I’m really not trying to be a dick, but uhh… Look around? The world is literally on fire and efforts to put it out or even to stop pouring more gas on it are put down at every turn by capitalists in the never ending pursuit of more money for it’s own sake.

Let’s start here: are you a capitalist? Do you own any actual capital? I don’t mean your own house or car, that is personal property not private property or anything resembling the means of production.

I ask because many people consider themselves capitalist when really they are just workers who happen to own a bit of personal property, and they make themselves essentially useful pawns for actual capitalists.

And, if you’re not an actual capitalist, why are you so pro capitalism?

Why is capitalism so anti-folks?

Pretty simple really: capitalism requires infinite growth. We have finite resources. The world is literally melting around us due to unsustainability.

The pet peeve of many people is the greed (of billionaires, politicians, global companies, etc) for wealth (paper, essentially) yet not giving a flying fuck about the anyone else or the rest of the planet.

Capitalism sold us a fairy-tale.

Companies compete for customers, they improve products so it breeds innovation and they also compete for workers, so it gets better for everyone! Except it doesn’t.

The reality is quite the opposite. Here’s what happens. They want to maximize profits so that the owners of the company get more money. How do you maximize profits?

• You can advertise, and attract more customers. Alright, but eventually everyone has a widget. Maybe you can poach some customers from a competitor, but ultimately the market is saturated. Things get replaced as they break there’s a natural equilibrium. How do you increase profits?
• You can charge more. Raise the price. That only works so far before you lose customers to your cheaper competition, again you reach an equilibrium. How do you increase profits?
• You can innovate! Oh yes, that’s what capitalism is all about, improve your production, instead of 5 parts that need to be screwed together, now it’s just one part that falls out of a machine. You spend less time making each widget so you make more profit. But eventually there just isn’t any room to innovate any more. How do you increase profits?
• You can use cheaper materials. But here again, you bump against an equilibrium, the cheaper materials often break more easily - sometimes that is wanted (planned obsolescence) but your customers will notice the drop in quality and eventually they’re not willing to pay as much for your widget any more. How do you increase profits?
• Well, the last big item on your list: payroll. Do more work with less staff, or in other words pay staff less.

So what you end up with is low quality products, it’s a race to the bottom of who can make the crappiest product that the customers are still willing to pay for.

And for the workers? Well, they don’t earn much, we outsourced their work to overseas or replaced them with machines and computers. All the money went into the pockets of the owners and now the workers are poor. They’re desperate to even find work, any work as long as it allows them afford rent and barely not starve. If one of them has concerns about the working conditions, fire them, somebody else is more desperate and willing to accept the conditions.

So capitalism is destined to make us all poorer. It needs poverty as a “threat” to make you shut up and do your work “you wouldn’t want to be homeless, would you?”

The problem is not money itself, it’s not stores or being able to buy stuff. That’s an economy you can have an economy without capitalism. The problem is that the capitalists own the means of production and all the profits flow up into the pockets of the owners. And often the owners are shareholders, the stock markets, they don’t care if a company is healthy, or doing well by their employees, all the stock markets care about is “line go up”, and it’s sucking the working class dry.

Regulation can avoid some of the worst negative effects of capitalism. Lawmakers can set a minimum wage, rules for working hours, paid time off, health and safety, environmental protection etc. Those rules are often written in blood. Literally, because if not forced by law, capitalism has no reason to care about your (worker or customer) life, only profits.

Oppose that with some ideas of socialism. aka. “The workers own the means of production” This is something some companies practice, Worker cooperatives are great. The workers are the owners, if the company does well, all the workers get to enjoy the profits. The workers actually have a stake in their company doing well. (Technically if you’re self-employed you’re doing a socialism) Well, that’s utopia and probably won’t happen, maybe there’s a middle ground.

Unions are a good idea. Unions represent many workers and can negotiate working conditions and pay with much more weight than any individual worker can for themself.

Works councils are also a good idea, those are elected representatives of the employees of a company. They’re smaller than trade unions, but can still negotiate on behalf of the employees of the company. Sometimes they even get a seat on the board of directors so they have a say in how the company is run.

That’s how you can have capitalism but also avoid the worst effects of treating workers and customers badly. Anyway, unchecked capitalism is not a great idea. The USA would be an example of such unchecked capitalism.

Especially when you know that money equals power and the wealthy can buy their politicians through the means of “campaign donations” and now the owners of companies control the lawmakers who write the laws these companies have to abide by … From Europe we look at the USA and are mortified, but let’s not make this even more political.

