It's ok to be angry about capitalism

[Summerstorm]

I don't know if the UK is a stand out in this one or if these stats are similar across similar countries (there's nowhere like the UK you say! Lucky bastards I say!), but on savings:

The average person in the UK has £17,365 in their savings.​

34% of adults had either no savings, or less than £1000, in a savings account.​

Almost two-thirds (65%) of people believe they wouldn’t be able to last three months without borrowing money.​

​

(https://www.money.co.uk/savings-accounts/savings-statistics)​

These are not good figures!

Hm, this looked wrong for my eyes. So, i looked up the german statistics. I think we should all be angry at capitalism, hehe.

For example (2017, asked values, provided voluntary, 10.000 samples):
average assets (minus debts) : 232.800 Euro per household
median assets : 70.800 Euro per household

ok, so. just a few rich people screwing with the numbers... let's see. Where could we look into?

Ah yes: People who owned one or more properties:
median assets of homeowners: 277.000 Euro
median assets of tenants: 10.400 Euro
cool, cool

back to persons: median assets per person is apparently about 25.000 depending on source and such
average 110.000, richest 10% are over 275.000

But of course not all in cash/bank. Lots of insurances and stuff in there.

 

[Satinavian]

Almost two-thirds (65%) of people believe they wouldn’t be able to last three months without borrowing money.

Yes, but if you look at Marx' arguments, he mentions very different timescales, as if one or two months of reserves would give workers the abiity to look for better employers and thus solve this particular problem.
Furthermore there is the important last part of the sentence "without borrowing money". Which is not really something Victorian age workers without assets would be able to do as easily as employees today.

 

[Baffle]

Yes, but if you look at Marx' arguments, he mentions very different timescales, as if one or two months of reserves would give workers the abiity to look for better employers and thus solve this particular problem.
Furthermore there is the important last part of the sentence "without borrowing money". Which is not really something Victorian age workers without assets would be able to do as easily as employees today.

Oh, I was just highlighting that generally this is a poor situation - people simply shouldn't be in the position of living so close to instability.

On the ability to borrow money to get through three months, I think the suggestion there is that they aren't employees: this is people who maybe were employees dumped at short notice, who have less that three months of reserves so they need to generate an income in a short time frame. Not being an employee would in that case quickly restrict access to legal or official finance (that is, not friends and family or worse sources).

 

[Silvanus]

Yes, but if you look at Marx' arguments, he mentions very different timescales, as if one or two months of reserves would give workers the abiity to look for better employers and thus solve this particular problem.
Furthermore there is the important last part of the sentence "without borrowing money". Which is not really something Victorian age workers without assets would be able to do as easily as employees today.

Borrowing money to live off while you job-search is also not something most people can feasibly do today. You tend to need income and good credit to do it-- otherwise its a fast track to high debt.

Fact is, most people cannot just drop their job and look elsewhere with ease, and the employer-employee relationship is still overwhelmingly unbalanced.

 

[Baffle]

Fact is, most people cannot just drop their job and look elsewhere with ease, and the employer-employee relationship is still overwhelmingly unbalanced.

I keep hearing that companies can't get employees etc, and that it's an employee's market right now, but when I look at the job pages I'm aghast at how little people are being offered for some really quite high-pressure responsible jobs. All they really mean is 'We can't get the workers we want at the wages we want to pay'.

It has a young-vs-old culture war feel to it to me: if we pay these youngsters how much they think they deserve to get paid, we're going to have to charge you (thank you for your service sir/ma'am) more to cover it!

 

[Satinavian]

Borrowing money to live off while you job-search is also not something most people can feasibly do today. You tend to need income and good credit to do it-- otherwise its a fast track to high debt.

It is still a far cry from what Marx describes.

Fact is, most people cannot just drop their job and look elsewhere with ease, and the employer-employee relationship is still overwhelmingly unbalanced.

Well, some of that certainly depends on where you live. The situation of "between jobs" obviously very much depends on the nations social net.

But i agree that the employer employee relationship is still overwhelmingly unbalanced. Why exactly differs again from country to country.

