If you feel the need to take down capitalism then Tonight We Riot is out now

do not confuse 20th century soviet productivism (which was sort of relevant considering the recent rise of ecology) and 21st century eco-socialism.

Do not confuse antiquity's pseudo agrarianism with feudal post mortemnism, particularly the latter being a precursor for quantic seropositivism.

<snip>

Yes. Because communism doesn't work.


<snip>

It does in Democracy 3 if you pick China, Nationalise everything, 1 yr military service, relax arms ownership, ditch the surveillance, restrict the death penalty, ensure everyone legal representation, legalise marijuana(with a 75% tax rate),nationalized childcare, nationalized secondary education, universal healthcare, universal retirement care, free press/speech, allowed vices such as gambling, cigarettes alcohol etc, but were heavily taxed(to contribute to healthcare) and set infinite re-elections with 5 year terms :D

I got re-elected for 500 years lol :D

If you pick the US and try to convert it to socialism, you get assassinated in your second or 3rd term :)

It's a fun game to play if you like political sims.

Nazi Germany is a perfect example of pro-capitalist state. Just like China. And the fact that people associate socialism with them is just because they use word "socialism" to describe themselves. And people are like: "They call themselves socialist, then they must be socialist! I call myself cereal box, so it's obvious I'm cereal box! What don't you understand!?".

Nordic countries are one of the most socialist countries in first-world and everyone wants to be like them.

I don't understand how one can love USA and hate China. Those are very similar countries, even when comes to political system. In both countries you have group of people controlling country for decades. In China a party, in USA coalition of two parties. Don't you remember how Obama was advancing everything Bush did? He was supposed to be so much different he even got Nobel Peace Prize for being responsible for 600.000 civilian deaths on Middle East.

Yes. Because communism doesn't work.

It does in Democracy 3 .
(…)
If you pick the US and try to convert it to socialism, you get assassinated in your second or 3rd term

Man, exactly same with Poland! I'm creating perfect state, no hunger, no poverty, no jobless, no crime and technology development good like never before; and capitalists keep assassinating me every time I reach that state because I'm taking like 5% of their huge income (tax on mansions, etc.) and redistribute it.


Last edited by pskosinski on 10 May 2020 at 6:25 am UTC

...but it always boils down to one weak point and that is people itself.

... unless you believe that democracy doesn't work, which I very much don't agree with.

I am not sure you or I understand each other. I think democracy works wonders... because it basically limits the aspect of "people problem" that I mentioned, because nobody is allowed to have too much power. The system is designed to limit, slowdown and prevent any radical changes.

Meanwhile with socialism, where you have strong government you get that problem, because you are governed by people that inherently have more power thanks to stronger standing of the state. People with too much power = abuse of power.

Hang on a minute. Two problems with this.
First, democracy is not defined as a system that doesn't allow anybody to have too much power, nor as a system designed to limit, slow down or prevent radical changes. The United States defines its particular system as being based around "checks and balances", but this is in no way inherent to democracy. So for instance, in parliamentary systems, in a majority government situation the prime minister has powers which are very strong indeed, and could very well be capable of making sweeping changes quite quickly.
Democracy is defined as a system that allows the people to rule, directly or indirectly through representatives. If the majority of them agree about something, a system is democratic to the extent that it allows that to happen, not to the extent that it frustrates their will if their will happens to represent a change.

Second, you appear to be using a setup where "democracy" and "socialism" are these two separate and opposed things in the same broader category, like "hot" and "cold". This is very much a category error.
True, we have no currently existing examples of societies in which the ballot box brought socialism. But the ballot box has brought socialist parties to power which then began to implement their programme in a number of different countries. Spain in the 1930s, Chile in the 1970s, Nicaragua in the 1980s . . . so far, every time it has happened the government in question has been toppled by violence, but that does not make socialism something distinct from democracy. Socialism is not a form of government. Depending on your perspective, socialism is either a purely economic concept or it is an extension of democracy to the economic realm. In either case, as noted above if the majority of people happened to want to create socialism, democracy would involve delivering the will of the people, not frustrating it.

