[liberty]

Gains through the stock market or other forms of money manipulation don't count.

Why wouldn't it count if that's what you do for a living?

So would laying off workers in America and then moving factories to "free trade zones" where workers make less than 2 dollars a day constitute an immoral act under your guidelines? How about billion dollar corporations paying less than a "living wage"? The things clearly cause harm to others.

1. The corporation that stays will probably go out of business because their competitor will leave and offer better prices. People will loose their jobs anyways and you will be hurting yourself, the workers, and your stock holders.

2. If you leave your workers in America will loose their jobs, sure. But you will be helping other poor countries. You will be helping your stock holders, you will be able to provide Americans with cheaper goods; thus they can save more money and build capital. You can't build capital without saving, that's why I don't consider America as a capitalist country.

You think someone will just sit their and yell I'm drowning if they know how to swim? I don't think so. Companies leave because of unions, taxes, and etc.

The first option is more of an immoral decision because you hurt everyone including yourself.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. I was simply trying to say that you can't say things have happened under communism if communism never existed.

The USSR wasn't communist?

It's well known that Marxists and capitalists have different definitions of value

Agree to disagree

I agree, I just think private property is the most harmful institution known to man.

Well, you believe money is the root to all evil and I believe money is the root to all good.

and that usually immoral acts such as killing are justified if it's to get rid of private property. There isn't a whole lot of difference between classical liberalism and ethical socialism besides the issue of property. Note, that this has nothing to do with my Marxism - I would support violent revolution even if I thought it was immoral, and so will every other worker, because it is in their interest to do so.

What would be best for your self-interest? It would be in your self-interest to have (or attempt) a peaceful revolution because if the violent one fails then you will go to jail. Also you could risk hurting your movement; people won't want to associate with terrorist and so on.

No you don't, you just need certain relations of production.

Under your definition the USSR would be a capitalist country, and they certainly were not.

How you build capital is through savings, period. That's why savings is in my definition.

I don't care about your definition of capitalism. To have capitalism you need savings, property rights, production, and exchange.

[canadiancapitalist]

You must have some source of money.

I have a few But that is EXACTLY the point. In a modern capitalist society there is so much wealth accumulated, even people like me who was raised by a single mother on welfare - cause yeah me, yeah me, I aint no fortunate one, yeah me, yeah me, I aint no senators son, yeah - don't really have to work if you're a little smart about things. That's the beauty of capitalism. It delivers everything that socialism promises, and so much more. All socialism delivers is poverty and death camps.

[TheGoatman1]

The corporation that stays will probably go out of business because their competitor will leave and offer better prices

So is the competitor being immoral? Does the competitors' immorality give the second corporation license to do the same immoral act for the sake of survival and stockholders?

if you leave your workers in America will loose their jobs, sure. But you will be helping other poor countries. You will be helping your stock holders, you will be able to provide Americans with cheaper goods

Helping WHO in the poor countries? The mistreated workers who don't make enough to survive and live in indentured servitude? or is it the elite of those countries? At least the stockholders will be helped out though. "well jim, we lost our jobs, but we can save $1.00 on plastic flip flops at walmart".

[Ademir]

The USSR wasn't communist?

Nope.

What would be best for your self-interest? It would be in your self-interest to have (or attempt) a peaceful revolution because if the violent one fails then you will go to jail. Also you could risk hurting your movement; people won't want to associate with terrorist and so on.

It would be objectively in my self-interest to own everything I produce, rather than have 98% it taken from me and put into my boss' bank account.

A peaceful transition to socialism is impossible. Any attempt to give the workers ownership of the means of production legally will fail because you can't use the capitalist-owned state to work against the capitalist class. This is why all those social democratic and labor parties that started in the 19th and 20th centuries have not only failed to legally construct socialism (assuming their intention was ever to do such a thing) but have mostly dropped the rhetoric of socialism entirely, settling for regulating capitalism (which is to the capitalist class' benefit, because it reduces social disorder). Some of them have even stopped doing that - in Australia, our "democratic socialist" Labor Party are basically neoliberals.

On the off chance that a particular party appears to actually be trying to legally nationalise all property for the workers, local right-wing forces will stage a coup, usually with US support.

