r/CapitalismVSocialism

USSR supported Israel because they thought they’d be a left wing anti imperialist country. What if the USSR prediction ended up being correct?! I have a feeling the modern left would be different.

What if it was the US arming and funding billions of dollars to weapons for Palestinians instead of Israelis? What would you think

there are like only 3 people who constantly fight each other on here.

some cia agent vs “criticism of capitalism not proof of socialism” vs a pragmatist of a non-existent economic system.

The irony.

Peace.

Its a hypothetical scenario, you have a house and a lawn and you just hate mowing your lawn, so you hire a person to do it for you. But you have a lawn mower and you have gas for it. So once every week he comes over uses your lawn mower and your gas to mow your lawn.

One day he has an accident, he falls and somehow the lawn mower cuts off his fingers on his left hand?

How would you feel about this?

Capitalists for a followup later I wanted to collect your opinions on this,

Is the government from the market, part of it, or is it separate?

This is because I ran into a definition of the free market that said it is when two parties voluntarily exchange without third party intervention.

Is the government always 'third party intervention'? What if they are the only representative agency left for some poor individuals?

Hello,

I ran into a definition where capitalism is defined as where the means of production are owned by private individuals rather than the state, and things are ran for profit.

The state fails all the time,

Someone asked where's the exploitation in capitalism?

When you think about at will employment, if you sign into a really bad wage then that's the wage you signed into. Your rights are that you can leave any time because you sell your labor.

But can the profit motive serve social good, why or why not? For example an economics professor told me self interest is not the same as selfishness, And that it's not the benevolence of the butcher but self interest, and then talked about how capitalism made sure cows are still around.

But beef is expensive now in the US

Either way can self interest or the profit motive become oriented towards social objectives such as wanting national healthcare coverage that is good for even people who are unproductive or disabled, good housing Options for the same demographic, and jobs anyone can do at wages people decide?

Instead of the government doing it, it could look like individual activists starting local companies offering health or housing cleaning services. Or a market where price signals are used to help serve the underserved. The problem is that this might still be called capitalist. However, this is in contrast to a moneyless economy. Could we have an honest discussion about this?

Hello,

Me and a good friend me and her were talking about things but she asked a question that had me stuck so I wanted to bring it up here.

Assume a large community of people already freely exchanging goods and services,

What would ever compel them to eventually come up with banks?

I feel like talking about why money was made is relevant too.

Ok but I'm stuck. Why did banks ever come up to begin with?

The best I had to say was that I thought banks allow you to lend so this means that you can have things now and pay later?

I asked this here because the discussion did eventually get into how banks might not be necessary and then an eventual change into a moneyless society could happen. The thing is I still thought banks serve something necessary for society but if I can't exactly imagine how it originated then maybe I'm in the wrong?

Something I've found a bit odd about parts of the modern left is how much hostility there seems to be towards industrialisation, economic growth and increasing consumption.

Obviously Marx was highly critical of capitalism, but he also saw it as an enormous advance over feudalism. He praised the productive forces capitalism had unleashed, and socialism was supposed to build on those achievements rather than reject them.

And I'd have thought this is something Marxists and pro-capitalist liberals should broadly agree on. The industrial revolution and subsequent increases in productivity have been hugely beneficial to humanity, even if we disagree about ownership and distribution.

So I find it strange seeing leftists talk about industrialisation itself as some great mistake, or treating reductions in production and consumption as desirable goals.

I'm aware not all ecosocialists are degrowth advocates, and obviously environmental damage is a real problem. But surely the goal should be making production cleaner and more efficient while continuing to improve material living standards?

Curious whether Marxists here see degrowth and anti-industrial environmentalism as compatible with their understanding of socialism, and whether capitalists think there's some common ground here

Brazil is heading for a presidential runoff at the end of the month. Bolsonaro has a narrow margin to win, supposedly representing ‘the right’, Lula is not far behind, supposedly representing ’the left’. But IMO, we’re just picking from two different flavours of cronyism.

Both are terrible choices. Quoting one of Brazil’s greatest movies, City of God “Do you wanna get shot in your hand or on your foot?”

It’s like a vicious circle. Populism wins elections. It’s not about policies or plans, it’s about selling an identity and then convincing people the other side is evil and stupid. If you question your side’s identity, that’s a betrayal, and if you are on the other side you’re a communist or a fascist, woke or a nazi.

Have we always been this tribal? Is there any hope for us to evolve past this type of behaviour?

If you have to choose the 3 best Economies in the world now, which would you choose and why? Maybe you think universal healthcare is more important than GDP growth. Maybe infrastratucre is more important. Let's see if we find some common themes.

I have heard that competition is one of the virtues of capitalism. But what is competition?

