PieFedWhen we explain to other people how our capitalist system works and they recoil in horror
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Dumb question, what is this meme format about?
Yeonmi Park, DPRK defector and conservative media darling. Claims of her life in North Korea are debated hotly- things along the lines of they eat rats and the like.
Cowbee [he/they]My favorite bit is that she's well known for her exaggerations about the DPRK, yet will say US college campuses run by liberals "remind her of it." That's why conservatives love her so much and why she makes good money, and why other defectors have criticized her for essentially spinning tales in a way that ends up undermining actual struggles in North Korea, or distorting their character for profit.
So, the joke here is that you've got someone, presumably a Chinese official, saying a reality about America in a startling way that sounds like completely cooked up propaganda but isn't.
I have multiple times had the experience of explaining to non-Americans elements of our system, and they simply don’t believe me. They think I’m making it up to fuck with them because it’s so atrocious that it couldn’t be real.
I literally had to tell people libertarianism fails harder and faster than communism was getting weird stares until I told them about the book "a libertarian walks into a bear"
I still look like a raging communist but idc
I watched a video that had dr. Robotnik say how is going to take over the US Healthcare system and make it hell... then shadow keeps interjecting to tell him that his plans are actually a vast improvement over the system, and Robotnik is then left unsure what to think.
Kind of has a point that modern "communist" systems in practice seem identical to all the bad parts of Capitalism.
Phrase I picked up from Well There's Your Problem: centrally unplanned economy.
One company, Baxter, makes 95% of the saline IV solution for the US. Most of it comes from one factory in Marion, N.C. It has been hit by natural disasters before and caused shortages. One happened just this past few months.
I donate plasma twice a week and there were rations for the past couple of months on saline. Instead of getting refilled with saline after the donation, we had to eat gold fish drink and drink a Powerade before the donation and drink a Powerade and sit for 15 min after. Last week was the first time they started doing saline again.
Tbqh the saline is only necessary because a lot people aren't sufficiently hydrated in the first place. That Gatorade did basically the same thing on a ~24 hour delay.
Ofc, that's easier to say for people with a decent amount of blood volume in the first place, and for people who aren't losing that much plasma on a regular schedule.
Be very careful about donating that frequently if it's a regular thing btw. Citrate reactions have compounding effects over time on bone density, it's why civilized countries don't let you sell or donate plasma as often as America does.
Technically speaking all of the warning material they make you sign tells you this, but in my experience they're pretty shifty about making sure donors actually understand the risks.
Best thing you can do is to buy some Tums/chalk tablets and eat one before you donate. If you ever get a tingling feeling in your lips while donating it's because the citrate anti-coagulant is binding with the calcium in your blood that is *supposed* to be going to your daily needs, the Tums both works pretty quick to relieve the tingling and makes sure you're getting enough calcium to negate the loss.
BlackmistYour problem is neither capitalism nor communism.
Your problem is greedy cunts. Both systems will end up putting them in charge.
SpaniardThat's because people who aren't greedy don't seek that kind of position.
NutWrenchSocialism:
A system of government where the country's wealth is concentrated into a small, ruling class of billionaires, who use the media they own to keep the lower classes fighting with each other while they . . . the rich . . . run off with all the farking money.
Oh wait. that's capitalism. I don't know how I got those two systems confused.
Like the classic "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money" while in today's capitalism everybody except a small elite is running out of money.
Why does everyone think the only alternative to capitalism is communism?
American brains have been shaped into 2-lane highways.
Based on the state of American infrastructure, this is patently false, as it implies the existence of wrinkles on American Brains.
Or wait... are your two lane highways smooth? What is THAT like?
ofc they are smooth like actual roads, how are cars supposed to comfortably drive in rough, wrinkly roads? /s
Because people who don't understand what words mean label every possible post-capitalist system as communism even though they're as different from each other as they are from capitalism.
explodicleBecause of successful anti-anarchist propaganda, an overwhelming majority of Americans think anarchy means no rules whatsoever.
