Political Memes

Seems like you could get most of the way there by just keeping the current system but adding a social dividend

This Swedish Market Socialism plan was somewhat similar to that, unfortunately it got scrapped at the last minute for being too radical.

We don't even need to go that far (although it would be nice). We could just make it illegal for stores to throw out perfectly good food and instead force them to donate it to food banks. They can even get a charity write-off as a treat.

It's not semantics as you try to portray. It's the real life case that simply negates your "solution" if any.

Dude I’m a Marxist-Leninist

Yes, hence why I believe you've read very little Marx.

This is empirically false. You can’t provide a scientific source for this because it’s wrong. Central planning is the most efficient tool, that’s why Amazon and Walmart (extremely centrally planned systems which have power to control their supply chains at will) systematically outcompete all other businesses.

Jesus Christ. That's not what central planning means.

Also, where does Marx talk about the efficiency of markets and inefficiency of central planning???

Holy shit. Thank you for demonstrating "hence why I believe you've read very little Marx."

Under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

...

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

...

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

The revolutionary nature of the capitalist mode of production and its importance in developing capital to the point where it is possible for the proletariat to seize power is fucking core to Marx's writing. This is not advanced stuff.

Fucking MLs, talking about historical dialectics and materialism and then demonstrating an utter lack of basic knowledge on the subject.

We may be miscommunicating a bit here, because I don't mean to imply that capitalism sprung into being wholly formed, or that it was something that was consciously pursued; rather, that capitalism, once the main features that we would recognize came into being, put down roots and spread because it was a more efficient solution to an extant problem, or, if 'solution' sounds too final, a more efficient alternate means to tribal/feudal/guild/mercantilist economies of addressing the problem of resource distribution inherent to complex societies.

Like how traditions of banking spread because they're more efficient than allowing money to be hoarded - not because the ruling class up and says "Banking, what a wonderful idea!", but because polities whose institutions tolerate, mesh with, or allow for the innovation, ceteris paribus, end up in a superior position over those which do not, because they are in possession of a solution (to hoarding, in the case of banking) of increased efficiency than non-banking solutions, making polities which have banking or banking-like institutions the norm over time.

That being said, I've put both of those books on my to-read list, because they sound excellent.

Nitrogen fertilizers don't date to the early 17th century, when this trend of explosive economic growth becomes apparent in early capitalist states, unless you're counting four-field rotation farming, itself only adopted because of the market-driven demands of early capitalist societies.