Asklemmy

I am anti- wealth and power concentration, and believe that proper compensation for labor is a requirement for a healthy and functioning society.

Money is supposed to flow, through the regular purchase of goods and services. Therefore, siphoning off wealth and hiding it is unhealthy for the economy.

Call it capitalist, socialist, communist, anythingist, whatever. If it aids and abets wealth and power concentration, it's bad, and there is no ideological wordplay that can make it otherwise.

A lot of people here are giving various answers, and that's for 2 reasons. You asked a very loaded question in a lemmy instance that started with an explicitly socialist bend, and you're essentially asking people about very personal reasons they hold a political belief.

Everyone's political beliefs are shaped by the conditions of their life. For example, I grew up poor on a rural farm in the Midwest of the US. Over time due to various things, I had several life situations impact my views on politics and the world. I started to learn things, things that didn't make sense, things that challenged my world view, things that I knew were wrong but didn't know why they happened. Eventually, I rejected liberalism and needed to find something else. That something else came in the form of a walkout at my workplace. I was thrust into the labor movement. Now I'm an anarcho-syndicalist (I believe all hierarchy is bad including capitalism and governments, and the people should govern themselves through unions and other forms of organizing).

This is a very, very brief description of my life from when I was born to literally right now, and how it impacted my beliefs. This process of life impacting personal political beliefs is called our "material conditions". People may have similar material conditions and completely disagree, or drastically different material conditions and agree on everything. More and more Americans are seeing and feeling the dramatic impacts of capitalism and the power of a few people on the top. That is driving people both to the anticapitalist left and to the fascist alt-right. Whatever reasons you read here, know that they're justifications for their material conditions causing them to take a radical position.

The real question is: how are you NOT?

I care about sensible regulations for health and safety, I care about the enormous wealth gap where money is hoarded by the rich while fellow citizens struggle. Honestly the class war is about to pop off.

I'd sum it up as capitalism requires egoism, and not of the healthy kind.

I think it's okay as long as it's heavily regulated, and the core stuff- health, education, transportation, housing, energy + utilities (including internet) all has a public component creating competition. When people have alternatives, society can progress.

Society becomes worse when any number of these get depleted or captured. You see healthcare diminish in the UK and Canada. You see things like STD rates skyrocket in the US when sex ed is torn out in favor of religion. You see it in the regulatory capture of Canadian cell providers. You see everyone in Texas suffer when private electrical companies dictate prices on power and can't keep their services running in extreme temperatures.

All this pales in comparison to authoritarian counties though. China's completely muzzled internet, insane tracking, concentration camps, authorities welding apartment buildings shut. Russian oil companies lining their pockets while corruption depleted their military and made it a joke (no flare systems on helicopters? Is this WW2?) At least we have the freedom to move countries, move states, and choose where we work and live, and who we get to love.

The Achilles heel of humanity is greed. Doesn't matter what goverment or economy style. Greed will fuck everything up. At the same time, don't lose sight of the positives. Most people get to live normal, healthy lives. We have modern medicine. Generally things are pretty peaceful. Crime is low. The economy is decent. We have ways of communicating instantly and are closer than ever to exploring space.

My stance on this starts with the things that a lot of people for the most part can admit are problems. Corporations with the power and wealth of small countries, concentration of money in the hands of a few, absurd costs of living, decreasing access to education, the environmental crisis, constant wars that destroy poorer countries, and in many countries poor healthcare outcomes. And this is by no means an exhaustive list.

Now why do these things happen? In my opinion the origin of these issues comes down to private ownership of vitally important organizations and infrastructure, and the resulting profit seeking regardless of the consequences. This also is how I would define capitalism, because capitalism is at its core only a way of organizing the economy.

There are then multiple answers to how we should address them. Regulating companies and reforming capitalism without addressing the root issue are a common one, and in some cases somewhat effective. However, in most cases such movements(which I would call social democratic) have a tendency to quickly walk back their achievements. For example, Tory attacks on the NHS in the UK have contributed to its reduction in quality. Or the walking back that the Mitterand administration did in France. Or the deregulation of trucking in the United States which led to substantially lower wages. This is also a western-centric argument on my part, because social democracy also relies on ruthlessly exploiting poorer countries' workers but that's a whole separate can of worms.

One could think of this backtracking as faults in the political system, which they perhaps are, but I think they are inherent to capitalism, because when you have such overwhelming power in megacorporations, they will inevitably eventually get their way as long as they exist. It's the equivalent of being surprised that you will eventually burn up if you try to stand on the sun despite your thermal shielding or other mitigations. Which isn't that absurd of a comparison because the sun's surface is only ~15 times hotter than a human if you measure from absolute zero.

The next answer is to try to, through monopoly breaking or other means, to revert capitalism to a former state of less concentrated capital. This is a fool's errand and a reactionary stance in most cases, because monopolization is inherent to capitalism, especially now that companies' fixed costs are immense, but the marginal cost of each new unit(be it a package sent through a carrier or a complex electronic device) is nearly negligible in comparison, making a monopoly the inevitable outcome.

And about at this point in my political development I found out about Marxism and it's overall proposal for an alternative to capitalism, and I found it the most compelling. The history of Marxism is also a whole separate can of worms so I won't go too far into it, but I agree with the Marxist class analysis that there are owners(most of which aren't even individuals anymore) and workers, and that workers' main political strength are their numbers. And a lot of capitalism reform proposals do actually rely on mass political organization of workers. Now what I say is, I think we can be more imaginative as to what that power can be used for. I don't think what comes next after capitalism will be perfect, but I think we can do much better.

While this has turned into a fantastic discussion, I don't have the bandwidth to handle some of the nastier comments. I'm going to lock it now.

The community choice was fine. The only challenge is that we don't have bandwidth to mod contentious discussions, usually those related to politics and other sensitive topics. Because the quality of the discussion tends to be high, I'm happy to let these go until I notice too many comments that cross the line.

In general: when you come across comments that break the rules (see the sidebar) please do report them. There's a lot of content here and we may not see everything.

“I’m pretty pro-capitalism myself…” is one of the weirder things I’ve read on here. Socialist or not, that’s weird to me.

This is a decentralized platform meant to be a social media system without the corporate power inherent to all the others. The developers of Lemmy for example have essays on Maoist China being hosted on their Github.

By its very nature, it's going to attract people who are trying to get away from corporate influence. It's essentially why I'm here and not on reddit. I don't want a company profiting off of my content.

There's space for pro-capitalists as well though. I believe in the open market of ideas - listen to what people have to say and share your bit. Engage genuinely and you'll learn something and maybe teach someone else something.

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.

The Lemmy developers are very anti-capitalist and this is one of the first instances, the one that they are most liked to. Like attracted like, leading to a lot of users being anti-capitalist.

Other instances have different internal cultures due to how and why they were formed.