Still think something between communism and capitalism would be the best. Both show a lot of problems but both have benefits. A well regulated and equal competition with linear growth(not like capitalism with its exponential growth that produces musks and bezos’) sounds right to me. I think UBI would be exploited so just give them the basics in food, shelter, internet access, etc. But of course in the hellscape called modern politics everyone has to be an extremist so only hardcore capitalism, hardcore communism, genocide, etc are represented.
Market economies are actually pretty great for a lot of things. The problems we have in capitalism are 1. the capitalist class, who make their living without contributing anything by min-maxing wages and prices, and 2. the privatization of necessities.
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A market economy for non-essentials would work splendidly so long as the income of each business was distributed to the people who actually did the work. The problem is non-working shareholders. Every worker should be a shareholder, every shareholder should be a worker. Market socialism is the way.
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Market economies cannot work efficiently for essentials. If the alternative to a purchase is death or serious injury, it ceases to be a voluntary purchase, the downward pressure of abstinence vanishes, and prices skyrocket. We’ve seen this in healthcare and housing. We need a public option for both.
Profit motive still forces enshittification, unfortunately.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
There’s also a lot to be said about financial norms and systems, for instance regardless of the organization of labor the way we measure GDP is fundamentally a very flawed and arbitrary approximation of “wealth” yet it is the driver behind so many political decisions. My (admittedly unqualified) understanding is thst we could significantly improve quality of life and market efficiency by addressing some of these flaws.
Market Socialism would be a great improvement in stability and quality of life, but it wouldn’t solve enshittification outright, because the profit motive is still there. Ideally that would be phased out.
Every improvement is incremental, a stable system is developed by individual steps in the right direction. Overly ambitious changes tend to regress back to the last point of stability.
This is the way
I think if we can steer this burning trash pile into a regulated coop-based economy, with a star-based voting system (I’d settle for ranked choice at this point), whose economy isn’t propped up by the cheap exploitation of developing foreign nations, I’ll be much happier. While we’re at it, solving homelessness and developing more sustainable infrastructures would be great.
You had my interest but now you have my full attention.
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Capitalism is very clearly not a one-size-fits-all solution…but if there’s one thing capitalism hates, it’s competition.
Also there’s nothing inherently wrong with extreme ideology as a concept. It’s only a call for radical change to the current social order. Liberalism which is to say our modern “democratic capitalist” structure would have been considered extremism during feudal times.
The extremist boogie man is a lie peddled by those who benefit from the status quo to insure those who don’t are too scared to change it
Extremism usually relies on wishful thinking tbh. Also see this handy chart:
The problem is that some of them don’t have to wait for society to collapse, sometimes society is destined to decay into a specific form. The final stage of capitalism is fascism
Yeah no, just because a socialist philosopher said it doesn’t make it true. Every economic system will eventually collapse for some reason, but the reasons for the collapse and the circumstances matter much more for predicting the future after the collapse than the system that collapsed. If you don’t believe that look at the many ways societies changed when feudalism collapsed.
Marxist philosophy isn’t just a prediction of what will be it’s also a analysis of how we ended up where we are and where we are headed. If you’re interested in learning about how Marx processed the world it’s worth reading into dialectical materialism. Marxism is much more complex than a simple capitalism eventually fails and socialism comes next.
In short, dialectical materialism is a philosophy that emphasizes the effects of material conditions and opposing interests on social relations. It is not specifically an economic philosophy but it is a very useful toolset for understanding the intricacies of socioeconomics. It also suggests that the best way to resolve contradictions is to restructure society so that those contradictions are eliminated. While that last bit sounds really obvious there’s been a lot of fighting about it, I’d elaborate but Hegelian dialectics is fucking gibberish if you aren’t familiar with the terminology.
So basically yeah some guy saying something doesn’t make it true but it’s worth checking when that guy has had his work holds up after being scrutinized and expanded upon for 2 centuries
Some of the og stuff
Yeah no, Marx’s predictions were wrong. The most obvious one is he thought the workers revolutions would come from industrialized nations, that was completely wrong. But, with many of his other claims, those who support his ideology will twist any event happening to fit their narrative, just as a christian may twist any event into fulfilling a biblical prophecy.
Oh fuck I forgot, Marx did get one thing wrong. I guess the entire philosophical and logical scientific analysis developed by 100s of scholars is just trash, my mistake
Why not something like market socialism?
