Capatilism is only possible when you steal value from someone or somewhere else.
The US financially raped the rest of the world to generate it’s vast wealth.
China saw the opportunity to steal this wealth back itself by convincing US companies to abandon their manufacturing capabilities. Now we are watching the slow decline of the world’s default nobility as they scramble to justify their value.
Capatilism is only possible when you steal value from someone or somewhere else.
I don’t know about “Capatalism” but “Capitalism” doesn’t require stealing value. All capitalism requires is private ownership of the means of production and using it to generate profit. If you’re a painter and buy paint, an easel and some canvas, and use that to sell portraits, you’re doing capitalism.
Most zoomers are anti-capitalist because they don’t actually know what capitalism is, and can’t really picture what it would actually be like in a different kind of economic system. Anybody who grew up after 1989 hasn’t actually seen a world where any other economic system exists. Capitalism was an attempt to improve a world dominated by monopolies, with big tariffs and trade barriers, where workers had no freedom to change jobs and had to fight over the scraps left over from the wealthy. If that sounds like the current world, it’s because we’re backsliding from capitalism back towards mercantilism and feudalism. Not because capitalism sucks.
I don’t know about “Capatalism” but “Capitalism” doesn’t require stealing value. All capitalism requires is private ownership of the means of production and using it to generate profit. If you’re a painter and buy paint, an easel and some canvas, and use that to sell portraits, you’re doing capitalism.
Private ownership of the means of production is theft. What you described with the painter is personal - not private - ownership of the means of production. Personal ownership is when someone owns something and uses it for their own benefit. Private ownership is when someone owns something that they do not use themselves, instead hiring others to use it for them to generate a profit. The painter isn’t doing capitalism when they paint and sell portraits, they’re doing productive labor and participating in a market economy, which is not exclusive to capitalism. If the painter hired other painters to paint portraits using equipment and a studio that belongs to the original painter and kept the profits for themselves, that’s capitalism.
Now, if the hired painters decided they didn’t like this arrangement and claimed the equipment and studio for themselves collectively (seizing the means of production), that would be socialism. The original painter - the capitalist - would consider this theft, as those things were their private property. The hired painters - the socialists - would consider what the capitalist was doing theft and they are taking what is rightfully their collective personal property because they are the ones using it to produce value. To the capitalist, the value is produced by their capital (the means of production) and the labor is just another kind of capital which they have already paid for with wages. To the socialist, the value is produced by their labor and the means of production is being rented to them by the capitalist for their excess labor value, whose only claim to it is that they paid the upfront cost.
The owner of a company is like a landlord except instead of gatekeeping land/housing they are gatekeeping the means of production. Instead of paying rent, those who want access to the means of production sign away their excess labor value by agreeing to a set wage.
The term capitalism was coined by socialists to describe existing systems where wealth accumulated into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Only later did the supporters of the existing system attempt to “reclaim” capitalism and change the meaning to this nonsense. Capitalism is not “an attempt to improve a world dominated by monopolies,” monopolies are the bread and butter of capitalism.
Painters owned their own paint supplies under feudalism. Were they “doing capitalism?” No, capitalism is not something you “do” on an individual level, it is a system that exists, and which has only existed for a few hundred years. Capitalism does not mean simply trading or owning tools.
Monopolies are the bread and butter of mercantilism. Capitalism was seen as a way to break up those monopolies.
You steal value by creating monopolies. You steal it by artificial controlling resources, your “capital” so that no one else can benifit. You price gouge, manipulate, spread propaganda, and lie. Make dirty deals behind closed doors. Undercut your competition.
Pro capitalist always leave out all the awful tactics capatilism employs to do things that require you to buy from them. That’s the theft. Gaming the system to put people in hard places. Baiting the general populace to bad behaviors all for the means of profit.
We shouldn’t be required to play a game of literal monopoly to survive.
Free market capatilism is a joke. Capatilism only drives invitation of the business model and freedom for the owning class at the expense of the people.
What’s the difference between feudalism and capatilism when corporations own ever piece of property on this spec of dust and you’re required to rent? Still playing the rules of capital, but without any of the rewards. Think about it. I doubt you own your house. The bank probably owns it just like it owns a majority of peoples. Probably the same thing with your car. Your education. Hell even your life depending on how your health is. People who have to pay 1000s to insurance companies every year just to stay alive. For insulin treatment that was sold for a 1$ by its creator for the good of humanity. Monopolized. You aren’t a capitalst if you own nothing.
Most people own nothing because that’s the goal of capatilism.
The perfect company has no employees, sells no product, carries no debts, yet takes from everyone it can. It is the nature of capatilism to shuffle towards this structure.
