Asklemmy

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 :)

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Seems to be an extremely inefficient resource distribution system, where a few people end up with most resources while a shit ton of people lack basic needs stuff. There are some good existing work arounds, like social market economy - which tries to combine socialist and capitalist element in an unholily dialectic alliance.

Capitalism 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.