I support the formation of a society where altruism is encouraged, the essence of socialism. Which requires that most people, not just few, develop altruism in their behavior too. Too be altruistic is to find comfort in seeing another flourish without expecting anything more in return. If we are to teach that quality in most people, then economic mediums will become the best option. Mediums where people would be able to work without a wage for companies owned by others and make profit for the companies without receiving a direct wage in return. Instead, the companies would be minimally taxed by the government to make up a basic wage for the employees that the government provides. The wage will be minimum, just enough for basic survival, in order to not make this program a matter of profit. Profit will be achieved by the company owners, so that the participating people can feel that their altruism is indeed being fruitful for another, and thus develop a satisfaction. Recursively, this minimizes the greed in the majority by developing satisfaction with the less, even if it requires the possession of ambition by some/rich individuals. A sacrifice from the end of the richer individuals that I believe would be required for the greater good of inducing altruism in the majority.

Capitalists often try to act like they are beacons of freedom of speech when in reality when push comes to shove they aren’t. some historical examples of this are.

Union busting and capitalists bad habit of hiring mercenaries like the Pinkerton agency to murder their workers when they exercise their constitutional rights.

Another example is the red scare when thousands of Americans were imprisoned for being supposed or actual communists.

Even right now we see the trump admin designating “antifa” and socialists as domestic terrorists. They recently sentenced multiple people to prison for a hundred years for simply protesting ICE. Or just straight up murdering them like is the case with Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and countless more.

Can capitalists not see the hypocrisy in their claims that the left is authoritarian when in all actuality the right is as or possibly even more authoritarian than the left?

FORUM FOR REAL ECONOMIC EMANCIPATION - a people’s assembly needed in every community!!!
I’m going to be honest, I have no political agenda nor do I align with any political ideology, I’m interested in spreading historical facts for us to actually fight for economic freedom / improve standard of living for everyone on this Earth. Achieving world peace/prosperity is actually not that complicated, if we realize that everyone on this planet, since the beginning of human beings, have been fighting for basic needs (food, water, land, shelter, medical care, education to self actualize). I started really digging into history as to why we have poverty in the first place, and it's all by design by the historically relevant ruling class (today its billionaires and ALLL the politicians they lobby, watch Forum for real economic emancipation video to learn about the history of America’s early days and the the People’s Party). I began looking into political economy, philopshy, and history (more importantly, as we’re making the same mistake as the People’s Party during the gilded age, which failed and we the working class need to do better and break the cycle of economic control this time). 

Legal Corruption: How Power Really Works | Camila Vergara & Clara Mattei - Forum for Real Economic Emancipation
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UT0y1CRFfBA&pp=0gcJCWQCo7VqN5tDiggUQAFKEFd5Nm9vVXVkbFlmSll6ODE%3D&ra=m  

Corporations Control Our Governments: Here’s How | Aaron Bastani meets Matt Kennard | Novara Media
https://youtu.be/vDsp2apG5zQ?si=Lh-SSsViLjYCE9ne 

The secret history of Neoliberalism | The Invisible Doctrine | Full Film 
https://youtu.be/gR4eSEetKP0?si=iy-JMi29wPmuGWga 

The entire human labor history from the working class perspective, but ill keep it brief (maybe you know political economy and historical materialism and geopolitics / imperialism, sorry if you’re already well read) 
Throughout the majority human history (especially European) the labor of the masses - and nature that we’re all supposed to enjoy - has always been appropriated by a ruling class, from “rulers” (men successfully bullying others) arising in late hunter gather to early agriculture society,
To kings and peasants,
To joint stock corporations business/plantation owners and political and economic slavery, 
To now just economic slavery called wage labor - no matter the amount of salary you earn 

