• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      48 minutes ago

      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.

      • Big_Boss_77@lemmynsfw.com
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        1 hour ago

        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?

        • Elrecoal19_0@lemmy.world
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          ofc they are smooth like actual roads, how are cars supposed to comfortably drive in rough, wrinkly roads? /s

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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      44 minutes ago

      Because of successful anti-anarchist propaganda, an overwhelming majority of Americans think anarchy means no rules whatsoever.

    • ThisIsMyLemmyLogin@lemmy.world
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      That’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.

      • nifty@lemmy.world
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        But 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.

    • Hikermick@lemmy.world
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      44 minutes ago

      Capitalism or communism the greedy and power hungry will weasel there way up. The only thing that will save us is a vigilant electorate.

      • Wogi@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        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.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          35 minutes ago

          Provide 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.

        • ameancow@lemmy.world
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          1 hour ago

          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.

        • RamenJunkie@midwest.social
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          2 hours ago

          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.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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          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?

          • Wogi@lemmy.world
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            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.

            • fakir@lemm.ee
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              1 hour ago

              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.

            • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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              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.

              • Wogi@lemmy.world
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                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.

                • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                  There’s a difference between saying we should work towards getting rid of the necessity for Markets, and saying we need to do that instantly, today, by outlawing them. Black Markets didn’t kill the Soviet Union, but they did highlight flaws in how it was run and where it was lacking. That’s a separate conversation that we can have, if you want, but is largely unimportant.

                  The thing is, over time, markets centralize through firms outcompeting and absorbing or eliminating smaller firms. This increases barrier to entry as it is more expensive to compete on even footing. Marxists don’t want to abolish markets simply by decree, but developing to the point that they no longer make sense. Competition can’t last forever, and neither can markets.

      • fakir@lemm.ee
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        22 minutes ago

        https://lemm.ee/c/fedonomy

        I created it and it’s empty, but the gist is here -

        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.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      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.

      • AccountMaker@slrpnk.net
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        I have to ask, as someone who has only a basic understanding of the philosophies, how are the end goals of Anarchists and Marxists different? I understood them as only having different methods of arriving to the same state of society without class, states and money - communism.

        By my understanding, Anarchists go bottom up by propping up a parallel system based on voluntary cooperation and mutual aid, to the point where the state is no longer needed for anything, and Marxists (or rather Marxist-Leninists) go top down by seizing control of the state in the name of the workers, and then gradually give the workers more and more direct control until the state is no longer needed (“The withering of the state”).

        Assuming what I just wrote is wrong, what faults would Anarchists and Marxists find in each other’s end goals, assuming they succeed in establishing their ideal societies?

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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          Up front, I am a Marxist-Leninist, but used to be an Anarchist (more specifically a Syndicalist). As such, those are my biases. This is going to be extremely oversimplified, and if you want sources from Marx, Engels, etc I can give recommended readings (or I have an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list linked on my profile you can check out).

          The key distinction is that Anarchist Communism and Marxist (not only ML, Marxist in general) Communism are different, because Marxists and Anarchists have different views on class and the state.

          For Anarchists, their chief concern is hierarchy, and the state is an entrenched monopoly on violence that upholds that. They seek, therefore, decentralized networks of Communes, and can have differing forms of this within each commune, some may have currency, some may have labor vouchers, some may have gift economies, they all vary.

          For Marxists, their chief concern is class, most simply stated as a social relation of ownership and control of the Means of Production. As such, they seek a fully publicly owned and planned economy, with democratic structures and delegates. The “State” is an instrument of class oppression, but not all government deals with that. When the entire world is publicly owned and planned, and democratically controlled, there ceases to be any purpose to armies, or police, or private property rights, hence the “whithering of the state” and what remains being the “Administration of Things,” as Engels puts it. The State whithering isn’t a policy that can be put in place, but a consequence of gradually folding private property into public control.

          A bit on Vanguardism, the idea isn’t that the Vanguard “gives up” control and has all control in the beginning, but that the Vanguard is the formalized entity of the most politically advanced of the working class. A vanguard will always exist whether you formalize it or not, MLs seek to formalize it so it can be democratized and connected to the ruling class, rather than emerge naturally and unaccountably. The existence of a vanguard does not mean they control everything and the workers don’t.

          An Anarchist critique of Marxism is that Marxists retain hierarchy even into Communism (managers and administrators that share the same ownership as any other form of labor are not distinct classes), and that Anarchists believe power corrupts, so this process is doomed if you don’t combat hierarchy from the beginning.

