Because they benefit from it?

This is only part of it because the vast majority of people do not benefit from capitalism. Not anymore at least. Of those in the working class who defend capitalism I would say most are victim to the constant stream of propaganda that the media pumps out at the behest of the capital owning class. It’s something that starts from birth in most western nations and permeates into the narratives people are taught in school in a way that requires deliberate and consistent work to unlearn and break away from.

I dont want to interrupt but im still waiting on my money from the election in Berlin. We were promised a bonus if you win.

What do they have to do with that?

this. i remember a few years ago i was somewhere that folks had put on the macy’s t-day parade. it was the first time i’d really noticed the intensity of the propaganda. most of the themes and music were just about acquiring material things and how good and normal that is. the propaganda was so strong it made me viscerally uncomfortable to watch.

Even more benefit from a social market economy, which might be an optimal sweet spot if done right.

No arguments there

EDIT: I mean “can’t argue with that”. Just incase what I wrote originally didn’t make sense

Capitalism with a larger social safety net is still capitalism, and it relies on the exploitation of workers in the Global South to function. As the Global North’s capacity to imperialize the Globe South deteriorates, so too does its ability to bribe its own workers at home with treats.

That’s why I wrote “if done right”.
A truly social market economy also has to make sure that workers along the whole supply chain have to get similar rights and treatment as local workers.

Besides that, centrally planned economies (being the opposite to plain free market capitalism), also don’t really shy away from exploiting the resources of poorer countries.
(Looking e.g. at imperialistic China here).

China isn’t exploiting anyone. You really need to start questioning what your own empire accuses its enemies of. Previously:

• The Atlantic, 2021: The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth
• Jason Hickel, 2026: Is China doing “colonialism” in Africa?
• Deborah Brautigam, 2019: A critical look at Chinese ‘debt-trap diplomacy’: the rise of a meme
• 📺 Michael Hudson & Radikha Desai, 2024: The truth about China’s economy: Debunking Western media myths

China isn’t exploiting anyone.

Total Imports 2025 EU / China:

Mineral fuels, oils, distillation products $467.75B / $442.95B
Plastics $68.38B / $56.48B
Pearls, precious stones, metals, coins $56.12B / $118.02B
Articles of apparel, knit or crocheted $53.13B / $3.74B
Articles of apparel, not knit or crocheted $48.56B / $5.79B
Iron and steel $44.08B / $30.86B
Edible fruits, nuts, peel of citrus fruit, melons $31.17B / $20.69B
Fish, crustaceans, molluscs, aquatics invertebrates $29.23B / $19.93B
Rubbers $26.46B / $20.57B
Footwear, gaiters and the like $26.30B / $5.70B
Copper $18.63B / $74.63B
Oil seed, oleagic fruits, grain, seed, fruits $18.63B / $57.02B
Pulp of wood, fibrous cellulosic material, waste $11.87B / $21.98B

So, looking at the absolute numbers, China is eploiting the world’s resources in a similar fashion as the old style European Union, so I have to disagree.

I won’t comment on the content of your provided reports and youtube videos (of which at least two look a little… juicy… at first glance), as me just providing you with a bunch of counter-reports and videos, whose reliability you would question in a similar way as I am questioning yours, won’t change anything.

Country X importing from country Y doesn’t magically equate to country X exploiting country Y. Exploitation is a matter of unequal exchange, and not every exchange is unequal. Exchanges coerced through classical imperialism or through neoliberal debt trap peonage are unequal.

Looking at the top 3 exports of China (by a wide margin before anything else):

Electrical, electronic equipment $1016.58B
Machinery, nuclear reactors, boilers $603.82B
Vehicles other than railway, tramway $248.31B

That’s all high price stuff.

Combined with its huge trade surplus, this is a classical “Buy cheap resources - sell expensive highly processed commodities back” scheme, the same as e.g. the uprising European industrializing nations employed as a strategy during their colony exploiting times (and to some degree still do in a similar fashion as China).

No, there is nothing equal here.

Somehow you’re still ignoring how those Euro-American exchanges occurred under duress, at the point of a gun.

Buying raw materials at a freely-agreed upon price, and then applying labor to them to create a finished good, is not exploitation. No one was coerced into anything.

Where are China’s guns? In China. The US has over 800 overseas military installations, while China has one, an anti-piracy port in Djibouti.

But that free international market argument applies to all (well, most of all…) countries, which is exactly my point. Modern China is as exploitative as any other highly developed modern country, independent of economic system.

Sure, as long as you insist on misdefining exploitation in that way, then by your self-serving definition, modern China is just as exploitative as the imperial core.

That’s the definition the imperial core wants to promote, because if they can’t look good, they can at least claim that their enemy is just as bad. But the majority of the world isn’t buying the hogwash that the always the same map minority is pushing.

Because they’ve been taught it’s the best system and only one that works.

What other alternatives do we have? We have some experience with communism and, eh, that didn’t go well either. Not defending capitalism here, just saying that the alternative need to work. Really work. Not just in theory.

Do we? Isn’t it mostly state capitalism and dictatorship, which has been falsely labeled as communism? Not to mention American/western intervention to destabilise any remotely socialist/communist attempt, and constant fear mongering anti-communist propaganda. Also capitalism doesn’t really work itself, riddled with internal contradictions and frequent economic crashes. If interested watch e.g. some LiterateMachine: redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=QaDtAOWgKdQ from 4:18

The main question was, what other alternatives do we have. Based on your comment, sounds like there are no reputable alternatives. I couldn’t name one either.

How are you going to get “reputable” “working” alternatives without trying them? You’re acting as if “theoretically” is somehow bad, while literally any system was theoretical before it was implemented.

But yeah, your mentality is showcasing exactly why we still have capitalism. People are afraid to try new things that might upset the status quo. They’re more afraid of new, untested things failing, than known, bad things staying.

