like restricting immigration and a post-war boom and trade protections!
Yes, those are fine examples. Also, social security and the rest of the social safety net and state investment in infrastructure â WalMart, UPS, and oil companies probably wouldnât be quite as profitable if the federal government had invested in rail in the 1950âs instead of the Eisenhower interstate system and Amazon would look a lot different in that alternate reality as well. The US hasnât been shy about establishing monopolies or near-monopolies for utilities and utility-like services and those fairly heavily regulated monopolies provide infrastructure for the rest of the economy. This sort of infrastructure provides services that favor certain kinds of businesses over others and so the intervention of the government into infrastructure-providing businesses is a huge factor in which sorts of businesses can become profitable by using that infrastructure.
IMO, the federal governmentâs heavy hand in the energy and agriculture industries are enough to put paid to the idea that our economy is a purely capitalist one.
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I only speak the language, and my dialect is a mishmash of several regional ones and RP, with West Country predominating, so what do I know? I mean, I pronounce the H in âherbâ, which is wrong by American standards, though right by British Received PronunciationâŚ
At any rate, the original complaint was about pronunciation, which is an even smaller hill to defend than âproper grammarâ â whatever that is. By any reasonable English grammar, if the H in âhistorianâ is weakened or non-existent, then you say âanâ before it. Which I do. Sometimes.
The Iphone as a phone/portable computer yes, but what is the real difference between the 5, 5s and 5c? I mean, wouldnât a 5 suffice?
Marx never said that it was a simple matter of political will, but that economics and politics are inseparable. Any economic system, collectivist or not cannot be fully understood without its political dimension. Capitalism didnât become the only economic system on Earth without being a an intentional political project. European imperialism of the 19th century, and American interventionism in the 20th have been crucial to establishing a unified global market. And the construction of this global market caused tens of millions of deaths, mostly from famine, as countries went through the dislocation of being integrated into the system. Even within European countries, it required centuries of political effort to breakdown feudalism to make the conditions possible for capitalism.
I agree, economics is an important part of understanding the way things are, but they are still only a part. Furthermore, what understanding contemporary economics offers us on the current state of things, is not universally applicable to all of previous history. Economic laws are specific to a given system, they arenât a natural force like gravity. Current Chinese economic policy would be disastrous if applied to the Song dynasty, because their economic systems are totally different. It took determined political action to turn an agrarian pre-industrial economy into an urbanized industrial one, and in the case of China, this was externally imposed causing massive social upheaval.
Yes, and economics will also tell you that letting prices float freely has the same effect, if for the opposite reason. Instead of a shortage of goods for people to buy, there is a shortage of money for people buy goods with. Itâs still rationing, just without the line ups that fixing prices causes.
Biology and chemistry are also separate fields, but each is incomplete without the other. To divorce politics from economics is to blind yourself to the ways in which economics is as much a normative endeavor as it is a positive one. It is also profoundly ahistorical since a quick glance at any human society would obviously show the intimate connection between the distribution of wealth and the distribution of power.
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Uh. That article specifically backs my position and opposes yours.
Look, youâre operating off a caricature of Marx here. I really encourage you to read more Marx, or a summary of his thinking, because it would at least clarify your criticisms of him. Marx said that economics should be understood as a political issue, not that politics makes economics. This is an important distinction, because your understanding is Marx precisely backwards. As @FoolishOwl explained, Marx saw political forms as usually derived from economic ones, although there is feedback between the two. The political nature of economics to Marx was that allocation is not neutral or scientific, but that it reflects the relations of power within society.
I cannot fathom how a system which has lead to outcomes where tens of millions of have people starved to death because it was literally unprofitable to feed them is non-political.
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I was hoping it was Richard.
