this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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Late Stage Capitalism
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I keep saying this to friends whenever we debate capitalism and socialism.
If every human on the planet was given enough food, shelter, health care, and a full education for the first 20 years of their lives ...... we'd probably cure most diseases, eliminate most or all cancers, bring global warming under control, build entirely new technologies for just about everything and start inhabiting space.
Instead we have about 2,000 billionaires who use their wealth and power to not allow anyone to do anything, about a billion people barely getting by and seven billion with hardly anything at all. And we wonder why our world is falling apart.
When people tell me that capitalism breeds innovation and socialism doesn't because the only motivation people have is money i just remind them that Open-source software exists
There are so many people out there that do things because they like helping, and they like joy, and they like other people.
Fundamentally humans are social creatures, and we have an inherent tendency towards pro-social behaviour (with some exceptions due to mental health issues). We like doing things. We like doing things for other people. And doing something for the greater good/greater community instills us with a sense of pride and accomplishment
Hell, I want to do things for the benefit of society, and my biggest barriers to that are a society that pushes me past my limits leading to burnout, and then I'm useless and feel useless. If I just got the support I needed when I needed it, it would be better for everyone in the long run
I think that might be a bit too optimistic re: cancer. Cancer can happen just through normal cellular division in your body, and the older you get the likelier it is that it just happens randomly. This is independent of environmental factors, which certainly don't help but aren't the cause of all cancers.
You’re thinking about it like cancer ceases to exist, but it’s more likely that we discover super early detection and non-invasive elimination.
Let’s use use the metaphor of a lawn that becomes overgrown by weeds. It’s difficult to control the entire ecosystem that contributes to the lawn, but if we’re able to detect a single invasive seed as it takes root, we could pluck it before it sprouts, let alone spreads. The lawn will quickly recover from a few blades of grass being removed. The longer it goes unmanaged, the more drastic measures and larger swaths must be killed to stop the weeds from overtaking the lawn.
You're right ... there are many forms of cancer that might be more harder to 'cure' or manage. Age also plays a role and it is generally agreed that as we age, the body inevitably just breaks down and eventually will start developing cancers no matter what we do in very advanced age. But the majority of all cancers we now live with are mostly all preventable and many of the ones that aren't preventable could be treated. In a utopian world, we would manage all the food intake, environmental factors and genetics that all contribute to cancers in most people.
Buddy learn the damn term, it's not really not that complicated
You understand that this response is why people disregard your opinions on things, right? If you're ignorant and unwilling to learn, no one is going to pay attention to anything that falls out of your mouth, because it's worth less than bullshit, cuz that's at least useful as fertilizer.
Go learn what words mean, or go back to reddit where your attitude will be welcomed with open arms.
"It never works".
It never materializes (apart from short periods of time before bureaucratic deformation) for very long because it is shot down by the oligarchy. There is tremendous motive in keeping the social status quo (system of classes), and socialism is vilified precisely because it is such a danger to the ruling class.
Look no further than the US's intervention in Cuba to try to quash its socialist efforts
Oh so your point was that the reason socialism hasn't worked as well as it could is capitalism. That didn't seem to be what you were communicating.
If it wasn't, then no, I'm proving an entirely different point.
UBI and socialized Healthcare are both things often brought into democratic systems by socialists.
Socialism is a theory, it is not any one economic system. Marx regarded it as a threshold between the takeover of capitalism and communism. The term has changed a lot since then as people have used it differently, as colloquialisms go. Socialism and democracy also don't have to be separate. Socialist democratic systems exist, the Nordic model being a prime example.
It sounds to me like you have a lot of ideas that do align with socialism, but you've been exposed to so much propaganda growing up that you haven't made, or refuse to make the connection.
Why might the ruling class not want you to know what socialism is? Who might it benefit to convince you it doesn't work?
And just saying it doesn't work doesn't change my opinion at all and it's not convincing to anyone in this thread because you've provided no justification besides "there are power-hungry people", and we are literally seeing power-hungry people destroy any semblance of democracy within the states right now, under a capitalist system. So clearly that flaw is a flaw among most economic systems and is not exclusive to communism.
It's also much easier to cynically dismiss all proposed solutions, which is the path you've chosen. The things you mentioned before - free healthcare & strong social safety net - have only ever been implemented because people dared to dream bigger. The New Deal in the US was advanced in response to revolutionary socialists as a means of appeasement. Without the international socialist movement we would not have gotten the short break from unfettered capitalism that is now coming to an end.
In addition, it's a gross oversimplification to characterize the revolutions that established the USSR and PRC as total failures. No serious student of history considers these in isolation from the context of what came before. Though flawed, the first socialist states were a marked improvement over the oppressive Tsarist regime and chaotic rule by several Chinese warlords.
Usually when people talk about socialism now, they're referring to a semi-planned economy. That's how. They're not talking about authoritarianism of the soviet-era (like forced collectivization which is very hard to get people on board with). Their intentions are generally around people being provided necessities through subsidization, not controlling people. Some government intervention is necessary to keep those with unnecessary wealth(power) at bay.
Literally as simple as necessities are nationalized: Healthcare, housing, food, education, that type of thing. (Ie. None of these should be profit-making institutions, along with prisons, but i can explain why in another comment if you're curious.)
If you'd like, I can explain economically why the free market cannot allocate resources effectively for necessities like this, and therefore my reasoning behind nationalization.
We really shouldn't be encouraging endless accumulation of wealth, because it slows down the velocity of money when people hoard it, and it becomes a burden on our economy, especially when the class divide gets as wide as it currently is.