          A Marxist critique of Anarchism is that communes that only control and own what’s within the commune doesn’t actually get rid of class, as there is unequal ownership across communes and therefore a potential for trade imbalances and a resurrection of Capitalism. Moreover, disconnected but trading communes severely restricts the emergence of large-scale industry, which is a necessity for improving production to better provide for all.

          Like I said, this was an extreme oversimplification. I can elaborate more or offer reading (at least with Marxist or Marxist-Leninist texts and concepts)! I’ll let Anarchists respond for the theory bit.

  • vga@sopuli.xyz
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    People with hammer and sickle in the name never fail to give out impartial takes.

  • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee
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    21 hours ago

    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.

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          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.

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        10 hours ago

        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.

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    Socialism: 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.

    • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
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      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.

  • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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    Then go live in China 🤡

    Bro I just said I don’t want diabetics to pay 300usd per month for insulin jfc

            • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              6 hours ago

              Well, technically speaking, if it’s the same shit from the same ass but you can chose your favorite buttcheek, you do have a choice.

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              21 hours ago

              Up until recently you really did. US citizens decided to not have it, so who knows in the future, but you really did.
              American really cannot do comparative analysis, they believe that their country is the only one in the world and very unique, so it’s hard for american brain to comprehend that some countries are better at something and some are worse. They need to be either the best or the worst.

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                21 hours ago

                Up until recently you really did.

                Not in my life time… or ever really. Political process is captured by the two party regime.

                Do you want to get fucked and dirty or slow?

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                  14 hours ago

                  This attitude betrays that you never actually engaged with it besides reading about a candidate 2 minutes before casting a vote that one time and never again.

    • Broadfern@lemmy.world
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      How dare we want our country to be better and for our fellow citizens to not die in cartoonishly preventable ways? /s

      • Soup@lemmy.world
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        Not to mention that those same people will post shit about “why are we helping foreigners when people at home are suffering”-sorry stop me if you’ve heard this one ten-thousand times before.

        • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          “I’m just gonna hit the pause button right there, bud. The US government doesnt help people.”

  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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    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.

  • Sgt_choke_n_stroke@lemmy.world
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    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

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    Kind of has a point that modern “communist” systems in practice seem identical to all the bad parts of Capitalism.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      Your problem is neither capitalism nor communism.

      Your problem is greedy cunts. Both systems will end up putting them in charge.

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      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.

      • BassTurd@lemmy.world
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        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.

        • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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          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.

  • peregrin5@lemm.ee
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    Can 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.

    • eatCasserole@lemmy.world
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      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.

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      At 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.

      • RamenJunkie@midwest.social
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        2 hours ago

        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.

    • Refurbished Refurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org
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      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)

      • RamenJunkie@midwest.social
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        2 hours ago

        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.

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        I don’t think you can get to communism where there’s a relatively small group in power tasked with dividing the means of production. That power will be abused like oligarchs do now.

        • Refurbished Refurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org
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          Yeah, I agree with that. Mass centralization is bad regardless of the situation IMO. We need collaboration instead.

          I’m personally a fan of Prof Wolff’s idea to force all corporations to surrender ownership to their workers, converting them into worker-owned coops. This would largely mitigate the ability for extreme wealth concentration to happen to begin with, especially if combined with other wealth-limiting regulations.

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            What would be the motivation then to even start a company/corporation if every time it happens, it is seized and given away?

            • JamesFire@lemmy.world
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              23 hours ago

              As long as you still work at it, you are one of the workers.

              The only forcing going on here would be forcing you to consider all the workers’ voices, not just yours.

              If you stop working at the company, then you’d have to give up any control over it. Which is frankly entirely reasonable.

            • Refurbished Refurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org
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              1 day ago

              Really good question!

              We look at the motivations for starting businesses through a modern-day capitalist lens, but the motivations would change under a different economic system (not entirely, though, depending on the economic system).

              Making money is still the goal here for most people, but this would be combined with a strong social welfare program that makes all basic human needs (housing, food, utilities, internet, etc.) available to everyone, so fear of failure is vastly reduced.

              As for the motivation to create a startup, there could be a few different cases, such as only having large businesses (determined by either employee count or total annual profit or revenue) be impacted by that regulation that forces all businesses to be worker-owned.

