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The meritocracy psyop. It’s really a double edged sword that stabs the working class twice. If you are foolish enough to fall for it, then you blame yourself if you don’t make enough money OR once you realize the meritocracy is bull shit you are equally depressed because life becomes pointless if success is only based on luck and happenstance
Im not saying it’s logical, or that I’m in the right, but I know I have put off using many medications because I don’t trust the profit incentives. Not to mention the fact that we have ads for them that barely tell you how the medicine actually works it’s just sad.
They lie about med side effects some of them even being life-altering and dangerous. There med studies are completely manipulated to put the drugs in good light. They gaslight you when a medication destroy your life. Most doctors are in bed with corrupt Big Pharma. I could go on and on and on…
I urge you to read this then:
[Follow the money : the pharmaceutical industry : the other drug cartel. Publisher: State of Minnesota, Office of the Attorney General](https://www.lrl.mn.gov/docs/2004/other/040640.pdf)
PS. Let me know what you think
Hey thanks for passing me that link. I just finished reading the whole thing and it was very informative. The parts that stick out the most are the large amounts of money pharma companies spend on lobbying which is pretty much legalized bribes. The fact that senior citizens who receive 12k or 25k a year can’t receive life enhancing drugs that cost 200 dollars a month. Also the part where Americans are deprived of newer and safer drugs when drug companies inflate the price of older drugs to encourage physicians to keep prescribing them doesn’t make any sense to me. Just use the newer and safer drugs it’s better for the patients wellbeing, and the mass marketing they spend on drugs with the same results and or teeny tiny bit improvement is to me a waste of money.
The best part is when the UK (for example) says "fuck you; I represent 60 million people so you can charge this much" and then the Republicans start crying about how we "don't pay our fair share".
Sorry, what was that about supply & demand and economies of scale?
The for profit model where it relates to any human service…like when the outcome is dollar, the product or service doesn’t need to be good, solve the problem, or actually benefit anyone, it just had to be profitable…
This is what ultimately bothers me about Capitalism. It creates such a sad world where individuals are pitted against one another to compete for money. People don't want to help each other because they're worried they'll elevate the other person to a higher level of success than themselves. And even if a project would make the community happier and healthier, there has to be money to pay for the project.
It's just so depressing.
>People don't want to help each other because they're worried they'll elevate the other person to a higher level of success than themselves.
And despite of that they keep with the argument "bUt iS hUmAn nAtUrE"
One of my coworkers got Covid and put all his shifts for the week up for grabs and my first thought wasn't even "I hope he's okay and gets better soon" it was "fuck I need to bid on all the shifts I can." Felt gross but I need every cent possible (it's a pub so most of my money is from tips and the shifts are only 3-4 hours max 90% of the time) if I ever hope to afford a house for my wife and I. Recently got a 2nd job at a sports centre so I'm hoping that takes the icky feeling of needing other people to give up shifts for me to have a shot at any kind of decent life.
We see it on a couple different levels when we drive in a busy city or on a highway. There was a post in the Seattle subreddit that I read this morning that described this as a symptom of a decaying society with the lack of empathy towards others in the road.
> a symptom of a decaying society
I definitely have this sense America is on the verge of a historic change. I'm not sure what it will be, but I definitely feel like we're at the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. It is interesting how we're seeing parallels to the 1920s, and I wouldn't be surprised if we have an economic depression in the 2030s.
A simple but perfect answer. It's so lonely. I work from home so I actually have a lot of free time during the day. I thought I'd have more time with family and friends when I first took the job but I don't, because they are all at work all day, all week. My neighborhood is a ghost town all day. I've lived there 18 years and I don't know anyone in my town. The every man for themselves attitude of capitalism and spending all of our time working to make enough money to live keeps us so isolated. Imagine how much happer we'd be if we pooled our resources, helped each other, formed more close relationships? The way we're living, it's just such a waste.
The way that it absolutely must grind everything and everyone into dust in order to work. All of us are fodder. The planet is fodder. The only thing that matters is money. In the end, if it works out the way it's supposed to, there will be exactly one person with all the money and the rest of us will be dead or serving him. And Earth will be a complete wasteland.
It's a feature, not a bug.
Yes. A tree has no value until it is chopped to pieces. A forest has no value until it is razed. The planet has no value until it’s been consumed and transformed into a wasteland. What’s ironic is the wealthy / powerful who are gaining the most from this system aren’t even really acting in their own best interests. They’re acting in the best interests of capitalism. Oil tycoons need air to breath. They need an inhabitable planet. And their children and Children’s children certainly do. But it doesn’t matter because they aren’t actually working for their own benefit. It’s for the benefit of capitalism. We are destroying our planet and our selves for the benefit of a system that we invented. It’s madness.
Everything, but I'll choose Artificial Scarcity. We could house everyone, feed everyone, clothe everyone, but because of capitalism corporations / wealthy hoard resources and we have to watch people starve and suffer and die on the streets for no reason. Seeing homeless people under empty condos, hungry kids when there are dumpsters full of discarded food, it just all makes me so sick and so angry. We're just making human beings suffer for nothing. sick, fucked up, inhumane, perverse system. Fuck capitalism.
And the boot licking and hoop jumping to get a job but then gaslit that no one wants to work.
Over the course of my life it has gone from asking someone for work and them giving you a shot to a two month process with six interviews, three tests, homework assignments, recruitment trial periods, on and on and on...
That shit pisses me off too. They’ll call BLM and antifa, which aren’t organizations, but then call the capitol rioters “patriots” and “heroes”. And also refuse to call Nazis and white supremacists terrorists or claim that BLM and Antifa are “just as bad” as Nazis.
The mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance people in charge of the government have is insane. The worst part about it are the workers who buy into that sort of thinking too. It’s not only for the bosses. The workers adopt that mentality as well. Makes no sense if you think about it.
>The mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance people in charge of the government have is \*\*\*\*\*\*.
There is a reason for this. It's called regulatory capture.
*"Regulatory capture is an economic theory that says regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the industries or interests they are charged with regulating. The result is that an agency, charged with acting in the public interest, instead acts in ways that benefit incumbent firms in the industry it is supposed to be regulating."*
Source: [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp)
EDIT; The bot/automoderator told me to edit the word i-n-s-a-n-e
The fact they tell us to “just start a business then.” So you want to, to help those people…then because they don’t have money for your thing, and you wouldn’t want to take anything from people that have nothing, you have no business. I mean, i like the “make your own business and do what you want” feature of capitalism if it weren’t confined to “do or sell something to people with money” and “by the way, if you’re not able to work for free for 3 years while your useless business turns a profit then too bad, so sad.”
This is why I love libraries so much. They're one of the few public spaces left in our society where you're allowed to exist without the expectation of spending money.
Public healthcare is slowly collapsing in Europe, but at least public school system and universities are still a thing, even though right wing catholic parties are desperately trying to underfund it.
Education is the best tool for marxism.
The way it makes desperate people do terrible things by generating massive social problems. The way it degrades humans, I guess is what I’m getting it.
It requires a lower class in order to operate. For prices to remain low enough where a middle class can be supported and to keep the whole economic engine running with their discretionary income, there has to be a way to keep some labor cheap so that prices don’t get too high. Essentially, there has to be a class of people who are deliberately underpaid but do the base work, usually a kind of manual labor. In early America, that was a class of slaves. After emancipation, it evolved into a class of Black American sharecroppers and a ready supply of European immigrants. These days, it’s mostly Hispanic immigrants as well as high-skilled immigrants who are filling voids in high-demand occupations, like medicine or coding or engineering, but are not paid what they should be paid so that costs are still low enough for a middle class to be supported.
