The Rich and Powerful Who Abuse the System: the contempt topic

[SeanF]

8 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

The key finding of both the first and the second link seems to be:

So, again, how the fuck does this prove that capitalism is responsible for the reductions in extreme poverty?
How does this prove that capitalism itself does not tend toward a zero-sum game?

You show correlation without even attempting to go into causation. And even the correlation is obviously quite limited. I personally have explanations for key evolutions of the curve, but I'd be at a loss to explain it entirely with a single dimension. In all honesty, anyone looking at the data and saying "this is why," as if it could all be boiled down to a single factor, would be a bit of a dumbass.
What is certain is that, based on some specific criteria, there was an overall positive evolution in the last two centuries, but if you can't demonstrate causation, it's just as easy to say capitalism prevented this evolution from being evenly distributed than it is to say that it was responsible for it.
And we do have considerable evidence that capitalism concentrates wealth rather than distributing it, so there is very good reason to doubt its ability to lift people out of poverty, of all things.

Possibly. But how then could you possibly establish causality? If we agrre that profit is only part of most individuals' motivations, why would we say that a profit-seeking system is responsible for innovation?
Logic dictates that a profit-seeking scheme would mostly be producing some kinds of innovations: those that can be sold well to make a profit, and conversely, that it would stymie social progress that can't generate profit.
Which is pretty much what has been observed throughout history.

The reduction in extreme poverty was not caused by redistributing income or capital, from the rich, to the poor, over the course of two centuries.  The rich, today, are vastly richer than their counterparts were, two centuries ago.  The reduction in extreme poverty was driven by a vast rise in the overall standard of living, combined with the creation of social security, provided by the State.

WRT innovation, we could consider the alternative.  A society in which people are told, anything they create belongs to the State.  They get nothing, other than a sense of satisfaction in having devised something useful, in return for their efforts.  Nobody has actually created such a society, expect perhaps Cambodia under Pol Pot, which would imply, nobody thinks that such a society would work.  Even most societies with very left wing governments have sought to reward creativity and innovation.

 

[SeanF]

15 minutes ago, Conflicting Thought said:

they didnt want to make concessions, allot of people died and suffered to win minimum rights, fighting wealthy people at every turn. i mean if the wealthy have to fear for their lives to do the minimum then something was and is very fucking wrong

People are self-interested.  That's hardly surprising to learn.

There have been very few successful revolutions, in capitalist economies, aimed at overthrowing the economic status quo.  That's because (a) most people want to enjoy the fruits of the system, not to bring it down and (b) the people in charge have the sense to realise that timely concessions are sensible.

17 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

But that's a massive change in the narrative. If the driver is social pressure, then neither the capitalists nor capitalism are responsible for improving safety and workers' rights!!! FFS.

The driver is both. Living standards rise.  As living standards rise, so a better safety net can be afforded.  As a better safety net can be afforded, so people demand it.

[Rippounet]

49 minutes ago, SeanF said:

 The reduction in extreme poverty was driven by a vast rise in the overall standard of living,

This is a tautology that doesn't explain anything.

What does capitalism do? Through industrialization, it puts people from the fields to the factory.
Does this rise the standard of living? Possibly, but certainly not automatically. We know for a fact, that absent regulations (in urbanization and sanitation for instance) and protections for workers (an honest wage that puts people above subsistance level, plus security guarantees), it keeps people in poverty. Add the environmental question (pollution of the air, water, and soil), and the core of capitalism seems designed to exploit people, to the exclusion of everything else.

So why does capitalism gets so much credit? Because it's more efficient than comparable alternatives when it comes to the organization of labor. It's way easier for a capitalist to exploit a hundred people than for the same hundred people to form a successful cooperative.

