Honestly I think we could actually modify the existing system into a form of at least market socialism relatively simply, at least compared to the complexity involved in rebuilding everything from scratch.
The way that modern capitalism is designed, the rich don’t usually directly own the means of production, instead the factories and tools and infrastructure and such are owned by companies, which then funnel wealth to whoever owns those companies. Further, the companies are conveniently divided up into shares that allow for fractional ownership, and are generally controlled by people appointed by the owners of those shares.
It seems to me that, this means that companies are effectively proxies for the means of production, if you own then you own those means, and so if what you primarily want is for the workers to own the means of production, you don’t need to figure out new ways to organize the labor done in complex projects or industries or have a central state own everything “for” that workforce, you could just seize the shares of those companies, and distribute them among the people that work there, for as long as they work there (basically just mandate that all businesses bigger than a small family operation be employee co-ops), and leave the everyday structure of the economy that people are familiar with relatively intact.
This wouldn’t solve everything, a social media company for example is still going to be incentived to promote engagement and ad revenue even if owned by it’s employees, and it would need to be combined with a robust democratic system or else political elites can use their power to change the rules to take wealth for themselves again, but at the very least greatly reducing wealth inequality should help with a lot of things.
OR we could, rather than all that fucking paperwork they would fight us for every inch of and kill lots of us while we lobbied to half-ass a tiny wedge of a solution:
We just drag them out of their bunkers and do em all like the fucking romanovs. Then distribute things based, at least roughly, on need? Possibly based on who has or could create surpluses?
Edit: We have the communication infrastructure to do wothout nonsense obfuscating lossy abstractions like money. At this point it’s all cost no value.
This wouldn’t solve anything though, apart from slightly improving the amount of surplus value workers get back from their labor. Call that which you propose in any way you want, but it’s still capitalism - the mode of for-profit production remains the same, goods are produced as commodities to be sold on the market, wage labor remains fully intact (which implies labor exploitation) and so does capital accumulation meaning you’ll still have capital concentration, and given how it’s still capitalism, all of its contradictions remain such as overproduction that cause regular crises.
The kind of reform such as this one wouldn’t even have the advantage of being “easily, peacefully implemented” given how it would take away the ownership from the current capitalists, who currently hold the class dictatorship reigns. A revolution would be needed, but at that point it’d be better to change the present state of things entirely.
Redistributing the wealth sounds easy when we talk about billionaires. But what about people like me that make an above average salary because we also put in the effort, like a degree, learning new skills outside work to get better at work, etc.
I have friends that never cared about money and basically did the absolute minimum at work, so part of my savings should go to them? That also does not sound fair.
And what about leadership? Is the leader a dictator because that’s a hard no for me. Do we still use the democratic system? Because we already have an issue with idiots voting for populist parties. If we all “share” the wealth that is going to get much worse. Don’t let those brown people in they will steal all our shared wealth (offcourse that’s not even true, but people will vote like this anyway). People voted for brexit because they all believed a buch of lies, it’s unfortunately too easy to manipulate people.
Is there even a real example of communism where it worked for a long time, without leaders getting corrupt or production and GDP going down?
To me the more European version of capitalism sounds like the best system we have so far. If you have a system with good free education (giving people equal opportunities), strong consumer and environmental protection, plus strong workforce protections, high minimum wage, etc.
Communism is changing the state of things entirely, not merely changing or redistributing as your conception says - what you describe is closer to social democratic welfare state which is still fully capitalist.
The world is complicated, when it comes to economics you can go into the minutia all day and night but to summarize what communism actually is and how it differs from capitalism in simple terms, it’d be:
The transformation of the mode of production. Instead of right now where you produce commodities to be sold on the market and that essentially dictating what to produce, goods would be specifically produced to fulfill needs, basically what is socially necessary for a society and its people to thrive, and all this would be coordinated via economic planning. The current system is incredibly inefficient, we overproduce a lot, workers can’t physically buy all the goods on the market leading to waste or companies competing with its own unsold goods which decreases profit and leads to crisis where industry no longer becomes profitable, leading to unemployment. No more profit, no more things to buy, just make what people need.
The abolition of money and private property. Not to be confused with personal property such as your home or car or toothbrush, access to wealth accumulation and private ownership of factories or land inevitably leads to monopolization, exploitation of labor (with factory ownership) or just parasitism where a person contributes nothing to a labor process, yet has the full right to everything produced by said labor.
Kind of implicit in previous point, but abolition of classes entirely. If there’s no way to privately own means of production or land, or accumulate a mountain of money that you can invest to get another mountain of money and snowball to oblivion, that would eliminate the aforementioned capitalists, landowners - no person would be superior to another due to their economic caste. Of course, a level of hierarchy would remain like foremen managing workers, but economically they’d be in the same position of having their needs met.
Hopefully that makes it easier to conceptualize that a different kind of system can theoretically exist that isn’t capitalism - after all, we went from antiquity to feudalism to capitalism, all production modes of whom are drastically different, so why not communism?
