Theory vs Practice

Competition even in theory:

I won the competition, now buy my linen at 10x its value. Btw it costs 1,000 years of the average salary to start up a competing business, good luck lol

That's what we call economies of scale in modern parlance. :)

Capitalism only works on paper, it doesn’t take human nature into account

No, it doesn't even work on paper. We don't need to build two competing factories to see what is best. We invented science. Somebody can just make a graph. It's that easy
I dunno.. even on paper the idea of infinite growth in a system of limited resources doesn't seem to work ..
capitalism only works if you just really hate feudalism but also want to keep the rich people in charge which is what it was designed to do. In much the same way that the united states of America was only really created to form a singe legal entity to be responsible for sharing the debt of the revolutionary war accross the states and everything since is just mission creep
which is a large part of why the American constitution is so messed up and such a dysfunctional and stupid legal foundation of a country, the country wasn't really designed with maintainability or long term existence in mind from the start
- keep the rich people in charge which is what it was designed to do
  Under capitalism didn't the monarchs that were formally in charge lose power to the new capitalists though? For one, King George losing the colonies. I'm guessing a lot of the founding fathers probably were descended from feudal lords though.
The same is true of many implementations of communism. The problem isn't the system, the problem is people, and people try to corrupt the system to their benefit.
- lib
- The same is true of many implementations of communism. The problem isn't the system, the problem is people, and people try to corrupt the system to their benefit.
  People everywhere have always been exactly the same since the dawn of time. Mitochondrial Adam and Eve were literally McDonald’s franchise owners. I am extremely intelligent.
- The same is not true of implementations of communism. Socialist states at their best implement systems that encourage the natural human drives for cooperation and compassion, and in the two largest cases, China and the Soviet Union, it led to the fastest gains in quality of life in history
- Lmao, I literally read this exact same "argument" from a different user in a different thread five minutes ago.
  You guys really need to come up with some new material.
- There's no such thing as human nature. What you call human nature is the result of material conditions
- I mean, in the the liberal west used violence to replace comunism with a right wing dictatorship. Yes.
  However that isn't really a flaw in comunist theory

Tacit collusion is literally everywhere and completely normalized. A coworker was describing a revenue-sharing agreement but actually described collusion to set prices.

You call it collusion, we call it obeying market realities! As in, capitalists invent a reality and the people obey it.
Thanks for the term. I came to that conclusion on my own, but now I can actually look into it
the latter example there actually isn't collusion it's competition. adulteration is the natural consequence of unregulated free market competition. Everyone competes to be the bottom of the market so they can put everyone else out of business and to do so they cut costs as much as possible. And then once the market is dominated they raise prices without improving the standard of product

"Competition is good because it leads to cheaper prices for consumers", doesn't really work since it neglects the union of the state and monopolies to artificially charge higher prices for items of the same - even worse quality; while hindering competition that has the potential to change the status quo.

I mean—the US is trying to prevent the world from cooperating with China, Russia and other major economies because they know that they are incapable of competing due to their decades-long crusade of neoliberalism. Another example is the fossil fuel industry stalling for time against the wave of the renewable energy era; or the automobile industry lobbying against efficient public transportation.

The point is that the major neoliberal powers don't want competition to exist; they just want rent-seeking sectors that can earn them a treasure trove of money as fast as possible.

or the oil industry teaming up with the US government to kill off electric transportation 60+ years ago and prior to that killing off rail transportation
- No one believes me when i mention that electric cars used to be a thing >100 years ago.
Thing is that it's not a static system. Competition leads to winners growng. Bigger companies enjoy advantages such as economies of scale, brand recognition, established supply chains, and so on.
This means that the initial cost for new players that want ti compete with such companies grows as well. Forx example, a scrappy startup isn't going to be able to take on Amazon.
And if a new company does develop something that gives it a serious advantage then the bigger company can just buy it out.
- I had this discussion with my brother in law while drinking one night. He was going on about the free market or something and we sort of just talked through how the market could be free like people say. Organically we both realized just by talking it through that there's no way the could be a "free market" because the rules are always backed by state violence or the threat thereof.
  But beyond that, as certain companies succeed, they grow. As they grow they kill competition either by absorbing them, by out competing them, or by using vast resources to kill them through attrition. As they continue to grow they diversity to try to gain further advantages. They begin to control their supply chains and own the resources that ensure even their would be competitors become reliant on them, essentially neutering potential competition. They corner markets. If there were a "free market" it would end up as a single company that owned everything. At a certain point a single company would become so integral and so powerful that it would control the government, the banks, and all the resources and it would care nothing for anyone outside of the people who keep it in power and control.
  Obviously this isn't how things are though. There isn't a "free market", instead there are cabals that rig the system to keep themselves on top but none seem to gain enough advantage to kill off each other to take over entirely. There are likely many reasons why that hasn't or maybe can't happen outside of a singular perfectly seized opportunity, but the resulting situation we find ourselves in is hardly any better. It's close enough that most people in the world are deemed unimportant and expendable, if not detrimental.
- I don't think that we disagree. Because, for the reasons that you have provided, competition will produce almost-indestructible monopolies as a natural consequence, and those monopolies have a tendency to use their extensive power to destroy and buy out potential competitors and seek for quick, easy ways to accumulate wealth; notably, through rentier capitalism.
  This is literally what's happening right now; at least, in the US.
- People are led to believe that industrial competition is like a sports league where winners just get a trophy and the competition resets every year 😂
- Until they become too big and buy every potential competition out while they are still small.

There used to be one streaming service. It had pretty much everything and cost half of what modern streaming services cost. Now there are several streaming services competing with each other that all have smaller libraries at higher prices. Plenty of them require paying users to watch ads. Weird.

And through all that I get any show I want completely free on Stremio. Piracy will always win.
It'd be funny when some tech bro goes a level of abstraction above and makes a service that lets you watch the shows from all the other streaming services... oh wait there are already a lot of illegal (for now) services that do it. 😂 tech industry is literally just about getting between consumers/producers (even between other mediators!) and take a cut.

1 step closer from selling rat milk!

Also the classic: "My enterprise is falling apart, please give me public funds so I can continue to rip people off (don't worry, I'll still claim it's all pure market forces at work)"

that's right, privatize the profits and socialize the losses. That's just smart business.
- Literally. Anyone trying to do it different is highly likely to fail. Even the smaller businesses will take tax breaks and rely on government funding.

As with all ideas in theory, capitalism doesn’t sound terrible. But when the competition is done improving and they’ve got their audience/loyalists, it’s a race to the bottom and the only “losers” are the ones who step just a bit too far… and then they try it again in a few years and it works. Just look at micro transactions

Marx analysed the underlying mechanisms of capitalism thoroughly, and even in theory it's terrible. The only thing it's good at, as he noted, is being efficient at production.
I don't want to go out on a limb and say every serf and craftsman under feudalism would have refused capitalism if you'd told them what it was going to do to them, but the fact that there was primitive accumulation in the form of the enclosure act in the UK and similar acts in Europe shows that capitalism was far from being accepted by the people.
- I think it’s more the “good side” of capitalism is appealing and is why people swear by it. The idea that working hard means you too can live “the American Dream” even though that dream was thoroughly claimed hundreds of years ago and now only the truly lucky get in. You don’t even necessarily have to work hard to do it, just be unreasonably lucky lol
The "theory" makes a lot of very favorable assumptions. The real theory (Marx) reveals the real usefulness/shortcomings of the capitalist mode of production, and we are way past it's usefulness.