less_retarded_wiki/capitalism.md

Capitalism

"Capitalism is the astonishing belief that the most evil among men will for the nastiest motives work for the benefit of all."

Capitalism is the worst economic system we've yet seen in the history,^source literally based on pure greed and artificially sustained conflict between people (so called competition), abandoning all morals and putting money and profit (so called capital) above everything else including preservation of life itself, capitalism fuels the worst in people and forces them to compete and suffer for basic resources, even in a world where abundance of resources is already possible to achieve. Capitalism goes against progress (see e.g. antivirus paradox), good technology, freedom, it supports immense waste of resources, wars, abuse of people, destruction of environment, decline of morals, invention of bullshit (bullshit jobs, bullshit laws, ...), torture of people and animals and much more. Nevertheless, it's been truthfully stated that "it is now easier to imagine the end of all life than any substantial change in capitalism."

Capitalism produces the worst imaginable technology and rewards people for being cruel to each other. It points the direction of society towards a collapse and may very likely be the great filter of civilizations; in capitalism people de-facto own nothing and become wholly dependent on corporations which exploit this fact to abuse them as much as possible. This is achieved by slowly boiling the frog. No one owns anything, products become services (your car won't drive without Internet connection and permission from its manufacturer), all independency and decentralization is lost in favor of a highly fragile and interdependent economy and infrastructure of services. Then only a slight break in the chain is enough to bring the whole civilization down.

The underlying issue of capitalism is competition -- competition is the root of all evil in any social system, however capitalism is the glorification of competition, amplification of this evil to maximum. It is implemented by setting and supporting a very stupid idea that everyone's primary and only goal is to be self-benefit, i.e. maximization of capital. This is combined with the fact that the environment of free market is a system with Darwinian evolution which through natural selection extremely effectively and quickly optimizes the organisms (corporations) for achieving this given goal, i.e. generating maximum profit, on the detriment of all other values such as wellbeing of people, sustainability or morality. In other words capitalism has never promised a good society, it literally only states that everyone should try to benefit oneself as much as possible, i.e. defines the fitness function purely as the ability to seize as many resources as possible, and then selects and rewards those who best implement this function, i.e. those we would call sociopaths or "dicks", and to those is given the power in society. In other words we simply get what we set to achieve: find entities that are best at making profit at any cost. The inevitable decline of society can not possibly be prevented by laws, any effort of trying to stop evolution by inventing artificial rules on the go is a battle against nature itself and is extremely naive, the immense power of the evolutionary system that's constantly at work to find ways to bypass or cancel laws in the way of profit and abuse of others will prevails just as life will always find its way to survive and thrive even in the worst conditions on Earth. Trying to stop corporations with laws is like trying to stop a train by throwing sticks in its path. The problem is not that "people are dicks", it is that we choose to put in place a system that rewards the dicks, a system that fuels the worst in people and smothers the best in them.

From a certain point of view capitalism is not really a traditional socioeconomic system, it is the failure to establish one -- capitalism is the failure to prevent the establishment of capitalism, and it is also the punishment for this failure. It is the continuation of the jungle to the age when technology for mass production, mass surveillance etc. has sufficiently evolved -- capitalism will arise with technological progress unless we prevent it, just as cancer will grow unless we treat it in very early stages. This is what people mean when they say that capitalism simply works or that it's natural -- it's the least effort option, one that simply lets people behave like animals, except that these animals are now equipped with weapons of mass destruction, tools for implementing slavery etc. It is natural in the same way in which wars, murders, bullying and deadly diseases are. It is the most primitive system imaginable, it is uncontrolled, leads to suffering and self-destruction.

Attributes Of Capitalism

The following is a list of just SOME attributes of capitalism -- note that not all of them are present in initial stages but capitalism will always converge towards them.

