Still think something between communism and capitalism would be the best. Both show a lot of problems but both have benefits. A well regulated and equal competition with linear growth(not like capitalism with its exponential growth that produces musks and bezos’) sounds right to me. I think UBI would be exploited so just give them the basics in food, shelter, internet access, etc. But of course in the hellscape called modern politics everyone has to be an extremist so only hardcore capitalism, hardcore communism, genocide, etc are represented.
Market economies are actually pretty great for a lot of things. The problems we have in capitalism are 1. the capitalist class, who make their living without contributing anything by min-maxing wages and prices, and 2. the privatization of necessities.
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A market economy for non-essentials would work splendidly so long as the income of each business was distributed to the people who actually did the work. The problem is non-working shareholders. Every worker should be a shareholder, every shareholder should be a worker. Market socialism is the way.
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Market economies cannot work efficiently for essentials. If the alternative to a purchase is death or serious injury, it ceases to be a voluntary purchase, the downward pressure of abstinence vanishes, and prices skyrocket. We’ve seen this in healthcare and housing. We need a public option for both.
Profit motive still forces enshittification, unfortunately.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
There’s also a lot to be said about financial norms and systems, for instance regardless of the organization of labor the way we measure GDP is fundamentally a very flawed and arbitrary approximation of “wealth” yet it is the driver behind so many political decisions. My (admittedly unqualified) understanding is thst we could significantly improve quality of life and market efficiency by addressing some of these flaws.
This is the way
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Capitalism is very clearly not a one-size-fits-all solution…but if there’s one thing capitalism hates, it’s competition.
Also there’s nothing inherently wrong with extreme ideology as a concept. It’s only a call for radical change to the current social order. Liberalism which is to say our modern “democratic capitalist” structure would have been considered extremism during feudal times.
The extremist boogie man is a lie peddled by those who benefit from the status quo to insure those who don’t are too scared to change it
Extremism usually relies on wishful thinking tbh. Also see this handy chart:
The problem is that some of them don’t have to wait for society to collapse, sometimes society is destined to decay into a specific form. The final stage of capitalism is fascism
Why not something like market socialism?
Isn’t market socialism literally just a form of capitalism? Like if you still have markets and a profit incentive then you’re not really socialist
Not saying that’s bad, just thinking really it has always seemed to me like capitalism with a strong social safety net. Which to me seems ideal, just want to know if I’m missing something?
I think you’re confusing social democracy with market socialism.
In market socialism the working class owns the businesses they work for, possibly in conjunction with the government or their customers. There are no people who became shareholders by buying shares, and starting a business doesn’t mean you get to own all of it. It’s essentially a society where all businesses are worker co-ops.
It has nothing to do with a social safety net. In practice one would probably exist anyway, but it’s not a strict requirement of this sort of system like it is in social democracy. Technically you wouldn’t have to have free universal healthcare either.
It helps to know that the definition of socialism I am using is based on the marxist one: a society where the workers own the means of production.
Edit: Profit still exists in this system but it’s shared more or less equally between the workers of that business. This means workers actually have a concrete incentive to work well, not just the vague possibility of a promotion. It also means you will probably see less short term profit making and less overwork hopefully.
How do you get your initial capital to start the co-op? Like you can’t have investors, so is every worker required to buy in the the initial venture?
By the way you are entirely free to structure companies this way under a social democracy
By the way you are entirely free to structure companies this way under a social democracy
You can set that up in any capitalist society, not just social democracy. It even happens in the US. That’s one of the major advantages of worker co-ops. It’s not true socialism though unless every business is run that way. I don’t really want social democracy. I want real socialism.
As for funding I am not sure. Real worker co-ops must get funding from somewhere I would look into that. In a full market socialist economy the government could have a role in that. After all the current scheme of needing Capital to start a business isn’t fair at all.
Right, but why do you require every person in the country to work under a co-op? Is it not enough to let them choose?
In your socialist society if a group of people agreed that they would like to set up businesses under a different model what would you do?
And further, if you’re calling for an enormous change to the way we structure our economy then shouldn’t you be able to articulate how that system will work?
Right, but why do you require every person in the country to work under a co-op? Is it not enough to let them choose?
Look around you my guy. Capitalism doesn’t work. Most people who have the money needed to start or invest in a business are only in it to make themselves richer and to exploit others. My system prevents all of that.
In your socialist society if a group of people agreed that they would like to set up businesses under a different model what would you do?
