What's with all the “that's not real capitalism!” stuff?

[KCJV]

Hello comrades,
I guess I'll not be learning anything to you if I tell you that right-wing “libertarians” are almost always dishonest as heck when you begin arguing about capitalism with them ; basically their argument there is confined to “muh that's not real capitalism, that's crony capitalism/corporativism/cronyism” or whatever they call it, it's essentially a repetition of the same argument.

What led me to post this thread though, is that I've recently come across an interview of Marxian economist Richard Wolff, in which the interviewer asks the latter about why this system which liberals label as cronyism, is indeed related to capitalism—and I find Wolff's answer pretty clever by the way; unfortunately I can't post links yet, but you can still view the video on YouTube, it's called Marxism 101: How Capitalism is Killing Itself with Dr. Richard Wolff.

What I wonder though, is where that pseudo-argument about “not true capitalism” comes from; is it no more than a fallacy that modern-day “libertarians” have made up, or was it already in use among older liberalistic groups or thinkers?

In other words, when did right-wingers begin using the “not real capitalism” fallacy? I'm really interested to know so that we can finally have them quit using the same non-arguments time and time again.
Thanks in advance!

[Jimmie Higgins]

Not sure, but it only seems like it became a widespread argument in the last decade, maybe two.

My guess is that this argument wasn’t made that often in the recent past - because most pro-capitalist would have believed that government bureaucracy and welfare reforms to a degree were “normal capitalism”. They would have just said “love it or leave it” before and pointed to how crappy X communist country was.

But in the 90s, the entire mainstream claimed that the market was more or less infallible—so when failures are apparent, obviously it must be due to a false church of capitalism. Libertarian cultists, conservatives, and liberals all say that market forces work best. Either they have some sort of class-based ideological bias and lie to us in those interests... or some people or moral failing of people must be always mucking up a perfectly working biologically ingrained perfect system. Lol.

The dark-side is that libertarians in an age of recession apparently start radicalizing and blaming a whole group of people as being lazy (blacks, immigrants etc) or plotting to corrupt the system (the Jews... “cultural marxism” and for some reason usually the Jews again).

[ckaihatsu]

The libertarians have a *romanticized* attachment to the market mechanism in the historical context of the U.S. bourgeois revolution over the British Empire back in the 18th century.

At that time economic conditions for wealth were about as good as they can get (along with the 1945-1971 Bretton Woods period), since the nascent U.S. was already part of international trade and was no longer under a colonial yoke. The dynamic of banking crises, though, in Europe, quickly became part of the U.S. landscape as well as the nation matured and relied more heavily on banking, itself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banking_crises


There's also a political diversity *within* the libertarian camp, too -- some will be more acknowledging of the productive role of labor while others will only see economics in terms of wealth and exchange values.

I think their distinction between 'real capitalism' and 'crony capitalism' has to do with the historical tipping point in the late 19th century / early 20th century when the world got carved up among competing modern empires and post-WWI capitalism had to adjust to a more-*crowded*, multipolar economic terrain, as continues to be the case today. There were no more pristine untapped geographical market areas remaining, and so the U.S. became inevitably more militaristic, into the global empire of corporations ('crony capitalism') that it is today.

Libertarians *wish* the imperialist-militaristic part wouldn't be necessary, but of course it *is* in terms of the capitalist-empire carve-up of the world's resources and markets -- hence two world wars, and continuing regional wars for contested control in the Middle East and elsewhere.

[qnhan10a3]

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[Jimmie Higgins]

i have a solution to help you that 's google.com

What did you find from your search? I don’t have the internet, I send these in via telegraph and then someone transcribes it for me. Thanks transcriber!