I'll try for a little clarity on what "socialism" actually is. Classically, what socialism is, is public, and specifically worker, ownership and control of all the firms which are currently for profit and owned by private individuals. Within that there has always been a centralization/decentralization split, with a continuum from Soviet-style communists at the very centralized end, thinking the state should own all the stuff on behalf of the workers and plan and organize it all for them, to social anarchists, thinking that everything should be owned directly by the people who work in firms (or work the land), and they should make all the decisions themselves at the grassroots level. We don't think about Anarchists much these days, but the Spanish Republic that was overthrown by Franco included Anarchists as perhaps the largest and, ironically, best organized group.
The question of how it gets decided (democratically, by a dictator, by an oligarchy, by a theocracy etc) whether an economy is run by and for private profit, government paternalism, or popular empowerment is theoretically orthogonal to which decision gets made.

A system that's built upon eternal growth in an environment that only has limited resources doesn't sound very future proof to me.

That is not what capitalism is. When you boil it down, all capitalism means is you can own your own business and invest your money however you want. Even Richard Stallman had to make it clear he wasn't against capitalism as such on several occasions when capitalism was blamed for the problem of proprietary software.

That might not be what capitalism is, but it is how capitalism works. It's kind of like the distinction between life and evolution--evolution isn't what life is, but it is what will happen if there is life.
The basis of capitalism is investment and profit. Private individuals with money invest it in hopes of making a profit. If they do make a profit, they have more money ("capital", hence capitalism) and can invest more. Now at this point we can see a sort of evolution working within capitalism: Say you have various private individuals. Some of them invest money and make profit for a while, decide they have enough, and start just living on the surplus and continuing to reinvest the same amount, entering a steady state where their capital, and the bit of the economy they own, does not grow. Others continue to reinvest, growing their capital continually. Which group dominates the capitalist economy? Which group ends up buying the other group out? Yes, that's right, it's the ones who kept growing their investment.

Thus, growth is inevitable in a capitalist system. This is true no matter what Richard Stallman might believe on the topic.

Now up to a point, growth is not a bad thing. It is capitalism's spurring of dynamic growth that caused it to overtake various previous systems, to rapidly develop technology, and to generate a great deal of wealth. Right now, though, it's kind of a problem.

Marx made certain hypotheses about human history and from there, human nature, which turned out to be wrong. That is why communism doesn't work.
And It has never been "tried" because it runs counter to basic human evolutionary psychology.

The basis of, perhaps not upper level academic capitalist economics, but the capitalist economics that people get taught in ECON 101 and is echoed in editorials and political parties, is the efficient market hypothesis more or less as seen in neoclassical Walrasian economics.
It assumes all human beings are completely selfish maximizers who can efficiently calculate the most effective way to maximize their wealth, have perfect information, and value gains and losses as equal. This "Homo Economicus" is the basis of most capitalist economics. It obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with actual human nature or evolutionary psychology. So if false ideas about human nature make a system not work, I guess capitalism must really not work, and if they cause it not to be tried, I guess capitalism has never been tried.

Is the current system in the west perfect? No. But at least capitalism is somewhat self-aware that it's playing on human foibles. Communism is basically a secular religion. You have a fallen state, a state of perfection and a means to get from A to B. The problem is that it's based on a fauls idea about what people need to be happy.

Ah yes, of course, while capitalism is based on the truth, that what people need to be happy is as many crappy clothes from malls as possible.

As for socialism, it ironically has the same problem as what many people like to throw at capitalism: Every generation needs to chip in more resources into the system than the one before it. Elsewise, it cannot sustain itself. Or at the very least, it can't cover everyone of retirement age. Hence many of the problems socialist countries are facing now with their aging populations.

Huh?
First, socialist countries aren't facing any problems now because there aren't any socialist countries. There are some economies that are more mixed, but I don't see any signs that they're having bigger problems with taking care of their elderly than the more pure capitalist ones, unless you define "not letting them die in squalor" as a "problem".
I have seen a lot of articles talking about demographic time bombs and how supposedly we aren't going to have enough young people to take care of all the older ones. I've seen a whole lot of others about how the sky is falling because automation is going to take everyone's jobs and we'll all be unemployed. Well. It can't be both.
The fact is that productivity has grown faster than the proportion of dependent elderly in the population, so we can in fact spare more people to take care of them than we once could, and in the long term it's a temporary demographic bulge anyway.

This "Homo Economicus" is the basis of most capitalist economics. It obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with actual human nature or evolutionary psychology.

I read about a study where indeed some people acted like "Homo Economicus". However, this kind of actors "demonstrate psychopathic traits". So I, while being a noob when it comes to economics, agree that the market should not be based on this kind of model.

