redbloodedamerica:vibiaveritas:redbloodedamerica:vibiaveritas:redbloodedamerica:thewoodgrainman:prol

redbloodedamerica:vibiaveritas:redbloodedamerica:vibiaveritas:redbloodedamerica:thewoodgrainman:prolifeproliberty:vibiaveritas:This is really funny because it’s basically “its capitalism when its good” lololololIt’s capitalism when it’s voluntary transactions between individuals without government interference.When we say we support capitalism or free markets, we’re saying we support voluntary transactions between individuals without government interference.Our current system has a lot of “not capitalism” that we want to get out of the system. Actual pro-capitalism, pro-free-market libertarians and conservatives are not happy with our current system, and we want fundamental change. Just a different kind of change from what the Democrats and socialists want.“It’s capitalism when it’s good”Yeah - that’s the point, dumbass. If it doesn’t meet the criteria of the desecription then it ceases to be that thing. Wow. @vibiaveritas “It’s basically ‘its capitalism when its good’”Ah, let me play the game too! I believe in feminism. Feminism is defined as “the equality of the sexes.” Presumably you believe in that, don’t you? Then you’re a feminist. Feminism = equality, a good thing.Now that I have defined my belief as goodness itself, you should embrace it, and know that anything labeled “anti-feminist” is wrong and therefore evil. Whenever you critique what you think is feminism, it isn’t feminism at all, because real feminism is about promoting equality.Come on. “Voluntary trade” is hardly exclusive to capitalism. It’s intellectually dishonest to suggest that it is.Well, to be honest, there are, in fact, several different kinds of feminism which I don’t want to get into here.  So, I’m just going to default to “no, I am not a feminist” to derail your entire flimsy analogy at the get-go.  Also, a belief in “goodness” itself is a bit dubious to say the least.  Good in what way? Your way?  Call me unconvinced.And no one said “voluntary trade” is exclusive to capitalism.  It all depends on what you mean by “voluntary trade” and “capitalism”.  Voluntary free trade and free enterprise do not involve the government.  The meme above is explicitly referring to government intervention in the process of free enterprise and free trade.  So, I’m not quite sure what argument you are trying to make regarding voluntary trade in this context.  Moreover, if you are truly talking about voluntary trade as a form of exchange to mutually benefit each party, you are talking about the free enterprise system, aka capitalism. Now, in an actual communal system, there is a kind of voluntary system of exchange but there really isn’t supposed to be any form of private property, so are you really exchanging what is already really everyone’s property?  I’ll leave that for you to ponder.The real issue that I keep coming back to is that anti-capitalists and socialists alike have absolutely no clue what either of those terms mean.  Why they even bother forming an opinion on this subject in the first place is beyond me.So, you’ve never actually read Marx, have you? I’ll come back to that.You seem to have missed my point. Of course “goodness” is dubious. Let me say again. The graphic explicitly equates “non-violent transaction” with “engaging with capitalism,” insofar as engaging in that kind of transaction is the same as engaging in capitalism. There’s even a little arrow. Surely you’ve spent enough time in libertarian and conservative circles to know that this is how “capitalism” is used by those on the right. It’s basically the same way libertarians frequently define freedom: as liberty from intervention, even as independence. “Autonomy” is central to their belief in freedom. And this is certainly not even the classical sense of freedom, which we can understand in political dialogues as early as Plato. The semantic field of the term has changed as liberalism became the predominant ideology of the West. And so has the term “capitalism,” which when used by conservatives and libertarians, frequently means “voluntary trade without intervention,” just as the graphic simplifies, although this is not what the anti-capitalists are criticizing, nor is it how capitalism was used by the socialists who coined the term.Hence why libertarians rely so heavily on bootlicking memes and referring to leftists as sheep or royal subjects – obviously, their opponents just hate freedom and independence, which are inherently good. And if they disagree, they are clearly hating that freedom, clearly just idiots, clearly just people who love to be controlled (and therefore insane, deficient, etc.). This isn’t exclusive to libertarians – nearly every ideology fails to acknowledge that what it passes off as fact or “basic” or “just the way things are” is often a constructed, challengeable notion. If you think you are free from this, you’re just unconscious of it. I can point that out to you in a minute.“Non-violent transaction” is the indisputable, dubious “goodness” here; it’s the thing that no one except thieves or tyrants disapproves of. Why, that’d be exactly what you’d call me if I suggested against such a notion, and you should do so. So is “equality of the sexes” the indisputable, dubious “goodness.” No one but sexists would disagree. Therefore, if you agree, you’re a feminist, just as approving of nonviolent transaction is capitalist. Yes, there are many different kinds of feminism, I’m glad you’ve read a book or two. My point is not about feminism, but the unfair way you can conveniently define your ideology as basically the “good thing,” and in the process you 1) brush off your opponents as evil or stupid 2) actually fail to describe your ideology.Louis Blanc, a French socialist, was was among the first to use “capitalism” in the liberal sense. He specifically defines his usage as “the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others.” Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 defined it as “an economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor.” Although these are understandably arguable definitions, its use by Marx and other socialists was never about “voluntary trade,” but property rights and capital – the thing capitalists nearly never talk about. Anti-capitalists do not have a problem with peaceable, consensual trade, as far as I understand it; the problem was that capitalism required a socially constructed sense of “property” that he viewed as unjust. The “capital” bit is an important part of defining capitalism. No, it’s not that everyone actually just owns everything and therefore capitalism evil, as you seem to imply by your understanding of “””communal societies.””” It’s the idea that you can rightly own something even if you did not mix your labor in producing it, which, combined with other ideas, is absolutely essential to capitalism. This is that essential feature of capitalism the anticapitalists critique, because it is not “self-evident” (nothing is, by the way). It is this essential, prime belief that you conveniently forget or presume is “basic.” Without this defining feature, you could not have corporations in their present form, even without government intervention, for they do not function in such a way that workers own what they produce, but are paid for their labor.In short, the anticapitalists are not, at heart, criticizing voluntary trade or private property, although some do. They are criticizing that what capitalism takes as “basic” is not, in fact, basic, for except for certain principles of reason, no belief is actually “basic.” “Moreover, if you are truly talking about voluntary trade as a form of exchange to mutually benefit each party, you are talking about the free enterprise system, aka capitalism…”As I have outlined, this disingenuously lacks a defining feature of capitalism i.e. a framework of property rights. “Nonviolent transaction” exist in communal societies, but they do not earn capital on each other’s labor and cannot be called capitalist. For example, convents and monasteries, or I am sure there are examples to be found in present day ‘tribal’ indigenous communities.Now, in an actual communal system, there is a kind of voluntary system of exchange but there really isn’t supposed to be any form of private property…Demonstrably false, as many communal societies certainly secure a kind of right to personal property. It’s just that these societies don’t necessarily believe you can gain capital on someone else’s labor. Again, I bring up the example of a convent. Marx also believed in personal property.…so are you really exchanging what is already really everyone’s property?  I’ll leave that for you to ponder.Uh, thanks for your seemingly profound question, but there’s…nothing to ponder. It really seems like you haven’t thought about this topic. Communal societies can have a sense of property without a specifically capitalist-enabling sense of property rights. Say, for example, the idea that you own whatever you mix your labor with. So in working the land and producing food from it, the land and that fruit is yours. Using a capitalist notion of property rights, which really is just some contractual idea based on mutual agreement, then someone can theoretically “own” the land without working on it, but say as a means of inheritance or a contractual agreement, where its fruits belong to them and not the hired workers of the land. The workers technically are only owed wages for their labor, but not the fruits they produce. Again, this depends on a framework of property rights.Furthermore, its not only property rights that capitalists fail to understand. Your own ideology (unconscious or not) becomes especially clear when you say this: “Voluntary free trade and free enterprise do not involve the government.” Except they most certainly do! At least, they require people to agree on what they mean by “voluntary,” and also what property is, and what rights are. (I, for one, find that “voluntary” is not a fair way to describe what prostitutes do, but many libertarians disagree. It’s a matter of philosophical debate and by no means self-evident what makes something “free” or “voluntary.”)  Furthermore, violations of these agreements should be punishable so that these laws are enforceable. Ouila, a government should usefully arise, or least some government-like body, as it’s the only way of securely enabling this kind of free trade. Trade as you describe it depends on contracts and accountability for fulfilling your end, which, by the way, are literally social constructs. Hence, the graphic is disingenuous, unfairly portraying both what “capitalism” consists in and what the anti-capitalists say about it. I’m sure there’s something to be said for the way that young, dumb socialists and communists call every ill on society “capitalism,” but sweeping them into the bucket with Marx, especially when it seems clear you haven’t read or studied him, is callous.“So, you’ve never actually read Marx, have you? I’ll come back to that.”“The graphic explicitly equates “non-violent transaction” with “engaging with capitalism,” insofar as engaging in that kind of transaction is the same as engaging in capitalism.”Yes, a “transaction” is the same as engaging in “capitalism” insofar as capitalism means a voluntary transaction in the free enterprise market system.  I’m not sure why you decided to wax for paragraphs on autonomy and Western philosophy, but we agree here.  It takes you forever to make your point…“My point is not about feminism, but the unfair way you can conveniently define your ideology as basically the ‘good thing,’ and in the process you 1) brush off your opponents as evil or stupid 2) actually fail to describe your ideology.”Well, this is because my ideology is about voluntaryism and freedom and therefore it is ‘a good thing’ compared to the authoritarian models of 99.9% of actual leftist ideologues, including Marx.  Almost all of true leftist ideology involves coercion of some kind.  Anticapitalists never settle for simple communes, they want the absolute overthrow of the system itself.I’m not brushing my opponents off as evil or stupid.  