It's pretty funny to see such a blatantly biased article coming out of academia. Oh wait.
Meanwhile, I'll save my paychecks to buy the texts of some of those anti-capitalist produced standards.
In other actual anti-capitalist news, the NIH says we shouldn't have to pay twice for government sponsored research.
https://deepnewz.com/us-domestic-policy/nih-to-end-paywalls-...
It is, at its most fundamental description, a Top-Down system of governance and ownership (I admit, probably not the way you mean, but it did tickle me).
Dragons hoarding wealth might be emergent human behavior, but, hey, so are brave knights.
Neither. But to pick one, trade.
> has only been dominant for the last few hundred years
That's hard to falsify, although I'd guess people have had things for much longer, eg spears. Although this get's away from the point, and into something else.
Right now if I step out into the street, I can flag a taxi, I can buy a coffee. In each case these are direct peer to peer transactions, where the price is agreed between us based on what we both want out of the exchange. I find it easy to imagine that's how it was hundreds of years ago too, even within tribes. The capital (money, coffee, spear), isn't really the relevant thing. It's a conduit and focal point of behaviour. That was my original point, and why I don't value a top down aspect to it (even though that of course exists in groups with more scale - societies). I would welcome a refute on that point, or if you could frame a different way of looking at it (capitalism) at the level of individuals who want to consentfully interoperate (and don't even know the word capitalism).
People typically respond with “well using money and buying stuff in a market is just natural law” etc which isn’t “capitalism” and indeed the first chapter of Capital is all about commodity-money and primitive markets and production. These things are all pre-capitalism and have existed for as long as civilization has.
I agree that we can do this. I do not agree that this is, strictly speaking, capitalism.
Capitalism =/= the exchange of goods, services, and capital.
Capitalism is the system that says the people who own the property constituting the critical infrastructure of an organization - the "Means of Production" - should get to make all the rules. That's it.
If I own a big beef machine that turns cows into hamburgers, it doesn't matter that I need 50 people to run it and 200 people to box and ship and sell the patties, the fact that I am the person who had enough money to buy the big beef machine means that my word is law, period. If I don't like the way they touch my big beef machine, they go away. If they don't like how unsafe the big beef machine is, too bad. Doesn't matter how much I sell the patties for - I decide how much I pay you, and I keep the rest (not exactly peer-to-peer). I own the big beef machine, so my say goes.
I agree with you that trade will exist until the end of time, and has existed since the first time Ook had something that Grog wanted and Grog decided it was too much energy to kill Ook over it.
When I say I am "Anti-capitalist", I mean (among other things) that I do not believe Capitalism specifically is the best (most productive, least ethically repulsive) means by which to engage in trade.
None of these opinions relate to trade or even the concept of capital itself, but rather the means by which we organize it.
To the original quote: It is hard to imagine the end of capitalism, because people believe capitalism is a natural facet of human nature. It is not; it is a big beef machine.
If you're arguing capitalism naturally emerges from large societies, you have to prove it and explain why. You can't just claim it based on your surface level of modern economics.
And no, anti-capitalists don't think they can remove a few billionaires from their thrones and be rid of capitalism. Your idea that they do seems most uncharitable to them.
I haven't said that.
Do you have a point or view, which counters mine?
I wonder if it's capitalism, or the consent of humans with different values you reject.
First, I've yet to meet an "anti-capitalist" who believes its existence is enforced by a secret cabal at the top. They very much understand the material conditions that led to it.
Second, I reject your "function of consent/interoperability at scale beyond the immediate family/tribe unit". Take a look in your history books, societies have been organized in many ways that don't require accumulation of capital in the hands of a minority.
So, if your viewpoint is that capitalism is a natural state of things, I completely disagree, and there are many counter-examples throughout history.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with standards or the article, if that is what you are implying. The Internet, for example, along with the many standards that followed, is the result of government funneling money into the Pentagon, universities, and other research institutions. It did not emerge spontaneously. And then private enterprise has flourished on top of that baseline infrastructure, much of which is used unaltered to this day. If anything, we need more and up-to-date standards, not siloed proprietary technology that disappears on the whims of an acquisition or a bankruptcy.
Can you say what is baseless?
> people must have been living in tribes until the industrial revolution
Not sure where you're going with this?
> there is nothing wrong with standards
I agree.
It seems you think capitalism and standards are at odds with each other? I'm trying hard to read points from your sentences.
> Not sure where you're going with this?
I was just stating the corollary of your original statement. I know, it makes no sense, that's precisely my point.
