I’m gonna need some real sources for this… And maybe even a definition.

You would need an example to talk about that.

You smooth brains really stretch far for a meme eh?

Dam, I feel bad for people like you.

You just gave away you have no idea what communism is.

And I’m sure you’re an independent reporter from a neutral country that doesn’t benefit culturally from propaganda making communism look like fascism…

The more you bring it up the more people will respond…

Eh, it’s kinda both. Yes, it’s nice to stay on one topic like how we can make communism the best it can be and learn lessons of the past. But when people look at some of those decisions/theories and say “that sounds terrible, I’d rather keep what I have” then you really gotta cross-compare. America is only as well off as it is because of slavery, corruption, death and destruction. It’s just not death and destruction of their own people and land, so most American citizens don’t “see” that. Or if they do, it’s a “well, that sucks, we should do better” kind of thing, but lack real recognition that the system benefits them so much. As well, the capitalist autocracies have been way more deadly and authoritarian and corrupt than anything communist, and it’s important for people to learn about the differences.

A: “Communism is authoritarian” B: “Wehll, sometimes, but capitalism is too, and it is MUCH worse” A: “Don’t commit whataboutism” B: “Uhhhh, but we have to compare systems to know which is better and which is worse…”

Just IMHO.

You can’t just imagine some utopia where nobody has to work, and everything is free, and call that communism.

Those are the anarchists (usually, definitions get fuzzy)

Most communists recognize the need for a transition state, we call that Socialism.

This isn’t a utopia we’re pitching, it’s hard work, and there will always be controversy, and people will have to work, we will just work less, and we will strive toward working even less over time.

And that power will sooner or later be abused

There’s LOTS of evidence that, right now, under capitalism, that abuse is veeeeery bad. We can learn the lessons of previous socialist attempts, but capitalism? That’s shown to be corrupt and beyond repair.

As well, right now, under capitalism, your politicians are bought and paid for by capitalists. Power is already being abused beyond control. Under a socialist system, it would be illegal to donate to politicians. Political campaigns would run within a short, standardized window of time, with equal funding, and commercials would be illegal, it would just be a platform of ideas and opinions. The people would vote for the person who best represents them, normal people.

This exist in Cuba, right now. It’s SO much harder to take power from a system that actually represents regular citizens, instead of a system that is bought and paid for by the highest bidder.

Capitalist citizens tend to do better because their private organizations & government are willing to oppress the people in other parts of the world in order to extract their wealth. Communists respect the lives of poor people and refuse to take advantage of that, or oppress them further.

If a capitalist nation is completely cut off from the rest of the world they become fascist very quickly (Germany, middle east, etc. etc.), when a communist nation is cut off from the rest of the world they become poor (Cuba, USSR, East Germany, etc. etc.).

I don’t think the argument of “I’m rich therefore I’m better than you” is really a strong one.

When all else is equal, life is better under communism for the vast majority of people, just not the wealthy people of capitalist nations. But even for the capitalist “middle class”, when it comes to the essentials (Food, water, housing, healthcare, equality among women, minorities, etc.), communists still beat capitalists.

Okay so I was going to type out a whole long thing debating each point individually. But now I feel like not only do we see more eye to eye than not, the point is getting really nuanced for a written discussion like this.

I don’t see it going that way, therefore, revolution is what it will take.

Suppose I agree to that. But a revolution requires a design of the force to make it reality, and a design of the system which it will install. Both very specific, as systems intended to work very reliably.

This is the only quote I want to respond to specifically. I actually think that based on this comment you understand my perspective. I want to make things better, and if I saw things getting better slowly, I would be convinced. But I’m not convinced, I see things going in the wrong direction.

In the end, every time we make progress as a society, we take five steps back somewhere else. Between my career, my partners career, the statistics I read about online, what people say in countries other than the united states, all I see are steps being taken in the wrong direction, by the people who are currently in charge (In America and other capitalist nations), who do not care about the needs of the regular person, and will not change their mind without being forced too.

In the end we can look at theory, and talk about the previous attempts at communism. The USSR and how they ran their government, China and how they run their government, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. We can learn from these countries experiments and we can try to improve on them if we want to make similar changes ourselves but without the disadvantages.