Granted, we’re yet to have communism given how it must be global, or at least on a very large scale. Capitalism itself is a global system, it relies on global trade and countries that decide not to participate (e.g. go autarky) suffer heavily, and communism which is primarily a “meet the needs” type of system cannot interact with global capitalist trade given how it produces and values goods in a much different way. Also, a single country cannot really have access to all the necessary resources to meet the needs with, so global cooperation is required, and this cooperation would ensure safety too given how prone Capitalism is towards imperialist wars.
As for other questions like “how would government look like” and stuff - that’s mostly relevant for the transition towards it post-revolution given how this kind of society is simply unachievable in a capitalist dictatorships, liberal or otherwise, that we have today. While communism and its ideas are quite frankly weakest that they’ve ever been in terms of support, there’s still multiple parties around the world, each having a different plan for the government.
Sorry for the wall of text, and do keep in mind that this is an oversimplification. Transition towards communism is equally as important, but I didn’t want to go full hog explaining it given how it’d make it even more unreadable.
Don’t feel sorry, thanks for the wall of text. I also watched some videos on communism and socialism, from what I understand we never really had communism only socialism, but socialism could lead to communism.
But from what I also understand is that all socialism counties had massive problems with corruption and authoritarianism. So I’m not really convinced that communism could ever work. But thanks for the reply anyway!
Nothing to add really, just that I agree with every single word of this. Expanding unions and coops is a much more realistic way of transferring power to the working class that can happen right now, as opposed to pushing for a total revolution and hoping we’re lucky enough to come out on top. We don’t even have to use the s-word, just try to go out of your way to do business with employee-owned businesses.
One problem is leftists call this take “liberalism” and conflate it with full on fascism.
I would be more open to discussions about “replacing” capitalism… if the people suggesting it didn’t expect the rest of us to figure out what to replace it with.
“Ah so you want pure chaos, a war of all against all.”
“… and we’ll replace it with communism!”
“Aha so you want literally the Soviet Union.”
“… and we’ll replace it with democracy!”
“Aha aha hmm so you want a tyranny of the majority.”
Capitalist propaganda is so deeply ingrained in the average person that you’ll have much better luck starting a conversation about what capitalism actually is, and its problems, rather than open with a proposed solution. We’ve had tons of proposed solutions for centuries now.
For someone more open-minded, this can be frustrating because you’d prefer they get to the point immediately.
It isnt actually liberalism I dont think, because to implement what I just mentioned, you would at the very least need to seize a lot of what it currently considered to be private property (that stock and business ownership), and distribute it in a way that the person possessing it does not have the ability to freely buy and sell it (else people would just sell it off for one reason or another and ownership would quickly consolidate again). Liberalism, as I understand it, has an emphasis on personal property rights that would find such a policy and later restriction on business ownership objectionable.
Honestly I think we could actually modify the existing system into a form of at least market socialism relatively simply, at least compared to the complexity involved in rebuilding everything from scratch.
The way that modern capitalism is designed, the rich don’t usually directly own the means of production, instead the factories and tools and infrastructure and such are owned by companies, which then funnel wealth to whoever owns those companies. Further, the companies are conveniently divided up into shares that allow for fractional ownership, and are generally controlled by people appointed by the owners of those shares.
It seems to me that, this means that companies are effectively proxies for the means of production, if you own then you own those means, and so if what you primarily want is for the workers to own the means of production, you don’t need to figure out new ways to organize the labor done in complex projects or industries or have a central state own everything “for” that workforce, you could just seize the shares of those companies, and distribute them among the people that work there, for as long as they work there (basically just mandate that all businesses bigger than a small family operation be employee co-ops), and leave the everyday structure of the economy that people are familiar with relatively intact.
This wouldn’t solve everything, a social media company for example is still going to be incentived to promote engagement and ad revenue even if owned by it’s employees, and it would need to be combined with a robust democratic system or else political elites can use their power to change the rules to take wealth for themselves again, but at the very least greatly reducing wealth inequality should help with a lot of things.
OR we could, rather than all that fucking paperwork they would fight us for every inch of and kill lots of us while we lobbied to half-ass a tiny wedge of a solution:
We just drag them out of their bunkers and do em all like the fucking romanovs. Then distribute things based, at least roughly, on need? Possibly based on who has or could create surpluses?
Edit: We have the communication infrastructure to do wothout nonsense obfuscating lossy abstractions like money. At this point it’s all cost no value.
This wouldn’t solve anything though, apart from slightly improving the amount of surplus value workers get back from their labor. Call that which you propose in any way you want, but it’s still capitalism - the mode of for-profit production remains the same, goods are produced as commodities to be sold on the market, wage labor remains fully intact (which implies labor exploitation) and so does capital accumulation meaning you’ll still have capital concentration, and given how it’s still capitalism, all of its contradictions remain such as overproduction that cause regular crises.
The kind of reform such as this one wouldn’t even have the advantage of being “easily, peacefully implemented” given how it would take away the ownership from the current capitalists, who currently hold the class dictatorship reigns. A revolution would be needed, but at that point it’d be better to change the present state of things entirely.
OK so what’s the alternative? Communism?
Like hosest question, how would that work?
Redistributing the wealth sounds easy when we talk about billionaires. But what about people like me that make an above average salary because we also put in the effort, like a degree, learning new skills outside work to get better at work, etc.
