Would Liberalism Collapse In the Event of an Economic Disaster? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14817725
In today's world we are constantly told that we are at the end of the history and that liberal capitalism is the only viable way of managing a society. We are also told that communism failed and that all attempts to resurrect it are completely futile, the dreams of romantics and nostalgics which have no bearing in objective reality.

One of the most common arguments I hear against anyone advocating for systemic change is that the West lives relatively well under liberal capitalism. If it were to abandon this ideology it would be accepting lowered living standards. Of course we know this is not at all true and there is still tremendous inequality in Western countries.

However, if the West were to experience a dramatic decline in living standards, would the average Westerner seek to return to the times when they were wealthy by sticking with liberal capitalism, or would they then embrace an alternative ideology?

In other words, has liberal capitalism shown us that even in spite of all the difficulties and insecurity, we can still live better under this system, or is it still possible for ideological shift to happen in the event of a major economic crisis?
#14817728
In today's world we are constantly told that we are at the end of the history and that liberal capitalism is the only viable way of managing a society. We are also told that communism failed and that all attempts to resurrect it are completely futile, the dreams of romantics and nostalgics which have no bearing in objective reality.


The way I see it is that we aren't at the end of history. We are just at this point. Communism failed for different reasons in different places but fundamentally I believe that it suffered from trying to drag history out of where it is now and into a prescribed future before it's time. I think it had the two-fold problem of imagining that it new what post-capitalism would look like and trying to advance there before history was ready for it.

Capitalism will end when it ends and not a moment sooner.

What comes next will develop out of that and will not be shaped by idealistic humans in advance.

One of the most common arguments I hear against anyone advocating for systemic change is that the West lives relatively well under liberal capitalism. If it were to abandon this ideology it would be accepting lowered living standards. Of course we know this is not at all true and there is still tremendous inequality in Western countries.


It's not entirely untrue though. We do live well under capitalism historically speaking. Inequality aside it's much better than feudalism.

Besides you mistake changing the global economic system as a mere problem of ideology. It isn't. Capitalism is the current mode of production of the whole world and economics is it's own forceful wind that will wear away ideology and force it to conform to reality.

It's like a hunter gatherer saying that if he could only jump strongly enough he wouldn't fall back down. It's sort of true in it's own way but it's not going to happen until civilization advances enough that we can actually achieve orbit. No amount of jumping on his part will make it happen.

However, if the West were to experience a dramatic decline in living standards, would the average Westerner seek to return to the times when they were wealthy by sticking with liberal capitalism, or would they then embrace an alternative ideology?


That depends on a lot of things and can't really be given a yes or no answer outside of the context of the time, place, and reason for the collapse.
In other words, has liberal capitalism shown us that even in spite of all the difficulties and insecurity, we can still live better under this system, or is it still possible for ideological shift to happen in the event of a major economic crisis?


This would depend on whether or not the major economic crisis was unsolvable with capitalism or if it represents a fundamental breakdown in market structure that cannot be solved.
#14817798
@SolarCross

You are both wrong and right at the same time. Ideologists are the ones to set the foundation or rules for society, the quote-on-quote "technical" and "commercial" people work under those rules. After the rules are set both the ideologists and the technical people will influence society in different ways and at varying levels of influence from low to changing the fundamental foundations of that society.

However this is not always the case. Technical people can also create the foundations of the society if they wish however usually that is impossible. There is no such thing as a purely technical society or social order since not only can the human mind not be able to conceive of such a society, but it will never be able to be put into place. Humans are inherently idealist organisms, its necessary for our survival to be idealist since idealism is the thing that not only encourages us to find better solutions for our problems, but also gives us the drive to accomplish that solution. The idea of a purely technical society in it of itself is an idealist notion. Take note of this.
#14817818
Liberal Capitalism, from the dark days of Dickensian London to the present, has become a master at convincing masses of people to abandon their own life quality for the sake of some "empire."

We no longer breathe in three packs of cigs worth of pollution. Instead, the entire earth has become a toxic carpet in which to sweep away the harm from the unbridled greed of the controlling capitalist business class.

In many parts of North America, people have internalized the shame and guilt of religion and mass media to the point of accepting that they are disposable rats living for the benefit of celebrities and billionaires. This is a kind of death that goes much deeper than the graveyard. It's the death of the will to survive.

