EDIT: LOL, downvoted faster than the post could have been read, with zero rebuttals. Achievement unlocked: KICK HORNET’S NEST.
(America-centric post because that’s where I’ve spent my 54-years and know the most about.)
Capitalism ain’t the problem. Capitalism for the economy and democracy for the government is the best we humans have figured out. Problem being, money has been funneled to the top. The top took our vote via lack of education, media control, and union breaking, and their power has been snowballing for the last 20-40 years. Now we’re too ignorant and misled to vote in our own best interests, no unions to back us. We’re seeing the end game, the end game of any unregulated system.
Said many times, almost every evil of capitalism gets nullified when the government disallows and breaks monopolies and megacorps. Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, argued vehemently against monopolies. Couldn’t find a succinct quote because he explained the evils in depth. Sorry, no sound bite for this one.
Having grown up in the 70s and 80s, I am stunned by what is allowed. A handful of corporations own and control our health, food, entertainment, news, banking, everything. Education is the one thing that’s not wholly corporate, and the oligarchs have had that sector in their sights for decades.
And they’re not after education merely to skim more money. Education in history, math, critical thinking, current affairs, is how they can be beaten. FFS, we’re repeating the mistakes of exactly a century ago, people can’t figure when back-of-the-napkin math doesn’t make sense and can’t tell when they’re being conned. I see the latter items on lemmy, daily.
Stumping for socialism? Well, the Soviet Union failed mighty fucking hard. “But that wasn’t true socialism!” And capitalism isn’t what you are experiencing now. In neither case does the name fit the theory. North Korea’s official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Oh, and they’re “socialist”. Want to model their system?
“But socialism gives workers the power!” As the great socialist Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Coal miners aren’t organizing to stop fossil fuels, and neither are roustabouts. Were those the workers you imagined handing power? How about insurance company employees who would be out of a job with universal health care?
We can’t let workers vote for bread and circuses. Capitalists compete amongst themselves. That competition works for everyone, as long as unions are the brake pads on that train. We took the brakes off and blamed the train conductor wanting to go fast. Well, that’s his job in this poor metaphor, hope it comes across.
Blaming capitalism is as naive as saying, “Trump did this!” We can acheive nothing but backlash from ignorant supporters. Instead say, “The GOP did this!” (politically) and “The billionaires did this!” (economically). Words matter if you want to win hearts and minds.
How about insurance company employees who would be out of a job with universal health care?
What about all of the manual weavers put out of work by the power loom?
This happens with advancement. Grow up. “Someone might lose a job” is a terrible reason to perpetuate a murderous system.
This is a terrible example by OP. Why can’t those individuals simply move to the public sector after health insurance companies are eradicated?
You not blaming capitalism is exceptionally stupid. VERY stupid when you say, “problem being, money has been funneled to the top”.
You don’t know what capitalism is, because that is THE EXACT PURPOSE of capitalism: Take earned money from the workers and keep it away from them.
Things got this way because of fools like you thinking capitalism isn’t that funneling of money. It’s the root of the corruption you’re whining about. The rich wouldn’t own the government if they didn’t have so much money that they cannot be competed with and can wantonly lobby (bribe) and overtly bribe politicians.
Name your economic system that does not funnel money to the top. I’ll wait patiently.
Capitalism is to be restrained by democracy. That’s rather the thrust of the whole post. Did you not read it? If you did, what parts did you disagree with? Because it sounds like you’re reacting to the headline and not the content.
Never heard of socialism or communism? Never heard of worker coops? Never heard of simply distributing out the fucking money people earned to the people wbo earned it?
Your problem is you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about in the first place.
A system that requires heavy adversarial regulation is not an inherently good system, yet all you dumbfucks think it’s magically the best.
Look dude, I spent half an hour laying out my reasoning. Can you do better than a quick rant with some of your favorite words thrown in?
How does socialism or communism solve these ills? How is a worker co-op any different than the unions I was promulgating? Co-ops do indeed excel on a small scale, but can they scale up to 350,000,000 people? How does that work?
