less_retarded_wiki/capitalism.md

# $$$Capitalism$$$

*Capitalism is how you enslave people with their approval.*

Capitali$m is the worst socioeconomic system we've yet seen in [history](history.md),^[source](logic.md) based on pure greed, culture of slavery and artificially sustained conflict between everyone in society (so called [competition](competition.md)), abandoning all morals and putting money and profit (so called [capital](capital.md)) 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](antivirus_paradox.md)), [good technology](lrs.md) and freedom, it supports immense waste of resources, wars, abuse of people and animals, destruction of environment, decline of morals, deterioration of art, invention of [bullshit](bullshit.md) (bullshit jobs, bullshit laws, ...), utilizing and perfecting methods of [torture](marketing.md), brainwashing, censorship and so on. In a sense capitalism can be seen as **slavery 2.0** or *universal slavery*, a more sophisticated form of slavery, one which denies the label by calling itself the polar opposite ("freedom") and manipulates people into them approving and voluntarily parttaking in their own enslavement. However wage and consumption slavery is only a small part of capitalist dystopia -- capitalism brings on destruction basically to every part of civilization. It it also often likened to a [cancer](cancer.md) of society; one that is ever expanding, destroying everything with commercialism, materialism, waste and destruction, growing uncontrollably with the sole goal of just never stop an ever accelerating growth. Nevertheless, it's been truthfully stated that "it is now easier to imagine the end of all life than any substantial change in capitalism." Another famous quote is that "capitalism is the belief that the worst of men driven by the nastiest motives will somehow work for the benefit of everyone", which is describes its principle quite well.

{ Some web bashing capitalism I just found: http://digdeeper.club/articles/capitalismcancer.xhtml, read only briefly, seems to contain some nice gems capturing the rape of people. ~drummyfish }

**Capitalism is fundamentally flawed and CANNOT be fixed** -- capitalists build on the idea that competition will drive society, that market will be self sustaining, however capitalism itself works for instating the rule of the winners who eliminate their competition, capitalism is self destabilizing, i.e. the driving force of capitalism is completely unsustainable and leads to  catastrophic results as those who get ahead in working competition are also in advantage -- as it's said: money makes money, therefore money flow from the poor to the rich and create a huge imbalance in which competition has to be highly forced, eventually completely arbitrarily and in very harmful ways (invention of bullshit jobs, creating artificial needs and hugely complex state control and laws). It's as if we set up a race in which those who get ahead start to also go faster, and those become the ones who oversee and start to create the rules of the race -- expecting a sustained balance in such a race is just insanity. Society tries to "[fight](fight_culture.md)" this emerging imbalance with various laws and rules of market, but this effort is like trying to fight math itself -- the system is mathematically destined to be unstable, pretending we can win over laws of nature themselves is just pure madness.

**Capitalism produces the [worst imaginable technology](capitalist_software.md)** and rewards people for [being cruel to each other](entrepreneur.md). It points the direction of society towards a [collapse](collapse.md) and may very likely be the [great filter](great_filter.md) of civilizations; in capitalism people [de-facto](de_facto.md) 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](slowly_boiling_the_frog.md). No one owns anything, products become [services](saas.md) (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, each one controlled by the monopoly corporation. Then only a slight break in the chain is enough to bring the whole civilization down in a spectacular domino effect.

**The underlying issue of capitalism is [competition](competition.md)** and conflict -- competition is the root of all evil in any social system, however capitalism is the absolute 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](free_market.md) is a system with **[evolutionary system](evolution.md)** 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](fitness_function.md) 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. Yes, this is how nature works, but it must NOT be how a technologically advanced civilization with unlimited power of destruction should work. 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.

