It’s a lot simpler than what everyone here is saying tbh. They don’t know what it is. Most of them think capitalism is just markets existing. Or some other random definition they made up in their head. So they’re defending the imaginary version of it that they made up, which of course they like.
In fact the Epstein class wants you to be miseducated about capitalism. They have class consciousness and want that we don’t.
Because they benefit from it?
This is only part of it because the vast majority of people do not benefit from capitalism. Not anymore at least. Of those in the working class who defend capitalism I would say most are victim to the constant stream of propaganda that the media pumps out at the behest of the capital owning class. It’s something that starts from birth in most western nations and permeates into the narratives people are taught in school in a way that requires deliberate and consistent work to unlearn and break away from.
this. i remember a few years ago i was somewhere that folks had put on the macy’s t-day parade. it was the first time i’d really noticed the intensity of the propaganda. most of the themes and music were just about acquiring material things and how good and normal that is. the propaganda was so strong it made me viscerally uncomfortable to watch.
I dont want to interrupt but im still waiting on my money from the election in Berlin. We were promised a bonus if you win.
What do they have to do with that?
Even more benefit from a social market economy, which might be an optimal sweet spot if done right.
No arguments there
EDIT: I mean “can’t argue with that”. Just incase what I wrote originally didn’t make sense
Capitalism with a larger social safety net is still capitalism, and it relies on the exploitation of workers in the Global South to function. As the Global North’s capacity to imperialize the Globe South deteriorates, so too does its ability to bribe its own workers at home with treats.
That’s why I wrote “if done right”.
A truly social market economy also has to make sure that workers along the whole supply chain have to get similar rights and treatment as local workers.Besides that, centrally planned economies (being the opposite to plain free market capitalism), also don’t really shy away from exploiting the resources of poorer countries.
(Looking e.g. at imperialistic China here).China isn’t exploiting anyone. You really need to start questioning what your own empire accuses its enemies of. Previously:
- The Atlantic, 2021: The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth
- Jason Hickel, 2026: Is China doing “colonialism” in Africa?
- Deborah Brautigam, 2019: A critical look at Chinese ‘debt-trap diplomacy’: the rise of a meme
- 📺 Michael Hudson & Radikha Desai, 2024: The truth about China’s economy: Debunking Western media myths
China isn’t exploiting anyone.
Total Imports 2025 EU / China:
Mineral fuels, oils, distillation products $467.75B / $442.95B
Plastics $68.38B / $56.48B
Pearls, precious stones, metals, coins $56.12B / $118.02B
Articles of apparel, knit or crocheted $53.13B / $3.74B
Articles of apparel, not knit or crocheted $48.56B / $5.79B
Iron and steel $44.08B / $30.86B
Edible fruits, nuts, peel of citrus fruit, melons $31.17B / $20.69B
Fish, crustaceans, molluscs, aquatics invertebrates $29.23B / $19.93B
Rubbers $26.46B / $20.57B
Footwear, gaiters and the like $26.30B / $5.70B
Copper $18.63B / $74.63B
Oil seed, oleagic fruits, grain, seed, fruits $18.63B / $57.02B
Pulp of wood, fibrous cellulosic material, waste $11.87B / $21.98BSo, looking at the absolute numbers, China is eploiting the world’s resources in a similar fashion as the old style European Union, so I have to disagree.
I won’t comment on the content of your provided reports and youtube videos (of which at least two look a little… juicy… at first glance), as me just providing you with a bunch of counter-reports and videos, whose reliability you would question in a similar way as I am questioning yours, won’t change anything.
Country X importing from country Y doesn’t magically equate to country X exploiting country Y. Exploitation is a matter of unequal exchange, and not every exchange is unequal. Exchanges coerced through classical imperialism or through neoliberal debt trap peonage are unequal.
Looking at the top 3 exports of China (by a wide margin before anything else):
Electrical, electronic equipment $1016.58B
Machinery, nuclear reactors, boilers $603.82B
Vehicles other than railway, tramway $248.31BThat’s all high price stuff.
Combined with its huge trade surplus, this is a classical “Buy cheap resources - sell expensive highly processed commodities back” scheme, the same as e.g. the uprising European industrializing nations employed as a strategy during their colony exploiting times (and to some degree still do in a similar fashion as China).
