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I'm not sure whether prioritizing profit above all else is necessarily part of capitalism. I can imagine a world where businesses have a different top priority.
by proc0 3y ago
I'm not sure whether prioritizing profit above all else is necessarily part of capitalism. I can imagine a world where businesses have a different top priority. A business can still survive without cancer-like growth that reaches global levels with tens of thousands of employees and lobby groups. Of course, that world would require every business to agree and not pursue profit, otherwise the ones that do will out-compete the rest. It seems like a much deeper problem than capitalism, and one that is being mitigated the most by capitalism if we compare it to the previous economic systems.
- CrackerNews 3y agoPrioritizing profits is a part of capitalism. Capitalism is simply the private ownership of the means of production, but the interests of the capital owner are to use capital to accumulate wealth, which leads to exploitation of labor being a method. This is especially so versus the falling rate of growth as an industry matures. The tendency of capitalism then is to consolidate into an oligarchy of major dominant corporations and conglomerations, which is that aforementioned cancerous growth. Capitalism won out over previous modes because it outcompeted them. Granting laborers some economic power (as opposed to slavery or serfdom) turned out to be an enabler for economic growth. In the example of WFH, markets could end up winning out in the end as new telework industries outcompete the prior office commute industries. This could end up enabling innovation to be untethered and accelerate.