I mean what do you propose, I mean I personaly do not want to regress farther to fudalism
Heavily regulated socialist democracy.
Provide basic needs, food, clothing, healthcare, childcare, and education. Hell even a phone and Internet access.
Emphasis on the *basic.*
Allow for those who do not wish to, or are unable to work to live with all basic needs covered. Those who wish to work are incentivized to do so, with access to luxuries. Better housing, better clothing, better technology. Allow a place for the market, but don't make people *depend* on the market.
No reason to work a job you hate, no reason to employ people you don't need. Everybody wins.
This.
Also, extremely agressive measures to stop the harm of others through the accumumation of mass wealth.
Basically, once you reach, I dunno, 5-10 million total "worth", you get taxed at 100%.
Something like that. No one will ever need that much ever, and they can feel free to just reture and live out their life doing nothing if they manage to get there.
This sounds fantastic, and will never work in the USA as long as there are classes of people who live above the rules and can influence society through policy and social media. If they smell any extra income, rights or services you receive, it's like blood in the water and they will come from miles to get a piece of anything you own, exactly as they do now.
UnderpantsWeevilProvide basic needs, food, clothing, healthcare, childcare, and education. Hell even a phone and Internet access.
Any government that has the power to grant these goods/services will have the power to take them away. Unless the public can directly own and administer the property through local councils and administrative bureaucracies, they are banking on the largesse of national socialist leadership to continue indefinitely.
Allow for those who do not wish to, or are unable to work to live with all basic needs covered. Those who wish to work are incentivized to do so, with access to luxuries. Better housing, better clothing, better technology. Allow a place for the market, but don’t make people depend on the market.
All of that is predicated on a continuously expanding surplus of raw materials, advanced technologies, and an educated labor force.
You can either import these as luxuries, in which case you're operating an export-oriented economy predicated on the market price of your domestic surplus. That requires a bigger economy you're effectively beholden to. Looks good in the moment, but over the course of centuries you just end up as a West African / Middle Eastern / East India Tea Company-controlled kingdom, wherein the bottlenecks of trade produce oligarchs of immense personal fortune.
Or you produce domestically, in the Juche model, and live within the means provided by your real estate and your people. But that requires an economy that can plan and organize resources on the order of decades (if not centuries) and invests domestically rather than keeping an eye towards meeting the needs of foreign import markets. It won't work as a capitalist system, because the capitalist demand for growth will push you back into the export-oriented model that foreigners exploit.
"Free" markets follow the bubbles in credit and compel local economies to chase short term speculative bubbles at the expense of long term economic needs. Planned economies can build infrastructure in advance of future needs and plan social policy to curb economically regressive short-term profitable impulses with long term costs (opium consumption, coal/NGL power grids, cash crops that deplete arable land and water reserves like tobacco and pistachios).
They aren't durable. They produce rapid consolidations of wealth and political capital. And they create intergenerational risks that the current cohort of investors have little reason to acknowledge or prevent.
I mean, you're almost speaking of the exact system Marxists want to work towards, just with the caveat that Marxists think Markets are only useful tools in less-developed and less-critical industries temporarily, before public ownership and planning becomes more efficient, and that the spread in difference between "luxuries" decreases over time as productivity improves to account for that. The whole "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" bit that requires extremely developed industry to achieve.
Marxists aren't opposed to increased pay for more skilled or more intense labor, rather, such a system is a necessity until sufficient automation and industrialization allow for more goods and services to be free.
Have you read Marx, or Marxists?
I've read The Expanse lol. I was describing the system on Earth in that series.
The thing is, markets predate the written word. Some form of trading is literally one of the first things humans *did.* It could even be a prehuman invention. Eliminating markets is like trying to eliminate prostitution, or drugs.
Markets, much like life, uhh... Find a way.