Even though nowadays quite a lot of time has passed since times of [Marx](marx.md) and capitalism has evolved to a stage with countless disastrous issues Marx couldn't even foresee, it is useful to mention one of the basic and earliest issues identified by Marx, which is that economically capitalism is based on **stealing the [surplus](surplus.md) value**, i.e. abuse of workers and consumers by owners of the means of production (factories, tools, machines etc.) -- a capitalist basically takes money for doing nothing, just for letting workers use tools he proclaims to own (a capitalist will proclaim to "own" land that he never even visited, machines he didn't make as they were developed over centuries, nowadays he even claims to own [information and ideas](intellectual_property.md)) -- as [Kropotkin](kropotkin.md) put it: the working man cannot purchase with his wage the wealth he has produced. This allows a capitalist oppressor to make exponentially more money for nothing and enables existence of monstrously rich and powerful individuals -- consider for example that nowadays there are people who own hundreds of buildings and cars plus a handful of private planes and a few private islands. It is not possible for any single human to work an equivalent of effort that's needed to produce what such an individual owns, even if he worked 24 hours a day for his whole life, he wouldn't get even close to matching the kind of effort that's needed to build the hundreds of buildings he owns -- any such great wealth is always stolen from countless workers whose salary is less than what's adequate for their work and also from consumers who pay more than it really costs to manufacture the goods they buy. Millions of people are giving their money (resources) for free to someone who just proclaims to "own" tools and even natural resources that have been there for billions of years. The difference in wealth and privileges this wealth provides divides society into antagonist classes that are constantly at war -- traditionally these classes are said to be the **[bourgeoisie](bourgeoisie.md)** (business owners, the upper class) and the **[proletariat](proletariat.md)** (workers, the lower class), though under modern capitalism the division of society is not so simple anymore -- there are more classes (for example small businesses work for larger businesses) but they are still all at war.

Nowadays **capitalism is NOT JUST an economic system** anymore. Technically perhaps, however in reality it takes over society to such a degree that it starts to redefine very basic social and moral values to the point of taking the role of a [religion](religion.md), or better said a brainwashing cult in which people are since childhood taught (e.g. by constant daily exposure to private media) to worship economy, brands, engage in cults of personalities (see myths about godlike entrepreneurs) and [productivity](productivity.md) (i.e. not usefulness, morality, efficiency or similar values, just the pure ability to produce something for its own sake). Close minded people will try to counter argue in shallow ways such as "but religion has to have some supernatural entity called God" etc. Again, technically speaking this may be correct, but if we don't limit our views by arbitrary definitions of words, we see that the effects of capitalism on society are [de facto](de_facto.md) of the same or even greater scale than those of religion, and they are certainly more negative. Capitalism itself works towards suppressing traditional religions (showing it is really competing with them and therefore aspiring for the same role) and their values and trying to replace them with worship of money, success and self interest, it permeates society to the deepest levels by making every single area of society a subject of business and acting on the minds of all people in the society every single day which is an enormously strong pressure that strongly shapes mentality of people, again mostly negatively towards a war mentality (constant competition with others), egoism, materialism, fascism, pure pursuit of profit etc.

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 advanced -- 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](just_werks.md) 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, world wide surveillance 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.

Under capitalism you are not a human being, you are a resource, at best a machine that's useful for some time but becomes obsolete and undesired once it outlives its usefulness and potential to be exploited. Under capitalism you are a slave that's forced to live the life of 3 Cs: **conform, consume, compete**. Or, as [Encyclopedia dramatica](dramatica.md) puts it: work, buy, consume, die.

