Why we should get rid of...

[MrSavage]

..

[bloody_capitalist_sham]

I keep reading those articles you link, and they are all really really really bad.

I don't know who you get to write them, but who ever they are need to do some research rather than spewing out the tripe they seem to be doing.

Please stop spamming the board with your shitty website. :angry:

[Naxal]

Well, I have many objections to such a system:

* When talking about Capitalism, and more importantly, when criticising it I think there are two major points that you can focus on, when speaking about Capitalism as a purely economic model ("In the void" as I like to cal it. Economists see it as a system, not as a structure that operates in *GASP* the real world!) and these are constant expansion and scarcity.
1) Capitalism is based on the assumption that constant expansion is possible, and indeed, constant expansion is not only desirable- it is necessary. Without constant expansion there is 'recession' and recession hurts Capitalists and this in turn hurts consumers (i.e. normal people e.g. us) as the Capitalists will often minimise their losses by making any loses up by passing them on to the consumers. In a severe recession the wheels of Capitalism start moving very slowly which results in unemployment, inflation etc. If Capitalism is not moving forward then it is not working properly and there is generally an almost immediate negative consquence for both the Capitalists and us.

Ok, this is all very simplistic, but this is a forum so you'll forgive me.

Now, constant expansion takes two main forms- expansion of production and expansion of markets. Expansion of production is fairly self explainatory- if you must be constantly expanding the most obvious sign of constant expansion is that you're going to produce more widgets (widgets = a non-descript good or service) because if produce more widgets you have more to sell and then you will make more money (according to economic theory you will also put your prices down to undercut your competition- but this very rarely happens) and with this money you can further expand your business and achieve the holy grail- an economy of scale.

An economy of scale, basically, means that you're so big that you can produce things at a lower cost than a smaller business- you could have the bigger machine, robots, whatever- the end result is the same. Why is this important? Two reasons- firstly, if you don't change your price you have a greater profit margin and secondly, you can destroy your competition.

So, you're an economy of scale, you're pumping out millions of widgets a day- but all of this is useless if you have no-one to sell your widgets to. In addition, even if you have an existing market for your widgets, any person only wants a certain amount of widgets and they're not going to buy more than they want. So what do you do? You expand your markets, which generally involves expanding within your country and expanding outside your country- back in the '80s when China was just opening up businesses flocked there because "If I can sell one widget for $1 to every person in China, I'm a billionare" and this is when you must build a false desire for your good, you don't actually need a widget- but your life will be so much better if you have one (sort of like ads for cigarettes- "You'll get lung cancer, but your life will be so much more fun").

Ok, so that's the basic idea of constant expansion and its importance to Capitalism, which leads nicely to:

2) Scarcity. Economics is built around a few key questions. One of them is reconciling unlimited wants with limited resources- few resources are unlimited (air and water are the only two I can think of. And we can make them useless, but they'll still be there), the rest are limited, they are scarce. Unfortunately the word tends to imply that there isn't a lot of it, in economics it doesn't. There is a hell of a lot of iron-ore in this world and there's probably a hell of a lot that we don't even know exist- but once it's mined and used up it's gona. The resource is finite and this is what makes it scarce.

Scarcity of resources means that there will come a point where Capitalism will literally not be able to expand due to a lack of resources. They will either be gone or they will be guarded with nukes (hyperbole, but you know what I mean). I would really rather not see this happen to the earth, but it is inevitable because almost all resources are scarce. Capitalism, because of its nature, has a built in self-destruct timer. Unfortunately said timer only goes off when it can no longer expand thanks to there being no more resources.

Secondly, markets are finite, particularly when you look at population trends. If you follow population trends then families in places like China, Russia and India and so on will get smaller, just as they have got smaller in Europe, Japan etc and in the most extreme cases the countries will start shrinking- Germany needs 100,000-150,000 immigrants a year just to stop it shrinking. Constant expansion of production is fine and dandy, but there will come a point when the market for widgets is gone. We all have our widgets. And as you will have noticed, companies have serious trouble going from producing widgets to producing wingets.

So, even from a purely economic point of view Capitalism is destructive, self-destructive and not sustainable.

