This is trying to say much the same as the last post in a much less formal and much briefer manner
The point of praxeology is to make our axioms, suppositions, hypotheses, observations, and deductions obvious and open to criticism, so we can progress our understanding as we encounter new events and new understandings.
Capitalism is a set of social organisations of ‘forms’ or ‘systems’ of life
Human life occurs within interacting systems. The basic system on which all others depend are the planetary ecological systems. The capacity of human life depends on the functionality of these systems.
Propositions on Profit
Monetary profit seeking does not seem to be a sufficiently complex concept to drive a functional economic system. [People have many aims beyond profit.]
Monetary profit seeking appears to drive non-functional or even pathological systems, which delete human capacities, reduce most humans to machines for cheap labour, set up plutocratic forms of government and induce confusion and ignorance over vital information and understandings of problems.
Whatever pro-corporate economics says. there are no externalities to the planetary system, and any economics which considers pollution external to its own working, will cultivate non-functionality and death. It is useful to remember Ruskin’s idea of illth. Profit seeking will often produce externalised illth.
Continual enlargement of profit, company or economy is likely to be impossible, and should be treated with suspicion as generating non-functionality and destruction.
Freeloading
Freeloading seems inevitable in profit seeking and profit enlargement economies, and is harmful to social development, constructive co-operation and ecological functionality
Prices
Competition is imperfect and difficult because of the information system, and because of risk (companies are not providing exactly the same products).
Historical Digression: Trajectories of Capital accumulation
Differences in access to capital accumulation are not just the result of virtue, or productive talent as claimed by most pro-capitalist economic theory, but of a history of violence, theft and murder.
The advertised benefits of capitalism have largely been brought about by worker co-operation, threat of revolution and by becoming a market. The benefits have not been brought about by capitalists.
Proposition: Human Competition and Co-operation
Humans are both competitive and co-operative. Most pro-capitalists economics ignores co-operation between the wealth elites, against the working classes, but its important.
Propositions on power and economic action
Wealth is a basis for power.
Capitalism generates a situation of unequal wealth and hence unequal power – especially when the Wealth elites co-operate against the ‘lower classes’
Proposition: ‘Crony Capitalism’ and ‘State Capture’ are inevitable
Crony capitalism is normal and leads to State Capture or State Takeover – plutocracy. Capitalists use their wealth and power to shape the State to serve what they think are their best ends….
Wealth gives power, liberty and capacity; and inequality of wealth gives inequality of power liberty and capacity.
Siding with the elites
Some working people side with the capitalist class through taking managerial positions – however this may not lessen their vulnerability.
Power in the ‘Marketplace’
Power differentials affect market transactions and satisfactions.
Information system
Capitalism inherently confuses the information system by using it for advertising, PR, lies, etc., and by doing so, lowers that system’s capacity to provide useful and accurate information. This undermines the response of the wealth elites, and the polity as a whole, to real problems.
Information mess likely exists within most corporate bodies as well as in the more public sphere.
The information system is confused by normal action, so that various forms of market and social collapse are usually surprising.
Markets, Relationships and Trust (Morals?)
Human non-capitalist economies are as much about relationship and co-operation as monetary exchange. Exchange of money may defeat relationship.
Uncertainty and experimental politics
Uncertainty is normal in life and information incomplete even in the best circumstances. Hence policies should be regarded as experiments rather than as dogma. Attention should be paid to after-events in order to refine the actions and understandings.
Returning to systems
We live within systems. Individuals appear in systems of interactions.
The primary political need seems to be to recognise that we need functional ecologies in order to have functional economic systems, functional political systems and so on. Tending to ecologies is a fundamental political act that needs encouragement.
If we kill, or unrecoverably disrupt, our ecologies then the likelihood of us humans having much of a future severely diminishes….
