Hi all,
I’m seeing a lot of hate for capitalism here, and I’m wondering why that is and what the rationale behind it is. I’m pretty pro-capitalism myself, so I want to see the logic on the other side of the fence.
If this isn’t the right forum for a political/economic discussion-- I’m happy to take this somewhere else.
Cheers!
I’m really not trying to be a dick, but uhh… Look around? The world is literally on fire and efforts to put it out or even to stop pouring more gas on it are put down at every turn by capitalists in the never ending pursuit of more money for it’s own sake.
Let’s start here: are you a capitalist? Do you own any actual capital? I don’t mean your own house or car, that is personal property not private property or anything resembling the means of production.
I ask because many people consider themselves capitalist when really they are just workers who happen to own a bit of personal property, and they make themselves essentially useful pawns for actual capitalists.
And, if you’re not an actual capitalist, why are you so pro capitalism?
It’s not illogical to be pro-Capitalism while not owning any “means of production” if it means you still have better outcomes.
There are no true Capitalist countries and no true Socialist countries. It’s not even a spectrum; it’s a giant mixed bag of policies. You can be for some basic capitalist principles (market economy, privately held capital) and for some socialist policies (safety nets, healthcare) and not be in contradiction with yourself. There’s more to capitalism than the United States.
I think OP was seeing a lot of “burn the system down” talk. Revolutions aren’t bloodless, instantaneous, or well directed. Innocent people will die and generations will suffer. It’s stuff only the naive, the malicious, or the truly desperate will support. And if you’re here posting it on the daily, I don’t believe you’re that desperate.
Global warming is upon us. If something doesn’t drastically change, now, our entire species is going to die.
And some people will be hoarding money until the last, bitter second.
I think this conflates capitalism with lack of coordination. We could fix global warming today via regulation. Even if our government was socialist, it would probably still not be curbing emissions due to trying to achieve some other non-capital goal.
Second, there isn’t any need to falsely imply our species is going to die because of climate change. No model points at that. Billions of people having crappier lives and dying sooner should be enough motivation.
We’re ~ 5 degrees from mass crop failure and famine, and that’s pretty well documented.
“Billions of people having crappier lives” is a weird way of describing starvation.
Because the models don’t support your statement.
Billions WILL have worse lives due to this. A very small subset of that will be because they are on the verge of starving.
Hmmm, its those kinds of extreme statements that make me a bit suspicious. Is global warming really an extinction level event? I can imagine terrible civil wars over resources and increasing displacement from natural disasters, but total eradication of the human race is afaik not a possible result of global warming.
It’s kinda like when they called it world war 1 and 2 - it didn’t actually include the entire world, but it did include so many countries that people considered it to be the world. The amount of people that could die or be affected by global warming could kill billions. Billions.
Hmmm… words used in not-satiric circumstances where the true meaning isn’t the intended meaning is a bit confusing…
If global warming doesn’t completely wipe us out, we’ll finish ourselves off with nukes.
Yup, that is the goal. Juuuuust short of desperate. That is where we are aiming for most of our population to live.
I’m really not trying to be a dick, but uhh… Look around? The world is literally on fire and efforts to put it out or even to stop pouring more gas on it are put down at every turn by capitalists in the never ending pursuit of more money for it’s own sake.
Well I mean it’s unclear to me that we’re much worse than previous points in history. I’d rather have the climate crisis over the nuclear one, or either of the world wars, or live under a feudal system where I’m owned by the local lord in his castle.
I sympathize (and agree) with the belief that the current system isn’t serving everyone, much less serving everyone equally. But the world is a complicated thing and we’ve got >7 billion people to feed! I think we should be very careful before deciding “yeah it’s time to tear down the existing systems and hope that there are better systems out there”. It’s easier to make things worse than to make things better.
Let’s start here: are you a capitalist? Do you own any actual capital? I don’t mean your own house or car, that is personal property not private property or anything resembling the means of production.
I guess? I’ve wanted to start my own business a couple of times. I’m a programmer, so I’ve toyed with the idea and done some research into creating a few apps which I believe people would find useful, and might pay my bills. I don’t own a house or a car-- I live in an apartment in a mid-size US city.
I ask because many people consider themselves capitalist when really they are just workers who happen to own a bit of personal property, and they make themselves essentially useful pawns for actual capitalists. And, if you’re not an actual capitalist, why are you so pro capitalism?
I’m guessing you’d consider me a pawn, but I don’t. I fit your description of owning a bit of personal property, and being a worker. I’ve worked for some large companies in the past which are supposedly the “actual capitalists”. But I promise they don’t give two shits about social good (or social bad). They are just desperately trying to make products that people want to buy. In my view, it’s a pretty good system which constrains huge organizations like Apple to making devices, when the alternative is that they could be setting up their own governments.
Well I mean it’s unclear to me that we’re much worse than previous points in history. I’d rather have the climate crisis over the nuclear one, or either of the world wars, or live under a feudal system where I’m owned by the local lord in his castle.
