Why are folks so anti-capitalist?

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?

Why is capitalism so anti-folks?

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 :)

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.

Capitalism sold us a fairy-tale.

Companies compete for customers, they improve products so it breeds innovation and they also compete for workers, so it gets better for everyone! Except it doesn't.

The reality is quite the opposite. Here's what happens. They want to maximize profits so that the owners of the company get more money. How do you maximize profits?

• You can advertise, and attract more customers. Alright, but eventually everyone has a widget. Maybe you can poach some customers from a competitor, but ultimately the market is saturated. Things get replaced as they break there's a natural equilibrium. How do you increase profits?
• You can charge more. Raise the price. That only works so far before you lose customers to your cheaper competition, again you reach an equilibrium. How do you increase profits?
• You can innovate! Oh yes, that's what capitalism is all about, improve your production, instead of 5 parts that need to be screwed together, now it's just one part that falls out of a machine. You spend less time making each widget so you make more profit. But eventually there just isn't any room to innovate any more. How do you increase profits?
• You can use cheaper materials. But here again, you bump against an equilibrium, the cheaper materials often break more easily - sometimes that is wanted (planned obsolescence) but your customers will notice the drop in quality and eventually they're not willing to pay as much for your widget any more. How do you increase profits?
• Well, the last big item on your list: payroll. Do more work with less staff, or in other words pay staff less.

So what you end up with is low quality products, it's a race to the bottom of who can make the crappiest product that the customers are still willing to pay for.

And for the workers? Well, they don't earn much, we outsourced their work to overseas or replaced them with machines and computers. All the money went into the pockets of the owners and now the workers are poor. They're desperate to even find work, any work as long as it allows them afford rent and barely not starve. If one of them has concerns about the working conditions, fire them, somebody else is more desperate and willing to accept the conditions.

So capitalism is destined to make us all poorer. It needs poverty as a "threat" to make you shut up and do your work "you wouldn't want to be homeless, would you?"

The problem is not money itself, it's not stores or being able to buy stuff. That's an economy you can have an economy without capitalism. The problem is that the capitalists own the means of production and all the profits flow up into the pockets of the owners. And often the owners are shareholders, the stock markets, they don't care if a company is healthy, or doing well by their employees, all the stock markets care about is "line go up", and it's sucking the working class dry.

Regulation can avoid some of the worst negative effects of capitalism. Lawmakers can set a minimum wage, rules for working hours, paid time off, health and safety, environmental protection etc. Those rules are often written in blood. Literally, because if not forced by law, capitalism has no reason to care about your (worker or customer) life, only profits.

Oppose that with some ideas of socialism. aka. "The workers own the means of production" This is something some companies practice, Worker cooperatives are great. The workers are the owners, if the company does well, all the workers get to enjoy the profits. The workers actually have a stake in their company doing well. (Technically if you're self-employed you're doing a socialism) Well, that's utopia and probably won't happen, maybe there's a middle ground.

Unions are a good idea. Unions represent many workers and can negotiate working conditions and pay with much more weight than any individual worker can for themself.

Works councils are also a good idea, those are elected representatives of the employees of a company. They're smaller than trade unions, but can still negotiate on behalf of the employees of the company. Sometimes they even get a seat on the board of directors so they have a say in how the company is run.

That's how you can have capitalism but also avoid the worst effects of treating workers and customers badly. Anyway, unchecked capitalism is not a great idea. The USA would be an example of such unchecked capitalism.

Especially when you know that money equals power and the wealthy can buy their politicians through the means of "campaign donations" and now the owners of companies control the lawmakers who write the laws these companies have to abide by … From Europe we look at the USA and are mortified, but let's not make this even more political.

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.

Man this debate is so US centric - as if there is only two choices: Unhinged, raging, exploitative, robber-baron capitalism OR Bolshevik Communism.

