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When we explain to other people how our capitalist system works and they recoil in horror
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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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Why does everyone think the only alternative to capitalism is communism?
Capitalism or communism the greedy and power hungry will weasel there way up. The only thing that will save us is a vigilant electorate.
Capitalism has its benefits. Namely, the rapid economic growth afforded through exploitation of natural resources by unemployed labor mixed with cash-rich / debt-friendly entrepreneurs. You don't want an economic system that loses the benefits of industrialization and domestic improvement.
On the flip side, capitalism also has a huge problem of wealth distribution. Bottlenecks within the flow of revenue create huge pools of malinvestment, squandered natural resources on vanity projects, and a strong incentive for public sector militarization / police violence as a tool to maintain the disproportionate wealth distribution.
We need a system in which individuals can still cooperatively administer an economy with an eye towards long term economic prosperity, but one in which the surpluses aren't horded or wasted by a rigid hierarchy of generationally wealthy lenders and carnival barker entrepreneurs. Communism provides a roadmap for redistributing titles and incomes across entire populations, while still socially reproducing a bureaucracy capable of managing industrial-scale and national-scale projects.
American brains have been shaped into 2-lane highways.
Based on the state of American infrastructure, this is patently false, as it implies the existence of wrinkles on American Brains.
Or wait... are your two lane highways smooth? What is THAT like?
That's just Americans. They can only think of 2 options; this or that. Democrat or Republican. Capitalism or Communism. Good or evil. Simple binary choices.
There are countries in Europe which are ruled by a coalition of 3 or 4 political parties. Very few Americans would be comfortable with something so complicated.
But a lot of people answer along ideological lines on purpose. It saves you from being griefed by others who are just extremists and will call you bigot or whatever. That’s why people being polled will say whatever, and vote whatever makes sense to them. Then others are surprised by the outcome. Ideological extremism has killed people’s critical thinking capacities.
I mean what do you propose, I mean I personaly do not want to regress farther to fudalism
Heavily regulated socialist democracy.
Provide basic needs, food, clothing, healthcare, childcare, and education. Hell even a phone and Internet access.
Emphasis on the basic.
Allow for those who do not wish to, or are unable to work to live with all basic needs covered. Those who wish to work are incentivized to do so, with access to luxuries. Better housing, better clothing, better technology. Allow a place for the market, but don't make people depend on the market.
No reason to work a job you hate, no reason to employ people you don't need. Everybody wins.
This sounds fantastic, and will never work in the USA as long as there are classes of people who live above the rules and can influence society through policy and social media. If they smell any extra income, rights or services you receive, it's like blood in the water and they will come from miles to get a piece of anything you own, exactly as they do now.
Only if they live above the rules
This.
Also, extremely agressive measures to stop the harm of others through the accumumation of mass wealth.
Basically, once you reach, I dunno, 5-10 million total "worth", you get taxed at 100%.
Something like that. No one will ever need that much ever, and they can feel free to just reture and live out their life doing nothing if they manage to get there.
Socialism is when the government is nice to you bottom text
I mean, you're almost speaking of the exact system Marxists want to work towards, just with the caveat that Marxists think Markets are only useful tools in less-developed and less-critical industries temporarily, before public ownership and planning becomes more efficient, and that the spread in difference between "luxuries" decreases over time as productivity improves to account for that. The whole "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" bit that requires extremely developed industry to achieve.
Marxists aren't opposed to increased pay for more skilled or more intense labor, rather, such a system is a necessity until sufficient automation and industrialization allow for more goods and services to be free.
Have you read Marx, or Marxists?
I've read The Expanse lol. I was describing the system on Earth in that series.
The thing is, markets predate the written word. Some form of trading is literally one of the first things humans did. It could even be a prehuman invention. Eliminating markets is like trying to eliminate prostitution, or drugs.
Markets, much like life, uhh... Find a way.
Instead of turning up your nose, make them work for you, in a way you want. We don't want the markets to spread, unrestrained, like kudsu. We want Bonsai markets.
This has been my conclusion as well after many years of deep reflection amidst my depression since the pandemic. The problem with current capitalism isn't markets, it's 'how vulnerable the entire system is to greed & power and if it can grow unchecked like cancer to corrupt the nervous system of society - the government itself'. This sure happened in the most capitalist nation of all as we're witnessing it now, but don't tell me a strong centrally controlled government isn't susceptible to it. A government that can dictate what you can & cannot make holds enormous power over all individuals. Markets really represent individual freedom. I can make a fucking cake and exchange it for whatever piece of jewelry I want from the free market. Currency just allows for easy exchange of goods. These are just tools, not the root of the problem.
Trade isn't the same as a market, necessarily, and markets aren't the same as the specific Capitalist iteration that depends on the M-C-M' circuit where commodities C are produced with money M in exchange for greater money M'. When Marxists say they wish to abolish markets, they mean so by stating that they wish, rather than production being handled through competing entities where that M-C-M' circuit applies, we instead fold all of these entities into the public sector and democratically plan them along a cooperative basis.
