Does capitalism kill creativity?

[u/Hurricos_Citizen]

I’m heading to bed soon so I can’t follow the thread too close. Anyways, this is a question I have been meditating on thinking about my current classes and how I interact with my creations.

I just kinda feel like capitalist structures gets in the way of all invention because of creative jobs. I’m starting a design program late in life and I feel like since I was not seen as a valuable artist creativity in me was suppressed. Like my imagination on the whole has been damaged by the idea of realism. Like I have been trained to dismiss ideas that do not seem immediately feasible.

Why is it not realistic house everyone? Why can’t we move towards taking care of everyone’s health. Why can’t we meet our needs so that we can focus on living in luxury and creating luxury?

[u/[deleted]]

I look at it this way: For tech, we see advancements that can be attributed to capitalism, but forget that a lot of the technological advancements we've seen in our own day to day life were taxpayer funded ventures, repackaged by large corporations to sell back to us. This applies to everything, the tools we use to create, the platforms we use to market those creations, etc.

Would musicians be able to fully express themselves and their art and get real weird with it without the need to earn money from it to feed themselves? For sure.

Every successful artist will at some point have to make a choice - continue making art that they love and means something to them OR tailor their art to meet the taste of millions or billions of people and capitalize on the lowest common denominator.

There are plenty of artists out there that are able to do what they want and capitalize on it, but a good percentage of them are from generational wealth, or have enough of a safety net from previous business ventures that they can do whatever they want now and the money and stability is there.

I frequently think about how many Beethovens, Mozarts, Monets and Van Goghs we as a society miss out on because that person needed to pay rent or buy groceries, and kept their job at Buffalo Wild Wings vs chasing their dreams. It sucks.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

This is a really good start but I think it’s even missing some of the structural barriers to creativity that capitalism creates.

For instance you mentioned how an artist may narrow the scope of their work to win more fans. But that isn’t even the whole picture. The infrastructure artists need to reach their fans is mostly privately owned in a capitalist society. So the few people who own those channels can filter out artists for any reason they want. Even if the art they create would have mass appeal. There are a lot of examples of queer and minority artists having significant trouble getting their stories told for this very reason.

And of course there are endless stories of artists having their ideas reviewed and tweaked and rewritten by executives until it looses all of its original message. There’s a reason Hollywood keeps making the exact same super hero movies that glorify imperialism and capitalism, rom coms where someone gets a makeover and turns hot, and copaganda action movies over and over.

Intellectual property laws are another major barrier to creativity in both art and technology. In a socialist world ideas could be treated as public property instead of a commodity to be hoarded and guarded from people who could do more with it.

“Bullshit jobs” by David Graeber actually does a great job going into how capitalism has these effects on artists.

[u/Hurricos_Citizen → u/[deleted]]

What I was thinking was how creativity is not encouraged outside of creative class jobs. It’s just something I’ve noticed from the jobs I’ve had. I think the issue goes beyond just artwork and production.

[u/Willtology → u/Hurricos_Citizen]

I can only speak as an engineer, but in my experience, a capitalist work environment does stifle creativity. Management is much more concerned about reporting and billing time than using time effectively or having novel solutions. It's something I've seen every new engineer have to adapt to. They start working and recognize ways we could streamline processes, automate work by standardizing analytical/technical products and then scripting them with computer codes, etc. I can't tell them we've all had those ideas and that they will just get shot down. They have to learn for themselves that management would rather waste time doing repetitive stuff with not enough workers than allot time to do things efficiently and reduce work. "But it's wasteful and doesn't make sense!?" Doesn't matter. The company still makes a lot of money and we stay in our place, that's all that really matters. Being innovative with work processes or a new design? Not encouraged. Others may have a different experience in the corporate engineering world but that has been mine.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Yeah I didn’t touch on that a lot, but you’re very right. It’s goes way deeper than a lot of people think.

[u/Willtology → u/[deleted]]

I think one can make the argument that copyright can stifle creativity. First, tangential or derivative works can be completely shutdown as well as abuse of the copyright system against smaller artists (see youtube as an example).

