I have to admit, Lemmy is so politically uniform that I kinda welcome something else.

Question: how do libertarian capitalists expect to combat corporatism? If anything, capital has a tendency to grow or die, and economies of scale along with vertical integration dictate higher survivability and profits of larger businesses vs smaller. And so, corporate structures appear again. What can be used to prevent it?

Also, if you allow me to comment on some of the key points raised…

The rich get richer, but the poor also get richer

One of the most common criticisms of late-stage capitalism is exactly that poor do not get richer anymore.

For example, here are nominal and inflation-adjusted median household incomes in the US: ALT3245

Considering that inflation metrics count the whole economy, and not particularly basics like housing (which went through the roof and yet accounts for a huge share of expenses in a median and especially poor household), it’s not unreasonable to assume poor people are worse off than they were 20 years before.

Prices being allowed to move through supply and demand, rather than being set by central planners, are necessary for the efficient allocation of scarce resources to their most needed ends.

The socialist criticism is that “most profitable” and “most needed” are two different things. Suppose you made a meal, and offer it to a millionaire and a broke homeless individual. Most likely, the latter will need it more, but won’t be able to pay for it as much as the former.

We see China’s economy dramatically advance by switching to an overwhelmingly capitalist mode of production

And we see USSR economy skyrocketing after socialists came to power. And yes, extreme growth went way beyond New Economic Policy.

What we need to look for here, if we must be honest, is externalities. China switching to a more capitalist mode was net benefit because it enabled global trade as opposed to relative economic isolation. One of the main issues dragging socialist economies behind was that, being formed mostly of a few countries tilted into extreme poverty by previous regimes, they never got to access the same volume of trade and capital investment as their capitalist counterparts. When even these markets started to crumble through the Cold War, China had little other options.

USSR, on the other end, started on a low enough point that first advancements were relatively easy and investments paid off rather quickly. And, of course, there’s gulag, too.

Well, the wealth gap between rich and poor people nowadays is higher than it was a the time of the French Revolution (we still refer to Marie Antoinette’s “why don’t they eat cake” as a despicable blindness of an ultra-wealthy person to the condition of the world she inhabits, but the rich today are far, far more removed from those who try to survive without having their basic needs met and that removal its just accepted by most or even idolized by some).

How, if this is the state of the world today and as you said, the protection of property is the de facto leading legal principle of a society under capitalism, can the immense wealth that has been accumulated by all of us working (seen or unseen) in this system but is manifesting itself as the property of a select few be considered a consistent rise in the quality of life of the masses? Isn’t it true that the planet is dying because capitalism can only work in a world with unlimited resources, which is not ours? That the number of armed conflict is the highest since WW2, because this is capitalism’s answer to realizing this planet’s resources are not unlimited? That fascism is on the rise again because a society without discrimination would not work for a capitalist economy that needs people who have to do underpaid, life-threatening work or right out forced labor so that companies can join the free market with a competitive price (the holocaust btw happened under capitalism and many companies e.g. VW got big because they relied on detainees from the labor camps to give their lives working for them)? That the low birth rate in many countries puts women’s bodily autonomy in danger, because capitalism needs a stable influx of new people to join the workforce (and the military, see above) and if this is not a given, because nobody who isn’t rich can afford children and keep their current living standard anymore, measures will be put in place to enforce a stable birthrate in the future?

A rising living standard for the masses is an outdated, ideological assumption about capitalism.

There’s a lot that’s fundamentally wrong with this comment, but I think I can hit the core pretty narrowly. You cannot disentangle capitalism from the state, the capitalist state is not outside of capitalism but is instead a core function of it. Corporatism and cronyism are not in opposition to capitalism, they are a later stage in capitalist development, as compared to earlier capitalism when markets are highly underdeveloped and instead very decentralized and anarchic.

You also have a deeply moralist analysis, not a materialist, logical analysis. There is nothing inherently good about private property rights, and justifying the theft of surplus value on the basis that it is already common practice and would require violence in the form of revolution to change it is a moralist argument. It is just as easy to say that the everyday violence of theft of surplus value is a violent attack on working people, who create all new value. We must make scientific, materialist arguments, not simply rely on emotional soundbites.