You’d rather have the climate crisis as it currently stands. I think you’ll change your tune on that in coming decades but by then it’ll be far too late to actually do anything about it. You’re also more insulated to it’s effects than many millions of people around the world who are already losing their lives, homes, livelihoods, etc and this is only a sniff of what’s to come. Also, peasants in feudal times on average had more time off, made more money comparatively, and were able to travel more (yes, even serfs) than your average American currently. The chains just look a little different, they aren’t gone.
I sympathize (and agree) with the belief that the current system isn’t serving everyone, much less serving everyone equally. But the world is a complicated thing and we’ve got >7 billion people to feed! I think we should be very careful before deciding “yeah it’s time to tear down the existing systems and hope that there are better systems out there”. It’s easier to make things worse than to make things better.
We’ve got 8 billion people to feed and are doing a terrible job of it. Take under half of Elon’s wealth alone and you could feed the entire world, yet instead we laud these modern day dragons for their “success,” instead of slaying them for the good of the people. It’s easier to make things worse for you, than better for you. Billions of people currently suffering terribly for the profit of others would vehemently disagree. Also, just because the unknown is uncertain doesn’t mean it should be feared. We know capitalism isn’t working for the planet itself, yet people would rather stick to it because it’s enriched a small fragment of humanity. You happen to be in the side of the boat that isn’t currently underwater, but make no mistake that the water is pouring in.
I guess? I’ve wanted to start my own business a couple of times. I’m a programmer, so I’ve toyed with the idea and done some research into creating a few apps which I believe people would find useful, and might pay my bills. I don’t own a house or a car-- I live in an apartment in a mid-size US city.
You are not a capitalist.
I’m guessing you’d consider me a pawn, but I don’t. I fit your description of owning a bit of personal property, and being a worker.
You are a worker, so why look out for the interests of an entirely different class that doesn’t do the same for you?
I’ve worked for some large companies in the past which are supposedly the “actual capitalists”. But I promise they don’t give two shits about social good (or social bad). They are just desperately trying to make products that people want to buy.
Therein lies the exact problem: profit is the only motive. And to get profit, capitalists have shown they are willing to do everything, damn the consequences to others, to society, to the planet. Climate change isn’t a whoopsie, starving, desperate people aren’t a whoopsie, train derailments aren’t a whoopsie, even most wars (every American involved war since WW2) are not a whoopsie. They are all the predictable results of capitalists choosing to rake in more profits at the expense of you and I.
In my view, it’s a pretty good system which constrains huge organizations like Apple to making devices, when the alternative is that they could be setting up their own governments.
Why would they need to set up their own governments when they control ours? How exactly are they constrained? Google is arguably more powerful than most nations’ governments. Sure, most of that is soft power, but if trends continue it won’t stay soft for much longer.
Well I mean it’s unclear to me that we’re much worse than previous points in history.
That’s interesting, because to me it’s very clear. After all, small isolated pockets of people ruining their economy and the environment they depend on is quite a bit different from all of humanity everywhere doing this.
That’s an interesting perspective! Care to share some data?
Personally, I think the fact that the median person in capitalist nations has enough food to eat is a pretty big plus! I don’t think that’s been the case throughout most of history.
That’s an interesting perspective! Care to share some data?
Well, of course the data on what our actions (much of which are due to and based upon capitalism) are doing to are environment and climate, and inevitably must lead to given the implicit but incorrect assumption of infinite resources of that system, is everywhere and basically impossible to ignore these days, isn’t it? And, almost as easy to find is the data on other cultures killing themselves off (in the, at the time, limited scope of their part of the planet) due to their actions, such as Easter Island.
You don’t own your own home and you feel this way? Yeesh. Have fun paying your landlord’s mortgage for the rest of your life as buying a house becomes more and more difficult.
I’d rather have the climate crisis over the nuclear one
Why? Either way, everybody dies.
or either of the world wars
Instead of dying from mustard gas, we’re all going to die from heat and starvation. Yay.
or live under a feudal system where I’m owned by the local lord in his castle.
Today, you get to choose which lord owns you, and change lords on occasion, but other than that it’s pretty much the same thing.
If you have to work in order to pay your bills you are not a successful capitalist. And it doesn’t matter whether you freelance or not.
I’d rather have the climate crisis over the nuclear one, or either of the world wars, or live under a feudal system where I’m owned by the local lord in his castle.
Give it a couple of years, because the world is going to get a lot, lot worse than it currently is (which is already pretty bad, for folks around the world). The World Wars will be nothing in comparison, and at least a nuclear war would be a relatively fast end.
Apple recently entered banking. So…
Yeah, and if they serve the needs of customers better, then they’ll be given encouragement (money). If they don’t, they’ll be given discouragement (they lose their investments). Seems like a good system, no?
Of course, corruption and regulatory capture subvert this system and are bad for everyone, but those are subversions of capitalism.
