He’s confusing market economies with capitalism.

Market economies can exist without capitalism.

A lot of people think that anything to do with socialism means a USSR style planned economy, but socialism can utilise markets. In fact, ironically, truly free markets can only exist under well regulated markets.

Capitalist corporations want as little regulation as possible so they can influence the markets and do other capitalist shenanigans, like selling at a loss until you’ve cornered the market and then hike prices up.

Capitalism is like the malignant form of market economies.

People “want” religion the same way — they’ve been raised on it, and conditioned to include it in their value system.

It’s a mix, IMO. There’s tons of stuff pushed by companies to get you to buy things you didn’t even know existed. There’s tons of stuff that companies force you to buy by unbundling products. There’s products you essentially must have to get by in a modern society.

There’s plenty of manipulation of desire by companies. That’s what advertising is. Doesn’t matter how it’s done, via conventional ads or product placement in movies or products talked about by influencers. You may not have known about or wanted something, but they’re going to do their best to make you want it and buy it. This is probably the biggest facet of the argument. Companies are always trying to make you buy what they’re selling whether you need it or not, and there’s nothing subconscious about it. They’re in your face as much as they can manage. They want you to see it, but whether or not you recognize it as deliberate or not is worth mentioning. They spend millions to find out how much they can charge, how artificial scarcity could manipulate pricing, how long a product should last before the next iteration shows up they want you to buy or not piss off the buyer when it fails and they need to replace it.

There’s plenty of stuff you can’t really do too well without in society, like a mobile phone or car, so I’m not sure if I could reasonably argue about these kinds of items because of their necessity. You’re going to buy something like this, the only question is which company’s marketing wins and the $ in your pocket.

Pushing capitalism… that’s a question of who is in charge of the system. While there may be some hypothetical debate over what could happen in an ideal system with honest players who each ideally exercise their abilities in the system, the reality is that the consumer has little to no control over capitalism.

Capitalism is driven by billion- and trillion-dollar mega corporations that control what you see, hear, eat, wear, drink, drive, and every other facet of your life that interacts with products of any sort. That’s just the direct attempts. We haven’t even gotten to you seeing what your friends are wearing, what they’re driving, what they are watching, etc. That influences the viewer as well. Companies are constantly striving to dictate what you want to buy and working hard to extract the maximum price the market will bear. They want you in their walled garden. Sure, the consumer might have a hand in directing trends, maybe occasionally get a product to fail due to popularity or poor function, but overall the consumer has little hand in consciously directing what companies make. I think your friend really hand-waves away the amount of effort and money companies spend to make you want to buy, and buy their products. IMO they’re not being honest about that.

Lastly, I think the whole idea of capitalism exists because demand is sort of false because it assumes that capitalism is the only way to do it. I’m not going to argue for any other system, but it’s patently obvious that before capitalism sort of became the default that products and services were generated and traded or bartered for over centuries. It’s just that regulated capitalism does it faster and more efficiently for more people.

All of those things can be produced without capitalism. Demand doesn’t explain why this mode of production is used over another.

I’d say it’s bit of both. Capitalism offers solutions to legitimate needs/wants of people, but more frequently than not the wrong ones. It can be seen through housing scarcity and other necessities not being addressed correctly. Giving wrong solutions to issues doesn’t resolve them, allowing capitalists to get more out of the issue. Sometimes they will go as far as create an issue for people, so they can sell them a (wrong) solution to it.

exchange of goods exists because there’s a demand for things. their type, the conditions of their production and the manner of their exchange is something else.

you can start right on page 26 of das kapital

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/epub/capital-v1.epub

I think this comes down to a persons definition of capitalism. For some its the idea of exchange of goods and services. For others it starts at virtualizing value with tokens. For others its the idea of ownership of land and natural resources. Others personal property in general. For others its about laws that start getting into virtual entities of production/consumption like corporations. For others its meta things like interest. And none of these generalities would fit any particular persons things as its about some parts but not others. I myself am shifting to what I think of as anti corporatist which many might see as anti-capitalist. Its sorta funny but citizens united drove me to anti corporatism and Qanon flipped me to full athiesm.

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The existence of the multi billion, if not trillion dollar industries of marketing, advertising, market research, “store layout specialists” or whatever you might call them, “consumer psychology” (yes, an actual thing), and so on and so on, all there to brainwash you from birth to not only consume, but consume “brand” x over y (the existence of “brands” in itself!), prove your friend wrong.

Literally everything in our life is commodified for profit, not only our basic needs and human rights like food, housing, healthcare, but also the made up concepts capitalism invents to “fix” our problems, which it created, like stress and burnout (or halitosis), with ideas like “wellness” and “mindfulness” and whatever else they can use to make us buy more while distracting us from the real cause of our problems and making us feel like we’ve done something for ourselves, when we wouldn’t need to be doing it in the first place if we weren’t existing in a for-profit society.
There’s also the whole “keeping up with the Jones’s” and “American dream” type propaganda they push to make sure we’re always “aspiring” (and so thinking like temporarily embarrassed millionaires and acting against our own interests). There is absolutely no need for there to be a new phone model being released every week, or for you to buy a new one every year, or for you to buy a new wardrobe every season to keep up with “fashion”, another industry there to sell the unnecessary (the concept of “fashion” that is, not clothes themselves) but they create a need with the industries I’ve mentioned already, but also with shit like planned obsolescence and artificial scarcity.

The whole thing is a massive manipulation to get us to work hard to make money (mostly for the capitalists, but just enough for us) to buy a load of shit we don’t need to solve problems created specifically to sell us said shit (along with the things we actually do need, which are put behind a literal pay wall by, and) to funnel even more money to the capitalists, while they make us think it was all our idea. Your friend is proof of it. And while it might be uncomfortable for them to realise that they’ve been completely taken in by the propaganda, it just goes to show how well it works.