lofhay

I frequently read comments which want to blame capitalism for the woes of our economy and for the predicament of those who are in financial trouble.

I think of capitalism like someone said about democracy: it may not be perfect, but it is the best we have.

Willravel

We have a mixed capitalist system, which is an important detail. When a market becomes too free, it starts heading towards cronyism, the way ours is now, where power eventually is gathered to a few super-wealthy individuals and corporations. This is just as bad as a totalitarian government in that it's taking power away from the people and resting it with the few.

We need to maintain a mixed system where the market has plenty of freedoms, but not free reign. There are common sense limitations that have to be put in place so that the market doesn't shift towards corporatocracy.

Baraka_Guru

There is nothing inherently wrong with capital, owning capital, and using capital. Problems arise in how capital is used. This is why most economic systems employing capitalism are actually mixed economies as Willravel mentioned.

Pure laissez-faire capitalism will likely never happen. There would be too much social unrest and upheaval before it could be established.

Many of the recent problems in world economies can be traced back to lax regulatory policies. Though I understand this is up for debate.

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Charlatan

With appropriate regulations and oversight, there is nothing wrong with capitalism.

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roachboy

i'm not sure i understand the op. there's no particular "pure" state of capitalism. so i am not sure what constitutes a mixed system. no offense---the problem is that i dont really follow what the op is asking about. care to elaborate?

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

Yes, hard to say, without just rehashing doctrinaire positions advocating one or another point of view.

Care to start in some imagined "state of nature"?

I suppose we'd have some form of economic exchange - barter/buying and selling. And at the same time, we'd have some sort of political (might makes right or tribal consensus) power. At that point, one could discuss various forms of social control.

Is this too reductionist to hold our interest?

Or do you think we might take a look at things like economic/political systems in some new way?

Wouldn't that have some interest?

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LordEden

To boil it down: Pro when it makes me money, Con when it ends up costing me money.

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Lindy

OP says nothing about pure. But even if there were no single malt Scotch whiskey sold, would it be difficult to know what constitutes blended whiskey?

Lindy

roachboy

the op uses a category without defining it.
at a semantic level, things could be easy were we in a less degenerate political environment i suppose---using the single malt example, you'd not need to know anything about what that meant to know that whatever a malt was in this particular bottle there's one of them and on the basis of that the distinction which enables blend to make sense rests and from there the condition of possibility of parsing the notion of a blended scotch. in other words, you're wrong to think that a blend would make sense without reference to something else which was not a blend.

captialism is a more complicated idea than is scotch in any event.

what is it exactly? i think it's an entire social system, but a sequence of social systems that have in common the same division between capital and production---holders of capital are discrete from the organization of production, so there's a separation. stock-holding say. people like to call all forms of economic activity capitalism, but that's just because they don't know what the word means but have been told that they like the word so it comes to mean types of economic activity that i like. americans like to imagine that they free-think their way into imagining capitalism has always been around.

are small-scale businesses capitalist? is barter capitalist?
is capitalism one thing? is it many?
what are we talking about when we say "capitalism"---anything in particular? everything?

it may well be that there are lots of types of economic activity which aren't capitalist in any strict sense that you or i interact with every day that we don't much think about because we assume all forms of economic activity are capitalist. there may be lots of types of hierarchy, lots of ways of thinking and doing. we may use capitalism in a loose, general way as a means to disempower ourselves.

so maybe capitalism is a matter of scale and organization---but its also necessarily connected to ways of thinking about and ordering information, transmitting it, using it. it's linked to ways of defining the world around economic activities, and defining the world socially. it's linked to a way of thinking about what education is. it's linked to ideologies, which are linked to how education operates, which is linked to reproduction of labor pools which is linked to a project of continually validating the existing order while at the same time loosening up enough of the causal linkages that enable that validation so that a degree of innovation can creep in but not so much of that particularly not if that innovation involves basic conceptual operations. like any social system, capitalism is about itself, about maintaining itself. were these features not capitalist, the firm model at its conceptual center wouldn't be functional.

so riddle me then what is this capitalism thing that we talk about?

alot of this could go back to what art outlines above.
i'm not sure about a state of nature scenario though because typically states of nature are models built around assumptions which are debatable to the extent that they're features of the political world of the writer projected onto the written. questions about states of nature often end up being about which features are built in and which are not (hobbes builds in material scarcity as a precondition so everything goes one way; locke does not so everything goes another...it's like that).

early in the morning.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

Yes. "state of nature" is probably an unfortunately unavailable hypothesis. It was a nice idea...hate to see it go...but you're probably correct, roachboy...hopelessly Romantic, I suppose.

