Do you support sustainability, social responsibility, tech ethics, or trust and safety? Congratulations, you’re an enemy of progress. That’s according to the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
Who are all these extremist wackos who don’t already want to abolish capitalism?
Kind of need a valid replacement.
Edit The amount of downvotes versus provision of a valid replacement is telling
I ask the reader, if you could live in any country in the world, what country would that be? Seriously think about it for a moment. Take your time. … Now, note if the country you just chose is capitalist or not, it almost certainly is.
Yes, capitalism has flaws, but we have yet to see a better system.
Because capitalist countries keep using their massive wealth to dismantle socialist/communist countries. Just look at the history of US interventions in Latin/South America, which replaced a lot of democratically elected leftists with murderous dictators so we could have cheaper bananas.
Also it’s a lot harder to create a system that works for everyone instead of an oligarchy run by the wealthy. The reason so many countries slide into capitalism is because it’s a pit that self-interested parties are constantly trying to drag people in
Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system. It’s not perfect, but neither is any other system.
Industrialization lifts people out of poverty, capitalism sinks them into poverty by stealing the value of their labor as profit.
Also what’s with the phrase “lifted out of poverty?” The fuck does that mean? Why is this same phrase repeated anytime some criticizes capitalism? It’s like a stock phrase or talking point that makes you sound like a robot.
Are you sure about that, because last I checked the Soviets industrialized and their people still stayed poor as hell.
Yes, all those wonderful capitalist innovations like minimum wages, the 5-day work week and paid holidays.
Oh wait those are all things capitalists fought tooth and nail against and social movements made happen. You’re assuming that because something good happened under capitalism that it’s because of it, but most of the actual good things that lifted people out of poverty were anticapitalist. Meanwhile all the needless suffering and deaths because of capitalism never seem to get attributed to it despite the fact that wealth hoarding is responsible for creating so many resource scarcity problems that we have the ability to solve.
That is only true if you use capitalist metrics to measure poverty
(1) It is unlikely that 90% of the human population lived in extreme poverty prior to the 19th century. Historically, unskilled urban labourers in all regions tended to have wages high enough to support a family of four above the poverty line by working 250 days or 12 months a year, except during periods of severe social dislocation, such as famines, wars, and institutionalized dispossession – particularly under colonialism. (2) The rise of capitalism caused a dramatic deterioration of human welfare. In all regions studied here, incorporation into the capitalist world-system was associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality. In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, key welfare metrics have still not recovered. (3) Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began several centuries after the rise of capitalism.
The way capitalists use capitalist metrics to prove capitalism is good is really annoying. “Look at our per-capita GDP!”
“Yeah but you have one billionaire and everyone else goes bankrupt if they get sick.”
“Yeah, but our per-capita GDP is high so we don’t need to do anything.”
It’s a myth that capitalism alone has lifted people out of poverty. In fact, many nations have fought to implement strong social policies just to try and shield their citizens from its excesses. For every claim of progress, there are countless tales of exploitation, dispossession, and environmental ruin. Saying no system is perfect trivialises the issue. With capitalism, the true cost is often hidden behind the glittering façade of consumerism, at the expense of human dignity, ethics, and our planet’s health.
What the hell are you talking about. The nordic countries constantly rate as one of the most economically free countries in the world. Capitalism is everywhere in the nordic countries, but it’s also used to support comprehensive welfare state.
And yes, I come from the “happiest country in the world” so I guess I can literally see that we are quite capitalistic.
Edit: it seems that the original comment was edited so my comment looks kinda unnecessary now
I think it’s been several years in a row now Nordic countries have been rated the happiest in the world.
Those studies tend to be heavily Euro-centric.
Some of the happiest countries on earth are in East Asia. Bhutan, in particular, is the happiest country you’ve never heard about. Vietnam and Singapore also tend to rate very high. Bolivia also tends to punch well above its weight class.
But it should be noted that the Nordic states have historically been very far removed from war. With the Ukraine/Russia conflict, Fins are significantly more unhappy than they’ve been in prior generations. I don’t think you can blame that on their domestic policy or their economic model. As more refugees are forced through Europe in an effort to flee conflicts in Armenia and police crackdowns in Hungary and industrial sabotage through the Baltic Sea, happiness in the region is plummeting.
The fact the Nordic countries are rated as the most happy in the world proves that abolishing capitalism is a fucking awful idea. The Nordic countries are all capitalist.
You’re confusing capitalism with industrialization.
The development of modern modes of production came about nearly two centuries after the foundation of modern marketplace practices. The Dutch East India Company did not bring people out of poverty. Just the opposite. It served as a means of rapidly conquering and subjugating large indigenous populations, by using the speculative bubbles created during periods of looting to construct large militaries capable of further conquest. The rapid militarization and trans-continental looting/pillaging of the 17th and 18th centuries resulted in the increased spread of contagious disease, the worst genocides committed since at least the Roman era, and the formalization of Colonial Era chattel slavery.
Industrialization, which was a product of the mathematical and material sciences renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, produced huge surpluses in commercial goods and services. Revolutions in textile manufacturing, fertilization, fossil fuel-based transportation and electrification, materials sciences, and medical innovation brought hundreds of millions of people out of the agricultural economy and brought a functional end to a litany of common causes of death. The industrial era was not specific to the capitalist economic mode, but it was practiced most aggressively early on by capitalist states.
But the Industrial Revolution had a huge knock-on effect. Mass media and modern communication reoriented traditional class hierarchies and formed new models for social organization. The seed of socialist theories that had been planted in the 17th and 18th centuries blossomed into massive revolutionary labor movements during the 19th and 20th centuries. This, combined with the industrial collapse of the imperial core in the wake of the First and Second World Wars, signaled the beginning of the end of capitalism as a hegemonic economic force.
By the 1950s, numerous socialist political experiments produced successful industrialized civilizations, some of which even persist into the modern era. Meanwhile, rising standards of living from industrial surpluses in food, fuel, and living space raised living standards globally without regard to one’s economic mode.
The real test of capitalism as an enterprise has kicked in during the last 50 years. By the 1970s, the era of cheap fossil fuel was coming to an end and various economic models were forced to contend with a declining rate of new surplus goods and services. Forced to choose between economic conservation/improved efficiency and a new wave of imperial aggression, the capitalist states have attempted to backpedal into their old traditional colonial models of business. The end result has been a new generation of major military conflicts - from the Vietnamese Jungle to the Iraqi desert - alongside a number of ugly civil wars and domestic insurrections in former capitalist strongholds.
Without a continuous industrial surplus to drive profit, modern capitalist economic models are failing. Quality of life in capitalist states is beginning to decline. And capitalist leaders are turning to more militant methods of seizing natural resources, forcing low-wage labor, and wrecklessly disposing of excess waste.
Capitalism rode the cresting wave of industrialization for a century. But now it is failing. And people in capitalist states - from the UK to Saudi Arabia to the Philippines - are seeing their quality of life erode away at a rapid pace.