Man this debate is so US centric - as if there is only two choices: Unhinged, raging, exploitative, robber-baron capitalism OR Bolshevik Communism.

Typing this from one of the richest, strongest market economies in the world, which provides free health care, free education and generous e employment protections in the world. Everyone is happy, everyone is healthy, broadly, and capitalism exists next to a system of government that regulates to ensure the well-being of their citizens.

Social democracy people, it’s for real!!

“Free market” Capitalism is self-destructive. As the wealthy build and consolidate power, more and more resources get funneled to the top while the people at the bottom actually creating those resources go with less and less, and it’s unsustainable.

Being a billionaire is a moral failing. To have the ability to do something about all the suffering and death in the world, and to choose to do nothing borders on sociopathy. The systems designed to allow for billionaires to exist ensure that they don’t pay a fair share of their taxes, and they contribute nothing to society. They are leeches, feeding off the working class and giving nothing in return, when they have so much more to give than anyone else.

For us young people: Because the system feels broken, and that there’s little future to grow towards.

I grew up privileged, I attended private school until 5th grade before moving to one of the best public schools in a US state known for having good education. I’ve had a safety net my entire life, and that has allowed me to take risks, and end up homeless, that otherwise could have permanently screwed me over.

I, only a few years later, finally feel somewhat stable with the path I’ve pursued. For me stable means ~2 months emergency savings, probably not getting evicted by my batshit landlord anytime soon, and only having to work 2 jobs.

If that is what it takes to feel stable, then I can only feel like the system is screwed. I will never have the money to buy a house anywhere near where I work, near being defined as within an hour. I spend my days working for people who can drop more than what I make in a year on vacations. People who live in neighborhoods where the ‘cheap’ houses start at $10 million. And I work with some amazing down to earth people. If I’m one of the lucky ones, and I definitely am for where I live, how can the system not be broken?

Our climate is fucked, my only hope of every owning property is a massive market crash, I will likely have to keep working till I’m close to dead, vacations are a distant dream, allwhile I make my landlord richer, the corporations take all my money, because I can’t afford good, organic or local food, and the people at the top get even richer.

Our system has incentived turned all the workers into profit. At work we’re measured by the value we add to the company, never officially, but punished for missing work or being sick, and at home we’re measured by the value we add to corporations through our purchases. Even our attention has become a product. How long can companies get us to stare at their product, mindlessly consuming and being served ads.

Even in our own homes we are a product. We are an unwilling cog in a machine that makes us poorer and those with the power richer. The government should be here to protect the common man and woman. For every example of the gov. doing the right thing to protect us from monopolies and predatory practices, there are 10 or 100 examples of the opposite.

No change will come about under our current socio economic system, and you need to remember. I’m one of the lucky ones.

Let’s say you have a cow. The cow had a baby, and it’s producing milk, but more than the calf or your family need. So you start selling the excess milk.

It’s good money! Soon you buy another cow, and another. Eventually you can’t take care of them all, so you hire people to help you. Yay!

After a while you realize that waiting for the cows to be impregnated by your bull means they are not producing milk as much as they can. So you start forcefully impregnating the cows so they are always pregnant or producing milk.

The calves are drinking a lot of your milk, so you decide to kill them as soon as possible. You don’t know what to do with the dead calves, so you start marketing them as “veal”, a delicacy!

A lot of your process is still manual, so you buy machinery that increases your productivity by 100x. You’re still paying your workers the same amount, even though they’re now responsible for producing 100x more.

One day you realize there’s too much milk in the market. If you sell it all, the price will drop too much. So you dump thousands of gallons of milk in the river, to keep the prices stable. You couldn’t give them away to people in need, that would still affect the market!

You’re still not selling enough (though you have more money that you could spend in your lifetime). So you buy some politicians so the government says that milk is essential, the only way to absorb calcium, and it should be in every school. People are convinced they need milk, even though it’s from another species and even though humans don’t need milk after a couple years of age.

That’s why I hate capitalism.

Climate change cannot be addressed under capitalism.

Capitalism has given a lot of people out there a raw deal: low wages, increasing gap between the rich and the poor, home ownership is out of reach to many, healthcare is unaffordable to many, having a family is prohibitively expensive, we own almost nothing and rent almost everything, even basic necessities like food, water and clothing are painfully expensive. What’s more, when you look at the systems in place today, it appears that these aren’t bugs, but features.

I’m a socialist because I believe that society ought to use its collective power and money to guarantee all of its people a minimum of the basic, essential things that they need to live, by subsidizing food, water, shelter, clothing, heat, electricity, data, education and healthcare.