So if we're having this discussion, the key takeaway is that the one thing capitalism has for it is how easy it is to implement, how adaptable (to various cultures) and easy to understand it is.
Did capitalism raise the standard of living? I do not think so. State planification proved as efficient as capitalism in doing so. Cooperatives are functional. Standards of living can rise with small enterprises alone. ... etc, etc.
Capitalism is just the fast and easy way - the simplest, most unfair, and most destructive, of the ways to organize human labor. If it can't give us anything without a shit-ton of regulations, then I don't think it doesn't give us anything really.

 

44 minutes ago, SeanF said:

People are self-interested.

Capitalists certainly are, but if everyone had the same level of greed and entitlement we wouldn't have any kind of wealth or prosperity.
It's the supreme irony of capitalist propaganda: if self-interest was so central to human nature, the capitalists would not be able to exploit other people. Exploitation is only possible because some people are more self-interested than others.

44 minutes ago, SeanF said:

The driver is both. Living standards rise Stuff is produced and sold.  As living standards rise, Stuff is produced and sold, so a better safety net can be afforded.  As a better safety net can be afforded, so people demand it.

I would make the following change, which makes all the difference.

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, SeanF said:

There was plenty of social pressure.  Which was why the wealthy preferred to make concessions, rather than go to the guillotine.  

And every time they take them back the moment they feel safe enough from 'the people' to do so.  Even to the point of reinstating serfdom and slavery when they could, or thought they could.  See, for one, why yes, Napoleon.  See: NOW everywhere.

 

[SeanF]

9 minutes ago, Zorral said:

And every time they take them back the moment they feel safe enough from 'the people' to do so.  Even to the point of reinstating serfdom and slavery when they could, or thought they could.  See, for one, why yes, Napoleon.  See: NOW everywhere.

 

You do get idiots, like the man quoted in the O/P, who dream of a world where they don’t pay tax and they live in luxury.  And, such societies exist -places like Russia or Somalia.  But, there’s a price to be paid for no tax.  Being murdered or imprisoned at the whim of the dictator or local warlord.

The more intelligent multi-millionaire recognises that a society where he pays, say, a third of his income in tax, but which has a fair legal system, low crime, excellent schools, impressive cultural amenities and shops, offers a far more agreeable standard of living.

[SeanF]

45 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

This is a tautology that doesn't explain anything.

What does capitalism do? Through industrialization, it puts people from the fields to the factory.
Does this rise the standard of living? Possibly, but certainly not automatically. We know for a fact, that absent regulations (in urbanization and sanitation for instance) and protections for workers (an honest wage that puts people above subsistance level, plus security guarantees), it keeps people in poverty. Add the environmental question (pollution of the air, water, and soil), and the core of capitalism seems designed to exploit people, to the exclusion of everything else.

So why does capitalism gets so much credit? Because it's more efficient than comparable alternatives when it comes to the organization of labor. It's way easier for a capitalist to exploit a hundred people than for the same hundred people to form a successful cooperative.

So if we're having this discussion, the key takeaway is that the one thing capitalism has for it is how easy it is to implement, how adaptable (to various cultures) and easy to understand it is.
Did capitalism raise the standard of living? I do not think so. State planification proved as efficient as capitalism in doing so. Cooperatives are functional. Standards of living can rise with small enterprises alone. ... etc, etc.
Capitalism is just the fast and easy way - the simplest, most unfair, and most destructive, of the ways to organize human labor. If it can't give us anything without a shit-ton of regulations, then I don't think it doesn't give us anything really.

 

Capitalists certainly are, but if everyone had the same level of greed and entitlement we wouldn't have any kind of wealth or prosperity.
It's the supreme irony of capitalist propaganda: if self-interest was so central to human nature, the capitalists would not be able to exploit other people. Exploitation is only possible because some people are more self-interested than others.

I would make the following change, which makes all the difference.

 

Perhaps, had revolutionary movements come to power in the 1800’s, that abolished private property, and guaranteed every citizen a high standard of living, the world would be vastly richer than it is today.

Perhaps.

However, I doubt it.  My suspicion is, that we’d have a standard of living today, that would be similar to that of 1800.