Are they really subversions? A pure capitalist society is determined purely by incentives and the rules of economy (supply and demand and such). If it’s in a business’s best interest to do something unethical, they will do it. They will band together to price fix, they’ll collaborate to pay workers the bare minimum, they’ll create monopolys and duopolies to get the most money possible, because in a capitalist society, money is the #1 incentive. Government regulations are anti-capitalist policies to prevent these things from happening - although maybe not as effectively as they should be, given how things are.
Capitalism is defined as a set of rules/regulations that allows people to own the capital that they produce. Regulatory capture is when an organization gains control of the regulations to subvert other people’s ability to own their capital. This is why I say that the more regulatory capture that happens, the less capitalist the system.
And yes! Capitalist systems heavily incentivize caring about money and nothing else. But the system also makes it so that when people act purely selfishly for money, that it results in good outcomes for everyone. That’s why I think it’s a good system.
For example, if organizations price-fix, it heavily encourages a third party to undercut them. If they try to prevent the third party by legal means, then that’s not capitalism.
But the system also makes it so that when people act purely selfishly for money, that it results in good outcomes for everyone.
Nobody should take you seriously.
Boy, if their statement were true, we’d be living in paradise!
Isn’t the prisoner’s dilemma the exact opposite of this claim
Just chiming in to say that if organizations price fix, it’s pretty rare a 3rd party can sustainably undercut them. The price fixers can agree to drop prices way lower, sell at a loss until the 3rd party is forced to price fix too or go out of business, and then resume the fixed price
So the outcome from a customer’s perspective is that the price fixers have dropped their prices way lower? That’s good, no?
And then once the 3rd party goes out of business and they resume their high price… they’re encouraging a new 3rd party to try again. So the prices lower again.
Meaning there’s pressure on prices to be lower, which is what we want. Therefore, good system.
Of course, I’m not saying it’s ideal. But is there a better system?
Good outcomes for everyone by acting selfishly? Oh boy! Let me tell you about the distant past of 2008 when selfish/greedy actions could have crippled the entire world economy but instead governments bailed out the selfish/greedy corporations and left all non-corporation people affected to flap in the wind.
And that’s skipping over the COVID-19 capitalism fuckery, dot com bubble, healthcare, housing in 2020’s etc.
Capitalism is a cancer and it is literally killing people for the sake of money. But here’s a $1 so just forget about all those useless bad things.
No, that is not the definition of capitalism. Where did you even hear that? So, in your vision of capitalism, the board of directors gets no money ever, because they produce nothing. The capital they have is produced by laborers.
Either you’re a dedicated troll or an absolute rube.
He’s a mid-western rube living a padded life in the heartland of the empire.
You probably won’t see this, but I hope you will amend your definition of capitalism:
Capitalism is defined as a set of rules/regulations that allows people to own
thecapitalthat they produce.You know this, right? We all know a trust fund baby is perfectly capable of using the wealth they were born into to buy a factory, mine, apartment complex, or shares in all of the above. (Hence profiting off of value they did NOT produce.) We all know capitalism does not distinguish in any way whatsoever between this form of capital ownership and the self-made variety.
“Capital they produce” and “capital they acquire / inherit / use stolen money to purchase” can both be wielded the exact same way. That’s the point of capitalism.
And this is only half of why, “that they produce” doesn’t work in this definition. The other half is that it contradicts the definition of “capital.”
Capital is literally “any form of property that can be used to collect the value of other people’s labor.” That is the opposite of “ownership over the things you produce.”
The exact opposite.
To “own the capital you produce” one must personally build the means of production. Otherwise, the owner is owning the capital someone else produced.
And you’ll find the vast, vast, vast majority of almost every form of capital (patents, copyrights, factories, burger machines, server computers, office buildings, mines, mine equipment, oil rigs, oil tankers, power plants, land, the list goes on) does not belong to the people who turned the screws, drew up the plans, welded the seams, mined the materials, performed the research, wrote the movie script, poured the cement, or otherwise PRODUCED the capital.
It belongs instead to the people who funded it. The people who, under capitalism, own it.
Anti-capitalists are not against people owning what they produce. In fact, in America, there is a distinctly anti-capitalist business model that thrives in numerous cities called a “cooperative” (co-op for short) that is owned by either (a) customers, or (b) workers. And a worker co-op is literally workers “owning what they produce”, but is considered market socialism by anyone who cares about using words correctly.
I would love if co-ops replaced corporations. Any anti-capitalist would. Even Maoists would tell you, “a society full of co-ops would be wonderful. The only reason I don’t find that sufficient is because capitalists would use violence to crush co-ops just as they have used violence to crush governments that didn’t favor US corporations.”
All anti-capitalists want people to be able to own what they produce. The system that robs people of their control over what they produce is exactly what anti-capitalists have been struggling to overthrow.
(Aside: many anti-capitalists support a “corporate death sentence” where any company that commits a crime causing more damage than it can afford to repair can have its assets seized and turned into a cooperative and given to its workers. This allows a company deemed “too big to fail, because too many workers would lose their jobs” to be kept running and keep its workers employed while also punishing the people whose decisions caused the damage. The investors would lose their shares, and the CEO elected by the investors would lose their job and their shares. Everyone else would be fine.)
