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!
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 misnamed. Marx’s analysis that capital has a special theoretical role in the system is wrong. Accepting the pie metaphor means falling for the capitalist framing. Capitalism is a property system, so criticize it in property theoretic terms. The problem with the system becomes clear as the capitalist legally owns 100% of the positive and negative product of the firm and employees own 0% of the product. Whole analysis doesn’t fit in a toot, so link: https://www.ellerman.org/rethinking-common-vs-private-property/
Not capitalism, but hating on corporations and on unregulated capitalism. Imagine having one commercial entity more powerful than many of the states in the world, then having them abuse that kind of power given by money to supress the rights of people in the weaker states. The government should act as a staunch and uncorruptible protector of the people against these kind of big economic legal or illegal entities
Socialism doesn’t scale up. Capitalism doesn’t scale down.
While this has turned into a fantastic discussion, I don’t have the bandwidth to handle some of the nastier comments. I’m going to lock it now.
The community choice was fine. The only challenge is that we don’t have bandwidth to mod contentious discussions, usually those related to politics and other sensitive topics. Because the quality of the discussion tends to be high, I’m happy to let these go until I notice too many comments that cross the line.
In general: when you come across comments that break the rules (see the sidebar) please do report them. There’s a lot of content here and we may not see everything.
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.
great stuff, saving this for later
Just to provide evidence, you can see the impact of corporate profits and the unit cost of products during COVID-19 in this study:
Corporate profits were a majority of the driver of cost of products during a literal pandemic when people were suffering and needed cheaper goods the most. The pandemic caused inelastic demand to increase and so companies took advantage of a global crisis to line their pockets.
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This perfectly encapsulates my feelings about capitalism.
You are an absolute scholar! Thankyou!
Capitalism isn’t necessarily bad, but unregulated capitalism encourages the most cut throat to thrive.
Capitalism is a great economic model when you can have a competitive market, but oligopolies, monopolies, and monopsonies are natural. After you have no where else to go, labor is a cost, and capitalism encourages the cut throat to minimize that by any means.
Also, even right wing economists agree there are some market failures within capitalism. It encourages you to not consider the economic impact outside of your company. These are typically referred to as negative externalities.
Smokers are a negative externality to the health care system. When a corporation gets hacked, their clients suffer the consequences for when their stolen data is abused. No corporation can stop all other corporations from polluting with cheaper energy, and the most cost effective will thrive in a capitalist system. So all corporations have to choose dirtier cheaper energy.
These are all examples of market failures. Regulation compatibile with capitalism include taxing negative externalities and using that money to subsidize positive externalities.
Tax smokers and use the money to fund health care. Fine corps for getting hacked and subsidize hackers to pen test systems. Tax dirtier forms of energy and subsidize greener sources.
I’m also fascinated by cyberpunk dystopias, but I prefer never to live in them.
.ml stands for Mali.
.ee stands for Estonia.
.tv stands for Tuvalu
Just like .ca stands for Canada.
I don’t know if there’s any “evidence” but it’s well known that the devs of Lemmy are Marxist-Leninists, and that’s the reason for many choosing to use Lemmy.
It’s actually the domain name for Mali, but that’s allright. Just like how be in youtu.be is simply the domain name for Belgium
i simply choose to believe it means bagel enjoyer
What are your favorite bagels? Good New York bagels are great! I also really enjoy a Montreal bagel sometimes. I’m in Texas where bagels are mostly from national chains or the grocery bakery, which are ok because you can usually get a jalapeno cheddar.
my food preferences have not changed since i was a child so i like cinnamon raisin
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Isn’t the prisoner’s dilemma the exact opposite of this claim
Boy, if their statement were true, we’d be living in paradise!
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.
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.
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?
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.
Yup, that is the goal. Juuuuust short of desperate. That is where we are aiming for most of our population to live.
Global warming is upon us. If something doesn’t drastically change, now, our entire species is going to die.
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.
