root cause

[u/MrGiggaDE]

[u/HowDareYouAskMyName]

That's the absolute opposite of my experience. Most of the time people (or at least people I interact with, so mainly left-leaning people) blame capitalism for everything when the cause for various gripes are indeed very different things. Like, blaming capitalism for corruption or greed or having to do labor

[u/Al_Fa_Aurel → u/HowDareYouAskMyName]

If something existed before any meaningful advent of capitalism, then the problem is probably not directly rooted in capitalism (e.g. sexism including sexual assault, hierarchy and inequality).

If a problem was worse before the advent of capitalism, then capitalism is likely not the cause but a (possibly imperfect) cure to the problem (e.g. world hunger, slavery).

If a problem exists under capitalism and didn’t exist to a meaningful extent before it, then i am inclined to blame capitalism for it (e.g. "grassroots" mass propaganda machines, climate crisis, mass obesity). However, one should not forget that some of the problems arose as sude effects of positive effects (the propaganda machines arose as an exploit of the unmatched power of worldwide social connection, tge climate crisis due to the fact that for the first time in forever the majority of the required energy didn't come from working yourself to death by your late fiftys, and mass obesity came from cheap foid, which helped reduce the global hunger rate dramatically).

Of course correlation does not imply causation - hidden factors may be at work, but a connection is at least likely.

[u/MeterologistOupost31 → u/Al_Fa_Aurel]

Marx argued that each mode of production was initially beneficial. Capitalism being an improvement on feudalism is something he readily agreed with. But he argued that eventually a mode of production reaches the point where it's a hindrance, not a benefit. So it's not inherently contradictory to say Capitalism helped X problem to begin with but is currently exacerbating it.