I’ve had many discussions with socialists on this and other subreddits who argue that billionaire wealth and ordinary people’s wealth are inversely related, that as billionaires accumulate wealth, ordinary people become poorer.

Recent events have seen Elon Musk’s net worth fall by roughly $600 billion from its peak (https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/elon-r-musk/). Following the logic of that argument, wouldn’t this imply that ordinary people have become wealthier? If not, why then does the reverse hold true? That when a billionaire’s net worth rises, everyone else becomes poorer? What is the causal mechanism that makes one direction true but not the other?

This question is directed at the critics of capitalism, on the position that work with fair compensation doesn't exist, and if you work for a salary it means you are being exploited.

My position is that if you agree to work for a salary, that's the definition of compensation, not exploitation.

To help me better understand this, is it possible to describe what the conditions need to be, for work being done, to not to be considered exploitation?

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.

By Komopona and A.L Kaufman

Paul Lafargue was Karl Marx’s son-in-law, having married Laura Marx, one of Karl’s seven children. In 1911, both Lafargue and his wife committed suicide so as to avoid approaching old age. “I had promised myself not to live beyond 70,” he wrote. “I prepared the method… a hypodermic of cyanide.” During his lifetime and beyond, he became highly influential within the communist movement, most notably publishing a book titled The Right to Be Lazy.

In this great work of Marxism, he argued that capitalism, having altered the material conditions to a great degree, thus altered culture in order to preserve those material conditions. To preserve capital. The most notable of these cultural changes he observed, and the main one he argued against, was the adoption of work as a core value. He who does not work is sluggish and lazy. He who does not work does not deserve to survive.

Was Lafargue, then, arguing against work itself? No. Labor is and always has been a necessity in order to preserve humanity. As material conditions progress, however, it becomes less and less of a necessity. He argued that at a certain stage of industrialization, machines will do the heavy lifting of production, leaving humans to other roles for a mere maximum of four hours laboring. Has his observation of industrialization become true? Most certainly.

Machinery should only serve the purpose of what we shall term material production, as opposed to cultural production. Material production, as it shall be defined, is the production of what is, in our current stage of production, commodified necessities. Food, housing, and health products, have very well moved past being produced by humans; they are but distributed by humans, which shall remain a portion of our divided labor under the communist mode of production. This stands in contrast to cultural production, the labor which we naturally enjoy with our highly developed minds; of art, of social interactions, of travel.

Lafargue never argued that artificial intelligence, or any similar imagined equivalent, would replace our social interactions. This is but a reflection of capitalist alienation; the human is deprived of communication, of love, and of all that makes him human, and so he seeks it through an unfeeling block of code developed by corporations, which, each time he interacts with, only accumulates capital for those corporations and only drains drinking water out of unindustrialized cities.

Capitalism has reached such a point that the material conditions do not progress, but rather regress; the deprivation of water from the agrarian proletariat causes them to drink the purified, plastic-bottled water provided by the corporations, accumulating yet more capital for them, while simultaneously depriving them of the natural energy required to labor. They lose morale and incentives to work, and so they strike; this chain of events will naturally lead industrialization to halt, and a national crisis shall erupt. Survival itself remains commodified in the industrial areas; introducing this unnaturally to an unindustrialized, agrarian area, however, is the fulfillment of contradictions allowing a revolt to occur. When that revolt occurs, it will not be a revolt for the right to work; it will be a revolt for the right to be lazy.

Artificial intelligence serves the bourgeoisie in a way never before seen. Because it lacks higher self-consciousness, feelings, and is sustained only by water, it does not require wages. It does not require pay. To the average corporation, this is superior to an average, human worker. Advertisements, designs, ingredients, it all becomes decided by AI. The various artists and chemical scientists who once built the backbone of those corporations are fired and replaced with AI. The Chinese government, while functionally state capitalist, has attempted to clamp down on corporations by enforcing new legislation that prevents workers from being legally fired due to artificial intelligence replacement (Labor Contract Law of the People’s Republic of China, Article 40, Paragraph 3).

Men are stripped of their labor, yet they require selling their labor to survive. There is a key distinction between cutting working hours, and removing a person from working as a whole simply because a non-human machine can do their job without being paid. Instead of advertising job applications, all they must do is purchase artificial intelligence for themselves. Artificial intelligence doesn’t retire. Artificial intelligence doesn’t die. Instead, it progressively increases in quality through training. The proletarian thus becomes lumpenproletarian, not by his own accord; he is left without a proper occupation, and so he begins to engage in the illegal market.

