2 replies to this topic

[wjfox]

I just watched this very interesting discussion. Peter Joseph talks to Abby Martin about the problems with capitalism today, and how a reform of our current socioeconomic system could transform our world in the future. Alongside the business, cultural and political aspects, he describes potential advances in AI and automation, energy, food production and patent law.

 

 

[Mike the average]

I like Peter Joseph but his solutions are the reason why the far left are actually far. Capitalism is still a working solution, just very far from perfect, it is lack of knowledge and understanding of the average person that is the greatest problem. The rich are not bad by default and the poor are not good by default.

If we went with his theoretical future we would have just as many problems, because it assumes we are all going to magically work together with improved efficiency and automation.

We need a big name to admit how much of a facade the world economic system is, to deflate what capitalism has become, not replace it.

I think given time someone like Zuckerberg will be that hero.

[Yuli Ban]

^ Indeed.

 

Even the most devout capitalists I know say that capitalism has flaws like anything else in our entropic world, and those flaws are plain to see in our modern, neoliberal world order. My question is: why let the flaws be? You wouldn't drive a car if you knew that the engine was flawed and would randomly give out. You wouldn't eat a fruit if you saw mold growing on it.

 

The last time we tried letting it stay as it is, we were living in the "golden" age of communist revolution. When capitalism reformed itself, all of a sudden socialism, Bolshevism, and communism became far less palatable to the masses. That's actually how Che Guevara got killed— he tried spreading revolution to another country (I believe Peru?) where the workers and peasants turned against him because the ruling capitalists had already accomplished land and wealth-concentration reforms that benefited them. Whereas he had no problem spreading it in the Latin American nations where the capitalists were virulently anti-reform. And it wasn't even just in the '60s; socialist and quasi-socialist movements were a thing going back to the 1700s whenever these situations arose, and the United States grappled with middlingly successful movements in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The era we know of as the Gilded Age.

 

But nowadays, they don't even believe you when you say that the reforms stopped socialism from coming to America and the West (usually because they say the reforms were socialism). By undoing those reforms, it's almost as if capitalists want to bring that era back and risk another 'soviet' Union scenario. But as I said in another thread, capitalists have become so stupidly schizophrenic in recent years that they've even started attacking their own system as being "socialist" and screech at any suggestion of revolution as being violence-fetishism and scientific socialism. The same thing was happening in most pre-revolutionary countries in the 20th century. It's almost like a Catch-22.