To anyone who supports capitalism or otherwise opposes socialism:
Do you support the idea that one man can accumulate enough wealth to own all land of this Earth, making everyone born in his empire under his rule as long as he can kill to defend it? What prevents capitalism from accomplishing this in law? What law exists that limits the borders of nations?
Why, then, must we endure a system where a single man owning the Earth and enslave it is a feature, not a bug?
https://dice.camp/@sean/114698774200264413
I just wanna know what people think. Why must this be maintained? Why is any opposition to capping wealth just the end of the world when it probably would save it, just logically thinking it through?
this is an interesting analogy that i haven’t heard before. it doesn’t seem like a fully fleshed out analogy though. it jumps between concepts without making the links apparent.
would anyone like to expand upon this analogy for us? how do we get from ruling everything, to killing, to borders, to law, to economics?
This is the first anti-capitalism post on Lemmy I can agree with. Not because I think capitalism is bad (but what we see now actually is bad and ugly, no question there), but because it poses a valid question: if you are against whatever looks like socialism, go on and explain how current fuckery should be the norm. Thank you for posting this
If we hate capitalism and want socialism, we need to recognise that most people do not really know what those words mean, or are even intimidated by them. We need to use very plain language - fewer isms - if we want to bring people with us. Otherwise we are just preaching to the choir.
Tim Walz’s attempt to rebrand social democratic policies as neighborliness might be a good start.
No doubt, but I’m talking to people who care about the term capitalism so much that they’ll be considered “pro capitalism.” That’s fine if you’re not a capitalist, but I’m not trying to argue that people who are already not pro capitalism should be against it, I’m trying to argue that people who are pro capitalism should be against it.
Fair.
Generally agree on not assuming a high level understanding but
fewer isms
Okay but this specific phrasing makes me want to violence you. Would you be amenable to this?
Knock yourself (or me!) out :) But there is an irony in not liking the word “isms” in an argument against using them in their full / correct form.
Organisms.
Schisms!
anyone who hates socialism must hate driving their truck on all of those free roads.
And they should pay the fire department for saving their home.
I honestly don’t understand this comment. Is the “free roads” part sarcasm? Roads cost money to build and maintain, so, what are you trying to say here?
the roads in america are socialized, even for those that dont drive or own a car (yet the infrastructure on/near the roads for non-drivers is lacking at best). taxes that arent related to cars pay for ~75% of the taxes that build and maintain roads (the other 25% is from mostly car-specific taxes).
So in other words, America isn’t running on true capitalism?
Sometimes i think I’m great at that bit, then i meet a true master, and am humbled.
There’s sort of an unstated rule that capitalism needs black markets / organized crime to work, so, criminals would stop this
I look forward to seeing an evolution of thought, theory and practice in the next few years.
I think there are effective ways to undo this problem that are not born yet
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It’s an interesting and hard problem. Because most billionaires don’t own billions in cash - they own companies that are worth billions. These companies also don’t have billions of assets - they are valued at billions by investors.
The problem is that musks and bezoses of the world didn’t start with billions - they started with millions and lucked out. So to prevent this from happening you need some system that can fairly catch a moment where a business becomes too big and do something about it.
You can’t really cut the majority owner out, because well they own the company - you can’t just take away what they own. But you can’t really pay them some ceiling cost either - you’ll just end up making someone else a billionaire.
UHMMM AKSHUALLY (🤓) a single man cannot own all of earth, given how liberalism is heavily propagated and maintained by concepts such as nationalism and by extension xenophobia, racism, bigotry - all that fun stuff.
If a single man or an entity tried to create some pan-cosmopolitan world where every piece of land is under a single world-wide country, you bet your ass there’s gonna be countless of reactionary national liberation movements to proclaim sovereignty.
If only one man owns everything, then expropriation would be really fast in theory
Not if he’s surrounded by dead bodies, but capitalism can’t prevent that either.
People using violence to gather resources and power to themselves has always been the state of humanity. Capitalism is just a present day version of that.
Power is never relinquished willingly. Only through the threat of violence, or by actual violence.
I highly recommend you read up on history. For most of humanity’s existence we lived in small relatively egalitarian groups were people depended on each other for survival.
Your “always” is a very recent state of afairs and also not universally true even today.
Not only is it recent, it can also flip back relatively easily. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Paradise_Built_in_Hell
This looks really cool! Thanks.
Reminds me of the books by Rutger Breghman like Humankind
Thanks for the link to that book, it looks super interesting.
has always
No.
(implied) human nature
No and fuck you
power is never relinquished willingly
Has been, could be, but won’t be here. No.