Main point: I think before asking,
why do so many people dislike capitalism?
You need to first ask,
how do people define capitalism, and is it possible for the thing I like (people owning what they produce) to be protected in an anti-capitalist organization or system?
But the system also makes it so that when people act purely selfishly for money, that it results in good outcomes for everyone.
Why do you think this??
Look at all the constant environmental disasters and harmful products that happen because corporations did the math and determined that paying a few million to lawsuits every once in a while is cheaper than being more careful. “Voting with your wallet” does not work because the big corporations undercut the competition and bombard us with advertising to ensure they will win no matter what.
Hell, most of us are on here because Reddit started doing scummy things in the name of money, and we’re a tiny fraction of their userbase; Reddit is still unfortunately doing pretty much fine. Is that the best outcome for everyone?
And don’t forget that there are a lot of regulations passed in the last hundred years that were necessary because corporations were doing stuff like dumping so many chemicals into our waterways that rivers would constantly catch fire. This is what happens with unfettered capitalism.
You’re forgetting economies of scale. Let’s take phone plans. A few giant companies have infrastructure (cell towers) built across the country. Coverage is extremely important - a phone plan with coverage in a small area isn’t anything anyone will want. How is a third party supposed to compete? They’d need enough money to set up nation-wide infrastructure, contracts with phone manufacturers to make sure phones are compatable, and they need to do all that before they even sell anything. Even if you try to compete, how do you make your prices competitive after spending that huge amount of money?
For example, if organizations price-fix, it heavily encourages a third party to undercut them. If they try to prevent the third party by legal means, then that’s not capitalism.
If the goal is profit, then using any means available to increase profit is the promoted method. This includes creating barriers to enter into competition. This could be things like temporarily selling at a loss until your competition runs out of money. It could also be using your money to influence politics to get laws in place that make it harder for others to compete with you. It could also be many other methods.
It also means increasing profits through other means, such as cooperating with other companies to not compete (this is called a trust, and it’s supposed to be illegal, but we all know it isn’t always, for example the oil industry). If they all agree to not lower prices to compete with each other then they all make more money at the expense of the consumer. Obviously this is bad, which is why most capitalist countries are supposed to prevent this by law (so, obviously capitalism isn’t that great alone), with limited results.
Capitalism also assumes perfectly rational actors in order to have good outcomes. Anyone who’s interacted with another person knows this isn’t possible. Without perfectly rational actors, the “best” outcomes are not guaranteed. There are far too many ways to obfuscate information and manipulate people. For example, in the case of a trust forming the consumer likely has no way to recognize that in order to work for their own interest over the interest of the companies trying to screw them over.
Basically, capitalism leading to ideal outcomes is a fairytale told by capitalists to ensure they aren’t questioned. They tell you that it’d your fault if you don’t get the best outcomes, but this isn’t true. They know it isn’t true, but it’s in their favor. They use their influence to make sure the fairytale stays intact though. Capitalism is the newest large religion. It asks for faith, takes your money, and provides you with nothing.
That’s way too simplistic. It’s not just big corporations that block each and every measure to mitigate climate change.
Ask a small home owner, or car owner, why they are against climate change measures. They will point out that their life would need to change, and that’s why.
Climate is fucked primarily because people are unwilling to look around the next corner. That corporations are the same is more a property of them being comprised of people rather than capitalism per se.
Capitalism would work with wind and solar parks just as well as with coal.
And yet, the giant oil corporations lied about climate change and subverted efforts to develop renewable energy back in the 80s when it could have actually helped. They did that to line their pockets, fucked over the entire world, and have had no repercussions for it. Don’t act like it’s the people’s fault. A large large portion of the damage to the climate was done so executives could save an extra .1% of profit for themselves.
No, a large portion of the damage done was so regular people could keep driving their oversized cars, eat out of season food, and cheaply heat their homes. Socialism does not require good environmental policy. Capitalism does not prohibit it. Climate change is a human problem.
Ask a small home owner, or car owner, why they are against climate change measures. They will point out that their life would need to change, and that’s why.
It’s perhaps a little tangential to the “merits of capitalism” topic, but it’s worth noting that the circumstances that caused such a large percentage of the U.S. population to own single-family houses or cars – the Suburban Experiment – is substantially the result of deliberate policy choices by the Federal government starting around the 1930s:
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Euclid v. Ambler established the legality of single-use zoning, which enabled the advent of single-family house subdivisions that outlawed having things like front yard businesses, destroying walkability.
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The Federal Housing Administration was created, which not only published development guidelines that embodied the modernist1 city planning ideas popular at the time (they literally had e.g. diagrams showing side-by-side plan views of traditional main-street-style shops and shopping centers with parking lots, with the former labeled “bad” and the latter labeled “good”), but also enforced them by making compliance with those guidelines part2 of the underwriting criteria for government-backed loans.
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The Federal government passed massive subsidies for building highways, while comparatively neglecting the railroads and metro transit systems.
