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What is better than Capitalism?
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Dog 3000
Dog 3000
4611 posts

Marx again
Sep 10, 2003, 19:11
I didn't want to get too deep into criticizing Marxism cuz it's such a huge and complicated topic.

Clearly the Internet is not simply a "tool of the r-c" since it's given birth to thousands (millions?) of "countercultural" websites, file-sharing which is breaking the back of the record industry (and soon movies and other forms of media) etc. It's totally decentralized and therefore resists top-down control. To view it in "materialist" terms (a bunch of hardware manufactured for profit) is to miss the whole point.

As for Marx predicting the future -- he said more or less "the contradictions of capitalism will cause it to fall and be replaced by socialism" -- that sounds like he's saying he knows how the future will turn out to me. At least many of his followers use this idea to claim that the fall of capitalism is "inevitable," which it isn't, unless you think he could predict the way "history" is going to turn out.

At any rate as I said earlier, "capitalism" is a loaded term that comes straight out of Marxist analysis. I really don't think it exists anymore than you think "communism never existed because Lenin-Stalin-Mao didn't really implement Marx's ideas." And the idea that billions are starving because of "capitalism" is a stretch since most developing countries aren't even close to "capitalist" (some of the worst starvation on earth is in N. Korea.)

What we DO have in most of "the first world" is a system where market forces determine prices and distribution. No, it's not a "free" market in the absolute sense, but such things are relative. It is "freer" than state-centric "communism" or whatever you want to call the systems that base themselves in Marxist ideology.

I am basically a believer in individual choice above all. "Market driven systems" allow for the most freedom of choice. And as I also noted earlier, "markets" and "profits" have been a feature of human society since the beginning of civilization -- long before Marx declared "the age of capitalistm."

Bottom line: if you don't like the choices people make, then that is basically a problem with humanity itself, not caused by some anthropromorphized boogeyman "system." If you want to change it, as someone else here put it you have to "educate" and "be a role model." The only alternative is force, which defeats the purpose.
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