Capitalists must always seek to maximize differential profits—they have to collect more profits than their competitors.
Because you can reinvest those profits in buying up more revenue generating assets, you can expand your business and grab more market share. Or, like when Microsoft bought Nokia to grab the patents Nokia held, you can invest in blocking your competitors from expanding.
If your share of the market falls so far that you can’t make payroll or pay your creditors, you go out of business. Your capital is seized and sold off, and you become just another worker, subject to the whims and commands of capital owners.
So capital owners in competitive markets must always try to grow at a rate faster than their competitors. If they stop, if they take a break, if the global ecosystem collapses, then so does capitalism.
There have been periods like in the post WWII era where steady reliable profits were seen as preferable to large risky profits by giant corporations like GE, and then in the 70's there was an ideological shift towards the kind of 'grow or die' ideology that we have today.
So it's not so much capitalism would die if they slowed down, it wouldn't, but they're not going to do that.
@HeavenlyPossum Sure, i mean if you can cite research to prove your point I'll look at it but really. its a pretty poor theory that only has minimal observational support. If you can prove it I'll happily use it to smush other tweets I have seen in my thread today so win-win.
@RD4Anarchy Sure lets just blindly believe the Anarchists.... that will end well. @HeavenlyPossum I'm interested in speaking with people who think differently than I do and I do sometimes act slightly tonally reflective which can piss people off but hey I might learn something.
@HeavenlyPossum@RD4Anarchy well, you seem to have problems with the English language since I said upthread "Blindly follow" which is different than "not interested in learning anything" which you claim I said. Of course I now suspect that some anarchists conflate the two in their heads
You’re welcome to try again without the smirky dismissive bullshit, and you’re equally welcome to fuck off if you can’t stop being a troll for a moment.
@HeavenlyPossum well I can c&d the smirk, but you gotta play the same on the BS. Dismissive is core to the argument though, because I don't buy the basic premise.
“I disagree” is not an argument. “Do research work for me that I might but probably won’t consider” isn’t an argument. You don’t find my post compelling? That’s fine, I will not lose sleep over it.
@RD4Anarchy Blair Fix appears to be an anarchist. Seems to be the main source for your commentary. No? A couple of sidebars hardly count for denying source hating of structure.
@HeavenlyPossum@Alexander_Anotherskip_Davis IMHO. mostly that you are conflating monopolists with capitalists and what passes for capitalism today is NOT capitalism, it is the opposite of what Adam Smith meant by free markets in capital and labor, and most your issues appear to be with what monopolists are doing to corrupt free markets and perform rent-seeking. Capitalism with good rules and referees is what's needed, but both have been corrupted by monopolists (and not for the first time).
Capitalism is the result of rules—it is inescapably the product of state violence and cannot exist without massive state interference. This is capitalism acting according to the rules; there is no “good” capitalism but only degrees of violence and exploitation.
@HeavenlyPossum@pluralistic lol tho I will admit that today's capitalists do seem to want to make feudalism great again. The point is that it is the people who are generally awful, nowadays...
@HeavenlyPossum@pluralistic Stalin, Mao, Xi, Trump, Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Putin, Bork (per Cory), etc. Greed for Power is not limited to capitalism. (Side note, I can make a pretty good argument that the Magna Carta was a market reaction to feudal kings' power grabs... the thing is that imbalanced markets like that will violently come to a new equilibrium, literally! sometimes, and that is not good for anyone if there are alternatives).
I agree that greed for power is not limited to capitalism, although there is no meaningful alternative to capitalism right now, but I’m not sure why you felt the need to tell me this.
It's quite simple really: if it involves a state, it's not socialism or communism.
If it involves a state existing from, let's say around 1900 or so on, it's either a private capitalist state (like the US, or even "Nordic Socialist" states) or state capitalism (like USSR, China, Cuba, DPRK, Vietnam, etc).
