I’m seeing a lot of hate for capitalism here, and I’m wondering why that is and what the rationale behind it is. I’m pretty pro-capitalism myself, so I want to see the logic on the other side of the fence.
If this isn’t the right forum for a political/economic discussion-- I’m happy to take this somewhere else.
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?
But then that's not capitalism. Capitalism is making as much money as possible unrestricted as much as possible. If you start doing things like putting a maximum wage in, or taxing the highest earners and giving back to the lowest, that's socialism.
There are countries with way better CEO to work pay ratios. But in the USA we act like it's totally normal to have these huge wealth gaps, when in reality they are recent phenonemon and the only other era they were repeated was the gilded age which resulted in a decades long depression that was only ended by a world war.
A CEO earns 354x the income of a normal worker in the US. It’s really insane what happens over there. I’m really glad a CEO in Germany only earns 154x the income of a normal worker, much more fair over here!
I’m kidding, we are all fucked. US citizen say a ratio 6.7 would be justified, Germans say 6.3.
Yes, why the fuxk should you care about making society better when you live in one. Might as well go live in a jungle or something so you don’t get to benefit from improvements.
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.
A more morally forceful way to say this is labor is de facto responsible for all production. In other words, labor is responsible for creating the whole product, which has value. By the usual moral norm, legal responsibility should match de facto responsibility. The workers should legally get what they produce
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.
As was already stated, capitalism is unsustainable. It seeks infinite growth in a world of finite resources. Capitalism will almost always place short term financial gain over long term issues.
There are only two financial classes. The owner class and the working class. It doesn’t really matter if you make 30k a year or 300k a year. If you sell hours of your life for a salary, you are part of the working class. Capitalists make passive income off others labor. Being “pro-capitalism” is essentially saying that you’re okay giving all but the littlest amount of value you produced to someone else. This is paraded as a good thing in the United States.
Capitalism 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.
Anyway, any extreme “ism” is inherently unstable without the other side balancing itself. That’s cos humans are greedy, selfish fucks. The free market doesn’t work because humans are greedy, selfish fucks. Pure capitalism will eventually eat itself. On the flip side, pure socialism doesn’t work cos humans are greedy, selfish fucks. Pure socialism will eventually reify itself into complete inertia. Capitalism needs the inherent brakes that socialism provides; while socialism needs to incentives capitalism provides. Pure capitalism causes massive boom/bust cycles. Before the Great Depression, there were the Panics that happened about ever 20-30 years, where, similarly to the Great Recession, banks would overleverage themselves, and go bust. What ended up stopping those kind of panics were the socialistic programs of FDR and the New Deal.
Free markets only work when they’re actually free, that means no monopolies. We’re in an extreme stage of capitalism right now with monopolizes all over the place. There is no free market. Ppl like to say “late stage capitalism” but it’s more more similar to the laissez faire capitalism of the robber-barons of the late 19th century. Monopolies everywhere, wealth concentrated in the <1%, etc. Profits at any cost, including human life. Extreme capitalism is also tied into conservativism. This results in “rules for thee, not for me” circumstances. In other words, capitalists and conservatives believe laws should protect them but not bind them; while poor ppl, minorities and women should have laws binding them, but not protect them. This, of course, leads to massive social inequities and social unrest.
For more context, read the the Wikipedia articles on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, child labor in the Appalachian mines and how many children died from it, the Pinochet regime, etc. And, more recently, the actions at Amazon by not letting their employees evacuate or shelter from the horrific tornadoes that ripped through IL and collapsed a warehouse where 6 employees were killed (Amazon is being sued for it). The maquilladores in northern Mexico (thanks NAFTA!), child slavery in South and SE Asia (don’t buy Nike), and the general destruction of the environment. Hope you’re enjoying your heatwave!
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Maquiladora NAFTA
No great single resources for Nike / Child Slavery but... just search for it there are too many to link
I really shouldn't have to link to the environment, right?
"Free markets" do not exist nor work. Period. Even Wealth Of Nations says so.
Without regulatory control, they become rapidly captured by capital interests that push anticompetitive practices to tie up the market.
To prevent this, all societies, to some degree or another, impose regulations on the markets. They do so in a variety of ways for a variety of philosophical reasons and to varying degrees of success, but there exists no free market anywhere and never could. A truly "free" market would immediately be captured and exploited.
