My biggest problem with #capitalism is that it forces everyone to make earning money their primary objective.
Not to provide valuable services for society.
Not to make sure that people don't suffer.
Not to preserve our environment.
All these things are just optional side effects to the main objective of making money, and will be easily discarded if doing the opposite turns out to be more lucrative.
"Forces"? A bit strong. But the point is valid. That is where regulation is supposed to come in. Instead we have let money have too much influence in government and change the rules.
@SnerkRabbledauber Yes, forces
Do I want shelter? I need money.
Do I want food? I need money.
The huge amount of people that are living a life of very little joy just because they have to spend all their time making money just to keep them and their loved ones alive attest to that.
If there was not money you would still have to work to make the shelter and collect/grow the food. So all the money does is give you more options for how you work. It also allows us to collectively support each other's basic needs by all contributing in the ways we best can. That is the part that we have allowed to be eroded and we must rebuild. The basic needs met part.
@SnerkRabbledauber I agree with the last part, although we can also meet basic needs with constructs like mutual aid.
And note that I'm not saying that money is evil itself (although I am definitely hoping we'll get to post-scarcity at some point), I'm saying the system that puts money signs on everything, lets people starve and die when they have no money, and says that things without monetary value are worthless is evil.
I agree with that. I just don't think that sentiment is required to have any of the benefits of a market. It just requires regulation, which we have handed over to the wrong people.
I would certainly agree that once a company becomes publicly traded, then there IS a force to adopt those values. It is even enforced by law. The stock market is evil IMO.
@ainmosni I think people assume that business and innovation can’t exist in a more socialistic society, which is inexplicably false. I also think that people assume that socialism and communism are equivalent, which is also false.
Business can exist in socialism, innovation can happen in socialism. The idea is that profits are not the main focus and that helping society (and hopefully the environment) are more important than money.
@ainmosni As the owner of two very small businesses with no employees, I worry about the connection between entrepreneurship and capitalism. One of the businesses is a partnership with my daughter, creating works of art and crafts. The other is a sole proprietorship doing academic evaluations for homeschooled students.
But I am also not a fan of capitalism. I found an article today discussing ways to subvert capitalism while running a small business. I like it.
https://holisticbusinessacademy.com/how-to-subvert-capitalism-as-a-small-business-owner/
What can you do as a small business owner to resist capitalism? Though the process of unlearning capitalist logic requires deep, intentional personal work, here are a few starting points to consider.
@n69n It's not your fault, we're all forced into this shit, because we need to survive, and making money is not optional.
If we knew our food and shelter were insured, we could be more picky about what we'd do with our lives. We could say "well, not working will not kill me, so I'm not going to support this thing I'm having ethical issues with". But the rich and powerful like that we need to work to survive, so they know that they have more power.
Money on itself is just a tool to represent value which makes it very useful for the exchange of goods and services. The classic barter suffers from the issue that offered goods and demanded goods are often not compatible for the persons involved. For example, a fisher may want to exchange fish with a baker for bread, but the baker hates fish and so wont accept fish as a payment. Money solves that issue as the baker gets money that he can use to buy whatever he wants.
Money can be seen as a unit of value for allowed ressource consumption.
Living even a modest life requires sustained ressource consumption. No way arround that without literally dying.
Humans - given reasonable external circumstances - are capable of self sustaining themselves. This is however often less efficient time and effort wise.
Simple said, someone farming 8 hours a day will produce more food in that time than someone who spends the same amount of time as a hobby farmer. Technical progress has only made this gap
larger. Buying larger fields and efficient machines only makes sense if you require a lot of work to be done in a relative low amount of time.
This is true for the production of pretty much any service and any good. And this leads to specialization. We end up with farmers, blacksmiths and countless other profession that are really good at one thing... and dont - for work - do anything else. Because why would a blacksmith go farming when the farmer can do that many times better? Bonus points for people having different skills and interests... and people are always better at doing something that they enjoy.
So the bargain between the farmers and the blacksmith is going to look like this:
"We produce the food and you produce the tools we need"
This simple bargain becomes a very complex bargain in a modern large technological society. And thus the importance of a common value denominator becomes very very large.
Money is simple the tool used to designate value.
