This meme was inspired by the response to a meme I posted on r/worldjerking
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10351845
This is the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldjerking/comments/1d92dkp/rate_the_political_factions_in_my_totally/
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Because no viable alternatives have been shown to work.
Unregulated capitalism is untenable, but regulated capitalism is and remains the best system we've been able to come up with.
I'm all for new ideas, but you've got to show some kind of precedence of it working in order to change the largest system in the world.
I love this logic because capitalism has made it its job to kill any competition prove the alternatives nonviable. Chile was trying something truly revolutionary, a fully democratic based socialism, and the CIA aborted the attempt and installed a capitalism friendly dictatorship.
You won't catch me simping for Authoritarians or anything, but when the only other mode of operation is a military strong enough to resist the CIA, there's going to be a bias towards Authoritarian based alternatives. Convenient, if you're trying to paint the alternatives as nonviable.
Man I love state sponsored terrorism!
That's kind of a straw man, though, isn't it? Governments of capitalist countries have worked hard to suppress non-capitalist movements within and without their country, but that's just what governments do. The Soviet Union was communist (as pure communist as the US is pure capitalist, which is to say, not very), and that also suppressed any alternatives. It's not a function of the economic system; it's a characteristic governments repeatedly demonstrate, regardless of their economic ideology.
I agree with the grandparent argument: capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best thing we have so far. Personally, I don't believe communism can work, mainly because I think it goes against human nature. Except for clan behavior - altruism to your family, friends, neighbors - people are generally selfish, and communism requires us to be altruistic at our own expense to people who we not only don't know, but who may talk differently from us, look different from us, have different culture from us. And even at the clan level, communism struggles. There were hundreds of attempts at building communes in the US in the 60's, and I honestly believe most died out not because they were subverted by the government, but because people are selfish and they collapsed under their own internal conflicts. Very few of those remain, and when you look at them, they have fairly rigid internal structures that re-enforce the commune.
Maybe if we can make it to post-scarcity, we'll be able to afford to be communist, because then it won't depend on altruism. But right now, when times are hard and food is scarce, most humans will look to feeding their own children first, and the priorities of the commune tear like tissue. Capitalism endures because it's built upon greed and selfishness, and those come easy to humans. When times are hard, we tend to fall back on barter, which is capitalism.
Anyway, saying that the US suppression of communism in Latin American countries says less about capitalism than it says about the US government, and their perceived interests. The proof is in the parallels in Soviet and communist (Mao era) China regional actions.
I mean, that's why I'm here using a p2p alternative. Since Napster and Bittorrent, they've proven that the most reliable way to resist their violence is to decentralize.
So do you have a functional alternative or do you just want a functional alternative?
(We ALL want the functional alternative)
Se can't have a functional alternative if we don't try and experiment dysfunctional ones and improve them. No system arises perfect. The argument that there is no alternative good enough is a tool to abot the creation of a good enough alternative through the improvement of not so good altemratoves.
We don't requite perfection from capitalism, but require from it's alternatives. Why? To block the possibility of a alternative, as all systems have problems, and initial experiments are problemsl ridden.
Some argue that the true democratic socialism has been achieved in India under Nehru. He was a socialist and the Indian economy was heavily regulated and many industries were government-owned. I'm not sure of the specifics but that hasn't worked out well for many years. There is a reason why the news that India "liberalising" its economy in 1990s was big and seen as historical. Many credit India's continuing growth from the liberalisation of the 90s. But some things have been relaxed too much imo.
I don't know about the situation, but from what you described that wasn't democratic socialism, it was social democracy; social democracy is a branch of capitalism. More specifically, social democracy emerged from a compromise made by capitalists to quell socialist and communist fervor.
In socialism, workers would be the owners of business and would distribute the profits among themselves. In social democracy, the states runs/manages some businesses with (in theory) the countries interests in mind, and creates several public support systems (i.e. public education and free healthcare) to improve overall quality of life for the average person; however the economy is still a capitalist one with free (but regulated) markets, where the only power workers have is voting on government elections.
I don't think it was social democracy in India under Nehru. If I'm not mistaken, Nehru's policies were further left than social democracy but I am willing to be corrected.
Edit: I forgot to mention, the Indian state of Kerala elects a socialist party since the independence of India, and have successfully uplifted the standards of living in its population with free housing and education etc, but people there are emigrating because there aren't any jobs.
If the alternatives dont work then why does the ruling class work so hard to squash them?
Because no viable alternatives have been shown to work.
Capitalism has proven it definitely doesn't work, we're careening toward ecological collapse.
Humans existed without state, and therefore with (likely multiple coexisting) informal economic systems for hundreds of thousands of years, I'd say that has been show to work.
There was nowhere close to the number of humans or level of complexity that there is today when those systems were in place.
That doesn't mean those methods or some form of them can't work, you just assume this is true because you've been given that message by those who need us to believe this for them to maintain power.
And let's say no non-state method can possibly work at our scale, is that to essentially throw up our hands and say, "well, since intelligently shrinking our population and economy to a size that can be sustainably managed and is appropriate sized for our planet (i.e. "degrowth") is unspeakable, and other methods we sorta tried for a bit don't seem to work, we'll just go ahead and continue with this known broken method until it all collapses from overexploitation" ??
Wouldn't it make more sense to say "I want human society to exist in 100 years and for that to happen, we need to learn to live within the bounds of our planet"?
How can we try anything new if everything has to have a precedence.
By doing smaller changes on an existing system. By forming strong unions, like the EU and releasing new regulations, one after the other.
I'm all for new ideas so long as they're old ideas.
take a look at The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber
Read up on the Paris Commune, read Homage to Catalonia by Orwell, read up on the anarchists from Manchuria. Those are just the bigger ones I can think of from the top of my head, but there are plenty more (usually smaller scale) examples. Also, read David Graeber's work, especially The Dawn of Everything like another user suggested.
The common point of failure for those, was being a smaller entity that was surrounded and attacked by imperialist forces; some of which received help from other, more powerful, imperialist forces that had a vested interest in these groups failing.
I'm trying to remain cordial and nice, but it's quite difficult when it seems like usually the people claiming "no viable alternatives have been shown to work" have never actually looked into any alternatives; it hardly feels like good faith argumentation.
Socialism is defined as the government owning or regulating the means of production.
When there's an actually well regulated market, like say, we have here in the Nordics, you'll tend to see other socialism alongside it. We have good social security and labour laws. Exactly because it's regulated market economy we utilise.
Capitalism does not have aa monopoly on market economies.
Capitalism is to market economy what cancer is to cell growth.
Even the US employs socialist policies. As in the policies themselves are socialist in nature. Antitrust laws. Because without them, capitalism would fuck over the economy in a heartbeat.
If something has been shown to not work it's capitalism.
Capitalism is the antithesis of a well regulated market and will always fight regulation in any form, because it's harder to make profits if you can't sell unsafe garbage and exploit workers to their death.
Has anyone tried lottery? I wanna bet that picking leadership completely at random would be better representation than rich assholes like Biden and Trump. That's how we do things with QA testing and statistical analysis. It's how we try to eliminate bias.
Nice! We gotta do that Athenian business!