I imagine the same thing we do now with people who have illegal businesses or businesses that go against regulations.
And further, if you’re calling for an enormous change to the way we structure our economy then shouldn’t you be able to articulate how that system will work?
You have never talked to marxists before have you? They don’t even know what economic system they want to use most of the time, because they don’t consider that detail to be important and think we can figure it out after or during the revolution. If I started asking them these questions they probably wouldn’t give me a straight answer and it would probably turn into an argument.
Meanwhile I am missing a couple of small details. Ones you can find yourself if you are willing to do more research than I have.
Market postcapitalism with worker coops doesn’t mean the workers own the means of production. That idea of what postcapitalism looks like is Marxist baggage that needs to move into the dustbin of intellectual history. A worker coop can, for example, lease means of production from another worker coop or individual without violating the workers’ inalienable rights to workplace democracy or to get the fruits of their labor @lemmyshitpost
What idea needs throwing in the dustbin? The “workers own the means of production” part? What exactly is wrong with that idea?
There is no reason why only workers should own the means of production nor why the means of production a firm uses must be owned by the workers of the same firm. Leasing out means of production to other firms is a perfectly valid way for worker coops to exchange products of labor. What is illegitimate is the employment contract as it violates inalienable rights. There are distributive justice and efficiency arguments for common ownership of capital, but that includes non-workers
Aren’t workers not owning means of production the reason surplus value can be extracted from them? Workers owning means of production is the definition of socialism for a reason. How can you guarantee the workers won’t be exploited without this?
holy shit, bad apple
nagareteku
Serious question not trying to troll here: Isn’t everyone stuck in this hellish capitalist system part of that class?
No. Classes are determined by how you get your money and by how comfortable you are.
If you are working for a paycheck, you do not touch capital.
If you are working for a paycheck, you do not touch capital.
Ok so I have my beef with capitalism, for sure, but this is inaccurate. People all over the country own property, shares in public and private companies, shares of government utilities, just to name a few examples.
Ownership of things does get distributed through capitalism. As manipulated as it is, that’s the concept of the stock market.
I’m not rich, but I do own a small amount of capital. My net worth far, far exceeds what I have in my bank account when you account for my car that I’ve paid off, small investments that have appreciated over time, stuff like that.
Now the top of the capitalist class? They have SO MUCH cash, and so many resources to draw on that they can manipulate stock prices and company values at will. That’s where the whole system starts to break down.
Idk what definition of capital you used to determine this but I will be using the Marxist on because capital is a Marxist term.
Capital is private property used to create surplus value usually involving the purchase of wage labor. It can be the money a capitalist uses to pay their employees, the land their workers use to produce surplus value for them, and/or the machinary required for their workers to produce surplus value as a few examples. Buying stocks does not mean you own the means of production in any significant way. You may have stake in how those means of production are use but you do not control them and you do not use them to produce surplus value nor do you purchase wage labor, you only profit off someone who does.
Furthermore your personal possessions like your car are not capital.
If you sell your labor to someone who possesses the means of production you are proletariat
If you work for a living, and being unemployed indefinitely would threaten your survival, you are part of the working class. Owning a few crumbs of capital is a nice cushion, but does not define your class.
If your income is passive, and you could live your whole life off the returns from your investments without ever actually working, you are part of the capitalist class.
That can’t be true. I’ve done the math on my living expenses and it would only take a few years of saving in a high interest account for me to be considered a capitalist under that definition. if social mobility was truly that easy no sane person would be against capitalism.
That doesn’t sound plausible like you said. Either you’re way off the average living expenses/wages or have your formulas wrong.
'Ownership of things DOES get distributed…"
Uhhhh, no? Are you dumb? Owning stock in a company is far, FAR removed from owning any part of a company’s assets.
Ok, so are we talking about assets or capital?
You do not get any access to the company’s resources. There is no dollar sitting in company coffers for your dollar of investment. You don’t get to decide what that money does what so evwr, and its value is speculative on the performance.
That is far, far, far removed from owning or controlling any part of a company’s capital.
I’ve been part of multiple board elections where the little people have deciding votes because a 3rd party institutional investor needs to rally the retail investors to oust the current board for environmental
crimesreasons.Having a vote is having control of capital … and they pay you for it with dividends too.
