What's so bad about capitalism?

[tiny]

Hi, I'm new to socialism. It's obvious that capitalism is only good for the rich, but can anyone please give me some informed specifics why capitalism is bad?

When people ask me I can only give vague opinions, does anyone have statistics or some bullet points?

Thanks!

[CartCollector]

Well for starters, capitalism is inefficient. For instance, if people don't buy enough stuff one year, there's a recession and workers get laid off. In other words, some people have to go without being paid just because some other people didn't buy enough stuff. Because unemployed people don't consume as much, this can feed back into itself, less consumption leading to more unemployment leading to even less consumption, so on and so forth, until you've got 30% unemployment like in the Great Depression. Thrift creates catastrophe. Instead of laying people off when they produce less, why not just reduce everyone's hours? That way everyone benefits when there's less consumption instead of some people being forced to go without.
Also there's the issue of production, which is done in a backwards way. Instead of asking people what they want and producing it, in capitalism some people called entrepreneurs guess what people want, make it, and hope for the best. If people don't want what they make, they've just wasted time, money, and labor.
Also, there's the issue of allocation. Goods aren't allocated efficiently in a market. For instance, if all food was farmed as efficiently as it was in Holland, there would be enough to feed 67 billion people (source: http://www.marxists.org/archive/foot-paul/1977/wysbas/ch1.htm). That's more than 10 times the amount of people alive. However, 1 billion people on this earth have no idea where their next meal is coming from, and farmers will actually destroy their crops to keep food prices up instead of feeding people.
There's other ways in which capitalism is wasteful. Lots of money and labor is spent on making people buy more stuff (advertising). In socialism, there will be no incentive to encourage people to buy things they don't need, so advertising firms won't exist. The workers in those firms would be free to do other types of work, increasing productivity as a whole.

[RED DAVE]

Try here

Why Socialism? Revolutionary Politics for a New Century
(http://www.solidarity-us.org/whysocialism)
RED DAVE

[The Vegan Marxist]

Hi, I'm new to socialism. It's obvious that capitalism is only good for the rich, but can anyone please give me some informed specifics why capitalism is bad?

When people ask me I can only give vague opinions, does anyone have statistics or some bullet points?

Thanks!

Hell, one could just look at how capitalist markets operate to understand the exploitation that takes place naturally through capitalism. Capitalist markets operate under M-C-M, which means Money-Commodity-Money, & some people put M-C-M1 <-----the one meaning more than before. What this implies is that, through the capitalist market, you put in money to make a commodity (product) & then sell/trade that commodity to gain more money than put in. This is where profit is gained. Though, for this to work, we'd need to find a way to put in some money to make a commodity & use it to get more money than what was put in. The way the market does this is through human labor.

Say we give the producer (worker) $10 to make a chair. The worker makes it through the resources given, & then the seller (boss, ceo, manager, etc.) sells that product (commodity) to a consumer for $30. Now, as you can see, the seller sold a commodity that was $10 to make, three times more. So, the seller gains $20 extra, while s/he uses the rest, the $10, to keep the worker paid to keep making products. Instead of the worker gaining wages equal to his labor, he only gains a third of what he actually did, while the boss, manager, etc. reeks most of the profit. This is how the capitalist market purposely exploits the workers of said industry. There's a lot more to it though, Comrade. So keep learning & keep asking questions. You're on your way towards truth.

[Hexen]

I get the impression that capitalism is a corrupt broken system that only benefits a few "privileged" individuals rather than all of humanity.

[Stranger Than Paradise]

Capitalism works in the interests of profit over human needs. It benefits only the ruling class over the majority of the world's population.

[AK]

I get the impression that capitalism is a corrupt broken system that only benefits a few "privileged" individuals rather than all of humanity.
Bullseye. That's pretty much how capitalism ends up working. Although these individuals are collectively termed as a class (the Bourgeoisie). However, not all capitalists are bad. Take the Petit-Bourgeoisie for example. They are the class which typically own very little private property and either work on their private property alone or hire one or two individuals to help them out. The Petit-Bourgeoisie is oppressed by the Bourgeoisie who own more private property than they do and, as a result, reap larger profits from their workers' labour as when you own more private property, you have more workers. This is thanks to lovely thing called market competition which the Bourgeoisie embrace and support blatantly. And it keeps the Petit-Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat in line.

In summary, the capitalist system is so fucked up that the Bourgeoisie end up oppressing other capitalists as well. :lol: