Global warming is upon us. If something doesn’t drastically change, now, our entire species is going to die.

Yup, that is the goal. Juuuuust short of desperate. That is where we are aiming for most of our population to live.

And yet, the giant oil corporations lied about climate change and subverted efforts to develop renewable energy back in the 80s when it could have actually helped. They did that to line their pockets, fucked over the entire world, and have had no repercussions for it. Don’t act like it’s the people’s fault. A large large portion of the damage to the climate was done so executives could save an extra .1% of profit for themselves.

Ask a small home owner, or car owner, why they are against climate change measures. They will point out that their life would need to change, and that’s why.

It’s perhaps a little tangential to the “merits of capitalism” topic, but it’s worth noting that the circumstances that caused such a large percentage of the U.S. population to own single-family houses or cars – the Suburban Experiment – is substantially the result of deliberate policy choices by the Federal government starting around the 1930s:

• Euclid v. Ambler established the legality of single-use zoning, which enabled the advent of single-family house subdivisions that outlawed having things like front yard businesses, destroying walkability.

• The Federal Housing Administration was created, which not only published development guidelines that embodied the modernist¹ city planning ideas popular at the time (they literally had e.g. diagrams showing side-by-side plan views of traditional main-street-style shops and shopping centers with parking lots, with the former labeled “bad” and the latter labeled “good”), but also enforced them by making compliance with those guidelines part² of the underwriting criteria for government-backed loans.

• The Federal government passed massive subsidies for building highways, while comparatively neglecting the railroads and metro transit systems.

Of course, that isn’t to say that there wasn’t corporate influence shaping those policies! From the General Motors streetcar conspiracy to the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, it’s obvious that the automotive industry had a huge impact. It’s less obvious – or perhaps I should say, less “provable” – that said influence was corrupt (in terms of, say, bribing politicians to implement policies the public didn’t otherwise actually want) rather than merely reflective of the prevailing public sentiment of the times, but I don’t disbelieve it either.

TL;DR: I’m not necessarily taking a position on whether it was proverbial “big government” or “big business” to blame for America’s car dependency, but I am saying that it’s definitely incorrect to characterize it as merely the emergent result of individual choices by members of the public. Those individual choices were made subject to circumstances that both government and business had huge amounts of power over, and that fact cannot be ignored.

¹ For more info on “modernist city planning” read up on stuff like the Garden City movement started by Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City. In fact, I remember reading somewhere that Wright himself helped write those FHA guidelines, but I can’t find the reference anymore. : (

² It would be irresponsible not to point out that redlining and racial segregation were massively important factors in all this, too. However, this comment is intended to focus on the change in urban form itself, so hopefully folks won’t get too upset that I’m limiting it to this footnote.

Labor != Physical labor or producing physical things

Historically this has certainly been one of the biggest problems with anti-capitalist rhetoric; usually it’s a bunch of fairly well-off college-educated intelligentsia telling labor that akshually their problems are caused by alienation and wage value theory!

The result in Russia was the Going to the People movement, which was a dismal failure and resulted in revolutionary vanguardism.

Well I mean it’s unclear to me that we’re much worse than previous points in history. I’d rather have the climate crisis over the nuclear one, or either of the world wars, or live under a feudal system where I’m owned by the local lord in his castle.

You’d rather have the climate crisis as it currently stands. I think you’ll change your tune on that in coming decades but by then it’ll be far too late to actually do anything about it. You’re also more insulated to it’s effects than many millions of people around the world who are already losing their lives, homes, livelihoods, etc and this is only a sniff of what’s to come. Also, peasants in feudal times on average had more time off, made more money comparatively, and were able to travel more (yes, even serfs) than your average American currently. The chains just look a little different, they aren’t gone.

I sympathize (and agree) with the belief that the current system isn’t serving everyone, much less serving everyone equally. But the world is a complicated thing and we’ve got >7 billion people to feed! I think we should be very careful before deciding “yeah it’s time to tear down the existing systems and hope that there are better systems out there”. It’s easier to make things worse than to make things better.

We’ve got 8 billion people to feed and are doing a terrible job of it. Take under half of Elon’s wealth alone and you could feed the entire world, yet instead we laud these modern day dragons for their “success,” instead of slaying them for the good of the people. It’s easier to make things worse for you, than better for you. Billions of people currently suffering terribly for the profit of others would vehemently disagree. Also, just because the unknown is uncertain doesn’t mean it should be feared. We know capitalism isn’t working for the planet itself, yet people would rather stick to it because it’s enriched a small fragment of humanity. You happen to be in the side of the boat that isn’t currently underwater, but make no mistake that the water is pouring in.

