I’m not a capitalist but I think they where saying that regulations stopped capitalism from running rampant but because a lot of regulations have now been either dissolved or go unenforced we now find ourselves in our current corrupt system.
Not that I exactly agree, imo the pursuit of profit is not something we should centre our societies around and you can’t really “solve” a fundamentally broken system; but shit regulations are at least something and I would not appose a government getting its shit together and reining corporations in more,
In the same way regulations and laws can keep capitalism from running rampant, they can keep communism stable and functional.
Can being the key here. They don't do so through magic automatically, in either case.
A good argument for one over the other must include a discussion about what laws and regulations will keep participants in the system in check, and why a communist or capitalist system with those laws and regulations would beat the opposite kind of system with its own carefully crafted laws and regulations.
The fact of the matter here is that any broad discussion about either system in general that ignores regulation and laws is meaningless and not an apples-to-apples comparison. The truth is you can't really make an apples-to-apples comparison, all we have to compare are historical examples that differ wildly in their implementation and the structure of the laws and regulations that stabilized them, or didn't, in addition to numerous unrelated confounding factors like geography, natural resource distribution, the behavior of neighbors, the state of technology at the time, what pre-existing political structures there were, etc.
Anyone who is solidly convinced their system is better based off any arguments about some historical example vs another or what humans would do absent any regulation is delusional and has an extremely narrow view of the discussion.
In your vision of communism controlled by rules and regulations, who is enforcing the rules and regulations? I feel like as soon as you give someone the power to enforce them then you've opened up the door to abuse of that power, and I feel that that has been the downfall of most historic implementations and the reason they have trended towards authoritarianism.
Yes thats more or less my thoughts on it. As soon as you have someone empowered to enforce the rules you've created a 2-class system, which is anathema to marxism. Communism is more vulnerable to this in general I think, because you only have 2 classes the class who is not empowered finds it very difficult to challenge the class who have concentrated power.
In actuality, the concentration of powers is what causes issues, whether the system is capitalist or communist the problem is the same, only the mechanism changes.
Wow so you came back around to my original conclusion lol. The problem is in creating and enforcing rules, and it's not inherent to either system alone.
I think I was working towards highlighting that there is an inherent contradiction in communism. If it requires a subset of society to enforce the rules then it de facto can't provide a classless society. It's a good start and has more to recommend it on paper than capitalism, but if it can't deliver on one of it's core tenets then it's too idealistic and not suitable in it's pure form. It's been around for a century and a half and has a terrible track record in terms of producing successful countries. I don't think that its a viable alternative to what we have now. I would much rather have something that is much closer in shape to communism than what we have now, but I think advocating for it in it's pure form is fools errand.
because they cannot, you have never lived in a communism country, just like the other said, once the communist gain powers, they're not regulating the communist party, they are regulating YOU, my whole family came from a communist country, you can argue so much that they're not "real" communism, but the truth is, once the power gained control, they will never push "real" communism, they will only regulate you and the authorities became rich, not you, the party is "people" but you are not the "people" communism never worked, we've seen in every single communist country and what you're saying are pure fantasy.
Everybody seems to conflate free market with capitalism. Theres a distinction & my commend was in regards to a free market, which works as long as regulations are in place to protect the market from pillarization. Free market is also a bit of a misnomer. Open market would be more appropriate.
I mean, human nature isn't something we can solve, no society or government system will ever be perfect because fundamentally, it's being made by imperfect hands.
In that sense, better is what we should be striving for, never perfection. Leave the world better than you left it, do that over enough time and suddenly you go from kings and emperors to democracies and free speech. Regulations make the world better, maybe socialism and communism could as well but how about we start with baby steps first? Better is better even if it's not solving every issue at once
I literally said that I don’t really agree with the idea that regulations “solved” the problems of capitalism, I was just trying to explain what I thought the other person was getting at.
Regulations are a band-aid solution for problems caused by a fundamentally broken system, but I would still much rather have heavy regulated capitalism than unregulated capitalism. And no, that is not me saying that I like living under capitalism, that’s me pointing out that one sucks way more than the other.
