They're definitely profit-seeking, but I don't see how that makes them non capitalistic
Discussion
Was a medieval Baron capitalistic? An Ottoman timariot? A jewelry thief? A modern Burmese general?
One of the cringiest things about Conservatives is how they define Communism as "Anything I Don't Like".
One of the cringiest things about SocDems is how they define Capitalism as "Anything I Don't Like"...
Those are nice examples and all, but not only are they irrelevant when the topic at hand is Wall Street and big business, you don't ever actually explain how they aren't capitalistic. Big business is like the definition of capitalistic, so I'm very curious how you can argue against that. Wall Street perhaps even more so. It's literally the people with the most money buying and owning portions productive ventures so they can profit off them without contributing any labor, or trading commodities, or a dozen other things that all boil down to leveraging capital they already own to gain profits without having to perform labor.
So, you literally have no definition of Capitalism beyond "the feels"?
And from this glass house of yours, you... throw stones?
Dude, you could, you know, Wikipedia...
My dude, I at least discussed the topic at hand and highlighted how they leverage capital for profits under capitalism. You can't make literally any relevant points. You listed some totally different things, claimed I just think anything I don't like is capitalism even though I didn't even say anything negative about these things (seriously, ?????), and now accusing ME of leaning on "the feels" instead of a definition when YOU are the one who can't articulate your point properly.
Dude, the actual quote you are mocking is distinguishing "Capitalism" from the much larger category of "profit seeking".
Perhaps you should read it again.
And if you can't Wikipedia / Wikidictionary / Brittanica a definition, then I don't know how to help you. All of those three are good, btw.
Yeah, and the point was that these are, in fact, still capitalist in nature. You want a hard definition, fine, let's look at Britannica:
"capitalism, economic system, dominant in the Western world since the breakup of feudalism, in which most means of production are privately owned and production is guided and income distributed largely through the operation of markets."
https://www.britannica.com/money/capitalism
Big business privately owns the means of production and depends on the operation of markets to get their profits. That sounds inherently capitalistic to me.
Wall Street privately owns businesses and the products they produce, and it exists practically *entirely* to exploit the operation of markets to skim profits.
Both depend on ownership of capital to gain profits through markets, not by virtue of labor.
This all looks pretty inherently capitalistic to me. You can argue that the individuals are motivated by profits and not by the ideals of capitalism, but the systems they're using the gain those profits look pretty capitalistic to me.
Great definition, now actually read it.
- Private ownership.
- Production.
- Markets where buyers and sellers compete
Which part of that resembles Wall Street?
Wall Street
- Revolving door with government
- Financialise, suck bailouts, demand
- Use state violence to suppress competition.
Finally somebody on the Right gets this!
<3 <3 <3
Wall Street
- Directly trades in the private ownership of productive ventures
- The things they own are productive, which is how they derive profit from owning them
- Wall Street is practically all markets. Stock market, futures, currencies, if you can make a buck off of it, Wall Street is running markets for it.
So it ticks all the boxes for capitalism as you've listed them. Literally all of it resembles Wall Street.
A revolving door of government officials doesn't invalidate that. Paying off government officials to get bailouts and other free rewards from the government doesn't invalidate that. Using the state for violence to secure favorable market positions doesn't invalidate that. All of these things are just what the owner class under capitalism will do when exposed to levers of power: they use their capital to buy things and power that will enable them to secure more capital.
To argue otherwise is little different than arguing that true capitalism can only occur under anarchy as any government will provide levers of power for them to abuse and pervert the system. But under anarchy, you'll simply see those with the most resources spend them on armed forces to establish their own fiefdom in which they can maximize their profits, and then you see the exact same revolving door, bailouts, and "state" violence to protect market positions.
You have the same delusional beliefs about Wall Street that Conservatives do.
No, they don't do any of those Capitalist things if they can help it, too much like working for a living.
They use their proximity to power to extract money from others, via the levers of government.
Socialism for the well-connected.
And you know nothing of Anarchy if you believe that.
You know nothing of humanity, untwisted by State power.
For 99% of human existence, we were Anarchists of one flavour or another.
The State is a recent and poisonous novelty, a collection of monopolies used to construct further monopolies.
