h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>I think there are good economic reasons to suggest that slavery wasn't terribly efficient

Interestingly I read an article by someone involved in combatting climate change recently and he argued that the moves to energy efficiency are actually entirely *good* from an economic perspective because they'll reduce costs for businesses and individuals; Western society and business has become decadent and wasteful of money as much as resources. So, in this way, the moves against climate change are giving capitalism a dirigist kick up the @rse for its own good.

A509690 Come on Zagreb....

"Incidentally, I *hadn't* heard of the Prisoner's Dilemma so I'm currently educating myself in it via wonkypedia."

Enjoy it! It's one of the coolest ideas ever. And actually, the h2g2 entry doesn't look too shabby either, it even mentions the Axelrod stuff (I have his book on my shelf and one day I will get around to reading it properly rather than just descriptions of it).

"That assumes that the "big capitalists" are invariably ideological capitalists themselves."

Not necessarily (my favourite phrase! ). Capitalist bosses are under pressure from their shareholders to maximise profit, and so to keep their jobs they have to act in those interests even if personally they have trouble with them. As a matter of practice, probably that sort of attitude is difficult to sustain internally, so I guess a lot of them become more ideological as a coping mechanism. But now I'm just speculating...

"It's not supposed to stop climate change"

Well that was kind of my point wasn't it? (with suitable adjustments for technical quibbles about what we mean by climate change).

"...the moves to energy efficiency are actually entirely *good* from an economic perspective because they'll reduce costs for businesses and individuals..."

I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'good from an economic perpective'. Not destroying the environment is good from a long term economic perspective, but inconsistent with short-term profit motives.

My opinion.

I see capitalism as the effect of competition resulting in a more efficient economy. I think this is inevitable given enough people and a reasonable existing efficiency (which we have reached), dependent on transport links, currency, excetera.

I don't think it necessarily implies growth, but it does necessarily imply a constant state of dynamism. It is entirely possible for a capitalist economy, or more likely smaller sections within it, to run off down a dead-end.

We see state control and ownership as an opposing system, and in some way it is because it overrides change, but at the same time it's built on top of capitalism and remains part of it in a very similar way to a large corporation engaging in monopolistic behaviours. Sometimes, the state retards growth and gets in the way of innovation, other times it can be more efficient than private enterprise, and itself the source of innovation.

I think it would be wise to guide the economy to avoid environmental crisis.

Capitalism is the only system I have come across that fits with human nature . But it needs the balance of strong government and strictly but fairly applied regulation .

best fishes.....tod

Damn Dogster for dragging me back.

Marx is misunderstood. He was *not* simply saying 'Ooh! This Capitalism stuff is nasty! Let's overthrow it and have Socialism instead!'

You need to learn about Dialectical Materialism. For starters, I highly recommend 'Marx for Beginners' by Ruis. What you need to know is that Society (and History and Economics and basic human thought) proceeds as a series of dynamic, 'Dialectical Oppositions': Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis. Hold this thought. It's a powerful one. (and also, incidentally, one which is consistent with human psychology - see Kelly, Rogers, repertory grids, 'Man as a scientist')

Capitalism is an inevitable, economic, historical ans social phenomenon that arose with the industrial revolution and the subsequent evolution of feudal, peasant societies. Capitalism isn't an ideology: It's just how post-feudal industrial economies work. Nothing personal.

Except that it certainly *feels* personal to the Proletariat - those from whom wealth is accrued by squeezing out their Surplus Value...ie chipping away at their Ts&Cs to make goods ever cheaper. (Again - nothing personal; Capitalists need to do this to stay competitive, stay in business and feed their families/ send them to Eton).

