Serious Marxism, Socialism, Communism, Anarchism: the left-wing political & economic thought thread

kilometerman please stop posting in this thread if you're not going to critically engage material which has been provided. Robert Alfons made a fabulous post which already responds to the dense one-liner fearmongering you supplied (and frequently supply). further, you could use something like this to interrogate your own beliefs and provide some actual input and discourse. i recommend reading into emma goldman, bob black, and bell hooks, a few of my personal favorites, in order to gain a more knowledgeable stance about the issues that these actors promote. if you're going to proceed to portray leftism in a very ignorant light, you shouldn't participate in a thread which requires a baseline understanding of the praxis at hand.
 

kilometerman

Banned deucer.
kilometerman please stop posting in this thread if you're not going to critically engage material which has been provided. Robert Alfons made a fabulous post which already responds to the dense one-liner fearmongering you supplied (and frequently supply). further, you could use something like this to interrogate your own beliefs and provide some actual input and discourse. i recommend reading into emma goldman, bob black, and bell hooks, a few of my personal favorites, in order to gain a more knowledgeable stance about the issues that these actors promote. if you're going to proceed to portray leftism in a very ignorant light, you shouldn't participate in a thread which requires a baseline understanding of the praxis at hand.
I was responding to what I thought was a funny comment you made where you wanted to be disassociated with Karl Marx not because of his failed and horrific ideology, but the fact that he was racist. If you don't want one-liners, would you instead be interested in some more insight into the thing I'm "fearmongering" about?

https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Leap-Forward
https://www.britannica.com/topic/kulak
http://www.chinaonlinemuseum.com/history-mao.php

Nothing wrong with fearmongering if you're talking about an actual dangerous threat. Communism kills and anyone with a fraction of knowledge about the 20th century will tell you that.

And I see what you're doing with the condescending "you need to educate yourself more on the topic". It's scummy and a bad way to argue a point. If you like to recommend books, how about you try The Gulag Archipelago? It's a great insight into what actually happens under communist regimes and far-leftist governments. Much more of a history lesson than your anarchist utopia feverdream

EDIT: a response to "that wasn't communism" since you're immidiatrly going to respond with it anyway:
 
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termi

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kermit the frog over here says people who say the USSR etc didn't adhere to marxism are so arrogant that they'd think they do better if they were in Stalin's shoes, not realizing the whole concept of the nation state literally is antithetical to communism - your communism is internationalist or it is bullshit - and therefore to be in Stalin's position is a mistake to begin with.

kilometerman people like you and kermit aren't worth arguing with because you are too lazy and willfully ignorant to even engage with marxist and anarchist theory, instead saying "look at what (nominally) communist regimes did in practice, who cares about the theory and whether or not these regimes even conform to it and whether or not the more unfortunate situations in these countries are the result of communist doctrine or something else entirely." Rather than providing any sort of insightful criticism you just fall into dull cliches that allow you to slander your political opponents while cowardly avoiding real engagement with the things they actually advocate for. If you want to make a serious case against communism, show that you have a decent understanding of marxist and anarchist theory, of Marx's analysis of capitalism (I wonder how many of you devoted anti-communists even know what the labor theory of value is), maybe how marxism developed since Marx (considering nobody in their right mind is arguing mid-19th century theory can be directly applied to the circumstances of the present day), and point out why, according to you, these theories do in fact necessarily result in despotic murderous regimes that nonetheless have never been able to be nearly as murderous as unfettered capitalism is. If you can't even do that, you shouldn't be posting here.
 

kilometerman

Banned deucer.
Stop attempting to disassociate yourself from communist regimes. They all upheld the same ideals you do, about total equity for all and the removal of private property and ownership. Sorry dude but most people aren't dumb enough to believe that the genocides and starvation that happened under every communist system happened only because there was a flag and a guy in charge.

