🎓 Doc Freemo :jpf: 🇳🇱@freeschool @messaroundmarx > I'm possibly falling into that typical bashing of "Capitalism" maybe because I'm not getting what I want related to the other parts of life I want and responsibility of many systems which Capitalism doesn't seem to help with - at all (at least the Modern kind).
Yea that makes sense, that and I think there is a large dose of misusing the term capitalism as well, which is extremely common, even among people who are experts there can be debate on that.
Usually people wrongly take an uneducated approach to what capitalism is, they usually take it to mean "money rules and everyone is driven by greed", when in reality it means "markets are free, meaning everyone has the same amount of power int he market, no one can game the system". Much of what people therefore call capitalism is anything but. Banks having a monopoly on the market of fiat is very much anti-capitalism, as are all monopolies. Same goes for rich people being able to influence elections, that is anti-capitalism.
The other thing people do is they assume governments are monolithically one ideology or another. They will often refer to the USA as some model capitalism despite the fact that most of its characteristics are anti-capitlist and it only has a slight capitalism influence. Same is true of socialism, people often wrongly refer to most of europe as socialist when in fact the vast majority is anti-socialist and just has a handful of socialist qualities (and the USA too has a handful of socialist qualities).
People just really suck at nuance.
> Ideally I'd like to think, involves or implement #Mutual #Cooperation (towards various things), Saving #Nature, Increasing #Commons / #Commoning, #Feelings / #Consent being part of it but not I don't see these words a lot or at all in Capitalism or books. So maybe I blame it or anyone that uses it overly (which I don't think can only be blamed on (people but the design too).
Capitalism in no way forces such cooperation, nor does it preclude such cooperation. This goes back to thinking of capitalism as "everything a government does" rather than just one of a 100 ideologies a government may adopt. Capitalism just guarantees people can engage in trade fairly, nothing more. That trade can be used to further cooperation or it can be used to further competition, that is up to the society and even the government. We can, for example, use government taxes to help everyone and engage in cooperation, there is nothing remotely in capitalism that would be contrary to that, capitalism isnt anti-tax nor is it anti public service.
> So the name is one thing but also I'm just a bit more concerned / defending what these words ignore / over-write / replace with numbers or mathematical tricks frankly.
As well you should, the issue I had was largely with your choice of wording. Your concerns, at least around the baking system and cooperation and compassion, are perfectly valid and a legitimate criticism. But we have to be clear that criticism is just as prevalent in a capitalism as it is in a communism. Even the idea of a central bank is contrary to capitalism, but in communism you dont just have a central bank, you have a central authority that forces everyone to give up their money, so you centralize not just the bank but the bank customer (just one customer, the government, everyone else is at their discretion). So with communism you take the problem of a centralized bank and replace it with centralized money where one entity controls all money.. thats like taking the problem of authoritarianism and saying "maybe if we crank the authoritarianism up to 11 then we wont have authoritarianism anymore"... its really absurd.
But yea, your concerns, once we agree is outside of the scope of capitalism is perfectly valid.
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