Global Capitalism

[Gary Childress]

So when Trump, Musk, Bezos and company are finished wrecking the United States? What's next on the Capitalist agenda?

[FlashDangerpants]

That's not really a list of capitalists, those are Robber Barons. Crony capitalists. They buy permission to build cartels and monopolies from politicians.

Trump just happens to have been the first to realise this can be all be done out in the open now, and that if you do it in this manner, the bidding war drives up your profits.

It turns out that the old way of doing things - the quiet buying and selling of politicians in smoky back rooms - was itself a crony-capitalist means of limiting demand and lowering costs. If anything, political bribery has been subjected to a round of anti-trust cartel busting via all this openness. Replacing Walmart and Koch heirs with "self-made" proper billionaires who can pay much bigger bribes.

[Gary Childress]

That's not really a list of capitalists, those are Robber Barons. Crony capitalists. They buy permission to build cartels and monopolies from politicians.

Trump just happens to have been the first to realise this can be all be done out in the open now, and that if you do it in this manner, the bidding war drives up your profits.

If we define "capitalism" as private ownership of the means of production (let's throw distribution in there as well), then is it true that Trump et al. are not 'real' capitalists?

Or perhaps the real question is, have Trump and company destroyed capitalism by showing us all how dangerous it is?

Or how are we to define "capitalism"?

[FlashDangerpants]

That's not really a list of capitalists, those are Robber Barons. Crony capitalists. They buy permission to build cartels and monopolies from politicians.

Trump just happens to have been the first to realise this can be all be done out in the open now, and that if you do it in this manner, the bidding war drives up your profits.

If we define "capitalism" as private ownership of the means of production (let's throw distribution in there as well), then is it true that Trump et al. are not capitalists?

Or perhaps the real question is, have Trump and company destroyed capitalism by showing us how dangerous it is?

Or how are we to define "capitalism"?

That's a faulty definition of capitalism. Private ownership of property goes back to the cave men, Capitalism doesn't.

Competitive markets that reward investment in upgrading private property via enhanced profits is the minimal basis of Capitalism.

[Impenitent]

proper nouns...

-Imp

[Immanuel Can]

...how are we to define "capitalism"?

Capitalism -- abstract noun. A term invented just about the time Marx wrote, by Socialist writers, to signify an imaginary ideology of "capital-worshipping," thereafter employed so that the pseudo-religion of Marxism would have a bogeyman against which artificially to forment resentment. (See also "propaganda" and "hogwash.")

[Gary Childress]

...how are we to define "capitalism"?

Capitalism -- abstract noun. A term invented just about the time Marx wrote, by Socialist writers, to signify an imaginary ideology of "capital-worshipping," thereafter employed so that the pseudo-religion of Marxism would have a bogeyman against which artificially to forment resentment. (See also "propaganda" and "hogwash.")

Yes, we know how you feel about social programs. They're unprofitable and therefore resource drains taking away wealth that would be better invested in raising capital for entrepreneurs to start new businesses. That's pretty much the philosophy of "trickle down" economics in a nutshell. The belief rests on the foundation that the wealthy will use money to invest and enrich the economy whereas the poor will only squander money on unproductive ends.

[FlashDangerpants]

...how are we to define "capitalism"?

Capitalism -- abstract noun. A term invented just about the time Marx wrote, by Socialist writers, to signify an imaginary ideology of "capital-worshipping," thereafter employed so that the pseudo-religion of Marxism would have a bogeyman against which artificially to forment resentment. (See also "propaganda" and "hogwash.")

Yes, we know how you feel about social programs. They're unprofitable and therefore resource drains taking away wealth that would be better invested in raising capital for entrepreneurs to start new businesses. That's pretty much the philosophy of "trickle down" economics in a nutshell. The belief rests on the foundation that the wealthy will use money to invest and enrich the economy whereas the poor will only squander money on unproductive ends.

You're playing into his hands, he likes it when you lose your shit at him, he gets to pose as your superior. He isn't as educated as he likes you to assume he is and he makes endless clumsy mistakes. All that gets buried under the carpet if he can rely on you to fall apart rather than point it out.

Marx was born in 1818 for instance. The year before tht, David Ricardo, who was a free market capitalist economist, not a socialist, wrote a book called "On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation". In that book, Ricardo describes an economy with a rentier class of landlords, capitalists who accumulate profits, and labourers who work for wages. The primary workings of capitalism had already been described by Adam Smith of course, decades prior (1776 to be specific), and Smith (not a socialist) is often called the "father of capitalism" but he didn't use that actual word.

The terms capitalism and capitalist were in use before Ricardo, but the book I just named is pretty much where the modern concept is defined (Proudhon never met a real capitalist in his life and had no idea how to describe one). Either way, trying to pin it on Marx is just clumsy.

[Immanuel Can]

Capitalism -- abstract noun. A term invented just about the time Marx wrote, by Socialist writers, to signify an imaginary ideology of "capital-worshipping," thereafter employed so that the pseudo-religion of Marxism would have a bogeyman against which artificially to forment resentment. (See also "propaganda" and "hogwash.")

Yes, we know how you feel about social programs. They're unprofitable and therefore resource drains taking away wealth that would be better invested in raising capital for entrepreneurs to start new businesses. That's pretty much the philosophy of "trickle down" economics in a nutshell. The belief rests on the foundation that the wealthy will use money to invest and enrich the economy whereas the poor will only squander money on unproductive ends.