Let’s put it this way:
If someone held a gun to your head and told you to shut the fuck up, you would shut the fuck up.
This has happened to me before. I did not shut the fuck up.
I dunno if i would today. Small calibur? Probably. Large calibur? No clue.
How does that apply, though?
Sure, tough guy, because caliber matters.
There have always been people who are willing to use violence (or the real theat of violence) to collect resources and power. Always. Many of those people throughout history have wielded huge amounts of power over large numbers of people, because most people reject violence. And once violent people have extended their power enough, they don’t have to do the violence anymore, because the threat is so deeply ingrained.
So, if someone held a gun to your head and told you to shut the fuck up, you would shut the fuck up, either because you ceded control to the violent person, or because you were dead. Any other result means that it was an empty threat. Violence, or the real threat of violence works. It always works, and the only way to defeat it is greater violence turned on that aggressor.
This is why the people “in charge” are usually horrible, awful, exploitative people. Because being horrible, awful, and exploitative is necessary to concentrate power. The United States is a propsperous nation because Europeans showed up and stole most of a continent from the dwindling number of people who already lived there, after having been mostly killed off by disease, much of the rest being finished off by - wait for it - state-sponsored violence.
Right or wrong, the people who are willing to use violence as a means to their ends succeed.
calibur matters
Yeah, surviving would suck. A really small bullet is survivable, maybe, if it hits the bone. Which it would, because head. Brain injuries suck.
have wielded, always
Nope. Read a book to find out why! Davids Graeber&Wengrow, anthropologist and archaeologist respectively, had a good one on early humanity ‘the dawn of everything: a new history of humanity’, but they’re not the only ones. Base your arguments on facts, not ‘i just assume’ bullshit people extrapolated with zero evidence, based on what seemed sensible to them with their experience of only ever living in authoritarianism, then let drift into ‘common sense’.
if they told you, you would
Yeah, again, i have been in that situation. Both sides, I’m ashamed to say. You have not. You’re trying to logic your way through just-so stories, and humans are way messier than that. In my case, i was pretty actively suicidal at the time. Broke the script. The asshole didn’t know what to do, gave me a wedge to talk. Maybe it would go differently with who i am today. Maybe it wouldn’t.
Maybe, if i don’t see a way out of the situation, i just go down talking shit, you know?
violence works
No. Fear works. Violence is staggeringly inefficient to actually apply. It’s messy and expensive and hard and rarely gets you what you want. My stepdad’s wife used to hit me to get me to do chores, used to try and physically move my hands, and it was so much harder than just doing shit herself. Plus she earned my hate, and i undid it all the moment she looked away. Even if she had killed me, she would’ve had a rotting corpse on her hands. If she had needed me to grow her food or something, bitch would’ve been so fucked.
always works
You write like you’ve never been exposed to actual violence. Only to the threat of it. Your experience of oppression exists in your head. It has been inflated and strengthened by your ego, by your interests, by your long held habit. You have surrendered your future in panic again and again and again.
You have forged your chains.
But they are your chains. Not mine. Not anyone else’s. So you can fuck right off with those.
(Unless you’re asking for help out)
you didn’t ask about my gun pointed at his head as well? why must only he have the gun?
You could be the “someone” being referred to. In the case you are not, nothing I said excludes you from participating.
if we both pointed guns at each others head, he would be pointing a gun at my head like you stated, but I’d also be pointing a gun at his. Why would either of us shut up in this equally threatening situation where neither are obviously in control? This is literally MAD theory btw. You are arguing countries with nukes would rather nuke each other than talk it out if you think two humans would rather kill each other over whatever made up scenario you invented to make your point on violence than try to resolve it without dying. I’m sorry, but people don’t just kill because they’re hungry. They’ll beg first. They’ll steal. Murder is often a last resort man, and any case that you may dream of, I’m sorry but capitalism isn’t a better solution to it any more than an honest attempt at democratic socialism.
Maybe you’re misunderstanding me, though I did say
Capitalism is just a present day version of [people using violence to amass resources and power].
There will always be people who are willing to break every rule and social contract to concentrate power to themselves. If violence is the last resort against them, they will succeed until it becomes the only option.
I’m sorry but this is a nonsense over thee top argument. This is the same as saying “do you support the rampant murdering of your opponents, and if you don’t, why do you support anarchy?”
Everybody can make dumb statements like that.
Every system, be it communism, capitalism, anarchy or other can and will be abused. There will always be those trying to become a dictator type asshole, see Stalin, for example. The only way for any system to work well is to put laws in place to limit what cheaters can do. For capitalism that would be tax the shit out of he rich, anything over 10M in personal wealth should be taxed at 100%. There is no right for anyone to be extremely rich.
