I think this meme fundamentally misidentifies the problem. People keep attributing every societal issue to “capitalism,” when many of the things they’re describing have very little to do with capitalism itself.
To be clear, I have plenty of criticisms of capitalism as an economic philosophy. Left unchecked, it incentivizes wealth concentration, externalizes costs, and often places profit ahead of broader societal well-being. There are legitimate reasons to criticize capitalism, and I don’t particularly admire many of its outcomes.
My issue is with the inconsistency in this meme. The behaviors it’s describing, pathological greed, regulatory capture, monopolistic behavior, and the relentless pursuit of short-term shareholder profits, are better described as corporatocracy than capitalism itself. That’s a system where large corporations wield enormous influence over government and markets, insulating themselves from competition and shaping policy to serve their own interests.
If you want to criticize corporatocracy, I’m right there with you. But treating every economic or social problem as though it’s simply “capitalism” is an oversimplification. Distinctions matter, especially when you’re trying to identify the actual root cause of a problem. If we’re going to criticize a system, we should at least be criticizing the correct one.
Said it better than I could.
People are greedy; greedy for any resource they can control. Today it’s money. It could easily be something else.
“But they wouldn’t be allowed to!” They’re not allowed to do what they do now, but they force courts and opinions to work otherwise.
For anyone asking themselves how socialism might work with current technology:
https://alexeyminin.medium.com/building-socialism-2-0-c698b2db66c
I should have read the title and saved myself one paragraph
I’m in the medical field, and the number of people who absolutely despise private insurance, but despise public Health systems even more, for no reason, is too damn high.
…i always ask providers up-front what is my cost without using any insurance versus my out-of-pocket cost after insurance, and most of the time it’s substantially cheaper not to use insurance at all even though it won’t count toward my deductible…
…those private-industry middlemen are a huge burden on the healthcare system, and they persist only because their costs are hidden from patients…
It’s awful. And until you hit maximum out of pocket, the insurance company may not be paying anyway.
They sound like my family. God forbid there be “socialized” healthcare that the “leeches” can benefit from, but also insurance sucks and doesn’t pay for anything and whoops now we have medical debt.
They don’t want their tax dollars to subsidize the care of anyone they think is less deserving than them, while they begrudgingly accept having to pay hundreds of dollars each month on an insurance plan that won’t even cover the care they need.
And they want to see every change introduced by Obamacare undone, so, have fun going back to insurance plans that can deny you coverage just because you have a preexisting condition that they don’t want to pay for.
Fun fact! The US is spending more on healthcare than it does on its military. By A LOT. The military gets around 4% of the federal budget, healthcare gets around 12%.
The US taxpayer pays MORE on healthcare in taxes than the the taxpayers in Switzerland or Norway!
Where does that money go, you ask? Why, to the pockets of the corpos owning private healthcare, of course!
Yep. Republicans like my family are still so focused on the idea of “welfare queens” and illegal immigrants who are sucking up their hard-earned taxpayer dollars, while completely blind to the fact that they are spending thousands in taxes and insurance premiums enriching corporate middlemen who provide little to nothing in return. So who are the real leeches?
“They have us fighting a culture war so we don’t fight a class war.”
We need to start teaching that you can’t just throw capitalism under the buss. Unchecked capitalism, among other oppressors has lead to where we are. A fairly taxed and regulated capitalism combined with a solid and kind welfare system could be paradise. But eventually money and power will manipulate people. If not the ones who changed the system then the ones after. I would almost vote for a A.I. model of a senator who’s only motovation is the actual bylaws of the constitution.
I think as long as ppl can as individals buy massive superyachts we are fked and wont progress, only regress, the amount of toys, widespread power, and long term health you can buy with wealth only increases over time
It’s even worse than that, they think the root cause is immigrants, minorities, and trans people.
Capitalist: No no, what you really hate is socialism.
Citizen: Why do I hate socialism?
Capitalist: Because socialism causes [lists problems created by capitalism].
Citizen: Wow, I sure do hate socialism.