The US in the 1989s had Europe and the rest of the world by the balls by being the global reserve currency. A system put in place after world war 2 where Europe basically sold itself to the United States. Everyone had to spend money and buy it in debt while the US had the keys to the printing press.
When you take out a loan why do they charge you interest? If you don’t pay your loan back they will simply toss you in prison or reposes what meager property you have. Garnish your wages? What incitive does interest serve? It’s just their to keep you paying, to keep you under your feudal lord.
Somethings just shouldn’t have a price tag and should be owned by the people.
If you’re going to post these screeds, you should at least learn how to spell capitalism.
First time was a mistake the rest were to bother you :)
Capitalism != free market.
Under a free market, a painter buys paint, an easel and some canvas at prices set by supply and demand, and then paints and sells portraits again at a price set by supply and demand.
Under capitalism, an artist wants to start a painting business, so he goes to a rich person or group of rich people and says “If you give me some money to start my painting business, I will give you a share in ownership of the business and its profits.” with this so-called capital, the artist rents or buys a building and supplies and operates the business to effectively pay back that loan. The working class make a living and the rich get richer for having been rich.
Under a free market, a painter buys paint, an easel and some canvas at prices set by supply and demand, and then paints and sells portraits again at a price set by supply and demand.
That’s capitalism, my dude:
- Private ownership of the means of production: the worker owns the paint, easel and canvas
- Used for obtaining a profit: the worker uses the capital to transform inputs (the blank canvas) to outputs (painted canvas) which they sell at a markup to generate profit.
What you’re describing as capitalism is also capitalism, but it adds unnecessary steps. Capitalism isn’t about selling shares in companies, although that can happen under capitalism (it also happens under mercantilism). It’s not about loans (but of course they can happen under capitalism, just like under any other economic system).
Your misunderstanding of capitalism is why people hate capitalism. They think it’s about the rich getting richer. But capitalism is merely about private ownership of the means of production, and selling the results using that capital for a profit. That’s it.
In the middle ages you could buy art supplies and do art, but if you wanted to sell your art, you needed to be in the right guild. For example, if you lived in London you couldn’t sell playing cards unless you were a member of the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards. And, whether or not you made a profit wasn’t a matter for the free market, rates were determined by the guild. The guild determined who could own the means of production for the arts they controlled, and the guild determined prices.
Similarly, under communism, there was no private ownership of the means of production, so there was no selling things for profit after making them. Everything belonged to the state. Until the 1960s in the USSR there was an exception for small production cooperatives owned by groups of artists. But, those were liquidated and transferred to the state because they really weren’t in line with communism.
If you want to be able to sell things on the free market, and to buy and own the tools you use to make those things, then you want capitalism. If you don’t want wealth concentration, then you still want capitalism, you just want it to be regulated in the way that the early thinkers like Adam Smith thought capitalism should be regulated.
You know…
A phrase I often hear associated with communism, especially the kind of people who aren’t communists but want to be, particularly the “revolutionaries” who do all the work of turning a state communist before being killed and replaced by a psychotic despot, is “the workers shall own the means of production.”
Of course, most or all of the people are the “workers” so it’s “the people shall own the means of production.”
Of course, collectively, the people are the “public” so it’s “the public shall own the means of production.”
Of course, anything pubic is controlled by the “government”, so it’s “the government shall own the means of production.”
Of course, the government is made up of the “elites”, so it’s “the elites shall own the means of production.”
It strikes me that an artist privately owning his tools and materials independently of any others is closer to “the workers owning the means of production” than anything anyone calling themselves communist have ever accomplished.
I think the existence of the elites and their psychopathy is the actual problem, and that between the two systems, capitalism or the free market economy or whatever you want to call it hands literally all of society to the elites slower than “communism” does.
It strikes me that an artist privately owning his tools and materials independently of any others is closer to “the workers owning the means of production” than anything anyone calling themselves communist have ever accomplished.
Except when that artist buys the supplies on the free market for themselves and then for that artist to own them as private property.
The communist way is for the artist to join an artist collective, and for their art supplies to be supplied (free of charge of course) by whoever it is that makes art supplies. That artist might use some of the communal supply of art equipment that the artist collective collectively has access to. If the collective doesn’t have whatever art supplies the artist wants, they’d have to make a request to whoever produces art supplies to produce something for them, which might arrive in a few months, assuming the request was approved.
between the two systems, capitalism or the free market economy or whatever you want to call it hands literally all of society to the elites slower than “communism” does.
