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Both sides are the same
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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That's not far left IMO, that's just left. This is a recurring problem we have in France too, where medias call "far left" parties that are just left. This is a slippery slope, the one on which Overton window slips towards the (far) right...
Far left is: "We're going to destroy the very concept of private ownership and wealth accumulation"
"... to meet everyone's basic needs"
"..."
"To meet everyone's basic needs, right?"
/AnakinAndPadmeMeme.jpg
Literally yes. Housing, employment, education, healthcare and pensions are guaranteed in Cuba, and were guaranteed in the USSR, both in theory and in practice. What are you exactly talking about?
Communism is just impossible to implement. It only takes one human's greed to destroy the system. Center-left is far more plausible where the economy is capitalist with lots of checks and balances to counter extreme capitalists' greed and the state having control over essential industries and important parts of the economy (energy, water supply, transportation, education, healthcare and stuff) while abolishing religious systems to nil the discrimination on that end.
The entire concept of life itself is very capitalist — You have to exploit all resources available to you so you can survive and thrive. Only some species share resources — that too if they are in abundance for them.
This is an incredibly inaccurate way to describe nature and you feed into narratives that capitalism is "natural" that stop us from thinking critically both about nature and humanity when you frame things in this way.
Did I ever say capitalism is good? I am saying extreme ends of both economic systems are impossible if you want a free and thriving society.
What you have accomplished is to introduce a completely arbitrary and reductive continuum and stated both ends are bad... so what?
I don't care either way what you think about capitalism, I am telling you to stop comparing capitalism to nature because it exposes that you clearly don't know anything about nature.
Great job editing your comment after I post my reply.
I know more about nature than you clearly do. I was a professional wildlife photographer for a long time and have travelled to various places, studied a lot of animal behaviour and have been around people who are professionals in this field. So yeah… I won’t be taking shit from a person banging a keyboard in their mother’s basement.
Socialism is not extreme. However, communism is. Educate yourself.
Civilisation would be impossible to implement if we didn't criminalise destructive behaviour like murder.
Make greed (hording wealth) illegal.
Capitalism literally encourages human greed to accumulate wealth and destroy the societal system. Even if you tax and regulate them that's still what's encouraged, as its literally the entire point of the system
And regarding "only some species share resources.." Yes. Us. That's literally what society is. How do you think humans grew to become the most successful species on earth? If you win I do not lose. It's not a zero-sum game. Cooperation is literally a win-win. Do you think technology and science would thrive and prosper in a cutthroat society where people kill and steal from each other over any tiny advantage they can get?
I am not saying capitalism is great.
You guys ignore the very fact that socialism and communism is a failed system because they are so extreme in its nature. You have to make people believe that the opposite is worse. Capitalism is failing today because it is going towards an extreme, both are the 2 sides of the same coin. Having the best of both worlds is what will create balance. The capitalism from 50 years ago and capitalism today are vastly different. Because earlier we were either centre-right or centre-left.
It definitely didn't thrive under socialism.
I mean, do you know what socialism is? Do you know what capitalism is? It's not really extreme in the objective sense, what is extreme is that someone can own a thing that they don't even use, and hire other people to use for them, and then them profit just because they own it. Or own land and make others pay to use or live on that land, just because they own it. I mean, I find that to be absurd in the grand scheme of things, but that is what capitalism is.
Capitalism just feels like a very anti-social economic system
I mean Russia did put people in space
Whose space program caused significant dent in their already broken economy just to compete with the US. Won't call that thriving.
Also China is not socialist. It is state a owned authoritarian capitalist country at best. It just calls itself is socialist but ranks no. 2 in total number of billionaires after the US.
And during both regimes' socialist/communist eras, each country's individual death toll, as a result of the economic policies and the authoritarian regimes, was more than the Nazi holocaust. I won't even call that a thriving civilization let alone thriving of science.
So how about the death toll of countries under the strain of capitalism?
Sure capitalism has blood on its hands. But pointing to capitalist deaths doesn’t erase the catastrophic death tolls under communist regimes. It's not a competition of “which ideology killed more,” it’s about which system actually functions without collapsing or requiring authoritarian control.
You can control capitalism with regulations. Communism historically only survives through force and collapses when markets are removed.
I’m so tired of individuals confusing socialism and communism. It is not the same thing. Educate yourself.
I don’t see where technology is exactly “thriving” under capitalism. Sure it’s advancing but in ways that don’t actually serve the people. It actually seems to be a significant dividing factor for people today. Even healthcare is the U.S. is fractured (to be polite) because a handful of wealthy decided science is whatever they say it is and defunded research.
You state capitalism isn’t great and claim socialism as a failed system, but how can that be when we see literally today capitalism has failed us. Has there ever been a point in time we as people have truly implemented a socialist society that is not twisted, bent, and raped by capitalism or communism?
First level headed comment i think ive ever read on lemmy. People need to get out of black and white thinking. It has to be a blend.
We need libraries and fire stations. We also need some competition and industry so we can live comfortably and buy shit; thats just how it is.
We dont need billionaires.
