[American biased post, because that’s what I know and where I am]
Been screaming that capitalism is not the problem you are experiencing. Monopolies, or more to the point, cartels, have exploded in scope over the past 40-years. Think of a company you hate, a company that’s fucking you over, a company that’s fucking us ALL over. Bet they fit the bill.
Hate your job at Lowe’s? Go to Home Depot! wait… There’s a great family-owned, local hardware store, but I can’t afford to shop there.
Walgreens piss you off? Just go to CVS! well damn… New local pharmacy chain is really nice! They can’t take my insurance.
If you’re under 40, or maybe even under 50, I cannot relate how alien this all is, the words fail me. If you’re in your 20s or 30s, it’s easy to think it was always like this. Oh hell no it was not.
Along with allowing corporations unlimited political “speech”, i.e. campaign contributions, the proliferation of cartels will go down in history as America’s failing point. (Basically the same thing?)
News like the current entertainment mergers didn’t fucking happen. And here on lemmy we’re talking, with a straight face, about the ups and downs of the Netflix/Warner Bros./HBO merger. And if you’ll remember, Warner Bros./Time Warner/AOL was the largest merger in US history!
Wrong community.
You’re just describing capitalist inevitabilities
Everything in the post screams unfettered, unregulated capitalism as the underlying cause since it’s the system that allows and promotes this behavior.
Also as a 40+ year old, I can remember that this has been the case too since I remember the wal-marts moving in and killing every local business with everyone smiling about cheap Chinese goods. Same as it ever was.
Well, unfettered China will soon take over, since they don’t have the same issues.
I’m not even a China shill, I was very critical of China until.
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I got to see reports from my boss, his son, and some YouTube videos on how they are actually advancing, and how decent their society is becoming.
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I see how awful our countries are in general. (except Finland, Denmark, Norway, etc).
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Realize that they are wimning regardless, there’s no way we are overcoming their momentum. Say what you will about how good some country is, but this is no good! One country rulling the world is terrible, a recipe for the end times.
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The bitch is that we need to not only overcome capitalism and the right, but also the brand of liberal consultant that makes 6 figures a year blaming bad actors in defense of the system that makes them.
Uncharacteristically self-aware of you to post this in the shitpost community.
There’s a paradox I heard of that’s pretty relevant in this line of thought that is pretty transportable to most things. I heard it in the context of IT security.
It goes something like this: you buy security and after 2 or 3 years when you need to renew, nothing bad has happened, so it seems like you don’t need security. When in actual fact the extra security has been the reason there haven’t been any incidents.
So it’s almost impossible to prove that buying the security is helping without extensive analytics.
In many cases those analytics are either very difficult or impossible to get.
To demonstrate the transportable nature of this concept, let’s transpose it to vaccines.
If everyone is vaccinated, then nobody gets sick from those diseases, making it seem like the diseases are not a threat anymore, which means that vaccines are no longer useful.
Meanwhile, in all actual fact, the only reason why polio is so rare is because there is a safe and effective vaccine for it that everyone has taken (replace polio with whatever disease you want that has an effective vaccine).
It’s a paradox of: how do we prove this is working, without discontinuing it and possibly being eaten by rats/leopards/whatever.
If there’s only monopolies in the market then is their product the best on the market, or is everyone using it because there’s no alternatives?
Leaning that monopoly argument against capitalism, it’s almost certainly not the best product. When you have a captive audience, those that need your service and don’t have an alternative, there’s no incentive to innovate, or invest in improving the product at all. Do innovation stagnates so that corporations can maximize shareholder value; because the focus of a corporation isn’t to innovate, or improve what they do, their focus is always on extracting the most value for the least cost.
Therefore, monopolies will almost certainly lead to a sub-optimal product. The people that suffer for this are the users of that product. In the case of something like Google search, that’s basically everyone.
There’s a more modern term for this phenomenon: enshittification. Actively making a product worse specifically for the purposes of creating profits for shareholders.
Late stage capitalism is fun, isn’t it?
Monopolies are bad in every sector with the exception of software development. Let me explain:
When you produce 5 cars, you have 5 cars. That’s 5 times as good as 1 car. So it makes sense to produce more cars.