You're playing into his hands, he likes it when you lose your shit at him, he gets to pose as your superior. He isn't as educated as he likes you to assume he is and he makes endless clumsy mistakes. All that gets buried under the carpet if he can rely on you to fall apart rather than point it out.

Marx was born in 1818 for instance. The year before tht, David Ricardo, who was a free market capitalist economist, not a socialist, wrote a book called "On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation". In that book, Ricardo describes an economy with a rentier class of landlords, capitalists who accumulate profits, and labourers who work for wages. The primary workings of capitalism had already been described by Adam Smith of course, decades prior (1776 to be specific), and Smith (not a socialist) is often called the "father of capitalism" but he didn't use that actual word.

The terms capitalism and capitalist were in use before Ricardo, but the book I just named is pretty much where the modern concept is defined (Proudhon never met a real capitalist in his life and had no idea how to describe one). Either way, trying to pin it on Marx is just clumsy.

What I said was that the word was invented "about the time Marx wrote." I did not say Marx invented it. He borrowed it, as he did most of his ideas. And, what I said is perfectly true: before that, the word simply did not exist, apparently.

Of course, money existed. And private enterprise existed. And free markets existed. And private property existed. And investment, and interest, and profit -- all these existed. But none of these was pulled into an ideological term, "Capital-ism," because none of them was ever an ideology, or even part of an ideology.

Marx needed an ideological term. He needed to fool people into imagining the world as a deathly struggle between his Marx-ism and some enemy. And because Marx was an ideologue himself, he needed it to be ideological as well. He needed it to be quasi-religious and something associated with a whole creed or belief system -- just like his narcissistic and tragic Social-ism or Marx-ism. He need the world to be cast, not as a dispute between the free and the ideological devotees, but between rival aspirations. He needed to be seen as equivalent with what he was trying to eliminate.

So, once again, Marx invented a historical distortion, and then made it into a way people came to think about things. Many people today falsely imagine there is some "Capitalism" out there, a creed people follow, that worships profit at the expense of poor, suffering proles. And greedy and stupid people have clung to belief in this illusory battle of ideologies, because they think that ginning up that imaginary conflict will yield them welfare benefits, or food stamps, or free education and healthcare. Of course, it never does: Socialism, in every case, has produced nothing but misery, failure and death. Total economic collapse is a poor basis for "free" anything, we discover.

There is no such thing as "Capital-ism." Nobody worships capital. There is no Capitalist Manifesto, no creeds, no coordination of free markets, not plot to rob the helpless proles of their labour's "surplus value" (another of Marx's idiotic ideas). There are no capitalist clubs and societies. Nobody does phony scholarship premised on the worship of capital. Nobody ever ended up in a gulag or labour camp, or dead in a ditch because of some ideology of capital. But we can't say the same for Marxism.

There is no "Capitalism." There never has been. The choice is between totalitarian Marxism and free markets. And free markets have produced the most affluent and privileged societies in human history, and even raised the lot of the Developing World's poor faster than any force in history. It has made Westerners so rich and privileged that they have leisure to indulge in idiotic speculations like Marxism.

So there it is.

[FlashDangerpants]

See Gary? He gets confused and defensive if you just point out one of his errors. But he never takes more care to get it right next time, so he will make all the same mistakes again and again. He's easy meat. I'm throwing this fish back now.

[Immanuel Can]

See Gary? He gets confused and defensive if you just point out one of his errors. But he never takes more care to get it right next time, so he will make all the same mistakes again and again. He's easy meat. I'm throwing this fish back now.

Oh, the level of self-congratulation! Oh, the pride in nothing achieved!

Marvelous, truly marvelous.

Have a nice day.

[Impenitent]

...The terms capitalism and capitalist were in use before Ricardo...

sure, but Montalban had artificial body coloring acting as radar...

-Imp

[Immanuel Can]

The term "capitalism" in its modern sense emerged in the mid-19th century, with thinkers like Louis Blanc and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon coining the term -- Wikipedia

Capitalism is a word used variously to describe an economic and social system, a modern form of political power, a dynamic mode of production, a stage in a world-historical process running from feudalism to communism, a western object of ideological allegiance, a durable form of inequality or, more simply, a thing. Like many other words that end in “-ism” (think, for example, of liberalism, atheism, nationalism, feminism or environmentalism), capitalism is the name given to a number of originally separate subjects and problems that, because of the ending in “-ism”, came to be grouped together as a single noun. -- Princeton

In the second half of the 19th century, capitalism had evolved from a name
characterizing an economic system to that of an ideology. Especially after the interna-
tional success of Marxism, capitalism became the antonym of communism, which could
also denote both an economic system and an ideology. Due to this status of capitalism
as an antonym of communism, capitalist followed communist in designating a person
that embraced the ideology expressed by the corresponding word in -ism. -- Language Science Press

[FlashDangerpants]

Still at it?

I don't need to look at any Wiki page to know that it isn't going to say that the term Capitalism is "A term invented just about the time Marx wrote" because I know it was already used by others a couple of decades before Ricardo described The Capitalist in a book he published the year before Marx was born.

Time for Mannie to do another round of bad losing.

[Immanuel Can]

Still at it?

I don't need to look at any Wiki page to know that it isn't going to say that the term Capitalism is "A term invented just about the time Marx wrote" because I know it was already used by others a couple of decades before Ricardo described The Capitalist in a book he published the year before Marx was born.

Where did he use the term "Capitalism"? Quote it. Because that was the question, not the one you're trying to skate on. And what the heck is "Global Capitalism"? Are we to suppose an ideology the world has had?

You're just wrong. But you must be getting used to that by now.