> It seems you think capitalism and standards are at odds with each other?
Not at all.
> I'm trying hard to read points from your sentences.
Maybe check your reading comprehension, then. Try again.
I didn't really want to wade into a pointless argument, but this is a very ungenerous reading. They didn't say any of the things you're implying they did. A system can be natural, inevitable, emergent and still require that blood be spilled to make it happen. Karl Marx certainly believed so.
I don't think my reading was ungenerous, though. OP wasn't even stating anything related to the article, mostly just spammed free market fundamentalism. That bottom-up argument etc. is entirely baseless and does not check with even recent history.
This area was previously under the religious fundamentalist rule of Islamic State, who were pushed out by a Anarchist/Libertarian socialist milita, around half of whom were women (much to the dislike of ISIS, whose fighters believed if they were killed by a woman, they don't get to go to heaven).
Currently it's the first example of a working Anarchist system.
No laws means that capitalism isn't illegal, so it still exists there.
But most of the economy is based on cooperatives and wages are three times higher than the rest of the country.
They smartly played the global power order, letting the Americans develop their oil and the Russians develop their gas.
Unlike what many may think, people don't go around killing each other without laws in place - which does happen in the rest of Syria under a statist (State based) system of government.
Data interoperability would make our digital lives so much better.
Energy that companies spend on dirty tricks and dirty trick defense is waste, and makes us all poorer. But you can't expect any particular firm to unilaterally give up an incompatibility moat, unless all of them do. Government stepping in to set standards is solving a collective action problem.
And standards can also be bullshit. No mention of the OOXML debacle.
The whole article hinges on examples of a non-capitalist mode of knowledge production being hard to imagine or conceptualise. Wikipedia is often used as an example of precisely that idea; I reckon I'd see it in that context at least once a month.
At this point, it's basically the standard example.
The more universal a need is, the less it should be supplied by capitalism.
Education; healthcare: universal needs. When left to the private sector, prices explode and exploitation reigns. Because no matter the price, people will pay.
Las Vegas’ strip on the other hand, needs no government intervention. Folks there are spending money they can live without!
American culture worships the market as solver of all problems - which it is while there’s still growth. But when things settle in, standards allow new players to keep incumbents honest.
Regarding standards, neat that the “standard” for C is ANSI C. It calls back to a time when standards bodies were key to technology development. It predates even IBM’s XT and AT PC - a transition away from standards-bodies-driven hardware development toward market-leader driven.
Ultimately the universality of standards and ability for new players should always be maintained in every market - it should never be impossible to disrupt lazy incumbents. Standards are crucial to keeping markets and industries healthy.
Soooo how we doing over in social media?
jongjong•10h ago
AlotOfReading•10h ago
I would actually go entirely the opposite direction and argue that many standards are so useful that it's inappropriate to lock them behind a paywall. They should be entirely free and public despite the costs to produce standards.
jongjong•9h ago
In such system, everyone would be a small producer. So everyone would benefit. It would be much harder to move cities or countries but that would be a good thing. Everyone would have a great work life. Everyone would have an advantage within their community over unknown foreign producers. Equality of opportunity would be maximized.
The biggest problem in everyone's lives today is their job/career. People spend all their time working. So the system should be optimized to make workers' lives better, not consumers' lives. Capitalism already looks after consumers naturally. The government's job should be focused mostly on producers.
It's not right that every aspect of the system looks after consumers when they don't necessarily produce much social value. A lot of their income nowadays is subsidized by money printing, not the result of past labor as the myth suggests.
gessha•9h ago
AlotOfReading•9h ago
TFYS•6h ago
Large scale is good, the problem is who owns the large scale solution. When it's owned privately, it's easy to abuse such a position of power and workers and consumers don't get the full benefits of scale. The solutions should be collectively owned and managed.
saurik•10h ago
jongjong•9h ago
True decentralized communities do not require standards. They don't require global coordination.
The problem is that you don't even realize that they exist. If you're mainstream, your idea of decentralization is actually just a thin veneer. It's often all centralized behind the scenes. Made centralized using standards and an unhealthy obsession with cooperation on a global scale. Ignoring that small-scale competition is healthy and necessary to keep everyone motivated and doing the right thing.
Then they sooner or later fall victim to a big company like Microsoft with their three Es philosophy; Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
gessha•9h ago
We successfully communicate on this bulletin board thanks to standards and protocols. We will be in the Stone Age of computers if it wasn’t for standards.