Chompy the Beast
Hakim
comments
Comments by "Chompy the Beast" (@chompythebeast) on "Why Capitalism Will Always Fail (Capitalism's In-Built Self-Destruct; The Falling Rate of Profit)" video.
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@ShihammeDarc Russia and China moved from peasant populations to industrialized nations in a matter of years, doing what took England and America centuries. Without the USSR, all of Europe would almost certainly have fallen to fascism (instead of the third of it that did during the Cold War, thanks to the US). And speaking of Star Trek Socialism, the USSR beat the West to Space―we absolutely don't need Musks and Bezoses to get us there. Those nations were not without many mistakes and even some willful atrocities, but the lives of billions of people have by now been improved by the efforts, both domestic and international, of China and the USSR. But that's a whole 'nother pair of fields of study.
In short, it's fair to say that our conception of those countries is extremely biased by nature here in the West, and that while many Western criticisms are valid, we are made to focus only on those failings, even as we are made to focus only on our own system's greater merits
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@ShihammeDarc There is not a way forward with capitalism any more (or less) than there was with feudalism. That is the very topic of this video. Dialectical Materialism*, a theory which underpins all modern social sciences from archaeology to demography, makes it clear that conditions for capitalism's overthrow are naturally, inevitably provided by capitalism's success.
*Since that term Dialectical Materialism is so wordy, a brief definition of it (if you aren't familiar) could be summed up like this: The material conditions of any society are the primary factors in shaping that society, and the primary factors in any social change a given society experiences. So social arrangements that make sense at certain levels of technology or productivity, or in certain environments, do not necessarily make as much sense in other contexts. Those contexts are what drive social change.
Capitalism has changed the material conditions of the world more vastly than any other social arrangement in history. But in so doing, it has in fact laid the very groundwork for its inevitable replacement with a system that better reflects the new circumstances in which we find ourselves. This isn't an attack against capitalism any more than it is an acknowledgement of its success. But feudalism before it laid the groundwork for capitalism, too: Capitalism's replacement is truly as inevitable (and indeed desirable) as feudalism's replacement was.
I very much doubt that what replaces capitalism will manage to last for eternity, either. But the explicit goal of socialism is to create a society that frees itself from the exploitative cycles of previous systems: It seeks to not only outmode the exploitation of capitalism, but to make that exploitation fundamentally impossible to achieve by eliminating the source of all previous social upheavals: Class divisions, and thus class conflict.
To conclude, I find it strange that all the most fervent support of capitalism comes from pointing to humanities ugliest elements, as if those are the things we should enshrine in society. It is all so ludicrously pessimistic: As humanity has capacity for greed and selfishness, so too does it have the capacity for self-sacrifice, for love, and for what may be called justice. These traits are no less innate than our less social ones. Suggesting that capitalism is fundamentally necessary because the human animal is just so vile that capitalism is all it deserves is truly to believe the lies of the wolves, it is to simply justify the worst behavior that we are told to relentlessly tolerate by the master class. And at any rate, it's hardly an argument that stands up to rational inquiry: "Life ain't fair, therefore society should be intentionally unfair" is nothing less than cyclical, slavish thinking.
In short, the true glories achieved under feudalism did not disappear under capitalism: The true glories of capitalism will not disappear under communism, either. Arguing that enabling the worst of humanity's cruelty is somehow necessary to achieve anything worth achieving was rhetoric used by the Monarchists and the Fascists and the Roman apologists of old, too, and they were as misguided by their masters then as those saying the same thing in defense of capitalism are misguided by their masters now.
Anyway, I hope you have a good rest of your week
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@ShihammeDarc Also, there were dozens of Republican and bourgeois capitalist revolutions in the world going back as far as the Dark Ages. All of them were brutally crushed by arbiters of the old status quo, just like socialist experiments of the 20th century. So once again, your argument against communism is the same as was made against capitalism for centuries, unfortunately.
Things move much quicker now, so it won't take that long for the next revolution to finally stick. Cuba still exists, after all, despite being a tiny island nation less than 100 miles away from the richest empire in history that has launched hundreds of attempts to overthrow it while also being under embargo from more than half the world for more than half a century. Imagine how much more successful it could be without those restrictions imposed on it, like every other socialist experiment has suffered before.
Besides, arguing that socialism "failed" and that capitalism "succeeded" by pointing to these crushed socialist nations is a bit like that Eric Andre meme: In frame one, the Capitalist West shoots democratically-elected socialist governments in Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America. Then in the next frame, the Capitalist West turns to the camera and says "Wow socialism is a failure" with the gun still smoking in its hand. Parroting that idea is like echoing the gloating of a murderer as he is still standing over his victims, it's ridiculous
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