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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
Capitalism is just a continuation of the feudal system. Great for owners / gentry, bad for serfs /workers. Labor creates all value, and should be rewarded as such.
I agree that capitalism is great* for owners and bad* for workers, but it is definitely not feudalism. Marx literally wrote that feudalism and capitalism are different modes of production.
They're different modes of production, however the bourgeoisie intentionally transitioned to capitalism so they could maintain their power. It got a little watered down and theoretically allowed for economic mobility, but that was a sacrifice they were ok with
A more morally forceful way to say this is labor is de facto responsible for all production. In other words, labor is responsible for creating the whole product, which has value. By the usual moral norm, legal responsibility should match de facto responsibility. The workers should legally get what they produce
The income gap between executive and median salary employees is around 32,000%. I guess the question is, what planet do you live on where a system that allows for this kind of inequity is okay?
There are countries with way better CEO to work pay ratios. But in the USA we act like it's totally normal to have these huge wealth gaps, when in reality they are recent phenonemon and the only other era they were repeated was the gilded age which resulted in a decades long depression that was only ended by a world war.
A CEO earns 354x the income of a normal worker in the US. It's really insane what happens over there. I'm really glad a CEO in Germany only earns 154x the income of a normal worker, much more fair over here!
I'm kidding, we are all fucked. US citizen say a ratio 6.7 would be justified, Germans say 6.3.
But then that's not capitalism. Capitalism is making as much money as possible unrestricted as much as possible. If you start doing things like putting a maximum wage in, or taxing the highest earners and giving back to the lowest, that's socialism.
Because it's objectively unsustainable? I don't really get what it even means to be "pro capitalist" at this point. We know, for a fact, that capitalism will lead to disaster if we keep doing what we're doing. Do you disagree with that? Or do you not care?
What is your general plan for what we should do when we can see that something we currently do and rely on will have to stop in the near future? Not that we will have to choose to stop it, but that it will stop because of something being depleted or no longer possible.
If you imagine that we're trying to find the best long-term system for humanity, and that the possible solutions exist on a curve on an X/Y plane, and we want to find the lowest point on the function, capitalism is very clearly a local minima. It's not the lowest point, but it feels like one to the dumbass apes who came up with it. So much so that we're resistant to doing the work to find the actual minima before this local one kills literally everyone :)
I don't think we know that. Indeed, what we're currently doing as a species to the environment is unsustainable. But it's not clear to me how it's the capitalism that's the unsustainable part. My understanding is that capitalism is a system which allows us, as a society, to produce things very efficiently, and to distribute resources. It hasn't failed in that role, has it?
I don’t really get what it even means to be “pro capitalist” at this point.
I believe that, for example, if I wanted to open a bookshop, I should be able to. Or that if I wanted to rent a couple of 3D printers and sell widgets, that I should be able to. Or if I wanted to hire some dude on fiverr to write some music to my screenplay, I should be able to. This is capitalism. Do you disagree? This is what confuses me, and why I asked the question-- on my side of the fence, I don't really understand what it means to be anti-capitalist. Hence why I asked.
We know, for a fact, that capitalism will lead to disaster if we keep doing what we’re doing. Do you disagree with that? Or do you not care?
Well no need to be rude! Of course I care! And yes, we're headed towards disaster in terms of the environment. But I don't understand, like I said above, how capitalism is causing it and how not-capitalism would solve it. We have 7 billion people on the planet and they all need to be fed. Capitalism is the most efficient system we know of to create and allocate resources. Should we... move to a less efficient system? Wouldn't that be worse for the environment? How does that solve anything? This is my confusion.
What is your general plan for what we should do when we can see that something we currently do and rely on will have to stop in the near future? Not that we will have to choose to stop it, but that it will stop because of something being depleted or no longer possible.
This is an interesting question! I'm parsing it to mean "how can the current problems be solved within a capitalist system?". It's a good question, and I don't have a 100% guaranteed answer. But I don't see that any capitalism alternative has a good answer either, so still I don't see how capitalism is the "bad guy".
In any case, my answer is this:
A side effect of all of capitalist driven efficient production is that the environment is harmed. Here, I think the governing bodies have failed in their roles: their role is to define what "capital" means and rules of ownership. They haven't done that for environmental concerns, which is why capitalism isn't taking it into account properly. My desired solution is that the government could define a "total amount of carbon emissions" that would be allowed by the country as a whole, and then distribute transferrable carbon credits on the open market. This turns "rights to emit carbon" into a form of capital, and capitalism will do what it do and optimize for it.
In essence, I believe that governments have done a bad job of using the tool of capitalism to solve the problem of pollution.
If you imagine that we’re trying to find the best long-term system for humanity, and that the possible solutions exist on a curve on an X/Y plane, and we want to find the lowest point on the function, capitalism is very clearly a local minima
Great analogy! But.... have we seen a lower minimum? What's the rationale behind that system? That's my question
I believe that, for example, if I wanted to open a bookshop, I should be able to. Or that if I wanted to rent a couple of 3D printers and sell widgets, that I should be able to. Or if I wanted to hire some dude on fiverr to write some music to my screenplay, I should be able to. This is capitalism. Do you disagree?
This isn't really capitalism, this is production/commerce. This is what capitalists (people who own capital) tell you capitalism is. Capitalism isn't you buying a tool and using it. It's buying the 3D printer, paying people to design and build widgets, paying people to sell the widgets, then taking most of the money for yourself. You might say you make and sell widgets for a living, but you don't. You own a 3D printer for a living, and exploit the people who make widgets for a living.
You can hate capitalism and still make stuff. Anticapitalists usually aren't interested in taking away your 3D printer. State Communism isn't the only alternative, and most leftists hate that idea just as much. Some alternatives include worker coops and mutual aid.
I hate that I can work (with others) to build a company from the ground up and have nothing to show for it, because the owner is using us to fund his lifestyle. I hate that landlords can buy up all the homes, driving up the cost to the point no one can afford one, then rent them out and sit on their ass while I pay their mortgage. That's capitalism. People profiting off of ownership. It inevitably ends with some people owning almost everything, and the majority owning nothing.
You'd like Marxism. The whole point is that Capitalism is our dominant ideology because it was more efficient than feudalism, but now e have the tools to build a system more efficient than capitalism and we should build that instead. Capitalism is the most efficient system we've built so far, but it's very obviously not the most efficient system we can build.
The issue is profit motive is inherent in capitalism. Businesses and government work on the same resources (money in this case). Businesses do everything they can to maximize profits, then they use the profits to buy government and ensure they keep business as usual. Power corrupts. So they don't offer living wage, they cut costs, they pollute and they collude. And in law, these businesses are legal entities too. They are afforded the legal status yet if an actual person did what a business does, he would be put away for a long time. Businesses act as psychoes yet people glorify being a successful business owner. Being successful in this system means that you exploited the most and you are the most psycho. Congrats then I guess.
I believe that, for example, if I wanted to open a bookshop, I should be able to. Or that if I wanted to rent a couple of 3D printers and sell widgets, that I should be able to.
I'm not sure why you think this is inherently only possible in a capitalist economy. In a more socialist or even communist economy, you could still do all of that. The only difference would be that all the workers there (if there is more than just you working at said business) would be paid equal to the amount of labor they put in, as opposed to now where the majority of workers are paid less than what their labor is worth.
First, no alternative is required for something to be unacceptable to continue. This is a very common line of reasoning that keeps us stuck in the local minima. Leaving a local minima necessarily requires some backsliding.
Capitalism is unsustainable because every single aspect of it relies on the idea that resources can be owned.
If you were born onto a planet where one single person owned literally everything, would you think that is acceptable? That it makes sense that the choices of people who are long dead and the agreements between them roll forward in time entitling certain people to certain things, despite a finite amount of those things being accessible to us? What if it was just two people, and one claimed to own all land? Would you say that clearly the resources of the planet should be divided up more fairly between those two people? If so, what about three people? Four? Five? Where do you stop and say "actually, people should be able to hoard far more resources than it is possible for anyone to have if things were fair, and we will use an arbitrary system that involves positive feedback loops for acquiring and locking up resources to determine who is allowed to do this and who isn't".
Every single thing that is used in the creation of wealth is a shared resource. There is no such thing as a non-shared resource. There is no such thing as doing something "alone" when you're working off the foundation built by 90+ billion humans who came before you. Capitalism lets the actual costs of things get spread around to everyone on the planet, environmental harm, depletion of resources that can never be regained, actions that are a net negative but are still taken because they make money for a specific individual. If the TRUE COST of the actions taken in the pursuit of wealth were actually paid by the people making the wealth, it would be very clear how much the fantasy of letting people pursue personal wealth relies on distributing the true costs through time and space. It requires literally stealing from the future. And sometimes the past. Often, resources invested into the public good in the past can be exploited asymmetrically by people making money through the magic of capitalism. Your business causes more money in damage to public resources than it even makes? Who cares, you only pay 30% in taxes!
There is no way forward long term that preserves these fantasies and doesn't inevitably turn into extinction or a single individual owning everything. No one wants to give up this fantasy, and they're willing to let humanity go extinct to prevent having to.
My understanding is that capitalism is a system which allows us, as a society, to produce things very efficiently, and to distribute resources. It hasn’t failed in that role, has it?
When you look at the growing wealth inequality over the past 70 years, it's pretty easy to argue that it is failing at that role currently. I see where you're coming from though, as overall, capitalism / free markets are a powerful decentralized system for resource allocation, but they have a lot of problems that aren't being addressed and there are some fundamental issues with how they apply to the information age.
Externalities like environmental damage aren't accounted for, anti-competitive behaviour (like Apple's walled garden) prevent fair competition and resources being allocated to the right spot, same thing goes for advertising and marketing which are by and large exercises in using money to psychologically manipulate people instead of making a better product. When wealth concentration is not reinvested in the product / business for societal betterment but is instead hoarded for personal gain (as we see at the investor / c-suite level) it causes resources to be spent on frivolous rich bullshit (yachts instead of food), and possibly one of the biggest issues is that capitalism has no inherent mechanism for caring for the less useful and those unable to work.
Yes it sounds great when you frame it in the context of a business making a better product getting more money, but it sounds a lot more soulless when you're talking about someone being born a little slow having to live a shit life just because of how their dice were rolled.
Even if you correct for all of these, capitalism falls apart in an information economy. At a very fundamental level, capitalism and trading is based on the idea of things being finite and increasing in scarcity when used up. Mass and material / energy does this. If you possess an object, I cannot possess it, so the more of it that is used up, the more valuable the remaining pieces become, to copy it takes a lot of energy or duplicate resources as the original. But information doesn't work the same way as matter / energy. Information can be duplicated and replicated instantly, across impossible distances, and our technology to do this has gotten so advanced and global that we can now duplicate basically any information an infinite numbers of times anywhere around the globe nearly instantly. In this context, capitalism falls apart, because as soon as information is created, there's no reason for it to be scarce, meaning it has zero value.
