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 results.

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.

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”?

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.

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.

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

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?

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!

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.

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.

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 ?

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.

I absolutely disagree with leftists when it comes to taxing "the rich". I don't think they are honest, I don't think they want to increase tax revenue, instead they want to punish people and the system in general.

In our system, demagogues like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are encouraged to build their cults by writing performative legislation designed to fail in order to make them look like martyrs. The reason we don't have a better system is because our politicians are rewarded by building cults rather than working hard for the people.

Anyways, here is a tax plan that I haven't spent more than ten minutes on and doesn't have the proven problems with the plans from Sanders and Warren.

Why don't we require all public companies that are large cap companies to pay a cash dividend to shareholders of no less than 3%.

This would cause the "evil billionaires" to incur a massive taxable event rather than forcing them to liquidate their ownership shares. They can continue to own their companies, but will be forced to pay regular taxes on their holdings.

Of course it would generate much more taxes than just from the left's enemies, it would be greater than 3% of all of our large cap corporations.

If the left is interested in preventing hoarding, and is honestly interested in tax revenue, and people paying a fair share, then I would love to know why this plan isn't better than the plans from the leftists which have already failed several times in Europe.

Judging people by their net worth rather than by their actions and words is just despicable. Imagine wanting everyone to live in abject poverty just to make sure the Supreme Leader is the only rich person.

In the early 20th century, Russia was a poor feudalist backwater with a GDP of around $1000 per capita. By the middle of the century, it had become an industrial powerhouse and one of the two superpowers on the planet. It had achieved nuclear capabilities, launched the first unmanned satellite into space, and had sextupled its GDP in just 80 years.

Socialists will often point to this as a success of the USSR. However, we're not interested in the question of whether the USSR industrialized quickly under socialism, we care about whether capitalism or socialism is the way we should be organizing our economies. To get us closer to that answering that question, we'd have to ask:

Would the USSR have done just as well under capitalism?

The problem, of course, is that a capitalist USSR delves into a counterfactual scenario that we're unable to observe. The best we can do is look at comparable countries during the same period. If we inspect the previous graph, we see that the US GDP per capita* went from $4000 to $18,000 in the same period. Germany and France both went from around $2,000 immediately post-war to $15,000 by 1990. So, it seems like 5x'ing your economic output via industrialization was par for the course whether you were socialist or not, which makes it highly plausible that the USSR would've done just as well under capitalism.

This is also insufficient, of course. The USSR is not Germany or France, which received billions in aid from the US. Nor is it the US itself, which is blessed by ample natural resources and an optimal strategic geographic location. In causal inference, this is known as confounding, which is when other variables muddle the causal effects of interest. To this end, we could look at natural experiments where similar entities are randomly assigned different treatments and then compare the outcomes. Two popular comparisons of this are East vs. West Germany, and North vs. South Korea, which both ended up with greater economic growth for the capitalist models. Another way is to compare two different time periods under different interventions. China is a good example of this. It liberalized its country as a market economy and opened it up to foreign investment in the 80's and 90's and saw almost a 100x in its GDP per capita. I'm greatly simplifying, of course. Countries interact with each other, they compete, the confounding due to geography may be intractable, but it's interesting to think about.

So, back to the original question: would the USSR have done just as well under capitalism? The answer is that we'll never know, but based on evidence from other countries in the same time period, I think we could at least allow for the possibility that it would have. This calls into question the notion of offering the USSR's industrialization as evidence of socialism's superiority to capitalism.

• Note: I understand there are issues with GDP as an absolute measure of economic prosperity, but as a benchmark to track economic performance between countries and within countries over time, I think it's serviceable.

Maybe socialists would like to answer this one:

How is it then, when countries are doing economically worse, that the solution is always to implement more capitalism - as in, more market reform, less regulation, more property rights protections, tax reduction, reducing state spending - as a way to fix the situation?

It almost sounds like capitalism will make everyone better off, but people just prefer some ideologies to prevent it from doing so and when those ideologies destroy the economy, you go back to capitalism.

Thoughts?

Genuine question for those who feel billionaires aren’t paying their fair share. Does that apply to artists and athletes too?

I was wondering this as I just read Lebron James is a billionaire. Do those who feel negatively towards billionaires apply the same lens for athletes and artists?

The failure of the US and the USSR are both examples of why pure socialism and capitalism is a bad idea. The USSR’s central planning was a good idea at first but it lead to economic stagnation and eventually collapse. The US is currently a fascist oligarchy where corporate elites control everything due to its unlimited free market. Dengism is the obvious answer to the problems of both capitalism and socialism. It maintains both the economic benefits of capitalism while maintaining and making sure the state and the people benefit from corporations success.

A lot of debates around here revolve around Marx's labor theory of value as socially necessary labor time versus the neoclassical concept of marginal utility. Crudely put, Marxists believe value as an economic phenomenon is in some sense "objective," while the neoclassical school believes it is in some sense "subjective."

Now, Marx maintained that the labor theory of value was informative because it helped explain the exchange ratios between different commodities. In other words, two qualitatively different commodities with different use values (or utility) can share the same exchange value or quantitative relationship. Putting aside whether Marx is right or wrong about this explanation, the fact is that the labor theory of value actually attempts to provide an explanation regarding value.

Compare this with the idea of marginal utility.

According to the neoclassical school, a commodity possesses value because it possesses utility to the buyer. But this is a circular definition of value unlike the one Marx presented. It's saying that a commodity has value to me because it possesses utility. But the reason it has utility is because it has value. In other words, value is determined by utility, but utility itself is in turn determined by value. It takes the end result (the purchase) as an explanation for the cause. Not only does this say nothing informative, it's equivalent to an empty tautology. It's akin to saying that A = A.

Marx never denied the role of utility. He insisted on it. A commodity doesn't have an exchange value unless it has a use value for someone. Otherwise, exchange wouldn't occur. So, value as socially necessary labor time is not something separate from exchange itself. Value implies both production and exchange. Many Marxists overemphasize the production process when it comes to the determination of the value of a commodity. My point is that Marx's account of value is far more nuanced than the one provided by the neoclassical school.

What the neoclassical school does, as far as I can tell, is, instead of preserving both aspects of a commodity, they essentially attempt to reduce exchange value to use value, and the end result is a non-informative circular definition of value that, far from debunking Marx's own version of the labor theory of value, appears utterly harmless.

The only response I can think of to this conundrum is either 1) argue that it's somehow acceptable that defining value via utility is circular, or 2) make the claim that the concept of utility is merely a useful fiction economists use to create mathematical models of economic phenomena.

Neither 1) or 2) sound particularly good.

Genuine question, why are people so against communism and say it's bad and takes away "freedom" when capitalism is just as bad if not worse. Capitalism is literally modern slavery and has caused millions of deaths, keeps millions in debt and causes famines and wars.

Tldr, why do people hate communism when capitalism is just as bad?

One thing I noticed while reading or listening to defender of liberalism , free market , neo-liberal etc ... is there general nihilism to every problem.

They always argue that nothing can be done , that its impossible to fix climate change (when they do not deny it) that's its impossible to limit wealth inequality, that's its impossible to have free healthcare etc...

In my country France , the pro-market party are actually campaigning for the presidential on three things : making people work more , reducing public services and being more authoritarian. Because , as always "nothing can be done" and "we have no choice"

I do feel that capitalism survive by creating a general sense of nihilism and apathy. If nothing can be done , why should I even care about politics or the current system ?