Topic: Capitalism is destroying us. - page 4. (Read 1398 times)

And we can see by examples how good socials countries are doing, and how many people are moving to those from those rich slavery capitalist countries

Basically you get to choose between the sociopaths being in business or in government. Pick your poison.

Eh, that is not completely true. Yes stupidity can corruption can exist under any form of policy, Socialism and Communism just make it exceptionally easy for them.

s/Capitalism/Capitolism/ig

Just to be honest, stupidity of the government has nothing to do with its declared economical policy.
Just compare china to north korea or japan to mexica, and you will see what do I mean.

Capitalism is not a good force, at least not any longer. It causes some to buy up medical companies with good cures and kill the medicine, just to protect older patents which has not yielded profit yet, money > medicine. Some also prevent curing dieases while there are expensive medicines that slows a disease down, money > life. We frac, use tar sand, drill oil at sea and devastate rain forests to export meat, money > environment. We work and work and most of the tax money goes to paying national dept interest and the military sector, money devastates our planet and creates a war machine to protect it. We must have better goals then this, when money is the goal, we only enter a state of cyclical consumption, things are simply made and thrown away over and over. A good society should not behave like this, it should stagnate and be maintained like anything else that has been created to its optimal state.

When privatization hit the health care sector and schools in my country it went to shit right away. Rich areas got better schools and hospitals instantly, leaving large groups with few teachers  and long health care waiting times in the poorer and more overpopulated areas.
Capitalism leads to corruption and violence on a grand scale. There is no dam room to start your own company, if 3 billion did that right now do you think they will have costumers??? Do you thing the system can support everyone to get rich from working?
NO, it is designed to make very few very rich and put the rest in day labor, going from pay check to pay check, your story is great but this feat can only be achieved by a very few, the economy is NOT growing, it is impossible for a company to grow without another LOOSING value, its just quick maths, simple facts

Resources today is being used to profit, even water are being used to make nice cloths and produce meat, while many have none to DRINK. This is insane, waste away water to create products that only a few % of humanity can afford or enjoy, when we run out of clean water, is capitalism still good? when we have no rain forests and massive amounts of pollution due to capitalistic interests and our atmosphere goes to crap, is it still good?

Anyhow capitalism will be what destroys the earth, we already behave like a virus for the earth and we are growing fast in numbers while the economy is stagnated = more poverty + depletion of resources.

The world has begun to divide at two levels. Such problems in any field of any industry may be extinct in the future, or human beings are always selfish. This is a terrible reality. We must face it.

Those are great questions and I applaud you for asking the most appropriate questions related to socialism I have ever seen on this site.
Collective ownership does not mean equal salary and your share of the wealth would likely depend on your share of the work.  There is no specifically prescribed way that this would be done, as workers would vote on it democratically, but most cooperatives have rules and penalties in place for showing up to work.  Keep in mind the entire purpose it to give the wealth to the people who produced it and not some lazy person who isn't even there.  That is how we feel about capitalism.

You still end up with more educated people accumulating more wealth

In a democracy decisions are made upwards.  The government is not dictating downwards how company decisions must be made.  Its hard for our minds to grasp how true democracy works because we have only seen governments where decisions made at the top are enforced downwards.  

Perhaps there are still socialists who want to confiscate wealth but that is a very fringe type of socialist.  We simply want to make sure no new wealth is confiscated.  

 Giving everyone their fair say and fair share doesn't mean talented people cannot be rewarded more for their work.  

Worker cooperatives already exist and some are very successful.  Most cooperatives vote on a salary structure and many have rules where the person at the top can only make x times the person at the bottom.  They all vote on x and they vote in the interest of making the company function because if they vote in a way that runs away the rare talent, then their own job will not be sustainable.  

Any system in place for penalizing lazy workers in a capitalist company could still be implemented in a cooperative.   The difference is that they have democratically agreed to these systems.  Again,  people don't want to work while lazy people next to them benefit, so they wouldn't vote on measures to structure the company that way.  

Large cooperatives vote on board members but always have the ability to call a vote to replace them or overrule an unpopular decision.  Cooperatives that make "bad" decisions will end up with less money to share while more successful cooperatives that make "good" decisions will be the ones that attract and reward talent, make more money, and end up with more wealth to share.  

Entrepreneurs who do not have people working under them would not be affected at all as they are the "workers" and already own the means of production.  
If someone knows of an obvious inefficiency or fault in a company, then they will bring it up at a stakeholder meeting, propose what they are recommending, and people would vote on the change because at the end of the day, they have vested interest in the success of the company they work for and own.  Any company that offered highly skilled professionals minimum wage, would not have any highly skilled professionals and would not have a company.  