It is not in the spirit of this post to look up an answer without saying so. And reposting the output of a LLM is, of course, never appropriate.

This post is one of a series. I am not re-asking these questions here in listing the post titles:

• What do you mean by the 'Utility' that is maximized?
• What do you mean by 'capital'?
• What do you mean by efficiency?
• What do you mean by the labor theory of value?
• What do you mean by supply and demand?
• What are the axioms of the subjective theory of value?

An OP in this sub recently started with someone making the early claim that "value is finite." What followed wasn't an explanation of value, but a description of physical production capacity limits. The author pointed out that society has a limited number of workers, a limited number of hours in a day, and a limited stock of tools. He credited the Labor Theory of Value (LTV) for the premise.

It is an interesting confusion because it exposes the core blind spot of Marxist economic thought. It treats value as if it's merely a synonym for physical production limits, with labor acting as the sole social input. That skips the majority of the actual economic story.

Value in any meaningful sense isn't a measurement of physical factory output. Value is about us: what we want as human beings, what we prioritize, and what we are willing to surrender to get what we don't have. Production capacity describes what is physically feasible. Value, on the other hand, describes why anyone cares enough to produce it in the first place.

The entire socialist narrative that production is (roughly) a value-generating engine with labor as the sole meaningful human input turns economics on its head. Labor doesn't magically inject an invisible substance called value into physical objects. Labor is a cost. It is an expenditure of scarce, finite human time and effort. We don't value goods because labor went into them. Rather, we only expend labor when we anticipate that the finished good will be valued enough at the margin to justify the sacrifice.

When challenged on this, socialists invariably try to cram the missing half of the equation into the words "socially necessary." But that is an answer that isn't an answer. What makes labor socially necessary? The market. How does the LTV explain that mechanism? By declaring after the fact that whatever didn't sell, whatever failed to clear, or whatever had its price collapse simply "wasn't socially necessary". It uses the outcome of market exchange to define the inputs retroactively, then pretends the input was the causal driver all along. It doesn't explain how society coordinates priorities. It just labels the result, draws an arrow to labor, and claims economics has been explained.

Every single person possesses scarce resources: our time, our energy, our specialized skills, our tools, and our savings. We can deploy those resources in an infinite number of combinations. Private property is simply the institutional recognition that individuals can own, maintain, and trade those resources, and the tools used to produce further things, in a decentralized network. It is the mechanism through which millions of separate individuals figure out what society actually wants, what trade-offs are worth making, and how to allocate scarce effort without relying on a central authority to guess on everyone's behalf.

To wish that entire coordination mechanism away requires a deeply reductionist view of the world. Reducing the complex web of human evaluation to a factory capacity ledger, waving away the hard problem of social valuation with the words "socially necessary," and then concluding we should abolish private property, is just an economically crippling dead end.

Libertarians love to make the broad statement that “socialism always fails”; however, currently, capitalism is failing on a global scale, a scale never seen in human history. It is not a matter of if socialism works, it is a simple and clear necessity to save the biosphere.

To prove that capitalism fundamentally requires the exploitation of the environment on ever greater scales, we must first establish that capitalism requires infinite exponential growth, and that this growth cannot be decoupled from environmental harm.

Firstly, capitalism requires infinite economic growth.

Let’s imagine a fixed pie scenario where there is no economic growth whatsoever. Even if we assume complete structural changes, like the abolition of the credit system and interest that require growth, among other structural pillars, we are left with a glaring fact of capitalism: private ownership of the means of production requires a positive average rate of return. If the rate of return was <= 0, then no private investment would occur whatsoever, and production would completely seize to exist privately. On the other hand, if the rate of return > 0, in a fixed pie scenario, the rate of return can only be funded by the shrinking of the workers slice of the pie. Inevitably, what this causes is the complete impoverishment of the proletariat, the average person, and the eventual collapse of capitalism. This cannot be fixed with taxes because after calculating taxes there will fundamentally be a rate of return. OK, so capitalism needs growth, that is for sure, but how do we prove that this growth cannot be absolutely decoupled from environmental destruction?

Decoupling is a neoliberal fairytale

Let me preface this by clarifying the terminology, relative decoupling is when an increase in economic growth corresponds to a lower (but still positive) increase in environmental destruction. Absolute decoupling on the other hand means that the economy grows while the rate of environmental destruction decreases. With this in mind, relative decoupling is unimportant. We have the business as usual calculations for climate change, if emissions decrease because of currently enacted policies (relative decoupling means they increase) then we will surpass 2.5C of warming by 2100. This is the temperature where large, currently inhabited geographic regions would reach wetbulb temperatures, capable of killing an adult man sitting in the shade with adequate water.  So anyways, if we want to avoid the most catastrophic global warming effects, we MUST decrease our emissions substantially, this means absolute decoupling. Unfortunately, the rate of absolute decoupling in the wealthy nations that have achieved it is nowhere near the scale needed to avert the worst climate scenario. It is simply too little and too late. When we expand our scope to the global scale, absolute decoupling has never occurred globally, and without EXTREME local absolute decoupling in wealthy nations, we cannot expect it to, as the global south is currently industrializing rapidly (as they have the right to do so). The absolute decoupling that has been achieved has mostly relied on shutting down old coal burning power plants and on the further exploitation of the environment in other ways.

