The core concept of capitalism is that capital works for you. It separates earning money from working. If you have enough starting capital, you don’t have to work at all, because you can hire people to work for you and you can even hire people to do the hiring for you. You can even abstract all that away by not hiring but instead investing, and you can even pay someone to do that for you.
If you have money in a capitalist society, you don’t need to work, and if you don’t have money, you can work all you want and you will still not become rich.
On the other hand, the American Dream says that if you just work hard enough, you will be successful, you will make it, you will become rich, no matter whether you have money and contacts or not.
These two ideas directly conflict each other.
American Capitalism, with its abundance of neoliberalism, works on the premise that given no external involvement, the market will take care of itself. Companies will make products that people like, or will be out competed.
The American dream extends from that idea that workers can work wherever they want and have completely free movement. So if someone is smart or a hard worker, they have plenty of opportunities and will eventually be successful.
In reality, neither of the above are true. Markets are not capable of taking care of themselves, e.g., because there is inertia, inelasticity, and barrier to entry for many high-capital businesses. Government has propped up most “desirable” large industries through heavy subsidies and tax breaks, like oil, farming, telecom, and tech. Workers do not have free movement, some from self inertia to want to stay close to roots, family, friends, but mostly from the same neoliberal policies that remove social safety nets and fail to provide everyone the basic necessities.
Add to that the fact that a solely money based capitalist system has no ability to measure environmental degradation, wealth inequality, or population satisfaction. And the government is more than happy to step in when it’s businesses being hurt vs people - think too big to fail or propping up businesses during covid/after natural disasters.
Even if a true capitalist system were allowed to exist, it is ultimately anti-competitive. A business in a segment that’s doing well will slowly acquire other businesses in the segment to become a monopoly. Eventually the monopoly will keep growing and acquire the largest businesses in other segments. Besides regulations, technology disruptions can break this cycle but those are fairly rare, and are mostly a recent and likely short lived phenomenon.
Finally, capitalism requires economy and population to keep growing, in the absence of which, there is complete stagnation of movement and the system will collapse into feudalism.
Anyway, I think you are both right and wrong. Capitalism as people imagine it to be feeds into the ideal of the American Dream. But both true capitalism and its reality actively thwart it, by closely interlinking the economic system with the political.
murkkka should not exist
When do we reach the point where we get to post-scarcity and that we no longer work for money, instead we just try to make society better as a whole for our common goal à la Star Trek?
We are already post scarcity. The resources simply aren’t distributed properly or are wasted because of profit seeking. We only get a moneyless society far after the revolution. (So probably not in our lifetime unfortunately)
No they don’t conflict; they’re symbiotic.
The “American dream” was dreamed up by rich capitalists to encourage poorer people to work harder, longer hours, and to do so with as little grumbling as possible. Couple it with the “rite of passage” mentality - i.e. working super shitty conditions because everyone else had to do the same - then it’s the perfect indoctrination needed to convince people that their hardships are their own failures and not the system’s.
Another, simpler, way to look at it is that the “American Dream” is a carrot on a very long stick that is dangled in front of us to encourage us to move forward with their capitalist agenda while making us think we’re getting a reward for our labor.
The American Dream is capitalist propaganda, not anticapitalist.
Sure it is, no question. But if you take it seriously, it is completely not compatible with capitalism.
America is not a capitalist society. It is a clasical liberal society. The core concept is you can work for whatever you want and thus obtain it.
Nope. That’s just the propaganda.
The American Dream is inherently capitalist, it being a myth doesn’t change that.
The crux of the American Dream is that you have to suffer on the bottom of the totem pole, but eventually you’ll get the chance to be on top and exploit the others on the bottom. The American Dream is very useful to the capitalist class because it gives people motivation to stay in the rat race, to believe that they have a stake in capitalism as a system, because one day their hard work will be rewarded and they will be a capitalist as well.
Outside of the context of capitalism, the American Dream doesn’t really make sense. If realizing that it’s a lie helps push people to the left, that’s good and should be encouraged, but I don’t think that makes the Dream itself anticapitalist.
The purpose of the dream/myth is capitalistic, but if you analize its contents like OP you end with ironic conclusions. You are both right.
They don’t necessarily conflict.
The worker works and slowly earns more money and contacts. Eventually, he can earn enough to take over or start his own company, and build up the next generation of workers turned owners.
Of course, we know this isn’t really how it works, but that’s why they call it a dream.
They call it the “American Dream “ because you have to be asleep to believe it.
That is only the case if the system is not capitalistic in nature, meaning that capital trumps work.
That’s the significant feature of capitalism over prior systems: Capital is more important than anything else.
Social mobility is a bug in capitalism, not a feature. Because if you have social mobility, then the rules aren’t loose enough so that capital trumps everything.
There’s a reason it’s called capitalism and not meritalism.
Luckily capitalism is not a binary thing and we don’t have pure capitalism.
Kind of like playing the lottery and expecting to win.
