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The real problem with socialism is that it offends the CIA, and bad things happen to people who offend the CIA.
Giving away 40% of your salary to the state for healthcare and welfare -> Crazy crime incredible inhumane and brutal theft
Giving away 75% of your salary to private companies who do the same things but worse and that don’t even ensure you full coverage -> Amazing business Enterprise of freedom choice of Democratic democracy 💀
“Ask people what they hate about socialism/communism and they’ll describe capitalism.”
Man I hate it when socialism capitalisms.
I get that it’s a meme but 85% is delusional. If you think under socialism we could work 15% as much as we do now and maintain the same standard of living then lol, lmao, etc.
*online leftists coping and seething after food and housing don’t just magically spring forth from the earth when you abolish rent-seeking
The top 10% of households hold 67% of all wealth. If we assume that every worker produces roughly the same value, that implies ⅔ of value produced by the average worker is being taken.
Of course, 33% is not 15%, but I’d say it’s roughly in the ballpark. And in certain cases, there are definitely workers who are exploited to that level.
Wealth is not income. You can’t derive the rate of exploitation from wealth inequality.
If we assume that every worker produces roughly the same value
I mean lol again. Especially if you need to stretch as far as the top 10%. Doctors, surgeons, electricians, linemen, plumbers, veterinarians, dentists, engineers, etc are all going to be producing more than double the value of your average retail worker.
The only way to create wealth is via work, e.g., income. It’s not a perfect measure, I concede, since wealth is static and can accumulate over time. However, I think we can still use it as a rough estimation of stolen income over time.
However, this source claims there is a 70% gap between wages and produced value. That roughly matches the number I gave.
That is not what that data is or says.
158 is not 30% of 285 for starters.
Total wages paid are a bit over half of gdp. 55% is notably quite a bit more than 15%.
For anyone interested, here’ a short excerpt on this point from a socialism crash course:
Unlike workers, Capitalists make their living, not by clocking in and being paid a certain fixed wage per hour, but through absentee ownership. Their wealth is earned while sleeping, playing golf, or visiting the mailbox to collect pieces of this wage theft, often in the form of stock dividends. A worker’s wealth is dependent on the number of hours they can work; a Capitalist’s wealth is based on how much absentee property they can accumulate, and as such can multiply infinitely. Some Capitalists earn an average worker’s yearly salary in a single night’s sleep.
For example, a Copper mine owner neither physically mines the copper, and (living thousands of miles away) likely delegates day-to-day operations to a hired manager. Yet, because they have a piece of paper that says they own it, they get a large cut of everything that was mined: the ultimate free lunch.
A 1983 report by England national income and expenditures found that on average, 26 minutes of every hour worked (or 43% of labor value added) by English workers across a wide range of industries went to various exploiting or unproductive groups, with workers receiving only 57% of their pre-tax productive output as wages<sup>1</sup>. In other words, at least 40% of the work you do every day is stolen by Capitalists.
Funnily enough the problem with capitalism is actually that eventually you run out of other people’s money.
Tap for spoiler
Capitalism inherently serves to concentrate wealth since the ones with the money make the rules. As wealth disparity increases and people get poorer they can’t buy as much stuff and growth dries up. Then the only way for the rich to keep getting richer is to degrade labour conditions, but that’s unpopular so you need to blame a scapegoat and enact a repressive regime to enforce it. That’s quite a problem, and it’s one which might feel familiar to the astute reader.
Hey I recognize this happening.
Then the only way for the rich to keep getting richer is to degrade labour conditions, but that’s unpopular so you need to blame a scapegoat and enact a repressive regime to enforce it.
I didn’t get this part. Please explain?
The money they collect is the money we pay them minus the money they pay us. If we can’t pay them more the only way to get more is for them to pay us less. Gross simplification obviously. Then the typical strategy is to blame immigrants or Jews or whatever for the decrease in living standards, and crack down on anyone who tries to improve things.