Source: https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunked.pdf

Climate Tunnel Vision

In face of the most eminent threat to our survival, it seems quite clear that climate change is the most important environmental issue; however, this does not mean we should get environmental tunnel vision. The absolute decoupling of emissions in certain nations has relied on the externalization of other environmental destruction. For example, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions we must build solar panels, but this astronomical mass of solar panels is made by the mining of finite metal resources in the global south, using dirty energy. Then, the solar panels themselves need batteries to replace fossil fuels, meaning we have to spend more dirty energy and environmental destruction to mine rare earth metals like lithium, or platinum for hydrogen fuel cells. Climate change is only one of the major ways in which we are destroying the environment, and they are interconnected. Our deforestation of the amazon rainforest to fuel economic growth by harvesting timber and creating farmland accelerates greenhouse gas emissions while pushing towards the amazon rainforest dieback tipping point. Climate change reduces the amounts of available freshwater, a resource we are already abusing. Synthetic fertilizers, whose use will increase when climate change decimates global breadbaskets, is causing eutrophication and hypoxic dead zones on a mind boggling scale. The collapse of biodiversity and ecosystems from all of these different processes of destruction are making the remaining ecosystems more vulnerable to the effects of climate change and our continued pollution, etc, etc, etc. When we look at greenhouse gas emissions, it may be the easiest form of environmental destruction for us to mitigate. There are simple, and most importantly, profitable solutions like renewable energy that can drastically cutback emissions rapidly. Despite this, we are still failing.

Jevons paradox and thermodynamic limits

Jevons paradox states that as our efficiency and productivity increases, we do not use less resources, we just consume more of the now cheaper products, leading to an increase in resource use. If the near limitless source renewable energy makes energy super cheap, what will we do? We will use more energy. If the price of fossil fuels drops because of decreased demand from green energy adoption, what will we do? Industry and developing economies will use those cheap fossil fuels. This same idea applies to nearly everything we can consume. And it makes sense, GDP growth is not the only thing that has historically been exponential, so is productivity increases, and yet have those productivity increases helped the environment? Beyond just the logical paradox, there are thermodynamic limits. If we keep increasing our energy use exponentially, then very quickly we will reach a point where we will not be able to even extract enough energy from renewable energy. Pushing this even further, the physicist Tom Murphy, using historical data on energy use increases, predicted that within 400 years, our energy waste would boil the earth’s oceans.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-022-01652-6.epdf?sharing_token=yNwL92oPzcpklZSqVsr-ndRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0N0u2htmeT1Hou6SrdtT_vjhsjDi8mPyrY6gILuO1cIPYM5r9vTrCV6dFSGWkHiq63t24rvELuWNN1w82farMIezAYiWj7ialZ8KkzI_SEgHP98WBPRE6PFu8lx9H4EP5A%3D

Final Notes:

-          Sorry if this post was kind of long and incoherent, I mostly wrote this from memory.

-          Do not go into the comments and claim climate change is not real.

-          Do not go into the comments and claim that some magical technology like Negative Emissions Technologies or some source of infinite energy (fusion) will just fix everything, that is purely skeptical, unscientifically backed fairytale hope.

-          I mainly want to hear your arguments regarding the possibility of drastic sustained absolute decoupling across not just greenhouse gas emissions, but environmental destruction in general, under capitalism.

-          The fact that previous socialist countries were productivist does not take away from the actual argument because this post serves to illustrate why capitalism fundamentally requires environmental destruction, the same argument cannot be made for socialism.

I think it is anarchy, because building anarchy itself is intrinsically connected to social trust.

The system of anarchy is predicated on relying upon, and working with, local people you know instead of institutions and systems. I think it would make people associate with each other, and trust each other more, lowering atomization to a very low level.

A big problem that causes modern democracies to fail, is when people lose social capital, and no longer feel they can rely on others to act in good faith. Now people are divided and atomized. This breeds discontent, and also allows strongman dictators to rise and take control of governments. This can be seen in the US, Europe, and other parts of the world.

A prior post mentioned the term "racial capitalism.". I love this. Just add the word capitalism to anything bad.

Help me by adding my this list of things that suck.

