Yet another stupid argument with people whose ability to understand reality has been warped and turned upside down. Annotations in yellow, argument is here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Alfonso Gutierrez
Capitalism and free-markets have murdered billions of people, so the free-market economies have led to starvation and wars.
Trade has not killed anybody ever. What about capitalism?
Given that authoritarianism is implicit in the free-market theory.
Not even a sentence, let alone an accurate claim about the world.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Alfonso Gutierrez
Libertarian scumbag keep denying the truth. Free-market capitalism destroyed the world's economies.
Surely this is just trolling.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Alfonso Gutierrez
Privatization of our communities is destroying our democracy. It is time to impeach the corrupt libertarian supreme court.
Is this in reference to the enclosure of common land? Only primitive tribes and state-enforced edicts have ever created a so-called commons in land and resources, so no cigar.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matthew John Hayden
+Alfonso GutierrezSomeone took an overdose of blue pills...
Stupid comment. Shouldn't have been made.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Phat Cat Moneybags
Haha, to hell with democracy. You say that free-markets are evil because they are authoritarian, are you going to say that same for the "will of the people"?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Evil Gandhi
+Thomas ClarkI don't think he considers the capitalist model "free".
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Alfonso Gutierrez
The will of the people is democracy stupid libertarian.
The will of the collective, which doesn't exist separately from or prior to the wills of its members, and a fallacy of the majority to boot. Two fallacies (reification, majority) in the same short sentence!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Alfonso Gutierrez
Libertarians are all thieving dupes who are willing to betray their own people. Money is their own God. And libertarians stop consuming blue pills and marijuana.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Evil Gandhi
+Alfonso GutierrezYou say free-market capitalism destroyed the worlds economies. I have to wonder; what planet do you live on? My country's economy is still functioning.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matthew John Hayden
OK, to everyone talking smack about capitalism, I refute you thus;
http://rickkelo.liberty.me/2014/07/03/what-capitalism-did-to-botswana/
http://rickkelo.liberty.me/2014/07/08/botswana-vs-america-economics-not-soccer/
Nothing like a history lesson to cleanse the palate, non?
Later on some folks will take these links to task while never explaining why.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Slave2PaperWithInk
+Alfonso Gutierrez The 2min52 video ''Why Do Banks Make So Much Money?'' - the 3min01 ''Inequality:Why are the rich getting richer?'' - the 5min35 ''Power of Banks vs Democracy,'' by Positive Money [UK] plus the 3min15 ''George Carlin - It's a big club and you ain't in it.''
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laniakea Official
+Matthew John Hayden nothing like shit mining, non?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matthew John Hayden
+Laniakea Official Quite.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laniakea Official
+Matthew John Hayden I don't mean to be rude but I was actually critiquing your sources in sarcasm. I guess I shouldn't be sarcastic though.
And no, as I mentioned above, he never explains why he has a problem with the links.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
butterflycaught900
+Matthew John Hayden Can I ask you something? Genuine question. What is libertarian about people giving orders and others taking them?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matthew John Hayden
+butterflycaught900Good question. And genuinely awkward.
Some people giving orders and some people taking them is irrelevant to libertarianism unless the ones taking orders are coerced, but I didn't think of this at the time so I said;
As in... what is the entitlement to command and the duty to obey?
I guess all hierarchies are supposed to justify themselves before being maintained or discarded. What are the metrics by which their usefulness or not is to be judged?
Performance and the presence or absence of coercion, perchance?
To the best of my limited knowledge and reasoning ability there is no such entitlement and no such duty, and only voluntary, mutual relationships between moral agents are valid.
Michael Heumer spends an entire book trying to answer it... or at least the first of two sections of the book. It's called 'The Problem of Political Authority.'
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
butterflycaught900
+Matthew John HaydenI get the whole "but its voluntary!" thing but really isn't that irrelevant since wage labor is a necessary outcome for the majority of people in a capitalist system?
Wage labour is necessary anywhere one doesn't see universal subsistence, yes. Does this guy want universal subsistence / primitive tribalism then?
You work, accept whatever charity is available, or starve whatever anarchy you find yourself in.
It just seems disingenuous for ancaps to talk about avoiding it, considering that.
The point is it's not coercive, and a repeated argument by people I've spoken to is that the need to work, accept charity or starve is an example of some kind of structural violence.
If it's voluntary it's not forced, and thus not slavery - there is no problem of unlibertarian-ness in the first place.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laniakea Official
+butterflycaught900anarcho capitalism is a contradiction since capitalism begets class system begets hierarchy intrinsically.
I didn't address this at all, but it depends on the hierarchy - see above point on hierarchies.
Class? Hierarchy? Within organisations? Within households? Over a society as a whole?
Class as a concept relies on humans being giant clumps of segregated meat with unified 'class' interests.
As market competition, war, social mobility & the lack of uniform incomes among real people attest, class as conceived by Marxists and C19th anarchists is a myth.
Organisational and household hierarchies don't matter as they are natural and, in the case of organisations, voluntary.
The last one is called a government.
Aren't hierarchies supposed to be tested for their legitimacy or lack thereof? Didn't several leading anarchist thinkers say that? Presumably performance and coercion will be the metrics by which hierarchies are tested by society, non?
Capitalism, on the other hand, is a mode of production, and utterly agnostic to the question of hierarchy.
Essentially it's a cover up for libertarianism which is a cover up for neofeudalism, capitalism without rails(defined track or regulation). Monarchy, you name it.
Hockey stick graph, much? Note the contrast between the feudal flat-line and the capitalist upward surge. Different is the opposite of the same.
The whole no aggression principal is idiotic as well.
Depends on how it's justified, but any NAP is ultimately just a principle, not a law, saying it's a bad idea to begin something intrusive or coercive, and that's it.