You claim communism is impossible to implement yet you have no issue in attempting to implement a democracy that capitalism won't be able to pervert, despite one never having existed before and it being impossible for one to exist.
It sounds less like genuine rationality and more like rationalising a status quo bias. Even worse when people are claiming capitalism to be the natural order of life, despite existing for less than 0.0000001% of it and humans being egalitarian for far longer than they were capitalist.
Peak homoeconomus experiencing "capitalist realism." They even colonised your dreams.
Yes, capitalism as a formal economic system is recent but the behaviours it’s built on aren’t. Competition, territorial control, hoarding for security, unequal outcomes all of these exist across nature (including humans). Lions fight for dominance, trees compete for sunlight, squirrels hoard food. Resource competition is older than any ideology.
Communism, on the other hand, assumes sustained large scale human cooperation without hierarchy, which has never existed stably either outside small tribes where scarcity was low and populations small. Scaling that to millions is where it collapses.
I’m not defending status quo. I support regulated capitalism with social welfare (centre-left). Capitalism needs checks, not abolition. Meanwhile Communism needs human behaviour to fundamentally change.
One system builds on instinct and incentives and the other demands we override them entirely.
That’s the difference in feasibility.
No, you're just rationalising sociopathy with thoroughly disproved social-Darwinism. Contrary to what people think, it was our sharing of resources that set us appart from our competitors, not competition within our species. That's basic human evolutionary history.
People had to be beaten, whipped, staved, dispossessed of their land and forced leave their egalitarian lives to endure capitalism, making it the opposite of human nature. You just don't know the history of capitalism.
Again, can you name one single country that hasn't had its democracy utterly perverted by capitalism? We both know you can't and that's why you refuse to answer. Can you even name one check that hasn't been perverted? As you can't, why do you think any could magically work now?
Believing it to be human instinct is just telling on yourself for you lack of empathy, believing everyone else has as little as you do.
We were egalitarian for 10s of thousands of years. That's real human nature whether you like it or not. Just because we happen to be ruled over by the most greedy and sociopathic people in society, it doesn't make it our nature.
You can't name a time capitalism hasn't perverted democracy and failed the 99% but think failing that way only applies to communism. Like I said, peak homo economicus experiencing capitalist realism. You fell for the first lie you were told and refuse to hold it to account.
Yeah cool I am stupid and useless. Now go take your solution and start a revolution. I will grab a popcorn. I have a life to live. 🤡
"...and to achive that, you will do the job we pick for you, you will work the hour we decided, you will be paid not in money but in basic needs, and any excess you have will be confiscated."
Let's not pretend we didn't have the example for far left.
Literally making this up. By the 1970s in the USSR, 1 in 10 positions in the economy were open, and people were completely free to change their jobs and move to others without having the threat of unemployment. The only restriction I've seen to that, is that university graduates, as a payment back to society (university, as of all education in the USSR, was free and actually included accommodation and upkeep), had to work for a few years on a state-mandated position in their field of study. I'm a Spaniard physicist and 9 in 10 of my friends are unhappy fucks who are either unemployed or hating their lives in consulting.
Tell me one socialist state that hasn't paid their workers in money. I can tell you that my girlfriend's mom, in a capitalist country, once got paid in juice boxes because the company didn't have money for her salary.
Again literally untrue. You're mistaking capital (private property used to produce goods and services in order to extract surplus value from workers) with personal property (the things you use on your own for your own shit, like your house or your toothbrush).
Have you ever actually talked with a Marxist, or are you just going off what you heard on FOX news?
I must admit i don't talk with Marxists nor do i know what is FOX news, and i do exaggerated my point, but lets not pretend Mao Zedong and North Korea didn't exists, whatever you mentioned above is no way closer to far left. Socialism is practiced everywhere, but that doesn't make them far left.
Literally the excess i'm talking about.
The excess in your opinion is forbidding rich people from exploiting the poor. There were plenty of people making the same point against abolition of slavery in 200BCE that you're making right now.
Under Mao Zedong, China's life expectancy went from 23 years of age to almost 60, more than doubling. Apply this to 1 billion Chinese, and you get that communism in China saved hundreds of millions of people. China in the early 1900s was a western colony much like India, and it had similar levels of industrialization and economical progress. Comparing the development of India and China since communism, the only possible conclusion is that communism uplifted a billion people from destitute poverty, gave them healthcare, education, pensions, jobs and housing. Mistakes were made during Mao? For sure they were. The balance is still overwhelmingly positive by any metric you want to apply.
As for North Korea, maybe if the USA hadn't bombed the country using more explosives than in the entire Pacific theater of WW2, and destroyed literally 85% of the buildings in the entire country, North-Koreans wouldn't have had such an extreme policy of international isolation and self-defense.
Yeah. Somehow, every morally just ideology that liberals/democrats ever had suddenly became the sole property of the far left when they decided to label everything even slightly right of Stalin as “bLuEMaGa”.
Each and every one of them now sit at the dead center of a their own little circle, where they try very hard to entertain themselves, and one another- by attempting to smugly out enrage everyone with edgy memes.
It’s pretty fucking entertaining if you ask me.
Who are "they"? Your comment has more pronouns than a Tumblr thread