Edit: this is sort of a meme-ified version of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall which is the real theory of how economic crises in capitalism come about and not really the same as what I’m describing here, but along some similar lines. It’s worth reading about from actual scholars in detail if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
Imagine that the entire world is a 100 people neighbourhood and you start selling peanuts, at first you start growing by acquiring more clients but what happens when everyone is already your client? How do you grow at that point?
I wish the watermark said “made with beer” at the bottom left.
itt people who don’t know who Margret Thatcher was enough to have seen this misattributed/misquoted from her before.
Well yes, the rich are running out of their worker’s money after a while and that totally is an issue for them. Isn’t that exactly what they say all the time? I don’t get it.
Let me guess OP, you got a C- in Economics?
What makes you say that?
Because OP knows big words but doesn’t understand economics.
Can you explain?
On the hopes that you’re not just being sarcastic,
Socialism fundamentally works by creating a system that taxes those who have more than others and goes to those who have less than others. Theoretically this can work forever because the tax revenue is being spent on the betterment of the society and as long as the majority of people are giving more than they receive. The problems arise when people start to take more than they give. This can happen from a number of factors like someone who pays $15,000/year into the system but then takes $1,000,000 for cancer treatment or someone who can contribute chooses not to and still receives the benefits.
In relation to the last panel, they are saying that they are giving 85% of their labor value to their boss who doesn’t work. There’s multiple problems with this way of thinking. The first and most obvious one is the 85%, which is just an arbitrarily large number to make it feel scary. Second is the claim that the boss (and one can assume owner) doesn’t do any work. That’s obviously not true because 99.99% (I’m being dramatic) of owners work an equal or greater number of hours per week than the rest of the employees. And there’s also the fact that while needing to know how every aspect of the company operates the owner is the one who takes the biggest risks and has the most at stake so it makes sense that they make more than the new hire who has no work experience. Yes, you’ll have owners who take more than they “need” but you also have to remember that technically all costs of the company can and are taken out of the owners paycheck because the lower profit the company makes the lower the owners paycheck can be.
Hope this helps.
The problems arise when people start to take more than they give. (…) or someone who can contribute chooses not to and still receives the benefits.
Not a problem exclusive to socialism. Capitalism has plenty of very obvious such examples. Amazon is clearly taking in a lot more money than it is giving its workers or the govt. Bezos and others of his ilk can contribute more to taxes, but don’t, they evade them all thanks to legal loopholes and still receive govt benefits.
That’s obviously not true because 99.99% (I’m being dramatic) of owners work an equal or greater number of hours per week than the rest of the employees.
Maybe true for smaller companies. I doubt Musk, Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Zuckerberg or similars even work 40h a week. MAYBE they did, many years ago. Nowadays? Doubtful.
And there’s also the fact that while needing to know how every aspect of the company operates the owner is the one who takes the biggest risks and has the most at stake so it makes sense that they make more than the new hire who has no work experience.
Do you really think that a single person’s work can be worth more than 1000x the work of someone else? To put some perspective: someone who earns 20 million a year is the equivalent of having a hourly salary of ~10,500. What kind of miraculous, one-of-a-kind work is worth that? Bezos doesn’t know how “every aspect of the company operates”, nor do any CEO of any megacorp. Or, to give a better example, no general or field marshal knows “every aspect” of the platoons and soldiers under his command, they rely almost entirely on his subordinates’ reports, which may embellish or hide details.
technically all costs of the company can and are taken out of the owners paycheck because the lower profit the company makes the lower the owners paycheck can be
Except when it’s taken out of the workers’ paycheck who get fired to ensure those above don’t lose their bonuses
They arent really loopholes though are they, Musk for instance is taking a risk to avoid taxes, and someone else with a low time preference is benefiting by accruing interest by lending him money.
