r/CapitalismVSocialism

So many people are convinced that Marx's account of LTV as socially necessary labor-time has been "disproven" by the concept of marginal utility. I don't think such people understand Marx's distinction between use-value and exchange-value. To begin with, use-value refers to what others call utility, which is to say that in order for something to possess exchange-value, it must already possess some use-value to someone. In other words, Marx is already careful enough to point out that value is intrinsically tied to utility. The marginalists have a shallow view of the matter. Whereas Marx understands value as both "objective" exchange-value) and "subjective" (use-value), the neoclassical school understand value as strictly subjective. At least that's my understanding of things. They conflate the two aspects of what constitutes "value."

I also don't think the concept of diminishing returns as it applies to the idea of marginal utility is significant. The only reason one can evaluate an extra unit of X item as possessing less value than a lesser number of that same item is if it's capable of being produced at a faster rate with the implementation of more advanced technology, which presupposes a reduction in labor-time. For Marx, a commodity loses its value because it is produced in less time than previously. If there are more of said commodity exchanged in the market as a result of this increase in production, then the subjective evaluation, which Marx acknowledges, of said commodity is naturally going to accompany such an increase.

Are opponents of Marx simply not reading Marx? What's going on? The cynic in me says that idle intellectuals in the 20th century were offended by the notion that they lived off the products of another person's labor, so they effectively rationalized their parasitism by reusing concepts that were already popular in Marx's time.

I'm curious about how this hypothetical scenario would play out in your ideal society:

A man recently lost his job. Let's call him Dave. Dave can no longer support his family and they face homelessness and starvation. Fortunately, this man happens to run in to Ellen Muscato, an ultra billionaire famous for their vast wealth.

Ellen asks Dave how they're doing and Dave explains his situation. Ellen, always the philanthropic type, offers Dave a deal:

Ellen will pay Dave's family $2 billion if Dave allows Ellen to hunt Dave for sport. Ellen also assure Dave that each of his kids will also get a $1 billion trust fund. After the hunt, Ellen will taxidermy Dave and put him in his trophy room in one of his mansions.

They find a lawyer and draft the contract. Then Ellen goes on to drop Dave off in the jungles of Brazil with adequate food supplies and the hunt begins. Ultimately Ellen kills Dave and has his body taxidermied and placed in his trophy room as per their contract.

Is this acceptable to you? Is it logically allowable under your preferred society? Why or why not?

EDIT: I'm particularly interested to hear from right libertarians. But I do want to see how all the different systems would approach this problem.

You keep seeing "it's been 180 years!" and? A lot of theories being employed after millennias. Just throwing a number out isn't an argument, it's hand waving, "look how big this number is" trying to win over not with reason, but with vibes.

One of the posts being up "crisis of Marxism" which was coined in 1890s to argue the same thing: "omg you're still on it? It's actually gone, it's uncool, it's irreverent" 20 years later you have entire wave of revolutions throughout Europe.

"Workers united by race and nationality, not by class" yeah after bourgeois government created concentration camps for socialists, communists and trade unionists. Or were they empty? If class consciousness wasn't growing there would be no one to imprison, no efforts from capitalist class to divert popular ideology away from proletarian internationalism.

"Why Russia? It was not developed!" Nor did it have socialist transformation. Revolution in Russia didn't achieve much more than 1848 French revolution, it just so happened to occur while communist ideas were popular. It was majority peasant population overthrowing monarchy. Sure, it had radical elements early on, so did French one and in both cases they were swept away by following reaction.

Bolsheviks never saw Russia as socialist, it was materially ready to ditch feudal monarchy with ideological communist aspirations of countries that already have. It was possible with the aid of the developed countries, but once revolution in Germany died, so did Russian near communist future.

Title. I'm going to sound very pretentious because I myself am a Communist, and I will be imposing my own philosophies and biases in the following explanation. The following also applies to pro-capitalists in general, and also probably AnCaps

Libertarians often seem naive or dumb because they think that "government = anti-freedom" and "rich people = freedom". They believe that a free market will regulate itself with an invisible hand, which does sound childish. Seemingly, they even think that poor people don't deserve to live; "because they shouldn't have medicine they can't afford, housing they can't afford, food they can't afford"

These beliefs are near impossible to productively debate because of a fundamental difference in the philosophy they see the world through, compared to Marxists

I propose that while Marxists consciously look at the world through dialectical-materialism, Libertarians sub-consciously see the world through a philosophy I'll call rational-idealism

Rational-idealism is the name I'm inventing for Libertarians based on (self-explanatorily) rationalism, and idealism.

