Editing Capitalism (section)

== Issues ==

Of course, the proven failures of communism do not mean that particular implementations of capitalism, in either the 1860s or today, are without flaws, or that the basic ideas behind socialism/communism are defective in themselves. However, other analyses of these flaws, and  solutions for them, have been proposed by people who have adjusted for circumstances that Marx could never have foreseen, were more willing to take a gradualist approach, or believed that Marx didn't go far enough. 
The most notable is probably Henry George, who identified ''private ownership of land and other natural resources'', rather than private ownership of capital in general, as one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated against humanity, and proposed fixing it with a tax on the unimproved value of land rather than with a global revolution. Needless to say, if the Bolsheviks had read his book ''Progress and Poverty'' instead of ''Das Kapital'', history might have gone very differently. Then again, taxes are a lot less sexy and appealing to <s>philosophy majors</s> (whosoever wrote this has likely never even seen a university; John Rawls, especially his work "A Theory of Justice", is the complete hotness in contemporary political philosophy - and it's ''highly'' socialistic, with a hardcore stance for wealth-redistribution ((It's also been torn a new set of assholes by Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, among others)) and disgruntled workers than violent revolution and radical reorganization of society and the Bolsheviks' interpretation of Marxism was considered quite unorthodox to begin with in its own time.

One major gripe against capitalism is it's Darwinian/meritocratic nature of chasing ever increasing profit and competing with others with the usual outcome being an oligarchy/monopoly with all the rest subsumed or destroyed. This is usually countered with pointing out historical examples of new techs and industries uprooting the old ones along with Fortune 500 top 10 companies on the list being very different every decade, however more often than not these disruptions are subverted by outright buying up the competition or lowering your prices short-term and bankrupting the new rival company AND THEN buying them out for peanuts. Also, this can even lead to social-darwinism whereupon the success in a capitalist system is attributed to "fitness" and any attempt to reform the system is labeled as a rebellion of the unfit against the "just natural order" which in turn is made more and more rigid by design to prevent upsetting the status quo.

Additionally, for all of its lauded efficiency and "economic calculus", capitalism produces enormous amounts of waste and unused products. Just take a look at your local supermarket dumpster, if you can even get past the secured fence they are in (no dumpster-diving freeloaders allowed!). In the recent megacorp-era this has gotten so bad that Amazon, the world's largest shipping and retail company, routinely destroys thousands of unsold items ranging from electronics to books. This is not to mention the sheer irrationalities it encourages when it comes to the environment, polluting and destroying nature for short-term gain and thus proverbially shitting and pissing all over the only house you have while not cleaning any of it since it detracts from the pleasure of (increasing) eating and drinking. It doesn't help that capitalism is based around the prospect of infinite growth, which only works in a scenario where you have equally infinite resources (which was ''never'' the case and is becoming increasingly less so due to said wastefulness)- as soon as there's nowhere left for it to grow, it's going to collapse under its own weight. 

Furthermore, Capitalism has a troubling tendency of interfering with the democratic process and tends to seep into public domain sphere. Lobby groups and political kickbacks if not outright bribery see unelected corporate officials influence the workings of the country to benefit themselves, often at the expense of the general population. Privatization of education, healthcare, law enforcement and prison system can often lead to decline in quality as profit takes over quality as the main motivator. 

Oh and the whole "meritocracy" aspect falls flat immediately with the second generation inheriting their parents' wealth and thus getting an inordinate head-start in life regardless of how well they were raised or how motivated they may be personally. Also, as families such as Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Windsors show, capitalism can create long-lasting pseudo-noble dynasties just as any other economic system based on wealth accumulation. More hilariously, the wealthiest families of Florence (Italy) remained wealthy over the period of 600+ years, being unaffected by political, sanitary and technological turmoils. Such families also tend to rear their children with 0 tolerance for nonsense or wastefulness so the families rarely if ever loose much of their wealth while continually multiplying it.

Lastly, a worrying feature of what our colleagues on [[communism|the other side]] call "Late Stage Capitalism" is commodification - transformation of as many segments of society into objects of trade or commodities, examples of which are goods, services, ideas, nature, personal information, interpersonal relations, people or animals. This opens up virtually all spheres of our existence to purely economic modes of comprehension which as detailed above can cause huge problems. For example, if humans are just another commodity, why not bring back slavery for those who are willing to sell themselves into it? And if such things as prostitution, Dubai or sweatshops came to your mind - ring-a-ding, you are paying attention.

Moreover, the overtaking of the social sphere by the capitalist mode of thought causes a side-effect called "Capitalist Realism" which is the idea that neoliberal free-market capitalism is the best and only socio-economic model of human society to be viable, which is demonstratively false as we went through at least three prior systems (primitive communism, agrarian slave economy, and feudalism). This prevents us from even thinking about some other system though granted, new modes of economic production were often result of social and technological evolution and not deliberate planning so leaving capitalism to run its course may be a viable option...but given that there's an alarmingly high chance that said course might lead to the irreversible destruction of the planet's ability to support anything that could be called "civilization", is that really a risk worth taking?