But also,
Citizen 2: [lists actual socialist policies while avoiding certain key words]
Capitalists: I can get behind that.
[explains certain LGBT talking points while avoiding certain key words]
Homophobe: I can get behind that.
Let me fix that for you,
Citizen 1: I can get behind that.
Capitalists: You shouldn’t, that’s communism! Think of all the money you have to waste when you get rich!
And that’s the core of it.
Every poor moron thinks that one day they will get rich and they don’t want to ruin things for their future rich self. The don’t actually DO anything to get rich, they don’t have a plan, resources, much intelligence, they’re not doing anything to improve their life, go to school, seek a better job, learn about finances. But one day, they’ll be rich. They believe this until they get to about 50-60, their health issues start creeping up, then it starts to dawn on them that they’re over the hill and have no real future beyond the current state of affairs–same life, but just older, sicker and weaker. THEN they sometimes wake up and see the bullshit, but it’s too late.
Some of these people pick up a modest inheritance from their dead parents, but they usually piss it away in a few years, certainly aren’t going to invest it, use it to build anything or have any expectation of creating generational wealth. They buy a big pickup truck and some assorted stupid shit, and it’s wasted in a flash.
The other core is “I’d rather die of preventable diseases so long as black people suffer more”
I’d rather be physically and socially secure than the 10 to the power of 42 chance I’ll make it big.
Nah that’s why it’s called “The American Dream”. The point is, we’re supposed to be fantasizing about a better life in the future if we just endure a little hardship now.
That sounds shockingly similar to the tactics used by religion. And pedophiles in vans. It’s weird how they are all the same thing. They all over-promise, under-deliver, and fuck you in the ass along the way.
And if you do put in the planning, resources, sacrifice and work and earn money, the unmotivated (and jealous) people around you claim you’re “lucky”.
Socialists are fans of socialism. Capitalists are persons who own capital, not fans of capitalism.
Call it solidarity. And cote exemple like Mondragon corp. And then a capitalist understand socialism.
Then some socialist buds in and says “actually socialism isn’t when the government does stuff!” and then I say “it is if it’s a democratically elected government” and then they say “This isn’t real democracy!” and then I agree and point out that actually the REAL root of all these problems is the lack of democracy, and then they get mad.
Then you met someone who is socialist and idiot;
Please don’t lump everyone together, you just look like an idiot if you do so
I have yet to meet a single self-described socialist willing to admit that welfare programs like universal healthcare in democratic countries are a form of socialism. Will you be my first?
That’s a socialist policy implemented in a capitalist system
It’s not a capitalist system or a socialist system, it’s called a mixed economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_economy
One could make the same argument about a socialist country forced to coexist and trade with a capitalist world. Absolutism gets us nowhere.
Something most people miss is that the speed of change is a barrier.
You can do socialism fast or slow, the fast way is like a revolution, which most people don’t want since it sucks for the individual.
The slow way, which imo is the better way, is just doing policies that get you closer and closer to socialism within the capitalist framework.
The second way often means helping people who are less fortunate than the average person first, before getting to your average voter. That’s what individualistic societies can’t get past, they want their lives improved now. They fear they will vote for things that benefits poorer people and then the next government would come in before it’s their turn.
IMO the solution to this is obvious, focus on policies that literally benefit everyone. Don’t do select benefit programs, do problems that help everyone. UBI is a perfect example.
That sounds very much like must online leftists. Every single thing that improves the world slightly is pushed against, simply because it doesn’t solve every problem.
Of course, none of these people do anything for the Revolution they love so much. They’re evangelical at this point. Where the Revolution is the second coming, requiring no actual work, just believing in it.
The thing about the slow way is that it’s too readily reversible, and since the existing order allows the wealthy who would lose under such policies to consolidate power quite easily, those changes can be undone much more easily than they can be made.
Well the thing about the fast way is that it’s easily co-optable and you can end up with things really sucking for everyone just to end up in a worse position if you’re not careful.