• slavery, oppression, loss of freedom: In capitalism people are slaves firstly as workers -- in work time, so called wage slavery -- and secondly as consumers -- in "free" time. Banks create inflation to devalue money people save so that they have to work constantly for their whole lives as products are getting progressively more expensive. More and more essentially unnecessary spending purchases are forced on people -- new smartphone every year, mortgages, gas and maintenance to cars, new clothes according to fashion, insurances etc. Practically no one has a truly free time nowadays.
• extreme waste: Bullshit products, bullshit jobs and the need for constant dynamics on the market force to waste energy, material and human work just on keeping everything in motion, even if purely arbitrarily. Corporations keep reinventing and reselling slightly modified version of already existing products, one group of people is creating something while another group is destroying it, just to keep everyone occupied. Byproduct physical waste such as plastics and chemicals are dumped in the environment and pollute it for decades, even centuries to come.
• antivirus paradox: Sustaining and artificially creating negative phenomena so as to build a business in fighting it, to keep and create jobs ("firefighters starting fires").
  • artificial scarcity: In order to be able to sell something, that something has to be scarce, an abundant resource such as air cannot be sold. Once technology emerges to make some resource abundant, it threatens those who have a business in selling that resource. This creates the huge interest in keeping resources scarce, sometimes by force. Corporations are known to routinely destroy food that can still be eaten, and other goods as well. Corporations indirectly conspire on keeping resources scarce by artificial obsolescence, outlawing old products as "unsafe", using copyright to prevent people from recycling old intellectual works etc.
  • artificial obsolescence: To keep businesses running companies have an interest in making people consume even things that could otherwise last them even whole lives, so we see phenomena like people being forced to buy new phones every every year. There used to be the famous light bulb cartel (Phoebus cartel) that fined any bulb manufacturer that made long lasting light bulbs, bulbs were forcefully made to last for a short time. Apple has remotely decreased the performance of older iPhones when new ones came out. There are countless examples.
  • artificial crippling of technology: It is nowadays the norm to create a high tier product, such as a CPU or a car, and then artificially cripple some of the manufactured units (limit car engine power by software, burn parts of the CPU, ...) so as to sell them as a lower tier of that product. It is cheaper than to separately invent several tiers of the product. So it costs the same (actually less) to create a high end CPU as the low end one -- we could all be using high end CPUs, but the poorer of us are forced to use the forcefully crippled versions, because "capitalism".
  • purposeful incompatibility in technology: In market competition products of one company will often be incompatible with products of the competition on purpose, so as to discourage consumers from buying it. Technology corporations create their own "ecosystems" for consumers into which they are trying to lock them.
  • bullshit jobs, invention of bullshit products/needs: As automatization takes people's jobs, people try to keep jobs by creating artificial bullshit, e.g. "lack of women in tech" leads to creation of "diversity departments", politicians try to create more jobs by increasing bureaucracy etc. This is of course in direct conflict with the base goal of civilization itself of eliminating the need for human work. One online company even successfully sold literal excrement (which had no actual use, it was just marketed as "funny and cool").
  • preventing progress, sustaining status quo: Capitalism is extremely hostile towards social progress (more leisure time, more social security, ...), i.e. the main kind of progress. It is also, contrary to popular belief, against technological progress -- the established corporations want to perpetuate their established businesses and will attack and destroy new ideas that endanger it (i.e. electric cars vs fuel powered cars, ...).
• fascism: Capitalism is based on fascism, i.e. extreme hierarchy and "tribes" of which each fights to death for its own self interest. This fight happens between companies themselves, between state and companies, different departments inside companies, between workers and employers, between brands on the market etc.
• no long term planning, irresponsibility: Companies need to make immediate profit, it's extremely rare to plan longer than 5 years ahead. Managers hired to new positions are expected to immediately increase profits and they won't stay for long, so they simply do whatever it takes to create immediate profit without considering any long term consequence such as pollution etc.