Capital is not money, capital can be represented by money but it is not inherently money. Capital is something you use to buy someone’s labor. More specifically it is the social relationship between wage labor and profit. Assets (private property) used to produce profit (surplus value) are capital
Capital is “the characteristic the means of production acquire when they are used to hire labor and generate surplus value”
“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”
there is no capital without labour
Then maybe labor should organize its own capital and not some entitled prick of a class.
It’s not quite so black and white, though.
My spouse and I both work for a living, and we’d be in a hard spot if either of us lost our jobs. We also own 3 rental properties, and I have a military pension. We also own a farm where we raise 6 cows and enough chickens to have some eggs to sell.
So, we get most of our money from our labor, the rental properties pay for themselves most of the time but we don’t pool that with our personal money…it’s for the mortgages, taxes, maintenance and to cover for when we don’t have renters (which is almost never…weird how that happens when you aren’tcharging exploitative rents).
We sell eggs and make a small profit on those, but not enough to support ourselves…same with the beef…it’s mostly for us and family to eat (because fuck factory farming) but if we don’t have the freezer space we’ll sell the extra as well. That makes us both labor and capital… and my pension and military retirement benefits are basically as close to socialism as we’ll get in the US anytime soon, the biggest difference being I had to earn it.
The landlord side of it is the murkiest imo. You having a military pension doesn’t mean you’re in the bourgeoisie, it just means you’re getting paid for having given time from your life. Similarly, selling the surplus from your own agriculture doesn’t place you in the class of controlling capital because you aren’t using others’ labor; you’re creating something through your labor and when faced with having a surplus, are distributing your goods. Yes you sell them, but it’s not fair to criticize you for trying to offset your costs while living under a capitalist system so long as the price isn’t exorbitant.
Imo being a landlord is usually the scummiest, but if you’re charging rent at a price set to maintain the buildings and ensure that your tenants still have housing, then I don’t think you’re exploiting anyone. Imo the more profit you take from your rental properties, the more it moves out of the grey area. It sounds however like you don’t take profit or take a very minimal amount, and that you price your property so that it’s self sufficient but not much more. In that case then you aren’t really exploiting your tenants. Are they still being exploited? Yes, by the system that forces them to pay for housing. Do you have a hand in that exploitation purely by being their landlord? Yes, however if you aren’t trying to extort them for money so they have housing, then I wouldn’t say you’re exploiting them more than just owning their housing. Theres a reason that leftists tout that theres no ethical consumption under capitalism; even in trying to help people or do the right thing, you are still feeding into a system of exploitation and extortion. That doesn’t mean you still aren’t trying to do the right thing or be genuinely helpful, it just means that unless we find an alternative system then we will all continue to exploit each other and be exploited. This is why the proletariat must be unified as otherwise, we will never shake the binds of our collective oppression.
Congratulations, you’re one of an extreme few still living in the middle class.
Now realize how minority your experience is.
Oh, believe me…I am well aware of my privilege and spend a lot of time trying to question my own motivations… especially around the rental properties. I do feel like rental homes are generally exploitative towards the renters, but the 1st property kinda fell into our laps, and the other 2 were situations where we we were using our credit to help the rentersbgetninto a house they wanted but couldn’t finance due to their credit. Basically, they picked the house, we bought it, and they rent it from us while we report their on-time payments to rebuild their credit.
I definitely wasn’t born with a silver spoon…was homeless myself several times as a kid and for a while immediately after moving out on my own. Joined the military as it seemed the best way out for me at the time. Wrecked my knees and fucked my brain but at least they’re paying me for the trouble. Now we’re in the privileged, if often uncomfortable, role of being better off than most of our friends and peers. We still struggle some months, and it feels like we’re barely making ends meet for the last year or so, so I KNOW everyone else is hurting. Even aside from our current financial state, I’m a cishet white veteran living in a very red state. About the only privileges I don’t have here are being a lefty and an athiest, and even with all that, it still feels like I’m hanging on by a thread. When I imagine dealing with the state of the world today in the socioeconomic conditions I was experiencing when I was younger, I’m not sure I’d have endured.
Even being better off than most is pretty fucking hard these days.
Based on my definitions. Owning the 3 rental properties makes you owner class as that is private property, also when you pay off the mortgages you are going to be in a great spot right?
Farms are weird, if you only had the farm and have hired nobody else to help you run it then working class. If you hire people, well then you are owner class.
You both also have jobs on top of running a farm? Out of curiosity how do you have the time to manage your farm and work at the same time?