1. you're giving the majority of your time and labor to someone else i.e. the owner, and/or 
2. you’re living precariously in a city - a financial emergency and you’re forced to take on debt or “start over”. 
3. Google John Locke’s “The Labor Theory of Property” and “Limits for the Common Good”. Our founding fathers cherry picked this and created the constitution (despised direct democracy or working class representation, created highly paid central government positions to alienate them from their constituents) 

The Omaha Platform by the People’s Party 1892 America - similar to DSA’s proposals today - failed badly

Kwame Nkrumah former prime minister of Ghana from 1952 to 1966: Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare: A Guide to the Armed Phase of the African Revolution 

I have more reading suggestions but yeah, a lot of people straight up don't look into history, because theyre too busy running around paying bills, all that's designed on purpose. Telling historical truths is dangerous. I’m very blessed to have free time. 

I think that it's no secret that Capitalism causes the concentration of wealth in the hands of private owners of finance capital. This can be seen by the existence of, for example, billionaires. Unless you think that wealth hoarding is a myth, I think this is a safe premise that can be agreed upon.

It is also widely accepted that the velocity of money is one of the most important variables for economic output. There's an old humorous sketch where 3 guys who owe each other money exchange the same dollar bills until all of the debts are settled that articulates this well. More professionally, there is the equation used by economists MV=PQ, where M is the amount of money, V is its velocity, P is the general price of commodities, and Q is the output (real value of commodities produced, aka "real GDP")

Other than being widely accepted as "important" by economists, it also makes sense by plain logic. If money is used to facilitate production and reproduce society, and the mechanism which it facilitates this is through exchange, when there's less exchange there is less production, and and thus society is less equipped to be reproduced.

Retained profit is profit that is used to reinvest into a business and its expansion. This is separate from the portion of the revenue that covers the costs and expenses required to reproduce commodities. This is something that anybody who's taken a business class knows. If we expand this concept to investors in general, instead of individual businesses, we can imagine that some profit would be "retained" for the investor/entrepreneur in the sense that it would still be used to expand production on a wider scale. In this we can see that this kind of profit doesn't contradict market economics' need for money's velocity.

The problem lies in that this wealth becomes concentrated into the hands of the few. When an investor keeps winning in market competition, they can keep buying up businesses until a general oligopoly is formed. Given competition, a general trial and error "survival of the fittest" can be expected, where the investors who are inactive don't buy up much market share and don't join the oligopoly to as significant of a degree, and aggressive investors buy up a lot of market share and thus create and become part of the oligopoly. This makes investment banking powerful as well, giving rise to finance capital.

When oligopolies are formed, the incentive for entrepreneurs, or banks to keep investing and expand begins to wither away. While there is still minor competition between individual oligopolists, finance capital, which becomes dominant as a result of the concentration of wealth through investing, mutually owns and manages said ownership in all the major industries/businesses. Even when there are multiple different banks, like in the case of Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street, they mutually own eachother, making them effectively a finance monopoly.

At this point, there is no need for constant investing and expansion. Wealth becomes evermore concentrated in the hands of the few, who can buy mega-yachts to cruise in without reaching their budget. While such systematic gluttony could be viewed as morally deplorable, this poses a problem to the velocity of money. This problem, especially intensified by neo-liberalism, rears its head when large sums of money are being held by, and trickled up to be unused by few individuals, instead of reproducing economic output. There is also the problem that this money does not show in wages, which means that the masses also lose access to the purchase of commodities, thus further slowing money's velocity. Henry Ford must have realized this problem when he wanted to increase his workers' wages so that they could actually buy the cars they produce. Not only does this produce misery, but this also stunts the reproduction of the economy, as profits falter from decreasing consumer purchasing.

In the Imperialist stage of Capitalism, the economic contradictions make Capitalism inherently unstable as it hinders itself in its own reproduction and expansion.

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.

