So I don't know that it's fair? Nearly all the material goods around me and a ton of services were provided by corporations, which are largely composed of regular people glued together at scale by bureacracy.
Correction:
Stop buy stuff.
My issue would be with the corporations, which I see as the new estates. Except that they are far larger and far more powerful than what we had two centuries ago. Their perks include: regulatory capture, political access, access to finance. Ie powerful corporations run the infrastructure for capital movement and consumption - in their interests.
Free market competition makes sense. Lowest prices.
What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such. It is a racket, a ponzi scheme. There are many variants of capitalism. Even the chinese adapted their variant to sinomarxistic ideals (to certain extent; I don't think today's main China is purely capitalistic nor purely sinomarxistic as it once used to be).
> Capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be exposed to the risks entailed by competition, and feel the goad of that insecurity. They want monopolies, or platforms, or monopoly platforms. They want assets, not businesses.
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-...
Government intervention is the principal mechanism by which powerful participants restrain other partipants' market activity, and insulate themselves from competition.
So there is no theory/practice distinction here, because there is no applicable theory -- it's all just a description of manifest reality. Markets just are ecosystems of people engaging in value-for-value exchange with each other, and competition just is an inherent characteristic of them that's observable in reality.
> What happens in practice is that one or a small set of participants become big enough to shut others out through all sorts of tactics including locking suppliers and customers into exclusive contracts, buying out competitors, paying for ads and headlines about customers, etc., etc.
Negotiating exclusive contracts is a way of securing long-term business from a customer, motivated by a desire to prevent the customer from defecting to a competitor -- naturally, customers don't sign such agreements unless there's something in it for them.
Buying out competitors is only possible if there are competitors to buy out, which means there aren't barriers to entry, and other firms can target your weaknesses, which you're seeking to compensate for by gaining the market position of a firm that's been successful at doing so. If you can't maintain that position, someone else will fill it -- if they couldn't then the competitor you're acquiring couldn't have done it in the first place.
Paying for ads is a method of trying to win customers' business in a competitive environment. If you didn't have competition, you wouldn't need to advertise.
Everything you're listing here are methods by which firms engage in competition with each other. Every single item on your list is a tactic used by firms because they are in a competitive environment.
It's not "a competitive environment" just because it's legal to found a company if anticompetitive tactics are allowed.
You can start a railroad, but if the big existing railroads that already have lines running to the cities and factories refuse to let you connect to their service, your company has no hope of surviving.
You can start a factory making paperclips, but if the incumbent has billions of dollars in reserves and can afford to sell at a loss or barely above cost you will never be able to grow and thrive.
You can make a lot more money talking to your competitors and agreeing to fix prices or to each operate in regions that happen to not overlap, eliminating competition.
You can tell customers that if they want to buy product X that they want, they have to buy a bundle that includes Y, meaning that any competitors to Y are bound to fail since customers are already buying that version anyway.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. "History of antitrust" will give you any number of real world examples.
Unchecked Capitalism always leads to Mono/Duopolies aka Mafia. The best of both World is maybe called Social-direct-democratic-capitalism.
>What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such.
Has everything to do with unchecked Capitalism, go too far and both extremes end in a ~Monopoly, in Socialism/Communism it's mostly the State (China, USSR, Cuba etc.) in Capitalism a massive conglomerate of Enterprises (S.Korea, again "new" China, Russia, USA, India)
But he also wasn't interested in major political change.
So we've got something that I'm surprised Europeans don't recognize; state-backed champions and heavy government intervention in various markets, and almost total free markets in sectors that the government doesn't really care about. But at no point can any one company or industry even attempt to undermine the central authority, because Deng wanted to get China out of the economic gutter, not lose power.
But the issue is not about corporations - or companies - per se.
The issue is how they relate to the general population. You can have good corporations and bad corporations. When billionaires buy legislation then something is wrong. When a corrupt elite invades countries and kills people - that's bad.
The problem of "billionaires buying legislation" is that billionaires get money from market activity to buy it with, not that it's up for sale by politicians or that the limits on the scope of legislation are insufficient?
When a military force marches into another country, that's the work of a vague "corrupt elite" and not the political officials in charge of the military?
Shock horror, people tend to care most about things that they feel personally affect them.
Samesame after a while if unchecked, just play cyberpunk 2077 ;)
So even when these people have turned into a broken clock about being anti-corporate to the point that they’re anti-open-projects, someone will always come along to explain why we everything is the fault of corporations. A normal working class person can not be faulted for their beliefs in this model, because every fault will be transformed into something that can be blamed on a corporation.
Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning. You can’t blame everything every individual does on corporations having either made them do it or forced them to believe it through their actions. At some point we have to admit that people’s thoughts and actions are their own.
If someone becomes so bitter that they’re becoming anti-OSM or anti-Wikipedia or anti-OSS, I’m fully okay with holding them to account for their chosen beliefs.
> Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning.
The fact that you are describing a behavior that you believe to be shared among a sizable group of people seems to contradict your claim that their beliefs are due to individual failings rather than some broader social forces that caused them to believe these things, no?
The historical left/marxist view is essentially: look at someone's social context and where their money comes from, and you'll know how they probably think. The American ideology is: everyone is an individual and a tramp can be a philosopher.
The second is much more appealing to us as individuals, and to our sense of self-determination and independence. And people do have agency---some people succumb to despair, others don't; some work hard, some don't; some rebound from setbacks, some don't.
But if you look at large groups of people, the first one starts to have strong explanatory power. Look at US coverage of foreign elections, and that second view is almost all you see.
US coverage of foreign elections can't indulge in personality based coverage or leverage the audience's in-built understanding of culture and politics, so you get broad statements about how urban professionals voted for party X but the rural poor voted for party Y.
I think GP pretty clearly states it's due to broader social forces:
> They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche
I don't think that was a complicated point, but maybe you think you were asking something else, while trying to still blame whatever "social forces" TikTok has told you to blame.
I’m responding primarily to this sentiment:
> At some point we have to admit that people’s thoughts and actions are their own.
I generally find that placing blame on individuals for views that one believes are wrong is not constructive. Clearly there are reasons that they believe the things that they do, and this is especially true when you disagree not with an individual but with an entire group.
Of course anyone is free to get angry at anyone else for their individual beliefs, and I believe that individually people’s minds can be changed. But blaming individuals _who you have never met_ for behaviors that you are stereotyping from an entire group seems wholly unproductive. This is not going to change the group’s minds, and is only going to make you bitter.
When discussing group behavior, it only makes sense to discuss things that influence the whole group.
The problem isn't "corporations", it's capitalism. The economic system forces corporations to behave in anti-social ways.
Similar goes with the trope you peddle, individuals were to blame. They're not. The system they live in, and never had any say in shaping, forces them to engage in behaviors short term that ultimately run counter to their own interests long term.
Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable. Those contributions get monopolized and their benefits privatized. That's not a "belief".
Which bits do you object to? The idea that people should be able to form going concerns that outlive any individuals (e.g. investing in the construction of a fishing boat)? That several individuals should be able to share in the risk and profit of such a venture (e.g. a group investing in the construction, and receiving shares of the profit of each catch)? Or that they should be able to hire others on a free market for a wage or share of profits (e.g. hiring a crew for the boat)? Or that if they should have a dispute, there should be a formal, legal, process to resolve it?
The trouble is that there is no human system in which the agents who distribute the resources are perfectly aligned with the agents to whom resources are distributed. This is nowhere more obvious than in the planning, execution, and communication, failures of the Soviet Union. This is a general case of the alignment problem, which is fundamentally unsolved. I would argue that it's un-solvable as long as your agents are living organisms competing in an ecosystem.
Niches exist to be exploited. As long as the niches exist, they will be exploited. Resenting that is akin to resenting the biggest fish in the pond for being so damn aggressive - it's pointless. We live in a pond, and we should focus on maintaining the nonviolent and often ecosystem-benefitting nature of our exploitation (since it is hard-won and precarious), rather than resent the inescapable reality of its existence.
As far as I can tell none of these things existed before modern times. Mostly people were under authoritarian rule.
When you refer to "private ownership", you unreflectedly endorse things like individuals "owning" land.
The consequence of that negligence are things like environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on. A substantial part of what currently goes wrong on the macro-scale.
"Free exchange" is a misnomer in the same vein. The "freedom" leaves people to willfully avoid asking whether they really should in the first place. More importantly, it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without.
"Due process" isn't tied to capitalism to begin with and all these things don't "span back to the dawn of agriculture".
You put up the straw man of the Soviet Union, prepping it up to the height of serving as the epitome of what humans could conceive of as alternatives (or modifications) of the existing system. That's a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy, not higher insight.
> environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on
> asking whether they really should in the first place?
> it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without
All of these criticisms reflect a total naivety to ecosystem dynamics at play, and the motivational landscape that they create. As long as these behaviours continue to create a competitive advantage for the organisms that display them, they will continue to emerge and perpetuate. There is no method of social organization that can overcome the competitive reality of the ecosystem we live in.