Consequentialists, deontologists & ethical egoists all justify their own NAPs in different ways, but the actual presumption is the more or less the same in all cases, don't attack people.
So 'don't attack people' is idiotic. OK.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
butterflycaught900
+Laniakea OfficialThing about the NAP is that it's based on equivocation. They call it "non-aggression" because that sounds nice. But then they base it on a definition of "aggression" that doesn't at all match what most people mean by the word.
True as far as it goes - like bc900's definitions of private property and anarchy.
In common parlance, it's perfectly possible to aggressively defend one's property. But to libertarians, the previous sentence is incoherent. Aggression is bad, but defending one's property can't be bad, so it can't be aggressive.
Who acted non-coercively to take control of it?
Who acted coercively to take control of it?
Which one am I allowed to hit/shoot/stun to stop them
To truly 'aggressively' defend your property you'd have to attack somebody before they deprived you of the use if it, but in my next comment I humour this point as it's not a major attack.
Its about hiding behind an aggressive definition of private property with the agreeable-sounding "non-aggression principle." They pretend to defend private property as a consequence of non-aggression while obscuring the fact that the defense of private property is necessary to the understanding of what they mean by "non-aggression." And in the end it's hard for outsiders to tell who's in on this ruse and who's been fooled by it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matthew John Hayden
+butterflycaught900"to aggressively defend"
Sure, if 'aggressively defend' means I strike you or push you or both in order to get you, say, out of my house then I agree. Now that that's out of the way...
But then he ain't talking about houses. The bee in bc900's bonnet is all about land and buildings where production takes place, so "my house" is a bad example.
...you think that because non-philosopher, non-economist Youtube / Reddit / Facebook ancaps say "no force evah!" that makes defence by violent means a contradiction of their ideas about ethics.
That does ignore that the violence only follows after somebody else invades or steals their property, not before. The point is redress, or return to equilibrium. But I'm not wasting anymore time on this crap.
This 'commons' you're all humping in your dreams every night? Who created it? When? For what purpose? And what were the long term economic consequences of it? Compare to private property over, say, parallel 300-year periods.
If you seriously believe private property is a problem - I might as well tell flat-Earthers the world is round. Love you, but you're beyond helping, so I ain't responding again.
BUT!
First - who does what where when matters.
Second - no collective taking in all of humanity covering whatever arbitrarily defined geographical area can claim so much as a molecule as the collective is just a concept, so doesn't exist as an actor, therefore there is no prior claim for me to violate when I homestead shit.
Third - Anything but the private property answer to "who gets to use what means" is absurd.
http://ecomonyblogtime.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/demolishing-common-property-in-110-words.html
Walker walks onto Proper's land and claims nobody can own land. This situation sees Proper's land put to a use he does not choose or want, and Walker contradicting himself by occupying the land and choosing how to dispose of wherever he stands - this situation is now a dispute between these two people.
Who is allowed to resolve the dispute and by which means?
a. Proper can act to get Walker off his land somehow.
b. Walker can act to get Proper off the land or restrain him so he can't not share it.
c. Neither can do anything and they just stare blankly at each other until they die of thirst
d. Both can act first, cue outright chaos (bad Matt for not including this one, cos this is an option)
---
Everything above completely ignores another comment stream on the Chomsky-Molyneux vid because my most important comment on that thread was deleted and the definition of private property you gave I can't find anywhere else whatsoever, so I assumed you were deficient in the honesty department.
Goodbye gorgeous.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matthew John Hayden
+Laniakea OfficialFeudalism? The kind of feudalism whereby the Normans created the English Commons?
Sounds like you want ancapism to turn the world into a feudal hell-hole, cos then the feudal lords will recreate the commons to mollify the peasants.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laniakea Official
+Matthew John HaydenIt IS feudalistic in nature. I guess in some cases, I don't even like libsoc or anarcho syndicalist because statelessness becomes sort of a mental masturbative dream with no real account for human nature. But yeah, your life will be a life of renting from day one, you are a product of rent renting and so on. It might as well be feudal where they were rentees and debtors.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matthew John Hayden
+Laniakea OfficialAt least you hate all of us. Fair enough, bro.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
kvnd733
+Alfonso GutierrezIf it weren't for capitalism, you would probably be living under a feudal lord right now or a centrally planned oppressive government. Either way, you'd be dirt poor and far, far worse off than you are now. Capitalism isn't perfect, but if you think there is something better you are a fucking idiot
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
butterflycaught900
+kvnd7331All new value comes from work/workers.
Capitalists simply steal & redistribute value. ie, they attempt to hide their parasitism by alleging they're "providing capital."
Or, a similar claim is that they're "providing management." But really workers can manage themselves, elect managers, etc.
Basically the capitalist class provides nothing of value & is 100% parasitic.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matthew John Hayden
"All new value comes from work/workers."
By what means? Where? When?
I ask cos the economics profession spent the end of the 19th Century burying such objective value ideas.
Last I looked the value of the things I could potentially do or obtain was an artefact of my own cognition.
Now we see; claims made with neither reason nor evidence can be dismissed with neither as well.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
kvnd733
+Matthew John Haydenhe's not a serious person don't bother
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laniakea Official
+Matthew John Hayden
value does come from "work", it is essentially the primitive structure behind cost motivation. Cost or price being determined by work or labor put into it.
But I am not cognitively plugged in to the work that goes into goods or services, therefore my inclination to buy or not buy them at whatever price cannot be said to be a function of labour effort, and neither can another person's inclination to sell or not sell them.
Blacksmiths' work generated value and the price of swords.