• extreme lowering of quality of products, deterioration of art: Despite capitalist propaganda, capitalism doesn't lead to increased quality of products -- on the contrary it seeks to find the MINIMUM quality that will be accepted by the consumer. In seeking to minimize manufacturing cost of a single unit, companies save money wherever they can and rather invest in marketing etc. -- for example instead of paying several experts to produce a good, well fact-checked documentary, only one man will be paid to create the documentary with the focus on it being "fun and engaging" rather than factually correct. Art is hasted, scheduled, produced on short deadlines, littered with product placement etc.
• plutocracy, i.e. loss of (true) democracy: In capitalism only illusion of democracy is sustained, there is no rule of the people, there is rule of the rich THROUGH people, as the rich are who make the laws and actually take the ruling positions and who have a tremendous power to manipulate masses via private media. State is becoming more and more the tool of corporations rather than a protection against them.
• monopolies with unlimited power, degeneration of competition: The naive ideas of capitalists that markets will magically regulate themselves quickly falls apart, basically no one believes it. In a competitive market monopolies arise in a short time who will prevent any competition from even arising. Can a tiny starting company compete with an established corporations with billions of dollars at their hand? No. The corporation can defeat them by gigantic marketing, unfair practices (unfair prices etc.) despite fines, by buying them, legal trolling, negative internet reviews etc. Once a monopoly without competition exists, the few advantages of competition disappear completely. A corporation doesn't respond to demand, it creates the demand. It can do whatever it likes, it can set arbitrarily high prices, create arbitrarily shitty products and so on, no competition is pressuring it to do otherwise, people have no choice than to to subvert.
• poverty: Despite capitalist propaganda, not everyone can be successful in capitalism (if everyone could retire at 20, why doesn't everyone just do it?), and it is a fact that because money makes money, the gap between the poor and the rich is becoming wider and wider (as of 2020, 8 richest people owned as much wealth as the whole poorer half of the population). Poor people are pushed into loans, getting into debts, working multiple jobs, while their health deteriorates increasing their depth on medical bills, decreasing their ability to work more etc.
• torture and killing of people: The poorest, mostly in third world countries, including children, are forced to hard labor that destroys their lives. Whole cities live off of processing waste coming from first world countries, e.g. disintegrating used ships with primitive tools, no work safety, breathing cancerous fumes etc.
• money and profit above everything: By definition capitalism advises ONLY to maximize one's profit, any other values such as human well being, peace, preservation of life environment or progress are subverted to the goal of profit. As other values are often in conflict with profit, profit wins and people suffer.
• fight culture, extreme hostility between people, disappearance of morality: The very basis of capitalism -- competition -- nurtures people towards self interest, self centeredness and hostility towards others while suppressing good attributes such as sharing, love for others and altruism. With this morals decline. Furthermore the system of overcomplicated laws are starting to replace morals, people as "is it legal?" rather than "is it a good thing to do?". This creates a society of dicks and psychopaths who are additionally rewarded for their immoral behavior by becoming "successful" and wealthy. In long term this serves as a natural selection of Darwinian evolution, immorally behaving people are actually more likely to survive and reproduce, which leads to genes of psychopathic behavior becoming more and more common in society -- under capitalism good people quite literally become extinct in the long run.
• fear culture: To keep people consuming and constantly engaged a tension has to be kept, comfortable people are undesirable in capitalism. So there is constantly a propaganda of some threat, be it viruses, terrorism, pedophiles on the internet, computer viruses, killing bees etc.
• consumerism: To keep businesses running people need to consume everything, even things that shouldn't be consumed and that could last for very long such as computers and cars. This leads to creation of hasted low quality products (even art such as TV series) that are meant to be used and thrown away, repairing is no longer considered.
• commerce infects absolutely everything: In advanced capitalism there is no such thing as a commerce free zone, everything is privatized eventually and serves selfish interests. Nowadays even such areas as health care, wellfare or education of children is permeated by money, ads and corporate propaganda. Even nonprofits have to make money. Educational videos in schools are preceded with ads (as they are played on YouTube), propagandists even legally go to school and brainwash little children (they call it "education in financial literacy" and teach children that they should e.g. create bank accounts in the propagandist's specific bank).