People are specifically afraid of trying things that have led to extremely bad outcomes for countries that tried them…like millions dead from famine bad. This isn’t let’s experiment for fun territory. If there was a single non-capitalist success story, that would probably help.

i personally believe that employee ownership of business with community oversight is the most reasonable way forward. it would be much more democratic than the economic autocracy most workers currently live under and communities affected by business decisions would have a say.

Check this out…

Why It’s So Hard To Imagine Life After Capitalism by Second Thought

youtu.be/PaASqPnpq5Y

I think in some way capitalism is tied up with technological advancement and we like that. We probably shouldn’t because it will be our undoing, but we do.

The majority of people are resistant to change in general and can’t imagine a better world than what they know. The majority of people are focused on themselves without looking at the big picture.

Because they think of themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires rather than wage slaves.

I am fearful about the extreme ignorance, simple mindedness and gullibility of some of the electorate. They are completely blind to the effects of neoliberalism, which is the main guiding force behind the bumptious, odious and fascist/racist Republican party who believe that competition is the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning. Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised; public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance, and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

People go with the information they are given. People don’t do academic research into these things before forming an opinion (myself included). Through cold war times, capitalism was advertised as a morally correct choice (and not just as one type of economic system). Even within this, the American flavour or neoliberal capitalism isn’t the only choice. There can be a more heavily regulated capitalism like in Europe with elements of strong social support.

These aren’t isolated economic theory concepts anymore. These are ideas linked to people’s identity, politics, social groups, morality and sense of justice/right and wrong. This is compounded by a false sense that we live in a meritocracy and just world. As if the world will give money and success to those who are right and good, so we shouldn’t stand in the way of that.

Those that benefit from it spend a lot of money on trying to make sure the majority of people don’t realise it’s fucking them over

Stockholm syndrome.

Ironically enough, I wish we had stockholm Democratic Socialism while also suffering Stockholm Syndrome.

In America, we grow up to really cherish liberty and freedom of choice (even if it just the illusion of choice) and so we really idealize entrepreneurship.

Capitalism is the only economic system that allows upward class mobility

The examples of socialism/communism collapse are all within the lifetimes of most (or not far off for those of us under 40). Capitalism hasn’t quite failed yet (2008 hurt a lot and woke some people up to its failures).

It may not be popular with some of the instances on the fediverse but capitalism is the least flawed of all the flawed economic systems. The systems are flawed because they are ran by flawed humans. The best societies take strengths of each system and combine them to mitigate the flaws of each. Capitalism with strong social safety nets is probably the best that humans can do.

Capitalism requires brutal resource extraction, by force, from poor countries and that is usually done by killing, bombing, and using other forms of violence to enforce this extraction of resources.

We (USA) are literally doing it to Venezuela and other countries right now. I’m guessing you are American if you think capitalism with strong safety nets is the best.

You mean Capitalism with Strong safety nets for YOU. Not for people from South America, Africa, South Asia, etc. Americans (among other euro countries and some Scandinavian and east euro countries too) would have to give up a few apparatuses of luxury for the world to be able to afford even half of what we enjoy on a daily basis.

That last sentence is a mixed economy system, which should probably be the best, current way of doing things. Taking the benefits of each successful economical system. Yes, communism was successful in converting Russia from am agricultural-servant nation to an industrial powerhouse. Also, communism didn’t collapse by itself, the USA made everything they could to boycott it, and they still do because they are afraid of it. They are perpetrating their own silent genocide in Cuba, just to ingrain in our brains that communism is sentenced to collapse.

Wait… So all of those rich and billionaires in socialist countries are just figments of imagination?

Also, have you looked at how terrible the US upward mobility rankings are now? Under Capitalism you aren’t likely to move anywhere unless you’re born into it.

Edit: I brought receipts: en.wikipedia.org/…/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

The rich and powerful in socialist countries were born into it.

I can’t argue with social mobility being harder than ever under capitalism now. But perception often lags reality which is why people defend the broken system

Except that’s not what the data shows: en.wikipedia.org/…/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

What exactly does the data show? The only socialist country on the list in China at #45 while the US is #27 (not great)

If you are saying that the US should be more like Northern Europe then I agree

But all of the top ranked countries are also capitalist economies

I agree with a lot of what you say. But I’m not sure that social mobility being desirable should be taken as self-evident.

I believe equality is good for us, so if social mobility results in greater inequality, for me that is bad.

And of course social mobility goes both ways when there are finite resources. It can go downwards. You recognise the need for social safety nets, and I would say that these are both more necessary and harder to supply in a more unequal and ‘socially mobile’ economy. At least that is what is happening in English-speaking countries like mine and yours.

The basic assumption is that we should be able to work our way from poverty to prosperity, but I’m saying that all of us should be kept somewhere roughly between the two.

This is the only reply of currently 40 that tries to honestly answer the question and of course it is down voted. People are not reading this post for honest takes, just gripes about “brainwashing”, “ignorance” and “neoliberal conspiracies.” It’s basically an eco-chamber of grievance. It’s pretty easy to make an argument for any position, and no one else even tried.

I think a lot of people does fine under it. They are also very vocal, because they are in a relative position of power. For example, little bosses in front of a couple of employees will make more noise than their employees regarding capitalism and entrepreneur values, while the employees will basically survive.

same reason they defend religion, indoctrination.

If you believe food comes from a field, you will defend the field. If you believe the food comes from the supermarket, you will defend the supermarket.

They get told all those horror stories about ‘the others’ who hate us for our freedoms and want to rule the world, where they have to work real hard and still can’t afford a house, and the regeeeem is spying on them all the time.
We wouldn’t want to live like that would we?

Because the last 50-100 years of Western political-economic development (especially, but it goes back longer than that to a lesser degree, and is more prevalent in America) has “bourgeoisified” vast swathes of the population, to the extent that there is not even a handful of causes but an entire ecosystem of hundreds of them.