You also ignore imperialism as a function of capitalism as it develops. The expansionist nature of capitalism causes it to dominate developing countries, where a share of the spoils are used to uplift the imperial working class. This is why the poor often get richer in developed capitalist economies, not because capitalism lifts all, but because developed capitalist economies shift their greatest contradictions to the international scale.

When you move on to socialism, you are entirely wrong. For example, the marketization in China is found in their developing industries, where markets do play a progressive role. However, in their developed and critical industries, China uses central planning. This is because planned economies overtake marketization when production advances to the national and international scale. It isn’t a binary planned/market distinction that socialists advocate for, it’s instead looking at the level of development of the productive forces and using the correct method accordingly.

Monopolies are an inevitable result of capitalism, because as technology improves, it requires more input to maintain. We cannot simply break up monopoly without inefficiently destroying productive forces in the process. This is where cronyism and corporatism, as you describe it, come in. Socialism and planned economy solves these problems by using the developed productive forces according to scientific planning, which is far more efficient at this scale (and is why China is doing so much better than capitalist economies).

Even more totally planned economies like the USSR saw some of the most rapid economic growth on the planet. They did not introduce starvation, they took overwhelmingly backward societies and brought them at and beyond their peers in rapid time. Life expectancy doubled between Tsarism and socialism in a matter of decades. Famine, while common in Tsarist Russia, was eliminated by 1935 outside of wartime. GDP growth was extremely rapid, all without running into crisis of overproduction or falling profitability:

You write a lot about what you “oppose” about capitalism, but without a coherent understanding of the totality of the system, you are reduced to unactionable moral platitudes, rather than concrete actions that can be taken. You remove the state from the economy and pretend it can be made to work both in the interests of the people as a whole while also shrinking, despite the fact that capitalists prop up and dominate the state as a co-evolutionary process.

The solution is socialism. Planned economy for developed industry, marketization limited to developing industry, and as all industry develops, transition to full planning to a collective and scientific aim.

Hi. It is hard to give too much of a response to this, because you have ignored the definition of capitalism that I stated and instead responded based on a different one. If you wanted to argue that the definition of capitalism I stated inherently leads to imperialism, cronyism, and all the rest of what you’ve posited, so be it, but you have not actually made an argument for why it does so, and I certainly wouldn’t agree that it does.

A couple points though:

1. My argument presumes a moral position that individuals have rights that should be respected, a position that can be argued on either deontological or consequentialist grounds. It also presumes that society getting more prosperous is a good thing. I think 99% of people agree with both these claims. I can suggest many philosophers who have made the argument that there is something “inherently good” about this perspective at length, all with differing justifications. You can look at Michael Huemer (The Problem of Political Authority), Hayek (Law, Liberty & Legislation, and Consitution of Liberty), Murray Rothbard (Ethics of Liberty), Ayn Rand (many books), Robert Nozick (Anarchy, Statt, & Utopia), and there are many more.

2. The entire Marxist argument falls apart for me as soon as you say “Surplus Value.” There is no such thing. The concepts assumes both the false Labor Theory of Value, which is accepted by virtually no modern economists, and also assumes that there is no value provided via entrepreneurship and capital allocation, which is false. Entrepreneurship and capital allocation are both vital to a prosperous functioning economy in which all classes of people gain wealth, and are economically rewarded as such.

3. Imperialism is directly at odds with capitalism how I have defined it, which is how advocates of capitalism see it (when I say “advocates,” I don’t mean some random Republican politician or voter trying to make things that don’t fit together fit, but serious economists and philosophers who understand and support capitalism). It is inherently a violation of property rights, which is essential to have a system that can be called capitalist. If it is imperialist, it is by definition not capitalism.

