Upvotes on an anti-capitalist comment on HN?!? Why I never....
To all the 'gracious employers': we are sick of working for pennies while you peddle psychobabble to get us to work harder. The problem is our exploitation. The end.
To all the 'gracious employers': we are sick of working for pennies while you peddle psychobabble to get us to work harder. The problem is our exploitation. The end.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14197344 (which was bad enough in the first place) and marked it off-topic.
Scarecrow addendum: this isn't against any ideology, it's against arguments about them.
And I _still_ think this article is a terrible advice. In capitalism, capital is the prime resource, to be gathered and kept. Being an employee is a good start, but I doubt it is a good lifelong strategy.
Absolutely, you need Atlas Shrugged on the bookshelf to understand the mess we find ourselves in.
The most amazing thing is the hypnotic scam that has been pulled, on us that makes us believe this is all our "lot in life".
Thumbs up!
I guess there are people out there who really believe the individualism in Atlas Shrugged is a model for society? My interpretation is that's darkly satirical humor.
Okay Ayn was a genius, but I think she had a sense of humor too. At least that is the way I would like to think of it.
In capitalism, we should not be glorifying working and generating profit for your employers (in socialist countries that was the state - but the same shit.).
To jump from parts to wholes exclusively in the case of capitalism/history — from "critical of capitalism" to "developmental issues" — probably indicates that you have some developmental issues.
Nah, no it doesn't. It implies that you're circumspect of introspection into the very reasonable path from being "critical of capitalism" to more being concerned about the negative externalities in free markets than, for example, armchair rocket-science or whatever hobby you engage with in the ample free time afforded to you as a member of the coddled petit bourgeois while still managing to ride a high horse around the subject of anti-capitalism.
You do not, of course, see why anyone would be critical of a system that has given YOU so much, but of course to dismiss the active cynic of capitalism is to exclude yourself from your own liberation.
Had YOU been there, you would not have been redeemed.
Firstly, I'm curious how expressing an anti-capitalist sentiment differs from being critical of capitalism.
Secondly, I'd like to propose a few reasons why a person of sound mind might be anti-capitalist:
* There are several well known cases where market forces, in isolation, cannot solve a problem. This already leads one away from several forms of "pure" capitalism. Once you move away from pure capitalism though, you create new problems that require more complexity to solve (regulatory capture perhaps being one of the bigger ones).
* If you look at the post-industrial-revolution capitalistic societies, there is a massive underclass that was substantially made materially worse-off (yes, a generation or two later, society as a whole ends up in a generally better position, but it was accomplished by grinding up and spitting out cheap labor that typically did not directly benefit from it.
* There are some very serious environmental problems currently facing us, most notably global warming. Companies that were profitable by externalizing the costs of these quire rationally found that the best way to maximize their profits was to muddy the scientific waters sufficiently to significantly delay any attempts at addressing these problems (which would certainly involve some way of preventing them from externalizing their costs).
There's probably a lot more that I'm not thinking of right now. I would suggest finding friends who are anti-capitalist and listening to their reasons, not with an eye to shutdown their response, but just to get a sense of differing views.
Even someone who agrees that the natural experiment of the 20th century proved capitalism is superior to communism (which is in itself debatable due to the low sample size and several confounding differences between the powers involved), might feel that some other non-capitalist form of economy could be superior.
Capitalism is greed: it is the accumulation of what you are not morally owed.
"Don't ask what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."