let's make capitalism a dirty word

[MineralMan]

37. Well, I didn't really expect an answer.

Karl Marx really called for this back in the 19th Century in Das Kapital. The argument hasn't really changed since then, despite a huge increase in population and the utter failure of Marxism-based economic systems everywhere.

Typically, when someone does answer the question I asked, they ramble on about some sort of agrarian society, where everyone has a farm in their backyard or on their window ledge. Of course, almost nobody who waxes eloquent about non-capitalistic economic systems has actually ever lived in such a system, and is typing on a computer created by capitalism and transmitting their intellectual efforts over a commercial Internet.

In a small, agrarian society, capitalism can be replaced, of course, with any number of other non-technological economic systems. And yet, all of those systems are based on the kind of hard work we eschew as individuals. There are no tractors in such systems. There's no electricity. There is no computer technology. That's because such things are essentially impossible to create in a locally-based economy.

Most people don't live that way in the Western world. Nor do they have any desire to do so. Most would be incapable of doing so, in fact. That was the way people lived in the 18th and early 19th century in the United States, and they rid themselves of it as quickly as they could, as technologies made it possible. And capitalism created that technology.

All non-capitalistic societies are non-technological, because capitalism is the engine that creates and produces technology. I have no interest whatever in tilling the soil to get my food. None whatsoever.

I don't think many people have any interest in that. We all want, demand, and depend on the technology we have. Destroy capitalism, and that technology will disappear. It's a fool's quest.