Hi all,
I’m seeing a lot of hate for capitalism here, and I’m wondering why that is and what the rationale behind it is. I’m pretty pro-capitalism myself, so I want to see the logic on the other side of the fence.
If this isn’t the right forum for a political/economic discussion-- I’m happy to take this somewhere else.
Cheers!
Because it’s objectively unsustainable? I don’t really get what it even means to be “pro capitalist” at this point. We know, for a fact, that capitalism will lead to disaster if we keep doing what we’re doing. Do you disagree with that? Or do you not care?
What is your general plan for what we should do when we can see that something we currently do and rely on will have to stop in the near future? Not that we will have to choose to stop it, but that it will stop because of something being depleted or no longer possible.
If you imagine that we’re trying to find the best long-term system for humanity, and that the possible solutions exist on a curve on an X/Y plane, and we want to find the lowest point on the function, capitalism is very clearly a local minima. It’s not the lowest point, but it feels like one to the dumbass apes who came up with it. So much so that we’re resistant to doing the work to find the actual minima before this local one kills literally everyone :)
I don’t think we know that. Indeed, what we’re currently doing as a species to the environment is unsustainable. But it’s not clear to me how it’s the capitalism that’s the unsustainable part. My understanding is that capitalism is a system which allows us, as a society, to produce things very efficiently, and to distribute resources. It hasn’t failed in that role, has it?
I believe that, for example, if I wanted to open a bookshop, I should be able to. Or that if I wanted to rent a couple of 3D printers and sell widgets, that I should be able to. Or if I wanted to hire some dude on fiverr to write some music to my screenplay, I should be able to. This is capitalism. Do you disagree? This is what confuses me, and why I asked the question-- on my side of the fence, I don’t really understand what it means to be anti-capitalist. Hence why I asked.
Well no need to be rude! Of course I care! And yes, we’re headed towards disaster in terms of the environment. But I don’t understand, like I said above, how capitalism is causing it and how not-capitalism would solve it. We have 7 billion people on the planet and they all need to be fed. Capitalism is the most efficient system we know of to create and allocate resources. Should we… move to a less efficient system? Wouldn’t that be worse for the environment? How does that solve anything? This is my confusion.
This is an interesting question! I’m parsing it to mean “how can the current problems be solved within a capitalist system?”. It’s a good question, and I don’t have a 100% guaranteed answer. But I don’t see that any capitalism alternative has a good answer either, so still I don’t see how capitalism is the “bad guy”.
In any case, my answer is this: A side effect of all of capitalist driven efficient production is that the environment is harmed. Here, I think the governing bodies have failed in their roles: their role is to define what “capital” means and rules of ownership. They haven’t done that for environmental concerns, which is why capitalism isn’t taking it into account properly. My desired solution is that the government could define a “total amount of carbon emissions” that would be allowed by the country as a whole, and then distribute transferrable carbon credits on the open market. This turns “rights to emit carbon” into a form of capital, and capitalism will do what it do and optimize for it.
In essence, I believe that governments have done a bad job of using the tool of capitalism to solve the problem of pollution.
Great analogy! But… have we seen a lower minimum? What’s the rationale behind that system? That’s my question
This isn’t really capitalism, this is production/commerce. This is what capitalists (people who own capital) tell you capitalism is. Capitalism isn’t you buying a tool and using it. It’s buying the 3D printer, paying people to design and build widgets, paying people to sell the widgets, then taking most of the money for yourself. You might say you make and sell widgets for a living, but you don’t. You own a 3D printer for a living, and exploit the people who make widgets for a living.
You can hate capitalism and still make stuff. Anticapitalists usually aren’t interested in taking away your 3D printer. State Communism isn’t the only alternative, and most leftists hate that idea just as much. Some alternatives include worker coops and mutual aid.
I hate that I can work (with others) to build a company from the ground up and have nothing to show for it, because the owner is using us to fund his lifestyle. I hate that landlords can buy up all the homes, driving up the cost to the point no one can afford one, then rent them out and sit on their ass while I pay their mortgage. That’s capitalism. People profiting off of ownership. It inevitably ends with some people owning almost everything, and the majority owning nothing.
