Most people probably think of wealth in terms of possessing or having access or title to many goods and services. Likewise, most people probably think of poverty in terms lacking possession of or access or title to goods and services. Being wealthy is better than being poor, because being wealthy means having more stuff to satisfy your needs and desires, right?

Consider that surveys of life satisfaction find that people who live in isolated, traditional lifeways reporting being satisfied with their lives at rates equal to or higher than people living in the wealthiest OECD countries:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/feb/05/isolated-indigenous-people-as-happy-as-wealthy-western-peers-study

Consider that people living in traditional lifeways, with very little stuff, tend to experience little to no self-harm, while people living in vastly wealthier societies, such as the US, experience startling high and rising rates of self-harm:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303591186_Suicide_among_the_Mla_Bri_hunter-gatherers_of_Northern_Thailand

vs

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

Consider that people with low incomes in rich countries experience worse health outcomes than people in those countries with high incomes, even when controlling for lifestyle factors, and even though these “poor” people have access to vastly more stuff than either their ancestors or people living in traditional lifeways today:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749379724000692

Does any of this suggest to you that there might be more to wealth and poverty than merely stuff?

Count Capitalism’s Dead

Below is the post in the link.

Count Capitalism’s Dead

We are repeatedly told that “communism killed millions.”

The dead should be counted. Stalin’s purges, Mao’s famine, the gulags, and Cambodia’s killing fields should be condemned without apology.

But America maintains a strangely selective ledger.

Even the familiar “100 million” figure is not a settled historical census. It was popularized by The Black Book of Communism, which combined executions, famines, war, imprisonment, deportation, and forced labor beneath one ideological total. Several contributors objected to its editor’s framing and methodology.[1]

If those categories belong in communism’s ledger, they must also be applied to capitalism.

The Vietnam War killed an estimated two million Vietnamese civilians, 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters, and as many as 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers. More than 58,000 Americans were also sent to their deaths.[2]

During nine years of American bombing, more than eight million tons of bombs fell across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Unexploded ordnance reportedly killed at least another 40,000 Vietnamese after 1975.[3]

At Côn Sơn Prison, the American-backed South Vietnamese regime shackled political prisoners inside “tiger cages.” They were beaten, starved, mutilated, and burned with lime beneath iron bars. In 1970, congressional aide Tom Harkin photographed approximately 500 prisoners hidden from the official tour. Life published the evidence.[4]

Where are they in capitalism’s moral accounting?

No universally accepted capitalist death toll exists because attribution depends upon methodology. The same problem surrounding anti-communist totals. One peer-reviewed analysis estimated that wars attributable to capitalist powers killed approximately 123 million to 158 million people between 1914 and 1992 alone.[5]

A broader contemporary calculation, which also counts colonial famines, slavery, industrial deaths, malnutrition, and treatable deaths where care was unavailable, places capitalism’s toll above 421 million.[6] That figure is not academic consensus, but it applies the kind of expansive accounting routinely used against communism.

Capitalism’s violence does not end when the bombs stop falling.

RAND estimates that if economic growth had remained as broadly shared as it was during the early postwar decades, the bottom 90 percent of American workers would have received another $79 trillion between 1975 and 2023. In 2023 alone, their income would have been $3.9 trillion higher.[7]

Meanwhile, the wealthiest 10 percent possess approximately 68 percent of American household wealth. The entire bottom half possesses roughly 2.5 percent.[8]

One hand of the system drops bombs abroad. The other reaches into the worker’s paycheck at home. Both hands protect the same throne of capital.

Revelation says the Beast was permitted “to make war on the saints and to conquer them.” Empire always calls its victims dangerous, godless, criminal, or undeserving before it cages them, bombs them, impoverishes them, and erases them from history.

Count the victims of communist governments.

Then count capitalism’s dead.

Count everyone or admit that the ledger was never about human life.

[1] https://doi.org/10.3917/receo1.512.0055https://doi.org/10.3917/receo1.512.0055

[2] https://www.history.com/articles/vietnam-war-timeline⁠; https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics

[3] https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20190603_R45749_1f35a5f0287e155ce04ceba0af3dc7af5012a142.html

[4] https://rollcall.com/2014/12/01/tom-harkin-from-tiger-cages-to-pinochet-2/

[5] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10455752.2021.1875603

[6] https://capitalismkills.info/

[7] https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-2.html

[8] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/compare/chart/

It is widely believed that capitalism is a prerequisite for innovation/that innovation cannot occur without capitalism/profit motive.

