I saw it on forums that leaned libertarian: some members would start out talking about how the banks had screwed us, how the government was letting them do it, how we needed to demand that the government do something about it…you know, nothing terribly untoward. It was when they started referring to bankers as things like “parasites” and “subhuman” that it became a little disquieting, and when discussions finally ended up devolving to mentioning how many bankers were Jewish, alarm bells started going off and they had to dial it down a bit.
p.s. I would love a concrete Free Republic definition of “conservatism” because apparently Ron Paul is a raving liberal no different than Obama? Eh? They claim to want to support Constitutional ideals but want to promote conservatism and apparently Ron Paul doesn’t stand for promoting conservatism because his policies would lead to legalized drugs and gay marriage…I don’t pretend to understand anymore, I’m just glad the average age of that brand of conservative seems to be about 90.
Capitalism is a pale shadow of nature. Nature expands and contracts constantly; from sickness and health, to population booms and crashes, to forest fires and regrowth, to meteor strikes and mass extinctions, to ice ages, to supernovae, to big bangs.
Capitalism not only constantly expands, but it crashes too, in order to mount an even bigger expansion the next time around. And possibly facing an unrecoverable crash at some point. Just like nature.
The difference is that Capitalism is subordinate to the natural systems; in this case, the planetary ecology that eventually will catch up with it.
There’s an interesting account of Marx’s ideas, in Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, by John Bellamy Foster. Foster lays out that Marx and Engels were highly aware of the developing science of ecology, with its modeling of ecosystems as made up of metabolic cycles, as dialectical processes.
For example, Marx wrote about the widespread problem in agriculture of topsoil depletion, as a problem of capitalism’s tendency to deliberately disrupt cyclical processes and provoke crises. The trend in early industrialized agriculture was for intensive farming to extract the soil’s nutrients without replenishing them, so that the soil would become exhausted. The first solution to this problem was to look for new agricultural land to exploit, so there was a tendency for farmers in North America to move west, for instance; however, by Marx’s time, that solution was no longer viable. Of course, industrial agriculture was shipping its products to rapidly growing industrial cities, and an obvious solution would be to ship the wastes back to agricultural land to replenish the soil, thus completing a metabolic cycle. (This was also generally the pattern with pre-industrial cities and agriculture.) That’s not the solution capitalism hit on. Instead, cities dumped their wastes in rivers and oceans. Soil was replenished with fertilizers, partly from primitive accumulation – there was a boom in the exploitation of guano from caves and islands (mentioned, somewhat comically, in Conrad’s Lord Jim) – but mainly the development of an industry manufacturing chemical fertilizers. There were more opportunities for the extraction of profits and for industrial expansion (with the concomitant further disruptions through resource exploitation), so that less sustainable, more disruptive model was the one capitalists preferred.
Yeah, when I run into those I start working on rephrasing, retraining is too uncertain and time consuming.
The problem is the question . . .
Capitalism isn’t a thing that grows.
Meanwhile, the textbook answer might leave the the wrong impression with some. So I’d add the following for emphasis, because within that part of the answer is a solution.
In a nutshell:
Entities that use capitalism (Nations and Corporations) don’t have to grow at all, any entity that contains an entire supply chain can treat any external interactions as optional.
Yes, I know what you were talking about. Three years ago I bought hay from a nearby town waste treatment project for my horses. The poor dears almost died.
Uh, no. As @William_Holz pointed out, “capitalism” is not measurable; as such, it does not grow or expand. The application of specific capitalistic principles can spread as more entities implement them; capital, as measured by some definition of currency, can increase in some points, and the same is true for other parameters (volume of exchanged or manufactured goods, overall wealth as defined by a certain number of parameters, etc etc).
Capitalistic systems are, by nature, set up to increase the amount of capital held by whoever holds some in the first place. They “expand” insofar as they need to generate more capital from somewhere, be it by creating more fiat money or by extracting value from entities that did not previously take part in them. Whenever these options are too limited or entirely unavailable, capitalistic systems lose their own meaning, which is why actors stop taking part in them and you perceive a “crash” of sort. It happens to be that value extraction can be obtained simply by exploiting human trust (this is what the financial sector does, at the end of the day), which is something you can, in the long run, replenish by one way or the other. Hence our perception of another round of “expansion”.
Capitalism is not a “shadow of nature”: it’s just the rulebook for a game played over essential principles of human psychology.
