this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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In case you want the good faith counterargument (I know, I know, socialist wall of text):
I'd be willing to bet you have a different definition of "capitalism" compared to socialists. For most people, capitalism is just trade, markets, commerce, etc. None of that is incompatible with socialism (broadly speaking). When socialists talk about capitalism, they're referring, specifically, to private ownership of capital. It's not the buying and selling, it's that ownership of companies is separate from labor.
We don't owe technological development to capitalists, we owe it to engineers, scientists, and researchers. We owe art to artists, performance to performers. Socialists want those people to be the primary beneficiaries of their own work, not someone who may or may not even work at a company, but whose wealth means they can profit off of other people's labor by virtue of owning the property those people need to do their jobs.
And you've probably been bothered by enshittification in one form or another. Some product or service you like has probably gotten worse over time. That's not a decision made by the people who take pride in their creation, or the laborers who want long-term security. It comes from the capitalist class that doesn't really give a shit about any of that, they just want quarterly profits, long-term survival be damned. That's capitalism, as the meme was getting at.
You can take this further, and discuss how many empty homes are owned by corporations that are sitting empty, along with how many homeless people there are in the richest country in the world. Or how much food is thrown away while people remain hungry. Both of these things are happening because housing homeless people and feeding hungry people just aren’t profitable.
That’s my main problem with American capitalism. Along with capital owning our politicians and passing anti-competitive laws designed to allow the ones at the top to stay at the top unchallenged. That’s probably a different discussion though. The “Free Market” is a myth.
Absolutely. While I can be convinced on markets for some things (with regulation to protect consumers and prevent monopolies), it completely falls apart in others. Necessities absolutely should not rely on free markets because capital holders hold an extortionate amount of power, most people have little to none, and if it's more profitable to let some people die, then the profit motive will let those people die.
Necessities must rely on free markets because free markets are the only mechanisms productive enough to cover those necessities.
Health care, education, and housing are three markets that we have attempted to control on the basis that they’re necessary so we shouldn’t take any chances.
As a result, health care, education, and housing are ultra expensive and scarce, and major sources of stress and worth for people.
But far more fundamental than any of those, and hence capable of producing far greater suffering when lacking, is food. Food is a much more free market than health care, education, and housing, and as a result food is abundant and cheap.
The constantly-driven message that capitalism cuts people off from things is deep within our brains. And it makes sense: you imagine someone wanting to eat and not having money and they don’t eat and that’s a horrible thought. But it’s not what happens. We buy and sell food all the time, and we also give enormous amounts of food to people for free. Heck we just had an annual ritual last night based on giving people food. I flew a sign once that said “food only please” and I ate very well. Like, people saw that sign and went to buy me a $50 steak then came back to give it to me.
All I’m saying is: please just try and differentiate between the things that are mostly handled by free market, and the things that are centrally controlled, and then ask yourself what is abundant and what is scarce.
I think you’ll find that capitalism gives more away as an afterthought than other economic systems even produce in total.
In 2018, 11.1% of American households were food insecure. While this is better than many developing and historically colonized countries, this statistic is still worse than for many other developed nations.
Health care in the US is so expensive because there is currently a capitalistic private ownership of insurance because historic efforts for socialized medicine were crushed by the ruling class. Additionally, efforts to implement socialized programs have been systematically handicapped by private insurance company stakeholders.
In Finland, a country with socialized education, tertiary education is free to citizens. In the US, the average cost of attendance to a public university, the cheapest category of 4-year tertiary institution, is $26,000.
Housing prices are skyrocketing because private equity groups and hedge funds are rapidly buying property to drive up prices for profit.
You are pointing out problems that capitalism and free markets have given us, and pointing the finger at socialism, when efforts to socialize each of these necessities have been systematically squashed. You are contributing to misinformation by writing this post. Please do some research and back up your claims with reliable sources before spouting nonsense you don't understand on the internet.
Actually, under our free market system, people eat like kings even when they have no money to buy food.
I’ve been homeless and I’ve been on food assistance. In both cases I ate plenty of food provided voluntarily by people who … just like the idea of feeding people.
No centralized system is necessary to achieve that. Capitalism is so productive that we have food coming out of our ears. I find it kind of interesting that as a capitalist nation where supposedly there’s a price tag on everything, there are copious resources freely available.
It’s not because free stuff is the central ethos of capitalism. It’s because capitalism produces so much wealth that the tiny sliver we are willing to part with for free is still beyond the total production of the non-consensual economic systems.
Thank you for taking the education angle. I'd like to add another perspective for folks' benefit. I'm not 100% sure it's correct, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
Your labor has some value. Ideally, you should be paid a corresponding amount of wealth to the amount of value you generate through your labor. So you do $20 worth of work and get $20 worth of money. This is the ideal.