Yes, I agree that this should be possible. Of course, if I’m taking too much money, the capitalist system will encourage my competitors to defeat me. Meaning that there a dis-incentive in place for doing bad/selfish things. Sounds like a pretty good system!
Yes I agree! I hate these things too. But capitalism doesn’t prohibit every bad thing. Bad things can still happen under capitalism. I’m just saying that such things are harder to do under capitalism than any other system. For example, you mention landlords have to buy up every home before they can take advantage of you through their monopoly. That’s way harder than other systems, where the government already owns all the homes, and can simply drive up the cost whenever they want :/
When was the last time you voted for your landlord?
That would be the last time I moved, so about a year ago.
Also, I happen to very much like my landlord. This is because they’re heavily incentivized to address my concerns because otherwise I’d leave a bad review which they care about. Examples are: they fixed a couple of times the laundry facilities were broken, they fixed broken windows a couple of times, etc. etc.
EDIT: Actually, you’re making a very good point which I didn’t address properly! You’re saying that voting gives society more power than prices do. This is a good point, but I disagree. I think prices control production more than any government can, because it allows a much more granular decision-making. For example, every single individual can “vote” that their apartment is too expensive by leaving and finding cheaper places, driving prices down.
I’m glad you have enough financial stability where you can pick and choose your landlord. It’s unfortunate that there are plenty of people who can’t “vote with their wallet” on account of not having all that much cash in there. And plenty of landlords who don’t fear bad reviews because there’s no place they can even be reviewed at, and even if they were to receive such a review housing is an inelastic good and in too short of supply for people to be picky about it.
Additionally, the government has no incentive to charge you more that what it costs to run public housing, whereas the landlord has a profit motive. Even if the government charges you more than how much it costs to build and maintain buildings, this money isn’t send to a pit - it is used to build roads, railroads, sidewalks, provide healthcare, and to build so much more infrastructure and provide various different essential services. If you give it to a landlord, it’s used to fund martinis and vacations on Ibiza. What’s the better deal?
Respectfully I think a point that is often missed with your mindset is how your capital is giving you your voting power. Market Socialist policy aims to even out that exact voting power and more labor focused socialism does the same without market forces. The issue is the hoard and the power that hoard is giving individuals (and firms) over us.
I’m in a similar position to you and I can see many of these policies would hurt me directly, but can also see the historical patterns and current material conditions. We need to build a future for everyone, everyone who agrees with that is a socialist if you argue with them long enough
The TLDR:
They hate capitalism because they’re losers and they think that under a different system they wouldn’t be such a loser. But they would be.
The issue is profit motive is inherent in capitalism. Businesses and government work on the same resources (money in this case). Businesses do everything they can to maximize profits, then they use the profits to buy government and ensure they keep business as usual. Power corrupts. So they don’t offer living wage, they cut costs, they pollute and they collude. And in law, these businesses are legal entities too. They are afforded the legal status yet if an actual person did what a business does, he would be put away for a long time. Businesses act as psychoes yet people glorify being a successful business owner. Being successful in this system means that you exploited the most and you are the most psycho. Congrats then I guess.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” - Jiddu Krishnamurti
I’m not sure why you think this is inherently only possible in a capitalist economy. In a more socialist or even communist economy, you could still do all of that. The only difference would be that all the workers there (if there is more than just you working at said business) would be paid equal to the amount of labor they put in, as opposed to now where the majority of workers are paid less than what their labor is worth.
Read about externalities.
And the radium girls.
Yes! I’m aware of externalities, and agree that these are a side-effect of capitalism. My belief is that externalities are failures of the governing bodies to correctly define the “rules of ownership”. Once that’s done, the externality is resolved. This is an ongoing effort that’s necessary to properly use capitalism.
In my opinion, saying “capitalism is bad because of externalities” is like saying “I used an electric saw without installing the safties and it had bad side effects”.
