At anything bigger than city scale, it’s pretty much impossible to implement any “real” alternative without fuckloads of work - we’re talking 10+ years. Making a commune on a farm with ~15-ish people is easy (lots of hard work, but doable, there are historical examples of success), but even that group has to participate with the capitalist mother state whenever they need to get stuff they can’t produce themselves. If the commune grows too much, it becomes impossible to keep things running smoothly because, well, there’s just too many people involved now.
Comment on When we explain to other people how our capitalist system works and they recoil in horror
peregrin5@lemm.ee 4 days ago
Can you point me to a real first world developed country not run by a dictator that doesn’t have captitalism? I need a reference to see that the alternative is better.
ICastFist@programming.dev 4 days ago
RamenJunkie@midwest.social 2 days ago
This is why Libertarianism and Ayn Rand followers are so dumb. Galt’s Gulch only works because its like, a hundred or so people. The entire concept breaks at any level of scale. Not every person can provide a genius world changing idea to cash in on if only that pesky government would stay out of the way.
ICastFist@programming.dev 2 days ago
They’re dumber because they effectively defend a type of feudalism where they’re on top and “merit” is the explanation for the hierarchy, all while complaining that everything bad is the state’s fault
eatCasserole@lemmy.world 3 days ago
not run by a dictator
The catch here is that in the west, we label anyone anti-capitalist a dictator. You can be the very definition of dictatorial, but if you align with western interests, you’re just a “president” or a “leader” or something. But start nationalizing your oil industry and 🚨 dictator! dictator! 🚨
So yeah, within the bounds of the narrative that capitalism is the only way, you’ll find that capitalism is the only way, unsurprisingly. But the fact that this narrative is baked into us from childhood doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s aligned with reality.
DrDeadCrash@programming.dev 4 days ago
Democratic socialism is not unheard of…
marcos@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Democratic socialism without the support of capitalism is truly and completely unheard of.
Capitalism is a tool, use it and beat it back into submission when it fails.
DrDeadCrash@programming.dev 4 days ago
But don’t worship it. Make it work for the nation, don’t make the nation exist for the sake of the economy. This is what we do in America, and it’s fucking wrong.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
It’s not unheard of, but it’s incredibly ill-defined and means a million different things to a million different people. Socialists are, as a rule, democratic, so “Democratic Socialism” is similar to stating “Anti-Capitalist Socialism.”
As a consequence, Democratic Socialism seems to mean anything from the Social Democracies in the Nordic Countries to Socialism but with a democracy structured like the US or Western Europe, as opposed to Soviets or Worker Councils or Trade Unions.
rimu@piefed.social 4 days ago
There is more than one alternative and some of them involve having capitalism...
refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
No, because we live in a global society where if you don’t participate in global trade (especially with the USA in the past couple hundred years), your country will fail.
The USA has played a massive part in making communist experiments fail, most notibly the USSR.
The closest thing that the western world has is the nordic countries’ social democracy, which is still capitalist by nature. They only implemented it, though due to communism being literally right around the corner (USSR)
SupraMario@lemmy.world 4 days ago
The USSR didn’t fail because of the USA…the fuck is with you tankies.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 3 days ago
I’m sure fighting a global proxy war for most of a century has absolutely nothing to do with the (state) failure of the USSR.
Now, excuse me, I have to go to the ER because of all the compounded brain damage it takes to both think that and say anyone that believes otherwise is a tankie.
Objection@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
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RamenJunkie@midwest.social 2 days ago
I mean, the Nordic Countries are kind of an example of how you can make an economy work that that isn’t purely “endless growth capitalism” and isn’t “everyone is poor and miserable Communism.”
There can be things in between.
kryptonidas@lemmings.world 4 days ago
I don’t think you can get to communism where there’s a relatively small group in power tasked with dividing the means of production. That power will be abused like oligarchs do now.
refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
Yeah, I agree with that. Mass centralization is bad regardless of the situation IMO. We need collaboration instead.
I’m personally a fan of Prof Wolff’s idea to force all corporations to surrender ownership to their workers, converting them into worker-owned coops. This would largely mitigate the ability for extreme wealth concentration to happen to begin with, especially if combined with other wealth-limiting regulations.
peregrin5@lemm.ee 3 days ago
What would be the motivation then to even start a company/corporation if every time it happens, it is seized and given away?