If global warming doesn’t completely wipe us out, we’ll finish ourselves off with nukes.
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.
And some people will be hoarding money until the last, bitter second.
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.
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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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.
What are you a fan of?
Respond to a question with a question…
A more highly regulated capitalism with high business taxes and no loopholes so companies pay their fair share for operating in a market that provides them their revenue.
There should also be nationally controlled resources instead of privatizing them (internet should be included with water and power).
That would be a good start.
To my dying day, I won’t understand why anyone (who doesn’t benefit from it) could think that privatised utilities are a good idea. The last forty years have seen a steady decline in, well, every aspect of formerly publicly owned industries in the UK, but stans for capital still wang on about how publicly owned utilities in the 70s were crap.
Crap, maybe, but a damn sight fucking cheaper.
im here with you. capitalism is fine in cases were there is significant and robust competition. for things that are not necessities and in all cases there should be significant oversight and regulation by a democratically elected goverment over it.
Common ownership of the means of production
Please identify where this concept currently exists in the real world and is currently successful.
Edit: I’m a socialist, and yet all the hypocritical communists here that are using devices made using capitalist infrastructure with the money they earned participating in a globalized capitalist market are coping by down voting me and rather prefer not answering the question.
Asking why collective ownership of the means of production does not exist in our “globalized capitalist market,” while denying or ignoring the efforts of the Unied States and other rich capitalist nations to actively prevent any such nation from ever existing, is disingenuous at best. The United States in particular has a long history of involvement in regime changes / coups of left-wing governments, even those instituted by entirely democratic means.
Ok, so throughout the several tens of thousands of years of modern human civilization, there have been different kinds of economic systems, all of which had cultures that were supported by them and utilized their economic systems to attack each other relentlessly.
Why has free market globalized capitalism survived so well consistently the entire time?
Are you seriously trying to argue here that communism is so weak it can’t survive attacks from the outside by a fragile failure that is capitalism?
It’s hard to when any of those experiments have been met with bombs, embargoes, coups, and other fuckery
Worker cooperatives (and often cooperatives in general) are an example of this. They almost always exist within a capitalist system, so are not able to completely separate themselves from all aspects of capitalism, but they are definitely examples of common ownership of means of production.
Specifically you can look up the Mondragon Corporation which is probably the biggest/best known example of a workers cooperative but there are many others. There are lots of variations on this same concept - one where risk, rewards, and decision-making are shared more equitably among everybody participating. I think the most interesting are food co-ops (and sometimes CSAs), utility cooperatives, and housing cooperatives. These are all over the place and are often quietly successful examples of common ownership.
May sound good on paper, but everywhere where it was tried, nothing good happened. There is something in human nature that makes it inefficient and have tendency to become dictatorial state. Socialism (in classical sense) is just worse system in practice, as many countries in 20th century demonstrated.
If I try to grow some tomatoes, and by the time they’re sprouting out of the ground, my neighbor tramples them and lights them on fire, does that mean that I can’t ever grow tomatoes and they’re doomed to fail?
Who trampled on the Russian tomatoes? (Don’t say the Nazis, they trampled on everyone’s tomatoes including their own) For Russia, there was some small scale support for the whites during their civil war, but otherwise trade between the Soviets and the west increased year by year during the NEP period until Stalin purposely contracted it (if someone knows more about this period, feel free to correct me. I’m working off of information I learned in classes years ago and this article that matches with what I remember). I’d propose that the Soviet issues were internal due to blindly ideological governance that crippled their economy and society. They didn’t have to make such an insane number of nukes, create the culture that caused Chernobyl, nor invade Afghanistan.
Otherwise, who trampled the Mainland Chinese tomatoes? They basically won their civil war, their only issue was blind allegiance to chairman Mao that resulted in disaster after disaster. The West didn’t force them to try the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Down to the Countryside ‘Movement,’ nor the One Child Policy. The CCP did those to themselves, and they only found success once Mao died and they made their economy more capitalistic.
