I've found it all a bit distasteful since I was a rebellious teenager and have dabbled with alternative lifestyles as result..
I should probably just grow up really.. no-one else is interested anyway.. are they just 'sheeple' and 'breadheads' or is there a more logical reason for not getting back to basics..?
any thoughts..?
A lot of people, I reckon, would approve of the theoretical principles of radical socialism (it is fairer, eh?), but the overwhelming majority would never deny themselves the possibility of attaining capitalist riches.
As the Lottery used to say: "It could be you", to which it should have added "It almost certainly won't be you, but the remotest possibility that it could be you is enough to keep you hooked."
Thing is whats the alternative.
Communism doesn't work either
EDIT: Communism would work if resources were less constrained. ie luxury items available to all those who wanted them etc (within reasonable limits obviously)
Think about the world presented by Star Trek, resources not contsrained, one government for the entire world, no money. They only got there through WWIII reducing the population and being visited by aliens though!
what about anarchy...?
what about anarchy...?
If anarchy ruled there'd be no manufacturers left to make the snazzy balaclavas.
Can this wait till I've sold my house!
Social democracy - retain the capitalist means of production but all infrastructure managed by state.
Churchill said about democracy:
"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
I sort of feel the same way about capitalism. It sucks. But so do all the others.
Lend me a fiver for a pint, I'll give it you back...sometime, not too sure when, but you'll not mind eh...
Dont worry..its all in hand
what about anarchy
Not sure if anarchy would ever work. Humans tend to be self organising. Some form of goverment always shows up
Can this wait till I've sold my house!
If it's days or weeks, then yes, probably. If it's months, the news might not be so good...
Recommend me a good balaclava seller... camo16's feelin' angry!
what about anarchy...?
Too many dimwits and too much inequality for anarchy (absence of coercive government). Maybe in 200 years...
Capitalism could be excellent; a brilliant use of the simplest form of barter. Regulate it properly and it don't allow large businesses to extract money from communities (with over-margin profits being paid to local services, for example) and it starts to become less anti-social.
I am not a fan and one day it will collapse like all systems but it is very good at delivering the bare minimum to the many [ ie just above threshold at which they riot or have an "arab Spring"
Benign dictatorship, it's the only solution.
I'd suggest this bloke:
Humans tend to be self organising.
Like fat lazy parasitic ants..?
When people have nothing they will accept nothing, in as much as Communism is a great idea when the majority have barely enough to eat, working for a central goal seems like a good idea. The problem with Britain at least is that all classes have the taste of luxury, and supply of food out strips demand. If suddenly there was no fuel and no supermarkets, I'd like to think socialist communities would sprout up, in reality I expect dictatorships will thrive.
not so much capitalism as the combatative/contradictory left/right carry on we've swung between for years. I think this prevents true long term planning/stategy and it seems to me that each side is deliberately and maliciously planting 'cost bombs' in any policies they manage to implement to prevent them being changed. I'm not entirely sure how this can be legitimately considered in the interests of the country, and sadly that is probably the crux, as I'm afraid that I think that there are lots of other interests being put before the greater good of UK plc.
The rich 1% of the worlds puopulation have a stranglehold on the power though, and they have a vested interest in maintaining a capitalist status quo. So for there to be any real change there would need to be a grassroots insurection on the scale not seen for centuries, if ever.
And there is little chance of that happening because, as far as I can see, because the masses have been indoctrinated into a capitalist and materialistic way of life, and starved of the real facts and denied an education that encourages them to think independently. I had kind of hoped the recent civil unrest might have been the start of things changing for the better, but it turned out to be for the worse - instead of protesting for a fairer and better society, they just went out and took all the materialistic things they've been told they want but can't afford. That might sound snobbish, but it's not my intention.
I still thing things might be coming to a crunch though. Growth can't be sustained once people either attain everything they desire, give up trying to attain it, or finally see through the capitalist charade for what it is and get bored of it. And if half of Europe goes bust, bringing donw several major banks in the process, a real revolution might just happen. Not sure it will be for the better though...
..the masses have been indoctrinated into a capitalist and materialistic way of life, and starved of the real facts and denied an education that encourages them to think independently..
So what else is there then?
Communism? Radical socialism? Anarchy?
Capitalism or some variant of it seems to be a pretty default state for humans. We naturally gravitate to towards hierarchical organisation, like any other social pack animal. And that hierarchy creates bosses and workers, rich and poor, haves and have nots.
that's a very lazy argument graham..
I consider it a realistic argument.
You can't expect people to give up capitalism if you can't offer a viable alternative.
