I’ve always found these quotes a tad ridiculous. The two ways we’ve discovered to allocate jobs are labour markets and central planning. People arguing that capitalism is antithetical to freedom have to make the case that a government deciding for you what your job should be is more free than the status quo. They fail to even attempt to do so, possibly because most people would find such arguments ridiculous when it’s explicitly spelled out.

Capitalism has plenty of flaws but alternative mechanisms for allocating labour seem far more against freedom.

Labour markets != Capitalism. I suspect Varoufakis would be more amenable to labour markets regulated so that labour without ownership is not legal, which would not be capitalism.

There is no reason for the government to decide for you what your job is. Even the USSR since the 60s didn't have such a system. You would have to work for a set amount of years for a set job if you wanted to get an advanced education. After that, you were able to go look for available jobs and choose which one you wanted. Which is just a price-controlled labour market.

I doubt very much that the market socialist Varoufakis would want a more restrictive labour market than that of the USSR, so your accusation really seems to be a strawman.

> I suspect Varoufakis would be more amenable to labour markets regulated so that labour without ownership is not legal, which would not be capitalism

He pretty much stated it in one of his answers: he'd want to get rid of tradable shares and replace ownership with 1 job = 1 share. The same open job market that's used today can remain in place, just with labor - not capital - owning the shares.

The problem with this is businesses require capital and you can’t expect labour to be able to provide it. A system that compensates the investment in business with nothing at all won’t get that investment in business. If we’re trying to use something akin to the current job market we have to ask how companies are created within it. The best answer I can come up with is some sort of dystopian form of government picked winners where tax money replaced investment capital.

> The best answer I can come up with is some sort of dystopian form of government picked winners where tax money replaced investment capital

if you squint a bit, that's what has been happening in the past 4 or so years considering the the amount of money the feds pumped into money markets that filtered through venture capital funds. This is one of Yanis' postulation: that businesses that require capital don't have to rely on profits, and can instead benefit from money printing; and I'll put up Uber as exhibit A.

You can have the government act as venture capital if that is truly necessary. Otherwise labour does provide capital through the surplus, and loans can fill in the blanks.

Labour can potentially provide some capital but the mechanism by which it has to do so in the socialist system would be the wildly impractical an equal amount from each labourer. Anything that causes investment to break one worker, one share for the ownership structure of the business is not allowed. This means if some workers have enough capital to invest they aren't going to do so since it doesn't give them any practical returns. Only if all workers can agree on what to invest and all workers can and will do so will the required ownership structure work with investment from workers.

Price-controlled labour market implies that price is actually a mechanism which is complicated to do if you’re operating on something akin to “from each according to ability and to each according to need”.

Whatever system you use needs to somehow resolve the issue that 53% of the youth population wants to be a social media influencer yet far fewer than 1% of jobs are that. Permitting price gets you this but it seems to be a very weak form of socialism if you adopt a system in which some people will make millions and others will make peanuts.

>if you’re operating on something akin to “from each according to ability and to each according to need”.

Well nobody is saying that this possible short of a post-scarcity society. The Soviets themselves were certainly not making the claim that was how they were operating, simply that it was their goal and they were getting closer to it.

> Whatever system you use needs to somehow resolve the issue that 53% of the youth population wants to be a social media influencer yet far fewer than 1% of jobs are that. Permitting price gets you this but it seems to be a very weak form of socialism if you adopt a system in which some people will make millions and others will make peanuts.

The basic issue Marx-inspired people have with capitalism (I think Marxist is far too strong of a term) isn't necessarily with the fact that income inequality exists. Marx did write about how perfect egalitarianism is not a realistic nor desirable goal, and I don't think Varoufakis disagrees.

The issue that is seen with capitalism is rather the unfair social relations that capital forms against which society is inevitably structured, which leads to people making billions simply from being an owner, and having debilitating control over society.

As far as people making hundreds of thousands or even in the low millions because their work is particularly necessary to society's needs and few other people can fulfill those needs, there is nothing necessarily wrong with that. As long they don't get undue control and get to set up biased relations that are then independent of their ongoing contribution to society, I don't think this is a weak form of socialism at all, it would actually be a much stronger form of socialism than most that have been successful, and I think that this is also the kind of socialism Varoufakis would prefer. Short of a post-scarcity society in any case, I don't think any reasonable socialist, Marxist, or Communist has hopes for anything better.

As far as the people making peanuts, if it is because what their productive output is not useful to society and they can't adapt to produce anything useful, we can use redistribution and de-commodify necessities in order to make it so that at least richer people do not have too problematic a power differential. And of course, we should strive to make opportunities as absolutely equal as possible.

But what I'm trying to get at is that really socialists are fine with some degree of inequality if it simply comes from differences in productivity. The issue is not from the distribution of resources, but really the process of production and its impact on society.

Of course, from each according to his ability to each according to his need is on a spectrum. The more our abilities increase relative to our needs, the closer we can get to the ideal.

My how the goalposts have moved. Millionaires are the new proletariat. Socialism needs to borrow almost all of capitalism from capitalism. Fairly soon socialists will be advocating for (partial) investor ownership of the means of production because once you accept price mechanisms in labour markets you have almost no good alternatives for new business formation.

No goalposts have been moved. The proletariat has never been defined by income level, rather simply if they sell their labour without owning capital. A vanishingly small percentage of the proletariat has been a millionaire or equivalent basically forever.

Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, nothing more, nothing less. If someone really is able to produce 20x more than their peers, there's nothing wrong with them have a before tax income of 20x more.

If you have rights to personal property and profit from labor then you have Capitalism.

You don't have a right to personal property though, because you can't use your property to make a profit from someone else's labour, which is the difference with capitalism.

I know yanis' thoughts well enough to tell what he was saying, but I really wish he would define capitalism more narrowly there. The thrust of his argument lies somewhat far away from the broad brushes the vocabulary he uses has been painted with.

     Profitability no longer drives the system-as-a-whole, even though it remains the be-all and end-all for individual entrepreneurs. Consider what happened in London on August 12, 2020. It was the day markets learned that the British economy shrank disastrously – and by far more than analysts had expected (more than 20% of national income had been lost in the first seven months of 2020). Upon hearing the grim news, financiers thought: ‘Great! The Bank of England, panicking, will print even more pounds and channel them to us to buy shares. Time to buy shares!’

I immediately thought of Uber - widely considered to be a successful market leader, yet not profitable, and funded by VC money which ultimately comes from the central bank money printing.

When he said the words "liberal techno-communism" in seriousness, as something NFTs could help? He lost me.

I sincerely doubt he's talking about a moneyless, classless, stateless society - what Communism is.

After all, there's (crypto)currencies and private (as opposed to personal) ownership rights. Sprinkle in some representative Democratic State that can build structures to isolate itself from the will of the people? And that's Liberalism, the thing Communists rebel against, critiquing to this day.

Platonically-Synthesizing these two opposites would prove challenging without undermining the premise of one or both halves.

While such a "Left" exists in more authoritarian contexts of international relations? They serve as examples of the failure of the previous "synthesis". Down here in the neighborhoods where life happens? Leftist action is often about showing each other that we're all we need.

Why pay for a plow to scrape the apartment building's lot when we can do it? Why submit to draconian rent hikes from Slumlords when we can form a Tenant's Union? Why let people go hungry when we can throw in on a professional kitchen and the food we need to held our neighbors?

There's plenty of work to do, even when there's no money. So damn the cash, full speed ahead! We have a better world to build. State be damned. Needless Social hierarchy be damned. Just do the things your neighbors need. And never act alone.

Learn from Rojava. Learn from the Zapatistas. Learn from Cospaia.

We don't need some magical thinking about how the Masters' Tools will dismantle the Masters' palace in the hands of some "great man". That same great man who, inevitably seeks - or is forced by necessity - to rise to dictatorship to keep the State together and potentially in line.

And somehow, this whole State apparatus is supposed to wither away on its own? When it is our crutch against "external threats" and the State's own internal corruption? Color me skeptical.

You can use NFT's as decentralized permission tokens for access to decentralized databases.

Abstract all the world's resources and how they're converted between each other into one big linked excel table. Everyone wants to know how resources are moving around, but nobody can be trusted to host "the diagram of everything". Different parts of the excel table correspond to different resources in different places, and have notions of data sovereignty over their resources in the table, with areas of joined access between separate entities along boundaries where they exchange resources.

Obviously you'd use something like soulbound NFT's, so its harder for people to sell off write permissions. But you could use all sorts of Sybil protection techniques.

It seems like one possible starting point for a decentralized communism.

That's neat how different people see things from different perspectives because that statement is meaningless sophistry in my world.

It's built on a bunch of education and theory that's not at all covered in the article. The man is sufficiently credentialed to suggest that this is at least a well considered position of his based on his experiences as an economist and finance minister.

The man is sufficiently credentialed to suggest that this is at least a well considered position of his based on his experiences as an economist and finance minister.