When i said that Marx is outdated, i meant his actual writing. Sure, if we take most of the base arguments and transform them in a way that fits the current situation, then they remain valid. Many of his core ideas are still valid. He is influential because he was insightful about capitalism.
But one would need to do those extra steps. One can't just take his worrds at face value and pretend they fit our modern situation. Some extrapolation and adaption is necessary in most cases.

And in some cases he might even actually have been wrong. There is a lot about classes and class warfare that doesn't really ring true anymore. In some cases he even doubted parts of his analysis in his later days, mostly about the necessity of revolution and utter futility of progress within the system.

 

[Terminal Blue]

The main problem with Marx is that he mostly describes Capitalism and its failings. He is surprisingly vague about how Communism is supposed to work in practice.

Why is that a problem?

Firstly, Marx' political writing was basically a little hobby he liked to do sometimes when he wasn't inventing sociology or scamming money from his rich friends to pay for his kids' piano lessons. The Communist manifesto is 23 pages long, because it was designed to be read by factory workers who didn't have the education to read multi-volume philosophically-dense analyses of capitalism.

Which brings us to the second point. Marx is not Lenin. Marx clearly did not see it as his job, as a bourgeois intellectual, to tell people how to politically organize themselves. On the rare occasion he talks about it, it's clear that Marx' idea of post revolutionary society is a worker's state. It's a state created by and for workers, not a decrepit theocracy religiously following the posthumous designs of some random nerd who never worked a day in the kinds of conditions he was describing. His role, and the role of bourgeois socialists in general, was to impart political education to the proletarian class so that they could organize for themselves.

Lenin was a revisionist. He disagreed with Marx on the issue of political leadership, and saw oversight by bourgeois intellectuals like him as integral to the survival of the revolution. He wasn't confused or misguided because Marx was just too vague, he had his own political position which deviated significantly from that of Marx, and which he was perfectly happy to explain in exhaustive detail.

Thirdly, Marx was a Hegelian. He saw history as being largely driven by social forces that were bigger than individual people. In fact, this is one of the most obvious recurring criticisms of him and the one that I think has the most merit, but even here I think you'd struggle to say outright that he's wrong. We tend to view history through an economic and political lens of liberal individualism, which means we tend to think of people as rational actors who drive history forward through their own choices, rather than focusing on the way those choices themselves are the product of the conditions under which people live, it's not really any less simplistic or more flawed than Marx' view.

Marx's view isn't that he's invented this whole new way of doing things and if people just do what he says he will lead them out of Capitalism like Moses, it's that in the end capitalism is inherently unsustainable. It has internal contradictions, and sooner or later we won't be able to escape or deny them any more. The necessity of struggling against Capitalism, for Marx, isn't a political ideology, it doesn't actually require you to believe in it or to have faith in it, it's a part of capitalism itself. It's created by intrinsic features of capitalism itself.

Before capitalism, society was governed by aristocrats whose right to rule over and dominate everyone else was based on the belief that their superior (in)breeding made them naturally suited to it. Even talking to these people without the appropriate deference was completely incomprehensible and liable to get you tortured and killed. That state persisted for hundreds of not thousands of years. Noone bothered to question it, not because they were stupid but because a society that worked that way just seemed normal to everyone. But that changed. People reached a point where the intrinsic problems of aristocratic rule couldn't be ignored any more. It wasn't an individual act of heroism where someone woke up from the Matrix and decided to guillotine all the poshos, the world just changed in ways that made aristocratic rule increasingly impossible. Marx' point is that because the society we live in is not so different, it will eventually suffer the same fate.

 

[Satinavian]

Why is that a problem?

It is a problem because no one else actually managed to properly fill in the many gaping holes. Every single greater scale Communist experiment failed because it was built upon an unfinished concept. And people always looked at Marx for answers that weren't there. It is not necessarily Marx' mistake, but it is a problem for communism.

