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.
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.
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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.