: : There would have to be a compact of mutual trust before any different economic arrangement would represent an improvement over capitalism. That's why many of the participants in this forum are in favor of "one big union."
: It is those kinds of vague, nonsense answers that diffuse your argument. Mutual trust? How many of you would blindly accept this in any form? What guarantees would you need or want? This kind of mutual trust is a silly notion based on personal relationships that can not work unless each person takes responsibility for one another....when you can figure out how to do that.....then start talking. It should take you about five hundred years....start with Israel and Palestine.
No-one is suggesting that healing conflicts like that would be easy. Yet trust exists in collectives and co-operatives throughout the world. Witness the strength of the Co-operative movement in Britain. Since the days of the Chartists, non-heirarchical collectivism ("unions") have spread across the world. I'm not suggesting that they are perfect, especially when heirarchies creep in. On the whole, they work.
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: : : Again capitalism, money, "greed", "profit", "commodity lust": whatever you want to call it, produces inovation and technology.
I'm not a Christian, but I would point you to one of the more famous aphorisms: "What profit it a man if he should gain the world but lose his soul?".
Firstly: state a causal link between innovation and capitalism. I might be able to accept your statement if you said they had common roots, but to say that capitalism is the moving force behind progress, or to equate capitalism with a desire for profit, is as wishy-washy as anything here.
The perversion of the profit motive that we know as "capitalism" is essentially a short-term phenomenon, insofar that the drain on material resources is unsustainable in the long term. Our children and our childrens' children will hold us accountable for a lot of the environmental degradation they have to put up with. To use a mechanical example, it is like subjecting an engine to maximum overload - you may get a short period of very high performance, but you also end up with a heap of scrap metal.
: : It is people in their roles as intelligent thinkers who have produced innovation and technology, and in their roles as capitalists, they have merely tried to "cash in on" innovation and technology. Social innovations, such as the Bill of Rights and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, have to my knowledge not netted any direct profit to any capitalist, and there are plenty of people I know who "innovate" technologically in order to make their lives easier, regardless of the possibility of profit coming from such innovation. No one, here or elsewhere, has persuaded me that such innovation is entirely dependent upon a capitalist system.
: What is the benefit to innovate, if I am not pressured to do so? Why not get nice and big and fat and stale.....or I suppose that this apparent unionism will result in an elevation of the human spirit to innovate and all work together.
See Samuel's reply on this. The Academy of Plato was not a profit-making venture. Einstein worked as a clerk. Count the things that humanity has produced, not for profit, but for pleasure.
: ....Capitalist systems force innovation based on market share...it actually results in better made products at lower prices....The incentive is real....because it often requires investment to develop...the only incentive is return.
Did Turing work for profit? Were Keats or Owen or Dante inspired by money? Not everyone is "in it for the money". Capitalism engenders exploitation by the demand for better products at lower prices - your trainers may be comfortable and cheap, but are only so because someone further up the chain is being paid a pittance for a hellish job.
Gideon.