The other option is seizing the means of production illegally aka an actual revolution. The only way this could be "peaceful" is that it MIGHT not require physical violence, but most people agree that stealing or seizure still qualifies as violence being that it is coercive. What is far more likely though, is that any such attempt will result in repression by the capitalist state, requiring the workers to take up arms in a type of civil war. And even then, if the working class wins, outside capitalist forces almost always invade. Any quick look at Russian, Middle-Eastern or Latin American history will show you this.

Under your definition the USSR would be a capitalist country, and they certainly were not.

How you build capital is through savings, period. That's why savings is in my definition.

I don't care about your definition of capitalism. To have capitalism you need savings, property rights, production, and exchange.

Under my definition, I'm not sure what the USSR was. I'm still deciding. But, I think it was either capitalist or a degenerated form of socialism. It most certainly wasn't communism. The definition of communism is classlessness and statelessness. Unless you can prove demonstrably that the USSR was not only classless, but not a state (haha) then it wasn't communist. You are confusing communism with having a Communist party in power legally.

I have a few But that is EXACTLY the point. In a modern capitalist society there is so much wealth accumulated, even people like me who was raised by a single mother on welfare - cause yeah me, yeah me, I aint no fortunate one, yeah me, yeah me, I aint no senators son, yeah - don't really have to work if you're a little smart about things. That's the beauty of capitalism. It delivers everything that socialism promises, and so much more. All socialism delivers is poverty and death camps.

So you're a prostitute?

[redcarpet]

No country is capitalist, thankfully. The US is a social democracy(mixed economy). Just leaner & meaner than its European counterparts.

[KurtFF8]

I'm sorry but I have to jump in late here and reply to something on the first page that is quite false.

Slavery and serfdom aren't economic systems. And in fact society was capitalist when slavery was practiced. The practice of serfdom and the practice of slavery are, in and of themselves, severe market distortions -- specifically regarding the property rights of the slaves and serfs themselves. Capitalism and socialism are matters of degree, they aren't flipped on or off like a lightswitch.

This is nothing but pure revisionist history based on a liberal understanding of the world that is quite false. Take labor, for example. Under Capitalism, there is a labor market, and labor is bought and sold freely: under feudal and slave systems that preceded capitalism, labor was not a commodity in the same sense nor was there a labor market. You're basing your assumptions on the idea that the market is a natural way to distribute commodities when history shows that to be quite false: that's what made liberalism (the ideology) and capitalism (the mode of production in place that the ideology attempts to justify) so radical for its time.

And the idea that Capitalism and Socialism are "matters of degree" is simply false and based off your ideology, not any actual understanding of how production/consumption/distribution of goods and services works.

No country is capitalist, thankfully. The US is a social democracy(mixed economy). Just leaner & meaner than its European counterparts.

Maybe this is true if you're talking to Ron Paul, but his understanding of economics has little to do with the production/distribution/consumption of commodities and he sees Capitalism as equating to: little government intervention in the marketplace.

This is the libertarian line and it presupposes quite a lot of falsities. (E.G. The market is the natural state of economic affairs, That government intervention is somehow the measure of what an economy is, etc.)

[proud communist]

Private property doesn't always mean capitalism necessarily although that private property may or may not control many means of production and a variation of control of the means of production throughout society is capitalist because no one can have "all" the means of production nor can everyone have "all" the means of production if it were capitalist. If you define your economic or social class based on "how much money you have" then you are wrong because all of that really comes back to and is defined by the amount of means of production you control. So if youre class is defined by your control of the means of production within society, and capitalism is the unbalanced distribution of control of the means of production in society and the social structure of that which i described above, then I would say the US is "capitalist" although there is always the "grey area" that complicates things. I already partially forgot the first, main question

[Negotiator]

No country is capitalist, thankfully. The US is a social democracy(mixed economy). Just leaner & meaner than its European counterparts.

Err ... with that logic, no capitalism ever existed.

Human beings had need for a social state from the very beginning, and all human societies have some form of social state, because thats the only way to have children in the first place.

So there was never a time without any kind of social state like structure in place, ever.

However, the USA has such an awful social state that not even human rights are satisfied, because social welfare is time limited. There is no time limit on human rights, and the USA is the richest country in the world, so there is no general shortage of the society that would justify the time limit either. Naturally, because of the time limit, the USA also has an extremely high crime rate. What are people to do without a job and without welfare aid in an industrialized country, anyway ? They only have the options to starve to death or steal.