This is a dumb argument that I'm not interested in having anyway. Not only is the idea that the human population would willingly give up the products of their own labor to "the people" including those who don't work at all, without any kind of administration or state, is laughable. Hardly even a matter of discussion. What happens when someone says "I just worked for these crops. I think I deserve to eat them"? How is this handled without a state? How are resources distributed "evenly"? What happens when someone (as always happens under anarchy) establishes some sort of government? Who decides who's property is to be burned and stolen? Who decides which rich people are the ones who can be murdered?

I look at Marxism as a realist. I understand that it looks great on paper. I understand that a world totally equal (in outcome, mind you, not opportunity) is appealing to some. But you have to understand that the real world doesn't allow it to exist. People are inherently different from each other in ability. Right off the bat this makes it so the only (realistic) way we can achieve total equity (not equality) is by hurting those who are higher than the rest. The classicide that occurred in both China and Russia is a good example of this. Marx blatantly calls for destruction of the upper class and holy hell have you guys demonstrated that. The mass murder of the upper classes was so brutal and massive that we still have no idea exactly how many were killed. 700,000-5,000,000 in Russia. 10,000,000 in China. Marx convinced his followers that "if your neighbor has 5 dollars and you have 4, then he STOLE from you and you better go over there and murder his family for it". And they did.

The idea that a man is not entitled to the product of his own labor, that a man working 10 hours a day tirelessly deserves the same payment and life as a man who sits back in his house and watches him, is absurd. It defies logic. The idea that people should be punished, or even murdered because they chose to work hard in life, is counterproductive to society. The desire for a perfect utopia free of pain and suffering is preposterous even for a damn child.

You try and act like you're the saviors of the working class. That you genuinely care for them. But you then support an unrealistic borderline insane ideology that has resulted in the deaths of millions of them whenever it has been applied in the real world. How many more millions have to die before you people admit that it doesn't work? We're at about 100 right now. 150? 200? You know what the right did after Nazi Germany? They realized how destructive it (and it's socialist economy, mind you) was and disassociated themselves from it. It was a genocidal regime that murdered millions of innocents and left nothing but destruction and despair in its wake. But not the left. 10 million landowners in China are of no concern. The victims of the gulag are of no concern. You know it's really hard to maintain the "liberator" title when you turn around and wave a damn Soviet flag around.

Anyway. You didn't provide a source for capitalism killing more people than communism (which even if it did wouldn't be a legitimate argument since communism hasn't been prominent since the 20th century). Would love to see it.

Knickerbocker, H.R. (1941). Is Tomorrow Hitler's? 200 Questions On the Battle of Mankind. Reynal & Hitchcock. pp. 133–134.
Wu, Harry. "Classicide in Communist China". Comparative Civilizations Review.
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, pp. 92–97; 116–21
 

vonFiedler

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Maybe it's cause far leftism is a bunch of voodoo witchcraft to a guy like me and my eyes glaze over whenever Alfons or Myzo post, but it always seem like nobody loves communism more than people like kilometerman and deck knight. It seems to come up all the time in every thread regardless of whether anyone else brings it up. It seems to have been coming up even when the democrats were the right, when hollywood was blacklisting people and McCarthy was setting himself up as a future pariah (how do you not learn from this?) "But what about communism?" Almost nobody really cares about communism but those who try to benefit from it as a boogey man. And it's so thin too. Like, how does an ideology that isn't about killing people kill people?

And from where myself and other "dangerous centrists" sit, it doesn't really seem like the Right disassociated with nazis at all. The right didn't learn anything from that. Some people want a form of communism that exhibits it's core ideologies without centralizing power and killing people, which I don't remotely agree with, but it seems that they're trying to learn. The right exhibits the same motives and inclinations towards specific actions that we condemn Nazis and McCarthy for. Why have you never learned from this?
 

termi

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This is a dumb argument that I'm not interested in having anyway.
Then why are you still posting?