You’re right, but being careful about stuff hasn’t and isn’t really working out for us.
policies cannot always benefit everyone. e.g. wealth tax won’t benefit the wealthy, consumer protection won’t benefit the corporates
Everyone except the wealthy.
Well public transport even helps the wealthy. It clears the roads for their cars
And moving to renewable energy sources will inevitably bring down costs and make it so if a tornado/hurricane/earthquake takes some power lines down a giant chunk of houses won’t all lose power, many of those houses will be able to keep refrigerators and necessities up until backup power from the grid gets restored.
Half the oceans ships are moving fossil fuels from place to place, so you can cut that tenfold… Making cleaner healthier ecosystems in both cities/towns and for the earth in general.
And there’s the third method: subsume it from within. Build a capitalistic product that depreciates a category and eliminates demand, thus rendering entire industries and their related activities obsolete.
It’s why renewable energy is being fought tooth and nail.
Edit: and no, this is not my response to “fastest way to socialism”, this is more like “how to speed-run post-scarcity”
Just depreciate the worthless stuff. If the average person doesn’t need petroleum then that’s 1 less need they have to take care of. If electricity is so cheap from overproduction then it’s practically free.
And here’s where it gets controversial and I start getting downvotes on principle: AI is part of that.
I think you recognize a fundamental problem and yet do not address it.
Superseding an entire industry consolidates the economic weight of that industry into a smaller, more captive market. A capitalist push towards post-scarcity won’t work because the capitalists will always be motivated to implement artificial scarcity to protect their profits. Look at the current cost of computer hardware for one example.
A revolution of some sort would still be needed to truly make a post-scarcity economy, otherwise the fruits of those innovations will remain limited to the hands of the few.
Not if the push in question reassigns the value itself. And since we’re subsuming, I’ll base it off current fintech: imagine a blockchain but instead of smart contracts you do inference and buy tokens. That’s what upcoming tech is trying to work out the mechanics of.
Except things arent getting better slowly are they, and the one party that pretends it is moving toward socialism just openly told some very mild,slow reformers at the DSA that the dems arent a socialist party, they are a capitlaist one. Do you need a link?
So there goes your theory on that one.
I would also argue that few people have made a very good case connecting peoples concerns to capitalism. So to many it has a Southpark-ish ring to it: capitalism is bad. Don’t do capitalism. It’s an abstract thing, and abstract opponents make people feel despair and impotence.
The most persuasive people I’ve seen don’t use that word often. They directly link peoples concerns to inequality (unfair taxation and employment laws), climate ( fossil fuel companies) and unregulated abusive businesses such as big tech.
Those are not faceless, abstract entities, so people can organise their (justified) anger better.
Has anybody else heard good approaches for helping people understand ?
The most persuasive people I’ve seen don’t use that word often. They directly link peoples concerns to inequality (unfair taxation and employment laws), climate ( fossil fuel companies) and unregulated abusive businesses such as big tech.
This is the way. Lefty movements have rightly been criticized for being too academic. Expressing people’s concerns in a more relatable and practical way gets more people on board.
totally. my latest ex is pretty socialist and anticapitalist, and i agreed with them on pretty much everything they said, but they drank the coolaid on using classical communist jargon to talk about stuff. half the time they would use definitions for words that were, to be generous, at odds with commonly accepted definitions. then they would get pissy and the discussion would devolve into semantics because they would only accept those definitions, while i was trying to use the normal definitions because of fucking course i would. so would almost everyone else. so in order to talk to them about government or politics without causing some kind of misunderstanding i would have to read a bunch of communist literature from the 1800s. i confronted them with the fact that this is a problem for the movement in general and they should be more straight forward with their words, but they just got pissy again.
it really sucks as a situation because theyre right, they just cant fathom that you cant expect people to read a bunch of old ass books in order to understand wtf theyre saying. add to that the jargon has been coopted and memed to death so every conservative gets triggered like a sleeper agent hearing the code word to execute their mission, we should probably abandon it and just talk in simple practical terms people can understand.