Rationalism is the philosophy of disregarding empirical evidence to ascertain truth through logic alone. It is a frankly absurd, as many of the claims by rational philosophers, save for the most obvious observations, such as Rene Descartes' "I think, therefore I am"

Idealism is the philosophy that the mind, and consciousness dictates reality, and that reality and matter does not truly exist independent of consciousness. Idealism is the opposite of materialism, the philosophy (and rather objective fact) that matter and reality exists independent of thought. Under idealism, a concept exists first, and then the object embodying that concept enters existence. I believe the game Chaos;Head Noah is based off of that philosophy, if you know ball. If you want an example of idealism, think of the quote: "If a tree in a forest falls, and nobody is there to hear it, did it truly make a sound?"

This philosophy, rational-idealism has a few characteristics:

• Cartesian-Dualism
  • The belief that the mind and the body are separate; by extension, the surrounding environment should also be completely separate from the mind under this idea. To put it simply: "Mind over matter."
  • I find that this concept is rather absurd, because, following the concept to its logical conclusion: You as you are now would be the exact same individual, would be the same if you were born in North Korea, blind and deaf like Helen Keller. It is also provably false, as animals in zoos behave differently to animals in the wild; people in one culture behave differently to people in another; even in the body, which is claimed to be wholly separate from our mind, our stomachs have neurons and are capable of non-conscious thought, which also influences our conscious thought up into our brains; "gut-feelings"
• Freedom if separated from "coercion through violence"; the government
  • This builds off of Cartesian-Dualism as well as Hegelism (dialectical-idealism)
  • Libertarians, or probably more accurately AnCaps (though I've heard Libertarians parrot the same idea) foolishly believe that as long as there are no governments, and that if governments, or regulation is abolished, we will all be free.
  • This operates under the concept that the government is the only entity that can influence others, and cultural hegemony could never affect someone's thoughts because cartesian dualism and our reality is completely made of what we think unless someone named government imposes their thoughts and taxes with force.
    • This mirrors a childish version of Hegel's Slave-Master dialectic, viewing the government as the master. In Hegel's dialectical slave-master example, a conscious person, whose world is entirely his own because he has never met another person (thesis), meets a similar person, and they struggle for conscious dominance (antithesis). The victor of the struggle chooses to enslave the loser because a slave is more useful than a corpse, thus they establish a slave-master relationship (synthesis)
  • This is obviously wrong, because even without government, the bourgeoisie have huge power with their wealth and hold cultural hegemony. They can control the proletariat through the manipulation of culture, as well as economic coercion. Besides, how much agency can you really have if you're poor, and can barely afford food? You don't even get the freedom to choose anything but the cheapest option. Under libertarian ideology, freedom is actually only for the rich and powerful. This happens in real life, yet libertarians deny reality and claim only government is responsible for lack of freedom; they can't see empirical evidence if it screamed at them in their face, thus rationalism
• The idea that under a free market, or a market in general, anybody can just simply choose to start a business; therefore there's freedom and no monopolies!
  • This is idealism because it assumes that people are only employees because they "don't want to take the risk for an entrepreneurial expenditure" as if the idea that one wants to start a business automatically manifests into actually starting a meaningful business independent of one's finances, and it pre-supposes that people are only poor because they want to be
    • It makes the childish dialectical "analysis" of "someone wants to take the risk of a business, others don't, therefore the others work for the entrepreneur. because the others who totally had the resources to start a company (/s) 'chose' with their 'freedom' not to start a successful deserve to be poor and exploited because they were completely free to start their own business instead, or simply be poor and unexploited (and starve to death)" (????)
    • the above analysis also forgets that if the business fails, all that supposed risk that the entrepreneur took also transfers to the employees, who are now out of a job and still poor. The only distinction is (unless it was a limited company, in which case the workers get more risk than the "entrepreneur") that the owner now has debt to pay off, while the workers don't have debt (well not from the failed business anyway) (but they're still poor)
  • Frank does not start a hotdog stand for $0.50 per hotdog and get empowered by the free market, it doesn't work that way because Frank is an ordinary dude who doesn't already have millions in assets to run at a loss with to gain market share. Multinational billionaire company can undercut Robert (who is an ordinary dude that opened a hotdog stand for $2.00, the cheapest price he can manage for 5% profit margins) by operating at a loss to steal Robert's market share and put him out of business, because with billions in assets, they can afford to have negative profit for a few months if it gives them better market share and better long-term revenue
  • With dialectical analysis, idealist or not, it should be obvious that in a free market, businesses are under competition. One business (thesis) competes against another business (antithesis) and eventually wins (synthesis) because that's what competitions are. In this synthesis, the winning business now holds a monopoly. So much for "free markets can't have monopolies!!1!!", I guess, but that should've been obvious from the gilded age for anybody who cares about evidence, but we're all rationalists here, right guys?
• The invisible hand of the free market will magically guide society in a good direction
  • This is probably the biggest example of idealism under libertarian thought. While the invisible hand of the market is a metaphoric term, libertarians treat it like a literal psychic collective consciousness that just wants to bring prosperity, self-regulation, etc. to the freest market.
  • It is a childish concept, and again, un-empirical. free markets, as explained above, naturally form monopolies. It also brings the Wealth of (Some) Nations (not an original phrase; the title of a book by Zak Cope), not overall prosperity. Even then, only prosperity for the bourgeoisie. Also in the opposite direction, government control has had some of the most successful outcomes. The USSR went from some backwater Tsarist feudal state with a famine every other week to competitive with the US in industry and technology (and better in living conditions). Similarly China, which although is debatable if currently socialist, still undebatably has a state-controlled market, and is more prosperous than the US. Also, the "Uygher genocide" is a hoax made by feds if you're just dying to scream it because you heard China as a positive example
• Governments are always evil (because idealism) therefore government having power bad
  • This is another idealistic concept; it presupposes that a government entity always has a despotic thirst for power and control, and is always inclined toward corruption; whether it's that people who enter the government do so because they already have this kind of mind, or also that even purer individuals are doomed to corruption if they become powerful
  • While seemingly true in present society, this is the natural consequence of governments in capitalism; liberal "democracies" are dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The government exists to serve bourgeoisie interests, because it is also shaped by the bourgeoisie. Read Marx for further understanding, but this is a foundational concept under Marxism, discovered with the analysis through dialectical materialism. The economic base (in this case, Capitalism) forms its contradiction, the super-structure (in this case, the government and any other relevant institution or social construct)

