soon they will get the one they really want, fascist capitalism.
Surveillance capitalism
What the fuck even is “stakeholder capitalism”. You mean the people with money???
It is the fantasy that corporations can serve the interest all stakeholders (employees, customers etc.) rather than a minority of shareholders as is currently: https://www.investopedia.com/stakeholder-capitalism-4774323
They could serve their employees if they’re employee-owned. 😄
Then that’s Mutualism lmao
Mfw Ezra Klein III is streaming holo-eds to my great grandkids excoriating the left for not supporting his new book “Mutualist Capitalism” after David Hogg failed to stop Barron Trump getting elected president for life
I assumed it meant capitalism where everyone is a stakeholder of the company they work for or something like that.
Yeah like giving you a few non-voting shares that give you the stakeholder vibes with none of the actual power.
Oh I like this! Packaging communism and socialism as capitalism!
Maybe they don’t know what a retail investor (hog for slaughter) is but tried to express the same concept
To be fair experimenting is good. It’s still better than feudal system. I just wish we experimented with other models once in a while too.
I will read a sci-fi novel thousands of years into the future with fantasy-magic system, and economic model is still “21st century capitalism but we replaced the word money with credits so it’s future now.”
we do. those just get bombed away a lot of the time they pop up.
or explained away as a brutal undemocratic regime or something.
Would be harder to explain it away if they weren’t brutal undemocratic regimes though
don’t be silly. the most brutal and undemocratic country in the world is the us.
Erm, Somalia anyone?
What relevance does the US have here
its literally the country pulling the lever in the meme, AND the one bombing or propagandizing against others trying to do things differently.
Why do you think it’s the US specifically and none of all the other capitalist countries?
Would be harder to explain it away if they weren’t brutal undemocratic regimes though
They aren’t though.
Cuba passed a new constitution by referendum in 2019 with 90%+ in favor.
A common perspective I’ve heard here in Vietnam is “socialism means the government has to represent everyone”. (Another common perspective is that the party is openly corrupt and not meaningfully democratic. Those typically aren’t held by the same people)
Most every Chinese would tell you 1. Democracy is important. 2. The CPC represents my views via democracy.
Lay off the kool aid
What’s that
Capitalism exists to replace feudal systems. It’s easier to have kings, and to have a handful of them so they aren’t fighting as much for a single spot, when you convince the average idiot that now they can also be a king and its their own fault that they aren’t(or better yet, another person’s fault as you oppress them both).
When all the people who had gotten rich by being parasites because of who they were related got afraid they just changed the rules so that it wasn’t ahout blood relation anymore(on paper) but they still had all the money they’d stolen. Nothing functionally changed.
The entire system “the rich get everything they want and no one gets to stop them” does not have a good version. It’s fucked every single way.
It’s still better than feudal system.
According to whom? I wonder what we would see if we were to compare the average amount of labour time feudal peasants had to put in to survive vs. that of the current global proletariat.
I’d agree that capitalism has been better for some - like, for instance, white ex-peasants who now gets to be members of the (so-called) “middle class” or gets to cosplay as pseudo-nobility in colonised spaces- but it has been an unmitigated disaster for lots of others.
According to whom?
According to Marx, Engels, Lenin and any other respectable communist.
Capitalism is a historical progression rather than something you adopt willy nilly, and it has expanded productive forces significantly allowing us to produce stuff far more efficiently in far higher quality and complexity. With feudalism, it’s mode of production was far more individualized, with peasants essentially producing for their and their family’s subsistence only, and artisans in guilds would only work in small groups, limiting to what they can produce.
Therefore, this expansion of productive powers in capitalism in theory leads to better life quality, less socially necessary labor time to provide for everyone, less mortality given how we can now produce things like insulin in complex labs, etc.
Keyword is in theory - in practice, everything else in the system goes against that, leads to overproduction and having us proletariat work for much higher hours than is socially necessary, it concentrates wealth to private owners giving them immense political power. That’s what communists are trying to do - progress forward so we produce not for profit, but for use based on need which would solve these issues.
Btw, comparison between feudal peasantry and proletariat is flawed - peasants were based in countryside and essentially were the middle class of it, owning a small amount of land that they worked for themselves. Proletariat are urbanized, work in factories they don’t own and produce for thousands of people. A more apt comparison in work hours would be proletariat vs guild apprentices - their exploitation and work hours were essentially the same and this system was precursor to capitalist wage labor.
Who has switch over from feudalism been a disaster to?
I mean, just off the top of my head…
And, let’s not forget, those conditions never ended - they were just exported.
