Teen Vogue sent out this Tweet:
Of course we all know that the worst poverty is seen in capitalist countries while the nations that abandon it soar into economic prosperity.
It’s places like Cuba, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe where teenagers all have the latest iPhones to see Tweets from Teen Vogue, while in the US kids are eating road kill and out of garbage cans.
Oh wait… that’s backwards.
What “Capitalism” Is and How It Affects People
What it is, how it works, and who is for and against it.
Capitalism is defined as an economic system in which a country’s trade, industry, and profits are controlled by private companies, instead of by the people whose time and labor powers those companies.
The link embedded in “is defined as” (original in the article) goes to Miriam-Webster. Their definition is:
An economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.
That nonsense about “instead of by the people whose time and labor powers those companies” is not in the dictionary at all.
This is some serious Marxist bullshit.
The major problem with this kind of thinking is that is fixes people to a role – employee, laborer, owner, etc. – for life.
In this way of thinking, the owner of the company is just that, the owner. He’s never himself been an employee.
That’s not the way it works by any means. People move up and down, back and forth across this line all the time. If you are a professional, a lawyer, accountant, architect, etc., your first job is as a junior associate. You are an employee. You work with the hope of one day making partner, at which point you become a partial owner.
Or you can quit and start your own firm, in which case you are the owner AND the employee. Your work powers the firm AND your reap the rewards.
The great thing about this is that anybody can do it. Can you fix toilets? Buy a truck, get some tools, register an LLC and start your own plumbing company. Trust me, an after hours emergency plumber can make $100 an hour in some places.
It also claims that the owner does no work to power the company. He is just sort of a parasite that sucks off the work of everyone below him. What about the work that the owner did to start the company, assuming that he did.
Then there is the issue of stock. Employees in publicly traded companies can buy stock and become fractional owners. Many private companies have ways that employees can buy shares or will be bonused shares as part of promotions.
The demarcation between owner and employee is not a fixed and immutable one. But this makes capitalism more attractive.
Marxists want people to think “I’m being taken advantage of and used for my labor” and become resentful.
The lesson of capitalism is “work hard and one day you can be an owner too.” That doesn’t breed resentment so the Marxists need to crush that idea.
The United States and many other nations around the world are capitalist countries, but capitalism is not the only economic system available; throughout history, other countries have embraced other systems, like socialism or communism, so it’s important to explore what capitalism actually is.
Those other nations failed and 100 million died because of it.
CNN recently reported that 66% of people between the ages of 21 and 32 have nothing saved for retirement. However, according to Salon, the reason many millennials haven’t been investing in mutual funds or building up their own financial nest eggs isn’t because they’re too broke, or that they lack personal responsibility — it’s because they think our current economic system, capitalism, will cease to exist by the time they are in their 60s.
66% of 21-32 year olds have been made stupid by Socialist ideologue professors who all have generous retirement packages as part of their tenure.
The millennials Salon spoke to expect to see a grand societal shift in their lifetime, either toward socialism — a political and economic system in which the means of production are collectively and equally owned by everyone — or toward a sort of dystopian Mad Max nightmare in which resources have dwindled, rich plutocrats own everything, and ordinary people need to band together in small, autonomous communities to survive.
I’m pretty sure that socialism turns nations into “a sort of dystopian Mad Max nightmare in which resources have dwindled, rich plutocrats own everything, and ordinary people need to band together in small, autonomous communities to survive.”
To conservatives’ dismay, the modern idea of socialism, which has roots in Greek philosopher Plato but emerged as a popular political idea in the early 19th century among German radicals like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, has become increasingly popular among young people in the past several years, following Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders’s underdog run for president and the authoritarian creep of the ultra-capitalist, anti-socialist Trump regime.
Socialism was a Platonic thought experiment that even he admitted wouldn’t work in practice. The part about it being “a popular political idea” sounds nice, but popular isn’t always good. The Klan was popular in the South and Nazism was Popular in Germany too. Popular but not good.