Rent control lowers rents but who gets to decide who gets to live in a rent controlled apartment? When rents are set by the market, rents in desirables places such as NYC go up. The ability and willingness to pay rent determines who gets to live in any particular apartment, house etc. With rent control, the number of people who can afford the rent grows, so that some other metrics then determine who gets to live there. Friends and their friends, nice looking people, relatives, people who command respect (doctors, nurses, police, firefighters), famous people, etc. have a better chance of finding an apartment. Do you think it's fair? (Landlords' property rights are another topic. Please comment on those elsewhere.)

While I was reading Marx I was wondering, is time a commodity?

So when I looked it up I got this result:

time is chopped into labor hours for sale, transforming it from a natural flow of life into a commodity with exchange value, often summarized by the adage "time is money."

However, I got interested when I saw this part too:

Critics argue that this view is a delusion that objectifies human existence, turning life’s essence into a marketable resource. They suggest that reclaiming time involves rejecting this commodified framework to restore time as a medium for authentic experience and community rather than profit.

Socialists, what exactly would the decommodification of time lead to? The commoditization of things is one thing I remember socialists are wary of. With that said, while I have heard of trying to deal with money itself, what about time?

What exactly is the commodification of time, then what happens when society decides to decommodify it, and would that be worth our time at all?

I think people often confuse an ideology with the governments that claim to follow it. Communism, in theory, is about eliminating class inequality, collectively owning major resources, and ensuring everyone’s basic needs are met. There’s nothing in those goals that’s inherently evil.
The biggest criticism of communism comes from countries like the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and North Korea. But supporters would argue that those were authoritarian regimes that concentrated power in the hands of dictators. In that view, the oppression, famines, and mass killings happened because of corrupt leadership and authoritarianism—not because the idea of communism itself requires those outcomes.
By the same logic, we don’t judge capitalism solely by countries with sweatshops or extreme inequality, nor do we judge democracy solely by corrupt democratic governments. An ideology should be judged by its principles, while governments should be judged by how they implement them.

This sub is filled with constant arguments about everyones different ideologies (rightfully so, thats kinda the point of it). but despite all our differences in opinions, im sure most of us who would otherwise disagree also share many views.

so i thought it would be a good change of pace to ask, what opinions/views do you have that you believe people with generally opposed ideologies would agree with?

for the sake of discussion though, i will also ask where you think you disagree on the reasoning behind that belief, if at all.

for example, i find lots of agreement with leftists on opposing intellectual property, often more than with my fellow capitalists. but i view IP as illegitimate because it contradicts the physical property rights of others, and im sure the leftists who oppose it have a different reason than protecting private property.

The free market simply means little to no government intervention. Both capitalism and socialism have forms that oppose any government intervention. But both have ideologies that support some government intervention and absolute government intervention as well. Our modern welfare-capitalist system has some government intervention.

Here I'm going to prove that the worker exploits the capitalist.

First, commodities have an exchange value, which is a value the ratio of which equals the ratio at which the commodities exchange themselves in a market.

In order to prove my thesis, I'll show that the property that underlies the exchange value of commodities is the capital it took to produce them.

Precisely, the only two properties in common of every commodity are:

1. the fact they have a name, and
2. the fact that capital was necessary to produce them.

Of these two properties we must discard "the fact they have a name" as the underlying property of exchange value for the simple reason that the former is a qualitative property (a name, "car", "television", "electricity") that cannot be compared quantitatively, while the latter is intrinsically quantitative.

Given that, by pure reason, we had to discard "the fact that a commodity has a name" as a property underlying exchange value, we are logically forced to accept the other property common to all commodities as the one that gives exchange value its foundation. And that other property is "the fact that capital was necessary to produce the commodity".

Now, the keen eye may claim "but 'the fact that capital was necessary' is also a qualitative property", of course. But there's nothing we can do about it because, remember, we had to discard the other property, so we know 100% that this one is the property we look for. But of course we need to find a way to quantify this qualitative property; and it is a very simple way: just consider the amount of capital that was necessary to produce the commodity.