Quoting my response (link: https://programming.dev/comment/1167093) for how I believe that environmental concerns are an externality that can be addressed here:
It’s not a side effect, it’s an effect. It’s a feature. If companies could, they would externalize everything they could. Including paying workers as little as they can (or not at all, see slavery), or externalizing the health problems with the work (see radium girls), etc, etc,
What you place as failure of the governing body is actually a success of the lobbying industry. You know, capitalism.
By the way capitalism wants no governing body. You are putting in a factor (govt) which unfettered capitalism does not want to have and (effectively) actively tries to get rid of. And the fun part is you ascribe the failures of capitalism to the government. Funny how that works, huh.
How would giving complete economic power to the government eliminate special interests? Sure, it lowers their economic power in dollar terms but it does not lower their influence or incentives.
It’s funny that people think it needs to be 100% one way government has “complete economic power”, or 100% the other way unfettered capitalism, absolutely no rules, no regulation, free for all.
The short answer is: we need regulation. Businesses can run, but they shouldn’t decide the rules.
Regulation is still capitalism. People in the western left and right seem to have forgotten this. The means of production are owned by private individuals. That’s just laws. It’s an equal playing field. Government programs are where it starts to get muddied.
I would say you can have capitalism with regulation. But regulation itself is not capitalism. Rules that are not based on market forces are literally outside capital forces.
Right, but they can’t! That’s the whole point of capitalism! Slavery is the pinnacle of anti-capitalism, because slaves don’t own their own capital! It’s explicitly not capitalist.
Holy mental gymnastics, Batman
Please explain-- what gymnastics?
Wikipedia definition of capitalism:
If slaves don’t have private ownership… then they’re not living under a capitalist system. Right? What am I missing?
Slaves don’t have private ownership of their capital (that is, their own labor)… because someone else does.
Most “free” workers, in terms of capital, own only their own labor.
Capitalists own the majority of the capital–land, equipment, intellectual property, etc.
A system where the workers own the capital (aka the means of production) is socialism.
You’re being disingeneous. You’re a troll.
I think I see the problem: You think you have capitalism in the US. You do not have capitalism in the US (or Canada, or Europe). You have regulated capitalism.
The more capitalism you have, the fewer rules and regulation.
Capitalism in its true, unfettered form with no rules will give you everything I said: Externalize everything, low/no pay, unsafe conditions, poison your workers, etc, etc,
But we have regulated some bad parts. This regulation is not the result of capitalism. It expressly goes against capitalism.
They can’t because we (unions/govt) said hey we need rules on this capitalism, because look at the effects of capitalism.
So we’re back to the funny part. Now you ascribe the success of unions/government to be the success of capitalism. Funny how that works huh. You’re full package:All the problems of capitalism, you ascribe to government. And all the success of unions/government, you ascribe to capitalism. You have now turned around everything to fit your narrative.
Slavery, child labor, killing your workers (I don’t think you’ve read about the radium girls) is literally the pinnacle of capitalism. It’s literally what capitalism resulted in, it’s all over history.
Ah yes of course, that must be why no one ever finds people under working conditions analogous to slavery under capitalist states. Ever. Never happened.
I’m trying to take this thread seriously, but my man you sound so naive it hursts. I live in a global south country and the ammount of damage done to my society due to both capitalism and imperialism (which benefit from each other, you can’t fully separate them) is revolting. You need to read more and travel more.
The slaves don’t own capital because they are the capital!
Nowhere in the definition of capitalism does it require that everyone owns capital; in fact it’s much more the opposite.
Chattel slavery was and is a stage of capitalist development.
First, no alternative is required for something to be unacceptable to continue. This is a very common line of reasoning that keeps us stuck in the local minima. Leaving a local minima necessarily requires some backsliding.
Capitalism is unsustainable because every single aspect of it relies on the idea that resources can be owned.
If you were born onto a planet where one single person owned literally everything, would you think that is acceptable? That it makes sense that the choices of people who are long dead and the agreements between them roll forward in time entitling certain people to certain things, despite a finite amount of those things being accessible to us? What if it was just two people, and one claimed to own all land? Would you say that clearly the resources of the planet should be divided up more fairly between those two people? If so, what about three people? Four? Five? Where do you stop and say “actually, people should be able to hoard far more resources than it is possible for anyone to have if things were fair, and we will use an arbitrary system that involves positive feedback loops for acquiring and locking up resources to determine who is allowed to do this and who isn’t”.
