Happy Birthday, Karl Marx!

Ha! frontrun that tried argument by 1 minute

There are quite a few of those over on the Lemmy.ml version of this post.

Wrong, capitalism when government doesn't do stuff. Naturally socialism is when government does stuff, and when government does a lot of stuff its communism.

/s

How is it not?

The one true way humans were meant to live is free, it is the natural way for us to live when we're not distracted by capitalism. Not just because we don't see it, but because it actually no longer exists in the collective consciousness in any form it takes, at least not as a "reasonable alternative" to communism and more as something that must be prevented.

Hey LibertyLiz. Nothing to add, just wanted to say hi. I enjoy seeing your name pop up spitting truth. Hope you're doing good!

Similarly, the word "Humane"; if a human does something, it is human-like behavior. It is not synonymous with "good" or "ethical".

Capitalism and Feudalism are both examples of class societies, but are not the same. Both have had working and owning classes, but the nature of relation to production is different, thus the class mechanisms at play are different. Engels sums it up succinctly in questions 7-10 of Principles of Communism, but I'll only copy 7 and 8, as they are more relevant here:

Question 7 : In what way does the proletarian differ from the slave?

Answer : The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, the property of a single master, is already assured an existence, however wretched it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, the property, as it were, of the whole bourgeois class, which buys his labour only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the proletarian class as a whole. The slave is outside competition, the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries. The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of civil society; the proletarian is recognized as a person, as a member of civil society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, but the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and himself stands on a higher level than the slave. The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian himself; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.

Question 8 : In what way does the proletarian differ from the serf?

Answer : The serf enjoys the possession and use of an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for which he hands over a part of his product or performs labour. The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has not. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it. The serf frees himself either by running away to the town and there becoming a handicraftsman or by giving his landlord money instead of labour and products, thereby becoming a free tenant; or by driving his feudal lord away and himself becoming a proprietor, in short, by entering in one way or another into the owning class and into competition. The proletarian frees himself by abolishing competition, private property and all class differences.

You should check out mutual aid by pyotr kropotkin. Sure, we have several thousand years of history of the carnage of states and individuals. Thing is, humans have existed for over 100,000 years -- there is a lot missing about what our "natural" state is. Archaeological and anthropological evidence show that human societies exist on a wide spectrum of peaceful --> violent, stateless --> hierarchical.

Your implication that humans are inherently bad, cruel, competing for resources, etc. is a vestige of theory from Thomas Hobbes, connected to social darwinism, that completely ignores the observed behavior of a vast amount of animal and insect species, wherein individuals aid one another out of no apparent immediate benefit to themselves.

A somewhat famous passage from kropotkin to illustrate:

[...] to reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance, just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole. It is not love to my neighbour — whom I often do not know at all — which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is also with animals. It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy — an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.

This isn't to endorse primitivism, or Rousseau's state of nature. I'm not sure I would even say "humans are innately good," necessarily. Clearly, we have the potential for evil. But the idea that capitalist competition, social darwinism, humans reveling in their own private benefit, greed, and cruelty, is natural, is both played out and nonsensical.

edit: Source https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution

This is just an absurdly broad definition of capitalism. I mean it's so broad as to be meaningless.

Because that's not how feudalism worked, your land was yours as long you supported your ruler, who actually owned everything.

The definition of capitalism is that you have private ownership of the means of production, feudalism was more like a big Pyramid scheme or MLM, King owns everything, but kinda lends some lands to nobility those manage it and people on it and then goes down all the way to the peasants who also get some small land in exchange for working on their rulers land

Capitalism is also older than Marx. (Shhh don't tell them that)

Capitalism was supposed to solve the issue of generational wealth so that the amount of money you have directly represents the number of hours you worked regardless of profession or how much money your parents had

But people in power/people with wealth aren’t going to give it up so no matter what system you try, they are going to modify it

Communism remedies this by having no one in power. Unfortunately that is still subject to the above so we have many examples of countries that failed to become communist

🤣

1.) Assuming that's truly innate, why should we uphold a system that incentivizes and rewards self serving behaviors with more power?

2.) I would argue a much more genuine claim to why we still exist is actually our communal nature.

Almost every country on the planet is a mixed economy. There are no pure capitalist or socialist countries that I know of.

Just asking questions? Sure.

What specifically do you mean by "socialist government"? There are many valid ways to interpret that.

There are many governments which follow various socialist schools of thought (China, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, DPRK), the ruling leader of Burkino Faso certainly has Marxist influence, the large Zapatista territory in Chiapas, Mexico (population ~300,000) is governed in a socialist manner, one of the two main parties in the Nepalese government is communist, as well as almost all of the opposition (it's... complicated). And this is taking an anti-capitalist definition of socialism, none of that social-democracy Nordic model stuff.

This is not exhaustive. Many more self-declare themselves socialist..

Now, whether someone believes each of those governments fits their definition of "socialism" is a whole other story.

The prevalence/popularity of an idea has no direct relationship to it's merit.

In other words, even if there were no socialist friendly governments (which isn't the case, but even if it were), that wouldn't be proof that socialism is a bad idea.

Note: I realize this person is trolling; I'm not replying for their benefit. Still worth countering the nonsensical fallacy they've spewed into the community, IMO.

There are plenty of socialist policies in place around the world. Just like there are plenty of capitalist policies. There are no purely capitalist or socialist countries.

You can't look at Scandinavia and America and say they are the same thing. It's a different mix and Scandinavia is much more socialist leaning and has much better outcomes.