In addition to sustainability concerns others have mentioned, capitalism is also inherently unjust. You earn money by having money and many of those who work the hardest are also the poorest.

Getting fucked by capitalism will do that.

a lot of hate for capitalism here

The fediverse is largely populated by 2SLGBTQIA+ people and people of colour who are oppressed by capitalist regimes. The other big contingent is marxists and people who like FOSS. FOSS, at its core, is anti-capitalist.

You’re in a place founded by anti-capitalism, that exists in spite of capitalism, asking “why is there so much anti-capitalism here?”

I asked my co-admin once if he thought Capitalism was evil, he’s usually extremely careful with his words. He responded with “it might be”.

It seems to have a lot of real problems, wealth inequality, human exploitation, environmental destruction. I think countries that have a mixed system, where it’s part capitalist and part socialist tend to do better in most metrics. I wouldn’t want to live in a country without socialised medicine, socialised education and pretty strict environmental restrictions.

People are anti-capitalist because they’re increasingly realizing that it’s an abominable system that’s based on mass exploitation of the working class by people who own capital, and it produces oligarchical political systems such as seen in US and many other western countries that tantamount to living under the dictatorship of capitalists.

Capitalism is responsible for some of the worst atrocities in human history including things like the African slave trade, barbarism associated with colonization of America, countless famines such as the Irish and Indian famines, and never ending wars.

Today, capitalist need for growth and consumerism is literally destroying our very habitat that we all depend on at a planetary scale. Either capitalism ends or humanity will end.

Because the unintended consequences of capitalism, due to human psychology, are the destruction of the substrate it relies upon and that humans require for survival (as is so very demonstrable right now), and (again, due to human psychology and our tribal and hierarchical nature) the increasing imbalance of wealth (and therefore power) to a select few (who are generally making the former issue far worse).

Reasons for anticapitalism

1. It violates inalienable rights to democracy and to get the positive and negative fruits of their labor, which flow from the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. In the firm, the employees are de facto responsible, but employer is held solely legally responsible.
2. It violates the equal claim to natural resources everyone today and future generations have. It, instead, incentivizes ruining the environment

Capitalism is a system that will always result in long-term oppression of the workers and consumers, corruption of governing bodies, and environmental destruction.

This is because the base idea is wrong. Adam Smith and the Capitalist theorists that came after him claimed that the invisible hand of the market would trend towards better outcomes for the workers and consumers. This would be true if the best way to be profitable was to do good, but that isn’t the case.

More often than not, it is more profitable to do harm than good. Firms that seek to always increase profits, which is the fundamental goal of a Capitalist system, will always be incentivized to get as many people as possible to pay as much as possible for as little as possible.

This has been demonstrated over and over again. Think about software platforms for the most recent example. Netflix has only gotten more expensive with worse content and harsher usage rules. Same with YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. This is called “enshitification.” Companies always want to make more money, that can only happen by charging more, giving less, or creating some kind of production efficiency. And what’s the quickest way to make production more economically efficient? Fire workers and make the remaining/replacement ones work harder for longer with the same or worse pay.

Those are some of the practical reasons Capitalism is bad. The theoretical reasons have to do with the way Capitalism tries to justify private ownership and the employee/employer relationship.

How is it ethical that a man who has never set foot on a factory floor, never operated a machine, never worked a double shift because he needed to feed his family, to reap a majority of the produced value of that factory simply because he owns it?

How is it ethical that a man simply because of his privilege of upbringing, can “earn” 100-200-300X more than his average workers? Does he produce 300X more value? Does he work 300X as hard? Is his position 300X more difficult to perform? No, it’s because Capitalism justifies such grievous disparities and in fact, rewards them.

Answer this: The person who is told, “you are free to either be abused, or to die.” Is that person free in any significant sense?

I used to be a Capitalist, hardcore one actually. But slowly I came to realize that it can only result in one thing long term, collapse and dystopia. I’d be happy to discuss this stuff further with you, just DM me, maybe we can chat more on Discord or something.