Every single thing that is used in the creation of wealth is a shared resource. There is no such thing as a non-shared resource. There is no such thing as doing something “alone” when you’re working off the foundation built by 90+ billion humans who came before you. Capitalism lets the actual costs of things get spread around to everyone on the planet, environmental harm, depletion of resources that can never be regained, actions that are a net negative but are still taken because they make money for a specific individual. If the TRUE COST of the actions taken in the pursuit of wealth were actually paid by the people making the wealth, it would be very clear how much the fantasy of letting people pursue personal wealth relies on distributing the true costs through time and space. It requires literally stealing from the future. And sometimes the past. Often, resources invested into the public good in the past can be exploited asymmetrically by people making money through the magic of capitalism. Your business causes more money in damage to public resources than it even makes? Who cares, you only pay 30% in taxes!
There is no way forward long term that preserves these fantasies and doesn’t inevitably turn into extinction or a single individual owning everything. No one wants to give up this fantasy, and they’re willing to let humanity go extinct to prevent having to.
Yes there is! This system is at least feeding most people in most countries. I refuse to say that “because this system is not ideal, we must destroy the system which is feeding billions of people without an alternative in mind”. Are you arguing that it should be okay for people to die?!?
It has to be okay for people to die, because ALL PATHS FORWARD INVOLVE PEOPLE DYING. Any choice you make involves some hidden choice about who gets to suffer and die and who doesn’t.
But no, that’s not what I was saying. Also, are you aware that extinction also involves lots of deaths? Have you thought about what does and doesn’t count as “death” to you? What about responsibility for that death? How indirect does it have to be before you’re free from responsibility? Is it better to have fewer sentient beings living better lives, or more beings living worse lives? Does it matter how much worse? Is there a line where their life becomes a net positive in terms of its contribution to the overall “goodness” of the state of the universe? Once we can ensure a net positive life for people should the goal to be for as many to exist as possible? Should new people only be brought into the world if we can guarantee them a net positive life?
But hey, thanks for the very concrete example of how being in a decent local minima is very hard to break out of.
When you look at the growing wealth inequality over the past 70 years, it’s pretty easy to argue that it is failing at that role currently. I see where you’re coming from though, as overall, capitalism / free markets are a powerful decentralized system for resource allocation, but they have a lot of problems that aren’t being addressed and there are some fundamental issues with how they apply to the information age.
Externalities like environmental damage aren’t accounted for, anti-competitive behaviour (like Apple’s walled garden) prevent fair competition and resources being allocated to the right spot, same thing goes for advertising and marketing which are by and large exercises in using money to psychologically manipulate people instead of making a better product. When wealth concentration is not reinvested in the product / business for societal betterment but is instead hoarded for personal gain (as we see at the investor / c-suite level) it causes resources to be spent on frivolous rich bullshit (yachts instead of food), and possibly one of the biggest issues is that capitalism has no inherent mechanism for caring for the less useful and those unable to work.
Yes it sounds great when you frame it in the context of a business making a better product getting more money, but it sounds a lot more soulless when you’re talking about someone being born a little slow having to live a shit life just because of how their dice were rolled.
Even if you correct for all of these, capitalism falls apart in an information economy. At a very fundamental level, capitalism and trading is based on the idea of things being finite and increasing in scarcity when used up. Mass and material / energy does this. If you possess an object, I cannot possess it, so the more of it that is used up, the more valuable the remaining pieces become, to copy it takes a lot of energy or duplicate resources as the original. But information doesn’t work the same way as matter / energy. Information can be duplicated and replicated instantly, across impossible distances, and our technology to do this has gotten so advanced and global that we can now duplicate basically any information an infinite numbers of times anywhere around the globe nearly instantly. In this context, capitalism falls apart, because as soon as information is created, there’s no reason for it to be scarce, meaning it has zero value.