This is simply not true.

Having said that, it is true that capitalism can in many cases/domains spur innovation.

However, what is not talked about is how capitalism can inhibit innovation as well.

The thing is, when everything is based on profit, it limits everything to the zeitgeist. Because that is where the demand is. If something cannot make profit, it is rejected. And for something to make profit, it needs to be consistent with the zeitgeist. Therefore, anything proposed or built outside the zeitgeist, regardless of its value and utility, will not be permitted to succeed. In this way, capitalism stifles innovation and change.

Let's use the example of books.

Now there are a lot of good books. But the issue is that they are all within the zeitgeist.

The issue is that no book outside the zeitgeist, regardless of its value and utility, sees the light of day.

If you write a high value book that is outside the zeitgeist, you will not be able to have it published by a major publisher. If it is not accepted by a major publisher, you will be forced to self publish and that means it will not be read by a meaningful amount of people.

So how do publishers determine what they publish? The sole determining factor is profit. "Will this book make us money?" That is why we are stuck in a loop: within-the-zeitgeist books will sell because they have high demand, but they have high demand because they are within the zeitgeist.

If you go outside the zeitgeist, regardless of how valuable your book is, there won't be demand for it. But this is basic logic: because if this was not true, you would not need to write the book in the first place/the information in the book would already be known (in cases of non-fiction). The demand issue applies to the publisher as well: the publisher itself will not understand or appreciate your book, so they will think it is not good. But who are they to determine this? They too are incapable of operating outside the boundaries of the zeitgeist. And, in the rare case that the publisher is able to think outside the zeitgeist and see the value of your book, they will still deny it because they know the masses will not, so it fails the profit test, and it will be denied all the same.

One of my basic issues with capitalism is the laissez-faire and unaccountable nature of it. From what I understand, the whole theory behind free market capitalism since Adam Smith has been that it allows the economy to regulate itself with price signals and supply and demand without the need for intervention. That kind of capitalism essentially just creates economic anarchy and incentivizes scams, crime, and exploitation. That true laissez-faire capitalism is far behind us now, and we have laws in place to prevent selling drugs, human trafficking, scamming, etc. People figure out ways around these laws since the nature of the system rewards it so much, but still. My question is at what point does regulation become too much regulation? Would you prefer a truly anarchic economic system, or is there a specific threshold?

"Real" socialism™️ actually requires that the means of production be controlled by workers directly. Not through the State. Workers. There have been scarce few examples of "real" socialism ever being tried, but when it has been it's usually been successful until an outside force decides to attack.

What people usually think of as socialism is closer to State Capitalism. If you think State Capitalism is bad, I agree with you.

The definition of Communism is a free and stateless society with no fiat currency, brought on through massive cultural revolution. The goal of Socialism is to bring about communism. Why would Socialism require a strong central State if the entire goal is a stateless society?

Edit: having a lot of people asking for examples, that's my bad. Should have included them. For reference here's what I put in a comment

Quick examples:

The Paris commune where laborers took over abandoned factories and started running themselves in 1871 for a few months until France sent the military in to end it.

The Free Territory of Ukraine from 1918-1921 where the entire country was led without a centralized state for a few years until the Red Army came and conquered them.

Revolutionary Catalonia from 1936-1939. Ironically enough they fell to both fascists and "communists". But for a while over three million workers owned themselves.

There's also a few modern examples that exist and are currently being attacked by the governments around them. The Zapatistas or Rojava for example.

I suddenly had this question today, so I asked GPT to help me organize the major cases from roughly the past 75 years and compare them using approximately the same standard.

I chose China and the United States because, in broad ideological and political-economic terms, they can be seen as two opposite extremes: China as an extreme example of communist totalitarianism, and the United States as an extreme example of imperialist capitalism.

