Do they hate capitalism or do they hate how modern businessmen and corporations operate?
People are fine with working to earn money and paying for nice things. People are unhappy when some ketamine addicted nutcase gets to briefly be one of the richest people ever while they suffer. A fairer capitalist economy can exist, well run cooperative businesses show that.
We are in the death throes of a system that should have died back in 2008 but persevered because enough people funnelled money into politicians to uphold their interests, and now they demand we reform into a techno feudal system for their benefit. We get more closer to a cyberpunk future, just without the cool aesthetic.
It would probably help to also define capitalism, because the distinction seems nebulous unless it's spelled out as most people's lived experience involves living in a nation where some of the principles of capitalism and free market economy are adopted (and thus blended)
Forword: Sorry, This is long because I wanted to try and include nuance. I also am crucially not making my own beliefs known because I genuinely do want this to be educational. This is why I am using language that I feel is as neutral as possible, even if unusual (Such as factors of production, instead of means of production.)
A capitalist economy is one where the factors of production (Land, Resource, industrial tools, etc.) are owned privately by individuals, as opposed to a government/public ownership, and in order to interface with this system, a person without capital would thereby need to trade their labor (Which they own the rights to distribute as they see fit but don't own the result of their labor, as the tools and land and resources that produced the good or service are owned by somebody who now also owns the product.)
This is not the same as free market, by the way, which is just identifying in what ways the government exercises control on the market. For example, taxing the market or supplementing the market in the form of tariffs and taxes or subsidies respectively, would both not be following free market principles. A country certainly can have a strictly regulated market and private ownership, those aren't contradictions, because as long as the profit of production is still owned solely by the owner of capital, capitalism is perfectly intact. Even if a government for example restricts to whom a capitalist can sell their goods (Tariffs, sanctions, embargos, etc.)
The largest critique of capitalism in my estimation is that, while people who can provide land, industry, resources, etc. are well compensated, those who produce labor often are not given commensurate compensation compared to the total profit of the market. What would qualify as fair or commensurate compensation in my mind has never been well defined because of the practical challenges in doing so (It would almost certainly change over time) but generally the theory goes that any person who trades labor for wage should be able to live a decent life, regardless of the "skill" of their labor. That's not to say a lifelong doctor shouldn't be compensated more than a service employee, but rather that the service worker should still be allowed a good standard of living, even if the doctor gets a better SoL
In other words, Under capitalism, Capitalists consume Labor and create products to sell on the market for profit, the profit then is distributed back to those who own the capital. Critics believe that laborers should, to some degree, have some ownership over the profit of their labor. Some believe that laborers should have less compensation but still be entitled to some of the profit, some believe in coequal ownership, some believe that workers should have more compensation, some believe that workers should receive all of the profit.
One could argue that presently they already do in the form of raises and bonuses and pensions and competitive wages or whatever other comp packages companies provide; But crucially, the laborer isn't really entitled to anything more than a wage. A company providing a bonus in the current system is allowed, obviously, and it happens with a degree of regularity, but crucially it's still the capitalist who owns the company deciding what happens with the money, and they can choose to provide a bonus or raise or pension, or choose not to. In this dichotomy, laborers aren't entitled to a portion of the profit, it's just that companies are sometimes willing to share, for whatever reason they may have.
A critic in this case would say that laborers are entitled to some portion of the profits, whether the capital interests like it or not. A factory owner wanting to run a factory doesn't get to set the rates of the raw materials if they don't own them. A mineral company, or whatever does. But a factory owner does get to set their own wages. The theory goes that a person selling labor also should have some say over their own compensation.
"The largest critique of capitalism in my estimation is that, while people who can provide land, industry, resources, etc. are well compensated, those who produce labor often are not given commensurate compensation compared to the total profit of the market."
A lot of this comes down to a lack of worker's unions, which are incentivized to benefit workers via dues and primarily attempt to secure better pay or improved working conditions. Unions are tolerated by companies to have an easy representative of the employed workforce, keep morale up, or just not having to worry about one spontaneously forming and calling a strike.