A proletarian is at it’s most basic a person who owns next-to-nothing. The archetypical proletarian rents an apartment, takes public transit, works without a contract, does not own his own tools, and holds no shares in stock. While peasant revolts did occasionally happen, even the minor allowances given to the peasant class in some countries - virtual land ownership; livestock, tool, and vehicle ownership; and a thriving middle class of landholding, employing peasants - were enough to completely neuter revolutionary sentiment among the peasants.

Policies which “buy common people into” the system of Capitalism are what lead them to supporting the system or, at least, opposing its complete dissolution. To avoid writing an entire essay, I’m just going to list some of the policies that I believe contribute to the bourgeoisification of Western workers:

(1). Invested retirement funds instead of pensions

(2). Suburban home ownership

(3). 13% of Americans are part of the employing class

(4). Car culture over usable public transit

(5). Valorization of the “small business owner”

(6). The death of shop-floor Union organizing in favor of “union-as-a-service”

(7). Domination of unions by labor-aristocratic forces, and the resulting ties to liberal political parties

(8). The offloading of economic extraction onto colonized peoples, including so-called “internal colonies” of racial minorities and immigrants, whose political rights are suppressed.

(9). Voter suppression more generally - it is more difficult for poorer people to vote than wealthier people

(10). Control of media, including social media, by the middle and upper classes. You are more likely to see bourgeoise perspectives reflected not only on legacy media but most forms of social media as well (think small business tyrants and their wives posting on NextDoor, Facebook, etc., or “influencers” on youth media).

And so many more reasons.

I haven’t read any theory yet but I’ve heard from other people that under communism, you can still buy and sell goods and services right? Usually capitalists point out that people are naturally greedy so they need to be able to consume goods and accumulate wealth.

You should probably read more, lol.

Decades of intense cultural manipulation and suppression of any pro-communist media. Also, the whole economic base affecting the superstructure thingimajig.

or basically, we da baby and the ruling class are the fisherman:

They don’t even know socialism exists in the US.

Also what you say is more tied to political identity instead of your actual beliefs whether or not the belief falls anywhere close to truth.

They don’t even know socialism exists in the US.

You don’t know that it doesn’t and never has.

Every modern economy is mixed to some degree.

Care to explain the main idea of your inference?

Measuring the percentage of private vs state ownership of the means of production isn’t going to tell you whether that state is a capitalist one or a socialist one. The salient question is, which economic class wields the power of the state to suppress the other class? Socialism isn’t a slider bar, it’s a matter of political power the class war.

Previously:

The US government was never not captured by the bourgeoisie, because the US was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

Here’s my opinion.

Every morning you drive on a road you didn’t build, drop your kids at a school you didn’t found, and trust that if your house catches fire, someone will show up without asking for a credit card first. None of that came from a business looking to profit. It came from all of us chipping in so everyone gets something we couldn’t manage alone.

That’s the basic idea behind socialism: we’re stronger when we pool what we have. And we already live it. When big banks and automakers were about to collapse, the government stepped in with public money to save them. If it’s fine to share the risk for corporations, why is it “radical” to share it for regular people?

So the question isn’t whether we do socialism. We already do. It’s who the leadership is willing to do it for.

That’s the basic idea behind socialism

Not really, no. What you’re describing is the socialization of production.

What you’re describing is fine; it’s not wrong. The issue is that you’re abusing the term “socialism,” which already has a well-defined and widely agreed-upon meaning that is quite different from the one you’re using.

You’re right, the textbook definition is social ownership of the means of production, and “socialized costs” or “public support” would be more precise for what I’m describing. And I don’t think it’s “well-defined and widely agreed-upon.”

Marxists, market socialists, democratic socialists, and libertarian socialists all disagree on what it actually requires, and in everyday US usage it’s commonly used to mean government spending for social programs.

Either way, my point stands: we already collectivize risk and costs for some groups. The real question is who gets that help.

socialism exists in the US

??? are you writing from a parallel universe or is this just “socialism is when the government does stuff”

Are you in the universe where people start sentences with question marks?

Spanish speakers would be pretty surprised to hear that claim.

Uno signo de interrogación de apertura, is different than your freestyle butchery.

It’s a lot simpler than what everyone here is saying tbh. They don’t know what it is. Most of them think capitalism is just markets existing. Or some other random definition they made up in their head. So they’re defending the imaginary version of it that they made up, which of course they like.

In fact the Epstein class wants you to be miseducated about capitalism. They have class consciousness and want that we don’t.

It is worse, most people equate capitalism with the monetary system and get confused how they could buy something without capitalism.

successful brainwashing.

Propaganda and suppression of the left was successful and certain crumbs had to be given in the past decades, currently there’s still enough comfort that many will defend their current status. A comfortable person isn’t going to start asking or rocking the boat, it’s in their interest that the boat is on the steady ride.

Deflection, gaslight and disciplining of those who find themselves in the “have not” becomes a way of comforting yourself that the ride was always within your capability and not dependent on the exterior mechanisms or just plain luck to be born in the lineage of “haves”.

Because the people that “rage against capitalism”, tends to put a lot of rollover effects occurring due to no guardrails. Onto being a fault of capitalism, rather than a fault of government.

We could tax inheritance 100% and most of the rollover issues are gone.

We could provide healthcare, public transportation and many other services. While maintaining a capitalistic based system.

Infinite growth is not a necessity of capitalism, that’s a necessity for consumer franctic societies.

Right now there’s a lot of countries looking towards Scandinavian models, they’re capitalistic by nature and imo still lack guardrails against intergenerational wealth. Inequality is skyrocketing everywhere, but that’s not a fault of capitalism. It will happen in unregulated capitalistic setups, but capitalism is really effective at guiding companies into providing the goods the populations need - And we have not theorised a better system yet.

Capitalism has always sounded great in theory, just the way you described. But in practice it has never worked, it always results in the accumulation of wealth in few hands, who can then use that power to subvert democracy and get their way.

Why do you think inheritance, wealth, etc is taxed too little? Because wealthy elites have abolished and prevented those taxes through lobbying/corruption. Many countries had the exact social democracy model you describe, but abolished and privatized these systems because rich people paid the media and politics to make it happen.

