this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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Capitalism is a socioeconomic system in which private individuals (capitalists) own the means of production and employ others to work them. The employer exploits the employed through wage labor, a system in which the surplus value of a laborer is taken as profit for the capitalist. Capitalism is often characterized by market relations and generalized commodity production, but there are always exceptions as in any system.
I think your first point is the most important: it's a system in which those who own the means of production, those who benefit the most from production, produce nothing.
But they do have the means to produce, so without them the laborers cannot produce on the same level. It should be a mutual relationship that everyone involved should benefit. I think when others say that capitalism is bad, they're referencing the corrupted form of capitalism we have today. A sort of pseudo slavery where corporations and those in power merely gives laborers just enough to survive but not enough to thrive.
That's capitalism's end goal, though, is slavery. Really it's just feudalism with extra steps.
Wait! @[email protected] isn't wrong. Also, I think we are miscommunicating with pro-capitalists.
Granted, we both know capitalist propaganda labels basically everything positive about human interactions "capitalism" and then scaremongers about how "the left wants to take THIS away from you!" And that is the main source of our problems communicating with pro-capitalists.
But some responsibility (maybe 20% of the responsibility?) lies with the fact that we choose to label "capital" the problem instead of... you know... the fact that our laws and customs favor a zero-sum employment contract between capital owners and workers where there can be only one winner?
Of course the owner of more capital is always on the better side of this contract, (which is why we identified capital as the problem in the first place.) But labeling the problem "capital" makes it look like we don't see any value to capital. Which isn't true. Marx and Engels dedicated several paragraphs of their manifesto to explaining why the means of production should not be damaged, because the existence of capital leads to abundance, and the means of production is valuable. They didn't want the means destroyed: they simply wanted it democratically owned by workers' cooperatives and state socialism.
The problem is employment contracts that are part of how our society treats the individual, private ownership of capital. Not the idea that capital is a valuable contribution to the production process and deserves reward.
Capital is causally efficacious in workers use of it. However, capital is a dead tool. It cannot be de facto responsible for anything. The person that uses the capital is the one that is de facto responsible for what they do with it positive and negative. Your assumption that critics of capitalism are merely criticizing improper application of fundamentally sound principles is wrong. The sophisticated critiques of capitalism apply even in its "perfect" form found in econ 101 textbooks @asklemmy