I guess? I’ve wanted to start my own business a couple of times. I’m a programmer, so I’ve toyed with the idea and done some research into creating a few apps which I believe people would find useful, and might pay my bills. I don’t own a house or a car-- I live in an apartment in a mid-size US city.

You are not a capitalist.

I’m guessing you’d consider me a pawn, but I don’t. I fit your description of owning a bit of personal property, and being a worker.

You are a worker, so why look out for the interests of an entirely different class that doesn’t do the same for you?

I’ve worked for some large companies in the past which are supposedly the “actual capitalists”. But I promise they don’t give two shits about social good (or social bad). They are just desperately trying to make products that people want to buy.

Therein lies the exact problem: profit is the only motive. And to get profit, capitalists have shown they are willing to do everything, damn the consequences to others, to society, to the planet. Climate change isn’t a whoopsie, starving, desperate people aren’t a whoopsie, train derailments aren’t a whoopsie, even most wars (every American involved war since WW2) are not a whoopsie. They are all the predictable results of capitalists choosing to rake in more profits at the expense of you and I.

In my view, it’s a pretty good system which constrains huge organizations like Apple to making devices, when the alternative is that they could be setting up their own governments.

Why would they need to set up their own governments when they control ours? How exactly are they constrained? Google is arguably more powerful than most nations’ governments. Sure, most of that is soft power, but if trends continue it won’t stay soft for much longer.

Well I mean it’s unclear to me that we’re much worse than previous points in history.

That’s interesting, because to me it’s very clear. After all, small isolated pockets of people ruining their economy and the environment they depend on is quite a bit different from all of humanity everywhere doing this.

You don’t own your own home and you feel this way? Yeesh. Have fun paying your landlord’s mortgage for the rest of your life as buying a house becomes more and more difficult.

Apple recently entered banking. So…

If you have to work in order to pay your bills you are not a successful capitalist. And it doesn’t matter whether you freelance or not.

I’d rather have the climate crisis over the nuclear one

Why? Either way, everybody dies.

or either of the world wars

Instead of dying from mustard gas, we’re all going to die from heat and starvation. Yay.

or live under a feudal system where I’m owned by the local lord in his castle.

Today, you get to choose which lord owns you, and change lords on occasion, but other than that it’s pretty much the same thing.

I’d rather have the climate crisis over the nuclear one, or either of the world wars, or live under a feudal system where I’m owned by the local lord in his castle.

Give it a couple of years, because the world is going to get a lot, lot worse than it currently is (which is already pretty bad, for folks around the world). The World Wars will be nothing in comparison, and at least a nuclear war would be a relatively fast end.

At least? I’m convinced they have a moral obligation to do so much more than that.

Don’t you know if you would just use paper straws the earth would stop warming? Just ignore the shipping and energy companies massively destroying the ecosystem.

What about capitalism requires infinite growth?

Nothing. It’s just one of the slogans pinkos love to spam because they think it makes them sound intelligent

Feel free to be pedantic, but my point remains: historically and currently capitalism strives for infinite growth and cares not for resource limitations.

Now, can capitalism serve both purposes? Of course. Technological improvements developed by capitalism can (and must) improve environmental and resource impacts of population needs. Does it currently? Not nearly enough. How to direct capitalism to become a better steward for the planet and its resources is a separate topic and discussion. OP asked a question that I was answering without getting into the weeds.

You are objectively wrong that capitalism offers an effective system at distributing medicine and food amongst societies. I’m amazed you’ve come to that conclusion when hundreds of millions of people die every year because they can’t AFFORD TO BUY food or medicine… Further more the world is melting because of horrific mismanagement by the elite class and not much else. The technology, money and resources exist to solve most problems on earth but the monetary COST is deemed too high. See capitalists and capitalism will always choose wealth over human life, always, it’s literally how capitalism began with old mate Columbus and the new world slave trade. From top to bottom, start to finish, capitalism is fucking shit and irredeemable.

People have tried alternate systems, some have even gone extremely well until they are destroyed by capitalists

The fact of the matter is, the only reason there isn’t another system is because capitalists have gone out of their way to destroy every other system that has been tried.

You can’t make a fair comparison when you factor in that capitalists already control the world.

Even democratically elected communists were destroyed by the US government.

I believe that, for example, if I wanted to open a bookshop, I should be able to. Or that if I wanted to rent a couple of 3D printers and sell widgets, that I should be able to. Or if I wanted to hire some dude on fiverr to write some music to my screenplay, I should be able to. This is capitalism. Do you disagree?

