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capitalism > communism bc basically runs itself. didn't need to be introduced through cataclysmic violence. gradually evolved out of political realities and common law vs. conceived as an ad hoc solution to the world at large by a resentful, egg-head, patronizing, false prophet.
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Have you read Braudel or other early histories of capitalism? It's not quite that clean. In mercantilist pre-modern form it managed to bootstrap slavery and militarist colonialism without much of an ideological egghead air cover going.
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there's no "it". "it" does nothing, does not act. the strong subject the weak. the air cover was people pretending this was just or moral. more and more I think nobody ever believed that
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There is an it. Sorry, just because there is no subject that can be blamed doesn't mean there isn't a coherent complex system of mechanisms that exhibits emergent intentionality and has clear effects.
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Capitalism is an egregore. To accept how the mechanism works (which I do, as do you clearly) is to accept complicity in its effects. It is not so inscrutable that we can walk away from (say) the Bhopal gas tragedy with "oh, it's a thing that runs itself, nothing to be done"
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Capitalism is not "strong subject the weak". That is selling it really short, and is the mistake the NRxers make. It is actually much better than that. It actually drives strong and powerful emergent virtues (cf. McCloskey's "Bourgeois Virtues") that I think beat Darwin
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more nuance: these traders and merchants found they were more and more powerful, and used the power to bend politics / culture further towards their interests. call it leverage if not strength.
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my sense is this: "the way we live today is not new. the suffering we experience and witness, as subjects of political / economic realities, is a continuous feature of human experience."
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Heh, now we've traded positions. You're giving capitalism too little credit. The way we live now is drastically different from pre 1800, and the credit primarily goes to capitalism for immersing us in a mechanism that allows us to get away from conditions like serfdom etc
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I think the reason you seem to be arguing some sort of dark darwinist version of market superiority is that you appear to have thrown out the good bits of whig philosophy. Remember, capitalism post 1800 is Schumpterian, ie driven by science/tech progress.
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It pumps new wealth (more than material, idea capital). We're still subject to political/economic realities but that's not a stark zero sum thing. It's a continuously improving picture due to injection of knowledge. I have less need to oppress you because I have a laptop now.
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