Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I object to the term "capitalism". The correct term is "classical liberal" (modern liberals are something else with very little in common). I boost capitalism because it is a result of freedom, and that also informs when I will limit my support for capitalism.
Capitalism isn't a result of freedom at all, it's actually the opposite. There are many examples I could give, but a simple one is land. There was a time where nobody could own land, it was considered a shared, public resource, that anyone could make use of. Under capitalism, land is made private, and restricted people from roaming there. The freedom of one person to own land is inherently taking away the freedom of others to roam or use that land.
Capitalism incentivizes hoarding as much wealth and power into as few hands as possible, encourages our most selfish, anti-cooperative impulses, hampers innovation, and inevitably leads to fascism.
And communism is worse. China boasts a greater population percentage of poor than America does. And has the same 1% controlling the most wealth.
I'm an anarchist. I advocate for anarchism. I'm not a fan of China at all. But Capitalism is way worse than anything China is doing. Capitalism is why we have kids working in sweat shops, conflict minerals being mined in war-torn countries, colonialism, slavery, and fascism. World War 2 was directly caused by capitalism.
https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/index.html
As a rule, I generally don’t take seriously, anything that follows:
…unless it’s followed by the rest of the lyrics.
In his book, Anger is an Energy, Johnny Rotten says:
Neat.
Enjoy!
I'm not a fan of the Sex Pistols, I'm way too young really, I assumed you were!
The music was great! The politics were gimmicky. So not much has really changed.
So are you like, rich or something?
The foundation of classical liberalism is "life liberty and property". The ability to own land is a large part of that.
There is no capitalist society, but many of them are versions of classical liberal - while the two have much in common there is a major difference at the core.
Every classical liberal society is also inherently capitalist. If your society is based around private ownership of the means of production and generating profit, you've got a capitalist society. Capitalism is the bedrock underlying liberalism. You're basically saying "we do not drive motor vehicles, we drive cars"
You have the relation backward. Liberalism underlies capitalism.
Capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with liberal values. If the rights of the individual and equality are important to you, then you should oppose capitalism, because it is responsible for creating the greatest inequality humanity has ever seen, and for creating the most oppressive regimes the world has ever seen. Fascism is capitalism taken to it's logical conclusion.
I think you're probably right about this, as evidenced by...well, everything. But can you flesh this thought out, if it's something you've thought about in detail? It's just interesting to me to read more on that connection.
Thanks for the question, I'd be happy to expand a little bit - the basics of it go something like this: the more money you have, the easier it is to accumulate more money. Money can be used to purchase goods and services, including all sorts of propaganda. Over time, wealth will concentrate in fewer and fewer hands. This leads to progressively worse and worse inequality. This inequality is most harshly felt by the most vulnerable to begin with, but eventually it begins to impact more and more of the working class. As the working class begins to push back against the growing inequality, those in power are incentivized to shift the blame onto others, because they don't want to give up their wealth and power. The wealthy will use their institutional power, their control over media apparatus, etc. to push a narrative that the problems felt by the working classes are caused by [whoever]. They also push all sorts of propaganda to divide the working class into smaller and smaller sub-groups - if you've seen stories in the news about how Millenials/Boomers/GenZ are ruining X/Y/Z, that's an easy example of the ruling class sowing division among the working class. Eventually, as the inequality grows worse and worse, the poor suckers who bought into the ruling class's propaganda begin to demand more and more extreme solutions to their problems - which obviously aren't improving, because [whoever] isn't actually responsible for their problems, it's the ruling class.
Laws can't solve this problem, because lawmakers can be bought. Elections can't solve this problem either, because the problems are so deeply entrenched that even if we managed to elect leaders that truly do represent us, the ruling class have so much institutional power in other instruments of the state - the military, the police, the judiciary, the media, the education system, the civil service, the intelligence services (CIA, FBI, NSA, et al.) and so on - are controlled, directly or indirectly, by the ruling class. This is why we need a social revolution, we need to throw off the ruling class and never re-establish it. If there are rulers, then there will always be oppression.
I'd recommend taking a look at an anarchist FAQ for more information about the problems in society and how anarchism can solve them.
Again, I'm a clasical liberal. capitalism is a strawman so you can make arguements like the above. In some ways what I support looks like capitalism but only because and where it is a concequense of clasical liberalism.
note that I need to specify clasical liberal above. Modern liberals are different form us in many complev ways
The inevitable outcome of classical liberalism is fascism. A free market means the accumulation of wealth into fewer and fewer hands becomes inevitable. Then liberalism dies and is replaced by corporatiam. Classical liberalism is propaganda for capitalism. They made you a slave and called it freedom. And you love it.
Liberalism is a type of capitalism. It’s hard for me to understand why people can’t grasp this concept. It’s not a difficult one.
You have it backwards. liberalism came first and underlies capitalism.
the difierence is important because we e do capitalism because of liberalism - freedon - and not a devotion to capital.
You appear to be using the term "capitalism" in a confusing way. From etymonline:
Words can change meaning and all that, but when people complain about capitalism, they don't mean what you're talking about. You seem to mean something like "well-regulated free market", and other people mean "broken, exploitative system that worships greed"
That is why I object to capitalism - it is defined to be whatever socialists want to demean without reguard if that is even what is happening, if it is acceptable because of other benefits. It assumes capitalists are fine with corruption.
When in reality we are liberals who understand rule of law.