Subj : Capitalism vs. Corporatism
To   : Boraxman
From : Kaelon
Date : Mon Jul 18 2022 13:50:57

  Re: Re: Recession to Depressi
  By: Boraxman to Kaelon on Mon Jul 18 2022 08:57 am

 > This is what Capital wants though.  It wants protection, it wants to use
 > power. Why would people who work with Capital not wan't to rig the system in
 > their favour?  They have the capital and the power, so they can.  You expect
 > them not to?
 >
 > I don't see a difference between "syndicate corporatism" and "capitalism".
 > The latter must lead to the former because that is how power is distributed.
 > Capital, not producers, win the power contests so the state bails them out
 > at the expense of producers.

This is an interesting conversation, and I hope you don't mind if we debate it a bit further.

I think true Capitalism, including the "free hand" of the market, needs freedom in order to function properly.  Which means it also needs the freedom to fail.  At some point in our history (most likely, the Copper Speculative Bubble of 1908, which resembles a lot of the same Cryptocurrency Bubble we have now), the wealthiest investors started to leverage their tremendous assets to co-opt banking institutions to create insurance models that would, in essence, create soft-floors for failure.  This should have been thwarted then and there.  But it became the foundation for how our society enabled the rampant speculation of the 1920s, and how it rebuilt our entire economic global order following the Great Depression.

Corporations today are not engines of capitalism or innovation.  They are syndicates of vast capital control, and resemble nothing like the intentions of true capitalism -- which were not single-man corporations or self-employed persons.  Remember, after all, that the modern corporation traces its origins to the Dutch Corporations of the late Middle Ages and the Italian Banks of the early Renaissance.  They had shares, shareholders, risk-taking, reward-sharing, and all of the hallmarks of true opportunity pursuit.  What we have today is nothing like the original corporations, because they have become so deeply interconnected with our institutions - especially our fiduriary controls and our political organs.

One might argue that following the Great Depression, the only way to mobilize all of society to combat both imminent economic institutional collapse and to defeat geopolitical threats, was to unite the pillars of commerce and government into a single corporatist continuum.  This was certainly the approach of the Fascists and Communists.  I would argue it's ultimately what happened in the Western - now Global - Order, in that Democracies learned how to harness and unify the economic structures to unite military and industrial components to thereby coopt commerce for political aims.

If that's the case, then, is there any way to unwind this Corporatist Dystopia in which we find ourselves?  Or has the dream of a true Capitalist Restoration gone for good?
_____
-=: Kaelon :=-

---
 þ Synchronet þ Vertrauen þ Home of Synchronet þ [vert/cvs/bbs].synchro.net

.