Market Socialism is a great common sense first step, but it leaves enshittification because it keeps the profit motive. Ideally the profit motive should be phased out.
I don’t think it’s a perfect system, however there are easy ways to prevent this problem. You simply make either the customers or the government one of the parties holding shares of the companies. That way the customers also get to vote on decisions, or the government on behalf of the whole society.
I feel like that’s just a less efficient non-market form of Socialism, at that point it might make more sense to just fully socialize.
Fully socialize? Socialist market economy is a true socialist system already. You can’t make it more socialist. Your confusing communism with socialism.
I’m aware that it’s fully anticapitalist, but full Socialism would imply collective ownership of the Means of Production, not just ownership at an entity level.
Communism would also get rid of the state, so I’m not quite referring to Communism in this instance.
Your confusing Leninism for socialism. Not all socialism even requires a state never mind state ownership.
Google georgism
Georgism isn’t really anywhere near socialism. The only thing George recognized is that land ownership isn’t a real market. Other than that his policies would lead to probably less regulation than in most modern “capitalist” countries.
holy shit, bad apple
nagareteku
*and the same
Serious question not trying to troll here: Isn’t everyone stuck in this hellish capitalist system part of that class?
No. Classes are determined by how you get your money and by how comfortable you are.
If you are working for a paycheck, you do not touch capital.
there is no capital without labour
Then maybe labor should organize its own capital and not some entitled prick of a class.
That’s literally what socialism and communism are
Yes, I am a great proponent of those things. Why did you assume otherwise?
I’m too used to seeing people say “we need another way instead of capitalism”, completely (willfully?) ignoring that socialism and communism, that I assumed that’s where you were going. Sorry for the tone I put in my comment
It’s not quite so black and white, though.
My spouse and I both work for a living, and we’d be in a hard spot if either of us lost our jobs. We also own 3 rental properties, and I have a military pension. We also own a farm where we raise 6 cows and enough chickens to have some eggs to sell.
So, we get most of our money from our labor, the rental properties pay for themselves most of the time but we don’t pool that with our personal money…it’s for the mortgages, taxes, maintenance and to cover for when we don’t have renters (which is almost never…weird how that happens when you aren’tcharging exploitative rents).
We sell eggs and make a small profit on those, but not enough to support ourselves…same with the beef…it’s mostly for us and family to eat (because fuck factory farming) but if we don’t have the freezer space we’ll sell the extra as well. That makes us both labor and capital… and my pension and military retirement benefits are basically as close to socialism as we’ll get in the US anytime soon, the biggest difference being I had to earn it.
The landlord side of it is the murkiest imo. You having a military pension doesn’t mean you’re in the bourgeoisie, it just means you’re getting paid for having given time from your life. Similarly, selling the surplus from your own agriculture doesn’t place you in the class of controlling capital because you aren’t using others’ labor; you’re creating something through your labor and when faced with having a surplus, are distributing your goods. Yes you sell them, but it’s not fair to criticize you for trying to offset your costs while living under a capitalist system so long as the price isn’t exorbitant.
Imo being a landlord is usually the scummiest, but if you’re charging rent at a price set to maintain the buildings and ensure that your tenants still have housing, then I don’t think you’re exploiting anyone. Imo the more profit you take from your rental properties, the more it moves out of the grey area. It sounds however like you don’t take profit or take a very minimal amount, and that you price your property so that it’s self sufficient but not much more. In that case then you aren’t really exploiting your tenants. Are they still being exploited? Yes, by the system that forces them to pay for housing. Do you have a hand in that exploitation purely by being their landlord? Yes, however if you aren’t trying to extort them for money so they have housing, then I wouldn’t say you’re exploiting them more than just owning their housing. Theres a reason that leftists tout that theres no ethical consumption under capitalism; even in trying to help people or do the right thing, you are still feeding into a system of exploitation and extortion. That doesn’t mean you still aren’t trying to do the right thing or be genuinely helpful, it just means that unless we find an alternative system then we will all continue to exploit each other and be exploited. This is why the proletariat must be unified as otherwise, we will never shake the binds of our collective oppression.
Congratulations, you’re one of an extreme few still living in the middle class.
Now realize how minority your experience is.