Capitalism has good parts and whether you like it or not, it’s by extremely the most successful to move humanity forward . I have zero problems with a capitalist system that would work like this. Limit company sizes to 500 employees and a billion dollars max in value. Again, tax anything over thst at 100%.
This will get you loads of smaller companies that will have to compete for employees, it’ll be easier to force them to obey the law.
This will get you a shit load of money in a government that can then use that for a socialist system that pays for free healthcare, free education, free housing, free great public transportation, etc.
How are “we” going to tax the rich when politicians spend 30% of their time seeking campaign contributions?
Every political viewpoint has a flaw but that doesn’t mean people should not bring up the flaw.
Let people criticize all political ideologies and through discourse people can examine what is true and what they want in the future
Capitalism facilitates the rich getting richer. It controls political activity. Capitalism is not a system that allows wealth to be distributed from the rich to the poor.
These are literally critical questions. I’m asking “what prevents it”. If “nothing” prevents it then nothing prevents it and maybe we should try to figure out ways to prevent it before it becomes a reality because “nothing prevents it”.
Why would every landowner sell their land? What could be valuable enough to convince them? Maybe money and if they could keep their land like on an 80 year lease?
You may be moving goal posts. Who cares why the sell their land, capitalism doesn’t forbid someone for doing it for fun or any reason. Capitalism doesn’t prevent it, therefore there is no way to prevent it within capitalism—this is a fundamental truth of capitalism, like it or not. Nothing stops, in a capitalist society, a human being from attaining all the wealth in the world: that is a valid dream within capitalism. Thankfully capitalism hasn’t seen it through yet, but it’s absolutely possible. This is a feature of capitalism. It must be made a bug.
I’m just engaging in the conversation that you started. You said someone could purchase every piece of land in the whole world. I asked why everyone would sell, you say they might sell for fun?
Why does anyone ever sell land? Maybe because they’re in massive debt and the only thing they have left is a family christmas tree farm that’s 100 acres. Maybe they got high and chose to. It honestly has no merit to the debate, I encourage you to engage with the questions posed, specifically the final one.
We need to get money out of politics, until that happens logic and morality will not matter
I don’t think there’s much reason to worry that people will get high and sell their land or just do it for fun or will sell the family Christmas tree farm to settle their debts. All great scenarios
We need to get money out of politics
A) America is a capitalist system. B) In America, the law is for sale.
Capitalism is a system that doesn’t prevent the sale of law. Nothing in capitalist theory prevented the sale of law from happening. It literally was put up for sale and is now available to those with capital (aka, not you or me). Capitalism is the system of America. Capitalism allows the sale of law. Capitalism supports the sale of law, and the only thing stopping it is supposed to be democracy, but that’s failing at the moment.
All of this to say, money in politics is a observably feature of capitalism, not a bug. This is a failure of democracy that’s supposed to reign in capitalism but when so-called democratic leaders choose to not act, capitalism wins. This is not a surprise at all, because capitalism wants everything to be purchasable, even power and authority.
Forward towards what?
Yeah it’s good that we can only gave nice things as the side effect of a scam, that everything must be based in exploitation, and the only check on that, which usually serves to maintain it, is a massive institution that exists for violence.
This all sounds great. Love it.
I think that idea is that a healthy, well-balanced capitalism (with working competition and anti-trust law) would make this imposible. It’s a good argument agains cronyism and other broken form of psudo-capitalims… which most reasonable poeople would agree are bad regardless on theier political aligments. Capitalims shoudn’t have monopolies. Period.
Capitalims shoudn’t have monopolies. Period.
But the ability to accrue capital inherently enables one to buy out competitors. You need a massive regulatory apparatus to prevent this, and nearly everyone who self-identifies as a capitalist opposes this.
No if you have anti-trust law. In Europe state stopping someone from becoming to big is very normal. Do you remember that Microsoft was at risk of being forcebly splited into multiple companies over Internet Explorer being preinstaled? US just foritted those very needed state rights. There are plenty of capitalist that agree that regulations are needed. Some probleme are to big, and only state can fix them. No sain person is trying to fix global warning by deregulations. That’s preaty much a prevailing opinion everywhere… outside US. But what’s in US it’s not capitalism. It’s not even a rule of law at the moment it would seem.
Right? Yeah we should still only be allowed to make or do stuff as the byproduct of a scam, we just shouldn’t go over board with it.
I agree. The version of the philosophy of value where ownership is valued and labor is not, is just :violated by things like ‘owning too much’ and ‘exploiting labor’ and ‘doing whatever you like with all the shit you own’.