@RD4Anarchy@HeavenlyPossum@pluralistic From Britannica - you are still conflating "monopoly/oligopoly" with "capitalism". The point being that what we have is NOT a free market based economy (Defn of Capitalism here), based on market principles, but rather an oligopoly based on monopolistic principles. That is what #enshittification is all about - Rent Seeking through Monopoly.
It’s important to understand “enshitification” in the broader context of capitalist critique. Thorstein Veblen observer a century ago that “business” (ie, capitalists) were often at odds with “industry” (ie, the people who work to materially supply society), and would often deliberately slow or “sabotage” production to maintain artificial scarcity and thus profits.
We see this more expansively today, from copyrights and trademarks to planned obsolescence to product crippling to the deliberate destruction of oversupply. Industry works to supply us; capital restricts to profit. You cannot profit from something that is not scarce, but many things we experience as “scarce” are not organically so, like access to social media. There is no shortage of tweets.
Jonathan Bichler and Shimshon Nitzan have built on the work of Veblen and others to identify property itself as a form of sabotage—a declaration of interference—and capital as a measure of social power over others. This is why we do not identify your personal home or a farm you work yourself as “private property” or “capital” because it entails no command over anyone else. A property relationship becomes capital when it entails command—I own your farm that you work and collect a share of your income by virtue of ownership.
Their capital-as-power theory helps explain how both dollars in a bank and a farm or factory can be “capital” at the same time—because they represent the ability to command people to work for you, rather than the “stuff” itself.
Yep, we have had 20 years of #dotcons selling us libertarian individualism to push aside collective support of the "revolutionary" #openweb which is when we last had left tech power.
For this 20 years we have had #geekproblem pushing #closedweb as left tech, this is OBVIOUSLY a disaster we can't keep doing. Yes, let's not get into a prat fight, this is needed as a supplementary.
All capitalism is rent-seeking through monopoly. Every bit of “capital” is a monopoly for the extraction of rents. Capitalism—a system of capital—is antithetical to any market operating via voluntary production and exchange.
@pyperkub@RD4Anarchy@HeavenlyPossum@pluralistic An absolute free market economy can be talked about in the abstract but can’t exist in the real world as there’s always state involvement due to the state being the one that enforces private property claims. The current oligarchy/#enshittification regime is the natural result of the capitalist class using economic pressure on the state to protect its profits.
There were markers before states. There was no capitalism before states and, indeed, before the early modern state. Capitalism is, at most, a few centuries old and is not a synonym for “trade” or “commerce.”
Because the state brought capitalism into existence and exists to serve capital owners.
Let’s try this: all that private property owned by capitalists—all the land, farms, mines, all those natural resource—how do you think it came to be owned by the capitalists who own it today?
Once upon a time, nobody owned it, but now someone owns it. What was that process like?
I’m also really befuddled by your argument that the Magna Carta, of all things, was somehow a product of market forces. What exactly do you think the Magna Carta was?
@HeavenlyPossum From a markets/economic perspective, the King was using his power to take rather than pay for them, throwing the market out of equilibrium as well as bankrupting the monarchy and the barons, and the barons forced the market into a new equilibrium form that monopoly abuse is kind of how I argue it. Markets aren't only economic is the idea, and the Magna Carta can be seen as an example of an implicit Market Failing and the Barons taking collective action: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketfailure.asp
This is such an atrocious reading of history that I don’t know where to start, but I’ll give it a go anyway:
John’s relationship to his barons was feudal, not market based.
his barons rebelled against him in a war, not a market transaction.
the resulting document helped define relations between different categories of feudal landowners, not capitalists and certainly not anyone engaged in market exchange.
the charter was explicitly and specifically about relations between feudal lords who inherited their status.
@HeavenlyPossum The point is that POWER is a currency too. and as soon as you see that, then you can treat it as a question of supply and demand, monopolies and market forces.