In this light we created copyright and patent systems to assign ownership of information, but what these systems really do is create artificial scarcity where there is no need for scarcity, just so that they can fit into a capitalist model. Do you know what would be better for overall useful economic growth? If all companies open sourced all their software. You know what won’t happen because capitalism is the only system we have for assigning resources? That.
A couple notes on this. Firstly, just as an argument perspective, this is a burden of proof fallacy. Just because “not-capitalism” may not have a good answer, doesn’t mean capitalism has a good one or even just a better one. I could be mischaracterising your argument, if so my bad, this is just how it reads to me. Secondly, I personally believe that socialism offers a better answer and a good one at that, which all revolves around incentives. A collective-ownership structure has more incentive for social well being, such as avoiding climate disaster, than a purely capitalist structure does.
As a side-note, I also think you’re mischaracterising capitalism by including governing bodies, but you’re doing it in a manner that’s only one logical step away from socialism. By a government placing restrictions on a market or producer, say by defining a carbon emission cap, the market is no longer operating at true efficiency. While not fully capitalist anymore, that’s still okay though as it’s serving a social purpose. Zoom out a little and you can see other markets in which the government should set limits in. Now the whole economy isn’t operating as a true free market. In this case, the government is defining what the social good is, and (at least in democratic nations), the government defines that based on the voice of the people. The problem with this is that it’s reactive. I can pass as many laws as I want saying you can’t emit carbon above a certain level, but I can only enforce it after you’ve gone over that cap at which point the damage is done, and some may make the economic calculation that it’s worth it if you get more profits (fines are in essence “legal for a price” after all). If the government owns the industry, this can be prevented before happening.
Also free markets can exist without capitalism. I think another person somewhere on this thread mentioned worker co-ops, which are not a capitalist institution.
As a parting thought, I would also point out that one of if not the most efficient energy companies in the United States (in terms of energy produced per dollar input) is the TVA, a state-owned enterprise.
How is it efficient to throw away 40% of food produced rather than let it go for cheaper or free? How is it efficient for Nike and nearly all other clothing companies to massively overproduce their products and then cut them up and trash them at the end of the fashion season? How is it more efficient to create massive animal agriculture torture chambers that require massive monoculture farms to feed than to grow food crops and eat them directly?
Capitalism itself isn’t really the problem though, a free market economy should work. The issue is that the owners, be they corporate or private, don’t view their workforces the same way.
The greed of those at the top is crippling the very people that are driving the economy.
Free market capitalism is inherently about generating wealth for primary stakeholders but externalizing the social and environmental costs. It’s basically how the entire system works.
You are misusing terms, a stakeholder is anyone affected by a company’s actions while a shareholder is anyone with ownership in a company. All shareholders are stakeholders, not all stakeholders are shareholders.
I was using the term in it’s original sense, i.e. investors, employees, and suppliers.
I didn’t want to say “shareholders” because not all businesses offer shares.
The greed is baked into capitalism, though, because it’s fundamentally baked into humanity. This is what happens with the unregulated pursuit self interest, and that’s what capitalism encourages.
Because markets inherently aren’t “free”. Real competition is an illusion because capitalism doesn’t account for all the non-capitalist levers (e.g regulatory capture, cronyism, collusion, political lobbying, etc) that businesses will pull to serve their own interests.
Capitalism is an incredibly naive approach to economics because its ability to account for human behavior – the fundamental driver of economic systems – is rudimentary at best. And that’s just one of its problems, really.
I agree with all of what you say except I think people are not as naturally greedy as we are led to believe. The idea that selfishness and greed are the sole or primary motivators of human action is capitalist propaganda. The idea that humans are “innately selfish” so an economic system built on selfishness is the only way to run society is capitalist propaganda. There are many other things that motivate us in our lives, and many motivations that would lead to more happiness than the pursuit of selfish goals, and we’re quite capable of following those motives when we’re not compelled by a greed-based society to continually scramble to grab what we can for ourselves.
I don’t think it’s that all people are greedy, but that a small minority of people are extremely greedy, and they will do anything for money and power. This breaks both capitalism and socialism from becoming the best version of what each could be.
