• BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk
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    16 hours ago

    it always results in the accumulation of wealth in few hands, who can then use that power to subvert democracy and get their way.

    But that’s not really capitalisms fault. We’ve seen higher degrees of inequalities in socialist countries and feudal economies could be claimed the inequality is a part of the design.

    It’s due to a lack of government rules.

    Capitalism brings with it a complete alienation, communities don’t own their land, people don’t own their work

    It opens up for the possibility of either owning your work or owning the value (wage) of your work. 2 millennia ago, when everyone worked in their own workshops and sold to the market, that was ultimately also a capitalistic economy.

    Communities now can own their land, because everything is a commodity. Under other systems, the government, noble or other highly ranked owns the land and leases it out - We could argue that’s still happening under capitalism, through property taxes.

    I’m curious if you can expand on the alienation.

    That’s an incredibly offensive claim

    Yet you’re not highlighting any, because capitalism is a tad too efficient. The alterations we seek out to do, does not stop capitalism; Just changes the goals of it and the late stage setup to move more power/capital back to the people.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      13 hours ago

      Capitalism includes the capitalist state, which is why these supposed guardrails do not exist. Further, capitalism with guardrails still has fundamental problems like the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, crisis of overproduction due to an inability to be coherently planned, not to mention surplus value exploitation leading to enshittification and all the problems with the profit motive.

      • BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk
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        10 hours ago

        crisis of overproduction due to an inability to be coherently planned

        Is your claim planned economy is better? Because history shows planned economies tends to underproduce on necessities.

        not to mention surplus value exploitation leading to enshittification

        There’s still issues of people skimming, but because essential monopolies has been created historically. No one has others to buy from, so enshittification has no way to be challenged.

        Capitalism is just really effective at sending signals back, as it hurts every part of the chain if the seller can’t sell their goods.

        The one socialist society that almost succeeded their market, but USA unfortunately fucked them hi Latam, essentially build market signals into their models and wasn’t centrally planned.

        like the tendency for the rate of profit to fall,

        And why isn’t this a positive? Goods being traded at the cost to produce. Not at some random markup, just because.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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          3 hours ago

          Planned economy is better once highly developed productive forces are achieved, and history shows that planned economies dramatically expanded production as compared to what came before. Rather than underperforming, the USSR was one of the fastest growing economies on the planet during its existence, while never once facing a crisis of overproduction:

          The DPRK also outperformed the ROK until the ROK was flooded with western investment, and this was further hampered by the dissolution of the USSR. Today, however, the DPRK is steadily progressing (largely based on increased arms sales, such as to the Russian Federation), while the ROK appears to be in crisis.

          Markets serve a progressive role historically when they stitch together disconnected production into production on a national and international scale. However, once they reach the national level, they quickly lose any amount of progressive quality and immediately become an impediment to further progress. At this point, planned economy becomes far better. This isn’t a binary either, socialist countries like China leverage planned economy for their large firms and key industries, and marketize underdeveloped sectors.

          Surplus value exploitation is not merely people “skimming.” Capitalist profits come from exploitation of labor, paying workers less than the actual value they create. Ownership does not create value, labor does. Further, the fact that the monopoly stage has been reached does not mean we can work backwards, with monopoly scale comes technologies and productive techniques that can only be employed by monopolies. This is why markets lose their progressive character to planned economy as monopolies form, as planned production can make much better use of the scale developed by markets.

          As for the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, it leads to crisis of profitability and economic collapse. This is a key force behind what turns monopoly capitalism into its imperialist stage, as capitalists chase increased absolute profits through market expansion to fight this. If they can establish an absolute monopoly globally, they can then price fix as they please, accelerating enshittification.