Anti-Capitalist Sentiment (with some morality)

[wufwugy]

i think the bolded part is contentious in this context. i understand perfectly what you mean, and i agree it is true in an economic game-theory sense. but the majority of anti-capitalist-folk don't accept the fundamental premises of this capitalist mindset. ie the belief that all agents ought to make decisions based purely on their perceived self-interest , or that other people and their unique skills/traits are purely means-to-ends/commodities, or that the biodiversity/natural processes of the planet ought be secondary considerations to an individuals immediate financial self-interest.

I wouldn't say this follows after "humans are commodities", but people think it does. It's more correctly put as "in an economic system, people behave like commodities". It doesn't matter if we like it, but as facets and actors of an economy, we are commodities, and we'd best understand how to best utilize that reality. Many don't like this fact (or don't know it), but that doesn't change it. Supply and demand is a social phenomenon similar to how gravity is a physical phenomenon. Being moral actors in the economy doesn't mean we can ignore supply and demand, but that we should understand it and use it to better our moral purposes. The anti-capitalist sentiments, which usually call themselves socialist, are against this. If this was physics, their position wouldn't be unlike rejecting the theory of gravity because they think it's wrong that people can fall over

[Renton]

I wouldn't say this follows after "humans are commodities", but people think it does. It's more correctly put as "in an economic system, people behave like commodities". It doesn't matter if we like it, but as facets and actors of an economy, we are commodities, and we'd best understand how to best utilize that reality. Many don't like this fact (or don't know it), but that doesn't change it. Supply and demand is a social phenomenon similar to how gravity is a physical phenomenon. Being moral actors in the economy doesn't mean we can ignore supply and demand, but that we should understand it and use it to better our moral purposes. The anti-capitalist sentiments, which usually call themselves socialist, are against this. If this was physics, their position wouldn't be unlike rejecting the theory of gravity because they think it's wrong that people can fall over

This is a great way of putting what I was trying to illustrate before. Basically, the economy works based on physics-like laws. Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses. That resources are scarce is a reality that can't be altered, despite governments' best efforts. A market that is as free as possible will distribute these resources based on their most valued use, but governments want to divert them to less-valued uses, and this causes major problems.

It's not as if these laws are arbitrary and only apply to a capitalist world. They apply to any society, even a controlled economy like the Soviet Union, and every level of government involvement in between.