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"b...but we can fix capitalism"
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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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Public ownership of the means of production with the suppression of the owning/capitalist class until all capitalist nation state have been destroyed and we can have a socialist world republic, duh
A system where:
Goods are produced to fulfill human needs via the help of central planning as opposed to commodity production where the "invisible hand of the market" dictates what to produce
Goods get distributed to fulfill needs rather than "rationed" through universal commodities like money
Private ownership gets abolished which gets rid of the parasitic class that extracts value out of land/labor
A system where the entire mode of production changes, and the present state of things gets abolished aka communism/communist mode of production though most of these core points that I outlined (it's not everything) can also apply to anarchism.
It's easy to write these ideas off as "having provably failed" given the history, but failures at building communism have nothing to do with these economic aspects or "human nature" or whatever, but rather political and material situations. USSR didn't achieve communism because of majority of its population being peasants as opposed to urban proletariat, and you can't really fulfill the needs of people if you haven't developed the productive forces to produce said needs, and if you stay on capitalism long enough, you'll start getting opportunists who want personal power and wealth.
Other post-Stalin regimes that called themselves communist (such as Vietnam, Cuba) only did so to gain protection from the Capitalist west given their ex-colony status, so they adopted Marxist-Leninist aesthetics to gain the protection of USSR - materially, they weren't communist at all though given their repression of the workers and independent labor unions, mode of production remaining capitalist and class divisions still going strong.
You know communism of some form obviously private ownership of the means of production is self evidently bad for humanity and the planet in general.
socialism, yk, anarchism, is hard to understand for u? do you need your brain checked?
I'm going to have to ask this again it seems. Where has 100% socialism worked for longer than 10 years for a country?
I think socialism is a great idea, but it doesn't work for anything larger than a small commune and you have to have a common purpose. The greeds are going to take over and become authoritarian pretty quickly if you try it for a country. That's why socialist democrat seems to be the way to meet everyone's needs. Bernie style.
Where the hell has capitalism worked?
You could lazily ask that question or you can actually read about how anarchist and communist societies are formed and destroyed (hint: often by outside armies when theyve only just begun). Capitalism clearly doesn't work for anyone but the rich & powerful, so we need to try something different. No one has The One True Answer, we have to build the new world starting from where we are.
I agree that social democracy would be a big improvement over the terribly cruel form of capitalism we have today. I would make further changes than just that, but we can choose not to fight each other at least until we get that far. Organize together instead of infighting.
That's socialism. It should be noted socialism is a very broad spectrum of ideologies, and they primarily fail at being implemented in the first place, not at being maintained.
Liberalism is difficult to implement as it requires the powers that be to relinquish some power to capitalists and the middle class, however when both those groups started holding significant economic power liberalism could succeed in many parts of the world.
Socialism is harder to achieve as there are no large economic powers that gain from it. Greedy corps, governments, and individuals all oppose its implementation and therefore it's difficult. There's also the issue of organizing everyone and all that.
So no, you don't seem to quite understand. Socialism doesn't fail, nor is always organized into communes, and "socialist democrats" describe socialists.
Things need to change and sitting on our hands and saying that changing the system in any way won't work is extremely counter productive.
Also, it has become clear that capitalism can't maintain democracies for all that long. It's not a stable system. The few accrue wealth and property and create oligopolies which destabilize the systems we depend on, leading to the slow decline of social and liberal democracies worldwide. Capitalism needs to go.
Edit: Basically what I'm saying is that you don't know the definitions of the words you are using. "Communist states" are largely not communist. They are often state capitalist or some degree of a planned economy. The workers don't own squat. Most socialists I know don't argue in favor of anything similar to china or the soviet union, but actual democratic socialist states. While many want revolutions we also generally work towards reforms and unionizing since a revolution requires some popular support.
All positive aspects of liberal states are socialist policies implemented by socialist politicians or forced through by unions. Usually unions. I therefore personally favor forms of socialism that lean into the union part such as syndicalism. Might be worth having a look at that if you want to learn what socialism is.
it's confounded by the US, a powerful state, being deeply ideologically opposed to socialism. Maybe shit would have worked without the US sabotaging it
If a system cannot defend itself from the influence of foreign interest, it can't function on the world stage. That's like saying a motor design would work without friction or thermodynamics sabotaging it. It implies there are still problems that need to be ironed out before the system is rolled out.