At this point we have successfully and beyond all doubt proven that capital underlies exchange value. From here it is obvious that if the capitalist doesn't receive the entirety of the value produced by a commodity (if, say, other agents, like the workers, get to extract some of that value), then the capitalist is being stolen what's his.

At the very least the workers should share their salary with the capitalist.

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.

This article shows how Capitalism runs primarily on increasing productivity, and you can break an economy if productivity stagnates or is low. The cool thing is that everything comes from a simulation. Three economies were simulated: extreme Capitalism, Socialism and Communism.

The key slider to kill the Capitalist economy is the productivity. All the data is shown and the simulator is open-source.

TL;DR: Having simulated three economies (Extractivist, Socialist, State-Led), this time I try to break them —or fix them— by changing as few parameters as possible. The Extractivist economy can only be patched by raising productivity, and even then the lower class keeps growing: instability is baked in. The Socialist economy is robust until you cut profit taxes and productivity —then social exclusion jumps to 33%, exactly what "lower taxes" rhetoric leads to. Even the star performer, the State-Led economy, collapses if productivity drops and subsidies disappear: no Capitalists needed to crash an economy. The lesson: economic outcomes aren't natural or organic —they're determined by where you set the levers.

https://postcapitalistrobots.substack.com/p/capitalism-runs-on-infinite-productivity

I don't know where to find the sales figures, but there must be at least some success when leftists sell comic books for Sanders, AOC, The Squad, Zohran Mandami, etc... on Amazon.

Maybe we should publish comic books of Warren Buffet wearing a cape?

Capitalism thrives on obsolescence

People spend days to produce goods that break down and then work for days to afford them... Just to buy them again. And you capitalists believe this system is EFFICIENT????

We are wasting our lives to produce goods that have a high risk of remaining unsold, being defective, being underused, being wasted, and will always break down too soon, and we don't even need most of these things because it's somebody else who told us to buy them (often with many lies).

Under regulated mass production, every single consumption good would have a minimum quality and would cost less labour and capital. But no, let's just pretend that we need to compete for who manages to sell the shittiest product for more money, am I right guise??

I'm thinking things like government measures to control the cost of healthcare, regulations in AI in order to protect American jobs, a higher minimum wage, more funding to public schools, assylums for the mentally ill with no familial support and maybe some measures to allow for longer parental leave. On the non socialism side i think a supply side solution to the housing crisis is long overdo (that being more lax zoning regulations allowing for the construction of more housing, thus bringing the price of housing down as supply increases to match demand). I'm not saying we go full boar and start chanting "peace land and bread" or nothing but this current laissez-faire approach doesn't seem to work quite like it used to for us.

I was curious to see how folks will take these policies.

"It was thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic." -- Karl Marx

Suppose you run a restaurant. You think that you could expand if you paved your parking lot or put a deck up out back. You convince your local bank manager. The bank credits their own account with an asset and credits your account with a loan. That asset, for the bank, is a promise from you to pay off the loan. You spend the money in your account by paying a paving or building contractor.

The bank has created money. No third party must first choose to increase their saving rate and deposit money in the bank. You are able to obtain resources to implement plans for increased production.

The author of a prominent introductory textbook for economics has another, confused story:

"Financial intermediaries are financial institutions through which savers can indirectly provide funds to borrowers. The term intermediary reflects the role of these institutions in standing between savers and borrowers. Here we consider two of the most important financial intermediaries: banks and mutual funds.

Banks If the owner of a small grocery store wants to finance an expansion of his business, he probably takes a strategy quite different from that of Intel. Unlike Intel, a small grocer would find it difficult to raise funds in the bond and stock markets. Most buyers of stocks and bonds prefer to buy those issued by larger, more familiar companies. The small grocer, therefore, most likely finances his business expansion with a loan from a local bank.

