capitalists right now are terrified of the spectre of “automation”, which is, ostensibly, an incredibly good thing.
capitalists are writing articles that say “Machines Are Going To Replace All Low-Income Jobs” as if this is somehow a bad thing to be happening
machines taking the grunt work and doing it for us? order takers at restaurants being replaced by tablets? unnecessary work being done for us, automatically? these are all GREAT things!
but under capitalism, this reveals a fatal flaw; the poor cannot exist, cannot subsist, without being fed scraps by the rich. when our jobs are replaced by robots, the rich man has no reason, any longer, to hand us those scraps.
in an ideal world, robots doing trash collection and janitorial work and other such jobs would be a good thing. but under capitalism, it means the decimation and further poverty of the working people.
once again “capitalism is bad because of this thing that it does unimaginably better than everything else”
under capitalism, the low-class and the despised have the ability to sustain their existence by doing useful things, like janitorial work and garbage collection, even though everyone hates them and wants to harm them for existing
under every single other system that can ever possibly exist including and especially your personal vision of your mythical, blessed Real True Communism, the low-class, despised people do not have this ability, and are left in a world where the only salient fact about them is that everyone hates them and wants to harm them for existing.
capitalism does more for them than any other system ever has or ever will, ever, no matter what, because capitalism is the only system where they can be sustained by something other than “how much other people like them”
so of course you hate it and want to destroy it, so you can replace it with a system where people are “cared for”, which means “allowed to exist according solely to how much people care about them being alive”. social entropy is invincible and unstoppable and can never be fought by anyone.
This analysis is half-true at best, and it does a bad job of identifying the actual social virtues of capitalism.
Most pre-capitalist economic systems are, in one way or another, more communitarian. You’re closely tied up with your extended family / your jati / your peasant village / whatever; lots of resources are pooled within that unit, and the unit (acting mostly through its leaders) gets a lot of control over everyone else.
This is actually a lot more egalitarian, resource-wise, than modern atomized capitalism. (Even accounting for the fact that the past contained fewer wealth-centralization technologies, which is of course true.) The units spread wealth around – sometimes through actual communal ownership, sometimes through a ton of mandatory festivals or whatever, sometimes through complicated marriage schemes – rather than letting the most successful individuals hoard it. Even low-skilled people tend to get a reasonable share, because the units like having manpower available, and any asshole can be an asset if you’re allowed to tell him what to do. Plus, everyone is someone’s kid, and it’s not that difficult to become a member of the local big man’s entourage, etc. etc.
The downside, of course, is that you’re embedded in a social unit that will try to run your life. For some people this is fine, or even better than fine, and for some people it’s soul-crushingly terrible. This can be called “the normie spectrum” without losing too much fidelity.
The big winners under atomized capitalism, from a social perspective, are non-normies with valuable skills; they get to benefit from using those skills without having to share the wealth, and they’re not subject to the social politics of people who don’t like or understand them. The big losers are low-skilled people who would otherwise receive subsidies from a communitarian social unit and who would thrive under its politics.
That last group of people is real. It is not a fiction. Many of the soon-to-be-displaced probably belong to that group. And they’re not wrong to say “we would do better under a system where we would matter to someone by virtue of participating in a social structure, and we are doing worse under a system where the free market makes us literally disposable to everyone.”