They still pay taxes in the end, and it will be far higher than it would be if we plucked the fruit of their labor now. Except the IRA thing but that cant be terribly common, and again Thiel took a massive risk by not diversifying. But sure go ahead and write a law to take a chunk of that unicorn whenever it is he decided to realize it, it will fund a few hours of government spending.
A BigBrain with a 5th grader’s (at best) understanding of economics who has never even been exposed to the labor theory of value and who literally doesn’t even know what Socialism is (confusing it with some form of Social Democracy) bursts into a room full of people who have been studying economics for years and starts explaining to them his ever so smart 5th grader’s version of economics. It’s so on the nose it’s like a badly put together meme.Removed by mod
And now an “I know you are what am I!” comeback attempt?
Are you actually in grade school?Also I’m a She not a he, “buddy.”
Not sarcastic, just a communist.
Socialism fundamentally works by creating a system that taxes those who have more than others and goes to those who have less than others.
No, it doesn’t. Socialism is a mode of production and distribution based on public ownership as the principle aspect of the economy, and the working classes in control of the state. The rest of this paragraph isn’t worth responding to, because it’s based on a false premise.
In relation to the last panel, they are saying that they are giving 85% of their labor value to their boss who doesn’t work. There’s multiple problems with this way of thinking. The first and most obvious one is the 85%, which is just an arbitrarily large number to make it feel scary.
Capitalists fundamentally make profits by paying workers for less than the value their labor-power creates.
Second is the claim that the boss (and one can assume owner) doesn’t do any work. That’s obviously not true because 99.99% (I’m being dramatic) of owners work an equal or greater number of hours per week than the rest of the employees.
Nobody is saying owners do literally no labor, just that their obscene wealth comes from stealing from workers, not from their own labor. Otherwise their wages would be about the same as any other worker at that company.
And there’s also the fact that while needing to know how every aspect of the company operates the owner is the one who takes the biggest risks and has the most at stake so it makes sense that they make more than the new hire who has no work experience.
The biggest risk a capitalist takes is in becoming a worker. Workers risk their livelihood.
Yes, you’ll have owners who take more than they “need” but you also have to remember that technically all costs of the company can and are taken out of the owners paycheck because the lower profit the company makes the lower the owners paycheck can be.
Sure, but their paycheck is made up of stolen surplus value to begin with.
Hope this helps!
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I do, actually! Did fairly well in my economics classes, though bourgeois economics is bullshit. I have read the first 2 volumes of Capital, so I’m still no expert but certainly not a beginner.
Lol, this just gets better and better. The person you’re responding to and accusing of not understanding economics is someone who literally hosts the reading groups for books on economics, arguably the most definitive books on economics ever written, as well as scientific socialism and socioeconomic theory, who has read Kapital
multiple times, maintains the active reading list for multiple lemmy communities, and has doubtless read more about economics this year than you have read on any topic (from See Spot Run to Harry Potter), in your entire life. But you’re telling him he doesn’t understand basic economics.
Seriously, if you actually have any interest in pulling your head out of your ignorant ass and maybe growing the fuck up a little bit, go look at his reading course suggestions on economics, it’s section 3, and get to reading. Twerp.
Wait, is this a bit and someone is actually playing the role of dipshit liberal know-it-all? This must be a bit and I fell for it.
Mate I don’t think you understand them. There’s a reason economist either end up being hyper capitalists or communists
Socialism fundamentally works by creating a system that taxes those who have more than others and goes to those who have less than others.
Prager-U level definition that has nothing to do with socialism.
Here’s a concise definition:
Socialism : A range of social and economic systems characterized by social ownership of the means of production. It can also mean the transitional stage between capitalism and communism, sometimes referred to as the dictatorship of the proletariat.
That’s what I said. LOL
That’s the problem with a C- in economics. If you sit behind that person and decide you’re going to just try to write the opposite of what they do you’re going to get an F
The problem with socialism is that people put it as: “You won’t need to do any work and still get money”.
And that makes the whole system sound stupid, because it just won’t work that way.Use the correct words and explain the real thing.