So we have various Dialectics set up:
- It is in the interest of Capital to squeeze the workers vs The workers are forced to stand up for themselves (eg to win 14% pay settlements)
- The workers' interests lie in Class Solidarity...but individual workers would be wise to migrate into the Bourgeoisie just as soon as they are able.
- Capitalism delivers net economic progress...but requires the subjugation and exploitation of humans. (I'm not trying to be emotive here: it simply does. Something like controlling toilet breaks allows shoes to be sewn more cheaply; not installing a pit-head shower means a miner has to stay clean and healthy at his own expense and via the effort of his wife)
etc.
etc.

Now we come to The Crisis Of Capitalism:

Markets are 'efficient' (a specialist economics term). Accordingly, they are very good at innovating to deliver ever more desirable, competitive and cheaper goods and services. So who makes stuff. Well...Marx stood on the shoulders of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and (especially) David Ricardo. Ever since Smith's 'The Wealth Of Nations', we've known that for a nation to be wealthy, it *has* to allow goods to be made more cheaply oversees and and concentrate on what it alone can produce efficiently.

So what happens when the engine of Capitalism...for all its brute flaws...has elevated everyone's material wealth (and, yes, it does do that: people in successful, capitalist nations are wealthy)...and when everyone's wealthy...
Who makes all our cheap goods?
Who does all the shitty jobs?
Or...over on the other side of the Dialectic...
If they can't be made cheap enough for workers to afford...who buys 'em?
Who does all the shitty jobs at an affordable rate?

Marx suggested that the answer was blindingly obvious. Cut the crap and just give shit away. Like software. Or Music. Or healthcare. 'To each according to their needs, from each according to their ability.' This will simply happen; it's the inevitable endpoint of Capitalism - albeit that getting there may be...er...fraught. Marx suggested about 150 years of The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat in conflict with Capital before an eventual 'Withering Away Of The State'. So any day now, really... Give or take an Irish Referendum.


Here's a thought. My recent purchases have included a professional quality, USB lab microscope (Lidl, £30), a high-quality NXT-speaker iPod dock (£20, Richer Sounds). All these are trading in 'Marginal Markets'. Marx talked about these in Das Kapital. Are we at the Crisis yet?

Yesterday, in Woolies, I bought my daughter a DVD of 'Animal Farm' for £1. That's *almost* Communism.












(that was the short version, btw. Buy me a pint and I'll fill you in on the rest.

>>Capitalism is the only system I have come across that fits with human nature

Care to define 'Human Nature'? It seems to me that, from an anthropological/ biological viewpoint it's:
a) highly varied.
b) enormously subject to environmental influences.

A mother in a famine-struck desert will die to feed her child. A father in an econonimically-deprived area of Glasgow will drink away his Family Credit and stub cigarettes out on his daughter.

Which of these is 'human nature'?
















(Trick question, for those too dim to spot it: Both, obviously.)

And all Socialists familiar with Steinbeck will have wept at the final breast feeding scene in 'The Grapes Of Wrath.'

>>>I think there are good economic reasons to suggest that slavery wasn't terribly efficient

RunDon'tWalk to 'The Black Jacobins' by the great (Marxist) historian, CLR James (who also has the distinction of being the only man who could get me to pick up a book about cricket.).

Slavery was *not* abolished by the moral lead of figures such as Wilberforce (admirable though he was). It was made economically inefficient by the constant, violent resistance of Africans. The security costs were simply unbearable.

The Capitalist solution was Evil Genius personified. Free the slaves. Give them a (small) share ('sharecropping'). Make them economically dependent on the success of their landlords/masters.

"The Capitalist solution was Evil Genius personified. Free the slaves. Give them a (small) share ('sharecropping'). Make them economically dependent on the success of their landlords/masters."

Something that backfires when the smallholders co-operate and use their profits to purchase more land. This is what happened in India where the Muslim servants combined their holdings to become significant players in the local production of food.

Companies exist for the benefit of their shareholders - not their customers, not their staff - not even their managers. By that directive anything a company does that produces more value for the shareholder is legitimate.

However this does not have to be to the detriment of all other parts of society - though it frequently is.