Backstreet Boys Capitalism

Hemorrhoid Capitalism

1990s Nostalgia Capitalism

Communism Capitalism

Sardine capitalism

Pickleball capitalism

PF Chang's Capitalism

Poodle capitalism

Slow left lane driver capitalism

Dallas Cowboys Capitalism

I am a Libertarian, and after studying economics that degrowth is actually good not bad when used right

Libertarian hear degrowth and immediately think it means killing the economy. That’s not what it means. It just means shrinking a harmful activity so the system can grow better later.

Simple example: fishing. If everyone fishes as much as possible, fish stocks collapse and the industry dies. If you reduce fishing for a while, fish recover, and later you can catch more every year without destroying the resource. Short term degrowth, long term growth. This is basic economics.

Libertarians already accept this logic. Removing subsidies makes bad industries shrink so capital moves to better uses. Letting bubbles pop causes short term pain but avoids bigger crashes later.

Capitalists accept it too. Firms shut down unprofitable divisions to become stronger in the long run.

Liberals accept it when regulation prevents irreversible damage that would kill future growth.

Degrowth is not anti market. It is about incentives, scarcity, and long run efficiency.

What honestly scares me is that when I explain this, leftists start agreeing with me, even though they don’t understand how decentralised economy works , the argument is coming from markets and long run growth, not planning.

We should not be scared of degrowth. as we understand decentralised economy

We should be scared of protecting destructive growth just because it shows up in GDP.

And I mean real socialism. Not communism. Not social democrat. True socialism

For me, I have to go with no. At least not here in the US

We're honestly to far gone. We're corrupted country who is cultishly into individualism. We cultishly worship millionaires and billionaires. We would rather support a stupid war than give everyone free healthcare.

We would rather see our empire burn than give people basic housing. (Which is the way that the US is heading unfortunately)

Would i like for socialism to happen? Yes. Because if we can spend BILLIONS on stupid wars. We can afford to help our own citizens.

But is it likely going to happen? No. Like I said, we in the US at least, are to corrupt.

What about you? What do you think?

The left is very good at misappropriating the meanings of words and generally understood concepts to promote their agenda. Examples:

Genocide: now basically any war

Violence: now includes any form of saying something mean

Slavery: now includes so called wage slavery where people who are not legally bound and under no threat of violence.

White supremacy: used to mean some KKK asshole saying white people are superior. Now it is anyone who doesn't meet a rigid definiton of anti-racist.

What are some others? To be fair, I am sure the right does the same.

The University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, is well-known for being a Catholic university. The Church has a history of social teaching. I'll mention the 1891 Rerum Novarum, the 1965 document from the second Vatican Council on the church in the modern world, and the 1986 pastoral letter by the United States bishops on the economy. For much of the twentieth century, this teaching was stridently anti-communist. On the other hand, liberation theology exists. Maybe the question of socialism vs. capitalism is not the right dichotomy.

Economics is not solely a technical subject. It has a political or value-based side. How should a great Catholic university research and teach the subject, while maintaining high standards of academic rigor?

Charles Wilber, chair of the economics department in 1975, pursued this question. By the turn of the millennium, Notre Dame had some very interesting researchers in economics, including in its history. And they had interesting researchers getting their doctorates there. I like, for example, some work of Esther-Miriam Sent, who knows that histories are constructed. Other histories could be told. Philip Mirowski, who has journal publications,, is known for books.

A later dean looked at this heterodox department and objected. The department was split in 2003. The heterodox economists were put in Economic and Policy Studies (ECOP). They could no longer supervise graduate students. And then the administrators closed ECOP in 2010. With tenure, I do not think they could fire some.

Deidre McCloskey, well known for her praise of bourgeois virtues decried this slow-motion purge when it was happening. She also mentions a few whose work she knows something of:

>"... [David} Ruccio is a leading Marxist economist. (If your reaction to that is to exclaim, 'Marxist economist!' then you really need to get out more. Does it strike you as a reasonable hypothesis that every one of the thousands and thousands of very intelligent people who take the Marxist tradition seriously are just dopes from whom you can learn nothing at all?)...

>... The standard should be Notre Dame's, not that of the editorial board of the American Economic Review (I have served on it, and know). Read the stuff. Isn't that obviously the only way of raising standards-having some?

>...Academic economics in the United States has a methodological and ideological range all the way from M to N. This is not because it is such a smashing scientific success, unless you count numbers of mainstream articles certified by mainstream scientists as 'success.' Real insight ... comes from the dwindling number of individual economists and sometimes whole departments of economics ... who think, as the present Department of Economics at Notre Dame does...,, that economics is the study of the economy and is a part of the conversation of humankind." -- Deidre McCloskey

Do you have a view on this academic bullying?