Reminder to the liberals here: If you bash actural leftists for being leftists you are in fact a right winger, furthermore if you are not an actural leftist you are a centrist at best.
“capitalism” has become such an over-used washed-down term that barely anybody knows what’s meant by it. please speak in clearer terms to be more clearly understood.
Capitalism is working so good that capitalists are the most consistently class conscious group. They are aware which class they belong to and side with it.
It feels more like people gravitate towards the “winning” team because they have the lion’s share of resources and commensurate status.
Billionaires are broadly class conscious, but they routinely feud and back stab one another in pursuit of primacy. Organizations have their own internal politics. People are regularly promoted and ousted as economic conditions shift and ideology drifts. Just ask any status climbing POC who had the ladder kicked out from under them in the name of DEI. Or any “Big Balls” DOGE teen who finds himself the de facto executive of a multi-billion dollar USAID program.
I would say the starkest shifts in Trumpian politics are the ways in which he’s redefining winners and losers in the domestic economy. Finance is out. Silicon Valley is in. Not all plutocrats are created equal.
Why are there so many liberals in lefty memes. And why don’t any of them know what socialism is.
Browsing all, mostly Americans
“I’m on the left! That makes me a leftist!”
Tbf it does actually make them a lefty in American terminology.
You’d have to look at community info to find out it’s meant to be explicitly socialist.
To be fair, most leftists also don’t know what socialism is lmao
I have been kicked out of things for bigotry for suggesting that reading theory was a thing people should do.
Capitalist democracy is not real democracy and you know it! Stop pretending this system works!
We’re not voting our way out of this I know that much.
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:
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
“… and we’ll replace it with anarchism!”
“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.
I’m not sure what system would work. The problem is people. Once the wrong people are in charge, they’ll ignore or break laws with impunity.
Capitalism has definitely proven that it’s not the answer, though.
There’s a solution to that: don’t have ‘in charge’.
People are shaped largely by material conditions of our world, and liberalism does encourage horrible qualities that we can see doing active harm today such as individualism, competitivism, selfishness, greed, dogmatism, etc. A great proof of this is looking at today’s tribes that still exist and see how they behave much differently than us in the civilized world - they put more emphasis on community, mutual survival rather than individual property ownership.
Therefore, the goal is not to refuse change because “human nature” or whatever, but change material conditions of our world to change our behaviors and values as well. Kind of a catch 22 situation, but given how we transformed our “nature” over the tens of thousands of years constantly it is possible.
Anarchism avoids this problem by putting no one in charge
Correction: Anarchism avoids this problem by putting everyone in charge. It’s not an arrangement in which nobody is empowered, it is an arrangement in which everyone is empowered.
True, you can argue it either way.
When there’s no one in charge, everyone is in charge.I guess making “in charge” synonymous for “an authority” squares the circle too.
so i have trouble understanding the anarchistic society.
how do you build public works? how do you get everyone to agree to sacrifice for the public good? how do you stop the warlord from seizing control? even worse, how do you solve the tragedy of the commons? if peer pressure alone of a group becomes impossible after 50 participants, are you stuck in fractals of 50?
It’s important to understand that anarchism is a bottom-up system of governance rather than top-down. Solutions to problems are discovered procedurally and organically by a society of individuals that agree from the outset to basic, simple rules which merely allow that process to occur: Stripped down, simply mutual respect and direct communication. Therefore if you try to understand anarchism as a pre-defined system like a democratic republic, your understanding will be frustrated. There are no singular answers to the questions you pose as there is no singular anarchist system. What is important and constant is that a group agrees from the outset to behave as a cooperative community of equivalent individuals. Anarchism is emergent, rather than prescriptive. And if you do not have that mutual agreement from the outset, you cannot yet do anarchism.
