This reads like so many academic papers do: as if they were written by people who have never actually experienced the thing about which they are claiming to be an expert.

Competition is a built-in feature of life. All forms of life compete for resources. Until mankind reaches the point where the desired resources are effectively unlimited, there will always be competition. Capitalism is simply the most basic economic form of that competition.

That we compete with each other for resources may sometimes feel incompatible with a stable society but clearly it’s not. Society in general is stable enough and when it’s not, it’s rarely due to the competition for resources. Instability is nearly always politically-driven by those seeking power or trying to hold on to it. Making society more stable require political reform.

Competition is a basic component of life. That’s not going to change for the foreseeable future.

>Competition is a built-in feature of life. All forms of life compete for resources.

Flip side, cooperation is what made complex life possible at all. When archaebacteria and eubacteria merged to become the first eukaryotes we got all complex life.

Without cooperstion the entire planet would still be filled with single cell organisms.

Correct. We both compete and cooperate. Generally speaking we cooperate with those whose goals are aligned with and support our own while competing with those whose goals work against our own.

Sure. People compete, but who makes the rules of that competition. And don’t give me the all american bullshit answer that it is the markets, duh!

You say that capitalism is a basic economic form of competition, but capitalism is a fairly recent economic model in the timeframe of civilization. I don’t deny that from the Bronze Age and before that commerce was a regular aspect of life, but commerce and markets ≠ capitalism.

The basics of commerce is fair trade. You value A as “= 1” and I value B as “ =1” so we agree in our trade that A = B, boiling it down to a zero-sum game. Capitalism is not zero-sum but rather focuses on profit so it must extract surplus value either from an imbalanced trade or from value which does not currently exist such as paying a low wage to produce a valuable product in the case of the former or buying property that is projected to increase in value for the latter.

On the value and virtue of competition, I agree with the other commenter of the higher value of cooperation. Competition could prove useful areas for certain areas of personal or even societal growth, but it might not be the best for solving problems. Especially in such an interconnected society that we have today, the actions of one can have repercussions, many significantly negative, that can be felt across a whole scope of locales that the original perpetrator of the action could not hope to respond to and alleviate. It could be environmental damage, the devaluation of other nations’ currencies, recessions, etc.

Competition itself could become stagnant when a player becomes too large that they could hinder their competitors and keep them low on the ladder, thus turning a game of “making sure I win” to “making sure I lose.” Your example of instability driven by those who hold onto power is precisely an example of this, since holding onto power can be the end result of competition. Why would someone who already obtained the end goal give it up for the others they had always been competing against? Also, what political instability causes is that cooperation breaks down on the National level, and it turns everything into a competition of resources where the other cannot be trusted and thus it isn’t until everyone comes to cooperate again that they can come out of the rut

> The basics of commerce is fair trade. You value A as “= 1” and I value B as “ =1” so we agree in our trade that A = B, boiling it down to a zero-sum game.

But it’s not zero sum. Each party trades to get the best deal they can. It’s impossible to determine equality when trading corn for a good axe. I might be a good hunter but terrible at making axes. We can’t be good at everything. This is where capitalism comes in. I decide to specialize in making axes or farming because by specializing, I can create something of value more efficiently than someone who doesn’t specialize. That extra efficiency is my profit.

We do sometimes have to cooperate rather than compete when the resources are such that we can’t monopolize them (clean air for example) or when the risk of competition is just too great for all involved.

Generally speaking however, competition produces the best result.

What rules, like antitrust laws? In Canada there's a competition act.

Coercion is not Cooperation. You can cooperate in a liberal society under capitalism, Marxism isn't cooperation it's necessarily coercive and oppressive - just ask what yourself what you do with people that don't feel like "cooperating."

The obvious counter to that argument is that we compete because we perceive resources as scarce, and therefore something over which to compete. As we grow closer to (and in some ways have already far surpassed) the vagaries of actual scarcity, we must be willing to make conscious change to accept that reality.

Put another way, we only have to compete today because of massive inequality and the enforcement of a scarcity mentality by power structures that benefit from the status quo.

Anyone telling you otherwise is profiting from how things are.

Capitalism is voluntary exchange between free individuals. I'm pretty sure he was referring to how this was also the case between tribes of humans 10s of thousands of years ago also.

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Which resources are not actually scarce but only appear to be? And how is the entire planet being fooled so easily?

Too many marxists here on Reddit - which is surprising knowing what we know about the communists states of the 20th century.