## 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](slavery.md), oppression, loss of freedom**: In capitalism people are slaves firstly as workers -- in work time, so called [wage slavery](wage_slavery.md) -- 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 of cars, new clothes according to fashion, insurance etc. Practically no one has a truly free time anymore.
- **extreme waste**: Bullshit products, [bullshit jobs](bullshit_job.md) and the need for constant dynamics of the market force to waste energy, material and human work just to 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. At the moment we are already drowning in physical waste, we just export it to third world and hope they will have infinite space to store more.
- **[antivirus paradox](antivirus_paradox.md)**: Sustaining and artificially creating undesirable phenomena so as to build a business in [fighting](fight.md) it, to keep and create jobs ("firefighters starting fires").
  - **[artificial scarcity](artificial_scarcity.md)**: 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](copyright.md) to prevent people from recycling old intellectual works etc.
  - **[artificial obsolescence](artificial_obsolescence.md)**: 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](phoebus_cartel.md)) that fined any bulb manufacturer that made long lasting light bulbs, bulbs were forcefully made to last for a short time. [Apple](apple.md) has remotely decreased the performance of older [iPhones](iphone.md) 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](bullshit_job.md), 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 (all progress should eventually serve well being of people, otherwise it's just artificial self-serving burden). 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, food corporations vs the solution of world hunger etc.). Capitalism prevents realization of any idea that's physically possible but which is **economically impossible**, ruling out e.g. many solutions to global heating etc.
- **[fascism](fascism.md)**: 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. Capitalism is a constant war against everyone else -- not even jungle has this much conflict.
- **no long term planning, irresponsibility**: Companies need to make immediate profit, managers hired to new positions are expected to immediately increase profits and they don't come to stay for long, they have no responsibility, 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](art.md)**: 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](plutocracy.md), i.e. loss of (true) [democracy](democracy.md)**: 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 those 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. [USA](usa.md), the worst case of capitalism, is infamous for having no voting freedom, there exists just a laughable choice of two parties which are exactly the same.
- **[monopolies](monopoly.md) with unlimited power, degeneration of competition**: The naive ideas of capitalists that markets will magically regulate themselves quickly falls apart, basically no one even tries to believe it anymore. 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 and thousand lawyers? No. The corporation can defeat them by gigantic marketing, unfair practices (unfair prices etc.) despite fines, by simply buying them, legal trolling, media trolling (negative internet reviews, ...), even physical attacks if necessary (just anonymously pay a bunch of hackers to DDOS competition's servers 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 subvert.
- **[poverty](poverty.md)**: 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](money_makes_money.md), 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, trapping themselves, working multiple jobs, while their health deteriorates increasing their debt 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.
- **materialism: there exists nothing but money**: 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](fight_culture.md), [fascism](fascism.md), 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](altruism.md). With this morals decline and fascist groups arise. Furthermore the system of overcomplicated laws are starting to replace morals, people ask "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 in 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](fear_culture.md)**: 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](consumerism.md)**: 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](youtube.md)), 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 life environment**: This is nowadays already pretty clear, [global heating](global_warming.md) is attributed mainly to capitalism and is seen as maybe the most likely doom that's probably already unavoidable. Lack of long term planning and any concern for anything but money, along with consumerism and extreme waste (of energy, physical waste such as plastic, toxic chemicals etc.) lead to building bullshit factories and performing unnecessary activity for economic reasons (e.g. transporting materials over the globe for assembly, then transporting it back), leading to extreme pollution of air (visible air smog already makes it hard to breathe in many cities), water (it is no longer safe to drink rain water as it used to be) and food (microplastic particles are already basically EVERYWHERE, eating them can't be avoided). Forests that are necessary for cleaning air, host many precious life forms and are overall a key part of ecosystem are being destroyed rapidly, entire species are disappearing very quickly. And that's just a quick sum up.
