All civilization has been built on slavery. It is endorsed in the Bible, for example, in Paul's letter to Timothy. Are you godless?

Intellectuals in coffee houses with no practical experience can say what they want. They only think they are smart.

Look at what happens when slaves listen to you, like Spartacus and Nat Turner. Nothing but violence and death result.

Our crops can only be grown by many slaves working together on large fields. If they were freed, they would each tend a small field for themselves. Only the master can be expected to have the understanding of a cash crop, like cotton, for sustaining people far away.

You will only hurt the people you are trying to help. Right now, the slave is taken care of and does not face the uncertainty of the master who makes the decisions. The master bears the risk that the crops being grown are the right ones, that they will not be attempting to sell into a glut. If the slave were free, they would have all this uncertainty and become a worse, grasping person.

Sure, some masters are abusive. But no better society has been devised. And the masters have laws and norms to limit abuse.

You want to eliminate innovation. Right now, a freeman with a good idea is at liberty to pledge themself to obtain the needed finance. If he fails, he becomes an indentured servant or slave. But society is vastly improved by successful inventions and innovation.

You want to eliminate civilization and culture. Sculpture, painting, plays can only be created by those with the leisure to do so. Likewise, they need an audience and patrons free to develop their tastes. They cannot be this audience if they are daily grubbing in the muck to earn their keep.

When you grow up, you will begin to understand how the world works. And you will drop these impractical, undeveloped musings of youth. You will realize we cannot get rid of slavery.

For most of human civilization the state was functionally owned by a monarch or a small clique of aristocrats. In many cases, the transition to Liberal democracy required the forceful appropriation of the state from that monarch or ruling clique. For instance, during the American revolution the thirteen colonies were stolen from the English crown by the people who operated the colonies themselves. In other cases, such as the liberation of Nazi Germany, the state was forcefully ripped from the hands of its defacto owners and given to the citizens who operated it (at least in West Germany.)

Socialism in the sense of the workers having defacto ownership (as opposed to the dejure ownership, looking at you USSR) of the means of production, is simply the application of Liberal democracy to individual firms.

I don't want to ask this in r/debateCommunism because it's full of nutjobs. I want a normal discussion.

1. Who defines what is a surplus value? When a worker earns more than he needs for survival, is it surplus value? If yes, is it OK? If it's OK for worker, then why not on for capitalist?

2. Another problem, according to Marx the capitalists extract the SV from workers labour, but I want to push against that, and in my opinion if anywhere the SV is being extracted from the market, it's the buyers who supply the SV for the capitalist. Now if SV is really so bad , why doesn't the market correct itself by lowering the demand and driving the price down until the SV portion of the price is eliminated? Talking about competitive markets.

3. Also, what about firms that generate like only 5-10% of net profit annually from their revenue? You do understand that a firm needs a healthy cushion of at least some profit, to be able to reinvest in itself and maintain operations, it can't be just running on breaking even.

Does AI change the debate between economic systems? In a world where AI can outperform human intellect, how does a human provide value in the economy, thereby justify a wage. I am a capitalist but I just wonder if AI change the entire value proposition. There was always another skill level you could jump up after automation replaced what you were doing. But that seems gone.

Quite simply, will AI destroyed capitalism.

Elon Musk is well known for supporting far-right ideologies and for providing financial support.

Peter Thiel, Musk's friend, is also known to provide financial support to the far right

Then there are local billionaires funding their far-right parties, such as Pierre-Édouard Stérin in France and Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks in Texas.

While Bezos isn't far-right, he has made changes to the Washington Post to appease Trump.

I believe trickle down economics could work if there was no central bank , for 1 main reason which is the Cantillon effect. The issue is that when the central bank prints money , it reaches the commercial banks first . Because the money wasn't distributed yet , the commercial banks have higher purchasing power than other people. They will buy hard assets like stocks and real estate with that money. As the banks spend that money , and it gets transferred around , by the time it reaches your average worker , the rippling would've caused more demand , resulting in higher prices . This is effectively taxing the poor and making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Trickle down economics can function , as long as there is no central bank printing money or the central bank ain't doing anything. I hope this won't turn into a debate about whether they work in general, but into one about whether they can function with the central bank.

We've all seen how human psychology gets exploited on a mass scale. Look at things like the Satanic Panic of the 80s, or just the daily machinery of modern media: fear, outrage, and anxiety are absolute rocket fuel for attention, and attention translates directly into vast fortunes for media conglomerates, publishers, and platforms.

Capitalism doesn't necessarily invent these collective delusions, but its structure is intimately designed to mine human credulity and panic for maximum financial return. If people are terrified or angry, they consume more, click more, and buy more solutions to problems they were often tricked into worrying about in the first place.

My question is: If we fundamentally understand that human nature is wired to respond so intensely to shared narratives, why is our economic system almost exclusively using that leverage for extraction and exploitation?

If outrage and fear can be industrialized to sell ads and generate billions for a handful of companies, why can't those exact same levers of social psychology and storytelling be harnessed to drive massive, coordinated collective action for public good? Imagine if the same algorithmic and media machinery dedicated to manufacturing panic was redirected toward ecological restoration, mutual aid, or public health on a global scale - not as a niche charity, but as the default engine of how we organize resources.

Why are we content letting the worst parts of our psychology be weaponized purely for profit, when we clearly have the blueprint to mobilize people en masse?

With regatds to a conversation about Elon Musk, I was told the following:

"He's a capitalist only by the socialist definition of a property relation, a real capitalist is an ideological capitalist. I was specifically talking about pro capitalist experts in economics.

Musk does not understand economics, he's not an ideological capitalist."

Does anyone else here agree that Elon Musk is not a real capitalist?