this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
650 points (98.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43471 readers
1516 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What definition of capitalism are you using here? Because I think most commonly-accepted definitions definitely do not assign this as an intention of capitalism.
Strong regulations, moral actors, and careful control can fix many of capitalism's problems. But the kind of unfettered capitalism that, for example, anarcho-libertarians espouse would certainly not lead to less environmental devastation, oppression/wage-slavery, and/or mis-allocation of resources.
Historically I think most people would agree capitalism is in a better state than it has ever been. Capitalism as practiced in the late 19th/early 20th century was very different from our understanding of it today and was much much worse across most dimensions. That is a result of evolving regulatory frameworks making capitalism more compatible with what we define as happiness, justice, and morality. Hopefully we can continue curbing the issues of capitalism while encouraging the things it is good at (like making numbers goes up and creating lots of shiny things people like).
Definitely true. But this is not a problem for most capitalist critiques; that the current system is better in some ways than others doesn't mean it also isn't bad.