Got into a little debate about capitalism last night with a co-worker, three points came up that I obviously hit back against but also want to state publicly.

“Capitalism gives equality of opportunity”

No it doesn’t, most rich people are born rich, the hardest work is often the worst paid, the system only functions when we have people without opportunity to exploit.

“The people sleeping on the street are there because of the choices they made”

- rough sleepers are there for many reasons, and rarely was it a simple choice that put them there, abuse from family, mental health struggles, losing a home through no fault of their own, and not enough places to live. I’d say the majority of us were lucky enough to be given the wealth needed to keep a roof over our head, be that education, money, health care from a young age, etc. We could be them tomorrow so be kind ffs.

“We can’t have enough for everyone, it’s impossible”

- no, we totally can, and we don’t even need an idyllic society to do that. We have more than enough resources to meet human needs for every single person and we choose not to.

Don’t drink the poison so willingly people.

@harrym Excellent work! I hope that they've been given a lot to think about!
@Gemma I’m hoping they were playing devils advocate and they don’t actually believe that stuff, especially about being unsympathetic to rough sleepers. But thank you

@harrym “The people sleeping on the street are there because of the choices they made”

Yikes! What's their number? I just want to talk.

@PEGSInstitute they wound it back after the horrified look on my face but they initially said they feel no sympathy for rough sleepers because they are their from their own choices.
@harrym Must be nice to live in the world where bad things only happen to bad people

karma is racist, ageist, sexiest, queerphobic, ablest, and hates the poor.

#FuckKarma

@PEGSInstitute @harrym which is why Kissinger is still alive clearly. Just ignore the millions of dead stacked behind him.

@harrym the one about people sleeping on the street is such a difficult one to read. I spent a few months sleeping rough in my late teens and I can guarantee you that the "choices" that led me there were no more or less stupid than that of any other teenager. The actual forces that drove me there were the random, cruel circumstances that capitalism foists upon people and punishments that drive you from precarity to disaster.

What's more, the circumstances that allowed me to climb back out were AS random as the ones that got me in. It wasn't some hard graft or evidence of character that got me out. It was pure blind luck, and it took me a decade to deal with the financial fallout of those few months. I'm still dealing with the mental trauma.

It's frustrating trying to get across to people that yes, it can and does happen to people, and it's not meritocratic. Nobody deserves to go through that, and the fact that broken housing systems and jobs that pay below the poverty line make it happen is, in fact, EVIDENCE that capitalism causes these things.

Our systems have been divorced from the people they were supposed to assist by financial interests, and it's so destructive. If you don't have years of savings, you can be plucked from relative comfort and have to face our modern dystopia, and most people would do well not to forget it.

@henryneilsen it was very hard to hear as well. I’ve never had to live that live so far, I’m very lucky, but it only takes a moment of talking to people who have had to live though it to see that they are just people who have the same needs we do.

To be fair, once I pushed back on this point they admitted that they hadn’t thought it though.

@harrym Here's where your co-worker's argument gets dangerous.

Women make up slightly more than 50% of the US population. Black Americans make up just under 14% of the US population: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045221

Yet just 4.8% of Fortune 500 companies have a woman as CEO. Source: https://fortune.com/2022/08/03/female-ceos-global-500-thyssenkrupp-martina-merz-cvs-karen-lynch/

Worse, just *six* fortune 500 companies have a black CEO. Source: https://fortune.com/2022/05/23/meet-6-black-ceos-fortune-500-first-black-founder-to-ever-make-list/

(Yes, just six. As in, you could comfortably sit every single Black CEOs from America's 500 biggest companies around a dining table with seats to spare.)

As a percentage of the population, women and Black Americans are massively under-represented in CEO roles.

For your colleague to argue that "capitalism gives equality of opportunity", by extension they would a priori have to make the racist and sexist argument that those massive inequalities in who gets chosen to be a CEO are due entirely to merit.

The truth is that in a patriarchal white supremacist society, capitalism doesn't give equality of opportunity.

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@harrym
Thankfully I only had to rough sleep for one night and I had my fiance with me.
@Picowlo