I have friends that never cared about money and basically did the absolute minimum at work, so part of my savings should go to them? That also does not sound fair.
And what about leadership? Is the leader a dictator because that’s a hard no for me. Do we still use the democratic system? Because we already have an issue with idiots voting for populist parties. If we all “share” the wealth that is going to get much worse. Don’t let those brown people in they will steal all our shared wealth (offcourse that’s not even true, but people will vote like this anyway). People voted for brexit because they all believed a buch of lies, it’s unfortunately too easy to manipulate people.
Is there even a real example of communism where it worked for a long time, without leaders getting corrupt or production and GDP going down?
To me the more European version of capitalism sounds like the best system we have so far. If you have a system with good free education (giving people equal opportunities), strong consumer and environmental protection, plus strong workforce protections, high minimum wage, etc.
Communism is changing the state of things entirely, not merely changing or redistributing as your conception says - what you describe is closer to social democratic welfare state which is still fully capitalist.
The world is complicated, when it comes to economics you can go into the minutia all day and night but to summarize what communism actually is and how it differs from capitalism in simple terms, it’d be:
The transformation of the mode of production. Instead of right now where you produce commodities to be sold on the market and that essentially dictating what to produce, goods would be specifically produced to fulfill needs, basically what is socially necessary for a society and its people to thrive, and all this would be coordinated via economic planning. The current system is incredibly inefficient, we overproduce a lot, workers can’t physically buy all the goods on the market leading to waste or companies competing with its own unsold goods which decreases profit and leads to crisis where industry no longer becomes profitable, leading to unemployment. No more profit, no more things to buy, just make what people need.
The abolition of money and private property. Not to be confused with personal property such as your home or car or toothbrush, access to wealth accumulation and private ownership of factories or land inevitably leads to monopolization, exploitation of labor (with factory ownership) or just parasitism where a person contributes nothing to a labor process, yet has the full right to everything produced by said labor.
Kind of implicit in previous point, but abolition of classes entirely. If there’s no way to privately own means of production or land, or accumulate a mountain of money that you can invest to get another mountain of money and snowball to oblivion, that would eliminate the aforementioned capitalists, landowners - no person would be superior to another due to their economic caste. Of course, a level of hierarchy would remain like foremen managing workers, but economically they’d be in the same position of having their needs met.
Hopefully that makes it easier to conceptualize that a different kind of system can theoretically exist that isn’t capitalism - after all, we went from antiquity to feudalism to capitalism, all production modes of whom are drastically different, so why not communism?
Granted, we’re yet to have communism given how it must be global, or at least on a very large scale. Capitalism itself is a global system, it relies on global trade and countries that decide not to participate (e.g. go autarky) suffer heavily, and communism which is primarily a “meet the needs” type of system cannot interact with global capitalist trade given how it produces and values goods in a much different way. Also, a single country cannot really have access to all the necessary resources to meet the needs with, so global cooperation is required, and this cooperation would ensure safety too given how prone Capitalism is towards imperialist wars.
As for other questions like “how would government look like” and stuff - that’s mostly relevant for the transition towards it post-revolution given how this kind of society is simply unachievable in a capitalist dictatorships, liberal or otherwise, that we have today. While communism and its ideas are quite frankly weakest that they’ve ever been in terms of support, there’s still multiple parties around the world, each having a different plan for the government.
Sorry for the wall of text, and do keep in mind that this is an oversimplification. Transition towards communism is equally as important, but I didn’t want to go full hog explaining it given how it’d make it even more unreadable.
Don’t feel sorry, thanks for the wall of text. I also watched some videos on communism and socialism, from what I understand we never really had communism only socialism, but socialism could lead to communism.
But from what I also understand is that all socialism counties had massive problems with corruption and authoritarianism. So I’m not really convinced that communism could ever work. But thanks for the reply anyway!
Nothing to add really, just that I agree with every single word of this. Expanding unions and coops is a much more realistic way of transferring power to the working class that can happen right now, as opposed to pushing for a total revolution and hoping we’re lucky enough to come out on top. We don’t even have to use the s-word, just try to go out of your way to do business with employee-owned businesses.
I agree with all of that.
One problem is leftists call this take “liberalism” and conflate it with full on fascism.
I would be more open to discussions about “replacing” capitalism… if the people suggesting it didn’t expect the rest of us to figure out what to replace it with.
Market socialism is not liberalism.
Fully agree.
Capitalist propaganda is so deeply ingrained in the average person that you’ll have much better luck starting a conversation about what capitalism actually is, and its problems, rather than open with a proposed solution. We’ve had tons of proposed solutions for centuries now.
For someone more open-minded, this can be frustrating because you’d prefer they get to the point immediately.
It isnt actually liberalism I dont think, because to implement what I just mentioned, you would at the very least need to seize a lot of what it currently considered to be private property (that stock and business ownership), and distribute it in a way that the person possessing it does not have the ability to freely buy and sell it (else people would just sell it off for one reason or another and ownership would quickly consolidate again). Liberalism, as I understand it, has an emphasis on personal property rights that would find such a policy and later restriction on business ownership objectionable.