“You won’t need to do any work and still get money”.
Redditors mis-defining socialism as capitalism again.
Unlike workers, Capitalists make their living, not by clocking in and being paid a certain fixed wage per hour, but through absentee ownership. Their wealth is earned while sleeping, playing golf, or visiting the mailbox to collect pieces of this wage theft, often in the form of stock dividends. A worker’s wealth is dependent on the number of hours they can work; a Capitalist’s wealth is based on how much absentee property they can accumulate, and as such can multiply infinitely. Some Capitalists earn an average worker’s yearly salary in a single night’s sleep.
For example, a Copper mine owner neither physically mines the copper, and (living thousands of miles away) likely delegates day-to-day operations to a hired manager. Yet, because they have a piece of paper that says they own it, they get a large cut of everything that was mined: the ultimate free lunch.
A 1983 report by England national income and expenditures found that on average, 26 minutes of every hour worked (or 43% of labor value added) by English workers across a wide range of industries went to various exploiting or unproductive groups, with workers receiving only 57% of their pre-tax productive output as wages<sup>1</sup>. In other words, at least 40% of the work you do every day is stolen by Capitalists.
For example, a Copper mine owner neither physically mines the copper, and (living thousands of miles away) likely delegates day-to-day operations to a hired manager.
And while they try validating their position with, “I take all the risks”, they would also, transfer all the damage to the workers at the drop of a hat, then lobby the Government to undo their losses at the cost of everyone else giving power to the Government.
Are you arguing about a meme and demanding it be remade for you?
no.
I can use some GIMP, if I required that.
No socialists say that though. That’s just what opponents of socialism pretend socialists say.
Or maybe just someone fooled by said pretenders.
I don’t see anyone explaining socialism that way.
Capitalists love making straw men of socialism like that.
Perhaps because you are not in spaces where people do so, trying to make Socialism and Communism sound stupid to make other people uninterested in others that would talk about it.
It might even be a part of someone’s misinformation campaign, really.
The same place had people calling themselves Muslim and trying to make others angry at them, in ways that it would increase -ive sentiment towards the religion itself.Simply put, the moment you put a buzzword onto anything (like any *-ism), that opens it to be grouped with anything anyone might claim it to be. And that’s why one needs to make sure to explain what they mean by the word, every time they want to argue about its pros/cons with others.
I suppose that exists on Reddit, but I don’t really see that much overall.
The problem with socialism is that people put it as: “You won’t need to do any work and still get money”.
I’ve only heard anti socialists say that as a way of smearing socialism. This is the kind of shit you hear in a PragerU video or something.
a way of smearing socialism
That’s the problem.
It is pretty easy to smear any *-ism or honestly any buzzword.See what’s happening with the word AI.
Some scientists use a very specialised model to make an actual +ive impact and everyone says “AI is great!” and use that to drive funding for destabilising the technology industry/market.Those who like to irresponsibly control people, will use buzzwords to attract people into groups and then use them to further an unrelated agenda by slowly drifting away from everything the word once stood for.
This is essentially the history we know of: under the names of gods of religions, of languages, and then ideologies and regimes.
In the end, all of them go to help those who will control people without caring about how they use them.What’s your proposed solution then?
I don’t have a solution for others.
Only one that I decided for myself and then applied it.
You gotta find your own balance point for how much you care about correctness and how much you are fine being led astray by “leaders” in turn for likeability and easy conversations.I personally don’t subscribe to the idea of leaders who can’t justify their position. Maybe your problem is that you see socialism as a system to be implemented rather than a thing that you do? Like, socialism is, and should be a constant revolutionary project, not just a static position.
Like, socialism is, and should be a constant revolutionary project, not just a static position.
If you try to put it that way, that then again opens it for others to add/remove as they feel like.