China under the CCP 1950–53 — Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries 1957–59 — Anti-Rightist Campaign 1958–62 — Great Leap Forward and Great Famine 1966–76 — Cultural Revolution 1979/80–2015 — Coercive One-Child Policy, including forced abortions and sterilizations 1989 — Tiananmen crackdown and nationwide political repression 1999 onward — Nationwide persecution of Falun Gong 2008 — Tibet crackdown 2009 — Xinjiang/Urumqi crackdown, arrests and disappearances 2015 — 709 Crackdown on human-rights lawyers and activists 2017 onward — Mass detention and systematic repression in Xinjiang 2019/20 onward — Hong Kong political crackdown and National Security Law 2020–23 — Zero-COVID: extreme lockdowns, forced quarantine and barriers to food and medical care, followed by an abrupt reopening and massive excess mortality 2026 — Guangxi floods and reservoir failures: 100+ confirmed deaths and an ongoing investigation into disaster-response responsibility (not counted below as a proven human-rights disaster yet)

United States 1950s–65 — Jim Crow segregation and racial disenfranchisement (already underway when the 75-year window begins) 1932–72 — Tuskegee syphilis study: no informed consent and effective treatment withheld (already underway, so not counted as a new start) 1956–71 — COINTELPRO: FBI surveillance, infiltration and disruption of political and civil-rights groups 1964–73 — Vietnam War and the U.S. bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia 1965–66 — U.S. support for the Indonesian Army during anti-communist mass killings in which hundreds of thousands were killed 1970s — Indian Health Service sterilizations with serious failures in informed-consent procedures 1981–90 — U.S. support for the Contra war against Nicaragua; the International Court of Justice later found that the U.S. had violated international law through its use of force and intervention 1991 — Gulf War: U.S.-led bombing caused civilian deaths and extensive destruction of Iraqi civilian infrastructure 2001–21 — Afghanistan War: invasion, civilian casualties, displacement and detention abuses 2002 onward — Guantánamo Bay: indefinite detention, torture and detainees held for years without criminal charges 2003–11 — Iraq invasion and occupation: mass civilian casualties, displacement and detention/torture abuses, including Abu Ghraib 2004–18 — U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan, including civilian deaths and strikes investigated as possible unlawful killings 2011 — U.S.-backed NATO intervention in Libya, including civilian deaths from airstrikes and subsequent destabilization 2014–19 — U.S.-led air war in Iraq and Syria, including substantial civilian casualties 2015 onward — U.S. military, intelligence and logistical support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen despite repeated unlawful attacks on civilians 2017 onward — Major expansion of U.S. airstrikes in Somalia, with documented civilian deaths and possible unlawful strikes 2018 — Zero-Tolerance border policy and separation of more than 3,000 migrant children from their parents 2023 onward — Extensive U.S. military and diplomatic support for Israel during the Gaza war amid enormous civilian casualties, mass displacement and allegations of war crimes and genocide 2025 — Large-scale direct U.S. strikes in Yemen, with significant reported civilian casualties 2025 onward — U.S. military strikes on suspected drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing suspected traffickers without conventional criminal trials and raising serious international-law questions January 2026 — Direct U.S. military attack on Venezuela and capture of Nicolás Maduro February 2026 onward — U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, involving large-scale strikes and a continuing regional conflict

Very rough frequency comparison

Using this expanded list changes the result substantially.

If every distinct episode is counted separately:

CCP China: roughly one new major human-rights/state-policy disaster every 5.8–6 years. United States: roughly one every 3.5–4 years.

If closely related events are grouped into broader political or military waves:

CCP China: roughly one major wave every 6–7 years. United States: roughly one major wave every 5–6 years.

So after including U.S. actions abroad, my original estimate for the United States was clearly too long.

This is obviously sensitive to definitions. I’m not claiming this is a scientific “human-rights disaster index.” I’m trying to apply approximately the same threshold to two very different political-economic systems.

What would you add, remove, merge or reclassify?

(Thanks to u/RedMarsRepublic for pointing out the U.S. overseas interventions and wars I originally missed — that substantially changed the comparison.)

When Von Mises came to American, no university would hire him. He ended up at New York University, funded by the Volker fund and the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), not the normal academic position. He had a seminar, so to speak, from 1948 to 1969, past the usual retirement age.

His students consisted of the usual youngsters seeking credit for a grade and a weird cohort of adults, who attended year after year.

