I'm an European living in a country with a lot of social progress that has been made, although it could still be better. Yesterday night, I debated with an American that supports capitalism. Many interesting things were said during our little debate.
First things first, rejecting capitalism doesn't imply embracing authoritarian governments like Chinese one (which is capitalist by the way), nor Russian government. There are several ways out of capitalism, I am personnally radical socialist/Marxist, I know anarcho-communism exists, I know primary communism exists, you can think of an ideology that supports a world without money, etc. So fighting capitalism doesn't necessarily mean supporting communism.
That being said, when I told the guy I was a Marxist/radical socialist, he had the generic reaction “it just doesn't work”. By that, he implies we should not use systems that don't work, so why the fuck are we using capitalism? I ask him if he thinks capitalism is working, and he confirms it. We started a mass extinction, we still haven't improved our democracy, workers rights are decreasing everywhere in the world, inequalities are growing astonishingly whilst children in China are working for incredibly low salaries instead of getting education, and those in poor counties are starving. But it's working, somehow.
The next thing we talked about was fairness in life with capitalism. The American guy was a landlord (and we talked about housing prices issues later on), so he had a lot of aberrant takes. He was convinced that capitalism was rewarding competence. The more you'd work, the richer you'd get. This is totally untrue in a country such as America where you need to pay thousands of dollars to get a decent education. In other words, children born in a rich family have a huge advantage in life compared to those born in poor family, you already know that. Even in countries where education is nearly free, rich children benefit privileges because they can go to the best schools that are often located in capitals, aka in places where living costs a lot. In America, you can combine both drawbacks: if you're poor, you get to live in poor places with bad education equality that you still need to pay hundreds for. There is no such thing as “rewarding competence” in this.
Then we got to talk about housing prices, speculation, him being a landlord. This is where I was in total despair facing his lack of empathy. He was arguing that capitalism and house prices speculation/inflation were fantastic because it would allow anyone to escalate from poor to rich just by buying, waiting, and reselling. First of all, this just makes houses unaffordable for most people. When housing should be a basic fucking human right, America has made it so you go debt ridden for life if you want it. And this is all because of the uncontrolled market that people like the guy I was arguing with were abusing.
After this, he insisted on the fact that investing in real estate should be a way out of poverty for EVERYONE. As in, if you're so poor you can't even buy a house, start by buying the tiniest shit you can, then step by step, aim for bigger, and slowly but surely you'll end up rich. What a lovely way to get rich. First of all, with interest rates when you take out a mortgage and prices of ALL houses (not just yours) going up, chances are you won't be able to buy bigger when you resell the house you've bought if it was too small. Even worse, since inflation rates are not the same everywhere, higher and big cities where you need to be rich to invest, you might not even be able to buy as big as what you originally had after resselling. Okay, now imagine that would still work, somehow, not just for rich people, but also poor ones. Imagine you could actually become rich with this system no matter how poor you were in the first place. It makes sense for everyone to seek their way out of poverty. So if the way out is real estate, then everyone should start investing in it. But what happens if everyone invests in real estate? Mortgage issues, hyper inflation, not enough buildings to speculate, it just collapses. Capitalism relies on a big percentage of people staying poor to work. Even he admitted it, said it was normal. Capitalism relies on poverty. Capitalism needs poverty to work.
Now, another issue with getting rich through stock markets or real estate is that, just like capitalism generally, it is extremely unfair. If you start rich, you can easily become more richer. Through real estate for example, you can be really unfairly advantaged if you inherited properties you can use for passive incomes and even resell them. Or even more simply, if you inherited money, if you were born in a rich family, you can already think big and start speculating on decently sized properties, which makes you even more richer. However, if you were born poor, you need to begin with small stuff, so small that it's not guaranteed to make you richer, that even if it does, will hardly make you escalate the economical ladder, all of that while you have to worry about affording an actual house for you to live in. So once again, the investment system is unfair and just benefits the rich people. The investment system helps keeping rich people rich, and poor people poor through inflation.
To this, the landlord answered “life isn't fair, some people are born with only one eye and we can't do anything about it”. What a dumb statement… Even the example is wrong, you can defo do research in the medical field to find ways to fix a missing eye, but that's not what the main issue is. The main issue with that statement is that economics and capitalism are something made by humans, for humans. It is entirely controlled by humans, and we CAN change it. Even further, we are the only ones ABLE to change it. That is exactly what politics are about, exactly why they are a thing. Changing this unfairness is what we stand for. The landlord at this point had admitted the system he was supporting and making money off of was unfair and based on poverty. His original statement, “capitalism rewards competence” had lost any credibility.
I hope it made it clear for everyone how capitalism is a cancer to human race. Peace and love everyone.