the value it does, if Bezos split his shares and decision making among 5 different people.

I think the difference here is looking at the situation from a 'personal' standpoint or an 'practical/utilitarian' standpoint. When I say 'owner', I mean the role of owner; when I talk about the owner being paid such-and-such or not providing this-or-that, I mean the role of owner pays or does that. I am not passing any judgement on the quality or goodness of the person who fulfills that role in a given company.

Well, conflict is part of life. There are people willing to be payed money to protect your goods and there are people that get payed money to steal your goods or sabotage your enterprise. The only way to do away with conflict is doing away with greed, envy, lust and so on. You know who else has a lot of concentrated wealth and power? The state. You know, the one you want to protect you from organizations with wealth and power. From the Wiki page on soviet ruble: The Soviet Union ran a planned economy, where the government controlled prices and the exchange of currency. Thus the Soviet ruble did not function like a currency in a market economy, because mechanisms other than currency, such as centrally planned quotas controlled the distribution of goods. Consequently, the ruble did not have the utility of a true currency; instead, it more resembled the scrip issued in a truck system. We also had these here on slave labor camps. It's like being paid in chuck e cheese tokens.

Not necessarily. Socialism does not mean "state do things". There's a wealth of libertarian socialist ideology out there. Besides, most Communist and Socialist ideology looked forwards toward a stateless society as its end goal. Also, market socialism, mutualism, anarchism, etc.

You poor fool! You absolute moron! You've activated my trap card! I'm not a statist at all! I don't want the state to step in. I want owners to step out. I don't care if the majority of my time, effort, and work is being sucked away by John Q. Owner or Minister for Production James Q. Owner. I don't want it to sucked away at all. The recovered factories I''ve listed have all operated either with state indifference or active state oppostion. If a worker-owned floor tile company can produce, sell, and ship floor tiles while fending off police incursions in an entirely capitalist, entirely stable country, a worker-owned floor tile company can produce, sell, and ship floor tiles anywhere. The Soviet ruble is money. It didn't act like money in a market economy because it wasn't in a market economy. Slave-camp scrip can pop up anywhere there's a restricted choice. If there are only five media companies I can buy internet off of because the media market has been left to concentrate and conglomerate, I'm not really any freer than if I can only buy internet off of five media companies because the state only allows five to run. You can only conceive of living in a system where someone has their boot on your neck. I am truly sorry for you.

Because real communism won't ever be a thing, same as "pure" capitalism won't ever be a thing either; humans are biased and tribal and no amount of social engineering will fix what has to be replaced at the literal genetic level. Fundamentally corrupt governmentally empowered capitalism is the natural endgame and always will be, and we've seen this implemented in various skeins in the west since the days of colonial conquest, where money and nationalism made all the magic of maximum exploitation happen, and even in China where confucianism was warped into 'give everything in service of the state, especially your work ability and anything you'd ever get from it, personal or otherwise'. Humans are built for greed, hoarding and tribes, and until that programming is outright removed, this little dance is simply going ot be variations on a theme until the literal end. There's nothing to fix, the fix is removing the system altogether which isn't going to happen until such time as mother nature once again decides to reset the clock on a unilateral basis. The mantra of letting the system become a joke, regulating it until it creaks, warping the regulations and checks to serve a minority tribe or association for selfish gain is how the system works at all, ever. Human beings have been inventing ways to game the gains and take as much as can be taken since day one, this is simply the current agreed upon version.

Well, if cooperatives are such a good idea, what's stopping them of taking the world by storm?

I suppose Scandinavia are the obvious example? And to a lesser extent, a decent chunk of Western Europe.

Luxury Goods

But you’re saying those systems are just as broken as the others when that isn’t the case? I dont care care to have an argument where the details don’t matter

Good question! First off, they can succeed and do frequently. Mondragon corporation, for instance, is a large financial conglomerate and is one of the biggest companies in spain. A UK study found a few promising things about co-ops. They found that: • Worker co-operatives are larger than conventional businesses and not necessarily less capital intensive • Worker co-operatives survive at least as long as other businesses and have more stable employment • Worker cooperatives are more productive than conventional businesses, with staff working “better and smarter” and production organised more efficiently • Worker co-operatives retain a larger share of their profits than other business models • Executive and non-executive pay differentials are much narrower in worker co-operatives than other firms They're also reportedly more resilient to failure. I wont go much more into detail with this source since the info is there and pretty well laid out, but I recommend it if you want to learn more. Co-ops also dont have exactly the same goals as normal corporations do. They're more invested in the welfare of their workers than in purely growth, for instance. Most companies take any margin they can and reinvest it back into the growth of the company, but as is probably obvious, co-ops wouldn't be interested in this growth strategy. Management and executives can make less worker friendly decisions to drive surplus value than would ever be voted on collectively by a co-op. I've also heard that the other big reason is that there's legislation that favors traditional businesses. In the US, they don't qualify for the same subsidies and bailouts as hierarchical corporations. I wont state this claim as fact since I haven't seen it really substantiated, which might be understandable given the complicated nature of business law, but I still don't want to call it a certainty without a specific example first.

Their carbon footprint per capita is still unsustainably high (no better than the rest of Europe). They still have absurd wealth inequality and so on. It's better than the US but it's not answering any of these fundamental issues is it.

Okay, so just so that I'm crystal fucking clear on this(because everyone said "No one is advocating for that") you are advocating for the deconstruction of capitalism because it is at it's core, salvageable?