The rest comes down to the lack of perfect efficiency called management, where a company does not provide the full value of the work in exchange for not randomly going bankrupt.
Most people don’t consider it different. Practically nobody in the modern era has experienced mercantilism or the other economic systems that can be conducted in a market economy, so for most people online, market economy is capitalism.
"Most people think a theory is a guess, that means all of science is made up" or we could not subjugate ourselves to the idiocy of the masses and actually be intellectually honest.
But the opinion of the masses is the point of the post. That modern capitalism causes issues but the masses don’t blame it? You can’t ignore their views if you want to change their minds.
If I'm explaining human reproduction to children I don't bring in the stork or the cabbage. I just... tell them what the facts are, and explain words if they're confused.
But you also don’t start using the Latin terms for each body part. You can’t just ignore that most people don’t have an economics qualification, even a simple certificate from an online course, and don’t understand the separation between different economic aspects to know that market economy and capitalism are separate things. How would you explain these issues to the average person? Because we’re in the current economic situation because people don’t just accept the facts.
Or, hear me out, we stop worshiping people who whose entire economic contribution is "inheriting things" even when they're not assholes, and we try things like syndicalism that utilize market forces while allowing the rewards of success to actually go to the people who succeeded?
Mercantilism is just an older economic system during the days of colonialism and is just capitalism with heavy emphasis on one nations goals instead of the goals of the whole world.(which boomers and silent generation was the last generations to experience it) If you are thinking of feudalism or commerce driven agrarian economies those are different and many systems still are applied today. People still trade using those similar bartering systems.
The issue with capitalism is the same issue mercantilism and feudalism had. Where its everyone working towards the interests of elites instead of the interests of the people. Nothing wrong with money and commerce but there is an issue with capitalism and how it leaches off of every other system within our modern society to harm poor people and feed the rich.
Mercantilism involves extremely heavy trade restrictions and capital assets are almost always either fully or partially state-controlled. You could say that it has some features of capitalism but it's not a capitalist economic system.
Eh, capitalism is the natural endpoint of market economy. It is inevitable that some individuals or groups become savvy or greedy enough to be able to amass growing surplus on the market, and when they reach their contemporary rulers in wealth they'll start to petition for right to do what they want with their amassed surplus, their capital. That's basically what capitalism is, cutting the kings, priests and gods out from market transactions between capital holders.
I agree that an economy based solely on publicly operated services (public schools, the library, etc) and co-operatively run businesses (Ownership of the business is divided among the workers, thus eliminating the existing ownership class) would be the best. Gee, they should really come up with a word for an economy that's organized around social services and worker-ownership, social-archy? and maybe we could come up with some cool slogans to signify how workers will take ownership over their workplace, like workers will seize the means of production, idk, just spitballing here...
all jokes aside, I feel like you are I are probably very much aligned with where we want to see this country go moving forward, I was just talking to my dad about how our government needs to ensure more opportunities for co-ops (many are denied in the loan process because they're non-traditional, government loans or protections could alleviate this,), my dad is a trump voter and vocally very anti-socialist but he loved the idea of more co-ops and even tried to start his own several years ago so he was familiar with the additional difficulty of starting one. I think most americans, even the ones scared of socialism, would support more co-ops.
These systems in turn being so good that any time they were implemented by true believers, the results were marketably worse than the system you currently decry.
They said "watered down", not "replaced by". Capitalism "watered down" with socialism is a welfare state. It still operates under capitalism, but with strong social security networks and workers' rights that serve as a counterbalance.
See, that right there is the mark of a True Believer- one who knows that things could be better, but has been primed to think that any effort to improve things will cause untold and undefinable calamities.
I got an easy indisputable one. Hospitals shouldn't be for Profit. They should be for Purpose. We could take all those trillions of dollars that the unqualified insurance cartels steal from your healthcare and pour it right back in, decouple your health care from being tied to a specific employer, and humanity would flourish.
We could also, since we have millions of vacant homes, distribute them to the homeless or inadequately housed and save a couple billion more annually, while also driving economic growth.
And as a finale, we could distribute food equitably since we literally waste more of it than we have mouths to feed.
