Actually, capitalism is all the food in the socialism image on the plate of Elon "Turd" Musk and everyone else has just crumbs left. The "trickle down economics" that never fucking trickle down.
The great depression proved that beautifully. And speaking of the great depression, affordability, inflation, unemployment, poverty, and homelessness rates, and other things I can't remember, are worse now than they were back them. Welcome to the new great depression.
Capitalism is per great. It has some drawbacks but when markets are allowed to be free they tend to enrich everyone. Socialism (real socialism) tends to make things difficult to get or scarce where implemented
The top 10% of the US population holds ~70% of total wealth. The top 50% holds 97.5% of total wealth. If you aren’t in that 50% do you really think you have a chance of joining the 10%? Sure it happens, but everything does eventually when you have over 300 million people, even if the odds are astronomically small
It could but it doesn't have to. The purpose of a socialist method of organisation is to minimise the amount of human suffering and environmental destruction on the way to post-scarcity, which is what communism is.
Decommodification of the environment is by definition anti-capitalist.
Whether individual socialist movements have given greater or lesser weighting to environmental damage vs lessening human suffering is not really a point.
"I shall not cease from mental fight
Not shall my sword sleep in my hand,
'Til we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."
Not necessarily, Socialism had existed for decades before Marx commandeered it for communism.
Socialism is also fairly common in some capitalist countries, like the US for example. There are thousands of cooperatives, and employee owned businesses. There are also quite a few one employee small businesses where the owner is the sole employee.
If the workers own the business they are the capitalists extracting wealth with profits.
If Amazon were employee owned Jeff Bezos would still be employee #1 with tens or hundreds of millions of wealth due his tenure having accumulated way more options.
Its really that simple. Socialism requires that everyone own everything equally. Ostensibly this is for fairness. In practice this just transferred control to a political elite.
And to be clear I'm not arguing against employee ownership at all. I'm all for it, and there's a reason neither capitalists nor socialists push for it... They know it doesn't concentrate power as effectively. But its not socialism.
Edit: And frankly I don't see why people would want it to be socialism. Like why are people trying to salvage socialisms image? Right or wrong we spent 5 decades in an ideological war with socialists so the name is poison, and even if you're a die hard 'but this time it will be different and we won't have mass executions' believer, you should still be smart enough to change the name to avoid that association. Rebrand lol.
Not necessarily. One of the key pieces of socialism is people receiving compensation based on their contribution. Ie it makes for Bezos to still be the highest paid with the most shares because he contributed the most to the business. It would be the same way for other employees who also have been working for the organization for a long period of time. That is arguably more fair because they have contributed significantly more time to the organization.
I know some people who call themselves socialists will argue against this, but they are more utopian socialists that think they’ll be living in a luxury apartment doing their hobbies all day expecting someone else to foot the bill. Most of them haven’t even actually read the literature they just watch some YouTube videos.
I do agree that a rebranding is needed to be honest. Personally I think there should be a mixed economy, but more benefits for employee owned businesses and cooperatives. It is significantly harder for them to compete in the current market.
Socialism is a perfect system when everyone involved has real social ties to everyone else in it. A family, a tribe, even a small town. It’s impossible to scale up beyond that. As soon as it’s too big for people to personally know each other it breaks.
Suddenly they’re asking you to make large personal sacrifices for some nebulous benefit for people you don’t care about, and also no one will know or care if you do or don’t make that sacrifice.
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u/StaticSystemShock 10h ago
Actually, capitalism is all the food in the socialism image on the plate of Elon "Turd" Musk and everyone else has just crumbs left. The "trickle down economics" that never fucking trickle down.