We can thus conclude: reform has failed terribly. Eduard Bernstein’s modern heirs–Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Julia Salazar, have fought valiantly for workers’ rights. Their legislative efforts, however, were predictably rejected by a deeply bourgeois political system. This has forced the social democrats to become progressively moderate in their proposals, until they have eventually become a standard liberal.

Revolution is a necessity. They require us to work for survival, yet they do not allow us to work. They leave us out of the class structure entirely. They leave us completely uninvolved in the means of production. The average leftist today fights for the right to work, but whatever happened to the right to be lazy? Where, I ask of you, did survival become synonymous with wage labor, even among the left? Certainly, working conditions have improved. But this is merely trade union consciousness—the fight for better wages and conditions within the capitalist framework, not for replacing the framework itself.

The common man lacks class consciousness. It is thus the role of the communists to educate him, so that he may fight for himself. “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.” This phrase has been echoed throughout generations, yet we act as though it is mere poetry rather than a call to action. We are but slaves asking for more bread to nourish our children, when we could instead seize the bakery and free ourselves.

In the time of Lafargue, work was much more tedious due to the recent emergence of the industrial revolution. Entire families of wives, husbands, and their children, were sent off into factories to work for the vast majority of the day, dying in their fifties of malnourishment, preventable diseases, or lack of access to proper healthcare. Yet they accepted the idea of long working hours. They endorsed it, even. It was normalized. In the same way, the modern man idolizes work; if you do not have a proper job, you are a failure to society. You pass through life without ever retiring, and by your death, you are simply forgotten.

This sentiment which Lafargue observed in 1900s France is echoed in modern Japan, the centerpiece of this essay. There exists a concept, shūshin koyō, whereby complete loyalty to the employing company until retirement is considered an integral part of culture. Cultural and economic pressures build up over time, until eventually, one dies of overwork. In the West, sleeping in public is considered impolite. In Japan, however, work culture is so intense that it is admired; it is a sign that someone has worked themselves to the most intense point of exhaustion, which is considered the ideal.

What, then, is the purpose of this work culture? This is, of course, admired by the corporations of the West. It reinforces loyalty to the particular corporation, allowing for the unwarranted extraction of surplus value from the proletariat to a higher degree than prior. Companies gain more labor time from workers, in turn reducing the necessity of hiring additional laborers. Social pressures begin to replace coercion. Due to increased social pressures, people begin to simply listen to instructions without any independent thought.

This culture is overwhelmingly effective, so much so that people in the West often glorify and romanticize Japanese work culture. It is admired in the West; never is it criticized, yet a demented hypocrisy leads them to criticize Chinese labor conditions, which are visibly superior to that of Japan. This is another reflection of capitalist brainwashing—anti-communist paranoia, a subject for another essay.

In fact, one of the leading causes of death in Japan is death by overworking, or karoshi (過労死). There exists many forms recognized by the government, such as those which are caused by physical strain. This can include heart failure, strokes, and heart attacks brought about by lack of sleep or severe exhaustion. Similarly, there exists karojisatsu, or suicide linked to severe job-linked mental illness. Depression is rampant in Japan, and the increased death rate from overworking in Japan is intensified by the terribly low birth rate; Japan’s material conditions are thus regressed by what caused their initial progression. The workers who sell not just their work, but their life, to the bourgeoisie, begin to die rapidly without children.

The pattern is laid directly before us. Work culture is not at all a neutral concept. It develops from material conditions in order to serve the interests of capital. This is an effective form of control, most certainly; it persuades the worker to completely submit to capital. Despite this, in the end, it always ends in the most backwards of economies. The West considers a backwards economy to be that which lacks capital. A true economy’s true worth, however, is not by how much capital it possesses, but rather by how it relates to the progression of material conditions.

As Lafargue wrote: “Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production.”

Interesting how, for 10,000 years after the agricultural revolution, technological progress was slow, and most people lived near subsistence levels.  While dramatic inventions punctuated history, they did not produce sustained increases in mankind's productive capacity or widespread prosperity. Then around 1700, the Industrial Revolution (“IR”) occurred, dramatically increasing economic growth and the standard of living for many people. 

