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What do you like about socialism?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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I think of it as a mental disease societies can catch. I do acknowledge that is full of good intentions. it just doesn't work and ends in missery. it just fails to account for basic facts like human nature.
Sounds like capitalism
Nope. Capitalism doesn't have good intentions, just good PR.
at least the way a socialist teacher taught me in primary school (and i don't completely agree with him but it's a good charactherization) you have desirable values of freedom and equality and they are in conflict. again I don't necesarrily agree with that and it boils down to the fact that when equality is implemented is always by averaging down everyone which is at the expense of freedom. anyways so supposedly you have capitalism as a system that places freedom above equality and communism as a system that places equality above freedom. so it's not really about good and bad but a conflict of virtues.
it's completely besides the point but i do rank freedom slightly above equality. in reality i would like to ensure some minimum level of support for everyone , i think that should be a pretty low level of support. just the bare minimun e.g. ensured education and equal chance at success at life, and health care depending on the actual amount of resources that can be allocated to it, nothing unrealistic but just the minimum to live without suffering, including other stuff like food and clothing and shelther as well. and then to have the freedom so that if anyone wants more than the minimum they should work for it. I'm sure that the people that wanted to work would be able to produce enough value to provide that minimum life support for everyone. so about 80% freedom and 20% equality.
Capitalism isn't about freedom, it's about exploitation. The "freedom" it prioritizes is the freedom of individuals to lay private claim to the value of public resources (land, natural resources, etc), then use their control of those resources to lay claim to the value of the labor of others (the employee/employer relationship). It's literally parasitism.
Capitalism is the "freedom" to extract profit. Profit is the difference between the price you sell something for, and the cost to produce it. It naturally results in paying employees less than the value of their labor, and/or charging the customer more than the value of a product. It is fundamentally a grift, profiting by skimming off value as a middleman. The freedom of the capitalist comes fundamentally at the restriction of freedom of everyone else, the majority "averages down", that's just a mathematical truth.
The longer capitalism exists, the more "freedom" is siphoned into generational wealth, and the more extreme inequality becomes. Capitalists gain the freedom to live a luxurious life without actually doing any work, while everyone else loses the freedom to use land and natural resources. It's literally just "dibs" metastasized.
Capitalism takes into account for basic facts like human nature.
No, it lies about it
https://theconversation.com/humans-arent-inherently-selfish-were-actually-hardwired-to-work-together-144145
We’re long past the hunter-gatherer reality with a world population of 20,000, which your post concerns.
you might have hearing issues.
Yeah, capitalism is completely bereft of good intentions.
yeah. unfortunately rejecting reality and substituting it with your own only works on the mind. it doesn't put food on your stomach.
Unfortunately attacking someone for holding a different position is why society sucks so much
I don't see anyone attacking anyone here. perhaps some light trolling but nothing beyond that.
https://theconversation.com/humans-arent-inherently-selfish-were-actually-hardwired-to-work-together-144145
Yes. Even a communal style of life works at small scales. But not at civilization scale. This is accepted and studied. And in particular the studies focus on the effects of the size of the group. As the groups grow larger the free riders appear. But I think what’s worse is that even if they didn’t have that problem they would still face the economic calculation problem and end up producing the wrong things instead.
edit: I should add that I think i would personally love to live in some small community in that sort of shared community setting even though I'm "white collar high earner".
Not that it's necessarily what you're implying, but it's ridiculous to me that people think capitalism is an inevitable result of human nature but socialism isn't. Either of them are just ideas we made up. The benefits and flaws of each are the result of human nature, just with different influences and in different ways. Socialism may fail to account for the parts of human nature that you find relevant. Because you've been brought up in a capitalist system to believe that, OR you're directly benefiting from its exploitation. That doesn't mean those are the only relevant parts of human nature.
I don’t think it’s an inevitable result. As we get better at handling complex systems we might have a chance at a more efficient planned economy (that would still have issues but so does capitalism) we are not there yet. I do think that capitalism is the best system we can currently use. It doesn’t mean it’s not flawed
I don’t think that my opinion is about how relevant I think the economic calculation problem is or worker productivity. It’s the famines that follow its implementation that i find “relevant”.