That's kind of the point. Everyone's life gets better.

Then everyone has won…?

I’m making the assumption, and I know it’s correct from past experiences, that you have fallen for the capitalist propaganda of basically “there has to be a underclass in order for YOU to have a nice/decent life. If you advocate for making things equal, you advocate for bringing yourself down, essentially.”

I could be an asshole (but correct) and compare this to the same ideology of white supremacists of the past and still today who essentially said “rights for non-whites means you have less rights.” This is basically half of YouTube now days with a mixture between inserting women, LGBTQ people, and non-white people/PoC gaining slightly more political power and white (mostly) cishet dudes crying about some perceived slight against them.

But I won’t do that. [inserting the third world very broadly for one of the aforementioned marginalized groups domestically].

What I will say instead is simply: that assumption is wrong and it’s propaganda told to you in a way to illicit fear, firstly, and secondly to crush whatever humanity exists within you and harden yourself to the fundamental problems of the world, brought on mostly to benefit the first world, and yes that means the poor of the first world as well to a degree.

The easiest way to alleviate any reservations is pretty simple if you understand magnitudes and waste. Magnitudes as far as a hypothetical person making (in USD for simplicity) $1000 a year vs $10000 vs $100000. Ten times factors. Pretty big differences. But when you consider there are humans who acquire wealth 100 times, 1000x, 1000000x (100K x 1M = 100B) purely from doing not laboring but rather shoving numbers around (at best). Does Elon Musk or Bezos labor a million times harder than some guy making $100K a year? What about someone in the third world who may get $10K equivalent a year? Does he work 10 fucking million times harder? It’s absurd on the face of it! What’s my point? Short version: you, possibly $100k guy, are insanely closer to $10k than either of you are, combined, to even low level capitalists but especially the billionaires. This does not justify the existence of millionaires either. And did I mention they don’t fucking labor for their wages? In the US you specifically have capital gains taxes (on stocks and such) and then you have earned income taxes (kinda gives the game away huh?). The names themselves betray the nature of capital gains as unearned income. These people very obviously have high interests in keeping the system the way it is. So they tell you “you like your life? It’s ok huh? Well, if you advocate for mr $10k guy, guess what? Maybe you’ll get it. But you’ll make $50k and so will he.” Conveniently never entering into the equation are those who suck value from society and hoard it for their benefit.

And I’m kinda tired of typing, so, shortly on waste. Think of all the time energy and wealth of nations, drained from their human populations, poured into war, bullshit means tested programs, purposeful waste to keep commodity prices high, the list is essentially infinite. Capitalism is waste. By design. When you have a system centered around increasing profits as to enrich the capitalists then you by necessity will ignore more efficient but less profitable options. I mean the easiest thing I can probably point at in the US is the complete lack of mass transit which is insanely efficient in favor of personal vehicles which is insanely wasteful. One makes auto companies money and one obviously does not. Again, infinite examples of poorly implemented societal solutions. Not having Nationalized healthcare, insanely wasteful. Same for no public housing. You cut allllll this waste, you cut out the capitalists, and I hope you see that there is absolutely no reason everyone on earth can’t live a life of dignity and respect. We already have all the technology we need. We just have to remove the biggest impediment to achieving it… the vampiric class of capitalists.

Then everyone gets rich, because the rich are everyone

I'd imagine you'd want a constant state of revolution to keep the party honest. I don't know much theory and this is my limited understanding.

We appreciate good faith questions and engagement at Lemmygrad. If that is why you are here, welcome; we do not want to put you off. However, your question/post/comment includes problematic claims/statements that are not conducive to good faith discussion. The problem might be: anti-communism, historical inaccuracy, revisionism, reactionary talking points, bigotry, liberal propaganda, a loaded question, assuming that we will all agree about what you might think are uncontroversial facts, or something else. If you re-word your question we can have a more productive conversation.

( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning )

*if

And at this point the answer is basically "who cares cuz it doesn't happen anyway to any meaningful degree"

You're wrong. You're completely making up a new definition that isn't based on anything

Where did you learn that "workers owning means of production" is capitalism? Geniunely curious lol

I am at a loss of words for what you said. The one on the left is the central tenant of Marxism.

You know your “capitalism” will inevitably turn into “corporate capitalism.” If there is a free market and competition then there will be winners and losers and the winners will grow larger while the losers disappear. Eventually there will be so few competitors that monopolies will form which are able to charge monopoly prices while paying workers almost nothing. We define this monopoly version of capitalism as imperialism, but if you describe it as crony capitalism you still can recognize that capitalism will inevitably evolve that way.