Before capitalism, society was governed by aristocrats whose right to rule over and dominate everyone else was based on the belief that their superior (in)breeding made them naturally suited to it. Even talking to these people without the appropriate deference was completely incomprehensible and liable to get you tortured and killed. That state persisted for hundreds of not thousands of years. Noone bothered to question it, not because they were stupid but because a society that worked that way just seemed normal to everyone. But that changed. People reached a point where the intrinsic problems of aristocratic rule couldn't be ignored any more. It wasn't an individual act of heroism where someone woke up from the Matrix and decided to guillotine all the poshos, the world just changed in ways that made aristocratic rule increasingly impossible. Marx' point is that because the society we live in is not so different, it will eventually suffer the same fate.

Oh, yes, that is another thing.

Marx' understanding of history and especially feudalism is pretty poor by todays standard. Can't really fault him for that, history as science taught/understood in the Victorian age was severely lacking in many ways.

The main reason he found so many parallels is because he basically imagined the past as so similar to his present. Of course there are a lot of parallels if you bring all your modern notions with you.

 

[ralfy]

Check out Prof. Wolff's videos:

https://www.youtube.com/@RichardDWolff/videos

 

[Terminal Blue]

It is a problem because no one else actually managed to properly fill in the many gaping holes.

Which holes though?

Again, there's an assumption (which you see on both the left and the right for very different reasons) that everything Marx did was in service to this concrete political agenda called "communism" which has incredibly specific objectives and yet somehow, mysteriously, people just can't gosh-darn well understand because their brains are small or because Marx, despite clearly having this elaborate 4D chess plan, somehow didn't bother to explain it. That assumption is wrong.

Every single greater scale Communist experiment failed because it was built upon an unfinished concept.

What does failure mean in this context?

It's an answer that probably seems very obvious but deserves to be investigated. There are still communist countries around today. China is a emerging global superpower. When exactly did the Chinese communist "experiment" fail?

In fact, let's ask a really dumb question noone would generally think to ask. Has liberalism failed? Is liberalism an unfinished concept?

Of course not, right. Many successful societies are explicitly based on liberal principles. The US is the richest and best country on earth and its foundational documents are all about the liberty and how the legitimacy of government is based on representation of the popular will and democracy and shit. But think about it. Has liberalism actually delivered any of the things the radical liberals of the Enlightenment said it would? The French revolution failed. The American revolution was carried out by people who owned slaves, and has created a country so transparently hypocritical in its approach to liberty that a demographically significant proportion of its population think their leaders are pedophiles who worship Satan.

If anyone bothered to read Rousseau or Locke or Voltaire instead of spending their school lives being fed circular nonsense about how lucky they are to be born in freedomland where everyone is free because freedomland is the best country where everyone is free because they live in freedomland, would they actually recognize the society they live in as being the fulfilment of the utopian dreams of the radical enlightenment?

To be honest, probably not.

Every single greater scale liberal experiment failed because it was built on an unfinished concept. All concepts in political thought are unfinished because (unless you're Francis Fukuyama and willing to publicly humiliate yourself by posting neoliberal cringe) history isn't finished, and we have to live in it anyway. Liberalism didn't give us the utopian society everyone creamed their stupid knee-britches over in the Parisian salon. It didn't usher in a new age of Enlightenment in which every man, imbued with the natural inheritance of reason, became a self-governing individual free from the decrepit trappings of custom, bound by voluntary contract into a greater commonwealth of free individuals animated by the golden light of liberty and justice. It gave us this shitty, banal world we live in where people starve to death while one incredibly stupid billionaire spends more money than any of us will ever see making sure his tweets get the most views.

People died for this. People willingly offered up their lives for a better world, and this is the one they got. What word could possibly describe that other than failure?

Marx' understanding of history and especially feudalism is pretty poor by todays standard.

Is it wrong though?

Like, that little branch of social theory which exists at the intersection of philosophy and history often gets picked on as a soft target by "real" historians looking to show off their massive throbbing primary sources, but by my reckoning these attempts frequently end up missing the point.

Marx isn't writing about feudalism to help his readers gain a detailed understanding of feudalism because god damn it I spent a decade learning middle English instead of getting laid and now you all have to suffer. The question is, is the understanding of feudalism sufficient and accurate enough to facilitate a deeper understanding of the present moment?