[Zorral]

https://www.vox.com/2023/9/15/23873898/today-explained-capitalism-economics-books-to-read

Quote

 

.... What is capitalism?
We’re all talking about capitalism these days, but we’re not all working from the same definition of what it is. It turns out, neither are economists.

“Economics, like many sciences and other forms of academic inquiry, is very specialized,” economist Wendy Carlin tells Today, Explained. “They might work on the economics of migration, or of competition policy. There’s not really a study of the whole system. And so they might feel a little uncomfortable if you ask them to define capitalism.” ....

 

 

Edited September 17, 2023 by Zorral

[Clueless Northman]

13 hours ago, Heartofice said:

If it was zero sum then almost everyone would have gotten poorer in the last 200 years , including previously rich people, for the current rich people to be wealthy. That this hasn’t actually happened really makes the mercantilists look rather silly, luckily for them they are all dead 

It's way too early to consider Malthus a failure, alas. Wait until the century is over. Heck, as far as I can guess, wait until half the century is over, and see how "well" we're doing.

  

On 9/16/2023 at 8:49 PM, Rippounet said:

The problem is that the evidence that material prosperity is, in fact, a zero sum game, is tremendous.

Earth being finite with finite resources, that's a no-brainer. It only appears NOT to be a zero sum game if you look at a smaller scale. But as you pointed out, even when the whole economy seems to grow for most and not be a zero-sum game, it's only growing because we're depleting resources whose reserves aren't taken into account in the evaluation. Once you do it, you see that mankind's footprint and its share of Earth's total resources is increasing, which means every single yeare we're leaving the rest of the natural world - all the plants and the other animal species - with less to live with than the year before. This can only end terribly for most involved - specially for mankind and the most advanced vertebrate species.

 

6 hours ago, Conflicting Thought said:

they didnt want to make concessions, allot of people died and suffered to win minimum rights, fighting wealthy people at every turn. i mean if the wealthy have to fear for their lives to do the minimum then something was and is very fucking wrong

That's the main reason why we're in such a shitty economic situation across the West right now: the people have forgotten that absolute and essential truth: the wealthy only fear physical harm and death. As long as you're just protesting, as long as you threaten them with fines, they won't give a fuck. People have to shoot a few CEOs and mob-lynch a few boardrooms before they're taken seriously and the average people's economic situation at long last get better. I'm not hypothesizing how many will have to be taken down and give them the benefit of the doubt, that a few dozens body bags would be enough to make them understand things have to change dramatically, but I obviously won't rule out we might need to go full 1793/1918 and literally wipe out the top 1% (and most probably the bulk of the political class, which is their subservient lackey).

 

4 hours ago, SeanF said:

The more intelligent multi-millionaire recognises that a society where he pays, say, a third of his income in tax, but which has a fair legal system, low crime, excellent schools, impressive cultural amenities and shops, offers a far more agreeable standard of living.

That's right, we saw it happen in post-WWII Western societies. But that's over. The multi-millionaire who argues that way now would be booted out of his firm by his board unless he owns most of his business and would be considered a lunatic by his peers. More crucially, it would only be an individual move, not a class / group decision that would involve the vast majority of CEOs, shareholders and the like, so the impact on society would be close to 0. Unless such a behaviour is forced on them, this is a prisoners' dilemma, and we know there's no way to solve it the right way when there are so many prisoners involved, left to their own devices.

[Zorral]

6 hours ago, SeanF said:

The more intelligent multi-millionaire recognises that a society where he pays, say, a third of his income in tax, but which has a fair legal system, low crime, excellent schools, impressive cultural amenities and shops, offers a far more agreeable standard of living

You sound like Abraham, begging his depraved evil city of Sodom be saved from God's cleansing wrath, if he could produce 50 righteous men of the city.  God agreed ... but Abraham kept having to knock the number of righteous down, down, down, because he couldn't find any. God let er rip. Genesis 18:24.  

[Heartofice]

21 hours ago, Rippounet said:

We'd need a working definition of prosperity to see if it has "gone up by enormous amounts" and identify what the reasons for that were.

