RolStoppable said:
I am serious with this modified Churchill quote. Capitalism, like democracy, may be condemned because it's imperfect, but people need to be conscious of the fact that everything else is imperfect too. As an analogy, we could look at internet comment culture where a place like VGC would be capitalistic because it has a police force, a hierarchy and somewhat of a reward system for people who put in effort. VGC isn't perfect, but nothing is. The equivalent of socialism would be the Youtube comments section. |
I'll offer one (Marxist) perspective but it does not represent all perspectives.
The fundamental problem is unjustified hierarchies, for example think about a feudal King. The king would get his position and justified hierarchy from the divine right of Kings/Mandate of Heaven and this position was tolerated for a time. Eventually this position lost it's legitimacy (due to changing material conditions) and people shook away the aristocrats in favour of a system based on republic (rule of law). So eventually capitalism would reach a point where it can no longer develop further and the same thing would happen, except this time the proletariat shake off the bourgeoisie.
But other hierarchies would still remain, for example if you were skilled in playing the violin and I am not then there exists a hierarchy because you would have authority. Classless societies of the past still had rules and norms, it wasn't just pure anarchy where everyone ran around and did what they wanted.
Your full quote should be: "Capitalism is the worst form of society, except for all the others that have been tried." Soviet style socialism has obviously turned out to be a failure and has lead to the resurrection of a terrible form of capitalism, so there's not much point to try to emulate that system again. However, capitalism itself has also evolved and changed, modern social democratic capitalism is quite a bit different from industrial capitalism of the 1800s (and has failed around the time of the World Wars) in terms of both economics and socially. The same would happen to socialism (lower stage of communism), it is an imperfect system which, like capitalism, would drive it to evolve further towards a higher stage.