No, there is nothing equal here.
In the US specifically, capitalism has been taught as the only way towards success. This has happened for decades, at least. It is deeply engrained in that society.
When capitalism fails, as has been apparent so many times lately, it is blamed on something else. And as the excuses run out, the scapegoats get more and more inventive.
That’s one reason why the current administration wants to you blame immigrants for everything: because it buys more time for the capitalists to make more money and shift the narrative again.
successful brainwashing.
same reason they defend religion, indoctrination.
They don’t even know socialism exists in the US.
Also what you say is more tied to political identity instead of your actual beliefs whether or not the belief falls anywhere close to truth.
socialism exists in the US
??? are you writing from a parallel universe or is this just “socialism is when the government does stuff”
Are you in the universe where people start sentences with question marks?
Spanish speakers would be pretty surprised to hear that they are from the other universe
Uno signo de interrogación de apertura, is different than your freestyle butchery.
They don’t even know socialism exists in the US.
You don’t know that it doesn’t and never has.
Care to explain the main idea of your inference?
Measuring the percentage of private vs state ownership of the means of production isn’t going to tell you whether that state is a capitalist one or a socialist one. The salient question is, which economic class wields the power of the state to suppress the other class? Socialism isn’t a slider bar, it’s a matter of political power in the class war.
The US government was never not captured by the bourgeoisie, because the US was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
Here’s my opinion.
Every morning you drive on a road you didn’t build, drop your kids at a school you didn’t found, and trust that if your house catches fire, someone will show up without asking for a credit card first. None of that came from a business looking to profit. It came from all of us chipping in so everyone gets something we couldn’t manage alone.
That’s the basic idea behind socialism: we’re stronger when we pool what we have. And we already live it. When big banks and automakers were about to collapse, the government stepped in with public money to save them. If it’s fine to share the risk for corporations, why is it “radical” to share it for regular people?
So the question isn’t whether we do socialism. We already do. It’s who the leadership is willing to do it for.
That’s the basic idea behind socialism
Not really, no. What you’re describing is the socialization of production.
What you’re describing is fine; it’s not wrong. The issue is that you’re abusing the term “socialism,” which already has a well-defined and widely agreed-upon meaning that is quite different from the one you’re using.
Every modern economy is mixed to some degree.
People fear change and the unknown. That makes one cling to whatever is familiar, even if it’s causing suffering. It takes effort to zoom out, see the big picture and how many problems can be traced back to capitalism.
Because capitalists can afford all of the bot farms and media adds.
It really makes you actually understand the whole, “the revolution will not be televised”
Because the people that “rage against capitalism”, tends to put a lot of rollover effects occurring due to no guardrails. Onto being a fault of capitalism, rather than a fault of government.
We could tax inheritance 100% and most of the rollover issues are gone.
We could provide healthcare, public transportation and many other services. While maintaining a capitalistic based system.
Infinite growth is not a necessity of capitalism, that’s a necessity for consumer franctic societies.
Right now there’s a lot of countries looking towards Scandinavian models, they’re capitalistic by nature and imo still lack guardrails against intergenerational wealth. Inequality is skyrocketing everywhere, but that’s not a fault of capitalism. It will happen in unregulated capitalistic setups, but capitalism is really effective at guiding companies into providing the goods the populations need - And we have not theorised a better system yet.
Capitalism has always sounded great in theory, just the way you described. But in practice it has never worked, it always results in the accumulation of wealth in few hands, who can then use that power to subvert democracy and get their way.
Why do you think inheritance, wealth, etc is taxed too little? Because wealthy elites have abolished and prevented those taxes through lobbying/corruption. Many countries had the exact social democracy model you describe, but abolished and privatized these systems because rich people paid the media and politics to make it happen.
Not to mention this analysis focuses only on material wealth. Capitalism brings with it a complete alienation, communities don’t own their land, people don’t own their work, and everything that was once a common good is slowly commodified and robbed of its soul. Art, music, relationships, capital fijds a way to monetize it eventually. But now we have online shopping and fast food! Hooray, happiness achieved!
we have not theorized a better system yet
That’s an incredibly offensive claim. You just spat in the faces of nearly two centuries worth of academics and thinkers in myriad disciplines that have worked tirelessly, in the face of often violent or even fatal backlash from capital powers, to create and implement alternative concepts. Not to mention humans have experimented with various ways of living together for our entire history before capitalism.
