How’s it with you guys ?
Mine is working fine but Sabine Hossenfelder made a pro-capitalism video that ignores the deterioration of the global market in the 20th century. Can someone send her a bugfix?
Is the deterioration of the global market not mainly a result of neglecting to keep monopolies in check and provide adequate regulation?
Is the deterioration of the global market not mainly a result of neglecting to keep monopolies in check and provide adequate regulation?
As Marx points out in Das Kapital it’s not possible to keep monopolies in check and provide adequate regulation since they will find a way to capture the government and its regulatory agencies, so that they work for the capitalists and not the public. So what Hossenfelder failed to acknowledge is that no civilization knows how to defend its regulatory agencies from elite influence. It also fails to address matters like the uneven distribution of wealth, which leads to failure of the state and a whole lot of violence.
And that deterioration of the global market was well underway at the time that capitalism drove the development of penicillin. Capitalist interests also drove the triggers of WWI, the overreach of the Treaty of Versailles and the consequential rise of the German Reich. And, capitalist interests figured largely in the advancement of the holocaust from concentration camps and a deportation policy to an annihilation policy and the genocide machine. ( Behind the Bastards podcast recently released a two-parter on Reinhard Heydrich, the lynchpin official who developed the whole process, worth a listen!) so as capitalism drove penicillin development to save fallen soldiers from infection, it also facilitated the driving motivations for conquest and belligerence, hence the war itself that shot those soldiers up in the first place.
And when I watch Hossenfelder’s videos, usually I can count on her to be more thorough than she was regarding the failures of a system, but it’s not the first time her biases have informed her content.
In these conversations I always get to an impasse because yeah, capitalism is very flawed and produces many horrible outcomes. But communism has failed to work at all (as far as I know). Last I spoke to a communist as passerby was asking for what my conversation partner thought was a example of true communism, to which the answer was “the very start of the Russian revolution”. I won’t pretend to be the most informed about history, and I know that there has been much interference from capitalist countries, but if communism were so clearly a better system would it not have stably worked at least once? I’m having a hard time understanding why that’s a better goal than the countries that seem to reign in capitalism with at least some success.
