Asklemmy

For all of the benefits and blessings that capitalism has given us, there are several things people need to realize:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

Is this bait?

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.

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’m pretty pro-capitalism myself,

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The Fediverse is dominated by hackers, who by their nature are incompatible with existing systems such as capitalism.

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:

1. Capitalism is based off of a system which inherently assumes infinite growth which is not possible

2. Free markets require easy and free access to information to govern things like price setting, but that information is almost impossible to obtain accurately

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

A valid question.

"Capitalism" is a huge umbrella term so means many different things to many different people. And as an extension of this, a lot of the things that are underneath that umbrella are inarguably ... extremely bad. Environmental devastation, the oppression and wage slavery of the third world, the existence of multi-million-dollar worthless baubles when people still die from lack of affordable health care... Even if you're very pro-capitalist it would be tough to argue that all aspects of capitalism are great for humans and humanity. Capitalism optimizes for economic performance, not human happiness.

Also a lot of people's only experience with oppression is through capitalism. Here, I am talking about the alienation of workers from their labor (or, put more plainly, "shitty jobs"). It's pretty bad for the soul to work as a wage slave in Amazon Fulfillment Warehouse #143249 earning $14/hour while bosses so removed from you they may as well be on another planet earn roughly $14,000,000/minute for doing nothing more than sitting in an office for 2 hours a day and sexually harassing their hot secretaries. Obviously there's more to it than this for those of us who are more pro-capitalism, but I think it's easy to see how some people get very angry about these conditions very rapidly.

Personally, despite these problems, I am more pro-capitalist than not, but it is because I experience (and have experienced) a fair amount of non-capitalism-related-oppression. As I have said numerous times capitalism is not perfect and is far from perfection. Nevertheless, it is the only economic system under which minorities such as LGBTQ+ people have been able to advance their agendas and see a modicum of gains in the field of civil rights. People hate on rainbow capitalism but I personally love it (and, by extension, fear Target and other companies caving to Republican pressure campaigns). The alternative to rainbow capitalism is companies and people hating LGBTQ+ people... and that is a far, far worse outcome for me than Northrop Grumman having a float in a Pride parade.

This is also a pretty typical leftist divide though. Those of us more on the "identity politics" side tend to see communists as white bros with bad beards whose only experience of adversity is that they're jealous of how much money their bosses make. On the other hand, communists see identity politics proponents as wanting more gay disabled Black trans drone pilots. Both these critiques are obviously basically true because everyone is problematic.

But I think that's basically where the capitalism hate on the Internet comes from.

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.