Early on, there would presumably be labor vouchers, which differ from money in that they would be destroyed on first use. A sort of credit for work, for use in the only "store" that exists. Social services and safety nets would be deducted from your "pay" and be free at point of service. Things like that, and this doesn't really constitute a "market" in the normal sense of the word. Eventually, these labor vouchers would likely be abolished once they became unnecessary.
That's really just a company store but worse somehow.
You're going to have a market. If you make markets illegal you'll just have black markets. You need to contend with that, failing to realize that literally killed the Soviet Union. It got so bad, and was such a core part of daily life that they just kinda made it legal, and the union collapsed shortly after.
You can't fix homelessness by making it illegal, you can destroy markets by making them illegal. These things have been tried and failed in practice.
There's a difference between saying we should work towards getting rid of the necessity for Markets, and saying we need to do that instantly, today, by outlawing them. Black Markets didn't kill the Soviet Union, but they did highlight flaws in how it was run and where it was lacking. That's a separate conversation that we can have, if you want, but is largely unimportant.
The thing is, over time, markets centralize through firms outcompeting and absorbing or eliminating smaller firms. This increases barrier to entry as it is more expensive to compete on even footing. Marxists don't want to abolish markets simply by decree, but developing to the point that they no longer make sense. Competition can't last forever, and neither can markets.
I don't think everyone believes that, there are many Anarchists that don't agree with Marxists, and there's broad diversity within Capitalist thought, Anarchist thought, and Marxist thought. For example, Anarchists take issue with hierarchy above all else, and so wish to establish generally a horizontal, decentralized network of communes, while Marxists take issue with Class, and so wish to have a fully publicly owned and planned economy run along democratic lines, ie everyone in the world will share equal ownership of all industry.
The reason why you may be seeing more Marxists is generally because Marxism has played the most widespread and significant role as an alternative to Capitalism in modern history.
I have to ask, as someone who has only a basic understanding of the philosophies, how are the end goals of Anarchists and Marxists different? I understood them as only having different methods of arriving to the same state of society without class, states and money - communism.
By my understanding, Anarchists go bottom up by propping up a parallel system based on voluntary cooperation and mutual aid, to the point where the state is no longer needed for anything, and Marxists (or rather Marxist-Leninists) go top down by seizing control of the state in the name of the workers, and then gradually give the workers more and more direct control until the state is no longer needed ("The withering of the state").
Assuming what I just wrote is wrong, what faults would Anarchists and Marxists find in each other's end goals, assuming they succeed in establishing their ideal societies?
Up front, I am a Marxist-Leninist, but used to be an Anarchist (more specifically a Syndicalist). As such, those are my biases. This is going to be extremely oversimplified, and if you want sources from Marx, Engels, etc I can give recommended readings (or I have an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list linked on my profile you can check out).
The key distinction is that Anarchist Communism and Marxist (not only ML, Marxist in general) Communism are different, because Marxists and Anarchists have different views on class and the state.
For Anarchists, their chief concern is hierarchy, and the state is an entrenched monopoly on violence that upholds that. They seek, therefore, decentralized networks of Communes, and can have differing forms of this within each commune, some may have currency, some may have labor vouchers, some may have gift economies, they all vary.
For Marxists, their chief concern is class, most simply stated as a social relation of ownership and control of the Means of Production. As such, they seek a fully publicly owned and planned economy, with democratic structures and delegates. The "State" is an instrument of class oppression, but not all government deals with that. When the entire world is publicly owned and planned, and democratically controlled, there ceases to be any purpose to armies, or police, or private property rights, hence the "whithering of the state" and what remains being the "Administration of Things," as Engels puts it. The State whithering isn't a policy that can be put in place, but a consequence of gradually folding private property into public control.
A bit on Vanguardism, the idea isn't that the Vanguard "gives up" control and has all control in the beginning, but that the Vanguard is the formalized entity of the most politically advanced of the working class. A vanguard will always exist whether you formalize it or not, MLs seek to formalize it so it can be democratized and connected to the ruling class, rather than emerge naturally and unaccountably. The existence of a vanguard does not mean they control everything and the workers don't.
An Anarchist critique of Marxism is that Marxists retain hierarchy even into Communism (managers and administrators that share the same ownership as any other form of labor are not distinct classes), and that Anarchists believe power corrupts, so this process is doomed if you don't combat hierarchy from the beginning.
A Marxist critique of Anarchism is that communes that only control and own what's within the commune doesn't actually get rid of class, as there is unequal ownership across communes and therefore a potential for trade imbalances and a resurrection of Capitalism. Moreover, disconnected but trading communes severely restricts the emergence of large-scale industry, which is a necessity for improving production to better provide for all.
Like I said, this was an extreme oversimplification. I can elaborate more or offer reading (at least with Marxist or Marxist-Leninist texts and concepts)! I'll let Anarchists respond for the theory bit.