This isn’t really capitalism, this is production/commerce. This is what capitalists (people who own capital) tell you capitalism is. Capitalism isn’t you buying a tool and using it. It’s buying the 3D printer, paying people to design and build widgets, paying people to sell the widgets, then taking most of the money for yourself. You might say you make and sell widgets for a living, but you don’t. You own a 3D printer for a living, and exploit the people who make widgets for a living.

You can hate capitalism and still make stuff. Anticapitalists usually aren’t interested in taking away your 3D printer. State Communism isn’t the only alternative, and most leftists hate that idea just as much. Some alternatives include worker coops and mutual aid.

I hate that I can work (with others) to build a company from the ground up and have nothing to show for it, because the owner is using us to fund his lifestyle. I hate that landlords can buy up all the homes, driving up the cost to the point no one can afford one, then rent them out and sit on their ass while I pay their mortgage. That’s capitalism. People profiting off of ownership. It inevitably ends with some people owning almost everything, and the majority owning nothing.

You’d like Marxism. The whole point is that Capitalism is our dominant ideology because it was more efficient than feudalism, but now e have the tools to build a system more efficient than capitalism and we should build that instead. Capitalism is the most efficient system we’ve built so far, but it’s very obviously not the most efficient system we can build.

The issue is profit motive is inherent in capitalism. Businesses and government work on the same resources (money in this case). Businesses do everything they can to maximize profits, then they use the profits to buy government and ensure they keep business as usual. Power corrupts. So they don’t offer living wage, they cut costs, they pollute and they collude. And in law, these businesses are legal entities too. They are afforded the legal status yet if an actual person did what a business does, he would be put away for a long time. Businesses act as psychoes yet people glorify being a successful business owner. Being successful in this system means that you exploited the most and you are the most psycho. Congrats then I guess.

I believe that, for example, if I wanted to open a bookshop, I should be able to. Or that if I wanted to rent a couple of 3D printers and sell widgets, that I should be able to.

I’m not sure why you think this is inherently only possible in a capitalist economy. In a more socialist or even communist economy, you could still do all of that. The only difference would be that all the workers there (if there is more than just you working at said business) would be paid equal to the amount of labor they put in, as opposed to now where the majority of workers are paid less than what their labor is worth.

produce things very efficiently,

Read about externalities.

And the radium girls.

My understanding is that capitalism is a system which allows us, as a society, to produce things very efficiently, and to distribute resources. It hasn’t failed in that role, has it?

When you look at the growing wealth inequality over the past 70 years, it’s pretty easy to argue that it is failing at that role currently.

Overall, capitalism / free market are a powerful decentralized system for resource allocation, but they have a lot of problems that aren’t being addressed.

Externalities like environmental damage aren’t accounted for, anti-competitive behaviour (like Apple’s walled garden) prevent fair competition and resources being allocated to the right spot, same thing goes for advertising and marketing which are by and large exercises in using money to psychologically manipulate people instead of making a better product. When wealth concentration is not reinvested in the product / business for societal betterment but is instead hoarded for personal gain it causes resources to be spent on frivolous rich bullshit (yachts instead of food), and capitalism has no inherent mechanism for caring for the less useful and those unable to work.

Yes it sounds great when you frame it in the context of a business making a better product getting more money, but it sounds a lot more soulless when you’re talking about someone being born a little slow having to live a shit life just because of how their dice were rolled.

Even if you correct for all of these, capitalism falls apart in an information economy. At a very fundamental level, capitalism and trading is based on the idea of things being finite, which mass and material is. If you possess an object, I cannot possess it. But information doesn’t work the same way as matter / energy. Information can be duplicated and replicated instantly, across impossible distances, and our technology to do this has gotten so advanced and global that we can now duplicate any information an infinite numbers of times anywhere around the globe nearly instantly. In this context, capitalism falls apart, because as soon as information is created, there’s no reason for it to be scarce, meaning it has zero value.

In this light we created copyright and patent systems to assign ownership of information, but what these systems really do is create artificial scarcity where there is no need for scarcity, just so that they can fit into a capitalist model.

First, no alternative is required for something to be unacceptable to continue. This is a very common line of reasoning that keeps us stuck in the local minima. Leaving a local minima necessarily requires some backsliding.

Capitalism is unsustainable because every single aspect of it relies on the idea that resources can be owned.

