This is beautifully written and frames the issue in a fresh way for me.
I'm taking away an appeal to individuals and business entities to intentionally optimize for economic public good as opposed to profit and that to contribute to international standardization efforts is one practical way to pledge to that goal.
If I were King of America, the first thing I'd do is start enforcing standard protocols for things like auth, messaging, data export/migration, etc. Mostly relying on industry to decide _what_ the protocols should be, but making sure everyone adheres to them.
Data interoperability would make our digital lives so much better.
It's funny to me that a piece like this is as likely to polarize people away from standards as towards it, since the case it's making is essentially orthogonal to the most salient debate about standards.
I tend to think standards are more about interoperability at the interface level - which doesn't specifically exclude innovation in non-interfacing aspects. So in that sense I don't think standards are synonymous with LCD.
Sure, that makes sense. I'm an anti-standards person, but lots of people are pro. I just don't think the labor theory of value enters into it very much!
The more universal a need is, the less it should be supplied by capitalism.
Education; healthcare: universal needs. When left to the private sector, prices explode and exploitation reigns. Because no matter the price, people will pay.
Las Vegas’ strip on the other hand, needs no government intervention. Folks there are spending money they can live without!
American culture worships the market as solver of all problems - which it is while there’s still growth. But when things settle in, standards allow new players to keep incumbents honest.
Regarding standards, neat that the “standard” for C is ANSI C. It calls back to a time when standards bodies were key to technology development. It predates even IBM’s XT and AT PC - a transition away from standards-bodies-driven hardware development toward market-leader driven.
Ultimately the universality of standards and ability for new players should always be maintained in every market - it should never be impossible to disrupt lazy incumbents. Standards are crucial to keeping markets and industries healthy.
Just an end to capitalism that perversely carves out an exception to normal reciprocal arrangements for using other people's property, for one of the most important categories of property: universally owned property. I.e. the environment.
Today, the value of our joint inherited environment has no systematic representation. The default is, do your damage until it is significant enough, and some white knight politicians, finally try to limit the damage with one-off narrow per-case idiosyncratic limits.
No wonder protecting the environment is near impossible. Legally and politically, our systems are tilted far into the direction of non-protection. Ignoring the literal reality of joint inheritance, and ignoring the tremendous value being mismanaged.
The default should be: reciprocal agreements in the form of cap and trade for all public asset impact. Most especially the environment. Exactly as it is required for impact anyone wants to have on another owners private property.
Then the legal and political default would be to protect the value of joint assets, and maximize the value back to the public of their use.
Then all the wonderful magic of capitalism, for optimizing the value of resources, would work for the environment.
This even creates an avenue for some universal income. We all should be paid for use of the non-human created, jointly inherited asset: the environment.
Instead of the default being endless over pollution of CO2, plastics, etc., the default would be all entities pay for what they use, and pay even more for what they use that requires fund for offsetting the damage. Suddenly capitalism and the environment work.
And we all get and dividend, reflecting our jointly inherited asset, on its use.
Value which will go up for everyone as the economy grows, without any form of wealth redistribution.
The numbers of top tier problems this would contribute solutions or partial solutions to, is considerable.
I don't really understand this article. The authors don't seem interested in the details of either capitalism or standards development organizations. Just because they're nonprofit doesn't mean they're outside of the market economy! (ANSI must have forgotten about their purported commitment to "information sharing for free or nearly free" when they started charging $2500 for the complete 2023 SQL standard.)
I'd agree with non-capitalist, but the authors are far too absolute for my liking.
The whole article hinges on examples of a non-capitalist mode of knowledge production being hard to imagine or conceptualise. Wikipedia is often used as an example of precisely that idea; I reckon I'd see it in that context at least once a month.
At this point, it's basically the standard example.
The thing 'anti-capitalists' never seem to understand, is that it's not a top down system but bottom up emergent human behaviour. A function of consent/interoperability at scale beyond the immediate family/tribe unit. Thus hard to see an "end to capitalism". That would be like an end to language. We'd just re-invent it.
Indeed even the Soviet Union depended on a proto-capitalist black market to make up for market deficiencies. In order to incentivize the elites to do anything at all, they had to exchange favors with each other, which meant that corruption became an essential part of governance.
I've found what's happening in north eastern Syria to be interesting.
