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ZunarJ5 11 hours ago

"Definitive of what capitalism is, this separation severely limits the scope of the political. Devolving vast aspects of social life to the rule of “the market” (in reality, to large corporations), it declares them off-limits to democratic decision-making, collective action, and public control. Its very structure, therefore, deprives us of the ability to decide collectively exactly what and how much we want to produce, on what energic basis and through what kinds of social relations. It deprives us, too, of the capacity to determine how we want to use the social surplus we collectively produce; how we want to relate to nature and to future generations; how we want to organize the work of social reproduction and its relation to that of production. Capitalism, in sum, is fundamentally anti-democratic. Even in the best-case scenario, democracy in a capitalist society must perforce be limited and weak."

https://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/centerpiece/fall2...

adrianN 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are very few purely capitalistic countries. All countries that I can think of use taxes and regulations to influence market equilibrium. „letting the market figure it out“ is usually the political expression for „I like the current state better than what the opposition proposed“.

skybrian 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do you really want to see votes on "exactly what and how much we want to produce" at each factory? Or what farmers plant?

jrflowers 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah imagine an economic system where farmers can’t even plant the seeds produced by the crops that they grow every year

defrost 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm in a massive grain belt ATM, as a sign of the times I can't place whether that's a reference to GM crops or the immediate issue of fuel and fertilizer.

creationcomplex 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Fascism is the logical fallback to protect wealth from redistribution.

bit-anarchist 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Capitalism (in the libertarian sense of the word) makes these "vast aspects of social life" off-limits to democratic deliberation in the same way it does for unrelated private corporations: without authorization from the rightful owners, it is supposed to be illegal (not to say that has stopped either).

She uses terms like "us", "we", "collective", but who are these? All the constituents, the people, in their totality, they are not, for people are not a homogeneous mass. In practice, it, along with democracy, just becomes a nice rhetoric device for stripping people of their rights.

Democracy was never really a good solution to an inclusive society-wide governance system. Most successful implementation even need to add limits to it to prevent the mob rule that's a feature to it. Some try to pretend it is anti-authoritarian, because the members get a vote. But that vote only matters when the voter is part of a majority. If they aren't, they might as well not even have it. That alone already creates a hierarchy. And it only gets worse: most people belong to minority of sorts, and they, by design, get alienated. This means that the doesn't really represent anyone... other than itself, very much like a corporation.

Which leads to the final point: capitalism (in the Marxist sense of the word) isn't antidemocratic. Democracy isn't in opposition to corporatocrocy, it requires a corporation large enough to own everything. Thus, dare I say, the democracy she seems to envision might as well be one of the forms of ultra peak capitalism.

dlev_pika 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

ch4s3 9 hours ago | parent [-]

The fascism of Europe in in the 1930s was EXPLICITLY anti-capitalist. You can read tons of statements by various prominent fascists about how capitalism was the tool of the British empire and "globalists"(they often used a different word). They viewed it as separating the people from the land. Capitalists were not in any way fundamental to the rise of Nazism.

If you're on about Pinochet, he only embraced market reforms 3 years after coming to power and came to power directly by a military coup. Business leaders had basically nothing to do with it.

throwawaysleep 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Trump is also often anti capitalist, between tariffs and government shares in business. There is what fascists say and what they do, and industrialists were often very good Nazis.