Hi all,
I’m seeing a lot of hate for capitalism here, and I’m wondering why that is and what the rationale behind it is. I’m pretty pro-capitalism myself, so I want to see the logic on the other side of the fence.
If this isn’t the right forum for a political/economic discussion-- I’m happy to take this somewhere else.
Cheers!
May sound good on paper, but everywhere where it was tried, nothing good happened. There is something in human nature that makes it inefficient and have tendency to become dictatorial state. Socialism (in classical sense) is just worse system in practice, as many countries in 20th century demonstrated.
If I try to grow some tomatoes, and by the time they’re sprouting out of the ground, my neighbor tramples them and lights them on fire, does that mean that I can’t ever grow tomatoes and they’re doomed to fail?
Yes, until you do something about your neighbors.
In case of (classical) socialism, since it is tried in many countries, I will argue it will fail again, unless something is changed. And I am arguing that that something is human nature. So, while we are the same humans, this will not work as effective as capitalism.
Ironically, I think Karl Marx understood this. This is why he was arguing for world-wide revolution. But Lenin changed this into “building communism in a single country”. Since half of the developed world continued to be capitalistic, it become quite obvious that people in capitalist countries live better (on average), and the soviet empire disintegrated.
Who trampled on the Russian tomatoes? (Don’t say the Nazis, they trampled on everyone’s tomatoes including their own) For Russia, there was some small scale support for the whites during their civil war, but otherwise trade between the Soviets and the west increased year by year during the NEP period until Stalin purposely contracted it (if someone knows more about this period, feel free to correct me. I’m working off of information I learned in classes years ago and this article that matches with what I remember). I’d propose that the Soviet issues were internal due to blindly ideological governance that crippled their economy and society. They didn’t have to make such an insane number of nukes, create the culture that caused Chernobyl, nor invade Afghanistan.
Otherwise, who trampled the Mainland Chinese tomatoes? They basically won their civil war, their only issue was blind allegiance to chairman Mao that resulted in disaster after disaster. The West didn’t force them to try the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Down to the Countryside ‘Movement,’ nor the One Child Policy. The CCP did those to themselves, and they only found success once Mao died and they made their economy more capitalistic.
And then once more, who trampled on the North Korean tomatoes? At the beginning of their war, they tried to crush the South’s tomatoes until a UN authorized force pushed them to the Chinese border and then a Chinese force counterbalanced to the current borders, but otherwise the North was economically better off once the stalemate began (the Japanese centered their industrial developments in the north). North Korea failed because of dramatic mismanagement and a ideology of constant militarism while the South, with ups and downs, prospered.
Sure, there were military actions, police actions, and garden trampling that harmed both sides during the Cold War, but you can’t just blame your enemy for beating you, you have to recognize why you lost.
No, but that’s not quite an accurate portrayal of the history of collectivist governance.
Please identify where this concept currently exists in the real world and is currently successful.
Edit: I’m a socialist, and yet all the hypocritical communists here that are using devices made using capitalist infrastructure with the money they earned participating in a globalized capitalist market are coping by down voting me and rather prefer not answering the question.
Worker cooperatives (and often cooperatives in general) are an example of this. They almost always exist within a capitalist system, so are not able to completely separate themselves from all aspects of capitalism, but they are definitely examples of common ownership of means of production.
Specifically you can look up the Mondragon Corporation which is probably the biggest/best known example of a workers cooperative but there are many others. There are lots of variations on this same concept - one where risk, rewards, and decision-making are shared more equitably among everybody participating. I think the most interesting are food co-ops (and sometimes CSAs), utility cooperatives, and housing cooperatives. These are all over the place and are often quietly successful examples of common ownership.
Asking why collective ownership of the means of production does not exist in our “globalized capitalist market,” while denying or ignoring the efforts of the Unied States and other rich capitalist nations to actively prevent any such nation from ever existing, is disingenuous at best. The United States in particular has a long history of involvement in regime changes / coups of left-wing governments, even those instituted by entirely democratic means.
Ok, so throughout the several tens of thousands of years of modern human civilization, there have been different kinds of economic systems, all of which had cultures that were supported by them and utilized their economic systems to attack each other relentlessly.
Why has free market globalized capitalism survived so well consistently the entire time?
Are you seriously trying to argue here that communism is so weak it can’t survive attacks from the outside by a fragile failure that is capitalism?
