Capitalism is criticized a lot on here (especially by American users, it seems to me). Most of that seems well-founded, but I also have the feeling that most of these complaints are simply venting and not the first step to improvement.
So I would like to know what specific changes you (especially Americans) want to see from lawmakers.
I suggest becoming informed and read about other economic systems yourself. There is a bit of ad hominem in your question. For many the materialist concerns of the current dominant economic system is why people complain. Those complaining aren’t the cause and should not be rebuked. The rich are getting richer and the poor; poorer. The chasm between the two only grows wider.
That said, many folks on the political spectrum would at least like to see the US end of neoliberal capitalism and a return to Kantian/welfare economic capitalism. You see flavors of this in European Democratic socialist countries, albeit even those are succumbing to neoliberalisation.
If you get into rights based discussion, many in that spectrum and further left would like to see positive rights enshirined constitutionally as well as the ERA. This would bring about many of those kantian economic mechanisms by default.
For many more on the left, we literally want to seize the means of production and distribute wealth equally among the masses. Bring about socialism to progress to communism. The DSA believes in a change and revolution from within, and have a national platform and a growing base. There are also the PSL, which demands a more revolutionary overthrow of capitalism into communism. Briefly put.
a return to Kantian/welfare economic capitalism
I’ve grown up under neoliberalism (I think). Thanks for pointing these out. I’m going to look them up.
You’re coming off fairly condescending. Leftists of many stripes not only have thorough critiques of Capitalism, but offer a wide range of solutions, both legislative and grass-roots.
There may be a lot of ranting, but most of it is based within robust theory and legislative efforts.
Strengthening unions and workers rights laws is almost always advocated for. Weakening the ability for corporations to exploit their workers and the general population/environment is another.
I’m an Agorist, that means I advocate fighting Capitalism from the ground up using grey and black markets to subvert existing Capitalist structures.
So acquiring and distributing pirated materials like college textbooks and otherwise expensive software is one example. Helping people jailbreak/hack their devices to run unofficial software that the corporations don’t approve of is another.
There’s lots of information out there, don’t mistake memes and ranting for empty idealism.
So acquiring and distributing pirated materials like college textbooks and otherwise expensive software is one example.
That’s an interesting example, because in threads on AI lawsuits there are many calls for expanding intellectual property, without any consideration for public benefit. It’s such an outright doubling down on all the pathological aspects of capitalism. It made me look whether there are any equally concrete demands going the other way and eventually make this post.
Thanks for your reply, sorry if I came off aggressive in my initial response.
For me I’m as hardcore anti-intellectual property as it gets. I think the very concept of IP is nonsense. And I don’t mean nonsense like it is stupid or silly or I don’t agree with the laws, I mean literally logically contradictory.
I view laws against copyright/IP infringement the same way I would view a law against poaching unicorns.
Despite the propaganda, IP law almost always protects giant corporations, not the “little guy.” It’s used to create and maintain multi-billion dollar IP portfolio monopolies. It supresses creativity and literally kills people in the case of pharma companies and their ridiculous drug patents.
I would love at a minimum for copyright to have a hard limit no matter the conditions. Like for all creative works, 20 year hard limit. After that, no matter what, it enters public domain forever. There are a million issues to work out, but not being able to hold IP for literally a century in some cases would be something.
Copyright should probably not be given to the publisher unless the publisher is the artist.
Tax the rich, regulate industry, punish CEOs and boards for crimes committed by corporations.
The youtube channel, Economics Explained, has a lot of great videos on macroeconomic concepts. They recently featured a video on Norway pointing out how it handles its economy near perfectly.
The video explains Norway got pretty lucky, and it’s not like every country could straight up copy them and succeed, but the major points are:
- Their massive natural resource reserves are majority owned by the government. The government puts the profits from this into stable long term investments to benfit the citizens of the country. In many other countries, natural resources have been sold to private companies for a one time payment and private shareholders now benefit from the long term investment.
- Their government has one of the highest tax rates in the world, even though they earn so much profit from natural resources they could literally have a 0% tax rate. Despite this massive tax rate, Norway has some of the lowest emigration of people and companies. Nobody has fled the country due to high taxes like many fear would happen elsewhere.