Typing this from one of the richest, strongest market economies in the world, which provides free health care, free education and generous e employment protections in the world. Everyone is happy, everyone is healthy, broadly, and capitalism exists next to a system of government that regulates to ensure the well-being of their citizens.

Social democracy people, it’s for real!!

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?

Capitalism rewards exploitation.

You've probably heard "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism" - and historically speaking, and in my experience, this holds to be true. I couldn't be typing this on my glass god rectangle if there weren't some children in a cobalt mine somewhere - at some rung on the ladder, people are dying, because where's the incentive to lift others out of poverty? Why would any capitalist elevate their source of cheap labour and materials out of the blood and sand?

There's also the interaction we have between the capitalist and socialist aspects of our society - for instance nationalised healthcare cannot be administered by capitalists because there is no incentive for the system to function for the good of the patients, but eventually the system will be optimised out of existence (by which I mean, broken into smaller units for budgetary reasons, small units degraded continually until they are canned, and the whole system is sunset because of "sound economic decisions").

Capitalism is the antithesis of what I think any reasonable person wants in society save for those with an amount of blood on their hands. Capitalism is a Mad Max dystopia where a handful of people live as deities whilst the rest of us kill each other in the streets for scraps.

Capitalism might have seemed viable when everyone was suffering from lead poisoning, but it's killing us today, and I support any means to remove this cancer and push for a more equitable life for everyone.

“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.

Let's say you have a cow. The cow had a baby, and it's producing milk, but more than the calf or your family need. So you start selling the excess milk.

It's good money! Soon you buy another cow, and another. Eventually you can't take care of them all, so you hire people to help you. Yay!

After a while you realize that waiting for the cows to be impregnated by your bull means they are not producing milk as much as they can. So you start forcefully impregnating the cows so they are always pregnant or producing milk.

The calves are drinking a lot of your milk, so you decide to kill them as soon as possible. You don't know what to do with the dead calves, so you start marketing them as "veal", a delicacy!

A lot of your process is still manual, so you buy machinery that increases your productivity by 100x. You're still paying your workers the same amount, even though they're now responsible for producing 100x more.

One day you realize there's too much milk in the market. If you sell it all, the price will drop too much. So you dump thousands of gallons of milk in the river, to keep the prices stable. You couldn't give them away to people in need, that would still affect the market!

You're still not selling enough (though you have more money that you could spend in your lifetime). So you buy some politicians so the government says that milk is essential, the only way to absorb calcium, and it should be in every school. People are convinced they need milk, even though it's from another species and even though humans don't need milk after a couple years of age.

That's why I hate capitalism.

For us young people: Because the system feels broken, and that there's little future to grow towards.

I grew up privileged, I attended private school until 5th grade before moving to one of the best public schools in a US state known for having good education. I've had a safety net my entire life, and that has allowed me to take risks, and end up homeless, that otherwise could have permanently screwed me over.

I, only a few years later, finally feel somewhat stable with the path I've pursued. For me stable means ~2 months emergency savings, probably not getting evicted by my batshit landlord anytime soon, and only having to work 2 jobs.

If that is what it takes to feel stable, then I can only feel like the system is screwed. I will never have the money to buy a house anywhere near where I work, near being defined as within an hour. I spend my days working for people who can drop more than what I make in a year on vacations. People who live in neighborhoods where the 'cheap' houses start at $10 million. And I work with some amazing down to earth people. If I'm one of the lucky ones, and I definitely am for where I live, how can the system not be broken?

Our climate is fucked, my only hope of every owning property is a massive market crash, I will likely have to keep working till I'm close to dead, vacations are a distant dream, allwhile I make my landlord richer, the corporations take all my money, because I can't afford good, organic or local food, and the people at the top get even richer.

Our system has incentived turned all the workers into profit. At work we're measured by the value we add to the company, never officially, but punished for missing work or being sick, and at home we're measured by the value we add to corporations through our purchases. Even our attention has become a product. How long can companies get us to stare at their product, mindlessly consuming and being served ads.

