As with all ideas in theory, capitalism doesn’t sound terrible. But when the competition is done improving and they’ve got their audience/loyalists, it’s a race to the bottom and the only “losers” are the ones who step just a bit too far… and then they try it again in a few years and it works. Just look at micro transactions
Marx analysed the underlying mechanisms of capitalism thoroughly, and even in theory it’s terrible. The only thing it’s good at, as he noted, is being efficient at production.
I don’t want to go out on a limb and say every serf and craftsman under feudalism would have refused capitalism if you’d told them what it was going to do to them, but the fact that there was primitive accumulation in the form of the enclosure act in the UK and similar acts in Europe shows that capitalism was far from being accepted by the people.
I think it’s more the “good side” of capitalism is appealing and is why people swear by it. The idea that working hard means you too can live “the American Dream” even though that dream was thoroughly claimed hundreds of years ago and now only the truly lucky get in. You don’t even necessarily have to work hard to do it, just be unreasonably lucky lol
The idea that working hard means you too can live “the American Dream”
at the expense of the genocided natives and on the back of slaves. there isn’t and never was an American Dream that was possible except through the brutal exploitation of human beings.
As with all ideas in theory, capitalism doesn’t sound terrible. But when the competition is done improving and they’ve got their audience/loyalists, it’s a race to the bottom and the only “losers” are the ones who step just a bit too far… and then they try it again in a few years and it works. Just look at micro transactions
Marx analysed the underlying mechanisms of capitalism thoroughly, and even in theory it’s terrible. The only thing it’s good at, as he noted, is being efficient at production.
I don’t want to go out on a limb and say every serf and craftsman under feudalism would have refused capitalism if you’d told them what it was going to do to them, but the fact that there was primitive accumulation in the form of the enclosure act in the UK and similar acts in Europe shows that capitalism was far from being accepted by the people.
I think it’s more the “good side” of capitalism is appealing and is why people swear by it. The idea that working hard means you too can live “the American Dream” even though that dream was thoroughly claimed hundreds of years ago and now only the truly lucky get in. You don’t even necessarily have to work hard to do it, just be unreasonably lucky lol
at the expense of the genocided natives and on the back of slaves. there isn’t and never was an American Dream that was possible except through the brutal exploitation of human beings.