You'll also note that environmental destruction, resource hoarding, and interference competition are all widespread behaviours in the natural world. We are part of that world, and are subject to the constraints that it produces.
It's like trying to overcome a bug in the CPU instruction set by writing JavaScript. The "problems" are part of the fundamental substrate and aren't addressable at the proposed layer of abstraction.
When you abstract, you leave things out. You claim to abstract from cave people. How is that the best we can do?
You pretend, humans were cells competing mindlessly. Then you conclude, any other approach than mindless behavior was naive.
You again observe animals and justify your behavior (on a vastly greater scale) by it.
How do you manage not to see the absurdity in that? You're not an animal, you have a conscious mind, capable of rational thought and according foresight.
Because that is, in a very fundamental and immutable way, who we are.
I'm saying that we live in an ecosystem, and that creates emergent properties and behaviours. Resource hoarding and interference competition are among those. No amount of consciousness, rational thought, or foresight, can change that.
As long as (e.g.) hoarding resources today makes it more likely for your offspring to succeed tomorrow, the traits that influence people to hoard resources will continue to perpetuate. It's also why, for example, we have the dark tetrad - it works.
Too high of trust creates opportunities for liars. Too many liars lowers trust to the point that it's not profitable to lie. There exists between these two points a stable equilibrium between zero liars and everyone lying all the time, and it's at neither extreme. The same is true for all other behaviours you moralize.
I'm not justifying anything, I'm simply observing the constraints of the system we live in, and inferring that any mode of social organization that ignores or opposes these constraints is doomed.
Apart from debatable (but real) genetic differences you don't know about, the crucial point is culture. We're not cave people as we don't share their culture and don't have to.
Your idea of our environment predisposing us for capitalism is simply false. Notably, the premise rests solely on your posturing here.
Your ideas about people being automata beholden to their genetic programming beyond their control is even more absurd. And lacks any basis in evidence.
You apparently have never heard about ethics. There is a difference between morals and ethics. Lying isn't wrong because "arbitrary morals" say so, it is because realistic, objective consequences tell you so.
Your idea of an "equilibrium of all behaviors" presupposes mindless automata, again.
Human societies are meta-organisms - they modify themselves over time, and compete with each other for finite resources. Any culture which sacrifices competitive advantage for any reason is simply out-competed and absorbed by other societies which make no such sacrifice. There is no escaping this reality. This is referred to as cultural group selection.
> Your idea of our environment predisposing us for capitalism is simply false. Notably, the premise rests solely on your posturing here.
I'm not saying it predisposes us to capitalism though, I'm saying it predisposes us to maximize resources and engage in competitive behaviour. This is supported by the fact that very nearly every organism in nature also engages in resource maximization and competitive behaviour (r-Selection). There is no altruism (going against genetic self interest) in nature, it's simply not sustainable.
> Your ideas about people being automata beholden to their genetic programming beyond their control is even more absurd. And lacks any basis in evidence.
I'm making no such claim. I'm simply claiming there are constraints in the system, and ignoring them doesn't make them go away.
> Lying isn't wrong because "arbitrary morals" say so, it is because realistic, objective consequences tell you so.
Any yet, no matter how hard we try, we've not managed to eliminate lying (or even agree what specifically it means). Are you really suggesting that some yet-undiscovered set of rules will create a society in which no one will ever lie? Doesn't that sound a bit.. unrealistic?
well, other systems were tried and were worse (feudalism, communism etc)
in practice capitalism with some regulations is better than known alternatives
> Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable
what is not questionable then?
Worse, you mistake the bounds of your personal knowledge as the borders of the world.
Even if there was no currently "known" alternative, the proper course of action is to research that and find one?
please test it properly before putting it in production, communism went poorly
> Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
note that I am not arguing that better system is impossible - that would be silly
but "destroy capitalism" attempts went remarkably badly so far
The idea, you would have to produce a turn-key solution, beta-tested on "somebody else" is obvious nonsense and pure deflection.
In the given dire situation, you have to do the best you can, not wait for some imaginary perfect escape hatch to appear.
Not taking a side in this particular discussion, but this specific sentence looks like a self-fulfilling statement: if people disagree with you, you take it as proof that they are unable to evaluate your claim fairly.
"Or maybe they just feel that organizational methodologies used by people to coordinate complex multi-participant activities are actively trying to harm them and this is the logical response?"
No, it's quite illogical.
Or maybe they just feel that corporations are actively trying to harm them and this is the logical response?
I don't think that's unfair at this point.