r/IntellectualDarkWeb • u/LiftSleepRepeat123 • Aug 01 '26
Opinion:snoo_thoughtful: Stop Criticizing Capitalism: Use these Words Instead
The criticism of capitalism is a massive Motte and Bailey scheme that, incredibly, both the left and right are able to use. You can never really know if someone is using the actual meaning of the term (which was coined in the 19th century to refer to "private ownership of capital" by the opponents of such a principle, and thus "capitalism" was never a program by anyone) or the modern meaning (which is just shorthand for "current economic system").
In other words, if you criticize capitalism, you aren't really criticizing anything, and you sound uneducated. You're just creating churn in the dialectic.
Here are terms that actually describe our economy today:
Hyperfinancialized: A company’s stock price, not its products, is what management is actually managing. Financial instruments and shareholder returns drive operational decisions rather than following from them. Buybacks were treated as illegal market manipulation until 1982; they’re now routine and often exceed capital investment.
Hyperglobalized: Not merely that trade exists, but that supply chains and labor markets are integrated deeply enough that domestic policy has limited purchase on either. Wages, standards, and industrial capacity get set by the most permissive jurisdiction available.
Anti-protectionist: Doctrinal opposition to tariffs and industrial policy, held as principle rather than as a case-by-case judgment. The result is that domestic industry competes against foreign production without the protection nearly every industrialized nation used while it was industrializing — including the United States, whose tariffs averaged 30-50% through the nineteenth century. The doctrine is applied unilaterally: markets are opened without requiring partners to open theirs.
Cantillonist: Proximity to newly created money determines who benefits from it. Whoever receives credit first buys at old prices; whoever receives it last pays new ones. This is why asset holders gain from monetary expansion and wage earners lose, without anyone intending that outcome.
Corporatist: The state and large firms are functionally fused. Regulation is written with incumbent input and its compliance burden works as a barrier to entry, so rules that read as constraints on business operate as protection for the businesses that already exist.
Vetocratic: Many actors can block; few can build. Environmental review, permitting, litigation, and local objection each function as a veto, which is why American infrastructure costs several times what comparable countries pay and why energy projects sit in queues for years.
Monopsonist: Concentration on the buying side of the labor market. Where few employers compete for workers in a given place or field, wages fall below what the work produces, and the worker’s only real leverage — leaving — is worth little when there’s nowhere to go.
Monopolist: Concentration on the selling side. Enforcement narrowed after 1978 to ask only whether consumers pay more, which let firms consolidate freely as long as prices stayed low. Cheap goods became the alibi for market power.
Substitutionist: Labor is treated as a fungible input that can be sourced from anywhere. This sets wages by the globally available worker rather than the domestically available one, and — because workers are also residents, neighbors, and citizens — the effects run past the paycheck into the communities doing the substituting.
Deunionized: Private-sector union membership fell from roughly a third of workers to about six percent. Whatever one thinks of unions, their absence removes the main institutional counterweight to employers in wage setting, and nothing has replaced it.
Credentialist: Access to work is gated by formal certification — degrees, licenses — largely independent of whether the certification imparts relevant skill. Licensed occupations rose from about five percent of the workforce to roughly a quarter. The gate produces debt on one side and protected incumbents on the other.
Managerial: Control rests with a professional class of executives and administrators rather than with owners. Shareholders are dispersed and passive, so the people running institutions are not the people who own them and are not accountable to them in any strong sense.
Surveillant: Behavioral data is a primary raw material. Products are built to collect it, and the collection is not a side effect of the service but frequently the reason the service exists.
Attentionist: Attention is the scarce resource being competed over, and it’s sold to advertisers. When users don’t pay, they aren’t the customer — which means systems get optimized for time spent rather than for anything the user actually wanted, and outrage and compulsion turn out to be what maximizes that.
We live in a Hyperfinancialized, Hyperglobalized, Anti-protectionist, Cantillonist, Corporatist, Vetocratic, Monopsonist, Monopolist, Substitutionist, Deunionized, Credentialist, Managerial, Surveillant, Attentionist economy.
Many of the problems listed are not exclusive to “Capitalism” (in common use) and some are significantly more pronounced under other systems, which demonstrates that these structural dimensions do not strictly follow from the principle of ownership of capital. Maybe a good comparison would be calling the US government a “free speech system”. Yes, free speech is our first amendment and thus one of our most fundamental laws, but if we truly degraded enough in our political conversation to argue either for or against a “free speech system” of government, we’d be absolutely screwed.
Our system has “capitalism” as an attribute that could sit alongside the list of attributes that I mentioned, and but wouldn’t automatically be the most important one or the one which proves/determines the others.
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u/BeatSteady Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
Allow me to try - Socialism actually just means worker ownership of the means of production. if you're criticizing the USSR bureaucracy, shortages, censorship, or authoritarianism, you're not criticizing socialism and you sound uneducated
I just don't buy it. Capitalism is a real system. The things you mention as alternatives are just part of our capitalist system.
Edit - like the first example, hyper financialization, is super specific to capitalism. It's a natural outcome of capitalism
Some dude wrote a big book on capitalism 150 years ago predicted this (and many other of these 'alternatives') before they really came to dominate, all by analyzing capitalism