A solution to the group size issue you pose is nested communes, a proven system for scaling anarchist society. It’s basically an inverted hierarchy: Hyperlocal communes of 50-100 individuals make all the final decisions right from the outset, on all matters that are destined to affect them. Then they send usually two messengers from their commune to a “higher” coordinating commune where they meet with the messengers from 25-50 other communes. These messengers are not “representatives” like in a democratic republic! They do not make new decisions. They are merely delivering their commune’s decision. It is then the job of this coordinating commune to cohere all of the delivered decisions from their constituent communes, through a number of pre-decided procedural conflict resolution methods. If there are conflicts between commune decisions that cannot be cohered and resolved through these methods, the decision can go no further and the issue gets passed back to the constituent communes to discuss again. Messengers don’t make new decisions without their home commune! The members of each commune know this, so they’re aware that sending out decisions that are bullheaded / undiplomatic / selfish / uncompromising are likely to cause a lockup and be rejected, therefore are incentivized to come to decisions that are agreeable and readily negotiable in advance. They are likely to phone up the next commune over when they make these decisions to double check that they’re on the same page, and negotiate changes to their decisions in advance. Many lines of direct communication are incentivized even before the messengers are sent to the coordinating commune. Everyone in this web is incentivized to be in dialog, or they could possibly delay getting what they want.
So, one coordinating commune can contain the regional consensus of ~5,000 people across 50 constituent communes. Once the decisions within that level 1 coordinating commune are cohered, if they also concern people outside of that 5,000 person region they can then proceed to a level 2 coordinating commune via another two messengers from the level 1! Same process as before, and 5,000 people grows to 250,000. The largest branch of governance in AANES, the Kurdish-led region of northern Syria, is a nested commune like this one (Liberal-style political parties exist in a separate, smaller branch). With roughly 4.5 million participants, they require IIRC 4 levels of this system and decisions can go from top to bottom (Or bottom to top, depending on how you see it) in a few weeks which is actually faster in many cases than a liberal congress. AANES is liberalizing and top-down structure has been formalizing out there, re-colonizing the social sphere, but last I heard most of these communes still meet daily.
Oh and as for the “tragedy of the commons”, that is a problem specific to capitalism and other hierarchical hoarding systems. If you ask an anthropologist they’ll tell you that this problem literally does not occur outside niche situations where people normalized to capitalism suddenly find themselves outside of that system having to manage resources for themselves (Like a shipwreck stranding). It simply does not occur in societies that have not been introduced and normalized into hierarchical hoarding. In fact the sheep pasturing example often used to illustrate the myth is a situation that was managed through anarchist-style mutual aid back when people really did have to communicate and cooperate with their neighbors to share a commons like grassland. Shepherds weren’t constantly in conflict with each other and running out of grass! They understood that they had to cooperate to survive! Tragedy of the commons is straight up capitalist propaganda.
peer pressure
Also culture, education, enlightened self interest, conscience, ego, the primal urge to act, boredom, laziness, scifi fandom…
Not everything has to be coercive.
tragedy of the commons
Created by the capitalist bullshit ownership. Not a real thing. Wasn’t a real thing for thousands of years and had to be enforced at gun point for centuries before it kicked in.
people will be evil come crunch time!
Literally the opposite of how it works. Provably: there are books on the topic.
The concept of ownership works more to inhibit industrius impulses and accomplishment than to nurture them. The threat of coercive violence fractures more than coheres social efforts. The mechanisms of that violence and their maintenance enable and necessitate a lot more violence than they stop. And they keep people from growing into fully mature adults. I dont think you genuinely outgrow childhood until you live as an outlaw or face state repression for a couple years.
But part of the beauty of this society is that everyone has a say. Nothing that you can see before it’s into the process of being made can or will be an accurate representation of it, because the collectivity of imagining it, which is so foreign to us here, is both such a huge part, and so impossible to do on your own.
ok, so there are fundamental things here i don’t agree with.
when mentioning peer pressure, i am talking about the need for acquiescence in matters which a person would otherwise not agree to. all the other methods you mention are ways to reach understanding sure, but you will have the contrarian, it’s a fact of life and i mention peer pressure as the only known way to compel without resorting to “violence” which i am using broadly. as the threat of the police can be considered a violence against citizens. plus all the same methods you mention can be the cause of the division in the first place…
we also seem to have a different understanding of the tragedy of the commons. the claim that humans, unless under the duress of the capitalist system would not exhibit these weaknesses is completely alien to human nature. even when you consider the most pure example of such society, the family. children having no real needs unmet, and even most wants satisfied, will still take every inch available, wether it’s warranted. this quirk in humans is seen before the advent of capitalism which tracks as those who did not act it were less fit then those who did. this is akin to claiming that of capitalism didn’t exist, people would not lie, chat, or steal.