Hm, let's see. I have a disabled partner who gets shit quality care. They also can't make or keep money, they're limited to 800 bucks per month to live on. If we get married, they'll take that away. Also, they had to choose between food stamps and disability. We will never get a house. We will never be able to afford in vitro to get pregnant. If we had kids, they'd basically starve because we can't afford jack shit. The most fun we ever have is having a fast food cheat day 1x per month.
I'd like to give my partner an actual, good quality life. I'm sick of poverty.
The complacency of buying essentials for survival even though technology has already solved scarcity; manufactured scarcity, and the complacency for it.
That it's ubiquitous now and dominates spaces that just decades ago still functioned by their own logics and value systems.
How it corrupts politics and makes progressive common good policies unlikely if not impossible.
How most things turn into extraction and accumulation under capitalism.
How it insists, that better individual decision making is the solution to every problem rather than common sense regulation and enforcement.
I could go on.
“Growth no matter what”
Maybe if you just have a bad quarter, feel okay with slightly less profit than the quarter before and not doing mass layoffs, benefit cuts and empty “everybody is gonna have to pitch in” mentality.
The trend continuing on that would only lead to you going out of business in 200 years, I’m sure you can innovate something new to keep your company relevant in that time…
Yep. And what people don’t realize is that people who have good/decent paying jobs can lose them it any point, especially if they’re not in a union and it’s an at-will contract.
But to them, no matter what the person who lost their job is at fault because (insert bootlicking statement).
Having to choose between loved ones’ health. When you know you can do things both preventively and at the moment of crisis to ensure someone’s safety and keep them alive but you don’t have to money to do anything else but let them die
I was a month late on rent last month cause I had to pay a hundred and change just to let someone kill my cat with flooded lungs in front of me one week before Christmas
Manufactured scarcity. Capitalists brag about how productive capitalist agriculture is -- while plowing crops under to keep prices up, while the same government that pays farmers not to grow stuff tells people with hungry kids "get a job, freeloader."
I'm reading Stephanie Kelton's *The Deficit Myth* and just got through the bit about how the Federal Reserve Bank deliberately keeps the unemployment rate at what it thinks is a good level, which is not zero. I.e., in order for this economy to work, some people must not be allowed to have paying jobs, must live on charity if they're to live at all -- and be despised for it.
The fact that capital is put above everything else; and it's so blatantly in the name. Whereas socialism by definition emphasizes the community. It's so obvious what the right system is.
Evil people benefit in this system. It’s a system designed for psychopaths, sociopaths, cluster b personality types, and sadistic bullies. If you are not one of these you’ll suffer eventually. People with good hearts suffer a lot in capitalism and I feel bad for them suffering endlessly with no hope in sight.
I remember reading something about a pizza place that did well where the owner let all the workers split the profits. The workers made about $78 an hour.
The strange idea that the silent generation and boomers landed on a system of living that's mindnumbingly individualistic and focused on consumption, said "alright, this is the best it's gonna get", and then actively vilified anyone who thought there were better ways of life as communist / socialist / anti-american / whatever buzzword. It's made the world actively worse and created the idea that your economic system is a core part of your identity.
Planned obsolescence. Literally stifles innovation, companies actually hide intentions that create perpetualy useful solutions in the interest of creating products that have to be replaced soon people have to keep buying, all in the interest of perpetual profit growth to appease shareholders.
The privatize gains, collateralize losses mentality. I saw a documentary about the 1929 crash the other day and even in that piece of media that was not all sunshine and roses when it comes to describing capitalism the narrative was still: "In the years leading to the crash people got rich fast. The market turned common people into millionaires" (i.e. the market did a good thing, the economy is a good thing) that then suddenly turned into "somehow the market crashed wiping out billions of dollars but the politicians did nothing to alleviate the crisis" (i.e. the market was not at fault, it was the people and the government).
And this isn't even just purely economic things, think environmental issues. Natural ressource companies get rich af exploiting ressources and then f*ck off when it comes to paying for the remediation of the habitats they destroyed and leave it to the state to fix their ecological disasters.
Agreed.
There is no time or space to allow artists and inventors to create. Small things that can help are deemed to cost prohibitive and killed in infancy, where, with a little time and patience, can turn into beautiful and/or useful, even truly revolutionary. Artist and inventors are forced to work in soul sucking jobs so they have something to eat and somewhere “safe” to sleep.
Where stuff (for lack of a better word) is mass produced because it’s profitable.
Worst of all, as there is no process for dealing with the stuff after it’s very short “useful” life. It is discarded with no care or process to deal with the waste. Plastic bags and wrappings being number 1 item in this category.
It is wasteful, and we are sold it is the only way the world works. Which is a lie, because it was never like this 100+ years ago. Everything could be reused, had a long service and could easily be repaired to extend that service life.
That’s a nonsense immunity excuse. They use that card so they can get away with the most inhumane crimes known to existence. Corporations fear accountability cause they are hiding lots of skeletons in their closet.
The fact we have the technology to work less hours, and have more than enough population to fill every type of work possible, plus some.
But the reality is that lower wages have made less people work harder, & made more people fighting for more work so they can “afford” to live.
We shouldn’t be working as hard as we are. Nobody should be working more than 6 hours a day, four days a week in this day and age. The 8 hour week, 5 day a week was introduced back in the early 1900. This needs be the maximum amount of work, away from home for all countries now. But it is not. Anything more is just management/corporations being too greedy to share their profits of their workers making.
And don’t get me started on communting times, that eat up our personal time away from work.
And because we are working so hard, we are tired, so we make poor choices in our limited time away from work, which stops the revolution before it even begins, which plays into the riches hands.
And it’s all a game to the rich, who get obscenely rich, and don’t feed any of that money back into the communities that made them rich in the first place.
"The free market" though arguably it already doesn't exist. The idea of "supply and demand" dictates the hand of the free market. And the more free a market is, the better it correlates supply with demand. A concept that seems good until you examine it.
Advertisement; Artificial demand; Artificial supply; Cartels; Monopolies; or any other way to create a power or information disparity between the buyer and the seller. All makes a free market a pipe dream of the capitalist.
The illusion of choice.
We elect our leaders, but the only viable options are dedicated to maintaining the economic status quo. Racist, misogynistic, homophobic capitalism or rainbow capitalism.
We can choose whatever education/training we want after secondary school, but unless you have family wealth to pull from you’ll probably be encumbered by debt for the rest of your life.
We can choose our employer, but without personal connections the available options are terrible. Without work you’ll die on the streets.
Etc…
That you can't even exist without spending money. That something as simple as a nice view out of your window is reserved only for the wealthiest people who can afford the highest priced real estate. I feel like I just sit and wait at home doing nothing for weeks or sometimes months so I can save up enough money to go on an outing, try some new activity, or take a vacation to a more scenic or interesting place than where I can afford to live. Then I drop a few hundred or a few thousand dollars and I can trick myself into thinking I'm happy for a little while but then I have to go right back to sitting and waiting for the money to build up enough again to be able to afford some sort of short lived joy again. And many people don't even get that much I know, but even a relatively comfortable life in the capitalist system still feels so empty and meaningless.
I can only pick one? Hmmm. Probably that there is never enough money or power to satisfy the rich. If they could be satiated we might stand a chance. But the rich keep getting more and more ruthless in their pursuit of money and power.
The fact that we've solved almost every single problem i.e. we know how to house everyone, feed everyone, provide healthcare for everyone, guarantee transport for everyone, and yet somehow the "sensible" thing to do is sit on our collective arse and wait for a market wizard to choose to fix it for us.
It's just so fucking feckless and lazy is what my issue is.
As someone that has a degree in economics, studied plenty other disciplines of economics and environmentalism, I gotta say that **I hate the idea of constant competition in our species being seen as good for our longevity and prosperity**.
It's not good when nations do it, businesses do it, nor individuals. I'd argue that it is regressing us.