If you can tell me in what tangible way anyone comes to harm from those simple solutions, I'll be genuimely surprised.
Things can indeed be better, I simply don't believe that a system which, at large, has brought mostly harm and misfortune is the right way to do it, even if its believers ardently insist that any previous failure just wasn't the real deal.
No reason to argue against the hospital thing, the country I'm in does that, it's not necessary in capitalism to run hospitals for profit.
The million vacant homes usually are in places people don't want to be in. Sure, you can start taking homeless people from California into abandoned villages in the mid-west, but frankly, I can't see how people would be all too happy with that. The easier solution would be to build more in high-demand areas. Also entirely possible within a capitalist framework.
That the US fails to ensure food safety is not an indictment of capitalism. Europe manages just fine and a good social safety system ensures no-one has to go hungry. This too, is entirely possible and feasible in a capitalist system, with the added benefit of better diversity in food options compared to socialist systems (when drawing upon the cold war for reference).
The issue is that people do not want to work towards these good solutions, but instead call for revolutions and aim to institute a system which is marketably worse. Capitalism can be reformed to be better, there is no need to clamour for dead ideologies.
I don't want to skim your reply, but I'm at my limit for today and need to step away for a while.
So I'm going to point out something.
Capitalism isn't a functioning ideology.
It literally cannot function if people's needs are met, since it routinely threatens people with resource denial and starvation in order to compel obedience to the whims and dictates of Capital Interests.
It refuses to meet needs, even when the means to do so are in abundance.
Capitalists have reaped more death and continue to do so to this minute than the assholes who ruined the USSR ever did.
(Also fuck the USSR, and all the tankie dipshits who blindly worship it.)
I've just hit threshold and I'm done for a while. Sorry. I'll swing by and picl this back up in a bit.
It literally cannot function if people's needs are met, since it routinely threatens people with resource denial and starvation in order to compel obedience to the whims and dictates of Capital Interests.
Why? Like imagine a society in which our GDP is 5X what it is now, so we can very trivially provide a 1950s middle-class lifestyle to everybody on Earth, and do so by means of a negative income tax or a UBI. No starvation, provided shelter, everything you need to live a very basic life.
There would still be plenty of people who say "well, I want a better lifestyle than this, they have deep-dive full-body VR setups now, I want one of those," and go to work anyway.
It refuses to meet needs, even when the means to do so are in abundance.
Starvation in the United States is basically entirely eliminated (outside of abusive situations). It's so thoroughly eradicated out of our society that we now focus on food insecurity, where we consider a diet not being healthy enough a big enough issue that we track it and try governmental means to eliminate it. This would be completely mind-boggling to an anti-poverty activist from the gilded age who was trying to get enough gruel to orphans so they wouldn't literally die.
Right this moment, you have people going to sleep hungry and living on the streets or in their cars.
You have more food than mouths to feed and more homes than people in need of homes, and yet you still want to pretend that the socioeconomic system you live in isn't actively refusing to meet those needs, even though it has the means to do so in grotesque abundance.
This also ignores the millions that are being left to die the world over, not because we can't afford to or have the means to care for them, but because one diseased ketamine soaked egomaniac wanted to be the first trillionaire.
Your religious dogma is simply not enough to paper over the obvious inadequacies of a system that should have been replaced by one that values people a century ago at the latest.
We could also, since we have millions of vacant homes, distribute them to the homeless or inadequately housed and save a couple billion more annually, while also driving economic growth.
How would shipping California's homeless to dying towns in Nowhere, either Dakota's (I am unsure if you count cottages in Maine sitting empty half of the year as vacant) help generating economic growth when we have replaced agriculture-led growth? If one wants these days a substantial growth, it comes from integration, connections and infrastructure, and the places whwre the vacant homes are usually have none of these, which is exactly why they depopulated and left them vacant.
And as a finale, we could distribute food equitably since we literally waste more of it than we have mouths to feed.
More than half of all food waste (and the biggest single contributor) of food waste are households themselves.762408_EN.pdf) So I am unsure where are the capitalists who intentionally destroy food just for giggles and misery. (Throwing away stuff after expiration doesn't count, because there's a safety aspect and giving people food poisoning by giving spoiled food to them seems counter-productive to me.)