If you were born onto a planet where one single person owned literally everything, would you think that is acceptable? That it makes sense that the choices of people who are long dead and the agreements between them roll forward in time entitling certain people to certain things, despite a finite amount of those things being accessible to us? What if it was just two people, and one claimed to own all land? Would you say that clearly the resources of the planet should be divided up more fairly between those two people? If so, what about three people? Four? Five? Where do you stop and say “actually, people should be able to hoard far more resources than it is possible for anyone to have if things were fair, and we will use an arbitrary system that involves positive feedback loops for acquiring and locking up resources to determine who is allowed to do this and who isn’t”.

Every single thing that is used in the creation of wealth is a shared resource. There is no such thing as a non-shared resource. There is no such thing as doing something “alone” when you’re working off the foundation built by 90+ billion humans who came before you. Capitalism lets the actual costs of things get spread around to everyone on the planet, environmental harm, depletion of resources that can never be regained, actions that are a net negative but are still taken because they make money for a specific individual. If the TRUE COST of the actions taken in the pursuit of wealth were actually paid by the people making the wealth, it would be very clear how much the fantasy of letting people pursue personal wealth relies on distributing the true costs through time and space. It requires literally stealing from the future. And sometimes the past. Often, resources invested into the public good in the past can be exploited asymmetrically by people making money through the magic of capitalism. Your business causes more money in damage to public resources than it even makes? Who cares, you only pay 30% in taxes!

There is no way forward long term that preserves these fantasies and doesn’t inevitably turn into extinction or a single individual owning everything. No one wants to give up this fantasy, and they’re willing to let humanity go extinct to prevent having to.

How is it efficient to throw away 40% of food produced rather than let it go for cheaper or free? How is it efficient for Nike and nearly all other clothing companies to massively overproduce their products and then cut them up and trash them at the end of the fashion season? How is it more efficient to create massive animal agriculture torture chambers that require massive monoculture farms to feed than to grow food crops and eat them directly?

Free market capitalism is inherently about generating wealth for primary stakeholders but externalizing the social and environmental costs. It’s basically how the entire system works.

The greed is baked into capitalism, though, because it’s fundamentally baked into humanity. This is what happens with the unregulated pursuit self interest, and that’s what capitalism encourages.

Because markets inherently aren’t “free”. Real competition is an illusion because capitalism doesn’t account for all the non-capitalist levers (e.g regulatory capture, cronyism, collusion, political lobbying, etc) that businesses will pull to serve their own interests.

Capitalism is an incredibly naive approach to economics because its ability to account for human behavior – the fundamental driver of economic systems – is rudimentary at best. And that’s just one of its problems, really.

No, it absolutely should not work. I can’t even imagine what you are imagining when you say that. HOW could it possibly work long term? Are you familiar with any game theory?

The problems you listed are a feature of capitalism. The rich owners have more power in the owner-worker relationship. Which means they get richer, which means they get more power, which means they get richer, which means they get more power, etc.

The only thing resembling some balance was unions, and they were gutted so that guess what, the rich child get richer. Which meant they got more powerful, and we’re back to the cycle.

Free market works only to create monopolies because in the real world companies compete and then one gets gobbled up and these mega corps can gobble, out compete or lobby for barriers to market if there arent any already inherently. Imagine a new telecomp trying to start but its small then it need a huge investment to cover only a small area, how will that compete with a giant already established telecom? That happens in all businesses and sectora

Why should it work? Capitalism by definition works against the free market because it favors monopolization. You need heavy regulations to slow that down at the very least.

Oh FFS, the capitalist system shreds ‘free’ markets with abandon. Monopolies eliminate competition. Regulatory capture eliminates anti-monopoly regulations. Capitalism is the perpetual accumulation of more money by investing in the production of more commodities. It collapses when it cannot evolve to expand demand, as it did in the 1930’s. As it is doing again now., although rather slowly, as it has learned how to use governments to mitigate financial collapse. It does indeed use ‘markets’ for exchanges, but it only cares about ‘free’ markets as an ideology. It’s motivating force is accumulation. The ‘greed at the top’ is the system itself, not some bad apples.

The idea that it “should work” is both controversial, and doesn’t help. As wealth accumulates at the top, they have less reason to give to anyone else. Human greed is encouraged by capitalism, and you end up with massive inequality when it’s left unfettered. We’re moving towards having robber barons again (or already do, depending on your viewpoint).

Not to mention, capitalism depends on consumption, of everything, and we are actively consuming the things we need in order for us to continue living on the planet. Capitalism doesn’t care because it’s all about profit, specifically in the short term because humans have short life spans and shorter memory and foresight.

Capitalism will always ensure that the greediest are seated at the highest point. Wanting more resources gets you more power under capitalism, so those who are willing to go to the greatest lengths to take capital from others are the ones who will end up with it all. That’s a feature, not a bug. It’s rotten to the core.

