"b...but we can fix capitalism"

"Capitalism is broken but we can fix it"

The proposed fix: more deregulation, less tax for the rich, removal of "wokeness" from society altogether.

Reminder to the liberals here: If you bash actural leftists for being leftists you are in fact a right winger, furthermore if you are not an actural leftist you are a centrist at best.

"capitalism" has become such an over-used washed-down term that barely anybody knows what's meant by it. please speak in clearer terms to be more clearly understood.

Capitalism is working so good that capitalists are the most consistently class conscious group. They are aware which class they belong to and side with it.

It feels more like people gravitate towards the "winning" team because they have the lion's share of resources and commensurate status.
Billionaires are broadly class conscious, but they routinely feud and back stab one another in pursuit of primacy. Organizations have their own internal politics. People are regularly promoted and ousted as economic conditions shift and ideology drifts. Just ask any status climbing POC who had the ladder kicked out from under them in the name of DEI. Or any "Big Balls" DOGE teen who finds himself the de facto executive of a multi-billion dollar USAID program.
I would say the starkest shifts in Trumpian politics are the ways in which he's redefining winners and losers in the domestic economy. Finance is out. Silicon Valley is in. Not all plutocrats are created equal.

Why are there so many liberals in lefty memes. And why don't any of them know what socialism is.

Browsing all, mostly Americans
- "I'm on the left! That makes me a leftist!"
  Tbf it does actually make them a lefty in American terminology.
  You'd have to look at community info to find out it's meant to be explicitly socialist.
To be fair, most leftists also don't know what socialism is lmao
- I have been kicked out of things for bigotry for suggesting that reading theory was a thing people should do.

We're not voting our way out of this I know that much.

Capitalist democracy is not real democracy and you know it! Stop pretending this system works!

Honestly I think we could actually modify the existing system into a form of at least market socialism relatively simply, at least compared to the complexity involved in rebuilding everything from scratch.

The way that modern capitalism is designed, the rich don't usually directly own the means of production, instead the factories and tools and infrastructure and such are owned by companies, which then funnel wealth to whoever owns those companies. Further, the companies are conveniently divided up into shares that allow for fractional ownership, and are generally controlled by people appointed by the owners of those shares.

It seems to me that, this means that companies are effectively proxies for the means of production, if you own then you own those means, and so if what you primarily want is for the workers to own the means of production, you don't need to figure out new ways to organize the labor done in complex projects or industries or have a central state own everything "for" that workforce, you could just seize the shares of those companies, and distribute them among the people that work there, for as long as they work there (basically just mandate that all businesses bigger than a small family operation be employee co-ops), and leave the everyday structure of the economy that people are familiar with relatively intact.

This wouldn't solve everything, a social media company for example is still going to be incentived to promote engagement and ad revenue even if owned by it's employees, and it would need to be combined with a robust democratic system or else political elites can use their power to change the rules to take wealth for themselves again, but at the very least greatly reducing wealth inequality should help with a lot of things.