This area was previously under the religious fundamentalist rule of Islamic State, who were pushed out by a Anarchist/Libertarian socialist milita, around half of whom were women (much to the dislike of ISIS, whose fighters believed if they were killed by a woman, they don't get to go to heaven).
Currently it's the first example of a working Anarchist system.
No laws means that capitalism isn't illegal, so it still exists there.
But most of the economy is based on cooperatives and wages are three times higher than the rest of the country.
They smartly played the global power order, letting the Americans develop their oil and the Russians develop their gas.
Unlike what many may think, people don't go around killing each other without laws in place - which does happen in the rest of Syria under a statist (State based) system of government.
I don't know where to being commenting on this, you've raised quite a few points. I've travelled to both Northern Iraq and Syria. Iraq while ISIS were there, Syria before the conflicts started.
I'd be interested if there was a documentary / podcast / etc you could point me to, in order to better understand all that you're presenting.
Either way, very glad ISIS was pushed back. I don't have the words to describe how horrible the situation seemed there.
I never understood the anti-capitalist argument to be that it’s a top down system (and thus is why it’s “bad”), I think the critique is more that capitalism will inevitably beget hierarchies and self-reinforces them. And to be fair, some earlier attempts at socialism also begot hierarchies, but now I’m being a little pedantic.
I don't hear it referred to as a top down system either, but infer that. People talk about a world without it, or after it, as if it's one thing - which is why I described it as top down. Ie one corner stone you can remove. Like a monarchy, or damn.
And indeed, the critiques (that come to mind at least) I've heard of capitalism all seem valid at first, until I realise they also apply to socialism, communism, etc. Thus so far I don't see capitalism as being relevant as people think, and stick with my - temporary - conclusion that it's an emergent behaviour.
Do you mean trade or mercantilism? Capitalism - a system by which the means of production are privately owned - has only been dominant for the last few hundred years, broadly exacerbated by the industrial revolution (where you could easily point to "Guy who owns the big Machine").
It is, at its most fundamental description, a Top-Down system of governance and ownership (I admit, probably not the way you mean, but it did tickle me).
Dragons hoarding wealth might be emergent human behavior, but, hey, so are brave knights.
> has only been dominant for the last few hundred years
That's hard to falsify, although I'd guess people have had things for much longer, eg spears. Although this get's away from the point, and into something else.
Right now if I step out into the street, I can flag a taxi, I can buy a coffee. In each case these are direct peer to peer transactions, where the price is agreed between us based on what we both want out of the exchange. I find it easy to imagine that's how it was hundreds of years ago too, even within tribes.
The capital (money, coffee, spear), isn't really the relevant thing. It's a conduit and focal point of behaviour. That was my original point, and why I don't value a top down aspect to it (even though that of course exists in groups with more scale - societies). I would welcome a refute on that point, or if you could frame a different way of looking at it (capitalism) at the level of individuals who want to consentfully interoperate (and don't even know the word capitalism).
> Right now if I step out into the street, I can flag a taxi, I can buy a coffee. In each case these are direct peer to peer transactions, where the price is agreed between us based on what we both want out of the exchange
I agree that we can do this. I do not agree that this is, strictly speaking, capitalism.
Capitalism =/= the exchange of goods, services, and capital.
Capitalism is the system that says the people who own the property constituting the critical infrastructure of an organization - the "Means of Production" - should get to make all the rules. That's it.
If I own a big beef machine that turns cows into hamburgers, it doesn't matter that I need 50 people to run it and 200 people to box and ship and sell the patties, the fact that I am the person who had enough money to buy the big beef machine means that my word is law, period. If I don't like the way they touch my big beef machine, they go away. If they don't like how unsafe the big beef machine is, too bad. Doesn't matter how much I sell the patties for - I decide how much I pay you, and I keep the rest (not exactly peer-to-peer). I own the big beef machine, so my say goes.
I agree with you that trade will exist until the end of time, and has existed since the first time Ook had something that Grog wanted and Grog decided it was too much energy to kill Ook over it.
When I say I am "Anti-capitalist", I mean (among other things) that I do not believe Capitalism specifically is the best (most productive, least ethically repulsive) means by which to engage in trade.
None of these opinions relate to trade or even the concept of capital itself, but rather the means by which we organize it.
To the original quote: It is hard to imagine the end of capitalism, because people believe capitalism is a natural facet of human nature. It is not; it is a big beef machine.
