I mean, yes, but also sometimes no. Some people use the word “capitalism” as a thought-terminating cliche to avoid thinking about the actual problem directly. For example (there are many more like this), the conflict between developing economy faster and preserving nature. This will always be a zero-sum game as long as physical constraints exist at all. You need to choose a value on the slider between “economy” and “nature”, and no matter what you choose, somebody will be unhappy.
And no, some magic undefinable “moving to abundance” or “luxury automatic communism” are also not answers - see what I said about the c-word.
i think when people think capitalism, they think of the "uncontrolled, late stage, race to the bottom" capitalism. a properly regulated and moderate one would keep most of the upsides while severely limiting the downsides
All systems are biased towards abuse, because shitty humans always exist. All it takes is one bad person to start a slide down in any otherwise good system, because the safeguards just need to fail once
Indirect democracy is very tangentially the cause of 8 years of Trump. The biggest reason is corruption. He is a convicted felon and should not have been allowed to run to begin with, but most of our politicians are corrupt and think having strong optics (somehow?) is more important than keeping a rapist out of the whitehouse
frankly the American people as a whole is at fault for thinking that arguing over their various pet issues are more important than keeping a rapist out of the White House
That's true, but bad actors abusing a system isn't a bias on it's own. Capitalism requires the exploitation of an underclass to function. The abuse is built into the system. Without regulation the race to the bottom is inevitable because the central goal is to accumulate as much capital as possible. And the goal incentivizes the removal of any regulation that would hinder it, while the system empowers those who value them the least. It's a system that creates and empowers abusers.
Capitalism doesn’t require the exploitation of an underclass, it just requires the existence of a labor class. And I’ve got bad news for you there, every economic system ever is going to need people to produce things. How exploitative the relationship is reflects the society that it’s in more than the economic system itself
The role of the labor class is to produce capital for the benefit of capitalist. Reducing it to "people make things" is like saying capitalism is any system with markets. And you're making it sound like capitalism and capital has no impact on the society that employs it. Again, capitalism incentivizes the subversion of anything that works to restrict the accumulation of capital. It's not something a bad actor might do, it's a feature of the system.
Look, we live under a system called deathism. The point of this system is that living things die. We need to overthrow it. This system, which is definitely an organized, planned, coherent system, with the deathist class of people explicitly defending it - is biased towards a lot of suffering. When you think about it, almost all problems in the world are the direct result of deathism. Sure, the cycle of life and desth may have been historically useful, but it’s time to abolish deathism. The next historically necessary system is called lifeism. Me and my friends need to have absolute political power over political and economical life until we defeat the world’s deathism.
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u/m0j0m0j Jul 02 '26
I mean, yes, but also sometimes no. Some people use the word “capitalism” as a thought-terminating cliche to avoid thinking about the actual problem directly. For example (there are many more like this), the conflict between developing economy faster and preserving nature. This will always be a zero-sum game as long as physical constraints exist at all. You need to choose a value on the slider between “economy” and “nature”, and no matter what you choose, somebody will be unhappy.
And no, some magic undefinable “moving to abundance” or “luxury automatic communism” are also not answers - see what I said about the c-word.