In a capitalist world, capitalism is behind everything. This isn't insightful.
In the magical, post-capitalist utopia where everyone is fed and clothed and housed without having to lift a finger, and nobody is compensated for anything they do, what things would people still choose to do? People make bikes on an amateur basis, but would people addict children on an amateur basis?
If you wish to defend capitalism, you should ask questions like "would people still farm, and supply others with food, in a free society without capitalism?". Y'know, the big, fundamental questions about the basic viability of a non-capitalist system. Trying to downplay capitalism's known downsides is the worst kind of apologism.
Every question about that is irrelevant and monumentally disinteresting. People define their utopia as whatever society doesn't have the problems they imagine, arguing against that is like arguing about how magic works in a fantasy novel with the author of said world. All discussion is completely fictional and if you discover anything which doesn't fit it is immediately rectified in the other persons head.
In fact the question you propose are stupid and boring. Who cares about the utopia? It is as boring as a question can possibly be, which is also why talking to "anti-capitalists" is so annoying, you are arguing against their fantasy world. Whatever objection you can have is disregarded. In Utopia problems don't exist, so whatever objection you have against the utopia is invalid by definition. "Anti-capitalists" are the most boring people in the world.
>People make bikes on an amateur basis, but would people addict children on an amateur basis?
In utopia bad things do not happen. So of course all children live protected in infinite joy. That is why you need to support my extremely radical and extremely specific political position, else you support everything bad in the world which is currently caused by anything, since everything is capitalism.
> People define their utopia as whatever society doesn't have the problems they imagine,
I defined it as (a) guaranteeing food, clothing and housing; and (b) where people are not compensated for their actions. This is an abstract model of a functional society that might exist without capitalism, and it's not subject to my whims.
If you believe such a society is impossible, or prohibitively difficult to get to, that's one thing. If you have reasons that such a society would be a bad place to live, then that's a different thing: it means we shouldn't be striving for it, and that's a really valuable insight! Both of these are ways you can productively argue with anti-capitalists, and I wouldn't say either kind of criticism is stupid or boring.
Such criticisms might be obvious to you, but they're clearly not obvious to good-faith anti-capitalists (of which there are many, though you might not meet them much on internet forums). If you can only share your insight, maybe you can turn those good-faith anti-capitalists away from their path of pointless, desperate futility.
> In utopia bad things do not happen.
I think you're thinking of eutopia (lit: good place). I said utopia (lit: no place). "Magical utopia" was a deprecating caveat, referencing the uselessness of this description as an instruction manual: if that part is confusing you, feel free to ignore it.
Compare the magical utopia presented in Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where food, shelter and immortality are available unconditionally to all citizens of the Bitchun society, and everyone else is dead. That society is not a mere happy fantasy land: it has problems, and those problems are consequences of how society is organised. The Clarketech that supports the society might be impossible, but saying "that society's impossible, so thinking about it is irrelevant" is just a refusal to engage with the premise.
Frankly, if you don't want to have an opinion, then don't have an opinion. If you don't want to explain your opinion, don't explain it. But don't state your opinion, and then act like explaining yourself is beneath you.
Again, I hate talking to people like you, simply because it is impossible. Who cares about your utopia? I certainly do not, it is a silly idea. Arguing about your stupid fantasy world.
>Compare the magical utopia presented in Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,
NO. I absolutely will not argue with some magic fantasy land. This is disingenuous, who cares what some hack writer has written. It is fiction and not constrained to the laws of reality.
>Frankly, if you don't want to have an opinion, then don't have an opinion.
Markets are an inescapable fact of life. In any society losers will exist and winners. Raging against that is futile and shows a fundamental disinterest in making anything better. There, you have my opinion. No I don't care that you think that some hack writer has written something where this isn't true, I really absolutely do not care that you can imagine a world where this isn't true. No I do not care that in some fantasy world scarcity does not exist, frankly I don't care about any of your arguments since you continue to argue about your silly fantasy worlds.
It would help if you explained why you think that. Adam Smith disagrees with you: in The Wealth of Nations, he wrote that markets were something that had to be carefully tended, lest they devolve – via monopoly – into non-markets. A basic, back-of-the-envelope simulation involving ideal rational selfish actors with fixed, differing capabilities and finite resources will show the same result.
> No I don't care that you think that some hack writer has written something where this isn't true,
The Bitchun utopia does actually have a reputation economy (Whuffie), and winners, and losers. Perhaps your criticism would be more meaningful if you actually engaged with any of the ideas you dismiss out of hand.
> frankly I don't care about any of your arguments since you continue to argue about your silly fantasy worlds.
Gedankenexperimente, in the tradition of Hans Christian Ørsted. Albert Einstein's fantasy worlds were much sillier: riding on a beam of light!
No, they aren't thought experiments, they are rationalizations you need to justify your politics. You can't talk about the qualities or problems of free market, since every possible problem would be solved if your utopia was real.
It is an anti-Gedankenexperiment in the sense that you don't use it to critically examine a concepy, you use it to uncritically accept a concept.
>Perhaps your criticism would be more meaningful if you actually engaged with any of the ideas you dismiss out of hand.
What is wrong with you to think I had read that garbage? I read one thing by Corey and was immensely unimpressed, I really couldn't care less whether whoopsy didly has a bingo bingo economic system or not.
> > I defined it as (a) guaranteeing food, clothing and housing; and (b) where people are not compensated for their actions.
> every possible problem would be solved if your utopia was real.
So, if food, shelter and clothing were covered, you think people would volunteer to study, train, and work as medical doctors – treating the sick and the dying at not-insignificant physical and psychological risk to themselves – for no compensation? I mean… I can actually buy that: there are probably enough people like that in the world, and if they wouldn't get money but didn't need to work for money, this might be what they chose to do.
But you think we'd be entirely rid of sexism, pub brawls, and pieces of Lego left on the carpet? That'd require the complete non-existence of certain classes of behaviour. I find it hard to believe that partially-satisfying everyone's basic needs would have such a universal effect on any kind of behaviour.
And you think we'd be entirely rid of climate change, plague, cancer, and falling down stairs? Really?