In contrast, capitalism has become markedly less popular among the younger generations, with The Washington Post noting in April 2016 that in one survey, a majority of young adults ages 18 to 29 said they reject it outright.
You have probably heard the word “capitalist” floating around in the past couple of years — maybe in relation to the anti-fascist, anti-capitalist protests at the Trump inauguration. So, what is capitalism, and why are people so passionate about it, one way or the other?
Yes, young dumbasses with shit degrees and no job skills love socialism because they believe that it means everyone who works pays for them to sit around and wax philosophical. The can’t imagine that it means that they are the ones forced to plant rice by hand in a field at gunpoint.
The origins of capitalism are complicated, and stretch back to the 16th century, when the British systems of power largely collapsed after the Black Death, which was a deadly plague that killed off up to 60% of Europe’s entire population.
Capitalism has always existed. The first time one caveman who was good at knapping flint traded a spear he made to a hunter in exchange for some meat, capitalism was born.
But yes, the black death was the greatest thing to happen to Europe in 500 years. All of a sudden, people who knew how to farm successfully were valuable and could move around to sell their skills to the highest paying lord.
A newly formed class of merchants began trade with foreign countries, and this newfound demand for exports hurt local economies and began to dictate overall production and pricing of goods. It also led to the spread of colonialism, slavery, and imperialism.
International trade hurt local economies? We’re not talking about shipping jobs to Mexico. Growing wheat in England wasn’t outsourced to China.
The death of feudalism — a hierarchical system often seen as oppressive that kept poor people bonded to their masters’ land, which they farmed in exchange for a place to live and military protection — also left rural British peasants with no homes and no work, which eventually funneled them away from the countryside and into urban centers. These former farm workers then had to sell their labor in a newly competitive work environment in order to survive, while the state worked in concert with the new capitalists to establish a maximum wage and “clamp down on beggars.”
THEY WEREN’T SLAVES TO A LORD ANYMORE!!!
This is the most insane Marxist statement I have ever read. Workers actually had the freedom to move and try to make better lives for themselves instead of being indentured from birth to death.
By the 18th century, England had converted into an industrial nation, and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution saw an explosion of manufacturing overtake the island. It is within those smoky factories and flammable textile mills that our modern idea of capitalism — and the opposition to it — began to fully flourish. In 1776, Scottish economist Adam Smith published his treatise, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which is regarded as the bedrock upon which modern capitalism stands. Though some of his specific ideas about value and labor differ from those of modern economists, Smith is often called “the father of capitalism.”
I believe there are two kinds of economic theories: natural economics and ideological economics.
Natural economics is like natural science, it comes from observing how the world works. Capitalism, supply and demand, those came from observing how people behave with money.
Ideological economics is like crystal healing, it starts with a narrative and then economic ideas are made up to fit that narrative. Marx’s ideas are all based on his ideology. Since the ideology isn’t based on natural behavior, implementing it always fails.
Smith didn’t invent Capitalism. He simply wrote some of the first texts in which he explained the why of what he observed.
Individual capitalists are typically wealthy people who have a large amount of capital (money or other financial assets) invested in business, and who benefit from the system of capitalism by making increased profits and thereby adding to their wealth. A capitalist nation is dominated by the free market, which is an economic system in which both prices and production are dictated by corporations and private companies in competition with one another, and places a heavy focus on private property, economic growth, freedom of choice, and limited government intervention.
Individual capitalists are people, any people, who invest to make money. If you invest by paying tuition for an education that you use, you are capitalist and you are investing in yourself. That’s called human capital.
I don’t have money to buy property for business. I invest in my education and skills and one day I hope to be like my mentor and bill $500 an hour and have people calling me daily to hire me for my talents.
Why would they do that? Because he is very good at helping companies solve production problems, so his clients invest $50,000 in him and get a million dollars in cost savings as a result.
