I mean it seems like you know my criticism of the nordic model, but hand wave it by saying we would simply make an off world without that bit. I’m not really convinced.

Uh no. Where are you getting these definitions?

From actual political theory and not Rothbard-esque ancap bullshit

This is not a difference of opinion, it’s a difference of the commonly understood meaning of words.

Very straightforwardly from the Encyclopedia Britannica website:

Capitalism is a widely adopted economic system in which there is private ownership of the means of production. Modern capitalist systems usually include a market-oriented economy, in which the production and pricing of goods, as well as the income of individuals, are dictated to a greater extent by market forces resulting from interactions between private businesses and individuals than by central planning undertaken by a government or local institution. Capitalism is built on the concepts of private property, profit motive, and market competition.

As for Socialism:

System of social organization in which private property and the distribution of income are subject to social control; also, the political movements aimed at putting that system into practice. Because “social control” may be interpreted in widely diverging ways, socialism ranges from statist to libertarian, from Marxist to liberal.

Some of the works of your greatest national authors are still fairly unknown here even after 150ish years

This is a really funny comment. What’s the difference between your WOT and mine? Also as far as that last comment goes, you assume I am just angry at capitalism. No, I am actively organizing against it. As much as you might like to strawman me, I do help people, I volunteer my time, I host and help organize any number of events. So spare me the sanctimony? I may have an ideology but I understand it, and yours, while you seem to think you don’t have an ideology. Its like a blind person saying there is nothing to see.

money is just power

Is that all it is? What is power? Its effort expended over time. What effort, what time? It is the accumulated value of the commodities that workers create. So you admit one of Marx’s basic premises, but ignore it out of incurious and dismissive nature.

So according to your definition of power we can answer your own question about what capitalism is: it is a system that pays an individual wage for socialized production methods (like assembly lines) where the compounding effects of socialized production are owned and realized by the capitalist. Its a complex topic. Wealth of Nations is 500 pages, Capital is over 1000. So you may like digestible little bites of info, but you might have to actually read a book if you want to understand it. Which you plainly don’t, you just want me to waste time giving answers that are insufficient to answer your question, and then nit pick those answers to make yourself feel smart.

What you describe in your second paragraph is an epistemic crisis, and its very true. What you don’t understand is that it is a two way street. Just because you don’t understand me doesn’t mean I’m speaking gibberish, it could be you just don’t want to, or want to strawman me as unintelligible.

I already explained how it is an ideology and an economic system, try to understand instead of just claiming everything as incomprehensible. I actually teach this stuff, so the burden of learning is on you. Its not just an ideology. But how would we define ideology? Well in any historical era, the dominant ideology is the ideology of the ruling class.

Liberalism does have a through thread, in all historic forms and it is the development and state protection of private property. It has different aspects which appear at different times in different places, as you allude to, but it is the ideology of capitalism that emerged in the 17th-20th centuries which defeated the ruling kings and queens of Europe and established global capitalism by the middle of the 20th century.

You probably aren’t going to investigate any of my sources, but a good place to begin is Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels, Wage Labor and Capital by Marx, Capital by Marx (just read Marx he’s amazing) and Imperialism the highest stage of Capitalism by VI Lenin.

But really you could try and read any books on the topic to improve your understanding, which is actually ignorance of how much you don’t know. And I mean this in the most generous way possible. I think I already partially addressed some of your questions in my first post so go back and read it before assaulting me with 1001 bad faith questions. I’ve spent years as an organizer and educator, don’t belittle me to give yourself some wiggle room to hang on to your misconceptions. Actually test your own assumptions and see if they hold up under scrutiny; or if every “answer” as you see it leads to more questions, and doubts, about what is really going on.

It’s not like they reset the fucking market when they boot up capitalism. The king had the most money, the king’s heirs and friends still have most of the money. The small ruling elite come with the system, because they brought it.

The way to uncover the nature of domination and exploitation, to prove that it isn’t just an economic system, is to instead of thinking of it as an objective thing with certain defining characteristics, but instead look at it as interconnected relationships that drive infinite growth, then it becomes apparent how it actually functions as a mechanism of class domination. The way you look at it, you only see the appearances of capitalism, you have an idealist view.

