[alt: a 3D rendering of two human bodies, where one looks like a spirit leaving the other body. The caption says: "the leftism leaving my body the moment i start to win at monopoly".]
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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It's so true, which is funny when you remember that it was supposed to be a criticism of capitalism.
In the end, competition ends up being harmful because it is by definition a zero-sum proposition, and whether it's a game or real life people stop cooperating once they think they are competing for something. It's our animal brains screwing us by telling us that we need to ensure our own position first through dominance, when all of civilization and society is based on mutual cooperation.
The Libertarian Delusion, if you will.
Capitalism has a lot of problems, but the "competing" part ain't it. Competition is the natural order of things, a large reason our biosphere exists and is self-sustainable. In the natural world, species and individuals compete with each other to ensure only the most adapted consume the limited resources efficiently. This is natural selection at play. Collaboration/symbiotism is the exception, virtually exclusively where species do not consume ressources.
In economic theory, competition is an important driver of innovation, and a source of bargaining power for labour.
If you want to expose the flaws of capitalism, I would start with unregulated capitalism, which brings antitrust/uncompetitive practices, worker exploitation (usually also because of uncompetitive hiring practices), and myriad issues around income inequality and equity.
Whew. There's a lot to break down with how wrong this is.
First off, the biosphere being self-sustaining has absolutely nothing to do with resource competition. It's a closed-loop, and has very little matter loss or gain. It is self-sustaining orthogonal to competition, because the most fundamental creatures and systems handle the waste created by higher-order creatures and systems, to break it back down into usable resources. Those processes (e.g. decomposition) are not usually (especially given that 99.99999% take place at the microscopic level) competitive. In fact, those systems are absolutely rife with symbiotic and complementary organisms. But everyone gets hung up on wolves eating deer to go, "see it's all about competition!" while ignoring how the 20% of the deer that isn't consumed, and 100% of the wolf after it dies, gets reincorporated into the biomass.
This is literally not natural selection. Natural selection has absolutely nothing to do with resource consumption, it is purely about the given traits that make one phenotype more successful in a given environment. As already pointed out, it's a closed-loop, so those resources don't go away whether they are or aren't consumed. Many species have, through natural selection, made themselves extinct by being too dominant in an area and killing off their food supply. That is not a "failure" of natural selection, that is natural selection itself. There is also sexual selection, which can go completely against what is most survivable, but is part of Natural Selection.
If literally every creature in the animal Kingdom died off, that would still be Natural Selection functioning properly.
The largest and most enduring myth of natural selection is that it is predictive. It's a purely post-facto map of how a species progressed, evolutionarily. There is no right or wrong, in natural selection.
This is also false. Groups of animals working together in packs and other social groups is extremely common in nature. And we're not talking about humans working with other species, we're talking about humans working with humans, so I'm not sure why you brought up symbiotism.
This is a circular argument, because "bargaining power" is another way of saying "ability to compete", so it is really just saying that "competition is an important driver of the ability to compete". In a market where labor does not have to compete with other labor for resources, competition adds nothing, and serves no purpose. We're obviously not in a post-scarcity society, but Capitalism (and unnecessary competition) is certainly driving us in the opposite direction from that. Capitalism throws out millions of pounds of food every day around the world, to prop up food prices. Capitalism plans obsolescence in order to artificially create demand. Capitalism creates cycles of boom and bust because economic equilibrium is anathema to Capitalism.
The argument about driving innovation is also only true in a competitive market, because it's being done to get a leg up.
Innovation for innovation's sake, as has happened throughout all of history (including the public funding responsible for many of the modern technologies that you probably erroneously credit market innovation with, e.g. the internet and most medicines), is responsible for much more technology than privately-funded research.
So, Capitalism. Anything is, by default, unregulated.
Regulations are, by definition, something that limits the natural function of something. Decreasing water flow through a pipe, decreasing actions that a corporation can take, etc. It's only a restriction. Adding a speed limiter to a car regulates its top speed. Strapping a rocket on top, while altering the top speed, does not regulate it.
That you have to add limitations in order to make something not bad (i.e. "regulated capitalism"), means that thing is bad in its default state.
Yes, I know. This was my argument.