All modern countries but for a few theocracies and authoritarian states function on fundamental principles from socialism, not "capitalism". Even the ones that claim to be fundamentally Liberal or capitalist are still perfectly happy removing property from a person for the public good -- proving there is no fundamental belief in private property -- and will follow policies that may harm individuals but benefit the overall social good. And this is good and proper, because these truly "capitalist" principles cannot work in practice.
Let me just repeat for emphasis: free markets do not, have never, and could never actually exist. They just can't and don't. It's preposterous to pursue them. But it IS possible for a socialist to make use of property leases -- which look and feel the same as private property but aren't -- and markets to exchange them to give you something that "feels" like a free market but is actually just socialism.
For all of the benefits and blessings that capitalism has given us, there are several things people need to realize:
When we talk about all the good that capitalism has done for us, that's a vanishingly small us. There are literally billions of people in the world today who are languishing in poverty that makes first-world poverty look downright lavish. Then there are those first-world impoverished, who doubtlessly do live lives of fruitless toil and abject misery. And now think about the people in centuries past -- the serfs, the slaves, the child laborers... The fact that capitalism has managed to give some comfort to some of us in some countries in the past century does not negate the immense, incalculable suffering it took to get here. And as I said, very many people today, even in modernized nations, are suffering immeasurably still.
Capitalism has overstayed its welcome regarding global crises like climate change. The profit motive seems not to be working at all, let alone with the appropriate urgency, toward the goal of saving us from the consequences of climate change. The scientific consensus largely appears to be that we're too late to sidestep a cataclysm, but this is still not enough to prompt world leaders (i.e. the rich and powerful) to step up their game.
On a more high-minded level, capitalism is inherently repugnant because the people at the top can only enrich themselves by skimming off of the rightful earnings of the ones at the bottom. This is unavoidable; how could the CEO get so rich if 100% of the laborers' value was given to them? This goes beyond the natural reality that labor is required to survive. The issue here is that rather than having organized our economy around people laboring together for their own mutual benefit, we've organized our world such that the vast majority of us labor for the benefit of the few elites who only deign to pass on a pittance once the laborers become too uppity. People who oppose capitalism do not oppose labor; they oppose the way our global society has decided to distribute its results.
Capitalism, at least in its cutthroat, largely unrestrained, American fashion, is by no means the only option we have. European countries demonstrate that capitalism can be moderated to work better for the masses, and there is no reason to believe even they've gone as far as they can. People love to jeer at communism for its many failures in implementation without seeming to realize that, as expressed above, countless people all over the world are currently suffering and starving and languishing under capitalism too.
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
May sound good on paper, but everywhere where it was tried, nothing good happened. There is something in human nature that makes it inefficient and have tendency to become dictatorial state. Socialism (in classical sense) is just worse system in practice, as many countries in 20th century demonstrated.
If I try to grow some tomatoes, and by the time they’re sprouting out of the ground, my neighbor tramples them and lights them on fire, does that mean that I can’t ever grow tomatoes and they’re doomed to fail?
In case of (classical) socialism, since it is tried in many countries, I will argue it will fail again, unless something is changed. And I am arguing that that something is human nature. So, while we are the same humans, this will not work as effective as capitalism.
Ironically, I think Karl Marx understood this. This is why he was arguing for world-wide revolution. But Lenin changed this into "building communism in a single country". Since half of the developed world continued to be capitalistic, it become quite obvious that people in capitalist countries live better (on average), and the soviet empire disintegrated.
Marx definitely did not believe capitalism would produce more surplus than scientific socialism. However, I doubt he believed it was a switch you could throw and suddenly have a more productive economy. His point was that you could approach the problem scientifically. Through hypothesis testing and experimentation you could develop something more rational than the anarchy of the market.
That said, communist governments haven’t ever found themselves in a position where they can safely experiment with a planned economy. The USSR was struggling for decades to defend itself from foreign adversaries. That’s why it developed a tightly controlled and powerful bureaucracy which eventually led to it’s downfall. It’s also why China and Vietnam decided it was safer to experiment with market reforms given that they are at an economic disadvantage to capitalist countries. Other attempts at building a socialist economy have been thwarted by either US backed coups or sanctions, as was the case with Chile and Cuba.
Who trampled on the Russian tomatoes? (Don't say the Nazis, they trampled on everyone's tomatoes including their own) For Russia, there was some small scale support for the whites during their civil war, but otherwise trade between the Soviets and the west increased year by year during the NEP period until Stalin purposely contracted it (if someone knows more about this period, feel free to correct me. I'm working off of information I learned in classes years ago and this article that matches with what I remember). I'd propose that the Soviet issues were internal due to blindly ideological governance that crippled their economy and society. They didn't have to make such an insane number of nukes, create the culture that caused Chernobyl, nor invade Afghanistan.
