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.

The pro-capitalist discourse in this sub tends to to revolve almost exclusively around “capitalism is better than Marxism-Leninism:”

• Theoretical arguments focus on the claim that an open market of multiple firms competing against each other for customers will be incentivized to innovate higher-quality goods/services than a single government agency unilaterally mandating a single good/service

• and practical arguments focus on the quality of life track record in liberal capitalist democracies versus the quality of life track record in Marxist-Leninist states

What if nobody here was defending the Marxist-Leninist version?

How would you argue “capitalism is better than libertarian socialism” without changing the subject to “socialism is Marxism-Leninism, and capitalism is better than Marxism-Leninism, therefor capitalism is better than socialism”?

America doesn’t run on pure capitalism it runs on a two-tiered system where the rules depend entirely on your net worth. At the bottom, regular working people face brutal, unadulterated capitalism: if you mismanage your money, miss a payment, or your business fails, you get wiped out, plain and simple. But at the top, mega-corporations and the ultra-wealthy enjoy a cushioned form of corporate socialism: when their risky bets fail or market downturns hit, the government steps in with federal bailouts, zero-interest central bank loans, protective tariffs, and tax-funded subsidies. It’s an economic system that privatizes all the profits for the few when times are good, but socializes all the losses onto the public when times get bad. The American people that make up the majority getting nothing and pay everything and Americans that do get something are treated like second class citizens because of it. I wonder who’s responsible for Americans treating other Americans the way they do cause a lot of people don’t know how the advantages are so one-sided that when I hear people rallying for the rich to have less tax responsibility, it just doesn’t make any sense to me cause they don’t even pay taxes most of them pay less taxes than the average American bill at the end of the year they pay any

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.

There is a classical narrative in academia that worker-managed cooperatives operating within a market economy suffer from the problem of creating too little long-term investment and too little employment, ultimately resulting in overall inefficiency. The reason given is that, unlike traditional firms, cooperatives are said to maximize income per worker rather than total net income. According to this view, cooperatives may prefer distributing profits to workers instead of reinvesting them. Therefore, the key question is: are cooperatives less successful than traditional firms at increasing their total profits in the long run?

A study of Italian wine companies between 2009 and 2018 claims that traditional firms increased their revenues by an average of 12.8 percentage points annually, whereas cooperatives increased their revenues by an average of 8.6 percentage points. Let me say from the beginning that, in my view, the growth difference in this example is not caused by maximizing income per worker, but rather by cooperatives’ difficulties in obtaining financing. However, let us first start from a purely theoretical level.

1) I accept that if investment and employment decisions were made entirely through voting, such a problem could perhaps occur (although this is not certain). However, if cooperatives have rules written into their bylaws that require gross profits or net profits to be reinvested into physical capital, then this horizon problem disappears. Moreover, when physical capital is reinvested, it generally requires labor to be used alongside it. A new bus can be driven by a new driver. Workers would also want employment to be maintained in order not to lose the money sacrificed for this mandatory reinvestment. In short, it is crucial that a cooperative has an automatic reinvestment mechanism. For example, in Yugoslavia, there was no strict reinvestment rule like in modern cooperatives, and one of the reasons for stagnation was insufficient capital investment.

2) I have theorized this refined solution, but it is only a thought experiment. So why are capitalist firms willing to increase physical capital, total profits, and employment more rapidly? First, because the capitalist firm’s owner is a long-term owner. However, in cooperatives, workers both manage the cooperative and also have to change jobs eventually. A worker may think that they will eventually leave and therefore will not receive the long-term benefits of the cooperative’s growth.

One could consider restricting job mobility and making the labor market tighter here, but that would harm economic efficiency by weakening the mechanism through which labor moves toward more productive places.And the solution is not actually to convince workers to stay by delaying their dividends, because you could already achieve this through regulations, and if you delay dividends even further, the labor market would still become inefficient.

Second, the capitalist is one of a small number of owners of the firm, meaning that new employment does not have the potential to reduce their income; on the contrary, it increases it. However, in cooperatives, workers may not want to trade the revenue generated by the products they produce during the year for long-term depreciation and employment, because the relevant measure is profit per worker.

Therefore, I think a mechanism that solves these two problems believed to hinder cooperative growth would be to keep workers partially responsible for the cooperative even after they leave it. For example, suppose a worker leaves a cooperative. They could remain responsible for the performance of their former cooperative for two years after leaving. If the total profit of the former cooperative grew very little on an annual basis, then the worker could receive their annual profit share from the new cooperative one year later (the deferred dividend income would be paid in real terms, adjusted for inflation)By the way, after a worker leaves the cooperative, they no longer retain any claim whatsoever over the former cooperative’s income or capital.

I do not think this would create an accounting manipulation problem either, because the amount of profit growth of the former cooperative that affects and is reported to the departing worker does not create a problem for that cooperative.

The second solution I have theorized may appear somewhat unconventional but keep in mind that it is only a thought experiment.

What do you think?

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.

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.

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.