There are more characteristics that can be extrapolated from the terminology and these examples. Apologies to any philosophers if I have misunderstood rationalism and idealism; I'm basically only an arm-chair philosopher if we're being generous.

Libertarians, take notes of why your ideology is incompatible with reality, or argue with me if you think I'm wrong or if I strawmanned you

Marxists, or leftists in general: the reason why Libertarians, Liberals, Capitalists, etc. are unbearable and unproductive to debate are because there is this fundamental difference in philosophy; often we debate starting at each of these individual talking-points, when our starting point is completely wrong. We cannot argue productively without addressing the fundamental philosophy behind these talking points, otherwise it becomes a game of "yuh uh" "nuh uh" where the winner is decided by upvotes. Take some notes. If some of my points are wrong, or even the sentiment of this post is wrong, tell me why.

Imagine two people start a manufacturing cooperative. They invest their entire life savings. They work eighty hours a week for four years. They take zero salary and live on bare minimums to get the operation off the ground.

​

In year five, the facility is finally highly profitable. They are overwhelmed with demand and need to bring on a janitor and a warehouse loader.

​Under a system where private ownership is abolished and workers must collectively own the means of production, how are these new workers integrated? You face three distinct mechanical options. Each one unravels the core premise of workplace democracy.

You give the janitor and the loader an equal 25 percent share of the company and equal voting rights on day one. This mathematically punishes the founders. The founders absorbed massive financial devastation and took 100 percent of the risk for years. The new workers take zero risk and instantly claim half of the established wealth and control. No rational human will ever scale an enterprise or hire new people under these terms. Growth stops.

You force the new workers to purchase their equity share to fairly compensate the founders for the existing capital and machinery. Most working class individuals do not have the cash to buy into a highly profitable enterprise. By requiring a buy in, you lock the poorest and most vulnerable workers out of employment entirely.

You pay the new workers a fixed hourly rate without giving them equity or voting rights until they "earn" it over a period of years. The founders retain control and extract the surplus value of the new workers' labor to recoup their initial investment. You have just reinvented capitalism, wage labor, and the exact hierarchical exploitation socialism claims to dismantle.

If adding a new worker to a successful enterprise either instantly strips the founders of their earned equity, economically locks out poor workers, or deliberately recreates wage labor, how does a socialist economy scale successful businesses beyond the initial founders?

Lenin didn’t use the word ‘Leninism.’ I’m using this word to refer to his ideas because when someone says “Marxism-Leninism,” many of Lenin’s sycophants will focus too much on how the term “Marxism-Leninism” was coined by Stalin. 

The definition of socialism I use is very broad and inclusive: “Social/common ownership over productive property.” This definition can even include state-run socialism, where the state runs SOEs, so long as the state is democratic. Some socialisms are far better than others, and this post isn’t about my ideal version of socialism being the only “true socialism.”

I’m saying that Leninism isn’t socialism because it isn’t socialist at all. I’m not going to speak about the things Lenin did (such as the NEP) that violate socialism, because there’s a stronger case to make that Leninism even in its own theory is not socialism. 

Leninism is to socialism what the Islamic Republic of Iran is to Democracy: 

Leninism is a system led by a “vanguard party,” who are not elected by the general public. The General Secretary is picked the same way a new Ayatollah is - via a vote by the political elite. There is no common ownership/decision making involved in picking the vanguard party. 

