This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Regarding semantics, I don't know what to tell you, this is a standard academic example for 'the contradictions of capitalism.' Maybe whoever translated Marx originally should have used a different word, I don't know, I don't think that's very important.
But importantly, I do think 'self-correcting mechanism' is way too charitable, and has connotations that miss the point here.
In the case where marginally lower employment leads to marginally lower resource prices leads to marginally higher investment in manufacturing leads back to marginally higher employment again, that's a self-correcting mechanism.
In the case where marginally lower employment leads to disinvestment in manufacturing and investment in financialization and speculation instead, and this process creates a feedback loop that drives more and more of the economy into those sectors until the bubble bursts and there's a large-scale recession, that's not really describing minor course corrections anymore. It's describing a cyclical failure where capitalism cannot function under it's own success, which I think is reasonably described as a contradiction.
It feels like we agree on the mechanisms here, and disagree about what to call them or how society reacts to them, or something?
Like, yeah, Marx acknowledged that capitalism inherently produces conditions under which it can no longer function successfully, and needs to be replaced with new systems which can successfully manage the abundance it produced. That's the cliff notes version of one section of his historical materialism.
Capitalists don't explicitly acknowledge that! Standard capitalist rhetoric is, as far as I can tell, that capitalism is just permanently and forever the best way to run an economy, under any circumstances, and any attempts to interfere with or subvert or replace it will only cause suffering and dysfunction.
It's not the case that capitalists are keeping a list of sectors of teh economy where capitalism has succeeded in creating post-scarcity and is no longer needed in that sector and that sector can be handed off to central planning or w/e because capitalism can't handle it anymore. They think capitalism can and should handle everything, and the cases where they insist on that even though they're wrong create the contradiction.
>During World War I, farmers worked hard to produce record crops and livestock. When prices fell they tried to produce even more to pay their debts, taxes and living expenses. In the early 1930s prices dropped so low that many farmers went bankrupt and lost their farms. In some cases, the price of a bushel of corn fell to just eight or ten cents. Some farm families began burning corn rather than coal in their stoves because corn was cheaper. Sometimes the countryside smelled like popcorn from all the corn burning in the kitchen stoves.
Sadly, no, goods do go to waste or cease being produced under unregulated capitalism; that's one of the reasons we have so many regulations today, which avoid the worst of these tragedies while also capping the amount of benefit capitalism can accrue to society.
Again, this is a contradiction: capitalism is so good at making goods cheap that we need laws to make them more expensive, or else capitalism can't properly distribute them anymore and no one can get enough of them.
Typically the most productive way to push these kind of conversations forward is to go back to definitions, to make sure if the difference of opinion stems from people merely using different definitions.
The reference to academia is a bit troubling, you make it sound like you don't really believe these arguments yourself, just relaying someone else's thoughts.
Why? By your own logic, the failure is cyclical, which means it is followed by a recovery. The general trajectory of capitalism, even taking these periodic crashes into account, is clearly that of growth. If you compare it to the results of systems that were supposed to be an alternative to capitalism, the contrast is even more stark. So I just don't see anything contradictory in it, and it does indeed look like a self-correcting system.
Then it looks like you're just completely unfamiliar with capitalist theory. They go to great lengths to point out that the entire purpose of the system is "rational allocation of scarce resources". That statement alone is at least double-redundant by my count, which shows how much they wanted to hammer the point home.
3 times cheaper than nowadays is indeed a good deal, but hardly post-scarcity. The fact that they were burning it instead of coal, is just a statement about the relative availability of coal, and we do it too nowadays (never heard of bio-fuels)? In fact, if anything this is probably an example of the rationality of capitalism relative to other systems. A central planner insisting "corn is for eating, not for heating" would be wasting coal, while letting an abundant resource go to waste. Also, the 1930's cannot be in any reasonable way be described as an example of unregulated capitalism.
The WWI example is even worse. War, especially in the past, has always been a time of great uncertainty, so it's not surprising people ended up producing too much or too little of something, because they were expecting the war to go a certain way, that didn't come to pass. None of this is an example of capitalism making goods so cheap that we need laws to make them more expensive. To show that, you'd need to show that the producers refused to correct production afterwards. Otherwise, it's not a contradiction at all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link