IMO that’s the key distinction. It seems like communism assumes people are fundamentally altruistic, and doesn’t really have mechanisms to channel people’s selfish drives. As a result, it gets corrupted much more quickly. Capitalism might suck a lot more in its ideal form than communism in its ideal form. But, it seems to do a better job of channelling people’s greedy and selfish interests, so it’s more resilient to the elites taking over completely. Communism is great in theory, but just doesn’t seem compatible with the realities of humanity. Capitalism in theory is somewhat unpleasant, but at least it kind-of works.
Millennial here. I don’t remember that either. I feel like my life has been in survival mode from one once in a lifetime crisis to the next and my dad died from issues from agent orange exposure in Vietnam and my mom died from early onset Alzheimer’s after she worked hard her entire life and lost everything after 2008 not because she didn’t work hard and save but because she was layed off at the height of the Great Recession and burned through her deflated 401k and then began to get sick and lost her home and moved in with me but I couldn’t access healthcare for her in this evil system and her slow horrible death was beyond traumatic for my small family. Things keep getting more expensive and corrupt everyday. When is it time to burn this mother down? And hold the pedofile parasite class accountable and take our power back? I don’t think we want much just the ability to live in a system with integrity and to not have to worry about being cast on the streets to die in squalid conditions
I think it going to be folks like you, who choose to say “Fuck it, we ball”, rather than get up and go to work.
Or someone whose fam was kidnapped or murdered.
Its gonna pop off.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
Millennials and zoomers are essentially the “hard times make good men” crowd like the greatest generation.
Unfortunately, I’m not too confident on “good men make good times” this time around.
I’m late 30s myself. Here is how I see the generational situations:
My parents’ generation: if you got any college degree or went into any skilled trade, you would have no problem purchasing a home.
My generation: if you picked certain well-paying majors or trades, you would be able to own a home.
The generation currently coming out of school: you will not afford a home without inherited wealth/family assistance.
It went from nearly anyone could get a home, to those who made just the optimal choices could get a home, to basically no one can get a home. I work with people who graduated with the same degree I have, yet because they happened to be born a 10-15 year later, they’re locked out of home ownership. I look at the cost of housing and compare it to their salary, and there’s just no way to make it work. To buy a home around here as a young person, you either need family money or you need to be a married couple, both working full time in high-paying STEM fields.
This is a super accurate general breakdown, maybe the clearest I’ve seen honestly. Completely matches what I’ve witnessed through life (with all the acknowledgements that it doesn’t portray everyone’s experience of course, and lots of the rest of my words here suffer from the same).
What I’m realizing more and more, and want to expand on your points with - is how badly we all misunderstand the “family money” thing. I was slow to grasp it, because when/where/how I grew up, that sounded like opulence.
These days it’s table stakes. A lot of us have it, built-in, a lot of us don’t. I never had that help, scraped and scrapped to take my family to stability. Now that I’m here, I can see - no one here is like me. Roughly everyone I meet, in the world I fought to enter, is somewhat at ease. They don’t have especially high income jobs. They didn’t fight and struggle and strategize to own a home here. They typically can’t even be convinced it’s not roughly this easy for most. And they didn’t inherit huge wealth, either - they have no idea they’re “special”.
The degree to which one’s parents had stability themselves is becoming a stark dividing line in the US. I expect that line grows sharper and wider in the near term.
Edit - the troubling thing I’m trying to point out, is the vast communities of families all across the US who had just enough of a boost to make their lives feel, in every (shallow) way, like the stable affluent days of decades prior - the thoroughly taught “American Dream”. The people with money to spend live in a cloistered fiction, accidentally (from their perspective), and this seems super bad news for the current state of affairs.
Some misconceptions here. The good old days that still existed in the ‘80s and early ‘90s were kinda still there, but the signs of economic retreat were there too. We were offshoring a lot of manufacturing, bankruptcies were tools to get rid of pensions and union strength, and then everything Reagan did to fuck us that just wasn’t apparent yet. They weren’t the good old days that the Boomers had, but they were far better than today.
You could still rent a place for a few hundred bucks on a single job, community college was ~$50/semester not including textbooks. A cheap house in a not so great area was ~$100k, often a lot less. People didn’t use credit cards the way they do now so debt wasn’t as common, it was harder to spend money you didn’t have. You could still claw your way ahead or at least tread water.
2000 was a turning point. The dot com bust, 9/11, offshoring of even more jobs in tech, multiple recessions, endless war, and corporations running out of ideas other than finding ways to extract more and more from the consumer while offering less in return. Every generation since has had to deal with more things being put out of reach.
