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. There is absolutely no grand structure for learning about politics that isn’t reactionary in nature.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 / $21.98BSo, 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 $248.31BThat’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.
No arguments there
EDIT: I mean “can’t argue with that”. Just incase what I wrote originally didn’t make sense
Short answer: people are dumb and gullible
It feeds many.
It starves many despite producing more than enough for everyone.
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.
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 in the class war.
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.
Every modern economy is mixed to some degree.
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 they are from the other universe
Uno signo de interrogación de apertura, is different than your freestyle butchery.
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.
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
- 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. 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 is an invented by a clown, before the invention of computers. For an explanation, see Towards a New Socialism, which explains potential economic planning beyond price.
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.
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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?
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:
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.
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.
successful brainwashing.
conditioning
Decades of totalizing propaganda, along with merciless suppression of alternatives.
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.
Capitalism has always sounded great in theory,
I dunno, “People who don’t do the work get rich” sounds kind of shitty.
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:
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 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.
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.
If you want to disparage socialists for mindlessly raging against capitalism, then I suggest you actually listen to what we say, rather than completely ignore core concepts like unequal exchange.
