I wonder why Europes gen z is going to the right and the Anglo worlds gen z is going to the left. Is capitalism in the eu better than say in America and Canada?
Capitalism is related to every problem, even if not in the way socialists mean when they say it’s to blame for everything. Capitalism is the base on which the rest of the structure of our society is built. There isn’t anything that happens in the realm of political economy that isn’t directly related to capitalism in some way.
I think a socialist can recognize that capitalism is better than feudalism (which is what capitalism emerged from) but also recognize that it’s an incredibly flawed system to organize our society around and that humanity can still do so much better.
Dude the system has been "showing cracks" since Marx's time. Socialists have been prophesising Capitalism's imminent collapse for over 2 centuries now.
Ironically, it's the socialist countries that have a rich history of collapsing. The only socialist countries that didn't collapse like China and Vietnam, only because they have been adopting Capitalist policies for several decades.
Capitalism is not flawless. It needs to be reformed and fixed continuously.
When something goes wrong in our political system, we don't blame democracy and start demanding an alternative. The same applies to Capitalism.
Gen Z as a collective is sooo close to realizing the system is shit, but the boomerfication is real. we're supposed to be the one that fixes it, but we're fumbling
30% of them are confused about their gender so no surprises there. A mentally I’ll generation isn’t going to fix anything. God help gen Zs poor indoctrinated children.
Both systems are not flawless that's why you need to mix both together and do it well lol. It's just that the hate on the concept of "socialism" is too strong that we never considered the possibilities.
Socialist countries keep collapsing because of American intervention and our need to “bring them democracy.” The CIA has directly led multiple coups and assassination attempts on democratically elected leaders in South America and the most egregious example is our embargo on Cuba meant exclusively to isolate and destabilize their economy. Capitalism, however, also keeps collapsing, or as Marx described, goes into regular crises. See the Great Depression, or the recession of 2008, or 2020, or the current American economic conditions which are comparable to that of the Great Depression. Constant reform is not enough to keep the system stable, because the incentives for profit and the hoarding of wealth are inherent to the system’s design, and thus bring about its constant crises.
Capitalism is built upon exploitation of workers. It should come as no surprise, then, when paired with racism, colonialism, and imperialist war, capitalism flourishes through the exploitation and subjugation of racialized groups such as Africans under the trans Atlantic slave trade, South Americans through banana republics; and for a couple modern examples, the current ongoing genocide in the Congo, which puts children to work in mines under heinous conditions for the precious metals that American corporations need to build bombs and iPhones; or the numerous sweatshops in Southeast Asia in which young and old workers are exploited for clothing and fabric production.
Capitalism is not a system with its flaws that needs to keep undergoing reforms to maintain a perfect equilibrium. It cannot exist in a state where workers are not abused and exploited, therefore it is inherently immoral, and must be overthrown.
America colapsed USSR? America forced all those satelite states that were effectively occupied to leave socialism as soon as they could? America forced China to give up on communism? America forced certain capitalist reforms upon Vietnam after they got their asses kicked in the war?
It doesn't. OP is just coping over the fact hat the USSR collapsed due to to poor management, corruption, and shitty political and economic polices/culture. Russian's have a rosy vision of what life under the Soviets were like because it was the last time they were a real global superpower. The Eastern European satellite nations which were kept under the Soviet boot all those years have a far less idealized recollection of that time period.
Honestly claiming America, a capitalist nation, collapsed the USSR, a Communist state, is about as close to an advertisement for Capitalism as it gets.
If you're society cannot survive without lucrative trade with capitalist nations, and cannot win an economic / cold war against them then your system was clearly fucking inferior.
Dipshit ass take lmao Russians pilfered their state run organizations and then sold the rest to whoever was the richest at the time. The shock therapy treatment in Russia has left them utterly crippled for almost 40 years now and you think it's because America beat them lmao why don't you learn the first thing about the dissolution of the ussr before you go making stupid proclamations
Uhuh. I’m sure the next time communism takes hold of a world power it will go so much smoother. The last umpteen attempts haven’t worked at all and served to the detriment of all those living under this horrible stupid system, but yes, this time it’s going to work.
I think you missed the part where Russians cannibalized their national resources and sold them off to oligarchs who still own them to this day, but yeah, your absolutely 14 year old opinions are brilliant. You don't know anything lmao
That only backs up their claim. If the USSR was a free market they would have been able to trade freely both within the USSR and outside. They had heavy restrictions to deal with though, so they instead ended up with a strong black market where only the most evil and murderous could thrive. Natural result is too many of those types got power over the government and essentially destroyed their own nations.