i don’t remember saying people will become evil during crunch time, but i take it that is your understanding of the tragedy of the commons. i think evil may be a bit strong, but i understand the tragedy is just ‘being in the wrong’ … that the tragedy didn’t start at crunch time. the tragedy started during good and plentiful times, a but the consequences didn’t happen until crunch time. the parable has the neighbors taking more then they needed from the public trust during the good time to prepare themselves incase there would be bad times. if you were to try to convince me that people are only self serving because of capitalistic pressures, that would be an uphill battle. and to assume that all people would be the same in this matter is overgeneralizing individuals, and sadly the true tragedy is that this qirk is infectious, it only takes one. usually this is held in check via threat of societal ‘violence’.
to say that coercive violence is bad for people and society is not anything i can argue one way or the other. i could and may agree, but its purpose was never to establish a bother/sisterhood, but to change the risk calculus for taking advantage of the collective. now i am not fully defending capitalism here. it’s beyond obvious that this benefits the chosen few at the extreme detriment of the meny. that capitalism can’t last 100 years without having to be burned down and started over.
without squaring what i consider fundamental human flaws, i do not believe an anarchistic society could run beyond groups larger then that of a family, or real small village. and if that’s the goal… then great sacrifices will have to be made, no public works, no schools, no job specialization, no technology, just survival. art may survive in some limited capacity
Tragedy of the commons is more applicable to capitalism, it’s competing groups trying to get as much resourses as possible when there is limited resources.
Public works can be done on a cooperative basis, by unions of workers.
The Conquest of Bread is a book that outlines how an anarchic society may function, here’s an excerpt from it about rails:In support of our view we have already mentioned railways, and we will now return to them.
We know that Europe has a system of railways, over 175,000 miles long, and that on this network you can nowadays travel from north to south, from east to west, from Madrid to Petersburg, and from Calais to Constantinople, without delays, without even changing carriages (when you travel by express). More than that: a parcel deposited at a station will find its addressee anywhere, in Turkey or in Central Asia, without more formality needed for sending it than writing its destination on a bit of paper.
This result might have been obtained in two ways. A Napoleon, a Bismarck, or some potentate having conquered Europe, would from Paris, Berlin, or Rome, draw a railway map and regulate the hours of the trains. The Russian Tsar Nicholas I. dreamt of such a power. When he was shown rough drafts of railways between Moscow and Petersburg, he seized a ruler and drew on the map of Russia a straight line between these two capitals, saying, “Here is the plan.” And the road was built in a straight line, filling in deep ravines, building bridges of a giddy height, which had to be abandoned a few years later, after the railway had cost about 120,000 to 150,000 pounds per English mile.
This is one way, but happily things were managed differently. Railways were constructed piece by piece, the pieces were joined together, and the hundred different companies, to whom these pieces belonged, gradually came to an understanding concerning the arrival and departure of their trains, and the running of carriages on their rails, from all countries, without unloading merchandise as it passes from one network to another.
All this was done by free agreement, by exchange of letters and proposals, and by congresses at which delegates met to discuss well specified special points, and to come to an agreement about them, but not to make laws. After the congress was over, the delegates returned to their respective companies, not with a law, but with the draft of a contract to be accepted or rejected.
If capitalist rail companies can cooperate to build a rail system, rail companies owned by the workers would cooperate much more freely.
Anarchic societies actually saw production increase, since it eliminated a lot of useless jobs, In an anarchist reigon of spain, they produced so much bread and oil that after giving it away for free they were still able to export some (source). (I highly recommend you read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, its a great book).
If people were able to overthrow a government once, they can surely do it again for a warlord. If anything, it would be harder to re-establish a government since people will see their lives materially improve with anarchism. Outside forces are a problem, but they’re a problem with capitalism as well.
But that’s how we started. How are you gonna stop the people that then gather and creates groups with leaders that ravage the land like the golden horde?
By meeting with them regularly as their neighbor and getting to know their needs through continuous dialog and figuring out how to make you and them materially reliant on one another in order to create an organic, interdependent, cooperative community in which the wants and needs of individuals become aligned.
This has literally always been the only way to dependably avoid your scenario under any system, regardless of institutional obfuscations to the contrary. Anarchism really just strips away those obfuscations and thrusts it’s participants directly into mutual power with one another.