While I understand that socialism is not some hard program that can exactly apply to every scenario, there has to be some tenets of it that are defended well, to prevent a malicious actor from uprooting its base.My personal solution is simply that I don’t subscribe to any *-ism and don’t group myself with anything even if it tends to provide similar solutions in the current scenario, simply because in some other one, the group’s solution might end up greatly differing from what I would consider acceptable.
Like, socialism is, and should be a constant revolutionary project, not just a static position.
If you try to put it that way, that then again opens it for others to add/remove as they feel like.
While I understand that socialism is not some hard program that can exactly apply to every scenario, there has to be some tenets of it that are defended well, to prevent a malicious actor from uprooting its base.There’s is. It’s really simple: “From each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need.” Anything else on top of that is philosophical.
My personal solution is simply that I don’t subscribe to any *-ism and don’t group myself with anything even if it tends to provide similar solutions in the current scenario, simply because in some other one, the group’s solution might end up greatly differing from what I would consider acceptable.
This is a similar tact that I took when I was about 16-17, but I find that to be a very naive point of view. Regardless of whether or not you want to apply any label to yourself (which is perfectly valid) the material conditions of the system we live in will come down on you too. So you either end up in the “We are stronger together” camp, or you end up in the “Me and mine are what needs to be protected. Other people be damned” camp. And if you find yourself in the former, you most likely align with people who call themselves socialist, and if you find yourself in the latter, well then you’re probably a bootlicker
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You really should read some theory and look at real socialist practice before you arrogantly state things that are just completely false.Edit: misread the comment thought the were making the quoted point.
So you’re saying that noone does any work in socialist countries? They wouldn’t last many days if that was the case
No? To the contrary, people need to work if they are able, at least until automation can cover most production and distribution.
Exactly, that’s why it was weird of the commenter to object to someone saying that socialism isn’t “You won’t need to do any work and still get money” with “you should read some theory” as if socialist theory said that that was exactly what socialism is
I don’t think that was their intention.
Based on their edit it wasn’t, they had misread the original comment
I understand that that is not what Socialism actually means.
People who thought of the system weren’t idiots.
I think you replied to the wrong person
Nope
Then you didn’t understand what was being said and should reread it. People work in socialist countries like I work in China we just have a minimum standard guaranteed to us and the government actually works for us instead of for corporations.
Then you didn’t understand what was being said and should reread it.
yeah i did actually read it multiple times to make sure i didn’t misread it, did you?
Edit: misread the comment thought the were making the quoted point.
Let’s double check before making accusations next time
read some theory and look at real socialist practice
I live in a socialist country. And it works (well, at least better than current US).
You should go around interjecting people who say, “You won’t need to do any work and still get money” and link them to places where they can read the theory, to reduce such BS’ers.
Do you live in Cuba, Vietnam, the PRC, DPRK, Laos, or Venezuela? If not, you don’t live in a socialist country, but a social democracy, which is capitalism but with safety nets. These social democracies in Europe rely on imperialism to subsidize their safety nets.
They live in India
Ah, gotcha.
Heyyy! No spoilers.
Now they don’t have the drive to read my extremely lengthy comment explaining the situation and then trying to guess my country from that.Sorry!
I live in a country that went from Imperial control to almost fully Socialist (except for the Police, which are mostly tamed bullies) and is now rapidly progressing towards Capitalism (probably because anyone that refuses to do so, gets on the offside of US).
And PRC qualifies as neither Socialist nor Capitalist.
If it’s not on the list, it isn’t socialist. As for the PRC, public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the working classes control the state, it’s socialist by definition.
and the working classes control the state
I find it hard to believe that the majority of the working class people consider territorial expansion to be good for anyone in this age.
I find it hard to believe that China is engaged in territorial expansion when it hasn’t dropped a single bomb in 35 years
Or do mean the border dispute with India? Because that’s an artifact of the British drawing shitty borders and imposing them on subjugated people and those people have not established an effective framework for redressing the problem yet
China isn’t expansionist, though.
You are an interesting person
