Yes and this underclass will coalesce around “racial” boundaries even if everybody is white. That’s what is meant by capitalism and racism going hand in hand, not “commies said the n-word too” or whatever these smoothbrains are screeching about. Jfc I am so tired.
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Scandinavian countries seem to pull off well-regulated capitalism + strong social safety net ok. Can we just do what they do?
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Weird, I was in the middle of replying to a different post of yours.
Imo the answer to “Can we just do what they do?” is obviously yes, but, you/we/they will be fought every step of the way as if it’s trying to do a socialist revolution regardless.
You said you supported Warren and I’ve noticed that the memory of billionaires crying on national teevees over her wealth taxes seems to have been repressed by a huge chunk of the populace. That wasn’t crazy Bernie, that was Liz being called mean and shrill and divisive and a filthy pinko who should be cast out on an ice floe.
In an episode of Chapelle’s Show once, Dave was asking the crowd about reparations and one young man said “I’d want land, not money” to which Dave joked “Ok brother but you know you can buy land with money, right?” So yeah, you don’t ever want to be that rigid in regards to acceptable solutions but maybe a more specific answer re: “Can we just do what they do?” is I dunno, can we?
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Can we please move the capitalism derail to the landlord thread?
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“A thousand years they had the tools/ We should be taking them/ Fuck the G-ride! I want the machines that are making them.”
Another reminder folks: socialism != government ownership. Instead socialism == worker control of the means of production. While capitalism means absentee ownership and profit extraction.
Can anyone give a coherent explanation why how a group of working folk are better off under absentee ownership, and having profit extracted from their own work -vs- not?
The problem, ok one of the problems, with our liberal friends is they lol-tastically think the world is like a Chinese Menu: like I’ll pick non-racism, I’ll pick capitalism, I’ll pick dumplings… like these are all just optional equipment. They imagine when folks say “you can’t have capitalism without racism” it’s just a ‘slogan’, that’s ‘convenient’, etc/etc/etc. Nothing could be more wrong. It’s a fact, like 2+3=5.
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I think the biggest issue with trying to define “free market capitalism” is land ownership. If land can be owned, and there is no government regulating its use, which is usually the insistence of the “true free market capitalism” crowd, then “free market capitalism” reduces to feudalism where each plot of land is its own little fiefdom, and one is either a landowner or a serf thereof. There isn’t any new land being made, and people have to exist somewhere, so the choices are to submit to a landowner or death for trespassing. If there isn’t a government to resolve property disputes, then each fiefdom is maintained by the owner’s force.
But if land isn’t owned, then there is no capitalism, because there is no capital. No one builds a factory on land that is free for all to use, because then no one would own that factory, either. No one owning land is antithetical to capitalism.
So, if one wants to insist that “truly free market capitalism” is something other than feudalism, but land can be owned, and non-land-owners have the freedom to sell their labor to the owner of their choice, that necessarily implies the existence of a state-like entity that, at the very minimum, guarantees laborers freedom of movement between owners, and property rights enforcement and dispute resolution for owners. But that is government regulation! So now the capital isn’t truly free to have absolute authority over its fiefdom. Thus, I don’t think “true free market capitalism” not only hasn’t been tried. It doesn’t exist. Anything resembling capitalism as we understand it requires a state that, at the very least, is the authority over who owns what. Certain states may grant more power to labor or more to capital, but there isn’t capitalism without a state regulator.
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It’s a “fact” that nobody in this thread has been willing or able to articulate beyond claiming it’s an indisputable fact.
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Sabo’s not big on backing up his widely sweeping claims.
Good post. The definitions of ‘government’ and ‘ownership’ are quite fuzzy though. You could very well call the organization, such as it is, at Slab City a form of government and the near 20 year continuous use of the Zanon/FinSanPat ceramic tile factory as a form of ownership by the workers.
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Sabo acknowledged that he’s just the big picture guy. He’ll leave the pesky details to the adults to solve.