In this light we created copyright and patent systems to assign ownership of information, but what these systems really do is create artificial scarcity where there is no need for scarcity, just so that they can fit into a capitalist model. Do you know what would be better for overall useful economic growth? If all companies open sourced all their software. You know what won't happen because capitalism is the only system we have for assigning resources? That.
But I don't understand, like I said above, how capitalism is causing it and how not-capitalism would solve it.
But I don’t see that any capitalism alternative has a good answer either, so still I don’t see how capitalism is the “bad guy”.
A couple notes on this. Firstly, just as an argument perspective, this is a burden of proof fallacy. Just because "not-capitalism" may not have a good answer, doesn't mean capitalism has a good one or even just a better one. I could be mischaracterising your argument, if so my bad, this is just how it reads to me. Secondly, I personally believe that socialism offers a better answer and a good one at that, which all revolves around incentives. A collective-ownership structure has more incentive for social well being, such as avoiding climate disaster, than a purely capitalist structure does.
As a side-note, I also think you're mischaracterising capitalism by including governing bodies, but you're doing it in a manner that's only one logical step away from socialism. By a government placing restrictions on a market or producer, say by defining a carbon emission cap, the market is no longer operating at true efficiency. While not fully capitalist anymore, that's still okay though as it's serving a social purpose. Zoom out a little and you can see other markets in which the government should set limits in. Now the whole economy isn't operating as a true free market. In this case, the government is defining what the social good is, and (at least in democratic nations), the government defines that based on the voice of the people. The problem with this is that it's reactive. I can pass as many laws as I want saying you can't emit carbon above a certain level, but I can only enforce it after you've gone over that cap at which point the damage is done, and some may make the economic calculation that it's worth it if you get more profits (fines are in essence "legal for a price" after all). If the government owns the industry, this can be prevented before happening.
Also free markets can exist without capitalism. I think another person somewhere on this thread mentioned worker co-ops, which are not a capitalist institution.
As a parting thought, I would also point out that one of if not the most efficient energy companies in the United States (in terms of energy produced per dollar input) is the TVA, a state-owned enterprise.
How is it efficient to throw away 40% of food produced rather than let it go for cheaper or free? How is it efficient for Nike and nearly all other clothing companies to massively overproduce their products and then cut them up and trash them at the end of the fashion season? How is it more efficient to create massive animal agriculture torture chambers that require massive monoculture farms to feed than to grow food crops and eat them directly?
Capitalism itself isn't really the problem though, a free market economy should work. The issue is that the owners, be they corporate or private, don't view their workforces the same way.
The greed of those at the top is crippling the very people that are driving the economy.
Free market capitalism is inherently about generating wealth for primary stakeholders but externalizing the social and environmental costs. It's basically how the entire system works.
The greed is baked into capitalism, though, because it's fundamentally baked into humanity. This is what happens with the unregulated pursuit self interest, and that's what capitalism encourages.
Because markets inherently aren't "free". Real competition is an illusion because capitalism doesn't account for all the non-capitalist levers (e.g regulatory capture, cronyism, collusion, political lobbying, etc) that businesses will pull to serve their own interests.
Capitalism is an incredibly naive approach to economics because its ability to account for human behavior -- the fundamental driver of economic systems -- is rudimentary at best. And that's just one of its problems, really.
No, it absolutely should not work. I can't even imagine what you are imagining when you say that. HOW could it possibly work long term? Are you familiar with any game theory?
The problems you listed are a feature of capitalism. The rich owners have more power in the owner-worker relationship. Which means they get richer, which means they get more power, which means they get richer, which means they get more power, etc.
The only thing resembling some balance was unions, and they were gutted so that guess what, the rich child get richer. Which meant they got more powerful, and we're back to the cycle.
Free market works only to create monopolies because in the real world companies compete and then one gets gobbled up and these mega corps can gobble, out compete or lobby for barriers to market if there arent any already inherently. Imagine a new telecomp trying to start but its small then it need a huge investment to cover only a small area, how will that compete with a giant already established telecom? That happens in all businesses and sectora
Why should it work? Capitalism by definition works against the free market because it favors monopolization. You need heavy regulations to slow that down at the very least.
Oh FFS, the capitalist system shreds 'free' markets with abandon. Monopolies eliminate competition. Regulatory capture eliminates anti-monopoly regulations. Capitalism is the perpetual accumulation of more money by investing in the production of more commodities. It collapses when it cannot evolve to expand demand, as it did in the 1930's. As it is doing again now., although rather slowly, as it has learned how to use governments to mitigate financial collapse. It does indeed use 'markets' for exchanges, but it only cares about 'free' markets as an ideology. It's motivating force is accumulation. The 'greed at the top' is the system itself, not some bad apples.
The idea that it "should work" is both controversial, and doesn't help. As wealth accumulates at the top, they have less reason to give to anyone else. Human greed is encouraged by capitalism, and you end up with massive inequality when it's left unfettered. We're moving towards having robber barons again (or already do, depending on your viewpoint).
Not to mention, capitalism depends on consumption, of everything, and we are actively consuming the things we need in order for us to continue living on the planet. Capitalism doesn't care because it's all about profit, specifically in the short term because humans have short life spans and shorter memory and foresight.
Capitalism will always ensure that the greediest are seated at the highest point. Wanting more resources gets you more power under capitalism, so those who are willing to go to the greatest lengths to take capital from others are the ones who will end up with it all. That's a feature, not a bug. It's rotten to the core.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
“Free market” Capitalism is self-destructive. As the wealthy build and consolidate power, more and more resources get funneled to the top while the people at the bottom actually creating those resources go with less and less, and it’s unsustainable.
Being a billionaire is a moral failing. To have the ability to do something about all the suffering and death in the world, and to choose to do nothing borders on sociopathy. The systems designed to allow for billionaires to exist ensure that they don’t pay a fair share of their taxes, and they contribute nothing to society. They are leeches, feeding off the working class and giving nothing in return, when they have so much more to give than anyone else.
I agree with your point of view, and I think the solution is more governmental regulation. Billionaires and companies keep leeching for infinite growth, and I believe our system can work (and has proven it can work), if we allow a free market within reason.
Since the current system allows the people who make the rules to be bought, I think we'd have to start over entirely from scratch for it to work at all.
Regulations are indeed an important part of managing our system as it is, but they're fundamentally a bandaid to the problems of capitalism.
You gotta catch the corporations doing a bad thing and then tell them not to do it, meanwhile they're buying politicians to fight against you on it. And it still doesn't stop them from committing actions that are horribly unethical and extremely damaging to our society and to the environment, they just tone it down a bit at best, or occasionally they'll have to put a small fraction of their money into a lawsuit without actually changing their behavior.
Some example where it works? Because where I live (EU), stuff is regulated and no one of my generation can buy shit. I pay so much for rent that I can't save money to buy something of my own. While the owner of the company has luxury cars. We're all wage slaves. Sadly, everything else is doomed to fail as well, so even the fabled communism of Soviet bootlickers won't save us.
All forms of power are self destructive. Greedy humans will want more of <insert means of power> and will exploit others to get it.
Capitalism isn't immune to that, but does provide a bit of a wildcard that other forms of government don't have. Mark Zuckerberg controls, frankly, more of the world than anyone should be comfortable with, and the reason it's him and not someone else is mostly dumb luck. If he plays his cards right, he can build a Zuckerberg dynasty, and his descendants will have power by birth, but him being in power is capitalism. Some random person can obtain mass power.
All other feasible economic systems centralize power by design, and centralized power is, historically, rife with corruption and dynasties. Hell, the US presidency alone is usually a race between two people that the majority isn't happy with. Our election system is one of the fairest (far from perfect) and we still have crap options. You can pick your favorite color, so long as it's black or white.
I'm all for exposing and discussing the issues with capitalism, but it's still better than most other systems. The general check to capitalism is government regulations, which works on paper, but not in reality. Our current government system is pay to play, so if you have enough money, the regulations don't effect you, they affect your competition, its the worst form of free market. Get money out of politics and maybe regulations will work. Until then, they mostly make it worse.
If we wanted to explore other options, like socialism, it still boils down to corruption in the government. If its not money, it's something else. At the end of the day, leaders need support to get elected, and they will pimp themselves out for that support. If we look at an extreme example of "All jobs pay the same", within a decade, all desirable jobs, such as hiring managers, will be held by children of politicians and allies. Corruption won't go away just because money does, but money gives an ordinary person a chance at obtaining power.
At least in the US, there hasn't been much of a history of successful dynasties. Fortunes do get passed down, but not for long. Take the Vanderbilt family. There are few famous Vanderbilts in modern day US life. The one I find most recognizable is Anderson Cooper, and he got his millions from working, not inheriting. Of course, there's a constant attempt from the Republican Party to repeal the estate tax, so that might change.
Have you seen the housing market lately? Capitalism was great for the boomers pretty much in every developed country. Now millenials and zoomers encountered this ripe form of it where everything is consolidated under a massive corporate entity optimizing only for profit.
I remember even a couple of years ago renting a place straight from the owners who moved to someplace bigger and after a year they just said i can live there however long i’d like with a month notice. Same rent for five years. Now every year i renew my lease through an intermediate management company and every year they hike the rent.
Groceries are getting more expensive, ads are fucking everywhere and every news outlet lies or creates mostly sponsored shit. We are surrounded by soulless corporations and we “work” for them at our bullshit jobs providing nothing of value. Feeling down? Why dont you install a fucking subscription app for therapy.
It does match exactly what's happening though. Others have mentioned housing cost which is a clear example, but you can also look at income inequality. Here's an article which cites data from the congressional budget office https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/
It shows up to 500% growth since 1979 in the earnings of the .01% while the 99% of earners are only making about 50% more than in 1979. That data makes it clear that wealth is being concentrated, and that people at the bottom are going with less. Especially considering inflation since 1979 has been 320% (source)
There's more overall for everyone, but the people at the bottom are getting a smaller and smaller share, and a lot of important things, like housing, not to mention with things like streaming, and online stores, we don't really "own" most of the media we consume anymore, we just pay forever to rent it. Fast fashion and planned obscelescence means that our clothing is worse than what people used to have, and our machines don't last as long, so we have to keep replacing both of those.
What we do have is designed not to last, and more meaningful, life-long purchases are out of reach. Meanwhile the people at the top of the pile who do literally nothing but "have wealth" sit around on their yachts blissfully ignoring the people starving to death on the streets.
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.
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.