Not to mention this analysis focuses only on material wealth. Capitalism brings with it a complete alienation, communities don’t own their land, people don’t own their work, and everything that was once a common good is slowly commodified and robbed of its soul. Art, music, relationships, capital fijds a way to monetize it eventually. But now we have online shopping and fast food! Hooray, happiness achieved!

we have not theorized a better system yet

That’s an incredibly offensive claim. You just spat in the faces of nearly two centuries worth of academics and thinkers in myriad disciplines that have worked tirelessly, in the face of often violent or even fatal backlash from capital powers, to create and implement alternative concepts. Not to mention humans have experimented with various ways of living together for our entire history before capitalism.

it always results in the accumulation of wealth in few hands, who can then use that power to subvert democracy and get their way.

But that’s not really capitalisms fault. We’ve seen higher degrees of inequalities in socialist countries and feudal economies could be claimed the inequality is a part of the design.

It’s due to a lack of government rules.

Capitalism brings with it a complete alienation, communities don’t own their land, people don’t own their work

It opens up for the possibility of either owning your work or owning the value (wage) of your work. 2 millennia ago, when everyone worked in their own workshops and sold to the market, that was ultimately also a capitalistic economy.

Communities now can own their land, because everything is a commodity. Under other systems, the government, noble or other highly ranked owns the land and leases it out - We could argue that’s still happening under capitalism, through property taxes.

I’m curious if you can expand on the alienation.

That’s an incredibly offensive claim

Yet you’re not highlighting any, because capitalism is a tad too efficient. The alterations we seek out to do, does not stop capitalism; Just changes the goals of it and the late stage setup to move more power/capital back to the people.

Capitalism includes the capitalist state, which is why these supposed guardrails do not exist. Further, capitalism with guardrails still has fundamental problems like the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, crisis of overproduction due to an inability to be coherently planned, not to mention surplus value exploitation leading to enshittification and all the problems with the profit motive.

crisis of overproduction due to an inability to be coherently planned

Is your claim planned economy is better? Because history shows planned economies tends to underproduce on necessities.

not to mention surplus value exploitation leading to enshittification

There’s still issues of people skimming, but because essential monopolies has been created historically. No one has others to buy from, so enshittification has no way to be challenged.

Capitalism is just really effective at sending signals back, as it hurts every part of the chain if the seller can’t sell their goods.

The one socialist society that almost succeeded their market, but USA unfortunately fucked them hi Latam, essentially build market signals into their models and wasn’t centrally planned.

like the tendency for the rate of profit to fall,

And why isn’t this a positive? Goods being traded at the cost to produce. Not at some random markup, just because.

Planned economy is better once highly developed productive forces are achieved, and history shows that planned economies dramatically expanded production as compared to what came before. Rather than underperforming, the USSR was one of the fastest growing economies on the planet during its existence, while never once facing a crisis of overproduction:

The DPRK also outperformed the ROK until the ROK was flooded with western investment, and this was further hampered by the dissolution of the USSR. Today, however, the DPRK is steadily progressing (largely based on increased arms sales, such as to the Russian Federation), while the ROK appears to be in crisis.

Markets serve a progressive role historically when they stitch together disconnected production into production on a national and international scale. However, once they reach the national level, they quickly lose any amount of progressive quality and immediately become an impediment to further progress. At this point, planned economy becomes far better. This isn’t a binary either, socialist countries like China leverage planned economy for their large firms and key industries, and marketize underdeveloped sectors.

Surplus value exploitation is not merely people “skimming.” Capitalist profits come from exploitation of labor, paying workers less than the actual value they create. Ownership does not create value, labor does. Further, the fact that the monopoly stage has been reached does not mean we can work backwards, with monopoly scale comes technologies and productive techniques that can only be employed by monopolies. This is why markets lose their progressive character to planned economy as monopolies form, as planned production can make much better use of the scale developed by markets.

As for the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, it leads to crisis of profitability and economic collapse. This is a key force behind what turns monopoly capitalism into its imperialist stage, as capitalists chase increased absolute profits through market expansion to fight this. If they can establish an absolute monopoly globally, they can then price fix as they please, accelerating enshittification.

that’s not really capitalism’s fault

Inequality is baked into capitalism the same way it is in feudalism. Capitalism is literally based on the idea of a two-class society, capital owners and labourers. Social democracy is just the attempt to curb raw capitalism, but the inequality in capitalism is not a side-effect, it’s a core feature.

2 millenia ago, when everyone worked in their workshops and sold to the market, that was ultinately a capitalist economy

No it wasn’t, and also, not even close to everybody did that. The world economy was far more diverse back then, and selling your labor to a capital owner for a wage would have been a pretty wild concept pretty much anywhere.

I’m curious if you can expand on the alienation

Sure! It’s a long topic with books dedicated to it, but here’s two small factors briefly touched on: 1. your workplace is owned by somebody else and you don’t have a say 2. Commodification of culture and third spaces means that everything becomes a transaction

you’re not highlighting any

There’s a long long list, but market socialism or syndicalism might be most interesting for you to look up first. Basically the small step of making companies owned by their workers, while conserving markets.

The major problem here is that you aren’t looking at the system in its totality, and this leads you to make false conclusions. The reason capitalism cannot work and truly have guardrails is because the state is not a neutral entity, it belongs to whoever the ruling class of society is and takes on a definite form. Scandinavian countries are imperialist, relying on unequal exchange, and this is how they at least pacify their working class.

The solution is socialism. Workers already run the world, we should own it too.

Workers already run the world, we should own it too.

Cooperatives is the solution you’re looking for, and I agree. They work within capitalism.

Let workers inherit companies and you have the best of both worlds.

it belongs to whoever the ruling class of society is and takes on a definite form

And why can the majority not be the ruling class?

Scandinavian countries are imperialist

Two centuries ago, fair. Now? Not really, it does however benefit from knowledge transfer due to third world citizens seeking universities in richer countries.