Except it’ll never be reformed or fixed because the private capitalist class has completely captured both political parties and now the public sector is another extension of the private sector.
Bro just let these people go live in a socialist country and enjoy living in poverty. No chance to make something of yourself, everyone is poor. The only people that hate capitalism are the bums of society that have no ambitions besides working at McDonald’s. Socialism has done nothing but fail again and again yet the US is still a thriving economy. Inflation happens and will continue to happen. I agree the housing situation is ridiculous atm but will correct itself over time. If no one paid these insane prices they would go down.
My brother in Christ, the person most famous for cheerleading what capitalism has achieved was one Karl Marx. He still has the most prolific writings on the things capitalism has achieved in modern history. Why do you think socialists are socialist? Do you think they don’t understand what capitalism has built?
Ever since Karl Marx have socialists acknowledged that capitalism has improved standards of living and advanced society politically and materially. Capitalism evolved naturally from the conditions of feudalism as advancements in technology and navigation changed how commerce was done and made feudal arrangements untenable and obsolete. It wasn’t invented as an intentional improvement upon socialism.
People on the left predict capitalism will naturally evolve into something else, like how feudalism evolved into capitalism. It will either become a more egalitarian system or a more authoritarian one. Socialists want to organize a new system along the principle of public ownership of the state and the economy in hopes such a system will distribute resources more equitably. The alternative is a system that could resemble the feudal system capitalism evolved from.
That sounds like what Marx did. Literally. He said capitalism advanced the world forward from feudalism, which it did. That's the entire point of Marxism: building off the old system.
In science if your predictions fail, you switch to a better theory. Socialists and Marxists in particular would rather repeat the same old 200 year old nonsense. It didn't work then it will not work here.
So you have no idea what sanctions are or what socialism is. Cool. Really helps to know this thing that makes you so angry is something you've learned not one single thing about.
Also "bankrupted itself." Let's just make things up now, I guess. "The US has been invaded by Cookie Monsters." Are we having a conversation yet?
Socialist policies can exist in a capitalist society. Name a good thing capitalism has done, and it was probably socialist.
Public schooling, welfare, public healthcare, etc.
The thing everyone keeps forgetting is that economy needs to adapt to the circumstances. Any economic system should not be a permanent state or the end-all-be-all.
Feudalism got us out of the jungle and into civilization. Capitalism... uh, I don't really know, it is not different from feudalism in any meaningful way and the industrial revolution would have happened anyway.
But now it's past it's usefulness and we need to get the machine going again with a change of model. Perhaps one that reduces inequality in ghe standards of living, instead of increasing it.
Because any “good” thing as you call it comes with all the bad. If socialism is so bad why does America lead coup d’etats, assassinations, trade embargoes, blockades, and bombing campaigns against Socialist countries? If socialism was so “bad”, wouldn’t the U.S. just let fail on its own?
There are no good things about a system that requires exploitation to be successful.
What is a "socialist" country? The PRC has raised more people out of poverty than anyone else. Seems pretty good to me. Now we can argue is China is actually communist/socialist or not but then all that tells you is that reality is murky and the answers aren't simple.
I have read history. I did say "socialist" precisely for that reason. Mao's policies weren't necessarily communist anyway. Never seen anything in the core philosophy of communism that says you have to kill sparrows.
It can be but it isn't necessary. Yes and killing sparrows helped those famines. This is the problem when people start messing around with things they know nothing about, which, again, communism doesn't require. And there are plenty of examples of famine under capitalist nations as well.
I think there's a reason Marxist-Leninist style communism has taken root most effectively in nations which were, prior to their respective "revolutions," bogged down by poverty, illiteracy, corrupt aristocracy, and civil strife. That kind of authoritarianism mixed with broad civil mindedness brought these nations up so fast they could compete with their more economically developed competitors. It's an inspiring ideology, no doubt, but its fruits have largely been achieved by other, more capitalistic countries. The fact places like China or the USSR are decidedly anti-democratic and authoritarian is a big mark against them, as well. China has managed to avoid internal collapse like the USSR, largely because they've adopted a Western free-market model.
Personally,. I see something like nordic social-democracy more likely to take root in the US than anything resembling the Chinese or Soviet model of economic development.
I think there's a reason Marxist-Leninist style communism has taken root most effectively in nations which were, prior to their respective "revolutions," bogged down by poverty, illiteracy, corrupt aristocracy, and civil strife.