You can read it up here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterubel/2014/12/15/is-homo-economicus-a-psychopath/

I am not sure you or I understand each other. I think democracy works wonders... because it basically limits the aspect of "people problem" that I mentioned, because nobody is allowed to have too much power. The system is designed to limit, slowdown and prevent any radical changes.

Meanwhile with socialism, where you have strong government you get that problem, because you are governed by people that inherently have more power thanks to stronger standing of the state. People with too much power = abuse of power.

The other side of that coin is that when stuff happens and something needs to be done about it, democracy can be slow to react. Take the Covid situation here in EU. Essentially, Italy had to take the punch for most governments to stop just bickering about the issue and start doing something about it.

Yes. Because communism doesn't work.

How do you know if they've never tried it, all "Communist" states people know of has all been dictatorships and according to Karl Marx himself, Communism and Democracy is inseparable, you need both. There are "Communist" governments still today who operate under democratic systems and those nations are all fine, Nepal and Mongolia to mention two.

Capitalism is great in that it drives progress in all fields as everyone strives to compete with each other

That's the description for a Market Economy, not Capitalism, they are two completely different things. You can have a Market Economy without Capitalism (Yugoslavia during Tito managed to do it and so did CNT-FAI during the Spanish Civil War), basically remove the whole system of stock-ownership and you're about 80% there, the remaining 20% is making sure you construct a system where workers own the companies they work for/at, if you work in a factory then you're a part-owner of said factory, such companies exists all over the world already and they work. Here in Sweden (where i live) our bigest store chain, Coop, is such a collective and we have many others. In Spain (which i mentioned before) there is a multi-sided company called 'Mondragon' which is also such a company, they all prove it's possible.

A system that's built upon eternal growth in an environment that only has limited resources doesn't sound very future proof to me.

That's the root of the problem with capitalism right there! Constant growth is not achievable nor practical if you want to keep the world from collapsing due to getting all it's resources sucked out. This is also what differentiates Capitalism from just a "Market Economy" a ME does not require constant growth, capitalism on the other hand, does.

So yeah.. never thought I'd write something political on this page but hey.. sometimes the world surprises you!

\

Marx made certain hypotheses about human history and from there, human nature, which turned out to be wrong. That is why communism doesn't work. And It has never been "tried" because it runs counter to basic human evolutionary psychology.

Is the current system in the west perfect? No. But at least capitalism is somewhat self-aware that it's playing on human foibles. Communism is basically a secular religion. You have a fallen state, a state of perfection and a means to get from A to B. The problem is that it's based on a fauls idea about what people need to be happy.

As for socialism, it ironically has the same problem as what many people like to throw at capitalism: Every generation needs to chip in more resources into the system than the one before it. Elsewise, it cannot sustain itself. Or at the very least, it can't cover everyone of retirement age. Hence many of the problems socialist countries are facing now with their aging populations.

What do you base that on? Every time i hear someone claiming "Socialism does not work because human nature" I've never got a good explanation to what you mean by that. If you, like many others I've talked to based the whole argument on "People are naturally greedy" then you're taking for granted that you cant be greedy in a communist society, which is wrong, you can still be greedy in such a society, and yes you can still own property in a communist society, the only difference between a Communistic and Capitalistic society (idealogical) is that you're not allowed to earn money on other peoples labour and that Private Property has been made illegal in the Communist one, while still retaining the right to Personal Property such as You're house, you're TV, you're computer, You're car.

Now you might be saying, "Then why didn't it look like that in the Soviet Union?" And that is a valid question, It's because the Soviet Union was an authoritarian dictatorship, just like China and all the other Soviet inspired dictatorships and that's not something that went unnoticed, in the very early days of the Union almost every Socialist and Communist movement in the West criticised the Soviet Union, which again is something most outside critics completely ignore and instead chose to lump all socialists and communists into one big bag despite us all being VERY different from each other, check out critics such as Rosa Luxembourg, Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, Stepan Maximovich Petrichenko, Amadeo Bordiga and Herman Gorter and many other great critics from that time


Last edited by Mumrik93 on 10 May 2020 at 1:45 pm UTC

[quote=LungDrago]

to stop just bickering about the issue and start doing something about it.