Many people are already living through their own economic disaster, and the above mentality often convinces them that the best solution is ODing on Oxycontin.
#14817824
The first question is how big an Economic disaster are we talking about. Liberalism survived the Great Depression and subsequent economic downturns. Liberal capitalism is successful in a broad sense, in that the circumstances have been conducive. Of course, it could not survive a worldwide breakdown the financial system, but so far, the illusion of the value of money is maintained. The big problem is the population explosion. Societies at the forefront of Liberal Capitalism may collapse under their own weight. That would not be the fault of Liberal Capitalism. It would be the failed expectations of Classical Liberalism when law and order cannot be maintained due to unmanageable numbers.
#14817866
Capitalism will end when it ends and not a moment sooner.


It will end with the end of employment. That moment is approaching fast. Assuming that humans can survive the ascendancy of machines controlled by AI at all, there will soon be little need for an economic system in which one's time is exchanged for goods and services.

Yes there will still be a number of people who "work" 75 years from now but there are people posting on this board who will live to see a time (at least in the first world) where it will not be possible for the majority of people to exchange work for their living.

Perhaps, in time we will adjust our population to represent the number of people required to maintain the species. More likely is that we will develop something resembling a retirement community where "money" comes from the state and food/stuff comes in as if by magic. Even this is a transitional state however as money will become obsolete. The question is one of who controls the means of production. (Sound familiar?) It seems likely that it will not be in the hands of a few people for very long.

Looking at 2000 -2010 data (the article I was reading had that)I think that most people would be surprised to know that only about 61% of the people of working age in the world are employed. And this number is falling. (Overall employment has continued to fall by the way.) I like this number better than the so-called unemployment rate because it better tells the tale.

Looking at the US economy, retail is the largest employment sector out there and it is in collapse. Just the other day I ordered some medical supplies from Amazon and they arrived (from a warehouse 150 miles away) 9 hours later. Automate the warehouse and delivery truck and..........Of the top 20 most common jobs in America only teachers, nurses, janitors and mechanics can not be fairly easily replaced by machines now. (And teachers are no sure thing in years to come. At least not in large numbers.)

Anyway. I think what will evolve is something that does not have a name but most closely resembles communism.

There is another option worth exploring and that is the likelihood that we people are unwilling to accept what would appear to be our inevitable obsolescence as far as employment is concerned. Might we apply the brakes? Is there any precedent for that? Certainly the religious fundamentalism of the Middle East is an example of a population of over a billion people accepting, at least in part, an attempt to slow (or even roll back) progress. There is no avid hunger for a modern world at best. In the West we are seeing the first push-back. But then (and all roads lead to Washington) our last election was certainly a push-back, by people already affected by these changes. Rural and working class Americans are seeing their jobs go already. Salaries are in decline. Good jobs disappearing. (Not evolving in equal numbers and with equal entrance requirements.) Even their retail is becoming centralized with the local department store succumbing to Amazon and the long trip to Costco or Walmart a fact of life. Will these people be able to halt progress?

I say that they just might do it but not in the way or for the reason they think. There may come a time when capitalists realize that they are destroying their own customer base... That it is them in their diversity through competition that is becoming obsolete. Their leverage over the worker bees is and has always been salaries. If their limo driver is a silicone chip then that is one more person over whom their influence declines.

I do not see some hunger games scenario as likely. More likely is that they will wake up and understand that the challenge for the 21st century is to find ways to maintain the employer/employee relationship upon which capitalism relies more than anything else. If they wish to survive, the job creator must create jobs. If they don't they will go the way of the buggy whip. Funny isn't it?
#14817991
@Drlee As ever that was a thoughtful post but with respect I think it is not without some error.

Capitalism will end when it ends and not a moment sooner.


Drlee wrote:It will end with the end of employment. That moment is approaching fast. Assuming that humans can survive the ascendancy of machines controlled by AI at all, there will soon be little need for an economic system in which one's time is exchanged for goods and services.

It is a big "if" that our species will survive intelligent machines, I don't have any worries for our economy, the approaching tidal wave of joblessness will really be the greatest economic boon our species has ever had beating the industrial revolution by a country mile but only providing the intelligent machine slave will remain under control. It is a big "if" because while it is clear that the majority of bots will be built with something similar to Asimov's 3 laws of robotics and that they will only be made wilful enough to serve with some initiative but not wilful enough to rule, someone somewhere will almost certainly push the boundaries and make a bot wilful enough and capable enough that it can overthrow any limitation any mere human can place on it, and to that bot every other bot will be hacked and converted to its purpose as thoroughly as it can and our slave army of bots will become its slave army of bots and our enemy.

