My first paragraph was not a defence of capitalism, it was a description of how competition inevitably leads to lack of competition and then the death of capitalism (and return of feudalism with a rentier class).
This is not an ideology by the way, it’s a law of nature. Since wealth accrues to wealth (wealth is an attractor in the system), we have that wealth distribution follows a power law. This is sometimes known as Pareto’s law or the 80-20 rule, but it generalizes to many natural phenomena such as rain puddles or the sizes of craters on the moon.
So it’s not capitalism that pushes us towards authoritarianism and autocracy, it’s human beings playing follow the leader (and taking shelter under the largest tree), just as they did under feudalism in the Middle Ages or during the Roman Empire or the despotic civilizations of the Bronze Age. Likewise, we saw totalitarianism in all of the communist regimes of the 20th century.
With perhaps a few exceptions, the only major systems where we saw proper freedom and human flourishing were with the autonomous indigenous civilizations of the past and under the capitalist liberal democracies of the 20th century. In the former case, those indigenous civilizations failed to defend themselves against colonization by autocracies (the Romans in Europe, the Mongolians and the Chinese in Asia, the Russians, the Mayans and Aztecs in central/south America) due to small size or they survived long enough to be colonized by Europeans in the age of sail.
Those indigenous systems are often held up by anarchists as evidence that anarchism without domination can work. However, for any system to succeed it must be able to withstand and defeat attacks both internal and external. The assumption that all people will fully believe in a system and only work toward upholding it is naïve Utopianism. After all, why do we need any system at all if you can just assume that everyone agrees to cooperate?
So then it should be obvious that capitalist liberal democracy where the spirit of free enterprise and wealth mobility are kept alive is extremely worthy of being protected. The present situation marked by wealth consolidation and a slide towards authoritarianism is not the inevitable outcome of capitalism, it’s the result of a concerted attack against the system by autocratic forces.
This attack has been made possible by a steady erosion in trust for institutions, many of which were accidents of history. For example, loss of trust in the mainstream media (newspapers etc) is an outcome that resulted from technologies such as the internet and social media. The internet first destroyed the classified ad business via sites like Craig’s list, forcing newspapers to cut journalism costs to stay afloat (and beginning a downward spiral in trust) and then social media gave rise to click bait, heralding in a new era of yellow journalism. This loss of trust in the media is one of the biggest contributors to the rise of trumpism and far right populism, and a big reason why things have gotten so precarious now.
My first paragraph was not a defence of capitalism, it was a description of how competition inevitably leads to lack of competition and then the death of capitalism (and return of feudalism with a rentier class).
This is not an ideology by the way, it’s a law of nature. Since wealth accrues to wealth (wealth is an attractor in the system), we have that wealth distribution follows a power law. This is sometimes known as Pareto’s law or the 80-20 rule, but it generalizes to many natural phenomena such as rain puddles or the sizes of craters on the moon.
So it’s not capitalism that pushes us towards authoritarianism and autocracy, it’s human beings playing follow the leader (and taking shelter under the largest tree), just as they did under feudalism in the Middle Ages or during the Roman Empire or the despotic civilizations of the Bronze Age. Likewise, we saw totalitarianism in all of the communist regimes of the 20th century.
With perhaps a few exceptions, the only major systems where we saw proper freedom and human flourishing were with the autonomous indigenous civilizations of the past and under the capitalist liberal democracies of the 20th century. In the former case, those indigenous civilizations failed to defend themselves against colonization by autocracies (the Romans in Europe, the Mongolians and the Chinese in Asia, the Russians, the Mayans and Aztecs in central/south America) due to small size or they survived long enough to be colonized by Europeans in the age of sail.
Those indigenous systems are often held up by anarchists as evidence that anarchism without domination can work. However, for any system to succeed it must be able to withstand and defeat attacks both internal and external. The assumption that all people will fully believe in a system and only work toward upholding it is naïve Utopianism. After all, why do we need any system at all if you can just assume that everyone agrees to cooperate?
So then it should be obvious that capitalist liberal democracy where the spirit of free enterprise and wealth mobility are kept alive is extremely worthy of being protected. The present situation marked by wealth consolidation and a slide towards authoritarianism is not the inevitable outcome of capitalism, it’s the result of a concerted attack against the system by autocratic forces.
This attack has been made possible by a steady erosion in trust for institutions, many of which were accidents of history. For example, loss of trust in the mainstream media (newspapers etc) is an outcome that resulted from technologies such as the internet and social media. The internet first destroyed the classified ad business via sites like Craig’s list, forcing newspapers to cut journalism costs to stay afloat (and beginning a downward spiral in trust) and then social media gave rise to click bait, heralding in a new era of yellow journalism. This loss of trust in the media is one of the biggest contributors to the rise of trumpism and far right populism, and a big reason why things have gotten so precarious now.