If you want to know what capitalism in a particular time/place looked like, say America 1787-1830 (constitution to Andrew Jackson). 3 questions tell you the answer: 1. What other explicit ideologies existed? 2. What was the shortfall in trust they faced? 3. What trust existed?
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“Capitalism” = how people with trust capital but cynical about the idealism of extant ideologies actually act in coordination. What unifies them is skepticism of grand visions. What empowers them is their mutual trust. So they pay lip service to ideologies and get on with life.
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The upside is, capitalists are always shipping and learning by shipping, never still. Whereas ideolgues are often frozen into either inaction or overt destruction because they lack the trust reserves to actually act on their ideas about how society ought to work.
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The downside: sometimes they ship slaves, guns, or drugs, which they’d rather forget. To the extent capitalism has any ideology and historic continuity, it lies in forgetting bad parts and only remembering when it shipped net good stuff — food firvthe hungry, medicines, iPhones.
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Like politics, capitalism and commerce are arts and sciences of the possible. And sometimes the only possible things are ugly, bad things. The alternative to doing those things is doing nothing, or doing purely negative things, which is anathema to people who want to “ship” stuff
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I have an always-be-shipping mentality. If I can’t write good stuff, I shitpost on Twitter. Behaviorally I’m a revealed capitalist. Fortunately with every passing century, the number of good things available to do increases and the excuses for doing bad things get flimsier.
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Increasingly the only reason to ship bad things is that you actually want to. Not because the alternative is inaction or pure destruction. This is one reason “good” capitalism requires being on the technological frontier where the good optionality is at its highest.
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The more you’re stick in the past technologically, the more your revealed capitalism will be ugly and the reflection of the lower optionality of the post. This is an underappreciated aspect of the evil of trump. He’s 90% stuck in steam and phone and TV era tech. Literally.
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The medium is the message. He keeps referring to his MIT uncle. His reason for preferring steam catapults for aircraft carriers over EM is an aesthetic preference for steam, the way kids like steam locomotives. Is it any wonder his revealed capitalism is ~1830s+1950s?
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Capitalism is more a behavioral disposition (restlessness for shipping) than a set of beliefs. The main way it is good or evil is generally being at or behind the technological frontier of maximal possibilities.
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Hmm just realized my account here is close in spirit to Zizek’s notion of cynicism as ideology. http://pujoldotcom.com/2011/11/21/slavoj-zizek-cynicism-as-a-form-of-ideology-concept-of-kynicism/ …
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Okay getting more convinced of this based on replies exchanges. Capitalism as an ideology is a category error. It’s like calling politics an ideology. Politics is a class of behaviors that may include ideologically prescribed and constrained ones but is much larger.
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There are times when politics gets confined to a set of possibilities, like “electrical democracy” but the thing itself is what Kevin Spacey does in House of Cards or what Cardinal Richelieu did in 1600s France. It’s a set of behaviors within a theater. They “shipped politics”
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