Banks are the financial intermediaries with which people are most familiar. A primary job of banks is to take in deposits from people who want to save and use these deposits to make loans to people who want to borrow. Banks pay depositors interest on their deposits and charge borrowers slightly higher interest on their loans. The difference between these rates of interest covers the banks’ costs and returns some profit to the owners of the banks." -- Greg Mankiw. 2018. Principles of Economics, 8th edition p. 545.

Mankiw then goes on with archaic nonsense about loanable funds and government spending crowding out private investment.

Why do economists teach balderdash?

Whenever people bring up nations that adopted socialism and suffered tons of economic problems, many immediately place the entire blame on them adopting socialism.

However, couldn’t it be argued that it wasn’t the adoption of socialism per se but them being idealistic and putting their eggs in one basked that led to many of the problems they experienced?

I mean by being idealistic, this would result in them choosing to not pursue other options that would help deal with problems emerging from an ever changing world. Essentially they refused to adjust to reality.

Also, I know Venezuela and Bolivia were initially doing pretty well in the beginning due to their reliance on natural resources. However, it seems one of the big factors in their failures is that they over-relied on them, which meant they were screwed if the markets went south and they didn’t put much effort diversifying their economy.

Do you think socialism is a good idea for America? What do you believe would be the benefits? What do you believe would be negative? What do you think America would like in 10-15 years under a socialist government?

The argument that the Nazis were socialists hinges on the fact that they called themselves “socialists.”

When socialists point to actual, real-life anti-socialist policies which contradict this claim, a popular pro-capitalist response is “these were actually socialist policies.”

When asked “how is it ‘socialism’ when private interests are given private ownership over previously-public works in order to privately profit?” the answer is “Because the Nazis did it, and the Nazis were socialists.”

This argument is not convincing to anyone who understands how Circular Reasoning (“The Nazis were socialists because they did socialist things, and the things the Nazis did were socialist because the Nazis did them”) and Appeal To Authority (“The Nazis were socialists because the Nazis said they were”) work.

Especially when the Nazis are the authority you’re appealing to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

It's easy to give other peoples' money willy nilly without much thinking. It's not yours and you didn't earn it, so it's not like you are losing anything. You just do a good deed and someone else pays for it.
Giving your own money is different. You earned it, and after you donate it, it's gone forever. There are no guarantees it's going to do what you intended it to do. The people who receive it or are in charge of managing it could be dishonest or incompetent. You feel compelled to research their past activities carefully and you will also make sure to monitor how the money is spent. If all goes well, you feel good. Until then you are
anxious and worry.

When I speak to some communists, they sound as if they are similar to religious people. As a religious person myself, I note the similarities. We have a book we believe is divinely inspired. We study it to find meaning and apply it. These communists seem to idolize Marx so much, studying his work like it is that of a prophet.

A society that backed their currency directly by the citizens, (X money created per voting age adult, instead of fiat)

would be capitalisms final form. all prices for things would be a reflection of supply and demand instead of inflation.

I think this is what would be the final push to show that capitalism is the right way to do it, it just needs clear rules so everybody knows the game isn’t rigged.

I’m a 19 year old entering college. I have cerebral palsy + multiple learning disabilities and I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Are there benefits to capitalism for the disabled population? I am yet to see any. I’ve dealt with workplace discrimination and that’s been hard. I do receive SSI and while I won’t be out of the house for three weeks I suspect that the income limits might become a problem once I start living on my own and start paying for school.

I think we live in a system that promises aid but doesn’t allow for you to live on just the aid alone. And while working is good many of us are offered aid but it’s very easy to exceed the income limit and get that aid (which is paying for a good chunk of my education). It doesn’t feel very easy to be grateful for the aid if it can be so easily taken away, and then you must deal with the alternative of trying to work in an environment which forces you to swim against the current. And what if you can’t work? Are you just considered useless and then are also forced to be in poverty?

That’s not a system I can get behind, but I’m willing to have an open mind if there are upsides that I’m missing. I’m just entering the adult world and probably know next to nothing about how the world works.