Indeed. Every time I say anything pro-capitalism I get downvoted despite the fact that it’s the reason we are no longer hunter-gatherers.

Communism is the worst of both worlds because those in power become corrupt and optimize around themselves. At least with capitalism, everyone has a shot.

You can compete in a Marxist society too?

The soviet Union had plenty factories, beaureu's and individuals all competing with each other. I'm not a Marxist but that's just established history.

When did I say anything about "competing in a Marxist society?"

What do you do with people who don't want to cooperate (i.e., liberals)? You have to reeducate them, throw them in the gulag or eliminate them. Liberal societies tolerate communists (just form a commune), communist societies are intolerant of liberals.

>What do you do with people who don't want to cooperate (i.e., liberals)

If you function in a society you're cooperating. Which Liberal isn't cooperating? A society without cooperation is just anarchy.

Liberals are ideologically opposed to communism. Any communist system would see resistance from the liberals trapped inside. So what do you do with the liberals that refuse to cooperate within the oppressive communist system? What do you do about those pesky humans that believe in individual human rights and freedom? Exactly as I've said and it's already been demonstrated plenty of times. (The communists start chanting "one of us. One Of Us. ONE OF US!" as they surgically remove your your soul and your humanity from your body).

There's a straight line from the idea of communism to the oppression, coercion and murder required to actually run it. Communism is incredibly evil.

You don't do anything? Why would you need to do something?

That's some strawman.

Then it isn't communism. You're attempting to paint communism as if it were liberalism where everyone gets to live the lives they want but that's not communism. You don't get individual human rights under communism because what matters is the "greater good" and not the good of the individual or their interests. "What you do" as a communist is exactly what I've already mentioned, which is exactly what communists have been doing for about a century now.

Remember again that in a liberal-democracy nothing is forbidding the communist from getting together with their communist friends and forming a commune. The good guys are obvious.

Communists trying to create division and resentment as always. If workers want to embrace capitalism there has to be a reason for it, why do they assume that workers have been manipulated or corrupted.

It's like they're not aware of the incredible advancements on workers rights under Capitalism. Now this "new workers" are considered traitors of the working class, because they reject a revolution and instead prefer supporting unions and parties always under Capitalism, sabotaging the bourgeois revolution.

There won't be a revolution, because workers lifes under Capitalism aren't as bad as communists wish them to be.

Jfc.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Soviet_Union

You're almost like the personification of the mocking "everything bad is communism" meme.

>Remember again that in a liberal-democracy nothing is forbidding the communist from getting together with their communist friends and forming a commune.

You don't think I'll be arrested for seizing the means of production?

Communism is more than just sitting in a commune, it's an entire economic system. The same way that capitalism is very different from feudalism.

Buddy there are NO individual human rights under communism. There were NO individual human rights in the Soviet Union. Are you kidding me? How are you going to completely ignore the red terror, the holomodor, or the gulags where innocent people were used for slave labour, starved to death and replaced with another innocent person.

You're the personification of complete nativity and ignorance. What a bloody fool.

"Seizing the means of production" = violating someone else's individual human rights. You're my proof.

Edit: one of you guys.. the Soviet Union was in fact what communism looks like. You can trace the root of the evil in the Soviet Union to the evil conception of communism as a straight line. Communism is necessarily coercive and oppressive. You can't force everyone to want to participate in your communist experiment, some folks believe in individual human rights. You're wrong. Quit drinking the kool-aid.

Hi, appreciate the reply!

You're perhaps right that exact equality is hard to determine, so I should have been more specific and said "≈1" instead of "=1" for the example, however while a perfect equality in trade might be outside of human scope, we do take it as a standard by which we judge a trade. Supply and Demand runs on this equilibrium.

Of course I do not deny that specialization of labor is good, however, such specialization predates capitalism and specialization itself does not ensure profit. No matter how efficient I am at making a product, making more of that product means nothing if there is no more demand for it, and if there is demand, it might not be consistent. Basically increase in supply does not necessarily mean increase in demand. People get full, so they don't need an abundance of corn. Enough trees are cut down so that axes are no longer necessary. A scythe is used only for the harvest and afterwards lays idle. Capitalism's solution in this case would be to introduce planned obsolescence in a product, use cheaper material or labor to make the product, or employ heavy propaganda to convince buyers that they need to buy more even if their needs are already met.