I recommend you read this: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-frequently-asked-questions-about-anarchism#toc7
More specifically,
But if we overthrow the government without offering something to take its place, what’s to stop something really nasty from filling the power vacuum?
That’s the mantra of those who are working up the nerve to be really nasty themselves. The really ruthless usually tell you that they are there to protect you from other ruthless people; often, they are telling themselves the same thing.
If we were powerful enough to overthrow one government, we would be powerful enough to prevent the ascendance of another, provided we weren’t tricked into rallying around some new authority. What should take the place of the government is not another formalized power structure, but cooperative relationships that can meet our needs while keeping new would-be rulers at bay.
From the vantage point of the present, no one can imagine creating a stateless society, though many of the problems we face will not be solved any other way. In the meantime, we can at least open spaces and times and relations outside the control of the authorities.
That entire FAQ is a hodge podge of logical fallacies; apparently written by someone who’s read lots of 20th century history books but has zero understanding of real life civics.
That’s the mantra of those who are working up the nerve to be really nasty themselves.
Calling everyone who disagrees closet-oppressors is an ad hominim not an argument.
If we were powerful enough to overthrow one government, we would be powerful enough to prevent the ascendance of another,
That’s a hasty generalization that US interventions abroad patently disproves.
not another formalized power structure, but cooperative relationships that can meet our needs while keeping new would-be rulers at bay.
That’s just reinventing the wheel. Relationships need to be formalized in order to consistently deliver at scale. Likewise power structures inherently exist because of the would-be rulers.
no one can imagine creating a stateless society, though many of the problems we face will not be solved any other way.
This is an appeal to ignorance on multiple levels.
Also: You are assuming that just because the text contains a fallacy, it is incorrect or worthless. That is a fallacy in itself.
Assumptions are not logical fallacies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
Assuming that the text is wrong because it’s fallacious is a fallacy.
How does it appeal to ignorance? It would be hard for a feudal peasant or lord to envision a capitalist society.
It would be hard for a feudal peasant or lord to envision a capitalist society.
And even harder, some might say impossible, for either of us to know what someone 500 years ago was thinking or could comprehend. The argument appeals to our ignorance as evidence of it’s merit.
You should look into Capitalist Realism (people won’t read the book, so here’s the wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism#HeroSection). It’s easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.
If we were powerful enough to overthrow one government, we would be powerful enough to prevent the ascendance of another
I’m not convinced. What if the government was just weak at the time
It’s also a terrible argument since hunter gatherer societies largely avoided conflict due to humans being so sparse. It was simply much, much, easier to move on than to fight prior to the agricultural revolution.
Meanwhile we have archeological evidence of subsistence marauders from the stone age. They found a village that lacked contemporary agriculture. It also had a mass grave of victims who had been killed violently but their deaths spanned over a decade.
Okay, but weapons exist. Any country that declared that it had no government would be taken over in less time than it’s taking me to type this (granted, I’m on a phone, but still).
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin is a great book that explores an anarchist society. It works because the anarchists are on an unwelcoming moon with very few resources.
Okay, but weapons exist. Any country that declared that it had no government would be taken over in less time than it’s taking me to type this.
Zapatistas seem to doing a good job.
They dissolved MAREZ, and while they still operate their community help centers, they no longer govern the area. While the whole list of reasons for this is unknown to anyone but the Counsels of Good Government, the greater issues they spoke about was a combination of the government bodies of Mexico applying more pressure, at the same time Cartel territory has expanded into their area, and the violence, and threats to the counsel that came from this.
So the Zapatistas are not in a good way at the moment.
Weapons exist for both sides :)
Anarchism isn’t about pretending harm doesn’t exist either. The people that want to do real harm and will cause harm (will in bold because it’s important to distinguish people who want to do harm and people who will do harm) can just as easily get into positions of power in our current system. Most people don’t want chaos, so why should we organize society around the assumption that we need rulers to prevent it? Basic morals are very, very easy for a super majority of a society to get behind.
Bad actors will mess up any polity, to any degree. That’s not a unique fault of anarchism, my friend.
Didn’t say it was.
Prison style.
