The very fact that we are talking about student loans, inflation, destroying the dollar and income (wage-labour) means that we are talking about capitalism; though other actors within a capitalist economy by virtue of having more military or property power may influence a capitalist economy, it does not change the fact that it is a capitalist system nevertheless.
Nowhere did I claim that "free market" policies led up to this point, nor did I claim that government intervention didn't lead up to this point. However I did claim it was due to the capitalist mode of production and so far I haven't been refuted on that point.
I'm posting right now on what is by and large a forum hostile to anti-capitalist thinking; this is the very opposite of me being in an echo chamber.
Many "decent" jobs require at least a university degree, which almost always entails taking out a loan. So while you don't have to "pay" large amounts of money, you may need to loan it and then pay it back later.
>Don’t blame capitalism because capitalism would never support the artificial cost inflation caused by government intervention.
What is capitalism other than the system of predominant wage-labour, private ownership of socially productive property (supported by the state), capital accumulation and class society? The idea that capitalism cannot be blamed for the fact that people are required to obey the whims of speculators in the market, to tailor their ambitions such as to maximise wage rather than to pursue enjoyment and the replacement of relations between people with relations between commodities is absurd.
Capitalism "supports" whatever will make a profit; in this case, student loans turn profits. Why would this system of student loans not occur under government intervention? There clearly exist private loan agencies.
To be clear I'm not speaking in favour of the Cuban system, so please don't assume that I am.
I think it's possible to critique both systems; the American (capitalist) system in which you need to pay huge amounts for education in order to have the mere chance to get a job that's above sustenace wage, the system screwing over especially those who can't afford to pay back debt; the Cuban system in which your training is free of charge but you cannot apply your skills such that you receive above sustenance wage. Considering the doctors who are able to get into well-paying jobs alone, the American system seems to work better.
Another commenter remarked that the Cuban system is set up to keep the people at the top in power, the American capitalist system less obviously so. I wonder what other methods of Socialist organisation may be explored other than the capitalist wage-labour system we see in both Cuba and the US. The idea of labour vouchers has always been interesting to me.
I think your analysis is correct; regardless of one's personal sympathies it's important to get the terms correct when discussing these issues. I think the image of what Socialism is has been corrupted based on misinterpretations of its meaning, especially in my judgement in the US. The fact that some people are downvoting my comment perhaps shows how ingrained biases are, and I am very far from perfect having only read the major Socialist authors, so it would be nice to be corrected if anyone has such a correction - though I doubt I will be; HN and Reddit are similar in that "drive-by" downvotes are common.
I remarked elsewhere that the art of dialectic was at some point lost; in Plato's dialogues the method was used to free the other person's soul from contradictions by advancing questioning of their assumptions and models. On mass platforms this cannot arise, as one's reputability (which should be irrelevant) comes into question via the usage of downvotes, and further the downvotes do not advance the dialectic, they aim to put a halt to it. It were as if there were, in the time of Socrates, a man sitting at the table during a diologue who did not engage but merely remarked "That's wrong!" or "I disapprove!".
Your definitions of Socialism and Communism are almost entirely false and lacking in any reference to the founders of the movement, their usage in the disciplines of philosophy, political philosophy and sociology, and historical meaning.
Socialism since its inception was never about redistribution of capital gains, it was about the ownership of society's means of production by the working class, i.e those who survive mostly or entirely from the sale of their labour-power. This definition stretches back to even before Marx, as does Communism. Your definition of "Socialism" is what it is thought of in the US, i.e Socialism is where the government spends money on social programs which it acquires via heavy taxation. This, as many point out, is actually social democracy, a form of economic management practiced most notably in Scandinavian countries.
So if what I have said is true, you may ask: What is the purpose of the word "Communism"? The truth is that 19th century authors used the term "Socialism" and "Communism" interchangably; this can be seen in Marx and Engels, Bakunin and Oscar Wilde's works. Although they were separated into higher and lower stages, the practice of calling the lower stage as "Socialism" is an invention of Vladimir Lenin who sought to describe his country as "state Socialist" in an effort to convince people of the idea that the means of production were communally owned by the working class.
Communism is further not about party control; the idea of the vanguard party again originates from Lenin; but here we must make a distinction - Lenin did not seek to modify what his theoretical predecessors meant by "Communism", he sought to create a model of praxis, that is, to ask and answer the question of: How is Communism achieved? Lenin's own idea to this was the usage of the vanguard party, which is a group of highly educated Communist intellectuals which guides the masses of the working class toward revolution and Communism.