Do you think mining workers had it better under feodalism? Not sure things went worse for them because of capitalism, mining was always a dangerous and shitty job, often done by slaves or convicts because of how shit the conditions were.
Do you think mining workers had it better under feodalism?
In the pre-capitalist world mining practices were all over the place… it wasn’t just chain-gangs and overseers. And the conditions for it isn’t fundamentally any shittier than working a farm or a factory - I know because I can literally walk down the street and ask a zama-zama (an artisinal - “illegal”, according to our bootlicking media - miner) and ask him who and what it is that actually makes their work conditions shitty and dangerous.
We all know what happens to miners under the capitalist mode of production, however - it’s literally why some of the most vicious crackdowns on organised labour in history involved the mining industry.
Mining conditions are all over the place right now. Some workers have it good, with good compensation, perks and with a lot of attention paid to safety and others live in horrible deathly conditions and are practically slaves
The unmitigated disaster part existed under feudalism also. Capitalism is slowly turning back into feudalism, which is kinda why it sucks so much now. I hate capitalism, but feudalism was worse.
Fuedalism with a fuckload of democracy might work. But it always turns into a bloodline thing.
The unmitigated disaster part existed under feudalism also.
Perhaps, but I have to wonder how many feudal peasants would willingly exchange their existence for the precariat one we exist under.
Capitalism is slowly turning back into feudalism
If that is true, then it must mean that capitalism never replaced feudalism, but was instead built on top of feudalism - which is not that difficult to believe if you live in a 3rd-world extraction zone (like I do).
Its also not hard to believe if you ́look at the continuation of power across much of Europe. Its not a 1:1 comparison but lots of families of feudal lords are still wealthy and powerful today if they didn’t completely fuck up. The power has spread out but has concentrated in other ways.
Blue Raspberry Capitalism. No, wait… Peanut Butter Capitalism
Baja Blast Capitalism
spirits deliver me, but I do love baja blast
plz bro, just one more time, bro
Best economic system ever, they say. Unlike communism, this is a situation where you can say it has been tried many times throughout history.
Communism, in the sense of the future stateless, classless, moneyless society, hasn’t been reached, but socialism absolutely has been and exists in several countries today. Communism is necessarily post-socialist.
Why do you tankies always say communism has never been tried? Power hungry people exist no matter the system, and so far…as much as the system is rigged, capitalism has brought a lot more people out of poverty than anything else. Communism has been tried countless times, it just ends up not working because power hungry people exist.
The largest elimination of poverty in history was in China, in a socialist economy. If you remove China from the last century, poverty has gone up.
Even though you’re getting shit on with downvotes, you are half right. Communism hasn’t been tried before, but it’s also very difficult to achieve due to opportunism (or what you call power hunger).
For communism to be achieved, the working class has to take down the dominance, or dictatorship of the capitalist class (also called dictatorship of the proletariat), then productive forces have to be reorganized to produce to satisfy everyone’s needs rather than for profit, and then abolish commodity production entirely and replace it with planned economy, distributing goods via labor vouchers or “according to their need” in later stages.
So far we got only to dictatorship of the proletariat (which manifests as state capitalism, not communism as many steps are missing) in USSR, and the Bolsheviks under Lenin were genuinely disciplined, but the country wasn’t industrialized, with hundreds of millions of peasants. Can’t provide for everyone when theres no factories to build enough stuff in!
However, capitalism and state capitalism breeds opportunism, meaning that if you don’t replace it quickly then even under proletariat class control opportunism will rear it’s ugly head, as seen in USSR. Of course there’s also other factors, but for communism to have a chance to work, it has to happen in an already developed country with international spread so capitalism over and done with quickly.
The problems with the USSR were more nuanced than the idea that opportunism is inevitable rot. There are existing socialist countries today that are continuing to develop, and trying to depend on the west for socialism to succeed anywhere is a self-defeating analysis.
Oh hi Cowbee
Yes, there were many issues with USSR, but inevitable opportunism that is bred by capitalist mode of production and the way of life it produces is, in my opinion, one of the biggest dangers for DOTP’s, and it does encapsulate a lot of other issues USSR had such as its underdevelopment or failure at achieving (meaningful) internationalism. It obviously doesn’t encapsulate everything, but I wrote the comment at work and I’m not really used to writing unreadable blocks of text from a phone.
Howdy.
The USSR did not have a capitalist mode of production, though. Public ownership was the principle aspect of its economy, and private ownership was mostly relegated to black markets. The economy did not rely on the circulation of capital, or its continuous transmogrification.