I agree that the definitions are a bit fuzzy, but I don’t know enough about those entities to really comment in particular. I don’t deny the existence of anarchic societies necessarily the same way I do “free market capitalism”, but if a society claims to be such but also has land ownership, I don’t think that really fits the definition. Collective ownership by the workers is a real thing, certainly, it just requires some sort of government-like entity to make it happen.
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I just went back and looked at all his posts, all I see is a post saying people will coalesce around racial lines in the underclass and a post agreeing that we can follow the Nordic model.
So I’m not sure what you mean. I’m saying the Nordic model of well regulated capitalism with a strong safety net is the optimal plan.
I mean the coalescing part. The idea is that there must be an underclass and that underclass will be racialized. That could be a caste or it could be like Jews, Italians and Irish weren’t considered white at one time or like most Costa Ricans are considered white in Costa Rica, but not in the US.
The deciding what plan we follow is a weird part of this meeting. WE don’t get to decide much at all. The only person around here I see making any relevant and important decisions is @JohnnyTruant.
Johnny slaying with this post. I think Kendi’s main problem was that capitalism was literally jump started/created off the back of slavery, i mean you can tout its great success now but it was kinda hard for it not to flourish with unlimited free labor a couple hundred years. The BEACON of capitalism that is the USA was literally built off of it. If the US didn’t have slavery ever, does it become the same rich country it is now? Obviously impossible to answer but its definitely less likely IMO yet still possible. And the rest of the problems are what i posted plus what Johnny is advocating. Sure its worked out great for a lot of america, not all, and it could be argued that it destroyed Africa and south america etc through colonization/slavery/exploitation. Like yea capitalism has been super great for USA but not so much for the whole world, not to mention global warming as others have said.
Is there an underclass in the Nordic model? Are their working class people not pretty content and well taken care of?
If everyone was making at least $15/hr, getting single payer, there was a jobs guarantee and/or expanded UI, and corporate political influence was blocked, why would racism be needed to support that system?
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Yes. The division between capital and labor is necessary for capitalism, and labor is necessarily an underclass. I don’t think I buy the fact that racism is necessary for capitalism, even though it is both common and useful: dividing up labor into tiers means people in a privileged labor tier will fight for their own privilege rather than against capital
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Yes, but these people
live longer than these people
They might wish they didn’t…but they do.
From my mindset is it’s hard to even evaluate claims like capitalism causes racism, at least from a scientific point of view. First, there’s often a lot of disagreement about what capitalism even means, etc. But assuming you can agree on what capitalism means, then you have a lot of tricky problems if you try to do a careful statistical analysis of the causal effects of capitalism that are related to (1) not having very many independent observations (the same type of problem that messed up election forecasting in 2016) and (2) societies are so complicated that it is difficult to tease out the causal relationships between what are essentially macro or system characteristics. Sure there are a lot of economic studies that try this type of thing. The studies I’m familiar with don’t look at racism at the outcome variable, but I’m sure there are some that do. But I really don’t think these studies do a good job of overcoming the two big problems.
In theory, you could sidestep this approach by trying to establish a relationship between capitalism and racism from first principles. Lots of people like this type of social theory, but I’ve never found a theoretical model of society that is very convincing to me.
So then there are a couple of approaches left. The one where I land is agnostic about big picture relationships and instead focuses on narrower questions. For example, does increasing black access to education improve outcomes for blacks? (And while these are narrower questions, they are still difficult to study and answer in detail.) Answering these types of questions gives us an incremental path to get where we want to go. This probably takes longer and may be less satisfying than just trying to abolish capitalism from the get-go. Maybe it ends up at the same place, or maybe it ends up at a different place because there’s actually a different answer to achieve our objective.
Another option is to take your social theory as a matter of faith, and just go for it. I certainly think there’s something to be said for that, but it’s just not how I think about things.
All of this isn’t meant to be a challenge to 6ix or Sabo. It’s just trying to provide a window into my mindset, which is probably very different than theirs, but maybe similar to others.
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