Thanks for such a breakdown at that scale. I appreciate it. (sorry for my slow reply).
I think my view of Capitalism is over-indexed to the human to human level. Although as I zoom up to ownership and 1 to many relationships, it gets more complicated but still fits in my consent view.
Regarding your beef machine example. What you present as the owner having control over the others still seems like consent to me, in that for them consent is something they has to opt into. What I see is the leverage has changed. Ie the machine owner can chose to fire a worker. But that is them no longer consenting to work with that person. I guess we could say, 'but the worker consented to work in an environment where they thought they had some protections' for instance. Is that how you see it as being non-consensual, or am I misunderstanding?
The point on keeping the profits also makes sense to me still. If I want to take risk, I can start a business, where I reap the rewards and bear the losses. If I don't want to take risk, I can agree to work for a fixed rate, but miss out on the rewards.
For sure I can imagine to some people, they want to make a collective and share all (rewards/losses), but that still seems like either require opt in (capitalism / collective structure).
So it's no longer peer to peer, but still seems consensual at a 1 to many scale to me.
I think there is a natural valuation drop off at scale.
For instance if only one person sells coffee, I really want to trade with them. If 100 people have coffee, I'm not that fussed about an individual vendor anymore. Then they loose leverage and I gain it. Haha, sounds crass to write it in those terms, but sure you know what I mean.
Regarding this part:
> It is hard to imagine the end of capitalism, because people believe capitalism is a natural facet of human nature. It is not; it is a big beef machine.
Does my analogy of buying coffee from one person or picking from 100, fit in with the big beef machine dynamic you point out here? Or how come not? I don't think the analogies line up perfectly, but can't put my finger on where they don't align.
Separate line of thought (but to the same end), curious what you think: If humans are nature, and humans have capitalism, is capitalism not natural?
Haha, easier to talk about these things in real life, appreciate your time/efforts here anyway.
I am going to try to respond to the middle chunk later, because I don't really understand the lines you are drawing and how they map to my argument. In some sense, you are describing "The Market", which is another thing that exists outside of the means of organizing the resources. There are collective systems of governance that answer a lot of these questions, too!
To this, however:
> Separate line of thought (but to the same end), curious what you think: If humans are nature, and humans have capitalism, is capitalism not natural?
I don't care? Cancer is natural, Bifocals aren't. I don't think it's a useful framing on the question. My opinions would be the same on capitalism if it were a plot from the moon-beings of Andromeda IX vs. it being written explicitly written into our DNA. In the context of the quote, it is meant as in "It is not an objective facet of our existence, or something we must endure."
"“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
The framing of it as natural was to point out that you can't get rid of it. It would be like getting rid of people having favourite colours. We just act like that.
>"“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
This was nice to read, although following on from my first point (this comment), I don't think this analogy fits. Kings to capitalism I mean. Kings are one central top down authority, whereas capitalism has many spheres of power which pop up wherever there are humans clustered. It's nature.
I disagree. Capitalism is a very specific, recent invention. You are living out the actual quote. I don't care if its nature - in my estimation, it fucking sucks!
Your argument works just as easily for Kings, Slavery, and every other horrible thing humans have done to one another. Capitalism is not in any way, shape, or form necessary to human existence. It would be like saying that Prime Time TV is "Nature" and worthy of almighty consideration. I pray I get to live to see the end of all of the above in my life time.
I've said my argument about as cleanly as I can! It's a complicated topic, and I encourage you to continue reading about it.
I'd guess it's more recent, since it's more recently we scaled.
With slavery, there wasn't consent. So I'm not sure that's comparable.
> I pray I get to live to see the end of all of the above in my life time.
That's kind of my point though, you can do that right? There are lots of collectives and alternative communities where you interact with people how you all agree. Or if you have a different structure, you can start it. Or do you feel differently?
There is a definition difference. What Marx defined as capitalism is a pattern of post-feudal production after the industrial revolution. It means the transformation of quantities of surplus value from wage labor, and the qualitative transformation of the surplus into capital.
People typically respond with “well using money and buying stuff in a market is just natural law” etc which isn’t “capitalism” and indeed the first chapter of Capital is all about commodity-money and primitive markets and production. These things are all pre-capitalism and have existed for as long as civilization has.
Thanks.
In your view, if people want to get rid of capitalism, or live in post capitalism or whatever, do you think that's possible?