And then once more, who trampled on the North Korean tomatoes? At the beginning of their war, they tried to crush the South’s tomatoes until a UN authorized force pushed them to the Chinese border and then a Chinese force counterbalanced to the current borders, but otherwise the North was economically better off once the stalemate began (the Japanese centered their industrial developments in the north). North Korea failed because of dramatic mismanagement and a ideology of constant militarism while the South, with ups and downs, prospered.
Sure, there were military actions, police actions, and garden trampling that harmed both sides during the Cold War, but you can’t just blame your enemy for beating you, you have to recognize why you lost.
In regards to the USSR, it’s probably the most complex example, but if you don’t think there was plenty of pressure on Russia from the West that wasn’t direct warfare (cold war as an incredibly basic example). Here’s a fun video on reasons why it fell that isn’t through a US centric lens
China is also complicated an I’m not going to speak to it.
But North Korea? You mean the country we absolutely turned to rubble through bombing campaigns to destroy ~85% of it’s buildings, and then on top of it cutting them off from most of the rest of the world from trade? That’s probably the most prime example of how we’ve trampled a country. Blowback has a deep dive into the history there and it’s great.
And here’s a holistic video in case you care to hear the exact argument broken down
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=w72mLI_FaR0
https://piped.video/watch?v=nFUC0UWgdGY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Yes, until you do something about your neighbors.
In case of (classical) socialism, since it is tried in many countries, I will argue it will fail again, unless something is changed. And I am arguing that that something is human nature. So, while we are the same humans, this will not work as effective as capitalism.
Ironically, I think Karl Marx understood this. This is why he was arguing for world-wide revolution. But Lenin changed this into “building communism in a single country”. Since half of the developed world continued to be capitalistic, it become quite obvious that people in capitalist countries live better (on average), and the soviet empire disintegrated.
Marx definitely did not believe capitalism would produce more surplus than scientific socialism. However, I doubt he believed it was a switch you could throw and suddenly have a more productive economy. His point was that you could approach the problem scientifically. Through hypothesis testing and experimentation you could develop something more rational than the anarchy of the market.
That said, communist governments haven’t ever found themselves in a position where they can safely experiment with a planned economy. The USSR was struggling for decades to defend itself from foreign adversaries. That’s why it developed a tightly controlled and powerful bureaucracy which eventually led to it’s downfall. It’s also why China and Vietnam decided it was safer to experiment with market reforms given that they are at an economic disadvantage to capitalist countries. Other attempts at building a socialist economy have been thwarted by either US backed coups or sanctions, as was the case with Chile and Cuba.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=PaASqPnpq5Y
https://piped.video/watch?v=PaASqPnpq5Y
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
*gestures vaguely at everything*
I’m not even full on anticapitalist but come on that’s just obvious.
Quoting my reply to a similar sentiment: (link here: https://programming.dev/comment/1167202)
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.
But the world is a complicated thing and we’ve got >7 billion people to feed!
Yes, and capitalism works to deny those people as much food as possible, to give it to others who can pay more. If you buy groceries and literally throw them away, that’s better for the companies selling the food than you using it. We’ve known for 50 years that climate crisis was coming, but in order for capitalism to keep expanding, they kept pouring (literal) fuel onto the fire.
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.
Worse for whom? We’re literally looking at unlivable temperatures popping up all over the globe, not to mention the storms, land erosion, lack of water, and the fact that soon, we won’t even be able to grow food like we do now. You think we’ll have cattle farms in 50c heat?
We don’t need a new system, we have one: Socialism. Not communism, socialism. Governments should exist to enrich and help their people, not to enrich a tiny percentage of them at the expense of everyone else.
