Political Memes

You haven't answered my questions and constantly duck and weave.

Have I not answered questions? What haven't I answered? I'm happy to go back and address things if you feel like I evaded something.

Here, I'll extend an olive branch. I can list several things, and you can tell me where you disagree.

Capitalism has the following flaws:

Sure.

1. Ownership of Capital by individuals results in a class conflict between Workers and Owners, resulting in a tumultuous society

Agree

2. Production of commodities for profit rather than use results in products designed to make profits rather than fulfill uses, ie enshittification

Agree

3. Capitalism cannot exist forever because of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, which leads to Imperialism and eventually fascism and collapse

I mean, a building can't last forever because of its tendency to decay and fall apart, but then if you maintain it properly, it's fine, for long enough to be useful.

I think this is the core of our disagreement: I would agree about the tendency, but not the inevitability. Like I said, I think that particular elements (strong labor unions and a strong-in-practice democratic government) can constrain capitalism to where it functions well and gives a good world to the people connected to it, but doesn't take over and become a destructive force (as it is today to a large extent).

It sounds like you're saying that the flaws are unfixable and so capitalism has to be rejected in order to make a good system. Which, I mean maybe, but in my mind that's unproven.

It also sounds like you're saying that because of these flaws, we need to replace capitalism specifically with communism or socialism and asserting that it'll be better. Which again, I mean maybe, but it seems like you're being consistently evasive about the details of what that would mean (either through details or a historical example), which makes it conveniently easy to hold up the theory of how wonderful it could be, against the actual reality of how capitalism is in practice, and assert that of course it would work better than capitalism in practice, because capitalism has these problems.

It's pretty clear by my wording that I was referring to when they were contemporaries, not the peak right after WWII to modern US, lol. Again, silliness.

Oh -- and I'm really trying not to get caught up in this extended back-and-forth over individual details because super fine details are not the point, but saying the USSR's incarcerations at their peak were lower than contemporary US imprisonment is even sillier. In 1940, the US had 0.2% of its people in prison, which is an actually-reasonable level for a decent country, and lower than the USSR's before-WW2-fucked-the-demographics level of 0.7% (1.5 million in prison out of 194 million people), which is equal to the US's peak of 0.7% and lower than its current level (I was wrong - it's dropped to 0.5% now, which is still of course way too much).

The skyrocketing of prison population from 0.2% to 0.7% happened pretty quickly, from 1980 to 2008, under the great neoliberal enfuckening of the country that was the end of the millennium. It's been going back down, slightly, since then.

I would like the system in the US to be back again more like the one that had the 0.2% that had lasted for 204 years up until that point, and work from there to make more justice at home and abroad. You could say that Reagan and Clinton are inevitable final stages of the system that no amount of safeguard can prevent, and there's no way to improve it within its parameters. I mean, maybe. But I still think it's reasonable to ask, okay even in that case what is the system we will do instead, that will prevent Reagan or Clinton from being replaced with a new Stalin (or, because of lukewarm support for the liberals from "pure" leftists, a Trump -- which is exactly how it happened in pre-Nazi Germany that led to Hitler) who will then make the days of "welfare to work" and 0.7% in prison look like wonderful happy days.