And you think that putting people in house arrest is "doing something about it" ?
Open borders and, in the case of Italy, 300.000 Chinese immigrants is recipe for catastrophe.
What brought us here was too much government; only the fall of these so-called social democracies and the return to healthy individualism will return Europe to its former glory.

Open borders and, in the case of Italy, 300.000 Chinese immigrants is recipe for catastrophe.
What brought us here was too much government; only the fall of these so-called social democracies and the return to healthy individualism will return Europe to its former glory.

I'm not sure you can realistically close borders effectively enough to stop a virus from spreading. So, I don't mean "doing something about it" as preventing an outbreak from happening, I meant it mostly as being prepared for it when it inevitably happens. Which we weren't. We were required to wear respirators even though there were no such respirators available for quite a while. We were caught with our pants down even though it has been coming our way for a long time.

the return to healthy individualism will return Europe to its former glory.

Can you be more specific? At what point in history exactly was Europe a better place to live? Just curious.

Or do you perhaps mean something else when you say "former glory"?

Can you be more specific? At what point in history exactly was Europe a better place to live? Just curious.

1914 was a watershed.
After that governments never stopped absorbing more and more power, never let a crisis go to waste. We were finally left with crumbs of our former liberties, in exchange for sclerotic leviathans we call States, EU on top as a rotten cherry.
Now they're taking away even the crumbs, in the name of health security.
I pray for all to crumble back to that August, when Governments were small and people free to decide for themselves.

And you think that putting people in house arrest is "doing something about it" ?
Open borders and, in the case of Italy, 300.000 Chinese immigrants is recipe for catastrophe.
What brought us here was too much government; only the fall of these so-called social democracies and the return to healthy individualism will return Europe to its former glory.

Are you proposing 300k Chinese just happened to immigrate to Italy carrying COVID-19? Because I'm quite sure that is not the case. If you really want to restrict any disease from hopping from one country to another you need to totally isolate that country, meaning absolutely no travel, immigrant or otherwise. Immigration was not the issue here.

Also, yeah, putting people into "house arrest" is "doing something about it", since people won't flood the hospital capacity and leave tons of people to die in the streets.

Can you be more specific? At what point in history exactly was Europe a better place to live? Just curious.

1914 was a watershed.
After that governments never stopped absorbing more and more power, never let a crisis go to waste. We were finally left with crumbs of our former liberties, in exchange for sclerotic leviathans we call States, EU on top as a rotten cherry.
Now they're taking away even the crumbs, in the name of health security.
I pray for all to crumble back to that August, when Governments were small and people free to decide for themselves.

This I find extremely funny. It's not like in 1914 extremely powerful, centrally lead global superpowers existed. Even better, those superpowers usually had some kind of a king in control to whom your average individual was but an ant. And these kings had a nasty tendency to send these average individuals to fight each other in pointless wars. But I suppose since they never were encouraged to stay home for a few months in order to stop hospitals from overflowing, they must have had it so much better than us.

Socialism is a cancer to all who are motivated and self-sufficient. Their talents and productivity is harnessed against their will with the threat of force and/or imprisonment for noncompliance. Can't wait to live in a police state.

Can you be more specific? At what point in history exactly was Europe a better place to live? Just curious.

1914 was a watershed.
After that governments never stopped absorbing more and more power, never let a crisis go to waste. We were finally left with crumbs of our former liberties, in exchange for sclerotic leviathans we call States, EU on top as a rotten cherry.
Now they're taking away even the crumbs, in the name of health security.
I pray for all to crumble back to that August, when Governments were small and people free to decide for themselves.

Ah, the glory days back when European empires were still free to exploit their colonies, women could not vote, the majority of people were servants, peasant farm workers or factory workers who had no rights to speak of, and so on. Oh and my own country was still a few years away from winning its independence, but I guess your definition of Europe is quite specific and excludes large parts of it.

Sorry for being a bit meta now:

I must say, this thread has greatly restored my faith in humanity.
With a few exceptions people here manage to discuss such a sensitive topic in a very civil way, backed by historic arguments. I can find a lot of points I agree on with all sides in this discussion (with the aforementioned exceptions...).

That's something quite rare on the internet today. On most forums people just yell at each other, or make claims not backed by any actual data.

Thanks a lot, it is a pleasure following this discussion.

Rents are modern slavery. Shelter is a basic human right. No more proof needed than seeing workers ordered to stay at home, and unable to obtain a paycheck. Watch the capitalists defend their compensation at the cost of human suffering.

