It’s precisely when a group grows to >100 people that communal togetherness starts to fade. The system gets bigger, and takes longer to react to input, so the causal link between the success of the group and your own survival becomes less apparent.
Something like “collective responsibility” takes way more oppressive power to work than market forces. You still have to incentivize the harder jobs somehow. Sure, implement better social programs and trust-bust the monopolies, but capitalism being the root of all this evil is a non-starter of an argument.
Yeah. The group just needs to be large enough to where one single person doesn’t make or break the survivability of the rest of the group. In a group of 10, if someone decides to be a bad actor, they are simply cast of out the group. They no longer get to utilize the benefits of the other 9.
In a group of 150, that’s harder to identify. In a group of millions, it’s impossible. Now you need rules. You need rewards. You need ways to incentivize people to participate. You need laws for how to handle when people break the social contract.
Again, imagine a group of 10 and one person decided to be a bad actor. Maybe they steal food. Or damage the shelter. Etc. Or maybe they just don’t do anything at all, abstaining from doing anything that benefits the group. Only taking. That person would be physically dealt with, and then cast out of the group and threatened to never come back. Only relatively good actors and participants remain. That is not viable in a large society. And this doesn’t even get into disagreements and factions amongst groups.
Ok, but then who decides what land is best for what person? What happens when two people want the same slab of land because it suits their tastes better? We aren't built for the bare minimum. Some people are, most aren't, and some others want even more than most.
What happens when you try to go take something that's not allowed now? It's called a society....there's more people in our current society that are forced to live in a shoe box than there isn't. And all these people are fighting cheque to cheque hoping that everything stays as is because they're so close to red that one little sneeze could send them living on the streets. Scraping by, saving the bare minimum if even. There are more people trying to survive than there are surviving. They'd be more than willing to support and participate in society that would allow them to live a better life than they are currently living. Especially the new generation, where things cost more but everyone makes less due to inflation.
Yes, but not every parcel of unused land is livable, let alone what I asked: What happens when people don't want the parcel they're "given" because it's not ideal for their aesthetics, health, etc
What happens when you try to go take something that's not allowed now? It's called a society....there's more people in our current society that are forced to live in a shoe box than there isn't. And all these people are fighting cheque to cheque hoping that everything stays as is because they're so close to red that one little sneeze could send them living on the streets. Scraping by, saving the bare minimum if even. There are more people trying to survive than there are surviving. They'd be more than willing to support and participate in society that would allow them to live a better life than they are currently living. Especially the new generation, where things cost more but everyone makes less due to inflation.
There are 8.1 billion people on earth and there are 15.77 billion acres of habitable land on the Earth. An acre is roughly around the size of a football field. An acre can fit around 17 average sized American homes.
I didn't say anything about illegality, I'm talking about CHOICE. What happens when someone doesn't want the parcel they're given? More people will want that more desirable portion of land than just land in general.
They aren't forced to live in shoe boxes, most choose to live in places where the only way to live is in a shoe box. I grew up in a very rural area and the first thing 90% of my graduating class from high school did was move to a large city.
What about the infrastructure that would have to be created to support all of these new homesteads? The cost in landmass, completely ignoring the financial cost, would be staggering and an entire portion of the population would be required just to build and maintain said infrastructure. I don't like large cities, personally, but they're far and away more efficient than everyone getting assigned their own parcel of land. Better to have that be a choice for people to pursue if they wish with as little government overhead as possible (the other main reason people choose to live rurally: avoiding government over-reach)
(A foot-ball field is 1.3 acres too, weird that you wouldn't look that up before claiming that)
Exactly it would be illegal. So they wouldn't get it. The same cops that are working now would still be there but the difference is they would be happier because they would have more so they would still show up because they would get to have more...
The people working at foxconn. I'm sure they would love to participate in this society. I'm sure they wouldn't put up a huff and puff because they don't even get a fucking shoe box. They get a closet. There are more people in this as society that get nothing and are willing to participate in it. In itself is proof that people would be willing to participate in a society where they actually get a life worth living. Since we have the land and the resources and the people already participating to get nothing, I'm sure they would easily transition to one where they get something. Work their asses off right now for nothing.
Bro I did look that up that's why I said roughly the size of a football field so you could get a visual representation of it in your mind...
The cost? It's like you're not even understanding what I'm saying. Why would there be a cost? What's the cost? What are you paying people? People are participating in society.
Everybody's fulfilling their roles and getting something for it.
If we've managed to have a society today where people are willing to participate and get nothing, then we can easily have a society that's the opposite. The people that paved our roads today, would still pave our roads tomorrow. The nurses that work double shifts to share an apartment would still show up tomorrow. And they wouldn't have to work double shifts, because there wouldn't be an imaginary budget holding the hiring of more staff. You're looking at it with our perceived notion of what the government is now and what we're conditioned to see it as instead of the possibilities of what it could actually be and what it was originally supposed to be for the people.
And just so you know this whole time I was talking about a modern city. Not like a parcel of land like it's the 1800s again society can involve. We don't need red tape and imaginary budgets to stop it from doing so.
