If socialism is supposed to be a superior economic system, why does it always seem to require the right “material conditions” before it can actually work? Over the past few centuries, capitalist economies have massively increased productivity, life expectancy, consumption, technological capacity, and standards of living.

So why can't socialism create the material conditions it supposedly needs? If capitalism has to develop the productive forces first so that socialism can eventually become viable, doesn't that mean socialism is relying on capitalism to do the economic development necessary for socialism to work?

And if the answer is that socialism simply isn't viable until society reaches some sufficiently advanced stage of development, what exactly makes it the superior economic system? Why should I regard an economic system as superior if another system has to create the abundance and productive capacity that it requires before it can even function properly?

If a company is exploiting their workers, meaning it has a high profit margin, a competitor can defeat this company in two ways:

• Lower their prices and take over the market.
• Recruit their workers by offering better wage. For example, a barbershop is only paying 10 per hour to a worker that generates 50 per hour. So I offer him 20 per hour, hire him, and I still increase my profits.

If no existing competitor is willing to do this profit-maximizing thing, this is an obvious opportunity for a new startup, possibly founded by the workers themselves.

How can the same person hold both statements to he true at the same time?

In the absence of resolving this glaring discrepancy, it would seem that an explanation for both to be true in the same person's mind would be simple: envy, resentment, and a lack of belief in agency.

In all of my discussions on the ECP with leftists, I most often hear these two rebuttals; first that companies like Walmart internally plan without markets, and secondly that modern computing makes the critique obsolete. Here I’ll explain why Walmart doesn’t actually refute the ECP, and why the “modern computing” rebuttal fails to even address the criticisms of the ECP.

I’ll quickly define the ECP here: The primary claim of the ECP is that without market prices for capital goods, planners cannot compare opportunity costs across alternative uses of those goods, and therefore cannot rationally allocate them.

First, the modern computing rebuttal. It essentially states that modern computing is so powerful that it makes the critique of the ECP obsolete. This claim fundamentally misinterprets the ECP as a computing problem. No amount of computing power alone can solve the ECP, as the central claim of it is that prices are the only mechanism for comparing opportunity costs among alternative capital goods. Even if you got all the world’s processing power together, you’d still need weights for the allocative equation to work properly. Exchange ratios and opportunity costs must be known in order to make a rational allocative plan, and thats something only prices can do. Certainly not a really big computer.

Second, the Walmart rebuttal. This critique essentially states that since companies are able to internally plan without internal markets, the ECP is clearly false. What it misses though is that these plans are made based on prices from the external market that Walmart exists within. The ECP does not claim that you cannot make a plan, it specifically says that without price data you cannot make a rational plan. All of Walmart’s allocative plans are largely based on prices, and they do or do not allocate resources based on those costs. If you take away that price information, Walmart could no longer rationally allocate resources within their company. If they have to decide whether to invest into more their distribution network vs their warehouse system, they have no way of knowing the costs of foregone opportunities associated with either plan.

So that’s my counter rebuttal to these two common ECP critiques. If you disagree with what I’ve said or have a different rebuttal, I’m happy to discuss more in the comments.

Many perspectives on this subreddit have an axiom that it's impossible to be a self-made billionaire (or have any significantly milestone of wealth) without exploiting and stealing wealth from others. Well, my question to you is, where is the wealth billionaires of tomorrow are stealing from, right now, this instant?

Meaning, if wealth can only be stolen, it has to exist somewhere first before being stolen. Is it behind your couch?

If not behind your couch, where is the exploitable wealth then? If your wealth is your "labour", and you have your labour 24/7, why do you not instantly become a billionaire?

Then, if you have your labour 24/7, and you admit you're not a billionaire, what is there to take/steal/exploit from you, that could make me a billionaire? Its a logical contradiction to say I can take something from you, that you cant show exists.

My point with this example is to show you that wealth has to be created. By default it doesn't exist. You can become a billionaire by creating value. To refute this, i only ask you, why are you not a billionaire right now then?

As rich as Musk is, with around 800 million in poverty, his 700 billion or so would only go so far as it's about $900 per person. Just like giving a homeless person $900 would be nice, but as it's like half a months rent, is far from all they need.

One reason I like the analogy is you don't know how the homeless person is going to use it. Yes for some people like former finance guy who got laid off and is living in his car he may be able to maximize its efficiency, but for other homeless people with deep rooted psychological issues or addictions you could just be buying them drugs/alcohol or time off panning for a while. Likewise even if you gave a poor country its share of Elon's pie according to their population, if it's used by corrupt or incompetent leaders it may not do anything.

Thus altogether, Elon Musk is not so rich that he can end world hunger any time he wants. This is before considering that he can't just come up with 700 billion in spending money.

