shitpost until AI can replace you by doing an equivalent job is a dicey proposition.
The techlords told me when AI replaces my job I can just be on the beach with full pay.
And they’re billionaires so they must be smart.
Communism is just as easy of an answer as fascism. Just a different direction.
No. You’re wrong.
I’m from Spain, we had fascism for 40 years. We had no public education for everyone, no free healthcare for everyone, no guaranteed employment, no right to unionize, no pensions, no guaranteed housing, university was only for the rich families, farm workers were exploited by the landowners, there was immense racism and ethnonationalism as state policy, and other cultures and languages (see Basque and Catalan) were forbidden and repressed.
Communism is literally antithetical to fascism, it provides universal free healthcare, universal pensions, guaranteed right to employment, guaranteed housing at affordable prices, universal free education to the highest level, respect for local cultures and languages, socialist internationalism as opposed to ethnonationalism, highest unionization rates, redistribution of the farmlands… This is the reason why the first thing fascists do is murdering all communists, anarchists and socialists
I suggest you read more on what fascism actually was, and what communism has historically actually been.
“Communism in one country as opposed to the glob” - that’s the problem.
How u gonna handle competition from non communist countries?
competition
That’s a weird way to spell bombs.
What makes socialism less competitive?
You have far fewer desperate people to feed into the meat grinder, you have to be right everywhere every time or the oppressors will magnify your failures both at home and abroad, your researchers aren’t researching almost exclusively weapons of mass destruction.
Also you know the whole “holding any value for human life” bit.
You have far fewer desperate people to feed into the meat grinder
Funnily enough, socialist countries typically don’t feature unemployment, making the utilization of labor more effective. Also, planned economy has immense potential in the information era.
you have to be right everywhere every time or the oppressors will magnify your failures both at home and abroad
You have tools to curb this, there’s a reason why the great internet firewall exists.
your researchers aren’t researching almost exclusively weapons of mass destruction
Fair enough lmao
These are things the most competitive countries on earth do though?
There’s literally a running joke where I work called the “Union Shit”. You run to the bathroom to take a 15 - 20 minute shit between your breaks.
Whether or not you’re actually shitting or just shitposting is between you and those walls lol
In Germany, you’re having a “Sitzung” which is the word for a conference meeting, but literally just means “sitting”.
When you return to your desk, coworkers will ask if the “meeting” was productive.It roughly means “session”, which also derives from sitting.
I never understood why we’re stuck with just capitalism or communism, two economic systems developed before railroads were a thing and written down at night by candle light or a lantern burning whale fat. I think we should come up with something better. To quote President Not Sure, “The water doesn’t have to come from the toilet, but that’s the general idea.”
Everyone who advocates for a “third way” always just ends up advocating for capitalism.
Railways were a thing when communism was developing during Marx’s times and Lenin wrote extensively about railways. Their analysis is still very valid, and if anything, planning has become more feasible than 100 years ago thanks to computers. There are some modern proposals, but they are still very much based on socialism, since capitalism can only lead us to ruin.
“It’s socialism or barbarism!”. It’s because there hasn’t been any other convincing arguments otherwise. If you give the capitalists an inch, they’ll eventually take it all. You cannot allow capital to accumulate to the degree that it wields real political power.
Socialism hasn’t exactly worked out either. Replacing a flawed system like capitalism with something even worse is not a solution
Rich cant exploit socialism as easily, therefore they demonize it.
“Socialism hasn’t worked out either” what exactly do you mean? Public schools have largely been more successful than not. Socialized medicine has been more successful than privatized insurance.
The blanket statement is simply a statement so sweeping it can only be incorrect. Because there are successful socialized portions of societies.
But that’s not what socialism is. Socialism is when the “public” (read: government) controls all of societies land, resources, and means of production and distributes them from ability to need. Socialism is a specific economic system where the entire economy is centrally planned.
You’re mixing like 3 definitions of socialism:
- as a state policy of central planning
- as a set of economic reforms
- modeled as a command economy (command economies pre date capitalism by a large margin)
Socialism encompasses a much larger group of movements and ideas with lots of differing thought schools largely tasked with improving society in economic ways. Democracy can be argued to be under the umbrella of socialism and socialist thought depending on how things are defined which is why there is such staunch anti democracy sentiments from capitalists.
Like the more developed ideas on socialism are where the benefits of capitalism are realized but the costs are offset or synthetic.
squawk “socialism bad” squawk
It is. You can smack your head against a wall, but reality won’t change.
The real choice is capitalism or democracy.
These aren’t opposites. Democracy is a system of governance, capitalism is a system of economics. A society can be both at the same time.
You cannot have real democracy when there is a ruling minority class, as in capitalism, simple as that.
Things don’t need to be opposites to affect each other in predictable ways.