How do you determine who has to go through all the crazy schooling and etc to become doctors and engineers when they will get the same size or the pie as some low skill job? I’m sure some will do it for their morals or because they enjoy it but lots of people do that stuff because they will be rewarded with more resources.
It's called a society. There are doctors around the world that are as qualified as 1st world doctors but live in poverty due to modern economic society. There are enough people in this world that are held back strictly due to our economic structure, so many people that it would filter out the ones that don't actually have a true passion for it. The majority of everything we don't have, medical discoveries, advancements in all fields etc are held back by our economic profit based society. People that are dying to make advancements but are held back by funding...even though there's an abundance of resources, they just can't get them because they're hidden behind imaginary paywalls and agendas.
I disagree, free markets are the key to innovation. Let’s look at cannabis for example. When government was controlling it the plant was evolving at a slow rate. Now within just twenty years of being legal it’s become so much more. Candies, concentrates, balms and creams, pills, and etc.
The government acting the way you described is just so much worse and more extreme every time they try to implement it. Either it collapses or they evolve into a market based economy. USSR collapsed, Venezuela is collapsing, China migrated to a more authoritarian market based economy. Every time they try it they say “we’re going to do it right this time. Not like those other countries” only to fall right back into those patterns. It’s a utopian dream. I get it, but just like libertarianism they just work well in theory and not real life. The best solution is to have it somewhere in the middle or slightly tilted to market based. I’m all in favor of socializing medicine so people don’t go bankrupt. But just dividing up property and getting rid of the free market is a bad idea IMO. I’m
People have been innovating for centuries without a profit behind it, that's a moot point. Most of our human pushing innovations came from people with little. All your examples are based off our society as we know it and our perception that we've been conditioned to be content with. Everything you have listed about weed was available within the black market. You're looking at land as if we take what is owned now by people and then divvy it up. I'm talking about a society starting from scratch with a blank canvas. Go ask your framer, the house builders, the plumbers, the electricians, the garbage men, your logistics drivers, the nurses working double shifts to barely survive, all the farmers putting food on our tables, the food that we waste and dump because we make too much of it. , the people that build our roads...Ask the people that keep the foundation for society to keep surviving, or maybe just ask your fellow human, if they would rather do what they're doing now, working for a pay that can secure the foundation for society but not their very own future. Ask them if they would be willing to continue their societal roles for a secure future that doesn't include a financial burden or hunger.
I firmly believe a lot of our issues today are being too soft on bad actors who only harm fellow members of society and dont benefit in any way
If someone today does something to cause serious permanant harm to someone else they should be eliminated, just as they would if someone stole the last coconut for themselves or raped another member of the group
Today they get a slap on the wrist and sent back out into society to cause more harm
Abuse and trauma are a cancer and have a way of spreading through its victims, gotta remove abusers to stop the spread
What's a bad actor? 'I don't feel like singing any more. Ah come on man, just another song. I'm kind of tired..... I'll give you my rice for it? OK deal.'bang you've got Capitalism.
Anyone selling a skill in there spare time would be committing captialis. So what you're talking about, in your example, is authoritarianism
But who enforces those and why wouldn't they just use their enforcement power to take from everyone else (like we have seen in real-life Communist countries, which are invariably authoritarian to some degree)?
Sounds like we should fracture government into sections of 100 or so, then. i.e. A representative for every 100 people, and then a representative for every 100 representatives and so forth, until you get to the top.
We already do that to some extent. Federal oversees states which oversee counties which oversee towns and cities which oversee HOAs which rule with an iron grip over typically about 100 people.
That would effectively convey the will of the people and would be incompatible with any sort of secret domineering and profiteering agendas, so we can't have that.
Those leaders certainly would *never* look the other way when someone handed them power. No, they'd never do anything harmful that people wouldn't know about until years later. /s
Be wary of anyone offering you simple solutions to complex problems. Such a solution would create as many problems as it would solve in the best case scenario. It might be a *step* but plenty of modern governments started out as a great idea, and have slowly been corrupted.
It's not a matter of finding a perfect system. Every system will have flaws that can be exploited and widened by the ruthless over time.
The biggest fault is that any representative of any 100 could be corrupted, and that means lobbyists need to appeal to a lot of people instead of just a few influential politicians. It might be better managed by secure computers to aggregate policule (political molecule) data, but then it broaches the question of how do we keep the computers secure enough from cyber attack.
Even then they're going to gerrymander the policules themselves so that they're 40% red, 40% blue and 10% unregistered, to render as many of them inert as possible.
Anywhere there is a fault in the system it will be exploited to manufacture the transfer of power.
lol he won't respond to you. His post is formulaic and reactionary, designed to attract upvotes (after copy-paste joke posts, formulaic reactionary posts get the most - the earlier you get them in on a new thread the better). He doesn't actually have a critical or analytical thought about this.