They are mainly ignorant and misguided–although there are some truly terrible tankies I’ve run across over the years, that share most of your views, who have wished all kinds of atrocious things on their opponents, including imprisonment, torture, and death.Also, I believe libertarians spend more time trying to not only explain their own ideology to others, but also the fallacies of their opposition’s ideology.  That’s what I will do again here today.“Anti-capitalists do not have a problem with peaceable, consensual trade, as far as I understand it; the problem was that capitalism required a socially constructed sense of “property” that he viewed as unjust. The “capital” bit is an important part of defining capitalism.”This is simply not true and is typical pie-in-the-sky nonsense espoused by so-called “left libertarians”, “libertarian socialists”, and anyone believing they are in the left-hand quadrant of the political compass. Also, to quickly address some of your classical socialist philosophers:Louis Blanc was a statist.  He believed in state intervention in banking, for example.  He was a career politician of the French government.  Even his concept of co-ops were basically state-funded redistribution projects to theoretically achieve a true socialist worker system somewhere down the road.  He just happened to be one of the first dopes to propose such a scheme; but he wouldn’t be the last.Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is actually more akin to a state of voluntaryism and mutual association.  So, he was an interesting character to many anarchists and anarchist-leaning individuals in this respect.  I personally have agreed with his theory of commutative justice over that of the social contract theorists.  In fact, since you’re so into Western political philosophy, this puts Proudhon at odds with Rousseau, who most modern-day leftists admire greatly.  Where he loses most true voluntaryists was in his declaration that “property is theft”; but then again he also called communism “oppression and slavery,” so I guess he was a bit of a wild card in the mix.  But ultimately, mutualism is still an ideology of theft, and modern mutualists have even incorporated the state into that original ridiculous proposition of labor theory of value.Karl Marx basically picked and chose parts of all these philosophies of Proudhon and David Ricardo and put them into a jumbled mess of un-economic idiotic theory bent on envy and resent.  Anyone who takes Marx’s views on economics seriously is a very unserious person.  I don’t care how learned they believe they are.“it’s not that everyone actually just owns everything and therefore capitalism evil, as you seem to imply by your understanding of “””communal societies.””” It’s the idea that you can rightly own something even if you did not mix your labor in producing it”There’s a specific reason I mentioned private property.  It’s because the outdated and illogical labor theory of value keeps sprouting up like a bad weed by the uneconomic masses because they have been brainwashed by bad 19th Century philosophy from bad professors or from their fellow brainwashed leftists.  They do not understand that this uneconomic philosophical premise of the long-gone Industrial Revolution has been crushed by modern scientific economic understanding of marginal utility from the likes of Carl Menger, William Jevons, and Leon Walras.I’m not going to bore a purported leftist philosopher with the complexities of these economic concepts, because I’d rather get down to the heart of the matter in regards to the subject at hand.  It is you who have suddenly injected labor theory of value into this conversation when I was talking about basic voluntary exchange.  Stay focused.  If you want me to club you over the head about how stupid labor theory of value is, I can do that at another time.  I will say that I completely agree with your observation that things like corporations could not exist in their current iteration without a government. But that is not the point.  My succinct point above is that voluntary trade (what is called “capitalism” by its detractors) at its basic form consists of exchanging forms of private property (although, of course personal labor can also be traded for property or other forms of labor too).  “In short, the anticapitalists are not, at heart, criticizing voluntary trade or private property, although some do.”I would argue that today most do in various ways.  “’Nonviolent transaction’ exist in communal societies, but they do not earn capital on each other’s labor and cannot be called capitalist… as many communal societies certainly secure a kind of right to personal property. It’s just that these societies don’t necessarily believe you can gain capital on someone else’s labor. ”That is an absolutely ridiculous statement.  It has absolutely nothing to do with “earning capital on other’s labor”.  We were discussing basic trade of private property.  Suddenly, you pivoting to labor theory of value again.  I said I wasn’t going to club you over the head with this, but let me use a simple analogy instead:  If in a tribal village, a woman is crafting some beaded necklaces to trade with a neighboring village, she owns the capital needed in that production–that is to say, she collected or made the beads to manufacture the necklaces at some point, in lieu of financial capital.  Now if she hired her daughter by promising her a special treat at dinner time, perhaps, in exchange to help build more necklaces than she personally could manufacture herself, she still owns the capital either way–that is still her private property.  She is merely allowing her daughter to trade her labor in exchange for a treat.  That is the extent of their voluntary transaction.  Now, at the end of the day, whether or not the mother is able to trade these necklaces at the neighboring village or not, her transaction is over with her daughter.  Her daughter walks away with the treat in exchange for her work.  The necklaces did not gain any more value simply because she now has more of them through her daughter’s help.  