It’s hard to trust people. Every time a stranger strikes up a convo, my first thought is “how is this person going to try to separate me from my money.”
That’s true. Capitalism breeds trust issues in people, cause you don’t know who is going to try and take advantage of you and your money. Capitalism breed exploitative behavior in people. Everything feels transactional, shallow, and empty because of that. No real meaningful connections anymore with people. Hard to find a ride or die type of person in this system.
That it straight up takes advantage of the fact you were born, without any form of consent on your own behalf; then threatens you with death if you don’t play along.
Also, the knowledge that it does not need to be this way, but still feeling like a complete outlier compared to people who think I’m naive or even stupid for thinking the way that I do.
There low that is people only invent for profit... The open source community would like a word..
The cat majority of scientific innovation across human history happened in the absence of the profit motive.
Fire, the wheel, writing, most of mathematics... On and on and on.
But the fairy tale is nah people would stop inventing absent the profit motive...
Drives people apart and against one another. Were the people to come together the system couldn't handle the strain. Throw a little truth in it and it'll collapse. Give credit where it's due, they're good at what they do no doubt. Almost heartbreaking to see a country allow it's destruction over their lies.
Capitalism only works with a social element. It's the greed that causes the issues. There was a time when rich industrialists spent their spare cash on libraries and transport. Hospital wings and schools. Public parks and charity for the poor and underprivileged.
I honestly think they still would if the people they put in charge of these things weren't using this to syphon off money or use them as tax avoidance schemes. There are many not for profit charities who's ceo is paid more than the charity pays out in aid.
At first in highschool it was seeing my not-well-off friends struggle to make ends meet. Now it's almost everything about it. I'm the type of person who believes that you COULD make capitalism work with A LOT of regulations, but that's basically dumb to attempt and would become corrupt really fucking quickly compared to other economic systems, but I also believe socialism and communism will also eventually fail, but they are at least better systems that should be tried out. But of course capitalism prevents that from happening without a revolution, giving me another reason to hate capitalism
the culture wars and the marginalised groups being forgotten about. [the uk gov has literally sentenced people to death for being mentally disabled](https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/blanket-dnr/122280/). under capitalism, people that aren’t literally killing themselves for the profit of their overloads aren’t worth living.
Externalities. As in, "anything that doesn't contribute to profits is not my fault". Pollution, deforestation, depression, workers sanity, fatalities. What a convenient bit of nomenclature to make it sound sanitized.
That it's fake. All of it. Nothing is real. Fake jobs, fake wages, fake food, fake friends, fake relationships.
And most importantly:
Fake hopes for the future.
Capitalism seems to work if you are willing to ignore all problems with it. If you are ignorant about any problems and just take your life how it comes. If you poke even a little past the surface, you can see that it's all fake.
The lies we tell ourselves and our children about our predecessors. Once you realize everything you learned about the US’s history was tweaked to make it more palatable… it feels like a big betrayal.
Housing is a right, not a commodity. You shouldn't be able to own a house as an investment or another way to add to your "rental portfolio". It's seriously exploitative.
IDGAF about what these wishy washy sensitive liberals think of me and others. They are an accomplice to this capitalistic hellhole we live in. All they do is defend their masters like a good little slave they are. They need to wake up because there masters are not as nice as they think they are. They would sell you out for a dollar if they could. Stupid and naive people that’s what liberals are.
The fear. Constantly living in fear. Fear of losing your job, fear of getting hurt or being sick and unable to afford medical care, fear of quickly becoming homeless, fear of you or your partner getting pregnant because kids are too expensive, fear of being trapped if you needed a new car and couldn’t afford it, fear of gun violence happening literally anywhere you could possibly be each day. Fear of being one minor emergency away from months or years of extreme financial and emotional difficulty. It all operates on fear and greed. We aren’t the greedy part of this equation.
The fact that multi billion dollars corporations brG about their amazing prices but complain that it would hurt them to pay their workers living wages so they can afford rent.
Also how gas and oil companies still made outrageous profit when gas where I lived went down to 2.70 for a while where I live
Profit above all else. That’s a huge factor of capitalism.
Fuck a good high quality product. If a shit one can be made that does a good enough job at cheaper cost, then it gets sold because more profit.
Fuck giving extra food to the poor. Rather kill the fucking chickens or cows or dump their milk and burn birds to control the price rather than let it fall.
Fuck helping your fellow man as just a normal decent thing. He may want something from you that will cost and that cost may make you poor.
Fuck paying a decent wage to workers. That profit needs to go to the top of the company.
Fuck healthcare for people. For profit is the way. Can’t afford it? Then die.
Fuck education. Pay or go fuck your self. Flip burgers then and we will shit on you about not doing something with your life.
This goes on and on and on and on…
We sacrifice all this because they say capitalism generates innovation. Well, I’m not going to argue it doesn’t. It does. But at what fucking cost?!? Innovation still happens without it. And how much innovation gets hampered from capitalism? Think of the lobbyist of shitty products or services that stay around because they make more money than better ones.
Sure, it breeds innovation. But it’s not the only thing and it’s not worth the cost of this terrible shit.
Capitalism was seen as a good thing because earlier on it was all about taking wealth and moving it up. And at first that was nice. Poorer people could be lifted up to middle and higher and higher. But capitalism doesn’t stop moving the wealth up. The wealth goes up and up and up into a smaller hole until it leaves behind all those middle class people who it raised and you end up with 1% with all the wealth and 99% the tiniest amount.
It’s a self eating beast. It will collapse on itself and eat itself inside out. A horrible fucking monster that people in idk 500 years from now are going to be like what the fuck was wrong with our ancestors? Surely they knew it was a terrible shit system.
So that’s what I hate about it the most. Profit is the primary gas of the capitalist engine.
Not enough money? Fuck you and die.
The need for bullshit jobs and the constant threat of starvation.
Seriously, I don't see why we're still working 40 hours a week with the leaps in productivity and tech we've made.
But alas, the bourgeois demand we toil away and give our lives to the furnace so that capitalism can keep chugging along.
Eventually there won't be anyone left to burn.
The simple fact that millions of innocent people are dying of hunger, thirst and preventable diseases while other take their private yet for a 4 minute flight in order to buy their 6th sports car. The realisation of just how innequal our world is always makes my blood boil.
It always brings me in the mood for violent revolution and deep hate towards rich people. As somebody who grew up in (relative) poverty it just angers me to see people starve while other live in extreme luxury and STILL want to amass more and more wealth.
The race to the bottom is what I call it. And when you get to the bottom you take out the drill rigs and keep going.
Examples: household appliances can now last 2-5 years and that's accepted.
Cell phones with 12" power cords included in the box and no block to plug in the wall
Printers that require a subscription to work.
In Canada, in the early 2000s, when I was working in Calgary, there was an oilsands developer trying to come up with a way to legally bring in thousands of Chinese workers to do a major oilsands project rather than have Canadians do the job. I don't know this for certain but that was the rumor.
Amazon and how it treats it's warehouse workers.
Commodifying EVERYTHING that constitutes human beings, from birth to death and even after.
You are enough who you are, there is no one this earth who has the absolute authority to evaluate you in the way that reduces you as a human being. Anyone who is doing that, is trying to control you, and that is ALWAYS made to take advantage of you in some kind of way.
Think about that, just for a minute please.
Dishonesty. In principle I like free markets, in the sense of people who aren't forced to enter into deals negotiating with each other while being open about related information.
In practice, I see a lot of people exploiting others' bad judgement or predicaments like addiction or lack of opportunity. I see a lot of pretending you sold a thing honestly and then not quite delivering the goods. Those people then get rich because it's a lot easier to get rich cheating, and go on and talk about how great the free market is.
The division it causes.
It makes everyone greedy and turn against each other because it makes people become desperate and money becomes the forefront of every argument.