Of course, that isn’t to say that there wasn’t corporate influence shaping those policies! From the General Motors streetcar conspiracy to the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, it’s obvious that the automotive industry had a huge impact. It’s less obvious – or perhaps I should say, less “provable” – that said influence was corrupt (in terms of, say, bribing politicians to implement policies the public didn’t otherwise actually want) rather than merely reflective of the prevailing public sentiment of the times, but I don’t disbelieve it either.
TL;DR: I’m not necessarily taking a position on whether it was proverbial “big government” or “big business” to blame for America’s car dependency, but I am saying that it’s definitely incorrect to characterize it as merely the emergent result of individual choices by members of the public. Those individual choices were made subject to circumstances that both government and business had huge amounts of power over, and that fact cannot be ignored.
1 For more info on “modernist city planning” read up on stuff like the Garden City movement started by Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City. In fact, I remember reading somewhere that Wright himself helped write those FHA guidelines, but I can’t find the reference anymore. : (
2 It would be irresponsible not to point out that redlining and racial segregation were massively important factors in all this, too. However, this comment is intended to focus on the change in urban form itself, so hopefully folks won’t get too upset that I’m limiting it to this footnote.
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I would reply asking if the people that are making these claims are actually the labor. Are service workers actually the ones producing anything? Western labor is compensated quite well relative to the rest of society which is why these ideas never go anywhere in the West. If you are not an actual laborer, why are you so pro-labor power?
Labor != Physical labor or producing physical things
Sure but in terms of a general strike, you will know the labor that really matters and what doesn’t. Critical labor in the West is compensated accordingly by the market, even by Western standards.
Historically this has certainly been one of the biggest problems with anti-capitalist rhetoric; usually it’s a bunch of fairly well-off college-educated intelligentsia telling labor that akshually their problems are caused by alienation and wage value theory!
The result in Russia was the Going to the People movement, which was a dismal failure and resulted in revolutionary vanguardism.
Capitalism sold us a fairy-tale.
Companies compete for customers, they improve products so it breeds innovation and they also compete for workers, so it gets better for everyone! Except it doesn’t.
The reality is quite the opposite. Here’s what happens. They want to maximize profits so that the owners of the company get more money. How do you maximize profits?
- You can advertise, and attract more customers. Alright, but eventually everyone has a widget. Maybe you can poach some customers from a competitor, but ultimately the market is saturated. Things get replaced as they break there’s a natural equilibrium. How do you increase profits?
- You can charge more. Raise the price. That only works so far before you lose customers to your cheaper competition, again you reach an equilibrium. How do you increase profits?
- You can innovate! Oh yes, that’s what capitalism is all about, improve your production, instead of 5 parts that need to be screwed together, now it’s just one part that falls out of a machine. You spend less time making each widget so you make more profit. But eventually there just isn’t any room to innovate any more. How do you increase profits?
- You can use cheaper materials. But here again, you bump against an equilibrium, the cheaper materials often break more easily - sometimes that is wanted (planned obsolescence) but your customers will notice the drop in quality and eventually they’re not willing to pay as much for your widget any more. How do you increase profits?
- Well, the last big item on your list: payroll. Do more work with less staff, or in other words pay staff less.
So what you end up with is low quality products, it’s a race to the bottom of who can make the crappiest product that the customers are still willing to pay for.
And for the workers? Well, they don’t earn much, we outsourced their work to overseas or replaced them with machines and computers. All the money went into the pockets of the owners and now the workers are poor. They’re desperate to even find work, any work as long as it allows them afford rent and barely not starve. If one of them has concerns about the working conditions, fire them, somebody else is more desperate and willing to accept the conditions.
So capitalism is destined to make us all poorer. It needs poverty as a “threat” to make you shut up and do your work “you wouldn’t want to be homeless, would you?”
The problem is not money itself, it’s not stores or being able to buy stuff. That’s an economy you can have an economy without capitalism. The problem is that the capitalists own the means of production and all the profits flow up into the pockets of the owners. And often the owners are shareholders, the stock markets, they don’t care if a company is healthy, or doing well by their employees, all the stock markets care about is “line go up”, and it’s sucking the working class dry.
Regulation can avoid some of the worst negative effects of capitalism. Lawmakers can set a minimum wage, rules for working hours, paid time off, health and safety, environmental protection etc. Those rules are often written in blood. Literally, because if not forced by law, capitalism has no reason to care about your (worker or customer) life, only profits.
Oppose that with some ideas of socialism. aka. “The workers own the means of production” This is something some companies practice, Worker cooperatives are great. The workers are the owners, if the company does well, all the workers get to enjoy the profits. The workers actually have a stake in their company doing well. (Technically if you’re self-employed you’re doing a socialism) Well, that’s utopia and probably won’t happen, maybe there’s a middle ground.
Unions are a good idea. Unions represent many workers and can negotiate working conditions and pay with much more weight than any individual worker can for themself.
Works councils are also a good idea, those are elected representatives of the employees of a company. They’re smaller than trade unions, but can still negotiate on behalf of the employees of the company. Sometimes they even get a seat on the board of directors so they have a say in how the company is run.