What law prevents a nation from expanding its borders to include the entire earth as long as “might is right” remains unchecked in this world?
This part I don’t get even as argument. What law would prevent one under socialism?
i understand the logic of “under capitalism -in theory - one could simply by every pice of land”. I don’t necessarily agree, but I understand. I don’t see how it makes a difference if the invader is a socialist or capitalist country.
might is right == capitalism seams reductive
Any economic system that has no safeguard to the “can someone own the Earth in your system?” problem is not a valid one in my opinion.
Socialism attempts to solve the problem by stating “the Earth isn’t ownable under socialism, and anyone who tries to own a piece of it is met with resistance. Anyone who tries to own a piece of land by violent means is resisted by violent means”. This is the nature of socialism and its theory on ownership. Is this not something that would benefit the Earth compared to the existing capitalist system that is only limited by democracy, which has historically used, and is currently using, systemic state-sponsored violence and regime change to achieve its goals?
hmm, it can’t eo owned indyvidualy. Can it be owned collectively? Can socialist country have borders? If it can, than I dont see what rules (not present in the capitalist country) would hard-stop it from expending those borders. If we use existing system from history as comparison, it’s not all kisses and rosesses here as well.
If it can’t have borders than we are talking the level of abstraction that I don’t know how to discuss productively in the context of the twitt.
Do you think democratic socialism fundamentally, foundationally, has a stance on what is and isnt property, and who can or cannot own it, and what is or is not ownership of property, and what level of violence is or is not tolerable in defense of property? If socialism does have quantifiable stances on these things, is it not perfectly reasonable to suggest socialism makes an attempt to address the issue of the original post?
Democratic Capitalism says anyone can own property, anything and anyone can be property (slavery is state sponsored and is allowed within democratic capitalism), and it allows murder in defense of any property. Can a cop kill someone looting a grocery store? Do you believe such a thing be allowed fundamentally allowed in a democratic socialist economic system? Which system do you think would logically lead to a more peaceful planet—the status quo or democratic socialism?
I think it’s a false dyhotomy. I think that “system” is a structured atrmpt to solve social problems - some of those are more efficiently solved by individuals and competotions, some are more efficiently solved by collective effort and collaboration. The dissaggreement between people about which system is better is mostly a categorization of those problem - if you believe almost non are in the first category. But it is a spectrum. Society with overwelmingly capitalist economy, strong social werfare and hard rules that prevents police from killing thieves over food, are not impossible. Those describe most European countries. I feel like people are taking what’s broken in US and and point to it saying “this is capitalism”. I don’t believe it is. I think it’s mostly lawlessness and the lack of rule of law. I think capitatalism at it best make most aggressive and predotory tactic both ilegal and inefficient. We just don’t see a lot of capitalism at it’s best recently.
“the status quo (democratic capitalism) must be maintained” got it!
Tired same old Internet argument garbage, where every argument is against the worst possible absolute of the Other.
The short answer is “numerous regulations and laws exist” and the long answer is that Capitalism pays the paychecks of everyone who controls basically everything, so it’s not going away, and the best you can do is enact sensible regulations on it. Because you and everyone else don’t have the ability to change any of that really.
It’s simply asking “what are the safeguards of capitalism that prevents a terrible person from doing terrible things with its seeming limitless ability to affect the Earth and its inhabitants?”
So far the answer has been: Western Democracy
“Is western democracy is enough to keep capitalism from doing terrible things to Earth and its inhabitants” is my question. The framing obviously alludes to the argument:
Western democracy is either complicit in allowing genocide and conflict across the middle east over the past three decades, or it has been too powerless and ineffective to prevent it. Maybe we should give the opposition to capitalism (any form of anti-capitalism) a try to maintain peace across this beautiful world we all inhabit and need to live.
lets try literally anything else
Okay, but, counter offer: cloud of sexless hydrogen?
Sounds pretty good, right?
Right?
I prefer my hydrogen sexed.
It’s from a poem.
No thanks, I’m not a socialist or a communist. I support the US Constitution and democracy, both of which are in far more need of support these days than fantasy revolutions like yours.
Let’s try out democratic socialism instead of democratic capitalism, why not? I love America and my neighbors of all races and religions and creeds, let’s make it great with socialism.
The real fantasy is believing capitalism will usher in a semblance of peace across this Earth, yes even for those brown and black people in the americas, Middle East, pacific islands, and Africa. I’m not so sure why you believe it’s the only way to make it happen.
you and everyone else don’t have the ability to change any of that
I beg to differ.
Go right ahead then, we will watch
