Most of us already hate capitalism (and its ideological cousin, liberalism*), in one form or another.
*That is, "liberal" in the everywhere-but-American sense
The easiest example I can come up with would be slavery in the American South, which was thoroughly capitalist from its inception. An easy post-slavery example we could talk about is King Leopold's Belgian Congo. Despite that Leopold was, well, a king, the Belgian Congo and its atrocities were thoroughly private in nature, and more-or-less completely separate from his duties back in Belgium. Another easy example, again from America: The infamous robber barons of the oil, steel, and railroad monopolies. One man saw an opportunity and came to own hundreds of billions of dollars. Or we could talk about the Great Depression, caused in large part by a deflationary spiral when Hoover's government refused to spend counter-cyclically after the stock market crashed.
The key flaw with each of these examples is that a) they're mostly not what we recognize today as capitalism, and b) liberal capitalists (of various flavors) were part of a militant response to all of these things: Slavery (British Empire, American North), the Belgian Congo (again, American/British libs), the monopolists (trust-busting progressives), and the Great Depression (Keynes and FDR, and today the various forms of social democracy in places like Scandinavia).
So, in other words, capitalists have been responsible for many horrible atrocities, but they (often the same ones, strangely!) have often been instrumental in ending atrocities as well, and they've broken bread with the socialists and communists that shared their moral outrage.
Even today, capitalists can be hard to pin down. Very few people are proudly and openly advocating for sweatshops or Carnegie-like monopolies. (Well, except for Amazon and Google. But even then, public sentiment is already beginning to turn on both, and the capitalist line today is that "something new will come along to disrupt and replace them", which isn't really something you can disprove. Point is, this argument is less about supporting Google/Amazon than about tolerating them and supporting the general system of capitalism.)
The point isn't to tar all capitalists as slavery-lovers or closet-monarchists or whatever. The capitalists who opposed slavery, just like those who supported slavery, did so with incredible conviction (It just so happens the opponents were on much sounder moral ground). This isn't because capitalism is some nebulous, undefined mass of impulses. Actually, I think most capitalists and their supporters are generally exactly what they say they are -- liberals who believe in free trade, private property, and less government regulation, along with the protection of basic political rights. They oppose government programs, spending, sanctions, and interference in the market.
However, what capitalists are alright with within that basic framework varies wildly from era to era, and just what capitalism (or capital) actually means is an evolving conversation. Sometimes it meant that people could be bought and sold. Sometimes it meant people could be used up very much like slaves. Sometimes it meant owning an entire sector of the economy and jacking up the price. Sometimes it meant not investing in jobs programs even though a huge proportion of the labor force couldn't find work.
And sometimes, in all these cases, capitalism meant just the opposite. Sometimes it meant that people needed to be protected from being bought and sold, or from being worked like slaves, or from being under the thumb of a plutocrat, or from... that chapter with the rotting oranges in Grapes of Wrath.
Sometimes capitalism means dehumanization and sometimes it means humanization.
But in all its forms, capitalism means an economic order that imposes itself anew into a political system and eventually overwhelms (or overturns, becomes, etc) the political system that had adopted it. The British Empire used to pit tribes/ethnicities against one another -- sure, there were minor (or major) ethnic differences before they imposed their colonial order, but the colonial system made those minor differences into the whole structure of society, until that new reified ethnic divide could function even without any help from the Empire.
Capitalism -- no matter how "neutral" or "voluntary" a system it presents as (rhetorically or genuinely) -- always becomes a social and political system, for good or ill. I hesitate to call any given form of capitalism a "project", though there's often a very deliberate plan and motive behind, ex: Hamilton's big capitalists crushing the little (& more egalitarian) capitalists in the Whiskey Rebellion.
And just as capitalism always becomes a social and political system, its defenders will, virtually from Day One, always treat their provincial little township as the Natural Order of Things, an efficient and even moral organization of resources.
So I don't really have to nitpick capitalism as a system -- its defenders have already argued with equal moral clarity for and against slavery, for and against colonialism, for and against environmental preservation, for and against Indian removal, for and against every positive and negative social change of the last four centuries. Another way to put it is that capitalism is less a specific economic system as it is an approach to economic system design, one that always centers around some form of ownership, a form which eventually comes to dominate the way that society is organized.
Because of the diversity of capitalisms and capitalists, it would be absurd to say that they're all crazy and wrong and I, the NBA blogger guy, can prove it. Even if I produced such a proof, it wouldn't hold up for long. As soon as President Ocasio-Cortez implements student loan debt forgiveness with a rider to re-implement the draft for green jobs, a new form of capitalism has been created, and we're right back to square one.
But, what I can do is point out the absurdity of capitalism as I experience it (and by "absurdity" I don't just mean something obviously dumb, I mean, literally, self-contradiction to the point of farce).