To sustain themselves,
humans need a certain amount of allowed ressource consumption. This consumption requirement can be expressed in money.
Any family, any society and any economy can only sustain itself in the long term, if the amount of created ressource value (which can be expressed in money) is at least as high as the ressource drain.
Nuff said, if you eat 4 plants a day but only replant 3, you will run out of food ultimately.
So we need to both
limit ressource withdrawal
and
incentive ressource production
to avoid unsustainable overconsumption.
In very basic terms, this means that a society - small or large - needs to create at least the amount of ressources it consumes to be sustainable longterm.
There is no way arround that in the end. Because ressources are always somewhat limited, they always need to be an incentive to create more and a disincentive to consume beyond the sustainable means.
And again.. money is just a unit of value for that.
And I would fully agree with you, that we often
have a very dubious distribution of the generated ressources/money and value some things well above and others well below their realistic value.
However one cannot ignore, that even with all unfairness in resource distribution fixed - we still cannot escape the cold basic truth that
ressource input =/> ressource drain.
And for people to be willing to part with their ressource allowance/money, you have to offer something they value at least as high as the money they part with.
And that is the large questionmark in your
"provide valueable service for society"
Who decides what value something has? For necessities, this is pretty easy. Everyone needs to eat and so food will never be without value.
Moving onto more complex things however, opens up a wide and personal value dissonance: People dont value the same things equally beyond basic needs. For a soccer fan, the expensive tickets for a game of his team may have quite a high value... for another person however, the value of those
tickets can be as low as zero.
So how do you value something like this somewhat fair?
Supply and demand offer at least a good indication. The more difficult something is to create, the lower the supply of it is, because most stakeholders are incapable of producing it for themselves. At the same time, this inability to create something for yourself also increases demand, so low supply goods which are seen as valuable tend to be expensive.
That system is not fair and has quite some flaws, but remains a good source of giving something a certain value. If nobody wants something, its value is going to be very low.
From a philosophical standpoint, I think "value" is a very personal and volatile thing. And it's dangerous to create a consent about it, which is used as a measurement for basic goods and services.
It is possible to think about a sci-fi without values (not even equal values for everything), without this concept, and imagining that might help us think about what we want to achieve using it, actually.
3/3
If we think about another way to distibute resources, I personally think we live in badly distributed abundance. However, managing resources, be they scarse or abundant, might be nicer with a cooperative, than a competitive approach.
Maybe seeing it as common goods, we should think more about mechanisms to handle the "tragedy of the commons".
There might be some non-capitalistic, valuation-free (and more democratic) approaches to tackle the actual problem.
@ainmosni money is supposed to be a concrete quantity representing abstract value, so it’s not impossible to represent those things using money. We just don’t, for the most part.
You can have a capitalist society where protecting the environment generates money and damaging it costs money. We are, at least, part of the way there. Carbon tax would help a lot.
@ainmosni It doesn't really force you to, though.
I took a job I knew pays poorly.
And when I feel I can ask for a pay raise and get one, I'd rather reduce my weekly hours for the same pay than get paid more for the same work.
You do have options.
@ainmosni there's a lot of issues with capitalism, this is definitely a big one…
but we can't overlook that it was born of various iterations of slavery (indentured servitude, caste systems, etc.) and mimics slavery still…it's very rich landed gentry sitting on top of mounds of wealth large enough to make them untouchable in the form of money generated by the manhours (life enegy) of the masses who are kept sick, hungry, poorly housed, kept in fear and kept so busy working that they cannot rise up to overthrow their overlords.
And to truly talk about this, we also probably need to address the socialization & systems of shame that keep the masses submitting to this torment with the bleak promise that if they work themselves to the bone they *might* eventually be able to relax someday. Which as the economy gets worse and worse, people are working longer and longer and dying before that promise materializes.
@ainmosni if we would erase making money the top priority then mankind will truly evolve. This could be the next step after industrialization.
🖖🏼
@ainmosni and then if you decide to make another goal your priority, because you genuinely care about other things. You're taken advantage of, bled dry, and then told you're an idiot who deserves to live in poverty because you "weren't smart with your money".
And then you have to put up with those same assholes telling you that your priorities "aren't human nature" wtf am I, a cheese doodle??? No they don't want to believe it's possible to reprioritize because they don't want to change
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