Really? When? How? Are you sure it's not the quality of the sword as perceived by its purchaser? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Value comes from labor ultimately, current day with post-industrialism has sort of clouded that fact the way we have dehumanized workers and the importance of labor as we increasingly see automation and the "ha well I manage the business" etc. types of attitudes and perceptions.
Say what? Evidence?
To deny that work and labor is a determinate factor historically or currently is an out right lie.
Because...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laniakea Official
+kvnd7331Says the guy who likes his own comments, coming out the blue.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laniakea Official
+kvnd7331lol if it weren't for capitalism is a non starter. Capitalism was always there, Classical liberalism shifted the market in favor of those not connected to aristocracy and old money of the monarchic ways.
Isn't capitalism supposed to refer to a specific mode of production? And isn't that specific mode of productino supposed to have only become a noticeable phenom in the 16th Century? And isn't it, further, supposed to have become the dominant mode of production only in the 19th Century?
Classical Liberal era was a rise in economic and individual freedom outside of the historical high-borne .
I think I agree with this, but I'm not sure. I am assuming he refers to the principle of equality before the law, in which case I agree entirely as equality before the law is any liberal's guiding star in political philosophy or jurisprudence.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
kvnd733
+Laniakea OfficialYou are talking about the labor theory of value... which has been disregarded as not true in economics for well over 100 years. Buy a microeconomics textbook, maybe you will learn something
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matthew John Hayden
+Laniakea Official" value does come from "work" "
Hmmm. Cost or price is demonstrably determined by the interchange of the supply of and demand for the things being traded... so everything you said is made up.
Unless you decide whether or not you want things at given prices based on the labour that went into them... but this is obviously false.
Actually explained in an annotation above re lack of psychic powers!
Not to mention, you still ain't explained why I should believe this objective value shtick.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
butterflycaught900
+Matthew John HaydenI didn't mention the LTV, and conservatives don't know what it is.
The basis of pretty much all socialist economic critique, whether Marxist or not. And it's obviously wrong. How can the work put into something intrinsically, as a quality of that work's workiness, impute value in anything? Why isn't bc900 explaining this?
Conservatives are "taught"/indoctrinated to believe things like "the LTV says if you dig a hole and fill it back up again that you created value." And things like "The LTV says price isn't decided by consumers."
None of that is true. Marx, Adam Smith, etc didn't say any of it, but said the opposite.
Adam Smith wasn't an LTV guy. I guess bc900 is thinking of Ricardo.
But that whole topic is a distraction. They want to stop debating what i actually said & pretend i endorsed some pseudo-LTV stuff they made up.
It's dishonest to attempt to change the topic, & dishonest to attempt to label my argument as a "theory" i didn't mention.
Without LTV; no exploitation, no parasitism, no socialist critique.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
kvnd7331
+butterflycaught900I'm not a conservative you twat. I'm a PhD student in economics, and you have no clue what you are saying. The people who know the least have the most confidence. It's strange.
No need to be rude!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laniakea Official
+kvnd7331Not all economist follow your school of thought. Economics in a sense is subjective that you attempt to engineer a structure and somewhat a philosophy behind it. But what ever, it's no point. Comment section as a medium of exchange and debate is pointless and that's why i stopped replying.
+butterflycaught900
Take my word of advice, best bet is to provoke video responses.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
butterflycaught900
+kvnd7331
[no counter-argument]
that's what i thought
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
kvnd7331
+butterflycaught900
The other guy counter argued it well. There's not much more to add. Value has a subjective component, market prices are determined by the interaction of supply and demand. Cost, as opposed to value, is not just dependent on labor, but capital as well. Market prices are determined by the costs firms face in producing goods as well as the amount of market power a firm may have. For the production costs, these may be either very labor intensive, or very capital intensive depending on the industry. There are also input costs besides just labor and capital. Is there anything you want to say?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
butterflycaught900
+kvnd7331You mention costs & labor. When I explain that the source/creation of new value is labor that is a different issue than whatever the cost will end up being for some product of work.
That is an interesting point, the distinction between the epistemology of economics and observations of present-day practice to determine whether present-day practice is desirable or not.
But it's been addressed already.
You mention so-called "market prices," but the truth is each "market" system is created by the violence/property system. ie, there is not "the market" but many specific markets created by specific violence/property systems.
If no violence was committed to claim a property, and only people who try to deprive the owner of it are ever attacked, isn't that defence as opposed to outright attack?
More bizarre upside-down nonsense.
By violently overpowering society & putting some ownership class in charge, then adding the ability for them to buy & sell with other masters, does not make the "costs" created by such violence legitimate.
Who is society & who isn't?
Homeowners? Shopkeepers? Who are the ownership class? The share of the population who own shares on the LSE has only gone up, and the only reason for any long-term shrinkage in the middle class these past four decades has been due to people graduating up into the upper class.
And the "capital intensive production" is in fact still just a) the product of work/workers or b) natural & pre-existing things violently taken/stolen by the parasitic class of masters.
Then everything bar primitive subsistence is parasitic... riiight. So bc900 does advocate primitivism as a commons in means of production?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matthew John Hayden
+butterflycaught900"I didn't mention the LTV, and conservatives don't know what it is."
What does "All new value comes from work/workers" mean, then? The idea that true value is imputed by labour is the labour theory of value, and that's that.
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-labour-theory-of-value-as-presented.html
~~~
" Conservatives are "taught"/indoctrinated to believe things like "the LTV says if you dig a hole and fill it back up again that you created value." And things like "The LTV says price isn't decided by consumers." "
I said no such thing. It is true that humans who are not me have done so, but I have not.
~~~
"None of that is true. Marx, Adam Smith, etc didn't say any of it, but said the opposite.
But that whole topic is a distraction. They want to stop debating what i actually said & pretend i endorsed some pseudo-LTV stuff they made up."
