Marx is incomplete. That doesn’t mean non-capitalist economics stopped with Marx.
Comment on Flowchart for STEM
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 1 month agoThe assumption of capitalist-like structures is for a good reason. Because there is literally zero practical evidence that scarcity can exist without them in scalable economies. If you require scalability in the presence of scarcity, you will have markets, you will have currency, you will have competition, you will have investment, and so forth. At best these things can be mediated by centrally planned state capitalism.
The overwhelming consensus of the past century regarding Marxist economic theory is that it is incomplete at best because it takes a very naive view of scarcity. Where Marx requires revolution and then a bunch of hand waving, modern revisionism requires harm reduction and the gradual whittling down of scarcity over time. Historical materialism is certainly a pretty useful economic lens, but Marx really goes off the rails in the prescriptive conclusions he draws from that analytical framework.
frezik@midwest.social 1 month ago
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Yes, that’s exactly what I am saying, but this is what MLs tend to believe.
jlou@mastodon.social 1 month ago
Marx ≠ anti-capitalism
There are other modern anti-capitalist argument derived from the classical laborists such as Proudhon.
Markets ≠ capitalism
In postcapitalism, we can use markets where appropriate. We have practical examples of non-capitalist firms with worker coops and 100% ESOPs.
There are theoretical mechanisms for collective ownership that can be shown to be efficient like COST.
There are theoretical non-market democratic public goods funding mechanisms
@sciencememes
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Yes of course there are syndicalist models as well but these things are still fundamentally different approaches to harm reduction. Capitalism is a boogie man bad word for a number of different economic forces which are inevitable in the face of scarcity. Don’t get caught up in linguistic pigeonholes. The point is that we seek to meditate and mitigate these forces, not that we worship some particular dogma which pretends they can be eliminated.