Being a capitalist doesn’t have to be that fancy. A guy with certificate from a trade school, a van, and some tools who owns his own plumbing company, or a guy with a truck, trailer, and mower and owns his own landscaping business is capitalist. Over 80% of the US economy is small business not unlike that. They are all capitalists.
Generally, those to the right of the political spectrum tend to be pro-capitalist; those on the left veer toward anti-capitalism.
This is the one unequivocally true statement in the entire article.
The kind of impact that capitalism has on your life depends on whether you’re a worker or a boss. For someone who owns a company and employs other workers, capitalism may make sense: The more profits your company brings in, the more resources you have to share with your workers, which theoretically improves everyone’s standard of living. It’s all based on the principle of supply and demand, and in capitalism, consumption is king. The problem is that many capitalist bosses aren’t great at sharing the wealth, which is why one of the major critiques of capitalism is that it is a huge driver of inequality, both social and economic.
Some bosses are dicks.
You know what the fix is? Find a better boss or BECOME YOUR OWN BOSS.
Capitalism takes the position that “greed is good,” which its supporters say is a positive thing — greed drives profits and profits drive innovation and product development, which means there are more choices available for those who can afford them. Its opponents say that capitalism is, by nature, exploitative, and leads to a brutally divided society that tramples the working classes in favor of fattening the rich’s wallets.
Pure Marxist class warfare. There is no exploitation when you have the freedom to walk away and find a better job.
For an example in recent history, the Occupy Wall Street movement began as an anti-capitalist protest against “the 1%” — the richest of the rich of the capitalist class — and asked why they are allowed to grow fat and happy while 20% of all American children live in poverty.
This comes directly from the ultra-Right Wing Chicago Tribune.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 4 percent of poor children were hungry for even a single day in the prior year because the family could not afford food. The average consumption of protein, vitamins and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle-class children, and in most cases is well above recommended norms. By his own report, the average poor person had sufficient funds to meet all essential needs and was able to obtain medical care for his family throughout the year whenever needed.
Of course, poor Americans do not live in the lap of luxury. Many of the poor struggle to make ends meet. But they are generally struggling to pay for cable TV, air conditioning and a car, while putting food on the table.
Poverty in America means having to decide between having Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime and not having all three plus HBO.
Poverty in Venezuela means that somebody tries to murder you for the loaf of bread you got after standing in line all day to buy your government allotted bread ration.
Also, life isn’t fair. That’s lesson Number 1.
Capitalism’s supporters believe in several key points: Economic freedom leads to political freedom and having a state-owned means of production can lead to federal overreach and authoritarianism. They view it as the only sensible way to organize a society, insisting that alternatives like socialism, communism, or anarchism are doomed to fail. As former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, whose pro-capitalism stance is said to have devastated the British working classes, once said, “There is no alternative.”
There are alternatives, the only problem is that they end in famine and death.
When asked to consider capitalism’s negative impact on the environment and our shrinking natural resources, many say that those resources will only become more valuable and able to generate more capital as they continue to diminish.
Or they find alternatives. John D. Rockefeller saved more whales than Greenpeace.
They also believe that the competition between companies benefits consumers by making products more affordable, and that capitalism’s dog-eat-dog atmosphere encourages people to work harder to achieve their dreams. They are likely to dismiss anti-capitalists’ concerns about inequality and oppression by saying that rich people are rich because they are more productive than their poorer counterparts.
That’s 100% true, but way to make being productive into a vice.
Placing central importance on the individual, rather than the collective, is a classic hallmark of capitalism and is at the heart of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative that capitalists find so compelling.
Damn that individual freedom. Power to the lazy who can’t be bothered to be useful.
Anti-capitalists view capitalism as an inhuman, anti-democratic, unsustainable, deeply exploitative system that must be dismantled. They see it as inherently at odds with democracy because of how capitalist bosses hold power over workers in the workplace and the fact that, the more capital one accrues, the more power they have.
If you don’t like your boss, quit. You have that power. It’s socialist countries with goverment planed economies where you can’t quit because a bureaucrat will have you shot if you do.
