I can’t really think of a reason for that as Reddit is hated somewhat equally by “both” sides of the spectrum. It’s just something I find interesting.
Really? Please, what linear, incremental changes can you make to a pressurized piston driven engine that will turn it gradually into an induction motor? Certainly, they both turn a wheel eventually, but the fundamental principle of operation is totally different. The things that were wrong with steam engines led to incremental improvements up until a point, when a total redesign was necessary.
Your analogical thinking needs improvement. Capitalism isn’t like mechanical engineering, it’s like external combustion. Socialism is like replacing it with internal combustion, communism is like replacing that with electric induction.
Steam engines literally led to the development of electric motors. Steam engines led to steam turbines which led to dynamos which led to electric motors, each invention building off the knowledge gained at the previous step.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Algernon_Parsons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamo
Your analogy is doubly flawed. Each type of engine you mention has strengths and weaknesses that depend on external variables. Internal combustion isn’t better at producing electricity for instance, which is why we mostly use external combustion to do that. Electric motors aren’t better than internal combustion, except that internal combustion is causing climate change. It’s also flawed because history has shown that Socialism doesn’t work better than Capitalism. I could see, if this were purely theoretical, someone arguing the benefits of Marxist ideas, but it’s been tried. In several places around the world, people tried to put in place the kind of changes you’re advocating. In every case it led to authoritarianism, brutal repression, and starvation. Does it suck that poor kids don’t have enough to eat, while Bezos builds space yachts? Yeah it sucks, but it’s not millions-starving-to-death levels of suck like we actually, not theoretically, got every time we tried Communism or Socialism or any kind of take-their-stuff-and-give-it-to-me-ism.
Right, but you wanna keep using steam engines to power cars.
History shows that capitalism has one exemplary use case: siphoning value from workers to capitalists. Full stop. It’s an outright failure at other things, or at least worse than most alternatives.
There are, in fact, millions starving to death under capitalism, and have been every time it’s been tried. Sure, they’re brown people in countries capitalists call “shit holes” so you personally can’t see them, but they’re there. Lots of them are working in dangerous conditions for negligible wages in order to prop up capitalism, because capitalism boils down to one equation:
(Revenue) - (Expenses) = Profit
Guess where wages fall in that equation?
Poverty and exploitation aren’t coincidental, occasional consequences of capitalism. They are the mathematically inevitable conclusion every single time. It’s almost impossible to find a mass-market product that didn’t involve child or slave (or child slave) labor somewhere in the supply chain. After all, the fewer pennies you pay for labor, the more space yachts you can buy.
The only times capitalist economies do anything other than exploit and cause poverty are when armed revolt is imminent and the government steps in to take-the-capitalists’-stuff-and-give-it-to-everyone.
Social democratic economies are thriving around the world. Every unregulated capitalist economy has devolved into space yachts and starving millions almost immediately.
Sure, there have been authoritarian governments that said they were socialist for PR. You can call a hammer a socket wrench. The failure of the hammer to turn a nut doesn’t mean socket wrenches don’t work, it means you’re pretending a hammer is something it isn’t. No one has tried communism, or large scale socialism. They’ve tried authoritarian centrally planned economies, which isn’t what either of those things are. Hammers marketed as wrenches. No one you’re talking about has ever tried the wrench.
Except worker co-ops.
Every unregulated capitalist economy has devolved
Right, but I’m not arguing for unregulated capitalism. I think capitalism should be highly regulated. I’m arguing for fair markets that reward good actors and punish bad. I’m arguing for continually refining capitalism and fixing the problems. Which is why I keep having this argument. You’re obviously an intelligent person, motivated to change society for the better, with a good moral compass. I want you on my side. I want people to want to work on the actual problems, and not pin their hopes on some big idea that will fix everything, because that doesn’t exist.
Sure, there have been authoritarian governments that said they were socialist for PR.
This is the cognitive dissonance about Marxism that bugs me the most. You believe that a system such as Capitalism is so flawed that it must be replaced with something else, but you are unwilling to see that Socialism is also flawed in different ways. If you adhered to the principles of pure Marxism, you would see that Socialism as well must be discarded for a better alternative. Instead of seeing that, you will label every failed Socialist state as a fake. We need something else.
