memes

It's funny that the people who usually say someone else lacks vision are the people keeping themselves blind. They assume that things must stay good because that's what they've experienced. They can't imagine the case where things are different, which most of the evidence is pointing towards.

Your friends are provably wrong. I'd have to look up the actual numbers and dates again, but since around 1994-2000 automation and industrialization has replaced more jobs than it has created, and has in every year since at an exponentially increasing rate. Unfortunately while it would be nice to do this peacefully, the first Rosie the Robot is likely to cause a mass upheaval. Stupid people will try to ban them outright, the smart ones will simply tax the companies that make them and control them providing universal basic income from the revenue.

It's hard to comprehend what 8 BILLION people really means as well. All of these social systems. Religion, governments, anarchy, empires all existed before there were even one billion people. Before globalization, before instant communication. During the fascist revolutions in China in the 70s there only a third that many people on the whole planet and no one had a cell phone.

Capitalism is failing because it's a pyramid scheme that's becoming flattened by the monstrous scale of the base. It makes it so clearly obvious what's going on now.

I feel like most of our attempts so far aren't equipped for the scale we're talking about. I hope someone with the resources to help can figure out how to educate the right people with the right perspective to come up with an alternative.. but probably not in my lifetime. Which is a bummer.

We definitely need to figure out how to average out the access to resources and influence. Lots of people think I mean communism but I don't. That's an old idea that we should consider borrowing from though.

My bad, I did mean useless in terms of a production standpoint.

I've never personally had a problem with being useless. The time I value most in my life is the time I spend idle because it feels like I have so little idle time.

Great plain language breakdown for the uninitiated. Doesn’t disregard socialism as a solution to the problems outlined, but that’s a whole other discussion.

I've always pictured socialism as more a middle step toward full blown communism. I also recognize the value of private enterprise and competition. So whatever communist society we end up with still needs to find ways for that healthy competition to thrive.

But like... We can easily meet human needs at this point for everyone. It's unjust and stupid not to do so

This is where the gaps in your perspective start, concrete 3D printing is incredibly niche, and would usually take more higher paid labor to be used in places that replace concrete methods. That’s not to mention the significant labor in their design and production.

Uh... I literally grew up in a family that runs a construction business and have been heavily involved with both the actual construction of houses AND the business management aspect side of things.

So let me tell you right now that you're totally and completely ignorant. Running one of these things takes 1 skilled person who makes sure the machine is extruding correctly by maintaining the proper water/concrete mix, and 3 unskilled people to smooth the concrete layers out.

That’s the same with medical AI, AI in general has a massive hallucination problem, but for diagnosis especially, just as many doctors are actually needed for the core part of their job- treatment and running the tests to gather the data for the AI in the first place.

Again wrong. My mom is a nurse and has worked with IBM as well. Currently nurses feed in all the data, and it spits out a diagnosis, then a doctor reviews it's diagnosis and rolls with it. Considering it's almost 99.9% accurate in diagnosis already it's better than the doctors.

Capitalism has been remarkably effective at that, it allows people to be as lazy as possible.

Lol yeah fucking right.

You are 100% bonkers man, the fact that you can spout this much bullshit is pretty incredible in and of itself.

I want to comment on this first:

... while we have had many counties try and fail to make a thriving socialist society. We have had capitalism thrive and make everyones lives better.

First, socialist countries haven't been allowed to thrive. They're a threat to the established capitalist status-quo. That's what the entire red scare period was about; undermining leftist nations so they fail. See the Guatemala coup for example. The country removed their dictatorship and formed a democracy. It happened to elect a leftist president who implemented a minimum wage and began granting land to peasants. This pissed off the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) who were benefiting from cheap land and exploiting labor. They had the US overthrow the democracy and instate a dictatorship (which ended up committing a genocide).

This has happened many times. The only leftist nations that were able to survive this are ones with strong governments and cultural hegymony (basically dictatorships with strong restrictions on citizens). This doesn't mean that's the only possibility because that's the only ones that survived, it just means those are more stable when undermined by a powerful external force. It's like asking why everyone who has been shot in the head has died. It's not their fault someone else shot them.

(Also, many capitalist nations have failed, and that equally is not a sign that capitalism is destined to fail.)

Now for this:

So I'm curious how do you expect innovation to happen in a communist world.

Innovation happens all the time without capitalism. In fact, capitalism often hinders innovation. The requirement of capitalism is profit seeking. If you don't think something will make a profit, you shouldn't invest in it.

I think it's penicillin that almost didn't exist because of capitalism. (This is from memory, so some parts may be wrong) The company was trying to create a certain drug. During the experiments penicillin was found. The company told them to move on, but the people running the experiment saw an opportunity and continued developing it on their own. Under capitalism, you shouldn't persue unlikely but potentially beneficial, though possibly not profitable, possibilities. Can you imagine the number of times this has happened and the people involved listened to what they were told?

People like to innovate. Just look at makers online. They make all kinds of stupid shit that won't ever make money just to see what will happen. Profit is not the thing that creates innovation. Human ingenuity is. If you give humans enough resources to persue what they want, they will innovate.

Also, generally communism or other leftist ideals aren't advocating for equality in outcomes. They're advocating for equality in opportunity. If you're born wealthy, you shouldn't get special access to thing that an average person doesn't have access to. You shouldn't be allowed to persue your goals when an average person can't. However, if you create something that makes your life easier or better, that's not going to be removed from you. There's equal opportunity to improve your life, but not everyone will persue things equally.