One man, one vote. That doesn’t change. If Trump taught us anything, money doesn’t directly equal political power.
As German Communist philosopher and economist Karl Marx — perhaps the most famous opponent of capitalism in history, who ironically enough helped to popularize the term — wrote in his book Capital, Volume 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, “Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.”
Teen Vogue loves Marx, don’t they.
The essential anti-capitalist argument is that “the hallmark of capitalism is poverty in the midst of plenty.” They say the immense suffering and violence that has been forced upon the laboring classes, the ruthless emphasis on profits over people, the proliferation of wage slavery — in which people have no choice but to sell their labor, which we see in every industry from fast food to corporate office work — and the social alienation.
How horrible that the poor have to choose between Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime. All those choices and they can only have one, while they sit on a couch in their air conditioned home, stuffing their faces with food.
And dear god, wage slavery? How dare a society ask people to be productive. There are billionaires out there, why shouldn’t they be the only ones who have to work while the rest of society engages in subsidized indolence? This is the worst anti-capitalist argument. “I shouldn’t have to work if I don’t want but I still demand all the benefits of work, like food, clothes, entertainment, and stuff.”
If a caveman didn’t want to hunt or gather but demanded that he be allowed to eat, the rest of his tribe would push him off a cliff or let him starve in wilderness. Even the bible tells us that for the able bodied “if a man will not work, he shall not eat.”
Marx also emphasized the system’s capacity to dehumanize workers, writing that capitalist methods of productivity “mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil.” As the looming threat of automation and erosion of public health care puts more pressure on the working class, its opponents worry that capitalism’s thirst for profit over everything else means that those who sell their labor will be worked to death.
But it’s the countries that followed Marx where people were worked to death at gunpoint and turned into fodder for the political machine.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. — a firm anti-capitalist — said in his final speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967, “One day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’…When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.”
MLK was wrong. Yeah, I said it.
Capitalism and socialism are generally seen as polar opposites, and discussions of either system are often framed as in opposition to the other. There are many forms of socialism, but at its root, socialism is an economic system in which a whole community — not just bosses or private companies — control the means of production equally.
Right… because Stalin and the Politburo stood in bread lines and lived in cramped apartments. Socialism has never resulted in equality, ever.
It assumes that people are naturally cooperative, instead of competitive. The goal of socialism is an egalitarian society run by democratically elected representatives for the benefit of all in accordance with a set of collectively determined parameters; unlike under capitalism, industry and production is run by the state, and the acquisition of private property is seen as counterproductive. Capitalist critics of socialism believe that the system slows economic growth, rewards worker laziness, and can stifle individual rights and free expression.
Tell me more about the goal. I can’t hear it over the deafening sound of its failure and the 100 million killed doing it and the hundreds of millions more that live in oppression.
In a capitalist country, the focus is on profits over anything else; in a socialist country, the public is seen to be more important, and social welfare is a major priority. The United States, the U.K., and Germany are examples of modern capitalist countries. In contrast, China, India, and Cuba are examples of modern socialistic, non-capitalist countries, as was the former Soviet Union.
And which countries on that list would the author prefer to live in? One sentence undoes the entire article.
Many other countries like Norway, Sweden, Canada, and the Netherlands incorporate socialist ideas into their societies, as does the United States to some degree; for example, universal health care and Social Security are both socialistic concepts.
And compare their economies to ours. When Socialists point to Socialism in the US, they love to point out Medicaid and Social Security which both suck and the latter is a bankrupt Ponzi scheme. Even in the US, the little socialism we have, is a total failure.
Teen Vogue went totally Marxist. It wasn’t even an attempt at being educational, it was propaganda.
I never thought they could publish an article that was worse than teaching pre-teens how to have anal sex, but they did.
I’m all for freedom of the press, but responsible parents should keep their kids away from Teen Vogue.
The life lessons it teaches will lead to nothing but anal fissures and economic ruin.
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