I will end this comment with this thought: Capitalism took a long time to become successful, there were many false starts and a significant amount of controversy during the transition. Life was not easy after capitalism started, and many people wanted to go back to Feudalism. Capitalism eventually became quite successful for the majority of people for a very long time, but as time grew on, we’ve started to see the limits of capitalist growths and we’re starting to see how this leads to monopolies and a preservation of power. Communism has a beginning, but I don’t believe we’re at the end.

It’s difficult for people. When Mao/Lenin/Stalin or even Marx are discussed they all go to the “takie” slur. Their brains turn off and all they can think about is their propaganda.

Everyone is so quick to write off the atrocities of the USA and Europe. Japanese internment camps, destruction of democracies and creation of fascists dictatorships. The funding of terrorists (before and after we called them terrorists), the destruction of the environment in pursuit of profits, child labor and slave labor also in pursuit of profits.

But damn, because communists took businesses away from their oppressors, they are just as bad as fascists. /Shrugs

People gotta read more books.

Not sure how you are defining them, but they are, and aren’t, the same. Socialism is a transitionary government to communism. It isnt the ‘exact’ same thing, but when a communist party is in charge, they create socialism, with goals to move towards communism.

Socialism is also a lot of things, but all those things are considered communist.

Democratic socialism is what Cuba has for example. Socialism run by a democracy.

Socialist democracy is what Sweden has, currently. It’s still capitalist, so is not communist at all, but regulates capitalism better than America and most of Europe does. They are slowly loosing the fight to Nazis though. Like literal Nazis, they call themselves nazis, That’s not a joke.

I’ve reconsidered my use of the term brainwashing. I think this explanation is a good one:

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

But yeah the bootlickers sure feels like they are brainwashed.

Sorry for another wall, there is a lot to discuss here.

let me start by saying that based on your response I actually think we have more in common than we don’t. We both believe that there are problems and society, but we may disagree on what causes them or how to fix them. Honestly this is better than what I was expecting, which is why I came out strong. I see a lot of people think that big corporations do nothing wrong and everybody is just being crybabies.

Furthermore, to defend why I believe capitalism is the source of these problems, requires talking about many nuanced topics that are all into related in complex systems. However, I don’t think my ideas are unique, and I don’t think they are hard to self-research. I’ll provide quick overviews as best as I can.

For example:

So a company is not fulfilling its obligations systematically, does not get sued sufficiently bad to stop, and you are blaming capitalism, not the judicial system, not lawmakers?

Ah, you bring up a great point. Why would we not blame lawmakers and the judicial system? Awesome, this really is a good point, let me explain.

Who makes the rules? Who decides the law? I’m not going to pretend to know all of the details. But it certainly isn’t you, or me. For now I’m going to chock it up to “politicians”, which in this case includes “lawmakers”. I know it’s more complicated than that, but this is a short post, not a ProPublica article.

Have you ever tried to sue a company for doing something wrong? First of all you are probably in a binding arbitration agreement if you are an employee. Even many of the services that you currently use, you have also implicitly agreed to a binding arbitration agreement. The law is stacked against you, we cannot sue these people with such a stacked deck against us.

The reason for this? Because those lawmakers allowed this to happen, because they are politicians are paid off by the corporations in the first place. Those corporations (as a “person” entity), and individuals, including but not limited to the billionaires, donate to big funds and super packs which get these politicians on the ballot and in front of the public in the first place.

Therefore, the people who are on the ballot, those that have commercials and other advertisements, have been backed by those companies willing to pay for those things. Therefore, those politicians, no matter who gets voted in, will support their real backers by backing laws that defend corporations, instead of defending you. And when corporations do break the law, they rarely get more than a slap on the wrist.

So what enables corporations and their very wealthy individuals to support this? Their massive profits. Capitalism incentivizes’ lots of profits and a high profit margin. Those profits go to the owners of the business, either in dividends or in stocks or in salary or bonuses. Either way, they get that money, not you. When the most successful companies are making the most profits, they are the ones that have the most power to buy off the politicians.

Therefore, capitalism is the source of dirty politicians, which is the source of dirty lawmakers, and a bad judicial system.