Capitalism has given a lot of people out there a raw deal: low wages, increasing gap between the rich and the poor, home ownership is out of reach to many, healthcare is unaffordable to many, having a family is prohibitively expensive, we own almost nothing and rent almost everything, even basic necessities like food, water and clothing are painfully expensive. What's more, when you look at the systems in place today, it appears that these aren't bugs, but features.
I'm a socialist because I believe that society ought to use its collective power and money to guarantee all of its people a minimum of the basic, essential things that they need to live, by subsidizing food, water, shelter, clothing, heat, electricity, data, education and healthcare.
Outside of those crucial things, capitalism is just fine, as long as people are being paid fairly for their time. And, as we've all seen, capitalism needs strict rules and guard rails to make sure that workers aren't being constantly exploited. If capitalism was working well for everyone, we were all getting paid fairly for our time, and people could take care of their needs (not to mention their wants), then nobody would have any reason to care or complain about capitalism. But sadly, as it is today, capitalism is just not working for a lot of people, and many people out there are not even having their basic needs met (even despite getting an education, taking out loans, getting a job, getting a second job, working hard, etc.).
To me, creating a prosperous and happy society is much more complex than picking capitalism or socialism, and some mix of both is probably the best of both worlds.
There is actually not much separating capitalism and socialism other than workers being in control of the means of production.
Socialism doesn't have anything against markets. Socialism doesn't have anything against organizational structures. What it does have issue with is workers not having any democratic say in how their workplaces operate and who they choose to do business with.
That's the thing, not a lot would have to change, other than putting legal protections and norms in place for workplace elections and so on.
To me, this is obvious. Most people agree some form of democratic control is good as far as the government goes. They don't see the logical extension that it should apply to the workplace if it's good as well. They haven't seen that as an option. They're told there's one hierarchy businesses can have and don't question it.
not a lot would have to change, other than putting legal protections and norms in place for workplace elections and so on.
I definitely don't identify as a Socialist but even still, I would have added, "tax the fuck out of the rich". Income inequality is the root evil for most people today.
There is nothing preventing anyone from starting a worker-owned collective. The fact that they don’t, while having the freedom to do so, indicates that the typical arrangement of wage labor is consensual. It’s what people choose.
If socialism requires an arrangement other than the one they would freely choose, then socialism requires a non-free market where people are forced into economic arrangements they wouldn’t freely choose.
So socialist may not in principle have anything against markets, but the fact that the implementation of socialism requires curtailing markets means it does have something against markets in practice.
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.
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.
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.
Instead of owning 100% of a district and everything the peasants on it produce, the aristos worked out that they could diversify their portfolios and thin out the risk.
So now they own a thousandth part of the product of a thousand districts instead.
Now if plague wipes out a village or six, you don't have to care, you're only losing a tiny chunk of your income. Now the welfare of the peasants isn't your problem, because they're not, like :douchebro sniff: exclusively your peasants.
The rich produce nothing, they add no value, they perform no labour. It's just predatory rent-seeking: the poor still do all the work, produce all the goods and provide all the services, but now somehow 99% of the value they generate goes to some smirking freeloader instead, who can just plough it into acquiring more and more peasants. They only thing they ever provided was a chunk of startup cash, which they got from exploiting other peasants in the first place.
And of course, none of that cash goes to the people whose income it supposedly buys. It's not a fair trade, it's not a trade at all, they aren't a party to it. Workers are just bought and sold over their heads, like dairy cattle. They get milked just the same, and some other fat bastard gets all the cream.
The whole system is rigged to concentrate power and wealth into the hands of the super-rich, stripping it away from everyone else and leaving them struggling to survive - and keeping the ladder well and truly pulled up so nobody else gets into the treehouse.
Libertarian types like to claim that taxation is theft, but taxation is a spit in a hurricane compared to the industrial-scale looting that goes on every day. Take the profits of any corporation, and divide that by the total salaries of the workers that actually generate revenue. Theft? You don't know the meaning of the word. What percentage of the value you generate goes in shareholder pockets? How would you feel about taxation at that level, funding not roads and schools and hospitals, but yachts and mansions and private jets for a bunch of one-percenters?
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.
As was already stated, capitalism is unsustainable. It seeks infinite growth in a world of finite resources. Capitalism will almost always place short term financial gain over long term issues.
There are only two financial classes. The owner class and the working class. It doesn't really matter if you make 30k a year or 300k a year. If you sell hours of your life for a salary, you are part of the working class. Capitalists make passive income off others labor. Being "pro-capitalism" is essentially saying that you're okay giving all but the littlest amount of value you produced to someone else. This is paraded as a good thing in the United States.
Capitalism requires coercion to function. Capitalists openly admit this by being staunchly against removing 'incentives' (read the coercion) to work.
The 'incentive' is goddamn starvation and being exposed to the raw elements with no shelter.
And apparently, if this was a basic human right provided to everyone, we'd all stop working over night and become lazy.
It's just such an ass-backwards way to look at the world.
People are not inherently lazy. But they need to be forced to work shitty jobs under unacceptable conditions. That's the crux of the matter. The ultra-rich require wage slaves. Not free-thinking, educated people who go after their own interests and are productive in their own ways.
I'm interested to see how the system will hold up when all the shitty jobs have been automated away.
My guess is that the rich will flee to some kind of Elysium type paradise, while robot police keeps the masses in check and 'poor' people, aka 99% of humanity goes extinct.
Capitalism is just feudalism with better marketing. A system that values property more heavily than the wellbeing of the overwhelming majority of the human race is objectively morally repugnant.
It's pretty basic. At this point in time we can see what the promise of trickle down economics was, and we can see where the country is, compared to before, for the middle and lower classes. Even without blaming capitalism for this, we can see that giving wealth to the top fails more people than just paying people a decent wage.
The people claiming most to be pro-capitalist between the major two parties in the US are saying to stay the course and go even further.
I would like a return towards the capitalism of the 1950's-1970's. But that is generally considered to be socialist by the party seeking to keep going in the direction that has failed most Americans.
I would also like to emulate the whole of Western Europe in hopes of having a larger middle class as a by product of tax collection and spending, rather than paying for-profit entities, to get guaranteed services that support basic daily life. Capitalists do not want that because they cannot profit off of services provided by the government to anywhere near the same extent.
It's simple, the type and level of capitalism currently in place in America makes life unnecessarily difficult for the citizens of America.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty for a basic rundown - in short, empiric data over the last 250 years show that unregulated capitalism concentrates wealth at a rate that is larger than the economic growth.
I like buying shit as much as the next person, I also don't think endless growth for shareholders is a laudable goal and is likely dangerous. I also don't think that essential services should be run for profit, but then I am from a country with proper government health care. Government should set a baseline, not a company.
Because people these days have lived through their parents losing a lot during the housing crash while wages continue to get lesser, prices continue to get greater, and rich people continue to get richer.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
Seems to be an extremely inefficient resource distribution system, where a few people end up with most resources while a shit ton of people lack basic needs stuff. There are some good existing work arounds, like social market economy - which tries to combine socialist and capitalist element in an unholily dialectic alliance.
Capitalism destroy people first, relationships and societies then, and the land and the world finally. It's not an accident, because if you want to fight that, you'll be destroyed too.
Another way to see it is that it's the opposite of society and civilization. It's the law of the jungle. Competition applied to everything will only destroy everything. Civilization is when you stop to see the other as an opponent and you cooperate with it instead. Capitalism is seeing those people as opponents in a life or death competition, and making everything so that society is a life or death competition between them. It's not pragmatic, it's death.
Why should I respect this elaborate system of property rights that was largely built by and for terrible human beings who actively sought to tyrannize others for their own gain?
How much of the wealth held today can be traced back to morally illegitimate if not outright criminal beginnings?
Some great answers here so I'll do something different and I'll give myself as a real-world example.
As a young adult, through a twist of luck, I found a cheap place to rent, so was able save a good amount of my income.
I used that saving to get a loan, buy property, and used that property to get a loan and buy a property, and then do it once again.
A short while later I now have no debt, can sit on my arse browsing lemmy in Bali (exploiting geo-arbitrage), and live off the market-rate rents my tenants pay back home.
If my tenants didn't have to pay market-rate rents, they too might be able save some cash and become capitalists themselves. I could lower the rent, but then I would have to get a job and actually earn my living again. People born into wealth can even skip that step of having to earn their initial capital.
But whats the point of owning income producing assets (like property, or business) if you're not improving your situation with it? The ONLY benefit of the capitalist system is that it allows the capitalist to reap the benefits of other's work, thus reducing the burden of the capitalist to work themself.
It's a ridiculous situation, I should not be able to live as I do, simply because I got a lucky break at the start of my working life, an opportunity that is given to the very few. The system should change.
Only you decide what you deserve. If you have decided that you don't deserve a good life, then that will happen. If you decide that you deserve a good life, that will also happen.
Not because of magic but because your mindset about yourself has changed.
I feel I deserve a good life. I'm a good guy who tries to support others and treat people well. That's my idea of deserving to have a good life.
That's "The Secret" level of crap. We're not born equal, especially those who are a minority in their country. Go tell a Tutsi that have seen their family hacked to pieces by machetes that it's because they decided they didn't deserve a good life that they had a bad life, I fucking dare you.
What a trite & meaningless comment. Dangerous too, it places all responsibility of having a "good life" on the oppressed. I'm sure that's how you get to sleep at night believing that other people's problems are their own fault because they don't have the right mindset...
A system based on perpetual growth has reached the limits of that growth and is now actively and manifestly shredding the planetary ecosystem., This isn't a question of anything other than the survival of human civilization. Your political views are irrelevant. The system is at its terminal point. In some other timeline we reformed the postmodern capitalist system and regulated it to prevent ecocide. That is not this timeline. That's because, concurrent to the shredding of the ecosystem, the culture of end stage capitalism, a culture evolved to make us all obedient consumer-workers, has further evolved to make us delusional, psychotic, fascist, it has shredded the collective unconsciousness of humanity and resurrected fascism as a way to defend the system as it self-destructs.
Perpetual growth is merely a joke of this system. The true rotten core of capitalism is individualism. And it's brother liberalism rotten core is competition.
It violates inalienable rights to democracy and to get the positive and negative fruits of their labor, which flow from the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. In the firm, the employees are de facto responsible, but employer is held solely legally responsible.
It violates the equal claim to natural resources everyone today and future generations have. It, instead, incentivizes ruining the environment
The fediverse is largely populated by 2SLGBTQIA+ people and people of colour who are oppressed by capitalist regimes. The other big contingent is marxists and people who like FOSS. FOSS, at its core, is anti-capitalist.
You're in a place founded by anti-capitalism, that exists in spite of capitalism, asking "why is there so much anti-capitalism here?"