Capitalist countries have problems defending themselves as well. Maybe that's not the system's problem.
I don't know if any political system would stand up to a concerted effort to sabotage it. If socialism was the dominant paradigm and some small country tried to do capitalism, it very well might have been sabotaged. It wouldn't follow to say capitalism can't work after shooting all the leaders and buying all their media
The thing about capitalism is that it excels at concentrating power into relatively few hands, which makes it much easier to direct resources for specific goals.
But that's not really the point. The point is that the conditions of the world are what they are. If your system requires the conditions to be otherwise in order to succeed, you either need to secure those conditions first or abandon the system.
As we saw with the USSR, the opposition from the US helped turn it into a corrupt oligarchy. The efforts to secure a strong socialist state just made their resources easier to divvy up.
That's not to say I disapprove of socialism and endorse capitalism. But we cannot ignore the material conditions in the world. Any improvement needs to take them into consideration, and have the ability to deal with them.
Honestly I don't think you actually can have socialism that isn't a functioning democracy. Ownership implies power over something, and a government by its nature must have power over the things within it's borders. If society at large, ie the people, don't control the government, then regardless of who owns things on paper, whatever smaller group of people actually control the government effectively own whatever is in that country, and therefore their effect is fundamentally similar to the effect that a wealthy capitalist class has in a capitalist society. Anything where the people aren't actually in charge that calls itself socialist, is just using the terminology and aesthetics to gain support without actually setting up the socialized ownership structure that the name implies.
I agree 100%, that's why they never have an example of one that has worked, there isn't one. I appreciate the goal, but the practicality of it is nil as a stand alone for anything country size.
I've known people that made it work as a living situation, but they all had outside jobs and were bringing resources from outside the community. I've heard of it working as a small commune in Norway where they grow their own food and such, but that's it.
There has to be some sort of trade with a world this size, we currently use ephemeral numbers that we trade and some times paper. If it was a commune, they would still have to trade labor, carrots, chickens or whatever. Capitalism will always be there in some form or another.
There's a difference between capitalism and just having markets and money, to be fair.
I mean this sincerely, because I don't know everything about economics. Is it?
A blacksmith with 5 apprentices is a capitalist, right? An artist like Da Vinci had apprentices, so he was a capitalist. What I'm saying is, you don't have to go too far from trading chickens to get to capitalism.
No it is not.
Currency is 3000 years old. Money and Markets preexist the capitalist system.
A core concept of Karl Max book was how local markets can influence prices in distant markets; resulting famine due to prices not availability. That was his literal moral justification for regulating the economy.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Capitalism is still capitalism under different names.
It's a matter of scale I think, I don't think I would consider a blacksmith having a handful of apprentices to be capitalism, especially considering the implication of an apprenticeship meaning that those guys will eventually become blacksmiths themselves. Maybe if he owned a whole bunch of blacksmiths shops and the associated tools and just paid the actual smiths a certain amount to use them, but if a small shop like that is capitalism, then every economic system from the dawn of trade to now is capitalism, and that isn't how I generally see people use the term.
Well, if we use the term in the way people generally use the term, I don't think we could go back to non-capitalism.
I don't know anyone that could build every component of a computer. I do know people who could from parts, but not make the actual parts.
So, let's say all of the employees owned every factory they worked in, that would be socialism, right? I could get on board with that. Has it worked anywhere where one person didn't take it over like a mob boss after a certain amount of time?
Edit: On that last question, I'm hoping that's a yes.
I have never personally worked in a worker co-op or employee owned corporation to give an anecdote about how they feel day to day, but I do know that they exist.
I haven't either, but I've been to one. It's sales only though. https://artistcraftsman.com/employment/ They are very helpful and better than most retail stores.
I just don't know how our country could switch. I never thought lockdown or trump would happen, so that doesn't mean much.
ah, well, designing a different system is a whole different problem to gaining the influence and political will to implement it once designed. And probably a harder one, seeing as it requires finding a way to convince a lot of other people to use what levers of power they have to push your idea, and changing peoples minds requires more than just thinking through an idea of what could be. (edit: I mean the latter as the harder one, Im realizing that I didnt exactly write it in a way that implies what I intended to mean)
I feel like you might be confusing capitalism for market economies in general. A market economy is when private entities buy and sell things. Capitalism specifically is a market economy where the means of production, the equipment that makes things, are owned by investors who do not themselves participate in production.