Instead of turning up your nose, make them work for you, in a way you want. We don't want the markets to spread, unrestrained, like kudsu. We want Bonsai markets.
This has been my conclusion as well after many years of deep reflection amidst my depression since the pandemic. The problem with current capitalism isn't markets, it's 'how vulnerable the entire system is to greed & power and if it can grow unchecked like cancer to corrupt the nervous system of society - the government itself'. This sure happened in the most capitalist nation of all as we're witnessing it now, but don't tell me a strong centrally controlled government isn't susceptible to it. A government that can dictate what you can & cannot make holds enormous power over all individuals. Markets really represent individual freedom. I can make a fucking cake and exchange it for whatever piece of jewelry I want from the free market. Currency just allows for easy exchange of goods. These are just tools, not the root of the problem.
Edit: I've interpreted the bonsai tree as -
Fedonomy, or federated economy, much like the fediverse, is a federated web of nodes, representing customers, producers, & service providers. It is an economic model that solves the problem of value creation, distribution, & consumption in a democratic, open, & equal manner without a middle man dictating the terms of such economy. It is the natural evolutionary step after capitalism.
I created it and it’s empty.
Trade isn't the same as a market, necessarily, and markets aren't the same as the specific Capitalist iteration that depends on the M-C-M' circuit where commodities C are produced with money M in exchange for greater money M'. When Marxists say they wish to abolish markets, they mean so by stating that they wish, rather than production being handled through competing entities where that M-C-M' circuit applies, we instead fold all of these entities into the public sector and democratically plan them along a cooperative basis.
Early on, there would presumably be labor vouchers, which differ from money in that they would be destroyed on first use. A sort of credit for work, for use in the only "store" that exists. Social services and safety nets would be deducted from your "pay" and be free at point of service. Things like that, and this doesn't really constitute a "market" in the normal sense of the word. Eventually, these labor vouchers would likely be abolished once they became unnecessary.
That's really just a company store but worse somehow.
You're going to have a market. If you make markets illegal you'll just have black markets. You need to contend with that, failing to realize that *literally* killed the Soviet Union. It got so bad, and was such a core part of daily life that they just kinda made it legal, and the union collapsed shortly after.
You can't fix homelessness by making it illegal, you can destroy markets by making them illegal. These things have been tried and failed in practice.
Not to be the um actually guy, but before any recorded trading existed, there was something called the gift economy. We just gave people the things they need, without expecting anything in return. No trading at all. I wonder what life could be like if we kept that system and people would be free to do whatever they want.
Prove it.
The first writings we *have* are accounts, receipts, and famously, a complaint about the quality of copper. The first named person in recorded history appears on a tablet accounting for a number of slaves.
Records were literally *invented* to document trades.
I don't think *everyone* believes that, there are many Anarchists that don't agree with Marxists, and there's broad diversity within Capitalist thought, Anarchist thought, and Marxist thought. For example, Anarchists take issue with hierarchy above all else, and so wish to establish generally a horizontal, decentralized network of communes, while Marxists take issue with Class, and so wish to have a fully publicly owned and planned economy run along democratic lines, ie everyone in the world will share equal ownership of all industry.
The reason why you may be seeing more Marxists is generally because Marxism has played the most widespread and significant role as an alternative to Capitalism in modern history.
ThisIsMyLemmyLoginThat's just Americans. They can only think of 2 options; this or that. Democrat or Republican. Capitalism or Communism. Good or evil. Simple binary choices.
There are countries in Europe which are ruled by a coalition of 3 or 4 political parties. Very few Americans would be comfortable with something so complicated.
My wife and I talk about this alot, we think it has alot to do with the religious Christian and Catholic institutions which this country is founded on. Literally everything turns into binary good and evil shit, if you look closely you see how most American brains and people do this without even realizing. It is righteousness essentially, every American thinks they are doing the "good" thing or part of the "good" group and then others are "bad."
