this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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This is why I prefer socialism over capitalism.
In socialism, I’d be poor and have no choice of what I buy or eat but I can live and afford having children.
In capitalism, where you have freedom, the same rules applies to poor and rich citizens. The difference is that the rich can afford lawyers and are able to lobby to change/break the law on their favor. You don’t.
This is how the cost of living would go 100% up and you wage increase by 1.34% each year.
you do know that under a socialist system worker-owned companies would compete in the market right? you’d still have lots of choice lol
I’m interested to know more.
Some people only think of bad vibes of the Soviet Union when anyone talk bad about capitalism.
In my country, we have free healthcare, free education, livable wages, free market.
We’re not capitalist tho. A mix of socialism and capitalism.
100% communism is bad, 100% capitalism is bad, 100% socialism is bad.
socialism isn’t just “government owns/provides everything.
There are different flavours. One of which entails workers owning the companies they work for, rather than the state owning everything.
That is the point capitalists cannot comprehend.
Twitter have resources to crush small social media apps. Monopoly is a serious issue in capitalism.
If people own a company similar how lemmy is open source then they would have resources to fight back big corporations.
I am a worker under capitalism. The owner tells me how to work. I sell my time for money. I produce value for the owner. The owner keeps the difference between the value I produce and the money for which I sold my time. The excess value after paying for my time is kept by the owner. I have money to buy products.
I am a worker under socialism. I decide how to work with other workers. I produce value. I provide my value to those in need.
I prefer to own my time and value. I do not want to pay a state to give money to owners. I do not want to empower a state to use violence if I do not comply.
I am not sure how communism, socialism and capitalism are being used here. I am an anarchist. I would say states are bad, owners are bad, heirarchy is bad.
Totally agree.
What I mean is the state should define rules and enforce them. And for critical industries the state can support / supplement the companies.
This way big corps cannot have monopoly.
My main issue with capitalism/ USA system is lobbying and allowing corps to do what ever they want in the fine print.
I think what you are reffering to as "not capitalist" is called social market economy, at least that's what it's called in german.
Some economists also reffer to it as Rhein Capitalism, because it's mostly used in europe and was important to prevent west german citizens from wanting communism.
Exactly!
I just know it did exist.
One good example is Germany. If the government didn’t phase out nuclear power as the citizens wanted they would have been in better place now.
Sometimes voting and democracy isn’t ideal as it’s easy to influence people if you have enough resources.
I disagree, voting is always right, but there's only an ideal outcome if the population is educated about the topic.
If people would have realised, that the true worst power source is fosile fules, we'd have cheaper electricity and better co2 rates now.
Same problem with power in austria btw, if some missinformed teens wouldn't have tried to be important back then we'd be maybe fully selfsufficient regaeding power now.
The issue is that educating people is not easy as it sounds. Also, if you’re rich, you can influence the people who vote.
Take Alex Jones as an example, he managed to convince someone to commit a crime. Look up Sandy Hook incident.
Also, Trump and Jan 6th.
You can see a pattern here. More resources means more influence thus manipulating people easily.
Could a worker-owned company sell itself to a single person, and become a company owned by one person?
That's called freelancing. That's already a thing and isn't an issue because the worker is getting the fruits of their labor - there's no capitalist making money off another person's labor.
Only if the workers agreed to, collectively.
Democracy would decide
Okay, and what if that single owner then hired some wage laborers who got no ownership stake?
You’d just have socialism that could drift into capitalism?
Also I’ll remind you that in a free market system, a single owner who doesn’t share ownership with his workers, has arrived at that situation through a combination of customer and worker choice. Workers choose to work for non-socialized companies all the time. And there’s nothing stopping people from starting worker collectives in our present system.
So if in the socialist system the workers are free to go capitalist, and in the capitalist system the workers are free to go socialist, then really they’re just two instances of the same landscape of choice. And it would appear the workers have chosen capitalism.
After running my own business for a while, now that I’m working a full time job for someone else I really appreciate how I don’t have to think about ownership and I can just go home.
My company even offers a worker ownership plan in the sense that I can purchase stock in the company at a reduced rate.
But I’m digressing. My point is this free choice boundary between capitalist cooperatives and socialist cooperatives, where in each system people can choose to enact the other. And the result of all that is that people have chosen capitalism. Not just governments, but companies and individuals. They’ve just decided it’s an easier life working for wages, than trying to start or join a worker’s coop.
Regardless of how you're defining capitalism and socialism, you haven't changed systems if all you do is change which private entity owns the company.