Oh, believe me…I am well aware of my privilege and spend a lot of time trying to question my own motivations… especially around the rental properties. I do feel like rental homes are generally exploitative towards the renters, but the 1st property kinda fell into our laps, and the other 2 were situations where we we were using our credit to help the rentersbgetninto a house they wanted but couldn’t finance due to their credit. Basically, they picked the house, we bought it, and they rent it from us while we report their on-time payments to rebuild their credit.
I definitely wasn’t born with a silver spoon…was homeless myself several times as a kid and for a while immediately after moving out on my own. Joined the military as it seemed the best way out for me at the time. Wrecked my knees and fucked my brain but at least they’re paying me for the trouble. Now we’re in the privileged, if often uncomfortable, role of being better off than most of our friends and peers. We still struggle some months, and it feels like we’re barely making ends meet for the last year or so, so I KNOW everyone else is hurting. Even aside from our current financial state, I’m a cishet white veteran living in a very red state. About the only privileges I don’t have here are being a lefty and an athiest, and even with all that, it still feels like I’m hanging on by a thread. When I imagine dealing with the state of the world today in the socioeconomic conditions I was experiencing when I was younger, I’m not sure I’d have endured.
Even being better off than most is pretty fucking hard these days.
Based on my definitions. Owning the 3 rental properties makes you owner class as that is private property, also when you pay off the mortgages you are going to be in a great spot right?
Farms are weird, if you only had the farm and have hired nobody else to help you run it then working class. If you hire people, well then you are owner class.
You both also have jobs on top of running a farm? Out of curiosity how do you have the time to manage your farm and work at the same time?
My BIL lives on the farm and takes care of feeding the livestock and keeping the pasture cleaned up. Otherwise, it’s just family helping family. We’re in the middle rebuilding part of the chicken coop now on the weekends. I say farm, but it’s more a ranch… we only grow hay and its only about 10 acres, so it’s not a huge burden with all of us working together.
If you are working for a paycheck, you do not touch capital.
Ok so I have my beef with capitalism, for sure, but this is inaccurate. People all over the country own property, shares in public and private companies, shares of government utilities, just to name a few examples.
Ownership of things does get distributed through capitalism. As manipulated as it is, that’s the concept of the stock market.
I’m not rich, but I do own a small amount of capital. My net worth far, far exceeds what I have in my bank account when you account for my car that I’ve paid off, small investments that have appreciated over time, stuff like that.
Now the top of the capitalist class? They have SO MUCH cash, and so many resources to draw on that they can manipulate stock prices and company values at will. That’s where the whole system starts to break down.
Idk what definition of capital you used to determine this but I will be using the Marxist on because capital is a Marxist term.
Capital is private property used to create surplus value usually involving the purchase of wage labor. It can be the money a capitalist uses to pay their employees, the land their workers use to produce surplus value for them, and/or the machinary required for their workers to produce surplus value as a few examples. Buying stocks does not mean you own the means of production in any significant way. You may have stake in how those means of production are use but you do not control them and you do not use them to produce surplus value nor do you purchase wage labor, you only profit off someone who does.
Furthermore your personal possessions like your car are not capital.
If you sell your labor to someone who possesses the means of production you are proletariat
If you work for a living, and being unemployed indefinitely would threaten your survival, you are part of the working class. Owning a few crumbs of capital is a nice cushion, but does not define your class.
If your income is passive, and you could live your whole life off the returns from your investments without ever actually working, you are part of the capitalist class.
That can’t be true. I’ve done the math on my living expenses and it would only take a few years of saving in a high interest account for me to be considered a capitalist under that definition. if social mobility was truly that easy no sane person would be against capitalism.
That doesn’t sound plausible like you said. Either you’re way off the average living expenses/wages or have your formulas wrong.
If it only took you a few years of saving, you make enough and spend little enough as a proportion of that that you’re outside the average.
A better way to say it would instead be the inverse: “If you don’t work for a paycheck, you probably hold enough capital”
'Ownership of things DOES get distributed…"
Uhhhh, no? Are you dumb? Owning stock in a company is far, FAR removed from owning any part of a company’s assets.
Ok, so are we talking about assets or capital?
Capital is not money, capital can be represented by money but it is not inherently money. Capital is something you use to buy someone’s labor. More specifically it is the social relationship between wage labor and profit. Assets (private property) used to produce profit (surplus value) are capital
Capital is “the characteristic the means of production acquire when they are used to hire labor and generate surplus value”
“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”
You do not get any access to the company’s resources. There is no dollar sitting in company coffers for your dollar of investment. You don’t get to decide what that money does what so evwr, and its value is speculative on the performance.