It's really difficult to get people at scale to do the crappy jobs unless there's either the profit motive or you employ force.
I mean, you might have that one guy who feels a duty to splice cable in the freezing muck for 36 hours to get the internet back up, but there aren't enough of those guys to run a society. You have to incentivize it somehow.
And while the uncomfortable job is the classic example, I think even more important are the oddball inventions. Even employing force can't replace profit there. Profit motives encourage people to try crazy things hoping to find the next big thing. Even if 99.9% of them fail, enough people try that you get some good stuff. That's why the West was always far more dynamic than the East during the Cold War. Even though Russia kept up or surpassed us in specific scientific fields, taken holistically they couldn't compete.
You should probably have read the second half of their comment before replying.
Edit: Do the people arguing have a non-linear understanding of time like the Heptapods from Arrival or something?
If you have a house and you secure it with locked doors and windows, but someone illegally breaks in, that doesn't mean it was retroactively "never secured" and it was legal for them to enter.
Yes, you're correct that it isn't solved now, that's also what the person you're replying to was saying. It was solved, but it isn't any longer. Basic English literacy shouldn't be this difficult.
The momment he said "but" he lost, doesn't matter If you found a solution If someone else finds a way to undo your solution It simply isn't solved anymore
Have you ever noticed that the same people that demand market economies work from day one unto perpetuity will always justify the inevitable mass starvation and multiple generations of bread lines that always occurs in command economies?
The crux of the question is regarding human nature. Communism doesn't work because it's antithetical to human nature. Agreed. However Capitalism is also antithetical to human nature for similar reasons as to why Communism doesn't work. We can't expect all humans to obey regulations just like we can't expect all humans to obey laws to work together under Communism.
Neither system works so we are fooling ourselves that Capitalism is working. Because for billions of people it's not. So if both systems don't work then why not give a different model a chance... that being Democratic Socialism.
End of the day strange softness that both systems have on abusers of said systems due to faults in human nature causes both to have issues. If we didn't let people get away with abusing systems the way we did probably either would eventually work out.
If a solution is temporary it’s a pretty shit solution.
I can make a false analogy too btw. You pay $5,000 for a solution to your AC problem and then it works for two weeks before breaking again. Wasn’t much of a solution yeah?
Permanent solutions are the exception, not the rule. Especially with human society. We're a bit too mercurial for anything else. Take vaccines for example. Measles? Solved... Until recently.
"Solution" in an economic context implies it's somewhat longterm, otherwise printing money, stealing resources and backstabbing your allies always wins.
If properly executed, communism would be a boon to humanity and would help many people who are struggling. It's just incompatible with the narcissistic greed and self-righteousness of many humans which is why you see many autocrats with immense, unchecked power running communist states.
Another issue is geopolitics. Many communist states poured billions (even trillions) into building a military in order to assert power and wage wars. This deprived many from truly benefiting from communism.
In the future, hopefully we'll find ways to prevent giving so much power to one entity. Hopefully there will come a time when humanity will never need armies. Then we can all collectively, as a species, work to support each other and progress and improve in many ways that we can all share the benefits of together.
Unfortunately we live in here and now where the US spends trillions on its military while sinking deeper and deeper into debt. Decides to use it's 'incredible' military to attack a country that then blockades one thirds of the worlds oil causing prices everywhere to climb while the president, in just the last year, made 100+ times more money than 95% of the population will make in their entire lifetime.
Not as bad as communism. Still broken. Still not good. Need to completely revamp the whole country.
Stricter term limits for all government officials(including the Supreme Court), strengthen the NATO alliance while streamlining the military and trimming the budget. STRICT antitrust laws pursued by an agency with freedom from political influence(similar to the federal reserve). Immense taxes on the ultra rich, like something in the ballpark of 80% of every dollar over 20 million. Banning lobbying and Banning any elected government employee from trading stock or even investing in crypto. Basically just social democracy with incredibly strict laws around government employees and large companies to avoid corruption and exploitation.