The USSR was also extremely internationalist. It was itself a multi-national union, and sponsored revolutions the world over, dedicated itself to building up relations with other socialist countries like China and Cuba, etc, and aided even nationalist revolutions against imperialism, such as in Algeria.
The problems with the USSR were myriad, but its dissolution was not an inevitability as you claim. Gorbachev’s reforms ultimately led to political and economic instability, and the USSR was forced into dedicating a large portion of their productive forces to keeping up with the US Empire millitarily in order to stave off invasion. The USSR, despite its flaws, was a tremendous first step for socialism globally, and managed to rapidly achieve huge gains in quality of life, scientific achievement, and industrialization in a planned manner in a socialist economy.
Public ownership was the principle aspect of its economy, and private ownership was mostly relegated to black markets
Public ownership doesn’t make a mode of production, it’s a falsifier belief (such as of Lassalle) Marx himself had to fight against that he called bourgeois socialism.
The economy did not rely on the circulation of capital, or its continuous transmogrification.
This does make their mode of production not purely capitalistic though I agree, even though the system wasn’t capital-free. Still, a lot of the social relations remained, enough for opportunism to still be heavily encouraged by the system especially when it came to the party and bureaucratic management of the capital.
That being said, it was still not socialist economy - a socialist economy comes after productive forces are sufficiently developed and commodity production has been completely abolished. Until then it hasn’t changed the mode of production yet from capitalist, with it being mixed at best and it instead is a period of DOTP where productive forces are developed or reorganized, which, don’t get me wrong, is a massive step forward and a massive achievement, but one that can be reversed unlike historical transformation of mode of production.
Stalin redefined socialism, which was previously viewed as the abolishment of capitalism into something entirely different and pretty much one of the main major goals into “whatever USSR was at the time”, which was quite a disgusting move in terms of opportunism, though may have had good intentions back when it was done. Now, it just serves to confuse people and as an excuse to call capitalism a different name.
Though, this is something we’ll NEVER see eye to eye with lmao
Yes, public ownership within a capitalist economy, under a bourgeois state, isn’t socialism, I agree. That’s not what I said, though. Just like markets in a socialist economy are not capitalism, public ownership in capitalist economies aren’t socialism. What ultimately matters is what is principle, not what exists period, otherwise all modes of production are the same as they all contain at minimum trace elements of others.
We’ve discussed this before, and I agree in that we will likely never agree, but I’ll say it again: your analysis of socialism fails because it relies on “one-drop” analysis. Capitalist economies are not defined by the absence of collectivized ownership, but by private ownership and the circulation of capital being principle. Socialism, as the transition between capitalism and communism, is no different in that it too is not defined by purity, but by principle aspects.
This doesn’t come from Stalin, but is from Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. A socialist economy cannot just will the productive forces to levels where public ownership is the most effective, I agree, but I disagree that that means that an underdeveloped country cannot retain ownership of the large firms and key industries, gradually appropriating capital with respect to its development. It’s like using fire for heating, keeping it in check by controlling the environment and all inputs, fuel, etc, and gradually replacing it with electrified heating as time goes on and you get the tech for it.
I fundamentally cannot agree with treating socialism itself as some unique mode of production distinct from all previous in defining it by purity and not by the principle aspect.
For communism to work, we need each and every person to not be a greedy bastard under it all. It only takes one greedy bastard to ruin it all, as history has repeatedly shown.
We are but monkeys in trousers. Our survival instincts still rule our behaviours, and until that changes, communism will not work, simple as that.
That’s not true, though. Communism, ie a system where production and distribution are fully collectivized and run according to a common plan, doesn’t care at all if someone is “greedy,” and socialist economies that have begun building towards such a society have proven the opposite of your claims; they’ve been remarkably effective at achieving positive economic growth while delivering better metrics for the working class than capitalist systems.
If you want, I made an intro Marxist-Leninist reading list, feel free to give it a look. Albert Einstein’s Why Socialism? | Audiobook is a good intro!
This is basically an intro course on ML, isn’t it! I’ve been meaning to read leftist theory from different angles so your links are handy. There’s a good (looking) anarchist reading list out there too that I’ve been meaning to dig into.
Yep, that’s the intent behind it! It’s designed to be approachable by anyone, feel free to leave feedback if you decide to follow it!
I appreciate it, I will.
You have no idea what you’re talking about, try listening and/or reading instead
I read so many discussions that end this way. Is this idea only knowable by completing a long and old book list?
