On balance, capitalism is more humanitarian than communism

Firstly, The debate is about the humanitarianism of capitalism vs. that of communism, therefore the true nature of capitalism is highly relevant and critiquing it is not at all a waste of space. As for "contractarianism", the "social contract" that libertarians, et al dream of is really one that would give them an escape clause from their responsibilities to our society as a whole, which includes its less fortunate members. Their social contract is a legal fiction that provides an excuse for being asocial individualists rather than standing in solidarity with your needy neighbor. And unless you arrogantly think you'll never be a needy neighbor you don't wish to sign on to such a contract! Next, what's so great about Rawls' "veil of ignorance" scenario if it's not realistic? It makes us think, objectively and fairly, it cuts through our usual ideological BS and forces us to get down to brass tacks about what a just and desirable society would look like. Now for some arguments. What's one of the fundamental but frequently unappreciated ways in which a society predicated on capitalist theory is not in most people's "self-interest"? Well, it has to do with one of the formulations of Kant's categorical imperative. The formulation that I have in mind goes something like this: Never treat another human being like a mere means to an end, never deprive him of his humanity and autonomy by objectifying him into a sheer utilitarian object that serves a purpose for you. Of course this is precisely what capitalism and private ownership does to working people, it objectifies them into flesh & blood worker droids for owners. The most poignant and pernicious tragedy of capitalism is that in a capitalist economy human beings are crassly utilized, commodified, and thingified, reduced to things that perform a particular economic function for an employer. Upon joining the work force we're unwittingly dehumanized into cogs in a corporation or busy little worker bees whose sole value and identity, as far as the bosses & bankers who own most of the economy goes, is our job, the way we serve as means to their end of making more and more money for themselves. Sure, this serves the self-interest of owners, but it profoundly and grievously disserves the self-interest of the majority of people who are workers, who are demeaned from being free and dignified human individuals into tools of another man's greed. To be on the receiving end of our system's violation of the categorical imperative, to have our humanity disrespected daily from 9 to 5, is an endemic evil of capitalism. A "communist" system in which everyone owns everything together and works for himself jointly with everyone else, would be a system in which no one is any longer made to function as a tool for the interests of another, in which no one is a wage slave producing so his employer can live in a mansion while he lives in a hovel. In short, in a system of social ownership and social equality no one is in an inferior position of being a means to someone else's material ends first, and a human being second, rather everyone would enjoy the full status of his humanity throughout his workday. Communism then upholds the categorical imperative, capitalism callously tramples it. Another way that capitalism systematically dehumanizes us is that capitalism creates a gesellschaft kind of society in which much of the time we one-dimensionally relate to each other as just our role in the economy. For example, when you go to the market you relate to the checker as his role in your shopping transaction, as the living robot who tells you how much to pay and who extends his hand to receive your money. Marx called this the "cash nexus", in other words, under a capitalist gesellschaft form of society we increasingly connect to others only on the basis of economic transactions, we largely cease to relate to each other as human persons. Well, there's nothing more in our "existential" best interest than preserving our humanity, and the sort of gesellschaft communities favored by capitalism, communities of standoffish individualists who only come together to use each other's services or to have our labor exploited by owners, are deeply opposed to our self-interest as human beings. Communist communities would be quite the opposite, they would be communities in which we share each other's lives not just on an economic but on a more well-roundedly human level. An authentic communist society would be a society of people relating to each other not exploitatively and objectifyingly, a society in which we do not diminish each other's humanity, but rather a society in which we realize, as a society, that it's not in our interest as individuals to do so, to degrade our neighbor into a virtual prostitute who services our economic desires. I'll conclude with a few more words on capitalism. There's a free-marketeer and libertarian urban legend, that we've never had real capitalism and that this explains all of the deplorable realities of our modern national and global economies. According to this ideological urban legend it's of course big government that has compromised and corrupted the integrity of American capitalism. But of course the real reason that we don't have theoretically pure capitalism is something that capitalist theory and its believers don't want to face, i.e. that it's really big business rather than Big Brother that's tweaked our system into something that doesn't conform to classic free-market principles. Yes, it's capitalists who've tweaked the "free market" to make it more favorable to their interests and who predictably have destroyed the dream of a free-enterprise paradise. The pesky, terminal flaw of capitalism is that it's a system that will always suffer such a fate at the hands of the alpha capitalists who run it. This is why pure capitalism is an unworkable, impossible dream. Maybe in a twilight zone, alternate reality somewhere there are capitalists who play by the rules and conscientiously practice the principles of capitalist theory, but in our real world that we all have to live in you can always count on human beings to pervert a system that grants them the permissive freedom to do so, which capitalism does. Capitalism gives the most successful and clout-wielding capitalists the permissive freedom to screw around with it, and so it promptly ceases to be "pure", "real" capitalism. This is its nature and its built-in self-defeating foible. The urban legend that if "pure" capitalism were ever given a fair chance it would work beautifully is laughable because "pure" capitalism by definition will never give itself a fair chance, it will always give the big players of the economy a chance to twist the system to serve their special interests, and they will always take advantage, making capitalism's supposed meritocracy into a barely covert plutocracy. But the "original sin" lies with capitalist theory, not the men who take license with it, because capitalist theory calls for a system that permits greedy men to gain the money-power that allows them to skew the system the way they want it. That is, capitalist theory inherently and ironically results in a system that lends itself to such corruption, to being debased from what it should be in its never-never land of people strictly following its precepts to what it is in the cold, hard, empirical world where human nature plays a big part in how a theory plays itself out. Pro-capitalists pride themselves on being the ones who are quite realistic about human nature, but they're the ones with an unrealistic belief at the heart of their philosophy, the belief that a society can successfully harness human greed, that a society can safely ride on the back of the tiger of unbridled avarice. The only way that you can really direct self-interest toward the common good is by socializing it, not by privatizing it.