Few people actually understand how capitalism operates, and even less understand the arguments against it

Capitalism is the most common economic system in today’s world. That does not mean it is the best, in truth it is far from it. The basics of anti-capitalism state that capitalism cannot exist without the following: poverty, oppression, war, and ecological destruction. Capitalism is a system that allows a few people to get billions and a few billion people to get basically nothing. There is already a system that can do better for everybody, the problem is that capitalism benefits the powerful the most.

The Basics of Capitalism

To understand anti-capitalism, one first must understand capitalism. Capitalism is based on the private ownership of capital. Out of this comes the other bases of the system, wage labor and profit.

A quote by Karl Marx can sum up the definition of capital quite nicely.

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To sum it up, capital has the ability to add value to itself.

Based on the labor theory of value, the true value of items is equal to the amount of socially necessary labor it takes to produce it. Basically, human labor is needed to produce or acquire any object, thus it is the only thing that can be used to measure the true value. More on that here. [1]

The value capital adds to itself must come from somewhere. This somewhere is the only thing value comes from:e the workers. This can only happen through the use of surplus value extraction, and is unable to happen through personal or collective property. This is because when a few people hold a monopoly on the tools needed to produce a good, the worker is dependent on them. When the worker is dependent on them, they can extract value from the worker. This surplus value is equal to the value the worker adds to the goods he labors on minus the amount which he is paid. All profit comes from extracted surplus value. In the end, the workers’ only options are to starve, labor, or be lucky enough to earn enough to own capital and start the cycle anew. [3]

The problem is that tools are more efficient when they are bigger and there are more of them. This means that bigger businesses can easily overcome smaller ones. In other words, the more capital one has, the faster it increases. This leads to a concentration of capital.

One example of this problem is bitcoin. Proof of Work is becoming concentrated within a few miners within China. This is for two reasons. Electricity is cheaper in China, and electricity, cooling, and components are often cheaper in bulk. Centralization can not be escaped under a private market system. That leads into the other problems of capitalism.

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Keeping Power

Incentives are the most influential part of any system. Under capitalism, the main incentive is wealth. This brings in a problem. Wealth is power. This gives the capitalist class, the owners of private property, the ability to dictate society. They do this in many ways including lobbying, propaganda, censorship, and even acts of violence. The tools they use to do this come in many forms; however, they usually only go by two names: The government and the media. There are no better tools for this job.

Lobbying
First we will go over lobbying. Getting elected (or any other high-up position at this stage, government or not) costs massive amounts of money. In the United States alone about 3 billion dollars were spent on the 2016 elections for house, senate, and presidential campaigns.[1] The majority of this has come from the rich, through companies (which have no cap), or themselves personally (which does actually have a cap). Nobody even choses as a candidate will have a chance of winning without massive money behind them. This is in an effort to introduce more “pro-business” legislation, to increase business profits. Since these profits come directly from the worker, they are anti-worker.

The reason the workers do not do anything about this is because that they require a steady job. Under capitalism, the only way to acquire a steady job is to work for a successful company, no matter how bad it is for them in the long run. This is because of the massive control of the economy the capitalist has. In an economy where the worker has gained more power, the businesses are unable to “dominate”. They will simply leave and find a place where they can more easily exploit the worker. (This place is now called the third world.) This makes the exploitation of workers not only a luxury, but a necessity. On top of that, a country must bow to the will of the businesses, effectively giving them complete control.

Propaganda and the Media
Capitalists are masters of propaganda. This is one of the main reasons capitalism still exists. They run propaganda in many ways. As was already discussed, the capitalist class effectively controls the government. This means all pro-business and pro-country propaganda is effectively pro-capitalist propaganda. Aside from the government, all privately controlled media is subject to the will of the capitalist class. Media, both small and large, depends on the capitalist class for revenue. This revenue disappears for any large pro-worker media.

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About 10 companies own all of media and they only have their own interests in mind. The commodity they sell is the attention of those watching, not the advertisements.

There is more to the control of the ruling class, though bosses often do not have direct control over what news is told, they do have other ways to control it. They control the distribution, the context, and even the language used. Using the time of day and the channel they can choose who to show it to, by using context they can have a massive effect on what people think of it, and the language used can seal the deal. Using “job creators” instead of “capitalist class” can make the workers class feel dependent and even thankful. On top of that, every news station reports on how everything affects the business, but often ignores or downplays the workers. Anything written by the workers point of view is treated as “activist” or “radical”. That is how propaganda operates. More information here.

Fun fact: Entire TV shows are often canceled if they become too popular with the wrong audience. For propaganda to work effectively, an audience must be segmented.

Violence

Violence is the last-ditch effort to subdue the workers. This violence comes in many forms and happens for many reasons.

Mass killings against anti-capitaists have become a common event. A few examples of countries doing this are: Argentina From 1976 to 1983, China with The Shanghai massacre of 12 April 1927, East Timor during the Indonesian occupation, multiple massacres in El Salvador, Germany during Hitlers rise to power, Guatemala since 1965, Iran during the failed revolution, Indonesia during 1965-1966, Korea during the Korean war, Spain during the white terror, Taiwan during the white terror, Thailand by the “Communist Suppression Operations Command”. The smallest of these only killed a few tens of thousands of people, while the Indian one was far over a million. Here is more information.

Firstly, this graphic will show how often the United States attacks other countries.

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Here you can find a list of 35+ dictators that the United States has backed. The leader of the free world does seem to love doing that. One big example is Iraq. The United States put Saddam Hussein in power. The reason they chose to take him out was simple. He tried to sell oil for the Euro instead of the Dollar, trying to take away the power of the United States economically. We invaded them and did one thing that stands out, even above the war crimes. We privatised the oil, we gave ownership to the ruling class in our own country.

Many of the pro capitalists will say: “That isn’t true capitalism, there is a government involved”. There is one thing they don’t understand, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. Without imperialism capitalism would literally collapse.

One of the biggest flaws in capitalism is that it must always expand. This is due to the nature of competition. Each business must compete with each other, or risk losing market share. To keep market share they must keep making more products for cheaper. On top of that, profit is made. The vast majority of this profit is reinvested within the company, forcing expansion. This expansion also leads to overproduction, which can cause a crisis. With all companies expanding and the rate of profit falling there are only two options: finding new markets, or turning to monopolies. Sometimes both. [4][5]

The expansion under capitalism has limits. The most common limits encountered is the border of the nation. This plus a finite and decreasing wage, means that new markets can not be created forever within a nation. One option is titans extracting a guaranteed profit without competition, a monopoly. That exists today, 5 people own as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the world. Profit motive, the integral aspect of capitalism makes this worse. Investment capital must have somewhere to go, nobody wants to waste an opportunity for profit. This means eventually new opportunities for profit must be opened up, outside of the country. Once there are none left, society will collapse or turn to outright slavery due to overproduction and monopolies.

To stave off the collapse of society, capitalists must turn to super-profits. Super-profits come from producing goods in third world countries at extremely reduced production costs, and shipping them to the first world. (Since labor is a production cost, this can also be considered super-exploitation.) The profit is then shared with the working class of the imperialist nation, to buy their loyalty. This nation becomes their farm of loyal soldiers and police. The “working class” of this imperialist nation then has an interest in upholding capitalism at the expense of everybody else. [6]

This can be seen often today. The privatisation of oil in Iraq, the miners in Africa, and those who produce our goods in China.

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This is only the first part, expect more to come. There is a lot more wrong with capitalism than exploitation and imperialism, the methods used to keep this system in place have killed hundreds of millions.

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