[beaconstudios]

I'm anti-capitalist too, but I think the capitalist argument is that wealth is the incentive to innovate in the marketplace - it doesn't matter whether it's actually useful, but that it motivates hard work. I think this argument is easily debunked by pointing to the comparative innovation of businesses versus state-funded research, or that wealth is created by the work of the employees moreso than the founders, but that's the argument.

[achenatx]

it is incomprehensible to me that people can be "anti capitalists" when capitalism has reduced poverty and suffering to the lowest level in human history.

Socialist countries routinely nationalize food production and immediately create shortages. This happens over and over.

Capitalism isnt just the innovation of the kernel of a product, it is marketing, selling, manufacturing, distributing, and supporting a product.

That takes capital and it requires risk. Capital is constantly being squandered on ideas that go nowhere, but some are successful and the overall system is more productive.

The key point is that no one can predict in advance which ideas and teams will be successful. Capital backs them all and the market determines which ones succeed.

It is human nature to try to acquire more, when that is rewarded, people respond (by working harder, more efficiently, or with innovation).

Labor usually thinks management is useless or dumb. And most managers are bad. But you can look at world class leaders and see that they do matter and can make or break an organization. Look at the bulls under phil jackson, then when he left for the lakers. And then when he left the lakers.

[Jochim]

> Socialist countries routinely nationalize food production and immediately create shortages. This happens over and over.

Socialist countries are routinely embargoed by capitalist countries, severely limiting their access to global markets. That's if they're lucky, if they're unlucky they're destabilised through targeted assassination of their leaders[0].

If you're even less lucky you'll be captured by the people the U.S. think are the good guys[1] instead of whatever socialist party was gaining traction. I sure hope the torture centre the U.S. military helped set up was built with private capital:

> The United States backed Alfredo Stroessner's anti-communist military dictatorship and played a "critical supporting role" in the domestic affairs of Stroessner's Paraguay. For instance, U.S. Army officer Lieutenant Colonel Robert Thierry was sent to help local workmen build a detention and interrogation center named "La Technica" as part of Operation Condor. La Technica was also a well known torture centre. Stroessner's secret police, headed by Pastor Coronel, bathed their captives in tubs of human vomit and excrement and shocked them in the rectum with electric cattle prods. They dismembered the Communist party secretary, Miguel Ángel Soler , alive with a chainsaw while Stroessner listened on the phone. Stroessner demanded the tapes of detainees screaming in pain to be played to their family members.

> That takes capital and it requires risk. Capital is constantly being squandered on ideas that go nowhere, but some are successful and the overall system is more productive.

Government funded research through universities and the military do so much of the foundational work here that it seems crazy to attribute it to private capital.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_attempts_on_Fide... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor

[cassepipe]

It seems to me that except for a small group of crazy persons on the internet fascinated with the imagery of the Soviet Union and a "US bad justifies anything" hard line on the internet and some sectarian self-proclaimed marxist-[leninist] groups no modern anti-capitalist will seriously defend any of the self-proclaimed "socialist" state. (I very much hope that) the consensus in the Left seems to be that a state-owned economy + no democracy = Horror.

One of the hard part is trying to understand what capitalism even is. In that endeavour, Marx has only laid out the basis for an analysis at the end of his life in The Capital. It's an unfinished work, hindered by a philosophical education he did his best to shake off. Most social sciences did not exist or weren't well established to help him then.

You are only seeing the good sides of capitalism because you are on the good side of the stick if I may say. But without regulations, capitalism incentives are to brutally exploit all living workforce at hand, and this has been very from the beginning of capitalism. It is true that scientific advances in production (and especially the algricultural revolutions) have enabled to production of a incredibly well (in terms of calories available) and cheaply fed workforce which in the end also benefits the working class but this might well be a relatively recent development in the history of capitalism and may have with the fact that investing in mechanization may have seem the best of option in times of working people unrest. Plus you have to factor in the competition that took place with the USSR to be the most prosperous for all state/model.

Maybe the solution is capitalism with regulations/better incentives, maybe it is democratic governance inside of corporations, maybe something else I don't know but history has shown times and times again that unregulated capitalism is awful for most of humankind. I am ready to acknowlegde that market mechanisms have their usefulness but that usefulness must be harnessed for greater good, it should not be turned into a religion.

Whether there exists or not a "human nature", trying to derive social phenomenas directly from it seems a deeply unscientific approach to understanding social systems that does not seem fit for the 21st century.