The reality is nobody is hired to decide why things are done. Under capitalism, the why is to make profits, to increase shareholder value, if you will. That's it.
You don't plan what you don't control, you don't control what you don't own. For the vast majority (yes, including engineers), the only thing we own that is a part of the whole process of capitalist production is our ability to do some kind of work. When that ability is sold (for a wage/salary) to whoever possesses the resources to decide the why, we forego the right to decide how it's used. Just like when you sell someone a chair for example, you don't get to tell them where and how they can use that chair.
You can refuse to get or do this or that job, but you need to have a job. At the end of the day, we all need food and shelter to stay alive and the bills aren't gonna pay themselves. So ultimately, someone—among the vast majority of us who don't have a choice—will also have to do the job you refuse. So we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking we have some sort of "superpower". We don't. That is, not unless we can collectively withold our ability to work and force the hand of the minority that actually decides why things are done.
A society where those who do the work decide why and how it's done, is a society where the working people own the resources. That is communism. That world is possible, but it won't build itself, you have to tirelessly fight for it. Look over at marxist dot com if you want to help out [1].
That doesn't mean that in the meantime we shouldn't strive to find meaningful work that fit with our values. We should, and whoever manages to find that good for you! You've been lucky (for now) but you won't be forever, and even if you are to be, the vast majority of people with pretty much the same skills and conditions as you, actually won't. We actually have to transform society if we want to secure that for ourselves and for everyone else.
Attributing "capitalism" to the increase of value to "shareholders" is a mischaracterization of capitalism. It's the only system that has worked for one singular reason:
People want more value for more work. If I work 12 hours picking potatoes and have to give 3/4 of them "according to my need" I will refuse to work. If you create fake jobs like "bolt counter" to insure 100% employment so the means can justify the ends (as communism believes) you end up with a collapsing economic system.
The current iteration of late-stage capitalism is not capitalism _at large_. It's feudalism clever disguised as an egalitarian economic system. The solution to this is not communism, it's undoing 100 years of stock-market oriented business design. We don't know what "late-stage" communism looks like simply because a revolution occurs several hundred years before it reaches that point. Not even the premiere implementers of communism, the Russians, could keep their system.
It doesn't work. In any country, in any system, with any group of people larger than 4.
In a free market, you aim to increase your market share and push out your competitors. That's how monopoly are formed. Not by some perversion of the "pure" principles of the free market, but as a logical outcome of it. Turn back the clock to whenever you want in the course of capitalism, the same conditions with the same logic will drive you back to the same results.
I agree, but theres historical examples of markets in non-capitalist systems. Graeber's Debt makes a fun point that the two are at odds even, because like you say, capital really wants monopolies, which is the opposite of a free market. So by extention, if you support a free market you must on some level reject capitalism.
I find it interesting and somewhat relieving how many normal people are 'pro capitalism but anti shareholder'. Which means that its mostly an outreach and organization problem. If you are anti-shareholder you're by definition anticapitalist but you just don't know it yet.
Which is why the powers that be have to pass things like this: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/118/hr5349/text/eh to keep people confused, and to conflate being opposed to shareholders (capitalism) with support for authoritarianism etc.
Don't fall for the trap of accepting "late-stage capitalism" as a valid concept - it's a made-up term that has no concrete or meaningful definition and is used by Marxists to constantly move goalposts and impute bad things into our functional (if suboptimal) economic system.
Zero evidence or explanation provided, meaning that it's far more likely that GP is making good points that you cannot respond to.
> here's an FAQ [1] that can help clarify what terms like capitalism, communism, feudalism, profit, etc. actually mean
This is a lie. Marxists intentionally repurpose and distort language, especially language around markets and governance structures, to deceive others into falling for their murderous and completely infeasible ideology. These are not what those terms "actually mean" - those are how Marxists use those terms. Claiming that those are what those terms "actually mean" or that that's how other people use them is false and deceptive.
You don't plan what you don't control, you don't control what you don't own. For the vast majority (yes, including engineers), the only thing we own that is a part of the whole process of capitalist production is our ability to do some kind of work. When that ability is sold (for a wage/salary) to whoever possesses the resources to decide the why, we forego the right to decide how it's used. Just like when you sell someone a chair for example, you don't get to tell them where and how they can use that chair.
You can refuse to get or do this or that job, but you need to have a job. At the end of the day, we all need food and shelter to stay alive and the bills aren't gonna pay themselves. So ultimately, someone—among the vast majority of us who don't have a choice—will also have to do the job you refuse. So we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking we have some sort of "superpower". We don't. That is, not unless we can collectively withold our ability to work and force the hand of the minority that actually decides why things are done.
A society where those who do the work decide why and how it's done, is a society where the working people own the resources. That is communism. That world is possible, but it won't build itself, you have to tirelessly fight for it. Look over at marxist dot com if you want to help out [1].
That doesn't mean that in the meantime we shouldn't strive to find meaningful work that fit with our values. We should, and whoever manages to find that good for you! You've been lucky (for now) but you won't be forever, and even if you are to be, the vast majority of people with pretty much the same skills and conditions as you, actually won't. We actually have to transform society if we want to secure that for ourselves and for everyone else.
[1] https://marxist.com/about-us.htm