Lets Talk About The Moral Basis of Capitalism

[Blackking]

Again capitalism is amoral, it doesn't care about oppression or if they are people in the bottom

If people that practice capitalism engage in oppression then they do, capitalism doesn't stop oppression

What I'm suggesting is that capitalism can be used to gain economic power by black people To put black people in a dominant position

Its a tool of oppression.

And you believe economics can put a group that's 12 percent at the top?... you do realize that history , before corporate capitalism is the Only reason whoever is currently at the top, right?

 

[Madvillain]

Which system(s) have been better?

The West has had a very very nasty history of suppressing anarchism/socialism/communism here and abroad since the 1800s. So that's kind of a loaded question IMO
I have plenty of gripes with the Soviet Union, but in a relatively short time, the USSR accomplished a great deal. But then again, a lot of people will call them state capitalist.

 

[theworldismine13]

Its a tool of oppression.

And you believe economics can put a group that's 12 percent at the top?... you do realize that history , before corporate capitalism is the Only reason whoever is currently at the top, right?

A gun is also a tool of oppression, so do you think black people should avoid guns too?

What other tools and weapons should black people avoid using because they are used for oppression? Boats, chains, wheels?

 

[Madvillain]

A gun is also a tool of oppression, so do you think black people should avoid guns too?

What other tools and weapons should black people avoid using because they are used for oppression? Boats, chains, wheels?

This is so disingenuous, it's not funny.

 

[theworldismine13]

This is so disingenuous, it's not funny.

its perfectly consistent with my premise that ive been saying from the beginning , which is that capitalism is a tool, nothing more nothing less

the only thing disingenuous is people like you out here peddling marxist/socialist philosophy that has been proven to not be able to compete with capitalism

 

[DEAD7]

Today's global economy is dictated by imperial forms of capitalism. ... so that isn't a fair parameter. Look at the way capitalism the amoral , lol, system caN push a government to suppress a nation like Cuba. Look at how aN amoral economic system can be the main motivator of a mid size war.

Todays global economy is an unfair parameter?

alright. I guess we're done.

 

[Madvillain]

the only thing disingenuous is people like you out here peddling marxist/socialist philosophy that has been proven to not be able to compete with capitalism

The problem is, again, you continuously prove you don't actually know what anything left of Clinton even means and you think capitalism can go on forever, having sprang from thin air, despite the inevitable changes in technology, worker militancy, climate and other changes that will eventually bring this mode of production to its knees and into the next. We can either accelerate this process as safely as possible or destroy the planet and ourselves being governed by the "invisible hand".
Obviously, operating within the current mode of production will be used as a tool (ask Lenin for example) - but there's a clean and accelerating method and there's the latter.

 

[theworldismine13]

The West has had a very very nasty history of suppressing anarchism/socialism/communism here and abroad since the 1800s. So that's kind of a loaded question IMO
I have plenty of gripes with the Soviet Union, but in a relatively short time, the USSR accomplished a great deal. But then again, a lot of people will call them state capitalist.

since you are a student of history would you be so kind as to tell us how many people died of starvation in the soviet union throughout its history

 

[Madvillain]

since you are a student of history would you be so kind as to tell us how many people died of starvation in the soviet union throughout its history

How many people have due to starvation because of capitalism? And how many that actually shouldn't have because of the artificial scarcity (driven by profit over need) that capitalism enforces?

 

[theworldismine13]

The problem is, again, you continuously prove you don't actually know what anything left of Clinton even means and you think capitalism can go on forever, having sprang from thin air, despite the inevitable changes in technology, worker militancy, climate and other changes that will eventually bring this mode of production to its knees and into the next. We can either accelerate this process as safely as possible or destroy the planet and ourselves being governed by the "invisible hand".

and again with the circular arguments, i dont know what socialsim is so therefore i cant criticize socialism but to understand socialism i have to accept socialist premises

yeah ok

but you are correct, i dont care about changes in technology, worker militancy or climate change, if you want to discuss those issue you should make a thread about them

 

[Madvillain]

and again with the circular arguments, i dont know what socialsim is

You've proven it time and time again. Your posts drip with a lack of knowledge of things you speak out against.

i dont care about changes in technology, worker militancy or climate change

yet you're in a thread debating the moral basis of capitalism advocating for capitalism if you can't see how the three amongst other things are very closely related to capitalism, you're stanning for something you haven't really studied the history of

 

[DEAD7]

The West has had a very very nasty history of suppressing anarchism/socialism/communism here and abroad since the 1800s. So that's kind of a loaded question IMO
I have plenty of gripes with the Soviet Union, but in a relatively short time, the USSR accomplished a great deal. But then again, a lot of people will call them state capitalist.

