Comic Strips

Housing costs double before you get home

Everywhere wants a tip. It's insane to me.

There's a difference though. To the extent that a communist society fails in it's goals, it's because of people's failure to achieve them.

The problems with capitalism are inevitable consequences of the system. Competition is theoretically supposed to keep things in check, but that just doesn't really pass the smell test for real life. We essentially never have markets that work like the mythical economic model of many sellers and many buyers so that nobody can be a price setter. Plus, competitions are meant to be won. Companies aren't working to keep each other in the race. The goal is to drive out your competition and become a monopoly. Maybe there are brief periods where things stay competitive, but even small differences in success can compounded to further solidify your advantage, in turn making it easier to keep doing that. And that's just if everything started our fairly, which it obviously didn't.

Then there is the divide between capital and labor. In order for there to be wage workers, there must be a population of people who don't own what they need to keep themselves alive. Otherwise there wouldn't be capitalists, there would just be people using their own property to produce their own goods. And once we've established that this is a necessary part of capitalism, we have to acknowledge that workers wanting to be paid the most possible and to buy things for the cheapest possible is in direct opposition to the capitalist's need to pay workers as little as possible and sell their goods for as much as possible. This isn't some anomalously evil behavior, it's the kind of optimization required to be the winner in the market competition. So even if you had a benevolent capitalist who decided to pay more and sell for less, they would just lose to someone else who is actually playing to win. And thus in the long term, the system filters out this altruistic behavior as a natural consequence of it's mechanisms.

Furthermore, this need to divide capital from labor is in tension with the possibility that people could just take the stuff you're hoarding. Because if they have nothing, you have an abundance, and you're just one person, then it'd be the rational thing to do to take the stuff without having to work for you. Thus, in order for this divide between capital and labor to be maintained, there must be a concept of property rights that is enforced with some kind of organized violence, either by the state or by private security.

The other symptoms of capitalism naturally flow from these core principles.

• Corporate capture of the political system? Aside from the state existing to enforce private property rights in the first place, the inequality created by the outcomes of competition and the capital/labor divide creates power imbalances that can be used to influence governments more than those with less power.

• Climate change and environmental destruction due to over-consumption? You don't make money from selling less stuff or from paying for things you don't need to pay for. So you do things to induce demand like advertising, planned obsolescence, and influencing policy to kill green energy and public transportation, etc. There's no reason for a corporation, a profit maximizing machine, to do anything that wouldn't optimize it's profits. If it did anything else, it would lose to someone who did do that.

• This meme: Privatization of public goods. If there is something you could make a profit from, a corporation must exploit that thing to maximize profits and win the competition. So there is an incentive to take things that aren't commodities and turn them into commodities. This is sort of related to the divide of labor and capital as well. In order to be able to sell people things, they need to not have those things and not have a means of acquiring those things outside of buying them from capitalists, which in turn means needing to work for capitalists. If you had adequate access to food, housing, water, clothing, and medical care, you'd have no reason to buy those things from capitalists and would therefore have way less of a reason to put up with working for them. So those things must be withheld. This is also part of why there has been a problem with loneliness and the destruction of communities. Communities support each other. If your friend is willing to drive you to the doctor (or better yet, if there's public transportation), you don't need to call a taxi/ride share. If someone is willing to help feed you when things are going bad, maybe you don't need to work another shift at some shitty job. If you have people you can enjoy socializing with by just talking or doing some free activity like taking a walk in the park, then maybe you don't spend money to buy as much entertainment as you would if you were alone. Maybe you don't have a social media account or don't spend a lot of time on it just so that you can get some kind of socializing.

These are all bad things done to us by bad people. But the problem isn't that the specific people in power happen to be bad and ruin what would otherwise be a good system. The bad people being in power is the inevitable end result of the system.

Capitalism would work if everyone played fair and all members of society were able to make informed decisions. Unfortunately businesses are always allowed to lie and cheat their way to success because they hold the power through capital.

Comminism would work if everyone played fair and all members of society were able to make informed decisions. Unfortunately the communist party is always allowed to lie and cheat their way to success because they hold the power through purity tests.

Most systems would work a lot better if they didn't require all participation to be in good faith.

I'm like 3/4 of the way through it and yes. I'm surprised at all the turns it's taken already and just how floaty the characters are. Probably a lot of parallels with how I understand the author's life got in the 60s. ☮