It is serious American brainrot
niftyBut a lot of people answer along ideological lines on purpose. It saves you from being griefed by others who are just extremists and will call you bigot or whatever. That’s why people being polled will say whatever, and vote whatever makes sense to them. Then others are surprised by the outcome. Ideological extremism has killed people’s critical thinking capacities.
Capitalism has its benefits. Namely, the rapid economic growth afforded through exploitation of natural resources by unemployed labor mixed with cash-rich / debt-friendly entrepreneurs. You don't want an economic system that loses the benefits of industrialization and domestic improvement.
On the flip side, capitalism also has a huge problem of wealth distribution. Bottlenecks within the flow of revenue create huge pools of malinvestment, squandered natural resources on vanity projects, and a strong incentive for public sector militarization / police violence as a tool to maintain the disproportionate wealth distribution.
We need a system in which individuals can still cooperatively administer an economy with an eye towards long term economic prosperity, but one in which the surpluses aren't horded or wasted by a rigid hierarchy of generationally wealthy lenders and carnival barker entrepreneurs. Communism provides a roadmap for redistributing titles and incomes across entire populations, while still socially reproducing a bureaucracy capable of managing industrial-scale and national-scale projects.
Capitalism has zero benefits whatsoever, you have American brainrot and have been propagandized to death
Capitalism has zero benefits whatsoever
Even Marx didn't believe that. Capitalism is an outgrowth of industrialization, repetitively turning low-surplus undeveloped real estate into high-surplus improved real estate. If you're not generating and then reinvesting your surplus, you're not going to move past a feudal agrarian economy into a post-scarcity socialist state.
you have American brainrot
This is, at absolute worst, British/German brainrot. The Americans fetishized the idea of capitalism and hid from its excesses with westward migration. But the Old World scholars were shoved into the maw and out the anus of it a century earlier.
You are privileged beyond belief. Capitalism is based on slavery and genocide coupled with the military industrial complex. It is fucked, nothing good about it
Capitalism is based on slavery and genocide
Feudalism is based on slavery and genocide. Capitalism is based on industrial development yielding a compounding rate of return.
It is fucked, nothing good about it
Its a historical stage of economic development every society ultimately passes through. Again, go back and read Das Kapital. Go pick up a copy of Piketty's Capitalism in the 21st Century. Get a book on Lenin's NEP or Dengism or the modernization of Castro's Cuba. Even the most staunch leftist cannot escape the materialist need to industrialize.
Capitalism or communism the greedy and power hungry will weasel there way up. The only thing that will save us is a vigilant electorate.
itslilithCommunism is a society that has done away with classes, money and the state. That means there isn't any position *to* weasel up to. On the way there we do need to be careful tho, not everyone calling themselves a communist truly wants to abolish classes and the state, some are quite happy to cling to power
Jerkface (any/all)Because capitalism is a communist concept to begin with. Communism *invented* capitalism. Communism is a direct response *specifically to* capitalism. One might legitimately label anything that follows from the analysis and criticism of Marx's concept of capitalism as a school of communism.
Whether you believe in it or not, it's like being shocked that all the treatments for vertebral subluxation are chiropractic.
peregrin5Can you point me to a real first world developed country not run by a dictator that doesn't have capitalism? I need a reference to see that the alternative is better. Genuinely asking.
not run by a dictator
The catch here is that in the west, we label anyone anti-capitalist a dictator. You can be the very definition of dictatorial, but if you align with western interests, you're just a "president" or a "leader" or something. But start nationalizing your oil industry and 🚨 dictator! dictator! 🚨
So yeah, within the bounds of the narrative that capitalism is the only way, you'll find that capitalism is the only way, unsurprisingly. But the fact that this narrative is baked into us from childhood doesn't necessarily mean that it's aligned with reality.