Both are dumb as fuck. Hint: if you have only some wood and no instruments to work on it save a saw and a hammer, you are not going to make a car with internal combustion engine
Now watch the history of dumb fucks trying to make a “good” society with people who have no idea why exploiting others is not good
Hint: if you have only some wood and no instruments to work on it save a saw and a hammer, you are not going to make a car with internal combustion engine
As a wood scientist, I can confirm that wood is generally a poor material for engine block manufacture.
Have you even tried ??
I’m trying and failing to find it. But awhile back I did see a trolling video one of the YouTube woodworkers created. I can’t recall the exact details, but they built a fireplace, a stove, or similar fire containing device. Except, they built it out of wood. Unfortunately, the concept seems unsearchable, as there’s no way to not get the search engines to interpret “fireplace made of wood” as “wood burning fireplace.”
They built this thing and set a fire inside it. And it went…well, about as well as one would expect.
ah, gotta find it !
Public ownership of the means of production with the suppression of the owning/capitalist class until all capitalist nation state have been destroyed and we can have a socialist world republic, duh
A system where:
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Goods are produced to fulfill human needs via the help of central planning as opposed to commodity production where the “invisible hand of the market” dictates what to produce
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Goods get distributed to fulfill needs rather than “rationed” through universal commodities like money
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Private ownership gets abolished which gets rid of the parasitic class that extracts value out of land/labor
A system where the entire mode of production changes, and the present state of things gets abolished aka communism/communist mode of production though most of these core points that I outlined (it’s not everything) can also apply to anarchism.
It’s easy to write these ideas off as “having provably failed” given the history, but failures at building communism have nothing to do with these economic aspects or “human nature” or whatever, but rather political and material situations. USSR didn’t achieve communism because of majority of its population being peasants as opposed to urban proletariat, and you can’t really fulfill the needs of people if you haven’t developed the productive forces to produce said needs, and if you stay on capitalism long enough, you’ll start getting opportunists who want personal power and wealth.
Other post-Stalin regimes that called themselves communist (such as Vietnam, Cuba) only did so to gain protection from the Capitalist west given their ex-colony status, so they adopted Marxist-Leninist aesthetics to gain the protection of USSR - materially, they weren’t communist at all though given their repression of the workers and independent labor unions, mode of production remaining capitalist and class divisions still going strong.
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You know communism of some form obviously private ownership of the means of production is self evidently bad for humanity and the planet in general.
socialism, yk, anarchism, is hard to understand for u? do you need your brain checked?
So you feel entitled to demand society be torn down but not a crumb of responsibility to build it again?
I can agree that something close to communism is the ideal government. But not if it’s run by incompetent or corrupt people. It would be akin to what we saw in post-exit Afghanistan, with clueless gun toting buffoons holding civic offices.
do you need your brain checked?
Grow up.
Sorry, did you just imply someone is irresponsible for suggesting communism and then immediately agree with their suggestion?
Wtf is up with the nasty “not a crumb of responsibility” line? Can you explain that or is that just a lack of coffee thing?
Anarchists/socialists want to sieze the means of production, not destroy them.
Seizing is a lot easier than managing.
Well then chap, grab a gun and seize us some means!
In an anarchist reigon of spain, they produced so much bread and oil that after giving it away for free they were still able to export some (source).
If anything, anarchism would make managing the means more effiecent, since it elimates the bureaucracy around it. There would be more workers since Bullshit Jobs (read the book by David Graeber, even if you’re not an anarchist it’s a good read). Would be eliminted.
A contextless example with no direct connection to 99% of other issues?
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Explain how your cherry picked example directly translates to other industries.
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Explain how that would scale from a small region to sustaining a population of millions
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What is your evidence that the main detractor to efficiency is bureaucracy?
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Why would people if office jobs go work on fields?
Like bruh this is literally the level of thinking MAGA put before essentially allowing ICE to deport half their workers.
Transitioning away from capitalism involves peoples lives… like millions to billions of them. Rational, empathetic people, will not join you in a revolution that could potentially cause more suffering than the status quo.
If you decide to continue believing (well…anything really…but still…) in the existing of any currency, then you, and everyone else, including me and mine, will die and stop. 2030 is the easily the call. Not much time left. Lucky if anyone makes it that far.
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if it exploits the people like capitalism does, it should be replaced
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I’m going to have to ask this again it seems. Where has 100% socialism worked for longer than 10 years for a country?