I can see why they’re your ex.
every conservative gets triggered like a sleeper agent hearing the code word to execute their mission, we should probably abandon it and just talk in simple practical terms people can understand.
Hard agree.
Exactly. We don’t need “socialism”. It’s just a word, one that has been deeply tainted through generations of propoganda. We can discard the label if it doesn’t help good outcomes… Material conditions are what matter, no matter what you call them
I love to fight someone forced to directly defend unaffordable housing and medical care. Please, tell me more about how you hate the common people and want us all to die. Speak up for the camera
If you’re willing to go “you’re absolutely right! What a good point!” every time the person you’re talking to aligns with you even a little bit like “you’re absolutely right, you work so hard it’s completely unfair you’re taxes are so high… and the taxes of the wealthy are so low in comparison!” they feel smart and validated and might not even notice you tacked on your own commentary and also avoid buzz words it’s actually not that difficult to talk to people in an effective way.
Presenting as a truck driving blue collar good ole boy before subtly bringing up how much we lose to income tax while the wealthy pay next to nothing is my technique. If they defend the wealthy they’re lost to the boot polish, but that’s pretty uncommon in my experience.
I’ve found “You work all day and get a small salary. The business owner sits around, and gets a huge payout. Does that seem fair?” is moderately effective.
You often get “they risk their money!” (so is gambling now something financially good?) or “they worked very hard to get there” (so why aren’t they as burned out as the rest of the “less hard working” workers?)
Hah, I had written something specifically about “they took on risk!” and a retort of “are we a slot machine and lotto driven society then?” but didn’t polish and post it.
For the latter, I might zero in on “they worked hard, maybe. Now they don’t. Should a freeloader get more than someone who works?” to see what happens.
IMO the challenge isn’t convincing them about socialistic policies, it’s convincing them to vote for less exciting candidates with low chances of winning in the immediate future.
FPTP is the real issue imo, it only allows the most bland and diluted policies through very slowly while market conditions change things rapidly.
That’s a good point. I’ve been voting for a party for years that started on 2-3% electoral preference. The general consensus at the time was that it would be nice to see them grow, but they’re a wasted vote. They’re now around 10-11% and even as opposition have impact.
We don’t have FPTP where I am, but I can see from our neighbours the kinds of problems it creates. Still, once you progress beyond FPTP, the kinds of attitude problems we have here still persist. I guess you’ll have a better idea of the next steps once you have proportional representation, because then you have a better idea of the government people really want.
Weak twitter-bait.
People don’t like any system, they don’t like obvious corruption and being taken advantage of.
But the world is very comfortable right now. Wouldn’t want to muck that up.
Everyone likes socialism, as long as it isn’t called socialism. Two sides of the same coin. We’ve been duped.
Everybody likes a mix of capitalism and socialism. Nobody likes 100% one or the other.
Everybody who has experienced it likes socialized medicine. Public education just makes sense. The idea of having to pay a contract to get private fire service seems absurd.
At the same time, nobody wants to stand in a bread line, or for the law to forbid an artist to profit from creating art. We like certain forms of capitalist activity, like a mom and pop shop, or a restaurant, or a good mechanic, or a lemonade stand.
Every country that believes in capitalism still has a mix of socialist elements. And, every supposedly “communist” country has realized that it doesn’t make any sense to forbid artists and craftsmen from owning their own tools and selling the things they made. The real question is where to draw the line.
The problem, as always, is the rich and powerful. Capitalism was supposed to be an improvement on feudalism because it required capitalists to compete, rather than just collect rents. But, that requires anti-trust, anti-monopoly laws, and for those laws to be enforced firmly and fairly. If a company has no competition, it can go right back to collecting rents and not doing any work. Communism also fails when “the state” owns everything, but really “the state” is a single dictator, or is a bunch of oligarchs who see that they get more than the rest.
nobody wants … the law to forbid an artist to profit from creating art.
What if the Capitalists pay all artists to praise Capitalism and to romanticize the individual struggle?