In this case, I believe Capitalism is the wrong term. What you are describing is "Commerce" and I do believe there is a significant distinction. In my replies, I have stated that Capitalism is a fairly new model of structuring our economy. Before that was mercantilism, before that bartering, etc. Capitalism distinguishes itself by a heavy focus on profit by trying to imbalance the zero-sum game of commerce. Also, if you look into the field of anthropology, you will see that tribes of humans were very communal, helping each other without seeking profit. I'm not claiming that it was some utopia nor that tribes always worked well with each other, but the claim that capitalism is some sort of innate trait in human society present in our ancestors does not hold well against evidence.

The Soviet Union did not achieve true Communism.

The means/vision to try to get there were prescribed by the vanguard/bolsheviks and then distorted/reimagined after Lenin’s death with Stalinism.

The Soviet Union went from a peasant agrarian society to full on industrialism within 30-50 years. The Communist ideal didn’t lead to the atrocities that happened under the Soviet Union (capitalism has its fair share as well). It was the material conditions that were operated from, the participation in a world war, the top down leadership approach, etc.

You’re copying propaganda from a place entirely lacking of nuanced thinking.

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Which is not really applied, otherwise there wouldn’t be a food oligopoly where over 90% of the market is controlled by 3 companies that always agree with each other.

This is what I get from a google definition search:

"an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state."

Anyways i don't want to spend much time arguing about this. There is plenty of that in this thread already lol

“All forms of life compete for resources”.

I guess ants don’t exist then. Nor any other social animals.

Ffs every single social species shares resources and don’t compete with each other, we’re the only one who does that.

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Hello again,

Yes, capitalism can be described as such, though I have seen some debate among scholars of the issue of whether or not something like State capitalism can exist such as the case with China once the precepts and statutes of capitalism are more closely looked and how china makes use of them even though their enterprise is not entirely private, but I don't know much about Deng's ideas to tell you. However, the definition you provided does necessarily reinforce your original comment.

I agree that capitalism does use the idea of free trade among free individuals, but if that were all that it entailed we would have never made another term for something that already existed. The key word would be profit. What separates capitalism from simple commerce or trade is that surplus value is generated by these transactions instead of just satisfying the needs of the two parties.

Also, although a quick definition might be a good starting point for discussion of the topic, it is also too short and simplified to capture the nuances and intricacies of an ideology that has had books written about it.

I wouldn't use ants as an example considering they constantly wage wars against other colonies and will wipe out any small creatures that are in their way and are constantly expanding. Sure they don't compete within the colony but they will against colonies even of the same species

Hint: getting a new flagship smartphone that requires some actually fairly scarce material isn't a human need.

Yes, I'm discussing something that would have to be done hand in hand with reworking what we consider valuable or necessary to some degree.

But runaway crony capitalism and the TV/radio/internet screaming that you "need" the latest and greatest Thing are poisons that will continue to keep humanity from moving beyond primitive "competition" and into a more sustainable cooperative.

It's about a realignment of values, and the value we assign to things. But the idea that "competition" in the modern world is some natural state that isn't the direct result of propaganda and manipulation is ridiculous.

Saying capitalism is behind advancements is the same as saying unemployment is behind advancements.

Communism inevitably leads to the death of people from hunger. The state cannot regulate all the needs of the people. The atrocities that took place under capitalism were simply natural for this time. And in these cases, some people suffered from others, but not from the state.
My relatives miraculously did not die of starvation under the USSR. The planned economy sucks.

> At least with capitalism, everyone has a shot.

except that, exactly like communism

> those in power become corrupt and optimize around themselves.

Thats just the reality of social and economic systems. Basic human greed means there will always be people wanting to take advantage of the system to benefit themselves, and will twist and manipulate the system however they can in order to do so.

Monopolies, price fixing, buying politicians, etc

and now that much of the western world has moved from capitalism into corporatism, where the assets available to those in power are so massive that the general public have zero chance to really compete against that manipulation of the system.

Over time values will change (that is a virtual certainty) and hopefully for the better. But society needs to change. Our government must represent the interests of the people not the other way around.

That’s not true. Ants wage war. Chimpanzees have been known to do so as well. Dolphins gang rape other dolphins.

But forgetting all that, all those species social groups compete with other social groups of their own species and other species for resources. No living thing is immune to competition.

The fundamental difference here is that we have a built-in survival instinct. So we are going to work to ensure that we best we can. Profit creates a buffer so that we aren’t constantly right at the very edge of survival. As long as there’s an economy, there’s going to be a profit motive. And there should be because profit drives people to create things they their people want.

