2026-10-12 07:52 UTC
Replies (40)
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@0xKesh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-10-12 07:54
Because they benefit from it?
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@grandel@lemmy.ml 2026-10-12 08:21
Because they’ve been taught it’s the best system and only one that works.
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@Daaric@lemmy.world 2026-10-12 08:51
What other alternatives do we have? We have some experience with communism and, eh, that didn’t go well either. Not defending capitalism here, just saying that the alternative need to work. Really work. Not just in theory.
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@Miller@lemmy.world 2026-10-12 08:58
I think in some way capitalism is tied up with technological advancement and we like that. We probably shouldn’t because it will be our undoing, but we do.
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@Feyd@programming.dev 2026-10-12 09:16
The majority of people are resistant to change in general and can’t imagine a better world than what they know. The majority of people are focused on themselves without looking at the big picture.
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@deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 2026-10-12 09:26
Because they think of themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires rather than wage slaves.
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@YragNitram1956@feddit.uk 2026-10-12 09:37
I am fearful about the extreme ignorance, simple mindedness and gullibility of some of the electorate. They are completely blind to the effects of neoliberalism, which is the main guiding force behind the bumptious, odious and fascist/racist Republican party who believe that competition is the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning. Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised; public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance, and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.
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@m532@lemmy.ml 2026-10-12 10:09
redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
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@cRazi_man@europe.pub 2026-10-12 10:33
People go with the information they are given. People don’t do academic research into these things before forming an opinion (myself included). Through cold war times, capitalism was advertised as a morally correct choice (and not just as one type of economic system). Even within this, the American flavour or neoliberal capitalism isn’t the only choice. There can be a more heavily regulated capitalism like in Europe with elements of strong social support. These aren’t isolated economic theory concepts anymore. These are ideas linked to people’s identity, politics, social groups, morality and sense of justice/right and wrong. This is compounded by a false sense that we live in a meritocracy and just world. As if the world will give money and success to those who are right and good, so we shouldn’t stand in the way of that.
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@9point6@lemmy.world 2026-10-12 12:13
Those that benefit from it spend a lot of money on trying to make sure the majority of people don’t realise it’s fucking them over
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@daggermoon@piefed.world 2026-10-12 12:19
Stockholm syndrome.
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@TORFdot0@lemmy.world 2026-10-12 12:57
In America, we grow up to really cherish liberty and freedom of choice (even if it just the illusion of choice) and so we really idealize entrepreneurship. Capitalism is the only economic system that allows upward class mobility The examples of socialism/communism collapse are all within the lifetimes of most (or not far off for those of us under 40). Capitalism hasn’t quite failed yet (2008 hurt a lot and woke some people up to its failures). It may not be popular with some of the instances on the fediverse but capitalism is the least flawed of all the flawed economic systems. The systems are flawed because they are ran by flawed humans. The best societies take strengths of each system and combine them to mitigate the flaws of each. Capitalism with strong social safety nets is probably the best that humans can do.
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@chobeat@lemmy.ml 2026-10-12 14:21
If you believe food comes from a field, you will defend the field. If you believe the food comes from the supermarket, you will defend the supermarket.
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@MaxLemminist@lemmy.ml 2026-10-12 14:33
They get told all those horror stories about ‘the others’ who hate us for our freedoms and want to rule the world, where they have to work real hard and still can’t afford a house, and the regeeeem is spying on them all the time. We wouldn’t want to live like that would we?
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@Drewfro66@lemmygrad.ml 2026-10-12 14:58
Because the last 50-100 years of Western political-economic development (especially, but it goes back longer than that to a lesser degree, and is more prevalent in America) has “bourgeoisified” vast swathes of the population, to the extent that there is not even a handful of causes but an entire ecosystem of hundreds of them. A proletarian is at it’s most basic a person who owns next-to-nothing. The archetypical proletarian rents an apartment, takes public transit, works without a contract, does not own his own tools, and holds no shares in stock. While peasant revolts did occasionally happen, even the minor allowances given to the peasant class in some countries - virtual land ownership; livestock, tool, and vehicle ownership; and a thriving middle class of landholding, employing peasants - were enough to completely neuter revolutionary sentiment among the peasants. Policies which “buy common people into” the system of Capitalism are what lead them to supporting the system or, at least, opposing its complete dissolution. To avoid writing an entire essay, I’m just going to list some of the policies that I believe contribute to the bourgeoisification of Western workers: (1). Invested retirement funds instead of pensions (2). Suburban home ownership (3). 13% of Americans are part of the employing class (4). Car culture over usable public transit (5). Valorization of the “small business owner” (6). The death of shop-floor Union organizing in favor of “union-as-a-service” (7). Domination of unions by labor-aristocratic forces, and the resulting ties to liberal political parties (8). The offloading of economic extraction onto colonized peoples, including so-called “internal colonies” of racial minorities and immigrants, whose political rights are suppressed. (9). Voter suppression more generally - it is more difficult for poorer people to vote than wealthier people (10). Control of media, including social media, by the middle and upper classes. You are more likely to see bourgeoise perspectives reflected not only on legacy media but most forms of social media as well (think small business tyrants and their wives posting on NextDoor, Facebook, etc., or “influencers” on youth media). And so many more reasons.
