I want to upvote this, but there are 2 serious problems with this post.
The way you demonize the people who’ve done well with the system as evil (e.g. Musk, Gates, Bezos) prevents me from doing that. I may have more issues with the latter, and the first two certainly are far from perfect, but capitalism has allowed them to achieve things and drive innovation and adoption on a scale that would be unthinkable without our societal obsession with efficiency and productivity. I too want to escape this daily grind, but in order to do so, I believe we need to achieve escape velocity. Which leads to the second missing point.
You never answer your own question. What is the point of capitalism? Capitalism is a bootstrapping mechanism. A particularly long and drawn out one, but a bootstrapping mechanism. It has given us greater societal wealth than any other system before it — and yes, I agree completely that the wealth we create needs to be divided more evenly than it has been. But the profit motive does still work to achieve further wealth growth, and to pretend otherwise is disingenious. More than anything, the profit motive works for investments, since labour is a captive and inflexible commodity with poor bargaining power (like health care). Even with unions that tend towards monopsony, that similarly malignant counterpart to monopoly. When you listen to people like Musk speak, they don’t speak of maximizing profits. They speak of building a future they want to see come to fruition. The tools given to them via capitalism are imperfect — and quite likely bring out their worst sides too. What if Musk could focusing on being a great design engineer, as he’s admitted he mostly tries to be during his working hours, rather than being multiple CEOs at once? Capitalism is imperfect, but let’s at least acknowledge the positive mechanisms it has given individuals and society; and by doing so ensure that the next system doesn’t scrap the good as well as the bad.
Like feudalism organized land and improved land productivity over subsistence farming, let’s not pretend capitalism has given us nothing. And let’s remember its benefits while we design the next system which ultimately frees us, once again, from toil and allows the pursuit of a liberal and just society. One where building big projects isn’t required or demonized.
