You can turn blue in the face sifting through all the wonderful labels people have constructed over the years. Let's keep things simple.<p>Either you're for a direct command and control structure, you want a mix, or you want free markets. It doesn't matter why you want that, in the end, it boils down to those 3 options.<p>Self-organizing cooperatives are not anathema to free markets. As long as some jackass somewhere isn't making them mandatory, I think they're fantastic and I'm a Capitalist with a big C. Open source software is a perfect example.
The whole idea of capitalism is to make it possible for people like you to experiment with different ways to organize and sell your work. If one method works really well for you - thats great. So I would say you are a capitalist enjoying the freedom in the free market. That includes the freedom to play small "s" socialist.
Hello Reginald, my name is Martin. I believe that society should promote a meritocracy where a person's success is highly correlated with their work ethic and abilities and that people should reap the rewards/losses of their risks. I used to think that made me some kind of right-wing type, but according to the current political climate, I'm actually a socialist too. Go figure...
Heh, collectively ownership and decision making would be great, only it's impossible in our world. There will always be a person who has more influence over others, therefore making him the leader.<p>Capitalism is kind of like advanced socialism, since everyone IS compensated based on merit or amount of work, only most people aren't ambitious or want to put in the amount of work that others will (i.e. not everyone wants to "maximize their potential"), therefore creating the inequality.<p>The exact same happened in the USSR, actually, and what did they do? They just put those uninterested people to work on the same jobs, for the same pay, as those who actually liked working there, and that brought the overall productivity down, because why would anyone work better and faster if the slacker next to him gets paid the same for half the work?<p>But hey, everybody had jobs, right? Problem solved! :-)<p>Capitalism would work amazingly well at advancing society/humanity and making individuals wealthy and happy IF every single one of them would want to always maximize their potential and do their best at everything, but sadly that will not happen very soon (or at all)...
> They generally share the view that capitalism unfairly concentrates power andwealth within a small segment of society that controls capital and derives its wealth through a system ofexploitation.<p>Capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism, etc, all end up like this, where power and control remain with the few.<p>You can't force or educate out human nature. Self-interest always ramains.<p>But people keep playing their games. Always looking outside, trying to change the world, rather than within. And they fail, fail, fail, over and over again. Same shit, different flies.
If I had cancer and science showed chicken soup could cure it, I'd take the chicken soup over chemotherapy. When I have the flu I'm not thinking chemotherapy. Marx talked about those with nothing to lose but their chains. People in the U.S., Europe, the West, are not in that situation. Chemotherapy has saved lives and people have won revolutions with Communist leadership.
The world's most economically successful and secure states today (China and Russia) would best be described as fascist or nationalist. The socialist states of Western Europe and the mixed economy of the US are in debt up to their eyeballs and careening through a series of financial crises.<p>So it will be interesting if in a few years, people start calling themselves unrepentant fascists. Probably the word itself won't be rehabilitated, but you may see more and more people declaring that the Chinese and Russian states provide a better business model than the failed American and European models.