Comment on When we explain to other people how our capitalist system works and they recoil in horror
OutsiderInside@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Why does everyone think the only alternative to capitalism is communism?
That’s just Americans. They can only think of 2 options; this or that. Democrat or Republican. Capitalism or Communism. Good or evil. Simple binary choices.
There are countries in Europe which are ruled by a coalition of 3 or 4 political parties. Very few Americans would be comfortable with something so complicated.
But a lot of people answer along ideological lines on purpose. It saves you from being griefed by others who are just extremists and will call you bigot or whatever. That’s why people being polled will say whatever, and vote whatever makes sense to them.
My wife and I talk about this alot, we think it has alot to do with the religious Christian and Catholic institutions which this country is founded on. Literally everything turns into binary good and evil shit, if you look closely you see how most American brains and people do this without even realizing. It is serious American brainrot
I mean what do you propose, I mean I personaly do not want to regress farther to fudalism
Heavily regulated socialist democracy.
Provide basic needs, food, clothing, healthcare, childcare, and education. Hell even a phone and Internet access.
Emphasis on the basic.
Allow for those who do not wish to, or are unable to work to live with all basic needs covered. Those who wish to work are incentivized to do so, with access to luxuries. Better housing, better clothing, better technology. Allow a place for the market, but don’t make people depend on the market.
No reason to work a job you hate, no reason to employ people you don’t need. Everybody wins.
I mean, you’re almost speaking of the exact system Marxists want to work towards, just with the caveat that Marxists think Markets are only useful tools in less-developed and less-critical industries temporarily, before public ownership and planning becomes more efficient, and that the spread in difference between “luxuries” decreases over time as productivity improves to account for that.
Have you read Marx, or Marxists?
I’ve read The Expanse lol. I was describing the system on Earth in that series.
The thing is, markets predate the written word. Some form of trading is literally one of the first things humans did. It could even be a prehuman invention. Eliminating markets is like trying to eliminate prostitution, or drugs.
Markets, much like life, uhh… Find a way.
Instead of turning up your nose, make them work for you, in a way you want. We don’t want the markets to spread, unrestrained, like kudsu. We want Bonsai markets.
This.
Also, extremely agressive measures to stop the harm of others through the accumumation of mass wealth.
Basically, once you reach, I dunno, 5-10 million total “worth”, you get taxed at 100%.
Something like that. No one will ever need that much ever, and they can feel free to just reture and live out their life doing nothing if they manage to get there.
This sounds fantastic, and will never work in the USA as long as there are classes of people who live above the rules and can influence society through policy and social media. If they smell any extra income, rights or services you receive, it’s like blood in the water and they will come from miles to get a piece of anything you own, exactly as they do now.
Obeying in advance is fucking pathetic
Socialism is when the government is nice to you bottom text
Provide basic needs, food, clothing, healthcare, childcare, and education. Hell even a phone and Internet access.
Any government that has the power to grant these goods/services will have the power to take them away. Unless the public can directly own and administer the property through local councils and administrative bureaucracies, they are banking on the largesse of national socialist leadership to continue indefinitely.
Allow for those who do not wish to, or are unable to work to live with all basic needs covered. Those who wish to work are incentivized to do so, with access to luxuries. Better housing, better clothing, better technology. Allow a place for the market, but don’t make people depend on the market.
All of that is predicated on a continuously expanding surplus of raw materials, advanced technologies, and an educated labor force.
You can either import these as luxuries, in which case you’re operating an export-oriented economy predicated on the market price of your domestic surplus. That requires a bigger economy you’re effectively beholden to. Looks good in the moment, but over the course of centuries you just end up as a West African / Middle Eastern / East India Tea Company-controlled kingdom, wherein the bottlenecks of trade produce oligarchs of immense personal fortune.