Just like in Iran, there is some democracy in the lower levels of a Leninist system, including some officials being elected. However, back to point 1, the Ayatollah General Secretary “manages” the democracy and has the final say.  

Leninist style “state” labor unions aren’t unions at all. A “union” that isn’t controlled by the workers isn’t a union by definition. Leninism - even in theory - gives workers minimal control over these “unions,” with these “unions” being ultimately accountable to the vanguard party. 

Also: Leninism is not “on the way” to becoming any type of socialism either. The Ayatollah isn’t going to bring democracy to Iran any quicker than the vanguard is going to give up its unchecked power. Some might say one can achieve socialism with state capitalism, but if the state capitalist system isn’t even democratic, then it’s as ridiculous a notion as thinking the Ayatollah will usher in democracy. 

But didn’t Leninism lift a hundred trillion former Russian Empire peasants from poverty? The thing is, the criteria for socialism is not simply progressive policies like universal healthcare and education. If it is, then Social Democracy is socialism. 

>For decades, Sweden was shorthand for the brand of high-tax, high-spend government that managed people’s lives from cradle to grave through state-run hospitals, schools and care homes.

>No longer.

>Today, nearly half of primary healthcare clinics are privately owned, many by private-equity firms. One in three public high schools is privately run, up from 20% in 2011. School operators are listed on the stock exchange.

>The capitalist makeover has allowed Sweden to do what few industrialized countries have managed in recent years: shrink the size of the state. That has enabled the government to sharply lower taxes and, economists say, sparked a surge in entrepreneurship and economic growth.

>Its total public social spending bill—which includes healthcare, education and all welfare payments—has fallen to 24% of gross domestic product, similar to the U.S. and well below the over 30% for nations like France and Italy.

>Sweden’s economy is expected to grow by around 2% a year through 2030, roughly the same pace as the U.S. and double the growth rates of France and Germany, according to an April forecast by the International Monetary Fund.

>“Sweden is a real land of opportunity,” said Elisabeth Svantesson, the country’s finance minister. “I want people and capital to stay here and grow.” 

>While many European countries are raising taxes, Svantesson has cut them three years in a row. Sweden’s top income-tax rate has fallen close to 50% from nearly 90% in the 1980s.

Paywalled WSJ article.

Society is very much capitalist. Nearly everything in the world is produced by capitalism and state-owned institutions still tend to be conservative in some way. For a socialist, how do you navigate life while knowing your smartphone was made by capitalist Labour, or vote in elections while knowing that most parties are capitalist, or buy food from commercial food chains without going against your own ethics? This especially applies to Western Socialists, the vast majority of products in the west have been created by capitalism, not socialism.

How do you justify this?

How do you somehow live your life avoiding these things without depriving yourself?

As I am aware, socialists have been pretty divided on the role of the state. The historically powerful form of socialism, state socialism (where the government centralises planning around itself, among other things) is usually what westerners think of when they hear the word socialism (The USSR followed this branch), but there's a branch of socialism called Liberterian Socialism, which rejects state control, vanguard parties, and hierarchical bureaucracies, instead advocating for workplace self-rule and grassroots democracy (prominent examples being Revolutionary Catalonia and the Free territory of Ukraine). Which one do you (the socialists in this sub) lean to?

Hear me out.

I've noticed a pattern when discussing with socialists.

They will present an idea like "We just need to have a dictatorship that will redistribute all the wealth!"
And the rebuttal will be like "But whenever this has been tried it ends very poorly."
And the socialist responds like "But we say it will be amazing!"

Does it matter what socialist say? Does it matter what anyone says? Why not prioritise facts in instead of sayings?

Why shouldn't we look at history to see how poorly the promises of socialists ended up?

Socialists love to live in capitalist countries. Drinking their soy lates and avocado toasts. Meanwhlie socialists don't want to live in socialist countries. How can we trust you? Seriously.

This is a bit of a tangent, but if I really believed in socialism I would go live in a socialist country.

I don't find it believable that socialists really believe what they say because they don't practice what they preach. So why should any of us care about what socialists say?

EDIT:
I should specify. I do think it's totally valid to care about what socialists do. Socialists cause a lot of problems. So I think it can be fruitful to engage with socialists on that end. But if socialists do X and say Y I care about X and not Y.

Libertarians love to make the broad statement that “socialism always fails”; however, currently, capitalism is failing on a global scale, a scale never seen in human history. It is not a matter of if socialism works, it is a simple and clear necessity to save the biosphere.

To prove that capitalism fundamentally requires the exploitation of the environment on ever greater scales, we must first establish that capitalism requires infinite exponential growth, and that this growth cannot be decoupled from environmental harm.

Firstly, capitalism requires infinite economic growth.

