This might be the first discussion I’ve had on Lenny in good faith as you say, so thank you for that.
My position summarized is that we definitely have massive issues with inequality, injustice, lack of rights, etc. But these are issues of legislation, corrupt government and leadership, enforcement, corporate governance, media disinformation, and so on. As you said any system can and will be abused. Swapping capitalism for any other -ism won’t change anything. (What would that even look like?)
Some of my meandering thoughts for potential solutions include controlling media disinformation, campaign finance reform, term/age limits, and ranked voting. It would be great to somehow change corporate governance to require leadership to prioritize stakeholders and not just shareholders, but I don’t really know how to do this. Maybe a requirement that all public companies be owned at least maybe 10% by non-officer employees, enough to get a seat on the board of directors.
It’s extremely complicated and there’s no clear solution. I’m not saying capitalism is perfect, I’m saying it’s overall ok and it’s very childishly naive to make a shitty comic about swapping it for another -ism to solve all of our problems. I really don’t want to argue about it though or get into a flame war, I just can’t handle the vitriol on this forum.
That’s a very shallow analysis, parts of which socialists have already responded to since Marx himself. First, it’s a little silly to just wave away changing the -isms, as you put it. It would change things a whole lot if we changed from capitalism to feudalism. Likewise, I suspect you do not actually understand how radical a change many socialists actually want, otherwise I don’t see how you can possibly think this.
Second, your implied distinction between politics and the economy is one that we on the left generally reject, and have for centuries. Marx wrote about the “political economy,” recognizing that the two are actually inseparable, despite the neoliberal proclivity to pretend that they are. Put another way, many of the policy suggestions you list are actually very popular, and yet they don’t happen. Researchers have measured this phenomenon.. The policies that wealthy people want correlate with what actually happens, whereas those that are popular have no correlation. Quote from that study:
Economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence.
Your suggestions will not happen so long as there is a class of people who own most of the things. That is the realistic analysis of our political economy. That’s the analysis we on the left bring that you’re missing – an explanation for why, in our supposed democracy, we have decidedly undemocratic outcomes. We will never legislate away the problems of capitalism because the capitalists have more power than we do.
Finally, you have this baseline assumption throughout your comment that things just fundamentally are what they are, and slapping a few labels won’t realistically change them. We have a term for this too! The late great Mark Fisher used the term “capitalist realism” to describe your attitude, famously saying that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” That’s what you’re doing. Even when talking to people who are explicitly proposing an alternative to capitalism, you are just… dismissing it? Waving it away? You’re definitely not engaging with it.
I hope that learning that Fisher wrote a whole book about what you’re doing, or learning that you’re making arguments writers from the 1800s were already critiquing, or even that I took the time to write this whole thing out to you, piques your interest in actually looking into what leftists have to say. Like actually, meaningfully engaging with it, not making a comment that is obviously the beginning of an argument, only to end the comment metaphorically throwing your hands up, which you’ve now done twice. We write about, think about, and try to organize around these ideas because we want the world to be better. It’s something I personally take seriously. I encourage you to take it seriously too, even if you don’t agree.
Thanks for the reasonable response. I’ll admit part of my attitude displayed is because i feel so beaten down here on lemmy from so many interactions with people at a level of toxicity strong enough to kill a bull. I’m surprised at how many downright reasonable comments there are in this thread for the most part. I’ll read more in depth and respond another time.
This might be the first discussion I’ve had on Lenny in good faith as you say, so thank you for that.
My position summarized is that we definitely have massive issues with inequality, injustice, lack of rights, etc. But these are issues of legislation, corrupt government and leadership, enforcement, corporate governance, media disinformation, and so on. As you said any system can and will be abused. Swapping capitalism for any other -ism won’t change anything. (What would that even look like?)
Some of my meandering thoughts for potential solutions include controlling media disinformation, campaign finance reform, term/age limits, and ranked voting. It would be great to somehow change corporate governance to require leadership to prioritize stakeholders and not just shareholders, but I don’t really know how to do this. Maybe a requirement that all public companies be owned at least maybe 10% by non-officer employees, enough to get a seat on the board of directors.
It’s extremely complicated and there’s no clear solution. I’m not saying capitalism is perfect, I’m saying it’s overall ok and it’s very childishly naive to make a shitty comic about swapping it for another -ism to solve all of our problems. I really don’t want to argue about it though or get into a flame war, I just can’t handle the vitriol on this forum.
That’s a very shallow analysis, parts of which socialists have already responded to since Marx himself. First, it’s a little silly to just wave away changing the -isms, as you put it. It would change things a whole lot if we changed from capitalism to feudalism. Likewise, I suspect you do not actually understand how radical a change many socialists actually want, otherwise I don’t see how you can possibly think this.
Second, your implied distinction between politics and the economy is one that we on the left generally reject, and have for centuries. Marx wrote about the “political economy,” recognizing that the two are actually inseparable, despite the neoliberal proclivity to pretend that they are. Put another way, many of the policy suggestions you list are actually very popular, and yet they don’t happen. Researchers have measured this phenomenon.. The policies that wealthy people want correlate with what actually happens, whereas those that are popular have no correlation. Quote from that study:
Your suggestions will not happen so long as there is a class of people who own most of the things. That is the realistic analysis of our political economy. That’s the analysis we on the left bring that you’re missing – an explanation for why, in our supposed democracy, we have decidedly undemocratic outcomes. We will never legislate away the problems of capitalism because the capitalists have more power than we do.
Finally, you have this baseline assumption throughout your comment that things just fundamentally are what they are, and slapping a few labels won’t realistically change them. We have a term for this too! The late great Mark Fisher used the term “capitalist realism” to describe your attitude, famously saying that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” That’s what you’re doing. Even when talking to people who are explicitly proposing an alternative to capitalism, you are just… dismissing it? Waving it away? You’re definitely not engaging with it.
I hope that learning that Fisher wrote a whole book about what you’re doing, or learning that you’re making arguments writers from the 1800s were already critiquing, or even that I took the time to write this whole thing out to you, piques your interest in actually looking into what leftists have to say. Like actually, meaningfully engaging with it, not making a comment that is obviously the beginning of an argument, only to end the comment metaphorically throwing your hands up, which you’ve now done twice. We write about, think about, and try to organize around these ideas because we want the world to be better. It’s something I personally take seriously. I encourage you to take it seriously too, even if you don’t agree.
Thanks for the reasonable response. I’ll admit part of my attitude displayed is because i feel so beaten down here on lemmy from so many interactions with people at a level of toxicity strong enough to kill a bull. I’m surprised at how many downright reasonable comments there are in this thread for the most part. I’ll read more in depth and respond another time.