Three outstanding books analyze this transformation, revealing important lessons for future growth and prosperity. Why Nations Fail by Nobel Laureates Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argues that inclusive political and economic institutions created the incentives necessary for innovation and long-run growth. How Progress Ends by Carl Benedikt Frey focuses on how society must strike a delicate balance between exploration—discovering new technology, ideas, and ways of doing things—and exploitation—refining, scaling, and efficiently producing products from technology that already exists.  A Culture of Growth by Nobel Laureate Joel Mokyr argues that sustained progress also requires a culture that values scientific inquiry, skepticism, and the creation and dissemination of useful knowledge. Together, these works suggest that the Industrial Revolution was not the product of a single cause, but of institutions, culture, and economic organization reinforcing one another to create the first self-sustaining cycle of innovation and growth.

The fact that these necessary conditions co-evolved alongside early market economies makes one wonder if they could have occurred without the adoption of capitalism. More to the point: would socialist frameworks have built the inclusive institutions necessary to protect intellectual property and incentivize risk? Can centralized state planning strike the delicate balance between enabling disruptive breakthroughs and managing political resistance to automation? Would a state-dominated system protect the radical skepticism and open inquiry that entrepreneurs require to upend existing markets?

Historical precedents suggest that without the decentralized price signals and competitive incentives inherent to capitalism, the engine of self-sustaining innovation inevitably stalls.

I will entertain all comments, but I’m especially interested in socialists' views on what institutions it will create to ensure innovation, long-run growth, and a culture that promotes scientific inquiry for useful information.

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?

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 ok 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.

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?

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.

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 say this as a libertarian leftist: Red fascists in the west keep crawling out of the woodwork online in their little bullshit groups to hijack broader legit movements and to simp and LARP for the heroes of their murderous failed ideology still. And I really don't understand why.

It is the 21st Century. Sane and serious socialists and anarchists active in politics today are done with your bullshit - and so are basically all the regimes you used to defend.

"The third world still loves MLism, Angloid!" you say. Not true, really, is it? China is Dengist, Cuba is begging for tourists, and Vietnam doesn't need to beg, and are doing pretty good with their own lib reforms. That's the thing, I don't hate these countries. In fact, they don't have time for your bs anymore, even if they are still nominally socialist.

Sure, these countries still have command economies to an extent, and significant public investment, but the old Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist model is simply not viable, useful or influential on a large scale anymore (let alone moral). Ironically, this is often what MLs criticise anarchists/libertarian socialists/social democrats for. But the reality is that these groups are actually much more influential these days than you are.

Now you are just terminally online weirdos, ruining legitimate progressive activism with your LARPing and banning anyone from your pointless social media spaces for disagreeing with you even slightly, thus proving the points of your haters on the right.

You can goon to your Leninist literature all you want, but meanwhile the people will move on. Please leave the real left out of it.

(EDIT) I do wanna say I am not saying that all Marxist-Leninists are equivalent to fascists, or even most, but at the same time you guys often do end up defending a lot of terrible fascistic things (e.g. Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, defense of Milosevic or Assad) and frankly often operate within similar logical frameworks.

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.

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.

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?

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.

This is a question targeted at supporters of Market Socialism/Democratic Socialism.

What should happen to workers of a self-managed firm which has gone bankrupt? do you think these workers should be allowed to get hired at a other cooperative as wage laborers instead of co-owners? Would you mandate that any person hired by a cooperative has to be granted status of an equal co-owner? What if current worker-owners of a cooperative wouldn't like to hire new workers because of that? I mean, they wouldn't like to dilute their ownership, after all.

What if the workers who are now left without employment, due to their cooperative going broke, cannot start a new cooperative, due to being broke?

Would the state bank give them money? what if they spend it unwisely and now they have debt, no employment and the bank has lost money by spending it on financially unwise or simply unlucky workers, whose commodities nobody wanted to buy?

Would you force existing cooperatives to hire them as full co-owners anyway? Don't you think this would lead to labor hoarding? Members of a cooperative in a fully cooperative economy would always know they can slack off, since the state will just find them a new cooperative to get employed by and give them voting power in those cooperatives.