Not particularly old or long but yes if you want to avoid being completely wrong about things you will eventually have to read about those things
Of course. What I’m curious about is why (only?) this particular idea requires that particular format. One can explain some pretty complicated ideas over Lemmy! I can be wrong about frogs, someone tells me how their spots work, but I don’t have to read a book about frogs looking for an answer.
Do constituent parts of the idea not make sense individually?
I’m by no means in support of communism but I think you’re assuming that these systems have been tested in a vacuum. Specifically with regard to communism in the global south where Western capitalist entities act as agents of sabotage in order to secure the people of these nations as a perpetually destitute global underclass. So that their corporations can continue to have access to underpaid labor. Which you and I benefit from in some way shape or form.
No system has really been tested in a vacuum. Some systems have just eirher adapted or endured it
Capitalism is the direct descendant of feudalism, a system that relies on essentially immutable social classes and bonded labor.
And capitalism also exists in a vacuum? Why is a system such as Communism supposedly so great but breaks because of outside influence…odd
Capitalism doesn’t stand up to outside pressures inherently.
Capitalism predates communism and has spent centuries chewing through human lives to get to it’s position of influence today. I refer you to the entirety of the colonial era.
No…no it doesn’t.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_communism
Even marx suggested that it’s pretty much the first tried system.
Early communalism isn’t the same as future communism, Marx was only comparing the two modes of production as far as they both lack class, not beyond that. Communism is not a return to communalism, but an advancement beyond socialism, ie towards fully collectivized and interconnected production at a global scale.
Modern communism (is the age of industrialization) is essentially Marxism which is younger than capitalistic models.
Hunter gatherer societies were egalitarian but its impossible to apply a pre-civilization framework to civilizational societies. So the fact that he referred to it as primitive communism is not an indictment on communism.
Communism as a political movement was introduced by Marx and Engles. Only since then has it been attempted on a nation state level. Prior to this nearly every political and economic system was an autocracy or monarchy where the state administered private land ownership rights to lords. There are very few exceptions to this in civilizational history.
So if we are looking at communism as a political and economic system as can be applied to modern civilizations ie. nation states, it is much younger than capitalism.
Technically utopian socialism, ie the socialism of Robert Owen, Saint-Simon, etc predates Marx and Engels. Marx and Engels created scientific socialism, which is where socialism began to really take off.
rofl you think I’m a tankie for shitting on capitalism!?
ahahaha way to broadcast how pitifully tiny your understanding is…
People being lifted out of poverty as an economic test COMPLETELY IGNORES the reality of technological advancement. Way to further demonstrate how you do not know even the major milestones of history, let alone economic history…
The history of the transition from one mode of production to the next has always been intrinsically tied to technological development. The transition from feudalism to capitalism could not have happened without the steam engine, as an example. That being said, socialism is most responsible for poverty eradication, if we cut out socialist economies poverty has gone up over the last century.
The technological advancements were in large part due to the large scale growth of industry under capitalism. Although lots of bloodshed and suffering was involved in the process, and without leftists fighting for reforms, we wouldn’t be able to enjoy its fruits today.
The mass availability of the internet, and many other pillars of infrastructure are a result of capitalism. And these developments definitely have increased living standards for the majority of humans, even ones in third world nations (The popular image of a destitute country with rampant poverty is extremely rare these days.)
Capitalism was most responsible for underdeveloping the global south. Europeans genocided the indigenous Americans and needed a large supply of labor, so they used their (at the time) minor technological advantage to trade high-demand commodities exclusively for slaves in Africa. This depressed African development and skyrocketed European development, and this expanded in colonialism.
Capitalism was progressive as compared with feudalism, yes, but it’s been socialist economies that have been most responsible of eradicating poverty. If you remove socialist countries, poverty has gone up in the last century.
I fully agree with the first part. Countries with already developed industry and trade got the boost, and that’s the major reason for the large difference in development between Underdeveloped and Developed nations.
If you remove socialist countries, poverty has gone up in the last century
I don’t get it. Remove in what way? Too vague to carry any meaning.
If you mean their political, economic, and ideological impact on surrounding nations then yeah, obviously. But the socialist countries themselves had to adopt some form of capitalism to continue to grow economically (see: china). The countries that didn’t move away from central planning eventually collapsed (eg. USSR*).
*I understand how the cause of the USSR’s collapse is not soley the inefficiency of central planning, but even if the country was allowed to continue unimpeded, it would have collapsed because of that one reason.
