Capitalism - Good or bad ?

[Mairead]

100. You really don't?

Wealth is whatever sustains, or can be exchanged for what sustains, life. If it doesn't or can't be, then it's not wealth. Thus wealth is situational.

We can see that clearly if we take the example of gold. Hereabouts, an ounce of gold can be exchanged for far more than 100 packets of seeds. But for someone on some remote island from which there is no prospect of rescue, a ton of gold would not be worth as much as even one packet of seeds, never mind 100.

Capital is wealth that exists in excess of current requirements. It need not be in private hands, and during most of human history it wasn't.

We can take the example of Polynesia, where in traditional economies, wealth is measured in yams and pigs. A village that works hard and produces a surplus of yams and pigs --their capital-- is a wealthy village because they can shift the focus of their work to some other goal and still keep going for some period of time. They can consume their accumulated capital.

A corporation, at bottom, is nothing more than a group of people. It's etymologically an "embodiment", a reified abstraction. It need not have a particular form of ownership. It can be a cooperative, where ownership and profit are distributed equally among the people forming it.

Steve Wozniak personally designed and assembled the first Apple. He could have continued to build them personally by hand, no corporation required. Or he and Jobs could have formed a cooperative corporation to produce them. There's nothing magical or foreordained about the fact that they didn't.

If you argue that Wozniak had integrated circuits and other technologies available to him, I'll agree. And I'll also suggest that we look back in history to see where they came from. And when we do, we'll find that all the underlying technologies came from achievement-oriented individuals working in sheds, not private-profit corporations owned by "money men".

Our current socioeconomic system is not a product of natural forces. It was organised by and for the benefit of psychopaths and greedheads, as anyone able to think about why we're in the fix we're in will inevitably conclude.

It's because it was organised by and for the benefit of the psychopaths and status-gamers that food, shelter, healthcare, education, and everything else are luxuries.

It's because our rulers are psychopaths that they're feel no remorse when people die because healthcare is a luxury they cannot afford.

It's because our rulers are psychopaths that they feel neither hesitation nor remorse when they send working-class kids to kill and be killed for a few cents more profit on the dollar, and then abandon the survivors.

There is no reason at all why, given the will to do it, we cannot change that deeply-pathological system to exclusively use communal capital to fund distributed-profit corporations.

As Mondragón demonstrates, such corporations are capable of doing the most cutting-edge research and the most complicated production.