My hope would be that we can transition peacefully to a hybrid model with the rising power of unions, gradual emergence of worker cooperatives, and increased demand for socialized health care and affordable housing.
However, I think it's more likely that things will have to collapse first. Especially with violent accelerationist types doing their thing. Unfortunately, it's far easier to destroy systems than it is to repair them.
You probably know it, but just in case that you (or anyone reading this, who might agree with you) don't: give the texts of The Fabian Society a check. They're rather close to what you're proposing with a peaceful transition; I have my criticisms against it as a Marxist strictu sensu, but I bet that you'll have a blast with it.
I have reservations about unions. While it does give employees bargaining power, it sometimes does it to a fault. We see this with police unions in the US as it stops bad apples from getting proper punishment, and as a result, they get slaps on the wrist. I imagine that it would be equally as hard to fire somebody in other industries like medicine unless there's a 3rd party (like an arbitrator or court) enforcing these decisions.
Also, without any legislation in the US, I'd argue that unions will stay incredibly difficult to form, and even if they do, it doesn't necessarily mean that they can negotiate with companies fairly. Companies out there (I believe Dish is an example) have spent 10 years stalling negotiations with unions, and it's all practically legal.
Have you seen this?
Why it's so hard to imagine life after capitalism? https://youtu.be/PaASqPnpq5Y
My hope would be that we can transition peacefully to a hybrid model with the rising power of unions, gradual emergence of worker cooperatives, and increased demand for socialized health care and affordable housing.
None of this has anything to do with capitalism tho.
Like, capitalism can and should be the economic engine driving these positive outcomes.
The current strategy of venture capital is not success, but sabotage
It's not good enough for you to be doing well, you have to strangle the competition and introduce yourself as an unremovable bottleneck
For example, becoming the intermediary between concerts and concert goers. The fees charged and the trouble caused is worse than if they hadn't been there.
Amazon makes examples out of any business that dare challenge it's dead zone around it.
VC money is meant to crush the competition and lock in the consumer to charge rent.
Why would they ever want worker control, or unions?
Why would the private healthcare industry ever stop lobbying against socialized healthcare? Why would a capitalist success ever lead to the political change necessary for it when the doctrine of capitalism is privatization
Why would any commercial real estate firm allow affordable housing to exist when they can scalp it on investment properties and leave them empty? Why build affordable housing when the margins are small?
Capitalism isn't a savior, it's just locally optimal to the people with capital.
"Defeated" implies being stopped by an external force, I don't see that happening.
It will collapse under it's own weight in less than a century.
Let’s hope it’s the next too big to fail/stock market crash.
It seems as if capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction. Not saying I know a better way per se but its in there all the same
Edit: to put it in Pokémon perspective: capitalism is Ghost type and its super-effective against Ghost type
What are some examples of capitalism destroying itself?
Capitalism, minus a strong guiding hand as described by Adam Smith, invariably leads to monopolies, or near enough. When that happens, either through a single strong monopoly or a small group of companies, the market doesn't work and price gouging rises. You don't have to look further back than the past couple years at inflation. Every study I have seen blames inflation almost completely on price gouging and market failing to work for consumers. Think record prices (and corresponding record profits) of companies across the board. If you want specific examples, check out the long history of Walmart and the negative effects its stores have on local competition and local earnings. Or the profit taking of gas companies. Or super market chains. Or....
People who love Capitalism always seem to have missed high school history/econ and have this ignorant belief that laissez-faire is the best. Even though proven to be shitty. This belief in trickle down bullshit has resulted in 50 trillion dollars going from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. If that's not capitalism destroying itself, I'm not sure what else to say.
Or as Leonard Cohen sang so succinctly,"The poor stay poor, the rich get rich / that's how it goes / everybody knows."
The concept of enshittification.
Granted, the concept applies specifically to platforms, but the idea is basically what capitalism is:
- Be good to everyone
- Be good to suppliers (supply-side economics)
- Be good to shareholders and, subsequently, alienate both users and suppliers of content. The platform collapses.
Late-stage capitalism is when shareholder wealth is maximized at the expense everyone else. So you have 3 billionaires with 50% of the wealth of all humanity or something, the middle class squeezed into oblivion, and a roiling undercurrent of pure fucking rage ready to sever heads like watermelons from a vine.
Why would you want it defeated?
The most successful and happiest countries in the world are the Nordic countries, which are capitalist economies.
I think it's because people see capitalism as one thing, while in reality they are implemented very differently.
The nordics are not successful only on their capitalism. It's because it is regulated, and because the money is distributed more fair than in other countries.