This is why so many people say things like “such a policy doesn’t make sense, its irrational.” But when viewed as a class struggle, it makes perfect sense, the system exploits the problems created by the relentless search for profit, by exploiting those problems for profit. Its the system that is irrational, and your desire to make it rational is well intentioned, but is basically just naval gazing. “This is what I learned it is so that’s what it is”. Its easier to see the illusions of capitalism for what they are than to hold on to them, but because they are a part of our identity, how we evaluate the world and our place in it, we don’t want to let them go. This is understandable.

But the stakes are higher than ever and the system is destroying, not building, killing and starving, not emancipating. This isn’t progress, its suicide.

I was calling out that the other person, and now myself, get downvoted predictably for saying anything not outright pro communist/socialist/Marxist/Leninists/etc. That is adding to the conversation.

A lot of ink gets spilled around this kind of bullshit, when most of communism is focused more directly around anti-capitalism and economic theory.

Effectively, the preventative mechanism against authoritarianism is just democracy, but extended towards parts of the economy which, under capitalism, are conventionally privatized, and thus, are kind of ruled in an authoritarian, “meritocratic” manner. Then this authoritarian capitalism infiltrates and rules the public, democratic portions of society, as we’ve literally just seen right now with the kind of, explicitly corporate-backed trump administration. I mean, as we’ve been seeing for maybe the last 80 or so years, right, in a slow ramp up. Which isn’t to say the US really had much of a democracy to begin with, it was sort of, designed from the inception to be more of an kind of joint-corporate state ruled by landowners, so in a roundabout way we are actually making america just as it was at inception. You could maybe contrast this situation of authoritarian capitalism with co-operative corporations, which sort of exist at various levels of democratic ownership, and exist to mixed success in a capitalist market context. Or union activity, maybe.

More specifically and directly to answer your question, you’d probably wanna use a Condorcet method, I’m partial to the Schulze method, and you’d maybe wanna set up certain factions of the economy to be voted on by those with domain-specific knowledge so as to not be overly politicized, weaponized, or met with undue interference by other portions of society. You want your railroad guys to be in control of the railroads, basically, rather than having to frame everything for the perhaps relatively uninformed general public. You want to avoid just using the public as a kind of rubber stamp where their approval of your program is contingent on how well you’ve phrased your proposal, because it just sort of meaninglessly increases costs for no reason. You want engagement to be legitimate rather than taken advantage of by cynical forces. Hopefully, by breaking up these specific sections of society, and giving them agency over their specific domain and nothing else, you can prevent a massive overly centralized and thus more authoritarian hierarchy from arising.

The other criticisms, say, of democracy itself, socialism doesn’t quite do as well with. Say, with majoritarian rule slowly shrinking over time, or, the lines and borders that you draw up around particular domains creating a kind of insular and exclusive self-interest of a given class. Which conflicts explicitly with the previous idea, right, of splitting the economy into more and more factions so you can have each of them operate in their domain more efficiently. These would sort of be, more anarchist criticisms of socialism. Communism is sort of, depending on who you ask, some theoretical end state of all this which puts all of these questions out of mind, where everything is as flat as possible.

Realistically, these all tend to be kind of overblown as criticisms anyways, and the much bigger problems stem from the real world circumstances of trying to establish a communist state in a global capitalist hegemony, which is an inherently isolating, hostile, and cruel context. It’s hard to do effective democracy in such a context, for the same reason that it’s hard to have democracy on a pirate ship when you’re getting shot full of holes, while, in other times, the ship would actually be ruled democratically.

I have never seen addressed…

Because you’ve never actually looked in good faith and without your glaring bias.

it doesn’t. Communism hasn’t even had a good white paper written about it. Just some random eastern european schizo writing about the rich people or whatever.

I would honestly be fine with it if tankies would purge the liberals.

Thank you for proving my point. Liberals aren’t trying to purge anyone. Seems like the main distinction between them and every other ideology.