Capitalism is about exponential growth, on a planet with finite resources. Eventually, you get to where we are now: End Stage Capitalism. A tiny number of people have a bulk of the wealth of the world. The game is over, they won. They made the planet unlivable for humans in a few generations in order to do it, but they won. Congratulations (confetti)
Ok so if you agree that everything is fucked idk why you’d take issue with my answer being “because everything is fucked.” I already said I’m not a full on anticapitalist so idk what your point in telling me we shouldn’t throw the whole thing out is, I don’t think that in the first place.
Gesturing vaguely at everything is not an argument for anything. Supposing the person you’re talking to agrees that everything is bad, then it’s simply an argument for radicalism, not necessarily anticapitalism or whatever your particular strain of belief is. Someone could, while gesturing vaguely, just as easily argue that it’s because of moral decline, that society isn’t capitalist enough, for race realism, for the need for a strongman to take over, or really anything that’d promise (but almost certainly not deliver) to vaguely fix everything.
Quoting my reply to a similar sentiment: (link here: https://programming.dev/comment/1167202)
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.
Dude, in this case what make it hard is not nature, is not our technology or even the will of most people.
We have means to feed everyone on this planet. Make clean water available to everyone. To make everyone have a house. And to revert clima change.
What is stopping that to happen? Most people here will answer “capitalism”, but explain and prove that is not so simple because, as you said, the world is complex and we live inside the system. Think about how someone on ancient times trying understand a critique about their own society made by an outsider. Not that easy. And to make that even harder, we feed get propaganda from all sides.
I suggest you to make more basic/small questions. Like “why food companies don’t donate excess food for people in need instead of trashing it?”, the answer will be an excuse about risk of being sued. That’s not true, the are laws in US to protect companies donating food in good faith.
Or maybe “Are there options to capitalism? What is socialism? What is communism? Why do they failed? Did they failed? What can we learn with history? Where can I find good sources?”
Also the planet being destroyed, with no end in sight as long as the entire society is organized around the sole purpose of enabling those with the most money to have more money, rather than anything actually meaningful or beneficial for those who live on the planet.
Most folks have taken things for granted for too long. Throughout the course of our history, we human have never been wealthier, healthier, and happier. Our stomachs have never been more filled. People have forgotten how we get here. It is not dynastic empires, Soviet Republics, nor facist dictatorships that bring us the quality of life we all enjoy. It is rather tragic to withness the spread of the anti-capitalism ignorance.
Unfortunately, your reply ignores the increasing, and increasingly destructive and fatal (for all), short, mid, and long term consequences of doing this. Yes indeed, for an unfortunately small overall percentage of all of humanity, we’ve never been wealthier, healthier, and happier. Very true! And for those of us, me included, that are enjoying the fruits of that (middle class and above in the world’s wealthier countries, which is also the demographic that is far more likely to be reading and commenting here) it is really easy to ignore, deny, and pretend those consequences are not rearing their heads both now and in the future. However, for the sake of our species we cannot ignore this.
What a simplistic, solipsistic, history-blind take! Do you have no knowledge of the 19th century? Arguably, before the Civil War was the prime time of truly “free markets” and pure capitalism in the US. It was also a time of drastic wealth inequality, exploitation of anyone that wasn’t a white, male landowner, to say nothing of slavery. How many thousands died creating the railroads in the US? All of those millionaires like Carnegie, JP Morgan, Vanderbilt, Rockerfeller, all made their money on the backs and deaths of poor people.
Prior to FDR and the New Deal, we’d have Panics, where there’d be massive bank failures about every 20-30 years because of unfettered capitalism. And, just like the Great Recession, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. It was the New Deal and the FDIC that stopped the cycle.
Workers rights are antithetical to capitalism. Triangles Shirtwaist Factory Fire, children in the coal mines in Appalachia, coolie labor building the railroads.
We are not “wealthier, healthier, and happier” because of capitalism. It was the New Deal that helped shape the world the US has now, for which conservativism has been chipping away since Nixon. Socialistic practices like labor unions, collective bargaining, etc., brought wealth and stability, and created the massive middle-class that we have now. There had been no real middle-class before that, historically, just the rich and the poor. FDIC stopped the Panics; labor unions and collective bargaining brought wealth and education the working class, thus elevating and creating the massive middle-class we have now. Prior to the Great Depression, life was pretty awful and hard if you weren’t rich in the US.