OR we could, rather than all that fucking paperwork they would fight us for every inch of and kill lots of us while we lobbied to half-ass a tiny wedge of a solution:
We just drag them out of their bunkers and do em all like the fucking romanovs. Then distribute things based, at least roughly, on need? Possibly based on who has or could create surpluses?
Edit: We have the communication infrastructure to do wothout nonsense obfuscating lossy abstractions like money. At this point it's all cost no value.
This wouldn't solve anything though, apart from slightly improving the amount of surplus value workers get back from their labor. Call that which you propose in any way you want, but it's still capitalism - the mode of for-profit production remains the same, goods are produced as commodities to be sold on the market, wage labor remains fully intact (which implies labor exploitation) and so does capital accumulation meaning you'll still have capital concentration, and given how it's still capitalism, all of its contradictions remain such as overproduction that cause regular crises.
The kind of reform such as this one wouldn't even have the advantage of being "easily, peacefully implemented" given how it would take away the ownership from the current capitalists, who currently hold the class dictatorship reigns. A revolution would be needed, but at that point it'd be better to change the present state of things entirely.
- OK so what's the alternative? Communism?
  Like hosest question, how would that work?
  Redistributing the wealth sounds easy when we talk about billionaires. But what about people like me that make an above average salary because we also put in the effort, like a degree, learning new skills outside work to get better at work, etc.
  I have friends that never cared about money and basically did the absolute minimum at work, so part of my savings should go to them? That also does not sound fair.
  And what about leadership? Is the leader a dictator because that's a hard no for me. Do we still use the democratic system? Because we already have an issue with idiots voting for populist parties. If we all "share" the wealth that is going to get much worse. Don't let those brown people in they will steal all our shared wealth (offcourse that's not even true, but people will vote like this anyway). People voted for brexit because they all believed a buch of lies, it's unfortunately too easy to manipulate people.
  Is there even a real example of communism where it worked for a long time, without leaders getting corrupt or production and GDP going down?
  To me the more European version of capitalism sounds like the best system we have so far. If you have a system with good free education (giving people equal opportunities), strong consumer and environmental protection, plus strong workforce protections, high minimum wage, etc.
Nothing to add really, just that I agree with every single word of this. Expanding unions and coops is a much more realistic way of transferring power to the working class that can happen right now, as opposed to pushing for a total revolution and hoping we're lucky enough to come out on top. We don't even have to use the s-word, just try to go out of your way to do business with employee-owned businesses.
I agree with all of that.
One problem is leftists call this take "liberalism" and conflate it with full on fascism.
I would be more open to discussions about "replacing" capitalism... if the people suggesting it didn't expect the rest of us to figure out what to replace it with.
- Market socialism is not liberalism.
- "... and we'll replace it with anarchism!"
  "Ah so you want pure chaos, a war of all against all."
  "... and we'll replace it with communism!"
  "Aha so you want literally the Soviet Union."
  "... and we'll replace it with democracy!"
  "Aha aha hmm so you want a tyranny of the majority."
  Capitalist propaganda is so deeply ingrained in the average person that you'll have much better luck starting a conversation about what capitalism actually is, and its problems, rather than open with a proposed solution. We've had tons of proposed solutions for centuries now.
  For someone more open-minded, this can be frustrating because you'd prefer they get to the point immediately.
- It isnt actually liberalism I dont think, because to implement what I just mentioned, you would at the very least need to seize a lot of what it currently considered to be private property (that stock and business ownership), and distribute it in a way that the person possessing it does not have the ability to freely buy and sell it (else people would just sell it off for one reason or another and ownership would quickly consolidate again). Liberalism, as I understand it, has an emphasis on personal property rights that would find such a policy and later restriction on business ownership objectionable.

I’m not sure what system would work. The problem is people. Once the wrong people are in charge, they’ll ignore or break laws with impunity.

Capitalism has definitely proven that it’s not the answer, though.

There's a solution to that: don't have 'in charge'.
People are shaped largely by material conditions of our world, and liberalism does encourage horrible qualities that we can see doing active harm today such as individualism, competitivism, selfishness, greed, dogmatism, etc. A great proof of this is looking at today's tribes that still exist and see how they behave much differently than us in the civilized world - they put more emphasis on community, mutual survival rather than individual property ownership.
Therefore, the goal is not to refuse change because "human nature" or whatever, but change material conditions of our world to change our behaviors and values as well. Kind of a catch 22 situation, but given how we transformed our "nature" over the tens of thousands of years constantly it is possible.
Anarchism avoids this problem by putting no one in charge
- Correction: Anarchism avoids this problem by putting everyone in charge. It's not an arrangement in which nobody is empowered, it is an arrangement in which everyone is empowered.
- Okay, but weapons exist. Any country that declared that it had no government would be taken over in less time than it’s taking me to type this (granted, I’m on a phone, but still).
  The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin is a great book that explores an anarchist society. It works because the anarchists are on an unwelcoming moon with very few resources.
- Prison style.

