this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Really depends on what you mean by market. Like a market has existed since humans have and probably will until post-scarcity. The market we have now with arcane rules that all end up enriching people with more money than any one human will ever need is something that has been in the making since industrialization. That market is pretty much at a point where salvaging it is not really possible even if there was any attempt made to do so. Control of how that market works seems to be at the hands of bad actors who just want to squeeze as much wealth out of it as they can, screwing over anyone else.
Like for example the power companies in my country stopped producing power on their own and bought power from neighboring countries just to sell it to locals at a higher rate. Basically just acting as middle men without providing anything of worth. That drove the price of power to hit 300% more than the year prior. The only reason they stopped was because our government started their own power plan with locally produced power forcing those companies to compete with it but the damage was done and power prices never went back to normal like they never do when companies inflate prices. A market regulated by people who only care about profit will never work.
This is not true. Market economies originate with the state. Prior to markets, most societies engage in gift-economies, where value and price are relatively arbitrary and dictated by personal relationships, not scarcity. It is only when an army comes in and forces you to trade with it do we see the emergence of market economies. You are however, correct that the market we engage with right now focuses primarily on capitalization, which is generating the most amount of money. That is the structural logic of a 'capitalist' mode of production. The liberal (or really neo-liberal, but we are splitting hairs at this point) lie around this is that this mode of production is and encourages the most 'efficiency' or 'productivity'. This is not true, as demonstrated in your example.
Within capitalism there will always be perverse incentives to value the 'fetish' (money) over the commodity (the object being produced). And it is this 'fetishization of commodities' that ultimately creates the series of rolling crises within capitalism, as the fetish must grow larger and larger even if (and especially if) the commodity production itself does not. The incentive isn't to satisfy demand, it is to generate profit.
That's why I started with "depending on what you mean by market". There are like a ton of different academic and colloquial definitions.
Though I don't agree that you need an army to enforce the current market system as the current system seems quite capable of being perpetuated by capitalists themselves.
Ehh, kinda, but not really. It's pretty standardized (which is hilariously rare for these disciplines) within sociology, anthropology and even economic theory. At most economics would label it an 'inefficient market' but even they are stretching their definition to the breaking point when there is no actual expectation of reciprocity for most transactions.
You absolutely need an army to sustain market economies. Somebody has to collect the debts. Why do you think America spends more money than anywhere else on it's police force? You have to have a monopoly of force in order to sustain obviously unfair and arbitrary property relations. Why does America have military bases across the globe and sanction countries that refuse to engage on it's market terms? Because we need to have the potential to place a boot down or provide training for those that will do our enforcement for us.
Look at crypto, without centralized financial support it all but crumbled, to only resurge as a speculative asset, only to dip again. Maybe it will make a resurgence, but it is capital with no army, never to break the bounds of the fin-tech industry.
Force is what drives and has always driven market economies. To believe otherwise is to be an-cap, to separate the historical development of markets, capitalism and the state.
The US police is a very weird anomaly in the world, the hiring standards and educational requirements are below anything most other countries consider acceptable while the budgets are higher than anywhere else as well while producing the worst outcomes of most other police forces.
Debt is pretty much never collected by a police force but usually by banks (or what ever other institution gave out that loan). Most of these relations are not maintained by cops or military since working class people lack a unified front to combat anything (France is the only place where that has even remotely shifted in recent years). So maintaining anything by cops hasn't even been necessary for like the last 50 years at least. If workers had any unified front that may change.
Also the only country that does imperialism with their army in modern times in Russia, the US, China, France etc all do their imperialism by investments making another country dependant on them and then exporting their resources.
Crypto was always a speculative asset. It has been used effectively as a stock market with no regulations the moment it contained any considerable amount of capital. At no point in time did it have a shot at replacing the current monetary system.
Force may have been a method to maintain the capitalist system once but in modern times it's division and complacency.
You are ignoring the immense weight of the threat of force
No, it exists but it's just almost never needed we ended up enforcing the system ourselves, no threat needed even if it exists as a backup.
I think you might be biased by your own experiences from places where the risk and reward for following vs breaking the law are so wildly in favor of following it. In poorer areas, the math gets closer.
Anyway, try mugging someone at gunpoint and telling them it was like you didn't have a gun because you never fired it.
I'm not from a country that's rich enough to have rich areas. No American style suburbs here thankfully.
The main disincentive is still societal even if you are talking just about shoplifting(Though I was mostly talking about private property). Cops will just arrest you but if you get a criminal record you will have a harder time finding a job, people will not trust you and your family may even disown you.
