When we explain to other people how our capitalist system works and they recoil in horror
When we explain to other people how our capitalist system works and they recoil in horror
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.
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 righteousness essentially, every American thinks they are doing the "good" thing or part of the "good" group and then others are "bad."
It is serious American brainrot
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. Then others are surprised by the outcome. Ideological extremism has killed people’s critical thinking capacities.
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.
This is a good start: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut_(economic_model)
Because of successful anti-anarchist propaganda, an overwhelming majority of Americans think anarchy means no rules whatsoever.
This is a communist sub
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. For example, Anarchists take issue with hierarchy above all else, and so wish to establish generally a horizontal, decentralized network of communes, while Marxists take issue with Class, and so wish to have a fully publicly owned and planned economy run along democratic lines, ie everyone in the world will share equal ownership of all industry.
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.
I have to ask, as someone who has only a basic understanding of the philosophies, how are the end goals of Anarchists and Marxists different? I understood them as only having different methods of arriving to the same state of society without class, states and money - communism.
By my understanding, Anarchists go bottom up by propping up a parallel system based on voluntary cooperation and mutual aid, to the point where the state is no longer needed for anything, and Marxists (or rather Marxist-Leninists) go top down by seizing control of the state in the name of the workers, and then gradually give the workers more and more direct control until the state is no longer needed ("The withering of the state").
Assuming what I just wrote is wrong, what faults would Anarchists and Marxists find in each other's end goals, assuming they succeed in establishing their ideal societies?
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 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.
Because capitalism is a communist concept to begin with. Communism invented capitalism. Communism is a direct response specifically to capitalism. One might legitimately label anything that follows from the analysis and criticism of Marx's concept of capitalism as a school of communism.
Whether you believe in it or not, it's like being shocked that all the treatments for vertebral subluxation are chiropractic.
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
“In America, they take your money for bombs and billionaires.”
Dumb question, what is this meme format about?
Yeonmi Park, DPRK defector and conservative media darling. Claims of her life in North Korea are debated hotly- things along the lines of they eat rats and the like.
I watched a video that had dr. Robotnik say how is going to take over the US Healthcare system and make it hell... then shadow keeps interjecting to tell him that his plans are actually a vast improvement over the system, and Robotnik is then left unsure what to think.
Phoenicianpirate is talking about this. :P
Even better, since his IQ is like 300
Socialism: A system of government where the country's wealth is concentrated into a small, ruling class of billionaires, who use the media they own to keep the lower classes fighting with each other while they . . . the rich . . . run off with all the farking money.
Oh wait. that's capitalism. I don't know how I got those two systems confused.
Like the classic "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money" while in today's capitalism everybody except a small elite is running out of money.
I literally had to tell people libertarianism fails harder and faster than communism was getting weird stares until I told them about the book "a libertarian walks into a bear"
I still look like a raging communist but idc
People with hammer and sickle in the name never fail to give out impartial takes.
It can be. It is not inherently. That's why people think you're spreading propaganda (because you are).
The best propaganda is the truth.
Then go live in China 🤡
Bro I just said I don't want diabetics to pay 300usd per month for insulin jfc
The median cost for a daily dose of insulin in China is $0.59.
How dare we want our country to be better and for our fellow citizens to not die in cartoonishly preventable ways? /s
I have multiple times had the experience of explaining to non-Americans elements of our system, and they simply don’t believe me. They think I’m making it up to fuck with them because it’s so atrocious that it couldn’t be real.
Kind of has a point that modern "communist" systems in practice seem identical to all the bad parts of Capitalism.
Your problem is neither capitalism nor communism.
Your problem is greedy cunts. Both systems will end up putting them in charge.
That's because people who aren't greedy don't seek that kind of position.
Phrase I picked up from Well There's Your Problem: centrally unplanned economy.
One company, Baxter, makes 95% of the saline IV solution for the US. Most of it comes from one factory in Marion, N.C. It has been hit by natural disasters before and caused shortages. One happened just this past few months.
I donate plasma twice a week and there were rations for the past couple of months on saline. Instead of getting refilled with saline after the donation, we had to eat gold fish drink and drink a Powerade before the donation and drink a Powerade and sit for 15 min after. Last week was the first time they started doing saline again.
Can you point me to a real first world developed country not run by a dictator that doesn't have capitalism? I need a reference to see that the alternative is better. Genuinely asking.
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.
There is more than one alternative and some of them involve having capitalism...
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.
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.
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)
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.
Democratic socialism is not unheard of...
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.
Would that be propaganda in favor of Communism, who's every real world iteration so far has led to corruption, tyranny, and human rights abuse on a scale that would put Capitalism's to shame? Gwon you're making us blush. Oh, you talking about aspirational Communism, but not actual real life experienced Communism, lol. Yes, that's what we need, fairy tales of the world to come, like Christianity.
on a scale that would put Capitalism's to shame
You say that like capitalism isn't ongoing massacres and abuse in various forms all day, every day. As if the t-shirt you're probably wearing wasn't made by someone who's exploited in Bangladesh so that minimum wage Americans can still afford to buy it without forgoing food because they're purposely underpaid by service industry corporations. As though you're not also talking about some sort of aspirational capitalism where the "free market" actually exists and doesn't inevitably lead to corruption and tyranny...
Meanwhile, the richest man in the world is about to secure control over US government agencies because he gave the most money to the current president.
How dare you? Those billion dollar corpos are doing you a favor by paying a "just good enough" wages to allow you to eat.
You say that like capitalism isn’t ongoing massacres and abuse in various forms all day, every day.
OOhh, but it's not capitalism' fault!! It's just stuff happening that's totally unrelated to capitalism!!! <- answer I got to a similar discussion back in ~2014. Either that or "a few bad apples" when complaining about shitty companies.
corruption, tyranny, and human rights abuse on a scale that would put Capitalism's to shame?
Funny how you're describing capitalism and trying to pretend you're not.
Source: Radio Free Asia told me so.