• destruction of environment: This is nowadays already pretty clear, global warming is attributed mainly to capitalism. Lack of long term planning, consumerism and extreme waste (of energy, creating physical waste such as plastics etc.) lead to the destruction of nature itself.
• loss of ethical behavior: Ethical behavior is a disadvantage in a competitive environment of the market, it is a limitation. Those trying to behave ethically (e.g. fair prices, ...) will simply lose to the unethically behaving ones and be eliminated from the market. Eventually there only remain unethically behaving entities, just as for example vegetarian people would not survive in a jungle.
• anti-people design: By definition in capitalism technology is not to serve people, it is to serve companies to make profit and abuse people, so technology spies on its users, refuses to work (DRM, ...) shows ads, forces children into purchases (predatory games), breaks on purpose so as to enforce a paid repair etc.
• censorship: So called intellectual property allows for extreme censorship. Privately owned media lawfully censor and manipulate information so as to manipulate people in whichever way they see will bring them most profit.
• surveillance: Companies want to analyze behavior of people, manipulate them, target ads, spam, train neural networks on their data etc., so there is an interest in applying surveillance. Indeed, this is exactly what we see in practice.
• extreme brainwashing and propaganda: Marketing becomes extreme in capitalism, utilizing advanced psychological tricks and repetition to the point of becoming a torture, with the goal of teaching people brand loyalty, consumerist behavior etc. Application of this brainwashing even on children has already been normalized. Entrepreneurs create cults of personalities. There is now even a "legit" job called an influencer whose sole purpose is in spreading corporate propaganda on the Internet.
• criminality: This is a direct consequence of poverty and diminishing morality.
• instability: Lack of long term planning, fragility of the market, increasing wealth gap, pushing workers to poverty, creating extreme interdependencies, eliminating self sufficiency and other phenomena pose great dangers of market collapses, violent strikes, disasters and even societal collapse.
• need for extremely complex market control and laws, burdening society: As corporations are absolutely unethical and pursue evil goals such as enslaving workers and abuse of consumers, there have to be an extremely complex set of constantly evolving laws and bureaucracy just to somehow "make corporations behave". However laws are imperfect and corporations work 24/7 on bypassing them as well as on attacking and eliminating the laws themselves via lobbyist etc. This creates a constant, extremely expensive legal war (which eventually corporations will likely win).
• uncontrolled growth: Capitalism is likened to cancer as it requires a constant uncontrolled growth which on a planet of limited resources inevitably leads to a catastrophic scenario.
• hyperspecialization, loss of self sufficiency: Entities (people, cities, companies, states, ...) lose self sufficiency as they hyperspecialize in some task and in everything else rely on someone else. This complete dependence creates slavery and danger -- in an event of a blackout for example people cannot survive as they cannot make their own food.
• loss of humanity: In capitalism humans are just consumers and resources -- corporations now routinely use these terms (human resources department etc.). People are brainwashed to no longer even take offense in being called such terms. People's worth is only in how much they can work or consume.
• abuse of animals: In capitalism animals are just products and resources, they are kept in very bad conditions just to be killed for meat or other purpose. They are slaughtered by millions just so we can overeat to morbid obesity. Maximizing profit dictates no money should be spent on animal comfort.
• productivity cult: People are brainwashed and forced into becoming robots whose sole purpose is to produce. Working overtimes, skipping lunch, minimizing sleep etc. has already become part of the work culture for example in USA and Japan.
• endangering existence of all life: The mentioned lack of long term planning, irresponsibility and instability along with creating a dangerous overdependence on technology and interconnections of self insufficient states and cities is just waiting for a disaster such as CME that immediately collapses the civilization and consequently endangers all life on Earth e.g. by meltdowns in nuclear plants or possible nuclear wars as a consequence of panic. The absolute preference of immediate profit is hostile towards investments in future and precautions.

