Eric Weinstein on the crisis of late capitalism
&gt; I identified the basic principle by which to judge societies, i.e. individual rights, regardless of what the social&#x2F;political&#x2F;economic system is called by their advocates or detractors nor the details of their legal manifestation. Does the society sacrifice individuals to the collective? That is the essential and though there are many variants I don&#x27;t think it is complicated to understand, though you may disagree.<p>Advocates of capitalism argue that it&#x27;s lead to the greatest increase in prosperity and decrease in poverty in the history of the world, yet also argue that extreme poverty faced by some is an acceptable cost for these benefits. Is this an argument in service of the collective against the individual? Furthermore, which individuals does capitalism preserve the rights of? Enslaved peoples? Those who have been dispossessed of their lands? Those who have been strong-armed into the expropriation of their natural resources and had their governments deposed by capitalist states?<p>It&#x27;s not even clear what &quot;individual&quot; and &quot;collective&quot; mean as these are not necessarily opposite poles or even coherently separable things. Individual health and wellbeing have social effects and vice versa. Except for nomadic and extremely rare instances of people isolated from society, the wellbeing of a society has extremely tangible and obvious effects on individuals and their rights. If the USSR was socialist, what do the NKVD and work camps have to do with benefitting the collective?<p>If capitalists are great advocates of the rights of individuals, do they venerate the right to steal? The right to squat in vacant homes? This entire framing is incoherent without an agreement on what the rights of individuals are, which will _necessarily_ privilege the rights of certain individuals over others, as the valid expression of individuals in a system of ethics are demarcations of where society says their agency as individuals begins and ends.<p>&gt; I think your whole approach is flawed because you are viewing these questions from a political or economic angle whereas I claim the Capitalism versus Socialism debate is really about ethics. I think it is telling that you ignored my last paragraph where I made that important point. Nobody has consistently defended or implemented Capitalism because it rests on the ethic of selfishness which is in conflict with the predominant ethic of today. In earlier times one was taught to sacrifice to the King or God and the only modern contribution to ethics has been to substitute Society for God or King. Capitalism was born of that past era and its moral foundation of selfishness was implicit from the beginning. The advocates of Socialism, in all its variants, have attempted to either destroy Capitalism outright or to somehow leash it to serve so-called &quot;social good&quot;. There is nothing incoherent about that argument unless you fail to see that these two political&#x2F;economic systems derive from fundamentally different and incompatible ethical systems.<p>Again, what does this even mean? There is no definition of an individual&#x27;s rights in a system of ethics that does not simultaneously circumscribe the agency of other individuals. &quot;Selfishness&quot; is a hand-wavy term used to heighten the sense that individuals will enjoy great autonomy and agency under your system of ethics (if also requiring them to orient their thinking towards their immediate prosperity and enrichment), yet that autonomy can only be guaranteed by its protection from interference by other individuals.<p>Socialism and capitalism are modes of production, they&#x27;re not ethical systems. Socialism was developed as an idea in response to the relations of power in a classed, capitalist society, and while various socialists have denounced things like greed, egotism, etc. Marx also emphasized the possibilities for individuals to pursue a fulfilling life under socialism. Even if I were to buy into your notion of the individual and collective as coherently separable entities, your account of this as essential to the difference between socialism and capitalism has to be tied to the ways in which people use these words. Fascism has always declared itself to be an enemy of socialism (and vice versa) so clearly there&#x27;s problems with your understanding of the socially constructed meaning of these words (and therefore the weird conception of their ethical foundations you borrow from von Mises).<p>The ethical dichotomy you&#x27;re referencing is from von Mises where he&#x27;s basically trying to copy Max Weber&#x27;s sociological investigation into protestant work ethic as informing capitalism, but his argument is so clumsy and incoherent (especially conceptually) and he doesn&#x27;t have a convincing historical account like Weber to bolster his argument.<p>&gt; Finally, I have read almost all of what von Mises wrote and I think your are misrepresenting or misunderstanding him when you claim he advocated fascism. This is factually wrong and an insult to a consistent advocate of individual rights and freedom and staunch opponent of socialism.<p>Look up Engelbert Dollfuss, the guy who von Mises literally provided economic guidance to. Von Mises preferred liberal capitalism, no doubt, but he was more than happy to make an alliance with fascists when labor militancy was high and socialists were gaining broad public support in Europe. This was mirrored by capitalist countries supporting authoritarian semi-fascist regimes like Pinochet, Marcos, Batista, the Brazilian military government of 1964, etc.<p>Yet another example of the ethics of capitalism that ostensibly prioritizes &quot;the rights of individuals&quot;.<p>&gt; Moreover, if you know the works of Mises you must know that he proved that Socialism cannot work economically. Without free markets to develop a meaningful price system Socialism cannot solve the problem of economic calculation.<p>von Mises did not &quot;prove&quot; anything. He makes a lazy argument that money as a unit of accounts is necessary to make informed decisions about the production of goods in an economy because he can&#x27;t conceive of any other way an economy might incorporate value judgements. Then he basically underplays how woefully inadequate and irrational price signaling is in practice under capitalist economies. You would basically get laughed at by any economist today for making this argument because of it&#x27;s hand-wavy account of money being &quot;flawed but good enough&quot; and a failure to engage with any of the ideas about production planning under socialism.<p>It doesn&#x27;t even say socialism is flawed or inefficient, it says it&#x27;s _impossible_ because an economy without money would involve judgements about production that would essentially be blind leaps, which is basically closing his imagination to any of the myriad ways that have been proposed for valuation and planning under socialism.<p>I assume he thinks that because Marx doesn&#x27;t go into this (because Marx is mostly concerned with the relations of production, the alienation of the worker from their labor, and class antagonisms in society, not a specific method of economic calculation) that there are no socialists with answers to this question.<p>He doesn&#x27;t even understand Marx&#x27;s understanding of private property (aka ownership of means of production by which the owner or owners retain exclusive rights of the profits generated via labor by others) and thinks it has something to do with unitary control by a single body of economic planning. Ironically many industries in capitalist states meet the criteria for his definition of socialist firms.<p>&gt; This fact is demonstrated historically where the socialists countries had to use prices determined out side their system in freer countries so that bureaucrats could make some semblance of rational plans. Without those prices socialist countries would have collapse much sooner than they did, and it demonstrates that Socialism is in fact a parasite on free societies and not a viable social system.<p>I don&#x27;t agree that the USSR was socialist nor do I think their method of economic planning was worth copying, but Russia transformed from a backwoods feudal and partially capitalist society to an industrialized developed nation and the second largest economy in the world under their system. If that&#x27;s socialist to you, it certainly debunks von Mises notion of it being &quot;impossible&quot;.