I agree. Any arrangement of society that’s going to work has to have some way to protect itself from this small minority of sociopaths. Unfortunately, in our current system they are firmly in charge.
I agree, and think this is closest to reality the way I’ve observed it. I think most people want more and better things for themselves - this part I believe is a natural instinct present in the majority of human, probably a result of some evolutionary survival mechanism. However, I think people generally also have some limits on what they are willing to do to advantage themselves over others around them. The problem is that this limit varies greatly among individuals. Some people are not willing to take advantage of a fly for self-gain, while others are willing to take advantage of anyone and anything for self-gain. It’s a complex problem that I think is difficult to solve in communities, especially in large, more loosely-knit ones (i.e., anything larger than a tribe or village).
Yes, there are also research to back this up. We are tribalistic, and we tend to cover for our kin, even sacrifice ourselves for the betterment of the tribe. Issue is we are most divided at this point in history. There are so many layers of personal ID that we cannot find our kin. Then it just becomes only me, or only my family, or only democrats, or only lgbt, etc. We have been given so many IDs, from music, culture, sports, politics, ideology, education level etc, we can only care about so far.
Is greed really a part of human essence? I don’t subscribe to that Hobbesian view.
No, it absolutely should not work. I can’t even imagine what you are imagining when you say that. HOW could it possibly work long term? Are you familiar with any game theory?
I mean… it has, hasn’t it? It’s worked pretty well for the last ~200 years. Even in China, the successful parts are the capitalist parts.
Yes, it’s costing us in terms of environmental sustainability. This is an externality which can be (but hasn’t been) addressed. A failure of government, not a failure of capitalism.
You should know that most Marxists believe capitalism is an economic engine unlike anything that came before it. That doesn’t mean we can’t build a more rational system. If we wanted to approach the problem scientifically we would study capitalism, understand how it works and came to be, form hypotheses for how to build something better, and then experiment.
I’d also add that the formation of the modern government, ie liberal democratic states, and the development of capitalism are one and the same. Our totalizing market economy can not exist without governments ensuring conditions are right for market exchange to operate smoothly. As such, I don’t think it’s possible to say a failure of governments are not a failure of capitalism. It’s a package deal so to speak.
It’s not a failure of government when the government effectively serves the ruling class (i.e capitalists). It’s a feature, not a bug.
Free market works only to create monopolies because in the real world companies compete and then one gets gobbled up and these mega corps can gobble, out compete or lobby for barriers to market if there arent any already inherently. Imagine a new telecomp trying to start but its small then it need a huge investment to cover only a small area, how will that compete with a giant already established telecom? That happens in all businesses and sectora
The problems you listed are a feature of capitalism. The rich owners have more power in the owner-worker relationship. Which means they get richer, which means they get more power, which means they get richer, which means they get more power, etc.
The only thing resembling some balance was unions, and they were gutted so that guess what, the rich child get richer. Which meant they got more powerful, and we’re back to the cycle.
Why should it work? Capitalism by definition works against the free market because it favors monopolization. You need heavy regulations to slow that down at the very least.
Oh FFS, the capitalist system shreds ‘free’ markets with abandon. Monopolies eliminate competition. Regulatory capture eliminates anti-monopoly regulations. Capitalism is the perpetual accumulation of more money by investing in the production of more commodities. It collapses when it cannot evolve to expand demand, as it did in the 1930’s. As it is doing again now., although rather slowly, as it has learned how to use governments to mitigate financial collapse. It does indeed use ‘markets’ for exchanges, but it only cares about ‘free’ markets as an ideology. It’s motivating force is accumulation. The ‘greed at the top’ is the system itself, not some bad apples.
The idea that it “should work” is both controversial, and doesn’t help. As wealth accumulates at the top, they have less reason to give to anyone else. Human greed is encouraged by capitalism, and you end up with massive inequality when it’s left unfettered. We’re moving towards having robber barons again (or already do, depending on your viewpoint).
Not to mention, capitalism depends on consumption, of everything, and we are actively consuming the things we need in order for us to continue living on the planet. Capitalism doesn’t care because it’s all about profit, specifically in the short term because humans have short life spans and shorter memory and foresight.