All of you people are discussing capitalism and communism and you don’t even have the slightest clue what either of those words mean.

Centrally planned economies are capitalistic (state capitalism) in nature, not communist. Communism is decentralized and has no state. “But China and the USSR were communist!” You all say, without the slightest clue what you’re taking about. No they weren’t. Both of those countries lacked a capitalist system and had an aristocracy and vast peasantry. The objective of the right wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party, also known as the Bolsheviks (which simply means majority in Russian, the leftists were Mensheviks or the minority within the party) was to address the problem of there not being a capitalistic system in Russia (which Marx and Engels pointed out is necessary for socialism to ever occur) by destroying the monarchy and aristocracy and peasantry and replacing it with a dictatorship that rapidly set up a capitalist system. Again, socialism and the eventual collapse of the State and the rise of an anarchistic mutual aid society known as communism cannot occur without a capitalistic stage to develop an economy and create the conditions for international socialism (worker ownership over the economy). Socialism is another word you all fail to understand. It has nothing to do with centralized government and economic planning. It’s worker ownership over the means of production. The “means of production” is capital. Vietnam and Kerala are probably the closest to a socialist system on the planet right now, but even they are still capitalist systems with zero worker ownership over the means. Venezuela is another example of state capitalism. Chavism was about bringing the peasantry into a capitalist system and creating the conditions necessary for socialism to eventually replace capitalism. The major difference between capitalism in the United States and the USSR, China, Venezuela, etc. is that those countries practice monopolist capitalism exclusively (actually not exclusively anymore after Deng’s market reforms in China and Venezuela’s economy is still more than 51% privately owned) and the US has a combination of monopolist capitalism with central planning (especially when it comes to agriculture and energy development) alongside a free enterprise system. These are both forms of capitalism. Monopolist capitalism isn’t socialism or communism, as you all incorrectly state.

And finally, capitalism doesn’t mean producing goods and services and buying and selling things. That’s also a goal of socialism. The difference is that capitalists extract profit from the economy (there are only a handful of Capitalists in the entire world) whereas workers would be getting the direct value for their labor in a socialist system. For example, factory workers currently make pennies an hour producing iPhones while the capitalists who own the factories and Apple make billions for no productive labor of their own (developers are also workers, by the way. I’m not talking about them). In a socialist system, the workers (not just the factory workers but also the programmers and other workers) would all be making hundreds of thousands each to produce the iPhone and the unproductive parasitic capitalists would be dead. So we still produce products and buy and sell. The difference is who gets the capital for it (the “means”). So it should be incredibly obvious that the former USSR, China, Venezuela, etc. are/were ruled by a handful of capitalists who have monopoly control over State. They are not ruled by communists, as communism is a final stage of socialism (which we haven’t even achieved anywhere yet), where there is no more need for government and scarcity has been solved.

This post was edited by inkanddagger on Jul 11 2020 12:30pm

so tell us how we get there cmon youre smart

A moral hazard to make a long story short is a poor investment. If one of your irresponsible friends asks for 100$ to do some business stuff, but then he goes and loses the money on black jack, that is a moral hazard, and if you keep giving him money, you are in essense creating more bad behavior. This is why you have people dying on waiting lists to get simple medical procedures in places like Canada and the UK.

In America this is part of what makes healthcare so expensive. Our government subsidizes unhealthy food and removes all negative consequences of not taking care of your own health properly. It also makes people less healthy overall.

Communist systems tend to create dysgenic eugenics schemes that lead society towards self-destruction.

We’re on our way right now. There are nearly no more peasants or monarchies anywhere in the word. The capitalist system is being globalized which sets up the conditions necessary for workers to eventually kill off the factory owners and landlords and set up a dictatorship of workers. This can’t happen in a single country. Socialism can only happen simultaneously and internationally. Organizations like the world bank, the IMF, the WTO, etc are all providing the tools that will be used to dismantle the systems they are currently perpetuating. The most important objective for revolutionaries is to fight the monopolists everywhere they exist (China, Venezuela, the United States) and to create alternative systems alongside them (ad hoc worker’s committees and local mutual aid systems and yes, even free market enterprise systems) so that when the global revolt occurs (and it will occur) there is an anarchistic system (“communism”) available that will also allow society to continue just without the shackles of government or monopolist capitalists (which, for the most part, are the same thing).

This post was edited by inkanddagger on Jul 11 2020 12:40pm

whos saying that? + were not talking about communism like "back in the days", i cant repeat it often enough.

you should trust more in the collective awareness of us humans

How does your communism incentivise good behavior and punish bad behavior?

send to australia, like back in the days.. smth like that? we could do like "little-australias" in each country, like the slums where the "tough boys" can do whatever they want? ez

+ this



This post was edited by Bananii on Jul 11 2020 12:50pm

Capitalism incentivizes bad stuff

I disagree. Trade can benefit everyone due to phenomena like comparative advantage.

Trade has nothing to do with capitalism though. There is trade and buying and selling in socialism and communism.