@[email protected] asked “why are folks so anti-capitalist?” not long ago. It got quite a few comments. But I noticed a trend: a lot of people there didn’t agree on the definition of “capitalism”.
And the lack of common definition was hobbling the entire discussion. So I wanted to ask a precursor question. One that needs to be asked before anybody can even start talking about whether capitalism is helpful or good or necessary.
Main Question
- What is capitalism?
- Since your answer above likely included the word “capital”, what is capital?
- And either,
- A) How does capitalism empower people to own what they produce? or, (if you believe the opposite,)
- B) How does capitalism strip people of their control over what they produce?
Bonus Questions (mix and match or take them all or ignore them altogether)
- Say you are an individual who sells something you create. Are you a capitalist?
- If you are the above person, can you exist in both capitalist society and one in which private property has been abolished?
- Say you create and sell some product regularly (as above), but have more orders than you can fulfill alone. Is there any way to expand your operation and meet demand without using capitalist methods (such as hiring wage workers or selling your recipes / process to local franchisees for a cut of their proceeds, etc)?
- Is the distinction between a worker cooperative and a more traditional business important? Why is the distinction important?
No actually, very different.
With a state or any other entity, who enforces the contracts?
That aside, capitalism specifically (distinct from market economies which I reiterate are not in and of themselves capitalistic) is defined by profit, which is defined as the difference between the sale price of an item and the cost (including labor). If there is no capatal-owning employer and wage-earning employee, it’s not capitalism. If there is, it cannot be anarchy.
Musings about contracts (which, again, require some authority to enforce anyway) are not relevant to capitalism. The existence of contracts is neither necessary not sufficient for capitalism; certainly they can and do exist in capitalism, but they are not a defining feature. The employer-employee hierarchy isthe defining feature.
Communism (actual communism) depends on spontaneous, voluntary cooperation. Every “communist state” was not communist, but rather some individual or group’s conception of a suitable transitory government to establish the conditions necessary for communism to emerge. I will not argue that their conceptions were indeed suitable, because I don’t believe they were. Personally, I think we are at least several generations and a great deal of technological advancement away from the conditions necessary for communism.
We could probably do pretty decent co-op-based market socialism, which I would actually personally advocate, but this isn’t a conversation about presently practical socio-economic ideologies. This is a conversation about the definition of communism. And the definition of communism (not of socialism, or transitory-states-with-the-eventual-end-goal-of-communism) is a moneyless, classless, stateless, non-hierarchic (and, consequentially, anarchic) society based on spontaneous, voluntary cooperation.
If it involves a hierarchic state, it ain’t communism. Simple as.
Whatever that hierarchic-state-claiming-to-be-communism is, you can certainly argue against for its many flaws. I’ll happily join you. But that thing ain’t communism, and the second a state pops out of actual communism, it by definition stops being communism.
Words matter.
Purpously forking the discussion here, since it’s two separate points and I don’t want one to overshadow the other.
Capitalism theory is ex-post, while communism theory is ex-ante.
Or to put it differenlty: Capitalism just happens while communism is a design.
Every single society that has ever existed spontaneously forms hirarchies.
So capitalism theory is about how to mitigate or exploit (depending on what side of the discussion the theorist is on) these hirarchies.
Communist theory instead is like a what-if-fanfiction to capitalism. What if nobody wants power? What if nobody wants an advantage?
There are essentially two ways communist theorists go. Either they split the world into bourgeoisie vs proletariat, believing that they are two separate species of humans and only the bourgeuisie wants hirarchy, so if they kill them everyone else has no wish to ever have an advantage over others, which is obviously flawed thinking. The proletariat is not in power because they can’t, not because they wouldn’t want to.
The other option is to proclaim the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (a term coined by Marx and Engels, which I guess, according to your definition aren’t real communists either then), embrace hirarchies and have a central instance that governs and enforces their view of communism.
There’s a simple reason why hirarchies emerge. People aren’t identical. There’s always someone who is more intelligent, has more knowledge/experience, is more charismatic, speaks/writes better, can naturally get people to follow them. Boom, there’s a hirarchy.
And if that person is consistently the person others turn to, this hirarchy becomes solidified.
That’s exactly my point though: Anarchism in any form is a contradiction. Communist anarchism is not less of a contradiction than capitalist anarchism.
Capitalist anarchism is, as you say, lacking an authority that enforces contracts and that authority will spontaneously appear due to the (translated from German) “right of the stronger”, meaning whoever is stronger will enforce contracts and the other party is out of luck. That’s what could be observed in real-life examples like the Kowloon Walled City, where the Triads became the de-facto government.
Communist anarchism depends on the stronger playing nice and not forcing their will on the other people and it also depends on people not banding together to form a democracy to oppose the stronger people/stop them from forming the de-facto government.
Capitalist anarchism is instable since it directly drops into an Oligarchy.
Communist anarchism is a direct contradiction.
What are you going on about? You’re not reading what I said, and at this point this level of “ignorance” really seems deliberate and in bad faith.
Anarchy isn’t “no regulations”, it’s “no hierarchies”. Yes, “no regulations” is considerably easier to accomplish (temporarily) than “no hierarchies”, but that’s not what the word means. If you want to talk about unregulated capitalism, do so. There’s nothing anarchic about it though. As you admit, capitalism spontaneously generates hierarchy in a vacuum.
“No hierarchies” is substantially more difficult to attain, but that’s what the word means, and the synonym is communism. I’m not here, like you apparently are, to speak to the pragmatism of that ideology. I will repeat, slowly, since I’ve done so many times without your understanding and I wish to do so no longer:
COMMUNISM IS NOT STABLE IN THE PRESENT WORLD
THAT IS IRRELEVANT TO ITS DEFINITION
THE EXISTENCE OF AUTHORITY PRECLUDES COMMUNISM
IDEOLOGIES WITH AUTHORITY ARE NOT COMMUNISM
MANY AUTHORITIES HAVE CLAIMED TO BE COMMUNISM
THEY ARE LYING, IT IS A CONTRACTION
I’m not going to keep saying the same thing. I’m done. Either you can’t read or you’re trolling, deliberately misunderstanding in bad faith. Reread my statements. I thought my last post quite deftly cut to the heart of it, you keep taking past me to a conversation I’m not having. You’re taking to yourself, or a ghost of the conversation you think you’re having, or there’s an inefficiency in translation.
Review my posts. I’m done. Das Gespräch ist kaputt. There is no continuation.
Someone’s got a temper, and someone believes he’s the only one who is allowed to define terms.
Seems like a case of “ex falso quodlibet”.
Emphasis, not anger. Necessary due only to your continued disregard.
I did not define my terms, I used their definitions. You’re the one trying to provide unique definitions.
Again, I’m done. Everything I have to say I’ve said already. Review for clarity.