I understand that system is leagues more fucked up in the US where the cops will just shoot you if you're darker than mayonnaise, 3 insignificant crimes get you serious jail time and every sentence is normal amount of years times ten but it's a uniquely bad system there and not a reflection of the rest of the world and in the rest of the world the threat of violence is generally not there and we perpetuate this system. You guys also have absolutely insane wealth differences and like no way to even do anything about it, Americans should really take pointers from the French and organize a proper general strike, nothing will change if people just complain.
Also your analogy would be more accurate if I mugged someone with a toy gun. As I said cops aren't as powerful as the whole of the working class.
And what happens if you resist arrest?
You would most likely still be arrested or you would get away if really lucky. But this is all irrelevant, if cops were Thanos snapped capitalism would not go away, without unity in the working class nothing will change. Being able to steal without consequence is not socialism.
Yeah because that's not the only way that the systw. Is maintained by the threat of violence, it's just the most obvious. You keep making points like "you're gonna have to organize and fight" as if that disproves that the current system is maintained by violence. I think you don't quite understand what's being talked about
As I originally said: the threat of force exists but it's not the primary or even secondary way capitalism is maintained. Also if the whole working class unified that would be a force so big force is both irrelevant and quite potentially even unnecessary. But I brought both points up in my previous replies, I'd not accuse someone if not understanding if you yourself end up repeating points already answered.
Tell that to the country with the largest prison popultation in the world, which also legalises slavery for prisoners and heavily relies on prisoners to perform labour. Oh wait that's the us, weird that
I already adressed the US situation as being uniquely fucked lower down. You guys need to organize more than pretty much any country in the world, take some pointers from the French. Cops will never be as powerful as a unified working class.
The us situation is not uniquely fucked. I used the us because it's a clear example, but every country has a prison population, which is one of many examples of force being used to maintain the current system.
I think you think that this concept of force might be a qualifier of something bad - it isn't. A revolution would also take force, fighting against capitalists would also take force.
Converting "hearts and minds" is all well and good, but when the capitalists coup you (which they will) you're gonna need force to maintain your system
Read the bottom replies if you wanna argue this, I don't want to repeatedly type out the same stuff on a phone.
Ultimately if the workers are unified capitalist don't have the power to coup anyone unless you are a dictatorship with a strongman to coup but that's no better than the current system. The 1% of people will never be more powerful than a unified 99%, like if that is achieved I doubt you even need force but I do consider it to be acceptable to fulfill the will of the people. Force is not the primary, way or even secondary, that capitalism is maintained, it's division and diversion.
Get it thru your dense head: Division and diversion, arrests, lies all of these things can only be, because they are insured by the backbone of state-monopolized violence. How is this so hard to get? No one is saying that tanks are.out in the streets every day, the point is that there is an implicit knowledge that the oppressors can always turn to violence - or force - to maintain the status quo.
A force that is both puny and irrelevant in the face of the whole working class acting together.
I mean, no? The USSR had a successful revolution and was almost defeated by the white army. The Paris commune was crushed by the forces of capital, Salvador Allende was murdered by capital, Cuba barely survived its infancy or the fall of the Soviet Union, COINTELPRO has crushed many nascent movements as well as the BPP, the government of Iran was couped as well as many others.
Pretending line capital does not have immense power is silly. Pretending we do not exist in a society wherein left movements are routinely hinted, crushed, suppressed, destroyed or subverted is naive and silly.
Every single revolution was long and drawn out, the victories precarious and hard-won. It's not a cake-walk. And even then it is impressively idealistic to go "the people united are indivisible" because yeah sure, but that unity has never been available. Reactionaries are a thing, fifth columnists are a thing. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks fought each other, the makhnovosts and soviets fought each other, China and Vietnam waged war against each other.
You gotta accept the reality of the world you're in, and work from there. I would suggest reading Engels "On Authority"
I have also brought up how having a dictator rule the working class with an iron fist is not a unified working class but an equally oppressed one. Having one strongman on top makes any country vulnerable.
All of that is irrelevant though without unity you have nothing but people shouting into the void of social media. No revolution or movement goes anywhere without unity and it's the only way to achieve socialism.
Great, then that means cops are unimportant and don't need to enforce the sanctity of capitalist property, right?
In 99.9% of cases yea we as a society have ended up enforcing it unfortunately. Gotta win over hearts and minds to change that and if most people can be convinced to change I'm sure there will be a bigger threat of violence and probably more than a threat but if enough people back changing from the capitalist system it won't matter, cops will never outnumber the working class. If only the working class learned to work together (and also stop putting dictators in charge who fuck over the working class).