Even in the 2010s it was still possible in some areas. I bought my first home in 2012, right at the bottom of the market. I bought a townhouse in a half-built development in a rough neighborhood. This was in Houston. The developer had gone under halfway through building the place. It was weird, but the place only cost $92k for a 3 bedroom 1800 ft^2 townhouse. I put 3% down on an FHA mortgage. I literally got into home ownership for less than people pay to get into an apartment lease today. Oh, and the mortgage was small enough that for several years I paid the entire mortgage by renting out the two spare bedrooms. The coastal areas were pretty unaffordable even back in the early 2010s. But at least then if you lived there and wanted to, you could move to a lower cost of living city elsewhere in the US and get established. Now? Everywhere is unaffordable.
GenX here - I’m not blind. I’m two shakes away from becoming a full-blown communist myself, from what I have seen.
Capitalism is violently coercive and lethally exploitative. It’s only purpose is to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a tiny proportion of people, and it does so exceedingly well.
Capitalism is the worst and most unethical of political tools, sadly it’s also the most efficient at what it does.
The thing about capitalism is that it swallows up and commodifies any ideology that tries to fight it. If you don’t believe me, go buy a book on communism and enroll at your local university to meet like-minded people and learn more.
Capitalism is a virus.
I am GenX and in my 20s lived stuffed into houses with 2 other couples so that we could make rent, I am not sure why people think we were skating on minimum wage, it was shit. If you put 6 wage earners in a house you can make it today too.
On college cost, that is absolutely true I do agree, it’s gotten so expensive it is not an automatic choice among my kids. Those who went straight out of school mostly didn’t have to borrow, nor did I pay much, they got scholarships to cover it.
i’m 36. i have young coworkers and i try telling them that even 10-15 years ago it was not like this.
Maybe not in the “developed” countries, but capitalism been fucking the rest of the world for a long while.
Also, are you forgetting the economic recession in 2008? That also wasn’t terribly fun. Millenials haven’t had a great go at this “good old days” either. Maybe when we were children, but it’s not like we were out buying houses then.
Also, 10 years ago was 2016, which is when all this awful really dove off a cliff for those in the “developed” world.
it’s difficult to explain concisely, it boils down to this; ten years ago i could rent an apartment while serving tables, today i cannot.
That’s fair enough. Today I can barely rent an apartment on a double income with a union job.
Many early zoomers (1993 to 2006) may remember something of the world before 2008 crisis and before neoliberalism fucked the ideas of the American left. We had the opportunity to experience a slower way of life and peace of mind. Many of us also had the opportunity to witness the very few last years when traditional family was still a thing. Late zoomers and Gen alpha have never experienced nothing like that
Aye, I still try to emulate that shit sometimes. As annoying as it is to have my music knocked out at times it’s nice to go through a cellular dead zone ya know? Now if only 07 and 06 weren’t some of the worst years of my life due to my physically and sexually abusive father combined with the shit fest that was foster “care”.
Ah the good old days. I do miss stagflation, the SNL crisis and the boot of Reagonomics on my neck. Fun times.
Yeah, I’m a millennial but I hear (and feel) the same things. And I know Gen X are big on griping. I think it’s human nature to gripe. And that’s not to suggest that things aren’t shit. It’s just human nature to gripe about how shit things are, because sometimes it feels like the only recourse we have.
I wish zoomers were anti-capitalist because they understood that the “good old days” were only “good” because of the exploitation of the global South.
I think a lot of it comes down to lived experience. Every generation reacts to the economic reality they grow up in, so it makes sense that perspectives would shift over time.
My gen Z students don’t even fight adverts anymore… They all look amazed that ublock origin exists, and it’s sad because they look so happy not to have to deal with ads.
We millennials grew up through the great recession (many of us started out working lives in it), but the one good time we did experience was early 2000s internet.
Some of us are trying to bring it back… https://discourse.32bit.cafe/t/resources-list-for-the-personal-web/49
I am more appalled that they think many of us older gen people actually experienced the “good ol days.” When do they even think that is? Lmao Nobody else outside their generation has ever experienced these same troubles ever?
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but without it would you be using a smart phone? Or a cell phone at all? Let alone a smart one. There would be no Amazon or shein or Reddit none of it. No designer wigs or nails.
Buddy, I’m already on board with the collapse of capitalism and the devouring of the 1%, say less baby.
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You’ve got some boot polish on your nose.
They’re just a troll… or Elon’s new Lemmy account. Either way, don’t take it too seriously, they aren’t.
Many of the discoveries that led to the creation of the internet and smart phones were via government-funded research. Capitalists just figured out how to put it in a sleek package and market it.
Also, you act as those these things are a net good, but have not demonstrated that in your post. Amazon and Shein have been atrocious for the environment and have been massively exploitative.