I find that many people conflate capitalism with free markets. They are different things.
Free market economies are ones where many businesses which provide competing products can use price as a parameter on which to compete. Even in famously free market economies, e.g, the United States, some things have prices regulated by the government. Think electricity, certain prescription drugs, other things deinfed in the arena of "utilities" or "necessities" for the general public.
Capitalism, on the other hand, is where there is an ownership class (which does little or no labor) and a labor class (which does most or all of the labor), and an portion of the compensation for the value that the labor class produces is redirected to the ownership class. Some of that is reasonable; I think it's true that putting capital at risk in order to start and operate a business should come with some kind of reward.
However, the amount of reward that the ownership class realizes is often far more than is reasonable, and the effect is that the labor class is drastically undercompensated. This amounts to wage theft, above and beyond the already common kind of wage theft that includes unpaid work hours or withholding agreed upon compensation for unjustifiable reasons. Furthermore, again in the US, the amount of risk that owners assume when staking their capital is very low or nonexistent; profits are privatized, losses are socialized. The labor class gets the double whammy of being undercompensated on one side, and paying for business failures on the other.
Losses are socialized only for very big companies though. If you are a minor capitalist with a small restaurant chain or something in that size no one will watch out for you.
That is certainly true. Smaller capitalists definitely do not enjoy the protection of socialized losses in the same way that large capitalists do. This fact is exemplary of the inherent unfairness of capitalism: the people who need the socialization of losses more don't get it, while the ones who need it least, or not at all, receive it.
It's a scramble to the top of the wealth pile, and the ones who are higher get there and stay there by kicking the faces of the ones who are lower.
Sorry I gotta provide some counterbalance here. This is a very dated Marxist perspective that I think is missing some modern fundamentals. Dividing the world into "ownership class" and "labor class" is simplistic thinking from the Industrial Revolution and doesn't hold up anymore without modifications. Your typical high salary cube dweller is neither ownership nor identifiably labor. If you're negatively classifying labor as "not ownership", you're talking about 99.9%+ of the population and it's a rather meaningless distinction and unhelpful in discussing policy.
First, I definitely appreciate your counterbalance and disagreement. That's how we all work together to develop ideas. I will do my best to be non-confrontational with this response.
Information work and physical work are both labor. When you refer to a "typical high salary cube dweller," yes, the information labor of people who work at desks can most certainly command high salaries in the modern world when compared to physical or "unskilled" labor. Those people are still undercompensated. The owners (less so for smaller businesses, as I described elsewhere) are still receiving a portion of the compensation for the value of information workers' labor solely on the basis of their ownership status, and not for any other value they provide through their own efforts.
I'm not trying to discount the value that leadership, and vision, and true unsocialized capital risk has. What I am saying is that ownership is vastly overvalued and vastly overcompensated for, and that in order to do that overcompensation, the reward has to come from somewhere. The balloon gets squeezed on the labor end in order to shift wealth to the ownership end. Am I talking about a huge proportion of the population being labor and a comparatively tiny part being owners? Yup. That makes it a worse problem, not a meaningless one.
But you're right, I have not offered any sort of possible solution to this quandary. It's oh so easy to armchair quarterback, point out the problems, and fold my arms in smug satisfaction, and I say that without sarcasm.
Ideally, everyone would have easy access to everything they need. Food, housing, healthcare, clothing, clean water, personal and property security, education, all sorts of things. And I say access on purpose: individuals should need to express agency about what they need, and make decisions about their own destiny in that context, which includes making the decisions about what is needed, and making the easy level of effort that would ideally be required to receive those things. We are all in this together, and I think we should come to some agreements, together, on what resources all people need, and to what fair degree. And then we should all contribute together, each according to their ability, to make sure that those things are provided to those who need them. Recall that in the mid 20th century, there were marginal tax rates in the 90% and higher range in the US. (For anyone reading this who's unfamiliar with marginal tax rates, that means that income over a certain amount is taxed at that rate, while income below that amount is taxed at lower rates). That's something I wouldn't mind seeing again.
I also wouldn't mind seeing a separate capital gains tax completely removed. Capital gains, when realized, should be taxed at the same rate as earned income. Why should owners get to pay a reduced tax rate on profits from selling a portion of their ownership? Why should the people who are already higher on the wealth ladder get a tax break? Why do we continually place a larger actual tax burden on people who spend essentially all of their income, who have no wealth to speak of, and a lower actual tax burden on people for whom that burden or a much larger one would come from their surplus and not impact their quality of life at all?
I know I'm doing the thing where I'm "asking questions that I know you know what I want you to think the answer is, which makes you automatically think it inside your own head, which uses human psychology to make my argument seem stronger," but fuck man, we have to stop doing those things.
The average “high salary” cube dweller collects an only marginally higher wage than everyone else, and is forced to work in order to avoid homelessness and starvation. That's clearly labor class.
Under capitalism, value is extracted and concentrated. That in turn means that your employer is motivated to get as much value out of you as they can. Companies are motivated to charge you as much as they can convince you to pay.
Think about a friend who might ask to buy something of yours; let's say it's a sofa. If we apply that same logic of capitalism, you should try to get as much money as possible. I don't know about you, but I don't like the way that it feels.
I have a very pragmatic view on capitalism. It isn't inherently good or evil. Social democracy provides the best compromise where regulated capitalism generates wealth and funds innovation while responsible democratic government protects employees and the environment and provides services that have a strong social benefit.
Unfortunately social democratic policies are undermined in many countries and resisted in others to the point where some young people become frustrated and look to answers in hateful extremist politics which really is a horseshoe.
Capitalism is fine as long as its well-regulated and is only one component of a larger system. It's no accident that the best countries in the world to live in all rely in part on well-regulated capitalism together with robust democracy and relatively high levels of what in the US would be called socialism.
For all of the benefits and blessings that capitalism has given us, there are several things people need to realize:
When we talk about all the good that capitalism has done for us, that's a vanishingly small us. There are literally billions of people in the world today who are languishing in poverty that makes first-world poverty look downright lavish. Then there are those first-world impoverished, who doubtlessly do live lives of fruitless toil and abject misery. And now think about the people in centuries past -- the serfs, the slaves, the child laborers... The fact that capitalism has managed to give some comfort to some of us in some countries in the past century does not negate the immense, incalculable suffering it took to get here. And as I said, very many people today, even in modernized nations, are suffering immeasurably still.
Capitalism has overstayed its welcome regarding global crises like climate change. The profit motive seems not to be working at all, let alone with the appropriate urgency, toward the goal of saving us from the consequences of climate change. The scientific consensus largely appears to be that we're too late to sidestep a cataclysm, but this is still not enough to prompt world leaders (i.e. the rich and powerful) to step up their game.
On a more high-minded level, capitalism is inherently repugnant because the people at the top can only enrich themselves by skimming off of the rightful earnings of the ones at the bottom. This is unavoidable; how could the CEO get so rich if 100% of the laborers' value was given to them? This goes beyond the natural reality that labor is required to survive. The issue here is that rather than having organized our economy around people laboring together for their own mutual benefit, we've organized our world such that the vast majority of us labor for the benefit of the few elites who only deign to pass on a pittance once the laborers become too uppity. People who oppose capitalism do not oppose labor; they oppose the way our global society has decided to distribute its results.
Capitalism, at least in its cutthroat, largely unrestrained, American fashion, is by no means the only option we have. European countries demonstrate that capitalism can be moderated to work better for the masses, and there is no reason to believe even they've gone as far as they can. People love to jeer at communism for its many failures in implementation without seeming to realize that, as expressed above, countless people all over the world are currently suffering and starving and languishing under capitalism too.
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.
In order to call yourself a capitalist, you have to own capital.
It doesn't qualify if you have a mortgage to your capital or debt to your capital. You have to own the thing or property outright and completely in order to say you have capital.
The majority of us are not capitalists because we don't own capital.
We may advocate for it but it's like arguing for your banker to stay perpetually wealthy and even more wealthier through your debt.
The reason as to why here relative to elsewhere is probably because people here tend to be more into free software and privacy and things like that, and caring about those things tends to have an anti-corporate aspect, because of the way corporations tend to act, and aligns pretty well with wider anticapitalist beliefs
Also the devs and pre-Reddit influx population are anticapitalist so that kind of helps influence the trajectory a bit
What do you actually like about it? Unless you are rich, it works against you in every way and is actively chipping away at your quality of life. The free market isn't free and meritocracy doesn't exist so it's hardly the fair competition capitalists make it out to be.
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
I just don't like greed. No, scratch that. I just don't like greedy people! I don't mind capitalism, as long as it doesn't produce greedy people. I know.. it's tough to even imagine such a thing...
I'm just gonna tell you what happens when pure capitalism would exist in a country.
There would be no taxes. That sounds alright, but listen: Everything is on a market. Healthcare, education, everything. There is competition for everything. That means companies will have to do stuff to win you as a customer. One big company in every industry sector will win and buy all the other companies that have gone bankrupt. Then, we have monopolies and the big companies can raise their prices however they want and control us in every way they want.
I don't own capital, so that would be contradictory for me to support capitalism. It's likely I will never be rich, like the rest of the 99%, so there's no reason to support the system in hopes of being among the ones at the top.
Also capitalism is inherently immoral, coercive, unsustainable and all around nasty.
One thing is that capitalism is poorly defined. Is it markets? Is it companies over some certain arbitrary size? Is it private ownership of the means of production, like Marx said, and if so how do you define "means of production"?
I think when people say they're anti-capitalist, what they usually mean is they're unhappy with the system and find private actors to be the most destructive actors, at least currently in their home location.
PS, lemmy.ml stands for lemmy.marxist-leninist. The instance has seemed mostly general audience since I joined after the Reddit blackout, but it is run by communists.
"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.
“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.
At least, in the United States, I think what most people actually hate is “Reaganomics”. That’s a form of capitalism that greatly benefits the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
Before Reaganomics, the US had a thriving middle class. That was under FDR’s version of capitalism.
All forms of capitalism benefit the capital owning class. They created this system exactly to do that.
From the state, to nationalism, to the police, to banking and finance, wage labour etc etc. It’s all capitalism and it’s all to benefit the capital owning class.
How the hell would it be any other way?
Everything we have that make this shit more liveable was won with blood by leftists, syndicalists, communists, anarchists etc. The 8 hour workday, weekends, benefits, minimum wages, public health…
There is no capitalism that is good for “everyone else” ever. Why would the system controlled by capital owners benefit anyone but them??
McCarthy era red scare and the elimination of socialist parties by Woodrow Wilson before him (among a lot of other things) contributed to US citizens having very little understanding of systems beyond capitalism. The imperial core mentality is real and we are not immune.