I do wonder about the conflation of economics and politics, though. Is it worthwhile to examine them in some separate way before we inextricably link them via unquestioned assumptions?

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roachboy

the state of nature thing comes from teaching the main texts probably way too many times. after a while they just look like deductive systems. it's particular, i suspect, that viewpoint. not wrong, just particular (not being able to see much of anything in the constructs other than deductive systems...so the problem is in the bases for the deductions rather than in what is deduced...) so it's not a romantic thing in my world...the state of nature is a modeling problem.


what capitalism is...it's a deceptively tricky question. my inner marxist has been taught to think in terms of:
separation of ownership from production....this is a tendency present from the earliest phases of textile production in a more-or-less capitalist mode that seems to my inner marxist (and to others inner marxists) to culminate in the creation of stock in the modern sense around 1870.
mass production of standardized goods....another tendency present from the earliest phases, one which in the end refers to alot of things (organization of production, nature of outputs, orientation around economies of scale)...it also refers to lots of different processes of manufacturing....all of which seem to the inner marxist to acquire a full expression in the assembly line model (which was put together by around 1910).

i mention these things because there's a whole lot of teleological thinking involved with this notion of capitalism...and this from a viewpoint shaped by my inner marxist, so from a viewpoint that was articulated in critical opposition to capitalism (even as the particularities of that opposition repeated a bunch of features from what it opposed)...

so yeah, it's definitely worth trying to walk into a different kind of understanding.
the question i suppose is where to start.

for example, one kinda axiomatic position my inner marxist adopts (and which i've thought about/through alot apart from the urgings of the inner marxist) is the impossibility of separating economic and political activities.
but like alot of things, this is maybe best argued for by way of demonstration around something specific. induction like.

so yeah, it'd be an interesting project to attempt.
where to start?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

Well, the exchange of items of equal value does seem inherently democratic doesn't it?

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Baraka_Guru

Capitalism is that amorphous system (or set of systems) we've built around this idea that capital (i.e. wealth/resources) is the prime mover of societies and that the holders of capital are the enablers of societies.

The nature of this system is based on the premise that capital is scarce and has a varying level of demand depending on the current status of a particular society in which a particular amount of capital operates.

Put another way, capitalism is viewed as the freest mode of socioeconomic order in that those who have capital are free to enable those who wish to use capital in exchange for any value which may (or may not) be generated by it.

That nemesis of capitalism (i.e. communism) makes the assumption that people on the individual level are either too stupid or too reckless to be permitted the level of capital required to enable society, whether this is individually or collectively, and so it is up to government to decide how capital is used and who has access to it.

Now this is not to say that capitalism is good and communism is bad. I think both are inherently amoral. I don't mean to suggest that capitalism and communism are binary opposites either. I think the opposite of communism (as we commonly know it on an operational sense) is actually laissez-faire or free-market capitalism, which in many ways is more aptly described as libertarianism or some form of anarchy, which, on a large and permanent scale, are practically impossible social states.

That said, I don't think the view of capitalism as its own stand-alone system of organizing society is a particularly useful one. Because that's not how it works. Capitalism is a method for organizing resources, which is one component of many that make up a social system. Capitalism on its own cannot survive because it's not a comprehensive social system—it is an economic one which happens to be a major competent within many social systems that have become well-established. So in a sense capitalism is made a social entity in that it is a function of society so ingrained that most cannot think of how society would function without it.

