Capitalism is how you enslave people with their approval.
Capitali$m is the worst socioeconomic system we've yet seen in history,^source based on pure greed, culture of slavery and artificially sustained conflict between everyone in society (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 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 jobs, bullshit laws, ...), utilizing and perfecting methods of torture, 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 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" 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 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, 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 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 is a system with evolutionary system 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. 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 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 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) -- as Kropotkin 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 (business owners, the upper class) and the proletariat (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, 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 (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 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 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 puts it: work, buy, consume, die.
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.
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"; 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. 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, 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. 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 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": 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.
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, openwashing 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 infamous EEE), 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 in which the fitness function is simply the ability to make 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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:
All content available under CC0 1.0 (public domain). Send comments and corrections to drummyfish at disroot dot org.