I think socialism is a great idea, but it doesn’t work for anything larger than a small commune and you have to have a common purpose. The greeds are going to take over and become authoritarian pretty quickly if you try it for a country. That’s why socialist democrat seems to be the way to meet everyone’s needs. Bernie style.
Where the hell has capitalism worked?
You could lazily ask that question or you can actually read about how anarchist and communist societies are formed and destroyed (hint: often by outside armies when theyve only just begun). Capitalism clearly doesn’t work for anyone but the rich & powerful, so we need to try something different. No one has The One True Answer, we have to build the new world starting from where we are.
I agree that social democracy would be a big improvement over the terribly cruel form of capitalism we have today. I would make further changes than just that, but we can choose not to fight each other at least until we get that far. Organize together instead of infighting.
Socialist democrat
That’s socialism. It should be noted socialism is a very broad spectrum of ideologies, and they primarily fail at being implemented in the first place, not at being maintained.
Liberalism is difficult to implement as it requires the powers that be to relinquish some power to capitalists and the middle class, however when both those groups started holding significant economic power liberalism could succeed in many parts of the world.
Socialism is harder to achieve as there are no large economic powers that gain from it. Greedy corps, governments, and individuals all oppose its implementation and therefore it’s difficult. There’s also the issue of organizing everyone and all that.
So no, you don’t seem to quite understand. Socialism doesn’t fail, nor is always organized into communes, and “socialist democrats” describe socialists.
Things need to change and sitting on our hands and saying that changing the system in any way won’t work is extremely counter productive.
Also, it has become clear that capitalism can’t maintain democracies for all that long. It’s not a stable system. The few accrue wealth and property and create oligopolies which destabilize the systems we depend on, leading to the slow decline of social and liberal democracies worldwide. Capitalism needs to go.
Edit: Basically what I’m saying is that you don’t know the definitions of the words you are using. “Communist states” are largely not communist. They are often state capitalist or some degree of a planned economy. The workers don’t own squat. Most socialists I know don’t argue in favor of anything similar to china or the soviet union, but actual democratic socialist states. While many want revolutions we also generally work towards reforms and unionizing since a revolution requires some popular support.
All positive aspects of liberal states are socialist policies implemented by socialist politicians or forced through by unions. Usually unions. I therefore personally favor forms of socialism that lean into the union part such as syndicalism. Might be worth having a look at that if you want to learn what socialism is.
I’m going to have to ask this again it seems. Where has 100% socialism worked for longer than 10 years for a country?
it’s confounded by the US, a powerful state, being deeply ideologically opposed to socialism. Maybe shit would have worked without the US sabotaging it
If a system cannot defend itself from the influence of foreign interest, it can’t function on the world stage. That’s like saying a motor design would work without friction or thermodynamics sabotaging it. It implies there are still problems that need to be ironed out before the system is rolled out.
Capitalist countries have problems defending themselves as well. Maybe that’s not the system’s problem.
I don’t know if any political system would stand up to a concerted effort to sabotage it. If socialism was the dominant paradigm and some small country tried to do capitalism, it very well might have been sabotaged. It wouldn’t follow to say capitalism can’t work after shooting all the leaders and buying all their media
The thing about capitalism is that it excels at concentrating power into relatively few hands, which makes it much easier to direct resources for specific goals.
But that’s not really the point. The point is that the conditions of the world are what they are. If your system requires the conditions to be otherwise in order to succeed, you either need to secure those conditions first or abandon the system.
As we saw with the USSR, the opposition from the US helped turn it into a corrupt oligarchy. The efforts to secure a strong socialist state just made their resources easier to divvy up.
That’s not to say I disapprove of socialism and endorse capitalism. But we cannot ignore the material conditions in the world. Any improvement needs to take them into consideration, and have the ability to deal with them.
Aye. If we could get a global leadership to fix tax havens and regulate for sustainable praxis we’ll get closer to the fully automated gay socialist space communism we all would enjoy.
Honestly I don’t think you actually can have socialism that isn’t a functioning democracy. Ownership implies power over something, and a government by its nature must have power over the things within it’s borders. If society at large, ie the people, don’t control the government, then regardless of who owns things on paper, whatever smaller group of people actually control the government effectively own whatever is in that country, and therefore their effect is fundamentally similar to the effect that a wealthy capitalist class has in a capitalist society. Anything where the people aren’t actually in charge that calls itself socialist, is just using the terminology and aesthetics to gain support without actually setting up the socialized ownership structure that the name implies.