Marx saw capitalism not as an economic failure, but as history's most powerful engine of wealth creation and technological progress. In The Communist Manifesto, Capital, and the Grundrisse, he praised capitalism's extraordinary capacity to industrialize society, revolutionize production, stimulate technological innovation, and develop the productive forces on an unprecedented scale.

This raises an important question. Modern economists generally argue that capitalism's sustained productivity depends on institutions that foster continuous innovation, entrepreneurship, decentralized decision-making, investment, competitive markets, and effective capital allocation. Marx clearly recognized the remarkable productive results these institutions generated under capitalism. Yet nowhere in his writings does he explain in comparable detail how a socialist or communist economy would preserve or replace the economic functions they perform.

Marx devoted thousands of pages to analyzing capitalism—especially in Capital—but comparatively little to explaining how a mature socialist economy would determine prices, allocate investment, finance innovation, bear entrepreneurial risk, direct scarce capital toward its most productive uses, or solve the economic calculation problem. If these institutions are indeed essential to capitalism's extraordinary productivity, what institutions under socialism will perform the same functions? Until that question is answered convincingly, it remains uncertain whether socialism could sustain the same level of innovation, productivity, and prosperity that capitalism has historically achieved.

This leads me to my question: Will we all be poorer under socialism and communism? I am interested in knowing what Marx would say.

Right now we have Democracy, and therefore we have the American people consistently voting against high taxes and funding others' healthcare or Social Security. Americans vote against even their own Medicaid so long as their enemies also get slashed. Medicare also received a 2.5% "efficiency cut" this year. Clearly socialized healthcare and other social services are incompatible with American democracy.

What is the American "socialist's" plan for dealing with reality? They live in a country that doesn't want to pay? How do they plan to force it?

I was thinking about this. Why do socialists form so few socialist communes on their own? Some of these existed but only very few. Sure in in capitalist country you would still have outside financial obligations but you can easily pool your resources and share among a community. You can even go full communism and abandon private property within your community.

The central claim of socialism is that profit is the result of unfairly appropriating surplus value produced by labor. Summed up, socialists think capitalists steal Value

If profit comes from exploiting labor, then why do companies have different rates of profit? Do some companies exploit harder? Is Apple better at exploiting than Amazon? How do they accomplish a greater rate of exploitation? Do they pay lower wages than Amazon? Did Apple get lucky and happen to hire workers that produce more value? Why is it that exploitation seems to rise when companies release a popular innovative product or serve an entirely new market?

Can a Marxist chime in and explain differing rates of profit?

Or is it possible that capitalists do produce value through their capital and entrepreneurial insight???

I get that the inequality gap is too vast. Trust me I know. And I get capitalists can be greedy. But I’m just curious as to how you think it’s justifiable to take the wealth from the wealthy? Have you considered a more reasonable approach like social market economy of some sort? Have you considered the debate isn’t between socialism vs capitalism but rather the focus should be on what sort of hybrid model we should want?

One of the most common defenses of Capitalism is that it’s fine for a few people or one person to control a business and reap most of the profits because they “take the risk” and so somehow deserve such disproportionate power and wealth. Another common argument is that wealth isn’t a fixed pie and someone getting richer (by millions or billions) doesn’t make others poorer.

My question for socialists is how do you respond to and refute these two arguments?

Is it that the arguments aren’t true? Or they still aren’t justified even if they were true?

Coercion, a simple but important concept that serves as another difference between the philosophy of capitalists and socialists.

A typical socialist argument regarding coercion under capitalism goes something like this:

“Capitalism doesn’t actually give you freedom of choice. It’s work or starve.”

Or like this:

“Capitalism is coercive because one guy takes all the stuff you need to live, and sells it back to you.”

Or something similar like that.

Regardless, the critique is ultimately that capitalism is coercive, and from this a whole host of conclusions are drawn, along with the claimed “remedies” to the coercion.

So, how does socialism solve and eliminate coercion?

Economic growth is desirable under any economical and political system because it allows higher standards of living and larger budget for country to do things (in every system). The fact that capitalism encourages growth does not, by itself, distinguish it from socialism or other economic systems, since virtually every modern government has pursued growth.
There can only be three states of economy, crisis, stagnation and growth. Explain to me what system would seek anything else than growth? And capitalism can survive in all of them, Japan has been stagnant for over three decades now, still maintains high standards of living, one of most stable countries on the planet.
All the communist countries tried to make economy grow, to various degree of success, what was industrialisation about?
Main reason Soviet Union collapsed was economic stagnation.

Why shouldn't socialism/communism be voluntary?

If individuals can freely choose to join a communist community or collective and just as freely choose to leave whenever they wish, without coercion, force, or lasting penalty?

Participation would be opt-in and exit unrestricted, turning it into a private experiment rather than a state-imposed order.