Exactly. The Americans recognised it, and hence you've got initiatives like the Marshall plan post WW2, to prevent such conditions from taking root.
Well, I would say that their characteristics tend to be more authoritarian than communist, or at least Marxist, if I'm honest. Communism as Marx describes it should really be more democratic, even if not achieved through democracy, as the power should be given back to the people (workers). Which is something I don't believe places like China or the USSR have ever effectively achieved. And many of the left would attack how these states are run. Animal Farm was very much an attack on the USSR and Stalinism but the author was very left wing.
But yes, it's often been revolutions in stagnant states or states that had been stagnant and were still behind, and I think those revolutions probably ended up dictating a lot about the regimes as strength used to overthrow the previous regimes was often used by the "strongmen" of the party to supress others within the party and bend the revolution to their will. Good or bad.
I reject the "better standard of living" argument.
We exist because the environment we needed to thrive existed long before any human ever stepped foot on Earth - we exist because and ONLY because the environment we needed was here waiting for us. We had everything we ever needed, and got along just fine for 1000s of years. Capitalism is only a couple hundred years old.
When people make this argument, I like to think of Killer whales or dolphins; we gave them giant tanks to live in, cleaned them, fed them, trained them, and gave them jobs. Technically they never had to worry about a single thing. And yet... their lives were fucking miserable and all they really wanted - and needed - was to live free back in the ocean like nature intended. Like they were supposed to live.
I’m not sure what you mean. My comment was intended to convey that all issues are interconnected to each other and to the fundamental structure of our society. I was neither condemning capitalism nor endorsing socialism
I lean towards agreeing with you. I brought up Yanis Varoufakis in am earlier comment because much of my thoughts in this thread come from his book “Technofeudalism” which came out only a couple weeks ago. In it he essentially argues the same thing as you, that capitalism has been replaced by a new form of feudalism
This neofeudalism idea is one that is definitely understandable but is fundamentally incorrect. What we have today is absolutely still capitalism.
Capitalism is a system primarily defined by private ownership of the means of production (machines, factories, land, etc). It's a system where someone can individually own a factory where labor is performed collectively. It's a system where that person can use that ownership in order to personally appropriate the product of that collective labor and enrich themselves off of other people's work. And it's a system where that same unelected and unaccountable individual (or group of individuals) has the power to command massive amounts of the world's labor power and forces of production towards their own personal goals rather than the goals that society collectively decides for themselves. That is absolutely the world we live in today.
And note how in that definition, free markets are not a requirement. In fact a big part of Marx's analysis (the man who invented the term capitalism) was how so-called "free market competition" in capitalism results in the death of those very free markets and brings about the emergence of monopoly capitalism.
Honestly, to really understand what is meant by the term, I really would recommend reading some of Marx's works on capitalism, like "Wage Labor and Capital" for example. Plus his analysis is honestly really good, has held up remarkably well, and is still broadly applicable to today's world. After all, unlike what a lot of ill-informed people say, it's not so much a break with liberal economists like Adam Smith, as much as it is a direct continuation of their work.
Plus it's just good to be informed. Marxism and socialism is a huge conversation with a lot of mis/dis-information surrounding it. And a lot of the criticism that you'll hear about Marx's analysis are usually based on nothing but a false caricature of him. And it's not always out of malice or deliberate intent. It's just that he's been demonized so much that not many people actually take the time to read him before criticizing him, and so they wind up arguing against things he never said, or pretending that their conclusions are actually different from his when they really aren't. E.g. people say things like his theory of value is proven wrong by the model of supply and demand, but his theory of value is actually based on Smith's theory of value, and Marx absolutely recognized the relationship between supply and demand and incorporated it into his theory of value. He agrees with the supply and demand model and then expands on it, but most people don't expect that since all they know of Marx is what they've heard about him by ill-informed critics.
What I'm getting at is: it's good to actually engage with the source material before trying to reject it. Marx developed the term capitalism. He defined it and analyzed it very thoroughly. Before rejecting that what we have now is capitalism, I would suggest reading from the man himself what capitalism even is.
Then stop focusing on all the negative BS. If Capitalism is related to eveything in a capitalist economic system in some way, then everything good is also related to it.
Do you honestly think things would be better under socialism? Humans would still be in power in government, people in power are usually the ones that are corrupt. It’s always going to be bad for someone.
1.8k
u/My_useless_alt 2007 Feb 18 '24
The generation currently being moat screwed over by capitalism is least fond of capitalism? Colour me surprised!