Unlike the communistic system where the political leaders use the system to enrich themselves?
Comment on He was no friend to the middle class
Dookieman12@piefed.social 1 month ago
Hypocrisy is a core component of the capitalist machine.
teslasaur@lemmy.world 1 month ago
AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 1 month ago
Unlike the communistic system where the political leaders use the system to enrich themselves?
An actually communist system would not have leaders that could enrich themselves, because communism entails the absence of private property. (including money, owning means of production that aren’t directly from solely your own efforts, etc)
I wouldn’t call myself a communist, but even I know this.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Actual communism cannot exist at the level of a nation state. You could maybe get to about the size of a small village before it starts breaking down fundamentally.
balderdash9@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
They said “communistic” when they likely meant “socialist”. People who haven’t read leftist theory run socialism and communism together. We should educate them on the difference between socialism as a transitionary stage and communism as a classless/moneyless/stateless society.
teslasaur@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You miss the point on purpose, or you didn’t read the rest of my message.
balderdash9@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Unlike the communistic system where the political leaders use the system to enrich themselves
Historically untrue of many communist leaders. Ho Chi Minh mended his own clothes. Vladimir Lenin was practically ascetic.
Obviously both are purely economic ideas that can’t exist in their ideologicsl [sic] state in reality.
Capitalism is an economic system that produces commodities: goods that are made to be useful but can not be used until they are bought/sold. Under capitalism, the capitalist owns the means with which to produce commodities and so takes the finished products and ultimately the resulting profits as their private property. The capitalist also makes all the decisions on how workers spend their labor time. On the other hand, the workers, the people that labored to create the commodity, are given a fraction of the value they produce in the form of wages. Capitalism exists here and now, any definition of capitalism to the contrary is idealist.
It’s fair to say that capitalism scales better than communism.
We have examples of socialist states scaling just fine. Perhaps we could have seen the true potential of socialism (and eventually communism) as an economic model; but countries that reject capitalism faced economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, assassination attempts, and retaliatory wars (e.g., Cuba, Vietnam, USSR, Chile [Salvador Allende], etc.)
Private ownership according to your contribution works very well in the realm of society.
You can keep your house and toothbrush under socialism: this is your personal property. The goal of socialism is to turn the private ownership of the means to produce all the things we want/need into public property that the workers own. This is necessary for us to stop producing goods for private profit and start producing them for direct consumption.
Steve@communick.news 1 month ago
Political machine
its_kim_love@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
Capitalist machine
Dookieman12@piefed.social 1 month ago
Capitalism is an economic system, not a political system. Politics is the means by which capitalist policies and systems are created and maintained.
The US political system could just as easily create and enforce (more) socialist systems and policies, but it doesn’t because it’s been captured by corporate and foreign interests.
teslasaur@lemmy.world 1 month ago
How is an economic system different from a political system? You’re making a pointless argument.
“Why is capitalism not communism? Because it’s not communism”
Why would foreign interests go against socialism? They are the same people as you, why would they be treated differently?
Steve@communick.news 1 month ago
Exactly