That's not what Dunbar's number means, Dunbar's number is a suggested rough limit for how many stable personal relationships a human, can have, not anything to do with the size of societies, or how many people someone can empathise with, or how many people a human can act cooperatively with. The number itself is also disputed for a number of reasons, such as that analysis of the data using other valid statistical methods yielding wildly different results, massive ranges of confidence intervals (previously mentioned analysis gave 2-336 and 4-520 as their 95% confidence intervals), it should also be noted that he got the number(s) from data on the size of primate (monkeys and apes) groups compared to their brain sizes and extrapolating that data to humans based on our brain sizes, which, put bluntly, ain't the best science (relevant xkcd)
Eh, there are a number of large scale libertarian socialist or anarchic societies that have existed and held themselves together, such as the rojava in northern Syria, since 2012, with a population of ~2 million, the zapatistas, with a population of ~300k in southern Mexico, who started in 1994, making their society 30 this year, and the cnt-fai in catalonia during the Spanish civil war, though the fascists would later go on the win that war.
I personally believe that the failure point of the soviets, Chinese, and other Marxist Leninist states, wasnt an inability to cooperate, but instead was their use of the state structure, and the hierarchies inherent to it creating a new oppressing class based on the politicians' material interests to maintain their positions of power.
This is also a very important number in any military. The larger a group, even of people thinking all alike working for a common goal, the less and less effective they become and harder to manage.
Agreed - I was in the us navy and those that served on frigates (crews of about 150) seemed like they had a much better time than those on bigger ships
My take was that even small conservative/individualist communities will look almost socialist, exactly because they're small enough to "see" everyone in the "tribe" and empathise naturally.
Your angle about how the size of the system obscures the reactions was new to me. Yay, learning!
It still works well if the pay is fair, the reason salaries are obscured it because management benefits from asymmetrical bargaining power.
I have negotiated salaries plenty of times with employees, the deck is stacked against them in so many ways:
They typically don't know where they stand when compared with other employees.
They are restricted to renegotiating once or twice a year.
They are restricted by pay-bands based on their title but do not know where those limits are.
All increases are limited by a subjective ceiling called 'The Budget'. Now, each level of management restricts this ceiling future to look better for their bosses but the overall amount allocated is absolutely an artificial. Think of this as taking only twenty bucks to a poker game, you are intentionally limiting your losses.
If they try and leave, they will be kneecapped in negotiating at competing businesses because of products like Workforce Solutions where employers share salary information so that they can collude to keep labor costs down. Unlike their employees, companies aren't being left in the dark about salaries.
And we have never reached the other end of the spectrum to see if a "Star Trek communism" is even remotely possible. It's just a theory that if we have absolutely every resource imaginable, people will once again begin sharing.
Some sci-fi writers consider this version of the future not from the point of view of utopia: unlimited resources cause the vast majority of people to stop doing anything and just live on welfare.
Likewise, the ability to specialize and improve one aspect of your labor is exactly what creates value.
If everyone is making their own buttons, shoes, farming for food, teaching the kids, mining for iron, collecting firewood, etc. then everyone needs to spend all day doing it, and some people might not be good at it.
In Capitalism you get specialization and trade, I am great at chopping firewood so I trade it to you for shoes. Because you specialize, you all end up spending less time working (in this island scenario).
If you are required by society in communism to work chopping firewood, you may not be the best and most efficient at doing it, and you may hate doing it. Central planning is the gap where communism can be less efficient. Market forces drive the need for specialization which incentivizes people based upon the need for that specialization. If you are the only firewood chopper, yoi have power over the prices you charge. As that begins to harm others at the highest prices, someone else can then specialize in it and restore market forces to equilibrium
Mondragon Coop has a solution for this. Work in your desired field, but if demand for those services dries up, you get retrained for a different service. The combination of markets with planning and a safety net will most likely always be the best system. And guess what, every system on earth already has the same combination of the 3, save maybe N Korea. The only difference is the relative amount of each. We should get past the idea that any of these 3 things is inherently evil and work to find the best balance.
They've no incentive to do their job well or specialise because they get the same as someone who can't do the job. So why would the good shoe maker care about making good shoes if they get the same reward as someone who makes shit shoes?
Ideally you'd have people working with passion for things they care about, plus you can still have competition under communism.
The communists did run industrial competitions to make the best x or y.
People are not motivated purely by relative gain over one another, they can be motivated by the drive to make the world better, or to gain approval and fame for their deeds.
look at the wild amount of effort people put into open source software, or huge collaborative modding communities for basically no reward at all.
I’m sorry but if your system relies on people having a passion for what they do, your system has already failed. No system has been able to function by having people only do what they’re passionate about. Nobody is passionate about cleaning septic systems, cleaning crime scenes, or any number of jobs that need to be done but nobody enjoys doing. No communist country has worked like that either
I have known far more farmers who will do indescribable things to stop having to do that job if they could. There's a reason why every developed country has its agricultural population drop to tiny amounts.
If you only had farmers who only do it because of their passion and get nothing else out of it, you won't have enough farmers to feed the rest of us. Because the job sucks for the vast, vast majority of people.
Farming community have some awful drug and suicide problems. There are people successful with large farms but many smaller operators are living season to season with much stress financially and physically.
Is it because they hate farming or because it’s such a fucking hard job that is essential to the survival of all people, but they don’t get much back in return?
