I disagree. Now what? (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Friday, October 18, 2019, 07:18 (1871 days ago) @ Harmanimus
edited by CruelLEGACEY, Friday, October 18, 2019, 07:34

Do you produce all your own seeds? Do you have an on sight chemical refinery and produce your own pesticides and fertilizers? Did you mine the ore and build your farming equipment from scratch? Is the currency exchange something you minted? What is the currency backed by? You and your transactions do not exist in a vacuum.

You seem to be making a false equivalency between production and exploitation.

People work to produce things because things need to be produced in order for humanity to survive. That has nothing to do with capitalism (in any exclusive sense). The history of humanity is the history of people learning to produce things in increasingly efficient and effective ways. Gradually along the way, we learned that we could produce more by specializing. Rather than each individual person being responsible for making everything they need, people could specialize their personal efforts and work cooperatively with others to produce more of the things we need. None of that started with capitalism.

Where capitalism enters the picture is when we adopted the belief that each individual should be the master of their own production. We each choose what we’re going to make, we choose what we’re going to use/consume, and we’re all active participants in deciding the relative value of both goods and the labour that produces them.

Yes, there are people who try to exploit the system and/or other people to further their own gains. But that isn’t a capitalist invention either. That’s as close to a universal law as anything to do with human beings. There are people who exploit every system. The difference is that so far, capitalism is the only system we’ve developed that maintains a foundation of free choice for people at all levels of society. Free choice isn’t always perfectly or evenly present, but when you move away from capitalism, free choice basically disappears for the vast majority of people. And yet, the corruption and exploitation remains. If anything, it gets even worse.

But this is the insane double standard that gets used by everyone who rails against capitalism. The real-world, messy, imperfect examples of capitalism that actually exist are compared to picture- perfect conceptual ideologies, all to illustrate the “problems” with capitalism. Never mind the fact that, imperfect and partially corrupt as it is, capitalism has lead to the most free, prosperous, and least repressive civilizations in human history. Never mind the fact that the supposed alternatives to capitalism keep producing the most murderous and repressive societies, every time they’re put into practice. We don’t need to deal with that. We’ll just sweep it under the rug and keep going on about how evil capitalism is
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