You are conflating Communism with praxis (thus making a category error) and further conflating that specific Leninist praxis with Communism in general. The evidence that this is a conflation rests in two facts: there exist and have existed through history democratic Socialists who not only used the terms "Socialism" and "Communism" interchangably as I have already mentioned but who sought to establish Communism not via representation of the working class themselves but via the normal methods of parliamentary democracy. An example of this praxis in use is various Socialist parties which compete in local and national elections in Europe and elsewhere. Further, there exist today several varieties of Communism, within academia the meaning of Communism can be stretched much father than you may have anticipated; Badiou writes, "where there is a State, there is Communism to oppose it". This is known as the Communist hypothesis.
On to the definiton of capitalism, the main factor is the private ownership of social means of production. By this I mean that the majority apparatus used to produce goods which society exchanges and uses are owned by individuals who seek to make a profit. This is echod by Smith, Ricardo, Marx and Keynes. Other factors which contribute to the definition include the predominant usage of wage labour and the goal of capital accumulation.
This leaves me to think why it is considered best practice to separate work and friendships. It's certainly not frowned upon in most places to make friends with your coworkers, to go for drinks after work or to meet up on weekends.
Interesting, the concept of dialectic stretches all the way back to Plato, even though Hegel (and later Marx) are most known for it. The Socratic dialectic operates by the principle of questioning, and through questioning internal inconsistency is shown. The most important part here however is that this dialectic wasn't a debate, it was conducted for the purpose of improving the "opponent"'s soul by freeing them of contradictions.
Whether this is possible now, I don't know, but I think it should be fostered. In the same way, I think attachment to views is the cause of many arguments, which I am guilty of engaging in.
The concept of dialectic is so powerful it was applied to many processes, usually as thought experiment. For example, Engels wrote:
>Species of grain change extremely slowly, and so the barley of today is almost the same as it was a century ago. But if we take a plastic ornamental plant, for example a dahlia or an orchid, and treat the seed and the plant which grows from it according to the gardener’s art, we get as a result of this negation of the negation not only more seeds, but also qualitatively improved seeds, which produce more beautiful flowers, and each repetition of this process, each fresh negation of the negation, enhances this process of perfection.
Quite often people don't get what they ask for; if they did then my point about politicians taking money would be completely moot; this is why direct democracy is gaining traction; having a direct democracy with rotating or random delegates seems to be a much better plan for democracy as it helps to rid ourselves of this problem.
Voters rarely make decisions as to who is in power; they are forced to select from a small group of candidates which have come so far already, and then a committee choses which candidate is best and makes them compete for election. I do not think that a system based on the agency of people rather than the agency of ideas is a good system.
Sometimes the voters don't actually get their say; a national organisation overrides their will. Sometimes the democratic pathways are blocked by media misinformation. These are problems of the situation in which democracy is placed, and they have been recognised at least as far back as Marcuse wrote in the 1960s. The problem is less to do with whether people get candidates in power, it's more to do with how well people are informed as to the true nature of their reality. It may sound as though I'm saying "people don't know what they want", but my intention is to advance to the super-democratic status of "people must obtain the information they need".
Marcuse puts it better than I ever could:
>The liberating force of democracy was the chance it gave to effective dissent, on the individual as well as social scale, its openness to qualitatively different forms of government, of culture, education, work--of the human existence in general. The toleration of free discussion and the equal right of opposites was to define and clarify the different forms of dissent: their direction, content, prospect. But with the concentration of economic and political power and the integration of opposites in a society which uses technology as an instrument of domination, effective dissent is blocked where it could freely emerge; in the formation of opinion, in information and communication, in speech and assembly. Under the rule of monopolistic media--themselves the mere instruments of economic and political power--a mentality is created for which right and wrong, true and false are predefined wherever they affect the vital interests of the society.
I agree that "capitalist democracy" is an oxymoron, but I come from the exact opposite side from Thiel; I believe that a democracy cannot function within capitalism when politicians can be bought off, and there is no democratic control over the economy, the economy being half of the societal coin; we accept democracy in matters of politics, but not in matters of economy, the economy having just as much if not more effect on our lives.
In my judgement it's not worse at all; we live in a world in which the content that actually has an impact on people is hidden no longer behind publishers but online centralised platforms; it is only appropriate that those publishers be held to a good standard by its users, as much as it is possible. But that's not the case; the situation is that the people who distribute the content are only beholden to the law and shareholders, both of which have very little to do with the largest and most socially important interest, which are the users.