That’s how you can have capitalism but also avoid the worst effects of treating workers and customers badly. Anyway, unchecked capitalism is not a great idea. The USA would be an example of such unchecked capitalism.
Especially when you know that money equals power and the wealthy can buy their politicians through the means of “campaign donations” and now the owners of companies control the lawmakers who write the laws these companies have to abide by … From Europe we look at the USA and are mortified, but let’s not make this even more political.
Why is capitalism so anti-folks?
Folks aren’t themselves capital (anymore (mostly)) and just end up costing capital to keep them alive.
A true capitalist recognises this and despises folk for it.
Beautiful 👏
Man this debate is so US centric - as if there is only two choices: Unhinged, raging, exploitative, robber-baron capitalism OR Bolshevik Communism.
Typing this from one of the richest, strongest market economies in the world, which provides free health care, free education and generous e employment protections in the world. Everyone is happy, everyone is healthy, broadly, and capitalism exists next to a system of government that regulates to ensure the well-being of their citizens.
Social democracy people, it’s for real!!
Capitalism rewards exploitation.
You’ve probably heard “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” - and historically speaking, and in my experience, this holds to be true. I couldn’t be typing this on my glass god rectangle if there weren’t some children in a cobalt mine somewhere - at some rung on the ladder, people are dying, because where’s the incentive to lift others out of poverty? Why would any capitalist elevate their source of cheap labour and materials out of the blood and sand?
There’s also the interaction we have between the capitalist and socialist aspects of our society - for instance nationalised healthcare cannot be administered by capitalists because there is no incentive for the system to function for the good of the patients, but eventually the system will be optimised out of existence (by which I mean, broken into smaller units for budgetary reasons, small units degraded continually until they are canned, and the whole system is sunset because of “sound economic decisions”).
Capitalism is the antithesis of what I think any reasonable person wants in society save for those with an amount of blood on their hands. Capitalism is a Mad Max dystopia where a handful of people live as deities whilst the rest of us kill each other in the streets for scraps.
Capitalism might have seemed viable when everyone was suffering from lead poisoning, but it’s killing us today, and I support any means to remove this cancer and push for a more equitable life for everyone.
Pretty simple really: capitalism requires infinite growth. We have finite resources. The world is literally melting around us due to unsustainability.
The pet peeve of many people is the greed (of billionaires, politicians, global companies, etc) for wealth (paper, essentially) yet not giving a flying fuck about the anyone else or the rest of the planet.
I think the infinite growth part is a big part of the problem: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”
Billionaires and their companies could at least pay their fair share in taxes.
At least? I’m convinced they have a moral obligation to do so much more than that.
All this talk is making me hungry for some reason
For some raw billionaire flesh?
Brined and slowcooked. Like a brisket, but fattier and more cathartic.
Raw? I could fit a small gutted adult in my smoker. 3 hours at 250 F mmmmmm.
Well, that’s because the rich folk are the ones destroying the planet and we’re the ones left with the bill. And I refuse to feel guilty for their wrongdoings.
Don’t you know if you would just use paper straws the earth would stop warming? Just ignore the shipping and energy companies massively destroying the ecosystem.
I am doing my part
Profit over everything else. That doesn’t support or sustain the human race.
What about capitalism requires infinite growth? And what does it require infinite growth in? What happens when growth stagnates in a capitalist system? Does it suddenly not become capitalist anymore?
What about capitalism requires infinite growth?
Nothing. It’s just one of the slogans pinkos love to spam because they think it makes them sound intelligent
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Feel free to be pedantic, but my point remains: historically and currently capitalism strives for infinite growth and cares not for resource limitations.
Now, can capitalism serve both purposes? Of course. Technological improvements developed by capitalism can (and must) improve environmental and resource impacts of population needs. Does it currently? Not nearly enough. How to direct capitalism to become a better steward for the planet and its resources is a separate topic and discussion. OP asked a question that I was answering without getting into the weeds.
This isn’t a property of capitalism, though. It’s a property of humanity, and really of life. What capitalism did was just to efficiently provide food and medicine to people, and the population graph turned into a hockey stick.
Is starvation and infant mortality preferable? Do you think if people had found some (as yet unknown) economic system that was as effective at supplying food and medicine, people wouldn’t have had kids? And if they did keep having kids, wouldn’t that have taxed the planet like capitalism has done?
People have tried alternate systems, some have even gone extremely well until they are destroyed by capitalists
The fact of the matter is, the only reason there isn’t another system is because capitalists have gone out of their way to destroy every other system that has been tried.
You can’t make a fair comparison when you factor in that capitalists already control the world.
Even democratically elected communists were destroyed by the US government.
Alternative systems such as…? I can think of several, but none I’d describe as ‘successful’.