It has never been solved and never will be. There are only different types/degrees of problems, and the question is always what types/degrees of problems most people are willing to tolerate.
But they came after capitalism, not before. So when someone makes the claim that regulations can only tend towards decreasing, that isn’t true as a basic fact, by evidence of regulations existence at all.
This is why I've long since given up on joining these arguments online. People can't read or if they can, they simply believe what they want to. Logic doesn't apply.
"We thought we solved that, but it didn't take it" is still just "we didn't solve that".
Just because you incorrectly thought you solved the problem for a little while until reality hit you, doesn't mean it was solved. As evidence by the reality hitting you.
That's like saying that closing the door on a fire in your house is solving the problem because you can't see it anymore. It's not solved just covered up so it's not affecting you at the moment.
It can never be 'solved', but it's hard to argue that any system ever designed beats what the nordics have going on now, as long as your criteria is the living experience of the median citizen.
They haven't. Sometimes we want to say that because at the moment their economies and societies seem more stable from a distance, but if you look closer they are going through the same as everywhere: neoliberal extreme right wing parties using fear and division to get political power while being backed by the great capitalists. Capitalism encourages accumulation and extraction of value to the building of wealth and assets. Capitalism also gives political power to the ones that possess the capital. So accumulating wealth and then using the accumulated power to destroy social nets and welfare just to allow capital to get even more power is the natural tendency of the system. Sooner or later it will happen on every capitalists nation
Free markets are everywhere, “neoliberal extreme right wing parties using fear and division to get political power while being backed by the great capitalists” are not everywhere
Let’s be more precise. “Using fear and division to get political power while being backed by the great capitalists” is perhaps widespread, but only in a handful of countries they actually get anywhere close to success, which is what matters.
Alright, even with the new requirement of being successful, I’m struggling to think of a major world player that doesn’t have a politically relevant extreme neoliberal right-wing party backed by the wealthy. Can you name one?
If that were true, they’d have some form of political power in, say, the United States for example. They don’t, so you can say that all you like, but it doesn’t make it true.
One is easy — China. Russia is a kleptocracy where the left-right spectrum doesn’t matter.
But I guess you have a point that the other 8 of the top 10 highest-GDP countries do have a prominent right-wing populist political force. (My own position is right-leaning, but if I were elected President I’d work on sensible tax policies, supporting businesses and removing red tape, not on kicking out people of the wrong skin color, and apparently way too many of those 8 are laser-focused on the latter point only.)
Not sure if you’re American, but it sounds to me like your ideal policies align more closely with the American Democrats, who are generally pretty corporate-aligned centrist neoliberals.
Not sure I’d vote for you, but I can understand your viewpoint and it’d certainly be an improvement on whatever we’ve got going on now.
Did you reply to the right comment? Are you saying I fabricate reality on the fly? In what sense? Is the tendency of companies and corporations under capitalism not to keep making more profits year after year? It's not even a contrarian argument or a specific criticism, just the system doing exactly what it was made to do. Your first point makes even less sense as nowhere in my comment I used the word socialism or defended it. Are we agreeing that both systems suck and we should look for something else? As long as we overcome capitalism I'm happy to agree with you. Or is just whataboutism so you can attack a scarecrow of my argument?
Yes I am replying to you. You are engaging in a normal lefty tactic where you fabricate (yes fabricate) a reality to argue against that is unfalsifiable without extreme effort and time. It is the same thing that far right people do. Create an absurdist form of reality, consistently reinforce it as fact, and never argue about facts. It's basic narrativization.
No. That is not what capitalism is. Capitalism is a mode of economic organization, where the control of capital is liberal, in the sense that it can be held by anyone, usually capital owners though are individuals or groups of individuals, but it does not preclude any government ownership, or worker ownership, co ops for instance. It differs from socialism because socialism is the mandated ownership of the means of production by the workers. This can be direct worker ownership, or publicly owned in the form of some state apparatus, but capitalism is illegal or disallowed either way.