 

[Satinavian]

Which holes though?

Primarily "How do i organize/plan/regulate my economy without letting the capitalist free market do all the heavy lifting."

Planned economies sucked. And no one has had a better idea so far beside going back to capitalism.

It's an answer that probably seems very obvious but deserves to be investigated. There are still communist countries around today. China is a emerging global superpower. When exactly did the Chinese communist "experiment" fail?

That was when Deng Xiaoping decided "Screw this, this doesn't work", ditched the planned economy and transformed the country into something of a hybrid system, where the economy works in a capitalist way but the party still hasn't given the political power to the rich guys yet.

To be honest, probably not.

That is probably a fair assessment.

Honestly, when i hear people talk favorably about enlightenment, it is usually in the way of "they had a lot of good ideas that were used successfully later or that we can still use now", but never in the way of "they totally understood humanity and we have successfully implemented their theories".
But honestly, i am not particularly well versed or interested in enlightenment.

Is it wrong though?

Like, that little branch of social theory which exists at the intersection of philosophy and history often gets picked on as a soft target by "real" historians looking to show off their massive throbbing primary sources, but by my reckoning these attempts frequently end up missing the point.

Marx isn't writing about feudalism to help his readers gain a detailed understanding of feudalism because god damn it I spent a decade learning middle English instead of getting laid and now you all have to suffer. The question is, is the understanding of feudalism sufficient and accurate enough to facilitate a deeper understanding of the present moment?

Yes, it is wrong.
His analysis might somewhat fit to the western and middle European aristocracy of the 17th and 18th century. It would be completely wrong for e.g. 13th century Europe which is, while quite stratified, not a classist society at all. Feudalism is all about personal bonds, local communities/in groups and families. All obligations and rights run along those lines and most people have several such roles at once. Rights and privileges are generally also a local, personal thing. It is very much not about classes.

 

[Ag3ma]

People died for this. People willingly offered up their lives for a better world, and this is the one they got. What word could possibly describe that other than failure?

If you want to determine a success or failure, you need criteria. Those criteria will then determine the end result.

Are capitalist, liberal democracies generally much better places than they were 100 years ago? Surely. Are they better than most of the rest of the world? Surely (at least, by our own generally liberal standards). On these standards they are broadly successful. Are they all that people hoped they would be? Well, in many ways not, and here they could be viewed as failures.

Broadly, I struggle to accept that "failure" is a good summary of where the world has gone over the last 100 years. I think the world as a whole is a better place. Not universally, not without setbacks, and not without new challenges, but better nonetheless.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

but the party still hasn't given the political power to the rich guys yet.

Something the CCP has become quite keen on reminding any outspoken rich people in the past few years.

 

[Gordon_4]

Primarily "How do i organize/plan/regulate my economy without letting the capitalist free market do all the heavy lifting."

Planned economies sucked. And no one has had a better idea so far beside going back to capitalism.

That was when Deng Xiaoping decided "Screw this, this doesn't work", ditched the planned economy and transformed the country into something of a hybrid system, where the economy works in a capitalist way but the party still hasn't given the political power to the rich guys yet.

That is probably a fair assessment.

Honestly, when i hear people talk favorably about enlightenment, it is usually in the way of "they had a lot of good ideas that were used successfully later or that we can still use now", but never in the way of "they totally understood humanity and we have successfully implemented their theories".
But honestly, i am not particularly well versed or interested in enlightenment.

Yes, it is wrong.
His analysis might somewhat fit to the western and middle European aristocracy of the 17th and 18th century. It would be completely wrong for e.g. 13th century Europe which is, while quite stratified, not a classist society at all. Feudalism is all about personal bonds, local communities/in groups and families. All obligations and rights run along those lines and most people have several such roles at once. Rights and privileges are generally also a local, personal thing. It is very much not about classes.

That last bit about Feudalism doesn’t really gel with what I studied about Japan’s feudal era where there was most certainly classism. Since the samurai were within their rights to murder peasants who bumped into them if it so pleased them. And outside of the odd tea ceremony I don’t think the people breaking their backs farming were able to just walk up to the Daimyo’s estate and complain.

