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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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. I see where you’re coming from though, as overall, capitalism / free markets are a powerful decentralized system for resource allocation, but they have a lot of problems that aren’t being addressed and there are some fundamental issues with how they apply to the information age.

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 (as we see at the investor / c-suite level) it causes resources to be spent on frivolous rich bullshit (yachts instead of food), and possibly one of the biggest issues is that 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 and increasing in scarcity when used up. Mass and material / energy does this. If you possess an object, I cannot possess it, so the more of it that is used up, the more valuable the remaining pieces become, to copy it takes a lot of energy or duplicate resources as the original. 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 basically 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. Do you know what would be better for overall useful economic growth? If all companies open sourced all their software. You know what won’t happen because capitalism is the only system we have for assigning resources? That.

But I don’t understand, like I said above, how capitalism is causing it and how not-capitalism would solve it.

But I don’t see that any capitalism alternative has a good answer either, so still I don’t see how capitalism is the “bad guy”.

A couple notes on this. Firstly, just as an argument perspective, this is a burden of proof fallacy. Just because “not-capitalism” may not have a good answer, doesn’t mean capitalism has a good one or even just a better one. I could be mischaracterising your argument, if so my bad, this is just how it reads to me. Secondly, I personally believe that socialism offers a better answer and a good one at that, which all revolves around incentives. A collective-ownership structure has more incentive for social well being, such as avoiding climate disaster, than a purely capitalist structure does.

As a side-note, I also think you’re mischaracterising capitalism by including governing bodies, but you’re doing it in a manner that’s only one logical step away from socialism. By a government placing restrictions on a market or producer, say by defining a carbon emission cap, the market is no longer operating at true efficiency. While not fully capitalist anymore, that’s still okay though as it’s serving a social purpose. Zoom out a little and you can see other markets in which the government should set limits in. Now the whole economy isn’t operating as a true free market. In this case, the government is defining what the social good is, and (at least in democratic nations), the government defines that based on the voice of the people. The problem with this is that it’s reactive. I can pass as many laws as I want saying you can’t emit carbon above a certain level, but I can only enforce it after you’ve gone over that cap at which point the damage is done, and some may make the economic calculation that it’s worth it if you get more profits (fines are in essence “legal for a price” after all). If the government owns the industry, this can be prevented before happening.

Also free markets can exist without capitalism. I think another person somewhere on this thread mentioned worker co-ops, which are not a capitalist institution.

As a parting thought, I would also point out that one of if not the most efficient energy companies in the United States (in terms of energy produced per dollar input) is the TVA, a state-owned enterprise.

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?

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

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.

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.