- Their government spends heavily on social welfare and ensuring a high quality of life for all of its citizens, and their companies provide short work weeks and long vacations, which are huge reasons why nobody has left.
I think when people say they hate capitalism, what they mean is they hate working 50 hour weeks at a job they hate for a boss who treats them like dirt for a salary that doesn’t even pay their rent while the CEO has more wealth than small nations and spends it on eating endangered animals on their mega yatch with politicians and judges who then pass laws making it legal to hire children and dump garbage into the ocean. They don’t really care about private companies and investments, they care about how sociopathic greed has become so normal that it’s actively defended.
In the way you explain norway, it seems this will not be possible without lots of natural resources that are worth a significant amount.
Not quite. Everywhere has a resource of something - it may not be a natural resource like minerals or valuable liquids, it everywhere has something.
The difference is how these have been used to invest. Norway invests in itself by keeping those resources internal. As the user said, the people and its government could choose not to pay taxes, but they still do. That has a huge gain on the longevity of resources because now the investment from them is actually being compounded upon from its people and its resources.
Other countries simply do not put investments in themselves. As the user said, they sell off these assets or let the claim go to a corporation which then maximizes its profit potential instead of sustaining it. (in some cases, the country had little to no choice so it’s not entirely a fault of that government but a poor handling of circumstances). We sell our resources, our people pay taxes, there is no compounding happening. The resources are now gone, the money has dried up, and the people are being pumped for the rest.
Thanks, I’m lining this up for listening.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
First off, wealth and power are the same thing and must be dealt with at the same time. So for a start…
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Aggressive progressive taxation, up to 100% (billionaires - even 9-figure multimillionaires- must never be allowed to exist).
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Abolish stock markets.
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All companies must be employee-owned. Employees share equitable ownership of the companies they work within. Profits are shared only among employees.
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Criminalize political spending, lobbying (aka bribery), etc. Candidates all draw from a public fund and platforms and that is all they may use.
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Aggressive market regulation to protect competition and prevent consolidation. Our failure to protect the market from excess consolidation and integration is the primary reason we’ve reached the late-stage capitalism hellscape we currently exist within.
Again, this is a start… the tip of the iceberg.
There is a massive amount of leftist documentation on economics. We’re not all communists, but we recognize that any system devoid of regulation/oversight/accountability will always quickly travel rightward and become authoritarian. So the question is what systems and policies can be put in place to ensure not only equity for all, but equity that remains stable indefinitely (or as close as is possible).
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Not an answer, but I do want to point out that your question may be missing a crucial point. Primarily: There are different types of capitalism. When people mock or complain about the current economy, you might hear about “late stage capitalism.” That’s because that’s referring to the current type of capitalism that we’re operating under. And Bernie Sanders believes in capitalism, too. But his belief is in a different type of capitalism.
This is all to say, when people complain, it may not even be that they want to replace capitalism, but even shifting to a more friendly type of capitalism would significantly remove a lot of strain from workers. I don’t mean to imply that that’s what the people you’re referring to meant, but I think it is important to consider that criticism against capitalism does not necessarily mean a full shift away from capitalism
No, late stage capitalism isn’t a kind of capitalism, it is the inevitable conclusion of capitalism.
Sanders is a liberal, liberals support capitalism.
Others are neoliberal, slightly more conservative “socially” (as if society can somehow be separate from economy), but still support capitalism.
And there are conservatives, who openly don’t care about society (or anyone in it who isn’t like them) and, you guessed it, they support capitalism.They all serve the same system.
(edit to add: a system designed to never let anyone who openly opposes it get near a position of power)
Not being comfortable with this, or believing in the illusion of choice they give, and pretending like some capitalism is fine, is ridiculous.
Capitalism in its essence is about constant financial growth, which will always and forever be impossible in a finite universe. It might take longer to decay if you sprinkle some social policies and safety nets on to that, but at the end of the day it will always end in vast inequality, exploitation, and destruction of the environment.
Return to pre-Reagan tax codes and laws. Bring back the 90% tax rate.
That makes you less a critic of capitalism and more of a critic of a particular set of policies within capitalism, right?