I still think you'd need to have consent, and you wouldn't get it as some people want to take risk but some don't so would opt for no risk but fixed - limited - reward.
I ask, as just as trading is long standing, so I'd guess would be a risk tolerance (and other tolerances which factor in).
I mean under Marx's definition I can easily envision a "non-capitalist" system where most economic activity is done by solo-entrepreneurs who own their means of production. This doesn't involve any wage labor being utilized. It's not socialism but there is arguably no labor "exploitation" which is the main moral argument I suppose, and frankly close to what a lot of libertarians imagine in their head as the ideal social arrangement anyway.
Communism is supposed to be socialized ownership of the means of productions. So yeah, in a communist world capitalism would be gone (duh). In fact, you don't even have to imagine it, just look at pre-agrarian societies.
If you're arguing capitalism naturally emerges from large societies, you have to prove it and explain why. You can't just claim it based on your surface level of modern economics.
And no, anti-capitalists don't think they can remove a few billionaires from their thrones and be rid of capitalism. Your idea that they do seems most uncharitable to them.
This is an old, unoriginal argument that is also completely baseless. According to this, people must have been living in tribes until the industrial revolution, right? And then capitalism just naturally emerged, of course. Not a single drop of blood was spilled.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with standards or the article, if that is what you are implying. The Internet, for example, along with the many standards that followed, is the result of government funneling money into the Pentagon, universities, and other research institutions. It did not emerge spontaneously. And then private enterprise has flourished on top of that baseline infrastructure, much of which is used unaltered to this day. If anything, we need more and up-to-date standards, not siloed proprietary technology that disappears on the whims of an acquisition or a bankruptcy.
> According to this, people must have been living in tribes until the industrial revolution, right? And then capitalism just naturally emerged, of course. Not a single drop of blood was spilled.
I didn't really want to wade into a pointless argument, but this is a very ungenerous reading. They didn't say any of the things you're implying they did. A system can be natural, inevitable, emergent and still require that blood be spilled to make it happen. Karl Marx certainly believed so.
Fair enough, if you admit that violence is part of that "natural" emergence of things.
I don't think my reading was ungenerous, though. OP wasn't even stating anything related to the article, mostly just spammed free market fundamentalism. That bottom-up argument etc. is entirely baseless and does not check with even recent history.
Yeah yeah, markets are a natural phenomenon arising from human nature itself and nothing can be done to fix the issues they cause, so we shouldn't even try. We get your argument, it's as old as humanity itself, and was used to justify feodalism, slavery, etc.
I have trouble even understanding your original comment.
First, I've yet to meet an "anti-capitalist" who believes its existence is enforced by a secret cabal at the top. They very much understand the material conditions that led to it.
Second, I reject your "function of consent/interoperability at scale beyond the immediate family/tribe unit". Take a look in your history books, societies have been organized in many ways that don't require accumulation of capital in the hands of a minority.
So, if your viewpoint is that capitalism is a natural state of things, I completely disagree, and there are many counter-examples throughout history.
That there are other systems doesn't mean one begets the other. Diversity exists. Thus your counter example point doesn't make the point you're alluding to. It's a straw man.
Likewise "who believes its existence is enforced by a secret cabal at the top" is another strawman.
Your comment make really little sense to me, I'm completely lost.
> The thing 'anti-capitalists' never seem to understand, is that it's not a top down system but bottom up emergent human behaviour.
They don't think that. Seems like a straw-man.
> A function of consent/interoperability at scale beyond the immediate family/tribe unit. Thus hard to see an "end to capitalism". That would be like an end to language. We'd just re-invent it.
Why? Are you claiming that any system would contain capitalism and thus we can never be rid of it? Because they are other systems without accumulation of capital in the hands of the few. Seems like an appeal to nature to me.
Top down is maybe the wrong term, but basically it's presented as one thing to get past, that wasn't opted into. That it's a thing in and off itself. That's my perspective. As I see it, people who don't like capitalism can just not do it - although of course then they will struggle to interoperate with others who are ok with it, but that's there choice.
> Because they are other systems without accumulation of capital in the hands of the few. Seems like an appeal to nature to me.
Can you share how they work, and solve the problem of different appetites for risk to reward/loss, and if they have consent?
As I see it people could opt in to a socialist structure, which seems fine to me as long as they are consentful (ie not trying to spread it forcefully onto others) and the participants are happy with still not having certainty.
