There is no such thing as capitalism.

wolly.green

wolly.green

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There is no such thing as communism, socialism or capitalism. There are only problems we face, and policy solutions we propose.

Labels like Communism and Capitalism exist as mere conveniences. In reality, societies are nothing more than an accumulation of policies, designed to solve particular problems. Sometimes they are designed with some ideological impulse in mind, but the problems themselves are objective. And whether policy solutions work is also objective. Ideological impulses bare little on what works, and what does not.

Between each system, measures of success may differ. Capitalists might use gross domestic production as a measure of success, while Socialists might use inequality and standard of living as measures of success. Regardless, measures are just as open to scrutiny and criticism as the solutions that are proposed. Thus they too, are objective and are therefore independent of ideology.

What are your thoughts? In particular, I want to here what @Ren and @charlatan has to say.
 
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Capitalism seems more natural, outside immediate family, and communism seems more natural inside family units.

For example, you'd use your vehicle principally to GAIN goods/money FROM others, but principally to GIVE benefit TO family members.
 
These systems only really serve as cages for which people are slaves though one at least does provide some measure of choice and a standard of living the other can only dream of but at a high cost. I do wish people were capable of working out something better than these binary choices for which people are forced into one of two camps. It is really annoying really to deal my own age demographic that buys into communism never realizing just how oppressive the system is while in turn to encounter the exact opposite with the boomer generation where money and status is all. I wish there was something else.
 
I don't see how any measure is more objective than the ideologies which use them.

Where does this measurement occur? In the action of a man, or in whatever he's measuring? In the parietal lobe? In the atoms? Somewhere in between? Speaking of objectivity is useless inasmuch as we can't show the one object but only its iterations.

If there is no such thing as capitalism or communism, then there is no such thing as a measure. If there is no such thing as a measure, there is no such thing as light.

Has anyone ever seen light? I see bright lights, dim lights, red lights...a colourblind person sees different iteration of light than me, and so does a man with glaucoma. The only commonality is that there exists a certain reference point of "light" that constitutes the bridge of meaning. But apparently nobody has ever seen "light" which exists purely as an abstraction. Nor have I ever seen "cup", despite having two of them right in front of me. They are made of different material, are different size and shape. The essence of a cup is what isn't there - the capacity for holding liquid. The problem is, of course, these same things are exactly what knowledge is.

Ergo, I have solved epistemology. Everything is a lie, but a truthful lie.
 
wolly.green said:
There is no such thing as communism, socialism or capitalism. There are only problems we face, and policy solutions we propose.

Labels like Communism and Capitalism exist as mere conveniences. In reality, societies are nothing more than an accumulation of policies, designed to solve particular problems. Sometimes they are designed with some ideological impulse in mind, but the problems themselves are objective. And whether policy solutions work is also objective. Ideological impulses bare little on what works, and what does not.

Between each system, measures of success may differ. Capitalists might use gross domestic production as a measure of success, while Socialists might use inequality and standard of living as measures of success. Regardless, measures are just as open to scrutiny and criticism as the solutions that are proposed. Thus they too, are objective and are therefore independent of ideology.

What are your thoughts? In particular, I want to here what @Ren and @charlatan has to say.
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I partially agree with you. I wouldn't say that they don't exist, but rather I would say that these isms are general formulas for policy solutions - for a specific example, the neoliberalism policy situation is to make the state to be as passive as possible for any given situation. They are all general formulas for policy solutions (and formula on a Te fashion, actually).

Sadly, a lot of people who govern or end up in power are very dogmatic - and usually they even bully the non-dogmatic people as a "self-interested centrist". Since they are all dogmatic, they appear to be objective when speaking and at surface, but they aren't actually - what tells them what is objective or not is their dogma, not reality, data or statistics, which are used only when they support the dogma. I really wish that there were more people beyond the dogmas that did had an actual objective approach for the problems. The indexes that you are mentioned are somewhat objective - like GDP, inequality - but the dogmas tells you which ones you need to look at and others you need to dismiss, and there are people who falsify these indexes in the name and for the sake of their specific dogmas and isms.

I would really like to see a truly objective government that would take in account many indexes and would either not be so tied to an ideology or use an ideology that has the "solutions depends on time, place and dynamics" phrase on it or something alike. But I highly doubt that is going to happen anytime soon.

Wyote said:
Nothing exists, we are all just label monkeys
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So, if INFJ type doesn't exist and is just a monkey label as well, doesn't that mean that this forum is totally non-sense XD?
 
wolly.green said:
There is no such thing as communism, socialism or capitalism. There are only problems we face, and policy solutions we propose.

Labels like Communism and Capitalism exist as mere conveniences. In reality, societies are nothing more than an accumulation of policies, designed to solve particular problems. Sometimes they are designed with some ideological impulse in mind, but the problems themselves are objective. And whether policy solutions work is also objective. Ideological impulses bare little on what works, and what does not.