Can you name a system, economic or political that does not require heavy adversarial regulation? How does that work when hundreds of millions of apes want their piece of the pie, and many want far more? You can’t change human nature, that’s off the table.
Answer these questions or I’m assuming you have no real input. You sound like a man at the town meeting screaming, “This shit should be better!”, with no new ideas or a map forward.
I will respectfully listen to your ideas. I will not listen to, “you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about”.
How does that work when hundreds of millions of apes want their piece of the pie, and many want far more? You can’t change human nature, that’s off the table.
Actually, the anthropological evidence directly contradicts this. Humans evolved as a cooperative species - we survived because we shared resources and worked together, not because we out-greeded each other. Hunter-gatherers actively discouraged hoarding. Modern behavioral economics confirms this: people reject unfair offers even when it costs them money, and babies show fairness instincts before they’re even socialized.
We’re not wired for pure greed. We’re conditionally cooperative - which traits dominate depends heavily on incentive structures and context.
On specifics:
Worker co-ops vs unions: Unions negotiate but don’t control decisions. Co-ops give workers actual ownership and decision-making power. The incentive structure fundamentally shifts - you’re not negotiating who’s maximizing quarterly returns, you or distant shareholders, you’re making decisions for your own workplace long-term.
Scale: Mondragon Corporation in Spain has 80,000+ worker-owners. Not 350M, but proves it works beyond small scale. You’d likely need a mix - co-ops, strong unions, public options for infrastructure, maybe some small scale traditional firms.
Regulation: Every system needs enforcement - agreed. The question is what we regulate and who has power. Currently we heavily regulate workers (what they can organize, strike over) while giving capital tremendous freedom. Why not flip that?
Concrete steps that aren’t utopian:
- Mandatory worker board representation (Germany already does this)
- Union sectoral bargaining instead of company-by-company
- Tax incentives for employee ownership
- Actually enforce antitrust laws
But at that point is this even still capitalism? Worker co-ops replace private property with shared property - workers collectively own the enterprise, but only while they work there. You can’t inherit it, can’t be an absentee owner collecting dividends. You can’t just hoard the labour of somebody else for eternity. When you leave, your stake goes to the remaining workers. That’s fundamentally different from capitalist property relations, even if markets still exist. Call it market socialism, economic democracy, or just a shared property economy - the label matters less than recognizing you’ve changed something foundational, not just tweaked regulations.
So yeah your union idea is solid, but history clearly shows unions gradually lose ground without structural power. The ownership question - who actually controls the enterprise - might be the key.
And personally I wouldn’t call it capitalism if capitalists aren’t the ones who own everything.
Ok, I’ll bite, then. I am not an economist, but I think about it in 3 ways:
- If you had a company, but all you ever did was take profit from the company, and never reinvested that money back into it, that company would fail. The examples for this are numerous. The nation is a company that we all work for. If a handful of “owners” skim all the profits without a certain amount of reinvestment, our nation will not survive.
Even worse than skimming the profits, the oligarchs are stashing them overseas, i.e. the Panama Papers.
Even worse than hoarding wealth overseas, the oligarchs pay less taxes than illegal immigrants.
None of these things will ever change under capitalism because the oligarchs have achieved regulatory capture. This is a well-known, but maybe less obvious result of capitalism.
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Commodifying basic needs is unethical. It is well-agreed that capitalism can find efficiencies in non-essential goods and services. But a significant amount of value in capitalism comes from failed businesses, or what I call “buying things a discount”. This process is indefensible when it comes to food, housing, healthcare, education, other than the “Charlie Kirk defense”, i.e. some people will have to die so other people can be selfish assholes.
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Capitalists are destroying the planet because their focus is on profit, not sustainability or general welfare.
Capitalism as an idea is dangerous because it elevates the rich. We have a social paradigm that the rich are better or smarter, or know something we don’t. Until we destroy the idea that profit is King, we will never overcome the above failures or create a society that prioritizes general welfare.
