Capitalism. For all the awfulness goodness gracious, quality of life has skyrocketed as we’ve figured it out. Parents almost never bury their children anymore, disabled folks who aren’t royalty have better lives than almost ever before, if you break a bone you can get it taken care of rather than have it heal poorly and cause pain for the rest of your life, almost no one gets literally crucified and most have access to clean drinking water in their house!!!
Yeah, we maybe don’t have it as good as our parents generation but goddamn we have it so much better than their parents and grandparents etc.
(I’d argue climate change is more a political problem than capitalism. A sane society would’ve put a carbon tax in place decades ago and let the free market sort it out. But we get into stupid political fights and the youth, who are most affected, don’t vote in primaries when it really matters.)
Literally all the benefits you mention are benefits of advancing science. All of those would still exist if there had been a global communist revolution in 1917…
The Soviets might have aspired to socialism early on, but slipped into totalitarian state capitalism.
Even so, they did start the space race from which a surprisingly large number of technical advances came. There are over a dozen advances in your cell phone that came from NASA research. That includes almost everything except the touch screen which was invented by the Smithsonian museum.
I studied early soviet history and Lenin was a total nutcase - the USSR was totalitarian from the start. It wasn’t a popular revolution, it was a hostile takeover of a nation
Unfortunately every example I’ve heard of communist and socialist countries is always followed by “unfortunately someone took over and they weren’t actually that”. Are there any countries since the industrial revolution that use actual communist or socialist economic systems and aren’t effective dictatorships?
It works the same for capitalism. I’m in the camp that says neither pure capitalism nor pure communism are systems that can realistically exist at all. In one system, the government usurps the power of capital and in the other capital usurps the power of government. They both end up totalitarian by different paths.
I’m libertarian, but that gets confusing since in America the right wing has twisted the definition beyond recognition. Libertarianism started as a left wing philosophy that uses the power of government and democracy to protect individual freedom from both government and capitalist tyranny.
Nice to meet someone in the wild who knows the difference between libertarian and the US definition of libertarian. I’ve often wondered why US politics takes perfectly decent words (conservative, socialist etc) and proceeds to redefine them at odds with the rest of the world. For example: team red’s loony religious right wing being called conservative or calling anybody from team blue left wing.
Specifically with politics the left-right spectrum is nothing to do with the surrounding culture. It’s objective rather than subjective. As a result to be classified “left” you cannot be occupying the “right” nor “central” section of the spectrum. Communist - socialist - centrist - conservative - fascist is an easy to remember five steps through the spectrum. Although obviously it is far more nuanced and complicated than that in reality.
Yes, as we’ve seen so many great examples of, none of these systems seem to work on their own at the national scale. I think a nice mix of socialism, capitalism, and libertarianism is the best we’ve had on a national scale so far. The United States was pretty fucking rad for half of the 20th century, and that’s when they were ramping up socialist policies after having just busted up unchecked late-stage capitalism, while still allowing plenty of personal liberty.
It’s really unfortunate how the far right in America has stolen the libertarian label. Now it just means Republican who likes drugs to most Americans, which isn’t at all what it is supposed to mean. Noam Chomsky has referred to himself as a libertarian and as an anarcho-syndacalist, and I think we all know he’s a damn site far from a Republican.
Let’s not forget they managed to match the Americans in the space race even though their space budget was so small they were using cardboard boxes as office furniture.
The USSR beat the US in every other stage of the space race.
First unmanned space vehicle (Sputnik), first manned space flight (Gagarin), first space walk (Alexei Leonov), first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova)… the list goes on, and I didn’t even have to look up any of this.
The space race didn’t end with the moon landings. The USSR launched the first manned space station program - which became crucial in the development of the ISS - and performed the first landings of probes on Mars and Venus. The space race effectively only ended when the Cold War ended, and I think historians could spend days arguing who actually ‘won’ it.
Ahhh yes, who can forget the glorious communist food sciences that led to the mass starvations of millions?!?
(Heck, have you ever seen that photo of Gorbachev in a supermarket, stunned by the variety and availability of food?)
Yeah, science tends to advance more quickly under capitalism. It’s not a coincidence that the scientific revolution and capitalism advanced hand in hand.
