Mastodawn

[Part 1/2]
My attempt to explain capitalism to a high school student

Economic system

An economic system is a way that a country or society organizes and manages its resources, such as money, goods, and services. It's like a set of rules and practices that determine how people earn money, buy and sell things, and make decisions about what to produce and consume.

Economic freedom

Economic freedom means having the ability to make your own choices about how to earn money, buy and sell things, and make decisions about what to produce and consume. It is the freedom to participate in economic activities without unnecessary restrictions or interference.

Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system where people can start their own businesses and make decisions about what to produce, how much to charge and where to sell their products. In this system, capital assets (e.g. factories, mines, rail, roads, ports etc.) can be privately owned and controlled by individuals or private companies and labour is purchased for money wages.
Profit is the money a business earns after paying for all the costs involved in producing and selling goods or services. The primary goal of capitalism is to make a profit (need not be as much profit as possible) by selling goods or services. This profit motive drives competition among businesses to be the low-cost producer of a certain good and to switch production to more profitable goods if necessary.

Economic freedom and capitalism

Economic freedom is not only related to capitalism. Other economic systems also provide economic freedom to varying degrees. Economic freedom is important because it encourages innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. When individuals and businesses have the freedom to make their own economic decisions, they are motivated to work hard, take risks, and come up with new ideas. This leads to the creation of new businesses, job opportunities, and improvements in the quality of goods and services.

Reference: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2015/06/basics.htm

#Capitalism #EconomicSystem #EconomicSystems #EconomicFreedom

What Is Capitalism? - Back to Basics - Finance & Development, June 2015

Sarwat Jahan and Ahmed Saber Mahmud - Free markets may not be perfect but they are probably the best way to organize an economy

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Srijit Kumar Bhadra

[Part 2/2]
My attempt to explain capitalism to a high school student

Major drawbacks of capitalism that can affect society

1. In a capitalist system, wealth tends to accumulate in the hands of a small percentage of the population, and this can lead to a wide gap between the rich and the poor.
2. Successful companies can usually become so powerful that they dominate the market, allowing them to charge higher prices to consumers.
3. Capitalism can encourage greed i.e. the pursuit of profit in capitalism can sometimes prioritize making money over making decisions that may benefit society as a whole.
4. Capitalism, with its focus on profit, mostly overlooks the environmental impact of production. This can lead to overproduction, pollution, and other harmful effects on the environment and climate that affect everyone.
5. Often people are rich, simply because they inherit wealth or are born into a privileged class. Therefore, capitalist society can not only fail to create equality of outcome but also can also fail to provide equality of opportunity. Societies which are highly unequal create resentment and social division.

Reference: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2015/06/basics.htm

#Capitalism #EconomicSystem #EconomicSystems #EconomicFreedom

What Is Capitalism? - Back to Basics - Finance & Development, June 2015

Sarwat Jahan and Ahmed Saber Mahmud - Free markets may not be perfect but they are probably the best way to organize an economy

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RD Feb 21

@srijit

Your attempt misses some very important foundational aspects of capitalism; reasons why it is malevolent from it's core, not merely because it has potential to go wrong in this or that consequence, or because it just needs more regulation. It cannot be justified or made benevolent any more than chattel slavery can.

Capitalism is based on lies about human nature and disingenuous "observations" about property that are in fact agendas to protect the wealthy and powerful, and to justify colonialism, exploitation, theft, violence, slavery and genocide.

Capitalism doesn't exist without Enclosure, which invalidates all the false claims about "economic freedom".

Capitalism was forced on the vast majority of us, and is maintained through constant state violence. It was never a choice or something that evolved naturally from the "grass roots". Capital is power. Wealth is a measure of social power over others, mediated through ownership and prices.

Capital is not a real thing, it is not "stuff" but a concept, and yet it has become a virtual god, ruling over the entire world, including states referred to as "socialist" or "communist".

The very idea of capital must be vanquished. It does not serve us in any way that is worth the horrific costs, both external and internal.

Comprehensive receipts for everything I just wrote can be found here, please share this thread with high school students everywhere:

https://kolektiva.social/@RD4Anarchy/110357255122736031

#capitalism #economics

RD (@RD4Anarchy@kolektiva.social)

Attached: 1 image HOW DID WE GET HERE? (a thread of threads, quotes, and links) This is a collection of writings and research concerned with how we got where we are today, which is in fact the story of what has been done *to* us, and what has been *taken from us*. By "us" we're talking about "the 99%", "workers", "wage slaves", all non-owners of private property, "the poor", unhoused people, indigenous people, even plenty of people who swear by capitalism and identify as "capitalist" yet have no capital of their own and no serious hope of ever having any worth speaking of. In other words almost everyone except for the very few who have had the power to exploit us and shape our lives to serve their agenda. We're going to examine institutions and concepts that have deeply altered our world at all levels, both our external and internal realities. By "here" we are talking about climate crisis and myriad other environmental catastrophes resulting from hyper-excessive extraction, consumption and waste; a world of rampant inequality, exploitation and oppression, hunger and starvation, genocide and war; a world of fences, walls, gatekeepers, prisons, police, bullshit jobs and criminalized poverty; a world overrun with cars and preventable disease; a world of vanishing biodiversity and blooming fascism; a world where "democracy" results in being led by some of the worst of humanity; a world ruled by an imaginary but all-powerful and single-minded god: Capital. Our inspiration and structural framework for this survey is this quote from "The Prehistory of Private Property", an important work from political philosopher Karl Widerquist and anthropologist Grant S. McCall: "After hundreds of millennia in which all humans had direct access to the commons, it took only a few centuries for enclosure, colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization to cut off the vast majority of people on Earth from direct access to the means of economic production and therefore to rob them of the power to say no. It took only a few generations to convince most people that this situation was natural and inevitable. That false lesson needs to be unlearned." https://widerquist.com/books-3/#2b Also recommended: "Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy" https://widerquist.com/books-3/#4b #capitalism #colonialism #enclosure #PrivateProperty #state #police #inequality #anthropology #environment #ClimateCrisis #economics 1/30

kolektiva.social

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AKingsbury Feb 21

@RD4Anarchy @srijit

Mr. Bhadra, you are of course more than welcome to engage this person, but fair warning; it's not a pathway to honest, mutually respectful discussion, but it is an excellent pathway to an endless stream of abuse.