The actual reason in most cases is because they think that abolishing capitalism would benefit them personally. Whether this is true or not is debatable, but that’s ultimately beside the point.

As was already stated, capitalism is unsustainable. It seeks infinite growth in a world of finite resources. Capitalism will almost always place short term financial gain over long term issues.

There are only two financial classes. The owner class and the working class. It doesn’t really matter if you make 30k a year or 300k a year. If you sell hours of your life for a salary, you are part of the working class. Capitalists make passive income off others labor. Being “pro-capitalism” is essentially saying that you’re okay giving all but the littlest amount of value you produced to someone else. This is paraded as a good thing in the United States.

Let’s say you have a cow. The cow had a baby, and it’s producing milk, but more than the calf or your family need. So you start selling the excess milk.

It’s good money! Soon you buy another cow, and another. Eventually you can’t take care of them all, so you hire people to help you. Yay!

After a while you realize that waiting for the cows to be impregnated by your bull means they are not producing milk as much as they can. So you start forcefully impregnating the cows so they are always pregnant or producing milk.

The calves are drinking a lot of your milk, so you decide to kill them as soon as possible. You don’t know what to do with the dead calves, so you start marketing them as “veal”, a delicacy!

A lot of your process is still manual, so you buy machinery that increases your productivity by 100x. You’re still paying your workers the same amount, even though they’re now responsible for producing 100x more.

One day you realize there’s too much milk in the market. If you sell it all, the price will drop too much. So you dump thousands of gallons of milk in the river, to keep the prices stable. You couldn’t give them away to people in need, that would still affect the market!

You’re still not selling enough (though you have more money that you could spend in your lifetime). So you buy some politicians so the government says that milk is essential, the only way to absorb calcium, and it should be in every school. People are convinced they need milk, even though it’s from another species and even though humans don’t need milk after a couple years of age.

That’s why I hate capitalism.

I just don’t like greed. No, scratch that. I just don’t like greedy people! I don’t mind capitalism, as long as it doesn’t produce greedy people. I know… it’s tough to even imagine such a thing…

Capitalism is flawed and has outlived it’s usefulness just as every preceding economic system has. One of the more poignant Marx quotes puts it well

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Capitalism is based on the accumulation of resources known as the “means of production”. As time goes on, those with capital are able to leverage it to further subjugate the working class as they amass a disproportionate amount of wealth and capital. The average worker is worth far more than they are paid, while the capitalist who they work under continues to pocket the majority of that profit.

For a working class person to begin to earn their fare share they have a few ethical options, be self employed, unionize to collectively bargain for a larger piece of the pie, join or form a co-op (effectively a small scale form of socialism).

The last point I’d bring up that is more central to my own politics is the inherent link between capitalism and imperialism. Even in a capitalist country where you may be able to comfortably live as a member of the working class, the global third world is often footing the bill in order to lower the cost of goods. Examples would be clothing, chocolate, coffee, etc where most of these are made in desolate conditions and sometimes with slave labor.

That being said, there are many reasons to be against capitalism and it is hard to express in a single comment. I highly recommend Lenin’s State and Revolution to anyone interested.

Capitalism is just based on mass exploitation and the only ones that really benefit from that are the rich that are exploiting the masses (the bosses of the big companys). Cannot see why you should like such a system other than you got brainwashed. On the other hand i dont know if there is currently anything better than the capitalist system because every other system failed if we look back in history. In my opinion combining aspects of socialism and capitalism to a “controlled and regulated capitalism” is the current best solution. I recommend to you to read Karl Marx to get and idea of what the “other side of the fence” look and get an idea of some critical view points of capitalism.

I like buying shit as much as the next person, I also don’t think endless growth for shareholders is a laudable goal and is likely dangerous. I also don’t think that essential services should be run for profit, but then I am from a country with proper government health care. Government should set a baseline, not a company.

But as I said, I still like buying shit