How It Works

Capitalism newly instated in a society kind of works for a short time, but it never lasts. Initially when more or less everyone is at the same start line, when there are no highly evolved corporations with their advanced methods of oppression, small businesses grow and take their small shares of the market, there appears true innovation, businesses compete by true quality of products, people are relatively free and it all feels natural because it is, it's the system of the jungle, i.e. as has been said, capitalism is the failure to establish a controlled socioeconomic system rather than a presence of a purposefully designed one. Its benefits for the people are at this point only a side effect, people see it as good and continue to support it. However the system has other goals of its own, and that is the development and constant growth that's meant to create a higher organism just like smaller living cells formed us, multi cell organisms. The system will start being less and less beneficial to the people who will only become cells in a higher organism to which they'll become slaves. A cell isn't supposed to be happy, it is supposed to sacrifice its life for the good of the higher organism.

{ This initial prosperous stage appeared e.g. in Czechoslovakia, where I lived, in the 90s, after the fall of the totalitarian regime. Everything was beautiful, sadly it didn't last longer than 10-20 years at most. ~drummyfish }

Slowly medium sized businesses will grow and become corporations. These are the first higher order entities that have an intelligence of their own, they are composed of humans and technology who together work solely for the corporation's further growth. A corporation has a super human intelligence but has no human emotion or conscience, it is basically the rogue AI we read about in sci-fi horror movies. Corporation selects only the worst of humans for the management positions and has further mechanisms to eliminate any effects of human conscience and tendency for ethical behavior; for example it works on the principle of "I'm just doing my job": everyone is just doing a small part of what the whole company is doing so that no one feels responsible for the whole or sometimes doesn't even know what he's part of. If anyone protests, he's replaced with a new hire.

Corporations make calculated decisions to eliminate any competition, they devour or kill smaller businesses with unfair practices, more marketing and by other means, both legal and illegal. They develop advanced psychological methods and extort extreme pressure such as brainwashing by ads to the population to create an immensely powerful propaganda that bends any natural human thinking. With this corporations no longer need to satisfy the demand, they create the demand arbitrarily. They create artificial scarcity, manipulate the market, manipulate the people, manipulate laws. At this point they've broken the system, competition no longer works as idealized by theoretical capitalists, corporations can now do practically anything they want.

This is a system with Darwinian evolution in which the fitness function is simply the capital. Entities involved in the market are simply chosen by natural selection to be the ones that best make profit, i.e. who are best at circumventing laws, brainwashing, hiding illegal activities etc. Ethical behavior is a disadvantage that leads to elimination; if a business decides to behave ethically, it is outrun by the one who doesn't have this weakness.

The unfair, unethical behavior of corporations is still supposed to be controlled by the state, however corporations become stronger and bigger than states, they can manipulate laws by lobbying, financially supporting preferred candidates, brainwashing people via private media and so on. States are the only force left supposed to protect people from this pure evil, but they are too weak; a single organization of relatively few people who are, quite importantly, often corporation managers, won't compete against a plethora of the best warriors selected by the extremely efficient system of free market. States slowly turn to serving corporations, becoming their tools and then slowly dissolve (see how small role the US government already plays). This leads to "anarcho capitalism", the worst stage of capitalism where there is no state, no entity supposed to protect the people, there is only one rule and that is the unlimited rule of the strongest.

Here the strongest corporation takes over the world and starts becoming the higher order organism of the whole Earth. It doesn't have to pretend anything at this point, it can simply hire an army, it can use physical force, chemical weapons, torture, unlimited surveillance, anything to achieve further seize of remaining bits of power and resources. We can only guess what will happen here, a collapse due to instability or total destruction of environment is possible, which would at least save the civilization from the horrendous fate of being eternally tortured. If the system survives, humans will be probably genetically engineered to be more submissive, killing any hope of a possible revolt, surveillance chips will be implanted to everyone, reproduction will be controlled precisely and finally perhaps the system will be able, thanks to an advanced AI, to exist and work more efficiently without humans completely, so they will be eliminated. This is how the mankind ends.