But "socialism" is a scary word

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By the way, commerce is not the same thing as capitalism.

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I hate that people are shit and will ruin any economic/political system no matter how high-minded it may have otherwise been.

Similarly capitalism wouldn't be a burning pile of diapers and old wigs if those involved didn't have a complete and total disregard-bordering-on-antipathy for humanity and the common good.

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Crippling student debt

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"There was a famine in China, which means we now only can have the most extreme forms of capitalism!" - 70% of the propaganda.

odd

I need to rate my employees based on a matrix with 9 fields so my boss can decide whom to fire because made up numbers are not as high as they anticipated them to be.

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There is no distinction. A socialist/communist party with a majority in a parliament forms a government, and there are examples of those elected. Even a lot of the authoritarian ones established in a revolution had a parliament with non communist parties having representatives.

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Of course there's a distinction. A partial socialist/communist government has never implement full communism (seize the means of production and guarantee equal distribution of resources). That's only ever been done by force.

They have achieved things like universal health care and education, however, and for that we should all be grateful. IMHO the best case scenario really is a parliamentary system with a socialist majority to get these kind of things passed but leave a heavily regulated capitalist economic system in place.

atro_city

Socialism and capitalism have a lot of overlap. This belief and meme that they are completely separate is incredibly simple-minded and indicative of US thinking patterns. US Americans have had it beaten into their heads that there are only two sides for so long that it permeates their very being.

To have a fair system, components of multiple philosophies and systems will have to be mixed. Treating capitalism as all bad is plain dumb.

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You are repeating false statements. There have been fully communist elected governments in Nepal, India, San Marino and probably more. In Spain we had a elected republican government run mainly by socialists and even an anarchist president.

The reason why most of them have been through a revolution is because they were declared illegal.

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Real democratic mechanisms in the USSR: highest unionisation rates in the world, announcement/news boarboards in every workplace administered by the union, free education to the highest level for everyone, free healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing (how do the supposedly "authoritarian leaders" benefit from that?), neighbour commissions legally overviewing the activity and transparency of local administration, neighbour tribunals dealing with most petty crime, millions of members of the party, women's rights, local ethnicities in different republics having an option to education in their language and widespread availability of reading material and newspapers in their language, lowest rates of wealth inequality in any country, more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world, higher representation of women in the party and in the justice system than anywhere else at the time...

Please explain me how getting to vote for the less-evil but equally neoliberal party once every 4 years is more democratic than that.

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You clearly have never read anything about it, so I’d be curious to know specifically which part of socialist theory you disagree with.

By definition, capitalism demands to be uncontrolled and without rules to bring the most profit. So when you're done pulling stuff out of thin air, let us know

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Which channel specifically are you referring to?

Your comment smells of "enlightened cantrist trying to sound reasonable" ~but failing~

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You can tell by some of these comments

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It's not but it can't be divorced form capitalism either.

A farmer does not produce grain out of the goodness of his heart. He's doing it to provide for his family's needs and wants, maybe new clothes for his kids or a new stove, etc.
We work jobs to get paid so we can feed ourselves and our families and maybe buy something nice or shiny once in a while and save for retirement.

Production of commodities and services, profit-motive, capital accumulation, If that's not the basis of capitalism, I'm not sure what is?

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To answer your rhetorical question, a lot of people think Capitalism stands for the corrupt ignoble western governments, unlike their own glorious reputable eastern "socialist" governments.

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Well you could really only vote for one party. And usually the elections were to some degree rigged. And the government that did all the nice things you mention also committed genocides, mass starvation, massively oppressed its people, and finally spent so much on its military that they crashed the economy.

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To me, left means progressive reform, so leftists definitely aren't the anarchists or authoritarians who rant all day and night about the capitalism boogeyman.

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But have you read enough theory? I think you need to read more of the theory.

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So the government who regulates is simultaneously the enemy of and the definition of capitalists?

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What a dumb question. Ya'll really act like that dude is obligated to give you a free economics lesson with such a vague pointless question.

On a broad scale any economy is simply how money is created and used.

When the federal state has complete control over the money supply and dictates how it is allocated to firms in various markets, as is the case in both "socialist" dictatorships and social democracies: the channel through which your labor is bought is purely through the government via offices and contract bids with industry suits attempting to maximize profits for themselves.

When the federal state takes a more unregulated hands off approach: the channel through which your labor is bought is purely through industry suits attempting to maximize profits for themselves.

Anarchist Society theoretically works very different, but they tend to only exist for about 5 minutes before devolving into the former case.

When the federal state takes a highly regulated and invested approach ("The Market System"): your labor is bought via your association to one or more of a series of small firms competing to fill demands to maximize profits for themselves. Some industries are allowed to operate at larger "economy of scale" for the sake of efficiency but ideally such a state wouldn't allow businesses to grow too large and would tax them such that doing so much more work would yield fast diminishing returns on investment.