The prevalence of the first comment (looking at you peter theil) made me a socialist. If the capitalists themselves dont believe its compatible with demoracy, its not compatible.

That can't be true, I've been assured both are exactly the same!

Surely this isn't satire. Right? Right?? Riiight?

No not really. Capitalism seeks to exploit, it will exploit democracy (see:the world)

Conservatism is still conservatism.

There must be a well defined, stratified, social hierarchy, and this system also must be morality itself.

This is what all conservatives believe and hold most dear... it does not matter that they are often too stupid to consciously realize this about themselves.

Their swollen amygdalas are terrified of uncertainty and the unknown, and a world that doesn't follow a fairly simple set of rigid, universal rules is essentially an apocalypse to them.

All that has changed in the last ~250 years is that democracy became normalized by way of violent revolts demanding it, or the powers that were acquiesing to reforms and limitations of their own power... so as to avoid a violent revolt.

This allowed capitalism to arise... initially it appeared to, or at least rhetorically presented itself as offering a more democratic approach to conducting an economy... but it has enough fundamental flaws that it guarantees the recreation of a stratified hierarchichal society.

Now, capitalism has fully captured most of the governments and much of the population of the West... and the Western Conservative is a-ok with this: Capitalism offers its own social castes, rules, morality system, and has the coherent power to be able to enforce these.

Democracy is just... a vestigial element of society, to a modern Conservative. Ancient, outmoded, optional. So long as the hierachy exists, and can perpetuate itself, of what use is allowing a potential for disruption?

In the long term, I don't believe it is.

The pressure from capitalism to:

1. Deregulate (as seen in the past 50 years)
2. Reduce the power of demoracies to reregulate

These pressures arise due to desire for profits, as well as the tendency for citizens to feel a lack of agency when they dont control their economic freedom, and therefore voting for the trumps of the world.

We could try regulation again, but thats what FDR did, and look where we are.

That's not what capitalism means. Nice projection though!

As much as economists like to pretend, capitalism is not a political system. The goal is exploitation because we choose so. As a society we could just as easily choose to make our goal the maximal fulfillment of the needs of the public. All that takes is preventing those without a personal concept of "enough" from controlling capital.

Capitalism is an exploitation system. It will exploitation what it needs to, to ensure it continues. If that is policies then it will do so. Preventing those without the concept of enough from controlling capital is an an uphill battle. Easier said than done

Not if you make greed a capital offense (pun intended).

Maybe you should try a cursory internet check for the definition first

Sure but who will enforce that what is defined as greed? It gets very muddy

A free market is often (not necessarily) a characteristic of capitalism, but it's not what makes a system capitalist. Capitalism is specifically when the means of production (the "capital") are privately owned (by a single "capitalist" or a group of shareholder capitalists).

This is opposed to socialism where the working class owns the means of production. Socialism vs capitalism basically comes down to who owns the mills and factories , the people who work there or some fat cat on a yacht somewhere? You can Google it for better explanations than I can give.

Really? How come the "free market" fails entirely without regulation?

When money is power, votes mean nothing.

It was the second comment that did it for me. I grew up knowing the people who believed in money above all else were evil, but seeing how the “good guys” kept kowtowing to the “bad guys” made me realize they are all bad and the only solution is to dismantle capitalism.

Capitalism doesn’t have a monopoly over the idea of exchanging goods and services. It’s all about accumulation of wealth and will pursue it endlessly because it has no endgame. Union busting; laying off 8,000 employees on leave (Meta); appeasing shareholders over the customers that made them wealthy; burying us all in AI slop.

Man, the amount of people that think capitalism is a system of money exchange almost seems like one of the major issues somehow, as if people are afraid that they won't be able to afford things, because there won't be money. Neglecting that they already can't afford things, because capitalism is a parasite that kills the host, not because tokens of value can exist outside that perversion.

That's just not possible when you factor in both accumulation of wealth (it's exponential like compound interest) and the competition between capitalists for profit. The competition does not come from their moral beliefs but from the incentives created by the system itself.

All that takes is preventing those without a personal concept of “enough” from controlling capital.

This would require to remove capital from the hands of individuals and either throw it in the hands of the state, or change its (corporate) ownership to co-op model (one worker - one vote). Both have been shown to work but that would no longer be capitalism but instead a form of socialism, as private capital would no longer dictate what's produced in the economy and how it's distributed. Instead it would be dictated by the state which is controlled by the people through some form of democracy, or democratically by the workers within each corporation, or both. In both cases what's produced is dictated by the needs of the majority of the workers in that state. And that's textbook socialism.

Dear liberals,

If we're so wrong all the time why do you call us the right?

Checkmate

How to make a cluekess dude read Marx? It's baffling that we have to answer the same questions again and again.

Grew up around both. Ended up an anarchist

In the same way licking the elephants foot is compatible with life, yeah.