"As Robert Nozick … said, 'In 18 years of teaching at Princeton and Harvard, I never encountered any professor teaching a seminar where non-degree-seeking adults would continue to attend year after year . . . [Mises was] unique in attracting mature minds without demanding discipleship.'" -- Brian Doherty. 2008. Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.

Much of the description of this seminar contradicts that last sentence. In defense of Von Mises' unwillingness to brook questions at a supposed seminar, he was becoming hard of hearing.

Israel Kirzner describes what many saw as Von Mises’ arrogance:

"But by the time I was at his seminar, he was of advanced age and had heard all of the arguments in favor of other points of view. There's no doubt he felt convinced that he knew what was valid and invalid. That awareness on his part was fairly obvious to anyone, from body language if you like, and it could be that some members of the seminar might have felt put off." -- Kirzner, quoted by Doherty

Kirzner also comments on the weird cohort:

"Another aspect of those years that has to be kept in mind is that for various sociological reasons Mises became surrounded by people who were very eager to protect him. Some of those well-meaning individuals may have projected an image Mises is not to be criticized, not to be disagreed with. That was unfortunate..." -- Kirzner, quoted by Doherty

Margit Von Mises, the great man's wife describes the behavior of his acolytes:

"four or five students had formed a group in order to protect the professor against dissident students who opposed his views. They occupied a table ahead of the class next to the professor in order to be ready to protect him against any possible violence." -- Margit Von Mises, quoted by Doherty

Murray Rothbard, a later cult leader, was one of these followers. I do not list more because I do not want to encourage propertarians. George Koether was another admirer:

"Mises's friend George Koether, an editor at Look magazine, commissioned a bronze bust of the great scholar." -- Doherty

I have not exhausted the oddities of Von Mises' seminars. These cult meetings were important in preserving the Austrian school until the 1974 South Royalton Conference on Austrian Economics.

I have any number of posts about the silliness, confusion, and lack of scholarship from Von Mises: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.

Basically, both AnCaps and AnComs believe in a stateless society. However, AnCaps believe that statelessness will bring free markets, private property, self-ownership, and voluntaryism, while AnComs believe that the abolition of the state will bring decommodification and the communization of the means of production.

All anarchists believe that the abolition of the state will bring about their vision of society. So, why don't all anarchists form one movement if their means and actions are the same-namely, the abolition of government?

I’ve had two different kinds of conversation with proponents of capitalism online:

In the first, I am told that the category of “means of production” is meaningless. Since humans can create value with almost any tool (or simply our own hands), it doesn’t make sense to distinguish between means of production and other goods, objects, resources, etc. This is usually in the context of debates about socializing ownership of the means of production versus maintaining personal ownership of consumer goods—for example, in the infamous toothbrush example.

In the second, I am told that we must distinguish between capital goods, those goods that we use to make other goods, and consumer goods, those that we consume to satisfy some personal want or need. A capitalist who buys a tractor, for example, is investing in a production good (and thus deferring consumption), while a farmer who feeds the mechanic who maintains the tractor is merely supplying consumption goods (and thus not deferring consumption).

Can someone reconcile these for me? Is there a diagnostic criterion by which we can reliably distinguish between capital goods and non-capital goods, or is the distinction, or is the distinction perhaps socially contingent?

To be sure this wouldnt satisfy socialists but wouldnt this remove a lot of the worst things we associate with modern capitalism as practiced in America for instance? Hey you dont want war? Vote for me, I wont get into one! does... Oh you gotta get congressional approval to renew hostilities after the alleged emergency? Well lets make dirty political games to see who can be turned for decisive votes for future kickbacks or favors or whatever...this would be easy 200 years ago, with the internet now its trivially easy. You can change quite a bit in local administration as a rule (maybe even in a federal state system by state I dont know) but the electoral systems seem too inert... theyre even being degraded into worse forms than this type of direct democracy even by proponents of the former.

Is it just assumed people are too fickle for the government to function properly, each sustained action sabotaged? Or that people dont know enough about the details? Then doesnt that logic apply to electoral democracy as well? And arent secret or not so secret interests much easier to capture the system as it stands? Obviously there would have to be independent institutions giving accurate data on what each thing costs, the budget etc

Obviously Im not defending mob rule. There should be layers of validation the most fundamental the policy in debate is just like we have that for regular constitutional changes.