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RD Feb 21

@AlexanderKingsbury

That's an erroneous extrapolation, Alexander. You and I have a special relationship with it's own particular context that does not apply to anyone else.

The IMF page you linked to ("What Is Capitalism?") starts off with this:

"Free markets may not be perfect but they are probably the best way to organize an economy"

This is another example of how capitalism is based on falsehoods.

Here is an excellent thread about "free market":
https://mastodon.social/@magitweeter/111653879323307502

more on economics here:
https://kolektiva.social/@RD4Anarchy/110486882725230512

#capitalism #economics

RD (@RD4Anarchy@kolektiva.social)

Appendix: EcOnOmIcS!!1!! If you have ever been told to "go learn some economics!", this post is for you. Here are links to a surplus of valuable thoughts on the subject, starting with the @blair_fix@mastodon.online piece that was excerpted in the fifth post of this thread, in case you didn't read the whole thing then: Can the World Get Along Without Natural Resources? https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2020/06/18/can-the-world-get-along-without-natural-resources/ A mathematician on the "free market" economic model, excellent thread from @magitweeter@mastodon.social https://mastodon.social/@magitweeter/111653879323307502 Revealing paper from Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan on how both liberal/neoclassical and Marxist economists fail at describing anything actually real when it comes to capital: Capital accumulation: fiction and reality "What we need now are not better tools, more accurate modelling and improved data, but a different way of thinking altogether, a totally new cosmology for the post-capitalist age." http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue72/BichlerNitzan72.pdf David Graeber: Against Economics https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-against-economics Interesting piece about what supply and demand misses, with important insights about value and market power, poverty and inequality: Bargaining Power and Prices: A Response to Sanyazi and Carson https://c4ss.org/content/58918 Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ Free Market Genocides: The Real History of Trade https://evonomics.com/free-market-genocide-the-real-history-of-trade/ GDP and the Idolatry of Growth from @dsdamato https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/05/25/gdp-and-the-idolatry-of-growth/ The Lie At The Heart Of Consumer Society https://indica.medium.com/the-lie-at-the-heart-of-consumer-society-1a6fe24d832f The Problem With Economic Models from @pluralistic@mamot.fr https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful David Graeber: What is the meaning of money? https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-note-worthy-what-is-the-meaning-of-money Here's another article from @blair_fix@mastodon.online that really belongs here: The Ritual of Capitalization https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2021/06/02/the-ritual-of-capitalization/ For an extensive deep dive into capitalist economics, here is a very thorough examination from An Anarchist FAQ, very much worth your time: What are the myths of capitalist economics? https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionC.html "State Capitalism: The Wages System Under New Management" by Adam Buick and John Crump https://files.libcom.org/files/State%20Capitalism.pdf The focus of this short book is to argue (very successfully IMO) that individual private ownership is not a defining feature of capitalism and that countries such as China, The Soviet Union (this was published in 1986), Cuba, Vietnam, etc, though they may identify as "socialist" and are called "communist" by many are in fact simply another form of capitalism called "state capitalism". In the process of making this argument, this book also became an excellent general reference for understanding what capitalism really is, how capitalist economics work, what socialism really is and isn't, and plenty of fascinating and clarifying historic context. I would be remiss not to mention: "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" by David Graeber, an absolute must-read to better understand the history of debt and money. https://we.riseup.net/assets/393727/David+Graeber+Debt+The+First+5+000+Years.pdf #economics #capitalism

kolektiva.social

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RD Feb 21

@srijit

Also from that IMF page:

"socialism, the state owns the means of production"

A better and more useful description of socialism is: workers controlling the means of production. State ownership is not worker control. States are always the tool of a ruling elite. State ownership is just state capitalism.

Private ownership of capital, as a supposed requirement of capitalism, is a red herring. Capital doesn't care if it is owned by a private individual, a corporation, or a state, as long as its demands are met.

Even if you own land, at least in the U.S., you are really just renting it from the state anyway. State dictates what one can and can't do on that land, and state can kick you off of it any time it chooses, for any reason. The law enforcement that you depended on to enforce your "ownership" now becomes the means of taking it from you.

Since at least the early 20th century, every state has been capitalist. None have eliminated capital as a ruling principle (effectively the official state religion of every state). None have eliminated wage slavery. None have extricated themselves from the global capitalist system, or stopped exploiting the global south and marginalized people within their own borders.

Neither authoritarian rule by a communist party (USSR, China, etc) nor welfare states ("Nordic socialism", etc) are socialism. It's capitalism all the way down.

Highly recommended book on the subject:
"State Capitalism: The Wages System Under New Management" by Adam Buick and John Crump
free pdf:
https://files.libcom.org/files/State%20Capitalism.pdf

#capitalism #socialism #economics