Was/Is the soviet union oppressive? Cause that seems to be the charge being leveled against capitalism in the west...

 

[theworldismine13]

How many people have due to starvation because of capitalism? And how many that actually shouldn't have because of the artificial scarcity (driven by profit over need) that capitalism enforces?

you didnt answer the question

so let me answer it for you

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932–33

The government's forced collectivization of agriculture is considered by some a main reason for the famine,[4] as it caused chaos in the countryside. This included the destruction of peasant activists' possessions, the selling and killing of horses for fear they would be seized, and farmers' refraining from field work. Authorities blamed the agitation on the kulaks (rich peasants) and kolkhozs (collectivized farmers), and accused them of sabotage. The authorities wrongly expected that production would increase as a result of agricultural collectivization, because of plans for exporting agricultural products based on attempts to industrialize.

Estimation of the loss of life[edit]

• The 2004 book The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–33 by R.W. Davies and S.G. Wheatcroft, gives an estimate of 5.5 to 6.5 million deaths.[9]
• The Black Book of Communism estimates 6 million deaths in 1932–33.
• Encyclopædia Britannica estimates that 6 to 8 million people died from hunger in the Soviet Union during this period, of whom 4 to 5 million were Ukrainians.[10]
• Robert Conquest estimated at least 7 million peasants' deaths from hunger in the European part of the Soviet Union in 1932–33 (5 million in Ukraine, 1 million in the North Caucasus, and 1 million elsewhere), and an additional 1 million deaths from hunger as a result of collectivization in Kazakhstan.[11]
• Another study, by Michael Ellman using data given by Davies and Wheatcroft, estimates "‘about eight and a half million’ victims of famine and repression", combined, in the period 1930–33.[12]
• In his 2010 book Stalin's Genocides, Norman Naimark estimates that 3 to 5 million Ukrainians died in the famine.[13]

i dont know how many people died of starvation from practicing capitalism, enlighten me

 

[theworldismine13]

You've proven it time and time again. Your posts drip with a lack of knowledge of things you speak out against.



yet you're in a thread debating the moral basis of capitalism advocating for capitalism if you can't see how the three amongst other things are very closely related to capitalism, you're stanning for something you haven't really studied the history of

i have proven time and time again that i reject your socialist premises

and again capitalism doesnt care about morality, its amoral

 

[Madvillain]

Was/Is the soviet union oppressive?

I'm no Stalinist and I respect Lenin but I wouldn't say I'm a Leninist either or especially a Maoist for that matter. Authoritarianism isn't unique to "free" markets and Marx himself said in so many words that the state was an organ of class oppression. I'll say they made great strides for a war torn land in under a century under state socialism (or state capitalism, depending on who ya ask) also under constant threat/attack from Western capitalist powers.

you didnt answer the question

so let me answer it for you

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932–33




i dont know how many people died of starvation from practicing capitalism, enlighten me

I'd read these before blaming the USSR directly for those: http://www.as.wvu.edu/history/Faculty/Tauger/Tauger, 'The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933, SR 91.pdf & http://www.as.wvu.edu/history/Faculty/Tauger/Tauger, Natural Disaster and Human Actions.pdf

Put simply, the problem is famine should not occur in this time (and others pretty far back many will argue) with the capacity to produce more than enough for everyone, but yet it still does because everyone cannot afford food and that food is hoarded to sell for profit or wasted. Socialism seeks to remove profit from the equation and end this problem forever.
Maas had an interesting passage in A Case for Socialism (p. 61-63) - I'll quote it in full if you feel like reading:

Guns and bombs are only one part of what socialists call “imperialism.” The other side of the U.S. government’s military reach into every corner of the globe is its domination—along with a handful of other powerful governments—of the world economic system. The two things go together, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman observed in 1998: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technology is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank are international financial institutions set up by the United States to control whether poor countries receive desperately needed economic aid. As a result, they can exercise a blackmailer’s power to demand government policies that they consider “appropriate.” Though they were thrust into the background by the economic crisis of the late 2000s, the IMF and World Bank have a long record of imposing what they called “structural adjustment” on poor countries around the world, forcing governments to slash government spending and sell off state-run companies and services to private buyers whose chief aim is wringing a profit out of them.
This was all part of the era of “neoliberalism,” as it became known—of letting the free market rule, which meant the un-challenged domination of the world’s biggest economies, especially the United States.
A couple decades ago, it might have seemed like the worst flash points of poverty were in remote regions untouched by the modern economy. That isn’t the case today. As a consequence of neoliberalism, it’s not unusual in even the poorest countries of central Africa to find modern factories built by Western corporations sitting side by side with shantytowns because the jobs in the factories don’t pay a living wage.
This is characteristic of how capitalism has produced more misery and suffering around the globe. But nothing exposes the barbarism of imperialism and the free-market system more clearly than the production of the most basic of all necessities—food—and its use as a weapon by the U.S. government.
Year after year, the United Nations food agency presents the same grim statistic—somewhere around six million children under the age of five will die in the next twelve months because of malnutrition and its related diseases. The number six million has a terrible significance in the modern world—that is the number of Jews murdered by Germany’s Nazis in the Holocaust during the Second World War. A holocaust of the world’s children takes place every year, because of hunger—and the world’s governments fail to act.
Even conservative estimates calculate that enough food is produced around the globe for everyone in the world to get 2,800 calories a day, well above the minimum standard set by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. And this is food that already exists. According to one study, if the useable land of the world were cultivated effectively, the earth could feed more than forty billion people—far more than are ever likely to inhabit the planet.
But the food doesn’t get to the people who need it. More than one billion people—almost one in every six people on the planet—suffered from hunger in 2009, according to the UN. Why? The obscene reason was summarized once by none other than the establishment Financial Times newspaper: “People are not hungry these days because food supplies are not available. They are hungry because they are poor.” In a capitalist system, food is treated like any other commodity, from cars and televisions to pharmaceuticals and health care. Instead of being organized to feed the hungry, the system is organized around not feeding everyone—so prices, and therefore profits, stay high.
In fact, the agribusiness giants have conspired with governments around the advanced world to make sure that prices stay up. Since 2000, the U.S. government has spent between $15 billion and $35 billion every year on direct and indirect agricultural subsidies. Most of the money was used to prop up the price of grains and other crops by buying up “surplus” food. For example, U.S. farmers produce twice as much wheat as the U.S. market needs. This oversupply should cause the price of bread and other products to fall. But the government buys the excess to keep prices up.
The politicians claim that agricultural subsidies support “family farms” in the United States. That’s a myth. According to the Environmental Working Group, 71 percent of farm subsidies since 1995 have gone to the top 10 percent of U.S. producers—the biggest agriculture operations, backed, if not owned outright, by multinational corporations.
Much of the food that the U.S. government buys is distributed around the world in the form of food aid. But like everything else it does, Washington’s motives aren’t pure. U.S. food aid is used as a weapon to promote U.S. interests—both politically, by providing aid where it will help the geopolitical schemes of the U.S. government, and economically, where it will help pump up the profits of American corporations.
U.S. laws require that government food aid be distributed in the form of U.S.-grown products—even when those products exist in abundance in the country they are being sent to. Thus, in the early years of the 2000s, the United States sent more than one million metric tons of grain to the famine-plagued country of Ethiopia—even though Ethiopian farmers estimated that they had at least 100,000 metric tons of locally grown corn, wheat, sorghum, and beans stored in warehouses, which Ethiopians didn’t have the money to buy.
Rather than feeding the hungry and helping countries struck by famine to develop agricultural production on their own, food aid from the U.S. government is mainly organized to help U.S. food bosses get rid of “surplus” food that might push down prices and profits. The effect is to keep food prices high at home and undercut competitors abroad, especially in developing countries—while the world’s poor go hungry. The German poet Ber tolt Brecht might have had this system in mind when he wrote: “Famines do not simply occur—they are organized by the grain trade.