Cooperatives are not the solution. They retain all of the core problems with capitalism, such as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, class distinctions, the inherent chaos of markets, the inability to be coherently planned, and all of the major issues with producing for exchange, rather than use. Socialism is the answer, collective ownership at a societal level, not at the level of individual cells.

The majority can become the ruling class, but it must do so by creating a state in its own class interest. A capitalist state isn’t a state that happens to govern capitalism, it’s a specific form of state that exists exclusively with capitalism. Likewise, socialist states are their own specific forms.

Scandinavian countries are imperialist today. They all depend on super-exploiting the global south, through mechanisms like neocolonialism and unequal exchange. Monopoly finance capital expands outwards and preys on the overexploited countries. Systems like the IMF and NATO help maintain this system of international plunder. The bulk of what people in Scandinavia consume does not come from the sweat of their own brows, but through the labor of global south workers.

It makes sense. Most people have no idea about most of it. You have stuff. You buy and sell stuff. Ezpz.

Any alternative is demonised and fought about and undermined and misinformation’d.

I think it’s the propaganda of the billionaire-owned media companies. Also, factory owners, landlords and and the greedy ( a small percentage of all the humans) keep the lie alive for obvious reasons.

You probably interact mostly with people living in the west. Most of us in the western world live on significantly more resources than the global average. True equality on the scale of the whole planet means most of us lose our standard of living. If you do it on the basis of just one country, then that creates an incentive for people capable of earning more money in another country, to move to that country. To deal with that, you need to ban people from leaving the country and…

It’s easy to see why communism tends to work best as a dictatorship. You need to use violence to keep the people in line, otherwise they’ll want more than their fair share. Free markets (especially the labor market, being able to choose your own job is pretty nice) give people a sense of agency, even if it’s misplaced.

I saw something really interesting the other day…

In our society, being good or bad depends on your net worth. If you’re rich, you are good. If you’re poor you’re bad.

Poor people know they can’t be good by being rich. They actually never even interact with actual rich people. Classes don’t really interact with each other in our society.

But what they get access to is the rich man’s ideology. Or what they think rich people are (what they actually see is the petit bourgeoisie, the lower capitalist class. Their bosses are the lower rung of the capitalists. Or the upper rung of the working class. Small business owners, management etc).

But the poor can at least be on the same team as the rich, fight for the same things, and in that way at least be on the “good side”.

They try to approximate goodness by ideology. They try to get closer to “good” by fighting in the name of the “good people”.

Then of course the actual rich people defend capitalism because it’s beneficial to them, materially.

Because of ideological reproduction (educational systems, media and political discourses) which all normalize capitalist (and materialist, dualist, etc.) worldviews. There’s a lot at stake in defending this as it is the basis of people’s identity and how they construe meaning in life (through work, career, status, consumption). Colonialism has also been an effective project in destroying other worldviews and political systems and labeling them as primitive, backwards, etc.

I think there is a big discrepancy between what Captialism is defined as, what Capitalism actually is, and the ‘Spirit of Capitalism’ that a lot of folks buy into.

‘The Spirit’ is the idealistic bit. Competition breeding innovation. The better the service/product, the more successful you can be. Classic American Dream stuff.

In reality, its a race to the bottom where all principles and values are eschewed for profit.

Kinda like Communism where what it Should be or what it Could be are different than what we get in practice. And any given person is going to be thinking about it from a different lens, so you get delusional, idealistic, cynical, and occasionally reasonable takes all talking about the ‘same but entirely different’ thing.

Capitalism just had better PR.

Communism isn’t really “different in practice,” people just confuse the socialist stage with the highly developed communist stage and judge past/present socialism against far-future communism.

Fair enough. Point stands that people don’t understand these terms, have different understandings of them, and are therefore almost never on the same page.

Just like ‘liberal’ means very different things to different people. Conservatives say its like they’re far left revolutionaries. Actual Leftists view them as Conservative lite. And a lot of in-between.

As a communist, to me this just means that we need to continue educating the working class on a proper and aligned understanding. The biggest strength of the working class is our numbers, and the best way to utilize mass is with unity and direction.

No doubt. Propaganda is just wild. Kindness and Unity are woke afterall.

I was born into the US and was a liberal for most of my life. I can explicitly tell you why so many of my countrypeoples defend capitalism:

Because they have the political education of an infant. You are told from a young age by everyone you trust that communism is bad and you never EVER get told the truth.

What’s left is an infinitesimal number of people with both the requisite curiosity and social opportunity to break out of liberal thinking. Most people are ingrained and never challenged their entire lives.

The incentives for supporting capitalism and rejecting communism are powerful and alluring in this country. But it is not an excuse. The books are out there. You absolutely must read.

Because they benefited from the exploitation of the global south

Because capitalists can afford all of the bot farms and media adds.

It really makes you actually understand the whole, “the revolution will not be televised”

People fear change and the unknown. That makes one cling to whatever is familiar, even if it’s causing suffering. It takes effort to zoom out, see the big picture and how many problems can be traced back to capitalism.

In the US specifically, capitalism has been taught as the only way towards success. This has happened for decades, at least. It is deeply engrained in that society.

When capitalism fails, as has been apparent so many times lately, it is blamed on something else. And as the excuses run out, the scapegoats get more and more inventive.

That’s one reason why the current administration wants to you blame immigrants for everything: because it buys more time for the capitalists to make more money and shift the narrative again.

conditioning

Decades of totalizing propaganda, along with merciless suppression of alternatives.

What’s capitalism?

Hi, I am probably one of the few right-libertarian capitalists on Lemmy (I love FOSS!). I’m also a former employee of the Foundation for Economic Education, one of the oldest libertarian institutions dedicated to explaining capitalism. I will do my best to give a big picture answer to your question, but it’s such a huge topic so feel encouraged to ask follow ups (in good faith please).