Capitalism has always sounded great in theory,
I dunno, “People who don’t do the work get rich” sounds kind of shitty.
it always results in the accumulation of wealth in few hands, who can then use that power to subvert democracy and get their way.
But that’s not really capitalisms fault. We’ve seen higher degrees of inequalities in socialist countries and feudal economies could be claimed the inequality is a part of the design.
It’s due to a lack of government rules.
Capitalism brings with it a complete alienation, communities don’t own their land, people don’t own their work
It opens up for the possibility of either owning your work or owning the value (wage) of your work. 2 millennia ago, when everyone worked in their own workshops and sold to the market, that was ultimately also a capitalistic economy.
Communities now can own their land, because everything is a commodity. Under other systems, the government, noble or other highly ranked owns the land and leases it out - We could argue that’s still happening under capitalism, through property taxes.
I’m curious if you can expand on the alienation.
That’s an incredibly offensive claim
Yet you’re not highlighting any, because capitalism is a tad too efficient. The alterations we seek out to do, does not stop capitalism; Just changes the goals of it and the late stage setup to move more power/capital back to the people.
Capitalism includes the capitalist state, which is why these supposed guardrails do not exist. Further, capitalism with guardrails still has fundamental problems like the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, crisis of overproduction due to an inability to be coherently planned, not to mention surplus value exploitation leading to enshittification and all the problems with the profit motive.
crisis of overproduction due to an inability to be coherently planned
Is your claim planned economy is better? Because history shows planned economies tends to underproduce on necessities.
not to mention surplus value exploitation leading to enshittification
There’s still issues of people skimming, but because essential monopolies has been created historically. No one has others to buy from, so enshittification has no way to be challenged.
Capitalism is just really effective at sending signals back, as it hurts every part of the chain if the seller can’t sell their goods.
The one socialist society that almost succeeded their market, but USA unfortunately fucked them hi Latam, essentially build market signals into their models and wasn’t centrally planned.
like the tendency for the rate of profit to fall,
And why isn’t this a positive? Goods being traded at the cost to produce. Not at some random markup, just because.
Planned economy is better once highly developed productive forces are achieved, and history shows that planned economies dramatically expanded production as compared to what came before. Rather than underperforming, the USSR was one of the fastest growing economies on the planet during its existence:
The DPRK also outperformed the ROK until the ROK was flooded with western investment, and this was further hampered by the dissolution of the USSR. Today, however, the DPRK is steadily progressing (largely based on increased arms sales, such as to the Russian Federation), while the ROK appears to be in crisis.
Markets serve a progressive role historically when they stitch together disconnected production into production on a national and international scale. However, once they reach the national level, they quickly lose any amount of progressive quality and immediately become an impediment to further progress. At this point, planned economy becomes far better. This isn’t a binary either, socialist countries like China leverage planned economy for their large firms and key industries, and marketize underdeveloped sectors.
Surplus value exploitation is not merely people “skimming.” Capitalist profits come from exploitation of labor, paying workers less than the actual value they create. Ownership does not create value, labor does. Further, the fact that the monopoly stage has been reached does not mean we can work backwards, with monopoly scale comes technologies and productive techniques that can only be employed by monopolies. This is why markets lose their progressive character to planned economy as monopolies form, as planned production can make much better use of the scale developed by markets.
As for the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, it leads to crisis of profitability and economic collapse. This is what turns monopoly capitalism into its imperialist stage, as capitalists chase increased absolute profits through market expansion to fight this. If they can establish an absolute monopoly globally, they can then price fix as they please, accelerating enshittification.
The major problem here is that you aren’t looking at the system in its totality, and this leads you to make false conclusions. The reason capitalism cannot work and truly have guardrails is because the state is not a neutral entity, it belongs to whoever the ruling class of society is and takes on a definite form. Scandinavian countries are imperialist, relying on unequal exchange, and this is how they at least pacify their working class.
The solution is socialism. Workers already run the world, we should own it too.
Workers already run the world, we should own it too.
Cooperatives is the solution you’re looking for, and I agree. They work within capitalism.
Let workers inherit companies and you have the best of both worlds.
it belongs to whoever the ruling class of society is and takes on a definite form
And why can the majority not be the ruling class?