@HeavenlyPossum And, part of my perspective is that as an undergrad, I started Chemical Engineering, then changed to English, then Economics, and finally graduated History (I also failed out, earned my way back in, and paid my own way as I could afford to... I took classes in just about every single subject offered at UCLA and drew parallels from different disciplines... when I wasn't out partying too much ;) )
@PKMKII@RD4Anarchy@HeavenlyPossum@pluralistic People enforce private property claims too. Ever seen a "No Trespassing" Sign, or one that says "Trespassers will be shot" - that ain't the State. You're still describing market capture and regulatory capture by monopolists, not capitalism, and the KEY takeaway is that part of Good Government and Communities is required to prevent Capitalism from all of the above. We're failing at that, but it's not because teh capitalism is bad.
@PKMKII@RD4Anarchy@HeavenlyPossum@pluralistic And this is true in Socialist and Communist Countries as well. It's just Power which gets monopolized w/o good government/governance. The fact is that market economics play out in all forms of government. Just with different currencies.
“No trespassing” does not signify private ownership in the sense of capital. A capitalist’s property would be worthless as capital if the capitalist excluded people from it; who else would the capitalist collect rents from at gunpoint?
@HeavenlyPossum@RD4Anarchy@PKMKII@pluralistic So, Farmers who own their land aren't capitalists? Their land isn't their property, no matter who is enforcing their perceived "right" to their property? I am literally not buying this ;)
Farmers are not capitalists. Some capitalists own farms on which farmers engage in productive activity, generating revenue that they had over to their owner in exchange for a fraction of it back as wages.
“Private” property in the sense of capitalism isn’t just a synonym for “stuff you own.” Property takes many forms—things we own personally through use and occupancy, like our homes and our toothbrushes, or maybe things we own in common, like a home you share with your family and from which none of you can exclude the other.
“Private” property in the capitalist sense refers to ownership of someone else’s productive activity—their farm, or their business, or their home, which you own and can forcibly exclude them, which allows you to collect a rent.
Organized crime operates in precisely the same manner as the state in this regard. You’re describing the same phenomenon under two different names, depending on how “legitimate” we’d like to pretend each organization is.
In reality, no non-state society ever voluntarily adopted anything like capitalism’s mode of private property.
To add to your reading list, if you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend Charles Tilly’s “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” I bet you can catch the drift from the title.
I see this so often: people are taught that a) capitalism is just trucking and bartering and trading, it’s free enterprise and economic liberty, and also b) we live under capitalism.
And some people are clever enough to recognize that what they were taught about (a) doesn’t look anything like the lived reality of (b).
And one possible solution to this contradiction is to conclude that we were lied to about capitalism.
Unfortunately, a lot of people cling to the idea that (a) is true and hence need excuses for the contradictions of (b). It’s those darn governments interfering with their minimum wages and cronyism and prohibitions on hunting humans for sport.
What we need desperately is for people to look critically at what capitalism actually is, because the idea of “voluntary production and free trade” part is utterly incompatible with the “private ownership of means of production” part, the part that is the actual product of government violence.
@HeavenlyPossum@PKMKII@RD4Anarchy@pyperkub@pluralistic the whole starting point of critical theory/radical critique (whether that is anarchist, communist, marxist, etc, or a mix) is this! Namely that modern social relations (incl. property and production relations, but you can include various structures of domination/violence) aren't the transparent and idyllic tale of harmony (e.g. that everyone gets "what they earn", that everyone is equal in the moment of exchange/market, etc) and progress (Steven Pinker lol) that hegemonic ideology/education/discourse/common sense tells us. It needs to be deconstructed/decyphered to unearth the actual social relations (and violence, exploitation, mafia-like hostage situations in the market, institutionalised violence e.g. police/borders/etc, )...
We are the great 400
If you want to know who we are
We put on airs cause our forefathers came over on the Mayflower
And it's really very snappy when your mammy and your pappy came over on the mayflower
We're in the social register
All lower class types we shun
But to keep our niche
We must stay very riche
For we'll be thrown out when we've none
And its really very funny when you've lots and lots of money to be horrible to those with none
This was the trade-off that the ruling elite made during the transition from the old feudal system to capitalism: producing exclusively for the market allowed capitalists to extract far more labor from the global working class than feudal lords could ever dream, but once the process got rolling, they could never jump back off.
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