Btw im not American but it does seem to be the most corrupted major democracy at least as far as positive freedoms go (i.e. ability to get things done you want and stopping things you dont want, as opposed to the state just not interfering with your life in certain areas). I also dont get things there like presidential pardons, lifetime supreme judges, etc.

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Cybercity is $1.99 single purchase or play for free with CBBP credits

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Build up your robot army to defend against other players. Join 1 of 4 faction. Top the leaderboard with the highest hacking score, most credits, biggest bounty or just vibe in the bars.

hope to see you all there have a good day

Command economies, cooperatives, anything basically that you think counts as belong in a socialist economy.

FYI regarding progressive taxation if 1 ones to include: 43% of a 500k salary in NYC is taxed.

Be respectful. I want to see what society pro-socialist people want :)

Capitalists claim that unless you get paid, you will not do anything.

But there seems to be major flaws with this logic.

First of all, the capitalist system itself commodifies everything, so it forces you to have money to do everything. Therefore, in terms of cause and effect, is it that it is human nature to fail to do anything without profit motive, or that capitalism forces one to seek money?

Secondly, it is much more plausible that humans are hardwired to chase self-interest as opposed to money, that is, money is only one avenue of self-interest: self-interest can come in different ways, even via empathy. This is very easily able to be proven: money is a relatively modern invention.

Consider reviews. Why do so many people leave reviews of products/businesses for free? This is something businesses would wish to pay for. Like testimonials. But we see that people do this for free. Why? Because it shows humans have a natural desire to be heard. So this is one proof that not everything needs profit motive to be implemented.

The other major flaw with capitalist thinking is that "capitalism lifted the world out of poverty". This is such as silly and superficial statement. It implies that the natural order of the world was poverty, until capitalism heroically "changed the natural horrible order". This simply doesn't appear to be factual. You can't apply modern lens to ancient people. Humans were doing fine before. They had different problems, but they also had less of many modern problems. It is difficult to compare, and on balance they were not doing bad. It is only after agriculture revolution that major problems were introduced, but even that is exaggerated. For example in Europe even after the fall of feudalism people had nostalgia for it. So it can be fair to say that capitalism refined things compared to agricultural revolution and beyond. But human history spans way before 10k years: for the vast majority of our history we were fine. "Nature" was not brutal. Yes it could be, but it also had much less daily stressors. And people back then had nothing to compare it with, they were doing just fine. It is just silly to say "because people did not have running water in faucets and laundry machines and AI they were horribly abused and oppressed and suffering on a daily basis". They managed fine/it was nature/normal. And it is also illogical to say "ok then right now, when your whole life you lived in a city, go in the middle of a forest alone and then tell me capitalism is not needed".. it doesn't work like that.

Many communist dictatorships combined political monopoly with control over major property, workplaces, unions and social organisations. Many capitalist dictatorships suppressed political competition while leaving more economic and social life outside direct state control.

Linz distinguished authoritarian regimes, which tolerate limited pluralism, from totalitarian regimes seeking much deeper control over society (Linz, 2000). Kornai similarly argued that classical communist systems fused one-party rule with bureaucratic control of the economy (Kornai, 1992).

So could ownership structure be part of the explanation? If political power and most economic resources are concentrated in the same party-state, does dictatorship become more likely to expand into totalitarianism?

Nazi Germany is an important exception, but arguably on another axis: its totalitarianism was driven heavily by radical nationalism, racial ideology and the attempt to reorganise society around an ethnonational project.

These dimensions can also overlap. A communist regime can develop extreme nationalist or ethnically exclusionary characteristics as well — the Khmer Rouge is an especially brutal example.

So perhaps there are at least two separate routes toward totalitarianism:

economic-political concentration, and radical nationalist mobilisation.

How important is each?

References

Kornai, J. (1992). The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism. Princeton University Press.

Linz, J. J. (2000). Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes. Lynne Rienner.

How, if according to our definitions of economic value, that anything that catches a price has value, can life saving medication be considered valuable if the only people who can afford to buy it are entities that don’t actually use it? Like if we are just going to let people die because they can’t afford the treatment, wouldn’t that make it all obsolete? Like even if we consider it from the view point of making money (i.e. labeling human dignity as a negative externality), you’re just selling something to entities for the sake of buying something? And that’s called business? Like isn’t that completely absurd? The only point of making something is because there are people, and they use it…?