That is far, far, far removed from owning or controlling any part of a company’s capital.
I’ve been part of multiple board elections where the little people have deciding votes because a 3rd party institutional investor needs to rally the retail investors to oust the current board for environmental
crimesreasons.Having a vote is having control of capital … and they pay you for it with dividends too.
But it isn’t the same as if the entire working class had a collective say in the capital, not just those who choose to and have the resources to pay in. It isn’t the same as the workers of that company having a say in their working conditions, shift lengths, compensation, etc.
I wish it was just by how comfortable you are. Because that way in world scale I’d be Croesus
Ok you defined this way better than I did.
No.
Basic and simplified class analysis is about shared interests based on similar social relations to Production.
The Workers do not own Capital, at least not in significant amounts.
Capitalists own Capital. They pay Workers wage labor to create commodities for sale.
There are other classes, but that’s the long and short of it.
The actual specific class you belong to can be tricky because there are sub-classes and shit like that but generally speaking you can simplify class dynamics into the owning class (bourgeoisie) and the working class (proletariat). If you own the means of production, the actual property such as land or machinary required to produce things, and you buy others labor to produce these things that you then sell, you are bourgeoisie. If you sell your labor then your are proletariat. You’ll find that the interests of these classes are in opposition; the bourgeois wants to increase profit through any means so as to provide for themselves and for investors while the prole wants a better standard of living, a safe work environment, and less work hours among many other things I need not name. These interest come into direct conflict when the capitalist runs out of ways to externally increase profit controlling a certain market niche, there is only so much demand. When this happens the capitalist looks inward at their company and wonders if they can increase profit through other means like cutting pay, skirting around safety regulations, finding ways to get around providing benefits, cutting pensions, etc etc. The really big bourgeoisie also look towards the legal system, if it only cost them 60mil of lobbying to change a law that makes them billions then that law is dead. The profit motive kills
How does this work for the modern world though? Many of the people who make the financial decisions for the company that I work for are also normal people with a normal income. Their job is to maximize profit for the company under certain constraints, but it’s not like they directly get that money for themselves. The image of the proletariat working ungodly hours in dangerous factories while a few rich fat capitalists claim all the money is often quite far from reality in my experience, apart from the ultra-rich CEOs like Musk and Bezos. And I don’t disagree that we should regulate the income disparity or anything, I just think that these classes don’t really make that much sense anymore
Apologize in advance if I over explain somethings or repeat myself with different wording, I’m not infantilizing you I’m just trying to be very clear.
I use industrial and agricultural labor as examples because they are typically more dangerous work and often more heavily exploited but even your manager is technically a prole. You’re friends that manage a finances are proletariat. If you sell your labor and the person purchasing that labor makes extracts surplus value from your labor, you are a proletariat.
Specifically, the capitalists who run the company you work at purchase the labor of those finance managers and extract a profit from their labor while doing essentially nothing other than being the person who owns the business and the capital required to produce whatever it is their workers produce.
Think about how a business is run. You have workers, the proletariat, who provide their labor in whatever form required whether physical or mental in exchange for a wage that they can then use to buy whatever necessities they need and extras they can afford. These workers are alienated from the product of their labor; they do not own the product nor do they own the means of production, they are also paid less than the product they created is worth so that the capitalist who does own the product and the means of production can extract a surplus value. In the case of your financer the product of their labor is literal money, they produce money for the capitalist and see very little of it. Their wage is what the owning class allows them to have. In a cruel twist of fate they are then required to give that wage back to the capitalist class in exchange for food, housing, electricity, sometimes water.
We still do have proletariat working ungodly hours in dangerous factories though, they are often just immigrants and minorities, sometimes children. I’d link a source for that but honestly just look up working conditions of abattoirs, specifically Tyson chicken. Or the laborers being exploited in that manner are just in another country worker for the same capitalist and getting paid less than the US minimum wage because it means the capitalist can extract more surplus value.
