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Capitalism is what replaced slavery, to generalize. By turning slaves into wage laborer-consumers, capitalists increased market sizes, thereby increasing the absolute size of the profit they get from owning the capital enterprises the laborers operated.

The US civil war is the most explicit demonstration of this process. Northern industrial capitalists ended the southern agrarian slave economy, increasing market size and generating extreme wealth in the latter half of the 19th century.

by phoronixrly4 hours ago|

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Eh... The internal combustion engine? Because we had climate change, oligarchs, housing prices, opioids, cryptocurrency, and now on top of all that we have war (edit: with Iran) and LLMs, and all of these can be traced back to extinction-level capitalism.

by TacticalCoder4 hours ago|

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> ... and now on top of all that we have war ...

There have been war since way before capitalism was invented. Beside war, humans were doing evil things way before capitalism: south america natives torturing kids to extract as many tears as possible from them before killing them, to please the gods, comes to mind, for example.

I'll never understand this fantasy people who hate on capitalism have that the world would be all fine and well if only this one time we did communism [1] right.

[1] or whatever floats your boat

by swagasaurus-rex3 hours ago|

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Nostalgia for childhood where you had a community (family) and your needs were taken care of (dependence).

by somenameforme1 hours ago|

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I think it's more than modern companies have, for whatever reason, become extremely scummy. They seem to have no values, ethics, or even regard for their own customers. The only thing that seems to matter to them is squeezing out a few more pennies from people, even if means the likely longer term implosion of their own companies. It's just bizarre to me how many companies, and in different industries, seem to be at war with their own customers.

I hold capitalism with a deep fondness, but I think that's largely because my formative years were in better times. For people who've never known any capitalism except for the mess we currently have? It's quite to see how they can think to themselves that anything must better.

by hurtigioll3 hours ago|

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pure Capitalism is law of the jungle

as we will soon find out, when AI will become better at Capitalism than us

by derektank2 hours ago|

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Not at all. Capitalism only exists as a product of the state, which acts as a guarantor of individual private property rights. It would not be able to survive without the laws and law enforcement of a sovereign with a monopoly on the use of force.

by actionfromafar2 hours ago|

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And unchecked Capitalism coopts the state.