Hopefully this is a thoughtful response you were looking for.
Good unpopular opinion!
The goal of capitalism is maximizing capital. What happens in society then is that human well-being comes second after capital maximizing. Yes, it is uncontested that capitalism has improved global human well-being. GDP growth is very obviously correlated with increase in human well-being. But correlation does not imply causation. If the goal were to maximize human well-being first and have capital come second, the outcomes would be different.
One criticism of capitalism that is ignored is that it was the 19th-20th century discovery of super-low entropy energy sources that were incorporated into production that has lead to such rapid growth in technological advances and efficiency. Within neoclassical economic models oil is considered a substitute for capital (which is infinite), not as a limited natural resource that provides energy that allows production to take place.
And so, as capitalism chugs on and on in society, burning more and more oil will continue to generate more and more capital, growth will go up and up and finally after all of that human well-being will go up and up. There is no endgame there, what happens when oil runs out? Or when there is too much CO2 in the atmosphere for human well-being to be sustained on earth?
If the goal changes from capital maximizing to human well-being maximizing then there is an endgame, to ensure
surethat human well-being (infinite?) is always sustained on earth. Increasing capital can come after that instead.It’s called unpopular opinion not objectively wrong opinion.
Upvoted according to sub rules, but wow what a shit take.
Capitalists compete amongst themselves. That competition works for everyone, as long as unions are the brake pads on that train. We took the brakes off and blamed the train conductor wanting to go fast. Well, that’s his job in this poor metaphor, hope it comes across.
Okay, but here’s the thing: This system is not in equilibrium. When you have workers and owners in a permanent tug of war, eventually someone is going to win and when they do they’ll either secure their position as the winner or let the other side recover and repeat it all again. What’s going on in the modern West is specifically that; the owner class won the tug of war in the 80s and went to work ensuring they’d never need to play that game again. They took a system that was not in equilibrium and pushed it towards their own preferred equilibrium, and as you can probably tell that equilibrium fucking sucks.
In my mind, the problem is hierarchy, whether it be in corporations or government. It must be limited as much as possible in any system. Capitalism is inherently hierarchical though. The billionaires have so much money now, they can bribe every powerful politician that’s not exceptionally principled, and control how people see the world through media. Even that Teamsters leader is acting like he’s getting some sort of kickback now; supporting the GOP.
Remember everyone: upvote for unpopular. This one should have 100k upvotes.
This is the popular opinion though. Maybe not on lemmy, but absolutely in the country
Yes, but we’re on lemmy, not FaceBook. I expect more nuanced and intelligent discourse.
It’s not an unpopular thought, that’s the problem
I’ll take both the upvotes and downvotes, but yes, in the spirit of the comm, I should be the most popular guy on lemmy ATM. 😂
Joking aside, I really don’t care about the votes. I want serious engagement, arguments, tell me why I’m wrong. I learn a great deal that way, no interest in being told I’m right. (OK, you can tell me I’m right, but you have to add something to the conversation.)
I feel our core problem today is concentration of wealth and power. I think many layman calls this concentration and abuse capitalism in the same way that many people call any kind of social service communism.
Now, I personally believe that this is the end result of capitalism due to regulatory capture, and that capitalism is inherently unstable without a resilient regulatory framework to keep the system working. Still, I’m not sure that the term capitalism is perfectly fit for our situation today. I like the concept of a free market, but we don’t have a free market. We have a market where the rules are set by the big players to their maximum advantage.
Extreme and rapidly accelerating wealth inequality will be the death of us if climate change doesn’t kill us first.
Now, I personally believe that this is the end result of capitalism due to regulatory capture, and that capitalism is inherently unstable without a resilient regulatory framework to keep the system working.
This criticism isn’t of markets or economics systems, but of the broader political system that fails to regulate it. Regulatory capture in particular is a type of government failure, a situation where regulatory action results in Pareto inefficiency. In representative democracies, this is rational political decision-making. A regulation that concentrates benefits to a special interest & diffuses costs to the public
- gains politicians influence & opportunities with the interest group at no expense to themselves
- gains the interest group benefits to themselves that exceed lobbying expenses
- costs each member of the public less than cost it takes to organize to oppose the regulation.
