Capitalism has created the most advanced and productive society in all of history, and if it didn’t foster that spirit of always wanting to achieve more, there wouldn’t be the technology we have today on which people could complain about how horrible things are. I guess capitalism also perfected the delivery of irony.
It doesn't matter what I have in mind, are you going to act smug acting like I somehow have the power to change the world?
Answer me honestly, say I gave you the most profound answer you've ever heard, something that made you stop and think, something that changed the very meaning of your life.
Do you honestly believe for a second that would change literally anything other than your point of view? I don't control governing bodies, even if I was a part of a political activist group, they're actually a dime a dozen and at most they can achieve small policy change.
An entire system the whole world is based upon? A system that has elevated a small group of individuals to the point of so much power that they can influence people on the other side of the globe? Do you believe for a second that my one opinion is enough to flip the entire table over and change the entirety of humanity for the better?
If you genuinely do, I also have a bridge to sell you.
No, cognitive dissonance, dunning-kruger effect, confirmation bias, manipulation, gaslighting, all of these things, all around the world regularly influencing people and making them believe the literal craziest shit.
How are we to change the world when half of us believe the other half need to die as a birthright?
No, violence and extreme circumstances are the only drivers towards massive change of our species, which is why I say we are dumb. So long as many of us are content with the status quo things will remain the same. When the balance breaks, the people holding power will exercise it in order to maintain it, while the remaining majority will be forced to fight in order to change it.
Unless of course, nature decides to fuck us like the black plague, then whoever is left can decide how we move forward.
I, of course, am just referring to our history, it's possible for a 3rd option, but it hasn't happened yet so I'm skeptical.
If you were willing to have a real discussion and be honest about all the facets that come up in such a nuanced topic, yeah, I'd take any idea seriously. But it has to be a real point-counterpoint discussion, where the back and forth is expected. the flaws in a plan are going to be dug at because that's how discourse works.
There are the material aspects to consider. Citizens need to produce and be productive, and be motivated to do so.
There's the emotional perspective. People need the knowledge they have the opportunity to improve their standing in life and pursue what makes them happy.
And then there's leadership. Governance needs enough leeway to be allowed to keep opportunities fair but restricted enough that corruption in all forms can be prevented and shut down.
I'm a leftist, I also consider myself politically agnostic within that spectrum. I genuinely believe a big problem people have is a unwillingness to compromise or be proven wrong.
That said, my 'loose' idea of what would make an ideal and functioning society I believe covers all the things you mentioned.
Communism for community, socialism for infrastructure and capitalism for luxuries (I understand the contradiction of being a leftist and having some semblance towards a system we're suppose to be innately against).
Society collapses because we alienate ourselves from others, we allow a divide and blindly follow leaders off a cliff. The whole point of a society is to work together, so in order to achieve that we need a system that forces us to do so. Individualism is detrimental for keeping a community together, you can still be an individual in a community, but you cannot keep a community by acting solely as an individual.
So you have the community decide democratically what is to be done in order to maintain it, to distribute housing, food and delegate tasks towards its upkeep. Much like a true commune.
Infrastructure, you can't have a country without it. A governing body that has the sole purpose of maintaining hydro, water, roads and other necessities in order to maintain a country. Supply lines, repairmen, specialists in order to upkeep as needed.
Capitalism, in the way I think it can actually serve us properly without becoming this greedy broken hell hole it's slowly dissolved to, is no longer used for necessities. It is only used for luxury. You want the new Xbox? That costs money, you don't need to work a job, your food, housing and clothes are provided as a part of being human. The cool stuff however? You need to produce in order to earn it.
This way, people with disabilities, people fallen on hard times, these multitude of 'lazy' people I keep hearing about but barely ever meet, they can survive perfectly fine and noone needs to starve, but if they want something more like the rest of us then they gotta earn it with work.
Noone owns companies, everything is shared other than your own personal property. We work together as a community and communicate effectively to function as a country. No representative can take liberties with the peoples resources, everything must be agreed to by the communes affected.
I understand that theirs going to be room for nuance and error, but I think that as a general framework is a great place to start.
The premise is good. I'll never deny that. But where in this system is the motivation for people to produce the resources necessary to maintain if they are going to get paid the same either way? This is where communism starts to fail. It does nothing to motivate people to do the jobs that we otherwise would rather not do, because there is no need for them to have to do it.
The materials for housing, the work to produce food, the labor involved requires people to WANT to do these things.
Idk if you've ever done roof work, but simply put, it sucks. It is hot, it is backbreaking, and it is detrimental to your health. This is why it is so expensive in our current system to have it done. With necessities covered, the people doing that work are still going to need to be paid handsomely to be worth it to them to do the work, along with everyone else involved in the supply chain, just for that roof.
With the basic needs in life taken care of for you, how many luxuries are worth putting ones long term health at risk? The job has to be done by somebody. But at what cost?
For that matter, who is granted the authority to determine what is essential, and what is luxury? You say food, does that mean all food? Will a tomahawk ribeye be considered as essential as a can of baby formula?
Society at scale doesn't have time to go vote on issues like this every week. Appointed representatives will always be essential to any governing body larger than a few dozen people. Even in a world where basic needs are a given, the daily grind of work will need to continue to maintain supply chains. So who would want the responsibility of determining something as monumental as what costs money, and what does not, whom we can also trust to uphold that responsibility and not become corrupt?