If one cooperative fails, it doesn't mean the entire system fails just like if I open a business and that business fails, the economy doesn't crash.  The important thing about a bottom up democratic system is that the largest level of decision making is done at the local community level.  It seems you are thinking about the entire economy running as one cooperative instead of thousands of small ones.

I don't like the doctor example because healthcare is a controversial sector, but lets say its any other sector because your point still stands.  If a brilliant engineer has his own ideas, he could propose them to other cooperatives, become a consultant, or start his own company with these core ideas.   Workers woul flock to join his cooperative and invest their labor because of his great ideas.  
What we mean by social ownership is that ownership of the means of production is never attached to one person.   The key is to distinguish between personal property and private property.  Each person has thier personal property.  Their home and belongings but no ownership over the personal property of others.  You cannot have a large factory or apartment building owned by a single person.

For cooperative companies, the workers of the company all own the company together.  Ownership and decision making is only made by the people affected by the actions of the company.  No external shareholders.   This means no one person should own another person nor should they own another person's personal property which is required to live (labor, home, etc) .

Workers invest their labor by working

You can't have capitalism without capital, and the banking elite has been sucking the capital out of companies, governments, pension funds and savers. Capitalism has been destroyed and replaced by debt, and that is the source of our current economic ills.

You are even not sure about what you really want.  

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

"Democratic socialism is defined as having a socialist economy in which the means of production (including wealth) are socially and collectively owned or controlled alongside a politically democratic system of government"

If you own the factory collectively with all the drunks that don't show up for work, but who control the factory as much as you, no matter how hard you work, how is this not the equality of outcome?

Sooner or later you end up stratifying the socialist society and you end up either with a centralized system with a Politburo at the top or a decentralized commune style of Columbian guerrillas.

Guess what?  It takes intelligence to accumulate wealth, make it productive and grow.  If you just distribute (by confiscation) the wealth owned by capitalists to people who know nothing about the capital, you are going to waste a lot of resources and in the end, everybody will be hungry and willing to rob their neighbor or sell their 14-old daughter for a bag of rice.  Check out Venezuela, or Cuba.

You really have not thought it through.

There is a reason why most rich people are intelligent and most poor people are simpletons.

You are advocating for the destruction of a social structure that worked for hundreds of years and replacing it with your idea of a fair system?  How are you going to reward entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers and punish lazy workers who screw up the costly production lines?

Are you going to force brilliant surgeons to work for minimum wage (decided by the hospital maintenance workers)?  Are you going to kill or imprison all the intellectuals?  If not, your system will fall apart as the intellectuals will expose the obvious inefficiencies and faults in it.  No brilliant doctor or engineer would want voluntarily stay in your system.  Why? because they will not be able to start their own businesses and run them the way they envision them.  You will be left with mediocre managers, doctors, lawyers and engineers,  and no entrepreneurs.  Is this the society you want to have?  Everyone as intelligent as your average cleaning lady?  There is no way this will work.

Who is going to invest in your made-up system if you eliminate the private ownership?

"As socialists, democratic socialists believe that the systemic issues of capitalism can only be solved by replacing the capitalist system with a socialist system—i.e. by replacing private ownership with social ownership of the means of production."

Capitalism only destroys those on the wrong end of the stick, those who don't understand the power they also have to use it to their advantage.

I think it is due to a horrible educational system. They essentially sell slavery to people and make it seem like going to work for someone else is the best thing you can do with your life, when becoming the boss, investing in smart assets and never going into debt is the key to "success," not understanding calculus and how to use semicolons. (depends on your line of business though).

If guess if you wanted to find a problem with capitalism, it would be that it's unsustainable in the long-term. The most profitable ventures are often not the most environmentally friendly or even healthy for human beings. Supply and demand doesn't take ethics into consideration and is sometimes cruel. Many profitable businesses are responsible for killing people- pharmaceutical industry, fertilizer business, tobacco, antibiotics (leading to antibiotic resistant bacteria). Maybe this is population weeding though who knows. Not enough good physical resources for everyone.



 

Where did you get the idea that socialists want to equalize outcomes?  Definitely not in my platform or any of the other links I posted.  Sounds like the same old straw man and further affirms my quoted point.  I argue for democratic socialism, post platforms, and ideological explanations and capitalists STILL argue against the stalinist model. 

People who don't understand socialism also seem to believe in a one dimensional political compass which means they are unaware of about half of all political ideologies. 

Ok, if it's so terrible to live in a Capitalist society you could donate all your stuff and go to Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela. They will enjoy a slave citizen like you, so proud of their system, working on their lands.

Tough times people 🏃