Read Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher on this phenomenon. wikipedia page
Capitalism is inherently contradictory to my basic values, terrible at efficient economic allocation, actively destroying everything, and is built on a foundation of war and genocide.
I believe that everyone should have as much autonomy as possible. Capitalism's basic premise is that economic allocation is determined by those who own capital, allocation of the resources communities and individuals use is an autonomy problem. Since Capitalism concentrates power among a very few, it is actively limiting the autonomy of literally billions of people for the benefit of less than a thousand.
The allocation of resources itself, the basic purpose of any economic system, is incredibly inefficient undee Capitalism. Take food, vast amounts are produced, enough to feed everyone, yet people starved to death while I was writing this. Not only that, food itself is peoduced in such a way as to maximize profit. This comes at the expense of local food systems, which have been in large part dismantled by environmental damage. It comes at the expense of vast CO2 emissions to run the machines that mine phosphorous, manufacture fertilizer and pesticides, run the various pieces of farm equipment, process food, and the planes, ships, trucks that ship it to stores. It comes at the expense of soil health, which monocropping, tilling, fallow, and agrochemicals all harm. This is just food, look at any other sphere of human activity and you will find a similar story. Meaningful measures of efficiency and system health are ignored to pump out as much profit as possible, and this gets called "efficient".
Capitalism is the great machine that is destroying everything. Under it's logic of endless expansion we have seen entire ecosystems bulldozed and turned into suburbs, watched millions of people be enslaved even in the present day, witnessed war and genocide on a scale never before fathomed. Both world wars happenned under Capitalism, and war has continued unabated ever since. The so-called United States is the dominant Capitalist power on Earth, and holds millions of people in legal slavery, if you don't believe me read the 13th amendment to its constitution. Many other people are describing the results of ecosystem destruction, the Climate Catastrophe, as their primary reason for anti-capitalist beliefs.
Capitalism as a system grew under feudalism before supplanting it, and directly springboarded off of Colonialism to become the dominant economic system of this world. The horrors of colonization follow(ed) a similar logic of expansion to capital, exploiting millions of people through slavery and genocide, spreading plagues that have killed countless individuals and entire cultures, introducing poverty to places where the concept had not preciously made sense. Capitalism cannot be separated from its historical roots, if you want to learn more about this I recommend the, "A ______ People's History of the United States" series of books. I'd prioritize the Indigenous and Black histories.
This is an indictment of Capitalism, but presents no alternatives. I will do that here.
Indigenous cultures had/have land-based economies that center care. This is not an alternative, it is thousands of them, each adapted to a local ecosystem. In order to survive we need to localize resource production, and land-based economies are the way to do that. I would recommend learning about how Indigenous people groups in your area thrived before Colonialism forcibly severed many of their connections to place, how they survive today, and how they are working to heal their relationships to the land. A related concept is that of the gift economy, a common practice for many groups world-wide, the particulars of which are as diverse as our species. Look into it, gift economies work, and operate on principles that are essentially as "anti-capitalism" as one can get.
Commons-based peer production is another, complimentary option for future economic systems. It is directly born out of the open source software movement, and imagines structuring all production around simular principles. People produce for themselves and their peers, keeping resources in common to ensure equitable allocation. If you do not believe commons can work, I would recommend looking into Ostrom's eight principles for managing commons, just highlight that phrase and paste it into a search engine. A related concept is that of "cosmo-local production". The idea is that physical production is localized to reduce impact on the planet (local), while information on process is shared freely with everyone (cosmo). This ties into the idea of "donut economics" which is basically the idea that we should meet human needs while staying within planetary boundaries, the inside and outside of the metaphorical donut respectively. Look up any of these terms and you will find loads of thought-provoking writing, imagining a better world. Plus many of the people doing the theorizing are programmers like you, I'm sure you'll find ideas that resonate with you if you look for them here.
It took courage to make this post, thanks for starting some interesting discussions. I might believe you are wrong about Capitalism, but I respect your honesty and willingness to engage with other ideas here. I would strongly encourage reading further to understand these concepts on a deeper level than a Lemmy comment can give you, especially the economic alternatives, I basically just skimmed over a whole field of emerging theory.
Edit: accidentally posted before I was done, added 3 paragraphs.
Personally I am against filthy rich. I don't mind people having money and owning property. It's when they habe way more than they could ever spend, that I am against it. There I no reason to have that much value/money
I asked my co-admin once if he thought Capitalism was evil, he's usually extremely careful with his words. He responded with "it might be".
It seems to have a lot of real problems, wealth inequality, human exploitation, environmental destruction. I think countries that have a mixed system, where it's part capitalist and part socialist tend to do better in most metrics. I wouldn't want to live in a country without socialised medicine, socialised education and pretty strict environmental restrictions.
Capitalism has been working so far because the economy has been growing, so even if you are poor right now and someone is filthy rich, you are still guaranteed to be better off in the not-so-distant future.
However, the world's growth is slowly stagnating, and already has stagnated or even reversed in many developed nations. That spells doom for anyone who was not able to climb out of the economic pit.
Living in a stagnant world ruled over by a handful of oligarchs for the rest of eternity, or until the next economic boom (unlikely) is not a pretty prospect.
For me personally, I’m not necessarily anti-capitalist as a whole; I think it has its place. I think people incorrectly place how old capitalism actually is. Sure in the Medieval Period, people bought and sold goods like how we think of markets, and they even had currency to exchange for it, but it was still much more of a bartering based system. Capitalism itself is also a very cultural phenomenon, only emerging out of Europe (in India for example, capitalist thinking was anathema to the cultural norms and took many years to take hold once the British invaded). In reality, there was a period of time in which all of a sudden, resources in Western Europe and the Americas become suddenly abundant and a system had to be put in place to handle that, and the system was capitalism. Here’s some of the main problems, some of which have been pointed out by others:
Capitalism is based off of a system which inherently assumes infinite growth which is not possible
Free markets require easy and free access to information to govern things like price setting, but that information is almost impossible to obtain accurately
Capitalism even in its purest form is not a complete enough theory for governing an entire economy. Capitalism only has mechanisms for providing resources (money) to workers and capitalists (owners) which leaves out a full third of the population. That last third are non-workers, primarily made up of the old, the disabled, children, students, home caregivers, and temporarily unemployed
Capitalism enforces power imbalances in a population that make capitalism less effective. For a market to work most effectively, all parties involved (buyers and sellers) should be on equal footing, but they never are and never can be
Less of a functionality point, but I personally believe that there are some things that morally shouldn’t be governed by a market structure such as healthcare or food access
As parting thoughts, I would say that capitalism is not a bad thing in the short term. It’s effective at getting a country going to the point where they can become socialistic in the future. Karl Marx himself based his theories in “The Communist Manifesto” and “Das Kapital” on Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”. He also said that “capitalism is pregnant with socialism”. Capitalism is a tool to get to an end goal, it isn’t the end all be all system it’s made out to be though, and it’s also not the only tool that can get you there (see the economic theory of developmentalism).
Sorry for the long post, but I thought the detail was necessary.
TL;DR: Not a bad thing in and of itself, but a flawed system it’s time to move on from
I am anti- wealth and power concentration, and believe that proper compensation for labor is a requirement for a healthy and functioning society.
Money is supposed to flow, through the regular purchase of goods and services. Therefore, siphoning off wealth and hiding it is unhealthy for the economy.
Call it capitalist, socialist, communist, anythingist, whatever. If it aids and abets wealth and power concentration, it's bad, and there is no ideological wordplay that can make it otherwise.
I care about sensible regulations for health and safety, I care about the enormous wealth gap where money is hoarded by the rich while fellow citizens struggle. Honestly the class war is about to pop off.
A lot of people here are giving various answers, and that's for 2 reasons. You asked a very loaded question in a lemmy instance that started with an explicitly socialist bend, and you're essentially asking people about very personal reasons they hold a political belief.
Everyone's political beliefs are shaped by the conditions of their life. For example, I grew up poor on a rural farm in the Midwest of the US. Over time due to various things, I had several life situations impact my views on politics and the world. I started to learn things, things that didn't make sense, things that challenged my world view, things that I knew were wrong but didn't know why they happened. Eventually, I rejected liberalism and needed to find something else. That something else came in the form of a walkout at my workplace. I was thrust into the labor movement. Now I'm an anarcho-syndicalist (I believe all hierarchy is bad including capitalism and governments, and the people should govern themselves through unions and other forms of organizing).
This is a very, very brief description of my life from when I was born to literally right now, and how it impacted my beliefs. This process of life impacting personal political beliefs is called our "material conditions". People may have similar material conditions and completely disagree, or drastically different material conditions and agree on everything. More and more Americans are seeing and feeling the dramatic impacts of capitalism and the power of a few people on the top. That is driving people both to the anticapitalist left and to the fascist alt-right. Whatever reasons you read here, know that they're justifications for their material conditions causing them to take a radical position.
I think it's okay as long as it's heavily regulated, and the core stuff- health, education, transportation, housing, energy + utilities (including internet) all has a public component creating competition. When people have alternatives, society can progress.
Society becomes worse when any number of these get depleted or captured. You see healthcare diminish in the UK and Canada. You see things like STD rates skyrocket in the US when sex ed is torn out in favor of religion. You see it in the regulatory capture of Canadian cell providers. You see everyone in Texas suffer when private electrical companies dictate prices on power and can't keep their services running in extreme temperatures.
All this pales in comparison to authoritarian counties though. China's completely muzzled internet, insane tracking, concentration camps, authorities welding apartment buildings shut. Russian oil companies lining their pockets while corruption depleted their military and made it a joke (no flare systems on helicopters? Is this WW2?) At least we have the freedom to move countries, move states, and choose where we work and live, and who we get to love.
The Achilles heel of humanity is greed. Doesn't matter what goverment or economy style. Greed will fuck everything up. At the same time, don't lose sight of the positives. Most people get to live normal, healthy lives. We have modern medicine. Generally things are pretty peaceful. Crime is low. The economy is decent. We have ways of communicating instantly and are closer than ever to exploring space.
My stance on this starts with the things that a lot of people for the most part can admit are problems. Corporations with the power and wealth of small countries, concentration of money in the hands of a few, absurd costs of living, decreasing access to education, the environmental crisis, constant wars that destroy poorer countries, and in many countries poor healthcare outcomes. And this is by no means an exhaustive list.
Now why do these things happen? In my opinion the origin of these issues comes down to private ownership of vitally important organizations and infrastructure, and the resulting profit seeking regardless of the consequences. This also is how I would define capitalism, because capitalism is at its core only a way of organizing the economy.