Not only is the idea that the human population would willingly give up the products of their own labor to "the people" including those who don't work at all, without any kind of administration or state, is laughable. Hardly even a matter of discussion. What happens when someone says "I just worked for these crops. I think I deserve to eat them"? How is this handled without a state? How are resources distributed "evenly"? What happens when someone (as always happens under anarchy) establishes some sort of government? Who decides who's property is to be burned and stolen? Who decides which rich people are the ones who can be murdered?
Private property and personal property are different things, you dilweed. Nobody's coming to take your toothbrush. A communist society is not one where everybody works the same amount of hours, makes the same wage, and has the exact same personal property. Anybody who is serious about their communism will tell you they are in favor of the abolition of jobs and the abolition of money (and therefore wages). This should also give you an indication of how far the USSR was removed from actual communism (something they admitted themselves, although they insisted they were in a transitional phase from capitalism to communism despite the fact that there was no evidence they were really progressing the cause over the years).

I look at Marxism as a realist. I understand that it looks great on paper. I understand that a world totally equal (in outcome, mind you, not opportunity) is appealing to some.
On a side note, Marxism is not a political ideology, Marxism is a theoretical framework that attempts to critically analyze capitalism and its development by means of historical materialism. A mistake people often make is that the terms "Marxism" and "communism" are used interchangeably when they're really not the same thing. Communism is an ideology, Marxism is not (although naturally Marxists are also communists), so you cannot have, for example, a "Marxist state." There's also all these offshoots of Marxism like Neo-Marxism and whatnot but you seem to have enough difficulty understanding OG Marxism so I won't pester you with that for the moment.

Marx convinced his followers that "if your neighbor has 5 dollars and you have 4, then he STOLE from you and you better go over there and murder his family for it". And they did.
Marx doesn't say your neighbor stole anything from you, he says your bosses and the shareholders of the company you work in stole from you, but thanks for playing.

The idea that a man is not entitled to the product of his own labor [...] is absurd. It defies logic.
Hey would you look at that, a perfectly Marxist statement!

You know what the right did after Nazi Germany? They realized how destructive it (and it's socialist economy, mind you) was and disassociated themselves from it.
lol

Anyway. You didn't provide a source for capitalism killing more people than communism (which even if it did wouldn't be a legitimate argument since communism hasn't been prominent since the 20th century). Would love to see it.
Watch this for starters if you want to know (sources in description), although it was more of a throwaway line in my previous post so I don't really care to argue about the exact amount of deaths that can be attributed to capitalism. I don't have to know the exact numbers of deaths it caused to know it's a bad and unsustainable system, and I'm not too interested in defending the so-called "communist" regimes and their death toll because they're simply not the kinds of societies I consider worth defending to begin with. (Of course you want to repeat your "but marxism necessarily leads to mao!!!" argument, but I still haven't really heard anyone tell me how exactly, until you can give me a sound theory that actually explains the causal relationship between Marxist theory (real Marxist theory and not your imagined version of it) and the self-described "communist" or "socialist" regimes of the last century and why the one necessarily leads to the other, I find your argument entirely disposable.)

lol
 

Soul Fly

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re: "I look at marxism as a realist"/it might be broken but at least capitalism works/"there is no alternative look at Stalin"/other such totalising iterations

"Needless to say, what counts as 'realistic', what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a 'business ontology' in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. As any number of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a 'natural order', must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable."

- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (2009)​
 

MAMP

MAMP!
kilometerman no offense dude, but your posts consistently demonstrate that you really don't know what you're talking about. you can't make these kinds of criticisms when you very clearly have never read any of marx's work, or any other notable left-wing works for that matter.
What happens when someone says "I just worked for these crops. I think I deserve to eat them"? How is this handled without a state? How are resources distributed "evenly"? What happens when someone (as always happens under anarchy) establishes some sort of government?
you really think these questions have never been adressed? people have been discussing, debating, and writing about these exact issues for literally centuries. if you were actually familiar with left-wing ideas, you would know this. the communist manifesto talks about resource distribution extensively.
Marx convinced his followers that "if your neighbor has 5 dollars and you have 4, then he STOLE from you and you better go over there and murder his family for it". And they did.
mens_ideas_are_the_most-619-185.jpg

