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Comment by Refreeze5224

17 hours ago

I am generally anti-capitalist, and a big reason is because I don't think capitalism, inherently and fundamentally, can become anything other than what it is now. The benefit its provided is rarely accurately weighed against the harms, and for people who disproportionately benefit, like most here on HN, it's even harder to see the harms.

Anti-capitalist sentiment was incredibly widespread in the US during the 19th century through the 1930s, because far more people were personally impacted, and most needed look no further than their own lives to see it. If nothing else, capitalism has become more sophisticated in disguising its harms, and acclimating people to them to such an extent that many become entirely incapable of seeing any harm at all, or even imagining any other way for a society to be structured, despite humanity having exited for 100,000+ years.

Capitalism has many harms, but what's the alternative? Communism is worse - much worse.

  • Participatory economies such as those discussed here:

    https://znetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/zbooks/htdocs/books/...

    "In this book we argue for a new alternative based on public ownership and a decentralized planning procedure in which workers and consumers propose and revise their own activities until an equitable, efficient plan is reached. The vision, which we call a participatory economy, strives for equitable consumption and work which integrate conceptual and manual labor so that no participants can skew outcomes in their favor, so that self-motivation plays a growing role as workers manage their own activities, and so that peer pressure and peer esteem provide powerful incentives once excelling and malingering rebound to the advantage and disadvantage of one's work mates."

  • It's really not an either/or proposition. Humans have used a much larger variety of systems of social and economic organization than capitalists would have you believe. We have innovated as a species in so many ways, like putting a man on the moon, AI, the internet, etc. But for some reason (i.e. capitalists like it that way), we don't seem to think we can innovate in the way that we organize our society and economy. Which is total BS in my book. Of course the people who massively and disproportionately benefit from the current arrangement don't want us image an alternative to it.

    Capitalism is designed to maximize profit, which it does well. It has even improved life for many people. Even the most ardent Marxist acknowledges this fact. But what we really care about (unless you're super rich) is maximizing human well-being overall. So why rely on a system that is not actually meant to maximize, prioritize, or focus on what we actually care about, and only does so occasionally or incidentally? It doesn't make sense, and in almost no other arena of human endeavor is this done. Imagine writing software to maximize x, when you really want it to do y, and just hoping that x makes y happen, and saying it's the least worst way of doing it, without trying any other option.

    Fundamentally, I think any socioeconomic system should be designed with people in mind as the organizing principle. If we care about human well-being, happiness, flourishing, etc., it makes no sense not to prioritize it from first principles. I imagine some form of economic and political democracy, wherein people have direct control over the things that affect their lives, in the social, political, and economic spheres (the three are inseparable, despite common capitalist dogma to the contrary). And not the usual representative democracy, where you abdicate any real decision-making power to an effectively unaccountable representative every 4 years.

    The usual objection to this is that it would be impossible to maintain the status quo with an arrangement like this. But that's just more capitalist self-preservation talking. There are clearly tradeoffs required in a new system oriented towards maximal human well-being. Likely tons of dirt-cheap Chinese-made products are out. But those never made us happy to being with!