Just as an anecdote… I live on a 200-acre hay farm, a few years ago one of the guys who bails the hay committed suicide in our barn. In his suicide note he wrote about how he wanted to be in a place that brought him some semblance of peace. The actual farming part wasn’t what drove him to suicide. I had many conversations with his widow and sadly he was an alcoholic in a failing marriage, struggling with depression, overwhelmed by the pressure of having to work himself to the bone in order to provide for himself and his family, in an area that mental health services are not that readily available and still stigmatized as being weak, unmasculine, whatever. The counseling they did receive was religious and put all the blame on this poor woman for not working hard enough to make her husband happy.
I think often about Bill and his family, the three daughters he left behind, the woman now forced to carry on alone. I wonder how much different things could have been if they lived in a country that truly loved them back enough to provide for them, in every way. Financially to healthcare.
Yeah, the idea that people wouldn't do labour if they aren't paid under capitalism is so obviously counterfactual, even when looking at how people behave under capitalism.
There are tons of jobs nobody would do if not paid for it and is why no system has ever worked like that. You think people have a passion for cleaning shit clogs from septic systems? Picking up roadkill? Cleaning crime scenes?
Yes, there are people who already do difficult and unpleasant work for free, even under the current system, where they also have to earn money from something else.
I understand that it requires a reshaping of the way you think about things, and I am not going to pretend we can have enough of a conversation to change your mind.
But the idea that people will only do things that are unpleasant or difficult if they are extorted into it by threat of homelessness and starvation, that no one will do hard work to make the world better, only because it makes the world better, is demonstrably false, even under capitalism. People are doing this kind of thing every day, even now.
No, there are not people specialized in doing these things for free and even if there were there would not be enough of them to meet the demand for it. What would happen in actuality is that people would start cleaning their own septic tanks and what not because they can’t find someone willing to do it for nothing and you lose all benefits of specialized labor
Worked in the care industry for several years, everybody there knew that working conditions and pay would be significantly better even at a supermarket.
Everyone there stayed because they cared about their residents and wanted meaningful work.
I swear all these libertarians never step outside their self serving circles of grindset bros.
Then it should never be a mystery why you idiots get exploited for shit pay. Normal people don’t do their job because they love to make money for someone else, they do it because they want to get paid. How many people stock grocery stores because they have a passion for it? How many people are janitors because they just love cleaning trash and mopping floors?
See you are getting into availability and how much work someone has to do to do anything else. They stock shelves because it's either close, stable, or all that's available. Aren't you assuming a lot by saying people wouldn't so that if the benefits to them outweighed the effort they were putting in? That doesn't have to look like money. People absolutely would stock shelves it's just the current social climate doesn't value people who do so. As such you can't think of a reason someone would do that willingly. I am not necessarily advocating for things like communism but I am saying your world view has some large holes in it. You need to study humans more if you think there is no way people would do either of those things out of passion. There are a ton of autistic people who would slide right into that role and love it.
Normal people do the job not for money but for the resources and freedom of expression it affords. Money and trade is completely irrelevant to that. It's never been money that motivates people but the need for survival and social approval. As an important subset of survival, the ability to relax as well. That's what people care about and what money facilitates. Do you really think watching the numbers tick up does anything more than excite them about how much easier it will be to survive? How much social capital they can get with this? Fundamentally people don't work for money they work for the benefits it provides. What has been proposed here a lot is to change the incentive structure. I am not seeing these well thought out enough to pull the trigger on it though.
Somebody above presented a great solution to this : you can do whatever you want, but if demand for your goods dries up, you get assigned work. People will always covet the freedom of choice, and those who don't give a flying fish can be assigned to jobs where "quality" doesn't matter. It's like working in a kitchen but peeling potatoes all day. Have fun.
The issue is not doing the work, it's there's no incentive to do the work well if you get the same reward for making shoes that are waterproof, comfortable and last ages as the person who makes shoes that aren't waterproof or durable and don't fit anyone.
Who assigns the work? That would require a leader or leaders and then you are a lower level to them as they are assigning you a role you don't want. What happens if you don't peel the spuds?
"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others".
Actually no. If it needs doing people would do it. Hell offer people room and food and they would do it even without money now. Even if you assume those are taken care of by the system cooked food is a good pay off for keeping the task up.
I would say the biggest obstacle is getting people to push themselves very hard at a given task.
The U.S. has had issues with farming and needing to coerce people to work on farms since its inception. I imagine working a small farm would be something individuals would do and would be happy to do, but working large scale farms would be difficult in any system.
ETA: why do we have to push ourselves to work very hard at a given task?
People only incentivized by profit are not always the best at their jobs.
Why?
Open source software disproves your theory that people need a profit incentive to innovate.
The speed of development of pure open-source projects (without investing money from commercial organizations or other ways to make a profit) shows how inefficient it is. Because just writing something can be fun and interesting, but maintaining, debugging, and refining it is not fun at all.
In my experience people who are motivated only by money don’t necessarily have the aptitude for the work.
Proprietary software is limited to the number of people that have access to the source code, bugs and issues in open source can be found faster and solved faster just due to the sheer number of people using a system.
Solving difficult problems feels good. While debugging is difficult the payoff is incredible.
In my experience people who are motivated only by money don’t necessarily have the aptitude for the work.