Scandinavian countries are imperialist
Two centuries ago, fair. Now? Not really, it does however benefit from knowledge transfer due to third world citizens seeking universities in richer countries.
Cooperatives are not the solution. They retain all of the core problems with capitalism, such as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, class distinctions, the inherent chaos of markets, the inability to be coherently planned, and all of the major issues with producing for exchange, rather than use. Socialism is the answer, collective ownership at a societal level, not at the level of individual cells.
The majority can become the ruling class, but it must do so by creating a state in its own class interest. A capitalist state isn’t a state that happens to govern capitalism, it’s a specific form of state that exists exclusively with capitalism. Likewise, socialist states are their own specific forms.
Scandinavian countries are imperialist today. They all depend on super-exploiting the global south, through mechanisms like neocolonialism and unequal exchange. Monopoly finance capital expands outwards and preys on the overexploited countries. Systems like the IMF and NATO help maintain this system of international plunder. The bulk of what people in Scandinavia consume does not come from the sweat of their own brows, but through the labor of global south workers.
If you want to disparage socialists for mindlessly raging against capitalism, then I suggest you actually listen to what we say, rather than completely ignore core concepts like unequal exchange.
Because they benefited from the exploitation of the global south
Propaganda and suppression of the left was successful and certain crumbs had to be given in the past decades, currently there’s still enough comfort that many will defend their current status. A comfortable person isn’t going to start asking or rocking the boat, it’s in their interest that the boat is on the steady ride.
Deflection, gaslight and disciplining of those who find themselves in the “have not” becomes a way of comforting yourself that the ride was always within your capability and not dependent on the exterior mechanisms or just plain luck to be born in the lineage of “haves”.
Because of ideological reproduction (educational systems, media and political discourses) which all normalize capitalist (and materialist, dualist, etc.) worldviews. There’s a lot at stake in defending this as it is the basis of people’s identity and how they construe meaning in life (through work, career, status, consumption). Colonialism has also been an effective project in destroying other worldviews and political systems and labeling them as primitive, backwards, etc.
I was born into the US and was a liberal for most of my life. I can explicitly tell you why so many of my countrypeoples defend capitalism:
Because they have the political education of an infant. You are told from a young age by everyone you trust that communism is bad and you never EVER get told the truth. There is absolutely no grand structure for learning about politics that isn’t reactionary in nature.
What’s left is an infinitesimal number of people with both the requisite curiosity and social opportunity to break out of liberal thinking. Most people are ingrained and never challenged their entire lives.
The incentives for supporting capitalism and rejecting communism are powerful and alluring in this country. But it is not an excuse. The books are out there. You absolutely must read.
It makes sense. Most people have no idea about most of it. You have stuff. You buy and sell stuff. Ezpz.
Any alternative is demonised and fought about and undermined and misinformation’d.
People use the word “capitalism” to mean different things.
If you ask someone “Should someone who doesn’t do any work get money from people who do?”, a lot of people would say no. And they’d probably think you’re talking about welfare or communism. But that’s capitalism. The guy who “owns” the company can sit at home and watch netflix while all his office workers make stuff, and he keeps the profits. If you frame it right, you can get people to agree with you or suffer some cognitive dissonance.
But none of that is what some people are thinking of when they think capitalism. They think “free markets” and “competition”. They often don’t really think about how that trends towards monopolies or cartels. Either because of magic, or “the government will prevent monopolies.” But not too much regulation. There’s got to be a few decades of suffering before an intervention, typically.
There’s also a lot of binary thinking. Either capitalism, or total state ownership and oppression.
Total state ownership isn’t oppression for most people, though, assuming it’s a worker-run state. It’s also a necessary step towards building a fully classless society.
Also, it’s really funny how people think that private ownership by a small percentage of the population is somehow better than state ownership. It’s peak temporarily embarrassed billionaire mentality.
People confuse private with independence and state with dominance because they don’t see the state as a product and tool of class struggle.
Precisely, Anna Louise Strong puts best it in This Soviet World:
Yep, almost done reading this book too!
it’s so good, I just love how full of optimism it is
Yep! My biggest problem with it is that the language surrounding national minorities is… Dated… But beyond that, it’s an excellent look at the Soviet Union!
