Google/Amazon and FB are what I know to be the biggest offenders of tax avoidence and with there lawyer power have allowed a large amount of companies to piggyback on their methods and also escape tax in most countries especially the UK.
Therefore I tend to focus on the worst offenders in the UK who happen to be American.
Totally fair but it seems to me when discussing societal level transformation like anti-capitalism it’s doesn’t seem super fruitful to simply name bad companies.
The fruitful discussion should revolve around structural questions of how institutions and laws would/should work.
A liveable wage for everyone with a pension and free healthcare & free collages … That’s all I want for the world in general, everything else after will probably be a personal choice.
Alough those things have been so badly politicalised in the US that that’s a long road & makes you think just how much of an improvement it would be when so much energy and resources have and are still put into not getting them in any meaningful way and have only gotten worse in the +2,000.
This post makes it sound like anti-capitalists are fomenting revolution instead of talking about things like German laws on employees on boards, life in Cuba before and after, government provided childcare, and whether or not the definition of socialism requires a command economy.
Where are these posts that are calling for immediate change to a completely unrecognizable world? I don’t think even one of my posts here counts as advocacy for anything. I’m just talking about stuff that I think is and has been true.
Yes, indeed… I was just making the obvious examples that most would use, I’m sure there’s other major tax avoiding companies that the UK and EU and the rest of the world’s oligarchs thrive off of like gas and oil companies for one.
The political class have been captured in all meaning of the word even by your own comments yesterday, which was great to see BTW, in that recognition of them being bad is good for me coming from someone on the political scale as yourself.
And its why HR 1 Or any other invention of voting rights is never getting passes anytime soon with these charlatans and its why we as left and centre (If centre is OK a word to use to describe yourself, if not name one and I’ll use it) need to come together to get more AOC’s into the house and Congress.
It seems kind of weird to try to square these ideas, which are fully implementable within a broadly capitalist system, with the label “anti Capitalist”. The label itself evokes movements like anti-racism, which is (correctly) completely uncompromising. No one would try to argue that anti-racism means sone generally good ideas and policies within a broadly racist society.
What is “the capitalist system”? How many times itt already have people been like “there’s no such thing as pure capitalism or pure socialism. It’s always a mix.”? Maybe this is the socialist system and those things are just housekeeping.
But don’t you routinely tell us all governments should be abolished? It seems like you’re calling for a pretty radical change.
Then what the fuck are the “anti-capitalists” complaining about?
The point is that lots of people that have views against capitalism rightfully object to numerous genuinely bad outcomes that occur in countries/economies that are commonly described as broadly capitalist. Is that wrong? No, not really. It’s a mechanism to gather allies, organize ideas in a manageable way, etc. But people need to always keep in mind the risks of simplification. Its a pretty darn fine line between simplifying things to make them easier to work with and oversimplifying things to where you reach wrong conclusions and prescribe the wrong solutions.
I guess somewhere in here someone simply posted “capitalism sucks” maybe. I guess that’s what you’re talking about.
Didn’t this whole discussing start with the oversimplification simplicitus posted implying that anti-capitalists are the oversimplifiers and capitalism is responsible for long life? Who really are the oversimplifiers here?
I tend to think the, “Well the line went up my way, therefore it’s good,” type of argument is a sort of last gasp thing. Like people can see the mass inequality and the constant fuck ups (like Texas and their power grid) and they can tell that shit isn’t good. So they point to the line going up.
Yeah. Speaking of simplification. JT is in here making the anti-capitalist anti-simplification point that maybe that one line there isn’t the thing that makes life good or bad and it’s not the anti-capitalist’s problem of evil.
There are definitely semantic issues when i consider myself anti-anti-capitalist but prefer the German corporate system and nordic welfare systems to the US.
Not sure why this needs to be so aggressively phrased. This is a really interesting and vital debate. Let’s assume all sides need to defend their core assumptions and provide solutions with justification.
Nobody should assume the inherent correctness of either side since there is ample evidence of both the significant issues with capitalism and the significant issues with large scale replacement of the system.
Of course no one is saying this or even suggesting it as far as I can tell.
Indeed. I’m not sure why you pretend that there are no people that speak against capitalism broadly, and I dont think I need to justify to you that they exist. So I won’t.
I think there are two related issues at play in the more substantive conversation.
One is that when people are for/against different socioeconomic systems what they’re really emotional about is value systems, not socioeconomic systems. People who voice views against capitalism broadly are often most driven by the observed inequality in the system, and the apparent cold hearted disregard of people that espouse “capitalist” views. People who speak emotionally in favor of capitalism are often driven by values of providing opportunity and rewarding hard work. Those values can’t be argued with reason.
Two, people will take reasonable shortcuts in expressing nuanced views because we don’t all want to affix 6 pages of disclaimers to any opinion. So people say “look at Texas and its power system” and say its a failure of capitalism. And it is! But it shouldn’t be read as a conclusive indication that all capitalism is bad everywhere. The solution to a poorly regulated power system in Texas isn’t clearly a socialist revolution. Just fucking regulate the power system like everyone else.
The Nordic system is like multiply our welfare state by 1.5. It’s not that radical. People get it. The German corporate laws are radical by US standards. People would go insane if you said half the seats on the boards of big companies belong to workers. They would be certain that would lead to Stalinism. It doesn’t. How about two thirds of the seats?
Of course, to the extent economics implies that socialist societies will be outcompeted by “free market” countries, the true solution is One World Government. (The economic point is false anyway because of things like productivity and rule of law. And I favor One World Government irrespective of economic considerations.)
First off, good post. I’m leaving off the stuff I accept without question.
There are also public utilities as opposed to regulated private utilities. SoCal is mixed with LADWP (publicly owned) serving the City of LA and Edison (privately owned) just about everywhere else. So, having public utilities is socialist and you could say it would be revolutionary in Texas as opposed to regulated capitalism. But it still doesn’t mean you can’t open up a hot dog stand.
I am. I think you’re missing quite a bit of nuance.