I understand anarchy as anarchists want it. I also understand that society as we know it arose from that prehistoric anarchy you speak of. Because someone finally managed to consolidate enough resources to establish themselves as ruler. Which is what would happen if you took modern societies and put them in anarchy. We do not yet have the tools to keep each other in check, or else we would already HAVE peaceful anarchy. I think decentralized techs can do a lot to address that, but as it stands now, today, if we converted to anarchy without massively redistributing wealth, the richest among us would simply immediately entrench themselves as rulers.
On that, we largely agree.
But without the State, corporations cannot hope to survive in competition with free labour.
Proudhon was no starry-eyed idealist, he had been a successful small entreprenuer himself under Absolutist crony-socialism.
Corporations would simply form their own states. They'd buy small armies and if libre labor poses an actual threat to their profits, they'd be removed. Even if you ignore that inevitability, economies of scale suggest at least the biggest businesses would be able to compete quite well.
Unless you're prepared to be a farmer, you're going to need to buy food, so you're going to *need* to sell your labor to survive, so individual laborers have to deal with the power imbalance of needing food immediately, compared to a business owner capable of hiring you clearly having extra money on hand to weather a shortfall until you cave out of hunger. There's an inherent power imbalance in the worker-employer relationship, and the absence of a state won't fix that.
You're thinking good thoughts.
The societies we speak of lasted thousands of years, and attempts at doing all of those Statist things were done. And nearly all failed. You really need a critical mass of monopolies to become self-sustaining, if your victims are able to flee OR resist.
And now we know more about the "failure states" and how to spot them. And we can engineer technology to distribute power further than ever before.
Books I recommend:
"Seeing, Like a State"
"Against The Grain: a prehistory of the earliest States"
"Debt: the first 5000 years"
What? We've had a practically unbroken chain of authoritarian state societies going back like 6,000 years or more. Some of them failed, sure, but always to be consumed by another state, never again to form an anarchic community for any meaningful length of time on a historical scale. If there's a critical mass of scale, we've already blown well past it. It's practically demanded by the sheer scale of work required to maintain society. It's the only way we know how to organize ourselves at scale.
We can develop tech to change our power structures, but for better or for worse, I would not brand the ones we have as failures. They've survived without any real threat to their fundamental structure for thousands of years, only ever seeing one state fall to another. It's incredibly difficult to scale without centralizing, which is why it took thousands of years and the advent of networked computers to just decentralize the money.
You're really living up to your name here. They do all of those capitalist things, and they do them constantly, but because admitting that would be devastating to your point, you can't admit that.
They don't play by the rules, and they use their proximity to power to extract money from others because that's what any powerful class does under any system. Power itself becomes a market, and they broker in it for personal gain. Socialism for the owner class is the end result of capitalism, not some invalidation of it. Those with power will use it to enrich themselves, and under capitalism, capital *is* power, so how could you expect anything else?
We already agreed on definitions of Capitalism, and its very clear that describes small business (much of the time), not Wall Street.
Capital ipso facto is one form of power, there are many and entertwined.
Socialists love Big Business. It crushes and exploits them, but their horizons are so narrow they can dream of nothing but riding the machine.
They dream of being Conservatives.
I still disagree that it doesn't describe Wall Street. It's inherently capitalist to its core, even in the way it perverts and exploits government.
What do you think socialism actually is? Since you insist so strongly on getting a definition, let's check Britannica.
"socialism, social and economic doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources. According to the socialist view, individuals do not live or work in isolation but live in cooperation with one another. Furthermore, everything that people produce is in some sense a social product, and everyone who contributes to the production of a good is entitled to a share in it. Society as a whole, therefore, should own or at least control property for the benefit of all its members."
https://www.britannica.com/money/socialism
Sure seems to me like actual socialists would be against big business. Ironic that you can realize how conservatives label anything they don't like as communism but then proceed to do the exact same thing, just with socialism instead.
Actual socialists SHOULD be, but the Western world is full of "Euston Road Declaration"-type sellouts.
All of that Socialism definition except the last paragraph applies to the modern Wall Street.
And that last paragraph, I'm sorry to say, has never applied to Socialism anywhere more than briefly...
What? Wall Street *privately* owns things. They perform no labor but still take a share of the profits simply for having owned capital. And we agree that the last sentence doesn't apply, so basically none of this definition applies to Wall Street.
As for parts of it supposedly never happening (not fully versed, can't say for sure either way), I think that's more an issue with the supposed implementation not living up to the ideal or theory. It's not an indictment of socialism itself to say systems didn't properly embody it.