Hi all,
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.
Cheers!
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.
I think the infinite growth part is a big part of the problem: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”
Billionaires and their companies could at least pay their fair share in taxes.
What about capitalism requires infinite growth? And what does it require infinite growth in? What happens when growth stagnates in a capitalist system? Does it suddenly not become capitalist anymore?
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?
That’s way too simplistic. It’s not just big corporations that block each and every measure to mitigate climate change.
Ask a small home owner, or car owner, why they are against climate change measures. They will point out that their life would need to change, and that’s why.
Climate is fucked primarily because people are unwilling to look around the next corner. That corporations are the same is more a property of them being comprised of people rather than capitalism per se.
Capitalism would work with wind and solar parks just as well as with coal.
And yet, the giant oil corporations lied about climate change and subverted efforts to develop renewable energy back in the 80s when it could have actually helped. They did that to line their pockets, fucked over the entire world, and have had no repercussions for it. Don’t act like it’s the people’s fault. A large large portion of the damage to the climate was done so executives could save an extra .1% of profit for themselves.
It’s not illogical to be pro-Capitalism while not owning any “means of production” if it means you still have better outcomes.
There are no true Capitalist countries and no true Socialist countries. It’s not even a spectrum; it’s a giant mixed bag of policies. You can be for some basic capitalist principles (market economy, privately held capital) and for some socialist policies (safety nets, healthcare) and not be in contradiction with yourself. There’s more to capitalism than the United States.
I think OP was seeing a lot of “burn the system down” talk. Revolutions aren’t bloodless, instantaneous, or well directed. Innocent people will die and generations will suffer. It’s stuff only the naive, the malicious, or the truly desperate will support. And if you’re here posting it on the daily, I don’t believe you’re that desperate.
Global warming is upon us. If something doesn’t drastically change, now, our entire species is going to die.
I think this conflates capitalism with lack of coordination. We could fix global warming today via regulation. Even if our government was socialist, it would probably still not be curbing emissions due to trying to achieve some other non-capital goal.
Second, there isn’t any need to falsely imply our species is going to die because of climate change. No model points at that. Billions of people having crappier lives and dying sooner should be enough motivation.
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 :)
Because it’s objectively unsustainable?
I don’t think we know that. Indeed, what we’re currently doing as a species to the environment is unsustainable. But it’s not clear to me how it’s the capitalism that’s the unsustainable part. My understanding is that capitalism is a system which allows us, as a society, to produce things very efficiently, and to distribute resources. It hasn’t failed in that role, has it?
I don’t really get what it even means to be “pro capitalist” at this point.
I believe that, for example, if I wanted to open a bookshop, I should be able to. Or that if I wanted to rent a couple of 3D printers and sell widgets, that I should be able to. Or if I wanted to hire some dude on fiverr to write some music to my screenplay, I should be able to. This is capitalism. Do you disagree? This is what confuses me, and why I asked the question-- on my side of the fence, I don’t really understand what it means to be anti-capitalist. Hence why I asked.
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?
Well no need to be rude! Of course I care! And yes, we’re headed towards disaster in terms of the environment. But I don’t understand, like I said above, how capitalism is causing it and how not-capitalism would solve it. We have 7 billion people on the planet and they all need to be fed. Capitalism is the most efficient system we know of to create and allocate resources. Should we… move to a less efficient system? Wouldn’t that be worse for the environment? How does that solve anything? This is my confusion.
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.
This is an interesting question! I’m parsing it to mean “how can the current problems be solved within a capitalist system?”. It’s a good question, and I don’t have a 100% guaranteed answer. But I don’t see that any capitalism alternative has a good answer either, so still I don’t see how capitalism is the “bad guy”.
In any case, my answer is this: A side effect of all of capitalist driven efficient production is that the environment is harmed. Here, I think the governing bodies have failed in their roles: their role is to define what “capital” means and rules of ownership. They haven’t done that for environmental concerns, which is why capitalism isn’t taking it into account properly. My desired solution is that the government could define a “total amount of carbon emissions” that would be allowed by the country as a whole, and then distribute transferrable carbon credits on the open market. This turns “rights to emit carbon” into a form of capital, and capitalism will do what it do and optimize for it.
In essence, I believe that governments have done a bad job of using the tool of capitalism to solve the problem of pollution.
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
Great analogy! But… have we seen a lower minimum? What’s the rationale behind that system? That’s my question
I believe that, for example, if I wanted to open a bookshop, I should be able to. Or that if I wanted to rent a couple of 3D printers and sell widgets, that I should be able to. Or if I wanted to hire some dude on fiverr to write some music to my screenplay, I should be able to. This is capitalism. Do you disagree?
This isn’t really capitalism, this is production/commerce. This is what capitalists (people who own capital) tell you capitalism is. Capitalism isn’t you buying a tool and using it. It’s buying the 3D printer, paying people to design and build widgets, paying people to sell the widgets, then taking most of the money for yourself. You might say you make and sell widgets for a living, but you don’t. You own a 3D printer for a living, and exploit the people who make widgets for a living.
You can hate capitalism and still make stuff. Anticapitalists usually aren’t interested in taking away your 3D printer. State Communism isn’t the only alternative, and most leftists hate that idea just as much. Some alternatives include worker coops and mutual aid.
I hate that I can work (with others) to build a company from the ground up and have nothing to show for it, because the owner is using us to fund his lifestyle. I hate that landlords can buy up all the homes, driving up the cost to the point no one can afford one, then rent them out and sit on their ass while I pay their mortgage. That’s capitalism. People profiting off of ownership. It inevitably ends with some people owning almost everything, and the majority owning nothing.
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.
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.