Also "I replaced spring water with filtered sewage water, makes my product taste like shit but I can produce it for a fraction of the cost and sell it for the same price"
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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"Luckily" bottled water companies bought unlimited access to municipal water sources for pennies on the dollar, so fresh water is cheap enough (since they're piggybacking off of the water company's work filtering and purifying it) that they see no need to adulterate their product.
Sure sucks for the communities whose water is being siphoned away, but meh. It's their fault for not being born rich.
Also..."I am legally a person so my dozens/hundreds of lawyers and billions of dollars will just sue you into oblivion"
So is socialism (just different wordings). Also, "communism" (never actually done, as far as I know). Also, . And that's why we should bring up future generations to be better than us and leave the planet a better place than it was before us, not debate each other about what kind of pipe dream is more effective at achieving nothing
So is socialism
Aaand you lost me. Read a book
Read already, thanks
Also: I just bribed politicians who will let more uneducated immigrants in so I can exploit their labor and pay them pennies on the dollar compared to your local laborers. And I started a culture war so that anyone who raises concern to the immigration and how it suppresses wages will be silenced and called a racist by the left even though it undermines their own cause.
This actually happened in Europe.
And I started a culture war so that anyone who raises concern to the immigration and how it suppresses wages will be silenced and called a racist by the left even though it undermines their own cause.
Also applies in housing. Private developers build houses, then foreign vulture capital funds outbid the locals, and VCs raise the rent prices to extortionate fees. When it is pointed out that foreign corporate buyers contribute to housing crisis, neoliberals and NIMBYs go "are you racist?" And the government (including local NIMBYs) is only too happy not to build social housing to artificially inflate property and rent prices. Many politicians in my country own multiple properties themselves. And people wonder why the far-right is on the rise...
Cool!
Now do communism
Does the critique in this post trigger you so much you need to "both sides" it to feel good?
Communism in Theory
- Everyone on equal footing
- Everyone's basic human rights are met (Healthcare, Housing, Safety & Security)
Communism in practice
- Authoritarianism
- Homo/Trans-Phobia
We've yet to have true communism anywhere in my opinion. The road to communism opens up too many pathways to corruption and tyranny that so far have always been taken advantage of.
I think communism as a concept would be great but I just don't think true communism is possible, at least not long term anyway.
Maybe somewhere in more ancient times we had something close to it, but I'm currently unaware.
Being from ex-soviet state (although the one most hated by tankies), I can say that older folks still remember how there were constantly talks about reaching communism in next 20 years, and, of course, there years didn't count down.
Funny, because when surveyed, most older folks in ex-soviet states say that life was actually better under the socialists than it is now. Like, it still wasn't perfect, but most people felt more secure, had more access to housing, jobs, and necessities, and felt like the people around them were actually working together for the common good to build something equitable.
I imagine the tyranny was less felt in rural areas where a true sense of community still existed. And id correlate longer living wonders with living in those rural areas too. Wonder if that could be a reason?
Or it could be that life actually was better...
So, in first few decades (if we ignore some elephants in the room, that my grandparents had to survive) living in village meant you belonged to entity, called "колгосп" (collective farmstead may be the best translation), people there didn't even have USSR passports, just some papers about them belonging to that place. Villagers were paid for their work mainly by being allowed to take home some of the produce they made, and, most interestingly, they were heavily taxed for dumbest shit imaginable - if you, for example, had an apple tree in your backyard - yep, that's a tax. Few strains of Ukrainian apples got extinct simply because of that. Later it got better, but at first people had to work for food and were perpetually in debt.
True communism only works on a small scale. As soon as there are enough people that everyone doesn't know everyone else, it collapses.
I guess like communes right? Now that i say it it sounds stupid just saying it considering the name
Yes, exactly like communes. As soon as you get too many moochers who take and don't contribute, they fall apart.
It really puts the community in communism
Yup, kinda the whole point! And why the authoritarian "communist" governments are BS.
Dammit you are going to stir the hornet's nest!
What do you mean by this, comrade? Choose your next words carefully.
This is a failure of government to block these kinds of acquisitions. Google shouldn't be allowed to buy so many companies.
The solution to not being able to buy everything you want was to buy politicians so then you can buy everything!
Capitalism really does breed innovation! Woo!
/Wrist.
True, but like the one ring trying to get back to sauron, all of capitalism's will and malice bends towards monopoly.
This isnt a function of capitalism. It is a function of concentrated power.
Capitalism concentrates power, so I don't follow your point
Concentrating power is not exclusive to capitalism, and is more natural than not. In order to improve outcomes relative to capitalism, you must make a system which is geopolitically competitive with capitalist states while simultaneously actively avoiding concentrations of power. Saying capitalism is the problem is problematic because it does not account for this. If we limit our scope to saying capitalism is the problem, then we allow ourselves to advocate for systems which not only perpetuate the problem of power concentration, but worsen it.
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I might get a bit of hate for this, but fuck it. Capitalism isn't evil, just flawed enough that the evil can take advantage of it. Socialism makes sure that people have what they need, very good. Capitalism lets people get what they want. I propose smashing those 2 together with rather heavy regulations to prevent exploitation. This has kind of been done, but to a rather light extent. I'm not an economist, I'm just a guy. Don't listen to me. Eh, like 3 people will see this. How's your day going?
Capitalism is just another word for hoarding. The fact that it allows to have what you need is a side affect that capitalist would rather fix; it's a leak.
I like how you say that. It made me deduce a thought of how everything we need should be socialized to some extent (or at least have superbly heavily regulated mandated processes and stuff), and the stuff we want can be provided through a "free market" (not to say the free market shouldnt be regulated, but it wouldnt need to be as strict as stuff/services that we need).
Healthcare & transportation being the most important things I can think of where the government should keep 100% of the controls.
Since Capitalism is just a method to distribute goods and services, it can't be good or evil. There is no intent. The problems arises when humans use capitalism. A natural process occurs that creates oligarchs. So most people apply the evil label to it. It is not meant to be taken literally.
If I understand the communist/Marxist take on this, retaining any form of capitalism just allows the reproduction of these circumstances down the line. You stop it in the short term with laws, but if you retain the power of capital then those people just buy elections, buy politicians, etc, and we're back to this scenario again.
I'm not sure I agree with everything involved with communism, but I do agree with their take on this problem. We're going through it right now in the US. We fought, literally shed blood, for the rights we have and the regulations that protect us, and then money comes in and buys a shit government to take it all away.
You're probably right. I don't know shit.
It's ok, I don't either really lol I certainly don't have any real answers for where we go that's for sure.
Better to know you don't know than to run around thinking you know everything, so it's cool lol
If I understand the communist/Marxist take on this, retaining any form of capitalism just allows the reproduction of these circumstances down the line.
It's not even really theoretical. Lenin famously established the New Economic Policy (NEP) which basically allowed capitalism for farmers. As a result some farmers became quite wealthy and this gave them economic power over the communist party officials that were ostensibly overseeing them (Stalin during a tour in the mid-'20s often found his officials living in the houses of "kulaks").
Stalin of course solved this problem by exterminating the entire class of wealthy peasants - and a whole lot of other people, too, not to mention almost all of the nation's livestock. I guess the lesson here is that only rampant psychopathy can defeat capitalism, which is kind of depressing.
Stalin was still a capitalist. What he did was eliminate the competition in a particular violent way.
Stalin was a despot above all else. His particular brand of psychopathy long predates capitalism.
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