> Richard Wolff explains different approaches here very eloquently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ywyLiNT3Cs

Richard Wolff is total hack and the fringe of fringe fringe economics. Economic study of cooperative model within capitalism has shown the to be mostly not effective and not innovative. Success stories are few an far between and those that do exist usually are successful by copying existing business model.

There is a reason less then 1% of companies operate that way.

> Meanwhile capitalism promotes top down decision making, and necessarily leads to centralization and monopolies.

Funny, if you read Marx you would assume that there would be less companies over time and an workers getting poor consistently.

The exact opposite has happened.

the idea that capitalism lead to top down decision making is frankly incredibly false. Within each company there is some level of top down decision making, but every company has a different culture and many different types of companies have success.

Some companies are large stock holder conglomerates where there is very little top down decision making and each sub-company operates mostly by themselves. Some companies are run by a visionary leader in a more top-down fashion but the good once take advice and ideas.

And on system level the idea that decision making in capitalism is top-down is simply verifiable and completely untrue. The highest political authority clearly does not set prices, in fact often when they do they fail and they clearly don't make the economic choices for everybody.

Ok, lets go to the evil capitalist. Do they make all the choices? No clearly not. Even the richest capitalist only control small parts of companies that themselves are far less then % of the economy. And even the price and worth of those companies are defined in a decentralized way.

Meanwhile, not a single anarchy-syndicalist or even syndicalist system has ever actually worked for a modern economy for any length of time. The counter examples that Socialist often bring up, Basque country in the Spanish Civil war and so on are embracing examples of reaching compared to the global economy.

> The game of monopoly is a perfect illustration of this where every player starts in a fair position and over time all the power ends up being consolidated with a single player while the rest of the players lose everything.

Monopoly the game was designed by a socialist to impose his idea of capitalism the form of a game. Its literally a game design to show how evil capitalism is.

But a little tip from me, don't make up your philosophy based on a propaganda board game. All it shows that the guy who invented the board game is just as wrong as you.

> This dynamic plays out in the real world as well. As companies compete, successful companies grow while unsuccessful ones die out or end up being absorbed by ones that are successful. As the company grows the amount of initial capital needed to compete with it grows as well. It's pretty much impossible for a small startup to start competing with a company like Walmart or Amazon because these companies leverage advantages like economies of scale and brand recognition.

Funny how Walmart already existed when Amazon was created. Funny how IBM existed when Microsoft was created. The examples are literally countless.

You are literally using as an example, a company that is 25 years old. It existence proves that you are wrong. If your theory was actually correct, Amazon could never have been created in the first place.

Its always amazing to who socialism have predicted that all capitalism will centralize into one single big company, and after 200 years and the number of companies generally increasing they still make the exact same arguments. This does make a certain sense since socialism have for 200 years believed everything run by a single top-down operation would be the most efficient.

> If we look at capitalist economies we can see that monopolies and cartels are prevalent in pretty much every domain from telecom industry to food production to media and most other domains.

And Tom Hanks has monopoly on playing Tom Hanks. Hollywood is full of monopolies.

If funny, you just divide up the whole market in to arbitrarily sized sub-markets, then declare each a monopoly. Then you realize that this is not actually the case so you divide the market further. And then its still not actually monopolies, and then you claim that they are cartels (mostly they are not).

So even if your argument would be right, it would still be wrong, because you simply assumed a nationalist point of few. Or are you claiming all telecom companies in the whole world are a cartel? All food production in the world is from a few companies? Funny, I know at least 5 farmers who own their own land and buy food from them.

Oh maybe you mean food distribution? Its not really true their either. But I guess if you divide the market long enough eventually your argument becomes true.

> This is also incorrect seeing that capitalism predates communism, and communism developed as a response to capitalism. It's also worth noting that communism and large public sector are the primary reasons why China is pretty much the only major growing economy after the pandemic. It's pretty evident that this "legacy" system is currently doing a lot better than capitalism.

China is not Communist and anybody that claims it is just does it to score political points in the US political battles.

Funny enough China is a lot more like Imperial Russia then Soviet Union.