Let’s imagine a fixed pie scenario where there is no economic growth whatsoever. Even if we assume complete structural changes, like the abolition of the credit system and interest that require growth, among other structural pillars, we are left with a glaring fact of capitalism: private ownership of the means of production requires a positive average rate of return. If the rate of return was <= 0, then no private investment would occur whatsoever, and production would completely seize to exist privately. On the other hand, if the rate of return > 0, in a fixed pie scenario, the rate of return can only be funded by the shrinking of the workers slice of the pie. Inevitably, what this causes is the complete impoverishment of the proletariat, the average person, and the eventual collapse of capitalism. This cannot be fixed with taxes because after calculating taxes there will fundamentally be a rate of return. OK, so capitalism needs growth, that is for sure, but how do we prove that this growth cannot be absolutely decoupled from environmental destruction?

Decoupling is a neoliberal fairytale

Let me preface this by clarifying the terminology, relative decoupling is when an increase in economic growth corresponds to a lower (but still positive) increase in environmental destruction. Absolute decoupling on the other hand means that the economy grows while the rate of environmental destruction decreases. With this in mind, relative decoupling is unimportant. We have the business as usual calculations for climate change, if emissions decrease because of currently enacted policies (relative decoupling means they increase) then we will surpass 2.5C of warming by 2100. This is the temperature where large, currently inhabited geographic regions would reach wetbulb temperatures, capable of killing an adult man sitting in the shade with adequate water.  So anyways, if we want to avoid the most catastrophic global warming effects, we MUST decrease our emissions substantially, this means absolute decoupling. Unfortunately, the rate of absolute decoupling in the wealthy nations that have achieved it is nowhere near the scale needed to avert the worst climate scenario. It is simply too little and too late. When we expand our scope to the global scale, absolute decoupling has never occurred globally, and without EXTREME local absolute decoupling in wealthy nations, we cannot expect it to, as the global south is currently industrializing rapidly (as they have the right to do so). The absolute decoupling that has been achieved has mostly relied on shutting down old coal burning power plants and on the further exploitation of the environment in other ways.

Source: https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunked.pdf

Climate Tunnel Vision

In face of the most eminent threat to our survival, it seems quite clear that climate change is the most important environmental issue; however, this does not mean we should get environmental tunnel vision. The absolute decoupling of emissions in certain nations has relied on the externalization of other environmental destruction. For example, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions we must build solar panels, but this astronomical mass of solar panels is made by the mining of finite metal resources in the global south, using dirty energy. Then, the solar panels themselves need batteries to replace fossil fuels, meaning we have to spend more dirty energy and environmental destruction to mine rare earth metals like lithium, or platinum for hydrogen fuel cells. Climate change is only one of the major ways in which we are destroying the environment, and they are interconnected. Our deforestation of the amazon rainforest to fuel economic growth by harvesting timber and creating farmland accelerates greenhouse gas emissions while pushing towards the amazon rainforest dieback tipping point. Climate change reduces the amounts of available freshwater, a resource we are already abusing. Synthetic fertilizers, whose use will increase when climate change decimates global breadbaskets, is causing eutrophication and hypoxic dead zones on a mind boggling scale. The collapse of biodiversity and ecosystems from all of these different processes of destruction are making the remaining ecosystems more vulnerable to the effects of climate change and our continued pollution, etc, etc, etc. When we look at greenhouse gas emissions, it may be the easiest form of environmental destruction for us to mitigate. There are simple, and most importantly, profitable solutions like renewable energy that can drastically cutback emissions rapidly. Despite this, we are still failing.

Jevons paradox and thermodynamic limits

Jevons paradox states that as our efficiency and productivity increases, we do not use less resources, we just consume more of the now cheaper products, leading to an increase in resource use. If the near limitless source renewable energy makes energy super cheap, what will we do? We will use more energy. If the price of fossil fuels drops because of decreased demand from green energy adoption, what will we do? Industry and developing economies will use those cheap fossil fuels. This same idea applies to nearly everything we can consume. And it makes sense, GDP growth is not the only thing that has historically been exponential, so is productivity increases, and yet have those productivity increases helped the environment? Beyond just the logical paradox, there are thermodynamic limits. If we keep increasing our energy use exponentially, then very quickly we will reach a point where we will not be able to even extract enough energy from renewable energy. Pushing this even further, the physicist Tom Murphy, using historical data on energy use increases, predicted that within 400 years, our energy waste would boil the earth’s oceans.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-022-01652-6.epdf?sharing_token=yNwL92oPzcpklZSqVsr-ndRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0N0u2htmeT1Hou6SrdtT_vjhsjDi8mPyrY6gILuO1cIPYM5r9vTrCV6dFSGWkHiq63t24rvELuWNN1w82farMIezAYiWj7ialZ8KkzI_SEgHP98WBPRE6PFu8lx9H4EP5A%3D

Final Notes:

-          Sorry if this post was kind of long and incoherent, I mostly wrote this from memory.