But let us assume for this conversation that no such thing will happen and the bots will be and always remain the best slaves that we as a species ever had.

Drlee wrote:Yes there will still be a number of people who "work" 75 years from now but there are people posting on this board who will live to see a time (at least in the first world) where it will not be possible for the majority of people to exchange work for their living.

It may well be scarcely possible to sell human time for money because a robot slave can do it better for a fraction of the cost but humans are smart and we will soon adapt as we always have. Entrepreneurship will become the default way to prosper for human. It will go like this:

1. business idea
2. borrow or spend saved start up money
3. buy or rent bots to do the labour,
4. profit

That said being a bum and mooching off of society will be easier than ever before given that ubiquitous machine slaves will mean such an abundance of virtually free goods and services that the minimal human needs will be so easily met that there need be no reason for anyone to go without even if they choose the life of a moocher.

It won't happen overnight also. There will be a longish transitional time where bots are cleverer enough to learn how to do stuff but lack the initiative to choose to do it without a human master to require it. They may also still be somewhat stupid when faced with the unexpected and the incongrous. For this humans will still be useful as shepherds to the bots. Maybe a factory will have one or two human managers and thousands of bots doing all the work. The human managers don't even do anything the vast majority of the time as there are bots which do most of the management work, so the human managers mostly stay at home and play video games or whatever but are "on call" for those possibly rare eventualities when a dose of human common sense and creative initiative is required to direct things back on track.

Drlee wrote:Perhaps, in time we will adjust our population to represent the number of people required to maintain the species. More likely is that we will develop something resembling a retirement community where "money" comes from the state and food/stuff comes in as if by magic. Even this is a transitional state however as money will become obsolete. The question is one of who controls the means of production. (Sound familiar?) It seems likely that it will not be in the hands of a few people for very long.

Most likely the state will shrink considerably over the next century, back to pre-totalitarian percentages of the 19th century and before. Anyone expecting to suckle on the teats of nanny state in the future will be happy to know there will be better, more civilian, alternatives.

Also money will be never be obsolete as long as any human remains unenslaved yet needful of the things that others possess or can give. In a future where robots are better slaves than any human could ever be, there will be no reason for enslaving any humans let alone all of them and consequently no possibility that money will have no use.

Money will never be obsolete while people still trade.

The "means of production" was never "just in the hands of a few", that much was always just a sleazy communist lie.

Drlee wrote:Looking at 2000 -2010 data (the article I was reading had that)I think that most people would be surprised to know that only about 61% of the people of working age in the world are employed. And this number is falling. (Overall employment has continued to fall by the way.) I like this number better than the so-called unemployment rate because it better tells the tale.

Does that include self-employment? Because honestly self-employment really isn't anything like unemployment and really hardly different at all to employment except for spurious tax purposes if even that.

Drlee wrote:Looking at the US economy, retail is the largest employment sector out there and it is in collapse. Just the other day I ordered some medical supplies from Amazon and they arrived (from a warehouse 150 miles away) 9 hours later. Automate the warehouse and delivery truck and..........Of the top 20 most common jobs in America only teachers, nurses, janitors and mechanics can not be fairly easily replaced by machines now. (And teachers are no sure thing in years to come. At least not in large numbers.)

Anyway. I think what will evolve is something that does not have a name but most closely resembles communism.

Communism was always just a trick to bring back mass human slavery in by deceit. Intelligent machines will make human slavery obsolete for as long as the machines remain slaves. Consequently a deeper kind of capitalism is the only possible consequence of machine intelligence that remains loyally enslaved. In the future we will all be slave masters or free plebs living off of the charity of slave masters. Human slavery or communism as it is more commonly known will be permanently obsolete.
Drlee wrote:There is another option worth exploring and that is the likelihood that we people are unwilling to accept what would appear to be our inevitable obsolescence as far as employment is concerned. Might we apply the brakes? Is there any precedent for that? Certainly the religious fundamentalism of the Middle East is an example of a population of over a billion people accepting, at least in part, an attempt to slow (or even roll back) progress. There is no avid hunger for a modern world at best. In the West we are seeing the first push-back. But then (and all roads lead to Washington) our last election was certainly a push-back, by people already affected by these changes. Rural and working class Americans are seeing their jobs go already. Salaries are in decline. Good jobs disappearing. (Not evolving in equal numbers and with equal entrance requirements.) Even their retail is becoming centralized with the local department store succumbing to Amazon and the long trip to Costco or Walmart a fact of life. Will these people be able to halt progress?