They are both decision making processes where different groups hold power over society’s resources. Democracy very much has economic power and Capitalism is very much about who gets to make certain decisions.
They have what you might call… friction.
That’s how all societies work though. We live in a world where sacristy is reality, and therefore there will always be people competing to control the same limited resources.
Okay, give me your wallet.
I can list at least one.
Can’t think of a communist democracy, though.
To be fair, any of the counties that attempted it had a coup enacted by fascist capitalist countries to prevent them from doing so.
That’s just cope. The reality is that communism is fundamentally flawed to the point where failure was always going to be the inevitable outcome. That’s why despite a century of nonstop attempts across all cultures and lands, not a single attempt panned out well. They all either collapsed or reverted to some version of capitalism. The opposite never happened.
I’m all ears for ideas.
So am I! I just can’t believe Adam Smith and Karl Marx are the Einstein and Newton of economics. It feels like capitalism and communism are the luminiferous ether and fluid theory of electricity and we never bothered to advance any further.
Technically aether theory was never ruled out. People love to claim that the Michelson-Morley experiment ruled it out, but this is historical revisionism. The MM experiment was conducted in 1887. Hendrik Lorentz proposed his aether model in 1904. Obviously Lorentz was not such a moron he would not take into account the findings of MM, but that is what people are unironically suggesting when they say MM somehow retrocausally ruled out his model. Indeed, both Michelson and Morley did not believe their own experiments ruled it out either but continued to promote such models.
Lorentz’s aether model and Einstein’s relativity are actually mathematically equivalent so they make all the same predictions, so no possible experiment could rule out Lorentz’s aether theory that would not also rule out Einstein’s relativity. Indeed, if you read his 1905 paper where Einstein introduces special relativity, his criticism of Lorentz’s model is only a philosophical objection. He never posited that an experiment can rule it out. MM only rules out some very early aether models, not Lorentz’s model.
I would recommend also checking out John Bell’s paper “How to Teach Special Relativity,” where he also discusses this fact, and how the mathematics of special relativity are perfectly consistent with a reality with an absolute space and time. Taking space and time to be relative only comes at the level of metaphysical interpretation.
To paraphrase Tim Curry, communism and capitalism are both red herrings.
Oh that big punch up between the Soviet Union and the United States, decadent capitalism vs brutalist communism. Who won? According to the scoreboard as of 2026: Israel.
The catch phrase I’ve always heard about communism is “the people own the means of production.” Has that ever been true in practice? Did Soviet citizens own any piece of the means of production? Did anything resembling “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” ever once happen under the hammer and sickle? Or was that the false narrative the idiot asshole in charge used to cow the unwashed masses?
Similar questions could be asked of my fellow capitalist Americans. Capitalism is allegedly about the free market, supply and demand, if there is a demand someone will provide a supply, probably multiple someones, competitors will compete, those who do it faster, cheaper or better will succeed until someone else does it even fasterer, cheaperer and betterer repeat until someone else comes along with a completely different idea, welcome to the infinite cycle of meritocracy where the cream rises to the top. How’s that working out? Some substance has risen to the top, not sure it’s cream.
A common problem I see between the Soviet Union and the United States: Weak systems for preventing psychotic despots from ruining it all.
Further expanding on this: My understanding of the Soviet Union: Something something the Bolsheviks, something something communist revolution, They just about have an election, that Lenin overthrows because it isn’t going his way. Lenin is King Shit Of Turd Mountain until his death, then the dumb guy from the ghetto he kept around because he’s good at hurting people, Josef “probably worse than Hitler” Stalin takes the throne. The entire run of the Soviet Union is essentially a dictatorship with a command economy and remains thoroughly miserable.
The United States, meanwhile, has gone through phases. Tides have ebbed and flowed, robber barons have come and gone, consumer protection laws have come and gone. Times when a very few, very rich men have been mostly miserable for most people; times when those assholes get knocked down a peg and the common man has a chance to make a decent living get better.
The problem is a few ultimately rich assholes in charge.
That’s propaganda of the deed. Not all leftists are anarchists.
You criticize society, yet you live in it. Hypocrisy much? Chekmate liberal
I did some ‘back of the napkin’ math a few days ago to see what it would take for the employees in my company to purchase enough shares for a controlling stake in the company. I figured that we’d never get 100% of the employees to buy in, but we also don’t need 100% of the shares, so to keep it easy I calculated if 60% bought 60% of the shares… and it would cost each employee around $2.3 million.
That tells me that each employee provides $2.3 million worth of value to the company… and we’re not getting paid anywhere near that. Not even close.
Why is this highly upvoted? This is just a poor understanding of economics.
The market cap just shows the aggregate value of shares that are being publicly traded. It has nothing to do with labor value. You can’t derive labor value from the market cap because there’s no correlation. If you want to find out how much each employee contributes, you would have to use something like company revenue.