4. Neither China or the United States is purely capitalist/socialist or centralized/decentralized, both are mixed economies, but China is drastically more capitalist and decentralized then it was a few decades ago, a period of time in which the nation moved from famine to prosperity. See Ronald Coase’s book How China Became Capitalist which discusses the specific capitalist reforms China undertook and how those directly caused increased standards of living for Chinese people.

5. I believe you are simply wrong about the ability of planned economies to function. Please see Ludwig Von Mises’s Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth for the canonical argument on this. It’s a short easy read, and available for free from the Mises Institute. Yes the Soviet Union had a period of industrialization which led to a strong increase in wealth, but this period did not last, and to the extent that period succeeded it required the ability to piggyback off the prices set in the West in free economies. Without that, any functioning central economic planning at all would have been impossible.

You misunderstand, just because you can describe something does not mean that it’s a useful or accurate description. Debating the correctness and accuracy of how we define systems and structures is core to socioeconomic debate, because without definitions that accurately describe the world and its processes, we are left with fantasy. I explained why your definition was incorrect, and responded to these weaknesses. Nevertheless, I’ll address your points directly.

1. Moralism is not a base for scientific consensus. I already addressed the inherent failures of this form of argumentation. You even open yourself up for counter by saying “society getting more prosperous is a good thing,” when it is capitalism that is holding back common prosperity by funneling the wealth of society into the hands of a few. We must make our analysis based on materialism, on scientific fact, not the vague idea that stopping wage slavery is wrong because it requires force.

2. You are taking an incredibly eurocentric and chauvanist claim by saying “no modern economist believes in surplus value.” Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, and many more economists vehemontly disagree with you. Some of the most respected economists on the world stage are Chinese, such as Cheng Enfu. At best, your point is purely ignorant, at worst it’s racist. In any case, management of capital is labor, but ownership itself does not create value. All new value comes from labor, be it managerial or not, and the portion of the day workers labor for means beyond their own wages is the surplus that forms the basis of profits.

3. This is, frankly, naive. The version of capitalism you advocate for is not a real thing, and does not exist. You are moving from the realm of fact to the realm of utopianism. Just because you are uncomfortable with the inevitable consequences of marketization and private property relations does not mean you get to hide by defining them away. It is a simple, proven fact that in the real world, when markets progress, they trend towards monopolization. When they reach the boundaries of the national scale, they seek new markets internationally, which allows them to leverage their advanced position to exploit developing countries. This is capitalism as it actually exists. Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism is a short article going over how this system came to be and evolved in the modern day.

4. China did not take on “capitalist reforms.” China marketized underdeveloped industries, as the material base of marketization is decentralized production. For industries of a national scale and critical importance, China maintains dominance and planned economy. This is Marxist economics. See Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Concise Guide for a basic, entry-level explanation that requires no background in Marxist economics. China is a socialist economy, in the primary stage. The US is a capitalist economy as it is dominated by private capital even at the national and international scale. See the aforementioned Cheng Enfu’s handy diagram:

5. Mises is a clown that was disproven the second socialism began outperforming capitalist economies. The Soviet Union, despite being largely a siege economy, was again one of the most rapidly developing countries in history. Trying to attribute their successes to pilfering from the west is, again, chauvanist at worst and ignorant at best, and in any case would require an enormous level of proof on your part that you neglected to provide. Soviet economic planning avoided the crisis of overproduction and the crisis of profitability that shook the capitalist world, proving that they were independent from their problems. The economic calculation problem was invented by a clown, before the invention of computers. For an explanation, see Towards a New Socialism, which explains potential economic planning beyond price. You could even skip the book and just read Cockshott’s WordPress article on socialist computation.

Overall, I’m disappointed. You presented yourself as something of an expert, but you don’t even pretend to entertain essential functions of traditional debate like discussing definitions, you just take the definitions as a given. This is hardly taken seriously even by mainstream liberal economists.

(Side note on Cockshott, massive transphobe, unfortunately. His work on cybernetics is valuable, but his overall Marxist knowledge should be taken with heavy grains of salt due to his fundamentally incorrect understanding of dialectical materlaism).