 

[Silvanus]

Yes, it is wrong.
His analysis might somewhat fit to the western and middle European aristocracy of the 17th and 18th century. It would be completely wrong for e.g. 13th century Europe which is, while quite stratified, not a classist society at all. Feudalism is all about personal bonds, local communities/in groups and families. All obligations and rights run along those lines and most people have several such roles at once. Rights and privileges are generally also a local, personal thing. It is very much not about classes.

???

I fail to see how a society in which nobles directed economic and military policy from castles, peasants either owned small tracts of land or toiled in others, and serfs were indentured-- with all three having wildly different rights and laws affecting them-- was not classist.

Perhaps you mean that classism was not centralised. It was still tremendously inequitable, tremendously rigid, with little-to-no social or economic mobility, and with someone's wellbeing, opportunities and obligations almost entirely determined by birth and the strata of society into which they were born. That's classist.

 

[Satinavian]

That last bit about Feudalism doesn’t really gel with what I studied about Japan’s feudal era where there was most certainly classism. Since the samurai were within their rights to murder peasants who bumped into them if it so pleased them. And outside of the odd tea ceremony I don’t think the people breaking their backs farming were able to just walk up to the Daimyo’s estate and complain.

Yes, i wasn't talking about Japan. Marx did neither. I actually qualified talking about specifically Europe two times for a reason.

The world is so vast and history so long and feudalism such a broad concept that it is nearly impossible to make any useful statements without limiting the scope. Edo era Japan could reasonably be described as classist and potentially earlier eras as well but that gets a bit more fishy and i am not expert enough for Japan to give a definite statement for those. There are a lot of stories and events and such, but which ones depict typical behavior, which ones are exxagerated and which ones are so well known only because they were exceedingly uncommon and thus noteworthy ?
What do you think about late Heian or Kamakura Japan in terms of whether it could be really called a classist society ?


Also don't overvalue "someone is allowed to do violence in retaliation for insults". That might seem outrageous today but many societies technically allowed violence for slights or honor violations. (And most of them very much preferred less escalatory reactions). But it is often not a good indicator of status as those rights often (not in case of Japan) ran both ways. In the late medieval HRE a commoner had every legal right to declare a feud on a Duke for a slight or injustice and attack the duchy violently until all feuds regardless of station were forbidden and people directed to the courts instead.

 

[Satinavian]

I fail to see how a society in which nobles directed economic and military policy from castles, peasants either owned small tracts of land or toiled in others, and serfs were indentured-- with all three having wildly different rights and laws affecting them-- was not classist.

Because that is a stupid oversimplification.
Did you know that the vast majority of all petty nobles of 12 century HRE were unfree ? Did you know that it was incredibly common for peasants having serfs and even serfs having serfs ? That there are parts of Spain for a time where most households were noble ?

Also no. There never was something like a common/widespread set of laws privileges for serfs, peasants and nobles. Mostly because the middle age society was very far from static and people fought over rights and privileges locally and everywhere all the time coming regularly to very different conclusions.

Only by using very broad strokes, sorting people into three categories without respecting any nuance and then making heavy handed generalisations about those categories the result looks classist. But that would happen to every single society that ever existed if you did the same.

Even the social mobility stuff is extremely situation dependent.

 

[Silvanus]

Because that is a stupid oversimplification.
Did you know that the vast majority of all petty nobles of 12 century HRE were unfree ? Did you know that it was incredibly common for peasants having serfs and even serfs having serfs ? That there are parts of Spain for a time where most households were noble ?

Yes, I'm well aware of all of this, having studied it academically. None of what you've described here refutes the class-based nature of the society; what you've done here is mention complexities and caveats. But complexities and caveats existed in every formation of society, including the very most classist. They always will.

So yes, 13th century nobles were 'unfree'. They also enjoyed vastly more privileges, societal access, and economic wellbeing than serfs and peasants, by-and-large. And what they had the opportunity and freedom to do was also vastly greater than that of peasants and serfs.

