system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What are the major arguments against capitalism and what are the main proposed alternatives?
gpt
Capitalism in this context is interpreted to mean a free, unregulated monetary market. If you want alternatives to a monetary system completely, I'd recommend specifying so.

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Proponents of a complete free-market monetary system will point out that it gives individual freedom, and allows those who 'know how to play' the money system, who are allegedly knowledgeable, resourceful and benevolent, to gain the power (in form of large amounts of money) with which to incur their positive benefits to society.

They'll also point out anyone who's poor in this system must not be valuable enough to society to want to feed, and that society taking care of them for them motivates them to put even less effort into society, thus terms along the lines of "socialist cesspool", which is a society which loses all progress from trying to idealistically take care of everyone, taking away motivation from everyone to contribute.

These are positions for an unregulated free market, and the reasonings for all Western societies having adopted variations of this model. As such, it's not an unsuccessful system, more of a the-best-we-can-do system granted humans won't be motivated to contribute to society unless it's necessary for their own survival.

As such, reasonings against capitalism aren't primarily useful for replacing capitalism with a different system, but more to improve the current capitalistic system, to make it more fair and useful.

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Dangers of capitalistic systems include monopoly, where for instance a company may sell something basic like water, and if no one else is there to sell water, then you can charge anything you want for it, and customers have no choice but to buy it, because you need water to survive. A company can tell you you have to pay $100 for a bottle of water if they want, even if they could sell it for $1 and make money, nothing tells them to sell it for cheap. Thus companies can make large amounts of money for no real reason.

Corruption is one of the biggest dangers of capitalistic systems. This means a person with economic power pays money to easily-manipulated government officials to circumvent rules and regulations, thus gaining imbalanced economic advantages. Say for instance a large company pays the government to turn down other companies wanting to compete with your company, then you can get a monopoly advantage in a market which in turn allows you to get a large amount of money which allows you to continue paying the government to turn other companies down.

Even if you're not strictly going against rules, you can still gain unfair advantages by exploiting flaws in the currently existing rules. For instance in presidential elections, you can invest money into a candidate to have them gain a much bigger chance at winning than the other party through expensive campaigning, and there's nothing in the rules saying you can't do it. The person you then paid to put into office can then perfectly legally alter the rules to remove even more regulations against paying into election campaigns, then you can pay even more money into a candidate the next election. Thus companies can essentially pay indefinitely to have elections go their way, without ever technically breaking a rule. This is a major controversy of how democratic democratic systems are.

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In general, what you expect to happen with free market capitalism is for ingenious and hard-working people to move upward in society, and for stupid and lazy people to move downward in society. In reality, this doesn't always, or even most of the time, happen in true free-market societies. This because the above things happen all the time, companies do their best to influence laws and regulations to make the playing field stacked in their favor. It's a lot easier to pay money to be able to stay rich and making money, than to actually work hard and stay the best alternative on the market. This leads to bad-product companies staying rich because they're already rich, and good-product companies staying poor because they're already poor, thus going directly against the purpose behind free-market capitalism.

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If you ask a left-wing person, then the left wing party tries to achieve this balance, whilst right wing parties are essentially paid for by large corporations and only represent them, and are thus the downfall of capitalism. If you ask a right wing person, then the right wing party tries to achieve this balance, whilst left wing parties just want to give everyone things for free and be the downfall of capitalism. So whether there exists a 'true' proposed alternative to unregulated free-market capitalism, is up to your perception.