Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Hmm I don't know which communists you're debating on here but there are quite a few who i can say have made me reconsider my position enough times. I don't know whether that's because of how good they are at debating or how inherently strong their points are but i would be inclined to assume the latter. Maybe you're just arguing with the blabbermouthed "cAPitALism Bad" folks
Some are just 'west bad! China good!', the last one was actually trying but I'd read Das capital and simply felt base Marxism was hopelessly outdated as a darwinism era construct social model, obsoleted by game theory and other more modern behavioral frameworks.
I'm a moderate centrist on most issues, I think we need more social support systems to counter balance the power of corporations and the rich, I just understand a powerful government isn't a panacea, you're just shifting the power and therefore corruption to a different body.
Have you read Consequences of Capitalism by Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone?
No, I'm sure chomsky would be great.
I don't disagree with the criticism that we have far too unregulated capitalism, we need to go way back the other way.
My issue is the stupid, faith-based, communism will solve everything, even though it never has before.
Capitalism is corruption by the rich, communism devolves into corruption by the powerful, always.
In the past the people only had freedom when the king and the nobles checked each other in power, which is why the founders created checks and balances. Now the king has been replaced by the government while the nobility are the rich and corporations.
If both are balanced against each other (which has happened a few times in the past) then we have increased freedoms, often because they have to lobby the people in their struggle with each other.
When they join forces, we have fascism, which is when things are the worst. That's where we're going now with our current system. That's a problem.
The book does discuss a bunch of these topics, especially the history between capital business interests and the US government.
I think communism gets too muddy with everyone's different idea of what it is, especially do to all the different countries that have 'tried communism' to various degrees of success. I think socialism is more tangible to talk about. Changing the structure of businesses to a democratic organization between the workers, where the profit they generate goes to where is democraticly decided (such as fair wages vs reinvestment into the business). Changing the social organization of society would be revolutionary, as it at odds with the profit motive of capital interests
I'm far more open to movement in that direction as a counter balance to concentrated power. Not that it can't concentrate that way (ambition + charisma finds a way), but you need something.
It's the blind 'communists' who operate on pure faith that everything we tried before will work this time, in complete defiance of human nature.