BarterClubUnder capitalism
protistThere are serious ethical problems with a capitalist system, especially when it comes to the necessities of life, but there’s also ample evidence that other economic systems in practice have been just as bad of not worse regarding food security, eg follow the history of the USSR from the Holodomor in the 1930s to empty grocery shelves and bread lines in the 1980s
I cannot comment on communism as there has not been a true communism in the world yet, but dictatorships sure have been bad.
You know you guys are a meme out here in the real world, right?
harkSaid the crypto bro from monero.town
Lol burn
Meme doesn’t make it false
No system be it either communism or capitalism can be applied 100%
If we compare today’s capitalism it’s only fair that we compare it to real world application of communism.
As a Pole that was raised in a country freshly out of this system I can only tell you that you would have to be mentally insane to ever consider communism and expect it to work even half as well is it should on paper.
Yes, as with all things it must be balanced. Also, I wish we could recognize that monopolies are not capitalism, it’s just cronyism and there’s no place for that. It’s the antithesis of capitalism and it plagues communism too. It’s just pure corruption.
i thought monopoly is just the natural development in a competition, which (the competition) is pretty relevant in any market economy. I mean, an alt history line could have every monopoly in the market being prevented by gov regulation. But that would require gov that’s not payed in any way by the 1%, who benefit from inexistent competition, to serve its own interest. That’s really far from today’s reality, in most countries i guess.
It is a natural development which is why we have anti trust laws. We recognized over 100 years ago that monopolies are bad and that they need to be broken up to keep capitalism healthy, but decades of corporate lobbying and propaganda made that practice stop happening. You’re right that we need to clean up corruption in the government to make that happen again.
gmtomBut that’s not a “real world application of communism” in fact in reality the USSR never even claimed to actually be a communist society, they were just ruled by the communist party.
Communism has a specific definition, primarily its a post scarcity society, with no centralised government or monetary system. So any system that doesn’t meet that basic definition can’t be called communism.
Much like we don’t use places like the Democratic people’s Republic of Korea as an example of ehy democracy is bad, because its not actually a democracy, it doesn’t meet the basic definition of democracy.
You can argue its an example of socialism, but it would be more accurate to describe it as authoritarianism because without democracy a state owned system can’t really be called socialism.
Venezuelan here, how has been your experience on lemmy so far while discussing your real life experience of what leftists advocate for? Mine has been less than stellar
Yeah, you can’t really argue wity someone who never had to experience the consequences of running a country this way.
GlitchingtonOkay but like, at least understand why the shelves were empy. Behind the Bastards had a great podcast on the matter. Bad science is bad science, no matter how you trade.
Part One: The Russian Scientist Who Helped Kill 30 Million People - Behind the Bastards | iHeart
<p>In episode 31, Robert is joined by comedian Max Silvestri to talk about a Russian scientist named Trofim Lysenko. He set out to feed the world, but in reality, Lysenko wound up starving it. </p><p> </p> Learn more about your ad-choices at <a href='https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com'>https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com</a><p>See <a href='https://omnystudio.com/listener'>omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p>
What Lysenko did and the magnitude of it was enabled by and is inextricable from the Soviet systems of government and economy:
Lysenko’s success at encouraging farmers to return to working their lands impressed Stalin, who also approved of Lysenko’s peasant background, as Stalin claimed to stand with the proletariat. By the late 1920s, the USSR’s leaders had given their support to Lysenko. This support was a consequence, in part, of policies put in place by the Communist Party to rapidly promote members of the proletariat into leadership positions in agriculture, science and industry. Party officials were looking for promising candidates with backgrounds similar to Lysenko’s: born of a peasant family, without formal academic training or affiliations to the academic community. Due to close partnership between Stalin and Lysenko, Lysenko acquired an influence over genetics in the Soviet Union during the early and mid twentieth century. Lysenko eventually became the director of Genetics for the Academy of Sciences in 1940, which gave him even more control over genetics. He remained in the position for more than two decades, throughout the reigns of Stalin and Nikita Khruschchev, until he was relieved of his duties in 1965.
I view the problem as us treating a tool as a system of government. Capitalism is an incredibly powerful tool for increasing efficiency (real capitalism as in a healthy free market, not monopoly bullshit). But we should be using that tool to our benefit, not having that tool use us. We can use it as a tool without it being our basis of society. Also, capitalism is not self regulating. That’s a bullshit myth created by elite monopolists. Unchecked capitalism leads to monopolies and monopolies are the antithesis of capitalism. We used to know that. We used to bust monopolies. We need to learn when and when not to use capitalism. Certain things need to be monopolies. Like transportation and the power grid. Since healthy competition cannot prosper we cannot make them capitalistic. We already need to recognize that capitalism is a tool for us to use. It’s ok to break capitalism in special circumstances for the greater good, because the good of the people is more important than perpetuating capitalism. I think abolishing it leads to apathy and inefficiency, but worshipping it leads to inhumanity, and we’re not even worshipping it properly because again, monopolies are not capitalism. Like all things in life it’s about balance.
gowanThe wheat shortage in the 1980s had to do with a blight hitting the strains the USSR grew. The problem was not growing enough different strains of wheat that weren’t susceptible to the blight not their method of distributing food.
Well it wasn’t so much a problem to Russians because their centralized economic system allowed them to simply starve away those they didn’t like
Yeah, the problems are just different. A mixed form would be ideal, where basic needs would be handled socially and the rest may compete in a capitalist way. The difficulty is where to draw the line exactly.
Dadd VolanteFood.
Shelter.
Education.
Healthcare.
I miss anything?