The problem with regulating capitalism is the that under capitalism wealth accumulates into fewer and fewer hands over time. This happens for a number of reasons but the primary being that wealth is easier to accumulate when you have it. A bigger business can buy or outcompete a smaller business, sure we can bust monopolies but it doesn’t really matter if every company in every industry is primarily owned by a few people. Creating a society where capitalism is more heavily regulated and with social safety nets would only be temporary. This is seen in Nordic countries where in the pursuit of profit their capitalist class is lobbying against any further nationalized industry and actively attempting to roll back those social safety nets. The only reason those places were even able to develope social democracy is because of the giant red superpower right next to them at the time. Had the USSR not been their to provide Nordic proletariat with the threat of a supported revolution the capitalist class would never have given those concessions.
Das Kapital explains it better than I can if you’re that invested into the topic but it’s a tough read.
the Marxist project is also a great start from an academic lense and is easier to digest
Sorry for the abundance of text lmao, I have no idea if it’s coherent because I wrote it sporadically over the course of an hour and it’s like 3 am
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The definitions are tricky based on how you read them, but no. Your role in society is to perform labor (I’m assuming), and the fruits of that labor are then forfeited to those above you for a wage. Thus they have the capital and would belong to the “capitalist class.”
Capitalism ruins itself.
It’s the worst system we’ve ever come up with, right after all the other ones.
The idea of there being a form Capitalism which is not corrupt is about as ill-informed as the idea that there can be a World were everybody has the same as everybody else for ever and ever (i.e. the Utopia called Communism, which is not at all the same as the political bullshit out there called thus) and for the same reason: human Greed.
For there to be Capitalism there have to be Laws (the bare minimum being Contract Law and Property Law, and if you want things like ownership of ideas then also Intellectual Property Laws, plus indirectly the whole edifice of Criminal Law to make sure that violence is not used to force some for the profit of others).
Laws have to be made and ajusted as times change as well as appropriate punishments defined; there has to be Oversight to see if Laws are abidded by or not; there has to be Judgement of people’s actions with regards to those Laws; there has to be enforcement of the punishments for breaking the Law. Lets call the people who do all this Lawmakers and Law-enforcers.
How can anybody expect that Lawmakers and Law-enforcers, at the very least when such things impact profit making, under Capitalism where “Greed is Good” and wealth is the most important measure of a man, to not serve their own personal greed first and foremost, which in such positions often means being corrupt?!
Even if magically we started with squeaky clean Lawmakers and Law-enforcers, many people outside who are not squeaky clean and are looking to enrich themselves would be attracted to such positions were they can sell their control of the powers of law-making and law-enforcement to the highest bidder so you would always end up with corruption in Politics and the Judiciary as the crooked replaced the honest.
It’s frankly hilarious to expect that in Capitalism everybody would be looking out for numero uno except for those responsible for making and enforcing the framework of Laws that is the only difference between Capitalism and Anarchy, with those people expected put first and foremost the interests of Society above their own (in other words, be Socialists).
In summary: Capitalism naturally breeds corruption because maintaining and applying the very framework of rules that supports Capitalism without becoming corrupt would require in the right places a special group of impeccably honest people not influenced by the very Capitalist Spirit that pervades the rest of Society, along with a system making sure any replacement for those people are also of the same kind, all of which is impossible.
To be fair, Communism doesn’t assume everyone gets the same. In fact, that’s a big part of why Marx doesn’t say “Communism is when everyone is the same and gets the same forever.”
From Critique of the Gotha Programme:
"But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
Essentially, Communism is a goal to work towards, a final step for humanity to cross over. It isn’t when everyone gets exactly the same for unequal work, it’s when everyone can give what they can and get what they need. If someone wants more, they can get more.
It was the system, not the individuals, all along?
[surprised pikachu face]
This also works with cops.
“But it wasn’t real socialism”. Other attempts to create socialist government.
Who says Socialism isn’t Socialism?
You doubt the existence of people who think that any self-proclaimed socialistic country is not socialistic? Really?
I doubt the existence of people who deny every Socialist state as Socialist. I agree with people who say the Nazis weren’t Socialist despite calling themselves as such, because they were fascists that relied on privitization and Capitalism, but I’m sure that wasn’t your point.
I’m eager to read what countries do you think are actually socialistic. Give me a list please.
Why? You just trying to pick a fight? Kinda cringe. No matter what I’d answer you’d start shit.
You tried to accuse me of equivocating Nazis with socialists. Now urn saying I am the one who is trying to pick fight?
I asked the list of countries in order to provide with socialist critics of that specific countries.
Nah. Just state what you actually mean by your first comment, and we are good to go.
I agree to disagree. This place has too many communists.
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