Otherwise, who trampled the Mainland Chinese tomatoes? They basically won their civil war, their only issue was blind allegiance to chairman Mao that resulted in disaster after disaster. The West didn't force them to try the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Down to the Countryside 'Movement,' nor the One Child Policy. The CCP did those to themselves, and they only found success once Mao died and they made their economy more capitalistic.
And then once more, who trampled on the North Korean tomatoes? At the beginning of their war, they tried to crush the South's tomatoes until a UN authorized force pushed them to the Chinese border and then a Chinese force counterbalanced to the current borders, but otherwise the North was economically better off once the stalemate began (the Japanese centered their industrial developments in the north). North Korea failed because of dramatic mismanagement and a ideology of constant militarism while the South, with ups and downs, prospered.
Sure, there were military actions, police actions, and garden trampling that harmed both sides during the Cold War, but you can't just blame your enemy for beating you, you have to recognize why you lost.
China is also complicated an I’m not going to speak to it.
But North Korea? You mean the country we absolutely turned to rubble through bombing campaigns to destroy ~85% of it’s buildings, and then on top of it cutting them off from most of the rest of the world from trade? That’s probably the most prime example of how we’ve trampled a country. Blowback has a deep dive into the history there and it’s great.
And here’s a holistic video in case you care to hear the exact argument broken down
Please identify where this concept currently exists in the real world and is currently successful.
Edit: I'm a socialist, and yet all the hypocritical communists here that are using devices made using capitalist infrastructure with the money they earned participating in a globalized capitalist market are coping by down voting me and rather prefer not answering the question.
Asking why collective ownership of the means of production does not exist in our “globalized capitalist market,” while denying or ignoring the efforts of the Unied States and other rich capitalist nations to actively prevent any such nation from ever existing, is disingenuous at best. The United States in particular has a long history of involvement in regime changes / coups of left-wing governments, even those instituted by entirely democratic means.
Ok, so throughout the several tens of thousands of years of modern human civilization, there have been different kinds of economic systems, all of which had cultures that were supported by them and utilized their economic systems to attack each other relentlessly.
Why has free market globalized capitalism survived so well consistently the entire time?
Are you seriously trying to argue here that communism is so weak it can't survive attacks from the outside by a fragile failure that is capitalism?
Worker cooperatives (and often cooperatives in general) are an example of this. They almost always exist within a capitalist system, so are not able to completely separate themselves from all aspects of capitalism, but they are definitely examples of common ownership of means of production.
Specifically you can look up the Mondragon Corporation which is probably the biggest/best known example of a workers cooperative but there are many others. There are lots of variations on this same concept - one where risk, rewards, and decision-making are shared more equitably among everybody participating. I think the most interesting are food co-ops (and sometimes CSAs), utility cooperatives, and housing cooperatives. These are all over the place and are often quietly successful examples of common ownership.
A more highly regulated capitalism with high business taxes and no loopholes so companies pay their fair share for operating in a market that provides them their revenue.
There should also be nationally controlled resources instead of privatizing them (internet should be included with water and power).
im here with you. capitalism is fine in cases were there is significant and robust competition. for things that are not necessities and in all cases there should be significant oversight and regulation by a democratically elected goverment over it.
To my dying day, I won’t understand why anyone (who doesn’t benefit from it) could think that privatised utilities are a good idea. The last forty years have seen a steady decline in, well, every aspect of formerly publicly owned industries in the UK, but stans for capital still wang on about how publicly owned utilities in the 70s were crap.
Workers in a firm have an inalienable right to democratic control of that firm based on the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. This idea is the basis of the idea that people have the right to get the fruits of their labor, the moral basis of private property. The workers are de facto responsible for production, but the employer is solely held legally responsible violating these principles. In a democratic firm, workers get what they produce
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.
I am anti-capitalist because it’s a system used to exploit humanity without remorse so the rich elite can live luxury lives
Humans should he free to live their life and better themselves, not be stuck as a part of an exploitation machine run by the rich elite
I personally subscribe to a mix of solarpunk and gene rodenberry’s star trek ideals because a healthy mix of those two match what I want to see for the future of humanity where humans are free to live and better themselves
Yes. The rant was pretty positive of capitalism. The system is efficient, innovative, generates insane amounts of wealth, and most importantly it actually works unlike Marxism which has been an astounding failure at every turn both in theory and practice.