So to answer the OP, to blame something such as capitalism for financial woes would be akin to blaming democracy for political unrest. It's not the nature of the system that can be blamed so much as it is the use and/or management of that system within particular groups or sets of groups.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

roachboy

well, there are two questions that spring to mind:

equal in what sense?
(the tunnel of value opens here)
democratic in what sense?
(the one opens onto questions of semantics first, register-crossing...like is democracy a procedural matter or is it a way of thinking about equality as if equality and equivalence (so legal and mathematical senses of the same basic term) were interchangable?)


but to answer:
you'd think in an abstract barter or exchange situation that the question of value would be worked out situationally. so through the interaction rather than fixed in advance or with reference to some abstract medium (money makes everything interchangable, oranges are comparable with volkswagens are comparable with anti-retroviral drugs are comparable with cans of paint)...assuming good faith on the part of the people involved with the situation, and assuming that the value of an object is being determined through the interaction, there's a way in which you could see it as democratic.


but i'd push the democratic-ness of it onto the interaction that shaped the exchange and not the exchange itself.
which is in a sense builds a response to the second question above into it.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

It all comes down to perceived value (law of supply and demand). In viewing the profit model and how we do business in most cases, people become wealthy by providing value to those who are willing to pay for it.

We buy cell phones and pay for access to them because we see the value of paying as much for that product and set of services. But people are making a lot of money from it. Is that a problem?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

ARTelevision

This seems like a good track to pursue, though, doesn't it, roachboy?

I'm concerned that if we don't really put some effort into keeping it simple, we'll all just get hopelessly lost, as usual.

---------- Post added at 10:50 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:47 AM ----------

Baraka_Guru, well yes, perceived value. Yes.

I'm just so cautious of running aground in the shallows before we get anywhere near issues of great depth.

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roachboy

supply and demand need not have anything to do with it.
if the idea is to think our way from some starting point into a way to parse something about capitalism as a social system, it hardly makes sense to begin the game by importing ways of thinking which are obviously ideological--obviously part of the lingua franca of the order that is in a sense being explained.

you could say that supply and demand make the give-and-take of a barter relation unnecessary because there's a "Real" value out there somewhere. so the barter negociation either results in an approximation of that (a "good result") or doesn't (a "chump" result).

things get tricky really fast i think.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

Without supply and demand, you basically remove the major motivational factor behind those who have capital and those who want to use it. Even bartering is subject to the law of supply and demand. All you'd do is remove/bypass an intermediary medium of exchange. Supply and demand would still remain.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

roachboy

in the abstract maybe.

depends i suppose on what the exercise is that's being done here, yes? the idea was initially to talk about capitalism by way of something like a state of nature argument, which became an example of a type of exchange---a barter relation, say---posed in no particular time-space. i guess therein lay the problem....if you push the example away from the contemporary period, such that it floats as an abstract thought-experiment that may or may not enable a thinking-through of categories, then the upside is that this thinking through is maybe possible but the downside is getting from there back to something as complex (an porous and strange) as capitalism seems a long long way to go.
if we do the opposite and simply say: ok this is a barter relation that happens now, then the advantage is that it'd be relatively simple to track back to capitalism (since we never left the form of life, say) but it'd also be more difficult to step outside the dominant frames of reference because, even at the level of imaginary characters, the abstract agents (A and B, say) who play the game of bartering can be supposed to operate through the same frame of reference as you or i.

if that's the case then it makes sense to import stuff like "the law of supply and demand" and have it mean something--because no matter whether there *is* such a law that the terms *refer* in the present context means that for us there is at least a signified, yes?
but if the example is pushed away from the present, there'd at least in theory be some friction about introducing the category.

that seems to me where we are at the moment.

i'm kinda agnostic about the matter, but am trying to think of whether there's another way to go about this. not that i object to this one---i'm just wondering.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

All I'm saying is that I can see clearly that economics starts with us each having something the other wants or can use. We decide they are of equal value and we exchange them. That looks like economics to me.

That's step one.

Politics can be inferred by calling that equality of value exchange fair or democratic.

Other types of exchanges can also be envisioned. Those can be described in other ways as forms of ecomomics and politics.

It seems a fruitful path. But alas, perhaps there's insufficient patience for this.

