[Scalestein]

As a fellow anti-capitalist I struggle with how to live in a clearly capitalist world. I'm currently on track to retire at an average age or earlier and cynically view it as buying freedom from the system. In reality it reminds me of the old company store at coal mines. Paying workers in currency which can only be spent at their own store.

Breaking out of the capitalist cycle seems quite difficult to do while still maintaining a decent quality of life.

[throwaway894345]

I don't understand anti-capitalism. I get that it sucks to work to provide oneself with "a decent quality of life", but the whole point of capitalism is to minimize the amount of work one needs in order to secure that "decent quality of life". I.e., capitalism is the most efficient system we've found to secure a decent quality of life for as many people as possible.

The laws of nature require that food, shelter, and healthcare require the labor of some people and apart from slavery those people need to be compensated for the fruits of their labor. In order for each of us to share in the fruits of their labor, we have to have something with which to compensate them, which is ultimately our own labor.

It feels like anti-capitalists believe there is some forest of money trees that the capitalists are sadistically preventing anyone from accessing.

[ok2938]

I see capitalism as a good system in the sense that it does not require any belief in anything - that's certainly a plus.

What is bad is that I capital can just work and earn money, those not lucky need to be creative and actually use and sell their abilities.

Also bad: while there is competition, there is just a huge amount of excess and waste work because everybody is determined to out-compete the others.

In the end, a capitalist company aims for perpetual growth and monopoly, because that's where you can set your price and maximize your profit.

[throwaway894345]

> What is bad is that I capital can just work and earn money, those not lucky need to be creative and actually use and sell their abilities.

Yeah, inequality is a bummer, but it's a small price to pay to lift billions out of abject poverty. Further, we can do more to calibrate our capitalist systems to be more efficient which is to say we can reduce the amount of inequality and lift more people further out of poverty. That said, capitalism has allowed many of us have been able to lift ourselves out of the labor class and to begin to earn passive income even if it hasn't allowed all of society to do so in perfect lock-step. It's a centuries-long process (7+ billion people distributed through a lot of different cultures and political systems with varying degrees of corruption especially among the non-capitalist systems), but we can get there.

> Also bad: while there is competition, there is just a huge amount of excess and waste work because everybody is determined to out-compete the others

Far less than any other system known to man.

> In the end, a capitalist company aims for perpetual growth and monopoly, because that's where you can set your price and maximize your profit.

Our system largely marshals this corporate greed to the benefit of all of society. Many of us believe it can be marshaled more efficiently (i.e., less inequality and less poverty, probably by steeper taxes on the rich), but we're talking about calibrating the existing system--not changing to a fundamentally different one. Indeed, we haven't found an alternative to capitalism that isn't utterly catastrophic, so complaining about capitalism seems horribly destructive (by all means, complain about the degree to which our system could be made more efficient, but complaining that capitalism is responsible for the constraints imposed by nature is ultimately counterproductive).

[kansface]

> Breaking out of the capitalist cycle seems quite difficult to do while still maintaining a decent quality of life.

I would suggest that's because its capitalism that provides that quality of life.

[_k9eq]

I am not interested in descending into an idealogical argument here, but most (serious) anti-capitalist criticisms will acknowledge that capitalism has brought the hitherto highest quality of life, just that it is self-constrained by the necessity to produce for profit.

Socialism is then understood as the overcoming of this constraint, but as always if you ask n socialists/communists you get m answers, where m > n.

It is messy and tiresome to discuss, especially when everyone insists that their personal understandings of what terms mean are the only real ones. More so when you've heard every position a dozen times already...

[throwaway894345]

> it is self-constrained by the necessity to produce for profit

That's a constraint imposed by nature, not by capitalism. Capitalism tries to optimize the amount of profit per unit labor so as to elevate society out of poverty.

[throwaway894345]

Indeed, it seems like the parent thinks that if it weren't for capitalism no one would need to work for their food, shelter, healthcare, etc. When in reality "in order to have basic necessities one must labor" is a natural law and capitalism seeks to minimize the amount of labor required to achieve that decent quality of life. Further, the parent describes himself as participating in capitalism precisely because it is the easiest way to achieve his "decent quality of life".

This seems like the fundamental misunderstanding that anti-capitalists make--everyone wants to minimize the labor required to achieve a decent quality of life, but anti-capitalists uniquely (seem to) believe that capitalism is the reason we have to labor in the first place.