But to answer your question, yes - at present it seems to me any system would have capitalism emerging as it's a function of our diversity. Aside from slavery and other non-consensual systems.
You don't need an anti-capitalist case for standards. The capitalist case for standards is that you don't want firms to succeed though manipulation of the market because it keeps them from competing in productive ways (i.e improving product or process.)
Energy that companies spend on dirty tricks and dirty trick defense is waste, and makes us all poorer. But you can't expect any particular firm to unilaterally give up an incompatibility moat, unless all of them do. Government stepping in to set standards is solving a collective action problem.
And standards can also be bullshit. No mention of the OOXML debacle.
"And so we return to where we started: the difficulty of imagining an end to capitalism. We do not claim to have a solution to that particular problem"
It's pretty funny to see such a blatantly biased article coming out of academia. Oh wait.
Meanwhile, I'll save my paychecks to buy the texts of some of those anti-capitalist produced standards.
In other actual anti-capitalist news, the NIH says we shouldn't have to pay twice for government sponsored research.
Standards are a bad thing. Convenient isn't the same as good. They mostly help large companies to monopolize large markets. Without standards, there would be a patchwork of companies catering to different communities. It would create a lot of work opportunities, lots of competition and there would be adapters to bridge between different interfaces. It would be more hassle but it would improve everyone's work life 100x and would probably result in faster technological progress as more people would be able to have capital to innovate, in a more flexible self-directed way.
All of the monopolies I can think of are built on the back of a proprietary solution and every "patchwork of companies catering to different communities" is seemingly enabled by a standard...
Look behind and you will find that this so called 'patchwork' all benefit a small number of centralized entities who define the standards, ultimately.
True decentralized communities do not require standards. They don't require global coordination.
The problem is that you don't even realize that they exist. If you're mainstream, your idea of decentralization is actually just a thin veneer. It's often all centralized behind the scenes. Made centralized using standards and an unhealthy obsession with cooperation on a global scale. Ignoring that small-scale competition is healthy and necessary to keep everyone motivated and doing the right thing.
Then they sooner or later fall victim to a big company like Microsoft with their three Es philosophy; Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
> Standards are a bad thing. Convenient isn't the same as good.
We successfully communicate on this bulletin board thanks to standards and protocols. We will be in the Stone Age of computers if it wasn’t for standards.
Who monopolizes floating point or electrical sockets? Whose lives would be improved if every product had a different, incompatible implementation?
I would actually go entirely the opposite direction and argue that many standards are so useful that it's inappropriate to lock them behind a paywall. They should be entirely free and public despite the costs to produce standards.
Small producers would benefit. Producers who produce solutions that are most compatible for a specific community would benefit from other solutions not being compatible.
In such system, everyone would be a small producer. So everyone would benefit. It would be much harder to move cities or countries but that would be a good thing. Everyone would have a great work life. Everyone would have an advantage within their community over unknown foreign producers. Equality of opportunity would be maximized.
The biggest problem in everyone's lives today is their job/career. People spend all their time working. So the system should be optimized to make workers' lives better, not consumers' lives. Capitalism already looks after consumers naturally. The government's job should be focused mostly on producers.
It's not right that every aspect of the system looks after consumers when they don't necessarily produce much social value. A lot of their income nowadays is subsidized by money printing, not the result of past labor as the myth suggests.
People and communities are not that different from each other, so I don't think the idea that each community would benefit from a customized local solution would work. You'd lose the benefit of economies of scale and add a lot of friction to economic activity for no good reason. The workers are also consumers, and would have to pay a lot more for everything because a huge amount of work would have to be duplicated everywhere in the economy, making things more expensive.
Large scale is good, the problem is who owns the large scale solution. When it's owned privately, it's easy to abuse such a position of power and workers and consumers don't get the full benefits of scale. The solutions should be collectively owned and managed.
A regional standard is still a standard, like the electrical sockets I already gave as an example. What you're advocating for is the absence of standards. Not having standards generally makes producing things harder because you now have to reverse engineer anything you want to be compatible with instead of just designing to the standard.
Giving people meaningless work like translating between one company’s “standard” to another’s is BS. For successful cooperation and trade you need standardized way of doing things. Languages are a form of standard way of communication. If it wasn’t for standard there won’t be civilization.