Not that I support it, but if Twitter were a paid platform they would have more accountability to the users, not beacuse they have finally realised their place as a setter of massive trends and social control, but because the users hold the shareholders ransom by way of threatening to take away any profit.
Very much this, though I must also recommend his Comments on it, for the reader who has a hard time penetrating the critique. I have a short list of related books at the bottom of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15299592
>The ideas were certainly interesting, but had no real provable basis, and just seemed to be the reasoned expression of one author's individual sense of alienation - more like artistic expression than any real solution to the dilemma of civilization or consciousness.
An example to what you're referring to would strengthen your case, though my own experience has been almost exactly opposite; although many works are certainly difficult to read not only for the obscurity of the terms and the form of content used but also for their disturbing and socially challenging content, I don't think they rely on sloppy reasoning; take Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man for example; he speaks in terms the reader can identify with, not using formal logic.
For example, an enlightening passage on freedom under the idea of freedom of enterprise:
>Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. The technological processes of mechanization and standardization might release individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity. The very structure of human existence would be altered; the individual would be liberated from the work world's imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own. If the productive apparatus could be organized and directed toward the satisfaction of the vital needs, its control might well be cen-tralized; such control would not prevent individual autonomy, but render it possible.
As we can see, he uses no historical examples (at least not yet), he uses no logic or even dielactic. It's philosophy which prompts the reader to think about their own situation and what that freedom means to them.
Ultimately all action begins with the thinking subject; if we restrict ourselves to strictly empirical forms of knowledge then I think we throw out too much as it relates to how people actually live. I would much much much rather than we and academics continue to search and define boundaries, as almost everybody recognises the relevance of critiques delivered by the likes of Debord, Marcuse and Baudrillade on the social side of the Marxian coin.
That may blur the line between proletarian and bourgeois, but it does not invalidate the idea of class conflict within Marxism nor Marx's other critiques of capitalism such as commodity fetishism and alienation. Although you are very correct that Marx didn't anticipate modern financial phenomena, there has been active work within Marxian economics for the past 30 years about this, most importantly Anwar Shaikh takes it upon himself to do a semi-Marxist analysis of it in Capitalism, Conflict and Crises as does Kliman.
Somewhat off topic, but I'm becoming to realise that reading product pages like this is sort of like reading only the advertising pages of a magazine, but in this case I have the choice of what advertising I want to view; it's not enough to simply get information about the new system (I don't even have a Mac) but I need to be sold it as well. And the advertising is very impressive - strong colours, beautiful photography, crisp and clear screenshots and the "flat" icons. I can understand why there are so many people taken in by this advertising.
That's true, I have my parents if things go wrong; the thing is that before I started university last year my parents convinced me not to get a student maintenance loan (i.e what pays for my living expenses and rent). Instead I get a sum of money at the start of each month and that's supposed to subsist for the utilities in the house where I live and any other expenses I have, except rent which my parents pay. I have no children or dependents nor do I pay any taxes.
It's also true that I don't need a job, but I'm being pressured to get one for the idea that my parents will at some point stop giving me money, and that I need something to put on my CV/resume (I don't think Deliveroo is all that impressive personally).
My other options are things like working in a fast food joint, or something like a cinema. But I don't know if I can do that and fit in my education at the same time plus have some free time to relax myself, play a video game or whatever. It's honestly worrying and I feel pushed into a corner by all this.
You say that Deliveroo has shitty working conditions and I probably don't disagree (I know nothing of them), but I'm a second year university student and I'm being pressured to find a job by my parents while I'm here; Deliveroo seems like my best bet at the moment with flexible hours; I probably wouldn't be making any more than minimum wage elsewhere anyway.
I hope that's some insight as to why it's attractive to some people. If you know anything more about Deliveroo or other places I could look for jobs I'd be grateful, as it would really aid my search.
As a side note, I despise the way it is called the "sharing economy"; it's no sharing at all, and I wish this term were reserved for ideas I regard as more noble, like the gift economy, or a model in which people chip in a certain amount to a shared product on a large scale (such as democratic management of the economy).
Nowhere did I claim that "free market" policies led up to this point, nor did I claim that government intervention didn't lead up to this point. However I did claim it was due to the capitalist mode of production and so far I haven't been refuted on that point.