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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

The whole point of capitalism is that owners are rewarded and everyone else get's fucked. That's really fucking obvious. The key to living under capitalism is to become an owner (of capital) as soon as you can and stop being a worker. Anyone talking about any other strategy is talking nonsense. The proletariat will not rise up any time soon and capitalism is not going anywhere.

So everyone's best bet is to stop moaning and get with the program. We can't beat them, join them.

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So the goal would be that everybody is an "investor", but nobody works and produces any actual value?

That doesn't even pass the smell test, and is just an excuse for people to not seek justice, as is calling that "moaning".

I really wish both sides would stop naming everything capitalism.

Whatever it is we're now experiencing, it's not capitalism.

Good, and we've never actually had communism, socialism, or hell even a proper monarchy before and any empirical criticism thereof is obviously unfounded.

Productive discourse about "socialism", for instance, can be had once all parties agree upon a definition.

Failing that, it's all just blather.

As for "capitalism", most people, pro and con, are talking about corporatism (laissez faire), which is antithetical to capitalism.

I'd caution anyone on this ideological path that I can see you're on. I had a friend who used to say things exactly like this who is now terribly anti-Semitic. It's important to remember that many of these very wealthy, influential people and groups in media, finance, etc are there by merit and what may seem like nepotism to us is merely a coping mechanism by a historically persecuted and oppressed people.

If it helps, you may consider this the (much) lesser of two evils.

Fair characterization of industrial capitalism, perhaps. How about network capitalism of the type described by Yochai Benkler? https://www.benkler.org/

I'm not aware of Benkler, I'll take a look. That said, unless it's a very different form of capitalism that we currently practise...

I think fundamentally humans want to compete instead of cooperate and that a tiger can't change its stripes.

Capitalism !== markets. Markets are much older than capitalism and will be around long after capitalism has come and went.

Capitalism is merely a mode of production based on exploitation by control of capital.

Honest question, given the tens of thousands of years of humans cooperating to form groups of increasingly large size and interdependence, what makes you think there is more competition than cooperation happening?

Because after tens of thousands of years we are no closer to the utopian ideal as the cavemen were. Also because you can't cooperate for a mate.

In caveman times you were _far_ more likely to be killed via violent encounter, starve to death, or die from minor accidents or infections, etc. The average life expectancy was about 20 years, and a painful death was highly likely. And while you can't cooperate for a mate, there is no shortage of mate's to go around and likely millions of suitable matches for any particular person today. So however far from utopia we might be now, we are certainly _far_ closer than caveman times.

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