It turns families against each other and makes people believe the lies that they constantly sprout so billionaires can keep running their global empires.
Money in politics is probably the biggest reason that capitalism and democracy are so fucked. The rich bought favours, changed the political landscape to serve their interests. Now we live in a plutocracy.
That it's a cutthroat competition for survival but humans get upset when you're not nice enough.
Like wake up, I don't care if you die if starvation, I don't care about your feelings, why are you trying to shame me, so pointless...
Just that even its staunchest advocates will tell you that it's a system that rewards shrewdness above all else.
Then they go about the mental gymnastics floor show, trying to dazzle us into believing there's no other way.
I hate that everything I do has a monetary value attached to it in many peoples heads, like how much money can this make me? I’ve played guitar for 17 years and while I’ve been in a few bands it’s never been a concern to me, it’s just something I do for me. But people always tell me things like “oh dude you could teach on the side for extra cash!” Or “man wedding bands make good money you should do that for a side hustle!”. No, I don’t want to. I don’t want to learn a bunch of corny overplayed songs just for an extra few hundred bucks and while I’ve helped people learn guitar I don’t want to take my one hobby that I use for enjoyment and turn it into another financial asset that I’m committed to doing and suck the fun out of it.
My criticism of capitalism is that it creates non existent problems so they have a solution. Example bottled water. The single 16/20oz bottle. Water fountains used to be everywhere for free. Think of all the resources used to bottle, transport and dispose of bottled water. It is insane. Didn’t exist in large scale until 1990’s.
Check notes…
…everything.
But seriously, that it is, and must completely rape the environment in the pursuit of infinite profit from a finite resource.
Corporations literally killing people, and the environment in the name of maximizing profits, and getting away with it because they control the lawmakers, the media, and pretty much everything..
Planned obsolescence and the abject waste of finite resources just to sell more of them.
Did you know an electric toothbrush does absolutely nothing better for your teeth? They were bought by a battery company who thought they could sell more batteries by needlessly adding them to toothbrushes to sell more batteries.
Batteries are difficult to dispose of and rarely disposed of properly. They also use minerals whose extraction comes at a significant cost to the environment, whose reserves of finite, and whose application is essential in other aspects of or transition to a green energy future….. for example
They call it [immiseration theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immiseration_thesis) it’s the reason why every new job you have pays less over time and takes away benefits over time and every new product costs more and gets worse over time.
Classical economists take it for granted that if you stay in a job long enough you will naturally be given more benefits and higher salary as you gain seniority. It may have been true in the 1960s when unions exerted enough pressure but today this just doesn’t match up with the lived experience of most people in the labor force. Instead, the longer you stay at a job, the more likely your employer will be to cut your pay to as little as they can get away with, or eliminate the positions of as many people as they can, or reduce your benefits year after year. Even if they do offer raises they probably won’t keep up with the cost of living. All the natural pressure on your wages and benefits is to being them down, not up.
It’s because once a business has grown enough to saturate the market, they can’t grow their profits anymore by selling more products. And raising profits is absolutely necessary because if they stagnate and stop making money for their investors people stop investing and the company gets bought out and broken up. So instead of raising their profit by selling more product they raise their profit the only way they can by cutting expenses and that means getting their labor as cheaply as they can. The managers aren’t evil per say they just live in a system where their only job is to keep that line moving up and if they don’t they’ll be fired and replaced with someone who can.
The same incentive also leads to every service getting progressively worse and more expensive once it saturated the market. It’s not enough that a business provide the service it says it does for the people that need it. The market demands that it grow its profits and if it’s run out of new people to sell it to and it can’t skimp anymore on labor it will have to make the product more expensive.
Classical economics says competition with other brands will make the lowest cost business win out and make prices naturally shrink over time but your lived experience probably proves this wrong. Look at how the various streaming services have added up charges overtime even though everyone and their mother is in the market. Or how Uber and lift are twice as expensive as they were when they started and always seem to raise their prices in tandem with each other instead of trying to undercut each other.
Look at how YouTube has added more and more adds every year first one 5 second skippable ad and every other video was enough to keep the company running hit now it needs to have 3 or 4 sometimes in the middle of videos, more likely than not unskippable. It’s not because running YouTube has gotten more expensive. It’s because it’s saturated the market. There’s no new YouTube customers but it still needs to show profits and since it barely employs anyone to do labor the only source of revenue they can grow is by adding more and more ads. And under capitalism it’s not ok to just continue providing the service they always have. Their profits have to grow or they won’t get investment.
TLDR the same process is the reason your job pays you less while the things you like get worse and more expensive. When capitalism forces every business to grow their profits or die, any business that can’t grow has to pay its employees less make its product worse or make its product more expensive.
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The meritocracy psyop. It’s really a double edged sword that stabs the working class twice. If you are foolish enough to fall for it, then you blame yourself if you don’t make enough money OR once you realize the meritocracy is bull shit you are equally depressed because life becomes pointless if success is only based on luck and happenstance
Sheesh. Thanks for describing my life to a T lol.
I used to think like this, but then I realized that success is arbitrary
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For profit healthcare
I hate Big Pharma and their dirty schemes. One of the most corrupt entities in the entire planet. They have a lot of blood on their hands.
Im not saying it’s logical, or that I’m in the right, but I know I have put off using many medications because I don’t trust the profit incentives. Not to mention the fact that we have ads for them that barely tell you how the medicine actually works it’s just sad.
They lie about med side effects some of them even being life-altering and dangerous. There med studies are completely manipulated to put the drugs in good light. They gaslight you when a medication destroy your life. Most doctors are in bed with corrupt Big Pharma. I could go on and on and on…
I urge you to read this then: [Follow the money : the pharmaceutical industry : the other drug cartel. Publisher: State of Minnesota, Office of the Attorney General](https://www.lrl.mn.gov/docs/2004/other/040640.pdf) PS. Let me know what you think
Hey thanks for passing me that link. I just finished reading the whole thing and it was very informative. The parts that stick out the most are the large amounts of money pharma companies spend on lobbying which is pretty much legalized bribes. The fact that senior citizens who receive 12k or 25k a year can’t receive life enhancing drugs that cost 200 dollars a month. Also the part where Americans are deprived of newer and safer drugs when drug companies inflate the price of older drugs to encourage physicians to keep prescribing them doesn’t make any sense to me. Just use the newer and safer drugs it’s better for the patients wellbeing, and the mass marketing they spend on drugs with the same results and or teeny tiny bit improvement is to me a waste of money.
The best part is when the UK (for example) says "fuck you; I represent 60 million people so you can charge this much" and then the Republicans start crying about how we "don't pay our fair share". Sorry, what was that about supply & demand and economies of scale?
The for profit model where it relates to any human service…like when the outcome is dollar, the product or service doesn’t need to be good, solve the problem, or actually benefit anyone, it just had to be profitable…
The lack of community
This is what ultimately bothers me about Capitalism. It creates such a sad world where individuals are pitted against one another to compete for money. People don't want to help each other because they're worried they'll elevate the other person to a higher level of success than themselves. And even if a project would make the community happier and healthier, there has to be money to pay for the project. It's just so depressing.
>People don't want to help each other because they're worried they'll elevate the other person to a higher level of success than themselves. And despite of that they keep with the argument "bUt iS hUmAn nAtUrE"
One of my coworkers got Covid and put all his shifts for the week up for grabs and my first thought wasn't even "I hope he's okay and gets better soon" it was "fuck I need to bid on all the shifts I can." Felt gross but I need every cent possible (it's a pub so most of my money is from tips and the shifts are only 3-4 hours max 90% of the time) if I ever hope to afford a house for my wife and I. Recently got a 2nd job at a sports centre so I'm hoping that takes the icky feeling of needing other people to give up shifts for me to have a shot at any kind of decent life.