I’m not shitting on capitalism, but it needs the limitations that socialism brings to keep it in check, to keep it accountable, and not run roughshod over minorities, women, and children.
Also, scientific advancements actually came a lot from war, sad to say. The exponential growth of computers, GPS, obviously nuclear technology, a lot of medicine and medical procedures (thanks MASH units in Korea!) all came out of war. As for later 20th century advancements? All funded by the government. I’d suggest reading Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s book, Accessory to War.
So are you saying, after the New Deal, the US was/is no longer practicing capitalism? I am afraid I have to disagree.
The US government did not produce all the technologies. Many of them are from private companies. Yes the government funded them with public money, public money paid by the taxpayers.
So are you saying, after the New Deal, the US was/is no longer practicing capitalism? I am afraid I have to disagree.
What? Do you have only a black/white mentality? Of course not. We have a mixed system, as does almost the rest of the world that isn’t a dictatorship. Capitalism and socialism are not mutually exclusive; in fact, there’s a compelling argument that one really can’t exist without the other.
Yes the government funded them with public money, public money paid by the taxpayers.
Yes, that’s called socialism. The government levies taxes from its people, then the government redistributes the wealth, that’s the very definition of socialism.
What? Do you have only a black/white mentality? Of course not. We have a mixed system, as does almost the rest of the world that isn’t a dictatorship. Capitalism and socialism are not mutually exclusive; in fact, there’s a compelling argument that one really can’t exist without the other.
We have a mixed system. But we are capitalistic leaning are we not? Being capitalist or socialist are not discrete choices, but a continuous scale. I agree with you on that.
Btw the 1929 great crash was facilitate and exacerbated by lax Federal Reserve control of money issuance and the drastic tightening after the crash. This is actually an argument against centralized money.
Yes, that’s called socialism. The government levies taxes from its people, then the government redistributes the wealth, that’s the very definition of socialism.
Well a joint stock company also does that. It engages in production. It does redistribute wealth. For a long time, public services e.g. firefighting, were provided by private entities. Is it socialism? I don’t think so. It has to involve coercion, say, via monopoly of violence to be socialism.
Btw the 1929 great crash was facilitate and exacerbated by lax Federal Reserve control of money issuance and the drastic tightening after the crash. This is actually an argument against centralized money.
I’d suggest you look up the Panics of the 19th century.
Well a joint stock company also does that. It engages in production. It does redistribute wealth. For a long time, public services e.g. firefighting, were provided by private entities. Is it socialism? I don’t think so. It has to involve coercion, say, via monopoly of violence to be socialism as it is a form of governing.
You obviously don’t understand what socialism means. Socialism, by its definition, means involving government, be it local or federal. So, a private company is not socialism, a private fire fighting brigade is not socialism.
Science cannot exist without finance. Science and its practitioners do not exist in a vacuum. Who are going to feed the “scientists”? Or who are going to be the “scientists”? It takes time and resources to train “scientists”. It also takes time and resources to ensure knowledge is inherited and shared. That is why renaissance and enlightenment is such a big deal in history.
That is why renaissance and enlightenment is such a big deal in history.>
Umm…capitalism didn’t exist in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations wasn’t published until 1776. Most of Europe was still feudal during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. England is the exception, but England was always the exception. So, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. The Royal Society, for which Newton, Hooke, Halley, etc., were all members of, was funded by the Crown, hence the name, “Royal Society”. The European savants all had royal patrons, like Leibniz, Brahe, and Huygens, that funded their livelihoods.
For note, I am a published historian by education that specialized in Tudor England.
Capitalism as a classification/concept did not exist does not mean the practice did not exist. Capital (both in kind and in mind) accumulation has been occurring since even the stone age. Of course we would not call those societies capitalistic.