like i know youre tryna be hyperbolic with this one, but come on dude. it takes only a cursory understanding of marxism to know how silly what you said is
The idea that a man is not entitled to the product of his own labor, that a man working 10 hours a day tirelessly deserves the same payment and life as a man who sits back in his house and watches him, is absurd. It defies logic. The idea that people should be punished, or even murdered because they chose to work hard in life, is counterproductive to society. The desire for a perfect utopia free of pain and suffering is preposterous even for a damn child.
i agree. so did marx. you would know this if you'd read his works.
 

Soul Fly

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I have been doing some heavy drinking. Obviouslt the perfect time to talk politics.

i understand where communists come from when they say that the communist states we've seen aren't truly communist due to the end goal of communism being a stateless and classless society. with that said, i don't understand how communists expect this to be implemented. afaik, marx and others emphasize the need for revolution in order to implement this type of society, but he also claimed the need for a "dictatorship of the proletariat" as a sort of stepping stone to a communist society.

am i missing something, or is this just extremely idealistic and sorta flawed? genuine question too: i previously didn't really understand communism that well, so i'm trying to better understand it. so far, i don't really agree with anything i've read (been sent some articles by friends and acquaintances), but i'm still sorta confused about some core concepts of communism.
"Extremely idealistic" sure. But do you know what is also extremely idealistic? A free and a fair market. Can you tell me one place in the modern global world it exists? It really doesn't, but we labour under the illusion and make most of our socio-economic decisions on the premise that this is somehow more achievable and realistic than a "stateless classless society". Why? Have you ever thought about it?

The "dictatorship of the proletariat" make your red flags go up. But when capitalism argues for "necessary evils" like wages below subsistence level for the lowest bracket of society, holding your health and life hostage for money, prioritising efficiency over quality of life, fucking the planet over with uncontrollable climate change, why don't your alarm bells go off then? So many sins could be laid at the doors of capitalism: terrorism, insurgency, opioid epidemics, rising rates of mental problems worldwide, growing wealth inequality. So many oppressions directly manifest itself through the play of economics: of class, gender, race, caste. But no, capitalism still gets a wide berth. A belief in its imminent triumph despite all the fucked-upness of the world. On the other hand, somehow, a communist society is the one which is supposed to be "extremely idealistic" and unachievable because it is "sorta flawed"? Just because capitalism surrounds you you shouldn't just accept some notion of inherent betterness. People act as if it is winning some darwinian race of ideas or some shit.

All I'm saying is that it isn't as straightforward as you make it seem. I can't pretend to read the future, but there's clearly more to think about here, about why we hold these certain assumptions. I would start by questioning the deeper elements in play behind those set of assumptions. If you are going to hold the past "failures" of the left to indict its worthiness, why be so blind to the chronic everpresent failure of capital?

To answer your own question, certain elements of disparate leftist ideology have seen quite an unremarked upon stability and success in many different contexts around the world. Many countries have quite successfully provided universal healthcare for their citizens, Slavic/Nordic nations have made great strides towards pushing towards higher quality of life and sustainable growth by incentivising and coercing green practices. Certain highly stable and developed parts of the world are having promising test runs with universal basic income, education is increasingly subsidised, if not completely free (like higher edu in germany) in many parts of the world... etc etc etc. You need to want to look for it if you want to see it. You need to believe in what we could achieve as a society if these practices and more gain universal adoption. That is how people hope to achieve the "extremely idealistic" future.
 
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Chou Toshio

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I think the arguments of the last page are a problem of ideology vs. reality.

Communism can be a beautifully working and powerfully productive system-- if you are a eusocial insect or an organism/system with a similar set of motivational parameters. It doesn't work for humans.