Between each system, measures of success may differ. Capitalists might use gross domestic production as a measure of success, while Socialists might use inequality and standard of living as measures of success. Regardless, measures are just as open to scrutiny and criticism as the solutions that are proposed. Thus they too, are objective and are therefore independent of ideology.

What are your thoughts? In particular, I want to here what @Ren and @charlatan has to say.
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'Ideologies' or 'Weltanschauung', or whatever you want to call them, typically aren't just 'labels' applied to arbitrary groupings of ideas and policies, but descriptors (albeit imperfect ones) for systems of thought which exhibit an internal logical accordance and help to structure the understanding and experience of the people who subsist within them.

There is, unfortunately, no getting 'out' of having some kind of 'ideology' or 'worldview' (or whichever of its many synonyms you wish to invoke), simply because the axioms we adopt have natural affinities with other ideas and perspectives, leading to the creation of the epistemic structures we might term 'ideologies' over time. Suggesting that 'having no ideology' is possible is like imagining that the fish can live outside the water, or the man outside the atmosphere - these are the physical substrates within which they exist, and ideologies are simply their epistemic analogues.

Suppose that you believe in 'evidence' - in doing so, you've already invoked all of the concepts upon which 'evidence' is founded: causality, the reliability of observation, the existence of an objective reality, &c. Before you even blink you are swimming within an ideological substrate which in this case we might call a 'scientific paradigm'.

I do not see the utility in pretending that 'ideologies' don't exist, or that we can avoid them - this just leads to the implicit acceptance of more subterranean and unquestioned ideologies like individualism, consumerism, or what have you. There is no 'ideological vacuum' to which you can retreat.

Even if you manage to divest 'capitalism' and 'socialism', say, of their political associations, and to utilise them as something like 'technologies of statecraft', you will still have to apply them from within the logical strictures of another, more basal ideology (otherwise how would you even have 'political goals'?).

The policy 'problems' you refer to are only 'problems' as such because the logical descision-making matrix within which we live has pumped out that answer. Indeed, if we engage in the counterfactual exercise of imagining scenarios whereby these aren't 'problems' at all, actually we find that the process is quite easy, and, again, ultimately ideological at bottom.

For instance, one of our 'policy problems' might be that half of the population are dying of plague. That's only a 'problem' if we value these lives; if we submit to the idea of living in states; if we submit to the idea of a social contract, &c. &c. ad infinitum. We might just as easily say that we believe in Malthusian population controls and leave them be. The point is, however, that in every case, the 'problems' are only construed as such because the unspoken, ideological substrate within which we live have deemed them as such, and that this substrate can never be escaped.
 
I don't have a ton to add other then that I get a little tired with how chunks of the American left are using the term 'capitalism' to describe current issues that people have faced since time immemorial. Ed: They're using capitalism as a catch-all term instead of trying to hash out the specifics of what is going wrong. Capitalism might put it's own specific spin on how these issues manifest but some of these problems that people may have have always existed and likely will always exist in one fashion or another. In that way I think what you're saying has a point but I'm a bit confused on where you want this discussion to go.
 
Sidis Coruscatis said:
The essence of a cup is what isn't there - the capacity for holding liquid.
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But then a cup and a tank would have the same essence :thonking: My impression is that you're talking about the concept of cup, not the essence of it. I don't think the slippery notion of 'essence' is required here.

@wolly.green I think this is linked to the mistake you're making in your OP. You start from the notion that capitalism, communism etc. are immaterial concepts, unlike the concrete/measurable policies they involve. But this doesn't mean they don't exist. Of course they don't exist in a physical sense, they can't be perceived by the senses etc. But the same could be said about any concept.

The fact that you can tell capitalism and socialism apart implies that there is such a thing as capitalism and such a thing as socialism. If they were both equal to nothing, you couldn't compare them and examine their differences.

wolly.green said:
Labels like Communism and Capitalism exist as mere conveniences.
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Any label is a convenience, since names are conventions. You're not talking about capitalism and communism here, but about the actual names 'communism' and 'capitalism'. Hence confusing the signified with the signifier.

Whenever you actually refer to the signifiers, as in the rest of your post, it's actually quite clear that you yourself admit their existence and the (objective) differences between them.
 
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Ren said:
The fact that you can tell capitalism and socialism apart implies that there is such a thing as capitalism and such a thing as socialism. If they were both equal to nothing, you couldn't compare them and examine their differences.
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Ren said:
Whenever you actually refer to the signifiers, as in the rest of your posts, it's actually quite clear that you yourself admit their existence and the (objective) differences between them.
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By God, you're right
 
Ren said:
But then a cup and a tank would have the same essence :thonking: My impression is that you're talking about the concept of cup, not the essence of it. I don't think the slippery notion of 'essence' is required here.
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Maybe. The essence of abstractions is in their vagueness. :thonking:

I remember @John K talking about this in some other context (Taoism maybe). Anything that can be defined absolutely has to be non-material, considering all material is mutable. But at the same time, any absolute definition can still be understood relatively.
 
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