Much of the criticism of “capitalism” seems to be misplaced criticism of defects in the regulatory/political system that incentivize government failures.
Well, someone gets it. :)
I’d only nitpick that Americans call any sort of social service “socialism”. “Communism” is a word that’s still verboten. I’d also argue that social services are a political function, nothing to do with the economic system, except that the economics pays for the political, same as it ever was.
Adam Smith rolling in his grave like a turbine on hearing people call what we have capitalism. We have an oligarchy, maybe plutocracy is a better word. And neither is the natural result of capitalism. Again, Smith loathed the idea of monopolies and cartels, said those were break points in the system.
The rich seem to have figured out the inequality thing. As long as we have food, and most of us are fat, and as long as we have toys to distract us, we will never truly revolt. Lemmy fantasies aside, there will be no guillotines, not until we can’t get literal bread.
Monopolies & oligarchy are the natural result of unregulated capitalism, and regulation being treated as just as dirty a word as “socialism”.
The rich really don’t want anyone making rules for their game, so actual, non-captured regulation is also heavily propagandized as “killing jobs”, “bad for wages”, etc…
We absolutely have a plutocracy, not a democracy. We live in a system of government where money is the same as speech, votes, and power. Not human beings. The money votes and the money always wins. Money is represented above all else.
Capitalism easily leads to this exact situation. Some people believe that it’s the inevitable result that capital erodes regulation, but I don’t think it’s necessarily so. It depends on whether the political system remains strong enough to represent the public interest instead of the concentrated interests of wealth. When democratic institutions are healthy, regulation can evolve alongside capital to preserve fairness and competition. It’s our responsibility as voters to preserve it. But, when they weaken or become captured, capitalism naturally tilts toward monopolies and self-reinforcing power, which is the situations that we have today. It’s very difficult to come back from that, so there’s a massive and scary temptation to throw out the idea entirely and give communism a try.
I’m a pessimist. I think voters are too stupid and lazy to fix this problem until they are literally starving. I’m also a believe in that words should have meaning. Is capitalism the reason America is sick? Not exactly. It’s a vulnerable system that like everything else has rotted to the core when you don’t take care of your country.
Capitalism is unable to regulate itself, it goes against its fundamental nature. We’ve tried multiple times and it is simply not working because the people with the most power, given to them by the mechanics of capitalism, will do everything in their power to undercut and remove anything that stops them from generating more capital.
Is capitalism really succeeding? More than 10,000,000 people die from capitalism every year mostly by starvation but also from lack of access to healthcare and capitalist caused global warming. But that’s how capitalism works, building wealth for the few at the cost of the many.
The USSR did not fail in the way that you think. It succeeded in improving the lives of the majority of its citizens. In a couple decades, it turned a largely peasant agrarian population into a global superpower that beat the USA to space. I’m not saying it was all good, but I don’t think it was significantly worse than it is here.
More importantly, socialism isn’t the goal. Communism is the goal and socialism is a way to get there. Just like capitalism, it can take many forms, some more pleasant than others. But I’m trying to fight for a world where you don’t need a salary that will get in the way of your morals.
I think your analogy is pretty apt. The conductor wants to go fast. When we have functioning brakes, we manage to keep the train at a reasonable speed. But running the engine hard while the brakes are engaged means you’re squealing the entire way and destroying the brakes in the process. Eventually they wear down and the conductor gets to run off the tracks. I personally don’t want to be at the whim of a mad conductor. I would rather the people take control of the train so we can pool our knowledge to watching the tracks and adjusting our speed to stay on them.
Well maybe right now we’re speeding down the tracks and even if we take control we’re heading straight for a cliff. Then I say it’s time to stop the train so we can build a bridge.
Who provides the brakes to The Party?