It seems like one side argues that the system can theoretically work (which it can, and actually is successfully mirrored in some examples from nature), while the other side that points out that it can't work with actual humans in great numbers or complex systems (which it can't).

edit: Yeah, I don't believe the above so much these days... There's some form of workable socialism out there that's better than what we got now.
 
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Myzozoa

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capitalism can theoretically work, such as in small communities of eusocial traders, but it doesn't work for humans.

It seems like one side argues the system (capitalism) can theoretically work (which it might be able to but has never done), while the other side points out it can't work with humans in great numbers or complex systems (which it doesn't).

Chou Toshio yay for circular reasoning that contributes no content to the discussion.
 
The main problems I see in these types of ideologies and movements is that they place far too much faith in humanity to do the right thing. Humans are horrible, we are constantly murdering, pillaging, stealing, etc., and, especially in the case of something like Anarchism, I feel like humanity will always try and rise up above each other, to be superior in some way, if only because that’s just the way humans think. That is why no nation had never truly been able to reach pure communism. Someone who has too much power always steps in and throws a monkey wrench in the whole operation, right? The whole “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” type deal. When you give someone that temporary dictatorship, you can’t just expect them to do the right thing and willingly step down. That, I feel, was the real lesson of stuff like the USSR and China. I could be wrong though.
 

v

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The main problems I see in these types of ideologies and movements is that they place far too much faith in humanity to do the right thing. Humans are horrible, we are constantly murdering, pillaging, stealing, etc., and, especially in the case of something like Anarchism, I feel like humanity will always try and rise up above each other, to be superior in some way, if only because that’s just the way humans think. That is why no nation had never truly been able to reach pure communism. Someone who has too much power always steps in and throws a monkey wrench in the whole operation, right? The whole “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” type deal. When you give someone that temporary dictatorship, you can’t just expect them to do the right thing and willingly step down. That, I feel, was the real lesson of stuff like the USSR and China. I could be wrong though.
holy fuck, chill out hobbes
 

Chou Toshio

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The main problems I see in these types of ideologies and movements is that they place far too much faith in humanity to do the right thing. Humans are horrible, we are constantly murdering, pillaging, stealing, etc., and, especially in the case of something like Anarchism, I feel like humanity will always try and rise up above each other, to be superior in some way, if only because that’s just the way humans think. That is why no nation had never truly been able to reach pure communism. Someone who has too much power always steps in and throws a monkey wrench in the whole operation, right? The whole “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” type deal. When you give someone that temporary dictatorship, you can’t just expect them to do the right thing and willingly step down. That, I feel, was the real lesson of stuff like the USSR and China. I could be wrong though.
And yet... you cannot have working markets without humans being fairly intelligent and reasonable. Capitalism at its best is forced altruism, and it predicates itself on the wisdom of the collective; not the intelligence of the collective, the wisdom. It isn’t perfect but it is marvelously productive because it brings forth adaptive and evolving parts. (To be clear— the humans don’t evolve but the memes and software in their brains do, which lead to more effective behaviors). The motivations are better aligned with human nature.

The leftists are not wrong to have faith in humanity, but instead are asking humanity to do tasks it is bad at.
 
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Soul Fly

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got drunk, talked politics #pt2

Capitalism at its best is forced altruism, and it predicates itself on the wisdom of the collective; not the intelligence of the collective, the wisdom.
I disagree. That appears to be so naive.

Capitalism at best is a highly efficient machine, capable of gauging exchanges perfectly. It is amoral and hence incapable of factoring moral choices like altruism. I do not think any acceptable "wisdom" deems it morally sound to have a global market that is oriented towards increasing inequity, stunting post-colonial societies, and being integral to hegemonies of caste, race, gender etc. We have a market which is actively dissolving collective opinion-making because power is concentrated in the hands of a few. At that point it ceases to be wisdom, or collective. Altruism (true or otherwise) as an instinct can only manifest itself from conscious human effort, no economic system can compel it. Especially not Capitalism. At best you can only call it a cold calculating intelligence.
 