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@pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-10-12 15:22
I haven’t read any theory yet but I’ve heard from other people that under communism, you can still buy and sell goods and services right? Usually capitalists point out that people are naturally greedy so they need to be able to consume goods and accumulate wealth.
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@PunkMonk@lemmygrad.ml 2026-10-12 16:07
Decades of intense cultural manipulation and suppression of any pro-communist media. Also, the whole economic base affecting the superstructure thingimajig.
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@777Prawn@sh.itjust.works 2026-10-12 17:02
They don’t even know socialism exists in the US. Also what you say is more tied to political identity than your actual beliefs whether the true belief falls anywhere close to truth.
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@XiJinpingStanAccount@lemmy.ml 2026-10-13 00:16
It’s a lot simpler than what everyone here is saying tbh. They don’t know what it is. Most of them think capitalism is just markets existing. Or some other random definition they made up in their head. So they’re defending the imaginary version of it that they made up, which of course they like.
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@Lor@leminal.space 2026-10-13 01:49
successful brainwashing.
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@KnightOfOldEmpire@lemmy.ml 2026-10-13 06:10
Propaganda and suppression of the left was successful and certain crumbs had to be given in the past decades, currently there’s still enough comfort that many will defend their current status. A comfortable person isn’t going to start asking or rocking the boat, it’s in their interest that the boat is on the steady ride. Deflection, gaslight and disciplining of those who find themselves in the “have not” becomes a way of comforting yourself that the ride was always within your capability and not dependent on the exterior mechanisms or just plain luck to be born in the lineage of “haves”.
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@BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk 2026-10-13 06:35
Because the people that “rage against capitalism”, tends to put a lot of rollover effects occurring due to no guardrails. Onto being a fault of capitalism, rather than a fault of government. We could tax inheritance 100% and most of the rollover issues are gone. We could provide healthcare, public transportation and many other services. While maintaining a capitalistic based system. Infinite growth is not a necessity of capitalism, that’s a necessity for consumer franctic societies. Right now there’s a lot of countries looking towards Scandinavian models, they’re capitalistic by nature and imo still lack guardrails against intergenerational wealth. Inequality is skyrocketing everywhere, but that’s not a fault of capitalism. It will happen in unregulated capitalistic setups, but capitalism is really effective at guiding companies into providing the goods the populations need - And we have not theorised a better system yet.
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@yermaw@sh.itjust.works 2026-10-13 09:47
It makes sense. Most people have no idea about most of it. You have stuff. You buy and sell stuff. Ezpz. Any alternative is demonised and fought about and undermined and misinformation’d.
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@boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2026-10-13 13:40
You probably interact mostly with people living in the west. Most of us in the western world live on significantly more resources than the global average. True equality on the scale of the whole planet means most of us lose our standard of living. If you do it on the basis of just one country, then that creates an incentive for people capable of earning more money in another country, to move to that country. To deal with that, you need to ban people from leaving the country and… It’s easy to see why communism tends to work best as a dictatorship. You need to use violence to keep the people in line, otherwise they’ll want more than their fair share. Free markets (especially the labor market, being able to choose your own job is pretty nice) give people a sense of agency, even if it’s misplaced.
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@novibe@lemmy.ml 2026-10-13 13:42
I saw something really interesting the other day… In our society, being good or bad depends on your net worth. If you’re rich, you are good. If you’re poor you’re bad. Poor people know they can’t be good by being rich. They actually never even interact with actual rich people. Classes don’t really interact with each other in our society. But what they get access to is the rich man’s ideology. Or what they think rich people are (what they actually see is the petit bourgeoisie, the lower capitalist class. Their bosses are the lower rung of the capitalists. Or the upper rung of the working class. Small business owners, management etc). But the poor can at least be on the same team as the rich, fight for the same things, and in that way at least be on the “good side”. They try to approximate goodness by ideology. They try to get closer to “good” by fighting in the name of the “good people”.