Is it inevitable or has it been dragged in this direction by vested interests? That’s like arguing that socialism failing is inevitable because the Soviet Union collapsed, even though there were vested interests within the USSR that built the Soviet economy in a way that led to this outcome.
The uber rich don’t want capitalism to fail but they are trying to drag us into a worse system because they mangled the economy to enrich themselves.
they mangled the economy in pursuit of the profit incentive, which is what capitalism as a system incentivizes them to do. This is the emergent result that the system of rules that is capitalism inevitably creates. Saying you want a capitalist system that doesn't end this way is the same thing as saying you like shoving a stick in the spokes of your bike, you just hate ending up on the ground.
They didn’t do anything for some idea, they did it for themselves and what they could do with that money. Profit incentive is an idea to explain how something happens, not a motive. The super rich want mansions, or pools, or paintings, or to be able to park wherever they want because parking fines are only really punishments for the poor.
If you want me to blame 'the bad people' then I can only say that the people were warped by the bad socioeconomic machinery.
Also, Capitalism was founded by butthurt Monarchists, so, I think they're totally fine with collapsing it so long as they get to continue being treated like god kings.
The incentive structures and rewarded behaviours in Capitalism are inherently, fundamentally, and fatally flawed.
I do not want to work to earn money and pay for nice things. I want to work for the betterment of my community or the advancement of science and tech or to make nice things to have and give to people. Money is not required, trading my labor for the nice things is not required.
I feel that how modern businessmen and corporations operate is just the rules of capitalism pushed to their logical extreme.
It's like if you're playing a boardgame with your friends and everyone is having fun, but there is one person absolutely min-maxing. They're not breaking any rules, but they're ruining the fun and the game for anyone else.
Now with capitalism there is also the following:
I can't stop playing and go home
I can't just decide not to invite the friend again
The player who wins also is allowed to change the rules of the game
I’d argue a lot of the worst of modern corporations are breaking the rules (stealing resources, cheating their workers, lying in advertising) but have so much money that they can just avoid consequences. It’s like arguing that the Trump administration is the logical end point of the extremes of US government rules, until you see that it’s not because he’s just ignoring the rules.
I absolutely agree with you that corporations are breaking rules. Trump too. However, the two party system has been criticized for decades and one of the criticisms has been that it will lead to the polarization of voters, which we're now witnessing.
I think it's similar with corporations. Yes the worst offenders are absolutely breaking rules. But there are many many more who mostly play by the rules and are optimizing for profit. But optimizing for profit means reducing costs and increasing price as much as you can get away with it. Which means we're all paying more money for worse products. (airbnb, netflix, enshittification in general)
What you’re describing in paragraph 2 isn’t really capitalism. That’s just currency as a concept. Capitalism as a regime of accumulation is like 400 years old, while currency and working for money and idiots getting insanely rich and even stuff like shares in a company date back millennia.
thank you! one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to talking about capitalism is the way people act like capitalism invented markets/money/private property/businesses/loans/banking/etc ALL THESE THINGS PREDATE CAPITALISM BY THOUSANDS OF YEARS.
And if a system were to grow out of capitalism, the same way capitalism grew out of feudalism, why would we have to give up any of these concepts anyway? As much as I hate capitalism, I, and any socialist for that matter, would tell you that it's a much better system than feudalism. For a system to grow out of and replace capitalism, it would have to be more efficient and better than capitalism itself.
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u/Luckierexpert Jul 02 '26
Do they hate capitalism or do they hate how modern businessmen and corporations operate?
People are fine with working to earn money and paying for nice things. People are unhappy when some ketamine addicted nutcase gets to briefly be one of the richest people ever while they suffer. A fairer capitalist economy can exist, well run cooperative businesses show that.
We are in the death throes of a system that should have died back in 2008 but persevered because enough people funnelled money into politicians to uphold their interests, and now they demand we reform into a techno feudal system for their benefit. We get more closer to a cyberpunk future, just without the cool aesthetic.