Chou Toshio

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got drunk, talked politics #pt2


I disagree. That appears to be so naive.

Capitalism at best is a highly efficient machine, capable of gauging exchanges perfectly. It is amoral and hence incapable of factoring moral choices like altruism. I do not think any acceptable "wisdom" deems it morally sound to have a global market that is oriented towards increasing inequity, stunting post-colonial societies, and being integral to hegemonies of caste, race, gender etc. We have a market which is actively dissolving collective opinion-making because power is concentrated in the hands of a few. At that point it ceases to be wisdom, or collective. Altruism (true or otherwise) as an instinct can only manifest itself from conscious human effort, no economic system can compel it. Especially not Capitalism. At best you can only call it a cold calculating intelligence.
Soul Fly— the misunderstandings come from my leaving a bunch of terms without definitions or the reasons behind them.

Capitalism as forced altruism— I mean this in the strictest, simplest terms that if you have a government with a monopoly on violence that prevents market players from stealing, coercing, and rent seeking, you leave a market where people must create value for others. The only way for self-preservation is to do something other people value. The reality of capitalism is that government and self-regulation are nowhere adequate to eliminating all theft/coercion/rent seeking/etc.— this is why I stipulated, “at its best”; which to be fair, is a state no more realistic than a communist utopia.

Hoever, capitalism is so far the fittest state in that it has survived— and there are still things we can do to government to make it work better, most notably around campaign finance reform and ethics.


Wisdom v Intelligence— I am borrowing wisdom as used by the liberal evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein in how he describes successful designs from evolution. Creatures such as Sharks and Dragonflies that have long survived selective pressures are not intelligently designed, but the design carries wisdom compared to creatures with less evolutionary history. Whenever there is reproduction, variation, selective pressures, there will be evolution— and while none of these designs that are “fit” are perfect, they can be marvelously effective and efficient.

Capitalism doesn’t require human intelligence to be perfect in decision making for production— it only requires the human wisdom that emerges organically through many transactions going through selective pressure to steer markets in a generally productive direction.

Capitalism depends on the type of wisdom a dragonfly has. Individual humans are better at the wisdom required by capitalism than the intelligence required to plan a whole market.
 
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Myzozoa

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Soul Fly— the misunderstandings come from my leaving a bunch of terms without definitions or the reasons behind them.


Hoever, capitalism is so far the fittest state in that it has survived— and there are still things we can do to government to make it work better, most notably around campaign finance reform and ethics.


Wisdom v Intelligence— I am borrowing wisdom as used by the liberal evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein in how he describes successful designs from evolution. Creatures such as Sharks and Dragonflies that have long survived selective pressures are not intelligently designed, but the design carries wisdom compared to creatures with less evolutionary history. Whenever there is reproduction, variation, selective pressures, there will be evolution— and while none of these designs that are “fit” are perfect, they can be marvelously effective and efficient.

Capitalism doesn’t require human intelligence to be perfect in decision making for production— it only requires that the human wisdom that emerges organically through many transactions going through selective pressure to move steer markets in a generally productive direction.

Capitalism depends on the type of wisdom a dragonfly has. Individual humans are better at the wisdom required by capitalism than the intelligence required to plan a whole market.
I disagree with all of this, it is astoundingly naive and if you ever thought one of my posts were confusing then note how mixed the metaphors are here. It veers into complete self-contradiction at the end, I find it hard to believe you understand any of the concepts you mention.

In the first place, if capitalism has been the fittest species so far that remains entirely contingent: if corporate-willed climate change and/or nuclear war make the entire planet uninhabitable there will be no capitalists governments and it will be clear all along that, although it may have been inevitable, capitalism was fatally flawed: 'capitalist intelligence' must always be intent on the reproduction of a hierarchy, instead of the survival of the human species or any of its members. When faced with crises whose possible consequences are the destruction of the entire species (and thus the capitalist system), capitalist systems' intelligences continue to be geared solely towards reproducing hierarchies even if the cost of that is indeed the loss of the entire species. The 'end of the world' becomes a zero-sum game that might be 'won', if everyone else only loses more.

