Inspired by a post by Morecolorfulmetaphors

[feotakahari]

I don’t get anticapitalism, if only because of comparative advantage. I don’t want to live in a world where everyone grows their own food, because every plant I grow dies. Rather, I want to live in a world where someone specializes in growing food, and I specialize in what I’m good at, and I perform services that the food-growing person values.

And when people trade goods and services for other goods and services of equal value, what do you call that?

I want to end slavery, and apparently that’s something anticapitalists want as well. But they also seem to want a society where people do not trade, and aside from the implausibility of how you stop people from doing so, trade is something that makes my life better in a thousand different ways.

Comments

[entanglingbriars]

Trade existed prior to capitalism and isn't dependent on it. It also existed within communist/socialist countries (although not always very effectively). Capitalism refers to the means of production being owned by someone who does not personally use them but employs others to do so with the primary goal of producing profit for the owner. When the means of production are owned by the people employing them, or the primary goal of controlling the means of production is not profit, you don't have capitalism.

e.g. feudalism wasn't capitalism because although the means of production were not owned by those who worked them, the primary goal was the consolidation of political power within the government, not profit.

[zenolalia]

Entangling briars already explain it well, but I find that when there technical terms involved, an example is always easier to understand initially.

Under capitalism, John Jacob Richman the 6th owns a cell phone factory. He does not work there. In fact, he has never "worked" in a way the average person would recognize. He has hobbies, skills, even education. But he has never submitted himself to the dictatorship of another person for hours and hours, in exchange for food or tokens to buy food with.

The reason he does not work if because his ownership of a factory means he's entitled to take money from the sale of phones made in that factory. However, these are not phones he made.

Instead, he gives a fraction of the money made by selling those phones to the people who make the phones. In exchange for the money, he gets to control their actions and the things they make while at his factory.

However, without those people to make the phones, there would be no sales. John Richman would become John Poorman, because he does not make anything of his own. He just claims ownership of the facilities and tools used by other people to make the phones.

That ownership is what makes him a capitalist. Anticapitalism argues that the people who use those tools and make those phones should not have to give a share of the sales to John Richman, because he hasn't actually done anything. The factory workers can easily make phones without him there, and because he would not be taking the majority of the profits from phone sales, the factory workers would have more money as well.

There are a lot of complications and layers you can add onto it, but the basic-most premise of Anticapitalism is, "if a product or service could be done just as easily--or MORE easily--without you, then you probably shouldn't be getting all the money from it."