Are we oppressed by capitalism or just ungrateful?

So… I came across a post on good ol’ Twitter on capitalism and I thought it's worth sharing an opinion on it.

capitalism doesn’t work because people are good. it works because people are selfish and it figured out how to harness that into infrastructure. it’s the only system that survives human nature without needing to rewrite it

Imagine thinking people work terrible jobs because they are “selfish.”

you kill profit, you kill production. you kill production, you kill logistics. you kill logistics, and suddenly it’s day four of your anti-capitalist utopia and the shelves are empty, the power’s out, the pharmacy’s closed, and nobody knows how to fix a fucking thing

Nobody is trying to kill profits, just exploitation, but by saying this, you acknowledge that capitalism is zero-sum and I hate to imagine that it sounds right in any one's head.

anti-capitalism isn’t a philosophy. it’s a death wish dressed up as a virtue signal

you’re not oppressed. you’re just ungrateful

Is this fact? Are we ungrateful?

This is the source tweet and there's this one reply to another reply under the original tweet that prompted writing this article.

Said reply:

You’re assuming everyone has those values and we have a high trust society.

I can't dump the entire thread here as that would make this article really long, so to summarize what led to the reply above, some guy responded to the original tweet, arguing for a system other than capitalism where values are aligned with dignity, care and shared responsibility.

let’s build systems where the people who do the work have power over how that work is done—and who it’s done for. Let’s build systems that don’t require exploitation to function.

Here's the beginning of this reply.

Now to address the bold statement that we are not oppressed by capitalism but ungrateful and that most people lack high values.

First I'll have to agree that most people do lack high values, but this is mostly due to condition exposure.

Why does a child that grew up in a family whose wealth came from farming and has had to be involved turn out differently from a child that grew up in a tech-heavy home whose wealth comes from financial crimes?

So when someone says that our society lacks people of high values and trust, then that's an effect of condition exposure. Hence the need to build a system that incentivizes that without exploitation.

I think it's a wild thing to say that we're ungrateful to capitalism when it's not news that the system thrives on exploitative labor of not just adults but children. How can anyone in their right mind call anyone opposing this “ungrateful?”

You see, it's always comical to me when people do that thing where they say that it's human nature to be greedy, then vote to continue incentivizing it because they can't imagine a different world. But when it comes to something else that directly affects them, they suddenly throw out the “it's human nature” argument.

Why can't we not allow all human nature to thrive?

A system, as capitalism can have its pros, but the cons here are quite terrible.

One of the reasons I decided to even talk about this is because crypto and blockchain, somehow, is anti-capitalism. There's a huge possibility that labor can become less of an exploitation and the wealthy would have far more reason to not be evil due to the possibility of losing everything.

What the original poster claims to be what capitalism does — “capitalism doesn’t work because people are good. it works because people are selfish and it figured out how to harness that into infrastructure. it’s the only system that survives human nature without needing to rewrite it” — is what a system such as crypto and blockchain technology can actually lead, truly.

This is because here we have risks and rewards baked into all layers of processes of everything and since transparency is at the core, there's no hidden leverage to capitalize on, everything hangs down from the same protocol rules.

Crypto keeps the good side of capitalism — individual ownership — and fixes the flaw — exploitation without consequence.

Posted Using INLEO