Your metaphor is frustrating because by referring to capitalism as a species of government you obfuscate the fundamental way in which a capitalist system does not value the preservation of any human species members and further, the way in which industrial capitalism has actually destroyed the ecology of the the earth to the extent that it will inevitably lead to the end of intelligent capitalist life on earth due to mass extinction and or nuclear holocaust. (note: industrial communism is also be horrible for the earth).

Neo-liberal capitalism has not been able to address climate change in any significant way, thus there is much evidence that the human species is now far past the point that anything can be done to ensure the survival of liberal capitalist states in most of the world. I predict that except the UK, and Scandinavia, there will be no neoliberal capitalist states outside the global south by 2030... Continental Europe, Russia, and Canada will turn into powerful imperial states and most of the rest of the west will be destroyed from climate change, turned into basically whatever Mad Max: Fury Road style war-lord wasteland scenario you care to dream up, but I guess you're right: there will still be an economy, a market of some sort, so fear not for the markets.

My point is that these 'designs' aren't fit, they aren't 'marvelous' whatever that means (I think you could only be praising the efficiency and remorselessness with which this capitalist dragonfly intelligence disrupts ecological systems, or perhaps the concentration of glittering specie haha in the hands of so few is what you are suggesting is marvelous?). Maybe some people can marvel at a perfect doomsday plot, or the perfect way of disguising (wage-)slavery, but personally I can't seem to wrap my head around it. Based on the historical record, corporate industrial capitalism can inevitably rebuff any efforts to reign it in, but it always collapses or is co-opted by internal or external pressure. Industrial corporate capitalism is imperial and colonial, I think that is what you are missing about it: it has no end, it must always be searching to establish new markets and to stabilize control (through monopoly, the maintenance of which has lead to much violence, inefficiency, and injustice) of existing markets.
 

kilometerman

Banned deucer.
Neo-liberal capitalism has not been able to address climate change in any significant way, thus there is much evidence that the human species is now far past the point that anything can be done to ensure the survival of liberal capitalist states in most of the world. I predict that except the UK, and Scandinavia, there will be no neoliberal capitalist states outside the global south by 2030... Continental Europe, Russia, and Canada will turn into powerful imperial states and most of the rest of the west will be destroyed from climate change, turned into basically whatever Mad Max: Fury Road style war-lord wasteland scenario you care to dream up
I know I shouldn't give conspiracy theorists and fearmongerers attention but can you elaborate on this?
 
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Myzozoa

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There is no conspiracy, just an industrial capitalist system, as chou pointed out


Capitalism as forced altruism— I mean this in the strictest, simplest terms that if you have a government with a monopoly on violence that prevents market players from stealing, coercing, and rent seeking, you leave a market where people must create value for others. The only way for self-preservation is to do something other people value. The reality of capitalism is that government and self-regulation are nowhere adequate to eliminating all theft/coercion/rent seeking/etc.— this is why I stipulated, “at its best”; which to be fair, is a state no more realistic than a communist utopia.
 

kilometerman

Banned deucer.
There is no conspiracy, just an industrial capitalist system, as chou pointed out
If the world ends then the big scary capitalists will have nobody to sell anything to. Even if your "corporations are willing to destroy the planet and create an apocalypse" conspiracy is true, it would still never happen since the best way to make profits is having a non-apolocalypse world to sell your products in

itt people who think climate change is still a conspiracy theory and fearmongering...
Huh really? Where? I said that the claim "most of the rest of the west will be destroyed from climate change, turned into basically whatever Mad Max: Fury Road style war-lord wasteland scenario you care to dream up" was a conspiracy theory but I'm sure you actually read my post instead of looking for the quickest witty remark possible and realized that's not what I said
 

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