If you believe food comes from a field, you will defend the field. If you believe the food comes from the supermarket, you will defend the supermarket.
It’s a lot simpler than what everyone here is saying tbh. They don’t know what it is. Most of them think capitalism is just markets existing. Or some other random definition they made up in their head. So they’re defending the imaginary version of it that they made up, which of course they like.
In fact the Epstein class wants you to be miseducated about capitalism. They have class consciousness and want that we don’t.
It is worse, most people equate capitalism with the monetary system and get confused how they could buy something without capitalism.
Because the last 50-100 years of Western political-economic development (especially, but it goes back longer than that to a lesser degree, and is more prevalent in America) has “bourgeoisified” vast swathes of the population, to the extent that there is not even a handful of causes but an entire ecosystem of hundreds of them.
A proletarian is at it’s most basic a person who owns next-to-nothing. The archetypical proletarian rents an apartment, takes public transit, works without a contract, does not own his own tools, and holds no shares in stock. While peasant revolts did occasionally happen, even the minor allowances given to the peasant class in some countries - virtual land ownership; livestock, tool, and vehicle ownership; and a thriving middle class of landholding, employing peasants - were enough to completely neuter revolutionary sentiment among the peasants.
Policies which “buy common people into” the system of Capitalism are what lead them to supporting the system or, at least, opposing its complete dissolution. To avoid writing an entire essay, I’m just going to list some of the policies that I believe contribute to the bourgeoisification of Western workers:
(1). Invested retirement funds instead of pensions
(2). Suburban home ownership
(3). 13% of Americans are part of the employing class
(4). Car culture over usable public transit
(5). Valorization of the “small business owner”
(6). The death of shop-floor Union organizing in favor of “union-as-a-service”
(7). Domination of unions by labor-aristocratic forces, and the resulting ties to liberal political parties
(8). The offloading of economic extraction onto colonized peoples, including so-called “internal colonies” of racial minorities and immigrants, whose political rights are suppressed.
(9). Voter suppression more generally - it is more difficult for poorer people to vote than wealthier people
(10). Control of media, including social media, by the middle and upper classes. You are more likely to see bourgeoise perspectives reflected not only on legacy media but most forms of social media as well (think small business tyrants and their wives posting on NextDoor, Facebook, etc., or “influencers” on youth media).
And so many more reasons.
Those that benefit from it spend a lot of money on trying to make sure the majority of people don’t realise it’s fucking them over
Because they’ve been taught it’s the best system and only one that works.
Propaganda and suppression of the left was successful and certain crumbs had to be given in the past decades, currently there’s still enough comfort that many will defend their current status. A comfortable person isn’t going to start asking or rocking the boat, it’s in their interest that the boat is on the steady ride.
Deflection, gaslight and disciplining of those who find themselves in the “have not” becomes a way of comforting yourself that the ride was always within your capability and not dependent on the exterior mechanisms or just plain luck to be born in the lineage of “haves”.
The majority of people are resistant to change in general and can’t imagine a better world than what they know. The majority of people are focused on themselves without looking at the big picture.
Because capitalists can afford all of the bot farms and media adds.
It really makes you actually understand the whole, “the revolution will not be televised”
I was born into the US and was a liberal for most of my life. I can explicitly tell you why so many of my countrypeoples defend capitalism:
Because they have the political education of an infant. You are told from a young age by everyone you trust that communism is bad and you never EVER get told the truth. There is absolutely no grand structure for learning about politics that isn’t reactionary in nature.
What’s left is an infinitesimal number of people with both the requisite curiosity and social opportunity to break out of liberal thinking. Most people are ingrained and never challenged their entire lives.
The incentives for supporting capitalism and rejecting communism are powerful and alluring in this country. But it is not an excuse. The books are out there. You absolutely must read.
They get told all those horror stories about ‘the others’ who hate us for our freedoms and want to rule the world, where they have to work real hard and still can’t afford a house, and the regeeeem is spying on them all the time.
We wouldn’t want to live like that would we?Decades of intense cultural manipulation and suppression of any pro-communist media. Also, the whole economic base affecting the superstructure thingimajig.
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conditioning
Because they benefited from the exploitation of the global south
I think in some way capitalism is tied up with technological advancement and we like that. We probably shouldn’t because it will be our undoing, but we do.