- **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 or good treatment of employees) will simply lose to the unethically behaving ones and be eliminated from the market. Eventually there only remain unethically behaving entities, which is exactly what we are seeing nowadays -- there basically doesn't exist a single ethically behaving corporation in the world (which has however already been normalized and is no longer seen as an issue).
- **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](drm.md), ...) shows [ads](ad.md), forces children into purchases (predatory [games](game.md)), breaks on purpose so as to enforce a paid repair etc.
- **[censorship](censorship.md)**: One kind of capitalist censorship is so called [intellectual property](intellectual_property.md) (allowing "ownership" of ideas, art etc.), but there are many more, e.g. so called [moderation](moderation.md) of social media which censors specific political views (deemed "politically incorrect" and hence "dangerous" for the advertising potential or brand of the platform) or sharing of certain facts (e.g. those revealing unethical practice of the platform itself, negative reviews of its products etc.). Privately owned media lawfully censor and manipulate information so as to manipulate people in whichever way they see will bring them most profit. While "intellectual property" is marketed as "protecting intellectual workers", in practice it serves corporations and states to do whatever they want, from political censorship, deception and implementing surveillance (justified by "anti[piracy](piracy.md)") to legal bullying and implementing artificial scarcity ("no, you can't grow this type of food on your field as the plant is patented; only we can grow it and you have to buy it from us in order to live").
- **[surveillance](surveillance.md)**: Companies want to analyze behavior of people, manipulate them, target ads, spam, train neural networks on their data etc., so there is a huge interest in applying surveillance. Indeed, this is exactly what we see in practice -- this is not even a conspiracy theory, cases of revealed mass surveillance are almost daily news.
- **extreme [brainwashing](brainwashing.md) and propaganda**: [Marketing](marketing.md) reaches extreme levels 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](influencer.md) whose sole purpose is in spreading corporate propaganda on the Internet.
- **criminality**: This is a direct consequence of poverty, horrible working conditions, [fight culture](fight_culture.md) and overall diminishing morality. Poor people (the absolute majority in the system) become desperate and do desperate things -- of course, all blame is put on them, not on those who are responsible for their poverty.
- **instability**: Lack of long term planning, extreme interdependence, monopolies over essential resources, fragility of the market, increasing wealth gap, pushing workers to poverty while taking away social security, eliminating self sufficiency, extreme waste and other phenomena pose great dangers of market collapses, violent strikes and revolutions, running out of resources, destruction of living environment and other disasters and even societal [collapse](collapse.md).
- **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-like game in which everyone has to take part, which is completely arbitrary and unnecessary and which eventually corporations will likely win.
- **uncontrolled growth**: Capitalism is likened to [cancer](cancer.md) 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, they can't repair their basic tools etc.
- **loss of humanity**: In capitalism humans are just consumers, machines for production and "resources" -- corporations now routinely use these terms (*human resources department* etc.). People are brainwashed to no longer even see it as concerningto be 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](productivity_cult.md)**: 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.
- **everything is fake**: Everything is rotten and corrupted on the inside with an extreme effort towards putting up a misleading good looking facade. TV shows, including "news", are all staged (even those swearing not to be, no producer is going to invest money in something depending on pure luck), smiles and emotion of people you meet in workplace or see on ads, women's tits, butts and faces, men's muscles, photos on social media, food that has basically no food in it, even news and facts, everything is fake. Investigating any area (government, working conditions, technology, healthcare, education, charities, academia and "[science](soyence.md)", ...) a bit in depth practically always leads to unrevealing how corrupt it actually is despite it looking nice and ideal at the first look.
- **loss of ownership**: Even that which is most saint to a capitalist -- property and the ability to own things -- is greatly lost under capitalism. This happens with the trend of everything becoming a service, a typical example of which is so called "[software as a service](saas.md)". While in the past one would buy a physical copy of a program that he would at least physically own forever, nowadays many programs become a subscription service, e.g. games, movies and music are no longer something you buy but just buy a one time ticket for. But this trend is everywhere, artificial obsolescence tries to limit durability of physical goods such electronic devices so that one has to keep consuming them like a service.
- **[rape effect](rape_effect.md)**: The mechanisms of capitalism work in such ways that everyone gets progressively more raped with any further advance of capitalism.
- **endangering existence of all life**: The mentioned destruction of environment, 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](cme.md) 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. RIP.
- ...

