The problem with non-free-market economic systems is if the person or group controlling the resources doesn’t like you, you die.
The problem with free-market economic systems is if the person or group controlling the resources doesn’t like you, you die.
A free market is, by definition, one in which one person or group doesn’t control the reosurces.
Whereas no one has ever died because they couldn’t obtain resources from the market. 🙄
When we compare free markets to centralized control systems, pretty much all the starvation has happened under centralized control systems.
The reason for this is that under a free market, nothing is more profitable than providing things people desperately need.
There’s starvation happening right now in every free market and there always is, because every free market relies on a surplus army of reserve labor to keep wages low. That’s why 5% unemployment is “full” employment. There need to be people who are desperate at all times for the market to function, otherwise wages rise too quickly and profits decline at an even faster rate.
The reason for this is that under a free market, nothing is more profitable than providing things people desperately need.
What’s more profitable is keeping people on the street to act as a warning to everyone else: be productive or we will kill you.
Whereas no one has ever died because they couldn’t obtain resources from the party. 🙄
Exactly, thus the original point is a non-starter.
We need to instead analyze the proposed systems, and see which is more successful in fulfilling the needs of society, not just the elite. Socialists propose large safety nets, and satisfying the needs of the whole from the production of the whole via central planning.
Capitalist adherants argue instead that the profit motive incentivizes higher production, so even if resource distribution is heavily top-loaded, the aggregate production is proposed to be higher. However, they often fail to consider overproduction of goods purely for profit, leading to environmental issues, boom/bust cycles, and inefficient allocation of resources and production.
AES countries have also made larger efforts to provide for their poor, with free healthcare, education, and cheap housing as common advantages.
A country becoming Socialist doesn’t solve every problem overnight, but it does shift the priorities of society, and metrics tend to improve as a consequence, such as life expectancy, literacy rates, housing rates, and poverty rates.
There doesn’t exist a thing as a “free market economy” on a large scale. It’s an impossibility. Attempts at pure capitalism converge to diet fascism. But even if this hypothetical free market were to exist, it inevitably becomes a system where a small minority of people control the many. It’s a system that all but guarantees a wealth gap divide and generational wealth. It’s a system where the more capital you have, the more voting power you have (“vote with your dollar” is a capitalist phrase for a reason). It’s a system where resources are distributed based on capital, and capital is a resource, and obviously more resources allows you to generate more capital – do you see the problem here? Over time, most of the power accumulates in the hands of a few.
Despite the forum we’re on, I’m definitely not a Marxist-Leninist (nor a follower of any variation of highly authoritarian leftism or socially conservative leftism) and probably wouldn’t be described as a “communist” – it does get fuzzy there though since in a hypothetical unified or post-scarcity world I would want communism… Regardless of the terminology, surely you agree with me that attempting a “free market capitalist” economy is a very bad idea, and at minimum you need a well-regulated mixed economy to function?
Not who you replied to, and you’re free to ignore this comment, but I wanted to poke at something you wrote.
Despite the forum we’re on, I’m definitely not a Marxist-Leninist (nor a follower of any variation of highly authoritarian leftism or socially conservative leftism) and probably wouldn’t be described as a “communist” – it does get fuzzy there though since in a hypothetical unified or post-scarcity world I would want communism…
There are no significant numbers of socially conservative Communists on Lemmy (ie patsocs, MAGA Communists, and other far-right coopting of Marxism). Tossing that aside, we are left with your idealized goal of Communism, ie a society that satisfies the needs of the whole with the products of the whole via central planning, but no stated path to actually get there. If there isn’t a plan, then it ceases to be a goal, and instead becomes a dream.
My question is this: what do you believe Marxists want, and what makes them “authoritarian?” Is there a line in the sand between democratic and authoritarian? What about the Marxist stated plan is authoritarian, specifically? I think there’s some underlying bias here that I want to challenge just a bit, if you’ll entertain me.
I would consider myself a Marxist, with some asterisks, just not a Marxist-Leninist. The way I intend for communism to be achieved is for there to be an eventual revolution of the workers – realistically, this won’t happen in a society where anti-socialist biases are widespread from indoctrination, so the strategy before then would to push for social democracy and better education until people are more receptive to socialist messaging. Post revolution, it becomes more complicated.
I call Marxist-Leninists authoritarian because, from my view, the stateless democratic endgoal of it would be impossible in a capitalist world – as long as there are powerful capitalist countries with anti-socialist, any true democracy attempting to achieve communism is easily sabotaged (looking at Latin America, or Palestine where Israel funded Hamas to sabotage the PLO, or even Iran which wasn’t socialist at a but was labelled “socialist” and got a CIA-created monarchist revolution). The conclusion I draw is that in a geopolitical climate like with say, the USA, the only communist countries that can exist are the ones which have a highly authoritarian government and generally violate human rights or basic freedoms a lot.
So, that begs the question you asked, really – if communist worker’s democracy is impossible in a world with too much working against socialists, how should one expect to take the leap from a capitalist world to a socialist world? I don’t think that’s something I have a really definite plan for, but if I had to make an attempt, I think the most likely way is to do what I originally mentioned but on a global scale – getting enough people around the world accustomed to socialists, communists, and even just very left-leaning social democrats, getting them familiar with leftist ideology and grievances, enough for one spark to be enough to start a global revolution all in a relatively short timespan. After that, the immediate priority should be education reforms and pushing education heavily, since I believe full democracy can only work if it’s a democracy of the well-informed. There should be armed forced to take care of any imperialist leftovers, but other than that I think it should be a highly centralized worker’s democracy, working towards full communism. Now, this almost sounds like democratic/reformist socialism with a revolution thrown in once you get far enough, which would be ironic because I always bash reformist socialism for expecting socialism to be achievable in the framework of a fundamentally capitalist system (which let me be clear, I think is impossible). But looking at the modern capitalist world powers, most of which are rabidly against communist countries, I just don’t see a way in which communism can be achieved globally – the USA and Europe probably need a revolution before the world can start transitioning away from capitalism.
When it comes to the difference between authoritarianism and democracy, there’s no clear answer, but people in communist countries that have existed have very little influence from voting, and civil liberties are highly restricted (the USSR even started collapsing once people got free speech). I honestly couldn’t clearly define the point where it stops being “democracy” – the answer is far more complicated than I could imagine.
As for your initial statement – I have seen a lot of socially conservative communists. The OP of the current post, for example, has a post basically mocking being social progressive because “no war but class war”. I think a lot of communists misinterpret this as “the fight for social progress is a distraction from class conflict”, when in reality it means something along the lines of “we shouldn’t discriminate against each other over ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc.”, we should work to improve both the rights of marginalized groups and fight the war against capitalism. A really common sentiment I’ve seen among MLs is basically trying to use “<x western military> is full of queers and women” as an insult (although the actual wording is… a lot more inflammatory). There seems to be a lot of extremely bigoted rhetoric passed around, although I haven’t seen it brought up on Lemmy comments a lot, and I haven’t seen enough of communist communities to know how common the sentiment is here.
Weird how apparently not having a neoliberal economy means authocratic rule