Take advertising, for example. Everybody in the U.S. is exposed to many, many ads per day. Even me, and I avoid them like the plague -- it's hard to get a good ad-blocker for my phone, some of my favorite podcasts advertise, and though our awesome community radio station is a non-profit, they still have to "pay our bills" every hour or so. This in addition to the large amount of native advertisements, astroturfing, mailers, secondhand ads, adware-heavy NBA streaming sites, etc. And again, I'm someone who consciously avoids ads!
Now, everybody knows someone who thinks they aren't affected by ads. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that this person is right! Well, assuming they're part of the same human species as everyone else that ads target, this must a fundamental flaw in how money is allocated! Why would rational advertisers try to peddle their wares in every possible medium if there are lots of people that ads just don't work on?
Or, conversely, let's suppose that person is just full of shit, of course ads work, how can you seriously think that, etc. Then why would that person -- and the hundreds of millions of Americans who also say this or, worse, never even think about it -- rationally choose to devalue their time by listening to ads under the delusion that they're not being affected?
As with Amazon and Google (which, funded by ads, just saying), there are sophisticated responses that capitalists can make to this question: Consumers are able to comb through advertisements and, in general, make a rational response to what they see. Advertisers know that most ads won't work, and are counting on a small percentage of people with a specific ("rational", they might try to argue) need for a product. On a system-wide level, consumers do need to be informed about new products and deals that are available to them, just to make sure warehousing and seasonal labor are as economically efficient as possible. (Hell, I don't even know if they make that argument, but they should. It's a solid argument!)
But the sophistication can be deployed equally by those of us who hate and avoid ads: Fundamentally, advertisers are playing on dishonest motives any time products don't "sell themselves". For everyone who has never tried some new flavor of soda that they would love, there are ten people being exposed to a $5 million Super Bowl ad for Pepsi that plays upon a genetic hormonal craving for sweetness. Even when ads *are* rational, the product they're selling is not necessarily to an individual's long-term benefit or social good - sometimes it just appeals to a base desire to own and have more than our neighbors.
And there are countries (like, for example, almost everywhere else) that ban certain types of advertising (pharmaceuticals, for example). If these countries can exist without falling apart, it's hard to argue that the current (USA, 2018) regime of advertising can be justified -- we are exposed to far too many ads that in aggregate do not really serve a social purpose, and the things that ads prop up (sports, TV, search results, social media) would be even cooler if they weren't under the distortion of advertisement. I don't feel too much regret that I was denied the freedom to watch Marlboro ads on TV.
Advertising is a state within the state of capitalism, but I think it's autonomous enough and fits the pattern well enough to call it a specific form of capitalism. And those of us who have been deprogrammed from ads tend to be the biggest critics of this form of capitalism. Like, for example, me.
Quick story: Throughout college, I mostly watched TV in the form of DVDs, YouTube/etc., streaming services, and torrents. And so it went that, other than NBA games, I hardly saw longform TV ads at all. And I never went back to having a cable box. So, a couple years after graduating, I was looking for an apartment in Milwaukee and got snowed into my hotel room. With nothing better to do, I started watching one of the shows I'd loved when I was torrenting/streaming it. And it was just awful -- suddenly I understood why episodes of House were 42 minutes long -- there were 18 minutes of ads in an hour! I literally could not sit there and watch the ads. I'm not being a snob -- it just felt like an eternity. I literally turned the TV off even though I had nothing better to do. Five years of avoiding ads had completely (and unwittingly) made me viscerally hate them.
Another story, from later that year: When I lived in Milwaukee, the bus system was truly awful in a way that Madison's is not. Let's see: The fare was $2.25 (exact change). The only way to get passes in the whole Wauwatosa area was this one Pick N' Save under a bridge by the Fox River (I think?). The Pick N' Save was way off the bus route, and you could only buy passes a week at a time, and it wasn't like "the clock starts the first time you use it". It was like "June 15-20". And if it was June 18, you were fucked. Luckily, the bus passes were almost never in stock.
I could call this racism (which it absolutely was), or neglect for the poor (yep), or a byzantine system that by design was barely usable (it was all of those things and more).
Or, I could try to justify the way the buses worked, saying "at least there IS a bus system!". After all, it was nice to get to work without calling a taxi, even if I had to cross some awful roads every day. And, hey, with gas prices, $4.50 isn't a horrible amount to pay to get to a solidly middle-class software job. Really. And I'm sure they're working on making it better.