First of all, different people define capitalism different ways. When it’s proponents defend it, what we mean is a system of free markets and free enterprise based on a system of property rights. An essential part of this is the allocation of capital through investment, with profit and loss signals directing this capital. We don’t mean rich people trampling on the property rights of poor people; we would call this “corporatism” or “crony capitalist.” The current United States economy has capitalism in some areas, but corporatism in many others.

We believe that capitalism leads to the best possible outcomes for the most people. This doesn’t mean that its outcomes are perfect, or that there are zero people who get left behind (there certainly are), but that compared to all other existing possible systems, it is the best on a relative basis. Yes the rich get richer, but the poor also get richer relative to where they were in generations past (and, on average, over the course of their own individual lifespan). We also believe that capitalism is the most moral system in that it respects individual rights, or which a core part of this are their property rights. Systems that initiate force against peaceful people to take from some and redistribute to others violate people’s individual rights. This doesn’t mean that we oppose charity or don’t want to help people, we very much do, but that we see the initiation of force as a moral wrong in that pursuit.

We believe that capitalism is the only system that can lead to a consistent and rising quality of life for the masses for many reasons, but perhaps the biggest is the free price system. Prices being allowed to move through supply and demand, rather than being set by central planners, are necessary for the efficient allocation of scarce resources to their most needed ends. Without this, economic dysfunction is inevitable. (This is known as the Economic Calculation Problem or the Knowledge Problem, and the landmark essays in the history of economics that discuss it are Ludwig Von Mises’s “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” and F.A. Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”)

We know this to be true on a theoretical basis, but empirically looking historically and cross-culturally, we see that societies with more capitalism consistently outperform those with less capitalism. We see China’s economy dramatically advance by switching to an overwhelmingly capitalist mode of production, and economies that switch to socialist/communist mode of production stagnate and induce starvation and suffering. We don’t see the authoritarianism of communist nations as merely an accident of history, but as the necessary result of trying to force an impossible economic system to continue through its failure.

Capitalism, as we see it, requires a legal order that protects property rights (whether this legal order must come from government or not distinguishes “anarcho-capitalists” from “minarchists” who believe a small limited government is necessary). We do not believe that companies should be allowed to pollute other people’s property or cause damages to them, yet in a proper legal order we do not believe regulation is necessary to achieve this either. Instead, a system of common law and torts require damages to be paid to those whose rights are violated, with these damages to outweigh the benfits to corporations from taking such actions, thus incentivizing them not to engage in the rights violations to begin with. In our current system, corporations work with governments to regulate themselves out of such liability (this is called “regulatory capture”), which we oppose.

I’ve written a lot but only just touched the surface. With more narrow questions, I can provide more specific answers.

I have to admit, Lemmy is so politically uniform that I kinda welcome something else.

Question: how do libertarian capitalists expect to combat corporatism? If anything, capital has a tendency to grow or die, and economies of scale along with vertical integration dictate higher survivability and profits of larger businesses vs smaller. And so, corporate structures appear again. What can be used to prevent it?

Also, if you allow me to comment on some of the key points raised…

The rich get richer, but the poor also get richer

One of the most common criticisms of late-stage capitalism is exactly that poor do not get richer anymore.

For example, here are nominal and inflation-adjusted median household incomes in the US: ALT3245

Considering that inflation metrics count the whole economy, and not particularly basics like housing (which went through the roof and yet accounts for a huge share of expenses in a median and especially poor household), it’s not unreasonable to assume poor people are worse off than they were 20 years before.

Prices being allowed to move through supply and demand, rather than being set by central planners, are necessary for the efficient allocation of scarce resources to their most needed ends.

The socialist criticism is that “most profitable” and “most needed” are two different things. Suppose you made a meal, and offer it to a millionaire and a broke homeless individual. Most likely, the latter will need it more, but won’t be able to pay for it as much as the former.

We see China’s economy dramatically advance by switching to an overwhelmingly capitalist mode of production

And we see USSR economy skyrocketing after socialists came to power. And yes, extreme growth went way beyond New Economic Policy.

What we need to look for here, if we must be honest, is externalities. China switching to a more capitalist mode was net benefit because it enabled global trade as opposed to relative economic isolation. One of the main issues dragging socialist economies behind was that, being formed mostly of a few countries tilted into extreme poverty by previous regimes, they never got to access the same volume of trade and capital investment as their capitalist counterparts. When even these markets started to crumble through the Cold War, China had little other options.

USSR, on the other end, started on a low enough point that first advancements were relatively easy and investments paid off rather quickly. And, of course, there’s gulag, too.

Well, the wealth gap between rich and poor people nowadays is higher than it was a the time of the French Revolution (we still refer to Marie Antoinette’s “why don’t they eat cake” as a despicable blindness of an ultra-wealthy person to the condition of the world she inhabits, but the rich today are far, far more removed from those who try to survive without having their basic needs met and that removal its just accepted by most or even idolized by some).

How, if this is the state of the world today and as you said, the protection of property is the de facto leading legal principle of a society under capitalism, can the immense wealth that has been accumulated by all of us working (seen or unseen) in this system but is manifesting itself as the property of a select few be considered a consistent rise in the quality of life of the masses? Isn’t it true that the planet is dying because capitalism can only work in a world with unlimited resources, which is not ours? That the number of armed conflict is the highest since WW2, because this is capitalism’s answer to realizing this planet’s resources are not unlimited? That fascism is on the rise again because a society without discrimination would not work for a capitalist economy that needs people who have to do underpaid, life-threatening work or right out forced labor so that companies can join the free market with a competitive price (the holocaust btw happened under capitalism and many companies e.g. VW got big because they relied on detainees from the labor camps to give their lives working for them)? That the low birth rate in many countries puts women’s bodily autonomy in danger, because capitalism needs a stable influx of new people to join the workforce (and the military, see above) and if this is not a given, because nobody who isn’t rich can afford children and keep their current living standard anymore, measures will be put in place to enforce a stable birthrate in the future?

