... bruh I run a fucking comm called tankiejerk, I assure you, I am well fucking aware of the faults and flaws of the bureaucratic despotisms of China and the Soviet Union.

When I say it is destructive - and I thought I had pointed this out with unnecessary directness considering the leftist fucking comm we're in, but apparently it was still too subtle for some guests/passers-by who fail to read the sidebar - I mean that it is destructive inherently, as a system, it has no deeper goal. Tyrants and despots throughout history have destroyed, typically for their delusional dreams or petty self-satisfaction. Capitalism, as a system, is oriented around constantly retooling, not just materially, but also organizationally.

Traditionally, societies entrench themselves in their ways of behaving once it's established to be effective enough to survive. Capitalism, as an economic system, upends that because the transfer of power - through currency, which is not traditionally the main conduit of power - becomes extremely rapid and fluid. This means that more efficient solutions are, on a civilizational timescale, very quickly adopted in matters of internal and economic dispute, not just military advancements.

This also means, however, that capitalism is constantly building and rebuilding its own structures; seen in its most grotesque (but arguably not necessary) form as consumerism - this year's model is out of date in a year's time, even though it will function for another ten. Capitalism destroys the old, inefficient system, and replaces it immediately with a newer, more efficient system (or else pisses the money away, since failures are inevitable and capitalism is not a thinking system, it is a self-perpetuating system; "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" and all that).

Capitalism, thus, incurs massive material costs for its increased efficiency of designs - billions of tons of steel are created and then discarded because the rapidly advancing nature of capitalism makes it more cost-effective, under current conditions, to immediately move on to the production of the next, 4% more productive model to stay competitive in the market.

Furthermore, it incurs social costs in that, especially since the period of heightened labor mobility since the 1950s, it freely breaks up traditional social groupings by offering economic incentives for labor to relocate where it is economically needed, not necessarily where it is most useful to general society. Again, this is both good and bad - good when you need traditional social groupings broken up, bad when it's been picking up pace for two centuries now and counting, and we're questioning our ability to create social groupings faster than they're broken up.

Capitalism is destructive, as a system, not as a matter of decisions made or tyrannies enabled, but by its very nature, and this is both good and bad. We are fast approaching, with the efficiency capitalism has lent us, to the point where the bad may overwhelm the good - we are looking at industrial scale production creating shortages of raw material, excesses of pollution, and a rapidly changing climate that threatens economic and ecological devastation.