Ask Lemmy

I doubt capitalism is quite so dramatically responsible for the specific developments mentioned. While it does create incentives to develop certain technologies faster there were other structures that were developing things like medicines, sciences and so on before capitalism really took off and things like clean drinking water wasn't really attached to capitalism except for supplying water company data that showed different companies having different death tolls to the people they serviced.

It's important to put capitalism into context. There are a lot of ills but it's a beast of different degrees. Someone running a business where they own the factory and equipment and pay employees for labor can be an efficient practice that can exist harmoniously in a fairly stable system and variations of capitalism are actually very old as it doesn't strictly apply to all privately held property - just off of how labor and investment is structured in some instances. Unchecked it can be a beast that creates abuses.

False dichotomies are currently rampant with things like the philosophy of socialism being seen as anti-capitalist. It's more accurate to say that socialism is a spectrum of interfacing with capitalism that offers a mixed system. It very rarely and only at it's farthest end seeks to stamp out every single instance of private business ownership or investment banking. A lot of thought written aince it's inception shows it's more dynamic in the variable ways it puts checks on what can be considered privately owned resources. Things like offering protections of varying degrees for labour and managing resources to create public wealth are very much throughlines but total dissolution of private property isn't really a given of the philosophy. The capitalism/libralism and socialism are often veiwed as diametrically opposed but its more useful to think of them as demi-linked on a scale that can tip from a fairly medium degree of regulated private ownership and capitalist tolerance to very public property and social ownership based structures. But basically it all still looks at resources through the lens of money and statehood existing.

Communism is more strictly anti-capitalist as it veiws all aspects of private property rights, businesses ownership, investment banking and even currency as things to move beyond. Things capitalism requires to function.

Individual property rights aren't strictly capitalism based. A lot of our modern issues are bases around free market ideas but that is more traceable to the ideas of high individual property focused libralism... Which also isn't historically all bad. At one point libralism was key to creating a more secular society based less off of privileges of patrelinieal titles... But left unchecked it creates a very misanthropic society that keeps claiming things as personal property which were once collective resources, pushing colonialism and creating new power structures just based off different metrics.

It's important I think to retain a good solid idea of where the boundaries of different ideological sources and their historical precedents actually are and not nessisarily be too quick to state one or the other is all bad. The tendency has become that to be considered that ideology every example must be stretched to it's utter extremes to be considered that ideology. There are shallow ends and deep ends of individual systems.

The history of capitalism in a more general sense is often more responsible for creating incentive to hurrying people to an early grave in the history of predatory patent medicine than it strictly is saving people. A lot of the history of scientific and technological development wasn't and still isn't driven strictly by capitalism from a funding and motive standpoint. Public money actually underlies a lot more of the significant developments... But capitalism does have a habit of driving underlying resource chains and more or less the profit driven arm of distribution - which while efficient generally causes a lot of social problems and damages.

Religion also is also not really connected directly with capitalism any more than anything else is. You can very easily have a theocratic capitalist society and generally speaking that was the norm for the early history of capitalism.