If I'm understanding this right, people's prefered alternative to capitalism is, instead of having a board of directors, CEO, owner, etc., that instead workers combine together via a democratic system, where business leaders are elected, and everyone has representation in all the minutiae of company dealings? What's stopping that from happening now? Can't that also co-exist with companies who have owners, CEOs, stockholders, etc.? Unless, the idea is to forcefully dissolve any company with a non-democratic power structure? What's the ideal outcome then? Force every company to be run by democratic worker councils, or just encourage it? How would that stop companies from being greedy fucks, or certain workers holding more influence in proceedings, or for a worker's council to become authoritative and seize power? Would the state and laws prohibit that? Who would oversee these companies? I guess I'm not fully understanding the argument here so forgive me if I'm misrepresenting anything.

not necessarily but anything beyond what exists or has been tested in the world is within the realm of radical change. such changes have been discussed in here, like co-operatives. beyond that, the huge amount of legislation and political action required in such a short amount of time is absolutely radical change. you even said earlier that 'rich people wont let us do anything about wealth inequality' (or something to that effect) so what exactly do we do about that?

Well first of all, there is very little consensus at all on what peoples "preferred alternative to capitalism" is. There are so many competing ideologies and nuances within those ideologies, which is why it's frustrating to have it all reduced to a right-left spectrum. I think that personally, more democratic and worker-empowering companies could be a good "middle-ground" or transitional state between our current paradigm and what someone might call "Socialism". See my post above about the benefits of these worker co-ops and also my theory about why they don't tend to be the top dogs in the market. Union empowerment would also be nice, but I'll get to why they are losing power and why any granular solutions might not be practical. Truthfully this dynamic only really combats the ethical, philosophical, and perhaps sociological objections people have with Capitalism and would only get at the class dynamics part. It might not still address sustainability issues, although it possibly could. I think the more pressing and universally agreeable fundamental issue with Capitalism is in its unsustainability. Just look at our emissions, waste, ecological footprint, famine, etc. around the world. Resources are not taken in sustainably, and they are not distributed effectively. We grow enough food to feed 10 billion people - but billions still go hungry and millions die from starvation. This is only going to get worse with Climate Change, which I don't see as solvable under the current paradigm. It would likely take a massively authoritarian effort to bring down emissions through reductions in consumption and production - which I don't see as happening and probably wouldn't even be likely in my preferred system. My preferred system could probably make it a little bit better, though. I'd wager that democratic decision making in workplaces would make unethical decisions regarding the Climate less. There would be less empowered individuals around to lobby and influence Government entities. Most importantly, they would probably produce to excess less, as they aren't purely concerned about growth and the overproduction that comes with that. I think forcing everyone to abide by this is unrealistic, but preferable. We don't have a favorable time table for solving imminent problems and we can't really wait around for more organic change a la the transition from feudalism to market capitalism to occur. The latter probably is a more realistic outcome and would be hastened by the effects of Climate Change becoming more severe and immediately impacting to individuals. The biggest problem with any prospective changes is the presence of Globalism. A change to be more sustainable or less profit/growth driven would probably mean having less economic power, and surrendering economic power would be very dangerous in our current world. It's the same reason why unions are less of a realistic factor in the equation than they used to be. Companies can just outsource their production to people more than happy to work for pennies. There are too many competing States, and too much asynchronous development of those States to make the GLOBAL changes we need to. Maybe a parliamentary, leaderless world government could fix that, but we're a long, long way off of something like that being a reality.

I never said they didn't, my question was, simply: Is what they do legitimately harder/more important than the drudgery performed by their underlings? Is it so much more valuable to their operations that they somehow earn so much more than the people who actually make things happen? That may not be "what you're saying" or "what you meant" but it sure reads that way, the way you're saying it, and based on personal experience and observation of how these people operate, and how highly they think of themselves.

Not necessarily? You can be a business owner and manage said business, in which case you deserve a salary, just like any employee, since you create value. But that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Under a capitalistic system, business owner get a share of the profits because of ownership. The fact that ownership itself is rewarded, not compensation for work and actual efforts, is what I take issue with.

Capitalism requires a very fragile balance of power. Humans are naturally terrible creatures, so with too little regulation people start getting "bright ideas" on how to use one another. With too much regulation, nobody wants to bother and shit stagnates. We're seeing the former very prominently in modern day.

Even if it is regulated capitalism still relies on ruthless exploitation of the third world, endless expansion in a finite system and still stifles and ruins creativity and as such is a terrible flawed system that only exists due to the efforts of a ruling class. The whole human nature thing is a fucking myth, dont confuse culture for human nature. Human nature is to be cooperative with your neighbors not to fucking upsell them.

No i dont believe that is true. Exploitation is not a requirement of capitalism, just our current incarnation of it.

1st world workers are just complacent because they have certain rights, but the entire third world gets paid shit wages and giant international monopolies exploit their cheap labor and work them so hard they are effectively slaves since they have no upward mobility anyway. This story has repeated itself tons of times throughout history.

I'm not denying that. I never tried to deny that. I explictly said that capitalism doesn't require exploitation, and you ignored that to insist that it must require exploitation. That doesn't prove to me why or how it does. Yes, people have gotten abused under hundreds of different systems across time and history. I'm not denying that nor are you educating me. We all want to better the world, but I don't think you can really expect to do so from a perspective of destruction of what already is.

What you're espousing fails after about 150 employees every time, without exception, without fail. You get larger than that and invariably the wheels come off the cooperative equitable compensation bus. Every time.

Real capitalism has been given a chance and it works really well in a lot of ways, just not when it comes to social services.