My BIL lives on the farm and takes care of feeding the livestock and keeping the pasture cleaned up. Otherwise, it’s just family helping family. We’re in the middle rebuilding part of the chicken coop now on the weekends. I say farm, but it’s more a ranch… we only grow hay and its only about 10 acres, so it’s not a huge burden with all of us working together.
I wish it was just by how comfortable you are. Because that way in world scale I’d be Croesus
Ok you defined this way better than I did.
The actual specific class you belong to can be tricky because there are sub-classes and shit like that but generally speaking you can simplify class dynamics into the owning class (bourgeoisie) and the working class (proletariat). If you own the means of production, the actual property such as land or machinary required to produce things, and you buy others labor to produce these things that you then sell, you are bourgeoisie. If you sell your labor then your are proletariat. You’ll find that the interests of these classes are in opposition; the bourgeois wants to increase profit through any means so as to provide for themselves and for investors while the prole wants a better standard of living, a safe work environment, and less work hours among many other things I need not name. These interest come into direct conflict when the capitalist runs out of ways to externally increase profit controlling a certain market niche, there is only so much demand. When this happens the capitalist looks inward at their company and wonders if they can increase profit through other means like cutting pay, skirting around safety regulations, finding ways to get around providing benefits, cutting pensions, etc etc. The really big bourgeoisie also look towards the legal system, if it only cost them 60mil of lobbying to change a law that makes them billions then that law is dead. The profit motive kills
How does this work for the modern world though? Many of the people who make the financial decisions for the company that I work for are also normal people with a normal income. Their job is to maximize profit for the company under certain constraints, but it’s not like they directly get that money for themselves. The image of the proletariat working ungodly hours in dangerous factories while a few rich fat capitalists claim all the money is often quite far from reality in my experience, apart from the ultra-rich CEOs like Musk and Bezos. And I don’t disagree that we should regulate the income disparity or anything, I just think that these classes don’t really make that much sense anymore
Apologize in advance if I over explain somethings or repeat myself with different wording, I’m not infantilizing you I’m just trying to be very clear.
I use industrial and agricultural labor as examples because they are typically more dangerous work and often more heavily exploited but even your manager is technically a prole. You’re friends that manage a finances are proletariat. If you sell your labor and the person purchasing that labor makes extracts surplus value from your labor, you are a proletariat.
Specifically, the capitalists who run the company you work at purchase the labor of those finance managers and extract a profit from their labor while doing essentially nothing other than being the person who owns the business and the capital required to produce whatever it is their workers produce.
Think about how a business is run. You have workers, the proletariat, who provide their labor in whatever form required whether physical or mental in exchange for a wage that they can then use to buy whatever necessities they need and extras they can afford. These workers are alienated from the product of their labor; they do not own the product nor do they own the means of production, they are also paid less than the product they created is worth so that the capitalist who does own the product and the means of production can extract a surplus value. In the case of your financer the product of their labor is literal money, they produce money for the capitalist and see very little of it. Their wage is what the owning class allows them to have. In a cruel twist of fate they are then required to give that wage back to the capitalist class in exchange for food, housing, electricity, sometimes water.
We still do have proletariat working ungodly hours in dangerous factories though, they are often just immigrants and minorities, sometimes children. I’d link a source for that but honestly just look up working conditions of abattoirs, specifically Tyson chicken. Or the laborers being exploited in that manner are just in another country worker for the same capitalist and getting paid less than the US minimum wage because it means the capitalist can extract more surplus value.
The problem with regulating capitalism is the that under capitalism wealth accumulates into fewer and fewer hands over time. This happens for a number of reasons but the primary being that wealth is easier to accumulate when you have it. A bigger business can buy or outcompete a smaller business, sure we can bust monopolies but it doesn’t really matter if every company in every industry is primarily owned by a few people. Creating a society where capitalism is more heavily regulated and with social safety nets would only be temporary. This is seen in Nordic countries where in the pursuit of profit their capitalist class is lobbying against any further nationalized industry and actively attempting to roll back those social safety nets. The only reason those places were even able to develope social democracy is because of the giant red superpower right next to them at the time. Had the USSR not been their to provide Nordic proletariat with the threat of a supported revolution the capitalist class would never have given those concessions.
Das Kapital explains it better than I can if you’re that invested into the topic but it’s a tough read.
the Marxist project is also a great start from an academic lense and is easier to digest
Sorry for the abundance of text lmao, I have no idea if it’s coherent because I wrote it sporadically over the course of an hour and it’s like 3 am
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
No.