The trade market determines the value of the necklaces, not the labor inputted therein.The point being, that private property rights were established and retained at the point of capital acquisition and after labor production.  It is the same property throughout that worker/employer transaction because no amount of intrinsic value was added simply by adding labor. So, your statement is completely nonsensical and really moot considering many Marxists simply arbitrary decide what kind of property is considered private and communal.  However, in a true communist society, everything is considered communal property.  If you personally built a wagon and it can be purposed as a means of production, then it is now the community’s property.  Quibbling over the concept of allowing *some* private property is such a really bad commie excuse that has been used forever.  Even children in North Korea probably “own” toys… in secret that is.“Say, for example, the idea that you own whatever you mix your labor with. So in working the land and producing food from it, the land and that fruit is yours.”This is not a true collective farming proposal.  In fact, that sounds more like a Lockean proviso of homesteading–which is to say a more private property, “capitalist” ownership, libertarian model.Conversely, collective farming has long been a collectivist dream of joint or public ownership, as I explained earlier, as a means of common agricultural production.  The state communists took this collectivist principle to its logical conclusion that stealing from your communal parcel of land was a form of theft punishable by forced labor in camps or in many cases by death.  It most certainly was not private property.On this same topic, modern day mutualists, like Kevin Carson, tend to believe in a sort of “squatter’s right” of obtaining private property through occupancy alone and that by mixing labor with land or other forms of private property one can simply lay claim to that property.  It’s truly astonishing.  According to this mentality, if a rental car company loans a consumer a car and that consumer then makes a pizza delivery, then the renter somehow lays claim to the automobile.  This is truly galaxy brain type stuff.“Using a capitalist notion of property rights, which really is just some contractual idea based on mutual agreement, then someone can theoretically ‘own’ the land without working on it, but say as a means of inheritance or a contractual agreement, where its fruits belong to them and not the hired workers of the land. The workers technically are only owed wages for their labor, but not the fruits they produce. Again, this depends on a framework of property rights.”“Furthermore, its not only property rights that capitalists fail to understand.”No, I completely agree with your statement above.  So, I’m not sure what I am failing to grasp here.  It would appear we both understand the concept of private property very well.  It’s only that you are trying to justify ways for people to obtain it through non-contractual, non-mutually agreed upon ways.“Your own ideology (unconscious or not) becomes especially clear when you say this: ‘Voluntary free trade and free enterprise do not involve the government.’  Except they most certainly do!”“At least, they require people to agree on what they mean by “voluntary,” and also what property is, and what rights are.”Out of all of the ridiculous takes in your entire diatribe, this one takes the cake.  It’s basically a really bad form of begging the question: “Government must be involved to enforce contracts because government is the only way to enforce contracts.”  However, anyone who has a grasp of the common English language can agree that the word ‘voluntary’ means doing something unconstrained or by one’s own will or choice.  Even if there were language barrier, people understand the difference between doing things out of their own volition versus being forced to do so.  Prostitution is willingly selling your body in exchange for compensation while rape is having your body used against your will by someone else.  So, spare me the sophistry of pondering what ‘voluntary’ truly means.  We both know you understand the difference because you just pontificated above that “non-violent transactions exist.” Moreover, there are in fact other methods of private arbitration to deal with voluntary contracts, including breeches of contract.  Just because you either are ignorant of such alternatives or are too unimaginative to think outside of statist box is your problem to contend with.  In fact, Proudhon also proposed such a stateless system of justice.  You would think you would know that.“Hence, the graphic is disingenuous, unfairly portraying both what capitalism’ consists in and what the anti-capitalists say about it.”No, you have failed to put together any kind of rational argument that somehow debunks anything on this stupid flowchart above or anything anyone else has said on the matter.  You’ve only espoused a lot of philosophical paralogism outside the very basic premise the chart represents.  I mean, I did not even mention Marx or the labor theory of value– you just injected it into the conversation to somehow reinforce your non-argument.Not only that, but despite talking a big game about alternatives to voluntary trade in a free enterprise system, you have proven to be either a typical statist or a violent Marxist.  Because the only way to obtain private property outside of gifts, donations, or inheritance is through voluntary free exchange of said private property.  Communal property is not private property.  Some communes may grant the exclusion of personal effects and many co-operatives allow you to keep the financial fruits of your labor, but these are entities which exist within the free enterprise system, or as we call it ‘the capitalist economy’, as a whole.  And they are free to exist within this “capitalist” system while the opposite is true within a theoretical anticapitalist or socialist “economy”–if you can even call it that. -- source link

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