A rising living standard for the masses is an outdated, ideological assumption about capitalism.

There’s a lot that’s fundamentally wrong with this comment, but I think I can hit the core pretty narrowly. You cannot disentangle capitalism from the state, the capitalist state is not outside of capitalism but is instead a core function of it. Corporatism and cronyism are not in opposition to capitalism, they are a later stage in capitalist development, as compared to earlier capitalism when markets are highly underdeveloped and instead very decentralized and anarchic.

You also have a deeply moralist analysis, not a materialist, logical analysis. There is nothing inherently good about private property rights, and justifying the theft of surplus value on the basis that it is already common practice and would require violence in the form of revolution to change it is a moralist argument. It is just as easy to say that the everyday violence of theft of surplus value is a violent attack on working people, who create all new value. We must make scientific, materialist arguments, not simply rely on emotional soundbites.

You also ignore imperialism as a function of capitalism as it develops. The expansionist nature of capitalism causes it to dominate developing countries, where a share of the spoils are used to uplift the imperial working class. This is why the poor often get richer in developed capitalist economies, not because capitalism lifts all, but because developed capitalist economies shift their greatest contradictions to the international scale.

When you move on to socialism, you are entirely wrong. For example, the marketization in China is found in their developing industries, where markets do play a progressive role. However, in their developed and critical industries, China uses central planning. This is because planned economies overtake marketization when production advances to the national and international scale. It isn’t a binary planned/market distinction that socialists advocate for, it’s instead looking at the level of development of the productive forces and using the correct method accordingly.

Monopolies are an inevitable result of capitalism, because as technology improves, it requires more input to maintain. We cannot simply break up monopoly without inefficiently destroying productive forces in the process. This is where cronyism and corporatism, as you describe it, come in. Socialism and planned economy solves these problems by using the developed productive forces according to scientific planning, which is far more efficient at this scale (and is why China is doing so much better than capitalist economies).

Even more totally planned economies like the USSR saw some of the most rapid economic growth on the planet. They did not introduce starvation, they took overwhelmingly backward societies and brought them at and beyond their peers in rapid time. Life expectancy doubled between Tsarism and socialism in a matter of decades. Famine, while common in Tsarist Russia, was eliminated by 1935 outside of wartime. GDP growth was extremely rapid, all without running into crisis of overproduction or falling profitability:

You write a lot about what you “oppose” about capitalism, but without a coherent understanding of the totality of the system, you are reduced to unactionable moral platitudes, rather than concrete actions that can be taken. You remove the state from the economy and pretend it can be made to work both in the interests of the people as a whole while also shrinking, despite the fact that capitalists prop up and dominate the state as a co-evolutionary process.

The solution is socialism. Planned economy for developed industry, marketization limited to developing industry, and as all industry develops, transition to full planning to a collective and scientific aim.

Hi. It is hard to give too much of a response to this, because you have ignored the definition of capitalism that I stated and instead responded based on a different one. If you wanted to argue that the definition of capitalism I stated inherently leads to imperialism, cronyism, and all the rest of what you’ve posited, so be it, but you have not actually made an argument for why it does so, and I certainly wouldn’t agree that it does.

A couple points though:

1. My argument presumes a moral position that individuals have rights that should be respected, a position that can be argued on either deontological or consequentialist grounds. It also presumes that society getting more prosperous is a good thing. I think 99% of people agree with both these claims. I can suggest many philosophers who have made the argument that there is something “inherently good” about this perspective at length, all with differing justifications. You can look at Michael Huemer (The Problem of Political Authority), Hayek (Law, Liberty & Legislation, and Consitution of Liberty), Murray Rothbard (Ethics of Liberty), Ayn Rand (many books), Robert Nozick (Anarchy, Statt, & Utopia), and there are many more.

2. The entire Marxist argument falls apart for me as soon as you say “Surplus Value.” There is no such thing. The concepts assumes both the false Labor Theory of Value, which is accepted by virtually no modern economists, and also assumes that there is no value provided via entrepreneurship and capital allocation, which is false. Entrepreneurship and capital allocation are both vital to a prosperous functioning economy in which all classes of people gain wealth, and are economically rewarded as such.

3. Imperialism is directly at odds with capitalism how I have defined it, which is how advocates of capitalism see it (when I say “advocates,” I don’t mean some random Republican politician or voter trying to make things that don’t fit together fit, but serious economists and philosophers who understand and support capitalism). It is inherently a violation of property rights, which is essential to have a system that can be called capitalist. If it is imperialist, it is by definition not capitalism.

4. Neither China or the United States is purely capitalist/socialist or centralized/decentralized, both are mixed economies, but China is drastically more capitalist and decentralized then it was a few decades ago, a period of time in which the nation moved from famine to prosperity. See Ronald Coase’s book How China Became Capitalist which discusses the specific capitalist reforms China undertook and how those directly caused increased standards of living for Chinese people.

5. I believe you are simply wrong about the ability of planned economies to function. Please see Ludwig Von Mises’s Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth for the canonical argument on this. It’s a short easy read, and available for free from the Mises Institute. Yes the Soviet Union had a period of industrialization which led to a strong increase in wealth, but this period did not last, and to the extent that period succeeded it required the ability to piggyback off the prices set in the West in free economies. Without that, any functioning central economic planning at all would have been impossible.

You misunderstand, just because you can describe something does not mean that it’s a useful or accurate description. Debating the correctness and accuracy of how we define systems and structures is core to socioeconomic debate, because without definitions that accurately describe the world and its processes, we are left with fantasy. I explained why your definition was incorrect, and responded to these weaknesses. Nevertheless, I’ll address your points directly.

1. Moralism is not a base for scientific consensus. I already addressed the inherent failures of this form of argumentation. You even open yourself up for counter by saying “society getting more prosperous is a good thing,” when it is capitalism that is holding back common prosperity by funneling the wealth of society into the hands of a few. We must make our analysis based on materialism, on scientific fact, not the vague idea that stopping wage slavery is wrong because it requires force.

