i boosted this video a couple times already but want to stress that it's great! in a mere 20 minutes it:

- ELI5's the historical meaning and origins of capitalism, communism, and other jargon

- addresses the "but communist countries killed millions" argument

- uses this language to crystallize an argument about how the internet came about, turned shitty, and how to fix it

https://invidio.us/watch?v=L01iiJz8Thc

tyvm @strypey

@pho4cexa @strypey Interesting talk and worth watching. I'm sympathetic to many of his criticisms, but also critical of his framing.

He frames capitalism in the worst possible way, even though it's often used to refer to a market economy with private property and he frames communism in the most favorable way.

A free market economy does not require a star topology and the price mechanism doesn't require it either.

@pho4cexa @strypey

Also, ~40 million died in China, ~7 million in Ukrane and ~2 million (25%) in Cambodia. All states that had Communism as their stated end-goal.

Those deaths were avoidable, were all in the name of Communism and he doesn't address them at all.

@jcbrand @pho4cexa
> Those deaths were avoidable, were all in the name of Communism and he doesn't address them at all.

Because they're irrelevant to the way he uses the term, as he explains when he gives his definitions. As #DavidGraeber shows in his book 'The Democracy Project', political terms can have (at least) two totally different meanings, one based on a founding ideal, one based on notable historical failures to fulfill that ideal. So it is with the term "communism".

@strypey @pho4cexa

They're not irrelevant because you can't just divorce a term from "historical failures to fulfill that ideal". Especially not if those failures are actually millions of deaths due to forced deprivation and starvation. Doing so risks repeating those same "mistakes".

@strypey @pho4cexa

Additionally, through his definitions he creates IMO a false dichotomy between Capitalism and Communism because he removes free markets and free enterprise from his definition of Capitalism and then doesn't leave any space for them anywhere in his subsequent analysis.

Free markets create an emergent system and are the only way I'm aware of to maximize personal freedom. (pseudo-)communism has only ever been imposed via top-down authoritarianism.