Mind, I dont claim germany is much better. While our highest court has forbidden it, and it is against both our constitution and human rights, it is still general practice to shorten social welfare.

[CounterChaos]

The Problem of Production

One of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that 'the problem of
production' has been solved. Not only is this belief firmly held by people
remote from production and therefore professionally unacquainted with the
facts - it is held by virtually all the experts, the captains of industry, the
economic managers in the governments of the world, the academic and notso-
academic economists, not to mention the economic journalists. They may
disagree on many things but they all agree that the problem of production
has been solved; that mankind has at last come of age. For the rich countries,
they say, the most important task now is 'education for leisure' and, for the
poor countries. the 'transfer of technology',
That things are not going as well as they ought to be going must be due to
human wickedness. We must therefore construct a political system so perfect
that human wickedness disappears and everybody behaves well, no matter
how much wickedness there may be in him or her. In fact, it is widely held
that everybody is born good; if one turns into a criminal or an exploiter, this
is the fault of 'the system'. No doubt 'the system' is in many ways bad and
must be changed. One of the main reasons why it is bad and why it can still
survive in spite of its badness, is this erroneous view that the 'problem of
production' has been solved. As this · error pervades all present-day systems
there is at present not much to choose between them.
The arising of this error, so egregious and so firmly rooted. is closely
connected with the philosophical, not to say religious, changes during the
last three or four centuries in man's attitude to nature. I should perhaps say:
western man's attitude to nature, but since the whole world is now in a
process of westernization, the more generalized statement appears to be
justified. Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as
an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a
battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself
on the losing side. Until quite recently, the battle seemed to go well enough
to give him the illusion of unlimited powers, but not so well as to bring the
possibility of total victory into view. This has now come into view, and
many people, albeit only a minority, are beginning to realize what this means
for the continued existence of humanity.
The illusion of unlimited power, nourished by astonishing scientific and
technological achievements, has produced the concurrent illusion of having
solved the problem of production. The latter illusion is based on the failure
to distinguish between income and capital where this distinction matters
most. Every economist and businessman is familiar with the distinction, and
applies it conscientiously and with considerable subtlety to all economic
affairs - except where it really matters - namely, the irreplaceable capital
which man had not made, but simply found, and without which he can do
nothing.
A businessman would not consider a firm to have solved its problems of
production and to have achieved viability if he saw that it was rapidly
consuming its capital. How, then, could we overlook this vital fact when it
comes to that very big firm, the economy of Spaceship Earth and, in
particular. the economies of its rich passengers?
One reason for overlooking this vital fact is that we are estranged from
reality and inclined to treat as valueless everything that we have not made
ourselves. Even the great Dr Marx fell into this devastating error when he
formulated the so-called 'labor theory of value'. Now, we have indeed
labored to make some of the capital which today helps us to produce - a
large fund of scientific, technological, and other knowledge; an elaborate
physical infrastructure; innumerable types of sophisticated capital
equipment, etc. - but all this is but a small part of the total capital we are
using. Far larger is the capital provided by nature and not by man - and we
do not even recognize it as such. This larger part is now being used up at an
alarming rate, and that is why it is an absurd and suicidal error to believe,
and act on the belief, that the problem of production has been solved.
Let us take a closer look at this 'natural capital'. First of all, and most
obviously, there are the fossil fuels. No-one, I am sure, will deny that we are
treating them as income items although they are undeniably capital items. If
we treated them as capital items, we should be concerned with conservation:
we should do everything in our power to try and minimize their current rate
of use; we might be saying, for instance, that the money obtained from the
realization of these assets - these irreplaceable assets - must be placed into ii
special fund to be devoted exclusively to the evolution of production
methods and patterns of living which do not depend on fossil fuels at all or
depend on them only to a very slight extent. These and many other things we
should be doing if we treated fossil fuels as capital and not as income. And
we do not do any of them, but the exact contrary of every one of them: we
are not in the least concerned with conservation: we are maximizing, instead
of minimizing the current rates of else; and, far from being interested in
studying the possibilities of alternative methods of production and patterns
of living - so as to get off the collision course on which we are moving with
ever-increasing speed - we happily talk of unlimited progress along the
beaten track of 'education for leisure' in the rich countries, and of 'the
transfer of technology' to the poor countries.

Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher (selected from chapter one)