2. You are taking an incredibly eurocentric and chauvanist claim by saying “no modern economist believes in surplus value.” Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, and many more economists vehemontly disagree with you. Some of the most respected economists on the world stage are Chinese, such as Cheng Enfu. At best, your point is purely ignorant, at worst it’s racist. In any case, management of capital is labor, but ownership itself does not create value. All new value comes from labor, be it managerial or not, and the portion of the day workers labor for means beyond their own wages is the surplus that forms the basis of profits.

3. This is, frankly, naive. The version of capitalism you advocate for is not a real thing, and does not exist. You are moving from the realm of fact to the realm of utopianism. Just because you are uncomfortable with the inevitable consequences of marketization and private property relations does not mean you get to hide by defining them away. It is a simple, proven fact that in the real world, when markets progress, they trend towards monopolization. When they reach the boundaries of the national scale, they seek new markets internationally, which allows them to leverage their advanced position to exploit developing countries. This is capitalism as it actually exists. Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism is a short article going over how this system came to be and evolved in the modern day.

4. China did not take on “capitalist reforms.” China marketized underdeveloped industries, as the material base of marketization is decentralized production. For industries of a national scale and critical importance, China maintains dominance and planned economy. This is Marxist economics. See Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Concise Guide for a basic, entry-level explanation that requires no background in Marxist economics. China is a socialist economy, in the primary stage. The US is a capitalist economy as it is dominated by private capital even at the national and international scale. See the aforementioned Cheng Enfu’s handy diagram:

5. Mises is a clown that was disproven the second socialism began outperforming capitalist economies. The Soviet Union, despite being largely a siege economy, was again one of the most rapidly developing countries in history. Trying to attribute their successes to pilfering from the west is, again, chauvanist at worst and ignorant at best, and in any case would require an enormous level of proof on your part that you neglected to provide. Soviet economic planning avoided the crisis of overproduction and the crisis of profitability that shook the capitalist world, proving that they were independent from their problems. The economic calculation problem was invented by a clown, before the invention of computers. For an explanation, see Towards a New Socialism, which explains potential economic planning beyond price. You could even skip the book and just read Cockshott’s WordPress article on socialist computation.

Overall, I’m disappointed. You presented yourself as something of an expert, but you don’t even pretend to entertain essential functions of traditional debate like discussing definitions, you just take the definitions as a given. This is hardly taken seriously even by mainstream liberal economists.

(Side note on Cockshott, massive transphobe, unfortunately. His work on cybernetics is valuable, but his overall Marxist knowledge should be taken with heavy grains of salt due to his fundamentally incorrect understanding of dialectical materlaism).

Short answer: people are dumb and gullible

It feeds many.

It starves many despite producing more than enough for everyone.

Three big reasons:

1. Capitalism thrives on the promise of social elevation. You can become billionaire too, you know. And many are willing to sacrifice their living standards for the hope of making it big, however unlikely the latter is.

2. Capitalism is a current economic system in the majority of places, and most people are afraid of the change. They’d rather maintain the status quo - this is why, for example, socialist countries had majority of the population supporting socialism - not because they got enlightened to its potential, but because they already lived under it.

3. Privately owned media. Most people get their information from the corporate platforms, which, being owned by wealthy individuals benefitting heavily from capitalism, obviously downplay the horrors of capitalism and exacerbate issues of socialism. It is them who propel the “hope” narrative (see point 1) and thwart any serious attempts to popularise socialism. Even if you manage to host socialist media on socialist platforms and outplaying the algorithms, good luck getting corporate funding to make quality content with high level of reach when your platform is anti-corporate.

Capitalism is easy to understand. You do something and you get something - even if you cheat by “outsmarting” someone else. The reward is tied to your actions. Like doggy treats. At no point is it revealed that your effort might be worth more than you get. This doesn’t matter because it appears as a direct transaction. Work = pay. It’s not though, but that’s what it appears like to anyone who doesn’t think further than to getting their paycheck.

Socialism disconnects the transactions. Roughly put, the work that everyone puts into the system is used to pay out to everyone. You’re no longer working directly for the hand that feeds you.

Like many places elsewhere, Denmark has social security system that sort of works like this. Everyone pays taxes and the pool of money is distributed to those who needs it, based on all kinds of things other than what people paid into the system themselves. It disconnects the effort and the payout.

This has good and bad effects in comparison to capitalism. A bad thing is that people who don’t understand the larger picture will still look at it from a transactional point of view. Suddenly they think they deserve to get free money, and start making up their own explanations of why. They’ll also look at it as a zero sum game, where they believe that if anyone else gets something then they must also have the same or else they’d feel that other people take more than they deserve. All kinds of racism and fasicm grows in those capitalistic arguments when applied to a social system.
The good thing though is that they’re actually right in saying that they deserve more even if they don’t contribute. Everyone deserves more than nothing from a system. It’s possible, because it’s not a zero sum game. It raises the lower bar, and keeps more people healthy and thus capable of producing more.

There’s this quote “a greatness of a nation can be measured by how it treats the poorest”. It’s a mis-quote, but it’s true. Capitalism can not achieve the same when there’s no lower boundary to poverty. It will still have the costs of sickness, homelessness and poverty even if it tries not to pay for it by closing their eyes. A socialist system is the key the solving this. So maybe we do sometimes pay people who doesn’t deserve it, but it’s still cheaper than to have to pay for the costs of the problems in capitalism.

Socialism is not welfare, nor is capitalism any form of doing something in favor of a reward. Your metaphor, I feel, does a disservice to understanding each.

Go ahead then. Tell like it is. In words that people understand.

Capitalism is a system where capital owners dominate the state and the commanding heights of the economy, socialism is a system where workers dominate the state and the commanding heights of the economy. Any confusion of welfare for socialism implies that systems where capitalists are the dominant force is still socialist if it gives welfare, but existing social democracies that follow this model depend on exploiting the global south to prop up this welfare while maintaining capitalist profits.