This post is completely absurd. All of these things have happened in spite of capitalism and they’ve developed simultaneously in non-capitalist states. We (mostly) have access to clean drinking water because of environmental activism that forced companies to stop dumping industrial waste in bodies of water. We have access to healthcare because activists maneuvered politically to ensure it became a right, not a privilege. That’s to say nothing of developing capitalist countries that offer none of these privileges to their people. Capitalism didn’t give us these things. If you spend any amount of time reading about the history of labor or the development of regulatory bodies, capital has hindered social progress wherever possible to avoid any restrictions or taxation. These things were demanded and fought for by the people they were affecting. Industry and finance are owed none of the credit.
And under capitalism, capital and labour are generally in conflict. Same way most capital owners are in conflict with each other (that’s basically the engine of growth.)
Saying that labour battled for these advancements is no more an indictment of capitalism than the fact that McDonalds battles with Wendys for revenue.
Nonsense. The op originally cited things like childhood mortality, water cleanliness, access to doctors. First of all, non-capitalist economies have seen equivalent change. Look at Cuba, more doctors per capita than any other country in the world. Look at China’s infant mortality decline from 1950. Second, capitalism has existed for a long time. Look at an era like late 19th century gilded age America. Huge wealth surpluses but they largely went to the holders of capital, not society at large. Workers were violently repressed, living conditions were abhorrent. Social progress was made through worker action and democratic legislation, not through the allocation of capital and investment. Third, capitalism has also sought to dismantle these things. Private equity is buying up hospitals and significantly harming health outcomes for patients. Corporate lobbyists, especially for fossil fuel extraction companies, have been trying to kill environmental protections for years. Attributing capitalism with improvements to our society confuses cause and effect.
Since we’ve “figured it out,” we’ve made sure that most people don’t have access to basic services unless they spend huge amounts of money and that the planet is in a state of disaster.
(How is this not a capitalist problem?Having the government imposed a carbon tax goes against the idea of a free market. Most of the politicians in power are capitalists.)
What services do you think people had for free earlier?
And you misunderstanding how capitalism works doesn’t mean a carbon tax is against a free market any more than rules againat pouring nuclear waste into rivers goes against a free market. A free market had all sorts of rules to protect us from the excesses of capitalism, that’s literally the entire point of anti-trust law, because the correct capitalist move for a company is to become a monopoly, which would be bad for consumers. Thus, we tame the excesses of capitalism.
Give it up OP, you won’t find an audience here. Just angry kids bitching about capitalism on their devices, made by capitalist economies. LOL, want to piss off some of these tankies? Point out that China was a struggling, failing mess until they allowed capitalism into their economy. China is poised to become the 21st century America.
FWIW, I’m with you. Capitalism is the best economic system yet, but it needs guardrails. In America we’ve stripped those out. Anti-trust law isn’t a thing any longer.
That’s what we tend to think, but we’ve been here before with the robber barons at the turn of the 20th century. Rockefeller had an inflation adjusted net worth of over $400 billion dollars, and the entire country was ruled by 4 men. The government was able to rectify that situation and launch America into a golden age for the country and middle class alike. So, I think an unregulated capitalist system is an enemy of the people. That’s probably what people mean when they say “late-stage” since they mean several massive companies have seized the entire market, but it can be reset and regulated when the people force the government to do its job, regardless of how late the stage is.
I kind of wish there weren’t so many extreme leftists on Lemmy. It’s not even that I’m far away from them, politically speaking, but there’s no way you can bring up Capitalism and not have angry people commenting AT you and downvotes galore.
I’m not even pro-captialism, I’m just not nearly as anti as they are and it is still nothing but hostility.
I said something positive about the USA a couple days ago and a moderator deleted my comment. The comment didn’t violate any rules, he just didn’t like it. The platform is what it is because it has been curated to be that way, not necessarily because everyone here feels that way. Comments that don’t align with the hive mind get deleted.
I’m pretty sure these are all coincidences. It seems like a stretch to say that these are all because of capitalism. And they’re definitely not because of free market capitalism.
Capitalism is what gives us our fast food and our smartphones.
It’s (usually) governments keeping capitalism in check that gives us things like clean drinking water and accessibility and equality.