But how much labor is worth $20? Capitalism takes advantage of this ambiguity. The capitalist, e.g. a business owner or investor or similarly positioned person, pays you $19 for that $20 labor and pockets the remaining amount as profit. Sure, the capitalist likely provides some amount of leadership and direction, which is labor with value, but their compensation vastly exceeds the value they generate. This is why you see CEOs getting >300x the pay of their employees. The labor of these CEOs is not worth that much. One person's labor literally cannot be worth that of 300 people. (Engineers may pipe in on that point, but please realize you're in the same boat.)
If you see capitalism from this perspective, it makes sense why you would be angry. You're literally getting short-changed for your effort. Not cool
So what's the alternative? Well, there's a bunch. Personally, I like the idea of employee-owned companies. This way, you get the advantage of pooling people's resources, and any profit can be invested back into the company to generate more wealth for its employees or be held onto in case of a downturn. Both are better than a CEO's pocket.
One issue is capital investment. Starting a company is expensive, and many companies take a long time to become profitable. If every company had to bootstrap, we'd see much fewer successes and much slower progress. I'm not exactly sure how to solve this, yet. Would love to hear folks' ideas
This point is even stronger if you look at property rights instead of value. The workers in a capitalist firm jointly receive 0% of the property rights to the produced outputs and 0% of the liabilities for the used-up inputs while the employer receives 100% and legally owns the produced outputs and legally owes the liabilities for the used-up inputs. This is a violation of the moral principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match
My issue is socialism doesn't resolve centralization of wealth.
If you write a book and everyone buys it, you're rich now. Your second book will do better with your name recognition too, so you get wealthier by reputation rather than effort or quality. This is the exponential/multiplicative impact of wealth.
You need janitors and sanitation workers society and I doubt most people will just want to do it. Cleaning doesn't contribute to the bottom line, you can't say you cleaned $30 worth of value, so how much do you pay the janitor under socialist models?
You can see the same greedy processes as capitalism in condo strata and other situations where people must share costs. We're greedy shits and half of us will let the world turn to shit to avoid paying more than they have to.
And what happens to people who want to produce things nobody wants? Sometimes this stuff pays off hugely like the math behind cryptography (which was nothing more than an academic exercise for like 100 years), but sometimes a person wants to spend all their time making macaroni Squidward vore content.
I agree CEOs are overpaid, they're overpaid because there's a perceived lack of them because being a CEO is all about your pedigree. Shareholders won't make Jeff the 18 year employee into CEO because they don't know who Jeff is, and Sandy over there went to Harvard and has run 6 companies before, starting with the one she inherited or bought with her trust fund. That's not really fair at all, and it makes capitalism worse too.
I like the ideas of cooperatives and all that, but in my cynical eyes human greed is the center of the problem.
The thing is, that separation of capital owner and worker that you’re referring to is the arrangement people come to when given the freedom to choose their arrangements.
To me capitalism is defined by free markets. A free market is one in which the economic relationships are consensual.
Turns out, many people would rather have a steady job than be in business for themselves. I’ve done both, and I see the merits of both. Right now, I choose to work for a huge corporation. As long as I show up I get paid. That’s working well for me.
What you’re referring to as the laborers getting the benefit of their labor is something that’s already permissible in a free market, and it happens a lot. I was a freelance software developer for many years. I also had a business building and selling easels. And cookies. And smoothies, on a subscription model. You read that right: smoothie subscriptions.
So while it may seem that my definition based on free markets, and your definition based on the separation of ownership and labor, are different definitions, I see them as the same thing.
Or maybe, to be precise, free markets lead to capital accumulation and when capital accumulates beyond an individual’s ability to work it themselves and they hire someone else to work it, capitalism begins. So maybe free markets lead to capitalism by your definition, as a state of wealth distribution and a set of working relationships.
The real key point is that this set of relationships you call capitalism, is the natural result of people being free to do as they see fit.
This touches on the concept of an inalienable right, which is a right that the holder cannot give up even with consent because to give up that right would, in effect, put the holder in the legal position of a non-person contradicting their factual personhood. Some rights that are recognized as inalienable in many countries are political voting rights and the right to a lifetime of labor. A free market does not require that all human rights be alienable
If you think a system where the means of production are owned by a class of people and another class of people must sell their labor power in order to survive (the definition of capitalism according to Marx) is full of consensual economic relationships I worry about your definition of consent.
The means of production are not entirely owned by a seperate class nor is the barrier to entry for many industries so high that it is entirely impossible for the average joe to enter.
Sure some industries are nigh impossible to get into, like pharmaceuticals for example, there are much bigger industries that have lower barriers like machine shops (which are really medium entry but you can scale them), and manufacturing via 3d print hubs.
Not to mention aoftware development which is a fucking wonder when it comes to potential money vs barrier to entry.
Certain construction contractors and engineering consulting firms can be opened up with fairly low barrier to entry.
I'm sleepy so my replies may not seem very coherent so tell me if you don't understand what im saying
Look up how much debt the average US citizen is in and tell me what low barrier to entry industries they can break into