Same for the global poor being "much better off": how are they "better off" and how is "capitalism" responsible?

We could just talk about poverty. We can just talk about recent examples. The past 30 year is a good measurement. This is the era of Neo-Liberal economics, globalisation and pure evil (apparantly) 

Just looking at Ourworld in data:

" Over the past generation extreme poverty declined hugely. This is one of the most important ways our world has changed over this time.

There are more than a billion fewer people living below the International Poverty Line of $2.15 per day today than in 1990. On average, the number declined by 47 million every year, or 130,000 people each day.5"

This is all despite living in the capitalist nightmare of the past 30 years, and despite enormous wealth being accrued at the top of the chain, with the rich getting richer and richer. It also mostly occurred in Asia where capitalism has taken hold, China might be more centrally controlled but it's adoption of capitalism is what sparked it's ability to improve living conditions, and would never have been able to do that had it remained a purely centrally run economy. India is the other place to see enormous growth and that is mostly due to it fitting into the global capitalist economy.

How does that work in a world where everything is zero sum, I'm not sure you have explained it. For the rich to get richer, they have to have taken money away from someone, except, the poor have got richer as well. 

Now you could rightly say that the middle has been squeezed, and it has, a little bit, but nowhere near the amounts to compensate the the top and the bottom of that scale. So it doesn't seem like there is some finite pot of wealth sitting around that is being taken by some, away from others. Wealth is also created, through economic activity, largely as a function of capitalism. It might not be shared out equally, that we know, but it doesn't work in the way the mercantalists (and protectionists) think it does.

 

Edited September 18, 2023 by Heartofice

[Mentat]

20 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Not a jab at you, but that's asking a lot.
The problem of these discussions is that simplistic narratives that were consciously designed to defend capitalism and business interests (see the Powell memo for instance) will be presented as fact, and it almost literally takes entire books to demonstrate that they are bullshit. We can see it as a variation of Brandonlini's law, according to which the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
For instance, It took me over 30 lines to try and debunk SeanF's 3, and I doubt I even did it convincingly.

A good way to go around this is to demand that people trying to defend capitalism by crediting it with... basically, progress, should prove their extraordinary assertions with logic and data. While taking into account that we now know that any progress that requires the destruction of the environment is not actual progress.
I'm not even sure it is possible, so I look forard to reading the attempts.

If you'll give me the name of the architect or leader of the cabal and a rough time period, I'm willing to do the rest of the work. Otherwise, it's hard for me to believe that something as complex and broad as 'capitalism' could have been designed by one person or a small group of people with a specific (and nefarious) intent.

I'm not defending capitalism. I have my own opinion about what it is, which I gave in a previous post, but I do obviously need to read more on the subject. The way other people use the term, it's hard to know what it even means to them, which also makes it hard to know if any particular assertion about it is right or wrong. The frequent anthromorphisation of capitalism as something that wants and does stuff I find specially puzzling. I found Zorral's link helpful, and have added Wolf's book to my amazon basket.

If you blame capitalism for all of humanity's economic woes during the last 300 years, it's seems a bit strange not to give it some credit for some of the economic advantages we've come to enjoy in this period. If you say any increase in poverty or unemployment is due to capitalism, but deny any decrease is due to capitalism, then this assertion is, at the very least, counterintuitive.

11 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

That's the main reason why we're in such a shitty economic situation across the West right now: the people have forgotten that absolute and essential truth: the wealthy only fear physical harm and death. As long as you're just protesting, as long as you threaten them with fines, they won't give a fuck. People have to shoot a few CEOs and mob-lynch a few boardrooms before they're taken seriously and the average people's economic situation at long last get better. I'm not hypothesizing how many will have to be taken down and give them the benefit of the doubt, that a few dozens body bags would be enough to make them understand things have to change dramatically, but I obviously won't rule out we might need to go full 1793/1918 and literally wipe out the top 1% (and most probably the bulk of the political class, which is their subservient lackey).