Or you produce domestically, in the Juche model, and live within the means provided by your real estate and your people. But that requires an economy that can plan and organize resources on the order of decades (if not centuries) and invests domestically rather than keeping an eye towards meeting the needs of foreign import markets. It won’t work as a capitalist system, because the capitalist demand for growth will push you back into the export-oriented model that foreigners exploit.
“Free” markets follow the bubbles in credit and compel local economies to chase short term speculative bubbles for long term economic needs. Planned economies can build infrastructure in advance of future needs and plan social policy to curb economically regressive short-term profitable impulses with long term costs (opium consumption, coal/NGL power grids, cash crops that deplete arable land and water reserves like tobacco and pistachios).
They aren’t durable. They produce rapid consolidations of wealth and political capital. And they create intergenerational risks that the current cohort of investors have little reason to acknowledge or prevent.
This is a good start: en.m.wikipedia.org/…/Doughnut_(economic_model)
Because of successful anti-anarchist propaganda, an overwhelming majority of Americans think anarchy means no rules whatsoever.
I don’t think everyone believes that, there are many Anarchists that don’t agree with Marxists, and there’s broad diversity within Capitalist thought, Anarchist thought, and Marxist thought.
The reason why you may be seeing more Marxists is generally because Marxism has played the most widespread and significant role as an alternative to Capitalism in modern history.
Capitalism has its benefits. Namely, the rapid economic growth afforded through exploitation of natural resources by unemployed labor mixed with cash-rich / debt-friendly entrepreneurs. You don’t want an economic system that loses the benefits of industrialization and domestic improvement.
On the flip side, capitalism also has a huge problem of wealth distribution. Bottlenecks within the flow of revenue create huge pools of malinvestment, squandered natural resources on vanity projects, and a strong incentive for public sector militarization / police violence as a tool to maintain the disproportionate wealth distribution.
We need a system in which individuals can still cooperatively administer an economy with an eye towards long term economic prosperity, but one in which the surpluses aren’t horded or wasted by a rigid hierarchy of generationally wealthy lenders and carnival barker entrepreneurs. Communism provides a roadmap for redistributing titles and incomes across entire populations, while still socially reproducing a bureaucracy capable of managing industrial-scale and national-scale projects.
Capitalism has zero benefits whatsoever, you have American brainrot and have been propagandized to death
Capitalism has zero benefits whatsoever
Even Marx didn’t believe that. Capitalism is an outgrowth of industrialization, repetitively turning low-surplus undeveloped real estate into high-surplus improved real estate. If you’re not generating and then reinvesting your surplus, you’re not going to move past a feudal agrarian economy into a post-scarcity socialist state without that process.
you have American brainrot
This is, at absolute worst, British/German brainrot. The Americans fetishized the idea of capitalism and hid from its excesses with westward migration. But the Old World scholars were shoved into the maw and out the anus of it a century earlier.
You are privileged beyond belief. Capitalism is based on slavery and genocide coupled with the military industrial complex. It is fucked, nothing good about it
This is a communist sub
Because people who don’t understand what words mean label every possible post-capitalist system as communism even though they’re as different from each other as they are from capitalism.
Capitalism or communism the greedy and power hungry will weasel there way up. The only thing that will save us is a vigilant electorate.
Communism is a society that has done away with classes, money and the state. That means there isn’t any position to weasel up to. On the way there we do need to be careful tho, not everyone calling themselves a communist truly wants to abolish classes and the state, some are quite happy to cling to power
Because “capitalism” is a fucking communist concept to begin with.
ameancow@lemmy.world 2 days ago
American brains have been shaped into 2-lane highways.
Big_Boss_77@lemmynsfw.com 2 days ago
Based on the the state of American infrastructure, this is patently false, as it implies the existence of wrinkles on American Brains.
Or wait… are your two lane highways smooth? What is THAT like?
Elrecoal19_0@lemmy.world 2 days ago
ofc they are smooth, how are cars supposed to comfortably drive in rough, wrinkly roads? /s