There’s several misconceptions here, but I’ll get to them after addressing the poverty point. When I said “when we remove socialist countries,” I mean the absolute poverty worldwide has only gone down when you include socialist countries in that statistic, if you only include capitalist countries then poverty goes up, because poverty has increased in the combined capitalist sphere. That’s not vague, it’s clear-cut, poverty has reduced in socialist countries by a dramatic extent (largely in China) while poverty has increased in the rest of the world overall.
Onto the misconceptions. Markets and private property are not themselves capitalism. What distinguishes capitalism as a system from socialism as a system is whether private ownership or public ownership is principle, ie covers the large firms and key industries at a minimum. The USSR had some small degree of private property, and so did China even under Mao and later the Gang of Four. China opened up their capital markets to foreign investment while maintaining control of the large firms and key industries, and rely heavily on central planning to direct the economy. They are in the earlier stages of socialism, as shown here:
The reason for adopting controlled markets for the smaller and medium firms is because that form of ownership better suited China’s level of development. Public ownership works more effectively at higher levels of development, so it’s like a controlled fire for heat before replacing with an electric system when the tech advances. Out of control, the fire can be destructive, but by maintaining control of the large firms and key industries you maintain control over the rest of production.
As for central planning, that’s not why the USSR dissolved, and was actually one of its greatest strengths. The economy grew rapidly and consistently throughout the USSR’s existence:
Instead, what happened is that reforms such as those under Gorbachev created economic and political division against central planning, as well as problems such as nationalism in some of the SSRs and SFSRs, as well as the fact that the USSR had to dedicate tons of resources and production to maintaining millitary parity with the US Empire despite also needing to recover from the devastation of World War II.
There’s absolutely no basis for the idea that central planning induces collapse, China relies on it heavily as do other socialist countries like Cuba, and even megacorporations these days rely more on internal planning and minor cyberbetics than price signals as was traditional for earlier capitalism.
lol no
So no alternative explanation? You should at least point me to some resources that say otherwise.
I fully acknowledge the wild ecological harm and rising inequality that capitalism has brought with it. However, even Marx had written about the system’s capacity for the advancement of industrial technology and productivity.
Centrally planned economies like the ones of the USSR and similar 21st century socialist states do not work. They would never have enabled the vast distribution and rapid development of technology like we see today. Lemmy itself is a product of capitalism.
Lemmy is made by communists.
Planned economies do work. Using the USSR as an example, they achieved tremendous economic growth surpassing the vast majority of capitalist economies, all while under intense sanctions and invasion.
The USSR and other socialist economies have been some of the most rapidly developing countries in history.
Lemmy itself is not a product of capitalism, either, FOSS can be used by capitalism but largely sits outside that.
Planned economies do work
They do, to a certain extent. Once an economy begins to grow more and more complex, the intensity of calculations needed increases proportionally (edit: proportional may not be the right word here).
A large part of the USSR’s workforce was dedicated to economic planning at the time of its collapse, and it was projected to reach 50% by the 2000s.
They intended to solve this with computers, but there’s reasons this wouldn’t have worked:
A: Economic calculation involves NP-Hard problems, where the complexity can increase out of nowhere.
If you needed to perform 1600 calculations one day, next week the number needed could jump to 36000. (NP-Hard problems are also common in route determination programs used by delivery apps to devise optimum routes. If you increase the number of locations from 10 to 11, the computations needed to calculate an optimum route increases staggeringly, and it keeps getting worse the more complex you make it.)
B: Making the economy more complex makes the calculations needed more-than-exponentially extra intensive and numerous. If you introduce computers into the mix, more people are free to do other things and make the economy even more complex. It’s a really fast vicious cycle that doesn’t end well.
And in all of this, I haven’t even mentioned the corruption involved in bureaucracy
Says the guy who literally spouts tankie shit.
Communism was tried and is still tried just because it doesn’t look like this perfect utopia you read about in a book doesn’t mean it’s not been tried/exists.
This isn’t a friendly game of checkers and saying “that’s not what I meant to do”…
Goddamn you’re dumb
Projection is when a socialist says it’s bad to give a failed economic system another try.
The height of human prosperity was under Keynesian economic policy. If we’re giving stuff another spin, why not something that actually worked? Maybe next time just not get suckered by grifters pushing trickle down supply side reaganomics voodoo economic policy. That shit is almost as bad a failure as communism. Almost.
The height of human prosperity was under Keynesian economic policy.
Excellent and delicious rage inducing master baiter material.
The height of human prosperity*
*If you are a white Christian man of European decent
That was an “accident.” Just like Gary Webb’s two-shot “suicide.”