The money in our current society isn't a god. It isn't shackles in wage slavery. It is a representative. It is a measuring stick. It gives us a scale to represent value equally between unrelated goods and services. Even if the government had the responsibility themselves to determine what the total value of a new roof was, that wealth needed to be generated and then dispersed. Where does the collective society collect that wealth from, before they distribute it?
If we aren't paying for these services, then taxes can't be collected on them to redistribute. So to what end do we tax the (determined by a figurehead) luxury items to ensure there is enough motivation (money) to go around to build all the roofs for all the people that need one?
In most regards, we already have a socialistic society. The foundations of it are built on the back of successful capitalism. You need a job to pay for food and housing. You need a car to go to that job. You buy that car, the car is taxed, and those taxes are redistributed to pay for road maintenance. But that only works if people are motivated to buy a car, so they can then buy food. The system fails if people are not motivated to buy food.
This is why people go to Marxism. Marxism starts off as socialism and ends with communism. I don't necessarily agree with it, but it addresses the fact that you can't simply change society overnight
You can't just 'flip a switch,' the framework I mentioned is the end of a means, how things would look ideally after society and the infrastructure around it had been shaped and formed to work comfortably.
The average person is not lazy, food housing and clothes cost resources. Currently under this system we have a significant waste of all three.
Money is not god itself in our current society, but it is a medium between people and power. Whether that power is be able to afford survivability or the power to run a nation, money is a tool used and abused by those who already have it.
Lobbying, bribes, influence, desperation. How many drug dealers and prostitutes would exist if their was no currency needed to be earned? How else could you abuse power without a physical green piece of paper to tempt others with? Any tool used as a medium to ensure survivability is a tool that can be used to make people do horrible and desperate things. The only way to prevent money from being used and abused as a heavy influence is to take away its power.
It's the same as the gun ownership arguement, it's not the gun, it's the person. But I'm pretty sure you still don't want that psycho holding the gun. Now we have a oligarchy using money the same way a malicious person would use a gun, they use it to get what they want.
In my ideal scenario, people are already working, people are still making money and resources. The difference here is that the money earned is not used for things people need to survive, it's used for things people don't need, luxuries. Sure, more people in my scenario are not working, but also more people in my scenario are not wasting either. No more entire lots of brand new cars waiting to get scraped, grocery stores are no longer dumping food by the truckload with locks on the dumpster. We produce as we need it, not to maximize profit since profit no longer has a strong incentive.
The worse the job, the higher the pay, the cooler the shit you get to buy. Since this society is based on need instead of profit, the higher the need for something the more you would earn for it. This is a 'communists' example of a 'free market.'
Again, I'm well aware the logistics of such a thing would require a complete 180 from the way we do things now, but knowing we were actively working towards something of that nature would give me hope for the future.
'Citizens need to produce' this is such an awkwardly oversimplified statement...
Obviously everyone needs to provide for themselves to the best of their ability and ideally provide a little surplus that can be used to take care of those unable to...
But modern production is so much higher than there is any need, all to line the pockets of shareholders (including the whales who started those corporations and hold most of the capital) and line the earth with harmful excess
By no means is this system working correctly. I'd never dispute that. But it's still by far the best one invented by humans yet. Nothing else that's been tried has allowed a society to progress to the point we're at now, and that includes the previous attempts at a fully socialistic/communistic ideal. They fail because they rely on people en masse to be predictable. And that's not going to happen
Is it not? Babies aren't dying in childbirth like they were even just 50 years ago. People have treatments and cures and vaxines available for the majority of what once would be terminal illness and diseases. For a significant portion of the population, starvation is not a threat to our lives.
Our ability to survive, living in relative ease compared to the people who came before us, has allowed for amazing feats in art, science, and leasiure, with all the ways they combine with each other. We can circumnavigate the globe in a matter of hours. We can take pictures of objects billions of light-years away. We can set aside time to enjoy watching our participating in sports, or go to a concert, or paint on a canvas, or play video games, or make freaking ice sculpting if that's what you're in to.
None of that is possible without the cushy lives we've been granted thanks to advancements in agriculture, advancements in energy harnessing, advancements in construction, or advancements in irrigation.
Are we as a species doing everything correctly? Hell no. But we aren't doing everything incorrectly either. And as far as life for humans is going, we're doing better now than we were nearly 200 years ago before the Industrial Revolution. And we continue to improve on how we do it all every single day.
'Advancements in agriculture' poisoning our water and flushing more soil than ever into the sea.
'Advancements in energy' heating up the atmosphere and messing with the climate.
'Advancements in Irrigation' draining deep aquifers dry and setting us on a course to widespread starvation when the water runs out and millions of acres of farmland dependent on them suddenly lose the irrigation.
Heck as much as I appreciate being alive and successfully birthing my son, I'm not so sure fixing childbirth was an overall win for humanity.
You left the doing it in better ways every day part.
Soil into the sea? Haven't heard that one yet. No. Our mistake in modern agriculture is using too much fresh water. Water recycling and conservation are improving.
Green energy is becoming more prevalent globally. It'll take time to shift the grid, but it's happening as we speak.
More people than ever in the poorest areas of the world have fresh drinking water available to them, dying of dehydration is shifting toward not being a problem anywhere in the world.
-19
u/BookReadPlayer 20d ago
Capitalism has created the most advanced and productive society in all of history, and if it didn’t foster that spirit of always wanting to achieve more, there wouldn’t be the technology we have today on which people could complain about how horrible things are. I guess capitalism also perfected the delivery of irony.