I mean, of course it’s good if we get those things on a scale that will fix the problem. However, the critique socialists have of capitalism isn’t based on human nature or some moral judgement of individual capitalists. It’s based on an understanding of capitalism as a system and what forces drive it to produce the results we observe.

There is of course the labor issue, but let’s focus on the market aspect and how it relates to environmental issues for now. In a market economy, the pursuit of profit and growth combined with the laws of supply and demand create pressures that make some companies successful and others fail. This can be looked at like an evolutionary process. Survival of the fittest. Capitalists aren’t bad because they are bad people, it’s that only bad people become successful capitalists. Companies that are unwilling to engage in maximum profit seeking behavior over the long run get filtered out.

Then there is the financial aspect of this. Investors generally speaking don’t make money off of steady profits. They make money when the price of the stock increases above what they bought it for so that they can sell it for a profit. This dynamic demands continual growth. A company that is not growing is one that will be abandoned by investors or pressured to do so through ownership voting. This growth is necessary to outcompete other companies who can also seek to reinvest or acquire more capital to expand further.

These phenomena aren’t really in dispute. A pro-capitalist economist would say that this decentralized system of economic pressures creates incentives for growth and innovation. These incentives ultimately result in an optimized economy that has efficiently allocated it’s resources in the way that meets people’s needs. There is some degree of truth to this, but ultimately the claim that this form of economy produces desirable results for society demands evidence of these outcomes. It also depends on what you value. Was capitalist industrialization good for the workers who died in unsafe factories? Was it good for those in other countries which we violently exploited for profit? Was it good for managing our environment and natural resources in a sustainable way?

There is plenty of evidence that despite the progress made under capitalism, it has failed to produce desirable results in many respects as well. And once again, capitalist economists have analyses of these failures. For example, the damage to the environment is a problem referred to as “the tragedy of the commons.” While we all benefit from having a habitable environment, the pressures of the economy are such that no one person or corporation has enough of an incentive to take on the costs of pursuing that benefit on their own. And again, this isn’t merely a matter of preference for greed. Companies that choose to take on this additional cost for a relatively small return risk losing to companies that do not do so.

It is also evidently true that market competition is not always sufficient to keep companies in check. For all sorts of reasons, various industries have consolidated into monopolies or near monopolies. The basic assumptions of the market model are no longer satisfied. (Many buyers and sellers such that none have the ability to act as price setters.)

On top of the mainstream capitalist economic analysis of capitalism, there are of course additional critiques by Marxist economists, but this is already getting long enough.

Lastly, the typical liberal response is to say “ok, capitalism has these problems on it’s own, but we can just regulate it.” This sounds like a nice solution, but the problem is that these capitalists are able to convert their economic power into political power through campaign donations, media ownership, etc. We keep trying to regulate corporations, but these efforts ultimately fail or prove insufficient because the government which would pass and enforce these laws owes it’s political power to the very corporations it would be regulating. Fundamentally, the problem with capitalism is that it’s antidemocratic. A government can’t be of, by, and for the people if it depends on the wealth of a handful of capitalists more than it does the votes of the general public.

People often misunderstand what socialism is. It’s not just one thing. It’s not just “the government does stuff.” There are two core components of it: 1) You must observe and analyses the world and the relationships within it to understand how things change and then adapt to these conditions and changes accordingly. 2) That political power in society should be in the hands of the working class, aka the majority of the population.

The goal in this is to have the means by which we can collectively make decisions that we believe will benefit from society. That doesn’t mean we’ll get everything right, but at least we had that choice and we can learn from our mistakes and move on. Capitalism at it’s most theoretical is a system with nobody at the wheel. “The invisible hand” of the market guides priorities for society, not any particular conscious choice by people. More realistically, capitalism is a system in which wealthy capitalists make decisions for the rest of us. In either case, if the incentives aren’t aligned to be in favor of public good, then we don’t get public good.

Also, before you go “but China” again: I already said that I don’t agree with literally everything China, or any particular government, does. Doing so would be dogmatism. It would fail the first principle of socialist philosophy to analyze the world scientifically. I can look at their successes and failures and use that knowledge to make future decisions. Even for their successes, it isn’t automatically the case that we should copy their successes. Different times, places, and people create different conditions which need to factor into your analysis. What worked for them may not work for us, but it at least tells us something.