I doubt capitalism is quite so dramatically responsible for the specific developments mentioned. While it does create incentives to develop certain technologies faster there were other structures that were developing things like medicines, sciences and so on before capitalism really took off and things like clean drinking water wasn’t really attached to capitalism except for supplying water company data that showed different companies having different death tolls to the people they serviced.
It’s important to put capitalism into context. There are a lot of ills but it’s a beast of different degrees. Someone running a business where they own the factory and equipment and pay employees for labor can be an efficient practice that can exist harmoniously in a fairly stable system and variations of capitalism are actually very old as it doesn’t strictly apply to all privately held property - just off of how labor and investment is structured in some instances. Unchecked it can be a beast that creates abuses.
False dichotomies are currently rampant with things like the philosophy of socialism being seen as anti-capitalist. It’s more accurate to say that socialism is a spectrum of interfacing with capitalism that offers a mixed system. It very rarely and only at it’s farthest end seeks to stamp out every single instance of private business ownership or investment banking. A lot of thought written aince it’s inception shows it’s more dynamic in the variable ways it puts checks on what can be considered privately owned resources. Things like offering protections of varying degrees for labour and managing resources to create public wealth are very much throughlines but total dissolution of private property isn’t really a given of the philosophy. The capitalism/libralism and socialism are often veiwed as diametrically opposed but its more useful to think of them as demi-linked on a scale that can tip from a fairly medium degree of regulated private ownership and capitalist tolerance to very public property and social ownership based structures. But basically it all still looks at resources through the lens of money and statehood existing.
Communism is more strictly anti-capitalist as it veiws all aspects of private property rights, businesses ownership, investment banking and even currency as things to move beyond. Things capitalism requires to function.
Individual property rights aren’t strictly capitalism based. A lot of our modern issues are bases around free market ideas but that is more traceable to the ideas of high individual property focused libralism… Which also isn’t historically all bad. At one point libralism was key to creating a more secular society based less off of privileges of patrelinieal titles… But left unchecked it creates a very misanthropic society that keeps claiming things as personal property which were once collective resources, pushing colonialism and creating new power structures just based off different metrics.
It’s important I think to retain a good solid idea of where the boundaries of different ideological sources and their historical precedents actually are and not nessisarily be too quick to state one or the other is all bad. The tendency has become that to be considered that ideology every example must be stretched to it’s utter extremes to be considered that ideology. There are shallow ends and deep ends of individual systems.
The history of capitalism in a more general sense is often more responsible for creating incentive to hurrying people to an early grave in the history of predatory patent medicine than it strictly is saving people. A lot of the history of scientific and technological development wasn’t and still isn’t driven strictly by capitalism from a funding and motive standpoint. Public money actually underlies a lot more of the significant developments… But capitalism does have a habit of driving underlying resource chains and more or less the profit driven arm of distribution - which while efficient generally causes a lot of social problems and damages.
Religion also is also not really connected directly with capitalism any more than anything else is. You can very easily have a theocratic capitalist society and generally speaking that was the norm for the early history of capitalism.
Thanks to capitalism, almost every aspect of society is being viewed through the lens of economics. Profit and loss, surplus and deficit. We’re privatising everything that promises to make a profit for someone, no matter the drawbacks - healthcare, education, water supply. Everything else is being neglected even destroyed. Politics is utterly beholden to economic concerns (read: the will of wealthy donors). Which is one of the reasons why we don’t have a carbon tax. The free market doesn’t work in a system where growth and profit trump everything. We’re literally running government like a business.
We literally have a pandemic going on in which millions of people have died completely preventable deaths in only a few years, but we didn’t try to prevent those deaths for economic concerns. We literally had capitalists tell us that it’s better to let those people die so we can save the economy. That’s just one example of how completely and utterly capitalism has fucked up our society.
Capitalism. For all the awfulness goodness gracious, quality of life has skyrocketed as we’ve figured it out. Parents almost never bury their children anymore, disabled folks who aren’t royalty have better lives than almost ever before, if you break a bone you can get it taken care of rather than have it heal poorly and cause pain for the rest of your life, almost no one gets literally crucified and most have access to clean drinking water in their house!!!
Yeah, we maybe don’t have it as good as our parents generation but goddamn we have it so much better than their parents and grandparents etc.