When you have 5 programs (that each do the same), you have effectively 4 redundancies and you could get the same work done with 1 program. So, 5 programs is worth just as much as 1 program, and the other 4 are a waste. So it is more efficient to only write every software once. This also reduces bloat and confusion. For example, if iOS and Android had more common code basis, it would probably be better for everyone.
Consider this meme, but with products instead of standards:
This is why monopolies make sense in software development. Google developed a lot of software, including Android, which doesn’t need to be developed 10x times by 10 different companies. It only needs to be developed once. That’s the difference between hardware (cars) and software.
Google based Android off Linux. Apple based IOS off BSD. Both of those were the result of collaborative work between thousands of millions of contributors.
Frameworks exist that assist in making apps for either or both, just like they exist to build games for multiple consoles etc.
Meanwhile, Google has now declared that they will require developers register signing key WITH THEM in order to make software that will run on Android (regardless of whether it’s installed via their store or another) and has been taking steps away from providing the the necessary codebase under AOSP etc that allow for third-party projects that were based on Android
Google has also transitioned readily to “rent” based services such as YouTube while killing off Google Play Music etc (such actually allowed purchases/downloads of media). Both companies are already heavily investing in generative AI.
Do you think that once they have control of all app signing they’ll allow apps that circumvent their advertising or data-harvesting?
This doesn’t “make sense”, it makes us pay more to a digital landlord who throws around their weight to lock us in further and further while using their increasing wealth to buy up or crush all the competition. We’re accepting chains of convenience today in trade for restrictions and exploitation tomorrow.
I can think of one company that holds a dominating market position and has been somewhat benevolent, and that’s Valve. They don’t buy out competition, they’ve been active contributors to open-source (to the extent that they’ve made gaming on Linux actually viable and good), and they often seem listen to their customers in order to improve. They still do take a goodly % of sales revenue from developers who list with them though.
The real problem is people. It doesn’t matter which system you live under greedy shitty people will find every loophole they can to increase their own wealth especially if the consequences aren’t seen or felt. It’s not being evil it’s just how people are.
if your instinct is to blame human nature, you are wrong. i mean, not wrong that human nature is flawed, but wrong in that you are effectively arguing there can never be a solution to anything.
solving problems requires tackling the human element. and often times means holding people accountable.
I didn’t mean to imply that there can’t be solutions, only that there can’t be solutions that don’t account for most people being selfish assholes.
Oh! then we agree, unregulated capitalism was very dumb.
Is that Cory Doctorow?
Neoliberals didn’t do this solo.
The real problems is problems.
But that is the inevitable outcome of capitalism.
It’s like saying “the problem isn’t kittens, it’s cats”.It’s more like saying “the problem isn’t the several aggressive madmen with loaded guns shooting at you, it’s when the bullet hits you that’s the problem”.
Sort of.
I was trying to highlight the clear inevitable outcome, rather than highlight who to blame.
Oh, that’s fair.
Small local businesses fuck over their employees too. Capitalism incentives it. It also incentives monopolies. And it seems when the wealth disparity gets large enough, it captures government and starts transforming into fascism.
The fundamental argument here is that it’s not the system which incentivizes abusers that is the problem but rather the abusers who exploit the system. Sure, we can have another working class revolution, keep capitalism around and build institutions that keep exploitation in check but given enough time those with capital and the power that it represents will chip away at those institutions, continuing the cycle and harming people in the process.
a system that does not account for abuse will fail. but let’s not be so defeatist. society may go in cycles of rise and decline. we just have to stretch the rise and force the reset early enough to mitigate the harm. and while what comes after the next revolution may fail eventually, the good times should be fought for none the less. and be ever vigilant to remind those whom we entrust power that the leviathan sleeps as long as it’s cared for.
This would happen under any system since power-hungry narcissists are everywhere, so sooner or later every society would run into these issues. My statement is not meant to defend capitalism but to rather state the question on how to prevent or diminish these kind of influences from power-hungry people, independent of the underlying economic system.
Capitalism encourages narcissism. It strives on it. Corporations themselves are narcissistic entities. A system not built on individualism and greed would help.