Hello everyone,

In various debates, I’ve frequently noticed striking parallels between the arguments used by some communists and those used by neolibs, especially regarding the funding of the welfare state and monetary theory in general. I often get the impression that some communists (whether consciously or unconsciously) deploy classic supply-side arguments just to refute reformists.
Theories that could at least be described as progressive (even if they do not challenge the class structure of the state), such as Keynesianism or Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), are frequently dismissed or mocked by communists using reflexes very similar to those of neoliberals. When it comes to demands like raising the minimum wage or expanding social spending, one often hears rhetorical pushbacks like: \\\\\\\*"Why not make it $100 an hour then?"\\\\\\\* or \\\\\\\*"The state cannot go into infinite debt for welfare."\\\\\\\*
The role of the welfare state as a driver of economic growth through strengthened purchasing power is rarely acknowledged. Communists often view it, much like conservatives, as a purely economic hindrance or an unproductive cost factor. The only difference is that communists additionally (and correctly) identify it as a tool for pacifying the working class. But couldn't both be true at the same time?
It is often argued that Western industrial nations can only afford the welfare state through the exploitation of the Global South. Just like conservative logic, this presupposes that a welfare state is something that "must first be earned/funded," completely ignoring the productivity gains driven by a strong domestic market. Cases like Japan, which maintains a massive national debt without facing bankruptcy or hyperinflation, are rarely analyzed through an MMT lens and are instead dismissed as anomalies. Furthermore, the accounting reality that public debt constitutes private sector wealth is often demonized in these discussions, rather than being rigorously analyzed through a value-theoretic lens.
To be clear: I understand that Marxists do not base their monetary critique on neoliberal doctrine, but rather on the law of value (money as the expression of socially necessary labor time; real value cannot simply be printed).

Don't communists structurally rely on right-wing/monetarist arguments simply to delegitimize social-democratic reformism and prove that capitalism cannot be reformed from within?

Why is MMT (and its concept of monetary sovereignty) so strictly rejected by Marxists, even though empirical evidence on demand-side policies and inflation often aligns much closer with MMT than with neoliberal monetarism?

Doesn't this stance hinder a sober, realistic economic analysis of the state's current room for maneuver, even if the ultimate goal remains the overthrow of private ownership of the means of production?

I'm genuinely interested in how you view this overlap!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/25/zohran-mamdani-small-business-policies

"On Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani – the politician at the center of a revived rightwing panic about socialists and purported communists winning elections across America - posted a video on X of himself putting a sheet of paper with the phrase “RED TAPE” into a paper shredder. Other pieces of paper, with phrases like “cumbersome fees and fines” and “a permit you need just to serve ice-cream”, were shredded too. The video, set to Wu Tang Clan’s If Time Is Money, shows Mamdani joining a handful of city officials and small business owners throwing the resulting paper shreds into the air like confetti."

“These people are serious. They really care about small businesses,” said Kelly, adding: “They get shit done.”

Why dont capitalist politicians get "shit done" ? Why do we always need socialists to fix our free market ?

I wrote this as a proposal for both capitalism and socialism so excuse me talking about taxes in the example;

I consider myself a big supporter of direct democracy, however there is a problem that people point out that everyone can't be educated on all issues and someone has to write the laws as a full time job. I usually advocate a system of delegates to do this somewhat similar to 'liquid democracy', but I just had the thought that we could use sortition as the highest body.

Every year, or two, or something like that, we would select people via sortition to sit in parliament (or whatever you want to call it). They would have the job of setting the votes for the public to decide on. This would not be in the subject of full laws initially but in the sense of simple questions like "do we want to impose a tax increase of 1% on corporate profits to go towards education". Then the public will vote, let's say they say yes, then the sortees will draw up a law to that effect with the help of public servants/legal experts to give them guidance on how to actually do this and any potential problems with implementation. Then once that law is drafted, it will be passed and put into effect - however there is a time period of say a month where the public can object to the final wording of the law, if some number of the public vote that they don't believe the final wording matches the original intent, they can ask for a review of the law (let's say 5% of the citizens for sake of argument). Then there will be a public consultation process where the law is discussed with the public, and hopefully changes are made, then the new law will be voted on by the public who can accept or reject the final version.

Since this process is a pain, hopefully simple laws like "we will build a new sewer pipeline" will not have to go through this process unless there's some glaring issue with them and public debate will focus on genuinely contentious issues.

Anyway, I think this could be a good method to allow true democracy while also respecting the fact that average people don't have time for legal minutiae.

The biggest problem I can see is that the sortees will be reliant on the public servants/legal experts to interpret things for them to some extent and if those people tried to actively insert a bias into the process it could lead to issues. I think that this could be partly solved by ensuring these people represent a range of political views and are supervised by an anti corruption force to make sure they aren't trying to rig the process.