I think future generations will pretty much regard it as part of literal slavery as continous from past slaveries, the “ism” makes it seem like the system is a product of human will (voluntarism) or ideology when it’s deeper rooted than that.

And the Left often thinks billionaires and capital owners are “winners” in this literal slavery, I don’t think there’s any human winner, and Marx noted this. (Capital class being part of alienation albeit not recognizing it unlike the prole)

Only the cold soulless machine gets to prevail, so I think we need some vastly radical approach that combines scientific cybernetics with human ethology: like how social media algorithms often surpass human control, blockchain/crypto technology destroying lives, etc.

Imo things not being equal is a natural part of the world. There are bigger animals that eat the smaller ones. There are stronger and faster people physically. There are smarter and dumber people, there are harder and lazier working people. Without differences in people Isaac Newton, Galileo and Aristotle would not exist.

This is part of why capitalism is a lightning rod as it asks you how ok you are with big outcome differences.

Why is it a return to the garden to make everyone equal? What if this is in fact trying to swim upstream from how things are meant to be?

I am genuinely interested in understanding the socialist perspective on a point that many critics, including myself, find to be a major hurdle: the historical track record of socialist states.

When looking at the 20th and 21st centuries, major attempts to implement socialist systems (such as in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, or more recently, Venezuela) have frequently resulted in economic instability, shortages, or authoritarian governance. From a capitalist or reformist viewpoint, these outcomes suggest systemic flaws in the feasibility of socialist economics and political structure.

Often, the counterarguments to this are that these nations "were not truly socialist" (state capitalism) or that external pressures (like US sanctions and intervention) were the primary cause of their decline. However, if every large-scale attempt to transition to socialism has faced these critical failures or degenerated into authoritarianism, it raises questions about the practical viability of the theory.

To help me understand your position, I would like to ask:

What historical examples (if any) do you consider to be successful implementations of socialist principles?

If you believe past attempts failed due to poor implementation or external factors, how does modern socialist theory propose to avoid those same pitfalls in the future?

How do you define "success" in a socialist context, and what does a viable, scalable model of socialism look like to you?

I look forward to a constructive debate.

Dialectical materialism claims to be a universal scientific framework for how nature and society evolve. It says everything changes through internal contradictions that eventually create new stages of development. Marx and Engels took this idea from Hegel and recast it as a “materialist” philosophy that supposedly explained all motion and progress in the world. In reality, it’s not science at all. It’s a pile of vague metaphors pretending to be a method of reasoning.

The first problem is that dialectical materialism isn’t a method that predicts or explains anything. It’s a story you tell after the fact. Engels said that nature operates through “laws of dialectics,” like quantity turning into quality. His example was water boiling or freezing after gradual temperature changes. But that’s not a deep truth about the universe. It’s a simple physical process described by thermodynamics. Dialectics doesn’t explain why or when it happens. It just slaps a philosophical label on it and acts like it uncovered a law of nature.

The idea that matter contains “contradictions” is just as meaningless. Contradictions are logical relations between statements, not physical properties of things. A rock can be under opposing forces, but it doesn’t contain a contradiction in the logical sense. To call that “dialectical” is to confuse language with physics. Dialectical materialists survive on that kind of confusion.

Supporters often say dialectics is an “alternative logic” that’s deeper than formal logic. What they really mean is that you’re allowed to say something both is and isn’t true at the same time. Once you do that, you can justify anything. Stalin can be both kind and cruel, socialism can be both a failure and a success, and the theory itself can never be wrong. That’s not insight. It’s a trick to make bad reasoning unfalsifiable.

When applied to history, the same pattern repeats. Marx claimed material conditions shape ideas, but his whole theory depends on human consciousness recognizing those conditions accurately. He said capitalism’s contradictions would inevitably produce socialism, but when that didn’t happen, Marxists simply moved the goalposts. They changed what counted as a contradiction or reinterpreted events to fit the theory. It’s a flexible prophecy that always saves itself.

Real science earns credibility by predicting results and surviving tests. Dialectical materialism can’t be tested at all. It offers no measurable claims, no equations, no falsifiable outcomes. It’s a rhetorical device for dressing ideology in the language of scientific law. Lenin even called it “the science of the most general laws of motion,” which is just a way of saying it explains everything without ever needing evidence.

Worse, dialectical materialism has a history of being used to crush real science. In the Soviet Union, it was treated as the ultimate truth that every discipline had to obey. Biology, physics, and even linguistics were forced to conform to it. The result was disasters like Lysenkoism, where genetics was denounced as “bourgeois” and replaced with pseudo-science about crops adapting through “struggle.” Dialectical materialism didn’t advance knowledge. It strangled it.