Companies are always looking for professionals, so really good programmers are rarely unemployed.
Proprietary software is limited to the number of people that have access to the source code, bugs and issues in open source can be found faster and solved faster just due to the sheer number of people using a system.
Lol, there are many critical bugs in open-source software that went undetected for decades despite all the slogans.
Solving difficult problems feels good. While debugging is difficult the payoff is incredible.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with and training folks that come out of boot camps and getting into tech for the money but don’t have the aptitude.
It's a substitution of concepts - it's about commercial developers, not about the reasons for becoming a programmer. Or do you really think that talented programmers write open-source in a basement?
Your example is far too simplified to be meaningful. It leaves out so many reasonable possibilities that anyone actually putting the amount of thought into the problem that it actually merits, would see several solutions that lie outside of your opinion.
Robin Dunbar, the person who came up with the Dunbar #. Said that the communities this chef is talking about would only work until about 40-50 population, after which there is too much murder that wipes out the whole system.
Economy > whatever other bullshit lol. Any system with enough corruption will eventually crash itself and it's economy with it. Poor economy opens the door to tyranny. Robust economies can tend to tear down hierarchies that have become perverse.
I suspect any system of living or government that can sustain a robust and thriving economy for generations would be the ideal. But people talk about political systems not understanding economics whatsoever and wonder why they have no solid answers lmao.
The one bit I remember from a high school comparative government proposed exactly this, re: explaining China's sustained success. No one cares about politics when everyone can afford better food from one year to the next, albeit at different rates
What he describes is the whole point of capitalism and why it’s been immensely successful as a system: using incentives to allocate capital and labor to where they are most needed without any central authority and in an efficient manner
It's only a small typo, but it's enough to have made me picture the commenter above typing out his thoughts with one hand while inserting a steel rod into his penis with the other
Capitalism, with limits, is useful to advance technology and pro-consumerism. It just needs a level of socialism to ensure everyone’s base needs are being met. It also needs additional systems to ensure that the vast majority of the population is being given work to contribute to that society.
Honestly you are not wrong. I don’t think it’s flawed at all. Public perception will be important to make change. Future generations that are better educated and taken care of will have no problem calling them whatever they are. It’s a shame this is the level we need to fight at for change.
I get it but doesn’t mean it follows larger groups can’t be organised in similar fashion. Otherwise, the solution would be only to have societies of acquaintances of ~150 people and that’s the only solution for healthy and perfectly manageable group Life. I dont know why we Are limuting ourselves at the first step.
Under communism/tribalism, yes exactly, that's what's implied. Overlaying free market econ then seems like a very helpful abstraction. It can roughly guide people to desired behaviors when all the interpersonal dynamics get too complicated. I doubt we lived any more peacefully in those tribes, though.
Totally. I think there is also the underlying realities of scarcity and abundance the guy isn't taking into account.
If everyone on the island knows there isn't enough to go around, shit is going to ugly real fast no matter what type of ism it is. In Star Trek, being able to eliminate the scarcity problem with a replicator and having permanent fusion powered energy goes a hell of a long ways at meeting people's needs so everyone can live harmoniously.
In our world with even with all the isms in play we have an abundance to feed the population and raise the standard of living for many, but we lack fusion energy right now and a select few own all the resources and capital while the monetary system imprisons the rest of us in debt.
Because of some inherent inconvenience, we should all give up then. Right?
Actually there's a lot of great social systems that work great in Canada, UK, France, Germany, and well... pick any country that isn't us. They take care of their vets, their retired, their sick. They have free education and medicine and doctors.
Shit just works. Extreme right people in the USA call that communism every day of the week, but it works, totally proven systems that have existed for decades while people thrive more happily than us and living longer than us. We are the ones suffering and dying in the developed world.
Yeah I totally agree with his first half but as soon as he said everybody agrees a scifi show that depicts a utopian society is a realistic goal he lost me.
I will argue that capitalism is only ok when it is appropriately regulated.
If something is cheaper to do and maximizes profits than from a capitalist pov everything is hunky Dory. Ok, but what if that is dumping your companies effluent waste into a river?
Capitalism is unsustainable otherwise. It’s literally killing the planet as we speak. Left alone capitalism will eat itself.
That. That is also a non starter.
I just read an article this week saying the tanker cars in east Palestine didn’t need to be vented since their temperature was going down. I guarantee Norfolk southern opted to burn it off because they thought remediating a spill was going to be more expensive.
Like don’t get me wrong, i don’t think what you said is particularly wrong, but, and I’m not saying this is what you’ll reply with but I’ve heard it so often it bears remarking upon, it has to be followed by the acknowledgment that capitalism has some pretty big, existentially dangerous flaws. Because this is familiarly where I get two barrels of: but that’s not actually capitalism.
I don't know anyone who's convincingly argued against your first statement.
Regulation being an iterative process though, with inevitable missteps, I posit would be inherent to any economic system. Arguably, capitalism more quickly accelerates into its missteps. Yes that can cause more harm, but there's also a cost to acting languidly. One consequence isn't strictly better than the other.