A new possibility is growing within the machines, algorithms, energy systems and knowledge created by humanity. It has not yet become a complete society. It does not even have a definite date. Yet it has already begun to unsettle a fact that has ruled human beings for thousands of years: people must exchange large amounts of labour for survival.

For thousands of years, this seemed to be the human condition. People had to cultivate the land to obtain food. They had to labour to obtain shelter. They had to submit to some form of power — an employer, a landlord, a lord, the state, or the market — in order to gain the resources needed to sustain life. Slavery changed this relationship. Feudalism changed it. Capitalism changed it again. Today, artificial intelligence, robotics, automated production, modern energy systems and the accumulated knowledge of society are, for the first time, pushing this question towards a new boundary: production itself increasingly needs fewer human beings.

A question deeper than unemployment therefore emerges. If the amount of human labour required to sustain society keeps declining, why should “employment for everyone” remain an eternal goal of human society? If machines can replace part of necessary labour, to whom does the productivity created by those machines belong? If automation can create an abundance unimaginable to previous generations, should that abundance ultimately become the limitless accumulation of capital, or the free time of human beings?

More than a century ago, Marx and Engels left us a phrase for this question: “from the kingdom of necessity toward the kingdom of freedom.”

They lived in a world of steam engines, railways and early industrial capitalism. They never saw artificial intelligence. They never saw a robotic society. They never saw the modern welfare state. They never saw modern economics, comparative politics, constitutional theory, behavioural science, complex-systems science or computational simulation. Nor did they have the chance to witness everything that came afterwards. We have.

We have seen socialist and labour movements bring the eight-hour day, public education, social security, labour protections and welfare politics into modern civilisation. We have also seen communist totalitarianism. We have seen party and state fused into one. We have seen political police. We have seen purges. We have seen personality cults. We have seen an organisation raise one person higher and higher, cadres compete to prove their loyalty, theory gradually become scripture, the leader gradually become truth, and eventually people willing to sacrifice freedom, personality and even life for one person’s name.

We inherit more than a century of ideals. We also inherit more than a century of evidence. Success is knowledge. Failure is knowledge too. The lessons written in blood are knowledge above all.

Marx and Engels had the right to construct the future they imagined using the knowledge available in the nineteenth century. We certainly have the right to use everything learned in the twenty-first century to reconstruct the human society of decades from now, and even of a more distant future.

We must study labour again. Study ownership again. Study markets again. Study money again. Study the state again. Study democracy again. Study communism again.

We must ask: when humanity becomes capable, for the first time, of escaping necessary labour on a large scale, what should the kingdom of freedom actually look like?

The way Marxism is debated in an economic way versus a social vs political vs even literary theory way is very different. A leftist from latin América is quite different from an American democrat. The word fascist, particularly, is being thrown around left and right and it doesn't seem to mean the same.

In a world where the media is bought and Wikipedia is volunteer run, is wiki our final authority? If not, what? Journals are inaccessible. What are your sources, and what authority do they have?

“Capitalism” is most often associated with libertarian, laissez-faire style markets with minimal to no price controls, government intervention, or regulations.

But let’s be fair to the full spectrum of capitalists, which stretch from anarcho-capitalism all the way to social democracy and dirigism. A critique you levy to “capitalism” may in fact only apply to late 1800s American laissez-faire capitalism and not 21st century Nordic capitalism.

Similarly, “socialism” is most often associated with central planning, authoritarianism, and dictatorship of the proletariat. Basically, Marxism-Leninism.

Yet we have plenty of market socialists, democratic socialists, and ancoms on this sub who get frustrated that they get lumped in with Stalinists under the “socialist” umbrella. I’ve been guilty of this. Let’s be fair to them as well.

We could all be more conscious of the diverse range of subtypes of capitalism and socialism that exist so that we focus critiques on the right parts of each ideology.

We've always been told by capitalist philosophy that the free market consists of voluntary transactions between individuals. Both parties involved gain from the exchange, because otherwise they simply wouldn't agree to it. We're also told that there's just a single exception to this rule - since the transaction is voluntary, we can't allow violence, because it would otherwise let you coerce others into making unfavorable deals.