Capitalism is bad because it creates incentives for greed to people who do are not contributing. Greed is never good, but it’s especially bad when you use real work to justify why people do nothing to give them crazy amounts of money.
Even if a process is efficient, which in this case it isn’t (overproduction is terrible for efficiency), that’s not the only thing to consider, the moral aspect is important too. Off the top of my head, in this example, there’s the inhumane treatment of the cows, the workers get paid inadequately for what they produce, and the dumped excess produce probably affects the ecosystem.
No it’s because wealth is unfairly divided. Workers should benefit from productivity increases.
Also, the example in the original comment describes a dystopian death machine. A torture factory for cows to facilitate overproduction. We don’t need to eat that much meat nor consume that much milk. This is why the entire planet is going to shit…
It shouldn’t be, the work isn’t evenly divided. People get compensated per mutually agreed upon contracts on the value and contributions of their labor.
Workers should benefit from productivity increase
They do… If you want to argue for stronger worker rights and protections then I’m with you. But to argue that Marxism is some sort alternative is beyond stupid. Marxism is just as bad, if not worse, than Nazism. It’s a failed ideology in both theory and practice.
Also, the example in the original comment describes a dystopian death machine.
Humans aren’t vegan. There’s nothing wrong with meat farms.
A torture factory for cows to facilitate overproduction. We don’t need to eat that much meat nor consume that much milk.
Capitalism works on the basis of supply and demand. If there’s a demand, there will be production. If there isn’t, then the businesses in that industry will either slow protection or close. If that isn’t happening then that means there isn’t enough accountability in the government.
This is why the entire planet is going to shit…
We’re quite literally living in the golden age of humanity. The past 80 years human development has advanced so much in so many places to such a degree that it’s an anomaly in human history. The world will always face problems, but humans are very adaptable.
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).
I’m really not trying to be a dick, but uhh… Look around? The world is literally on fire and efforts to put it out or even to stop pouring more gas on it are put down at every turn by capitalists in the never ending pursuit of more money for it’s own sake.
Well I mean it’s unclear to me that we’re much worse than previous points in history. I’d rather have the climate crisis over the nuclear one, or either of the world wars, or live under a feudal system where I’m owned by the local lord in his castle.
I sympathize (and agree) with the belief that the current system isn’t serving everyone, much less serving everyone equally. But the world is a complicated thing and we’ve got >7 billion people to feed! I think we should be very careful before deciding “yeah it’s time to tear down the existing systems and hope that there are better systems out there”. It’s easier to make things worse than to make things better.
You have to be a fool if you think things like ending human slavery and many other achievements like ending the world war is caused by capitalism or that it’s the optimal system we can have.
Ok so if you agree that everything is fucked idk why you’d take issue with my answer being “because everything is fucked.” I already said I’m not a full on anticapitalist so idk what your point in telling me we shouldn’t throw the whole thing out is, I don’t think that in the first place.
But the world is a complicated thing and we’ve got >7 billion people to feed!
Yes, and capitalism works to deny those people as much food as possible, to give it to others who can pay more. If you buy groceries and literally throw them away, that’s better for the companies selling the food than you using it. We’ve known for 50 years that climate crisis was coming, but in order for capitalism to keep expanding, they kept pouring (literal) fuel onto the fire.
I think we should be very careful before deciding “yeah it’s time to tear down the existing systems and hope that there are better systems out there”. It’s easier to make things worse than to make things better.
Worse for whom? We’re literally looking at unlivable temperatures popping up all over the globe, not to mention the storms, land erosion, lack of water, and the fact that soon, we won’t even be able to grow food like we do now. You think we’ll have cattle farms in 50c heat?
We don’t need a new system, we have one: Socialism. Not communism, socialism. Governments should exist to enrich and help their people, not to enrich a tiny percentage of them at the expense of everyone else.
Capitalism is about exponential growth, on a planet with finite resources. Eventually, you get to where we are now: End Stage Capitalism. A tiny number of people have a bulk of the wealth of the world. The game is over, they won. They made the planet unlivable for humans in a few generations in order to do it, but they won. Congratulations (confetti)
Gesturing vaguely at everything is not an argument for anything. Supposing the person you're talking to agrees that everything is bad, then it's simply an argument for radicalism, not necessarily anticapitalism or whatever your particular strain of belief is. Someone could, while gesturing vaguely, just as easily argue that it's because of moral decline, that society isn't capitalist enough, for race realism, for the need for a strongman to take over, or really anything that'd promise (but almost certainly not deliver) to vaguely fix everything.
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.
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
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