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Why are folks so anti-capitalist?

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!

901 comments

  • 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 :)

    • 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.

    • Because it’s objectively unsustainable?

      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 don’t really get what it even means to be “pro capitalist” at this point.

      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.

      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?

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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

      Great analogy! But.... have we seen a lower minimum? What's the rationale behind that system? That's my question

      • 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 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.

      • You'd like Marxism. The whole point is that Capitalism is our dominant ideology because it was more efficient than feudalism, but now e have the tools to build a system more efficient than capitalism and we should build that instead. Capitalism is the most efficient system we've built so far, but it's very obviously not the most efficient system we can build.

      • 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.

      • 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.

        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.

      • produce things very efficiently,

        Read about externalities.

        And the radium girls.

      • 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.

      • 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?

        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.

      • But I don't understand, like I said above, how capitalism is causing it and how not-capitalism would solve it.

        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”.

        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 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.

  • Capitalism rewards exploitation.

    You've probably heard "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism" - and historically speaking, and in my experience, this holds to be true. I couldn't be typing this on my glass god rectangle if there weren't some children in a cobalt mine somewhere - at some rung on the ladder, people are dying, because where's the incentive to lift others out of poverty? Why would any capitalist elevate their source of cheap labour and materials out of the blood and sand?

    There's also the interaction we have between the capitalist and socialist aspects of our society - for instance nationalised healthcare cannot be administered by capitalists because there is no incentive for the system to function for the good of the patients, but eventually the system will be optimised out of existence (by which I mean, broken into smaller units for budgetary reasons, small units degraded continually until they are canned, and the whole system is sunset because of "sound economic decisions").

    Capitalism is the antithesis of what I think any reasonable person wants in society save for those with an amount of blood on their hands. Capitalism is a Mad Max dystopia where a handful of people live as deities whilst the rest of us kill each other in the streets for scraps.

    Capitalism might have seemed viable when everyone was suffering from lead poisoning, but it's killing us today, and I support any means to remove this cancer and push for a more equitable life for everyone.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 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.

  • Capitalism is just diversified feudalism.

    Instead of owning 100% of a district and everything the peasants on it produce, the aristos worked out that they could diversify their portfolios and thin out the risk.

    So now they own a thousandth part of the product of a thousand districts instead.

    Now if plague wipes out a village or six, you don't have to care, you're only losing a tiny chunk of your income. Now the welfare of the peasants isn't your problem, because they're not, like :douchebro sniff: exclusively your peasants.

    The rich produce nothing, they add no value, they perform no labour. It's just predatory rent-seeking: the poor still do all the work, produce all the goods and provide all the services, but now somehow 99% of the value they generate goes to some smirking freeloader instead, who can just plough it into acquiring more and more peasants. They only thing they ever provided was a chunk of startup cash, which they got from exploiting other peasants in the first place.

    And of course, none of that cash goes to the people whose income it supposedly buys. It's not a fair trade, it's not a trade at all, they aren't a party to it. Workers are just bought and sold over their heads, like dairy cattle. They get milked just the same, and some other fat bastard gets all the cream.

    The whole system is rigged to concentrate power and wealth into the hands of the super-rich, stripping it away from everyone else and leaving them struggling to survive - and keeping the ladder well and truly pulled up so nobody else gets into the treehouse.

    Libertarian types like to claim that taxation is theft, but taxation is a spit in a hurricane compared to the industrial-scale looting that goes on every day. Take the profits of any corporation, and divide that by the total salaries of the workers that actually generate revenue. Theft? You don't know the meaning of the word. What percentage of the value you generate goes in shareholder pockets? How would you feel about taxation at that level, funding not roads and schools and hospitals, but yachts and mansions and private jets for a bunch of one-percenters?

    How are you not angry?

  • It's pretty basic. At this point in time we can see what the promise of trickle down economics was, and we can see where the country is, compared to before, for the middle and lower classes. Even without blaming capitalism for this, we can see that giving wealth to the top fails more people than just paying people a decent wage.

    The people claiming most to be pro-capitalist between the major two parties in the US are saying to stay the course and go even further.

    I would like a return towards the capitalism of the 1950's-1970's. But that is generally considered to be socialist by the party seeking to keep going in the direction that has failed most Americans.

    I would also like to emulate the whole of Western Europe in hopes of having a larger middle class as a by product of tax collection and spending, rather than paying for-profit entities, to get guaranteed services that support basic daily life. Capitalists do not want that because they cannot profit off of services provided by the government to anywhere near the same extent.

    It's simple, the type and level of capitalism currently in place in America makes life unnecessarily difficult for the citizens of America.

  • Some great answers here so I'll do something different and I'll give myself as a real-world example.

    As a young adult, through a twist of luck, I found a cheap place to rent, so was able save a good amount of my income. I used that saving to get a loan, buy property, and used that property to get a loan and buy a property, and then do it once again. A short while later I now have no debt, can sit on my arse browsing lemmy in Bali (exploiting geo-arbitrage), and live off the market-rate rents my tenants pay back home.

