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Why are folks so anti-capitalist?
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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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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.
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.