One of the problems with "getting money out of politics" is that money is only one form of power, and it is the one that is easiest to measure directly and objectively.
So you get rid of the money.
Alright, so a girl shows up in Senator Phil McCracken's room every night. Nobody says she's there on behalf of anyone. Nobody says there is a deal. Nobody even says there is anything unusual going on. Suddenly, the toilet industry gets huge concessions.
"Oh, but he would have to report that."
Report what? A girl showing up at his room? There is no code of ethics under which you have to report every time you encounter a girl unless it is somehow connected to your official duties, and we just established that everyone involved says it isn't.
This is the modernist problem in miniature. You focus on money because money is countable, measurable, objective, and therefore controllable. But eliminate the measurable form of power and you have not necessarily eliminated power. You may have just pushed it into favors, access, sex, status, jobs, prestige, protection, relationships, and other things that are subjective, indirect, and extremely difficult to measure.
Doesn't mean you can't try to reduce corruption, it just means you're going to need to stop thinking like that modernist I'm criticizing to accomplish it.
And this is also why the one world government a lot of people think they want makes me nervous. They think it'll improve things, maybe because they imagine such a government doing what they want it to do. But what if you get your one world government and it becomes the one world empire under Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin?
The more power you put in one place, the more valuable it becomes to corrupt even a tiny piece of it. A government with authority over the entire world would control decisions affecting tens of trillions of dollars in economic activity. Capture a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of those decisions and you can make a fortune, potentially over and over again. And this is hardly a problem unique to capitalism: historically, wherever governments have concentrated enough power, people close to that power have found ways to turn access, favor, office, protection, and privilege into wealth.
Imperial China provides an old example of the same phenomenon. Its political culture often treated merchants as socially inferior to scholar-officials, but that did not make the competition for wealth and power disappear. It redirected ambition toward the bureaucracy. Wealthy families poured resources into educating their sons for the imperial examinations, because entry into the governing class brought status, influence, and opportunities that mere commercial success could not. The market for power had not disappeared; people had simply learned to buy into it with education, connections, and years of preparation instead of treating private enterprise as the only route upward.
Banning the obvious ways of buying influence does not remove the incentive to buy influence. It just changes what people use to pay.
Someone claimed "There is no special "Marxist" definition of capitalism"
No, there absolutely is a separate definition of capitalism for communists.
"Capitalism is when bad thing", or more accurately, "Capitalism is the capitalist economic system, every system surrounding it, and any negative consequences of those systems"
See, the normal definition is where capital is primarily owned and controlled by the private sector, free competition, and open markets, rather than the government. In it, people are free to sell their labor for wages to whoever they decide to rather than being directed by central planners, and prices are set by markets and negotiation, not by the state. But most people don't see that as a major problem -- When someone hires someone to do their lawn, or buys groceries with money they earned, or when they can save up for something they want, or if they save money and take a risk starting a new business or building a new invention hoping to make it big, that's considered at worst neutral. It's important to understand that pure capitalism really doesn't exist anywhere, so everywhere is a spectrum -- The United States is more capitalist than the Soviet Union was, but is considerably less capitalist than it was in the late 1800s when the state made up a single digit percentage of GDP.
Some examples of things that aren't inherently capitalist which commies like to blame on capitalism:
-State corruption
-Regulatory capture
-Corporate welfare and bailouts
-State-created monopolies
-Inflation caused by central banks
-Police brutality and prison abuse
-War and imperialism
-Human Greed
-Hierarchy
-Scarcity
-Pollution (Ask Kazakhstan how ecologically friendly the Soviet Union was to their region)
-Cronyism
-Bureaucratic alienation
-Consumer stupidity or status competition
-Poor conditions for the common man caused by state policy
-Unequal political power
Most of these things are either inherent to the nature of reality, or human nature, or the product of the state, not inherent to capitalism, not unique to capitalism, or not generated by capitalism alone. Therefore, eliminating capitalism will never fully eliminate these things. Things like human nature or the laws of conservation of mass or energy or finite linear time will always exist driving scarcity. A group of chickens with no concept of trade whatsoever will establish hierarchies and use violence to that end. Most of human history had limited markets and very powerful states that still had greed, pollution, cronyism, and corruption.
In a sense, it's like the counterpoint to the old phrase "Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" -- if back then you stuck your neck out and chose something other than IBM, you'd be blamed for every problem that occurred because you didn't choose IBM, even if those problems weren't unique to the system you chose and perhaps would have existed if you chose IBM anyway. In the same way, under capitalism, every problem ends up blamed on capitalism, even things that would exist under virtually any other system because of human nature and the laws of physics.
That broader definition has two effects. First, it allows problems rooted in scarcity, human nature, state power, political corruption and large-scale organization to be attributed to capitalism merely because they occur within a capitalist society. Second, it allows the abolition of capitalism to be presented as a cure for the entire bundle. If "capitalism" is defined broadly enough to include nearly every harmful feature of modern life, then eliminating it would indeed sound utopian. But eliminating private ownership, open markets and negotiated exchange would not eliminate scarcity, ambition, hierarchy, corruption, coercion or political favoritism. It would merely change the institutions through which those problems appear.
I was thinking about Ivan the Terrible. His reign was not capitalist, but he had entire cities of his own people sacked. Why? Because he was terrified of losing power, or more accurately, of being assassinated by people. Such people won't go away under a socialist government, they'll be given more power under socialism than under a more laisse faire government under capitalism. Nominally communist countries right now conduct purges in power games where individuals or groups of individuals are murdered to help the powerful get more powerful. Having another group of elites in the market players won't change that. Ironically, having competition between the groups of elites may (but also may not -- sometimes the common man is caught in the crossfire, or is divvied up as a resource to be consumed, regardless of who those elites are)
Related to my soon to be published next book, it is a modernist conception that you can describe the entire world through exactly one viewpoint that can place everything into one system. We do need the government, and we do need God, and we do need markets, and we do need families, and we do need communities, and we do need private societies, and probably a lot more things. Only in a world where many things can exist and bump against each other can the individual hope to have some liberty to pursue happiness.