A viable alternative? What about capitalism that works properly and benefits everyone rather than just a few? Whats that? I'm sure capitalism used to work, now it seems like its gone **** nuts. Too many greedy people?
What we have now isn't capitalism though.
Victorian Britain with its mills and factories (and owners and workers) and no welfare state is much closer to real capatalism. What we have now is weird hodge podge of capitalism, social protection and an increasingly regulatory government.
I'm not saying pure capitalism would necessarily be a good thing but its not what we currently have
Fair enough. Yeah I'm all for abandoning capitalism and replacing it with capitalism. 
What about capitalism that works properly and benefits everyone rather than just a few?
In the UK we mix capitalism with a healthy dose of socialism and state welfare. It's not perfect but we don't have many people starving to death so we're doing something right.
I wonder if capitalism would work better if it were illegal to charge interest? Make it impossible to charge money simply for lending money since money is just a means of exchanging goods and services without needing to directly exchange those goods and services. Owning shares and receiving profit based dividends I think is OK but charging money for money maybe causes some of the problems in capitalism?
That would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_banking
I wonder if capitalism would work better if it were illegal to charge interest? Make it impossible to charge money simply for lending money since money is just a means of exchanging goods and services without needing to directly exchange those goods and services. Owning shares and receiving profit based dividends I think is OK but charging money for money maybe causes some of the problems in capitalism?
Not a bad idea. Certainly an interesting one. It would mean an end to banking as we know it. It would also mean an end to lending money in the traditional way. Business lending would probably still work. Instead of a loan you would need to attract investors (a global version of Dragon's Den if you like) but how would you buy a house?
Neither system is a complete solution IMHO.
However, the current system is unfairly weighted in favour of the 5% who earn a lot of money and who's real income is growing at a faster rate than anyone else's.
Normally, I'd be fine with that, however the rising cost of everything from transport to taxation means that the system is punative to anyone who isn't in that 5% bracket. This is wrong, especially in the light of Phil Hammond's comments about the HS2 high speed rail being priced out of the market for all but the very wealthy.
We need a rebalance somewhere. If you receive the average salary in Britain, you're amongst the top 1% of earners on the planet.
Capitalism is what fits into natural human tendencies I think.
My vote would be for social democracy as mentioned above. Let us get on with it as long as we don't take the pee too much.
Someone needs to be steering the ship otherwise it'll drift onto the rocks. Stop people being too greedy, and make sure we don't rape the environment.
I'd be quite happy with a socialist type government on two provisos; firstly that I still had enough cash to buy myself a decent bike every couple of years or so and secondly that I was the bloke in charge and decided where the money went.
Only one thing for it. Why not phone up Robin Hood and ask him for some wealth distribution 
Feudal freemarket capitalism won't last much longer in the grand scheme of things... And personally I'd be amazed if the replacement whatever it may be works out worse. But at the same time, I accept it probably won't be an awful lot of fun to live through the migration period.
I wouldn't rule capitalism out entirely, it just gets a bad rap based on the current system which has run mad. (Which is a little like saying "Communism doesn't work, just look at Stalinist Russia") There are other ways, and evolution might be possible.
A rebalancing of reward is needed though, that's plain. And a sane and sustainable approach to growth and consumption- nobody can believe in expansion without end within a closed system.
And the freemarket ideology has proved itself as unsound as it is illogical, there is no invisible hand. And I expect that sooner or later the free market's inclination to self-destruct will outweigh nations' ability to shore things up, if we keep on as we're doing, and that won't be pretty.
It's been proved beyond any argument that the idea of the markets as a shepherd that would look after their own interests and in turn everyone else's was always delusional (and why did anyone ever buy it?) The free market unsurprisingly turns out to be a shepherd that kills the sheep in order to make it easier to shear them, then next year acts surprised when it's run out of wool. Then we give them more sheep because they can't be allowed to fall.
People say "What will replace it"- nobody knew what the effects stock trading and modern finance would have when they first emerged, and yet we ended up with the current world order as a result. None of the past systems of the world were planned in advance. Not knowing what happens next isn't a reason to tolerate what's wrong now and to commit such heroic efforts to supporting a system that isn't just unsustainable, but undesirable. There's no guarantee that we'll build something in its place- but there never was, and here we are.
All of history has been steps towards a better future... Sometimes faltering, sometimes backwards steps, but we can't just stop that process out of fear of what the next step might bring, because even if it proves a wrong one, another will follow it.
It doesn't really matter what colour manifesto you wrap it up in, any system that relies on constant economic growth is doomed to failure. So long as populations and expectations continue to grow faster than energy and resources, we're headed for a bust. This will happen no matter who we levargage the money from to pretend it's all okay.
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