“Small comic based on the amazing words of Ursula K. Le Guin”.
I don’t really fit in that well here at times because I don’t consider Capitalism as having anything to do with governance. Capitalism is a market system that uses competition to drive efficiency of creation of satisfaction of needs and luxuries both. If your democratic system of laws is being leveraged by highly efficient non-state entities, then you should really fix that shit, but fixing it doesn’t require abolishing private property nor would that end corruption.
Ok, any other historical solutions that have worked?
Most of Europe has phenomenal education and happiness rates with low crime rates despite the massive impoverished refugee camps they’ve taken in out of goodwill. If competent legislative reform and regulation doesn’t work then businesses wouldn’t be fighting tooth and nail to stop it. Better question: When has that other option ever worked?
It doesn’t “use” competition, competition is sometimes a condition, but capitalism works actively against competition.
And the absolute authority of the state to seize any and all assets, allocate all resources wherever they see fit, works actively against competition to a much higher degree, among the many other reasons not to do that. For an example look at Chinese housing infrastructure: everybody was built a home, massive complexes paid for by the public built by lowest bidders and people with connections rather than by developers and contractors. The problem is the homes weren’t built in the places those people live and work, so there is a massive homelessness problem in China and many housing units have sat vacant since they were built. And the amount of blood sacrificed to build this ineffective system under Mao was astronomical.
And that’s a controversial take. I could have brought up the USSR.
Who wants to abolish private property? You don’t need capitalism to have private property.
I want to abolish private property, as in “private ownership of the means of production”. I don’t want to abolish personal property such as your house or your toothbrush, neither does anyone, which is proven by the home ownership rates in communist or post-communist countries hovering or being above 90%, compared to the sad 50% of Germany and slightly higher values in the US or UK.
Kings never went away, they just changed to a different form and name to remain accepted in society, as the ones with the crowns ended up in the gallows.
This isn’t good historical analysis. The feudal class society, with its aristocracy, church and peasants, was highly rigid in terms of class mobility. Peasants stayed peasants and aristocrats stayed aristocrats. The current dominant class, the capitalist owners, exert their power not by god-given rights over the population, but by legal control of the means of production. The current exploited class, the workers, aren’t tied to a lord anymore and pay tributes in kind on exchange for land and protection, but instead are “free” to work where they want for a payment in cash, and unable for the most part to have ownership of the means of production they themselves work.
Kings have disappeared, classes in society haven’t
Up until the last part I thought your point was going to be “but now we have class mobility”. Yeah, we don’t 😫 freedom is an illusion for the most part, but a convenient one
Accepting the existence of class mobility doesn’t imply freedom. Freedom to exploit your fellow workers and become a class traitor isn’t freedom. It’s just a fact that social mobility has increased significantly
I mean that’s the rub right? Enlightenment liberalism clawed its way out of the corpse of feudalism. Marx assumed communism would do the same thing to the corpse of capitalism. So far he’s just been wrong, at least in terms of the revolutionary/vanguardism model. That’s why there’s been an entire century of revision to that model to incorporate more democratic forward values. It’s just you average internet leftist refuses to acknowledge this, because the fan service isn’t as good.
Part of the problem is that, while Marx writes well regarding the economic flaws of capitalism, he isn’t as good at writing about the politics of change.
When induced by the body politic, we see that some of the economic surplus can be reallocated to the workers provided there is political pressure. It can come in the form of state backed rights, progressive taxation, and even direct welfare payments.
It probably isn’t the perfect system Marx envisioned, but enlightened liberalism is able to make subtle shifts over time in a way that absolute monarchies can’t.
Your comment portrays a lack of reading of Marxist literature. Lenin, as far back as 1916, talks about this surplus being reallocated to workers through political pressure. He describes the leftists who pursue this as “opportunist socialists”, and explains why this is only possible in imperialist countries which exploit the resources and labor of other countries. It’s why basically all socialist revolutions have taken place in less developed countries, whether it be democratically like Chile under Allende or Spain and its second republic and Iran under Mosaddegh, or a coup as happened in Libya, or a bloody revolution as in the USSR or Cuba.
That’s why there’s been an entire century of revision to that model to incorporate more democratic forward values
How is a representative election every 4 years in a system where mass media are owned by the capitalist class more democratic than the ideas of Marx? The Soviet Union started out as the name implies, as a union of republics in which soviets, or worker councils, had the decision power. The fact that international interference and civil war (such as 14 countries invading the USSR militarily and many more sponsoring the tsarist loyalists or the anti-revolutionary Mensheviks) didn’t allow for a high degree of work democracy without extreme risk to the stability or the country, has more to do with the material and historical conditions of the USSR than it has to do with the ideas of Marx and Lenin.
The quote is correct, but as I recall the divine right didn’t end because the people cried out for freedom. Royalty was replaced by governments of the nobility or military, neither of which are necessarily better for the people.
And how did such replacement happen? It wasn’t out of nowhere but after a lot of turmoil, uprisings, and guillotines. The point being, there’s people outcries, prostest, and so on. I’m not endorsing violence, but we can’t just ignore that there was a process in-between. That’s the whole point of the quote, is up to grassroots movement to try and find a way to open a crack and then make it grow…
Sure, but if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow