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”

Because they benefited from the exploitation of the global south

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.

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.

Because of ideological reproduction (educational systems, media and political discourses) which all normalize capitalist (and materialist, dualist, etc.) worldviews. There’s a lot at stake in defending this as it is the basis of people’s identity and how they construe meaning in life (through work, career, status, consumption). Colonialism has also been an effective project in destroying other worldviews and political systems and labeling them as primitive, backwards, etc.

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.

I think it’s the propaganda of the billionaire-owned media companies. Also, factory owners, landlords and and the greedy ( a small percentage of all the humans) keep the lie alive for obvious reasons.

You probably interact mostly with people living in the west. Most of us in the western world live on significantly more resources than the global average. True equality on the scale of the whole planet means most of us lose our standard of living. If you do it on the basis of just one country, then that creates an incentive for people capable of earning more money in another country, to move to that country. To deal with that, you need to ban people from leaving the country and…

It’s easy to see why communism tends to work best as a dictatorship. You need to use violence to keep the people in line, otherwise they’ll want more than their fair share. Free markets (especially the labor market, being able to choose your own job is pretty nice) give people a sense of agency, even if it’s misplaced.

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 think there is a big discrepancy between what Captialism is defined as, what Capitalism actually is, and the ‘Spirit of Capitalism’ that a lot of folks buy into.

‘The Spirit’ is the idealistic bit. Competition breeding innovation. The better the service/product, the more successful you can be. Classic American Dream stuff.

In reality, its a race to the bottom where all principles and values are eschewed for profit.

Kinda like Communism where what it Should be or what it Could be are different than what we get in practice. And any given person is going to be thinking about it from a different lens, so you get delusional, idealistic, cynical, and occasionally reasonable takes all talking about the ‘same but entirely different’ thing.

Capitalism just had better PR.

Propaganda and suppression of the left was successful and certain crumbs had to be given in the past decades, currently there’s still enough comfort that many will defend their current status. A comfortable person isn’t going to start asking or rocking the boat, it’s in their interest that the boat is on the steady ride.

Deflection, gaslight and disciplining of those who find themselves in the “have not” becomes a way of comforting yourself that the ride was always within your capability and not dependent on the exterior mechanisms or just plain luck to be born in the lineage of “haves”.

It’s a lot simpler than what everyone here is saying tbh. They don’t know what it is. Most of them think capitalism is just markets existing. Or some other random definition they made up in their head. So they’re defending the imaginary version of it that they made up, which of course they like.

successful brainwashing.

If you believe food comes from a field, you will defend the field. If you believe the food comes from the supermarket, you will defend the supermarket.

Those that benefit from it spend a lot of money on trying to make sure the majority of people don’t realise it’s fucking them over