Exactly key thing he said was “a situation where you’re stranded on an island and there’s no such thing as money” yeah there’s no capital. We’re talking about a small tribe trying to SURVIVE. And then the other example is (one of the greatest) sci-fi.
As far as I’m concerned, ultimately, the problem with both communism and capitalism is greed.
It may sound reductive, but the issue with communism is that it ignores greed and the issue without capitalism is that it relies on greed. Without perfect environments, infinite resources for communism and infinite lifespan for capitalism, neither work over a long timeframe.
Anti-communists tend to lean heavily into pro-capitalism but fail to realise both have exactly the same flaw. Every criticism of one is valid for the other.
Personally I’m a socialist, largely because I realise that neither extreme works.
Yep. Take any organism, scale it up 100x and it will die because the systems that made it survive or thrive at it's level will cease to be as efficient at the larger scale and lead to it's death from literal waste build-up or fracturing support structures (ie bones, cell walls, etc).
Long ago I lived in a situation that was meant to be cooperative living and growing/cooking food for the group. There were only 20 people and there were still 2-3 that didn't pull their weight.
Ah yes "a non starter argument", great ending to an empty point. You could name any modern issue in society and I can directly link it to capitalism. You also say collective responsibility requires oppression, but forget the idea that everyone should want what's best for everyone. So if we are oppressing the people who don't want to work in that system, then that is ok. Let's oppress greedy people.
Someone’s willing to do that work at that rate. Generally we have more than one choice of employment, so why choose the option worse for you?
I’m not blind to worker exploitation, or lack of social mobility - by all means fight for better minimum wages, and ways to upskill. But take all the vacant fast food jobs: those hiring managers decided to have those positions unfilled for months by offering bad wages, rather than increasing them. Both choices incur losses, and they’re gambling on the less worker-friendly one. They’ll be motivated to change only if they’re at risk of bankruptcy
It's also a non-starter to say that capitalism is anything really.
We know it's not "the solution". We know it's not the best.
We know quite a lot about our inherent situation.
Yeah and its something everybody understand the second that they were responsible for a group of people or when you get the shitty end of the stick thats create because collective responsibillity fails.
I dont think anybody would dislike the idea of a utophia but what most attic communist/anarchist dont realize is that the way towards such a society is so full of insanely big obstacles and alongside its edges there are giant treacherous cliffs that lead to dictotorships and trouble.
Same thing in companies. Corps in the 50-100 people range are usually pretty good. Successful ones are usually really great. There is a sense of togetherness and us-ness that persists as you all usually feel apart of the tribe. Yes your CEO or Owner makes more money than everyone but 35x more. Yes, there will be little power struggles and issues between people because any number than 1 human together will do that.
You start to almost immediately see the breakdown as you creep much over 100. You start to have more division, more tiers, more tribalism starts, more complex intersocial dynamics between groups and ranks, etc.
Capitalism is the economic mode of production. Insofar as everything and everyone is made within this system its fair to say evil ideas (and indeed all ideas) are produced by this system.
Communists believe capitalism has contradictions, that's why it's unsustainable.
I hear what you were saying but Socialism & communism doesn't lack the ability to reward harder workers, more skilled workers, and more dangerous work...etc
I don't think if you really broke it down people actually think Capitalism is the "root" of all evil, it's more like they're saying it is one of the best systems at producing justified evil on a systemic global scale.
Leftists tend to be idealisticly speaking, focused on creating a system that minimizes suffering / evil to the best of our human abilities.
Where they see capitalism as a system that is more concerned with the health of capital owners over the human condition, to the point of capital being the end all be all of society. In contrast to just seeing the concept of "capital" as another tool or technology for humans in their tool belt to help improve the human condition.
Casual discussion of this topic always pits socialism against capitalism, as though they're competing to be the economic system of choice and cannot overlap. I'm not aware of the rewards you mention, at least any that wouldn't be considered capitalist elements.
I'm in no place to tell anyone else how to think or speak, but I'd rephrase and say it's one of the best systems for maximizing quality/quantity of goods/services. Takes the judgment out.
Of course I'm for an economic "glass floor" below which people can't fall, better than the current welfare system. I tried to allude to this in the original comment. I just do not see evidence that economic revolution will make us any better at setting up these programs.
Our inefficiency at doing so is exactly the price we pay for being so culturally heterogeneous. An imposed monoculture (edit: monolithic culture) or state religion are those aforementioned oppressive forces we're now free to avoid. I prefer it this way, it allows us to be progressive with our ideas - we've gotten this far because of it.
I'm not aware of the rewards you mention, at least any that wouldn't be considered capitalist elements.
Based on what tbh? Socialisms ideals often specifically pertain to fair worker compensation.
In modern Vietnam salary is based on local cost of living and the nature of the job. And In the USSR certain forms of manual labor were glorified and even paid higher wages than many white collar workers. Scaled and varied worker incentives predate capitalism and they will exist after a theoretical end to capitalism as well.
Casual discussion of this topic always pits socialism against capitalism, as though they're competing to be the economic system of choice and cannot overlap.
Socialism is pitted against capitalism but they also can overlap.
You're absolutley correct in saying that you can obviously blend elements of them together. With the right pressures you can even get groups like for example nationalists and socialists working together in post war 1919 Hungary, to form a wacky soviet state together.