He was fired from finance minister of Greece after only a few months on the job for the less-than-braggable achievement of completely sabotaging Greece's recovery and ensuring Greece was the only European country which failed to recover during their bailout process.

> He was fired [...]

He resigned and for good reason and he proved to be correct in all his assessments. You clearly don't know what you're talking about, at least get your facts straight.

Not that I'm a fan of him, but that's the least generous interpretation of the negotiations for the crisis in Greece.

>The man is sufficiently credentialed to suggest

Who thinks this way? Credential-ism isn't a substitute for clearly stated arguments.

If he presents an argument reflecting his credentials that's great, but some useless platitude doesn't get a pass because he went to college or some nonsense

Reputation is a short cut. And it's super common in every human discussion. Whether it is the HN heroes of pg and Musk, or this guy, we can look at someone's reputation and get a sense for their abilities.

Also, credentialed doesn't just mean academic credentials.

What is this in response to? Do you think Yanis Varoufakis is unfamiliar with undergrad-tier “communism has failed every time” bromides?

This is an undeniable fact, not some "undergrad-tier bromide" as left-wing grifters dismiss it as.

Even now, after a century of failure, some dogmatic utopianists won't admit that their ideas don't work.

What is most tragic in all this is that it takes experimenting obviously bad ideas - whether it be socialism, or lockdowns - on billions of people, and producing hell on Earth, before a certain class of individuals will admit they are wrong.

This is a response to the illusion that we know there's a better alternative to capitalism

Do you think we get a vote on what which flavor of capitalism we get next, or if capitalism decides to change into something else as Yanis sees it?

It can be the case that we no know better alternative while simultaneously being true that capitalism and freedom are opposed.

Opposition to capitalism consistently produces less free societies.

There might be many factors involved in this. Not least of them, the influence of capitalist countries over alternative societies.

Chile for example was crushed internally and externally when it tried to move away from the system they had at the time. Though inflation did raise there was a huge campaign against the government to purposefully make it fail. Is this a failure of socialism?

Any new system will naturally find resistance because it has to break the old one and make the new one work. Though, in reality, these experiments even if they fail change perspectives of people. When Germany had to be put back together they didn't get rid of everything that east Germany was. And these ideas then spread through out the rest of Europe. And the world.

And finally, it might be misleading to look at things from the perspective of a person in a developed society and go "yes this system is great!" When on the other hand, this very same system, is producing and reproducing extreme global inequality. El Congo and other extremely poor and unstable countries in Africa, as well as in central and south america are all capitalist countries... theyre just the other side of the coin.

And don't get me started on other externalities! I'm sure if birds and monkeys in the amazon could talk they would say they would rather see humans go back to primitivism. Though that's really a question about progress and industrialisation; but it's a question that capitalism has a really hard time dealing with.

So, I guess I simply dont think the statement "opposition to capitalism consistently produces less free societies." is a statement that should be done so freely. When something doesn't work we should ask why and what can be done better, not simply shrug and keep ourselves covered in mud.

I think the future will look closer to socialism than capitalism, but ofc, that's just my opinion. If you want to read more on global inequality I recommend pikettys book "capital and ideology".

The tyranny imposed in societies where socialist doctrines became dominant was simply staggering, and beyond anything that could be blamed on foreign meddling.

This tyranny was all-encompassing because socialism demonizes entire classes of voluntary interaction on the basis that they are inherently exploitative, and thus despite all appears to the contrary, nonconsensual. Socialism is an ideological dogma instead of a sober commentary on reality.

Because of this shoddy foundation, socialism ends up promoting subordination to the state and top-down order, and this is fundamentally less functional and more tyrannical than a society based on the principle of individual rights and emergent order.

You're really doing not much more than a correlation equals causation thing. The rise of capitalism in certain countries has occured during an increase in the enjoyment of some specific kinds of liberty. But was that caused by capitalism, or was it caused by the parallel adoption of classical liberal political thought (which by itself has nothing to say about capitalism)? Was it caused by the rise of empire and the exploitation of natural resources across large parts of the world, exploitation that is not in any real sense dependent upon capitalism itself? Was it caused by scientific and medical advances that could conceivably have occured in different economic and political systems?

And then ... what are we to make of the freedoms that capitalism does not enhance? Current capitalist societies do a (historically) good job on what has been called "freedom to", but a fairly poor job on "freedom from". There is a coherent philosophical argument that the latter are at least as important as the former, in part because you cannot exercise the "freedom to <X>" if you are forced to trade your own labor in order to live, or because you are sick with no means of accessing health care. Capitalist societies certainly do very well at ensuring that those who control capital enjoy freedom; it's not so clear that they are anywhere nearly as accomplished at ensuring and amplifying the freedom(s) of those who do not.