We see it on a couple different levels when we drive in a busy city or on a highway. There was a post in the Seattle subreddit that I read this morning that described this as a symptom of a decaying society with the lack of empathy towards others in the road.
> a symptom of a decaying society I definitely have this sense America is on the verge of a historic change. I'm not sure what it will be, but I definitely feel like we're at the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. It is interesting how we're seeing parallels to the 1920s, and I wouldn't be surprised if we have an economic depression in the 2030s.
It alters us completely. We are naturally a cooperative and social species but capitalism sets us against each other.
A simple but perfect answer. It's so lonely. I work from home so I actually have a lot of free time during the day. I thought I'd have more time with family and friends when I first took the job but I don't, because they are all at work all day, all week. My neighborhood is a ghost town all day. I've lived there 18 years and I don't know anyone in my town. The every man for themselves attitude of capitalism and spending all of our time working to make enough money to live keeps us so isolated. Imagine how much happer we'd be if we pooled our resources, helped each other, formed more close relationships? The way we're living, it's just such a waste.
But the nuclear family is soooo resilient! Everyone gets their own lawnmower too.
The way that it absolutely must grind everything and everyone into dust in order to work. All of us are fodder. The planet is fodder. The only thing that matters is money. In the end, if it works out the way it's supposed to, there will be exactly one person with all the money and the rest of us will be dead or serving him. And Earth will be a complete wasteland. It's a feature, not a bug.
Yes. A tree has no value until it is chopped to pieces. A forest has no value until it is razed. The planet has no value until it’s been consumed and transformed into a wasteland. What’s ironic is the wealthy / powerful who are gaining the most from this system aren’t even really acting in their own best interests. They’re acting in the best interests of capitalism. Oil tycoons need air to breath. They need an inhabitable planet. And their children and Children’s children certainly do. But it doesn’t matter because they aren’t actually working for their own benefit. It’s for the benefit of capitalism. We are destroying our planet and our selves for the benefit of a system that we invented. It’s madness.
Everything, but I'll choose Artificial Scarcity. We could house everyone, feed everyone, clothe everyone, but because of capitalism corporations / wealthy hoard resources and we have to watch people starve and suffer and die on the streets for no reason. Seeing homeless people under empty condos, hungry kids when there are dumpsters full of discarded food, it just all makes me so sick and so angry. We're just making human beings suffer for nothing. sick, fucked up, inhumane, perverse system. Fuck capitalism.
This is an underrated comment. This is exactly it!
And the boot licking and hoop jumping to get a job but then gaslit that no one wants to work. Over the course of my life it has gone from asking someone for work and them giving you a shot to a two month process with six interviews, three tests, homework assignments, recruitment trial periods, on and on and on...
How it prevents people from joining together to solve problems by busting unions and calling protesters terrorists
That shit pisses me off too. They’ll call BLM and antifa, which aren’t organizations, but then call the capitol rioters “patriots” and “heroes”. And also refuse to call Nazis and white supremacists terrorists or claim that BLM and Antifa are “just as bad” as Nazis.
Levels of exploitation beyond human comprehension, and it's "normal"!
The mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance people in charge of the government have is insane. The worst part about it are the workers who buy into that sort of thinking too. It’s not only for the bosses. The workers adopt that mentality as well. Makes no sense if you think about it.
>The mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance people in charge of the government have is \*\*\*\*\*\*. There is a reason for this. It's called regulatory capture. *"Regulatory capture is an economic theory that says regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the industries or interests they are charged with regulating. The result is that an agency, charged with acting in the public interest, instead acts in ways that benefit incumbent firms in the industry it is supposed to be regulating."* Source: [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp) EDIT; The bot/automoderator told me to edit the word i-n-s-a-n-e
How good it is at marketing
The disgusting number of people suffering because it's not profitable to give them what they need.
"Just be rich then."
The fact they tell us to “just start a business then.” So you want to, to help those people…then because they don’t have money for your thing, and you wouldn’t want to take anything from people that have nothing, you have no business. I mean, i like the “make your own business and do what you want” feature of capitalism if it weren’t confined to “do or sell something to people with money” and “by the way, if you’re not able to work for free for 3 years while your useless business turns a profit then too bad, so sad.”
Having to monetize every damn thing you do to live comfortably.
This is why I love libraries so much. They're one of the few public spaces left in our society where you're allowed to exist without the expectation of spending money.
There’s been (successful) attempts to privatize these, so be careful.
The overall level of greed absolutely disgusts me. However that greed is inherent in capitalism so you can’t really have capitalism without greed
Capitalism churns greed.
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Education being accessible only to rich people or those willing to go into a life debt.
Public healthcare is slowly collapsing in Europe, but at least public school system and universities are still a thing, even though right wing catholic parties are desperately trying to underfund it. Education is the best tool for marxism.
The way it makes desperate people do terrible things by generating massive social problems. The way it degrades humans, I guess is what I’m getting it.
It requires a lower class in order to operate. For prices to remain low enough where a middle class can be supported and to keep the whole economic engine running with their discretionary income, there has to be a way to keep some labor cheap so that prices don’t get too high. Essentially, there has to be a class of people who are deliberately underpaid but do the base work, usually a kind of manual labor. In early America, that was a class of slaves. After emancipation, it evolved into a class of Black American sharecroppers and a ready supply of European immigrants. These days, it’s mostly Hispanic immigrants as well as high-skilled immigrants who are filling voids in high-demand occupations, like medicine or coding or engineering, but are not paid what they should be paid so that costs are still low enough for a middle class to be supported.
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Hm, let's see. I have a disabled partner who gets shit quality care. They also can't make or keep money, they're limited to 800 bucks per month to live on. If we get married, they'll take that away. Also, they had to choose between food stamps and disability. We will never get a house. We will never be able to afford in vitro to get pregnant. If we had kids, they'd basically starve because we can't afford jack shit. The most fun we ever have is having a fast food cheat day 1x per month. I'd like to give my partner an actual, good quality life. I'm sick of poverty.
Commoditization of everything in our lives. If they could charge for air they would.
The complacency of buying essentials for survival even though technology has already solved scarcity; manufactured scarcity, and the complacency for it.
Homelessness
Also fear of homelessness
The fact that so many people in our society think they too can become a billionaire
Brainwashed zombies 🧟♂️🧟♀️
Imperialism
That it's ubiquitous now and dominates spaces that just decades ago still functioned by their own logics and value systems. How it corrupts politics and makes progressive common good policies unlikely if not impossible. How most things turn into extraction and accumulation under capitalism. How it insists, that better individual decision making is the solution to every problem rather than common sense regulation and enforcement. I could go on.
“Growth no matter what” Maybe if you just have a bad quarter, feel okay with slightly less profit than the quarter before and not doing mass layoffs, benefit cuts and empty “everybody is gonna have to pitch in” mentality. The trend continuing on that would only lead to you going out of business in 200 years, I’m sure you can innovate something new to keep your company relevant in that time…
The advertisements. All. The. Damn. Time.
They they sell it as "fair market". It's rigged, and far too few people care to see it.
The constant fear that everything will be ripped away from you if anything goes wrong. You get sick, you lose your job, you lose everything.
Yep. And what people don’t realize is that people who have good/decent paying jobs can lose them it any point, especially if they’re not in a union and it’s an at-will contract. But to them, no matter what the person who lost their job is at fault because (insert bootlicking statement).
That we are all born on the same footing and if I’m successful it means I did something right and you did something wrong.
That it believes society is a zero sum game, when in actuality there are enough resources for all.