## How It Works

The "old" capitalism, or perhaps its basic forms, that socialist writers have analyzed very well is characterized mainly by abuse of workers by capitalists who declare to "own" means of production such as factories, land and machines -- as e.g. Kropotkin has written in *The Conquest of Bread*, it is **poverty** that drives capitalism because only a poor man who just needs ANY salary for himself and his family will accept horrible working conditions and low pay, simply because he has no other choice -- a capitalist exploits this, "employs" (enslaves) the poor and then only pays them as much as to keep the barely alive and working for him, and he further has the audacity of calling himself an "altruist" who "feeds" people and "gives them a [work](work.md)"; a capitalist employs workers in his factory like he employs chicken in egg factories or pigs in slaughterhouses -- in modern days many may fall to the illusion that workers aren't poor anymore as they may posses smartphones and big screen TVs, but in essence a worker still lives salary to salary and is in desperate need of it; without a salary he will quickly end up starving in the street. Workers do labor that's in itself worth a lot but the capitalist only gives him a small salary, firstly to gain own profit and secondly to keep the worker poor because again, only a poor man will work for him. This is also why capitalists are against anything that would end poverty, such as [universal basic income](ubi.md). If the workers owned the factory collectively and didn't have to cut the profit off their labor, they wouldn't have to work so many hours in such harsh conditions at all, it's only because there is a capitalist leech at the top that everyone has to slave himself to death so that the leech can get enormously rich.

Here a capitalist says to the worker: "I am not forcing you to slavery, if you don't like the working conditions, go elsewhere". Of course, this is a laughable insult -- the capitalist knows very well there is nowhere else to go; wherever you go work in capitalism, you get exploited -- you can only do as much as choose your slavemaster. A capitalist will then say: "start your own business then", which again is a complete idiocy -- it's extremely hard to succeed in business, not everyone can do it, those who have established businesses won't let anyone on the market, and of course it's the immoral thing to do, the capitalist is just telling you to start doing what he's doing: abuse others. If you do start your business, he will be sure to attack you as a competition and with his power he will very likely be able to stop your business. So this advice is similar to that of "go start your own country if you don't like this one" -- he might as well tell you to move to another planet.

The **new**, modern capitalism is yet worse as it takes full advantage of technology never before seen in history which allows extreme increase of exploitation of both workers and consumers -- now there are cameras and computers watching each worker's individual production, there are "smart" devices spying on people and then forcing ads on them, there are loud speakers and screens everywhere full of propaganda and brainwashing, nowhere to escape. Now a single capitalist can watch over his factories all over the world through [Internet](internet.md), allowing for such people to get yet much richer than we could ever imagine.

While the old capitalism was more of a steady slavery and the deterioration of society (life environment, morality, art, ...) by it was relatively slow (i.e. it seemed to be somewhat "working"), nowadays, in the new capitalism the downfall of society accelerates immensely. In countries where capitalism is newly instated, e.g. after the fall of an old regime, it indeed seem to be "working" for a short time, however it will never last -- 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 about 10 years. ~drummyfish }

Slowly "startups" evolve to medium sized businesses and a few will become the big [corporations](corporation.md). These are the first higher 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 and profit. A corporation has a super human intelligence (combined intelligence of its workers) but has no human emotion or conscience (which is suppressed by the corporation's structure), it is basically the rogue [AI](ai.md) we see 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"](just_doing_my_job.md): 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. Of course, many know they're doing something bad but they have no choice if they want to feed their families, and [everyone is doing it](everyone_is_doing_it.md).

Deterioration of society is fast now but people are kept in a false sense of a feeling that "it's just a temporary thing", "it's this individual's fault (not the system's)" and that "it's slowly getting better", mainly with the help of 24/7 allmighty media brainwashing. Due to heavy [greenwashing](greenwashing.), [openwashing](openwashing.md) etc. most people are for example naively convinced that corporations are becoming more "environment friendly", "responsible", "open source" ("Microsoft isn't what it used to be", ...) etc., as if a corporation had something aking emotion instead of pure desire for profit which is its only goal by definition. A corporation will repeat ads telling you it is paying black handicapped gays to plant trees but internally no one gives a shit about anything but making more money, a manager's job is just to increase profit, waste is increasing and dumped to oceans when no one is looking, bullshit is being invented to kickstart more bullshit business which leads to more need for energy wasting (unnecessary transportation, upkeep of factories and workplaces, invention of bullshit technology to solve artificial problems arising from artificial bullshit). A lie repeated 1000 times a day will beat even truth that's evident to naked eye, basic logic and common sense. Even when sky is littered with ads, cities are burning and people are working 20 hours a day, a capitalist will keep saying "this is a good society", "we are just in a temporary crisis", "it is getting better" and "I care about the people", and people will take it as truth.