This is asking the five “whys” of why the system has a problem. If you only ask only one why question, you will say that these companies are corrupt because their leaders are corrupt. If you ask two why questions, you might find that the judicial system is broken or biased. But if you just keep asking the why question, if you keep following the money up the chain, you inevitably find the source of the problem is the profits generated by corporations. A system by which a few people make lots of profits off of the backs of many people, is called capitalism.

–

Okay some other minor points

So paying for union membership is fine, but paying for company membership, where you can make money, is not?

I didn’t say that…, I think union dues are a compromise. Unions help laborers, therefore sending money on union dues is “worth it”. More profits for a company just feed the rich. Union representatives aren’t rich. This is a different situation.

Also I’m very familiar with worker coops. They are also a compromise. If a company can make it work, great, but capitalism doesn’t reward an awesome self-starter group working together to make their jobs better, it rewards profits for the already rich. Therefore coops tends to perform ‘worse’, even if it’s just because of the rigged system around them. Outside the US, they seem to work better, inside the US, there’s a lot of difficulties with them.

It is very illegal, just like what Microsoft has been doing for half the 90s. And maybe 10 or 20 years from now, when Amazon is not that strong, it’s going to lose a suit without real repercussions, just like Microsoft.

Wage theft is illegal of course, I was referring to the “other” things (Paying less than you make for the company, paying less than a living wage, etc). I hope you didn’t copy that out of context on purpose 😉

And plain power, which is not capitalist as well, it’s just a fact of life

Capitalism is one group exerting power over another. You can’t live without a job, they have the jobs. This is power, money or no money. I also reject the notion that this is a fact of life. I think you should read about what socialism and communism really is, there are better ways.

You can’t just vote for making them weaker and expect that they’ll magically just do that.

Yup, you are correct and you’re hitting a core ML idea. You can’t vote people out, you can’t ask them to take their own power away. If so, we would be able to fix this system slowly (or even quickly) over time. I don’t see it going that way, therefore, revolution is what it will take.

Anyway, profits and competition and power and evil people exist, these are, again, facts of life. There’s no option to vote for ruling these out, and a vote can’t by itself make any radical change. So when you want something, consider how the balance of power would change, because that power won’t go away or be magically transferred to different people.

Similar to the same topic, but the idea of Socialism -> Communism is to remove the ability to gather power for the capitalist class. So long as laborers are in charge of the system, we can make change in the right direction. Start by getting rid of private enterprise, then accumulation of wealth is nearly impossible, then eventually you can provide, for free, the necessities of life, and eventually remove things like money, thus completely removing the majority of the possibility of holding power over someone else. There is no utopia, and socialists know this, but we can do better than what we have now, which is, in my opinion, just leaning into the power struggle and simply letting a few people hold authoritarian control over the population.

This means that more centralization means less checks on them, not the other way around. Many politicians promise this, but in reality the singular center never goes against power.

This depends highly on who is in charge. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I believe that, for example, if we remove private business (nuance here, coops and whatnot would exist, and without capitalism would work just fine), and we remove the ability to pay off politicians (Pretty much requires interrupting the system we have and starting over, IE: revolution), then we can have democracy based on real peoples opinion, and not the opinion of a handful of oligarchs. This isn’t just a made up theoretical example, this exists in Cuba today.

Dude obviously you are out of your league. Yes all profits are theft, you worked to make $100 profit for the company, they paid you $10, $90 is taken, it’s not hard. But even if you aren’t ready to learn about Marxism…

Walmart: Please, PLEASE defend the billionaires that own Wallmart… #1 in stealing wages, yes, wage theft, actual theft. Please look it up. Even not considering Marxist ideas, just plain old theft of wages. Their employees have to live on government handouts, IE: You are paying more in taxes because Wallmart won’t pay their employees a living wage… They’re stealing from you… Like, this isn’t hard.

Please use your brain. Bezos’ company bans their sellers from selling lower somewhere else, forcing a monopoly on low prices for Amazon. Those companies and people make less money… Like… C’mon, just because it isn’t illegal doesn’t mean it’s not theft. Also wage theft, Amazon commits massive wage theft…

Google steals your data.