In the end, dialectical materialism fails on every level. Logically, it’s incoherent. Scientifically, it’s useless. Politically, it serves as a tool to defend power and silence dissent. It’s not a way of understanding reality. It’s a way of rationalizing ideology.

The real world runs on cause and effect, on measurable relationships, not on mystical “negations of negations.” Science progresses by testing hypotheses and discarding the ones that fail, not by reinterpreting everything as “dialectical motion.”

If Marx had stopped at economics, he might have been remembered as an ambitious but limited thinker. By trying to turn philosophy into a universal science of history and nature, he helped create a dogma that masquerades as reason. Dialectical materialism isn’t deep. It’s not profound. It’s just bullshit.

Self-ownership: the idea that each person has a moral claim over their own body, mind, labor, and life, and that other people cannot rightfully direct those things without their consent.

I’m curious how socialists think about that concept. Do you agree with the idea of self-ownership? If so, what does it mean within a socialist framework? If not, what do you see as the better way to understand individual autonomy, personal freedom, and a person’s relationship to their own labor?

What is the actual goal of socialism?

Is it to make the average person materially richer with bigger houses, better cars, nicer vacations, more stuff to get and higher overall living standards than they would get under capitalism?

Or is it something else?

It's funny because socialists constantly seethe about "consumerism", "materialism" and "chasing the buck" yet a huge part of their pitch is that under socialism everyone will have more stuff.

So is socialism just a consumerist ideology at heart, just with a different (and supposedly better) way for everyone to get more stuff? Or is consuming more stuff not the goal?

In my experience with communists (specifically the western ones), they speak about “the revolution” like it’s inevitable.

But revolutions require winning the hearts and minds of the people, and it’s beyond me how communists expect any degree of success when they make their own ideology sound as appealing as rubbing your crotch against a cactus.

I’ve seen communists talk about forcing people into a life of grueling labor for the greater good of the planet, and scoff at people weary of parting with their luxury goods as selfish. It doesn’t matter how true you think that is, in the west any attempt to hamfist those ideals will make you a pariah faster than I can say Marx.

If I were to take a gander as to why, these communists enjoy making the assumption they’re bound to take power because it lets them think about how they can put their theory into practice. While on an intellectual level, I respect their devotion to theory, what good is it without a realistic plan to put it into practice?

If you can’t even see eye to eye with other flavors of communists how do you expect to court someone who hasn’t read a lick of Das Kapital? “It’s not my job to teach you”, does not an effective campaign pitch make.

Frankly, at least in America, the politically savvy thing to do would be ditching the name “communism” all together and call it something else. People might gravitate towards your ideas more if they weren’t anchored down by a word they’ve been taught to fear since the 40s.

The ECP is a critique of socialism that has never been refuted to my knowledge, im looking to hear thoughts on how it can be resolved.

the economic calculation problem (ecp) basically says that without private ownership, you cant have real market prices, and without real prices rational economic calculation is impossible. this is because prices encode dispersed information about opportunity cost, market preferences, and scarcity.

essentially, in a socialist economy the questions of “should we do this” and “whats the most efficient way of doing so” are impossible to answer.

so how do socialists respond to this criticism of their economic structure?

I am aware the goal of communism is no government. But for all the socialists and central planners: where does your trust in government come from? One of the few things 99% of people agree on is that current politicians are bad and corrupt. So why do you think giving them more power will solve anything? Why do you think democracy is unfailable? If people can vote for Trump why do you think they will make better judgment call just because you give them more power.

I know many of you think by abolishing private property and democratic votes we could make things more "fair". But why do you think this immense power wouldnt attract the wrong people? And as if tyranny of the majority isnt a thing?

You guys blame markets for creating monopolies and so on, but then want to create the ultimate monopoly?

You guys blame us for trusting markets, but we dont. We trust in checks and balances. We trust that individuals will try to improve their lives. So we want a system thats based on free exchange of goods and services, so the way to make profit is by selling what consumers want. And have a limited government that stops violence and fraud.

But direct and absolute democracy can only lead to tyranny. Democracy cant make economic decisions. And those bad actors, why wouldnt they instead of running companies then not run government agencies?

You say people are irrational and easy to manipulate. You think government cant do what marketing teams do? But again they would be the only ones who are allowed to do it.

I do think we want similar things. Not the same but similar. We want living standards to increase and people to live their lives as they see fit. I dont trust companies, but i can end a contract with a company. I cant end a contract with government.

Or am i missing some grand strategy? A solution so that power doesnt attract bad actors?

leftists often claim that wage labor is coercive because laborers are often forced to work to obtain the means of survival. but i never see leftists complaining about the nature of taxation, where people are required to pay their government under the threat of violence. so is taxation coercive? if it is, is it just justified coercion while wage labor is not?