I Cast FistAt anything bigger than city scale, it's pretty much impossible to implement any "real" alternative without fuckloads of work - we're talking 10+ years. Making a commune on a farm with ~15-ish people is easy (lots of hard work, but doable, there are historical examples of success), but even that group has to participate with the capitalist mother state whenever they need to get stuff they can't produce themselves. If the commune grows too much, it becomes impossible to keep things running smoothly because, well, there's just too many people involved now.
This is why Libertarianism and Ayn Rand followers are so dumb. Galt's Gulch only works because its like, a hundred or so people. The entire concept breaks at any level of scale. Not every person can provide a genius world changing idea to cash in on if only that pesky government would stay out of the way.
They're dumber because they effectively defend a type of feudalism where they're on top and "merit" is the explanation for the hierarchy, all while complaining that everything bad is the state's fault
No, because we live in a global society where if you don't participate in global trade (especially with the USA in the past couple hundred years), your country will fail.
The USA has played a massive part in making communist experiments fail, most notibly the USSR.
The closest thing that the western world has is the nordic countries' social democracy, which is still capitalist by nature. They only implemented it, though due to communism being literally right around the corner (USSR)
I mean, the Nordic Countries are kind of an example of how you can make an economy work that that isn't purely "endless growth capitalism" and isn't "everyone is poor and miserable Communism."
There can be things in between.
The USSR didn't fail because of the USA....the fuck is with you tankies.
I'm sure fighting a global proxy war for most of a century has absolutely nothing to do with the (state) failure of the USSR.
Now, excuse me, I have to go to the ER because of all the compounded brain damage it takes to both think that and say anyone that believes otherwise is a tankie.
OBJECTION!
Democratic socialism is not unheard of...
It's not unheard of, but it's incredibly ill-defined and means a million different things to a million different people. Socialists are, as a rule, democratic, so "Democratic Socialism" is similar to stating "Anti-Capitalist Socialism."
As a consequence, Democratic Socialism seems to mean anything from the Social Democracies in the Nordic Countries to Socialism but with a democracy structured like the US or Western Europe, as opposed to Soviets or Worker Councils or Trade Unions.
Democratic socialism without the support of capitalism is truly and completely unheard of.
Capitalism is a tool, use it and beat it back into submission when it fails.
But don't worship it. Make it work for the nation, don't make the nation exist for the sake of the economy. This is what we do in America, and it's fucking wrong.
Rimu
LucidlethargyIt can be. It is not inherently. That's why people think you're spreading propaganda (because you are).
Or it is claimed that what life is under capitalism could be what life would be like under socialism/communism.
This is what's funny about people claiming that users on XHS are propaganzing people to hate America. It's Americans complaining about objectively true things and Chinese people saying stuff like:
Give Americans a brick wall to talk to and people will claim the wall is radicalizing us 🤣
Lol This is not even an exaggeration. This is what my fyp is like *right now.*
Just a couple of months ago a German court ruled that a magazine was extremist because analysing the capitalist system must consequently arouse the desire to destroy it. Well..
Sauce?
I thought it was this case:
https://gesetze.berlin.de/bsbe/document/NJRE001591260
Where a German magazine was suing against being watched by the constitution protection agency.
But it’s not quite like that. I dug around a bit, gotta say, I didn’t find it. Because of the inherent irony I am still sure I read about it like that.
Any comments about how we can "fix" capitalism will be promptly removed and the user given a timeout for rule 2. Capitalism is an *inherently* oppressive system.
Is this a SocDem-free zone? :o
Many SocDems believe capitalism simply needs to be reformed or properly controlled. This would not be allowed since regulating capitalism would still not remove the inequities inherent to it. For example, no matter how much we regulate capitalism in the US, it's still bound to cause global suffering, not to mention the gradual, inevitable destruction of all human life.
I usually say that capitalism is a horrible monster. You can try to put a leash on it, and maybe it'll pull your cart forward for a while. But it's going to shit everywhere, and break free of the leash (or be set free by some idiot), and then kill and eat as much as it can as that is the indelible nature of horrible monsters.
It would be better to not have a horrible monster at all.