Excerpt:
Banksy isn’t happy with Guess’ latest collaboration.
The legendary anonymous graffiti artist had a directive for his followers on Friday, encouraging them—possibly tongue in cheek, possibly not—to visit the Regent Street Guess store in London and steal the brand’s new collection that features his artwork.
“Attention all shoplifters. Please go to Guess on Regents Street. They’ve helped themselves to my artwork without asking, how can it be wrong for you to do the same to their clothes?”
Most of the things you’re attributing to capitalism could be solved in a capitalism society, but the real cause is just because survival is hard. We probably agree that too much land is private (I wont go so far to say it shouldn’t be owned), but even when people could find some space in the wilderness and make a home, it was a constant struggle just to survive. Not saying it was worse than modern society for some people, but it wasn’t easy for anyone.
And I’m not saying capitalism is a “good” system, but using American capitalism as an example of the problems with the theoretical implementation of capitalism is as misleading as using China as an example of communism. Both are flawed and corrupt, both have the issues you pointed out, and both could solve them in their own ways. If the upper class wasn’t constantly attacking workers’ rights, most of the problems you listed either wouldn’t exist or wouldn’t be nearly as bad.
The difference is that the ideal form of capitalism as defined by its advocates doesn’t even attempt to solve these issues. A theoretically pure free market capitalist society would still have homeless.
That’s not to say that solutions to homelessness can’t be implemented within a larger capitalist society—clearly they can and I would argue should be. But those solutions will not really be compatible with the ideology of pure capitalism.