Killing and hurting people is many things, but what it sure isn't is a novel idea. It's been tried on all different kinds of people throughout history many times. For some reason, it has consistently produced dead and hurt people and failed to produce a utopia of humanity.

 

[SeanF]

13 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

 

 

That's the main reason why we're in such a shitty economic situation across the West right now: the people have forgotten that absolute and essential truth: the wealthy only fear physical harm and death. As long as you're just protesting, as long as you threaten them with fines, they won't give a fuck. People have to shoot a few CEOs and mob-lynch a few boardrooms before they're taken seriously and the average people's economic situation at long last get better. I'm not hypothesizing how many will have to be taken down and give them the benefit of the doubt, that a few dozens body bags would be enough to make them understand things have to change dramatically, but I obviously won't rule out we might need to go full 1793/1918 and literally wipe out the top 1% (and most probably the bulk of the political class, which is their subservient lackey).

 

That's right, we saw it happen in post-WWII Western societies. But that's over. The multi-millionaire who argues that way now would be booted out of his firm by his board unless he owns most of his business and would be considered a lunatic by his peers. More crucially, it would only be an individual move, not a class / group decision that would involve the vast majority of CEOs, shareholders and the like, so the impact on society would be close to 0. Unless such a behaviour is forced on them, this is a prisoners' dilemma, and we know there's no way to solve it the right way when there are so many prisoners involved, left to their own devices.

That didn't work too well in either year.  The old 1% was replaced by the new 1%.

 There were benefits from the French Revolution, such as the impetus to abolish slavery, religious toleration, the dismantling of the relics of feudalism, a more sensible legal system, and in all likelihood, the Revolution ended up boosting free market capitalism, which few of the Revolutionaries had any objection to.  Men like Danton and Robespierre had no interest in an economic revolution.

I can't really think of any benefits from the Russian Revolution.

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

How does that work in a world where everything is zero sum, I'm not sure you have explained it.

I confess I'm a bit baffled that you need me to repeatedly point out the environmental cost of industrialization.

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

This is all despite living in the capitalist nightmare of the past 30 years, and despite enormous wealth being accrued at the top of the chain, with the rich getting richer and richer. It also mostly occurred in Asia where capitalism has taken hold, China might be more centrally controlled but it's adoption of capitalism is what sparked it's ability to improve living conditions, and would never have been able to do that had it remained a purely centrally run economy. India is the other place to see enormous growth and that is mostly due to it fitting into the global capitalist economy.

There's a lot to unpack here, but let's start by saying that if poverty has been reduced in spite of capitalism, one can wonder whether capitalism should be credited for said reduction. Or what its role in it is. But you've taken this into account:

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

China might be more centrally controlled but it's adoption of capitalism is what sparked it's ability to improve living conditions, and would never have been able to do that had it remained a purely centrally run economy.

This is imho the interesting point.
I appreciate the fact that we're now talking of capitalism as "sparking the ability to improve living conditions" rather than being directly responsible for improving living conditions.

I think this is the way the Chinese would talk about it too. BTW, I said earlier China could be credited with at least half of the recent reductions in poverty, but the actual number could be way higher, perhaps closer to 70-75%, depending at which poverty and which period you're looking at. Xi explicitly prevented the fight against poverty as being socialist in 2015: "Eliminating poverty, improving living standards, and achieving common prosperity are basic requirements of socialism and an important mission of the CPC." before claiming "victory" in 2021.

Now, I've tried to find what the measures themselves were (not for too long, I do have a job to go back to), and found this:

Quote

 

During its fight against poverty, China has taken five measures, including boosting the economy to provide more job opportunities, relocating poor people from inhospitable areas, compensating for economic losses associated with reducing ecological damage, improving education in impoverished areas, and providing subsistence allowances for those unable to shake off poverty through their own efforts alone.

