Comment by kelseyfrog
3 days ago
Why can't capitalism be judged on its own merits? Why do we need the state to get involved in shaping hegemony?
3 days ago
Why can't capitalism be judged on its own merits? Why do we need the state to get involved in shaping hegemony?
You know the answer. There’s a reason the state considers antifa a threat.
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I think a lot of this is revisionist. In most protests, what happens is the police get involved. The police don't know to to de-escalate anything, so surprise surprise - riot!
If you go back and look at the BLM riots, the police were there well before any rioting started. Having poorly trained people with guns, tear gas, and rubber bullets trying to "control a crowd" is a sure-fire way to start a riot. It doesn't help that BLM was protesting the police. Which, as you can imagine, means the police went into it pissed off.
Of course the blame is distributed, but we can't ignore the fact that the police are a major instigator of violence in protests.
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Capitalism "needs to win", but there's no way it can without being ruthlessly forced upon people. Heck even forcing it is just delaying the inevitable decline/crash.
Certain elements of Capitalism (cough AI) seem to simultaneously be speedrunning its decline and keeping it on life support. What strange times we find ourselves in.
Capitalism has been judged on its own merits, and been found to be a ridiculously simplistic, unworkable system that tends toward oligarchy, massive inequality, and authoritarianism.
The state needs to get involved to protect the unworkable system.
Maybe you are right, at least partially, I can identify many of its flaws myself. However for example my homeland has tried communism/socialism, and went through brief periods of anarchy, and the same can be told about all. My family has lost a lot to all of these experiments (including the current capitalist one), but stability and modest prosperity are the best, and anarchism is as far from that as it gets, especially as represented by the Antifa.
Even the communist regime persecuted anarchism. (though they supported it when it was not at home, as a destabilizing tool)
> the same can be told about all.
Because the idea that there's one simple ideologically-based system that's going to solve all problems is simplistic.
Markets are useful, but that doesn't mean that societies should be organized around entirely around markets and private ownership of almost everything as the primary governing principle.
The US has really taken this to an extreme, to the point that it has legally ruled that "money is speech", which essentially guarantees an oligarchy.
Treating capitalism and communism/socialism as two sides of a binary choice is a propaganda trick, basically.
Worth noting that at scale larger than family/clan/tribe it beats communism and feudalism on all relevant - to people - metrics.
(though unconstrained capitalism is not ideal)
> unworkable system
? unconstrained pure capitalism has bad effects, but it is not unworkable unlike say pure communism applied at scale larger than a family
> Worth noting that at scale larger than family/clan/tribe it beats communism and feudalism on all relevant - to people - metrics.
No, it demonstrably doesn’t. The countries that have the least problems with the issues I mentioned are ones that combine market economics with socialist approaches.
In many ways, those countries are closer to market socialism than they are to pure capitalism.
Also, the US’s historical use of socialism and communism as a bogeyman is starting to look less defensible as China succeeds while the US is failing, and actually doing all the immoral things it used to accuse its opponents of.
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Let's stick to the topic please. Don't dilute the investigation with random detours.
What has "judging capitalism on its merits" to do with the US declaring an Antifa SaaS provider terrorists?
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