I just don’t think we should be trying to tell people how to live. That’s never ended well. We can educate but we shouldn’t be mandating.

Circumstances and values change over time. I’m sure if we could leap ahead 500 years there would be things we’d recognize and things we wouldn’t. We would be comfortable with some of how society works and very uncomfortable with other parts.

Consider that 500 years ago there were very few professions. Most people were farmers. Today we have an countless things people do to earn a living. It would seem like magic to someone from 500 years ago. It will almost certainly be true in 500 years as well.

I know many are pessimistic about mankind’s future. I’m not. We will adapt and we will wait until a problem is pretty bad before we resolve it but we will resolve it. People are terrible at predicting just about anything long term. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to take climate change seriously for example. We do. But the people who thing we won’t survive to 2100 should study history better. We’ve survived ice ages, the black plague, pandemics (prior to vaccines), wars and more.

It won’t be easy but we will survive.

That basic human greed is the result of being shaped by evolution to make sure we survive and reproduce.

In the US 50% of Americans work for small businesses. If you want to work for yourself and you’re willing to do whatever it takes, you can. It’s not easy. I have worked for myself 32 of the 38 years of my adult life. There were times when I was working 16 hour days for weeks at a time.

Having said that, we need to overturn Citizen’s United. Corporations are not people. They are not allowed to vote for example. Given that they can’t vote they shouldn’t be able to donate to political campaigns. They are part of the reason our politics in the US are so divisive.

Yes, basic human greed has been a survival mechanism.

However now that humanity has transformed from hunter gathered tribes into a globally connected society, it has become a massive liability to that society

I’m not so sure. It’s also part of the reason we have our modern society. I certainly would not want to go back to living as a hunter-gatherer.

So system x is bad because it is not x or people don’t live according to its principles? I’m not much assured.

Which system sounds more shelfish to you:

One person owns everything

Or

All persons own their share?

Given that they are to decide before the existence of any rules. Measured in Paretian terms.

And under capitalism one trespassing is not cooperating and gets shot. It seems to be a feature of every system that those not cooperating as the official principle says, will get locked up. And when they cannot be fit into cells, they are put into camps!

why do they need to decide before the existence of any rules ?

Clearly thats never going to happen, any tribe, society or group is always going to have rules of some sort. There is absolutely no reason why a society can't decide on a reallocation strategy at any stage of their existence to try and make the allocation of resources more equitable (if they think they can do that without destroying their society in the process).

And, during that period, those with more will scream about being made worse off as reallocation occurs. And, compared to their previous position of wealth, that may be true, but compared to the rest of their society, is almost certainly untrue in real terms.

Before rules is the moral apriori viewpoint for the inductive process of discovering a coherent set of rules. Also only such a system can truly be voluntary, something the libertarian and the capitalist would agree on. If you start from an existing set of rules that would be illogical potentially. It is like assuming that the moon is cheese and building the rest of the theory regarding the cosmos in an incorrect manner around that assumption.

indeed, however "before rules" assumes a blank slate, which is, sadly, as far from reality as one can get. It does provide an interesting academic exercise, but very little else of value.

and developing a "coherent set of rules" without a viable mechanism to move from current state, to the idealized state, is also meaningless, and ignores the reality that all societies are transitory, evolving and changing over years, decades and centuries, and your coherent set of rules rarely caters for that reality.

The best your rules can cater for is something to handle the current situation, with an acknowledgement that they need to be flexible enough to evolve and adapt as the society and situation evolves and adapts.

Your rules may, possibly, be able to provide an adaptive framework for change, but not much else.

How is it a blank state? People would be as they are, unlike assumed in those academic thought experiments. They just need to revise their moral judgments, not pretend to be suffering from a collective amnesia which is a view from nowhere. The real problem of politics is that we know that the box of statism is not right but we don’t want to step out of it. So here we are, always carrying our blind spot of judgment.

"before rules" assumes that no rules currently exist, and hence you have a blank slate on which to build your idealized rule set.

and People clearly would not be as they are, because they currently exist within a set of rules, societal practices and pre-existing mindsets that you're choosing to completely ignore in order to build that set of rules.

> "They just need to revise their moral judgements"

Yup, they need to discard all their life experiences and societal upbringing from their entire life, discarding their current mindset and attitudes completely, in order to make the change to your new ruleset. I believe that may be semi-possible with mass brainwashing and massive propaganda campaigns, but its hardly reliable, nor achieves a consistent result across society.