The Nordic countries are also on Earth, which we are destroying. Some of their wealth comes directly from that destruction. Norway is the 5th and 3rd largest oil and natural gas exporter, respectively, making their happiness the result of good social policy that makes up for capitalist inequality which is directly funded by destroying the Earth and fueling capitalism elsewhere.
Even setting the climate aside (a ridiculous thing to do, really), the Nordic model isn't possible to sustainably replicate elsewhere on Earth on capitalism's own term, because we can't make every country a net exporter of the most desired commodities for obvious reasons, or the beneficiary of complex historical circumstances, like neutrality during ww2 (Sweden), or a long-time colonial power (Denmark).
Put another way, there is no Nordic model available for Bangladesh, whose workers work six days a week in factories to make the cheap clothing that happy Norwegians wear. Norways needs Bangladeshes to keep their standard of living.
In a previous job, I spent a good amount of time in a Bangladeshi garment factory. That specific factory in which I worked had been on strike a few years prior, requesting a raise to dozens of dollars per month. That's not a typo -- per month!. The police fired into their picket line, killing and wounding hundreds. This fall, Bangladeshi garment workers went on strike again, demanding a tripling of the minimum wage from its current ~75USD per month.
The urban poverty that makes my life possible, so far away, out of sight and out of mind, is an absolute fucking disgrace. We should talk about it daily. When they go on strike, as those garment workers are now, every single westerner ought to strike in solidarity, even if motivated by nothing but shame. Instead, we don't even know that it's happening, at least in the anglosphere.
I've since become convinced that there''s only one path to a just and verdant world -- international solidarity. Communists and anarchists have filled libraries with ideas for what that might look like. I've read some tiny sliver of that corpus. If you actually want to know why some of us want capitalism defeated (beyond the anecdote that I just relayed), or if you're curious how much better some of us think the world could be, I'd be happy to point you towards books that spoke to me.
Cuz rich gets richer and they steal my wages. Fuck em.
It's probably not sustainable for one.
Gens Y, X, Z, and soon A are being taught by conservatives that capitalism can't be reformed, and therefore are digging capitalism's grave with their own hands.
You want reasonable restrictions on firearms? Conservatives say that can't be done because of the 2nd amendment. They're basically teaching gens Z and A that the 2nd amendment needs to be eliminated and those generations might actually have the numbers to do it eventually.
It will be the same with capitalism. You want reasonable regulations and taxation to reign in the abuses of the rich and corporations? Conservatives say you can't do that because the free market must be supreme.
Conservatives will dig the grave of capitalism by continuing to fight against any reforms that would make capitalism more livable for future generations.
Climate change or nuclear war wiping out humanity
There's currently no external forces that can defeat capitalism.
We have to do it on our own. Eat the rich. Guillotine the techno-feudal lords. Confiscate and coöperativize their infrastructure resources.
After mother nature kills every last human being.
Capitalism is still preached in Usa, like socialism is preached in North Korea.
But capitalism is dead and gone.
Today we have neo-feudalism, or some call it techno-feudalism.
I think society will collapse first, likely due to mass displacement and migration due to climate disasters which will make more people willing to accept fascism.
It's unlikely to happen without some kind of apocalyptic event. Communist societies works very, very well on a small scale; you can have communes with maybe as many as a few hundred people, because everyone is connected to everyone else. That all falls apart when you start talking about anything bigger. Capitalist societies don't seem to need that direct relationship in order to function.
I think that the best we can hope for is some kind of reform that blends parts of capitalism with socialism, and sharply constrains that rights of the capitalist class.
I don't think that we'll even get that though; I think we'll get Cyberpunk 2077.
Destruction of Earth.
When we start talking to each other again without paid influence.
The troubles facing us all, middle class and below, are the same troubles. We need to practice working together locally to build something bigger before major movements are likely to work out. How do we rebuild community nonprofit hubs?
With thunderous applause.
When 99% or less of the population can’t work or make any money. What I mean by this is the economy mainly driven by robots/rudimentary AI. The top 1% will be angry and try to keep it as is, but as history has taught us humans really like the guillotine in such situations
The huge difference now is these disgustingly rich fuckheads don't live in any type of proximity to their workers anymore.
Permanently Deleted
When the poor have more money than the rich and are willing to give it up.
Through abundance it will defeat itself by working too well. Approaching full automation the only way for capitalism to survive is via UBI, otherwise there will be no consumer markets. When we have enough productive capacity and sufficient UBI that everyone is wealthy without having to work, a society like the Federation from Star Trek becomes possible. When everyone has enough wealth that hoarding it becomes meaningless, we might achieve something like a communist society.