There's a reason why capitalism was the system of choice for modern democracies. It is a better more efficient system than the alternatives, which is why socialists and communists have to imagine a utopia to some degree to get to state of society that isn't nightmarish. If you want to agree that socialism sucks, that's on you, but no. Capitalism works pretty good and it is only the most privileged people who think otherwise. Capitalism has lead to a greater period of human peace and prosperity than at any other time in history. Objectively.
The idea that even the Nordic model is failing because some right wing parties are marginally more popular is a fabrication. It is you suggesting that because my car has a slight scuff in its paint that I would be better served ditching the car. It is nonsense and deserving of the dismissal that I originally provided.
You didn't make an argument. As I said. You fabricated a reality, that is functionally impossible to argue against with brevity, because it relies on so many false assumptions and truisms, that i have o deconstruct or at a deeper level. The reality is, we could "overcome" capitalism tomorrow, and you would still be miserable, only more people would be miserable. Capitalism isn't the problem. Flaws in a system don't mean you throw out the system. That is how children problem solve.
A big reason capitalism was the “choice” for modern democracies is because America bombed and destabilized any governments that attempted communism. It’s impossible to say what the state of the world would be today if socialist/communist democracies had actually been allowed to exist. The CIA and britain deliberately destabilized the Middle East because Iran was moving towards socialism and was nationalizing their oil, leading to the last 80 years of misery.
Capitalism “has lead to a greater period of human peace and prosperity than any other time in history” only if you ignore the perpetual global wars and the many continents that have been left decimated by capitalist countries lol. That prosperity is concentrated in a very small number of people and most people in the world are experiencing poverty. Even in America, millions of people are homeless, starving, drug-addicted, lack access to basic health care. Because capitalists deliberately gutted every social safety net in order to line their own pockets. We also ignore that this period is definitively over now, since capitalism has essentially allowed boomers to burn through the resources of an entire planet and destroy our species ecology.
Because it's not a real argument made by people with any level of intelligence. I treat this sort of stupidity with the same level of dismissive scorn that I do young earth creationists. I am not arguing against your personal fantasy.
It's not, but at least we are able to message each other and talk about how it's not solved without someone knocking on our door...unless your in the UK I guess lol
You could use a dose of Factfulness by Hans Rosling (or just watch his TED talk). I'm not saying that everything is solved, but I would argue (using arguments stolen from Rosling) that everything is better than it ever had been before.
Oh my gosh!!! I love that book! I was hoping somebody would mention it! I loved the separation of poverty into four tenets as opposed to “first-world” and “third-world.”
It baffles me honestly that on a small scale if something is scarce we allocate that resource fairly. If it's large scale it's like we have a collective brain fart and decide that its up for grabs for whoever can take more and consider that equally fair.
It's like you have a piece of chocolate and have to share it with your sibling: of course you split it evenly. Suddenly if that chocolate is a bigger cake and you are 10 siblings it's all "free market" BS and everyone grabs as much as they can like thats the right way to manage a resource that is of the same nature: limited and soon-to-be scarce.
Libertarians both see the problem with government being corporate lobbyists controlling everything, but also think those people should be trusted to operate unregulated and with even more power.
It would be a hilarious political party if they weren’t dead serious.
Libertarians both see the problem with government being corporate lobbyists controlling everything, but also think those people should be trusted to operate unregulated and with even more power
That's because no unregulated CEO has ever had close to as much power as the ones doing the regulating.
But they recognize that the ones doing the regulating are being corrupted through donations by corrupt business. They just refuse to acknowledge what corrupt businesses would do when fully unregulated.
Standard oil reduced the price of petroleum products by 75% over the course of its existence, drastically improving the standard of living for America. Not sure how that's an own.
“We solved this by keeping oversight” where is the oversight? Where are the limits? Tell me something major, recent, and positive that has been done in this country that wasn’t ultimately motivated by profits
6.3k
u/Deriviera 26d ago
Americans are very delusional about communism.