It’s kind of a red flag (no pun intended) when your preferred system can be destabilized with some money stuffed in the right pockets, isn’t it? Most failed systems that were ‘undermined by capitalists’ mostly involved funding and support, not invasion or anything. Meanwhile, democracy and capitalism emerged in the midst of hostile aristocracy and royalty, and survived decades of attempts by the USSR (and now Russia) to undermine it.
My personal opinion is that those systems were doomed from conception, though I don’t deny that the US certainly engaged in speeding their demise.
Anyway, that’s all beside the point. Both populations and consumption increased under the Soviets, and any other system you care to name, proportionate to their effectiveness at keeping people fed and healthy.
This you? Or are you just that ignorant? US history class must have been a joke for you.
Undermined by stuffed pockets?
None of the systems I advocated were undermined by stuffed pockets, they were undermined by a capitalist country militaristically destroying a new nation, a capitalist country that has 50 percent of the ENTIRE WORLDS military spending.
That’s an important detail not to gloss over.
Revolutionary Catalonia had a wonderful system, the zapatistas have a wonderful system, neither were undermined by what you claim. I’m anti-red fascism, the Soviet union was evil. You just boldly assumed anarchists don’t exist, I agree that they were fundamentally doomed, but anarchists have no such fuckups.
Furthermore do you honestly believe capitalism is not susceptible to stuffed pockets??
You are objectively wrong that capitalism offers an effective system at distributing medicine and food amongst societies. I’m amazed you’ve come to that conclusion when hundreds of millions of people die every year because they can’t AFFORD TO BUY food or medicine… Further more the world is melting because of horrific mismanagement by the elite class and not much else. The technology, money and resources exist to solve most problems on earth but the monetary COST is deemed too high. See capitalists and capitalism will always choose wealth over human life, always, it’s literally how capitalism began with old mate Columbus and the new world slave trade. From top to bottom, start to finish, capitalism is fucking shit and irredeemable.
Then what’s your explanation for the huge rise in life expectancy and food availability–starting in capitalist Western countries, and then spreading to the rest of the world along with the market economy?
Capitalism is certainly imperfect at distribution of food and medicine. As the saying goes: it’s the worst system, aside from every other that has existed. And the margin isn’t particularly close.
You date the origin of capitalism to Columbus? Seems pretty arbitrary. Markets date back thousands of years, and recognizably capitalist forms of government emerged in the 18th and 19th century at the earliest. Columbus was sponsored by a king seeking new land, not capitalists seeking new markets.
Let’s say you have a cow. The cow had a baby, and it’s producing milk, but more than the calf or your family need. So you start selling the excess milk.
It’s good money! Soon you buy another cow, and another. Eventually you can’t take care of them all, so you hire people to help you. Yay!
After a while you realize that waiting for the cows to be impregnated by your bull means they are not producing milk as much as they can. So you start forcefully impregnating the cows so they are always pregnant or producing milk.
The calves are drinking a lot of your milk, so you decide to kill them as soon as possible. You don’t know what to do with the dead calves, so you start marketing them as “veal”, a delicacy!
A lot of your process is still manual, so you buy machinery that increases your productivity by 100x. You’re still paying your workers the same amount, even though they’re now responsible for producing 100x more.
One day you realize there’s too much milk in the market. If you sell it all, the price will drop too much. So you dump thousands of gallons of milk in the river, to keep the prices stable. You couldn’t give them away to people in need, that would still affect the market!
You’re still not selling enough (though you have more money that you could spend in your lifetime). So you buy some politicians so the government says that milk is essential, the only way to absorb calcium, and it should be in every school. People are convinced they need milk, even though it’s from another species and even though humans don’t need milk after a couple years of age.
That’s why I hate capitalism.
For us young people: Because the system feels broken, and that there’s little future to grow towards.
I grew up privileged, I attended private school until 5th grade before moving to one of the best public schools in a US state known for having good education. I’ve had a safety net my entire life, and that has allowed me to take risks, and end up homeless, that otherwise could have permanently screwed me over.
I, only a few years later, finally feel somewhat stable with the path I’ve pursued. For me stable means ~2 months emergency savings, probably not getting evicted by my batshit landlord anytime soon, and only having to work 2 jobs.
If that is what it takes to feel stable, then I can only feel like the system is screwed. I will never have the money to buy a house anywhere near where I work, near being defined as within an hour. I spend my days working for people who can drop more than what I make in a year on vacations. People who live in neighborhoods where the ‘cheap’ houses start at $10 million. And I work with some amazing down to earth people. If I’m one of the lucky ones, and I definitely am for where I live, how can the system not be broken?
Our climate is fucked, my only hope of every owning property is a massive market crash, I will likely have to keep working till I’m close to dead, vacations are a distant dream, allwhile I make my landlord richer, the corporations take all my money, because I can’t afford good, organic or local food, and the people at the top get even richer.
Our system has incentived turned all the workers into profit. At work we’re measured by the value we add to the company, never officially, but punished for missing work or being sick, and at home we’re measured by the value we add to corporations through our purchases. Even our attention has become a product. How long can companies get us to stare at their product, mindlessly consuming and being served ads.
