It always bothers me when someone attacks someone else's view of what communism or socialism or capitalism ... whatever is. Words are symbols, variables whose meaning comes from context and interpreting someone else's meaning means determining what they are trying to use their words to say. Words of the tools of people, not people to tools of words - or we are in the Orwellian world where we are slaves to words.
To me capitalism is the substrate, the basic archetype of trade and determining value, but that does not mean it is everything or should be the dominant determinant of reality, because if that is true then life is a game of monopoly and the first winner will determine the lives of everyone else in the game forevermore. That is an order that must be resisted and if necessary, overturned.
When Republicans make capitalism predominant, what they intend is anti-democratic, it is totalitarian, fascist, despotic, tyrannical, and only the people who believe they gain from such a system, or those who have grown up and been blinded to reality believe in it.
That is, capitalism, the market, always leads toward hierarchical power and tyranny, and in world history democracy only ever developed or meant anything in relation to its opposition to such a system. So that first their is human behavior, and then there are laws and conventions, society ... then in economic interactions first there is capitalism and then there is democracy developing to counter it, and then fascism to use the corruption of law and politics to control people leading to abuses, leading to democracy rebellion ... a continual process. Capitalism is the substrate of mass human behavior, and government and laws and democracy are there to regulate it to make sure the system exists to serve people and that it does not abuse those people, enslave them.
When I see how those terms are so often used in media in a political context, and that context is accepted by the political opposition, I see that we are wedged permanently in a fascist system that that oppresses and exploits the vast majority of people, and that the reason it does not get fixed is because people do not see it because their models of reality or corrupted so that the cannot put two and two together.
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ultravioletx (10212)
3 years ago
To me capitalism is the power of the individual, and socialism is the power of a society.
We come together as a society for the common good, to keep the individuals out of the mud.
But in order to maximize happiness, we have to give power to the individual to compete with each other.
So we end up with this social/capitalist hybrid system where people fall to a certain point and then stop, and people simultaneously have the ability to build up to the clouds.
The problem we run into is when someone builds too high, they gain an additional benefit of having a louder voice than everyone else and can change government with that one voice. That is the primary flaw of capitalism in our system.
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brux (14666)
3 years ago
Yeah, but you needs symbols, variable and models to be able to discuss that and model it.
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