There are then multiple answers to how we should address them. Regulating companies and reforming capitalism without addressing the root issue are a common one, and in some cases somewhat effective. However, in most cases such movements(which I would call social democratic) have a tendency to quickly walk back their achievements. For example, Tory attacks on the NHS in the UK have contributed to its reduction in quality. Or the walking back that the Mitterand administration did in France. Or the deregulation of trucking in the United States which led to substantially lower wages. This is also a western-centric argument on my part, because social democracy also relies on ruthlessly exploiting poorer countries' workers but that's a whole separate can of worms.
One could think of this backtracking as faults in the political system, which they perhaps are, but I think they are inherent to capitalism, because when you have such overwhelming power in megacorporations, they will inevitably eventually get their way as long as they exist. It's the equivalent of being surprised that you will eventually burn up if you try to stand on the sun despite your thermal shielding or other mitigations. Which isn't that absurd of a comparison because the sun's surface is only ~15 times hotter than a human if you measure from absolute zero.
The next answer is to try to, through monopoly breaking or other means, to revert capitalism to a former state of less concentrated capital. This is a fool's errand and a reactionary stance in most cases, because monopolization is inherent to capitalism, especially now that companies' fixed costs are immense, but the marginal cost of each new unit(be it a package sent through a carrier or a complex electronic device) is nearly negligible in comparison, making a monopoly the inevitable outcome.
And about at this point in my political development I found out about Marxism and it's overall proposal for an alternative to capitalism, and I found it the most compelling. The history of Marxism is also a whole separate can of worms so I won't go too far into it, but I agree with the Marxist class analysis that there are owners(most of which aren't even individuals anymore) and workers, and that workers' main political strength are their numbers. And a lot of capitalism reform proposals do actually rely on mass political organization of workers. Now what I say is, I think we can be more imaginative as to what that power can be used for. I don't think what comes next after capitalism will be perfect, but I think we can do much better.
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.
The Lemmy developers are very anti-capitalist and this is one of the first instances, the one that they are most liked to. Like attracted like, leading to a lot of users being anti-capitalist.
Other instances have different internal cultures due to how and why they were formed.
Yeah. I was just trying to answer OP's question in a different context, as I took to being interpreted as either "why do you hate capitalism?" or "why does everyone here seem to hate capitalism?" and I answered the second question while most answered the first.
Are there other less anti-capitalist instances you can recommend? I am so tired of the constant <insert random normal problem here>, "oh, it's because capitalism!" circlejerk.
A lot of the other ones are less anti-capitalist. The problem here is that no other instance seems to want to compete for AskLemmy since the community got built early here.
This is a decentralized platform meant to be a social media system without the corporate power inherent to all the others. The developers of Lemmy for example have essays on Maoist China being hosted on their Github.
By its very nature, it's going to attract people who are trying to get away from corporate influence. It's essentially why I'm here and not on reddit. I don't want a company profiting off of my content.
There's space for pro-capitalists as well though. I believe in the open market of ideas - listen to what people have to say and share your bit. Engage genuinely and you'll learn something and maybe teach someone else something.
Capitalism is just based on mass exploitation and the only ones that really benefit from that are the rich that are exploiting the masses (the bosses of the big companys). Cannot see why you should like such a system other than you got brainwashed. On the other hand i dont know if there is currently anything better than the capitalist system because every other system failed if we look back in history. In my opinion combining aspects of socialism and capitalism to a "controlled and regulated capitalism" is the current best solution. I recommend to you to read Karl Marx to get and idea of what the "other side of the fence" look and get an idea of some critical view points of capitalism.
There are a lot of good answers here. My perspective is that captialism generally doesn't serve the common person, and that essential services should under no circumstances be privatized.
Captialism is a race to the bottom in terms of cost, but this can only be achieved by sacrificing quality of goods, or by underpaying workers after a certain point.
For instance, look at the vape industry as a microcosm for captialism. A new need/desire was identified by the market. Everyone and their dog tried to capitalize on this by creating shops that met this demand. Shop owners took out ridiculous loans, didn't get their supply chains organized etc. Eventually the ones that were smart or lucky enough survived, while everyone else lost their shirts. Tada. Streamlined industry. Now that this is achieved, and vape juice is highly substitutable, the only way to compete and still make the same amount of revenue is to:
Lower prices in hopes of attracting customer while providing the same product. This is risky, so generally not done.
Find cheaper products of poorer quality and sell them hoping your consumers don't notice or don't care.
Underpay your workers.
Eventually, you end up with an Amazon esque scenario where workers are paid in dog shit, and products suck.
while you get a streamlined production line, a lot of people get hurt establish it and maintaining your competitive advantage. Finally, the vape market crashed after the hype and even more people lost money.
Now repeat this process with something as vital as healthcare (which again is relatively substitutable). The system only worships the allnmighty buck and doesn't give a shit for people's well being.
I guess most pro-capitalism people don't mind corporate-controlled social media, and so have stayed on reddit. I don't know why there aren't more anti-monopolistic pro-capitalism libertarians here, though...
Capitalism has been touted as superior to the alternatives (Socialism, Communism, etc) b/c it has been claimed to be "self-regulating" and "self-correcting" and "even if we don't understand why, it fixes itself"--basically the only choice among bad ones that, given our collective small brains, has any chance of sustaining itself and society in the absence of an ability of individuals or government to do so intentionally.
What it really is is an opportunity to stay anonymous while gaming the system, all the while convincing everyone else that they too can game the system (thereby being gamed). It is not a net benefit to society when taken to extremes.
Capitalism is great for the consumer in the micro. If there is a coffee shop on your street that sucks, and you start a coffee shop two blocks away to compete with it with your better coffee, you are participating in the version of capitalism that "works as intended."
It doesn't work in the macro. When, instead of continuing to manage your mom & pop business that barely breaks even, you vertically integrate, buy up or otherwise destroy your competition, and then reduce the quality of your product to bare minimums in favor of profits and shareholder value and growth, you take capitalism to an extreme that makes everyone else (the consumers, the workers, the would-be-competitors) have a worse quality of life.
People prefer better quality of life. Capitalism in the modern age is so far in that macro extreme that it no longer makes people's lives better. East Palestine train derailment as an example... why would they prioritize safety over cost cutting? Bam, a town is cancerous. It's not unreasonable for people to point at a corruptible system and blame it for the corruption that exists.
Problem is, people are corruptible, so whatever alternative we think is better, someone will come along and ruin it for personal gain.
Capitalism is currently causing vastly more problems than it is solving. It is concentrating wealth and resources in the hands of the few while the poor and working class suffer.
In addition to sustainability concerns others have mentioned, capitalism is also inherently unjust. You earn money by having money and many of those who work the hardest are also the poorest.
Friends and family bankrupted by basic medical needs;
Friends WITH medical insurance unable to afford basic medications like insulin or asthma control inhalers;
The increased atomization of society has led to a collapse of community in most of my country: people don’t care about each other because they can’t because they don’t have the time or money;
It has driven us and continues to drive us towards the complete collapse of the biological systems that sustain our planet at an ever increasing rate.
The only thing people can point and do point to is “oh but more people have more cheap commodities.” Great! At the expense of the common dignity of man and the ecosystems in which he depends, an ever smaller class of bloated egotists has gotten rich beyond comprehension while the rest of the world literally burns and melts in the name of increasing fortunes already beyond any and all conception of need. At the same time, the life of the average person is marked by degraded environments, exposures to industrial toxins, has their profession increasingly made precarious, has the cost of living increase while wages stagnate or shrink, and now is plagued by disasters directly resulting from the climate change a fossil carbon economy has caused.
What about any of that should I like? That I can eat a hamburger for $10 that is mostly ammonia-cleansed meat filler…?
I started off as capitalist. I believed the fairy tales from silicon valley: If I work hard enough, I might be able to rise to the top, not only able to leave my hometown or my country, but also I might even able to buy a cheaper sports car. Used, but it might be fun to refurbish, or even customize. I even had a paranoid fear of communism, due to fear mongering from the right.
Then reality hit hard. First, I had to learn that the people I idolized didn't just make some mistakes, but were outright evil, while the competition isn't much better. Then I had struggle with trying to find a job, especially due to my inability of making up a story of long time employment history and achievements. And then I had to drop out from college, because I couldn't do my mandatory internship time.
When I said we should at least do some regulations to not let these things to run amok, the answer was that it would be "communism", and instead we should left it up to the free market. And if the market doesn't have problem with it, then I'm in the wrong.
Then I found Libertarian Socialist Rants on YouTube, the forerunner of what we know as "lefttube". The rest is history.
Add time goes on, capitalism constantly needs more and more restrictions placed on it to not utterly destroy society. Child labor laws, minimum wage, worker rights... capitalism is inherently against all of that because it makes less money.
Even today the rights that have been fought for over the past century, capitalism is trying to erode away, all in the name of greater profits. Child labor is back on the menu in some states. Minimum wage has not kept up with inflation. In the USA they've discovered that dying people are a captive audience, so they can charge them ridiculous money out the ass for whatever will keep them alive. Like, what are they going to do, go home and do surgery themselves? Wait until Black Friday for a sale on MRI scans? lol.
Nearly every right and freedom for anyone below the top 0.1% of earners is a continuous battle against capitalism to maintain.
You seem to have arrived late to the party and just assumed 21st century Western society is just the natural state of capitalism. No, this is capitalism after centuries of people fighting for their rights. Seriously, you need to study some history. Especially what life was like in the Victorian or early industrial era.
Under capitalism, big companies can get together and raise prices arbitrarily simply to raise profits. In theory, customers would switch to less greedy companies but in reality big companies hold larger market advantages. Fuck greedy capitalism.
Capitalism is a system that will always result in long-term oppression of the workers and consumers, corruption of governing bodies, and environmental destruction.
This is because the base idea is wrong. Adam Smith and the Capitalist theorists that came after him claimed that the invisible hand of the market would trend towards better outcomes for the workers and consumers. This would be true if the best way to be profitable was to do good, but that isn't the case.
More often than not, it is more profitable to do harm than good. Firms that seek to always increase profits, which is the fundamental goal of a Capitalist system, will always be incentivized to get as many people as possible to pay as much as possible for as little as possible.
This has been demonstrated over and over again. Think about software platforms for the most recent example. Netflix has only gotten more expensive with worse content and harsher usage rules. Same with YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. This is called "enshitification." Companies always want to make more money, that can only happen by charging more, giving less, or creating some kind of production efficiency. And what's the quickest way to make production more economically efficient? Fire workers and make the remaining/replacement ones work harder for longer with the same or worse pay.
Those are some of the practical reasons Capitalism is bad. The theoretical reasons have to do with the way Capitalism tries to justify private ownership and the employee/employer relationship.