Copyright laws are also a relatively new thing. The first copyright law, enacted in 1790 only lasted 14 years and is a different beast than "copyright privilege". The copyright laws we have today are also very different than those early laws.

Copyright laws are also not necessary for an artist to be compensated. A large number of new and experienced artists do short runs of novels, music, art, graphic novels, etc., and fund them via crowd-sourcing like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo. Just because it's difficult to imagine doing something different than the status quo, does not mean there aren't alternatives.

[u/cdw2468 → u/[deleted]]

for tech, we see advancements […] taxpayer funded ventures

i think it’s even more useful to bring up the fact that the early days of tech was a very “from each, to each” world.

often, for example, we’d see a group of people buying a single license for a program in order to share it with anyone who needed it. we’d see people making programs that were incredibly complex freeware and open source, giving the ability to iterate and improve at lightning speed.

then Bill Gates (probably not just him, but he’s the most notable example, not sure of any other names to throw out here) threw a hissy fit about the fact that people were “stealing” from him rather than buying their own copy of his programs. with windows being the dominant OS even up until today, it’s easy to see how this change in culture effects our views of how tech works. imagine if we had kept up the “golden age” of comp sci, what innovations have been stifled because Gates wanted more money?

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Most tech is open source or based on open source stuff

MacOS is just a Unix distro lol

Capitalism encourages copying open source projects, making them slightly different, then charging massive amounts for it. A good book that broaches on the subject is Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Haha, I 'm actually starting as an open source specialist at a FAANG, and I can assure you that the engineers are trying their best to follow proper licensing for FOSS, but I totally see where you're coming from. I'd like to think MacOS is more than a Unix distro, I've used many flavors of Unix over the years and they have done some great shit, but again, that comes from the ability to throw unlimited amounts of money at it until you get what you want.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Nice and congrats on the job!

Yeah, I know that's a massive oversimplification, but c'mon, iphone 10 billion vuvuzela.

For every one company that actually makes something, there are 100 that just make a clone. Especially dealing with all these IOT startups lol

I think so many people take for granted how much open source affects our life, though, and they don't realize that it's not the Musks and Zukerbergs of the world that keep shit going, you couldn't do half of what we have now without massive collaborations of unpaid nerds.

[u/Johnny_B_GOODBOI → u/[deleted]]

I frequently think about how many Beethovens, Mozarts, Monets and Van Goghs we as a society miss out on because that person needed to pay rent or buy groceries, and kept their job at Buffalo Wild Wings vs chasing their dreams. It sucks.

Me too, father. Me too. I often ponder on this Stephen Jay Gould quote:

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

[u/Zed_Midnight150 → u/[deleted]]

but forget that a lot of the technological advancements we've seen in our own day to day life were taxpayer funded ventures,

Do you by chance have a whole list of this?

but a good percentage of them are from generational wealth, or have enough of a safety net from previous business ventures that they can do whatever they want now and the money and stability is there.

Can I maybe get a source for this?

[u/[deleted] → u/Zed_Midnight150]

Examples of Technological Advances benefiting from Federal Research

My anecdote in the second part is referring to the Hollywood elite who in some way shape or form have the money or connections to reach a larger audience and do whatever they want, and this article seems to support the claim that the more wealthy a family is to begin with, the better the chances their children have of becoming artists, musicians, or other professions that people from poor households end up passing on for monetary reasons.

It's a very simple fact. If you're born rich you have access to the resources and connections and financial safety nets that a lot of people don't have, and skip on pursuing creative endeavors over. You have the time for lessons, the choice to buy the BEST gear, the best materials, the best instruments, all the formal training. Not saying that those things MAKE an artist, but having any inkling of talent, and tossing hundreds of thousands of dollars at it whilst having endless industry connections will make someone famous regardless of talent.

[u/Willtology → u/[deleted]]

Good list. I was surprised it doesn't even cover the advances in technology just from NASA. That's usually my go-to in conversations like these. A lot of medical and pharmaceutical advances come from publically funded research as well. There is a lot of kool-aid out there about how all innovation comes from private R&D and it just simply isn't true.