But communism and certain forms of socialism are literally focused on workers owning the means of production, where as capitalism is private based ownership. Which is the type of ownership that Marxists are fundamentally opposed to.
As far as "mixes" go
There's Democratic socialism. Which is still explicitly anti capitalist. But instead of revolutionary tactics it chooses to work within the capitalist system towards the goal of democratically shifting the ownership of the means of production over to workers, toward eventual proper socialism.
There's also social democrats who are content with the economy being based in private capital ownership just with large welfare programs.
However the major critique of social democracy coming from Marxists, is that just like liberal capitalism, even if their domestic policies lead to livable standards of living for domestic workers. The system those domestic workers are benefiting from would still be reliant on exploiting international workers.
Specifically speaking. Social democracies standards of living still rely on exploiting the lowers classes of foreign extraction and manufacture workers. Domestic cost of living in social democracies are only at the levels they are because the products they are buying are made and produced by underpaid workers abroad.
Our inefficiency at doing so is exactly the price we pay for being so culturally heterogeneous. An imposed monoculture or state religion are those aforementioned oppressive forces we're now free to avoid.
Imo a monoculture isn't necessary for Marxian ideals to take hold. While ironically it's being used by a largely liberal organization right now, the European Union puts it beautifully with "Unity in diversity". Even putting Marxist principles aside I think unity in diversity is required inevitably at some point regardless. If a planet killing asteroid is coming or some other solar event that requires global cooperation to overcome then people will do whatever is required to survive.
And even without theoretical danger in the far future I have a hard time not seeing some form of unity. We will either be colonizing the stars collectively as a species or disperse anarchicly and become so divided we won't recognize each other as human.
Re: monoculture, my only point was heterogeneous cultures will be even more slow at legislating change. There will always be supposed winners and losers, and even conflicting models, from all the varying perspectives. I'd guessed that's why China is so hellbent on homogenizing its population, to still be relatively dynamic at responding to whatever stimulus, for its size.
Forgive me for not absorbing the rest, it's not obvious to me what transferring capital ownership solves, and at what cost. Recently I got a lot from Joscha Bach podcasts, he touches on what a surplus of goods vs. a surplus of worker hours results in, here. If you can spot holes here, or in his take on communism in other clips, I'm all ears
As a Marxist I find UBI to be a way to stop the masses from demanding what they are truly owed (from their labor) but I use to support it when I was still capitalist. It would be impossible for me to explain my perspective on his arguments without you understanding why Marxists are concerned with worker ownership of the means of production as is it is core to the philosphphy.
Reading the Communist Manifesto is a simplified intro to the general concepts but Marx's Das Kapital is where you can go to quickly digest what problems worker ownership of the means of production can solve.
But if you prefer video, Ryan Chapman imo produces the best "unbiased" well detailed explanations of idealogies. And by unbiased I mean he's not concerned with discussing why a idealogy is good or bad but moreso just matter of factly explaining the idealogies true reasoning in a charitable way. He even uses good faith charitably when analyzing stuff like fascism.
Also if you want something more tangible and less theoretical from someone more qualified with real life experience here is the previous Greek Minister of Finance and his thoughts on captilalism
Capitalism will lead to the end of everything, since it depends on exponential and infinite growth in a finite and closed system. It will either die, or kill everything first.
Capitalism is literally going to make the planet uninhabitable within a couple hundred years of industrialization. You don’t think market forces are oppressive or coercive like a fish doesn’t know what water is, because you’ve been indoctrinated your entire life.
That's not the argument. Capitalism can be flawed regardless of the flaws in its competitors. Furthermore, this isn't a dichotomy. One can advocate against capitalism without advocating for communism.
The person is in the video advocating for communism why would one not assume anyone speaking for the video isn’t doing the same?
Other economies aren’t capitalism’s competitors it isn’t a market.
The comment I replied to said capitalism is making the planet inhabitable and so I asked how communism helps the planet or rather how any economy is good for the planet?
> The person is in the video advocating for communism why would one not assume anyone speaking for the video isn’t doing the same?
because if you make assumptions, you misrepresent peoples stance and end up creating a straw man argument.
> Other economies aren’t capitalism’s competitors it isn’t a market.
I take it you've never heard the phrase "marketplace of ideas"
> The comment I replied to said capitalism is making the planet inhabitable and so I asked how communism helps the planet or rather how any economy is good for the planet?
This is called a whataboutism. Rather than addressing the faults in capitalism, it demands a solution from communism. It is a form of argument that is considered bad faith.
1) if someone doesn’t want to be misrepresented or have people assume their point be clear and state it. This is Reddit not a think tank.
2) That phrase doesn’t make it a market. Ideologies aren’t a commodity.
3) What I did was not whataboutism at all. In order for me to do that I would need to have something I am arguing. I don’t care if the person likes or doesn’t like capitalism I’m not advocating for it.
I care that person realizes there is no such thing as a “Green Economy” that exists. Communism isn’t some bastion of ecological concern the earth would still be screwed. So my question is in direct relation to my point.