Hopefully the soviets, supported by their people. Definitely shouldn’t allow the consolidation of power Stalin was able to get away with. Though maybe it looks even less like the USSR than that. Who says we need a The Party?
The Communist Party. Who else would get the concentration of power in communism? Any concentrated power structure will have the same problems because the problem is human, not economic.
There is no power structure in communism, concentrated or otherwise. Some forms of socialism utilize a concentrated power structure, but we don’t have to.
You don’t seem to understand human nature. Predatory opportunists exist within the spectrum of human personalities. If there’s no power structure, there’s a power vacuum. Someone will always try to fill it.
I don’t believe that greed is the exclusive human nature. I don’t believe that humans require a power structure. I believe that the largest piece of human nature is cooperation which is why we created society in the first place. I believe that the popular perception of human nature is both implicitly and explicitly repeated as a way to justify capitalism when capitalism itself is the chief instigator of human greed.
Yep. That’s where you’re fundamentally wrong.
Here’s a capitalism problem I can’t find a working answer to: How do you stop companies from enshittification when shareholders just blindly want more profits and higher stock prices?
If you have adequate competition in the market the companies thst dont enshittify should see more business. But that requires government to be effective at enforcing antitrust. Thinking the market is going to regulate itself is what leads to enshittification.
I think part of the point is that every system has some intractable problems
Evolution has unanswered questions; thier existence does not prove Creationism
No, it is
I agree. What the US have got isn’t classical Capitalism - it’s Corporatism, which is pretty much the diametrical opposite. I have zero problem with people taking a risk and benefiting from getting it right, particularly if they reinvest all the proceeds in performing solid R&D, creating new products to address real problems and / or create jobs. So long as they pay their fair share of taxes. And their fucking employees.
Instead, what we’ve got is people who - unlike actual capitalists - do not want honest competition. What they ideally desire is a monopoly, or, failing that, a cartel. Both virulently anti-capitalistic notions. In fact, what they really want in extremis, is for the State to be a corporation: Democracy annulled in favor of a Board of Directors telling everybody else what, when and how to do anything and everything. And there’s a word for that kind of central planning: It’s Communism (except, to be fair, ideally in a Communistic system the citizenry would be staffing the committee, not the owners - that’s never what actually happens though).
Edit: Heh. People really don’t have a counterargument to offer. Only downvotes. Pathetic.
Maybe you should go and learn what capitalism really is, and why that isn’t what you currently have. While you’re at it, look into what ‘corporations’ originally were and how they were meant to function (and, importantly, cease to function). Then contrast that with what you’re calling corporations these days. It’ll be instructive, I promise.
You might want to read Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo’ (which kept me sleepless for days on end) or, you know, any book really.
it’s Corporatism
Corporatism is an ideology and political system of interest representation and policymaking whereby corporate groups, such as agricultural, labour, military, business, scientific, or guild associations, come together and negotiate contracts or policy (collective bargaining) on the basis of their common interests.
Corporatism does not refer to a political system dominated by large business interests, even though the latter are commonly referred to as “corporations” in modern American vernacular and legal parlance. Instead, the correct term for that theoretical system would be corporatocracy.
Corporatism comes from a cultural disagreement over the basic unit of society.
A major distinction between different political cultures is whether they believe the individual is the basic unit of their society, in which case they are individualistic, or whether corporate groups are the basic unit of their society, in which case they are corporatist.
Labor unions & collective bargaining are corporatist as is fascism. To clear up misunderstandings from history class, definitions of fascism featuring corporate refer to that. Fascists imagined national collective management of corporate groups in a top-down system of state control that they termed totalitarian.
I’ll be honest with you: I’m way too drunk to give this post the consideration it rightfully deserves. I’ll be back later, once I’ve sobered up.
Great! Lots to unpack there, but I knew I was missing the mark only talking about monopolies. “Cartels” are the larger problem. We don’t allow strict monopolies, one company controlling a thing. But 4-5 companies controlling social media, entertainment, and news, for 350,000,000 American humans, the largest economic block on the planet, is, maybe, a problem?
