You’re preaching to the converted.

I didn’t advocate for capitalism. I said “even if” we stop short of ending it.

Upending the entire structure of modern society is no small task. If the only way you know how to think about solving problems is in absolutes, you’ll rarely fix anything. If every medical professional insisted on having a fully stocked operating room before they so much as touched a patient, a lot of people would die in ambulances.

You have to learn to think in terms of both big and small solutions. You have to be capable of advocating for total systemic reform and incremental improvements at the same time, not least because every incremental improvement that eases the boot of capitalism off of people’s necks a tiny bit allows more people the time and financial freedom to actually become involved in the greater cause of total systemic reform.

We would stop short of ending capitalism because it is extremely entrenched and it is easier to fix it than replace it. Also because making a massive change like ‘ending capitalism’ (however that looks) opens society up to exploitation by external parties applying a kind of “shock doctrine” to ensure that whatever replaces it is to their benefit.

The primary merit of capitalism is that it theoretically does not require central planning but self-organizes into a functional system.

However, fundamentalists like Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan believe (or at least espoused the idea) that, without central planning, these systems self-organize into some kind of optimal state. That’s the Ayn Randian wet dream, but we can clearly see that it is far from the truth, at least from the standpoint of societal and environmental well-being. (E. Ron Muskard and Jeff Bozo might disagree.)

One of the things communism and laissez-faire capitalism have in common is that neither properly account for human greed.

Adam Smith believed that people know what they need better than any central planner, and I agree with that. The role of the central planner is to ensure that excessive greed, short sighted and anticompetitive behaviour does not hinder the self-organizing aspects of capitalism. However the various central planners (read: governments) in any globalist, neoliberal country, pay lip service to this role, at best. Because of that reform will be difficult to achieve since government considers corporations to be constituents and are thus beholden to them.

I don’t know if it’s possible to ‘end inequality’ but we do need to set limits on how unequal things can get. Nobody should be so poor that they are miserable and nobody should be so wealthy that they can leverage their wealth to generate more wealth without providing a sustainable, long-term net benefit to society. A key point is that the market would no longer decide what is a benefit to society, since it clearly isn’t equipped to do that. Another key point is that unnecessary power hierarchies do more harm than good and governments shouldn’t be shy about dismantling them, including within their own structures.

I think an anarcho-syndicalist society with minimal power structures to maintain rule of order would be just fine, but I don’t see a clear path to get there without a major change of public perception. Sadly time is not on our side.

Anyway, those are my somewhat disjointed thoughts on the subject. You may not agree on all points but I think we can agree that the economic theories that have shaped our society will be our downfall if left unchallenged.