Outside of those crucial things, capitalism is just fine, as long as people are being paid fairly for their time. And, as we’ve all seen, capitalism needs strict rules and guard rails to make sure that workers aren’t being constantly exploited. If capitalism was working well for everyone, we were all getting paid fairly for our time, and people could take care of their needs (not to mention their wants), then nobody would have any reason to care or complain about capitalism. But sadly, as it is today, capitalism is just not working for a lot of people, and many people out there are not even having their basic needs met (even despite getting an education, taking out loans, getting a job, getting a second job, working hard, etc.).

To me, creating a prosperous and happy society is much more complex than picking capitalism or socialism, and some mix of both is probably the best of both worlds.

Capitalism is flawed and has outlived it’s usefulness just as every preceding economic system has. One of the more poignant Marx quotes puts it well

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Capitalism is based on the accumulation of resources known as the “means of production”. As time goes on, those with capital are able to leverage it to further subjugate the working class as they amass a disproportionate amount of wealth and capital. The average worker is worth far more than they are paid, while the capitalist who they work under continues to pocket the majority of that profit.

For a working class person to begin to earn their fare share they have a few ethical options, be self employed, unionize to collectively bargain for a larger piece of the pie, join or form a co-op (effectively a small scale form of socialism).

The last point I’d bring up that is more central to my own politics is the inherent link between capitalism and imperialism. Even in a capitalist country where you may be able to comfortably live as a member of the working class, the global third world is often footing the bill in order to lower the cost of goods. Examples would be clothing, chocolate, coffee, etc where most of these are made in desolate conditions and sometimes with slave labor.

That being said, there are many reasons to be against capitalism and it is hard to express in a single comment. I highly recommend Lenin’s State and Revolution to anyone interested.

The top 10% of Americans own 70% of the country’s wealth.

Have you ever stopped to consider the logical conclusions of that? If they lived at the same standard as the average American, we would only need to use 30% of the resources we’re currently burning through. It’s grossly inefficient. We waste more than 2/3rds of our resources so that rich assholes can live in $100 million mansions and fly around on private jets.

Say you’re an American working a 9 to 5 job. Once you hit 1 pm on Tuesday, you’ve done enough work for the week to meet all the actual needs for society. The rest of Tuesday, all of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are all just to pay for rich assholes to take a “hunting” trip to Africa and needlessly slaughter native wildlife. Or to buy the 400th car in their special collections that they’ve nearly forgotten about. Etc. Etc.

70% of the irreplaceble oil being drilled? Flushed down the drain just so that rich assholes can horde wealth. 70% of the pollution in the air? Put there so that billionaires can have parties on a private island. So that they can fly their private jets to private retreats and pretend to be outdoorspeople for a weekend. 70% of the new extreme weather being caused by anthropogenic climate change? All so that rich assholes can do things like jet around the world so they can say they’ve played a round of golf on 7 different continents in 7 days. Etc. Etc.

It’s nowhere near sustainable.

Capitalism is inherently evil, you can only make money if you already have it

As the natives said, how can your way be better when those who have nothing give to those who have everything?

But the greedy in charge lie and say it’s better, and they control ALL aspects of life because they have the money, news, police, etc.

Capitalism is slavery and is NOT in the constitution.

Imagine that the world of humans has been going on for 100s of thousands of years and the current system of economics that’s only been around for a couple of hundred years is treated like we’ve finally reached the pinnacle of how human beings should interact with each other to survive as a species, while we clearly see people in our species starving, being abused, being murdered for their race, etc.

The lie is that “Capitalism benefits everyone. And those that it doesn’t benefit aren’t trying hard enough.” Fuck that. I’ve been working regular, full time jobs all my life, and the trade offs you have to endure to keep jobs and/or advance in jobs are for things like your time with your family, your time enjoying things, your time appreciating life and other people, your perspective and views set aside to tell lies to people that work for you so you can keep your job where you must constantly lie to people that make less money than you that are often equally or more skilled than you.

Capitalism is a lie that is deeply highlighted in this thread. A lie of exploitation equaling opportunity. A lie of hoarders of wealth to convince others that they too hoard wealth at their level.

It is deeply disturbing what level of loss of being a decent human being must be discarded to keep capitalism going.

Look around you – capitalism is literally burning our ecosystem to transfer wealth into the hands of the rich. If you are “pro-capitalism” you are either ignorant of physical reality or you are selfish and think you can “make it” and be one of the tiny minority that actually benefits from the system, to the detriment of almost every other living being on the planet.