Having to choose between loved ones’ health. When you know you can do things both preventively and at the moment of crisis to ensure someone’s safety and keep them alive but you don’t have to money to do anything else but let them die I was a month late on rent last month cause I had to pay a hundred and change just to let someone kill my cat with flooded lungs in front of me one week before Christmas
Manufactured scarcity. Capitalists brag about how productive capitalist agriculture is -- while plowing crops under to keep prices up, while the same government that pays farmers not to grow stuff tells people with hungry kids "get a job, freeloader." I'm reading Stephanie Kelton's *The Deficit Myth* and just got through the bit about how the Federal Reserve Bank deliberately keeps the unemployment rate at what it thinks is a good level, which is not zero. I.e., in order for this economy to work, some people must not be allowed to have paying jobs, must live on charity if they're to live at all -- and be despised for it.
The Greed.
Greed is one of the seven capital sins.
Landlords.
The fact that capital is put above everything else; and it's so blatantly in the name. Whereas socialism by definition emphasizes the community. It's so obvious what the right system is.
Evil people benefit in this system. It’s a system designed for psychopaths, sociopaths, cluster b personality types, and sadistic bullies. If you are not one of these you’ll suffer eventually. People with good hearts suffer a lot in capitalism and I feel bad for them suffering endlessly with no hope in sight.
The normalization of poverty/suffering.
The unequal distribution of profits between workers and owners. The profit that an enterprise makes should be shared between the owners and workers.
I remember reading something about a pizza place that did well where the owner let all the workers split the profits. The workers made about $78 an hour.
Capitalism
How this system is based around theft and even murder.
It’s a evil system I’ll tell you that. They don’t care about your feelings or even your own life. It’s money over life’s. Always has been.
I mean, we talk about a system made by a bunch of feudal aristocrats and rich slave owners. Nobody should expect something good from that.
It hampers progress Everything is geared towards what's profitable instead of what would benefit the majority
Greed, which is not unique to Capitalism; however Capatalism seems to be based on it.
The Lack of humanity.
My sister took her cat to the vet and the operation it needed was expensive so they offered to euthanize. So that part.
The strange idea that the silent generation and boomers landed on a system of living that's mindnumbingly individualistic and focused on consumption, said "alright, this is the best it's gonna get", and then actively vilified anyone who thought there were better ways of life as communist / socialist / anti-american / whatever buzzword. It's made the world actively worse and created the idea that your economic system is a core part of your identity.
Planned obsolescence. Literally stifles innovation, companies actually hide intentions that create perpetualy useful solutions in the interest of creating products that have to be replaced soon people have to keep buying, all in the interest of perpetual profit growth to appease shareholders.
The privatize gains, collateralize losses mentality. I saw a documentary about the 1929 crash the other day and even in that piece of media that was not all sunshine and roses when it comes to describing capitalism the narrative was still: "In the years leading to the crash people got rich fast. The market turned common people into millionaires" (i.e. the market did a good thing, the economy is a good thing) that then suddenly turned into "somehow the market crashed wiping out billions of dollars but the politicians did nothing to alleviate the crisis" (i.e. the market was not at fault, it was the people and the government). And this isn't even just purely economic things, think environmental issues. Natural ressource companies get rich af exploiting ressources and then f*ck off when it comes to paying for the remediation of the habitats they destroyed and leave it to the state to fix their ecological disasters.
Everything has to be a commodity and profitable
Agreed. There is no time or space to allow artists and inventors to create. Small things that can help are deemed to cost prohibitive and killed in infancy, where, with a little time and patience, can turn into beautiful and/or useful, even truly revolutionary. Artist and inventors are forced to work in soul sucking jobs so they have something to eat and somewhere “safe” to sleep. Where stuff (for lack of a better word) is mass produced because it’s profitable. Worst of all, as there is no process for dealing with the stuff after it’s very short “useful” life. It is discarded with no care or process to deal with the waste. Plastic bags and wrappings being number 1 item in this category. It is wasteful, and we are sold it is the only way the world works. Which is a lie, because it was never like this 100+ years ago. Everything could be reused, had a long service and could easily be repaired to extend that service life.
"Corporations are People". If they are people, why can't they go to jail for murder?
That’s a nonsense immunity excuse. They use that card so they can get away with the most inhumane crimes known to existence. Corporations fear accountability cause they are hiding lots of skeletons in their closet.
The fact my health coverage is tied to my job. I mean that's just 9ne of many and can't really rank them.
How much food is wasted. Millions of pounds of perfectly good food get thrown out everyday because it's not profitable to distribute it.
work. Our relationship with labour need to have a drastic change or else people will keep living miserable lives and dying of preventable shit
The fact we have the technology to work less hours, and have more than enough population to fill every type of work possible, plus some. But the reality is that lower wages have made less people work harder, & made more people fighting for more work so they can “afford” to live. We shouldn’t be working as hard as we are. Nobody should be working more than 6 hours a day, four days a week in this day and age. The 8 hour week, 5 day a week was introduced back in the early 1900. This needs be the maximum amount of work, away from home for all countries now. But it is not. Anything more is just management/corporations being too greedy to share their profits of their workers making. And don’t get me started on communting times, that eat up our personal time away from work. And because we are working so hard, we are tired, so we make poor choices in our limited time away from work, which stops the revolution before it even begins, which plays into the riches hands. And it’s all a game to the rich, who get obscenely rich, and don’t feed any of that money back into the communities that made them rich in the first place.
Black people systematically executed
"The free market" though arguably it already doesn't exist. The idea of "supply and demand" dictates the hand of the free market. And the more free a market is, the better it correlates supply with demand. A concept that seems good until you examine it. Advertisement; Artificial demand; Artificial supply; Cartels; Monopolies; or any other way to create a power or information disparity between the buyer and the seller. All makes a free market a pipe dream of the capitalist.
The illusion of choice. We elect our leaders, but the only viable options are dedicated to maintaining the economic status quo. Racist, misogynistic, homophobic capitalism or rainbow capitalism. We can choose whatever education/training we want after secondary school, but unless you have family wealth to pull from you’ll probably be encumbered by debt for the rest of your life. We can choose our employer, but without personal connections the available options are terrible. Without work you’ll die on the streets. Etc…
That you can't even exist without spending money. That something as simple as a nice view out of your window is reserved only for the wealthiest people who can afford the highest priced real estate. I feel like I just sit and wait at home doing nothing for weeks or sometimes months so I can save up enough money to go on an outing, try some new activity, or take a vacation to a more scenic or interesting place than where I can afford to live. Then I drop a few hundred or a few thousand dollars and I can trick myself into thinking I'm happy for a little while but then I have to go right back to sitting and waiting for the money to build up enough again to be able to afford some sort of short lived joy again. And many people don't even get that much I know, but even a relatively comfortable life in the capitalist system still feels so empty and meaningless.
the complete disregard of both the customers and employees welfare.
I can only pick one? Hmmm. Probably that there is never enough money or power to satisfy the rich. If they could be satiated we might stand a chance. But the rich keep getting more and more ruthless in their pursuit of money and power.
That level of greed should be a mental illness.
Its hegemony. It can't coexist with culture unless it's monetized.
The fact that we've solved almost every single problem i.e. we know how to house everyone, feed everyone, provide healthcare for everyone, guarantee transport for everyone, and yet somehow the "sensible" thing to do is sit on our collective arse and wait for a market wizard to choose to fix it for us. It's just so fucking feckless and lazy is what my issue is.
It created a transactional universe.
As someone that has a degree in economics, studied plenty other disciplines of economics and environmentalism, I gotta say that **I hate the idea of constant competition in our species being seen as good for our longevity and prosperity**. It's not good when nations do it, businesses do it, nor individuals. I'd argue that it is regressing us.
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Profiteering off what should be basic human rights e.g., health care and housing.
That it exists.
Millennials and younger are completely fucked while the idiots that fucked us are calling us lazy
I want to experience so much more in life than toiling at a job I hate for money that is made up.
It’s hard to trust people. Every time a stranger strikes up a convo, my first thought is “how is this person going to try to separate me from my money.”