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@dickbutt@lemmy.ml 2026-10-13 15:23
Because of ideological reproduction (educational systems, media and political discourses) which all normalize capitalist (and materialist, dualist, etc.) worldviews. There’s a lot at stake in defending this as it is the basis of people’s identity and how they construe meaning in life (through work, career, status, consumption). Colonialism has also been an effective project in destroying other worldviews and political systems and labeling them as primitive, backwards, etc.
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@NEZ27@lemmy.zip 2026-10-13 15:34
I think there is a big discrepancy between what Captialism is defined as, what Capitalism actually is, and the ‘Spirit of Capitalism’ that a lot of folks buy into. ‘The Spirit’ is the idealistic bit. Competition breeding innovation. The better the service/product, the more successful you can be. Classic American Dream stuff. In reality, its a race to the bottom where all principles and values are eschewed for profit. Kinda like Communism where what it Should be or what it Could be are different than what we get in practice. And any given person is going to be thinking about it from a different lens, so you get delusional, idealistic, cynical, and occasionally reasonable takes all talking about the ‘same but entirely different’ thing. Capitalism just had better PR.
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@chloroken@lemmy.ml 2026-10-13 18:39
I was born into the US and was a Liberal for most of my life. I can explicitly tell you why so many of my countrypeoples defend capitalism: Because they have the political education of an infant. You are told from a young age by everyone you trust that communism is bad and you never EVER get told the truth. What’s left is an infinitesimal number of people with both the requisite curiosity and social opportunity to break out of liberal thinking. Most people are ingrained and never challenged their entire lives. The incentives for supporting capitalism and rejecting communism are powerful and alluring in this country. But it is not an excuse. The books are out there.
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@geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 2026-10-13 19:21
Because they benefited from the exploitation of the global south
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@Yuccagnocchiyaki@lemmy.world 2026-10-13 19:55
Because capitalists can afford all of the bot farms and media adds. It really makes you actually understand the whole, “the revolution will not be televised”
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@Malica@lemmy.zip 2026-10-13 22:34
People fear change and the unknown. That makes one cling to whatever is familiar, even if it’s causing suffering. It takes effort to zoom out and see the big picture and how many problems can be traced back to capitalism.
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@bigbangdangler@reddthat.com 2026-10-13 22:57
In the US specifically, capitalism has been taught as the only way towards success. This has happened for decades, at least. It is deeply engrained in that society. When capitalism fails, as has been apparent so many times lately, it is blamed on something else. And as the excuses run out, the scapegoats get more and more inventive. That’s one reason why the current administration wants to you blame immigrants for everything: because it buys more time for the capitalists to make more money and shift the narrative again.
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@yogthos@lemmy.ml 2026-10-13 23:35
conditioning
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@electric_nan@lemmy.ml 2026-10-14 01:13
Decades of totalizing propaganda, along with merciless suppression of alternatives.
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@dropdrip@lemmy.ml 2026-10-14 02:04
What’s capitalism?
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@jklem@lemmy.zip 2026-10-14 02:04
Hi, I am probably one of the few right-libertarian capitalists on Lemmy (I love FOSS!). I’m also a former employee of the Foundation for Economic Education, one of the oldest libertarian institutions dedicated to explaining capitalism. I will do my best to give a big picture answer to your question, but it’s such a huge topic so feel encouraged to ask follow ups (in good faith please). First of all, different people define capitalism different ways. When it’s proponents defend it, what we mean is a system of free markets and free enterprise based on a system of property rights. An essential part of this is the allocation of capital through investment, with profit and loss signals directing this capital. We don’t mean rich people trampling on the property rights of poor people; we would call this “corporatism” or “crony capitalist.” The current United States economy has capitalism in some areas, but corporatism in many others. We believe that capitalism leads to the best possible outcomes for the most people. This doesn’t mean that its outcomes are perfect, or that there are zero people who get left behind (there certainly are), but that compared to all other existing possible systems, it is the best on a relative basis. Yes the rich get richer, but the poor also get richer relative to where they were in generations past (and, on average, over the course of their own individual lifespan). We also believe that capitalism is the most moral system in that it respects individual rights, or which a core part of this are their property rights. Systems that initiate force against peaceful people to take from some and redistribute to others violate people’s individual rights. This doesn’t mean that we oppose charity or don’t want to help people, we very much do, but that we see the initiation of force as a moral wrong in that pursuit. We believe that capitalism is the only system that can lead to a consistent and rising quality of life for the masses for many reasons, but perhaps the biggest is the free price system. Prices being allowed to move through supply and demand, rather than being set by central planners, are necessary for the efficient allocation of scarce resources to their most needed ends. Without this, economic dysfunction is inevitable. (This is known as the Economic Calculation Problem or the Knowledge Problem, and the landmark essays in the history of economics that discuss it are Ludwig Von Mises’s “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” and F.A. Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”) We know this to be true on a theoretical basis, but empirically looking historically and cross-culturally, we see that societies with more capitalism consistently outperform those with less capitalism. We see China’s economy dramatically advance by switching to an overwhelmingly capitalist mode of production, and economies that switch to socialist/communist mode of production stagnate and induce starvation and suffering. We don’t see the authoritarianism of communist nations as merely an accident of history, but as the necessary result of trying to force an impossible economic system to continue through its failure. Capitalism, as we see it, requires a legal order that protects property rights (whether this legal order must come from government or not distinguishes “anarcho-capitalists” from “minarchists” who believe a small limited government is necessary). We do not believe that companies should be allowed to pollute other people’s property or cause damages to them, yet in a proper legal order we do not believe regulation is necessary to achieve this either. Instead, a system of common law and torts require damages to be paid to those whose rights are violated, with these damages to outweigh the benfits to corporations from taking such actions, thus incentivizing them not to engage in the rights violations to begin with. In our current system, corporations work with governments to regulate themselves out of such liability (this is called “regulatory capture”), which we oppose. I’ve written a lot but only just touched the surface. With more narrow questions, I can provide more specific answers.
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@Radical_Socialist_t00t@lemmy.ca 2026-10-14 02:12
Short answer: people are dumb and gullible
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@heartSagan5@lemmy.zip 2026-10-14 06:33
It feeds many.
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@Allero@lemmy.today 2026-10-14 07:26
Three big reasons: Capitalism thrives on the promise of social elevation. You can become billionaire too, you know. And many are willing to sacrifice their living standards for the hope of making it big, however unlikely the latter is. Capitalism is a current economic system in the majority of places, and most people are afraid of the change. They’d rather maintain the status quo - this is why, for example, socialist countries had majority of the population supporting socialism - not because they got enlightened to its potential, but because they already lived under it. Privately owned media. Most people get their information from the corporate platforms, which, being owned by wealthy individuals benefitting heavily from capitalism, obviously downplay the horrors of capitalism and exacerbate issues of socialism. It is them who propel the “hope” narrative (see point 1) and thwart any serious attempts to popularise socialism. Even if you manage to host socialist media on socialist platforms and outplaying the algorithms, good luck getting corporate funding to make quality content with high level of reach when your platform is anti-corporate.
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@bstix@feddit.dk 2026-10-14 07:46
Capitalism is easy to understand. You do something and you get something - even if you cheat by “outsmarting” someone else. The reward is tied to your actions. Like doggy treats. At no point is it revealed that your effort might be worth more than you get. This doesn’t matter because it appears as a direct transaction. Work = pay. It’s not though, but that’s what it appears like to anyone who doesn’t think further than to getting their paycheck. Socialism disconnects the transactions. Roughly put, the work that everyone puts into the system is used to pay out to everyone. You’re no longer working directly for the hand that feeds you. Like many places elsewhere, Denmark has social security system that sort of works like this. Everyone pays taxes and the pool of money is distributed to those who needs it, based on all kinds of things other than what people paid into the system themselves. It disconnects the effort and the payout. This has good and bad effects in comparison to capitalism. A bad thing is that people who don’t understand the larger picture will still look at it from a transactional point of view. Suddenly they think they deserve to get free money, and start making up their own explanations of why. They’ll also look at it as a zero sum game, where they believe that if anyone else gets something then they must also have the same or else they’d feel that other people take more than they deserve. All kinds of racism and fasicm grows in those capitalistic arguments when applied to a social system. The good thing though is that they’re actually right in saying that they deserve more even if they don’t contribute. Everyone deserves more than nothing from a system. It’s possible, because it’s not a zero sum game. It raises the lower bar, and keeps more people healthy and thus capable of producing more. There’s this quote “a greatness of a nation can be measured by how it treats the poorest”. It’s a mis-quote, but it’s true. Capitalism can not achieve the same when there’s no lower boundary to poverty. It will still have the costs of sickness, homelessness and poverty even if it tries not to pay for it by closing their eyes. A socialist system is the key the solving this. So maybe we do sometimes pay people who doesn’t deserve it, but it’s still cheaper than to have to pay for the costs of the problems in capitalism.