How is it ethical that a man who has never set foot on a factory floor, never operated a machine, never worked a double shift because he needed to feed his family, to reap a majority of the produced value of that factory simply because he owns it?
How is it ethical that a man simply because of his privilege of upbringing, can "earn" 100-200-300X more than his average workers? Does he produce 300X more value? Does he work 300X as hard? Is his position 300X more difficult to perform? No, it's because Capitalism justifies such grievous disparities and in fact, rewards them.
Answer this: The person who is told, "you are free to either be abused, or to die." Is that person free in any significant sense?
I used to be a Capitalist, hardcore one actually. But slowly I came to realize that it can only result in one thing long term, collapse and dystopia. I'd be happy to discuss this stuff further with you, just DM me, maybe we can chat more on Discord or something.
Anyway, any extreme "ism" is inherently unstable without the other side balancing itself. That's cos humans are greedy, selfish fucks. The free market doesn't work because humans are greedy, selfish fucks. Pure capitalism will eventually eat itself. On the flip side, pure socialism doesn't work cos humans are greedy, selfish fucks. Pure socialism will eventually reify itself into complete inertia. Capitalism needs the inherent brakes that socialism provides; while socialism needs to incentives capitalism provides. Pure capitalism causes massive boom/bust cycles. Before the Great Depression, there were the Panics that happened about ever 20-30 years, where, similarly to the Great Recession, banks would overleverage themselves, and go bust. What ended up stopping those kind of panics were the socialistic programs of FDR and the New Deal.
Free markets only work when they're actually free, that means no monopolies. We're in an extreme stage of capitalism right now with monopolizes all over the place. There is no free market. Ppl like to say "late stage capitalism" but it's more more similar to the laissez faire capitalism of the robber-barons of the late 19th century. Monopolies everywhere, wealth concentrated in the <1%, etc. Profits at any cost, including human life. Extreme capitalism is also tied into conservativism. This results in "rules for thee, not for me" circumstances. In other words, capitalists and conservatives believe laws should protect them but not bind them; while poor ppl, minorities and women should have laws binding them, but not protect them. This, of course, leads to massive social inequities and social unrest.
For more context, read the the Wikipedia articles on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, child labor in the Appalachian mines and how many children died from it, the Pinochet regime, etc. And, more recently, the actions at Amazon by not letting their employees evacuate or shelter from the horrific tornadoes that ripped through IL and collapsed a warehouse where 6 employees were killed (Amazon is being sued for it). The maquilladores in northern Mexico (thanks NAFTA!), child slavery in South and SE Asia (don't buy Nike), and the general destruction of the environment. Hope you're enjoying your heatwave!
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Maquiladora NAFTA
No great single resources for Nike / Child Slavery but... just search for it there are too many to link
I really shouldn't have to link to the environment, right?
"Free markets" do not exist nor work. Period. Even Wealth Of Nations says so.
Without regulatory control, they become rapidly captured by capital interests that push anticompetitive practices to tie up the market.
To prevent this, all societies, to some degree or another, impose regulations on the markets. They do so in a variety of ways for a variety of philosophical reasons and to varying degrees of success, but there exists no free market anywhere and never could. A truly "free" market would immediately be captured and exploited.
All modern countries but for a few theocracies and authoritarian states function on fundamental principles from socialism, not "capitalism". Even the ones that claim to be fundamentally Liberal or capitalist are still perfectly happy removing property from a person for the public good -- proving there is no fundamental belief in private property -- and will follow policies that may harm individuals but benefit the overall social good. And this is good and proper, because these truly "capitalist" principles cannot work in practice.
Let me just repeat for emphasis: free markets do not, have never, and could never actually exist. They just can't and don't. It's preposterous to pursue them. But it IS possible for a socialist to make use of property leases -- which look and feel the same as private property but aren't -- and markets to exchange them to give you something that "feels" like a free market but is actually just socialism.
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).
The actual reason in most cases is because they think that abolishing capitalism would benefit them personally. Whether this is true or not is debatable, but that's ultimately beside the point.
Nothing substantial to contribute ... just wanted to say that I came in here expecting a shit show (maybe I've been on mastodon too much :) ) and am genuinely impressed to see a bunch of polite and good discussion, not least from the OP!!
When you have a system that values profits over everything, it tends to (either by accident or design) exploit workers and destroy the middle class.
With capitalism, you’ll pay the absolute minimum needed to get workers, regardless of the value they create for the business and regardless of how much profit your business is making. You’ll collude with other businesses to keep wages down, because again that’s a way to increase profit. You WONT support any worker rights laws like weekends, PTO, benefits, minimum wage, etc.
You can argue that the free market takes care of itself, but we’ve seen that isn’t true. Companies constantly exploit customers and workers. They will raise prices and lower wages in ways that a pure “free market” theoretically wouldn’t allow.
Now this isn’t to say capitalism is all bad. I do think smart people and hard working people should be rewarded. But any sufficiently large system is going to have some corruption. I’d like to have a reasonable minimum standard of living for everyone before we run off and let capitalism give us multi-billionaires. If everyone was guaranteed enough for a decent standard of living, I’d be fine with the rest being as capitalistic as anyone wants. But we dont have that. Minimum wage is $7. Healthcare is shit and tied to employment. Etc. etc.
It's easy to blame capitalism when you're an American who has never traveled to a country with strong social safety nets and checked capitalism. I also assume most people who call themselves communists aren't actually communists though, they just want stronger systems in America to help the poor (Healthcare, education, etc)
The US used to have stronger social safety nets and they’ve been progressively eaten away at. It seems like the same process is happening in other countries with strong social safety nets. The riots in Paris over an increase is the retirement age is just one example. If you try to understand why that’s the trend it’s hard not to blame capitalism.
Unchecked capitalism allows for the snowballing consolidation of wealth and power, and is therefore inherently authoritarian/exploitative of others. It is possible to have markets that encourage and reward creativity, novelty, and competition without allowing any person or entity to become too powerful (mind you, wealth and power are always the same thing - or more specifically - two sides of a single coin).
This is also why you will see leftists attacking liberals - because liberalism is simply an extension of capitalism: the allowance and encouragement of inequitable consolidation of wealth and power. An egalitarian ends must actively oppose, prevent, and even correct such consolidation. Capitalism and liberalism are the enemies of freedom, liberty, and justice.
Pure capitalism favors the wealthy and the unscrupulous. That is if there are no laws in place protecting peoples rights then the business owners have little incentive to treat there employees well (they will trade short term profits over long term stability.
On the flip side a pure communist system favors the lazy since there is little to no reward for doing more than the minimum. That is to say the status quo is unchanging.
This is why we have government, to correct the selfish nature of capitalism, while hopefully still retaining the innovation and drive that it produces (winner take all is a strong motivator).
This only works in the long term if government is fair and balanced, looking out both for the interests of business and society (the poor, the environment, the common spaces, etc). And where an idea like socialism actually strikes a good balance between both extremes.
The idea that the markets will sort themselves out is a fever dream thought up by the right. The markets will quickly consolidate into monopolies and then exploit there power. It is only fair competition that produces benefits. And that is an unstable balance that must be carefully maintained by outside forces (government).
Laziness does not exist. It was a "sin" invented by slaveholding societies under what we call today "the protestant work ethic". Capitalism and socialism are incompatible systems. Socialism is the economic means of production being owned by the workers. Capitalism is the economic means of production being privately owned by individuals. I don't mean to be rude, but this is a very uninformed take.
I think that I hear the argument against capitalism the most from people who reference unskilled labor. Sure, the person working in a warehouse is getting screwed wage-wise because the company is greedy and they doesn't have a unique skill set. But the guy in the office that is maintaining a proprietary piece of software has the leverage to demand a higher wage. I think when it comes down to it, capitalism is just another version of the economic "game". I prefer this game to socialism (or really any other economic philosophy) as I know how to work the current system better. Don't want to get screwed in your career? Specialize! I understand a lot of people don't want to hear this as it puts the impetus on us instead of the rich,, but that's how the system works (for now). I will always be on-board with people wanting to better themselves and their situation (especially at the expense of the rich) but getting something for nothing just isn't realistic without massive mobilization of the lowest wage earners. Not to mention the hurdles in our government.
Pure capitalism allows many to abuse the system and that results in what we have today here in the us. Overtime politicians have continued to do patchwork to simply get by for the next one to take over and scrap whatever agenda the previous one had in play. Which makes the problems worst and in turn takes longer to address.
We need both legislation and accountability for alot of things but it seems to be impossible to get both of those things. Hell, I dont care that your rich. Just dont bring everyone down with you when you take that one gamble and it causes everything to crash!
I think people often mix up capitalism with market-based economies. The former describes social relations while the former describes how commodities are distributed.
I'm personally not a fan of either. A planned economy geared toward people's need, with the withering away of socio-ecomic classes (no more worker and capitalist distriction) just makes better sense to me.
Capitalism is built on the exploitation of others. Slavery, Homelessness, and Pollution are all side effects of a profit driven market without restrictions.
I have always believed that the majority of the world's problems stem from almost all of the world's countries rely on a private bank to print and regulate their money. Those banks aren't capitalistic, but I bet the people behind them are the richest in the world.
I'm a bit libertarian leaning myself, but I do believe capitalism requires moral constraints on external, societal costs that are not included in market forces (e.g. environmental pollution).
In short, capitalism's greatest benefit it is also it's greatest issue: it delivers most efficiently exactly what people want, but without any evaluation whether those wants are beneficial.
There is a difference between capitalism and capitalism-without-rules (which some might call libertarianism). Capitalism is meant to have rules to make it fair and prevent anarchy, just like, say, football has rules to make it fair and prevent anarchy. The rule makers are the government and the rule enforcers are/is the legal system (like in football, the FA makes the rules and the Referees and others enforce those rules). So while capitalism incentivizes business creation and innovation in the name of money-making, there are supposed to be checks and balances to make it fair and in the best interests of all citizens.
Capitalism today especially in the United States is practiced more like capitalism-without-rules where the government is owned by capital owners and therefore does a poor job of making rules that are fair for all and a poor job of curtailing unbridled capitalism. It also appears that the highest level of the legal system in the US is also heavily influenced by capital owners.
I suspect what the “hate” is about is the way capitalism is practiced today.
If capitalism was being practiced responsibly with checks and balances by well-functioning governments and judiciaries, then there would be less hate. This will only happen if people hold governments accountable through protest. Voting is not enough because capital can “buy” all voting options/parties. Protest has brought many civilizing changes to capitalism, especially in the US in the 60s, but the pendulum has swung back to the public not being organized enough or not caring enough to force governments to do their jobs.
The current system has a shit tonne of rules about how to do capitalism. It is not a free for all or an anarchy. It might be developing into a neo feudal system, with fascist oligarch clans running various nation states, but still lots of rules for running the beast.