If value comes from work and work in econ = labour then value COMES FROM labour.
There.
~~~
"It's dishonest to attempt to change the topic, & dishonest to attempt to label my argument as a "theory" i didn't mention."
Evidently I have done no such thing.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
butterflycaught900
+kvnd7331"Capitalism isn't perfect, but if you think there is something better you are a fucking idiot"
What economic principle says management must be responsive to shareholders rather than stakeholders (workers and community)?
Um, shareholders invested in the business. It ain't rocket science. When acting too beholden to shareholders gets a company in trouble its management must either change tack or see the business go bankrupt.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laniakea Official
+butterflycaught900They are in denial, and the comicbook man likes almost every one of his own comments. Unless you do a video response back and forth , fuck them. I've already gave good points that have been shot down with lackluster counter statements as far as I am concerned.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matthew John Hayden
+Laniakea OfficialYou never bothered to explain what was wrong with the links I shared.
You never bothered to explain what a "primitive structure" or "cost motivation" in econ actually mean.
Why should I take these seriously? Make me believe in your ideas!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
butterflycaught900
+Laniakea OfficialMy favourite part was when an ancap replied 'huh? what? when? where?' and this was described as me being counter argued so well nothing more needed to be added
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matthew John Hayden
+butterflycaught900Me?
"
"All new value comes from work/workers."
By what means? Where? When?
"
You neglected to say why your claim should be believed. By all means do say now if you can, friend. It's not like I could stop you even if I wanted to.
~~~
There's a comment thread below a Badmouse video started by Peter Miller and finished by me;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy8YGmTP5fk
If you can't find it there it's here too;
http://ecomonyblogtime.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/commentaryism-exploitation.html
The thread died when I took objective value theory believers to task. Not that that makes me particularly clever. But nobody's responded thus far. :(
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
butterflycaught900
+Matthew John HaydenYou picked three random factory fires, added up their deaths, divided by three because ???, and then multiplied that number by the number of countries in the world. I would charitably describe that methodology as literally one of the stupidest fucking things I've ever read.
Mean / average. Went over bc900's head.
Hasn't bc900 read Das Kapital?
I humoured the guy(ette)'s response because in fairness the disasters were in three different years and two different countries. But anyone who's actually handled statistics ever should know that that's the only weakness in my example.
Which is tardy macro-econ, I don't deny it.
Try this on for size. In a world that produces nearly 3000 calories of food per person per day, over 7.5 million people starve to death every year. About half of them are children. 800 million people currently suffer from malnutrition.
Aggregates on a world with a circumference of 40,075km around the equator and 40,007km around the meridian in which 7 billion humans occupy discrete and separate spaces and are limited by their bodily capacities and those of the technologies developed so far are never conclusive at best, unless the assertion is an incredibly broad brush stroke.
Why does this tell me anything about either capitalism on the one hand or, more generally, about distribution of produced goods and services over distances on the other?
The GDP of the U.S. and the EU combined is about $35 trillion. The cost of feeding the entire world would be about $31 billion.
Reducing reality to a spreadsheet.
Stating GDP figures doesn't explain the degree of the propensity of people to spend money on charitable giving.
This is also completely irrelevant to whether or not capitalism exists.
Also, far more than $31 billion ($1 trillion) has been spent already to basically no lasting positive effect.
In the absence of drugs and vaccines that are trivially cheap to manufacture, millions of people die of treatable illnesses every year, because it isn't profitable to sell them life-saving medicine.
I gotta wonder;
• How cheap?
• Manufactured where?
• And who else is demanding these scarce resources?
Such evil capitalists are also the only reason those vaccines exist at all. So far all bc900 is doing is advocating charity, not challenging capitalism.
Capitalism is a mode of production and completely agnostic to levels of charitableness, threfore blaming hunger and disease in piss poor countries on capitalism is a non-sequitur, as is any attempt to blame them on the market process.
All of this death and suffering is a result of misallocation of resources under capitalism.
This is circular & based on the spreadsheet view of reality further up.
And factually wrong as demonstrated by every attempt at planned aid to various African people over the last fifty years, and every other attempt at centralised economic planning, attests.
These numbers are better now than they've ever been, so if you go back a couple decades, even more people were dying.
Why are they better? Really wrack your brains, friend.
Add them up year to year, and capitalism eclipses the most inflated death tolls for all communism ever about once every decade.
Poverty. The cause of poverty.
And the cause of poverty is dearth of goods and services.
Goods and services offer;
• survival
• safety
• comfort
• leisure
And always in that order.
The conditions you complain about in Africa would be precisely the result of the kind of economy you want to live in. Try not to forget that while you're all fire and brimstone about capitalism.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matthew John HaydenYesterday
+butterflycaught900Somebody didn't read the actual text of the post.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"I would charitably describe that methodology as literally one of the stupidest fucking things I've ever read."
I'm happy you said that, because that was kinda the point. Though means are the tool of choice in much of basic econometrics.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Try this on for size." [ cites stuff that would be worse if capitalism didn't exist ]
Cute but no cigar. Perhaps instead of capitalism you should have said 'poverty' and you should have looked at some history again and realised that absolute poverty is the default condition of all humanity, a condition in which all currently existing common-property societies [eg Piaroa, Tiv, Merina] live right now.
Your complete and utter inability to identify cause and effect re poverty is your cross to bear, not mine.
Though I am glad that you didn't cite imperialism, as calling that literally capitalism is bizarre to the point of making an accuser sound insane. Props on that front.
Guess I didn't explain the causes of poverty well enough in the blog post... oh well.