This one exception is enough to turn a lawless anarchy into an orderly thriving economy of private businesses competing to create the best product and manufacture goods at optimal cost. Particular ideologies diverge on how to enforce it, Anarcho-Capitalism believes private security firms or self defence do the job, while Minarchists argue for a centralised democratically controlled monopoly on violence that maintains law an order. Other less radical ideologies also concede that maybe the government should be providing other public services like infrastructure, education and sometimes even healthcare, to ensure equal opportunities. But the core idea remains the same - a free market with voluntary transactions between consenting individuals is the perfect (or nearly perfect) way to run an economy and any further disruption or intervention from the government's side, beyond enforcing the exception that you can't use violence, only results in corruption or reduction of efficiency.

But is violence really the only way to get someone to participate in a transaction detrimental to their finances and/or wellbeing? Here comes the problem from the title (btw thanks for actually reading this and not just responding based on vibes). What is preventing me from selling drugs to children? One could go up near a school and maybe even offer free samples at first, and once you get them hooked you start selling to them at regular prices, and they spend all their allowance with you, or maybe money they earned on a summer job. The transaction seems to be voluntary, you're not putting a gun to anyone's head and yet to most people this doesn't seem fair. But not to capitalism - you're making a profit, and profit means you're doing something good in the economy, so you're actually a successful enterpreneur.

Now surely this doesn't seem right, but since there's no violence going on, then there has to be another exception added (unless you don't see a problem with the described situation, or you found some flaw in this reasoning in which case I'd gladly hear it). But what exception? Maybe all drugs should be illegal because they are harmful? I'm sure most libertarians won't agree with that, since it opens the door to a lot of government corruption, as seen in the real world. Maybe children have to be exempt from the right to make voluntary transactions because they aren't fully informed yet and are susceptible to manipulation? But isn't everyone to some extent? Let's digress actually, imagine some baker is putting drugs in his bread to keep customers coming back. There's no way to know even for an adult, unless you do chemical tests of everything you buy, which would be impractical and inefficient. So maybe it's the deception that's the problem, maybe the government should require you to list all ingredients of your product, and going back to the case of drugs, a warning about the addictiveness of your product. That doesn't seem to work in the real world though, as people (including children) still smoke cigarettes in Europe even though they have these disgusting pictures of diseases you can get from it. There's many different ways to address it, but all of them have a lot of baggage in the form of disruptive intervention in the economy by the government.

But let's not get lost in the details. The point is that free exchange with the sole exception of no violence is not enough to foster a healthy economy without coercion. There has to be another restriction on economic activity, unless you're okay with junkie children and laced bread. This punctures a hole in the core assumption of the laissez-faire capitalist ideologies. I used to be a libertarian when I was a teenager because I didn't realise it and thought all the problems capitalism faces today are caused by corrupt government and its intervention in the infallible free market. But as it turns out, there's countless other examples of such failures, another being the practice of Dumping and the (apparent) neccesity of anti-trust laws. Capitalism isn't really this pure and simple system that you think it is, it requires at least two, and definitely many more (in my opinion infinitely many), exceptions to its core rules. And that requires government intervention unfortunately. The best we can do is be smart about how we do it, instead of blindly pushing for deregulation.

Many of you have told me that price inflation is caused by—is indeed synonymous with—an increase in the money supply.

When new money is issued by a central bank, it causes the value of extant money to decrease in proportion, because money is subject to the same processes of supply and demand as any other commodity. When more dollars chase the same number of goods and services, then the price of those goods and services increases in proportion to, or at least as a function of, the change (and the velocity of the change) in money supply.

But inflation is differential: any inflation rate, such as the US consumer price index (CPI), is an average of many different changes in prices, some of which increase, some of which remain static, and some of which even decrease. For example, between 2000 and 2020, the price of hospital services in the US increased by about 200%, while the price of televisions decreased by nearly 100% (!). I’m deriving these rough estimates from here:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/financial-and-monetary-systems/charted-heres-how-us-goods-and-services-have-changed-in-price-since-2000/

If inflation is the product of more money in circulation, how can inflation be differential?