Plus I am replying to the comment that tries to dismember science from finance/economy.
Nope. What you mean is science cannot exist without resources. In wartime, countries switch to a production economy and finance is not executed when building all the war supply. The country simply has the resources to execute the production directly. It could also execute science as well, as seen in the manhattan project. It could also ensure the knowledge transfer and upbringing of future scientists too. But when government is for sale, laws protect the interests of the buyer. Simple as that.
And please enlighten me on where the resources come from and how they are allocated. Do the coal/oil/gas buried deep under earth dig themselves out or the cattle/pigs/chickens will automagically grow and serve themselves on our dinner table? Command economies can only work spontaneously. The Nazi and the USSR both did have made spectacular achievements over the course of their existence. But is the process sustainable? No. That was why they both failed eventually.
The US did not become the arsenal of democracies by centralizing all the industries during the second World War. The private industries involved a lot. You can say that paved way for the future military-industrial complex. Even the secretive Manhattan project had a number of corporate partners.
“Thing could be worse” is not a valid argument against improving things.
“Improving things” is not a justification for ignorance. I have never seen things getting “improved” by someone ignorant of the building blocks or even worse motivated to destroy the building blocks on which we all stand.
Feudalism was once the building blocks upon which we all stood.
Yes so we need to understand it. You don’t think our countless historians and social scientists are doing their work purely for fun or do you?
Yes so we need to understand it.
Sure. I never said we shouldn’t understand it.
Understanding != continued existence.
But with that said, capitalism has proven itself to be unsustainable and in need of replacement. The longer we take to replace it the worse things are going to be.
It’s because everyone here has only ever lived under capitalism, and they see all its issues and think socialism/communism would solve them.
I used to work with two former USSR expats - one Polish, one Russian. (I was 30 years younger than them.) We were a small crew and would work away from home for weeks at a time, so we’d spend a lot of our down time talking. They did sometimes reminisce about the things they liked from the old country, but they were very clear that their live was so much better once they left.
People on Lemmy have this romantic idea of communism. That you’ll work 15 hours per week doing something the like, like selling old books or gardening, and the state will provide everything you need. But in reality, under communism you will be assigned a job, assigned a house, and you’ll be happy about it. And if you complain, the state will take things away from you, because the state controls everything - your job, your house, your savings - they’re all government controlled. You can’t have freedom under communism. Don’t like your job - too bad, you’ll do it until you retire. You can’t take a gap year to find yourself (unless you count the compulsory military service), you can’t move to another city because you prefer the vibe there, you can’t start a business because you had a good idea.
Communism only sounds good if you’ve never lived it, and never really spoken to someone who has.
(Being Lemmy, I fully expect someone to respond saving that the USSR wasn’t real communism, and that they could design a communist system better than Marx or Lenin.)
I’m an immigrant that has worked extensively in the legal community with immigrants. I’m more than aware of what other regimes are like.
That being said, what I’d like to see is more nuance. There’s this bizarre belief, and I’m not sure if it’s age or lack of education, that says that only pure capitalism or pure socialism is BEST. When, in actuality, I don’t think a healthy society can exist without the other. Pure capitalism will eat itself without the checks socialism brings; whereas pure socialism will reify itself into inertia without the incentives capitalism brings. The trick, of course, is finding a balance.
Unless you’re an insane person like Maggot Trash-Garbage, I don’t think anyone thinks the FDIC is bad, or government funding for new antibiotics, or NASA, or necessary municipal utilities like sewage systems or fire fighters. All of that stuff is socialism, and they work great along side capitalism. I also don’t think the average person thinks breaking up monopolies is bad. Anti-trust laws and legislation are also socialism, remember.
Anyone who wants a free-market completely devoid of government intervention has clearly never studied economics.
The most important book regarding capitalism is “The Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith. It’s the first book any education on economics will ask you to read. It in, Smith states that the role of government should be 3 main points: defence, law and order, and public services. So the person regarded as the father of capitalism would consider NASA, firefighters and sewerage to all be government responsibilities.