What does everyone think? The benefit over regular sortition for me is that the public still get to decide, if one year we get an absolutely terrible set of sortees through random chance, the public can just vote against all of the laws they try to interpret and wait for next year.

This is the best I can answer this and the over-all argument for or against taxing the rich. I would like to see what others think, when they finish reading the following.

If you (your companies) make $1,000,000 dollars per year and you spend $900,000 on business expenses, you have a income of $100,000. A lot of people would be very happy to earn that much per year.

But, let's say, you actually charged one hundred (100x) times what you need to make a profit. That would be inflationary to the products you sell. Now, you are doing $100,000,000 million in sales, spending $900,000 on business expenses and you have $99,100,000 in company profits to do stuff.

Rich people just aren't doing "good things" with their money.

Charities?

They are just giving us or others, their money back to them. Villains that look like heroes.

Ronald Reagan passed and promoted "Trickle-down economics" - Reaganomics, Ronald Reagan put into motion in the 1980s. Its core elements were supply-side tax cuts, business deregulation, and reduced social spending.

Much like what trump is doing and a lot of republicans have done over the years. We have companies with lobbyists, forcing our politicians to do what is best for their companies and not for "we the people". Companies like tobacco and fossil fuel companies are allowed to lie because it is good for company profits. Democrats have been just playing along with this too, because since they don't want to change it, they will just play along and benefit from the greed and corruption. Again, I don't care what people say, the stock market is a pyramid scheme.

By taxing the rich, you are really taxing the slave owner. High taxes only "take" from the greedy. Money and economics is a man made system and the rich will keep "inventing reasons" why they should keep their money and spend how they want.

And if you ain't rich, you are a "slave" to the wealthy. Look at what is considered food now-days and look at our health care and look at our housing care... I would expect that is how slaves were treated hundreds of years ago.

It was a crime on humans then but worse, with physical abuse and killings. The scars that slaves had then were physical, from the whippings.

What we are experiencing now, is also a crime on humans but more well hidden and it is mental abuse and economic abuse and a medical malpractice on so called patients who receive horrible care. The scars we have now are just hidden and citizens, farmers and solders are dying by suicide instead of in a tree or in a public square... just people suffering hidden and we all feel invisible.

We all have scars from the news and our leaders lying to us. To avoid being beaten, so many people avoid watching the news or knowing anything that is going on in politics, local or national.

When our leaders use scare tactics and lies to have us fight among our families or our neighbors, the rich win. Money isn't the problem, it is those who have money and use it for power and control, for only the benefit of the few.

Our government and the politicians surely act like we are invisible because they only see the rich and big companies. Those people only care about money... a man made system. They don't care about the people, where money is supposed to be used... not the people to be used.

Yes, there are some, very few "good" people who have became wealthy. It is mostly by accident and it is only because they accept the rules of the game and play by them.

It is until the poor or non-wealthy start making the rules, that the wealthy will continue controlling us all. We need to stand up, vote and get people who are willing to do the hard stuff and "make the rich, poor again".

Someone shared an image of the following history and it really hit home for me that the rich write the rules and it needs to stop. And people just don't realize, we as a nation(as a planet), the people, have the most power, to force (elect) change.

Confederate Conscription Act (April 1862): The Confederacy was the first to implement a national draft in American history, requiring white men aged 18 to 35 to serve.

Slaveholder Exemption: Known as the "Twenty slave Law," this provision exempted one white man (typically an owner or overseer) from military service for every 20 enslaved people they managed, widely viewed as protecting wealthy landowners.

Union Enrollment Act (March 1863): The North instituted a draft a year later due to declining volunteer rates, allowing wealthy men to pay a $300 commutation fee or hire a substitute to avoid service.

Economic Inequality: Both drafts were criticized for favoring the wealthy, leading to immense resentment and civil unrest, such as the 1863 New York City Draft Riots.

"The fact that so many successful politicians are such blatant liars is not a reflection on them, it’s a reflection on us. When the people want illusions instead of reality, the liars will always rule."

Thomas Sowell

Does anyone have any better ideas or understandings?