Everyone from Karl Marx to President Obama has said the same thing, we aren’t going to change the system overnight. The funniest thing in the world is watching the local “revolutionaries” who have been screaming for overnight change for decades. Look at what happened in Russia after they kicked out the old Soviet system. A few guys like Putin snatched up everything at fire sale prices and the regular folks got less than nothing.
Others have answered your question, but I think you’re coming at the problem from the wrong angle.
I used to think about politics and economics how you are now: that there are different systems, and different people disagree on which is the best system, either because of their internal values (liberty, security, equality, prosperity, etc.) or because they believe that one system inherently performs better than another (efficiency, robustness, fairness, etc.).
Becoming a Marxist is realizing that while we, the working people, are sitting around bickering over whether command or market economies are more efficient, whether parliamentary or Presidential systems are better, whether our voting system should be Ranked Choice or Proportional or FPTP, the wealthy - the owning classes, the Capitalists, the ruling class - are stealing from us, are extracting our labor.
Politics is not about different people having different ideas about how to best organize society. Politics is about different groups acting in their material interests. The rich support policies which give them more power in society, while the poor, by all rights, should be doing the same.
I support a system where working people hold all power in society. I don’t care how that society is organized aside from that - I have some ideas, but there are smarter people than me for organizing logistics. Power and material interests are the only things that matter; and no system is incorruptible. Society needs to be lead by explicitly and wholly ideological organizations who will resist any attempt to undermine the power and supremacy of the working class, even if it is “legal” or “fair”, and they are justified in using whatever means necessary to do so.
All of this. The reason why the “trans debate” is so problematic is because of the “debate” part. I don’t give a shit about whether gender is a performance or a genetic thing - i care that trans people are murdered at an alarming rate, and that their rights to health care are significantly under threat - or gone already. My concern is that trans and gay people still have to worry about their safety when they come out of the closet.
I care about providing safety and normal human treatment for people who aren’t getting it.
The “debates” can happen after these people stop being murdered and abused. You can tell me all about your religious doctrines and how god made Adam and Eve or whatever after we agree that humans need to be treated like humans.
I haven’t a lot useful to say among the comments that are already here but I will say most broadly:
Democracy in the work place. Corporations and industries are too big and affect too many people to be governed by individuals that are just there to own it, and make a profit for themselves. Things need to be run for the common good by actually representing all stakeholders fairly.
I work in IT for a large university and there usually is some level of that. Projects are expected to pull in stakeholders so that interests from around campus have their voices heard. It takes talented facilitators to ensure that people feel comfortable speaking up. Surprisingly, coming to an agreement is rarely hard once everyone has talked it out.
Are you unaware of the vast corpus of leftist texts about just this? Do you think leftists are just teenagers on TikTok?
Incentives for worker ownership of companies to move more major economic decisions into the hands of workers. Mandatory worker representation on boards of directors. Significant wealth and inheritance tax. A nationalized healthcare service. Public ownership of all utilities, including internet service. Bring back programs like the WPA and CCC to rebuild infrastructure. Entirely publicly funded elections. Overturn Taft-Hartley, overturn all “right to work” laws natonwide. I think all these things would help us transition to a more just, inclusive economy. That’s what democratic socialism is to me, and it’s not just social democracy.
I support any policy that increases competition or against policies that remove competition. Public companies need great justification to merge. The vast majority of the food we buy is run by like 4 companies.
A specific pay-rate ratio between shareholders and all employees. Executives and shareholders should not be getting paid 100x what the bottom employees get paid. This kind of inequality is what is bringing about the collapse. As company profits increase, all employees should get the benefits, not just the execs and shareholders.
there is such a variation from what I see. Some anti capitalist are just anti corporatist while others would throw out the whole idea of buying/selling.
Personally, I want to see the removal of capitalism, as it is a terrible system, alongside other oppressive systems like the State. Because that doesn’t happen overnight, and it isn’t something congress would ever vote on, I support strong social systems, high taxes on the wealthy and corporations, strong environmental protections, and especially legislation that strengthens communities. Strong worker protections and benefits wouldn’t be bad to see either.