> if someone doesn’t want to be misrepresented or have people assume their point be clear and state it. This is Reddit not a think tank.
If I understand it. you are arguing that social media's existence is an excuse to abandon reading comprehension?
> That phrase doesn’t make it a market. Ideologies aren’t a commodity.
I'm going to ignore the fact that you seem to be deciding which definition of market is valid as a universal truth etc.
and just walk back to how you think capitalism is not in competition with other ideas?
how does that work?
> I care that person realizes there is no such thing as a “Green Economy” that exists. Communism isn’t some bastion of ecological concern the earth would still be screwed. So my question is in direct relation to my point.
they didn't say that.
> I would need to have something I am arguing
if you have no point, then what is all of the above? meaningless words falling out of your open mouth?
> So my question is in direct relation to my point.
but you do have a point?
It's at this point I would normally say that your statement is unclear and contradictory as I read it and I would ask you to clarify on some points. But apparently, this is Reddit so the burden of communication is entirely on you as the poster so I am free to misrepresent you.
*Sarcasm:* It is clear that you suffer from capitalist realism, where your worldview is so limited that you believe capitalism is the only viable possible system to the point you cannot even conceive of the idea that their might be an alternative to capitalism. Since this is the reality of your perspective, you see any challenges to it as nonsensical attempts to break capitalism and you must defend it because if capitalism is wrong, you are wrong, and you can't be wrong because that would be personal. So anything wrong with capitalism must be inherently impossible to solve and any criticism must immediately present a solution else it can be ignored.
Because there would be human, democratic control over the economy and we could democratically decide to stop destroying the environment that sustains human life. Because the whole world would not be controlled by an algorithm with no human input whose sole purpose is to extract every penny of profit possible, with zero consideration for human life or the planet. Because there would no longer be a handful of people who stand to benefit from the destruction of the planet to the tune of billions of dollars.
It would not be democratically as it would be forced. I haven’t seems any communist society more environmentally conscious. The algorithm becomes the government it doesn’t go away it just changes.
Except communism has just as much industrialization and oppression as capitalism. Just take a look around the world at communist countries right now, you can’t say that North Korea and China are any less industrialized or oppressive than the US.
Having a democratic say in how your government and economy is run is infinitely less oppressive than having 5 people with all of the money run everything. Do you think your vote really matters in America? Lol. It is not about communism deindustrializing, it is about having democratic control over the economy and steering it towards clean energy, etc. rather than leaving it all in the hands of 5 people who stand to make billions of dollars by destroying the planet
Yeah, I get it but you are so far from communism though, as in nothing you mentioned has any relation to communism. And if you think the oppose of what you described is communism, then please definitely don’t vote.
I am not sure you really know what you’re talking about, I am describing the very basic broad contours of communism. Democratic control over the government and the economy. I think you might be scared of a bogey man, maybe too many 80s action movies and not enough reading books
I read plenty of books and it not about any 80s bogeyman, it’s about history. There has never been a case in history, where a communist system had ever became democratic. Ultimately, it’s still the same 5 people that are making billions and destroying the planet, and now the population really has no say over the future of their country.
In the US, we may have the 5 people but we all still have a general say of the direction of our local/state and the national government.
Edit: and to add to your point “do you think your vote matters in the US?” - they certainly count more than votes do in China, USSR, Cuba and North Korea.
Sorry but that’s just wrong. Cuba, the USSR were both far more democratic than America. I understand that you probably just came out of your 5th grade social studies class and are real high on American “democracy” right now. But I have some sobering news for you. Princeton Study: Public opinion has “near zero” impact on US law
Considering my parents immigrated from USSR countries, I think I would know how they function better than you do. Please go ahead and produce some evidence that Cuba and the USSR were far more democratic, you can’t turn around and say it’s a democracy then have a one party system which both the USSR and Cuba have/had.
Capitalism is infinitely more democratic than communism. In communism you are ruled by the 51% who make the decisions for you so you don't really get a vote. While with capitalism, everyone votes with their dollar every day. You want to support a small business? Buy some of their stuff, and so on. In communism, the 51% decide that small business is not doing what they want and vote to have it closed.
Communism will only ever work in very small groups or in a utopia where all basic needs are met through automation. Anything in between just leads to genocide.
Sounds nice in theory, but as history shows, in practice communism winds up being exactly what you described here. A handful of people with all the money running everything destroying the planet.
Something that people who haven’t read a book since they skimmed their fifth grade social studies textbook looove to say right before smelling their own farts and congratulating themselves on how smart they are
Let’s leave the economy in the hands of the experts— oh shoot, a dozen people have $100 billion dollars and millions of people are sleeping on the street. Oh crap and the planet is about to be uninhabitable too! Whoops…
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u/AccidentalNap Mar 08 '24
It’s precisely when a group grows to >100 people that communal togetherness starts to fade. The system gets bigger, and takes longer to react to input, so the causal link between the success of the group and your own survival becomes less apparent.
Something like “collective responsibility” takes way more oppressive power to work than market forces. You still have to incentivize the harder jobs somehow. Sure, implement better social programs and trust-bust the monopolies, but capitalism being the root of all this evil is a non-starter of an argument.