EDIT
Just realised I didn't double up the stats at the end of the blog post - it was supposed to account for both Rummel and other accepted tolls re China (40 million) so I've fixed that. I also fixed the capitalism one to include an alternate ( zero ) since even trying to attach a death toll to a way of allocating labour and capital is a bit bizarre unless we talk of actual chattel slavery.
My apologies.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
butterflycaught900
+Matthew John HaydenSince this reply is little more than a wordy and pretentious "nuh-uh," without any real analysis or factual support, I don't think much of it at all. But I'll give it a spin.
""Try this on for size." [ cites stuff that would be worse if capitalism didn't exist ]"
Marx believed that capitalism was the stage of development that followed feudalism and preceded socialism. Poverty would be worse if capitalism didn't supersede feudalism, yes. Something that was explicitly acknowledged by Marx is not a point against Marxism.
"Perhaps instead of capitalism you should have said 'poverty'"
In a world with more than ample food and medical resources for all, in which those resources could be distributed at trivial cost to industrialized countries, poverty is the direct effect of an economic system that distributes resources only where it is profitable to do so.
And African governments and criminals will have no impact at all, and haven't had any impact to date?
"and you should have looked at some history again and realised that absolute poverty is the default condition of all humanity, a condition in which all currently existing common-property societies [eg Piaroa, Tiv, Merina] live right now."
We live in an industrialized world, not the state of nature.
The Piaroa, Tiv, Merina, and more than half of Africans do not live in an industrialised world, that's why they're poor. Props to this guy for confusing him/herself as well as me!
"Your complete and utter inability to identify cause and effect re poverty is your cross to bear, not mine."
K.
Poverty is the default condition of humanity. Near universal poverty, and the death rates that go with it, is a consequence of being human and living in the world, and that's that.
Only by the application of the capitalist process of deepening division of labour over time can people begin to escape this and gain easier and easier access over time to survival, safety, comfort and leisure.
If this were not the case then some other method would have proved equally as successful at eradicating poverty by now. None has.
"Though I am glad that you didn't cite imperialism, as calling that literally capitalism is bizarre to the point of making an accuser sound insane. Props on that front."
Imperialism is not "literally capitalism." It is a natural outgrowth of capitalism that is tied inextricably to it, particularly in the modern world. It is the means by which rich countries exploit poor countries to create wealth for themselves, very little of which returns to the exploited countries.
Countries exploit countries? Fictions exploit fictions.
Yet again irrelevant to capitalism.
Reification fallacy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Matthew John Hayden
I observe several things about the protest. First of all, yes, my comment was basically a "nuh uh" assertion because I'm tired of doing what I'm about to do. This will be the last time I bother responding to a comment in this way.
a. Despite what I said above you still think that capitalism is the actual reason why people still go hungry in the world. Yet again, it's a mode of production and completely agnostic to questions of the frequency and size of charitable donations.
b. And you think this even though the places where mass hunger is prevalent in 2015 have seen - as yet - almost no long-term use of the capitalist mode of production. Therefore where capitalism is allowed to trundle along things like mass starvation have disappeared completely ie Botswana.
c. You also think that capitalism gives rise to imperialism, ignoring Soviet imperialism, and pre-capitalist imperialism, plus the same problem as a. above, that capitalism is just a mode of production.
That's my cause and effect criticism in a nutshell.
a. Parasitism relies on theft of labour-produced value - relies on labour theory of value - which is metaphysical and so fictive
b. Anti-propertarianism relies on appeal to 'society' or 'the collective' enjoying claims over-riding those of original appropriators - 'society' and 'the collective' are nothing personified - fallacy of reification
c. Statements to the effect that capitalism kills people outside of specific workplace and renting situations when it is just a mode of production is a non sequitur
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
i DEATH
Some basis for claims about how many people die worldwide for what reasons every year;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate
A graphical breakdown of total 20th Century mortality by cause;
http://infobeautiful3.s3.amazonaws.com/2013/03/iib_death_wellcome_collection_fullsize.png
I don't see where the correlation between large numbers of annual human deaths on Earth and the existence of capitalism rests. Everywhere it's been tried there is a weak correlation but it's negative - that is capitalistic places see less death, at least after a few decades' worth of economic development off the back of that same capitalism;
ii SPREADSHEET LIVING
Humans are heterogeneous, human actions are heterogeneous, and land and capital are heterogeneous. Therefore totting up quantities of stuff that exist on Earth and saying one can alleviate the other does not represent the real-world challenges of implementing such a solution - otherwise central planning would work.
iii POVERTY
A report on the effects of Zimbabwe's socialist land reforms on agricultural productivity - that is, actual production of food that humans can eat. One of the sub-articles deals with the on-the-ground consequences for food production and mass starvation of imposing a commons in land;
http://www.cgdev.org/page/scorched-earth-zimbabwe-and-after-satellite-photos
A fabulous news story elucidating the same point as the link just above;
http://www.zimbabwesituation.com/news/zimsit_agriculture-tale-zimbabwes-sleeping-giant/
Poverty rate lower than ever because of capitalism, including in Africa - will be extinct in 25 years tops absent WW3;
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/10/05/for-the-first-time-less-than-10-percent-of-the-world-is-living-in-extreme-poverty-world-bank-says/
Dambisa Moyo explains why government to government aid is a non-starter - points out that $1 trillion has been spent on it to no long-term positive effect at all;
http://dambisamoyo.com/publications-articles-videos/books/dead-aid/
http://www.cfr.org/world/aid-dead-discussion-dambisa-moyo-foreign-aid-development/p34548
iv ESCAPE
M-PESA offers an easy way for farmers in Kenya & Tanzania to get access to credit to improve their farms through eg. fertilisers and machinery;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
The European Union Common Agricultural Policy is one of the biggest obstacles to more productive agriculture in Africa;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy#Anti-development
Clearly any attempt to turn the continent into a commons ain't going to work QED Zimbabwe farming commons;
http://www.cgdev.org/page/scorched-earth-zimbabwe-and-after-satellite-photos
Africans are not somehow magically different from other people. They will escape poverty in their own ways ('their own ways' meaning each person will find their own way) and the best thing an outsider can do is
a. let them by leaving them alone
b. donate to a charity that doesn't interact with Western or African governments
c. invest in African enterprise
v IMPERIALISM
...