Even in our own homes we are a product. We are an unwilling cog in a machine that makes us poorer and those with the power richer. The government should be here to protect the common man and woman. For every example of the gov. doing the right thing to protect us from monopolies and predatory practices, there are 10 or 100 examples of the opposite.

No change will come about under our current socio economic system, and you need to remember. I'm one of the lucky ones.

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.

The top 10% of Americans own 70% of the country's wealth.

Have you ever stopped to consider the logical conclusions of that? If they lived at the same standard as the average American, we would only need to use 30% of the resources we're currently burning through. It's grossly inefficient. We waste more than 2/3rds of our resources so that rich assholes can live in $100 million mansions and fly around on private jets.

Say you're an American working a 9 to 5 job. Once you hit 1 pm on Tuesday, you've done enough work for the week to meet all the actual needs for society. The rest of Tuesday, all of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are all just to pay for rich assholes to take a "hunting" trip to Africa and needlessly slaughter native wildlife. Or to buy the 400th car in their special collections that they've nearly forgotten about. Etc. Etc.

70% of the irreplaceble oil being drilled? Flushed down the drain just so that rich assholes can horde wealth. 70% of the pollution in the air? Put there so that billionaires can have parties on a private island. So that they can fly their private jets to private retreats and pretend to be outdoorspeople for a weekend. 70% of the new extreme weather being caused by anthropogenic climate change? All so that rich assholes can do things like jet around the world so they can say they've played a round of golf on 7 different continents in 7 days. Etc. Etc.

It's nowhere near sustainable.

Lots of good answers in here already.

Some stuff that's colloquially seen as capitalism is okay. Me paying someone to clean my house because I hate that chore is fine with me.

It quickly becomes Not Fine when you add in all the "if they don't clean up my shit, they risk starving", "they work for a boss who takes most of the money I pay", and "none of us pay for externalized costs like using toxic chemicals for cleaning" parts. Other things too I can't think of right now n

Left alone, nothing stops capitalism from selling you bread made with sawdust. People might say "well the market would reject an inferior product" but that's not necessarily true. Monopolies and cartels form. People might not know a product is harmful until it's too late.

Blah blah blah. Fittingly, I have to go back to work now.

Climate change cannot be addressed under capitalism.

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Capitalism is flawed and has outlived it's usefulness just as every preceding economic system has. One of the more poignant Marx quotes puts it well

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Capitalism is based on the accumulation of resources known as the "means of production". As time goes on, those with capital are able to leverage it to further subjugate the working class as they amass a disproportionate amount of wealth and capital. The average worker is worth far more than they are paid, while the capitalist who they work under continues to pocket the majority of that profit.

For a working class person to begin to earn their fare share they have a few ethical options, be self employed, unionize to collectively bargain for a larger piece of the pie, join or form a co-op (effectively a small scale form of socialism).

The last point I'd bring up that is more central to my own politics is the inherent link between capitalism and imperialism. Even in a capitalist country where you may be able to comfortably live as a member of the working class, the global third world is often footing the bill in order to lower the cost of goods. Examples would be clothing, chocolate, coffee, etc where most of these are made in desolate conditions and sometimes with slave labor.

That being said, there are many reasons to be against capitalism and it is hard to express in a single comment. I highly recommend Lenin's State and Revolution to anyone interested.

Capitalism is inherently evil, you can only make money if you already have it

As the natives said, how can your way be better when those who have nothing give to those who have everything?

But the greedy in charge lie and say it's better, and they control ALL aspects of life because they have the money, news, police, etc.

Capitalism is slavery and is NOT in the constitution.

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.

Capitalism is just diversified feudalism.

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?

How are you not angry?

Simply because it's a system based on infinite growth in a finite world.

Look at what the greed of capitalism is doing to our planet.

In a perfect world where humans aren't greedy, maybe it could work, but humans are evil and greedy and it'll never work.