Over the course, investment from the central, provincial, city and county governments have totaled nearly 1.6 trillion yuan (about 244 billion U.S. dollars), including 660.1 billion yuan from the central budget.

 

So I would conclude that it was a mix of job guarantees, investments in infrastructure and education, and welfare that got the job done. And that required money, in the sense of value that was driven from economic activities - mainly industrial, obviously.

2 hours ago, Mentat said:

If you blame capitalism for all of humanity's economic woes during the last 300 years, it's seems a bit strange not to give it some credit for some of the economic advantages we've come to enjoy in this period.

I don't think anyone has done the bolded - at least that's not what I personally am trying to do.
Capitalism has a lot of ill effects - no one can deny that. Yet, it's also hard to deny that capitalism seems to be the trigger leading to prosperity. So how does that work exactly? Understanding the mechanisms here would help see whether it's possible (at least in the abstract) to get the good without the bad.
Roughly speaking you can say there's stage 1 with massive industrialization based on wage slavery and stage 2 with "social" investment and redistribution. We can also add stage 3 for Western countries where neo-liberalism (for complex reasons) turns back the clock from stage 2 to stage 1.
But, BUT we now know that even stage 1 is problematic because of its environmental cost - in a finite world it's extremely difficult to avoid the "zero-sum effect." So, looking closely at what happens at stage 2 might allow us to know how to develop human societies with a smaller environmental cost.
And yeah, I'm aware that some variation of these questions has been asked since the birth of capitalism itself. In fact, a few counter-examples notwithstanding, I'll daresay everyone has always wanted to get the benefits of stage 2 while avoiding the evils of stage 1. I'm not saying I have a magical go-to answer to such complex questions, merely that this is and always was the correct question.

And so, this way, we can also go back to the thread title and the OP. The problem of many of us living in "stage 3" countries is that we glorify the people who are in fact useful for "stage 1," when it's really "stage 2" we should be interested in.

[Heartofice]

22 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

I confess I'm a bit baffled that you need me to repeatedly point out the environmental cost of industrialization.

I'm baffled why you keep bringing it up, it just seems to be a way to divert. So I'm going to stick to the point, poverty has reduced massively over the same period of time that the elites have also gotten massively rich. That is because wealth is not not zero sum. 

25 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

There's a lot to unpack here, but let's start by saying that if poverty has been reduced in spite of capitalism, one can wonder whether capitalism should be credited for said reduction. Or what its role in it is. But you've taken this into account:

That it happened during a period in which rampant capitalism and globalisation took hold across the globe should give you a bit of a clue as to how much you can credit capitalism. 

27 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

So I would conclude that it was a mix of job guarantees, investments in infrastructure and education, and welfare that got the job done. And that required money, in the sense of value that was driven from economic activities - mainly industrial, obviously.

The issue here is that China could do nothing if it was the poor agricultural society that it was before it adopted capitalism. It is only able to afford to do anything because it bought into the global capitalist economy. It also discounts India as well as the rest of asia. 

[polishgenius]

I think it is at least worth considering, in this debate, the chance that quite a lot of the trouble that is laid at the feet of capitalism can probably be more properly attributed to corporatism. Which is enabled by unfettered capitalism but is neither synonymous with nor inherent to it. 

[Rippounet]

36 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

The issue here is that China could do nothing if it was the poor agricultural society that it was before it adopted capitalism.

This is not true. For better or for worse, capitalism is not indispensable to industrialize or raise standards of living (and it wasn't for China). It speeds up things considerably, and the global economy makes it almost impossible to achieve without some form of capitalism (be it heavily regulated), but to claim that a country "could do nothing" without adopting capitalism is an over-simplification that is closer to dogma than reasoned argumentation.

18 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I'm baffled why you keep bringing it up, it just seems to be a way to divert.

If your promotion/defense of capitalism does not take into account the fact that its levels of environmental destruction are no longer possible, then I question whether a conversation with you is possible.

