Neither was making things better for humans. The point of the economy is for capital to reproduce itself, humans being taken care of is an accidental side effect because capital doesn't like a torch mob very much.

No, in any non-totalitarian society, humans being taken care of is the main effect. In a market of buyers and sellers, it is only by making the buyer better off that the seller survives. As Smith said over 200 years ago, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest."

And humans are literally just collections of cells, does that mean you have no wants and that your pancreas is running the show?

It's very arrogant to think that only humans have desires. Nations have desires, institutions have desires, and capital itself has a lot of desires. Lots of scary entities out there that have desires.

When capital is unhappy with capital owners it's prone to fire all of them, reconfigure entire industries, eliminate entire sectors of human activity, redraw nation-states and in the not so distant future probably reconfigure human bodies.

Of all the firms in human existence maybe a fraction of a percent are still around. You think the 'owners' of capital wanted that to happen? Capital keeps tagging along, individual actors, not so much. Give it another few decades and you may interact with a lot of firms that have no human working for it at all, and possibly not even one owning it.

This seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what people mean when they refer to organizations as entities. One might group together the common interests of an organization as a whole for the sake of simplifying discussion, but that in no way implies that an organization is actually some kind of inhuman entity that functions without humans. When people say "the government wants X" or "Britain doesn't like Y", they don't mean it literally. Government is nothing without the human politicians and officials it's comprised of and/or the human citizens that recognize its authority. A hundred dollar bill is worth nothing without humans to want it and the things it can buy. Suggesting that capitalism can produce non-human economic value contradicts the most basic definition of economic value.

And no, I don't think only humans have desires, but the capitalist economy we have created is based on human desires. Horses clearly have desires too, but thus far they have not invented an economy to serve horse desires. It wasn't non-existent horse capitalism that replaced horses, it was human capitalism.

> Of all the firms in human existence maybe a fraction of a percent are still around. You think the 'owners' of capital wanted that to happen?

Yes actually, I don't know why you think that's somehow undesirable. A lot of firms fail to adapt to human desires & needs so humans drop them. I'm honestly confused at the implication that capital owners want a lot of "firms" to exist when they're only a means to an end.

the same applies to you. You're a system of competing interests which we call "themacguffinman" solely for the purpose of simplification. You're nothing but an organisation of cells, systems and drives and the interaction of a lot of parts that we slap a label on for practical purposes. When we say something like "Britain likes X" we actually should take it literally, because Britain is a very real thing. Just like your body sends immune cells to kill themselves to fend off a disease, Britain sends her soldiers to die for a quasi empty rock off the coast of Argentina. Britain has territory, but none of her citizens have one. Britain has interests that are older and different than the interests of any of her people.

The world actually makes a lot more sense when you let go of the very atavistic idea that humans have any sort of special ontological status or have some level of realness that other entities don't have, it's just systems all the way up and down.

People actually intuitively understand this when they discuss the so called 'AI alignment problem'. They just don't understand that all the AIs are already around and we're solving alignment problems with entities with non-human desires and interests all day already.

Well no, Britain's interests are literally and technically and metaphorically and whatever-ly not older than the interests of any of her people. Britain did not exist in any way, shape, or form before any of her people. The humans of Britain sent other humans of Britain to die for the sake of humans of Britain. Britain doesn't have territory, the rulers and leaders of Britain have territory. Someone always benefits.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of systems thinking. It can be useful to describe the collective interests of an organization as a whole system, but they're still human interests. Sending immune cells to kill themselves to fend off a disease is still in the interests of cells, just like the humans of Britain sending humans to die in a war is still in the interests of humans. And just like humans can't have interests without cells, organizations and economies can't have interests without humans.

I'm also not saying that humans are special or unique in the way that they can have interests, I'm saying that the capitalist economy we live in is defined by human interests and cannot somehow become non-human. Human interests will always be involved because that's how we define the system of capitalism & economy. Suggesting that our economy could somehow replace all humans makes as much sense to me as suggesting that a body of water could some day replace all of its H2O molecules.

I'm going to go ahead and say that of course increasing inequality caused by capitalism is a major concern for many humans which seems to be what you're getting at. This talk of Britain & capitalism functioning without humans is distractingly nonsensical. No, capitalism can't get rid of humans because a capitalist economy without humans is not a capitalist economy. No, the importance of horses is not comparable to the importance of humans to a system literally defined by interactions between humans.

I think you're missing the point that if necessary, the humans involved can be swapped out until ones with the 'right' desires are in place.

> but that in no way implies that an organization is actually some kind of inhuman entity that functions without humans.

An organization doesn't have to be capable of functioning without humans to be an inhuman entity with inhuman motivations and so on. The human components just need to be fungible and more easily steered by tweaking incentives etc. than the organization is.

For that matter, epiphenomena like regulatory capture really don't occur at an individual level much, but largely at the interface between governments/agencies and corporations, or even higher-level entities like industry trade groups and consortia.

I don't see why an unemployable horse would be considered any differently from an unemployable human to the cold profit motive.

Sometimes that leads to really unfortunate outcomes (in my view) like Trump and Brexit, but those things were the result of genuine democratic processes and driven by the choices of individual voters. That's true generally in the democratic world too.

It may be convenient to blame the state of the world on shadowy anti-democratic forces running things from the shadows, because that can be used to de-legitimise the current state of the democratic world, but I'm afraid that's self-delusion. This is the world we have chosen through a process of consensus and compromise.

I think that most technology has made life easier if not measurably better for humans. Medicine, machinery, transportation. Those things dont make life better for people? I suppose the cynical take could be that it is for the 'ruling class' but I think the measured take is that even the lower rungs of society have at least some access to better jobs than they did 100 years ago.

What is the incentive for "wasting resources on the lower rungs of society" when you don't need them as workers anymore?

You kind of can though. The economy cares about no one, it cares only about capital. And as far as capital is concerned, humans are just fancy horses. Humans are expenses that need minimizing to the point of zeroing. In a perfectly efficient capitalist economy, no one pays any humans for anything ever.