• Kastelt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    I honestly just want a system that

    1. Gets all of us out of this climate mess
    2. Gets rid of poverty
    3. Doesn’t create a global and national elite of rich people

    For a long time I’ve seen communism, as in: planned economy, and no ruling class (the latter the USSR failed to achieve, it seems) as the solution. But nowadays I don’t know. I don’t know if marxism in it’s original form is enough to explain society, and I don’t think anarchist communism, collectivism, mutualism whatever can work on a large scale. Social democracy doesn’t seem like it’s enough, either.

    • rockstarpirate@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think fundamentally most people would agree with that. The problem with communism though is that it’s not just a staple of the USSR. There is something on the order of 48 countries that have experienced state-sponsored communism in relatively recent times and it has never once succeeded in achieving these goals but tends to exacerbate poverty, class division, and government oppression of human rights, if not resulting in completely failed states.

      Some will read this and assume I am advocating for capitalism. I am not. Asserting problems with communism does not imply capitalism is perfect or even good. But if we do choose to abandon capitalism, the wrong decision is to move to a system with a 100% failure rate of achieving its goals over dozens of historical attempts. As the meme suggests, many Eastern Europeans are old enough to have personal experience with those failures.

      Where communism can work well is on a smaller, voluntary scale. When people choose to get together and establish their own rules for pooling resources, small communities can sometimes live quite satisfactorily this way. But no, if we are willing to call capitalism a failure based on its history we have to be honest enough to say the same thing about state-sponsored communism.

    • DeanFogg@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Western politics already has a vehicle in which to accomplish your 3 bullet points called regulation. The problem is children in charge and the voters apathy to hold their feet to the fire.

      People should get mad, not at each other but at their “masters” that aren’t supposed to exist. The powers that be want us to argue amongst ourselves

    • Ddhuud@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Maximum Wealth should be set to 10 million. At that point you’ve won at wealth and every penny after that should go to someone else.

      • noodle@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        That’s a bit of an arbitrary figure. Also wealth isn’t really money as much as it is things.

        Take a house, for example. You only really need one. The monetary value of the house depends on a few factors, but it’s primary value is that it gives you shelter. It probably fluctuates in monetary value but the actual value doesn’t change. If you cap wealth based on monetary value, how do you deal with homes in different places that are valued differently? I think it’s going to be more complicated than it seels at first glance.

        Assuming you mean dollars, since everyone on the internet is American. 10mil seems like a lot all together. But if you had to feed your entire family for the rest of your life on 10mil you might struggle, depending on where you live.

        Maybe you mean 10mil income per year and not overall wealth. That’s different, but I can understand this. A progressive tax system could impose a cap of sorts but tax avoidance (the legal kind) would render it useless.

        I don’t have any answers, just felt like continuing the thought train.