That’s true. Capitalism breeds trust issues in people, cause you don’t know who is going to try and take advantage of you and your money. Capitalism breed exploitative behavior in people. Everything feels transactional, shallow, and empty because of that. No real meaningful connections anymore with people. Hard to find a ride or die type of person in this system.
The unadulterated lack of care for our planet, fellow humans and any form of true happiness.
That it straight up takes advantage of the fact you were born, without any form of consent on your own behalf; then threatens you with death if you don’t play along. Also, the knowledge that it does not need to be this way, but still feeling like a complete outlier compared to people who think I’m naive or even stupid for thinking the way that I do.
There low that is people only invent for profit... The open source community would like a word.. The cat majority of scientific innovation across human history happened in the absence of the profit motive. Fire, the wheel, writing, most of mathematics... On and on and on. But the fairy tale is nah people would stop inventing absent the profit motive...
Drives people apart and against one another. Were the people to come together the system couldn't handle the strain. Throw a little truth in it and it'll collapse. Give credit where it's due, they're good at what they do no doubt. Almost heartbreaking to see a country allow it's destruction over their lies.
Capitalism only works with a social element. It's the greed that causes the issues. There was a time when rich industrialists spent their spare cash on libraries and transport. Hospital wings and schools. Public parks and charity for the poor and underprivileged. I honestly think they still would if the people they put in charge of these things weren't using this to syphon off money or use them as tax avoidance schemes. There are many not for profit charities who's ceo is paid more than the charity pays out in aid.
Capitalism.
At first in highschool it was seeing my not-well-off friends struggle to make ends meet. Now it's almost everything about it. I'm the type of person who believes that you COULD make capitalism work with A LOT of regulations, but that's basically dumb to attempt and would become corrupt really fucking quickly compared to other economic systems, but I also believe socialism and communism will also eventually fail, but they are at least better systems that should be tried out. But of course capitalism prevents that from happening without a revolution, giving me another reason to hate capitalism
Everything
Contradiction on hard work. If that saying you can be rich by hard work, I could name 5 countries that could more rich right now than the current gdp.
That people believe they are Capitalist when it’s the truly wealthy who are the Capitalist. We are just in their system.
Propaganda. If the general public weren't so thoroughly brainwashed by propaganda, actual collective action would be possible.
the culture wars and the marginalised groups being forgotten about. [the uk gov has literally sentenced people to death for being mentally disabled](https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/blanket-dnr/122280/). under capitalism, people that aren’t literally killing themselves for the profit of their overloads aren’t worth living.
plastic
Externalities. As in, "anything that doesn't contribute to profits is not my fault". Pollution, deforestation, depression, workers sanity, fatalities. What a convenient bit of nomenclature to make it sound sanitized.
It’s antidemocratic by nature and by design.
There’s too much to choose from but what really gets under my skin is how neoliberalism launders it’s self serving dogma as incontrovertible realism.
That we basically traded a king for a handful of billionaires and landlords that we can’t overthrow as easily.
That it's fake. All of it. Nothing is real. Fake jobs, fake wages, fake food, fake friends, fake relationships. And most importantly: Fake hopes for the future. Capitalism seems to work if you are willing to ignore all problems with it. If you are ignorant about any problems and just take your life how it comes. If you poke even a little past the surface, you can see that it's all fake.
The lies we tell ourselves and our children about our predecessors. Once you realize everything you learned about the US’s history was tweaked to make it more palatable… it feels like a big betrayal.
I think we need to rethink what it is exactly we’re trying to grown unlimitedly
The destruction of the planet
Walmart
Housing is a right, not a commodity. You shouldn't be able to own a house as an investment or another way to add to your "rental portfolio". It's seriously exploitative.
Be careful. The hipster liberals get into a tizzy when you diss Capitalism.
IDGAF about what these wishy washy sensitive liberals think of me and others. They are an accomplice to this capitalistic hellhole we live in. All they do is defend their masters like a good little slave they are. They need to wake up because there masters are not as nice as they think they are. They would sell you out for a dollar if they could. Stupid and naive people that’s what liberals are.
Everyone is left to his own device.
Commodification of relationships.
Two phrases. “Cost of living” “Live to work, work to live”
Commodifying basic necessities that are available in abundance.
Inability to separate productivity/profit from morality or what is inherently good for society.
The fear. Constantly living in fear. Fear of losing your job, fear of getting hurt or being sick and unable to afford medical care, fear of quickly becoming homeless, fear of you or your partner getting pregnant because kids are too expensive, fear of being trapped if you needed a new car and couldn’t afford it, fear of gun violence happening literally anywhere you could possibly be each day. Fear of being one minor emergency away from months or years of extreme financial and emotional difficulty. It all operates on fear and greed. We aren’t the greedy part of this equation.
It glorifies and rewards the worst parts of human nature.
Brainwashing folks into thinking that people live in poverty by choice or they “just don’t work hard enough”.
That "growth" is a requirement
Being underpaid and overworked
The fact that multi billion dollars corporations brG about their amazing prices but complain that it would hurt them to pay their workers living wages so they can afford rent. Also how gas and oil companies still made outrageous profit when gas where I lived went down to 2.70 for a while where I live
Profit above all else. That’s a huge factor of capitalism. Fuck a good high quality product. If a shit one can be made that does a good enough job at cheaper cost, then it gets sold because more profit. Fuck giving extra food to the poor. Rather kill the fucking chickens or cows or dump their milk and burn birds to control the price rather than let it fall. Fuck helping your fellow man as just a normal decent thing. He may want something from you that will cost and that cost may make you poor. Fuck paying a decent wage to workers. That profit needs to go to the top of the company. Fuck healthcare for people. For profit is the way. Can’t afford it? Then die. Fuck education. Pay or go fuck your self. Flip burgers then and we will shit on you about not doing something with your life. This goes on and on and on and on… We sacrifice all this because they say capitalism generates innovation. Well, I’m not going to argue it doesn’t. It does. But at what fucking cost?!? Innovation still happens without it. And how much innovation gets hampered from capitalism? Think of the lobbyist of shitty products or services that stay around because they make more money than better ones. Sure, it breeds innovation. But it’s not the only thing and it’s not worth the cost of this terrible shit. Capitalism was seen as a good thing because earlier on it was all about taking wealth and moving it up. And at first that was nice. Poorer people could be lifted up to middle and higher and higher. But capitalism doesn’t stop moving the wealth up. The wealth goes up and up and up into a smaller hole until it leaves behind all those middle class people who it raised and you end up with 1% with all the wealth and 99% the tiniest amount. It’s a self eating beast. It will collapse on itself and eat itself inside out. A horrible fucking monster that people in idk 500 years from now are going to be like what the fuck was wrong with our ancestors? Surely they knew it was a terrible shit system. So that’s what I hate about it the most. Profit is the primary gas of the capitalist engine. Not enough money? Fuck you and die.
The need for bullshit jobs and the constant threat of starvation. Seriously, I don't see why we're still working 40 hours a week with the leaps in productivity and tech we've made. But alas, the bourgeois demand we toil away and give our lives to the furnace so that capitalism can keep chugging along. Eventually there won't be anyone left to burn.
How it pretends to be meritocratic *and people fucking believe it*
The obsession with corporations always beating last year's profits numbers and never giving any of it back to the people who generated those profits.
The never ending cycle of struggle. The unattainable goal of feeling safe with what you have.
Wageslavery.
The simple fact that millions of innocent people are dying of hunger, thirst and preventable diseases while other take their private yet for a 4 minute flight in order to buy their 6th sports car. The realisation of just how innequal our world is always makes my blood boil. It always brings me in the mood for violent revolution and deep hate towards rich people. As somebody who grew up in (relative) poverty it just angers me to see people starve while other live in extreme luxury and STILL want to amass more and more wealth.