But mostly, over four months of riding the bus to my disastrous new job, I came to see the whole system as a stupid, infuriating waste of everybody's time. It would've been better to have a zero fare -- given the net worth of the companies we were often commuting to, the system would quickly have paid for itself. More importantly, I came to see it not just as a poorly-designed system (or even a maliciously-designed system) but as proof-positive that "economic" systems could never be socially neutral -- that economic systems were always by nature the precursor to or the extension of social systems and hierarchies. And capitalism, to me, started to look more like that bus system (while rich/middle-class people, of course, all drove their own cars to work, which is deeply inefficient and fucked in its own set of ways).
Despite all the contradictions and variation in the different forms of capitalism over the years, the great commonality in all these forms is that there those who (by Nature, or Divine Will, or Market Forces) are "owners" and others who are "owned". The system will always make it as hard as possible to get by in the owned class, even if that oppression doesn't necessarily make the owners any happier.
Fundamentally, the capitalist in me learned to hate capitalism because he believes that people ought to be judged on their merits, not on the merits chosen for them by a social system. People who were born into the Milwaukee ghetto deserve to be able to get to work. And, uh, about that ghetto existing in the first place?
The socialist in me rejects the idea that this merit can ever really be divorced from social systems, and so enforced economic egalitarianism is the only way individuals can ever be given a fair chance of flourishing within society. And honestly, why are individuals so goddamn important, anyway? I could go on for hours abo
The anarchist in me rejects the idea that a state can truly enforce these things without creating a new form of caste which depends on equally brutal violence.
The little fascist voice in my head (think, Hitler on helium) gleefully informs me that he's very happy about the hierarchies every form of liberal capitalism seems to support (including socialists who love US imperialism), but these hierarchies just never go *far enough* for him. He's a real sick fuck. Everyone else wishes we could drown him, but he's always *there*.
And the amateur ecologist in me thinks that this whole discussion rests on the idea that the Earth is going to support humans in 100 years and that's kind of where my analysis breaks down.
I learned to despise TV ads because of a five-year hiatus after basically tolerating them for 20 years. I have the strong sense that no one would miss capitalism in health care after approximately 20 minutes. People would adapt to money and groceries being founded on a more eco-friendly basis. We'd find ways to make buses more livable if everyone had to ride them. We'd find ways to make housing more affordable (and better for everyone) if we couldn't just kick poor people into the streets or out of the city. We'd adapt to city council meetings and presidential elections being less of a captive audience thing and more about representing the will of the electorate, as opposed to the richest developer (or richest venture capitalist) in town. We'd find jobs for people, just as we did after the Great Depression, and I think those jobs would turn into good ones, and jobs that people would take pride in. If we focused our educational system on equity, we'd eventually achieve it, and our kids would end up equitably near the top of the world rankings again, just like Finland or China.
I also think we'd often find ways to make these things oppressive, and exclusionary, and mean. There would be plenty of individuals whose honest beliefs would get ostracized as counter-revolutionary or crypto-fascist. There would be some graft and corruption in the jobs program (maybe no worse than the construction industry today, but), and there would almost certainly still be some racial and gender discrimination. Even if the United States reduced our carbon emissions to zero, we'd find some other way to be obnoxious, murderous, and imperialistic in our decisions. There will probably be a few people out there who have to wait a little longer for some medical procedures.
But as the (very liberal) Vox podcast once pointed out, "Yes, people have to wait in Canada for health care sometimes. But, what they say is that they are alright with it because they know everyone waits in the same line."
As a species, humans are not going to solve species-wide problems until and unless our ruling class and their subjects are one in the same class. Otherwise the conversation will never be "How can we solve this problem?" It will be "How can we escape from this problem and pass it off to those people who ride the buses?"
That is why I think egalitarianism and global governance constitute the only possible solution to climate change. If it is unworkable, so is the human species. Scandinavia managed to survive implementing social democracy. Every country managed to survive abolishing slavery. Every country implemented, then dismantled some form of feudalism as capitalism stepped into the picture. Somehow I think we'll survive if capitalism steps back again. It might not be a pretty transition (these things rarely are) and we may not hit upon the system exactly right the first time. But we are obligated to try.
I don't know what should replace capitalism yet, because we're in frankly uncharted territory, and even the smartest leftists I know often seem to get hung up on quibbles and definitions. Figuring out the system that will replace our form of capitalism will be the great task of our generation and the generation that succeeds us.
Some Good Sources
Corey Robin -- "The Reactionary Mind" is an excellent description of how conservatism grapples with the aftermath of revolution to reassert itself (ex: how Burke realized that France could never go back to the ancien regime)
Barbara & Karen Fields -- "Racecraft" is a great illustration of how hierarchies are naturalized and then become unquestioned common sense, despite being total fictions. The title alludes to witchcraft.
Philip Mirowski -- "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste" lays out the more sophisticated forms that modern "neoliberal" capitalism takes.
Adam Hochschild -- "King Leopold's Ghost" lays out the history of the Belgian Congo. Leopold, in a very modern way, originally framed it as a humanitarian mission.
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