(I’d argue climate change is more a political problem than capitalism. A sane society would’ve put a carbon tax in place decades ago and let the free market sort it out. But we get into stupid political fights and the youth, who are most affected, don’t vote in primaries when it really matters.)
Literally all the benefits you mention are benefits of advancing science. All of those would still exist if there had been a global communist revolution in 1917…
Because the Soviets were so well known for their social and technological innovations, right?
The Soviets might have aspired to socialism early on, but slipped into totalitarian state capitalism.
Even so, they did start the space race from which a surprisingly large number of technical advances came. There are over a dozen advances in your cell phone that came from NASA research. That includes almost everything except the touch screen which was invented by the Smithsonian museum.
I studied early soviet history and Lenin was a total nutcase - the USSR was totalitarian from the start. It wasn’t a popular revolution, it was a hostile takeover of a nation
Unfortunately every example I’ve heard of communist and socialist countries is always followed by “unfortunately someone took over and they weren’t actually that”. Are there any countries since the industrial revolution that use actual communist or socialist economic systems and aren’t effective dictatorships?
It works the same for capitalism. I’m in the camp that says neither pure capitalism nor pure communism are systems that can realistically exist at all. In one system, the government usurps the power of capital and in the other capital usurps the power of government. They both end up totalitarian by different paths.
I’m libertarian, but that gets confusing since in America the right wing has twisted the definition beyond recognition. Libertarianism started as a left wing philosophy that uses the power of government and democracy to protect individual freedom from both government and capitalist tyranny.
Nice to meet someone in the wild who knows the difference between libertarian and the US definition of libertarian. I’ve often wondered why US politics takes perfectly decent words (conservative, socialist etc) and proceeds to redefine them at odds with the rest of the world. For example: team red’s loony religious right wing being called conservative or calling anybody from team blue left wing.
Something something left and right are relative to the surrounding culture?
Specifically with politics the left-right spectrum is nothing to do with the surrounding culture. It’s objective rather than subjective. As a result to be classified “left” you cannot be occupying the “right” nor “central” section of the spectrum. Communist - socialist - centrist - conservative - fascist is an easy to remember five steps through the spectrum. Although obviously it is far more nuanced and complicated than that in reality.
Yes, as we’ve seen so many great examples of, none of these systems seem to work on their own at the national scale. I think a nice mix of socialism, capitalism, and libertarianism is the best we’ve had on a national scale so far. The United States was pretty fucking rad for half of the 20th century, and that’s when they were ramping up socialist policies after having just busted up unchecked late-stage capitalism, while still allowing plenty of personal liberty.
It’s really unfortunate how the far right in America has stolen the libertarian label. Now it just means Republican who likes drugs to most Americans, which isn’t at all what it is supposed to mean. Noam Chomsky has referred to himself as a libertarian and as an anarcho-syndacalist, and I think we all know he’s a damn site far from a Republican.
nope
Let’s not forget they managed to match the Americans in the space race even though their space budget was so small they were using cardboard boxes as office furniture.
I don’t remember the USSR making it to the moon first.
The USSR beat the US in every other stage of the space race.
First unmanned space vehicle (Sputnik), first manned space flight (Gagarin), first space walk (Alexei Leonov), first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova)… the list goes on, and I didn’t even have to look up any of this.
Yet they still lost the space race.
The space race didn’t end with the moon landings. The USSR launched the first manned space station program - which became crucial in the development of the ISS - and performed the first landings of probes on Mars and Venus. The space race effectively only ended when the Cold War ended, and I think historians could spend days arguing who actually ‘won’ it.
Do you remember them making it to space first?
I remember them sending a dog to starve to death in space
And I remember decades of American crews arriving at the ISS in vehicles labelled ‘Soyuz’.
ISS was pretty far along. Let’s talk Skylab and Space Shuttle.
Ahhh yes, who can forget the glorious communist food sciences that led to the mass starvations of millions?!?
(Heck, have you ever seen that photo of Gorbachev in a supermarket, stunned by the variety and availability of food?)
Yeah, science tends to advance more quickly under capitalism. It’s not a coincidence that the scientific revolution and capitalism advanced hand in hand.