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.

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.

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.

Capitalism is a tool. Being pro-capitalism is like being pro-circular saw.

What you see as “anti-capitalism” is people pointing out that using one tool for everything is, at best, inefficient… and, at worst, dangerous.

Insisting that everything must be quantifiable and min/maxed according to market demands is nonsense, and hurts people.

There are things we value which are not profitable. There are things that are profitable but not valuable.

"Profit" is just another word for "unpaid wages."

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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.

But as I said, I still like buying shit

*gestures vaguely at everything*

I'm not even full on anticapitalist but come on that's just obvious.

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.

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.

Are you a billionaire? Or at least a +100millionare? If not, you are not pro-capitalism you are brainwashed

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.

I'd argue it should be the default position.

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.

Capitalism is an amazing engine to produce wealth. But it's also extremely opposed to the idea of distributing it.

Capitalism makes me feel like I don't deserve a good life because I'm not very competitive.

a lot of hate for capitalism here

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?"

Ever play Monopoly?

People are anti-capitalist because capitalist is anti-people.

Reasons for anticapitalism

1. 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.
2. It violates the equal claim to natural resources everyone today and future generations have. It, instead, incentivizes ruining the environment

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 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.

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.

People are anti-capitalist because they're increasingly realizing that it's an abominable system that's based on mass exploitation of the working class by people who own capital, and it produces oligarchical political systems such as seen in US and many other western countries that tantamount to living under the dictatorship of capitalists.

Capitalism is responsible for some of the worst atrocities in human history including things like the African slave trade, barbarism associated with colonization of America, countless famines such as the Irish and Indian famines, and never ending wars.

Today, capitalist need for growth and consumerism is literally destroying our very habitat that we all depend on at a planetary scale. Either capitalism ends or humanity will end.

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:

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.

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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.

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.

Is this bait?

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

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.

I'll be willing to talk to you eye to eye when no one in the world has a personal networth above 275 million dollars.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The real question is: how are you NOT?

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.

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.

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'd sum it up as capitalism requires egoism, and not of the healthy kind.

lemmy.ml/c/collapse

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.

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.

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.

“I’m pretty pro-capitalism myself…” is one of the weirder things I’ve read on here. Socialist or not, that’s weird to me.

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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.

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.

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:

1. Lower prices in hopes of attracting customer while providing the same product. This is risky, so generally not done.

2. Find cheaper products of poorer quality and sell them hoping your consumers don't notice or don't care.

3. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Capitalism is just feudalism with extra steps.

1. Friends and family bankrupted by basic medical needs;
2. Friends WITH medical insurance unable to afford basic medications like insulin or asthma control inhalers;
3. 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;
4. 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…?

Have you not played Bioshock?

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!

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.

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).

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.

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.

Idk people didn't ask for existence so why should they suddenly pay for it

pretty sure OP is literally Ben Shapiro lmfao

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.

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!

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Capitalism is built on the exploitation of others. Slavery, Homelessness, and Pollution are all side effects of a profit driven market without restrictions.

Capitalism is literally making our environment uninhabitable.

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

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.

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.

Getting fucked by capitalism will do that.

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.

It isnt about capitalism or sociallism but the education level of people running the system.

I think capitalism is fine to an extent. It's when companies become too large that their scale and power enshittify things.

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

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.

You know that the .ml in lemmy.ml stands for "Marxist-Leninist", right?

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.

Comments on a self-professed tankie instance

"BuT wHy Is EvErYoNe RiDiNg TaNkS"

This is LEMMY.ML, mister. Also, everything everyone else is saying.

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 don't get the same impression in my community. I'm pretty sure that we all love capitalism in "millionairs@lemmy.lm" What communities do you waste your time on?

Why be pro any *ism or *ist? Why not be pro *ance?

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.

Socialism doesn't scale up. Capitalism doesn't scale down.