People's moral judgements are based on a wide variety of things, and are specific to an individual, as shaped and molded by their circumstances, environment, upbringing, society etc.

"Revising" that in everyone in order to generate some form of conformity with your new rule set isn't a viable option by anything except force and brainwashing, because everyone's experiences are different, hence their moral attitudes are different.

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One can both critique capitalism and not espouse communism.

Individualism vs collectivism is the political spectrum. What you prefer is somewhere along the gradient from one extreme (anarchy) to the other (communism). Liberalism is critiqued by Marxism and I guess anarchy. So, yeah, you could espouse being an individual bandit also.

We must get back to our community based systems. The capitalist market is squeezing the collective of ppl dry. Homelessness is being criminalized as average rent in the city I’m in reaches $2500 and no, telling ppl to move isn’t the solution.

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What if dolphins don't have the concept of rape? What if to them it's just sex?

I agree that we’ve had a decent track record of solving problems. But a history of success is not a predictive model of the future. The overwhelming majority of species that have existed are extinct. We’ve failed to solve many problems but it just takes one apocalyptic event to break the trend.

Why are you not able to comprehend the difference between moral judgments regarding social justice and individual identity? This actually sums up the communitarian thinking that poses that the methodological neutral subject is both too thin and thick to make a theory. But if you deconstruct moral judgments regarding the division of property that are a political thing not part of individual belief, you don’t need to touch personal history or identity.

Although in some cases as in the idea of american citizenship some moral judgments are part of one’s identity. But this is like a poisoned well that only poisons its drinker farer and farer away from reality. Not good.

The point is that socialism is based on socialisation and living as a society, capitalism is a parasitic system based on exploiting others to death, until you eventually die yourself because you can’t sustain yourself.

That’s also the difference between parasites and social organisms.

So saying all forms of life compete for resources is an utter nonsense, otherwise social species wouldn’t exist, including mankind.

Absolutely agree. Either way we can’t know which outcome it will be. All we can do is the best we can and hope that’s enough.

The problem is that "real communism" cannot exist, the methodology Marx prescribes is the absurd absolute rule of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" to achieve a stateless society. In reality the only thing that comes from this dictatorship is a dictatorship. Imagine that.

>Competition is a basic component of life. That’s not going to change for the foreseeable futur

Elevating it as one of our most sacred cows, on the other hand, mutates decently enjoyable competitions into something else entirely.

It being a basic component of life doesn’t change a friendly game of checkers.

Checkers requires cooperation, under the rules of the game. To an extreme, it's war. In competition, cooperation is a requirement to keep it civilized.

While competition is a basic component of life, cooperation is not a basic component of competition. Some forms of competition require cooperation and some do not.

When two hunters are competing for the same animal, they don’t have to cooperate for one of them to win. When two trees in a dense forest are both trying to reach the canopy to get more sunlight, they do not cooperate. If they are side by side and there’s only room at the top of the canopy for one, there will be a winner and a loser without cooperation playing a role.

You know, as useful as it may be to think about extreme hypotheticals like survival strategies among shipwrecked sailors without any food, they aren't descriptive of ideal conditions in society or the economy. Extremes are what we generally want to avoid.

And they're certainly not descriptive of enjoyable past-times, like competitive sports where (hopefully) the competitors don't try to kill each other in the process.

That's my point: elevate competition to an extreme and once decently enjoyable (and beneficial) competitions become something else. ..

> elevate competition to an extreme and once decently enjoyable (and beneficial) competitions become something else. ..

You keep suggesting I’m elevating competition simply by using it to describe one aspect of life. I’m not. I’m using it as a word because words are how we describe things.

If I describe the sky as being blue, I’m not elevating the word blue. I’m using it to describe the sky. That’s what words are for.

This is about society and economic systems. At no point did I say "you" although, given I used a term to describe competition which means pejoratively, something unreasonably treated as sacred enough to be unquestionable, your issue with my criticism doesn't seem like it's doing any favors.

You argued competition is part of life and the natural world. I'm not disagreeing, I'm adding that cooperation is a necessity and without it, there's nothing to benefit society, being a state of affairs more like Hobbes' war of all against all.

Yes we cooperate when that is more sensible than competing. I’m simply saying that describing life as being competitive doesn’t elevate the concept of competition.

The realms in which they actually competed were basically centered around climbing the government and bureaucratic ranks by lying and deceiving others.