So why do you think we should change to communism, instead of eradicating blind brand loyalty and cracking down on wealth gained through stifling others.

Personally, I'm more towards anarchism than communism, but I see value in both and they share so much in common.

How would you go about eradicating "eradicating blind brand loyalty and cracking down on wealth gained through stifling others"? Those are fundamental aspects of capitalism. The goal of capitalism is to increase profits by any means possible, which includes breaking laws when it's more profitable to do so. Eradicating brand loyalty is only possible if you elemenate labels, but that also creates the opportunity for cheap alternatives to undercut on quality. Exploiting labor is also fundamental to capitalism. If the goal is profit then you should pay as little as possible for as much as possible. If you don't then someone else will undercut you and you'll fail while they exploit.

There's no avoiding it under capitalism because the fundamental goals are misaligned with morality. The only choice is a system that favors morality, potentially by making moral options profitable or just not prioritizing profit. You can't really "fix" capitalism. The fundamentals are rotten. You can improve it, but it'll always be misaligned with what we want. There may be a place for capitalism under another system, but capitalism as the foundation is never going to prioritize humanity, good, and doing what's right.

Kudos on the respectful questions instead of dissolving into rhetoric. I love these sort of conversations.

But while we have had many counties try and fail to make a thriving socialist society. We have had capitalism thrive and make everyones lives better

Hold the phone. We have thriving socialist societies today, unless the EU is doing a lot worse than I thought. In fact in France and Germany they're nearly 100% nuclear and renewable and in France's case have secured enough nuclear fuel to power their society for centuries. All of them have socialized medicine, and judging by the new heart surgery techniques out of France lately they're not lacking for innovation just cause the government is footing the bill. Furthermore, have ALL capitalist countries stood the test of time economically? I can name quite a few that exist right now like Fiji, which is certainly capitalist, but does NOT help their people in being capitalist (selling their water has harmed their environment, and the profits really are not passed along to their people).

Why would you think innovation would disappear?

Let's take the socialist (communist) medical systems in foreign countries. There is still IMMENSE value in winning the government contracts that use your medicine. And I'm a weird communist who still values personal property and intellectual property, I still see that as integral to the process. So like, if you invent the cure for cancer you can still demand $X per treatment, we're just talking about who's footing that bill in the end. I'm just cool with the government being able to design a competing product/treatment. That's kinda really it.

NASA is purely government funded and non-profit. If NASA had been able to charge for half the stuff they gave the world for free they'd be the richest corporation on the planet, since the MRI, CAT scanner, and a whole ton of other technology was made by them. Yet NASA doesn't profit on any of it, and is one of the most innovative entities in the world. Kinda puts a dent in your 'well there'd be no innovation' right? I dunno man, have you ever met scientists and engineers? I'm convinced if you just gave them all unlimited budgets and material all our problems would be solved overnight, and most of them would refuse anything beyond the satisfaction of having made something new and decent living wages and conditions.

And that seems to be working wonderfully for the EU countries who've already adopted this system, and for the Chinese, it's not like innovation just dissipated from there, hell they're beating us in a few areas right now.

Couple things, here.

1. Define "thriving," even the most famously abusive Socialist economies like the USSR managed to double life expectancy, and achieve other good metrics like free Healthcare and education, which even modern Capitalist economies struggle with.

2. "Capitalism" did not make everyone's lives better. Development did. That's why the USSR, in spite of its top-down, brutal structure, managed to double life expectancy.

3. Simple "blind brand loyalty" and monopolization are not the only hallmarks of "Late-Stage Capitalism." Other hallmarks include rampant consumerism, bullshit jobs, stagnating wages with respect to productivity, further alienation from labor, increased Imperialism, and more.

4. Blind brand loyalty isn't the issue here, and you cannot "fix" Capitalist exploitation within Capitalism, only make it more bearable.

All in all, lots of assumptions with no ground to stand on. As a leftist, I think it's safe to say that democracy is generally a good thing, as is decentralization, so a better system than top-down Capitalism would be an economy with democratic participation from the bottom-up. Communism can achieve this.

I'd argue that the people who think Socialism can only work with abundance, even Communism, fail to understand that Socialism and Communism must be built over a long time, and imagine concepts like "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" must be applied to a pre-existing Capitalist economy.

Really, they just don't see the timescale. There's no meaningful reason Socialism cannot happen today with current productive forces.

Unfortunately many terrible people like the second solution of just killing off the unemployable in various ways.

No communistic / socialistic people actually believe that garbage, the whole point of communism and socialism is to provide for people's basic needs. I've never once met someone that seriously talks about communism who would actually suggest using people like that. And communism doesn't mean democracy, the best systems are obviously ones where people have equal opportunity to voice their opinions and needs equally.

It's actually a bad faith argument by capitalists who struggle to see the use of a human being beyond how much labor they can be used for.

....sorta. I think the better question is to what degree should we be communist? Should people be homeless and hungry in 2023? Do people have the right to a doctor, access to free education, and communication through the Internet as basic human rights?

I'm pretty sure we can do these things, we just don't.

That is legitimately one school of thought, as I've heard it, yes. I'm not so sure about it myself, but we've definitely got capitalism -- no one's going to argue that -- so we may as well use it to the advantage of human flourishing.