Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "The real reason Boeing's new plane crashed twice" video.
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@Stupidlamb2 "Well, maybe in a true open market, only the safest manufacturers will remain at the end. I mean after so many deaths and accidents so that the demands would only pick those safer."
There are major problems with this way of thinking and I'm kind of shocked it needs to be said for the benefit of people like @Harsh . D .
It is in the interest of companies to conceal information about their product, meaning that it is impossible to have a market that is "free" and transparent. How can consumers make "choices" when they do not have adequate information? Do you think Boeing is going to volunteer to disclose the fact that its planes are malfunctioning? The only reason we know about it now—that there are only hundreds rather than thousands dead—is because there does exist a regulatory apparatus that world governments can use to intervene in industry—ground flights, call for redesigns, etc.
There's another issue. Can you imagine how onerous it would be to have to research, in depth, the production history of every good and service you want to buy? Having to research that your food isn't poison, that your electronics won't blow up, that your house isn't made of flammable material, that your car is safe to drive...
Even if markets were perfect—and they aren't for reasons I've mentioned—no one has time to both be an exploited worker AND a vigilant super consumer.
Saying that eventually the market will sort itself out may be true. It may be. But how many thousands upon thousands of people will have to get sick or die before some faulty product is discovered? The regulations we have today weren't invented out of thin air. Often they were invented in response to a crisis that the market could not correct—because markets are about short term profit, not making "the best" product—or in response to the very foreseeable crises that could arises. Think of something like Thalidomide.
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@kimber1911 If the root cause is the human condition, why should we want a system that exacerbates and rewards the worst aspects of that condition—greed, selfishness? Wouldn't the correct response be to create a system that rewards pro-social behavior like cooperation and accountability while disincentivizing anti-social behavior.
I agree that hierarchical arrangements in production and politics create problems. We should get rid of those too. No more CEOs, no more boards, no more politicians, no more lobbyists. Instead democratic community and regional federations, democratic workplaces. (A government is not a corporation. I think you know that.)
Lastly, is it not impossible, considering how malleable human nature seems to be, that our conception of it is shaped in large part by the present conditions of global capitalism? That is, not only do we mark different features of some generalized nature but that that nature itself changes as conditions change. A peasant from the 11th century will have a wildly different appreciation of human nature than you do. Saying that human nature is identical to humans living under capitalism—and therefore greedy, selfish—is no less an error than to say that human nature is identical to humans living under feudalism or slavery where different features were exaggerated or repressed as that society required.
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@kimber1911 "Look at how quickly society breaks down to base survival and greed when "power" is absent."
I think you're confusing an absence of power with a power vacuum. There's a rich anthropological record of egalitarian societies. Hierarchically organized states have only existed for somewhere between 0.005% and 0.02% of human evolution. They are not the default of our species but a monstrous aberration.
A power vacuum occurs when an existing power structure is suddenly and often violently displaced. It's akin to citing the emotional and psychological crisis that can occur when someone loses their faith in a religion as evidence that agnosticism or atheism are inherently unstable. The fault for the crisis lies not with the loss of belief but with the prior belief that created false expectations. So a power vacuum tells us very little about what life in a horizontally organized society would be like. Instead it tells us what life in a vertically organized society would be like if that organization were suddenly removed.
"Yes, a government is not a corporation on it's face but the workings are the same. "
They're not. A corporation exists to maximize profit, a state exists to (among other things) maximize the wellbeing of its citizens. Therefore a state can run deficits, print its own money, enact laws: corporations can't do most of those, and certainly not on the scale of a country. The country as corporation only makes sense if you ignore basic reality and treat those entities on the most vague metaphorical level.
"As far as capitalism goes, how do you provide incentive for labor, creativity, trading or purchasing of goods and services under an individuals free will?"
This Boeing tragedy is an example of how capitalism does not do those things. It did not stimulate creativity because Boeing was in a hurry to get to market with a product that could compete with Airbus. Furthermore, there's a growing body of research showing that creativity isn't strongly incentivized by personal monetary profit; in fact, more money and other material rewards can hinder creativity. Neither are hierarchical work structures, with levels of management and ownership dictating to workers below, ideal. What seems to stimulate productivity and creativity best are 1) having one's basic needs met, like shelter, healthcare, food, clothing, education in addition to some kind of meaningful cultural life (the income range is around $70,000 per year) and 2) work that is self-directed, autonomous, and seen as fulfilling.
So the question to ask is twofold. First, does capitalism meet these requirements, and it's obvious that it does not. It assumes that people are motivated primarily by profit and self-gain when most people's experience and academic research suggests otherwise—that what people actually need is a life free from financial stress coupled with meaningful work that they control. If human work were about making as much money as possible, we'd all be Wall Street traders or corporate lawyers, when in reality many of us must, out of economic exigency, take on menial, pointless work or pursue work that is meaningful (teacher, artist, social worker) but not lucrative. The standard capitalist story has nothing to say about the human nature underlying most of our choices and motivations with regard to work.
Second, we should ask what kind of system caters to human need, meaningful work, and autonomy, and the answer is to decommodify (which my spellcheck refuses to recognize as a word) the economy and radically expand democracy, not only improving and restructuring political democracy beyond perfunctory representation but expanding it into the workplace where we spend most of our lives, ensuring that production and distribution answer to human need rather than to the calculations of maximum profit.
Will such a system be perfect? Of course not. Humans have an inherent need for improvisation and change, which is why we're always modifying our language, clothes, gestures, and so on, communal and economic life being just other forms of socio-cultural activity. But this system will be better than what we have now, a system that reconstituted the old injustices of aristocracy and privilege under new guises, and allow us to discover new ways of improving human life that are now invisible.
That such a society does not now exist under a hegemony of global capitalism—which has always warred against its alternatives—is trivial and no argument against the necessity of this alternative—less an alternative than a fulfillment of the Enlightenment promises of liberty (understood not in the narrow sense of private property), fraternity, and equality which capitalist democracy betrayed. At some point in history, capitalism did not exist either, and yet that did not prevent it from coming into being.
Still, there are examples of such a society existing—fleeting, inchoate, but vital: Paris Commune, Spain in the 30s, Mondragon, Rojava today, hundreds upon thousands of worker owned and managed business across America and the rest of the world. When these experiments failed, it was not due to some socio-economic flaw but because they were up against hostile concentrated power.
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