Capitalism is totally self-sustaining because the money and power gravitates to a smaller and more ruthless section of society, who will sacrifice more of its middle order to perpetuate its own existence. The true leaders get richer, and the middle order are sacrified by both ends for their personal betterment.

Then a new market/technology/product appears and the cycle moves around another notch.

Of course...I didn't answer the question. But it needs rephrasing:

'Is *growth* inherently unsustainable?'

(Mental note to dig out a paper I read at university on Capitalism and Marxism making a similar assumption about Progress. It will need a phone call to a lecturere to find it, mind...)







Malthus...Limits To Growth...Kim Stanley Robinson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Mars

>>Then a new market/technology/product appears and the cycle moves around another notch.


Dialectical Materialism!

Jaysus! Marx was just soooo prescient. No wonder R4 listeners voted him as the greatest philosopher:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/greatest_philosopher_vote_result.shtml



Cor! That's a good list. I don't usually agree with these things, which tend to favour pish like St Pepper and BoRap.

"Capitalism is totally self-sustaining because the money and power gravitates to a smaller and more ruthless section of society, who will sacrifice more of its middle order to perpetuate its own existence. The true leaders get richer, and the middle order are sacrified by both ends for their personal betterment."

I think that's probably true; it's less that capitalism is moving inexorably to a crisis and more that it consistently evolves. According to Edward, capitalist societies advance until "everyone" gets a bit richer and no one wants to do the crappy jobs so a crisis emerges. But humanity is more complex than that; areas of cities and even whole nations go from "rich" to "poor" as economic strength slushes around. People who made money in a "boom" industry that promptly goes under find themselves working in "proletarian" jobs. There's also the plumber example. A skilled but not exceptionally well-paid job that no one wanted to do anymore. What happened? Suddenly there was a demand for plumbers and it became a high-paid job.

>'Is *growth* inherently unsustainable?'

Here's something I've often wondered and wouldn't mind someone answering.

Before Adam Smith's theory of the free market the dominant capitalist ideology was Mercantilism. If I remember correctly, this philosophy was based on the idea that there was a limited amount of wealth in the world and that nations were in competition to obtain it. From a commonsense (for want of a better way of putting it) viewpoint this seems to be true. But (again from what I can recall) Smith argued that wealth was essentially something that could be created infinitely and that international competition in the name of profit was foolhardy. Can someone explain why Smith was correct (I'm assuming he was given that mercantilism barely exists anymore)?

>Marx suggested that the answer was blindingly obvious. Cut the crap and just give shit away.

I'm not sure how such a system would be sustainable (ha) though. What happens when someone producing something themselves (such as music, for instance) realises that they can profit (in the non-monetary sense) from it. Let's say they give away their music in exchange for some food; you've got a "buyer" who's been given as much food as he needs by the commune but he's willing to sacrifice a little because he wants the music. The music producer does this with a lot of people and soon has lots of extra food and the people he's "sold" his music to aren't starving; they've basically just given up dessert (let's say). Eventually, other people see him doing this and start doing the same thing. You have the basics of a barter economy right there. How long until someone starts using special stones with holes in them (for example) as a substitute "I promise to pay" note. Eventually you have the bare bones of a capitalist economy sprouting up.

There's nothing that can stop this. A Marxist-Leninist state should (in theory) deal with this by sending in the political police but this is the communist end-game; there's no state to do any of this...

>>"Capitalism is totally self-sustaining because the money and power gravitates to a smaller and more ruthless section of society,

Not even Marx, btw. Ricardo. 'Rents accumulate towards landlords.'

>>I'm not sure how such a system would be sustainable (ha) though. What happens when someone producing something themselves (such as music, for instance) realises that they can profit (in the non-monetary sense) from it.

Yes...but - as ever - it's a dynamic system of opposition (a Dialectic) tending toards Communism. Sure, so DVDs of Animal Farm are currently £1. But their 'Marginal Value' (a standard economics term. known to accountants and stock contollers everywhere) tends to zero. Same with eberything else, in the longer term.