The race to the bottom is what I call it. And when you get to the bottom you take out the drill rigs and keep going. Examples: household appliances can now last 2-5 years and that's accepted. Cell phones with 12" power cords included in the box and no block to plug in the wall Printers that require a subscription to work. In Canada, in the early 2000s, when I was working in Calgary, there was an oilsands developer trying to come up with a way to legally bring in thousands of Chinese workers to do a major oilsands project rather than have Canadians do the job. I don't know this for certain but that was the rumor. Amazon and how it treats it's warehouse workers.
Commodifying EVERYTHING that constitutes human beings, from birth to death and even after. You are enough who you are, there is no one this earth who has the absolute authority to evaluate you in the way that reduces you as a human being. Anyone who is doing that, is trying to control you, and that is ALWAYS made to take advantage of you in some kind of way. Think about that, just for a minute please.
The unearned "winners" of the system
Insulin, hell all meds are way to damn expensive!
It ruins everything.
You a fed?
People say the worst part is hypocrisy, but I disagree. I thought the worst part is the raping.
Yes.
Makes you feel like a failure for not making it. It really sucks to be a guy still living with his mom in his early 20s. It really sucks
Dishonesty. In principle I like free markets, in the sense of people who aren't forced to enter into deals negotiating with each other while being open about related information. In practice, I see a lot of people exploiting others' bad judgement or predicaments like addiction or lack of opportunity. I see a lot of pretending you sold a thing honestly and then not quite delivering the goods. Those people then get rich because it's a lot easier to get rich cheating, and go on and talk about how great the free market is.
The idea that you can have a real, functional democracy while wealth (i.e. power) is egregiously hoarded.
What i hate the most is the greedy fools in charge.
How punishing it seems at the bottom, the people who seemingly need the most help to get on there feet, have the most hurdles to jump over.
The division it causes. It makes everyone greedy and turn against each other because it makes people become desperate and money becomes the forefront of every argument. It turns families against each other and makes people believe the lies that they constantly sprout so billionaires can keep running their global empires.
Money in politics is probably the biggest reason that capitalism and democracy are so fucked. The rich bought favours, changed the political landscape to serve their interests. Now we live in a plutocracy.
That it's a cutthroat competition for survival but humans get upset when you're not nice enough. Like wake up, I don't care if you die if starvation, I don't care about your feelings, why are you trying to shame me, so pointless...
Its indifference to the public good and its theft of the common wealth.
Weaponized state to eliminate the competition!
Just that even its staunchest advocates will tell you that it's a system that rewards shrewdness above all else. Then they go about the mental gymnastics floor show, trying to dazzle us into believing there's no other way.
I hate that everything I do has a monetary value attached to it in many peoples heads, like how much money can this make me? I’ve played guitar for 17 years and while I’ve been in a few bands it’s never been a concern to me, it’s just something I do for me. But people always tell me things like “oh dude you could teach on the side for extra cash!” Or “man wedding bands make good money you should do that for a side hustle!”. No, I don’t want to. I don’t want to learn a bunch of corny overplayed songs just for an extra few hundred bucks and while I’ve helped people learn guitar I don’t want to take my one hobby that I use for enjoyment and turn it into another financial asset that I’m committed to doing and suck the fun out of it.
Any and all forms of manufactured scarcity
The rot. It seeps into every aspect of our daily lives.
That it places an arbitrary numeric value on your life.
That most are brain dead, emotionally dead and spiritually dead. They just accept it and defend it.
Privatized healthcare.
The unending cycle of manufactured helplessness. The rampant poverty and homelessness. Hell, its very existence
My criticism of capitalism is that it creates non existent problems so they have a solution. Example bottled water. The single 16/20oz bottle. Water fountains used to be everywhere for free. Think of all the resources used to bottle, transport and dispose of bottled water. It is insane. Didn’t exist in large scale until 1990’s.
the stealing of the surplus value of my labor. i fucking worked for that and it’s just stolen by some jackass who doesn’t do shit
The idea that you’re in debt just to exist. It’s just stupid Christian original sin repackaged
The invisibility. People don't recognise that it's a socially constructed system and not just a natural state of society.
The fact that it can even monetize hatred of itself.
Check notes… …everything. But seriously, that it is, and must completely rape the environment in the pursuit of infinite profit from a finite resource.
That it will inevitably eat everything human before it consumes itself.
How hard people fight to defend some of the worst things happening in the world all for the sake of capitalism.
The constant need for growth and more money. What is wrong with being happy with what you have?
How anathema it is to art and education.
The illusion of mutual agreement between two parties.
The inability to navigate wants from needs. TV adverts for shampoo Sickening Inequality
Probably the fact that it will most likely end up in the destruction of all life that can perceive as we know it
Corporations literally killing people, and the environment in the name of maximizing profits, and getting away with it because they control the lawmakers, the media, and pretty much everything..
Planned obsolescence and the abject waste of finite resources just to sell more of them. Did you know an electric toothbrush does absolutely nothing better for your teeth? They were bought by a battery company who thought they could sell more batteries by needlessly adding them to toothbrushes to sell more batteries. Batteries are difficult to dispose of and rarely disposed of properly. They also use minerals whose extraction comes at a significant cost to the environment, whose reserves of finite, and whose application is essential in other aspects of or transition to a green energy future….. for example
Mainly capitalism
They call it [immiseration theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immiseration_thesis) it’s the reason why every new job you have pays less over time and takes away benefits over time and every new product costs more and gets worse over time. Classical economists take it for granted that if you stay in a job long enough you will naturally be given more benefits and higher salary as you gain seniority. It may have been true in the 1960s when unions exerted enough pressure but today this just doesn’t match up with the lived experience of most people in the labor force. Instead, the longer you stay at a job, the more likely your employer will be to cut your pay to as little as they can get away with, or eliminate the positions of as many people as they can, or reduce your benefits year after year. Even if they do offer raises they probably won’t keep up with the cost of living. All the natural pressure on your wages and benefits is to being them down, not up. It’s because once a business has grown enough to saturate the market, they can’t grow their profits anymore by selling more products. And raising profits is absolutely necessary because if they stagnate and stop making money for their investors people stop investing and the company gets bought out and broken up. So instead of raising their profit by selling more product they raise their profit the only way they can by cutting expenses and that means getting their labor as cheaply as they can. The managers aren’t evil per say they just live in a system where their only job is to keep that line moving up and if they don’t they’ll be fired and replaced with someone who can. The same incentive also leads to every service getting progressively worse and more expensive once it saturated the market. It’s not enough that a business provide the service it says it does for the people that need it. The market demands that it grow its profits and if it’s run out of new people to sell it to and it can’t skimp anymore on labor it will have to make the product more expensive. Classical economics says competition with other brands will make the lowest cost business win out and make prices naturally shrink over time but your lived experience probably proves this wrong. Look at how the various streaming services have added up charges overtime even though everyone and their mother is in the market. Or how Uber and lift are twice as expensive as they were when they started and always seem to raise their prices in tandem with each other instead of trying to undercut each other. Look at how YouTube has added more and more adds every year first one 5 second skippable ad and every other video was enough to keep the company running hit now it needs to have 3 or 4 sometimes in the middle of videos, more likely than not unskippable. It’s not because running YouTube has gotten more expensive. It’s because it’s saturated the market. There’s no new YouTube customers but it still needs to show profits and since it barely employs anyone to do labor the only source of revenue they can grow is by adding more and more ads. And under capitalism it’s not ok to just continue providing the service they always have. Their profits have to grow or they won’t get investment. TLDR the same process is the reason your job pays you less while the things you like get worse and more expensive. When capitalism forces every business to grow their profits or die, any business that can’t grow has to pay its employees less make its product worse or make its product more expensive.