-          Do not go into the comments and claim climate change is not real.

-          Do not go into the comments and claim that some magical technology like Negative Emissions Technologies or some source of infinite energy (fusion) will just fix everything, that is purely skeptical, unscientifically backed fairytale hope.

-          I mainly want to hear your arguments regarding the possibility of drastic sustained absolute decoupling across not just greenhouse gas emissions, but environmental destruction in general, under capitalism.

-          The fact that previous socialist countries were productivist does not take away from the actual argument because this post serves to illustrate why capitalism fundamentally requires environmental destruction, the same argument cannot be made for socialism.

The political system is broken and corporate welfare is out of hand. Big businesses use up front-line workers and discard them. Meanwhile, the government uses "band-aid" fixes like the Social Security COLA, which immediately gets eaten up by rising Medicare rates.

To fix this permanently, we need to stop trying to change human behavior or trusting politicians. We need a system that is human-proof, politician-proof, and bank-proof.

Here is the blueprint for the Universal Legacy Account:

• Equal Start: Every American baby receives the exact same flat-rate seed payment from the government at birth. No complicated paperwork. No income tracking. True fairness.
• The Big Three Only: The money goes directly to Vanguard, Fidelity, or Charles Schwab. No corrupt government administrators. No scandalous commercial or investment banks.
• S&P 500 Only: The funds are immediately invested strictly in an S&P 500 index fund. This ensures workers own a piece of the economy and benefit from the future of AI.
• The Hard Lock: The account is legally locked until age 67. No "hardship" exemptions. No loopholes for politicians to buy votes. No changes allowed unless there is a global disaster.
• Community Investment: The account has a clean ID number. Strangers, grandparents, or local businesses can securely deposit extra money (up to a limit) directly into the child's index fund. Parents cannot touch it.

By letting the S&P 500 compound untouched for 65+ years, every front-line worker can retiree as a millionaire. It protects the person you will become from the impulsive spending of your youth. It turns a broken system into a permanent birthright of dignity.

As someone who has once been in the ACF, what do socialists think of militarised youth groups? The UK has five militaru-themed youth groups, Army Cadets (ACF), Royal Air Force Air Cadets (RAFAC), Sea Cadet Corps (SCC), Combined Cadet Force (CCF) amd Volunteer Cadets. The first 3 are self-explanatory, the CCF is just military stiff as a while for school children and the Volunteer Cadets are also the navy like the SCC. They don't technically claim to be a military pipeline, but what was that founded as. Do socialists (specifically liberterian socialists) believe militarised youth organisations are compatible with the liberation from Capitalism and State? Asking because I want to know if a socialist society would keep these things, since I'm a defender of them.

If you are a supporter of capitalism and this doesn’t apply to you, then I’m not addressing you. This is only for the people I’ve seen on this sub who say that “not real socialism” is a cop out. 

Take into account the following hypothetical scenario: 

I am the dictator of a country you live in. I all but shut down every single private market. I set up state enterprises that plan and manufacture the entire economy. No one can legally own any private property. However, I name the system “Certified Capitalism.” 

Not only that, I claim in my books and speeches that I’m not only a capitalist, but the truest one of them all. My sycophants run around waving my literature, decreeing my ideas are the only non-utopian way to have capitalism. When you debate them, they quote my literature as to why capitalist movements outside of “Certified Capitalism” are fake capitalism. 

You - a supporter of capitalism - would probably say: “hey, that’s not really how actual capitalism works. It’s not real capitalism.“

What would you then say if “Certified Capitalism” supporters replied by saying that you’re coping? After all, my regime has put up statues of capitalist philosophers and littered the streets with pro-capitalist slogans. 

Do you see why “not real socialism” can be, and often is a valid argument? 

In hindsight, it was probably a bad idea ceding our critical communication infrastructures to capitalism.

The postal service - It was clean, efficient and timely. It blew out of the water all the private courier services out of the water. Then came neoliberal capitalism and the Post Office despite being a public service, as forced to turn a profit. As such, they allowed advertisers to run a amok overwhelming our mailboxes with literal garbage that goes straight to the trash. Then the neoconservative fascists gutted it anyway, despite turning a profit, so it wouldn't turn a profit so the private sector couriers can thrive despite sub par service like UPS, FedEx and others. We used to be excited to get mail, now we dread it.

Telephones - an amazing technology to connect us over massive distances. Fines fees and subscriptions priced massive amounts of the population out of the most basic communication method even today.

News media - once the most major way to get quality information about politics, the world, technological advancement. Now to compete at the top levels of reach you need to either be funded by corporations and billionaires, turn their platforms into ad farms, put their most critical content behind firewalls, or most likely, all 3.