They’re different modes of production, however the bourgeoisie intentionally transitioned to capitalism so they could maintain their power. It got a little watered down and theoretically allowed for economic mobility, but that was a sacrifice they were ok with

Since the current system allows the people who make the rules to be bought, I think we’d have to start over entirely from scratch for it to work at all.

Regulations are indeed an important part of managing our system as it is, but they’re fundamentally a bandaid to the problems of capitalism.

You gotta catch the corporations doing a bad thing and then tell them not to do it, meanwhile they’re buying politicians to fight against you on it. And it still doesn’t stop them from committing actions that are horribly unethical and extremely damaging to our society and to the environment, they just tone it down a bit at best, or occasionally they’ll have to put a small fraction of their money into a lawsuit without actually changing their behavior.

Some example where it works? Because where I live (EU), stuff is regulated and no one of my generation can buy shit. I pay so much for rent that I can’t save money to buy something of my own. While the owner of the company has luxury cars. We’re all wage slaves. Sadly, everything else is doomed to fail as well, so even the fabled communism of Soviet bootlickers won’t save us.

At least in the US, there hasn’t been much of a history of successful dynasties. Fortunes do get passed down, but not for long. Take the Vanderbilt family. There are few famous Vanderbilts in modern day US life. The one I find most recognizable is Anderson Cooper, and he got his millions from working, not inheriting. Of course, there’s a constant attempt from the Republican Party to repeal the estate tax, so that might change.

People used to be able to afford homes, so yes, it definitely is happening.

Have you seen the housing market lately? Capitalism was great for the boomers pretty much in every developed country. Now millenials and zoomers encountered this ripe form of it where everything is consolidated under a massive corporate entity optimizing only for profit.

I remember even a couple of years ago renting a place straight from the owners who moved to someplace bigger and after a year they just said i can live there however long i’d like with a month notice. Same rent for five years. Now every year i renew my lease through an intermediate management company and every year they hike the rent.

Groceries are getting more expensive, ads are fucking everywhere and every news outlet lies or creates mostly sponsored shit. We are surrounded by soulless corporations and we “work” for them at our bullshit jobs providing nothing of value. Feeling down? Why dont you install a fucking subscription app for therapy.

It does match exactly what’s happening though. Others have mentioned housing cost which is a clear example, but you can also look at income inequality. Here’s an article which cites data from the congressional budget office https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/

It shows up to 500% growth since 1979 in the earnings of the .01% while the 99% of earners are only making about 50% more than in 1979. That data makes it clear that wealth is being concentrated, and that people at the bottom are going with less. Especially considering inflation since 1979 has been 320% (source)

There’s more overall for everyone, but the people at the bottom are getting a smaller and smaller share, and a lot of important things, like housing, not to mention with things like streaming, and online stores, we don’t really “own” most of the media we consume anymore, we just pay forever to rent it. Fast fashion and planned obscelescence means that our clothing is worse than what people used to have, and our machines don’t last as long, so we have to keep replacing both of those.

What we do have is designed not to last, and more meaningful, life-long purchases are out of reach. Meanwhile the people at the top of the pile who do literally nothing but “have wealth” sit around on their yachts blissfully ignoring the people starving to death on the streets.

A CEO earns 354x the income of a normal worker in the US. It’s really insane what happens over there. I’m really glad a CEO in Germany only earns 154x the income of a normal worker, much more fair over here!

I’m kidding, we are all fucked. US citizen say a ratio 6.7 would be justified, Germans say 6.3.

So you’re telling me i need to store a lot of canned beans in a nearby cave system?

The problem is getting and keeping people in power who actually want to reign in capitalism.

But now in almost every country, the capitalists are the ones making regulations. They’re not going to do it to themselves.

But then that’s not capitalism. Capitalism is making as much money as possible unrestricted as much as possible. If you start doing things like putting a maximum wage in, or taxing the highest earners and giving back to the lowest, that’s socialism.

Every Social Democracy is built upon imperialism and exploiting goods and labor from the third world. Social democracies are the epitome of well it works for me and people who look like me but fuck everyone else. Plus social democracies almost always are very restrictive of who gets to participate in said social democracy since the state can only provide these services to so many people before things collapse because it fundamentally does nothing to break from the destructive capitalist systems. They also tend to be really really racist too.

Being in favor of private property and private incentive does not even necessarily mean that you are pro-capitalism. Capitalism as the term is used has three defining features:
- Markets
- Private property
- Employer-employee relationship
One could have a non-capitalist economy that replaced the last one with democratic membership in the firm and still kept the other two features such as a market economy consisting of worker coops