Corporations make calculated decisions to eliminate any competition, they devour or kill smaller businesses with unfair practices (see e.g. the [Microsoft's](microsoft.md) infamous [EEE](eee.md)), 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 (those who make laws are nowadays mostly businessmen who want to strengthen corporations whose shares they hold and if you believe voters can somehow prevent such psychopaths getting this power, just take a look literally at any parliament of any country). 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 an [evolutionary system](evolution.md)** in which the fitness function is simply the ability to make [capital](capital.md). 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](state.md), however corporations become stronger and bigger than states, they can manipulate laws by lobbying, financially supporting preferred candidates, favoring them with their propaganda etc. 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 share holder, won't compete against a plethora of the best warriors selected by the extremely efficient system of free market. Furthermore voters, those who are supposed to choose their protectors, are just braindead zombies now who literally do what their cellphones shows them on its display. By all this states slowly turn to serving corporations, becoming their tools and then slowly dissolve (see how small role the US government already plays). Capitalist brainwashing is so strong that **it even makes people desire more torture** -- see so called ["anarcho" capitalism](ancap.md) which the stupidest of our population have already fallen for and which is basically about saying "let's get rid of anything that protects us against absolute capitalist apocalypse". "Anarcho" capitalism is 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 corporation which has at its hands the most advanced technology there ever was.

Here the strongest corporation takes over the world and starts becoming the higher organism of the whole Earth, [capitalist singularity](capitalist_singularity.md) has been reached. The world corporation 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.

**People will NOT protest or revolt** at this point, they will accept anything that comes and even if they suffer everyday agony and the system is clearly obviously set up for their maximum exploitation, they will do nothing -- in fact they will continue to support the system and make it stronger and they will see more slavery as more freedom; this tendency is already present in [rightists](left_vs_right.md) today. You may ask why, you think that at some point people will have enough and will seize back their power. This won't happen, just as the billions of chicken and pigs daily exploited at factories won't ever revolt -- firstly because the system will have absolute control over people at this point, they will be 100% dependent on the system even if they hate it, they will have proprietary technology as part of their bodies (which they willingly admitted to in the past as part of bigger comfort while ignoring our warnings about loss of freedom), they will be dependent on drugs of the system (called "vaccines" or "medicine"), air that has to be cleaned and is unbreathable anywhere one would want to escape, 100% of communication will be monitored to prevent any spark of revolution etc. Secondly the system will have rewritten [history](history.md) so that people won't see that life used to be better and bearable -- just as today we think we live in the best times of history due to the interpretation of history that was force fed us at schools and by other propaganda, in the future a human in every day agony will think history was even worse, that there is no other option than for him to suffer every day and it's a privilege he can even live that way.

We can only guess what will happen here, a [collapse](collapse.md) 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 be more and more genetically engineered to be more submissive, further killing any hope of a possible change, 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](ai.md), to exist and work more efficiently without humans completely, so they will be eliminated. This is how the mankind ends.