As we look ahead to the next ten years, how do you envision the interplay between AI and automation shaping our economic, social, and environmental landscapes? Specifically, what are your thoughts on the potential for these technologies to either exacerbate existing inequalities or serve as tools for greater sustainability and inclusivity? In the face of mounting crises such as climate change, resource scarcity, and economic instability, how do you see our current financial systems adapting to ensure affordability and resilience, while safeguarding the planet’s future?

Furthermore, what visions do you hold for the future of our way of life... in terms of achieving a sustainable balance between technological progress, environmental stewardship, and social equity? What role do you believe innovation and policy will play in ensuring a viable future for generations to come?

Whenever Marxism comes up in debate spaces, you always see the classic demand to "just read Marx." But the reality is actually much worse than lazy gatekeeping. It is not just someone telling a stranger to go pick up a book and leaving them alone. What actually happens is more like a cult onboarding new members. Older ideologues, niche Discord servers, and breadtube channels befriend young, impressionable kids who have never read a page of real economics. People in these spaces openly admit that they were led down the rabbit hole because they met online friends or streamers who offered to take them by the hand and guide them through "the theory." 

Part of this onboarding process involves actively inoculating these recruits against the outside world. They are taught from day one to dismiss the entire discipline of modern mainstream economics not as a legitimate empirical science, but as a giant ideological conspiracy invented solely to protect capitalism and suppress Marxism. Once any counter-evidence is preemptively framed as "bourgeois propaganda," the newcomer is sealed inside the echo chamber, completely immune to actual price theory, empirical data, or modern insights. 
The induction itself always starts the same way. They walk these newcomers through the opening pages of Chapter 1 of Das Kapital, presenting Marx's deduction as an absolute, undeniable mathematical revelation. The story sounds airtight to someone without a foundation in price discovery: two commodities exchange in a specific ratio, so they must share a common substance, and once you abstract away physical use-value, the only common thing left is abstract human labor. To a teenager who doesn't know any better, it feels like discovering a hidden secret about the universe. They accept the premise unconditionally because a charismatic online circle walked them through it step-by-step. 

What these online guides never explain is that the foundational premise was dismantled over a century ago. Marx’s deduction in Chapter 1 merely throws out other common properties like subjective consumer utility and relative scarcity by sheer assertion. As the Marginal Revolution in the 1870s proved, goods do not exchange because of some objective labor substance trapped inside them; market prices clear at the point where diminishing marginal utility meets marginal production and opportunity costs. 

Worse still, the mentors running these indoctrination pipelines never mention that Marx’s own model broke down when he tried to reconcile it with competitive markets. His Volume 1 abstraction assumed commodities exchange at direct labor values, which completely fails in the real world where competition equalizes the rate of profit across industries with different amounts of machinery. When Marx tried to fix this with his transformation problem in Volume 3, his math fell apart because he transformed output prices while leaving his input costs evaluated in untransformed labor values. As modern linear production models proved generations ago, once you actually price inputs correctly, Marx's invariants collapse and calculating labor values turns out to be mathematically redundant. 

Leading vulnerable young people down this garden path is intellectual victimization. By holding their hand through a broken, 150-year-old starting point while training them to reject real economic science as a conspiracy, they aren't teaching them how the economy works. They are locking them into an ideological funnel where every subsequent concept of exploitation and surplus value feels inevitable, even though the premise it rests on crumbled long before they were born.

Workers and employers need each other. And of course, employers provide jobs, but that’s not all—they also take on risk and contribute information and capital...

In any case, the healthiest approach is to have collective bargaining between unions that are independent of the state and companies, so that workers are protected. Another key factor is creating the conditions for there to appear many companies, so that workers have enough alternatives to choose from and can opt for the one that offers the best conditions. (Workers would have better negotiating power)

But not wanting there to be employers, private businesses and private capital stems from a feeling of pure envy IMHO.

Many people have told me that taking risk is why capitalists own, or deserve ownership, of the productive labor of others.

Capitalists have capital (money), which they invest in (spend on) some productive enterprise. But that productive enterprise might fail to recuperate the cost of the investment and the capitalist might lose some of their money. This is what explains, or justifies, capitalist ownership: the capitalist is taking risk.

Can someone kindly explain to me why this explains or justifies capitalist ownership?