Asklemmy

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.

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

Ever play Monopoly?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.