I agree 100%, that’s why they never have an example of one that has worked, there isn’t one. I appreciate the goal, but the practicality of it is nil as a stand alone for anything country size.
I’ve known people that made it work as a living situation, but they all had outside jobs and were bringing resources from outside the community. I’ve heard of it working as a small commune in Norway where they grow their own food and such, but that’s it.
There has to be some sort of trade with a world this size, we currently use ephemeral numbers that we trade and some times paper. If it was a commune, they would still have to trade labor, carrots, chickens or whatever. Capitalism will always be there in some form or another.
There’s a difference between capitalism and just having markets and money, to be fair.
I mean this sincerely, because I don’t know everything about economics. Is it?
A blacksmith with 5 apprentices is a capitalist, right? An artist like Da Vinci had apprentices, so he was a capitalist. What I’m saying is, you don’t have to go too far from trading chickens to get to capitalism.
There’s a difference between capitalism and just having markets and money, to be fair.
I mean this sincerely, because I don’t know everything about economics. Is it?
No it is not.
Currency is 3000 years old. Money and Markets preexist the capitalist system.
A core concept of Karl Max book was how local markets can influence prices in distant markets; resulting famine due to prices not availability. That was his literal moral justification for regulating the economy.
It’s a matter of scale I think, I don’t think I would consider a blacksmith having a handful of apprentices to be capitalism, especially considering the implication of an apprenticeship meaning that those guys will eventually become blacksmiths themselves. Maybe if he owned a whole bunch of blacksmiths shops and the associated tools and just paid the actual smiths a certain amount to use them, but if a small shop like that is capitalism, then every economic system from the dawn of trade to now is capitalism, and that isn’t how I generally see people use the term.
if it doesn’t work, then why would america try their best to shut socialism down? seriously if you need a test and you’re in the uk, I can hook you up with a therapist
The U.S is just concerned for the people there.
They obviously have good intentions.Okay, name one that worked.
name one that wasn’t immediately bitch slapped by the uk/us/cia
Exactly, we’re agreeing.
This is why we gave up on democracy itself after Sparta conquered Athens that one time.
Dumbass Romans might have tried it again but obviously they lost after a couple centuries, glad nothing will ever challenge absolute monarchies which have obviously always existed.
Can you imagine some losers coming along a thousand years later and trying to do republicanism again? Morons.
Bernie style.
Socialism and capitalism aren’t diametrically opposed. Functionally socialism is just capitalism + egalitarianism. If capitalism can go to the moon… socialism prevents everyone from drowning. They aren’t mutually exclusive.
I agree that socialism “doesn’t scale”, but that’s due to the nature of markets. TLDR you simply cannot trade globally without the mechanics of capitalism coming into play. Like the beginning section of Karl Marx book was explaining how the economics of one region could directly cause a famine in a completely separate region.
IMO communism will only work in a society that enacts it peacefully. A violent revolution inevitably costs skilled individuals and inherently creates detractors. 90% of the challenges in a capitalist society will still exist in a communist one. The less traumatic the transition the better positioned society is for immediate success.
Most socialists are against capitalism while a lot of them ooh and ahh over a coffeemaker they just got off amazon. The people bitching here in this thread are using capitalism to do it. I really think we can have a world where communities and the government help each other, it doesn’t have to be like it is now. It actually has been pretty good in some portions of the last 100 years. Definitely not perfect though. A democracy sucks, but it’s the best option there is.
You hate capitalism, yet you participate in it. I am very intelligent
A democracy sucks, but it’s the best option there is.
Democracy is a terrible form of government; until you consider the alternatives.
You fucked up the quote and don’t actually support true democracy, just representative democracy, all while conflating democracy with liberalism like they’re inseparable concepts.
If you’re going by capitalist purism like Milton Friedman we’re nothing even close to that.
Also: still evil, antidemocratic. Literally not compatible with democracy.
The problem is, socialism looks great by reading the notes on the side of the tin, but there’s not a lot of successful installations that maintain individual freedom.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/socialist-countries
If you’re going to do it, it’s going to need to be done in a way that’s never been done before or you’re just going to end up another country listed as “former”
I think the way forward is to combine socialism and capitalism. The latter is an optimization layer that is ideal for fostering the personality of individuals, but royally sucks at promoting their everyday wellbeing. Socialism can be terrific for ensuring survival and fairness, but is too rigid to allow people to develop their humanity.