Email - once a cool new quick way to convey a ton of information in an instant. People stayed in each other's lives longer due to the ease of communicating. Now, since we decided not to regulate it, it's so overflowing with advertising and scams, we only check it to verify our passwords.

Cell Phones - it was once illegal to get scam calls on a cell phone due to cost. That went away when incoming calls and texts stop costing the customer money. Now our cell phones are all but useless staying on silent all the time while we duck "Scam Likely" our newest nemesis.

How do we keep falling for this? How is capitalist indoctrination so strong that we let them convince us to not trust our own lying eyes.

Provide whether you're a marxist, democratic socialist, social democrat, and Define and provide sources for 'Socialism' and 'Capitalism '

Gracias

Every socialist i speak to has their own definitions that conflicts with every other socialist, and are usually self-contradictory.

Most debates about capitalism and socialism focus on exploitation as an economic problem.

Socialists often argue that capitalism is exploitative because owners of capital extract surplus value from workers. Workers produce more value than they receive in wages, while capitalists profit from ownership rather than direct labor.

Capitalists often respond that wage labor is voluntary, that profit is a reward for risk, organization, investment, and entrepreneurship, and that markets create better incentives than planned systems.

I understand both sides. But I want to ask a deeper question:

Is exploitation really limited to capitalism, class structure, private property, wage labor, or state power? Or is exploitation something broader that exists throughout human society at every level?

What I mean is this: people exploit each other constantly, whether knowingly or unknowingly, directly or indirectly. This happens on a large scale through corporations, states, institutions, landlords, employers, bureaucracies, political parties, and markets. But it also happens on a small scale between friends, families, romantic partners, coworkers, neighbors, communities, and social groups.

A capitalist can exploit a worker. That is obvious.

But a worker can also exploit another worker socially, emotionally, financially, or psychologically. A poor person can manipulate another poor person. A family member can guilt-trip another family member. A friend can use another friend. A community can pressure individuals into sacrificing themselves for group approval. People can demand compassion when they are weak, then become selfish or cruel once they gain power.

So I wonder whether many political ideologies are too eager to identify one main villain.

For some socialists, the villain is capitalism, private property, and the bourgeoisie.

For some capitalists, the villain is the state, collectivism, and forced redistribution.

For some nationalists, the villain is foreigners or cultural outsiders.

For some liberals, the villain is authoritarianism or intolerance.

For some conservatives, the villain is moral decline or social disorder.

Some of these criticisms may be valid. But I think people often use ideology to avoid admitting something uglier: ordinary human beings themselves are often selfish, envious, hypocritical, status-seeking, and exploitative.

Society also creates artificial goals that most people will never realistically achieve. People are told that if they work hard enough, obey the rules, sacrifice enough, stay loyal to the group, support the correct ideology, believe the correct slogans, or wait for the right historical moment, everything will eventually work out.

Capitalism has this myth: work hard, compete, build yourself, and you can become successful.

Socialism can have its own myth: abolish capitalism, transform material conditions, and human exploitation will eventually disappear.

Religion, nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, and other belief systems have their own versions too. Every system seems to produce stories that keep people obedient, hopeful, and emotionally invested in goals they may never reach.

This brings me to human nature.

Many people say humans are naturally empathetic and cooperative. I think that is only partly true. Humans can be empathetic, cooperative, generous, and loyal. But humans are also selfish, jealous, envious, hypocritical, competitive, and obsessed with status.

These traits exist even among ordinary working people.

For example, workers may support equality in theory, but still feel resentment when their peers become happier, more attractive, more respected, more intelligent, more talented, luckier, wealthier, or more successful. A person may claim to want justice, but secretly hate seeing someone close to them rise above them.

If ordinary people naturally cared deeply about everyone else, why do most people not voluntarily reduce their own wages, comfort, consumption, or privileges to help people who are suffering more than they are?

Some people do charity. Some people are genuinely generous. Some people sacrifice for others. I am not denying that.

But most people still prioritize themselves, their family, their own security, their own status, and their own comfort. They may support equality in the abstract, but when sacrifice becomes personal, many people hesitate.

This is why I am skeptical of any ideology that seems to suggest exploitation can be solved mainly by changing the economic system.

Capitalism may organize selfishness through markets, private property, wage labor, competition, and profit.

But if capitalism disappeared tomorrow, would envy, manipulation, domination, hypocrisy, nepotism, status competition, sexual competition, social exclusion, and power-seeking disappear too?

I doubt it.

They might simply reappear through party bureaucracy, political loyalty, ideological purity, social reputation, access to state resources, personal connections, family networks, beauty, charisma, intelligence, credentials, or some other hierarchy.

Likewise, capitalism’s defenders often underestimate how easily “voluntary exchange” can hide desperation, unequal bargaining power, inherited advantage, social coercion, and dependency. Just because someone technically agrees to something does not mean the situation is free from exploitation.