There are degrees. And complexities do not undermine or refute the overall structure.

Also no. There never was something like a common/widespread set of laws privileges for serfs, peasants and nobles. Mostly because the middle age society was very far from static and people fought over rights and privileges locally and everywhere all the time coming regularly to very different conclusions.

Only by using very broad strokes, sorting people into three categories without respecting any nuance and then making heavy handed generalisations about those categories the result looks classist. But that would happen to every single society that ever existed if you did the same.

Yes, broad strokes are unavoidable when you're discussing a /continent over the span of a century/. I've used no broader strokes than you-- the only difference is that you've somehow concluded that because there was change and because there was nuance, therefore no overall conclusion can be reached. Which is historical nonsense: historians do so every time they draw any conclusion. Trends exist and can be recognised.

Even the social mobility stuff is extremely situation dependent.

Degrees. You point me towards the feudal 13th century society in which a serf was just as likely to have just as much disposable income as a lord, or in which their ability to travel/climb the social ladder/own a fief was just as likely to be just as great as a lord, and I'll happily concede.

But of course, if they could do all that just as easily... they wouldn't be a serf.

 

[Satinavian]

Yes, broad strokes are unavoidable when you're discussing a /continent over the span of a century/. I've used no broader strokes than you-- the only difference is that you've somehow concluded that because there was change and because there was nuance, therefore no overall conclusion can be reached. Which is historical nonsense: historians do so every time they draw any conclusion. Trends exist and can be recognised.

The main argument is that in 13th century feudalism your situation is primarily defined by who all your contacts and your family are, what kind of obligations and privileges each of these connections exactly entail. That is exceedingly more important than your "class". And as a direct result there is not much class consciousness or class struggle. Conflict lines were generally not drawn along class borders, it was generally between groups that formed when individuals called upon those obligations.
Without those personal bonds you are just some drifter/vagrant and there isn't even a difference between serf, commoner and noble. Because everything meaningful about your status is your connections.
You can't be a serf wihout the right to work a specific piece of land and a set of rights/obligations to one or several persons who have the rights to this land. You can't be a noble without either having gotten a fief from someone, being your own independent souvereign or being a vassal to someone else. As soon as those conditions don't apply, you are no longer your "class".

As for serfs deciding to no longer being serfs, there were ways (especially if we exclude Eastern Europe and the detoriation of the serf situation for a moment). And it happened often enough. But the choice between continue to be a serf and having a peace of land to work and all your connections nearby and being free any having none of that is not that easy. Especially if all you know is farmwork. Without land you only can become free landless farmhand, which is kinda bad and often can't support a family. Or doing something reckless and try to enter a new carrier without any contacts or knowledge.
But that touches inheritance again and what happens to children who can't continue to work the same land as their parents.

But of course, if they could do all that just as easily... they wouldn't be a serf.

I know you try to dismiss the unfree nobles, but ministerialis were not only technically serfs, originally their ranks were filled from the regular serfs*. Though later children of ministerials got priority or one could become ministerial by marriage or in some cases by submission. You can find many instances where those nobles still had at least part of the duties of regular serfs, including corvée or in cases of woman household chores. In most cases that was replaced by military duties though.

*and also from a group named liberi that was technically free but still bound to a piece of land and with limited property rights and with martial duties. And children of noble families that were not noble in their own right. There is still some debate about the proportions.

 

[Ag3ma]

That last bit about Feudalism doesn’t really gel with what I studied about Japan’s feudal era where there was most certainly classism. Since the samurai were within their rights to murder peasants who bumped into them if it so pleased them. And outside of the odd tea ceremony I don’t think the people breaking their backs farming were able to just walk up to the Daimyo’s estate and complain.

From my understanding of English feudalism, higher classes should not be randomly murdering the peasants (other knights, however...) and did have responsibilities of care. However, until the later feudal period, there was also relatively little legal means to stop nobles abusing the peasants because they had so much control. One of the major advances in the legal and governmental infrastructure of the country throughout the period was centralised authority under the king, curbing the excesses of the aristocracy.