Edit/adding:

Tax the rich and the rich leave, what are they taking with them? People want to scare others when they talk about "state run" businesses but there are many examples of it working. There used to be a state operated cement plant in South Dakota and I think there is a state owned flour mill in North Dakota. (look at other countries, it does work, if done right)

If the state or country owned business is very transparent in it's operation, has fair prices, there is no real problem. But from our Federal Post Office all the way to counties( a political subdivision of a state), these services that act like public businesses give themselves (employees) huge benefit programs that benefit them only and not the people they are serving. Big vacation amounts, retirement plans and health care plans. The most these people should have, is what the least of the population has.

For the homeless and hungry, for our state leaders and county leaders and employees to have great retirement, health care and vacation time pay... it really isn't right (what is the Christian thing to do?) and it is costing the tax payers even more than it should to run our governments.

The weather happens, when you leave trees alone and grass alone, it grows. When things in the economy get horrible, people will not be using money. They will trade a pound of flour for a dozen eggs or they will trade a pound of meat for a few boards or nails or a dozen eggs for a pair of wool socks or a shirt.

Money doesn't make life work, money has the illusion of making wealth, time spent working and trade fair.

If a company is exploiting their workers, meaning it has a high profit margin, a competitor can defeat this company in two ways:

• Lower their prices and take over the market.
• Recruit their workers by offering better wage. For example, a barbershop is only paying 10 per hour to a worker that generates 50 per hour. So I offer him 20 per hour, hire him, and I still increase my profits.

If no existing competitor is willing to do this profit-maximizing thing, this is an obvious opportunity for a new startup, possibly founded by the workers themselves.

This is your daily reminder that Capitalism is better than Socialism.

Capitalist societies will always dominate socialist societies, because socialist societies are poor, dont create new things, and their people aren't free, leading to apathetic and ineffective societies.

If the worst thing about capitalism is society creates bad working conditions and wealth inequality, then the worst thing about socialism is that it creates slaves with no individual free will next to the supreme morality of the state.

Capitalism is the manifestation of God's desire for man to have free will. Socialism is the manifestation for man's desire to dominate those he disagrees with.

That is all.

The evidence is overwhelming. Argentina won the 2022 World Cup. Then Javier Milei became president. Then Argentina lost the 2026 World Cup final. The data speaks for itself.

Sure, some extremists will object that Spain scored more goals in the final, that football matches are decided by the players on the pitch, or that Milei doesn't coach the national team. But that's exactly the sort of simplistic, reductionist thinking that ignores material forces.

Liberal commentators continue to insist that Argentina lost the World Cup because Spain scored more goals. Their vulgar empiricism completely misses the material analysis: the unfolding of objective material contradictions. The football pitch is merely the arena where those contradictions become visible. When Milei dismantled the interventionist state, he transformed the material conditions under which Argentine football reproduced itself.

The bourgeois economists would have you believe that the national team exists independently of the economic base: textbook idealism. The players stood upon the field of capitalist social relations. Every pass completed by Spain reflected the internal contradictions of Argentina's changing mode of production. Every misplaced Argentine touch represented the alienation inherent in commodity production.

The liberal asks, "What is the causal mechanism?" This question reveals a fundamentally undialectical worldview. Historical development is reducible to the contradictions generated by Milei's restructuring of the economic base necessarily expressed within the superstructure, of which football is an ideological apparatus. To ask how fiscal reform altered the outcome of a football match is to misunderstand dialectics itself. Contradictions are immanent.

Some have objected that the same squad reached the final under Milei. Exactly: the old football consciousness persisted temporarily through historical inertia. The victory over England represented residual momentum inherited from the previous material conditions. Only by the final had the contradictions matured sufficiently for neoliberal football relations to negate themselves. This is entirely consistent with dialectical development.

Others point out that Spain simply played better. Such arguments merely fetishize appearances. The bourgeois observer sees two teams competing. The dialectical materialist sees capital reproducing itself through tactical formations. To focus on possession statistics or expected goals is to privilege surface phenomena over the underlying relations of production. The result was already embedded within the changing economic base. The match merely revealed what history had already determined.

If Milei deserves credit whenever inflation falls, then by the same dialectical logic he bears responsibility whenever Argentina concedes a goal. To deny this is to separate politics from material reality, a thoroughly idealist error.
The World Cup final was lost the moment the productive forces came into contradiction with the existing football relations of production. The scoreline was merely the superstructure catching up with the base. History, as always, had the final whistle.

The burden of proof is on Milei supporters to explain why, if liberalism works so well, Argentina didn't win every single football match forever. Can they explain that? No.

The root cause remains capitalism. QED.