Yes it’s true that the current system has lots of rules but just because there are lots of rules doesn’t mean they’re effective. They do a poor job of limiting capitalism’s negative effects. Which is what they’re supposed to do. Quantity but not quality.
People have different definitions of capitalism, and cound different side effects into that definition.
While you are correct in your claims, it does look like you are not seeing negative effects it has on society and economy.
Similar thing happens with the other side, they usually put criminal activities (like corporations poisoning people) into definition of capitalism or they directly blame it for that kind effect on humans.
I think that is just not really accepting the nature of humans.
Shit will happen in every *isam and each one will be good for something.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't challenge everything that we see as bad, and there is no need to make those classifications.
It is like politics, looks like you can not be for lower taxes and support same sex marriage at the same time, even thou there are people with those options.
Capitalism isn't the problem. The problem are too big to fail SROs. End central banking and aggressively pursue antitrust to break up mega conglomerates like Citadel, Blackrock, Vanguard, Meta, Google, Microsoft, etc, so we can actually have a sane and open society rather than this corporate/media/government bloc that is currently running the world to ruin.
I think people in this thread is generally see capitalism as the reason for inequity and people's misfortune with medical bills etc. As a resident of a Scandinavian country this strike me as odd. All Scandinavian countries are for sure capitalistic but we pay high taxes and get for instance free education, free healthcare, retirement pension etc. in return. The opposite to this is not capitalism, but liberalism, in the sense that society should stay out of people's business and "freedom above everything else".
Countries where things goes to hell need to give up some freedom to benefit the greater good which I'm turn is going to help themselves.
No, Clyde - lick the boots of parasites if you want... but you are the one that needs to justify your beliefs. We who have seen through the fairy tales have no need to justify anything to the likes of you.
I'd say that unless you are pretty wealthy then you're pro- something designed to optimally exploit you while making you think that it's the greatest system on Earth and that society can't possibly do any better.
Capitalism is the worst economical system, but there is no better alternatives, as a ukrainian watching other developed countries i feel sad about my cumminist in the past country
This idea, ‘there is no alternative’, is a keystone of the neoliberal ideology. It is a delusion. It is the mistake of thinking the current system is a fact of nature, somehow an inescapable feature of human civilization. We know that this system has not always existed, and was not always universal. We also know, if we just open our eyes, that it has failed and is collapsing. So. Regardless of the validity of the concept that there is no alternative, we had better imagine one.
The problem is not 'Capitalism'. It's the JACK WELCH brand of Capitalism, the one that tears apart the soul of any company that produces goods and turns it into a robot for profit with the sacrifice of any meaningful corporate planning or infrastructure (including workers) investment.
Until THIS ends, Capitalism is, in fact, an evil.
Edit: Honestly. Please. Look up what Welch did to GE and how it spread to every other corporation. It's EYE opening.
I’m not downvoting you because learning about what Jack Welch did to the world is worthwhile. And you’re right that American capitalism was better for the common American before him. But capitalism is still shitty and the primary driver of the climate catastrophe
Lemmy.ml was started by tankies so that would be why there is little love for market capitalism on this server. Oddly enough, many seem perfectly fine with state capitalism like China has.
The current wave of enshittification is driven also by the fact that much of the current system is ‘built out’. How do you grow profits when you can’t expand your consumers? You enshittify. It helps if you are an effective monopoly, but isn’t required. If the consumers aren’t growing all the competing producers are highly motivated to enshittify together, and they do. Of course it also helps if the same huge investment funds are major stakeholders in the producers.
some people just like to "know the secret meaning that you dont know but im gonna tell ya". if youtu.be wouldn't be on their likening, the .be domain could easily disclose as butt-eating or whatever two word combination would go along as "meaningful" to smear.
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.
Because they've never seen well regulated Capitalism nor been educated on it as all we get in the US is Corporate propaganda on Capitalism to justify the hellscape the wealthy make the most money from.
The US is a hellscape? Why do we have such immigration pressure in that case? People aren’t immigrating to the US so that they can be elites. They’re immigrating here because the low tier they will have in society is better than their previous life.
I don't get the same impression in my community. I'm pretty sure that we all love capitalism in "[email protected]"
What communities do you waste your time on?
Because basic economics is never taught properly in schools. People don't understand what free healthcare/education/whatever costs. Because, at least in the US, universities are heavily politicized by anti capitalist mentality.
Because the ml in lemmy.ml stands for Marxist-Leninist, and this instance is populated mostly by a banned reddit community of pro-CCP Marxists. You should join a different instance.
edit: You know down voting something doesn't make it untrue? This is true whether you like it or not.
Every time I ask for "capitalism" problems I get answers about what the government does.
"too big to fail"? Government bailouts.
"antitrust"? Government granted monopolies and making the laws so that barriers to entry are too big.
"police shootings" Government gang.
"inflation"? Government monetary policy.
"colonization"? Government expansion
"not enough social programs"? Government policy.
Then you've got the sub-70s who go on about "exploitation" which is rooted entirely in fiction.
Life requires work. All life everywhere. Humans aren't exempt from this; demanding that others do all your work and provide for you or free isn't going to work.
Some of these people would complain that they have to chew their own food.
People forget that capitalism has lifted literally billions of people out of poverty, it's advanced our technology to where it's basically magic. It increased the amount of food we can grow with fewer people allowing people to move past subsistence farming (which many socialist countries reverted to).
Capitalism uses people greed to provide better, cheaper, faster versions of things..
Then the government gets involved and instead of blaming the government they're told to blame capitalism, so they do.
Ehh it's probably mostly kids who have been handed everything to them their entire life and when they realize they need to start providing for themselves after their parents kick them out of the basement they get mad because they don't want to do anything but play videogames and get paid. They don't realize the only reason they have videogames to begin with is because of capitalism.
Most people who hate capitalism are focusing in on its evil brother, "unfettered capitalism". UC is a shit show which has created many of the problems we see today and is the unholy unity created when big business and the government combine. When done right, capitalism pushes to lower costs and improve services for consumers. Companies competing is a good thing. Unfortunately the greed of corporations knows no bounds which is when UC enters the picture and fucks everything up.
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.
The things you stated are not because of our financial system, but rather the scientific advances made. Scientific advances are not limited to capitalist systems.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
This is certainly true. But it is also inarguable that capitalism has problems. I think we can talk about those problems without engaging in anti-capitalist ignorance.
I am pro-capitalist myself because there is literally no evidence for anything else working well on earth. Capitalist systems (albeit with regulations to maintain free markets - ie snuff monopolies and anticompetitive practices) have improved the standard of living for people more than any other system ever has. But I full expect flurries of downvotes because of where I am and the group think circle jerk here.
Any rational capitalist (or more realistically, mixed market supporter) should agree that other systems are theoretically possible, and should probably even support small scale scientific tests of whatever people want to realistically propose.
This already happens with tests of UBI occurring all over and examples of coops existing in many places as well. UBI is too new to say but looks promising, and coops seem great in certain areas of the economy if properly supported but not optimal everywhere, as far as I'm aware.
However, if someone thinks their system can only work with absolutely everyone in society participating after a revolution where the sinners (whoever they are) are eliminated, they really ought to recalibrate their beliefs or join a militia if they're really serious.
Can you point to a socialist country where it has resulted in better outcomes than its peers? Cuba might be a contender but then there's also Venezuela next door...
I do not consider China to be a socialist country. It is a market economy where your average Foxconn employee no more controls the means of production than your average Detroit autoworker. My understanding is that China doctrine states socialism is one big long term TODO (with ever moving goalposts), requiring their economy and material wealth to have grown first. Well, you can't deny it's grown but I'm still hearing a lot about Chinese billionaires while there's also a huge swath of Chinese rural poor.
I can agree with the "so far" qualifier. Things can always be improved, and yes many other systems look great on paper. I am just waiting for the evidence of those other systems functioning in practice. Personally, I would not my country to be the guinea pig in case it backfires. I am content with my western country and its generally current standard of living over past generations and civilizations.
You do realize most of the other attempts at something else have been largely destroyed or stifled by the United States on behalf of capitalist interests right? Map for context
Sure, there's no argument about the benefits for many (me and you included, as demonstrated by the fact we can have the resources and time to post this here) of that system. And it's true that it works better than many other systems we've tried. Absolutely! That does not change the fact that it is by its nature combined with human nature, demonstrably inevitably self-destructive for all. Ignoring that (which, of course, so many folks are very motivated to do) is at our peril. We literally won't have to worry about what system is better or worse for much longer if this continues.
So, it seems quite clear that arguing that it's better than the others, for many, for now, is not a useful, rational, or coherent approach, since it is inevitably fatal for all. That is a bit like arguing that it's 'better' to wear small amounts of lead (and other poisonous substances) in cosmetics to attract folks we want to have around us socially (as the elite did, of course, in our history) resulting in the inevitable mid and long term sickness and death of those people instead of finding other solutions.
Instead, it seems far more rational to work really hard to figure out what can work better!
I think if, culturally, we have a value shift (it's already happening imo) then we can properly commodify important aspects nature. e.g., how much value is there in reducing in our CO2 output? How much value is there in preserving these species? Right now, we don't place enough value on it, and that's why I think regulations are incredibly important in a capitalist system. We certainly need more of it, but we also need it globally so companies can't just jump ship to other places where those values aren't in place.
That is an extreme oversimplification of the issue. It would be way easier to support capitalism if the end result wasn't continued increasing concentration of wealth with a decreasing number of people. Maybe a better phrasing for the disdain people have is that we hate American capitalism. That encompasses not just the market, but the tax system and general financial landscape Americans have currently. It's the ability for companies to report record profits, announce layoffs, increase supply, and fight against wage increase and better benefits, all in the same breath, that creates the hatred people have right now.
Everything boils down to that, though. The only people you see actively going against the grain of capitalism are poor people, not rich people (you'll have some "socialists" like Bernie Sanders and AOC but c'mon, they're capitalists too, with their million dollar mansions and whatnot).
I'm not angry that people are richer than me, I'm angry that they're so UNBELIEVABLY MASSIVELY rich that they're basically black holes sucking in more money and leaving others with nothing. I don't want to be rich, I want to know I can still afford food and basic amenities next month and not have to think about whether my shoes can withstand another winter or if I should buy new ones and not to wonder whether that slight pain in my teeth needs to be fixed now or if it's just my imagination and not have to fight my health insurance for non-urgent leg surgery and other treatments that would increase my quality of life by several orders of magnitude (and enable me to work again at least part-time!) instead of treating symptoms. And I'm saying this in a first world developed industrial nation with a comparatively good social security safety net.