This post is completely absurd. All of these things have happened in spite of capitalism and they’ve developed simultaneously in non-capitalist states. We (mostly) have access to clean drinking water because of environmental activism that forced companies to stop dumping industrial waste in bodies of water. We have access to healthcare because activists maneuvered politically to ensure it became a right, not a privilege. That’s to say nothing of developing capitalist countries that offer none of these privileges to their people. Capitalism didn’t give us these things. If you spend any amount of time reading about the history of labor or the development of regulatory bodies, capital has hindered social progress wherever possible to avoid any restrictions or taxation. These things were demanded and fought for by the people they were affecting. Industry and finance are owed none of the credit.
You are confusing capital with capitalism.
No I’m not. Capital usually refers to the individuals or corporate bodies that control or direct investment. Capital is the anticident to capitalism.
And under capitalism, capital and labour are generally in conflict. Same way most capital owners are in conflict with each other (that’s basically the engine of growth.)
Saying that labour battled for these advancements is no more an indictment of capitalism than the fact that McDonalds battles with Wendys for revenue.
I’m not indicting capitalism. My point was that capitalism isn’t responsible for the last century of social improvement.
But it is, because capitalism produces enormous amounts of wealth and without that wealth we wouldn’t have had those improvements.
Nonsense. The op originally cited things like childhood mortality, water cleanliness, access to doctors. First of all, non-capitalist economies have seen equivalent change. Look at Cuba, more doctors per capita than any other country in the world. Look at China’s infant mortality decline from 1950. Second, capitalism has existed for a long time. Look at an era like late 19th century gilded age America. Huge wealth surpluses but they largely went to the holders of capital, not society at large. Workers were violently repressed, living conditions were abhorrent. Social progress was made through worker action and democratic legislation, not through the allocation of capital and investment. Third, capitalism has also sought to dismantle these things. Private equity is buying up hospitals and significantly harming health outcomes for patients. Corporate lobbyists, especially for fossil fuel extraction companies, have been trying to kill environmental protections for years. Attributing capitalism with improvements to our society confuses cause and effect.
Since we’ve “figured it out,” we’ve made sure that most people don’t have access to basic services unless they spend huge amounts of money and that the planet is in a state of disaster.
(How is this not a capitalist problem?Having the government imposed a carbon tax goes against the idea of a free market. Most of the politicians in power are capitalists.)
What services do you think people had for free earlier?
And you misunderstanding how capitalism works doesn’t mean a carbon tax is against a free market any more than rules againat pouring nuclear waste into rivers goes against a free market. A free market had all sorts of rules to protect us from the excesses of capitalism, that’s literally the entire point of anti-trust law, because the correct capitalist move for a company is to become a monopoly, which would be bad for consumers. Thus, we tame the excesses of capitalism.
Give it up OP, you won’t find an audience here. Just angry kids bitching about capitalism on their devices, made by capitalist economies. LOL, want to piss off some of these tankies? Point out that China was a struggling, failing mess until they allowed capitalism into their economy. China is poised to become the 21st century America.
FWIW, I’m with you. Capitalism is the best economic system yet, but it needs guardrails. In America we’ve stripped those out. Anti-trust law isn’t a thing any longer.
The National Association of Realtors just got hit with a 4 billion dollar anti-trust lawsuit that they settled, and made sweeping changes to the industry. The entire real estate industry is about to undergo massive changes that will drive half the realtors out of the industry.
Capitalism can be great, but late stage capitalism is the enemy of people.
That’s what we tend to think, but we’ve been here before with the robber barons at the turn of the 20th century. Rockefeller had an inflation adjusted net worth of over $400 billion dollars, and the entire country was ruled by 4 men. The government was able to rectify that situation and launch America into a golden age for the country and middle class alike. So, I think an unregulated capitalist system is an enemy of the people. That’s probably what people mean when they say “late-stage” since they mean several massive companies have seized the entire market, but it can be reset and regulated when the people force the government to do its job, regardless of how late the stage is.
I kind of wish there weren’t so many extreme leftists on Lemmy. It’s not even that I’m far away from them, politically speaking, but there’s no way you can bring up Capitalism and not have angry people commenting AT you and downvotes galore.
I’m not even pro-captialism, I’m just not nearly as anti as they are and it is still nothing but hostility.
I said something positive about the USA a couple days ago and a moderator deleted my comment. The comment didn’t violate any rules, he just didn’t like it. The platform is what it is because it has been curated to be that way, not necessarily because everyone here feels that way. Comments that don’t align with the hive mind get deleted.