Can you prove you have the ability to move beyond dogma? Because in all honesty, if I want simplistic defenses of capitalism that don't even take the environmental crisi into account I can click on Breitbart links on my own...

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

This is not true. For better or for worse, capitalism is not indispensable to industrialize or raise standards of living (and it wasn't for China). It speeds up things considerably, and the global economy makes it almost impossible to achieve without some form of capitalism (be it heavily regulated), but to claim that a country "could do nothing" without adopting capitalism is an over-simplification that is closer to dogma than reasoned argumentation.

And yet China was a poor agricultural society until it embraced the elements of capitalism and globalism that enabled it to bring millions of people out of the country and into cities to work in it's factories. Weird that it didn't do that before isn't it.
 

6 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

If your promotion/defense of capitalism does not take into account the fact that its levels of environmental destruction are no longer possible, then I question whether a conversation with you is possible.

Can you prove you have the ability to move beyond dogma? Because in all honesty, if I want simplistic defenses of capitalism that don't even take the environmental crisi into account I can click on Breitbart links on my own...

I'm trying to get you to acknowledge that wealth is not zero sum. Which is why I don't understand why you want to keep bringing up the environment. 

Either way, it's not like non capitalist countries were these havens of environmental purity, the soviet union generated 1.5 times as much pollution per unit of GDP as the United States up to its collapse in 1991, and North Korea has appalling levels of pollution from best guesses. 

[Rippounet]

6 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I think it is at least worth considering, in this debate, the chance that quite a lot of the trouble that is laid at the feet of capitalism can probably be more properly attributed to corporatism. Which is enabled by unfettered capitalism but is neither synonymous with nor inherent to it. 

Could you elaborate on the distinction you want to make here?

I had trouble distinguishing early-stage capitalism from industrialization earlier, because one leads directly to the other.
In a similar way, I find it difficult to see what the distinction between capitalism and corporatism would be. Scale, I suppose? But imho "capitalism" refers implicitly to important amounts of capital rather than small businesses.

[Heartofice]

23 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I think it is at least worth considering, in this debate, the chance that quite a lot of the trouble that is laid at the feet of capitalism can probably be more properly attributed to corporatism. Which is enabled by unfettered capitalism but is neither synonymous with nor inherent to it. 

I'd suggest it is Financialisation that is more relevant, or maybe you are talking about the same thing. Either way I think a move away from the old industrial economy to a service one, and one where the financial sector takes up even more of national income is one of the major attributes of modern capitalism and creates a lot of the problems. You could add in non existant interest rates, borrowing at extreme levels and companies who basically only seem to exist for the purpose of stock price.
 

[polishgenius]

6 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

In a similar way, I find it difficult to see what the distinction between capitalism and corporatism would be. Scale, I suppose?

 

I think I've misspoken here in that corporatism is a separate system related but potentially also an alternative to Marxism that I don't know much about or have an opinion on. Not quite sure what the term I'm looking for is. 

 

 

In any case, what I'm referring to is the domination of economics and, ultimately, politics and social systems, by megacorps and big business. The exploitation of resources by multinationals etc, the imbalanced expectation of loyalty to an employer, just generally the fact that so many decisions from a local to a huge national and multinational level are made for the business, not for individuals, a state of affairs achieved in part because corporations can act as individuals, but are difficult to punish, and therefore restrain, as individuals. It's very hard to hold anyone to account and achieve change when any mistake or consequence is met by a quiet (or loud) resignation but then a quiet (almost always) shuffling of the deck and they just continue on as before. And, beyond that, these entities are so powerful they're telling governments what to do-  and while that was true with private individuals (and still is, Musk and Murdoch etc), their influence lasts as long as the individual. How do you deal with a problem like Coca-Cola though? 

 

That's not at all inherent to capitalism. It's the way capitalism has gone for us, now, but as far as I understand it all capitalism really means is a system of private property, working for wages, and free markets. It's the framework in which this corporate system has been allowed to exist- but that it's evolved that way for us doesn't mean that it's the only way a capitalist system could evolve.