The Wealth of Nations was written at a time when government intervention was the cause of monopolies, not a solution to it.
As the free market was embraced in different countries, economists saw it operating and built on Smiths work. Pigou wrote about “externalities” (such as pollution) where the person benefiting is not paying all the costs of production, and that this required government intervention to correct the imbalance this causes in the free market.
A valid question.
“Capitalism” is a huge umbrella term so means many different things to many different people. And as an extension of this, a lot of the things that are underneath that umbrella are inarguably … extremely bad. Environmental devastation, the oppression and wage slavery of the third world, the existence of multi-million-dollar worthless baubles when people still die from lack of affordable health care… Even if you’re very pro-capitalist it would be tough to argue that all aspects of capitalism are great for humans and humanity. Capitalism optimizes for economic performance, not human happiness.
Also a lot of people’s only experience with oppression is through capitalism. Here, I am talking about the alienation of workers from their labor (or, put more plainly, “shitty jobs”). It’s pretty bad for the soul to work as a wage slave in Amazon Fulfillment Warehouse #143249 earning $14/hour while bosses so removed from you they may as well be on another planet earn roughly $14,000,000/minute for doing nothing more than sitting in an office for 2 hours a day and sexually harassing their hot secretaries. Obviously there’s more to it than this for those of us who are more pro-capitalism, but I think it’s easy to see how some people get very angry about these conditions very rapidly.
Personally, despite these problems, I am more pro-capitalist than not, but it is because I experience (and have experienced) a fair amount of non-capitalism-related-oppression. As I have said numerous times capitalism is not perfect and is far from perfection. Nevertheless, it is the only economic system under which minorities such as LGBTQ+ people have been able to advance their agendas and see a modicum of gains in the field of civil rights. People hate on rainbow capitalism but I personally love it (and, by extension, fear Target and other companies caving to Republican pressure campaigns). The alternative to rainbow capitalism is companies and people hating LGBTQ+ people… and that is a far, far worse outcome for me than Northrop Grumman having a float in a Pride parade.
This is also a pretty typical leftist divide though. Those of us more on the “identity politics” side tend to see communists as white bros with bad beards whose only experience of adversity is that they’re jealous of how much money their bosses make. On the other hand, communists see identity politics proponents as wanting more gay disabled Black trans drone pilots. Both these critiques are obviously basically true because everyone is problematic.
But I think that’s basically where the capitalism hate on the Internet comes from.
Thanks for engaging with me so politely!
“Capitalism” is a huge umbrella term so means many different things to many different people. And as an extension of this, a lot of the things that are underneath that umbrella are inarguably … extremely bad. Environmental devastation, the oppression and wage slavery of the third world, the existence of multi-million-dollar worthless baubles when people still die from lack of affordable health care… Even if you’re very pro-capitalist it would be tough to argue that all aspects of capitalism are great for humans and humanity. Capitalism optimizes for economic performance, not human happiness.
You’re right! But I don’t see how the bad things are the fault of capitalism. Capitalism is a tool intended to fix these very problems!
Environmental devastation is an externality because the rules haven’t been defined properly-- if the rules of capital ownership around environmental concerns were clarified (through some system of carbon emission limitations and carbon credits), then I’m sure capitalism could optimize for a good environmental outcome. A bad thing, to be sure, but not the fault of capitalism.
Oppression/wage-slavery in the third world happens mostly in nations that are the least capitalist. Also, the capitalist system works for the benefit of the country that establishes it. I believe this is how it should be. Other nations can simply block all trade if they want to remain unaffected, but shouldn’t be surprised if the capitalist nation simply takes advantage of their non-optimal economic choices. Again, a huge problem, but not the fault of capitalism.
Mis-allocation of resources is the very problem that capitalism is best at solving. I’d argue that systems like public healthcare are hampering the ability of capitalism to solve these problems.
