Capitalism is easy to understand. You do something and you get something - even if you cheat by “outsmarting” someone else. The reward is tied to your actions. Like doggy treats. At no point is it revealed that your effort might be worth more than you get. This doesn’t matter because it appears as a direct transaction. Work = pay. It’s not though, but that’s what it appears like to anyone who doesn’t think further than to getting their paycheck.

Socialism disconnects the transactions. Roughly put, the work that everyone puts into the system is used to pay out to everyone. You’re no longer working directly for the hand that feeds you.

Like many places elsewhere, Denmark has social security system that sort of works like this. Everyone pays taxes and the pool of money is distributed to those who needs it, based on all kinds of things other than what people paid into the system themselves. It disconnects the effort and the payout.

This has good and bad effects in comparison to capitalism. A bad thing is that people who don’t understand the larger picture will still look at it from a transactional point of view. Suddenly they think they deserve to get free money, and start making up their own explanations of why. They’ll also look at it as a zero sum game, where they believe that if anyone else gets something then they must also have the same or else they’d feel that other people take more than they deserve. All kinds of racism and fasicm grows in those capitalistic arguments when applied to a social system.
The good thing though is that they’re actually right in saying that they deserve more even if they don’t contribute. Everyone deserves more than nothing from a system. It’s possible, because it’s not a zero sum game. It raises the lower bar, and keeps more people healthy and thus capable of producing more.

There’s this quote “a greatness of a nation can be measured by how it treats the poorest”. It’s a mis-quote, but it’s true. Capitalism can not achieve the same when there’s no lower boundary to poverty. It will still have the costs of sickness, homelessness and poverty even if it tries not to pay for it by closing their eyes. A socialist system is the key the solving this. So maybe we do sometimes pay people who doesn’t deserve it, but it’s still cheaper than to have to pay for the costs of the problems in capitalism.

Three big reasons:

1. Capitalism thrives on the promise of social elevation. You can become billionaire too, you know, you just have to put in the work and be smart. And many are willing to sacrifice their living standards for the hope of making it big, however unlikely the latter is.

2. Capitalism is a current economic system in the majority of places, and most people are afraid of the change. They’d rather maintain the status quo - this is why, for example, socialist countries had majority of the population supporting socialism - not because they got enlightened to its potential, but because they already lived under it.

3. Privately owned media. Most people get their information from the corporate platforms, which, being owned by wealthy individuals benefitting heavily from capitalism, obviously downplay the horrors of capitalism and exacerbate issues of socialism. It is them who propel the “hope” narrative (see point 1) and thwart any serious attempts to popularise socialism. Even if you manage to host socialist media on socialist platforms and outplaying the algorithms, good luck getting corporate funding to make quality content with high level of reach when your platform is anti-corporate.

Decades of totalizing propaganda, along with merciless suppression of alternatives.

In the US specifically, capitalism has been taught as the only way towards success. This has happened for decades, at least. It is deeply engrained in that society.

When capitalism fails, as has been apparent so many times lately, it is blamed on something else. And as the excuses run out, the scapegoats get more and more inventive.

That’s one reason why the current administration wants to you blame immigrants for everything: because it buys more time for the capitalists to make more money and shift the narrative again.

Short answer: people are dumb and gullible

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.

conditioning

Because they benefited from the exploitation of the global south

People use the word “capitalism” to mean different things.

If you ask someone “Should someone who doesn’t do any work get money from people who do?”, a lot of people would say no. And they’d probably think you’re talking about welfare or communism. But that’s capitalism. The guy who “owns” the company can sit at home and watch netflix while all his office workers make stuff, and he keeps the profits. If you frame it right, you can get people to agree with you or suffer some cognitive dissonance.

But none of that is what some people are thinking of when they think capitalism. They think “free markets” and “competition”. They often don’t really think about how that trends towards monopolies or cartels. Either because of magic, or “the government will prevent monopolies.” But not too much regulation. There’s got to be a few decades of suffering before an intervention, typically.

There’s also a lot of binary thinking. Either capitalism, or total state ownership and oppression.

What’s capitalism?

It feeds many.

People fear change and the unknown. That makes one cling to whatever is familiar, even if it’s causing suffering. It takes effort to zoom out and see the big picture and how many problems can be traced back to capitalism.

It makes sense. Most people have no idea about most of it. You have stuff. You buy and sell stuff. Ezpz.

Any alternative is demonised and fought about and undermined and misinformation’d.

I saw something really interesting the other day…

In our society, being good or bad depends on your net worth. If you’re rich, you are good. If you’re poor you’re bad.

Poor people know they can’t be good by being rich. They actually never even interact with actual rich people. Classes don’t really interact with each other in our society.

But what they get access to is the rich man’s ideology. Or what they think rich people are (what they actually see is the petit bourgeoisie, the lower capitalist class. Their bosses are the lower rung of the capitalists. Or the upper rung of the working class. Small business owners, management etc).

But the poor can at least be on the same team as the rich, fight for the same things, and in that way at least be on the “good side”.

They try to approximate goodness by ideology. They try to get closer to “good” by fighting in the name of the “good people”.

Then of course the actual rich people defend capitalism because it’s beneficial to them, materially.