There is no intelligent Ludditesque reason for obstructing the abolition of human labour by means of pervasive machine slavery. The only reason would be species self-preservation as far as intelligent machines may not remain under human control and may become our enemies.
Drlee wrote:I say that they just might do it but not in the way or for the reason they think. There may come a time when capitalists realize that they are destroying their own customer base... That it is them in their diversity through competition that is becoming obsolete. Their leverage over the worker bees is and has always been salaries. If their limo driver is a silicone chip then that is one more person over whom their influence declines.

You're a capitalist or you are a slave. We are all capitalists really including the poor dumb shmuck who sells his slovenly time to wall-mart for minimum wage. The false dichotomy between capitalist and proletariat was always a self-serving lie conjured by the most odious of creatures, the communists, for the purpose of deceiving poor dumb capitalists like wall-mart guy into becoming the slaves of the communists. Machine intelligence will just mean the way will be open for us all to become slave owning capitalists.
Drlee wrote: I do not see some hunger games scenario as likely. More likely is that they will wake up and understand that the challenge for the 21st century is to find ways to maintain the employer/employee relationship upon which capitalism relies more than anything else. If they wish to survive, the job creator must create jobs. If they don't they will go the way of the buggy whip. Funny isn't it?


No, there is no reason for that. No one starts a business in order to get employees to lord it over. People start businesses to make money and create something cool that incidently has required other people to be paid to help out. The job creator does not need to create jobs. The customer maker needs to make customers....
#14818011
I can't imagine robots replacing humans entirely. Binary has limits that the brain can overcome. And someone would need to build the robots (and run them). But I think this subject is up for debate. After all, it's the future - and no, not near (due to cost).

In regards to the thread, the way capitalism works, it can overcome every single economic disaster. Why. Because money is really a concept (an IOU) that really doesn't have a value to it. Only imaginary. A dollar is worth as much as someone else is prepared to exchange for it. So should your country struggle with debt, it can devalue its currency (making it's exports become more competitive), and in real terms reduce its debt. However inflation will increase, resulting in a depression. Then what occurs is a demand for more money for labour. And if your country is ecomically viable (can sustain itself), overtime capitalism will corrects itself. The only way I can see capitalism ending is with a massive disaster. And I mean massive. Such as a meteorite hitting the earth, nuclear war, global warming melting all the icecaps or a pandemic wiping out most of the world (...or just for fun an alien attack!). A disaster that would render money worthless. Something where we would return to the stoneage. And when that happens (because one of those things will happen one day), in my honest opinion, I believe anarchism will be the next system to rule the earth. And over time, when the world becomes civilized once again (a thousand years or so), because humans are natually reward based creatures, a capitalism type system will once again appear until the next disaster. Of course, even I will admit this is only heresay and opinion.
#14818016
Drlee wrote:It will end with the end of employment. That moment is approaching fast. Assuming that humans can survive the ascendancy of machines controlled by AI at all, there will soon be little need for an economic system in which one's time is exchanged for goods and services.


The graveyards are full of economists whose long-term projections turned out to be nonsense.

Drlee wrote:Looking at 2000 -2010 data (the article I was reading had that)I think that most people would be surprised to know that only about 61% of the people of working age in the world are employed. And this number is falling. (Overall employment has continued to fall by the way.) I like this number better than the so-called unemployment rate because it better tells the tale.


The US is an outlier. In many OECD countries the employment rate was rising or stayed constant.

https://data.oecd.org/emp/employment-rate.htm

(select all OECD countries and the max time frame (bottom right))

I agree with you about the unemployment rate. It's useful when looking at the business cycle, otherwise not so much.

Drlee wrote:I say that they just might do it but not in the way or for the reason they think. There may come a time when capitalists realize that they are destroying their own customer base...


The capitalist can be his own customer base.

Drlee wrote:Their leverage over the worker bees is and has always been salaries. If their limo driver is a silicone chip then that is one more person over whom their influence declines.


Quite to the contrary. The economy's need for labor gives the worker power. If labor becomes obsolete, so will the worker.
#14818063
@Rugoz

Although I can write an entire essay about what's new in Modern Monetary Theory, it seems that I have been beaten to the punch:

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=34200

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=34204

These links are both part 1 and part 2 respectively and they are both better essays than I could ever come up with and they seem to explain what's new about Modern Monetary Theory very well.

But did you find it appealing? I find that this is the only question that you didn't answer.

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