Company value is just the result of shareholders expectations for the future company value. It doesn’t directly reflect the employees worth
each employee provides $2.3 million worth of value
Market cap is just the value at which shares are sold on the market, not necessarily the actual value of the company. It implies a lot speculation for investors on how much they expect to gain from the ownership. The company equity/net worth is a more accurate indicator. What you’re calculating is the accumulated value in time, not yearly.
If you want the ratio of generated value to wages paid, it’s hard to accurately calculate with just public data, but you can approximate it so: in a given year, take the operating income and divide it by the number of employees. Operating income accounts for overhead expenses like SG&A (Sales General & Admin), which includes things that you can argue are useless (like wages for execs, middle management, and sales), but they also include admin costs like office rents, etc. Then you also have to find the average/median wage of a worker at the company, so the total is:
yearly value created by a worker = (operating income / n. of workers) + median wage
You can also do a quick calculation using this tool: https://yourfairshare.info/
It’s interesting to note how in all of these top companies, for every 1$ paid to workers, another ~1$ is transferred to capitalists through dividends and buybacks.
this is interesting to me. can you show your work? Id be interested in going through the thought experiment as well.
Here’s a site that calculates basically how much you’re being exploited in a company. It’s mostly for American stock exchanges, but if you can find the financial reports of your company you can apply the same method (it’s nicely described).
The top comment doesn’t really work, because even if workers pooled the money together, shareholders or execs might refuse to sell their shares if they are expecting it to grow and pay them out more in the future. Buying up companies to turn into coops doesn’t work (except for failing/bankrupt companies), because it takes capital to do that, which workers don’t have by definition.
Market cap is around $141 billion.
Number of employees is around 60,000.
60% of employees: 36,000.
60% of market cap: $84 billion.
$84B / 36,000 = $2.33 million.
If you want to compare it to salaries, I think you would need to do the year-over-year change. But even that wouldn’t factor in all the bloated C-suite bonuses and such, so I feel like the calculations would end up being much more complex.
For instance, if you work somewhere for 23 years making on average $100,000 per year, you’ll have received about $2.3 million from that company over time. If that company’s market cap increases by $2.3 million per employee in that course of time, then you would be about even by your metric.
gotcha. What about assets? Im not an accounting person, but we routinely buy tooling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Raw materials have costs/value associated with them. How would that figure in?
Those are operating costs, I’m referring to control of the board of directors.
Market cap doesnt reflect the value of labor, its purely speculative these days.
These days?
So get to shitposting!
You should subtract initial investments in the company, value of real estate owned, value of machines etc.
Do the bare minimum to avoid getting fired.
Actively sabotage your employer.
why are you doing the bare minimum?! you’re so lazy!
bruh I’m doing literally only what the job asked, unless you pay me more, I’m not doing more
This but I’m self employed 😭
😂
commenting on shitposts at work until my value matches my pay 🫡
I thought shitposting at work increased my value.
Remember, people, the economy depends on you. It is important to be responsible, and to #ActYourWage
Well, you can always go work for a non-profit organization. Your salary will be even lower.
Non-profit only means that any profits generated will be reinvested into the organization, donated or put in a trust fund that finances things the owners want, as a tax avoidance scheme. It has nothing to do with how high the salaries are.
Mozilla is a non-profit and their salaries aren’t that bad:
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/mozilla/salariesReinvesting profits in the organization is in theory much better than giving it to shareholders. In practice, most non-profit are quite poor, and yes, salary are usually lower than market. Partly because they can’t scale up by using investors money like for-profit do, I guess.
It depends on the npo.
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Communism is a meme. It will never work and there will never be a silver bullet revolution.
You’re such a boring anticommunist proapgandist, you’ve been educated a million times in this platform and you refuse to absorb the smallest knowledge.
If communism doesnt work, why did it take 1bn people out of poverty and save Europe from Nazism?
Wtf are yountalking about?
I’m talking to this gorilla user, they’re everywhere whenever communism is mentioned carrying water for capitalism and its horrors
I doubt you can even define it.
It’s a shitty utopia thought up by a grumpy German philosopher from a bygone era where he thought that all the issues of Germany during the Industrial revolution could be solved by having all the resources, land, and means of production be publicly owned and operated as well as have the redistribution of them go from ability to need. He thought that this was the silver bullet solution to everything. He thought because there’s a theoretical equality of outcome, there would no longer be class division tearing society apart. Therefore, there will no longer be crime or discrimination or a need for money or even a state… as that’s the reason why these things exist in the first place. It should be noted that he thinks that the state would dismantle itself after the utopia is achieved just because, and it’s not just the government but also the state apparatus so things like the military, public schools, the courts, the media, etc would also get dismantled.
