But "socialism" is a scary word

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Good point. I've read that the Kurdish leadership is trying hard to integrate Arabs into government, making everything available to read in Arabic, etc. I just hope they can hang on and continue to improve. I don't trust HTS at all, and the Turkish government are doing their damnedest to eradicate Rojava.

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Oh so now we're moving the goalpost?

We started with "socialist theory is the problem!" but when pressured, suddenly it's "well the theory is not really the problem".

Go figures

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Thanks for the detailed responses.

Sounds like, to me, that you have a bigger issue with government than Socialism or Communism themselves. Are you much of an anarchist?

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No, I'm more of a social democrat. I'm a believer that the best we've come up with is to have a government who's job is to fill in the holes (economic externalities) of capitalism, while curbing it's worst instincts (monopolies, tragedy of the commons issues like global warming).

Indeed this is the system the most successful and happy countries use. Go too far to the capitalist side or too far to the socialist side and things deteriorate quickly.

Right now, especially in the USA, we are experiencing what happens when things go too far to the capitalist side.

Unfortunately it seems that this combined with misinformation leads to fascism which will destroy even capitalism and likely leave us only with war.

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More Anarchist, I think that we should try to disengage from states and their power structures and treat people with respect and autonomy. Try to bring thee principles into daily life and interactions and live as much of a better alternative as I can.

Devolution of powers is a fine first step to work towards if engaging electorily, but that's a long way from the be all and end all of political ideology.

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Where funny?

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I'm definitely on board on the small scale. Unfortunately when faced with issues like health care, education, global warming, and curbing the excesses of capitalism, only a government can solve those issues. At least it's the only mechanism we've found so far.

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That has been gone over by Marx over 150 years ago. I'm not going to go over everything Marx said about capitalism, he wrote an entire book called Das Kapital about it. Here's a summary that does a pretty good job at getting Marx's ideas across. You can skip the first 2-3 chapters as the main criticism of capitalism starts around chapter 4. But some things refer back to the previous chapters so you might want to watch them if some parts of Marx's ideas aren't very clear.

As for you points, I'll do a short summary:

Production of commodities and services is not capitalistic, we've been producing commodities and services for more than a millennia before capitalism was even a concept.
Profit-motive is a poorly defined concept if we want to divorce it from capitalism. Profit-motive in the sense that I want to make all the money is capitalistic. But if we talk about the "profit-motive" in the sense that I want money so I could buy things I want to use, Marx argues that is not capital and not capitalism.
Marx has a very specific definition of capital where capital is something that exists for the purpose of making more capital. If you make $10 mil and you buy a fancy house, that $10 mil you got is not capital and the house you bought is also not is not capital, but if you take that $10 mil and you for instance invest it with the purpose of getting $20 mil later, now it's capital. The capitalist definition of capital doesn't acknowledge the purpose money or things, so everything is capital which also makes it impossible to separate capital accumulation from just owning things you need to live your life. Your house is not capital, your car is not capital, your phone is not capital, the money you're saving up for a trip to the Bahamas is not capital. But if you own a company and the means of production within that company and you're buying in labor to use your means of production so you could siphon surplus value from the laborers work, that's capital.

The things you've brought up aren't necessarily the basis of capitalism. They're the basis of capitalism only if you want them to be the basis of capitalism.

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It's not funny, but it's still irony.

GladiusB

It's here in the comments by someone called the word police. I think they are cousins of the wambulamce.

GladiusB

I mean it's a tweet. The very essence isn't long from and open to discussion of every permutation of capitalism. It's like taking a snarky sarcastic comment and fully flushing it out and realizing there are hella holes in the comedy. Well yeah. There are ways to make it work. But those ways are being ignored for the profits. Which is implied in the sarcasm.

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Those still to be solved problems may also be the result of governments. Those problems would likely shrink (albiet be replaced by others) when there aren't global systems of power and exploitation pushing to keep extracting resources from a corrupted Global South, polluting as processed by an overworked Asia, into commodities to sell to underpaid and liminally employed citizens of the Global North for them to destress and feel a fleeting sense of meaning in our increasingly atomised societies.

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It's a good point. One that is true to some extent for communism as well. If we were operating in a system that was less efficient as extracting resources and using them for production, we would conceivably get more out of the resources we have.

Unfortunately in practice it didn't work that well because the resources under communism were just used less efficiently and in a more polluting way which negated a lot of the gains. The net result was just less benefit getting to the end user.

The other issue is that if one country is operating inefficiently and there is another country operating efficiently, inevitably the other country will overtake the first, as we saw in the Cold War. So such a system would need to be enforced pretty strictly on a worldwide level least it get beaten by a system more streamlined for production and militaristic endeavors.

For anarchy, enforcement isn't strong enough to not get taken over by another system (or at least the requirement for personal buy in of all in the system is too high to be practical)

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Memes are supposed to be funny. I didn't laugh at this

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I agree with all your points on Communism. At least in terms of how it's been implemented, at least in name, by the Soviet Union and the PRC it has been as extractivist and imperialist as Capitalist nations.

Though one can't really divorce the conditions in countries such as Nigeria or Bangladesh from Capitalism. The Global North's standard of living requires the conditions there to exist, the Socialist with Totalitarian Characteristic nations at least keep their poor conditions mostly in house (albiet with some local imperialism, and the PRC has recently started expanding outside it's borders though mostly infrastructure and resource acquisition so far.)

They're not quite two sides of the same coin as the goals for growth are expressly different but neither cares for social connections, a sense of belonging, society in the real, let alone the environment.

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That's why you need to define the term. Here's the first result I got when I searched for a definition of capitalism.

An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development occurs through the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.

Can commerce occur in other systems? Of course it can. It has, it does, it will continue to do so.

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Yes, some people will try to twist any type of system to benefit themselves. That's true, and it's also true that capitalism celebrates those evil motherfuckers, whereas some other forms of government don't.

atro_city

So I can reduce anything complex to a misrepresentation, tweet it, and claim "well, you know what I mean right? I don't have enough characters to express my actual belief, so this is fine". Got it.

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Memes are not supposed to be funny. Them being funny has just become a side effect if memes.

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The most boomer take I've ever heard about memes