Basic and simplified class analysis is about shared interests based on similar social relations to Production.
The Workers do not own Capital, at least not in significant amounts.
Capitalists own Capital. They pay Workers wage labor to create commodities for sale.
There are other classes, but that’s the long and short of it.
The definitions are tricky based on how you read them, but no. Your role in society is to perform labor (I’m assuming), and the fruits of that labor are then forfeited to those above you for a wage. Thus they have the capital and would belong to the “capitalist class.”
*and the same
Capitalism ruins itself.
This also works with cops.
If you’re not right you’re wrong. Better to be right. Capitalism is king.
I agree to disagree. This place has too many communists.
“But it wasn’t real socialism”. Other attempts to create socialist government.
But that is almost universally said in response to people pointing to things that were in no way socialism or communism. They have actual definitions.
The glorious democratic people’s republic of korea is literally none of those things and no one is stupid enough to fall for a name there, but it happens all the time something like China.
That’s because there are plenty of actually democratic governments and none of socialistic.
And there is no single definition of socialism or communism, it’s all a matter of debate. Some definition of it could contradict each other. I’m willing to support some social democrats, but when it comes to Marxist-Leninists or Maoists, well… treat them the same way fascists are treated.
Except there is exactly that: socialism is where the working class owns the means of production.
Anyone who suggests otherwise is normally a right wing or centrist nutjob. People who debate if the USSR are debating how well it meets that criteria, not what the criteria actually is.
Also there are loads of people who are socialists but not MLs. Not all communists are MLs or Maoists either. Anarchist communists, libertarian marxists are communists that don’t fit into that group. Anarchists in general are socialists that don’t agree with MLs or Maoists or authoritarian regimes like China or the USSR.
Stop going around spouting centrist nonsense and actually read socialist theories if you want to legitimately criticise it. You can’t criticise such a broad range of systems without first understanding what they are and what they have in common.
Bruh, I just wrote that there are different types if socialists. MLs think that whatever they did is workers owning the means of production. It just so happens that this ML ideology is the state ideology of the wast majority of “socialist” states.
I clearly wrote that I have no problem with liberal leftists by giving socila democrats as example of socialists I would support. Is not liking MLs a centrist nonsense?
And I have no problem with any leftists until they do not start to oppose the democratic system with checks and balances. Which they, especially ML types, often do.
So basically anyone left of a social democrat you don’t support? As far as I am concerned social democrats aren’t real socialists but support hybrid economy.
Out of curiosity do you have any problem with anarchist communism, market socialism, or any other true socialist ideology that is pro civil liberties?
Also MLs do want a democracy, it’s called democratic socialism (which are different from social democrats, yes it’s confusing). As far as they are concerned the democracy we live in now isn’t real, and I tend to agree with them on this as do many other leftist groups. Just to be clear I haven’t been an ML in a while.
I basically disagree with any left or right wing person that want to destroy, through revolution or any other means, democratic system with it’s checks and balances. Basically if your desired political system implies that there is no separation of power, I consider it authoritarian. And of course freedom of press, respecting human rights and not persecuting opposition is also an important part of it.
How can a society without a state - anarchism - possibly be authoritarian? There are no police or military to enforce any authoritarian policies is many forms of anarchism. What you are saying doesn’t make sense.
I actually agree with you that MLs can be authoritarian. That’s part of why I left those ideologies behind. What I don’t agree with is painting all socialist ideologies with the same brush. Some are based on direct democracy which is always going to be more democratic than representative democracy, weather you think that’s a good thing or not.
I also don’t believe we live in a true democracy as it’s controlled through political and economic corruption including lobbying, as well as the two-party system created through FPTP voting systems. Not to mention manufactured consent. So to me those checks and balances aren’t that effective, especially compared to real direct democracy.
Edit: also MLs believe in checks and balances last I checked. The USSR was full of bureaucracy for this very reason.
Who says Socialism isn’t Socialism?
You doubt the existence of people who think that any self-proclaimed socialistic country is not socialistic? Really?
I doubt the existence of people who deny every Socialist state as Socialist. I agree with people who say the Nazis weren’t Socialist despite calling themselves as such, because they were fascists that relied on privitization and Capitalism, but I’m sure that wasn’t your point.
I’m eager to read what countries do you think are actually socialistic. Give me a list please.
Why? You just trying to pick a fight? Kinda cringe. No matter what I’d answer you’d start shit.
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