The problem is, socialism looks great by reading the notes on the side of the tin, but there's not a lot of successful installations that maintain individual freedom.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/socialist-countries

If you're going to do it, it's going to need to be done in a way that's never been done before or you're just going to end up another country listed as "former"

I think the way forward is to combine socialism and capitalism. The latter is an optimization layer that is ideal for fostering the personality of individuals, but royally sucks at promoting their everyday wellbeing. Socialism can be terrific for ensuring survival and fairness, but is too rigid to allow people to develop their humanity.
I consider socialism to be a framework and structure of a economic house, while capitalism is the means to furnish it. To do this, we need to make money into something that doesn't buy necessities - society provides all of them - but rather, you use money to buy lifestyle upgrades. That can be fancier food, bigger cars, a nicer house, lots of books, going to the bar, hiring pleasant company, and so forth.
Like all optimization, capitalism will become detrimental if taken too far, so there would be a need for heavy regulations and strict lines to ensure that it sticks to its lane. To that end, I propose that job classes should be assigned to a fixed income rank. This means that a CEO is, perhaps, no more than 2x the income of a waitress. That sort of structural design can help keep capitalism from becoming malignant, since strong and simple rules would make it easier to diagnose corruption, such as wage theft.
As it is, the capitalism of our day is too random for individuals to grasp, while corporations can have dedicated staff to getting the most out of it, often at the expense of individuals. That stacks the deck, especially as the game goes on. If ordinary members of society knew their rights without needing extensive research, it would make it easier for them to call out bad actors and to enforce the rules.

Public ownership of the means of production with the suppression of the owning/capitalist class until all capitalist nation state have been destroyed and we can have a socialist world republic, duh
A system where:
Goods are produced to fulfill human needs via the help of central planning as opposed to commodity production where the "invisible hand of the market" dictates what to produce
Goods get distributed to fulfill needs rather than "rationed" through universal commodities like money
Private ownership gets abolished which gets rid of the parasitic class that extracts value out of land/labor
A system where the entire mode of production changes, and the present state of things gets abolished aka communism/communist mode of production though most of these core points that I outlined (it's not everything) can also apply to anarchism.
It's easy to write these ideas off as "having provably failed" given the history, but failures at building communism have nothing to do with these economic aspects or "human nature" or whatever, but rather political and material situations. USSR didn't achieve communism because of majority of its population being peasants as opposed to urban proletariat, and you can't really fulfill the needs of people if you haven't developed the productive forces to produce said needs, and if you stay on capitalism long enough, you'll start getting opportunists who want personal power and wealth.
Other post-Stalin regimes that called themselves communist (such as Vietnam, Cuba) only did so to gain protection from the Capitalist west given their ex-colony status, so they adopted Marxist-Leninist aesthetics to gain the protection of USSR - materially, they weren't communist at all though given their repression of the workers and independent labor unions, mode of production remaining capitalist and class divisions still going strong.
socialism, yk, anarchism, is hard to understand for u? do you need your brain checked?
- I'm going to have to ask this again it seems. Where has 100% socialism worked for longer than 10 years for a country?
  I think socialism is a great idea, but it doesn't work for anything larger than a small commune and you have to have a common purpose. The greeds are going to take over and become authoritarian pretty quickly if you try it for a country. That's why socialist democrat seems to be the way to meet everyone's needs. Bernie style.
- So you feel entitled to demand society be torn down but not a crumb of responsibility to build it again?
  I can agree that something close to communism is the ideal government. But not if it's run by incompetent or corrupt people. It would be akin to what we saw in post-exit Afghanistan, with clueless gun toting buffoons holding civic offices.
  do you need your brain checked?
  Grow up.
You know communism of some form obviously private ownership of the means of production is self evidently bad for humanity and the planet in general.

Both are dumb as fuck. Hint: if you have only some wood and no instruments to work on it save a saw and a hammer, you are not going to make a car with internal combustion engine

Now watch the history of dumb fucks trying to make a "good" society with people who have no idea why exploiting others is not good

Hint: if you have only some wood and no instruments to work on it save a saw and a hammer, you are not going to make a car with internal combustion engine
As a wood scientist, I can confirm that wood is generally a poor material for engine block manufacture.
- Have you even tried ??

If you’re going by capitalist purism like Milton Friedman we’re nothing even close to that.

Also: still evil, antidemocratic. Literally not compatible with democracy.

Yet when communism fucked up, that was just because of western interference.

*results may vary

Imagine having a bag of skittles and keep pulling out reds and saying, "this is all everyone wants and needs."

Just remember folks, youre not picking anything for yourself. Those born to capitalism will die with capitalism. You can imagine a world thats better, thats great, but it wont be for you.

Its your blood to shed.

Is this the country that has faced sanctions from the world's biggest economic power thus effectively locking them out of the positive sum game that is world trade?