You’ve hit other points I could have stressed. People are getting mixed up on capitalism as an economic system vs. what we have today. The owners do indeed want central planning, and it is, and will, go as well as the Soviet’s notion of government central planning. Amazon’s
us-east-1going down last week was hilariously reminiscent of the Soviet’s Ukrainian tractor battery factory burning back in the day. Single point of failure. And what system prevents this?Capitalism spreads the risk among owners. Doesn’t work that way today because the owners are oligarchs who have captured the political system. If they were truly competing, they’d stab each other in the back, crab bucket style, to keep any one of them from becoming too powerful.
Anyway, asked many times on here for an example of an economic system that cannot devolve into stronger apes sending the bananas upstream to even stronger apes. Never once had an answer. Not one time. Isn’t that something?
“Trickle down economics doesn’t work!” Yeah, we know, been there done that. “We can reverse it!” Do tell?
Here’s the thing: I’m Danish, right? I believe - wholeheartedly - in the notion of ‘social democracy’: That corporations should be subordinate to the State, which should in turn be subordinate to the Citizenry which it supposed to serve. It’s not a problem if a society gives rise to a corporation good at their job - that’s great! - it’s a problem when said corporation no longer thinks they’re subordinate the the society that initially nurtured their growth. Then they become a metastasized cancer slowly killing their host organism. A net negative as opposed to a positive. A malignant tumor to be excised with extreme prejudice.
Mario’s slimmer brother had a point there. And that’s why he scares the piss out of worthless executives everywhere. They know they’re pure poison, but they don’t want the host to realize it. That’d undercut their profit margin. To put it in the words of “The Cowboy” of Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”:
“Beautiful evening.”
“Yeah.”
“I want to thank you for coming all the way up here to see me from the nice hotel downtown.”
“No problem. What’s on your mind?”
“Well now, here’s man who wants to get right down to it. Kinda anxious to get to it are ya?”
“Whatever…”
“A man’s attitude, a man’s attitude goes some ways… as to the ways his life will be. Is that something you might agree with?”
“Sure.”
“And did you answer because you thought that what I wanted to hear, or did you think about what I said? And answer because you truly believe that to be right?”
“I agree with what you said. Truly.”
“What did I say?”
“…That a mans attitude determines to a large extent how his life will be.”
“So, since you agree, you must be a person who does not care about the good life.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, stop for a lil’ second. And think about it. Can you do that for me?”
chuckles “…Okay. I’m thinking.”
“No, you’re not thinking. You’re too busy being a smart-alec to be thinking. Now, I want you to think. And stop being a smart-alec. Can you try that for me?”
“Look. Where is this going? W-what d’you want me to do?”
“There’s sometimes a buggy. How many driver do a buggy have?”
“One.”
“So let’s just say, I’m driving this buggy. And if you fix your attitude, you can ride along with me.”
“Okay.”
…There’s a great deal to be learned from that interchange, especially in context.
Stumping for socialism? Well, the Soviet Union failed mighty fucking hard. “But that wasn’t true socialism!”
Soviet Union was a failed communist state: a socialist state with a dictatorial ruling class that promises to achieve communism, the pseudoscientifically postulated utopia of a stateless, classless, moneyless, post-scarcity society. Communist ideology is like the Christianity of economics that keeps promising the 2nd coming of Christ: they insist it’ll happen someday inevitably. No possible way Marx was wrong.
Economists often consider capitalism a persuasive definition coined by critics that poorly defines an economic system. Instead, they approach systems from considerations such as resource allocation mechanism & regulatory policies.
Western Europe has more social market economies: mixed economies where private enterprises operate in markets regulated to prioritize fair competition & social welfare. Technically, US has a mixed economy but with a weaker prioritization of social welfare; it’s not pure “capitalism” either.
When people in the US argue for a Western European style of social market economy, I think they’re asking for market regulations that raise the priority of social welfare & labor standards. While more social, that isn’t socialism.
