Political Memes

And you’re sitting here, typing to me on a computer that was the result of capitalism, presumably with a western education that was funded by a capitalist system, and probably benefiting a lot from that capitalist system

Western (U.S) education is failing on essentially every metric imaginable. It's either insanely expensive, or astronomically worse than any other country (vast majority of EU countries, China, Cuba, etc.). That said, this is even orthogonal to your point, as none of my education was funded by capitalism, it was publicly funded. Publicly funded education has nothing to do with private enterprise or private ownership of the means of production. Publicly funded education existed long before capitalism.

My computer wasn't developed by capitalism. Most individual parts, and even the network we're using to communicate (both the internet broadly and lemmy more specifically) exist despite natural capitalist tendencies. The internet for example is built on ARPANET, which was funded by the DoD. It's not something a capitalist envisioned and came up with. Another example is the microprocessor, again backed heavily by government funding, because private enterprise/companies/capitalists would not fund research with payout decades later.

Private capital could not have, and more importantly didn't, develop the vast majority of technology we use today. Private enterprise tends to take already researched and developed technologies and combine them for products that can yield short term profits. It's extraordinarily rare in the real world for private capital to research and develop technology that will yield profits in 20+ years.

Essentially the only times you see private enterprise take on long term research is when the capital is public, e.g the DoD funding some private contractor to do some research. Private investors/capital have very little interest in profits that long term, compared to the normal months or years they're looking at. It would be just as easy for the government to fund a worker cooperative instead of a private firm, it's just our government prefers private capitalist ventures over cooperative worker ones, so that's what they choose to fund. Once you have public money funding worker cooperatives, the means of production are owned by the workers and the capital is provided by the state, and there's no definition of capitalism that that falls under.