I’m pretty sure these are all coincidences. It seems like a stretch to say that these are all because of capitalism. And they’re definitely not because of free market capitalism.
Capitalism is what gives us our fast food and our smartphones.
It’s (usually) governments keeping capitalism in check that gives us things like clean drinking water and accessibility and equality.
I doubt capitalism is quite so dramatically responsible for the specific developments mentioned. While it does create incentives to develop certain technologies faster there were other structures that were developing things like medicines, sciences and so on before capitalism really took off and things like clean drinking water wasn’t really attached to capitalism except for supplying water company data that showed different companies having different death tolls to the people they serviced.
It’s important to put capitalism into context. There are a lot of ills but it’s a beast of different degrees. Someone running a business where they own the factory and equipment and pay employees for labor can be an efficient practice that can exist harmoniously in a fairly stable system and variations of capitalism are actually very old as it doesn’t strictly apply to all privately held property - just off of how labor and investment is structured in some instances. Unchecked it can be a beast that creates abuses.
False dichotomies are currently rampant with things like the philosophy of socialism being seen as anti-capitalist. It’s more accurate to say that socialism is a spectrum of interfacing with capitalism that offers a mixed system. It very rarely and only at it’s farthest end seeks to stamp out every single instance of private business ownership or investment banking. A lot of thought written aince it’s inception shows it’s more dynamic in the variable ways it puts checks on what can be considered privately owned resources. Things like offering protections of varying degrees for labour and managing resources to create public wealth are very much throughlines but total dissolution of private property isn’t really a given of the philosophy. The capitalism/libralism and socialism are often veiwed as diametrically opposed but its more useful to think of them as demi-linked on a scale that can tip from a fairly medium degree of regulated private ownership and capitalist tolerance to very public property and social ownership based structures. But basically it all still looks at resources through the lens of money and statehood existing.
Communism is more strictly anti-capitalist as it veiws all aspects of private property rights, businesses ownership, investment banking and even currency as things to move beyond. Things capitalism requires to function.
Individual property rights aren’t strictly capitalism based. A lot of our modern issues are bases around free market ideas but that is more traceable to the ideas of high individual property focused libralism… Which also isn’t historically all bad. At one point libralism was key to creating a more secular society based less off of privileges of patrelinieal titles… But left unchecked it creates a very misanthropic society that keeps claiming things as personal property which were once collective resources, pushing colonialism and creating new power structures just based off different metrics.
It’s important I think to retain a good solid idea of where the boundaries of different ideological sources and their historical precedents actually are and not nessisarily be too quick to state one or the other is all bad. The tendency has become that to be considered that ideology every example must be stretched to it’s utter extremes to be considered that ideology. There are shallow ends and deep ends of individual systems.
The history of capitalism in a more general sense is often more responsible for creating incentive to hurrying people to an early grave in the history of predatory patent medicine than it strictly is saving people. A lot of the history of scientific and technological development wasn’t and still isn’t driven strictly by capitalism from a funding and motive standpoint. Public money actually underlies a lot more of the significant developments… But capitalism does have a habit of driving underlying resource chains and more or less the profit driven arm of distribution - which while efficient generally causes a lot of social problems and damages.
Religion also is also not really connected directly with capitalism any more than anything else is. You can very easily have a theocratic capitalist society and generally speaking that was the norm for the early history of capitalism.
Thanks to capitalism, almost every aspect of society is being viewed through the lens of economics. Profit and loss, surplus and deficit. We’re privatising everything that promises to make a profit for someone, no matter the drawbacks - healthcare, education, water supply. Everything else is being neglected even destroyed. Politics is utterly beholden to economic concerns (read: the will of wealthy donors). Which is one of the reasons why we don’t have a carbon tax. The free market doesn’t work in a system where growth and profit trump everything. We’re literally running government like a business.
We literally have a pandemic going on in which millions of people have died completely preventable deaths in only a few years, but we didn’t try to prevent those deaths for economic concerns. We literally had capitalists tell us that it’s better to let those people die so we can save the economy. That’s just one example of how completely and utterly capitalism has fucked up our society.
But sure, climate change is a political problem.