"Hoarding" or controlling resources will be always meaningful. There is limited amount of accessible matter, and even if all basic needs of every human is satisfied, people have inspirations to do things, including BIG things, and for that they need resources. The only way we might have something like communist society is if AI takes control, and no human is controlling anything of a value. Kind of like a "Culture" series of books by M. Banks. Or if we go completely virtual, but even then, the computation resource is of the value...
When we are filling the vent shafts for the last billionaire bunker with dirt and rocks.
When the old people die out
When/How seems optimisitc. I'd start with a big IF.
One of these days they are going to finally sell us the rope. Or, I think Marx was probably right and eventually the productive capacity of capitalism will grow so extreme that something new and different emerges from it. Basically, capitalism probably doesn't work post-scarcity. As far as when, possibly never but probably sometime in the next few hundred years if we don't collapse our civilization first and get stuck Mad Maxing the wasteland.
I think there needs to be a catalyst that can't be known in advance. Right now, too many people have too much to lose. If something changes that, then we can bring down capitalism. Something like mortality for only the top 1% "might" do it, but probably not since the people who need it are the old people, who are also to old to fight. So it needs to be something that causes the young people to have nothing to lose.
If the "1%" was to suddenly magically die, that would just mean that the 2% becomes the new 1% and carries on. I think there needs to be a more fundamental change. Something better than capitalism will need to come along, and so far it's hard to say that any of the alternatives we currently have fit the bill.
I wouldn't say it's necessarily better, but communist idiosyncrasies seem etched in all the most capitalist societies already, and this will almost certainly grow from that.
I think capitalism will be defeated the next time we completely forget what happens every time communism defeats capitalism.
When there is enough critical mass that sees that this shit ain't working... so, never most probably... or after a nuclear war or another global catastrophy. People tend to look in retrospect only when faced with huge problems.
Well, there are some fairly reliable maximum bounds, I suppose:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe
There is a strong consensus among cosmologists that the shape of the universe is considered "flat" (parallel lines stay parallel) and will continue to expand forever.[2][3]
The ultimate fate of an open universe with dark energy is either universal heat death or a "Big Rip"[12][13][14][15] where the acceleration caused by dark energy eventually becomes so strong that it completely overwhelms the effects of the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong binding forces.
Neither a universal heat death nor a Big Rip --- and we expect one of the two to occur --- seems likely to be conducive to capitalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
The heat death of the universe (also known as the Big Chill or Big Freeze)[1][2] is a hypothesis on the ultimate fate of the universe, which suggests the universe will evolve to a state of no thermodynamic free energy, and will therefore be unable to sustain processes that increase entropy.
The theory suggests that from the "Big Bang" through the present day, matter and dark matter in the universe are thought to have been concentrated in stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters, and are presumed to continue to do so well into the future. Therefore, the universe is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, and objects can do physical work.[15]:§VID The decay time for a supermassive black hole of roughly 1 galaxy mass (10¹¹ solar masses) because of Hawking radiation is in the order of 10¹⁰⁰ years,[16] so entropy can be produced until at least that time. Some large black holes in the universe are predicted to continue to grow up to perhaps 10¹⁴ M☉ during the collapse of superclusters of galaxies. Even these would evaporate over a timescale of up to 10¹⁰⁶ years.[17] After that time, the universe enters the so-called Dark Era and is expected to consist chiefly of a dilute gas of photons and leptons.[15]:§VIA With only very diffuse matter remaining, activity in the universe will have tailed off dramatically, with extremely low energy levels and extremely long timescales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip
In physical cosmology, the Big Rip is a hypothetical cosmological model concerning the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the matter of the universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles, and even spacetime itself, is progressively torn apart by the expansion of the universe at a certain time in the future, until distances between particles will infinitely increase.
In their paper, the authors consider a hypothetical example with w = −1.5, H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc, and Ωm = 0.3, in which case the Big Rip would happen approximately 22 billion years from the present. In this scenario, galaxies would first be separated from each other about 200 million years before the Big Rip. About 60 million years before the Big Rip, galaxies would begin to disintegrate as gravity becomes too weak to hold them together. Planetary systems like the Solar System would become gravitationally unbound about three months before the Big Rip, and planets would fly off into the rapidly expanding universe. In the last minutes, stars and planets would be torn apart, and the now-dispersed atoms would be destroyed about 10¯¹⁹ seconds before the end (the atoms will first be ionized as electrons fly off, followed by the dissociation of the atomic nuclei). At the time the Big Rip occurs, even spacetime itself would be ripped apart and the scale factor would be infinity.
It will not be defeated. It will simply reinvent itself. Forms of capitalism seem to be human nature.
Tell American conservatives to tax Mike Bloomberg and other anti gun billionaires 70% and use the money to buy guns for poor people. America will become communist overnight.
It will not be defeated. It will simply reinvent itself. Forms of capitalism seem to be human nature.