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roachboy

and i would say that social relations start that way in many cases and the idea that there is a separate space of "economic" activity is a strange one.

take this hypothetical barter relation. A has something and for whatever reason is able to persuade B that this something is a pretty swell something and that this something can be had by B in exchange for another something that A might want or need. So there's a back and forth about which somethings are involved, what seems fair, etc. This whole relation, all phases of it, seems to me a social interaction.
is there a place within this scenario that an economic relation stops and starts?
or would the scenario have to be written differently for there to be one?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ring

Are we delving into the quantum theory of economics? B.Schmitt?

I need to stay in the shallows for a bit to acclimate & learn.
The colder deeper waters, I'm not all that familiar with.

ARTelevision

roachboy, apart from the difference of a few words, which are at this level nearly substitutes for one another, I find it refreshing to be thinking along these lines. Thanks.

Let's see, besides that, I'm in no hurry to - how they say..."jump to conclusions."

Without the occasional return to this sort of thinking, I'm afraid we run the risk of, too often, having no clear idea of what we're discussing.

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Poppinjay

The Economist had an interesting article. They surveyed citizens of different countries on how satisfied they are with the state of their nation. China led the way with 87 percent satisfaction. No capitalist country broke 50 percent. Emerging nations are seeing a recovery that is far outstripping the traditional "rich" nations.

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roachboy

thats why i keep thinking in terms of collapse of empire to talk about the ongoing crisis/transition period within neoliberal-dominated capitalism.
what i think is obvious but which folk aren't talking about because the ideological apparatus in a sense wont let it be talked about is that the primary consequences of the bush period are political and they're playing out across the position of the united states as hegemon within the neo-liberal/"globalizing capitalist" system...i think we're approaching the end of the arrangement that was mapped out of bretton woods across the early 1970s and which managed to function as an institutional framework for what amounted to an american empire--one modelled on neo-colonial forms of domination so in a sense a peculiar type of empire--but an empire nonetheless. maybe because it was predicated on indirect forms of domination (debt) and not on direct military domination--and perhaps because of the spectacular debacles that were bush period american military adventures in particular--the whole system the americans fashioned was rickety to the extent that nothing in particular held american power in place beyond the assumption that american power held the system in place.

so what i think is happening, and has been for some time, is a reconfiguration of power relations within the emergent globalizing capitalist system, one that is happening at the expense of the united states.

at the same time, there's an ideological problem to the extent that the ways of talking about capitalism that have been dominant in the states---the so-called "washington consensus" or this lunacy we call neoliberalism---can no longer provide either a compelling description of the world--the reason for this may well be a simple function of the neoliberal ideological framework in the states presupposes implicitly american domination of the global capitalist order and builds its various illusory schemas of continuity and discontinuity (on which rest the capacity to frame aspects of the world in or out of collective View) out from that...maybe not even as an explicit assumption but as something taken for granted in a kind of way that were it ever conscious would be understood as incredibly arrogant...but this is amurica dammit and basic things happen without anyone making a decision about them all too often, particular when those basic things are discourse-related and not about Objects and their Disposition in the World.

so the ideological frame is out of phase with what its being used to describe.
its out-of-phase nature is self-evident.
but a characteristic of a single dominant ideology is to not frame itself as an ideology. problem with that is all flexibility heads out the window.
so there's at the least a basic power shift happening that cant be talked about domestically.
there's the emergence of the illusory character of other neo-liberal bromides (that churn in mortgages could generate enough economic activity to compensate for the dissolving of the old-style manufacturing base for example)...without any alternatives presented, so there's just dysfunction.

the recurrent disease/recovery tropes that the dominant amurican ideology seems to crank out to avoid talking about its own situation aren't working out so well.

so its kind of a mess, politically.

capitalism yay! no problems with that.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

roachboy, it's good to see you moving away from the conflation of economics and politics - if that is indeed what you are doing. Reading back through this and other related posts, I do get the sense that it's not actually capitalism that both proponents and opponents of the concept are discussing, but what kind of political controls are involved in economic exchange and to what degree political systems interrupt economic exchange.

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