>Why the only alternatives to capitalism that come to mind are always China and Gulags? Is there absolutely nothing else we can imagine?
This is precisely Mark Fisher's argument in Capitalist Realism. Capitalist realism dictates that the majority of people have become incapable of imagining something outside of a kind of binary choice. There can't be an alternate future, because we can't imagine it in the first place. This was bessed summed up, rather ironically, by Thatcher: "there is no alternative".
Which is sad because unions and trust busting showed that regulated capitalism was better than the Ayn Rand flavor so popular now. (Yay child gig economy.)
But yeah, those are the only places where markets are off-limits. If you try to make a totalizing system that forbids people the right to buy or sell (say, on your way to burning man or after church), you'd need gulags to control the social unrest. People like to buy stuff and sell stuff.
> Why the only alternatives to capitalism that come to mind are always China and Gulags? Is there absolutely nothing else we can imagine?
The answer is that it's effective propaganda. Starvation and gulags are terrible evils. If you can plant the idea in someone's mind that they are what you get when a society questions capitalism, then you've created a zealous foot-soldier for capitalism who feels he's fighting for good against evil.
Someone who zealously fights starvation and gulags is fighting for good against evil, but those were mainly the result of particular alternatives to capitalism: radical Soviet-style central planning and dictatorship. That's not the only alternative: there are others, including many that haven't been thought of yet. Also, it's not like capitalism is over and we know how it ends. Maybe it too will find its way to starvation and gulags.
I believe that both capitalism and communism are broken because of broken brains of people who are "implementing" them. We need enlightened, self-organized people (no "leaders" or "representatives") as a starting point for any successful implementation of a Utopia (whatever -ism you like to call it). But no current system is going to support enlightenment of people because it would mean its end.
Self organizing doesn't work because everyone wants what's best for themselves. Every grassroots activity has figureheads and leaders. Hierarchy is literally older than civilisation and observed in most animal life.
While this is a familiar Peterson talking point, society has in many ways sublimated our nature for the broader collective good. Addressing the problems of capitalism would be another step in that progress.
Nah, I disagree. Capitalism is the most natural system because it accepts what we are - selfish beings in a competitive environment. If we didn't specialize and trade skills/products/services, we'd still be a hunter-gatherer species. The system is what kept us going, not what holds us back. It only looks like oppression in 2020 because of how easy the rest of life is.
There are a lot of good arguments and suggestive evidence that the exact opposite is true: that we were competitive in our environment not because we were selfish, but because we were social, altruistic, caring, supportive.
Capitalism cannot be the most natural system simply because it's only barely 300 years old. Before that, there was a whole slew of different ways to organize production and distribution. Primitive tribal communes, large tribal unions, agricultural slavery, feudalisms of varying shapes... and that's only in Europe.
Regardless of the obvious political quackery downvoting my original comment, this is what I was pointing out: we're not as self-prioritizing as we are convenience-prioritizing. Capitalism isn't the only solution, just like how any given criticism of the current implementation of capitalism isn't only indicative of a problem intrinsic to capitalism. The problem is we don't have effective checks and balances to over-conveniencing ourselves.
I believe that's the problem with capitalism as it is today. Whomever owns the means of production has literally zero constraints on maximizing their convenience. The expense ends up drastically inconveniencing, to the point of being a barrier to access, everyone who doesn't own the means of production.
> Whomever owns the means of production has literally zero constraints on maximizing their convenience. The expense ends up drastically inconveniencing, to the point of being a barrier to access, everyone who doesn't own the means of production.
maybe cooperatives are a potential solution to that issue?
Capitalism is fine, just don't treat it as a religion (looking sternly at you, HN crowd) and know that it needs to be fixed from time to time. We've been patching capitalism for centuries if not millennia: abolishing indentured servitude, environmental protection, public education, workers' rights, market regulations...
All that needs to be done is to properly mandate maximum work hours (no overtime even if the worker is willing).
The Working Environment Act defines working hours as time when the employee is at the disposal of the employer. The time the employee is not at the disposal of the employer is referred to as off-duty time.
There are limits for how much you may work per 24-hour day and per week. These limits are laid down in the Working Environment Act, but may also be regulated by your employment contract and by any collective agreements.
The limits prescribed by the Working Environment Act for normal working hours are:
9 hours per 24 hours
40 hours per 7 days
If you work shifts, nights or Sundays, normal working hours are 38 or 36 hours a week. The duration and disposition of the daily and weekly working hours must be stated in your employment contract.
The employer shall keep an account of the employee’s working hours.
Calculation on the basis of a fixed average
The normal working hours may be calculated on the basis of a fixed average. This means that you may work more than the limit for normal working hours during certain periods in exchange for working correspondingly shorter hours during other periods. The average number of hours worked must be within the limits for normal working hours.
I'm pretty hardcore capitalist but I also have started to think more about the ideas that go under the heading "market society" -- namely, that everything has its price, that we'll trade away all kinds of things, family time, vacation, meals with friends, etc. for some kind of price. That everything can be bought and sold, that everything has its price.
Some things have to remain outside the realm of market exchange. Marriage is a good example. You just can't put a price on it. Ditto for kids, and a lot of other highly meaningful life experiences.
I think the problem is thinking that markets and commerce are the whole story. They aren't. There's just so much more to life: serving others, community, family. None of this is anti-capitalist per se.
The quote starts with "In a sane world" and from the rest of the quote we can see that we're not living in such world. Isn't that enough to conclude that the (most of the) world is not sane, ie insane?
A major function of capitalism is to direct human attention towards utilitarian valuation, which produces the growth-and-exploitation formula we are familiar with: more stuff is made, more land is developed, but it is often done by overfitting to market prices.
But increasingly we are turning the valuation process over to algorithms, sensors, and other precision instruments. If we extrapolate this onwards, the market exchange will become vestigial in not that many years: the algorithms involved will already know how much can be sustainably produced, consumed, transported and trashed, and there will be known bounds to personal and societal consumption relative to planetary capacity. At that point, transition away from capitalism will seem obvious. And we might be closer to this point than it looks.
But what will happen when we get to that point? What world will these algorithms create for us? Will it be the utopia of Earth in Star Trek? Or will it be a "Disneyland with no children"[0], once economy becomes fully self-contained and eliminates its dependency on humans, leaving Earth to be inherited by machines endlessly working and trading, with no sentient being to see it or enjoy the fruits of that labor?
--
[0] - A phrase coined by Nick Bostrom, in "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies":
"We could imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children."
> At that point, transition away from capitalism will seem obvious.
I expect the global population to be reduced and/or reprogrammed over time (via genetic interventions) long before I expect techno-capitalist industrial society to implode.
The horror that is possible with technology is essentially unbounded, and any discomfort caused to humans can be overcome through drugs and similar measures. Hell, we're already medicating people in first-world economies in extraordinary numbers.