So basically it’s just a fantasy of anarchist society that doesn’t have state, money, or classes where all the people magically agree and get together to publicly manage all the means of production and redistribute all the resources in such a way where everybody has exactly what they need all the time. Oh, and all of this will happen after a violent revolution that overthrows capitalism followed by a transitional tyrannical socialist state that supposed to represent the workers that’s going to rule with an iron fist to bring about the necessary social conditions to realize communism. That’s the state that will voluntarily dismantle itself when communism is achieved.
The ideology is such a fucking joke that it can’t even withstand basic criticism and logical reasoning. It’s no wonder that it has literally failed every single time it has been tried. Hundreds of attempts across different time periods, lands, cultures, and circumstances. At one point communist countries controlled over 1/3 of the planet… and yet they all failed. Every single one is a failure. They all either collapsed, turned into authoritarian shitholes, or reverted to capitalism in some way. The opposite never happened. Capitalism is not good, it’s a very flawed system and idea, but at least it functions to some capacity. Marxist communism is so delusional and unsound that it literally doesn’t function. No amount of “MUH THEEREES” will change the reality of communism being a meme.
The Capitalist ideal is that you don’t need a state, cause if everyone only maximizes their own wealth with no barriers for the market, it will somehow work out to everyone’s best interest in the end.
If a global trillion $ corporation does shitty things, people will freely choose to buy from a newly sprung up competitor who doesn’t do that.
Homeless people won’t freeze in the street cause a benevolent billionaire will choose to help them.
And somehow, that system can keep growing exponentially forever in a world with limited resources.
We’re as far away from ideal functioning Capitalism as from ideal functioning Communism.The thing is that capitalism isn’t an ideology like communism. Capitalism is a purely economic system. There are ideologies built around it, but capitalism itself is not one. Capitalism can exist under wildly different ideologies and produce wildly different result. India, the US, Saudi Arabia, and Iceland are all capitalist but they very different from each other. That’s because capitalism is more like a tool. Communism actually tries to layout how a society should ideally be run economically, politically, and socially. The counterpart to capitalism is not communism, but socialism.
I disagree. Capitalists are definitely pushing towards running everything in society on economic principals, letting private businesses take over public infrastructure, social services, culture, communication and defense.
It just isn’t fully realized anywhere (yet).I mean the US isn’t the definition of capitalism. It’s just one hundreds of examples. There are other countries that do capitalism way better like Denmark for example.
Also a big part of capitalism is the idea that different factions will compete for influence. The idea is that the different fingers of the invisible hand (the government, the public, capitalists, corporations, institutions, NGOs, the media, etc) are going to keep each other in check. If tension breaks and things fall out of balance then you basically get a dystopia. That’s why checks and balancing is one of the most crucial things to any successful capitalist system. It’s also the reason why capitalism in the US is heading down the wrong direction. Money in politics has thrown everything out of whack.
Communism can mean a lot of different things. What kind of economic system do you advocate for?
Communism is just utopia. It’s the fantasy of a German man from a bygone era of how he thought a perfect society should look like. It’s not a realistic or practical ideology, and never was. This is why every single attempt at achieving it in history results in failure and it’s the reason why that’s always going to be the case.
You can’t run an economy based fictional utopias or treating some German philosopher’s subpar ideas as gospel. The economy, like with anything else in society, has to be run pragmatically. It needs to be studied like any other academic subject, and the research should be used to organize and refine what’s been proven to work and what doesn’t. Likewise, people who are experts on the subject should be the ones drafting guidelines that drive the economy, and the advice they give should be based on their society’s current problems. If it’s makes sense for their country’s economy to have socialized healthcare then they should do that, if it makes sense for their country to privatize their country’s musical instrument industry then they should do that. This idea that we have to box ourselves and our economies into some ideological box never made sense to me.
You didn’t answer my question and you ignored my point.
Communism can mean many things, and many things that call themselves communism have very little to nothing to do with what Marx wrote about. As an aside, Marx was not just a grumpy philosopher, he was also an economist who laid the foundation for thinking of the economy in terms of power, ownership and democracy. The Marxian school of economics is still influential today.
Your ramblings about “communism has always failed” leads me to believe that you are talking about Marxism-Leninism, which I also believe is outdated and dominated by dogmatic thinking, but I digress. Let’s increase our scope to socialism as a whole. Now let me rephrase: Existing socialism has worked many times, but has always been stomped out by brutal capitalist imperialism. A brief look at the history of central and south america, and all other colonially exploited areas should show you that the system that has produced the most suffering, destroyed the most democracies, is capitalism. Let me rephrase: Capitalism has never worked.
So again, what kind of economic system do you advocate for?
I just hope we do find an economic system that works at some point, before it’s too late.
Your labor is more valuable as part of a business than as a freelance secretary. If someone increases the value of your labor in exchange for a cut that’s a fair deal.
Your labor is compensated more as part of a business. That doesn’t mean it’s fairly compensated.
That’s between you & your union