[praxis1966]

To start with, as Naxal pointed out, the 'lassez-faire' system is at this stage of human development more a concept than a model. It's no longer in practice anywhere in the world, as lassez-faire economic systems are characterized by the fact that such an economy would suffer absolutely no governmental regulations. (The literal translation of 'lassez-faire,' after all, means 'hands off.') Recall The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Even the simple sanitation regulations for the meat-packing industry which he was advocating meant a de facto end to a texbook lassez-faire economic system.

While on the one hand the lassez-faire model is, by definition, pure capitalism, even pro-capitalist economists will tell you that it can not work, leastways not if any semblance of stability is desirable. For instance, consider The Great Depression. The reason that it perpetuated as long as it did was because the prevailing wisdom at the time of its onset, more specifically the judgement in the mind of President Herbert Hoover, was not to interfere. The belief was that the downward and upward swings of the market economy were cyclical, one begetting the other. In other words, the market would take care of itself. (However, this thinking was obviously errant and out of date even at the time as the U$ gov't had been meddling directly in business affairs since the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.)

For another example of possible calamitous effects of true lassez-fair economics, one might turn to the Irish Potato Famine as an example. On the one hand you had the failure of the Irish potato crop, not a total one, but one exacerbated by a certain screw-loose interpretation of lassez-faire economics. You see, at the time, Ireland was more or less a one crop country dependent on potatoes both for consumption and export (similar, in fact, to the way certain Indochinese economies farmed rice almost exclusively 50 or 60 years ago). It is still a matter of uncertaintity whether or not mass starvation and death should have resulted from the failure, but what is known is what the prevailing attitude of the Irish was, as Irish author John Mitchell describes as a first hand witness. In re the Coercion Bill, which set up a plantation/sharecropping situation akin to a late form of feudalism in Ireland:


This is the only kind of legislation for Ireland that is sure to meet with no obstruction in that House. However they may differ about feeding the Irish people, they agree most cordially in the policy of taxing, prosecuting and ruining them... The Irish People are expecting famine day by day... and they ascribe it unanimously, not so much to the rule of heaven as to the greedy and cruel policy of England. Be that right or wrong, that is their feeling. They believe that the season as they roll are but ministers of England’s rapacity; that their starving children cannot sit down to their scanty meal but they see the harpy claw of England in their dish. They behold their own wretched food melting in rottenness off the face of the earth, and they see heavy-laden ships, freighted with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all sail for England; they see it and with every grain of that corn goes a heavy curse. Again the people believe—no matter whether truly or falsely— that if they should escape the hunger and the fever their lives are not safe from judges and juries. They do not look upon the law of the land as a terror to evil-doers, and a praise to those who do well; they scowl on it as an engine of foreign rule, ill-omened harbinger of doom...

Couple this policy of paying tribute to England with the fact that, at least until it was too late, Westminster took an attitude of lassez-faire where it concerned Irish crops, and you have set the stage for a famine that wiped out between 12-13% of the population and scattered a similar number of emmigrants to the four winds.


Capitalism is based on the assumption that constant expansion is possible, and indeed, constant expansion is not only desirable- it is necessary. Without constant expansion there is 'recession' and recession hurts Capitalists and this in turn hurts consumers (i.e. normal people e.g. us) as the Capitalists will often minimise their losses by making any loses up by passing them on to the consumers. In a severe recession the wheels of Capitalism start moving very slowly which results in unemployment, inflation etc. If Capitalism is not moving forward then it is not working properly and there is generally an almost immediate negative consquence for both the Capitalists and us.

This is partially innaccurate, and partially out of date. Again, the best example of the boom/bust nature of lassez-faire capitalism is the Great Depression. In that instance, prices were not inflationary but deflationary. However, this didn't matter, since a full third of the country was unemployed at a time before unemployment insurance, welfare, food stamps, or social security. The bottom third of the populace, therefore, could not afford the proverbial pot to piss in whether it may cost one dollar or a million.

Further, I believe that the Wobblies had a better analysis of the problematic nature of capitalism than the one you posited. It was characterized by alternating periods of boom and bust, to be sure. However, they argued that even in a bullish economy, a certain number of people would be held in a state of economic crisis. In a bear economy, said the Wobblies, a greater number of people found themselves in economic crisis. Whether the economy was threw the roof or circling the drain, a certain number of people would still be in crisis. Therefore, the argument for communism became one of humanism; ie providing basic necessities by eliminating economic crisis, thereby making the system more humane.