So my argument is not simply anti-capitalist or anti-socialist.

My question is whether both sides sometimes underestimate the darker parts of human behavior.

Capitalists may underestimate how much economic power allows people to dominate others.

Socialists may underestimate how much domination can continue even after private capital is weakened or abolished.

Both sides often talk as if the correct system will discipline human selfishness. But what if selfishness, envy, hierarchy, manipulation, and exploitation are not just products of one system? What if every system becomes a new battlefield for the same human tendencies?

My questions are:

Is exploitation mainly caused by capitalism, or is capitalism only one structure through which humans exploit each other?

Can socialism eliminate exploitation, or would it mostly eliminate one economic form of exploitation while other forms continue?

Can capitalism defend itself from the criticism that “voluntary exchange” often happens under unequal and coercive conditions?

Can socialism defend itself from the criticism that abolishing private ownership does not abolish envy, hierarchy, bureaucracy, status-seeking, and abuse of power?

If humans are naturally empathetic and cooperative, why have domination, cruelty, jealousy, and exploitation appeared across so many different societies and historical systems?

If humans are naturally selfish and status-seeking, what political or economic system best limits the damage they can do to each other?

I am not saying capitalism is good. I am not saying socialism is useless. I am asking whether the usual debate is too narrow.

Maybe the real problem is not only “capitalists exploit workers.”

Maybe the deeper problem is:

Humans exploit humans whenever they have the opportunity, and capitalism, socialism, states, markets, families, communities, and institutions are different arenas where that tendency appears.

So which system best recognizes this ugly reality and limits exploitation in practice, not just in theory?

Robert Owen's New Harmony experiment stands as perhaps the most instructive lesson in economic history about why socialism fails every single time someone tries it. This wasn't some theoretical debate in a university classroom. Owen put his money where his mouth was, purchasing the thriving town of Harmonie, Indiana in 1825 for $150,000 and transforming it into his vision of a perfect socialist society.

The setup looked promising. Owen brought genuine intellectual firepower to Indiana. Scientists, educators, and progressive thinkers flocked to this "Community of Equality" where private property would disappear, money would become obsolete, and collective labor would serve the common good. Owen had already made his fortune in the textile industry, so he understood production and management. He wasn't some armchair theorist.

Within months, the cracks appeared. The hardest workers started questioning why they should break their backs when lazy neighbors received identical compensation. Why stay late to finish critical tasks when someone else could sleep in and still eat the same meals? Owen had eliminated the price system that communicates information about individual contribution and social need. Incentives collapsed immediately.

You can trace the predictable cascade of failure. Production dropped as effort declined. Disputes erupted over work assignments because no market mechanism existed to allocate labor efficiently. Without private property rights, nobody maintained equipment properly. Without profit and loss signals, managers couldn't determine which activities created value and which destroyed it. The community devolved into endless meetings about governance while crops rotted in fields.

Owen tried multiple reorganizations, breaking the community into smaller units, adjusting the rules, bringing in new leadership. Nothing worked because the fundamental problem remained: socialism eliminates the knowledge-generating mechanism that makes complex societies function. Prices coordinate millions of individual decisions without central planning. Property rights ensure people maintain and improve resources. Competition rewards innovation and punishes waste.

By 1827, Owen admitted defeat and sold the property. He later wrote that the experiment failed because of "the extremely defective and vicious training of the population of the world, under the existing systems." Translation: people behaved like people instead of like the angels his system required.

Without market prices, you cannot rationally allocate resources. Without individual ownership, you cannot maintain accountability. Without competition, you cannot discover efficient methods. Owen's community lacked all three mechanisms.

New Harmony's collapse took just two years, but it taught future generations exactly why voluntary exchange and private property create prosperity while collective ownership creates poverty. Owen spent his own money proving that human nature doesn't bend to utopian schemes. Production responds to incentives, not good intentions.

The Indiana prairie reclaimed Owen's socialist paradise, but the economic lessons endure. Every subsequent attempt at collective ownership fails for identical reasons. Owen's honest admission about human nature's resistance to pure collectivism deserves respect. Most socialist experiments end with leaders blaming saboteurs, foreign enemies, or insufficient revolutionary fervor rather than acknowledging the system's inherent contradictions.

Socialism always collapses when confronted with economic reality. New Harmony's failure was no exception.

Why do people view inequality as a problem rather than the issue being that the poor are poor. I can understand the view that it is a problem that the poor are poor or with policies that make the poor poorer and the rich richer but I would view a policy that made the poor 1.5* richer and the rich 2* richer a positive policy. This would be a policy that benefited everyone but increased inequality and I can not see the problem with such a policy, yet people seem to think that inequality is an inherent problem, why?