I can’t give you an entire education on political economy and socialist history in one comment.
well, good thing you can’t, because that would be graphomania, not a concrete answer to my question.
At the very least, socialism works towards solving the conflict that arises when one class of people do all the labour while another class reaps the profits […]
Still nothing a good ol’ law regulation or two can’t fix… Without the need for a regime change.
Hell, let’s imagine we live in the dreamland, where your average worker earns more-less same as their manager, or, better yet, ceo or even the business founder. Now riddle me this: who’d found the business in the first place? Who’d take the risks if reward is practically nonexistent?
I already hear you saying “we don’t need no private enterprise!”. I won’t even talk about how the product diversity is a very good thing to have, because even if we don’t account for that, there’s still a new problem, two even. Namely, corruption and enshittification. When everything is centralized, and every enterprise is basically a government-mandated monopoly, those two become very prominent. So prominent, in fact, that by the sheer force of inheritance the post-USSR countries are still more corrupt than their western neighbours. Decentralization is the single most effective method to fight it.
Enshittification? We live in the world where we live, i bet you know how monopolies tied to that word. Thanks to the previous “power word”, present in any highly-centralized government, no regulation would prevent it, only make it more creative in some cases.
This conflict is the main source of misery in the world today- war, starvation, deaths from preventable disease, climate change/ecological collapse etc. are all inevitable under capitalism […]
You count starvation as one of the sources of misery of a modern human? You’re either mindlessly quoting a 200yo book, or you live in one of not so many countries that still have problems with food. Newsflash, but starvation is not an issue for the majority of people in the 21st century, and, dare i say, there’s no correlation between starvation and capitalism, considering that the entirety of US, EU and pleades of other capitalistic countris haven’t known the taste of starvation for a very long time. According to the world resource institute 30-40% of the food produced in the world goes to waste. Any modern convenience store has a wider assortment of food than our ancestors have ever dreamed of. It’s almost as if since Carl Marx wrote Das Kapital, the food production had been solved by automatization and advancements in chemistry and biology.
Preventable diseases? Well, technically all diseases can be called preventable, at least medical studies try their best for this statement to be as close to reality as possible, so i’d like you to give me examples of what you consider a “preventable disease”, specifically, a preventable disease people systematically die of in all, or at least the majority of capitalist countries specifically due to capitalism-related issues. Because, as i said, if there’s one outlier like US, it doesn’t paint capitalism as a bad paradigm, it paints US as a deeply problematic country with fucked-up laws.
Next, the ecological issues. It sure is a challenge for humanity to solve, but i won’t say it makes us miserable right now. What kind of problems capitalism has with ecology that socialism is guaranteed to solve, or at least “doesn’t incentivize”? You think once socialism is established there’d be no schizo-politicians and climate change deniers? Or that a highly-centralized system isn’t a fertile soil for lobbying and greenwashing?
And finally, war. There’s an old saying. Something about wars ceasing only when there’d be a single person left alive or something. Do i really have to elaborate?
[…] because of the profit motive.
Except socialism doesn’t get rid of the profit motive. It just moves it from per-enterprise to global economy scale, i.e. it practically turns whole country into a single gargantuan enterprise working for its profit.
Those things can all happen under socialism, but the system itself doesn’t incentivize them.
I tend to disagree. Check my previous paragraph to get the reason.
To summarize what i’m saying, everything is a poison if the dose is wrong. I think the path to the least shitty system lies through gradual changes of the existing system in response to the immediate concerns
well, good thing you can’t, because that would be graphomania, not a concrete answer to my question.
Still nothing a good ol’ law regulation or two can’t fix… Without the need for a regime change.
Hell, let’s imagine we live in the dreamland, where your average worker earns more-less same as their manager, or, better yet, ceo or even the business founder. Now riddle me this: who’d found the business in the first place? Who’d take the risks if reward is practically nonexistent?
I already hear you saying “we don’t need no private enterprise!”. I won’t even talk about how the product diversity is a very good thing to have, because even if we don’t account for that, there’s still a new problem, two even. Namely, corruption and enshittification. When everything is centralized, and every enterprise is basically a government-mandated monopoly, those two become very prominent. So prominent, in fact, that by the sheer force of inheritance the post-USSR countries are still more corrupt than their western neighbours. Decentralization is the single most effective method to fight it.
Enshittification? We live in the world where we live, i bet you know how monopolies tied to that word. Thanks to the previous “power word”, present in any highly-centralized government, no regulation would prevent it, only make it more creative in some cases.
You count starvation as one of the sources of misery of a modern human? You’re either mindlessly quoting a 200yo book, or you live in one of not so many countries that still have problems with food. Newsflash, but starvation is not an issue for the majority of people in the 21st century, and, dare i say, there’s no correlation between starvation and capitalism, considering that the entirety of US, EU and pleades of other capitalistic countris haven’t known the taste of starvation for a very long time. According to the world resource institute 30-40% of the food produced in the world goes to waste. Any modern convenience store has a wider assortment of food than our ancestors have ever dreamed of. It’s almost as if since Carl Marx wrote Das Kapital, the food production had been solved by automatization and advancements in chemistry and biology.
Preventable diseases? Well, technically all diseases can be called preventable, at least medical studies try their best for this statement to be as close to reality as possible, so i’d like you to give me examples of what you consider a “preventable disease”, specifically, a preventable disease people systematically die of in all, or at least the majority of capitalist countries specifically due to capitalism-related issues. Because, as i said, if there’s one outlier like US, it doesn’t paint capitalism as a bad paradigm, it paints US as a deeply problematic country with fucked-up laws.
Next, the ecological issues. It sure is a challenge for humanity to solve, but i won’t say it makes us miserable right now. What kind of problems capitalism has with ecology that socialism is guaranteed to solve, or at least “doesn’t incentivize”? You think once socialism is established there’d be no schizo-politicians and climate change deniers? Or that a highly-centralized system isn’t a fertile soil for lobbying and greenwashing?
And finally, war. There’s an old saying. Something about wars ceasing only when there’d be a single person left alive or something. Do i really have to elaborate?
Except socialism doesn’t get rid of the profit motive. It just moves it from per-enterprise to global economy scale, i.e. it practically turns whole country into a single gargantuan enterprise working for its profit.
I tend to disagree. Check my previous paragraph to get the reason.
To summarize what i’m saying, everything is a poison if the dose is wrong. I think the path to the least shitty system lies through gradual changes of the existing system in response to the immediate concerns