What is a belief you’ve done a total 180 on?
I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
This is an unpopular opinion around here but greed and the desire for power are the real problems and they exist in any economic system.
Capitalism wouldn’t be that bad if wealth was distributed equitably - heavy wealth taxes et cetera supporting socialised human policies like education, healthcare, UBI, et cetera.
This is the particularly unpopular part: Capitalism is not completely without virtue.
For example, capitalism will find the most efficient means of production.
The “happiest” nations in the world are capitalist with sococialised health and education.
That is untrue. Capitalism will find the most profitable means of production. Profit is all that matters. Capitalism will happily abandon efficiency, safety, environmental protection, and happiness in general, all in the pursuit of more profit.
If you don’t believe me, truly ask yourself whether you think Comcast is the most efficient ISP possible.
Sure but efficiency is synonymous with profitability in a competitive market.
Commence downvotes dweebs.
Efficiency is a functionally meaningless term under capitalism. Efficiency of what? Efficiency of email and phone spam? Widespread advertisement campaigns? Efficiency in sabotaging your competitors or collaborating to fix prices? Efficiency in redesigning products to manipulate your consumers and planned obsolescence? Efficiency in environmental destruction? Efficiency in finding loopholes in the legal system and regulations? In lobbying the government to receive special treatment? There are many ways to compete in a competitive market.
Society needs direction. Production when necessary, at the level that it is needed, keeping in mind ecological constraints. Capitalism is incapable of that.
IMO, the problem with Capitalism is that it inherited the structural baggage of previous economic systems, which themselves were transitional forms of what came before them. It is all a collection of improvised bandaids from the beginning to now.
If we are to have an economic superior to the 'isms we had before, we would have to deliberately engineer it from a clean-sheet design. No prior institutions, no previous currencies, and so forth. Game theory, questions of what we actually want from the system, and so forth would all have to be considered.
It would suck installing a wholly novel economic engine into society, because it will have major teething issues…but it is clear that what we got now, cannot let most people survive nor thrive through the troubles to come.
To port over a semantic argument from elsewhere on Lemmy:
You know the phrase “own the means of production?” A phrase I’ve been taught to associate with communism is “the workers shall own the means of production.”
Well, ‘the workers’ means ‘the people’, and ‘the people’ means ‘the public’, and anything owned by ‘the public’ is actually owned by ‘the government’ and ‘the government’ is controlled by ‘the elites.’ Which is why any communist nation falls immediately to despotism, the instant you actually form your communist government the elites are in 100% control.
I’ve argued with someone on here before on the difference between a free market economy and capitalism. I was taught in a free market economy, private individuals own the means of production. An individual has his tools, he works, and trades goods or services to others at prices set by the laws of supply and demand. Under capitalism, capitalists own the means of production, a capitalist is a wealthy individual who invests that wealth - or capital - in ventures with an aim to make a profit. The boss owns the tools and pays workers a wage. The American system has sloshed around between those two extremes since the industrial revolution, periods like the early 20th century trusts and robber barons and…now, where large corporations headed by a very few very wealthy individuals own basically everything, and periods like the 50’s and 90’s when smaller startups in exciting new fields were springing up. The former are the closest we come to the elites owning the means of production, and it tends to be a terrible time to be alive for the average citizen, the latter are the closest I think humanity has come to “the people” meaning individuals at large actually owning the means of production.
Neither system “lifted millions out of poverty.” Neither capitalism or communism has the means or motive to do that. Industrialization did that. Turns out, improving the reliability and quality of food, water, tools and medicine increases the population’s standard of living.
Has there ever been a country without a government that did well in the long run?
I’m pretty sure that’s an awful idea.
Isn’t private property a necessity for society to function? Even in a communist society where everything is distributed equally, once resources are distributed, those resources become private property.
Or am I misunderstanding the concept of private property?
In Communism “property” gets split by function:
There is “personal property” - your clothes, toothbrush, phone, bike, house, car, etc.
“Private property” means any asset that produces something that can be used to extract profit. Think of factories, warehouses, rentals, mines, ships, servers, patents, etc.
“Common property” are things like community gardens, a public fishery (like a lake).
“Public/Social property” are usually state-owned, like public roads, the railway, the power grid (usually), etc.
“State property” also state-owned, but not publicly accessible, like the office buildings where government officials work.
“If you own a chair and sit on it, that is personal property. If you own a factory and other people work in it while you collect the profit, that is private property.”
My problem with these definitions is that my personal computer is also my private computer. I can use it to make money, but it’s also deeply personal. Then again, Marx could not have anticipated this issue.
Thanks for the explanation. That makes sense.
My problem with these definitions is that my personal computer is also my private computer.
This is something I’ve wondered about too. Maybe it should only apply to things that would be too expensive for a single person to own? If everyone can have their own, then it’s personal property, even if you can make money from it.
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