Simply create a system where it is impossible for a single person or faction to have enough power to do this kind of harm, and be constantly vigilant against any erosion of the safeguards.
It’s extremely simple when said in this way, but it’s also nearly impossible in practice.
“capitalism is not the problem. The problem is capital and it accumulation.”
Yeah. Great propaganda bro.
What are you talking about? Capitalism is a wonderful system that works perfectly fine!
…as long as there are established guardrails that hamstring nearly every facet of it. Perfection!
Same as a cow, without fence them come shit in you r bed without remorse.
Tell us about your economic system that doesn’t eventually funnel money to the top. To date, not a single person on lemmy has answered that question.
Systems are there to solve the human problem, but there is no system that can’t be eventually over come by people and gamed.
so what do you do?
you take on the mind set that nothing is everlasting. you stretch out the good times and you nip the bad times in the bud. maximize responsible individual freedoms, minimize group power. and when the system is no longer able to resist being gamed, you tear it down, and start anew. maybe every 5 generations or so
What id call modern democratic socialism makes use of cooperative economics. Both state run and stateless socialism (cooperatives) have already proven just, fair, equitable, sustainable, innovative …
Humans lived in what could be described as a sort of primitive communism for most of the species history.
Basically, the society needs to be decentralized. If you can keep it sufficiently non hierarchal, there isn’t a lot of power people can get over many others. A problem I see with this is defending against large, centralized, outside organizations. So, I guess you’d need some federation-like structures. Some communes are pretty democratic and decentralized. The Zapitista territories are the best example I know of, of a large non-hierarchal federation of communities.
Depends on your definition of funneling money to the top. You need a decentralized economic system designed not to behave like late stage capitalism.
One example of this is Parecon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics
Honestly though, most of our problems are not driven by our economic system so much as our culture. You have to face that just about everyone worships greed whether they like to admit it or not.
In the US it is extremely pronounced and we even have idolized phrases about it like “fuck you money”. Where you have enough money that you can do whatever you want and you no longer have to follow the rules.
There is obvious a problem with our culture, but it is not just the US. Fascism is pretty much everywhere and even the most progressive countries still have huge wealth gaps that are always slowly widening.
Democracies cannot exist with large wealth gaps unless the wealth is aggressively kept out of politics. This is extremely hard and that is why the majority of all policies in all governments all over the world are driven by corporations.
That’s easy! A post scarcity society where everyone’s basic needs are fulfilled and working is fully optional. Somehow we also solved religious and ideological differences, greed, fully renewable and unlimited energy and all the other things too.
Why does it have to be a single economic system? The answer isn’t an existing economic system because economic systems are broken from the jump. The answer is a constantly evolving system, moving toward the betterment of all, not the betterment of the few. Capitalism may have been the economic system for the Industrial Revolution/subsequent time—I think that’s up for debate, but any pro capitalist will tell you it’s great for innovation (which, nah, but sure let them have it). But after the period in which capitalism helped people progress, its time was over. We should have moved past it to keep it from getting corrupted. But we haven’t and look where we are now
That is a total non-answer, zero proposals, zero meat on the bone. So, still, no one has answered the question.
So your point, if I can describe it, is that the system should be amended. It’s a Ship of Theseus matter. How much can you change capitalism before it’s not capitalism?
We’re basically saying the same thing, minus any bootlicking on my part. I’m saying if you have a constantly evolving system that has different values and a different focus, capitalism should have basically been “bred” out of existence at this point. We’ve reached industrial satiation. Rapid expansion is now a cancer, not a benefit. But, like in the body, growth and change are natural. But when the individual parts start outgrowing the world, you’ve got a cancer. And that’s the stage of capitalism we are at. But, as you and I have both said, if you had amended the system as time went on, we wouldn’t have capitalism today.
Just because you don’t like an answer doesn’t mean it wasn’t given. And it’s quite obvious that the only answer you’re willing to accept is “capitalism is the only economic system that can allow us to not live as animals”, even though that’s demonstrably false, so I don’t know why you want people to do your research for you other than ego and immaturity.
There’s not one as long as cluster B personality disorders exist and are allowed in positions of power.
Communism is supposed to be what you’re describing, but it only works on paper.