My, but that was amusing. And what happens when the business automates 90% of the jobs in order to pay a “living wage” to the 10% remaining ?? Because that’s GOING to happen in Fast Food. You’re already seeing self-serve checkouts in big box stores. As soon as “smart shelf” tech is cheap enough, you’re going to see roboticized shelf re-stocking.
Hint: A job is where you trade your time, effort, and skills for money. If it’s not a difficult job, and especially one that nearly anyone can do with minimal training, the wage will not be high. Basic economics: Supply high, price low. . .
I’m sorry for what happened to your horses, but I don’t think we can generalize from that to conclude that a basic metabolic cycle on which all life depends – with the exception of industrialized agriculture – is a bad idea.
Well, that certainly isn’t what I was trying to express, but I’m always willing to concede that I may have been unclear. My point was that supporting necessary infrastructure is a lot different from funding hand selected charitable experiments. Voluntary charitable giving has its place, but will never be the thing that makes social programs sustainable or consistent once they’ve been discovered to be a good idea, and are implemented. Wealthy individuals who bring up their charitable giving as a reason to be offended by a tax increases are drawing a false equivalence between the two at best. There’s no glory in just paying your taxes anonymously and faithfully to support social programs, but IMHO glory isn’t the point when we’re talking about universal access to education and childcare.
Now you’re splitting hairs, and taking things out of context. Of course the many of us who have said “capitalism” in this thread are talking about “capitalist systems”. How could you not pick that up from the context? And yes, these systems, like socialism, or Marxism, or feudalism, or any other ism, are pale shadows of nature. Not just shadows, but pale shadows. Again, pay attention to the full context. You even said it yourself and contradicted your previous statement:
Human psychology is a part of nature. And capitalism, as the game that it is, mimics this natural system… poorly.
I totally agree. It’s preposterous for people to keep making these comparisons. They are false equivalencies. Not only were the European Jews nowhere near being the 1%, the Nazis had a twisted form of ethics directed at them based on an antiquated, flawed understanding of jewish genetic, religious and cultural heritage. Is that happening between the “99%” and the “1%”? Not by any stretch. Not even remotely. It’s scary bad sensationalism and hyperbole. It’s no wonder the 1% are not trusted… they pick spokespeople who are obviously delusional and a downright danger to the population.
It turns out that she’s his ex-wife. So possibly that label was intended to be a smidgeon ironic, or he was just being delusional again because it was personal.
I don’t think capitalism mimics anything – it plays human nature in the sense that it exploits it for its own ends. Exchanging tokens for the sole purpose of accumulating more tokens does not strike me as something particularly natural (where entities accumulate just enough resources to survive). It’s “a pale shadow of nature” like a coin could be “a pale shadow of a round black hole”, i.e. not at all.
I insist on this because, despite your critical approach, by comparing a capitalist system to an overwhelming and immutable system (nature) you’re basically extending these qualities to it. In truth, both capitalist systems and capitalism-the-ideology are purely arbitrary constructs, produced by human minds for human ends; they are not immutable and we can live without them if we want to. The minute we start drawing grand comparisons between *-ism and nature, is the minute we accept the *-ism as timeless and unavoidable.
… And don’t believe survivors of neo-Nazi violence? such pragmatism looks like willful blindness. similar pragmatism leaves people unwilling to confront sexism, racism, poverty, police brutality, and all the other evils in this society.
I think capitalism (capitalist systems, etc.) mimics nature because agents within nature don’t always simply attempt to survive. There are many instances where they stockpile (fat reserves before hibernation), exploit (parasite/host relationships), favor entrepreneurship (humans themselves, and one could argue adaptation in general), embark on conquest (ant wars in the Amazon tree canopy), retain private ownership of the means of production (mitochondria), and lots and lots of other examples. Contrary to your argument, capitalism does have many qualities exceedingly similar to nature.
The thing is, it’s a pale comparison, because nature’s rules aren’t constantly shifting. Capitalist systems are constantly shifting their rules, and most often shifting them to favor the already-moneyed.
I do think that extending the comparison from nature to capitalism is useful, because we can see how it succeeds and falls short. Just making a comparison doesn’t solidify anything. Using metaphors to describe something isn’t dangerous. As humans, we think and act in symbols and metaphor.
And I would further argue that any systems that we devise, capitalist or otherwise, are extensions of our nature and therefore nature itself.