Apple bans companies from repairing their products.

Oil companies literally cause problems in the middle east in order to control gas prices…

CEOs are making TONS of money off of… stealing… war… propaganda…

All of this creates more profits, and takes more money from you or their employees. Literally takes no effort to look this up. You are being contrarian for no reason. Or you are deliberately creating propaganda, because even if you don’t believe in Marxism, billionaires are still, easily, obviously, objectively, stealing…

Shit… Grow a conscious please… Prisons are supposed to be for rehabilitation, not slavery.

What an absolutely horrible mindset you must be in all the fucking time to think that someone deserves, at any point in time in their lifetime no matter what they’ve done, to be a fucking slave.

++1 TikTok is only political because Americans want to own everyone’s data exclusively.

You noted that the ballot box is the best way to do this, but that we also have to eat the rich. The big problem is that the ballot box is controlled by the rich. Both sides of the I’ll are paid off by corporate interests… And they don’t care about climate change…

The ONLY solution is to EAT THE RICH… The ballot box will actually be taken care of when corporations can’t pay off politicians anymore.

You’re missing the forest for the trees. Why do people drink Coke products? Well once upon a time they were filled with cocaine! But now they’re only filled with tons of sugar and caffeine, those are only the two most addictive legal substances besides tobacco and alcohol, which are simply more regulated than sugar and caffeine.

I’m not saying that people should not try to self-regulate drinking Coke. But I am saying that you will never, ever fix this problem by convincing individuals to drink less Coke. Especially since it’s not just about Cola, it’s about literally everything you do.

If you live in the suburbs, you absolutely have to use a car to get around. If you aren’t rich you cannot afford and ev, and if you want a cheap ev you won’t get much range or convenience (thought that is changing painfully slowly).

And you can’t live downtown if you have kids, or if you can’t afford the high rents or condo prices… so if you don’t have a lot of money, you then have to live in the poor run-down suburban neighborhood, which is a food desert. Now your only choices for food are Dollar general, Wallmart, or corner stores that have bars on the window because they are broken into so often.

Those people do not have a choice, they have to live in the world that they live in. In fact, we all do. Even having a choice to buy high quality products is a luxury.

The politicians on the ballot have all been given vast sums of money by organizations that sell you stuff. Politicians don’t have to listen to you, they have other priorities.

Can you find a company that is not greenwashing? But is actually trying to make sustainable change?

And does that company eventually get bought by one of these larger corporations that don’t give a shit?

Good luck voting with your wallet, you can spend a dozens and dozens of hours trying to find a clothing company that isn’t using child slavery… only for their use of child slavery to just be covered up really well, and actually they are the same as everyone else…

Could you completely avoid buying Coke products? Sure. But then again, you can’t control all of the restaurants that provide it by default, and it’s such a cheap product that it doesn’t require a lot of sales to be worth it.

Do you know what business idea doesn’t work so well? Creating products that cost more but are no better than any other products, but at least you aren’t using child slavery and environmentally destroying tactics! But then again, nobody can actually afford your product because most people are actually quite poor. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t by your stuff. So since your prices are going to be high anyway, you market to only rich people. But then again, most of those rich people don’t have the time or energy or even care about how green your product is, therefore it’s just bad business to spend more caring about how green your product is. Once you become a public company, nobody cares about anything except for your profits and stock price (usually based on your current or projected profits…). So… You ditch the green thing… There’s no incentive to be green, at all.

Trust me I’m trying, and it takes those dozens of hours to figure out that there’s even a problem like this, let along finding even 1 company or politician that isn’t contributing to the problem…

But… Being more green requires buying and using less things, which is bad for the economy. Unfortunately we cannot just switch to green energy, we have to drive less, consume less, etc.

And who do you think is going to push back on that? How about the people who sell us stuff…

And how much money do you have to donate to politicians? Because it’s probably not billions of dollars… but they have it, and they will use it.

I am not saying we should not try, but I am saying that we shouldn’t ask, we should demand, that things change. But when politicians won’t listen to you because of the fat stacks of cash stuffed in their ears… We will inevitably be closer to step 3, and if that happens, we’d better be organized and ready to build something better.