There's no question that capitalism has proven very effective at driving the discovery and adoption of highly efficient means of production. This has created a world of material comforts that has never been seen before, accessible in most senses to all but the absolute poorest in capitalist countries. The problem is that while material comforts may be a wonderful thing, and perhaps even in some senses a necessary component of freedom, they are also insufficient.

Dismissing human striving for something better has rarely been productive in the long run. Yes, we know that the experiments during the 20th century in the Soviet Union, Cambodia, Mao's China, and elsewhere should make us very cautious about any similar proposals. But to act as if this (both capitalism, and those particular sorts of responses to it) are the only options, as though this is just the best we can do and there will never be anything better ... this is just uselessly pessimistic and almost certainly wrong.

Socioeconomical systems are complex and ever evolving. Like technology.

Your strawman sounds like "All possible technologies has already been tried"

> You can either work for capitalists or die from various causes(starvation, lac of medical help, etc)

This is a straw man of capitalism. The idea that in capitalist countries citizens would be left to die and starve requires a great exercise of imagination.

> it was replaced by socialism/capitalism hybrid.

I agree with most of your comment actually. My point is there hasn't existed a free society without capitalism.

> So does capitalism, in the end pure capitalism failed (but not before taking lives of many people, child labour, unsafe work conditions, no health care, starvation and more)

What country society do you have in mind? I'm genuinely curious.

>This is a straw man of capitalism. The idea that in capitalist countries citizens would be left to die and starve requires a great exercise of imagination.

Just don't search how many people die due to lack of healthcare or how many people freeze to death(mostly homeless, but also people who can't afford to properly heat their homes), how many people were executed because they didn't have money for a good lawyer.

>I agree with most of your comment actually. My point is there hasn't existed a free society without capitalism.

On the other hand, capitalism can work perfectly well without free society. There is another problem with capitalism and democracy, capitalists compete with workers(non capitalists) for access to elected(or not) officials. They use power(money,connections, etc) to influence officials, which erodes democracy, in some cases, to the point where democracy is in name only. Normal people have a little influence on policies, while capitalists reap benefits of captured democracy.

>What country society do you have in mind? I'm genuinely curious.

I really don't know, but I believe that world without homeless people, starving children, sick without access to medicine is possible. I hope that socialism/capitalism hybrid(with democracy having control over capitalism, not other way around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany) will help in making it possible, but there are no guarantees it will. But I know that I don't really want to LARP Mad Max in real life.

> Just don't search how many people die due to lack of healthcare or how many people freeze to death(mostly homeless ...

Do you have proof that there would be less of these without capitalism. If anything the homeless population has increased in the USA as the market has become more regulated, so I don't see the proof that more capitalism produces more homelessness.

> >What country society do you have in mind? I'm genuinely curious.

> I really don't know

I think you should inform yourself a little bit more before claiming something and then coming empty handed when specific examples are asked. The capitalism you're thinking of exists mostly in your imagination if you can't provide examples.

>Do you have proof that there would be less of these without capitalism. If anything the homeless population has increased in the USA as the market has become more regulated, so I don't see the proof that more capitalism produces more homelessness.

In socialist countries (eg European ones, I have less familiarity with others) number of homeless people is lower, number of people without healthcare is also lower. I'm an example, when I was unemployed, living with my family, government paid for my healthcare. Stuff even people with private insurance might not have (in US). Also rises in number of homeless people correlated with decline in mental health services. Greyhound therapy?

>I think you should inform yourself a little bit more before claiming something and then coming empty handed when specific examples are asked. The capitalism you're thinking of exists mostly in your imagination if you can't provide examples.

First of, when talking about future, you just don't know what consequences our actions will have. As I said, I would like to see what socialism/capitalism hybrid(democracy controling capitalism, including German example, wiki link). That includes Nordic social democracies or European ones in general. So I mentioned example after saying that I don't know. You just ignored it, with a bonus of "forgetting" to copy-paste my full argument.

> The idea that in capitalist countries citizens would be left to die and starve requires a great exercise of imagination

How about dying from rare cancers due for living near superfund sites, or from opioid-related ODs?

Opiod-related ODs have increased as the market has become more regulated and since the war against poverty started. I don't see evidence of these being caused by capitalism, if anything I see a correlation with socialism.

Oh yeah, I forgot the Sacklers and their marketing department were dyed in the wool commies, committed to handing over the means of production to the proletariat.

Yanis is Syriza, the radical left(their description) democratic socialists.