I consider socialism to be a framework and structure of a economic house, while capitalism is the means to furnish it. To do this, we need to make money into something that doesn’t buy necessities - society provides all of them - but rather, you use money to buy lifestyle upgrades. That can be fancier food, bigger cars, a nicer house, lots of books, going to the bar, hiring pleasant company, and so forth.
Like all optimization, capitalism will become detrimental if taken too far, so there would be a need for heavy regulations and strict lines to ensure that it sticks to its lane. To that end, I propose that job classes should be assigned to a fixed income rank. This means that a CEO is, perhaps, no more than 2x the income of a waitress. That sort of structural design can help keep capitalism from becoming malignant, since strong and simple rules would make it easier to diagnose corruption, such as wage theft.
As it is, the capitalism of our day is too random for individuals to grasp, while corporations can have dedicated staff to getting the most out of it, often at the expense of individuals. That stacks the deck, especially as the game goes on. If ordinary members of society knew their rights without needing extensive research, it would make it easier for them to call out bad actors and to enforce the rules.
No, actually its not doing what it’s supposed to he doing, and yes, it can be fixed with laws and taxes, loads of taxes.
For all the moaning about capitalism is evil, capitalism is the most efficient system to generate wealth. Used properly it can give wealth to everyone through taxes and fun a social network that can take care of free healthcare, free education, even universal income.
But it’s easier to just say that communism is awesome because you read about it and China is amazing and can do no wrong ever
So… no capitalism immediately means communism to you?
Way to tell us how little you know of economic systems without just saying, “hey I’m also an idiot with an opinion!”
Did I say that?
I read my comment and I didn’t say that at all.
I did mention communism because left subs on Lemmy usually are very “capitalism is evil and can’t be fixed but communism is awesome and has zero faults!!”
You projecting your ignorance of economics doesn’t absolve you of making the implication yourself. If you don’t think the only alternative to capitalism is communism, then say that. Don’t preemptively strawman everyone unless you want to have an unproductive conversation.
calling china communist is like calling the nazis socialist, both are/were fascist regimes that were/are communist/socialist in name only
So you’re in favor of owning the means of production? And profit from others work?
I’m in favor of a system where nobody gets to be extremely richer or poorer than everyone else.
I’m in favor of a system where the richest person can’t get beyond -just a random out of my butt number that sounds reasonable - 10 million in networth. Any income beyond that gets taxes 100%. Below that, the poorest pay no tax, they get pay. Then the higher you go, the higher income taxes get until you hit the hard limit
With a system like that you get an enormous tax income which you can then use for a socialist system that gives free healthcare (including mental, dental, everything), free education, free housing, even universal income
The poorest don’t pay taxes, they receive money. If you can work, you work what you can and if you can’t work, then you don’t.
I want a system where companies cannot grow beyond certain limits either. Same deal, taxes get higher and higher until after a net worth of say, 1 billion, taxes to go 100%. No company can have more than 1000 employees so that if one breaks, it woi kill your economy.
I don’t think my idea is that far off from your ideas
I just want capitalism at the base of it because at its core, capitalism is just free trade however anyone wants it. it’s freedom but it’s also by far the best and most efficient system to generate wealth. So limited correctly, I think capitalism in that way could be awesome and contrary to, say, communism, this idea is actually that you can implement without wrecking havoc with the world
As I see things capitalism is the right to own the means of production, the right to exploit others work, and by that I mean your profit comes from other people work, not yours, and that is the main problem in my understanding
Yet when communism fucked up, that was just because of western interference.
Nah, westen interference wasn’t necessary to bring down communism, all those dictatorships did that quite effectively by themselves
China
*results may vary
Imagine having a bag of skittles and keep pulling out reds and saying, “this is all everyone wants and needs.”
Just remember folks, youre not picking anything for yourself. Those born to capitalism will die with capitalism. You can imagine a world thats better, thats great, but it wont be for you.
Its your blood to shed.
Is this the country that has faced sanctions from the world’s biggest economic power thus effectively locking them out of the positive sum game that is world trade?