What you describe in that last paragraph is called market socialism. You still have private entities buying and selling things, that's the market part, but instead of being owned by investors those entities are collectively owned by the employees doing the production, that's the socialism part.
This system preserves the strengths of markets, namely efficient specialization and price discovery, while eschewing the liabilities of capitalism, namely the siphoning of value from those who create it to investors.
Aye. If we could get a global leadership to fix tax havens and regulate for sustainable praxis we'll get closer to the fully automated gay socialist space communism we all would enjoy.
if it doesn’t work, then why would america try their best to shut socialism down? seriously if you need a test and you’re in the uk, I can hook you up with a therapist
The U.S is just concerned for the people there.
They obviously have good intentions.
Okay, name one that worked.
name one that wasn’t immediately bitch slapped by the uk/us/cia
Exactly, we're agreeing.
This is why we gave up on democracy itself after Sparta conquered Athens that one time.
Dumbass Romans might have tried it again but obviously they lost after a couple centuries, glad nothing will ever challenge absolute monarchies which have obviously always existed.
Can you imagine some losers coming along a thousand years later and trying to do republicanism again? Morons.
Socialism and capitalism aren't diametrically opposed. Functionally socialism is just capitalism + egalitarianism. If capitalism can go to the moon... socialism prevents everyone from drowning. They aren't mutually exclusive.
I agree that socialism "doesn't scale", but that's due to the nature of markets. TLDR you simply cannot trade globally without the mechanics of capitalism coming into play. Like the beginning section of Karl Marx book was explaining how the economics of one region could directly cause a famine in a completely separate region.
IMO communism will only work in a society that enacts it peacefully. A violent revolution inevitably costs skilled individuals and inherently creates detractors. 90% of the challenges in a capitalist society will still exist in a communist one. The less traumatic the transition the better positioned society is for immediate success.
Most socialists are against capitalism while a lot of them ooh and ahh over a coffeemaker they just got off amazon. The people bitching here in this thread are using capitalism to do it. I really think we can have a world where communities and the government help each other, it doesn't have to be like it is now. It actually has been pretty good in some portions of the last 100 years. Definitely not perfect though. A democracy sucks, but it's the best option there is.
You hate capitalism, yet you participate in it. I am very intelligent
Democracy is a terrible form of government; until you consider the alternatives.
You fucked up the quote and don't actually support true democracy, just representative democracy, all while conflating democracy with liberalism like they're inseparable concepts.
So you feel entitled to demand society be torn down but not a crumb of responsibility to build it again?
I can agree that something close to communism is the ideal government. But not if it's run by incompetent or corrupt people. It would be akin to what we saw in post-exit Afghanistan, with clueless gun toting buffoons holding civic offices.
Grow up.
Sorry, did you just imply someone is irresponsible for suggesting communism and then immediately agree with their suggestion? Wtf is up with the nasty "not a crumb of responsibility" line? Can you explain that?
Anarchists/socialists want to sieze the means of production, not destroy them.
Seizing is a lot easier than managing.
Well then chap, grab a gun and seize us some means!
In an anarchist reigon of spain, they produced so much bread and oil that after giving it away for free they were still able to export some (source).
If anything, anarchism would make managing the means more effiecent, since it elimates the bureaucracy around it. There would be more workers since Bullshit Jobs (read the book by David Graeber, even if you're not an anarchist it's a good read). Would be eliminted.
A contextless example with no direct connection to 99% of other issues?
Explain how your cherry picked example directly translates to other industries.
Explain how that would scale from a small region to sustaining a population of millions
What is your evidence that the main detractor to efficiency is bureaucracy?
Why would people if office jobs go work on fields?
Like bruh this is literally the level of thinking MAGA put before essentially allowing ICE to deport half their workers.
Transitioning away from capitalism involves peoples lives... like millions to billions of them. Rational, empathetic people, will not join you in a revolution that could potentially cause more suffering than the status quo.
If you decide to continue believing (well...anything really...but still...) in the existing of any currency, then you, and everyone else, including me and mine, will die and stop. 2030 is the easily the call. Not much time left. Lucky if anyone makes it that far.
if it exploits the people like capitalism does, it should be replaced