Maybe it is, but they're definitely at odds regarding the structure of society.

The core principle of democracy is equality: every person gets one vote, law applies to everyone equally, and so on.

Capitalism tends towards a pyramidal form, with few rich people at the top and masses of poor people at the bottom.

With checks and balances you can try to flatten the pyramid a bit and make it viable, sure. But there's always the risk of moving from democracy to something whose structure aligns with the capitalist pyramids, which we usually call fascism.

I don't see why someone would. You are obliged to do the minimum research yourself if you want to meaningfully participate in these discussions. You are arguing for your gut feeling as reality, and being belligerent with people who disagree. This is an incredibly common pattern and it indicates that everyone is better off just ignoring you.

Theft and rape get muddy but we still prosecute those. Society needs to draw a line somewhere.

For example say 100% tax after $50 million net worth. Or 1 year in jail for executive officers of a company if the net income (stock counts as income valued at the price when acquired) of the highest paid person in a company makes more than 30x the lowest paid person. Or we just drone strike Forbes richest person every year. We just need to draw a line.

Or we just drone strike Forbes richest person every year.

Love that idea!

Use of terms and "right" and "left" is from 1789 France. Supporters of the "Ancien Regime" sat on the President's right side and revolutionaries sat to his left.

Democrats and Republicans agree on opposing proportional representation.

Accumulated wealth is a choice. We can tax inheritance at 100% beyond a certain point (say 100,000x the federal minimum wage).

The competition does not come from their moral beliefs but from the incentives created by the system itself.

Disagree. It is a choice to not say to yourself "I have enough. I am stopping work and donating all this wealth I don't need to charity." It is a choice not to make your fortune, retire, and then give ownership of the company to the employees who made you successful. Society once chose to treat homosexuality as a mental illness. No reason we couldn't do the same for greed.

We say people can't use slave labor. We say kids can't work. There is no reason we couldn't say people above a certain wealth threshold can't work. That's just regulation, not socialism.

Das Kapital was published in 1867. Modern psychology is considered to have begun in 1879. The first DSM was not published til 1952. Marx understood economics but he has an archaic understanding of human psychology which cripples his work.

Thats commercialism not capitalism lol

capitalism is compatible with democracy

How did the "market of ideas" work prior to the internet?

Honestly I kinda hate that politics gets boiled down to right and left. I feel like it makes it so easy for people to strip the nuance out of everything.

Except that when push comes to shove the second one also chooses capitalism

How can an economic system that encourages and rewards concentration of power be compatible with democracy?

Exploitation is fundamental to the existence of capitalism, it cannot exist without it, at least in my opinion, and the opinion of many other economists.

In neoclassical economics (or at least to plenty of neoclassical economists - neoclassical being the prevalent theory in modern western society), the term "exploitation" refers to the exploitation of labour, which is when wages are lower than the marginal productivity of labour.

To put it simply, surplus value is the difference between the value added by the labourer (for example, the assembly of car parts into a car, or turning raw materials into a product), and the wages they are paid.

Surplus value also has another name: profit.

The whole basis of capitalist economics is to prioritize, reward and encourage the maximization of profit. Based on my statements above, there is only one way to do that: exploiting labour. Thus, exploitation is not only prevalent in capitalism, but encouraged, rewarded, and required, otherwise the business will fail because it cannot keep up.

Capitalism necessarily creates a class of owners of capital that shrink in size and gain in assets. This then shapes the state and controls it. You cannot truly think the dominance of capitalists is compatible with democracy, democracy can only be achieved under socialism, when the working class is the ruling class.

To be fair, it never worked. Debate-as-bloodsport is largely a bourgeois way of viewing ideological conflict. Leftist pedagogy is more collective than classic models. The idea of a "marketplace of ideas" assumes that logical victors of an argument survive, but instead people license themselves into agreeing with that which they believe benefits them. The ruling class further propogates ruling class ideology, and uses this idea of a "winners survive" debate market to legitimize the prevalence of bourgeois ideology as such due to logically surviving, even if it never did. The marketplace of ideas is a sham.

You cannot separate economics from politics, they are infinitely intertwined. The only way to actually control political economy by humans, rather than the capitalist control system, is through socialism. Collectivizing production and distribution and running it on a common plan, rather than profit, is the path to overcoming the way the profit motive shapes society and the state.

Can you elaborate? How does Marx's understanding of human psychology hold back his work?

i was gonna say that prior to the internet the ruling class had a monopoly on public opinion but that works too

Democracy is more important than capitalism. If anything, capitalism is a danger to democracy.

They generally do still! The internet has given both alternate means of subverting and enforcing cultural hegemony. This struggle of underground vs. above-ground ideological conflict has historically unfolded in similar ways. We need to advance and understand how best to gain leverage, asserting proletarian ideology. Leftist pedagogy is understudied for how critical it is.