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Iâll just leave this hereâŚ
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I found 3 different pages on this grammar an vs. a (which are found throughout the comments), two agreed with you, one with me (that itâs variable, depending on the pronounciation of âhistorianâ. I havenât found anything in strunk and white, thoughâŚ
Itâs a minor disagreement over grammar, and Iâm happy to be wrong⌠No need for an argument⌠I mean, this is an article about Marx, and it hasnât come to (virtual blows) yet⌠I refuse to let it do so over grammar⌠
BTWâ I looked it up in the Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition), and it says use an with words with consonants that sound like a vowel. I donât know if other style manuals say different things⌠I forget which other fields use Chicago other than history⌠Journalism, maybe? Any English nerds know what MLAs style manual says?
Iâll happily trade my âfreedom to capitalâ for the freedom not to starve or be economically destroyed because of health issues and not have the value of my labor disproportionately exploited by the employing classes.
Capitalism itself withholds capital from the masses. It literally does not function without a large base of disenfranchised people. Insufficient capitalism is not the cause of our woes.
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[quote=âNelsie, post:67, topic:21579, full:trueâ]By any reasonable English grammar, if the H in âhistorianâ is weakened or non-existent, then you say âanâ before it. Which I do. Sometimes.
[/quote]
Non-existent, yes. Weakened, whatever that is, no. I am still convinced -nh- goes against English phonology, and it appears -anh- and -anx- regularly became -ah- and -ax- in common Germanic phonology, thus thought [which loses the n before x] contrasts with think [which retains the n before k].
Iâve always used an before historian because it sound right to my ear (which could be wrong, of course, but we are talking about English, not French and American English, at that), but it seems like it depends on sound of the h⌠and that would vary with accent, no?
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Our system certainly isnât some sort of perfectly idealized capitalism system that would make a Randian weep with joy. Nation states manipulate currency and laws, corporations use political power to alter the rules, there is wealth redistribution through government action, etc, but on the whole it is mostly capitalistic in nature. The âsocialismâ in our system is âsocialistâ in the way Republicans use the word, which is to smear it onto everything that the government has touched (which is stupid). A welfare state and a socialist state are two different things.
Wherever you are, look around at your stuff. Unless you are writing from Cuba, it was all built under a capitalism system. All of the resources around you were allocated through market forces. Sure, government might regulate and try and push and pull it here and there, but the fundamental force at work to pull resources from the ground, build tools, use tools to make more tools, and then use those tools to make stuff which can be used to make more stuff is fundamentally a capitalist system. Even in things that we consider to be âsocialistâ system these days are really strongly market systems. Medical care in Western nations with socialized medicine is still largely supplied with utterly capitalist corporations operating in a capitalistic system, even if you pay the doctors out of a government budget with wedges set by market demand.
Iâm not cheer leading capitalism, and I really donât want to live in some Randian utopia, but our system is fundamentally a capitalist system, and 99% of the crap in it is made by corporations obeying boringly mundane market rules with a handful of regulations and taxes smeared on the side. We expect our needs to be met by a market operating under supply and demand, and for the most part that is how all of our stuff appears before us.
Using -nh- might seem uhinged or even uholy to you, but many other people seem less tha hesitant about it. You ca hear it from ihabitants of many different places, all the way from the Alaskan pahandle to Mahattan and beyond. I think word from o high is that itâs acceptable.
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As others have noted, the few quotes from Marx/Engels that are given in the article are apparently about the past/present, not predictions of the future. He/they were describing what was happening at the time (in fact in a few cases they were stating commonplace observations already made by other writers).
I find the third âpredictionâ particularly strange:
Marx wrote those words in 1848, when globalization was over a century away
Ah yes, that golden age before globalisation. America was building itself into an economic powerhouse by trading voraciously with every inhabited continent on Earth, just as Europe and Asia had been doing for centuries. China was already trading with the Mediterranean as far back as the 1st century AD, and Britain was enthusiastically drinking imported Italian wine hundreds of years before the Romans invaded.
The cultural exchange aspects of globalisation were also commonplace in Marxâs day. It was a big deal among the Victorians to study Eastern âwisdomâ, turn vegetarian, smoke exotic herbs, translate the Koran or Mahabharata, go looking for parallels between world religions, identify Krishna with Jesus, etc. Such things were long thought classy and progressive. The 1960s take on this was practically a revival (swinging London in the '60s inherited both Victorian garb and Victorian-style championing of Indian culture and mysticism).
Marx himself almost certainly sipped his tea from a China cup, and a vast army of African slaves had only recently been declared free by the British, a question the US would not finally confront for a few decades yet.
But no, there was none of that nasty globalisation, no sirree.
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I can ask my brother, whoâs a Linguistics prof. If I need an authoritative answer, heâs usually my go-to guy. Iâm with you on the matter anyway.
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Ironically, âMarxismâ is less sharply defined that the movement that sprung up to crush it - Fascsim.
Not that the definition of fascism is ironclad, either.
âStrong, militant, state with industry leaders as part of the political processâ?
- âIt is mostly capitalistic in natureâ sounds very much like a judgment call rather than a logical or numerical distinction. From my perspective, âit is mostly capitalistic in natureâ is a conclusion that can only be reached by ignoring the decidedly non-capitalistic influences on the economy â influences which are both ubiquitous and strong. Iâve already mentioned a range of these.
- Iâm not actually using âsocialismâ in the way that Republicans use it (they use it as a curse word where Iâm merely using it as a value-neutral descriptor; your assumption seems as though it may be predicated on the assumption that socialism is a bad thing), though I suspect youâre using âcapitalismâ in the way that libertarians use it. Are you simply referring to market-based allocation as âcapitalismâ? If so then thereâs a serious problem of semantics here because I think there are non-capitalistic market-based systems of allocation. I think âcapitalismâ specifically refers to the model in which a large amount of money (capital) is used to establish a business which then purchases labor from people who need to eat.
- I disagree that a welfare state and a socialist state are two different things. I think a welfare state is a type of socialist state. I think this is very much consistent with typical usage of the word âsocialistâ. This is a result of the specificity of my definition of âcapitalisticâ â since sale of labor is an integral part of any capitalistic system, putting a floor under the labor market with welfare provisions is a thoroughly socialistic intervention into the economy.
- It seems to me youâre conflating state communism with socialism. I donât think theyâre the same thing. France, just as one example, is often referred to as socialist despite the fact that its economy is largely market-based.
See above. I donât think âmarket allocatedâ and âcapitalistâ are synonyms.
Iâve already explained why this is wrong. Our system is only âfundamentallyâ a capitalist system if you ignore those aspects of the system which are fundamentally not capitalistic (âfundamentallyâ is a weasel word here; I donât care what it is âfundamentallyâ which is open to interpretation, I care what it is actually). Iâve already explained why âcrapâ being âmade by corporationsâ isnât enough to make the system capitalistic but Iâll go again: the government picks winners and losers by intervening heavily in utilities and similar infrastructure markets. If you actually trace all the inputs for any particular consumer product I think youâll see that a great deal of those inputs are from government sponsored monopolies or a result of infrastructure that was funded by the government. This means that the markets which determine how resources are allocated have been distorted by government intervention; if not for the governmentâs intervention, the profitability of any given product could very well be different and the range and type of âcrapâ manufactured would also be different as a result. Just look around at your âcrapâ and think about what probably wouldnât have ever been manufactured if it werenât for the US government subsidizing the petrochemical/petroleum fuel industries.
I suspect this is largely a semantic disagreement. If you want to change the meaning of the term âcapitalisticâ to refer to the sort of economy we have now then I canât really stop you. However, Iâd prefer to use the term âcapitalisticâ to refer to those concepts and practices which have traditionally been referred to as âcapitalisticâ â otherwise the term âcapitalisticâ is simply tautologically defined as whatever the nature of our economy is at the time weâre describing it. This makes it more difficult to analyze the actual structure of the economy since it impoverishes the set of words and concepts we can use to differentiate and describe various facets of the economy.
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