Even in our own homes we are a product. We are an unwilling cog in a machine that makes us poorer and those with the power richer. The government should be here to protect the common man and woman. For every example of the gov. doing the right thing to protect us from monopolies and predatory practices, there are 10 or 100 examples of the opposite.
No change will come about under our current socio economic system, and you need to remember. I’m one of the lucky ones.
Lots of good answers in here already.
Some stuff that’s colloquially seen as capitalism is okay. Me paying someone to clean my house because I hate that chore is fine with me.
It quickly becomes Not Fine when you add in all the “if they don’t clean up my shit, they risk starving”, “they work for a boss who takes most of the money I pay”, and “none of us pay for externalized costs like using toxic chemicals for cleaning” parts. Other things too I can’t think of right now n
Left alone, nothing stops capitalism from selling you bread made with sawdust. People might say “well the market would reject an inferior product” but that’s not necessarily true. Monopolies and cartels form. People might not know a product is harmful until it’s too late.
Blah blah blah. Fittingly, I have to go back to work now.
The top 10% of Americans own 70% of the country’s wealth.
Have you ever stopped to consider the logical conclusions of that? If they lived at the same standard as the average American, we would only need to use 30% of the resources we’re currently burning through. It’s grossly inefficient. We waste more than 2/3rds of our resources so that rich assholes can live in $100 million mansions and fly around on private jets.
Say you’re an American working a 9 to 5 job. Once you hit 1 pm on Tuesday, you’ve done enough work for the week to meet all the actual needs for society. The rest of Tuesday, all of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are all just to pay for rich assholes to take a “hunting” trip to Africa and needlessly slaughter native wildlife. Or to buy the 400th car in their special collections that they’ve nearly forgotten about. Etc. Etc.
70% of the irreplaceble oil being drilled? Flushed down the drain just so that rich assholes can horde wealth. 70% of the pollution in the air? Put there so that billionaires can have parties on a private island. So that they can fly their private jets to private retreats and pretend to be outdoorspeople for a weekend. 70% of the new extreme weather being caused by anthropogenic climate change? All so that rich assholes can do things like jet around the world so they can say they’ve played a round of golf on 7 different continents in 7 days. Etc. Etc.
It’s nowhere near sustainable.
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Climate change cannot be addressed under capitalism.
Capitalism is flawed and has outlived it’s usefulness just as every preceding economic system has. One of the more poignant Marx quotes puts it well
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
Capitalism is based on the accumulation of resources known as the “means of production”. As time goes on, those with capital are able to leverage it to further subjugate the working class as they amass a disproportionate amount of wealth and capital. The average worker is worth far more than they are paid, while the capitalist who they work under continues to pocket the majority of that profit.
For a working class person to begin to earn their fare share they have a few ethical options, be self employed, unionize to collectively bargain for a larger piece of the pie, join or form a co-op (effectively a small scale form of socialism).
The last point I’d bring up that is more central to my own politics is the inherent link between capitalism and imperialism. Even in a capitalist country where you may be able to comfortably live as a member of the working class, the global third world is often footing the bill in order to lower the cost of goods. Examples would be clothing, chocolate, coffee, etc where most of these are made in desolate conditions and sometimes with slave labor.
That being said, there are many reasons to be against capitalism and it is hard to express in a single comment. I highly recommend Lenin’s State and Revolution to anyone interested.
Capitalism is inherently evil, you can only make money if you already have it
As the natives said, how can your way be better when those who have nothing give to those who have everything?
But the greedy in charge lie and say it’s better, and they control ALL aspects of life because they have the money, news, police, etc.
Capitalism is slavery and is NOT in the constitution.
Capitalism isn’t evil. It has no moral. It doesn’t feel anything and doesn’t care. There is only one golden rule “accumolate capital”. That’s it. It doesn’t matter how. Abduct people to force them in to slavery. Sent kids in coalmines for 12 hours a day. Burn down villages. The logical end for capitalism is one person owning everything.
This isn’t evil or greedy. It is just people playing by the rules of the system. People aren’t bad people. It is the system that makes them act in evil or greedy ways. This is what capitalism wants us to act. This is how we are expacted to behave.
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As i said there is no morality in capitalism. There is no evil way to act in capitalism because the only right way to act in capitalism is tu accumulate capital there is no morality norm to classify actions as evil. Slavery in capitalism isn’t evil, it is a logical way zo act under capitalism. When we classify an action under capitalism as evil we do it with morality norms from outside the system. When we use the category “evil” we put value in how we treat living beeings. A question that ist part of capitalism. That’s why actions under capitalism aren’t evil under the view of capitalism but can be seen as evil from a not capitalistic point of view.
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Any system that does not inherently protect people is evil. It is a known fact that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Any system that does not intentionally address this issue is evil.
Look around you – capitalism is literally burning our ecosystem to transfer wealth into the hands of the rich. If you are “pro-capitalism” you are either ignorant of physical reality or you are selfish and think you can “make it” and be one of the tiny minority that actually benefits from the system, to the detriment of almost every other living being on the planet.