Also a lot of people’s only experience with oppression is through capitalism. Here, I am talking about the alienation of workers from their labor (or, put more plainly, “shitty jobs”). It’s pretty bad for the soul to work as a wage slave in Amazon Fulfillment Warehouse #143249 earning $14/hour while bosses so removed from you they may as well be on another planet earn roughly $14,000,000/minute for doing nothing more than sitting in an office for 2 hours a day and sexually harassing their hot secretaries. Obviously there’s more to it than this for those of us who are more pro-capitalism, but I think it’s easy to see how some people get very angry about these conditions very rapidly.
Agreed-- I’ve been in that situation, and understand that it doesn’t seem fair. But were any other systems better? It was worse to be a farmer owned by your local feudal lord, no?
Personally, despite these problems, I am more pro-capitalist than not, but it is because I experience (and have experienced) a fair amount of non-capitalism-related-oppression.
Ah I see I may have been preaching to the choir here, I apologize. Your perspective is appreciated, regardless! Thanks for your input!
Capitalism is a tool intended to fix these very problems!
What definition of capitalism are you using here? Because I think most commonly-accepted definitions definitely do not assign this as an intention of capitalism.
Strong regulations, moral actors, and careful control can fix many of capitalism’s problems. But the kind of unfettered capitalism that, for example, anarcho-libertarians espouse would certainly not lead to less environmental devastation, oppression/wage-slavery, and/or mis-allocation of resources.
Historically I think most people would agree capitalism is in a better state than it has ever been. Capitalism as practiced in the late 19th/early 20th century was very different from our understanding of it today and was much much worse across most dimensions. That is a result of evolving regulatory frameworks making capitalism more compatible with what we define as happiness, justice, and morality. Hopefully we can continue curbing the issues of capitalism while encouraging the things it is good at (like making numbers goes up and creating lots of shiny things people like).
It was worse to be a farmer owned by your local feudal lord, no?
Definitely true. But this is not a problem for most capitalist critiques; that the current system is better in some ways than others doesn’t mean it also isn’t bad.
This is a very difficult thread for me, because you’ve immediately started it from what feels like an insincere position of insisting on the polite debate of a system that has actively harmed innumerable people. And continues to do so.
While I don’t deny that polite debate is preferable to flame wars and anger, you’ve come in here to try and debate a subject that raises passions.
And the reason I say this from the outset is because of comments like this;
Environmental devastation is an externality because the rules haven’t been defined properly-- if the rules of capital ownership around environmental concerns were clarified (through some system of carbon emission limitations and carbon credits), then I’m sure capitalism could optimize for a good environmental outcome. A bad thing, to be sure, but not the fault of capitalism.
The ‘rules’ in this case have been defined. Most countries have rules in place to govern the environmental impact of industry. But companies led by capitalists ignore those rules as far as they can, which is how we are where we are.
Here in the UK, we have record breaking amounts of sewage and pollution in our rivers, because our water companies are run by capitalists to turn a profit. The fines from the government are ultimately paid by those of us who pay our water bills. The people in charge continue to pay themselves and their shareholders well.
And this is where capitalism fails miserably, in my opinion. As noted in another comment in here: capitalism is built for profits, not for human comfort. Businesses who pollute know full well that they should reduce their emissions, clean up their waste, and be better global citizens, but left unchecked, they won’t. You admit yourself in that quoted comment, that capitalism needs a set of rules around carbon credits and such to address the problem. They know there’s a problem, but are waiting for governments to force them to clean up their act.
That doesn’t make me feel that capitalism is the kind, loving economic system we all need. Quite the opposite.
Because the unintended consequences of capitalism, due to human psychology, are the destruction of the substrate it relies upon and that humans require for survival (as is so very demonstrable right now), and (again, due to human psychology and our tribal and hierarchical nature) the increasing imbalance of wealth (and therefore power) to a select few (who are generally making the former issue far worse).