~~~
To me this discussion raises some questions that might make a nifty study to undertake. Such a study might ask;
a. What share of the populations of what developing countries work either making things that are exported to the developed world or are employed by developed world companies?
b. And how have their material circumstances been changed?
c. What alternatives to this work are available?
d. Are the old ways pre-employment still available?
e. Over what time scale have people's material circumstances changed?
f. How have those circumstance changed?
g. And what are the likely future trends for such people?
~~~
20th CENTURY FAMINES
Those are crucial questions in identifying who is living under what circumstances and to correctly identify the reasons for those circumstances. But since a £40k grant from a major university hasn't just fallen into my lap I ain't going to be doing any such thing.
Apparently over the 20th Century about 117 [?] million people died due to famine, and in every single case it was demonstrably not a result of people trading food over long (10 or more km) distances, as would presumably be the anti-capitalist critique.
Rather it was simply because the division of labour and capital structure required to support them when harvests failed either hadn't been built yet or was sabotaged by war, genocides, or nationalisation.
So yeah, there is a problem of resource allocation, but it has nothing to do with a mode of production that is barely practiced in the places where people suffer these hardships.
Abject poverty and the ever-present threat of starvation by bad harvest was 100% true of basically every human on Earth until the first mass-scale agriculture, which only arose after the inception of private property (stuff that some people control to the exclusion of others until they die, gift it, or trade it away) on which the first cities could be built and civilisation begin gradually to knit together.
Of course even with mass-scale agriculture people were still vulnerable to bad harvests, but less so by the classical and mediaeval periods than in the days of the first farming.
Much of the population of Africa, India, Zomia, China, Indonesia and Oceania are still living at the basic mass agricultural level or are even more primitive in terms of food production than that, and only recently can any of them be said to be living amongst the activities (entrepreneurship, finance, and production according to previously untried allocation plans) that characterise capitalism.
~~~
MARX
"Marx believed that capitalism was the stage of development that followed feudalism and preceded socialism."
Yeah. I recall that both he and Engels wrote of the power of capitalism to drive material progress and even achieve superior material outcomes for people for a while. Glad you read enough to know that.
Other socialists felt similarly, and some I think even thought that capitalism would organically fade away eventually and that socialism would simply emerge peacefully as a replacement.
I'm pretty sure everybody agrees that capitalism will one day give out and be replaced by some other mode of production once the cost of everything falls to zero, though just to be clear I mean the capitalist mode of production.
The cost to you of acquiring a book, a toaster, a 3D printer, remodelling your kitchen, a ticket to Mars, whatever will eventually drop to nothing.
At that point making a profit becomes irrelevant since there's nothing to do with the profits anymore. By definition they're worthless, and thus not profits.
And this is factoring in the parallel between profit on a balance sheet on the one hand and marginal utility in your mind on the other. More on that a bit later...
~~~
But I am perturbed.
If a person wants to criticise - as Marx did - the reification all around them and point out that it's a silly fallacy, isn't it a little weird for them to build a theory of economics and of social progress built on reification?
Marx correctly pointed out the absurdity of treating nations, corporations, sports teams and so on as if they had any agency apart from or preceding that of really existing human beings, and he had no time for metaphysical speculation of the sort rampant in continental philosophy both before and during his time.
Why, then, does he commit the very same fallacy when imbuing some abstract collective (workers) with the one true cause. Isn't that just religious metaphysics? After all labourers are not some one-dimensional mass of meat.
Social classes ( capitalists, bourgeoisie, proletariat ) and capital described as actors separate from real individual actions are all examples of reification and can be dismissed as authoritative descriptors of reality for that reason.
Concerning action and its origins he goes even further by ignoring individual agency entirely. He seems to understand humans as exclusively acted upon rather than acting in any way, the same way a hammer is acted upon.
And as for economics, Marx took on the labour theory of value from Ricardo and spliced it with his burgeoning critique of society to arrive at the conclusion that labour adds value to things, the things don't always go to the workers, therefore the people the things do go to are robbing the workers - a mistake in one of your previous comments names Adam Smith alongside Marx, but Smith was never a LTV guy, Ricardo was.
Ricardo was just building on the - also silly - labour theory of property of such people as John Locke. He also imbibed the theory of equalities in trade - that people exchange equal values in a trade.
That bit does come from Smith, though was part and parcel of objective value economics from long before economics had a name.
Maybe it's starting to dawn on people where I'm going with this. The British classical approach to econ thus states that all trade is simply an equal swap - both parties give something away and gain something of equal value.
This silly British classical curiosity was swept away in mainstream econ by three books;
A General Mathematical Theory of Politial Economy (1862) by William Stanley Jevons
Principles of Economics (1871) by Carl Menger
Elements of Pure Economics (1874) by Leon Walras
Apparently Marx gave up continuing his work Capital well before his own death, possibly due to reading - or at least reading about - the theories exposited by these delicious people [Page 150 (150 on page, not reader) of the pdf in this link].
~~~
The marginal and classical explanations of the origin of value in economics differ in a vital way. Classical economists asserted that value resides in things, for various reasons, while marginalists say it's an artefact of human cognition and exists only in our own minds.
