I have written a bit about capitalism in the past . In this post, I'd like to put the idea in the context of how it relates to other elements of our society, past, and present. Here is a great Wikipedia article on capitalism. I love the way it puts capitalism in a historical context. The relatively modern view of capitalism seems to have emerged with Marx, who viewed it as an inherently evil and doomed system. These days, defenders of capitalism present it as the exact opposite of "socialism", which is seen to be evil in all its variations. It helps to avoid all the moral outrage and take a look at what capitalism is and why some like it but others don't. The issue is about ownership of the means of production, along with ownership of "profits" arising from that ownership. We are bothered by the fact that the "owners" are a tiny minority of society and the rest of us slave to make the rich even richer. To me, this system seems to be built...

Koestler was a master of analogies. He talked about magnetic storms, where everyone's "moral compass" swerves from "True North" without us realizing it. The visual image of this led me to think of humanity as a bunch of iron filings around a magnet.  One of the striking things in this image is the fibers of filings - the way they bunch up and line up head to toe under the influence of the magnetic field. Looking closely, you see that each fiber has its own little magnetic field, resulting in the textured pattern. I've given a lot of thought to the way humans "click" together, usually in "pseudo-persons" like corporations. This image invited me to consider another kind of alignment, the 'head to toe" relationship being the way people are connected, especially "transactional". A special case is a network of "perverse incentives" created by the social environment itself. Here's an example: We don'...

Socialism and Capitalism are both ways of combining theories of value with practices "on the ground" which purportedly reflect these perceived values. SOCIALISM It seems that Socialism pays special attention to three value-related concepts: "Fairness" in the system of allocating things of value . This needs to be unpacked a bit since there is a different concept, also called "fairness" in capitalism. The two concepts are so different that we can see part of the dispute as encouraged by a problem of language. The same word used in opposite senses, as in " newspeak ". Equal influence on public policy. The "government" should act on behalf of all citizens and not be dominated by a certain segment. Being "rich" should not equate to being politically powerful. One person, one vote, not one dollar one vote. Since "Socialism" is fundamentally a political world view , "socialists" are, of course, willing...

Thieves of State " Thieves of State " is about a particular form of society - sadly perhaps the most common form of society - a kleptocracy. "Thieves" goes into a lot of detail about how individuals are drawn into (assimilated into) this form of society ("dragon"). The examples allow us to drill down to get a close-up view of how assimilation takes place, how it is almost inevitable and why it is so difficult to resist. It's hard to find an example of a social form that doesn't feature a "strongman" (usually but not always male) with built-in mechanisms that draw group resources to the strongman and his immediate family. This is as true of a Canadian "first nation" as it is of the Trump administration in the USA. Chayes describes how this phenomenon permeates the whole society in a kind of fractal structure, with layer upon layer of mini-strongmen paying up to the strongmen above them while extracting resources from humans below...

... capitalism is not simply an economic system – it creates an entire culture that invades almost every aspect of life. It is a top-down culture where those on the bottom are virtually powerless and those on the top issue orders. It atomizes people by forcing them to compete against one another rather than join together in the pursuit of the common good. This is the culture that one confronts at work, whether in the private or public sector, in schools where students must compete against one another for grades, and it even infuses the union movement. Union members are rarely encouraged to engage in significant decision-making within their union (with the exception of unions like the Chicago Teachers Union) and hence for the most part do not bother to vote in union elections. Similarly, when unions call for mass demonstrations, few of their members bother to show up. ... Counterpunch  As you move "leftward" in the political spectrum, capitalism is portrayed more and mor...