    If my tenants didn't have to pay market-rate rents, they too might be able save some cash and become capitalists themselves. I could lower the rent, but then I would have to get a job and actually earn my living again. People born into wealth can even skip that step of having to earn their initial capital.

    But whats the point of owning income producing assets (like property, or business) if you're not improving your situation with it? The ONLY benefit of the capitalist system is that it allows the capitalist to reap the benefits of other's work, thus reducing the burden of the capitalist to work themself.

    It's a ridiculous situation, I should not be able to live as I do, simply because I got a lucky break at the start of my working life, an opportunity that is given to the very few. The system should change.

  • a lot of hate for capitalism here

    The fediverse is largely populated by 2SLGBTQIA+ people and people of colour who are oppressed by capitalist regimes. The other big contingent is marxists and people who like FOSS. FOSS, at its core, is anti-capitalist.

    You're in a place founded by anti-capitalism, that exists in spite of capitalism, asking "why is there so much anti-capitalism here?"

  • People are anti-capitalist because they're increasingly realizing that it's an abominable system that's based on mass exploitation of the working class by people who own capital, and it produces oligarchical political systems such as seen in US and many other western countries that tantamount to living under the dictatorship of capitalists.

    Capitalism is responsible for some of the worst atrocities in human history including things like the African slave trade, barbarism associated with colonization of America, countless famines such as the Irish and Indian famines, and never ending wars.

    Today, capitalist need for growth and consumerism is literally destroying our very habitat that we all depend on at a planetary scale. Either capitalism ends or humanity will end.

  • Under capitalism, value is extracted and concentrated. That in turn means that your employer is motivated to get as much value out of you as they can. Companies are motivated to charge you as much as they can convince you to pay.

    Think about a friend who might ask to buy something of yours; let's say it's a sofa. If we apply that same logic of capitalism, you should try to get as much money as possible. I don't know about you, but I don't like the way that it feels.

  • For all of the benefits and blessings that capitalism has given us, there are several things people need to realize:

    1. When we talk about all the good that capitalism has done for us, that's a vanishingly small us. There are literally billions of people in the world today who are languishing in poverty that makes first-world poverty look downright lavish. Then there are those first-world impoverished, who doubtlessly do live lives of fruitless toil and abject misery. And now think about the people in centuries past -- the serfs, the slaves, the child laborers... The fact that capitalism has managed to give some comfort to some of us in some countries in the past century does not negate the immense, incalculable suffering it took to get here. And as I said, very many people today, even in modernized nations, are suffering immeasurably still.
    2. Capitalism has overstayed its welcome regarding global crises like climate change. The profit motive seems not to be working at all, let alone with the appropriate urgency, toward the goal of saving us from the consequences of climate change. The scientific consensus largely appears to be that we're too late to sidestep a cataclysm, but this is still not enough to prompt world leaders (i.e. the rich and powerful) to step up their game.
    3. On a more high-minded level, capitalism is inherently repugnant because the people at the top can only enrich themselves by skimming off of the rightful earnings of the ones at the bottom. This is unavoidable; how could the CEO get so rich if 100% of the laborers' value was given to them? This goes beyond the natural reality that labor is required to survive. The issue here is that rather than having organized our economy around people laboring together for their own mutual benefit, we've organized our world such that the vast majority of us labor for the benefit of the few elites who only deign to pass on a pittance once the laborers become too uppity. People who oppose capitalism do not oppose labor; they oppose the way our global society has decided to distribute its results.
    4. Capitalism, at least in its cutthroat, largely unrestrained, American fashion, is by no means the only option we have. European countries demonstrate that capitalism can be moderated to work better for the masses, and there is no reason to believe even they've gone as far as they can. People love to jeer at communism for its many failures in implementation without seeming to realize that, as expressed above, countless people all over the world are currently suffering and starving and languishing under capitalism too.

  • Capitalism isn't necessarily bad, but unregulated capitalism encourages the most cut throat to thrive.

    Capitalism is a great economic model when you can have a competitive market, but oligopolies, monopolies, and monopsonies are natural. After you have no where else to go, labor is a cost, and capitalism encourages the cut throat to minimize that by any means.

    Also, even right wing economists agree there are some market failures within capitalism. It encourages you to not consider the economic impact outside of your company. These are typically referred to as negative externalities.

    Smokers are a negative externality to the health care system. When a corporation gets hacked, their clients suffer the consequences for when their stolen data is abused. No corporation can stop all other corporations from polluting with cheaper energy, and the most cost effective will thrive in a capitalist system. So all corporations have to choose dirtier cheaper energy.

    These are all examples of market failures. Regulation compatibile with capitalism include taxing negative externalities and using that money to subsidize positive externalities.

    Tax smokers and use the money to fund health care. Fine corps for getting hacked and subsidize hackers to pen test systems. Tax dirtier forms of energy and subsidize greener sources.

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