              Another reason could simply be wanting to create something new for the betterment of humanity. If all basic human needs are met, then the profit motive, while not going away entirely, is greatly reduced, as the need for survival is already met, so more experimentation with different ideas can happen with the fear of failure being greatly reduced, as it would be simple to restart from scratch with a strong safety net. There could still be a profit motive here, but it would be secondary to the actual idea.

              You’re an artist, but you’re not popular and you don’t make money off your work? Cool, you can do that full time.

              You’re wanting to open a (non-chain/franchised) corner store with 5 well-paid employees? Go for it.

              Your business expanded to over 50 employees, or makes more than $10 million in annual profit (completely arbitrary numbers here)? Now your business gets equally split up amongst the workers. The stock market in this situation would no longer exist, where external parties can both gamble on a company and influence the direction of that company, usually in favor of short term gain. When employees own the business, they tend to favor long term sustainability and stability, as that is what most people are seeking for themselves.

              There should also be a hard cap on wealth, as nobody could ever possibly need more than $50 million for their entire life (again, arbitrary number). If wealth had a hard cap, that would also reduce incentive to constantly try to seize more power in any field (wouldn’t limit it entirely, but I don’t think anything can).

              This will not eliminate the profit motive, as most people aren’t going to be satisfied with just the bare minimum for survival, but the lack of profit/business failure will not lead to homelessness/starvation/etc.

        • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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          2 days ago

          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.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        3 hours ago

        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.

      • marcos@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        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.

        • DrDeadCrash@programming.dev
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          2 days ago

          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@piefed.social
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      2 days ago

      There is more than one alternative and some of them involve having capitalism…

  • shoulderoforion@fedia.io
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    2 days ago

    Would that be propaganda in favor of Communism, who’s every real world iteration so far has led to corruption, tyranny, and human rights abuse on a scale that would put Capitalism’s to shame? Gwon you’re making us blush. Oh, you talking about aspirational Communism, but not actual real life experienced Communism, lol. Yes, that’s what we need, fairy tales of the world to come, like Christianity.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 days ago

      Ah yes the only two possible political systems, Chinese style autocracy or American Style Oligarchy.

      • Refurbished Refurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 days ago

        Clearly if it hasn’t been implemented before and doesn’t currently exist today, it’s impossible to ever happen. We live at the end of history, you see.

        • Allonzee@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          We live at the end of history, you see.

          You say that in jest, but human civilization is coming apart on easy paradise mode, and even then it took us about 200,000 years of wandering around in the dirt to even start trying, and in trying we’re irrevocably destroying the place eyes wide open.

          The idea that humanity will exist as more than scattered animals clinging to old hardened structures having destroyed our temperate climate for millions of years is laughable. The insurance industry is having a stroke about its continued survival after just a few of the teensiest little tastes of our good, irreversible work.

          The long arm of recorded history is ending, by our own capitalist hands, for short term profit.

          We’re literally razing the forest so there will be no shade for future generations, only clinging to base survival on a hostile planet they probably won’t even know their ancestors were directly responsible for.

          • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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            2 days ago

            Relax, bro.

            The octopi will inherit the Earth, and one day pick through our ruins!

            Assuming they evolve the ability to actually live after breeding at least. Kind of important for creating an enduring culture and educational system, though I suppose they might just evolve biological immortality first instead.

    • gonzo-rand19@moist.catsweat.com
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      2 days ago

      on a scale that would put Capitalism’s to shame

      You say that like capitalism isn’t ongoing massacres and abuse in various forms all day, every day. As if the t-shirt you’re probably wearing wasn’t made by someone who’s exploited in Bangladesh so that minimum wage Americans can still afford to buy it without forgoing food because they’re purposely underpaid by service industry corporations. As though you’re not also talking about some sort of aspirational capitalism where the “free market” actually exists and doesn’t inevitably lead to corruption and tyranny…

      Meanwhile, the richest man in the world is about to secure control over US government agencies because he gave the most money to the current president.

      • burgersc12@mander.xyz
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        2 days ago

        How dare you? Those billion dollar corpos are doing you a favor by paying a “just good enough” wages to allow you to eat.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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        2 days ago

        You say that like capitalism isn’t ongoing massacres and abuse in various forms all day, every day.

        OOhh, but it’s not capitalism’ fault!! It’s just stuff happening that’s totally unrelated to capitalism!!! <- answer I got to a similar discussion back in ~2014. Either that or “a few bad apples” when complaining about shitty companies.

    • Goodmorningsunshine@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      corruption, tyranny, and human rights abuse on a scale that would put Capitalism’s to shame?

      Funny how you’re describing capitalism and trying to pretend you’re not.