Indeed, considering all human experience is subjective, that we each have a mind of our own that is trapped inside our individual frame of reference, we are therefore subjects, perpetually subject to our own subjectivity.
Therefore all the opinions that come out of human cognition through speech and writing are subjective, including the price asked for something. Indeed how could it ever be otherwise?
One might not be able to acquire that something at the price-point that one desires, but nevertheless the interplay of people demanding certain things, other people offering those things, trend over time toward price formation that best represent, by matching the demand and the supply, the actual scarcity of the resources in question.
That's why government price freezes in the face of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina actually end up hurting more people than they help, because if shopkeepers can't raise their prices as their supplies dwindle, then the more and more likely it becomes that one customer will buy up the entire stock of, say, milk, or bread, or water, decreasing the number of people with milk bread or water from the store.
The way people rank wants and an answer to the diamond-water paradox is elucidated by two adorable CG automata as one talks at length about the neoclassical formulation of marginal utility.
Another exposition of the same thing is offered here, this time from an Austrian perspective.
~~~
"These numbers are better now than they've ever been, so if you go back a couple decades, even more people were dying."
Quite so but just a moment...
Does this mean you're not an anti-capitalist anymore? Cos the death rates from hunger and preventable diseases (admittedly they'd be unpreventable) would be vastly higher if the vast productivity increases fostered by capitalist investment on the one hand and market competition on the other had never existed.
Not to mention that in order to become a common property society you have to accept an end to the things that rely on private property, so money, increasing productivity through capitalism, and the division of labour go out the window to be replaced by everyone living the kind of lives you just complained about above.
Congrats for debunking yourself at last. And if you're thinking 'nice try, but where's the evidence' oh baby just read on!
~~~
POOR PEOPLE ARE POOR
"In a world that produces nearly 3000 calories of food per person per day, over 7.5 million people starve to death every year. About half of them are children. 800 million people currently suffer from malnutrition."
So the Earth is a spreadsheet? Resources exist therefore they can just be reallocated anywhere? Obviously this is false.
"In a world with more than ample food and medical resources for all..."
QED there ain't ample food and medical resources for all. This is a fallacy of aggregation because real life human beings and physical resources are remote in location from one another and cannot simply be acted upon (one of the biggest fallacies of Marxian and Keynesian econ) from outside like moving numbers on a spreadsheet in order to insert food/medicine into them.
Abhijit Banerjee in Poor Economics explains at agonising length the challenges faced even when people do get to poor countries with corrupt officials skimming the tasty treats, ordinary people distrusting the aid workers and the kit they offer (mosquito nets, plastic bowls, etc...) and more besides that will doubtless make for fascinating reading.
I do not deny that famines and poverty kill many people year after year, but I wonder where such deaths are least and most prevalent, and why. Interestingly almost every single famine in the 20th Century is, judging by the countries in question on this list, a place where the state either heavily intervened in or outright took over agriculture.
Looking at humanity as a spreadsheet it might be tempting to conclude that since certain aggregate quantities of certain resources exist on Earth that these resources can be made relatively easily available to fix aggregate problems.
If that kind of approach worked then the countless billions (well, $1 trillion so far) thrown at poor countries over the last several decades would have made them not-poor. It didn't.
A second opinion, just in case.
Dambisa Moyo defends her thesis in a discussion.
~~~
Also, have you ever studied agriculture in, say, African countries? Here's a study into Zimbabwe's agriculture as a result of the policies of Zanu-PF.
Turns out the land reform program pretty much ruined the country's economy (read, agriculture) and only in the last few years has a serious recovery begun.
It's much the same story in Ethiopia in the late 70's/early 80's, Somalia throughout the 80's, and pretty much everywhere else on the continent at some point plus much of Latin America (albeit after a previous capitalism period in the 19th Century, which is why Latin Americans on average (mean) are generally wealthier today than Africans, South Asians and even East Asians).
The big difference between Zimbabwe and those other countries is that the state isn't taking over the land and controlling its management, but redistributing it to peasant farmers who then proceed to grow enough food to feed themselves and nobody else.
Apparently trying to build a Kropotkinist paradise ain't going to work, but then we already know that from the Great Leap Forward in China, with people expected to be farmers and mini-scale steelworkers at the same time...
It is exactly the same problem as the collectivisation by the others I named, and results in a world where, if there are 7 billion-odd people all-told, 7.5 million of them will starve to death every year.
But you want this, right? I mean, you can't have your common property regimes in which people starve to death in their millions every year and then count them as a black mark against a mode of production (capitalism) they do not practice.
Massive agricultural vandalism in the name of whatever ideology (usually state socialism on the one hand or pure warlordism on the other) is the reason that Africa's agricultural sector, which should be pretty much the most productive on Earth, is the least*;
Admittedly there are a wide range of ideas about how to fix that. A fancy pow wow of World Bank folks and guest speakers drew up ideas concerning gender inequality and the lack of insurance as barriers to greater productivity.
A paper suggests African and maybe Western governments subsidise farmers to increase yields, maybe with the subsidies paid as and when produce is sold by the farmer.
A clever idea, of course. But why would they need a subsidy? Rhodesian / early Zimbabwean agriculture was completely unsubsidised and Zimbabwe was a net exporter of foodstuffs. Perhaps now we get into government subsidies and tariffs in the European Union and United States.
Turns out the European Union Common Agricultural Policy is one of the biggest obstacles to more productive agriculture in Africa because government subsidies in Europe encourage over-production, with those governments buying the surplus and either sitting on it or selling it to governments or wholesalers in Africa and the Middle-East. This has led in the past to those infamous mountains of rotting butter.
This also destroys the incentive for many African farmers to become more productive - even as so many Africans move into cities - as it denies them a potential market, not to mention that the European Union has a tariff wall against African foodstuffs of somewhere in the region of 14-18%, making it expensive to sell African produce within the EU.