{ So here you have it -- it's all here for anyone to read, explained and predicted correctly and in a completely logical way, we even offer a [way](less_retarded_society.md) to prevent this and fix the system, but no one will do it because this will be buried and censored by search engines and the 0.0000000000001% who will find this by chance will dismiss it due to the amount of brainwashing that's already present today. It's pretty sad and depressive, but what more can we do? ~drummyfish }

## Capitalist Propaganda And Fairy Tales

Capitalist brainwashing is pretty sophisticated -- unlike with centralized oppressive regimes, capitalism has a decentralized way of creating and spreading propaganda, in ways similar to for example self-replicating and self-modifying malware in the world of software. Creators and promoters of capitalist propaganda are mostly people who are unaware of doing so, they have been brainwashed and programmed by the system itself to behave that way, for example just by being exposed to hearing the capitalist fairy tales since they were born. Some examples of common capitalist propaganda you will probably encounter are the following:

- *"Capitalism is freedom."* -- This is of course a complete twist of the word freedom: capitalism promotes freedom of market which goes against the freedom of people. I.e. the freedom enabled by capitalism is the freedom to abuse others; the freedom to restrict freedoms of others, which is of almost the polar opposite of genuine freedom.
- *"In capitalism everyone can make it if he only works hard."* -- This is firstly of course not even logically possible, it's just as claiming that everyone can win the Olympic games; to reach the top in an extremely competitive system not only do you have to work hard, you also have to be born with the right talent, in the right place, to the right family, and be immensely lucky to be in right places in right times and make correct guess decisions in situations in which it is impossible to know the correct decision. Even if you work 24/7 without sleep, there will be thousands of others who do the same, your success is a pure bet on lottery. **Capitalist fairy tales make heavy use of the [survivorship bias](survivorship_bias.md)** -- you will see movies only about the successful people who are asked how they achieved success and who answer along the lines "I just worked hard". Indeed they did, but this doesn't imply that anyone working hard will succeed, this is the same as taking an advice from a lottery winner; if you ask a lottery winner how he won the lottery, he will simply say "I bet all I had on a random number". Following such advice is of course just about the worse decision you can make. If everyone can make it, why doesn't everyone do it, why don't we have a wold consisting exclusively of billionaires?
- *"Capitalism just works, capitalism is natural, capitalism means progress etc."* -- **Capitalism doesn't work, it's just hard to get rid of.** If it "works and is natural", then it works and is natural natural in the same way as for example cancer or wars. This doesn't mean we should support it or see it as something positive. Most of other similar lies are discussed in sections above.
- Fairy tales about about the rich capitalist altruist: you will hear stories about famous capitalists that paint them as nice guys who give to poor for free, who do manual work despite not having to etc. This is just part of cult of personality propaganda and applying cheap populist tricks to deceive masses. A rich guy giving $100 to a poor kid on camera is an extreme powerful marketing that costs $100, which for a billionaire is of course a laughable cost. The fact is that every billionaire is the best player of the most dirty game humanity has invented and researching any such guy reveals, basically in 100% of cases, that he was in fact the worst imaginable psychopath -- Edison killed animals with electric current as part of marketing, the owner of McDonald's stole the idea and know-how from McDonald brothers ALONG WITH their own name, similar thing happened with KFC, Steve Jobs was infamous for his psychological pressure on workers equating torture, the working condition's in Ford's factories were basically the same as those for black African slaves, etcetc. **Trying to find a rich man that's good is like trying to find a shark who's a vegetarian.**
- *"Capitalism isn't perfect but it's the best system we know."*: complete [bullshit](bullshit.md), capitalism is probably the worst system that there ever was. See this whole article.
- *"Successful capitalists are the most intelligent people."*: on the contrary, mostly the stupidest people become successful -- success in capitalism depends mostly on luck and lack of moral obstacles, i.e. doing whatever it takes to succeed such as stabbing friends in the back, public lying, exploitation of workers etc. High intelligence is actually a disadvantage in this manner as it makes one see all the negative consequences of his behavior, a smart man sees that by engaging in capitalism he is not just hurting and even killing other people, but even e.g. working towards destruction of art, culture, living environment and possibly life itself. Being a successful businessman in capitalism is like steering a plane full of people, including oneself, towards ground -- only an idiot can do it. 
- TODO: moar

## So What To Replace Capitalism With?

See [less retarded society](less_retarded_society.md).