/lit/ - Literature

Yes. I work for a living and invest my money in the stock market to protect it from inflation.

No

>>12730151
More like CRAPitalist haha

>>12730195
based

>>12730158
>I work for a living
Not sure if that means anything in particular. You just say you work and receive money, I suppose. Or do you mean you live to work, i.e. sort of like the American mentality?

I'd argue that to call yourself a capitalist also means to support the system. Distributing your wealth and investing is just an analytical strategy. You don't need to like capitalism to curate and optimize what you have. That's but a potentially smart time investment you can go for, being part of the system.

A capitalist would have a positive opinion about the market and how it relates to society. Or, if he/she is a bit more sociopathic, might argue it's the best system for him/her, given that it allows a certain level of freedom to climb up (at least within the frame that the ideology lays out - given that "up" is defined w.r.t. to other people and the broader circumstances of man in the world)

>>12730151
No, although I also don't think any sort of communist utopia is possible in my lifetime. In part because that requires violence, and the history of violence makes it so that nobody views the current situation (when the capitalists have been killed or whatever) as utopian society.
However, my criticism of capitalism are bourgeois in the sense that I'm actually very well of within it. There is however a point to be made, that capitalism might fuck up the world, in the long run (e.g. in the resource and climate sense), more than other systems could.
And while I work in tech, I don't think technological progress is even necessarily a good thing. For example, the obsession with curing cancer is a meme. Of course, nobody wants their loved ones die, but overall people live long enough I'd say.

>>12730151
No and neither am marxist. I dont have answers but I still believe there should be something else besides the so called virtues in capitalist society. All those variants of marxists from critical theory and postmodernist thinkers are right in some things. Living in this world is not that great. We are thrown into it and instead of trying to figure it out we make everything not only complicated but but psychopathic. The whole system is based on something intrinsic to humans and it is viewed as capitalist virtues although all other systems are based on human nature also so that argument was never that great.

To me it seems it is inevitable that humans will go into extremes the more one system is established until we end in dystopia. We may try to slow it down and control it but it is inevitable, like battling the time against death. I dont know the answer and no honest capitalist or critic knows it either. The thing that came to my mind would be some system that is based on cycling the best working economic models but I have no idea how to establish that without destruction. Otherwise maybe it is a rush against time, either we become something nonhuman a posthuman like transhumanism or we destroy ourselves because there is still the axiom of that when one can one will and it will happen in time.

Humans will exploit everything once they figure it out. It is humans nature in a way but that nature is also what gives us tools and makes us ponder about things. I dont want this to go into another topic so I would say I dont really like capitalism and wish we would have something that tried to be more virtuous instead of something that is eroding all meaning and just infinity growth, consumerist, no community or ponder about things individualistic system based on the fact that a lot of people must be constantly suffering so other can have wealth. I just dont believe marxism and communism is the answer.

>>12730216
I’m first replier
You raise multiple good questions. I didn’t even think about it that deeply. I suppose I really am just taking part in the system because it’s the best route to a comfortable life. I have no emotional or ideological attachment to the free market. I am simply for whatever system gives me the best chance to provide for myself, and that system just happens to be capitalism. If that makes sense

No, since i don´t own any means of production

>>12730262
>I am simply for whatever system gives me the best chance to provide for myself, and that system just happens to be capitalism.
This response prompts to further questioning and relates to what I said about the framework.
Capitalism means "you are to put in a life's work of effort" to end up with a surgeons salary at the end (this holds true for 99.99% of all wagies), while it permits those born into wealth to invest, found and then even expand over the monetary distance to the general working class.
The communist utopia has no money (or state, for that matter), at all. So it's not a consistent claim to make that capitalism is the system "that give you the best chance". That's an idea you mistakenly make from within the system, looking at the effort it would take to overcome it.
But as Fisher cites, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.