* I mean as an overall quantity of food, not per-capita production, though I presume that's potentially very high too because of the continent's middling population density.
~~~
Some media types opine how the breadbasket of Africa became a basket case after the land reform program linked above.
Quoth the article above; "In the 1990s, Zimbabwe was a net exporter of maize before the fast-track land reform programme in which thousands of people were resettled on farms formerly owned by about 4 000 white** commercial farmers.
Since then, Zimbabwe has failed to meet its food requirements."
Note that there's no causal link between capitalism and the food woes of that country's people. When I criticised the other guy re cause and effect that was what I meant. Their claim that capitalism either creates or prolongs poverty is patently false considering that the most capitalistic nations are now called the first / developed world.
And yet again, capitalism is irrelevant to arguments about generosity versus meanness anyway as it's a mode of production. Talk about how willing or unwilling people are to give to charity instead.
** Disclaimer - I find the fact that such a concentration arose in the first place abhorrent for the same obvious historical reason as apartheid in RSA. It was the British administrators doling out land to their friends long ago and was a cruel absurdity on a continent with people already there.
~~~
PROGRESS?
And as the other guy somewhat acknowledged, yes poverty is racing downward everywhere, and the rate of decline is increasing.
The gap in rate of escape from poverty between East Asia and the other two regions is entirely because more people in East Asia than in the other two are plugged in to capitalism as becomes evident when one looks at the respective rankings of these countries in any study of economic freedom.
Further evidence includes the declining rate of infant mortality everywhere, declining at a rate never seen before and accelerating in that decline - and I'm supposed to be angry at the mode of production that's making all this progress possible?
Gapminder offer several fascinating time series literally showing one the fall over time in basically everything that is materially bad in every country where people are free to start businesses, own property and trade with each other and with outsiders.
The first one shows infant mortality falling by two thirds from 1990 to 2015.
The second is a measure of wealth and health. The wealth side is just good old GDP per capita (which is always calculated using a mean, the same method I used in my joke capitalism death toll) while health is represented using longevity. It is not measuring healthcare.
The third is not part of any argument against anything anyone has said, but rather is just a reminder for anyone, including me, that it's foolish to lump people together into metaphysical flesh masses.
~~~
RATES & NUMBERS...
Should we be talking about numbers and using the number of dead to indict a mode of production that isn't being practised where they're dying?
Or should we - strictly in the context of analysing economic progress - be looking rigorously at the prevalence of hunger and preventable disease as a proportion of the population of Earth, of continents, & of countries?
You forgot the world is big, movement is expensive, moreso where infrastructure ain't been built, and that poverty, being the default condition of humanity, can only be assuaged over long (compared to our lifespans) stretches of time through cycles of capitalist investment - hence the contrast between India and South Korea, or between Zimbabwe and Botswana, or between Venezuela and Chile.
~~~
MORALITY & SCARCITY
Another thing that's bothering me about this person's responses;
Ascribing moral significance to deaths caused by scarcity is daft unless the resources to help are actually at hand. A vat of grain in Somerset is not 'at hand' as far as a starving peasant in Zimbabwe is concerned, and the reasons why it is in Somerset are the business of the people whose grain it is.
To even attempt to say otherwise is to launch oneself into a hornet's nest of epistemological absurdity.
For example;
Ten bushels of various grains that nobody needs are sitting in a barn in Somerset.
Ten bushels will feed the people of a village in Malawi but no such food is available.
The ten bushels in Somerset must now be moved to Malawi in exchange for nothing.
What distance must be travelled?
What modes of transport will be needed?
How will the grains be preserved on the journey?
~~~
Sorry but as per my analysis and apparently the other guy's too only through the application of the capitalist mode of production over time in the actual countries in question will this problem go away.
I'm not denying that it is a problem. But so is death overall, and everybody faces that eventually. The stats in the image linked in the executive summary above show how causes of death change in prevalence with increasing wealth levels, and since only free-ish markets or more plus capitalism have ever been seen to date to offer such improvements, maybe there's just the beginnings of a case in favour of capitalism here.
~~~
COSTA COFFEE EMPIRE
"It is a natural outgrowth of capitalism that is tied inextricably to it, particularly in the modern world."
And then Matt's eyebrow disappeared past his hairline.
My thesis is that capitalism and imperialism are irrelevant to each other, not that they can't co-exist. The US is a capitalist country, and it has an imperialist foreign policy, a policy that actually profits... who again?
That's right, the friends and constituents of the politicians! Why this is an intrinsic characteristic or outgrowth of capitalism rather than statism utterly mystifies me. Here's Noam Chomsky himself unwittingly admitting the very same about the military industrial complex. At about 14:20 he points out how the M-I-C would fare if it had to face market discipline. View to 14:52-ish.
What do entrepreneurship and investment in new resource allocation plans have to do with military action by agents of one government against the people claimed by another?
Really try hard - place those two things side by side, the mode of production and the political system... why, considering the components of each, does either rely on the other?
I ask because I was a devout socialist firebrand all through my teens, a huge fan of Chomsky and only really started my moderation after realising how poverty rates were actually falling in the so-called '3rd world' due to the very things I'd been protesting against.
~~~
TO DO LIST
Africans are not somehow magically different from other people. They will escape poverty in their own ways ('their own ways' meaning each person will find their own way) and the best thing an outsider can do is;
a. let them by leaving them alone
b. donate to a charity that doesn't interact with Western or especially African governments
c. invest in African enterprise
Clearly any attempt to turn the continent into a commons ain't going to work QED the Tiv, and Zimbabwe farming commons.
Comments
Post a Comment