The thing is most countries don’t go around declaring themselves “we are a capitalist nation, we follow the capitalist ideology”, so this seems pointlessly vague.
Although the US does go around saying we’re not communist and we’re not socialist even as we give hundreds of billions USD to corporate interests and have huge socialized programs like the US armed forces and the interstate highway system.
In fact, the Republicans disparage the Democrats by accusing them of being communist, when they totally are not, even the SDAs.
But then even most self-described socialists use the catch phrase “socialism isn’t when the government does stuff” these days. Even though it is, if the government was democratically elected.
And OP said the World, not America. There’s plenty of mixed economies around the world that are doing just fine, arguably better than any other form of economy.
I wouldn’t say they’re doing fine. They’re kind of doing fine in the way that the US was doing fine in the 1970s, which is to say, it may look okay, but the elements that would cause the later dissolution and collapse of the US economy were already in place, and unchecked. The first big symptom was Reagan getting elected in 1980 by a landslide.
Europe is suffering from the consequences of decades of neoliberalist policy thanks to the influence of international corporate interests, and we’re already seeing the decay of socialized services and the rise of far-right movements. It doesn’t help that the tippy-top (millionth of a percent) wealthiest have far more money relative to the rest of the population, enough to buy elections outright (or buy huge quantities of land and capital).
So the socialist features of the industrialized world are likely to suffer the same fate of numerous other socialist state that impeded large corporate interests, whether it is through legal shenanigans and political maneuvering (what caused Brexit and is kiling the NHS) or gunboat diplomacy.
And if you tell them that they don’t capitalism, they’ll just screech that you’re a tankie.
As if you can simplify it to one single cause
No seriously, if you pull off enough masks all of societies problems are just money and xenophobia in varying degrees.
I just spent 7 weeks researching organ shortages in the US for a class. Turns out live donations go up dramatically if you reimburse people for the money they lose while doing the procedures and families are more willing to donate the organs of the dead if they are told they’re going to a similar demographic as them.
Homelessness? “Those people” don’t deserve human rights and they don’t have the money for housing. Xenophobia and money.
Opioid crisis? The pharma companies knew there were addictive and factored that into their push to get doctors to prescribe them like candy. This has been proven by internal documentation released in court. Money.
White supremacy? Don’t even have to explain it. Xenophobia.
Rise of Facism? Xenophobia exploited for money.
Pay gaps between men and women? Xenophobia because women aren’t taken seriously and money because it benefits the company to pay someone less.
Stagnant wages? Xenophobia because rich people don’t think poors deserve money and money because they get more if we get less.
Racism in America? Xenophobia and money. Most racists are just raised to hate by previous generations. If you go back far enough for those you find that the hate came from considering the other as property and by turning them into people you hurt the owner’s money. The seed was money and the fruit is xenophobia.
Christian nationalism? It looks like xenophobia but Surpise! It’s money. Religious capitalism is the idea that God rewards those w who are holy and what better reward than wealth? So if you’re poor, it’s because god doesn’t like you which means you’re evil.
It is literally money and hate all the way down.
Hell, the xenophobia goes away when populations are mixed. People who look different are a lot less scary when they just look like Carl down the street.
Guess who controls who can buy into what neighborhoods!
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What many people hate about what is happening now is not even capitalism.
Capitalism is an economic system characterized by the private ownership of the means of production and the pursuit of profit.
Of course pure, laissez-faire capitalism has arguably never existed on a national scale. Modern economies are defined by their specific balance of market freedom and government oversight, but that is not what I mean.
Traditional capitalism was historically driven by equity. Owners investing their own capital or retained earnings into production to generate profits through goods and services. In contrast, the modern economy is increasingly driven by debt.
If capitalism implies a system driven by equity investment in production and disciplined by the risk of bankruptcy, the modern leverage-heavy economy deviates significantly. It functions as a hybrid system where financial extraction and state-backed credit have superseded productive investment and market discipline as the primary engines of economic activity.
Did they just source themselves? Is that a thing people do now?
