Asklemmy

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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