>>realises that they can profit (in the non-monetary sense) from it.

Explain the difference, please, between profitting in a monetary and non-monetary sense? Money is simply a means of exchange for for food, time, fun, sex... whatever.

Mercantalism was abandoned because trade generates more wealth than isolationism. You could go into more detail or theoretical depth than that, but I think this is the practical, and rather incontrovertible, argument that changed the minds of the world's economists.

Although there were times when isolationism was the better option. With essential goods (food), in the 18th century when transport networks were poor and this introduced a significant lag time into the economy's adaptation, experiments with laissez faire were often disastrous.

Which is the amusing deal with Malthus - he guessed* something along these lines in the very generation that railways became prevalent and it ceased to be true.

*(I say guessed because he used maths which was essentially plucked from the air.)

To the OP - sorry for indulging in this digression from the original topic. Maybe if anyone wants to reply they could take it up with me on my space or start a new thread?

Zagreb,

"Eventually you have the bare bones of a capitalist economy sprouting up."

This is a pretty standard but IMO wrong view that capitalism is inevitable and grows out of barter. There's a big difference between possession of goods and capitalist ownership of land, the means of production, intellectual property, etc.

Property rights are meaningless without a way of enforcing them. In your barter economy that you're imagining with stones with holes in them, I could 'sell' you a piece of land for lots of your pretty little stones, but what does that mean? Nothing unless I feel bound to honour an agreement not to use it myself in exchange for the stones. And why should anyone else feel bound by my having swapped stones with you? In contemporary capitalism, it's the state that does this.

Capitalism REQUIRES a state. Ultra free market economists like Robert Nozick say that the state should be nothing more than the minimum necessary to enforce property rights, because without that minimum there could be no capitalism. So why do you think that having no state would lead to capitalism?

I presume the answer is just that having no state in the past did lead to capitalism. But it only led to capitalism by a long and tortuous route going through various forms of feudalism, etc. So maybe you're saying that if we had no state, this would indeed happen, there'd be feudal lords, kings, etc., and we'd end up back where we started. But again there's no evidence for this, it's just that this is the way it happened before. But if we got to a position where there was no state in the future, it wouldn't be like the one we were in in the past. In the past, when there was no state it was because there was no society beyond small groups banding together. It's inconceivable that this is what a stateless society in the future would be like. In Marxist terms, the means of production would be totally different to what they were then, and so the outcome would also be different.

As far as I can tell, the idea that the state could wither away is based on the - possibly incorrect - idea that there could be a stable system of voluntary association ensuring equality. Imagine if somehow this could be achieved, then as someone living in such a society, attempting to deviate from it would likely make the others living in that society suspicious of you, and unlikely to have dealings with you, making it more difficult for you to gain the advantage necessary for starting the chain of events that lead to feudalism and eventually capitalism. If it were possible that such a state could be reached, it actually seems quite plausible to me that it could be stable. Marxists don't talk about this much, but anarchists like to speculate about it (with varying degrees of coherence).

Incidentally, I love to always mention that the idea of the withering away of the state predates Marx (by a long time), and at least goes back to William Godwin in 1793:

"In proportion as weakness and ignorance shall diminish, the basis of government will also decay."

- William Godwin, Political Justice Book III, Chapter VI (p247 in the 1985 Penguin Classics edition)

Surely when the 'company' become big enough it is indistinguishable from the state ?

I'm thinking here of the Dutch East India company, which for all intents and purposes ran itself like a government - even declaring war on people.

The current fad for global economies (free-market talk for a return to slavery) is an attempt to take the state out of economies, but of course the state remains a powerful customer.

As another aside where does marketing come into this - the idea that I'll pay you stones with holes in to use my wooden club, so that other people will come and buy my club and I can charge more for it ?

Never understood that one. ~(I know how advertising works, I get that.)