Edit: This question attracted way more interest than I hoped for! I will need some time to go through the comments in the next days, thanks for your efforts everyone. One thing I could grasp from the answers already - it seems to be complicated. There is no one fits all answer.
Under capitalism, it seems companies always need to grow bigger. Why can’t they just say, okay, we have 100 employees and produce a nice product for a specific market and that’s fine?
Or is this only a US megacorp thing where they need to grow to satisfy their shareholders?
Let’s ignore that most of the times the small companies get bought by the large ones.
OK, I will absolutely apologize for assuming you were American. I try not to creep on people’s post history unless necessary, and didn’t double check. That’s on me, and I’m genuinely sorry for that.
Though, I’m not defending capitalism, other then to try and find the minimal threshold necessary to fulfill it in the original comment. I respect you sticking to whatever politicial or economic stance you want, and I was being a dick yesterday and I’ll blame wine and sun for that. Mostly wine.
As a sorta-kinda economist, the point on which I have settled from seeing a lot of people on several continents live their lives, is that communal living and resource allocation is suitable for emergencies and basic survival in small and rudimentary settings. That is well documented in the anthropological record.
Beyond that, humans have a tendency towards transactionalism, often somewhat incorrectly termed capitalism, because transactions don’t require saving money for capital to be used later. There’s a great book called African Friends and Money Matters that is a frustrating look at a Westerner in Senegal trying to explain how the fundamentals of resource application work. It summarizes perfectly how most of African village level communities work, and I hope fascinating to someone who wants to start from a point of communal resource allocation.
But, my personal opinion is that we grow from that point outward to transactions while luxuriated and well-resourced, and capitalism past that in habitual abundance. So Marx proposing such limitation and hemming people in to a command economy seems counterintuitive simply from the perspective of trying to get people to participate willingly.
That’s not a defense of capitalism, but simply pointing to where it naturally crops up. I can’t abide Marx, so if there’s a third option other then radical agrarian anarcho-syndicate communes and basic cooperatives, that has seen success, I would be interested to hear it. But those, much like Yugoslavia, are also very personality dependent and so not likely to last longer than 60-80 years or so.