I am not sure you or I understand each other. I think democracy works wonders... because it basically limits the aspect of "people problem" that I mentioned, because nobody is allowed to have too much power. The system is designed to limit, slowdown and prevent any radical changes.

Meanwhile with socialism, where you have strong government you get that problem, because you are governed by people that inherently have more power thanks to stronger standing of the state. People with too much power = abuse of power.

The other side of that coin is that when stuff happens and something needs to be done about it, democracy can be slow to react. Take the Covid situation here in EU. Essentially, Italy had to take the punch for most governments to stop just bickering about the issue and start doing something about it.

The whole Covid situation in Europe is often misconstructed as EU acting late or not doing anything. EU has its limited competency and countries healthcare systems are not part of it, critics often like to bash EU for not doing anything or the opposite accusing them of overstepping their competency. Solving the Covid situation is national problem, so EU really has no say in here. Problem of Italy is that they have oldest population in Europe and they have lower amount of ventilators per capita than other countries. Italy is not a victim that got left behind by bureaucrats in Brussels. Nobody knew what to expect and they were the first that got hit hard, but not the only one (Spain for example).

What EU did and did it well was rescuing citizen from abroad that got stuck thanks to travel bans. What EU can do is to prepare some more coordinated effort in the future, but till then it is up to the countries themselves and that is not EU fault. This whole situation is unprecedented and makes sense there was no master plan for it. No country in the world, democratic or not really knew what to expect and how to prepare themselves. If anybody claims they have the answer (if only they had the power) they are most likely lying, there is no simple solution here. Lot of countries in EU solved the Covid situation fine though.

If anything I would say the migration crisis in 2015 was more of an example where we saw problems of such nature, but even that is not that simple, because it was Germany that initiated that whole mess with invitation and then acted surprised when other countries refused to participate. That whole issue is more political than anything else, because the solutions are already on the table.

Marx made certain hypotheses about human history and from there, human nature, which turned out to be wrong. That is why communism doesn't work.
And It has never been "tried" because it runs counter to basic human evolutionary psychology.

The basis of, perhaps not upper level academic capitalist economics, but the capitalist economics that people get taught in ECON 101 and is echoed in editorials and political parties, is the efficient market hypothesis more or less as seen in neoclassical Walrasian economics.
It assumes all human beings are completely selfish maximizers who can efficiently calculate the most effective way to maximize their wealth, have perfect information, and value gains and losses as equal. This "Homo Economicus" is the basis of most capitalist economics. It obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with actual human nature or evolutionary psychology. So if false ideas about human nature make a system not work, I guess capitalism must really not work, and if they cause it not to be tried, I guess capitalism has never been tried.

Is the current system in the west perfect? No. But at least capitalism is somewhat self-aware that it's playing on human foibles. Communism is basically a secular religion. You have a fallen state, a state of perfection and a means to get from A to B. The problem is that it's based on a fauls idea about what people need to be happy.

Ah yes, of course, while capitalism is based on the truth, that what people need to be happy is as many crappy clothes from malls as possible.

As for socialism, it ironically has the same problem as what many people like to throw at capitalism: Every generation needs to chip in more resources into the system than the one before it. Elsewise, it cannot sustain itself. Or at the very least, it can't cover everyone of retirement age. Hence many of the problems socialist countries are facing now with their aging populations.

Huh?
First, socialist countries aren't facing any problems now because there aren't any socialist countries. There are some economies that are more mixed, but I don't see any signs that they're having bigger problems with taking care of their elderly than the more pure capitalist ones, unless you define "not letting them die in squalor" as a "problem".
I have seen a lot of articles talking about demographic time bombs and how supposedly we aren't going to have enough young people to take care of all the older ones. I've seen a whole lot of others about how the sky is falling because automation is going to take everyone's jobs and we'll all be unemployed. Well. It can't be both.
The fact is that productivity has grown faster than the proportion of dependent elderly in the population, so we can in fact spare more people to take care of them than we once could, and in the long term it's a temporary demographic bulge anyway.

You seem to be taking all of this quite personally. If you think a person can own their own business and invest their money and assets however they wish, then you don't have a problem with capitalism. Corporatism, sure. And the bigger problem of automation is that most people NEED to work to be happy. Nevermind just making a living, there is the matter of their mental wellbeing.

>there are no Socialist contries

Mhm, if you say so.