The capitalist argument will always include that competition is somehow necessary to usher good products and low prices. However this argument is also similar to “natural selection”,where quality is supposedly refined by ,notice, some ardguas(sp?) unnecessarily dangerous attritional processes,that will also wear away at the strong as well as the weak.
I propose the reason why some have accepted and supported competiton instead of harmony is the same reason why many support death. Why? Death is not our friend,yet it is universally understood and gets a lot of attention.It thus gets popular,and thus gets accepted. People noticed competition and thought of positive aspects. But it is a menace.Some may support it,but can it even be done away with?Like death,it cannot.Competition is an animistic trait(to be fair so is social co-operation),and is much easier to produce than harmoniousness,although harmoniousness produces more efficient less burdensome results.
If a group of 5 competed to provide a superior product,and only 1 rewarded,the best one would probably win out,unless there was gang land sabotage or otherwise “war”(skirmishes?)
But if all 5 worked together,not only would each one’s superior ideas be added to the product,but it would be built and distributed 5 times as fast.
Granted they would have to split the profits,this is where greed comes in.
I hope your thinking of lots of implications and reading between the lines.
I agree with this. The matrix of capitalistic competition is like a Nash equilibrium, it makes things relatively efficient, a best fit scenario, in a world of greed. It’s not totally fair to blame greed per se, because it has to do with more fundamental problems in thinking, a belief that we are separate.
Harmonic equilibrium exists as an illusion itself. Its theoretical relative existence lies in perfect competition. Staticism and Dynamicism coexist relatively, as Being is Becoming. In physics, this is the general relativity of mechanics. In metaphysics, this mechanics is completely quantised as energic flux, which is in return applicable to all subjects. For example in economics, market movements are sculpted around individual preferences and choices. These preferences and choices are what Nietzsche calls as pertaining to the will to power. Nietzsche scorn this will to power here, because it is defined as capitalism, the accumulation of capital utility.
When one speaks of capitalism, one should not speak of its macro or micro economics foundations. Those are superfacialities. Capitalism is a morality, it boils down to a genealogy of morals. Everything else, besides the inquiry of such a genealogy, is unessential drifts among the surfaces. Economists are not employed as politicians because they don’t do Locke or Berkely. Rightly so.
That’s one of the reasons why, from an evolutionary perspective, cooperation wins out over competition.
Your body is a wonderfully cooperative system. Occasionally a cancer pops up, when a group of cells tries to outcompete rather than cooperate. Doesn’t work so well, does it?
I’ve seen people injure themselves, or make themselves ill/look stupid: just to compete and try to win against others who are just having fun/enjoying what they do.
To compete is to make oneself feel better for having gotten the better of some-one else over something that doesn’t matter to the non-competitive: who are too busy living life to care/notice/compete.
Competition makes winners and losers. Among humans, it is an old, outdated, Darwinian survival stance that morality should have done away with–that is unless one still believes in heirarchies of human value, in collateral damage in wars and in any other idea that considers some of us expendable. Religions support it! Philosphers praise it, which is why the 21st century began with a cultural, ethnic war.
I’m a lefty but I’m far from oppossed to competition in principal. In fact I would strongly contend that its a big part of our nature and couldn’t just be switched off even in yer “anarcho communist utopia”
so contests, wargames, sports, games of skill and chance etc would continue.
My big problem with competition under state capitalism is that the payoff is that the winners get such a hugely disproportionate quantity of power that they can then “rig” the game from that point forth.
Competition always implies winners but are there “fair” ways to reward them yet keep them game fair for more players?
Can the pitch be kept “relatively” level and by whom!?!?
