this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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Late Stage Capitalism
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I keep saying this to friends whenever we debate capitalism and socialism.
If every human on the planet was given enough food, shelter, health care, and a full education for the first 20 years of their lives ...... we'd probably cure most diseases, eliminate most or all cancers, bring global warming under control, build entirely new technologies for just about everything and start inhabiting space.
Instead we have about 2,000 billionaires who use their wealth and power to not allow anyone to do anything, about a billion people barely getting by and seven billion with hardly anything at all. And we wonder why our world is falling apart.
Buddy learn the damn term, it's not really not that complicated
You understand that this response is why people disregard your opinions on things, right? If you're ignorant and unwilling to learn, no one is going to pay attention to anything that falls out of your mouth, because it's worth less than bullshit, cuz that's at least useful as fertilizer.
Go learn what words mean, or go back to reddit where your attitude will be welcomed with open arms.
"It never works".
It never materializes (apart from short periods of time before bureaucratic deformation) for very long because it is shot down by the oligarchy. There is tremendous motive in keeping the social status quo (system of classes), and socialism is vilified precisely because it is such a danger to the ruling class.
Look no further than the US's intervention in Cuba to try to quash its socialist efforts
Oh so your point was that the reason socialism hasn't worked as well as it could is capitalism. That didn't seem to be what you were communicating.
If it wasn't, then no, I'm proving an entirely different point.
UBI and socialized Healthcare are both things often brought into democratic systems by socialists.
Socialism is a theory, it is not any one economic system. Marx regarded it as a threshold between the takeover of capitalism and communism. The term has changed a lot since then as people have used it differently, as colloquialisms go. Socialism and democracy also don't have to be separate. Socialist democratic systems exist, the Nordic model being a prime example.
It sounds to me like you have a lot of ideas that do align with socialism, but you've been exposed to so much propaganda growing up that you haven't made, or refuse to make the connection.
Why might the ruling class not want you to know what socialism is? Who might it benefit to convince you it doesn't work?
And just saying it doesn't work doesn't change my opinion at all and it's not convincing to anyone in this thread because you've provided no justification besides "there are power-hungry people", and we are literally seeing power-hungry people destroy any semblance of democracy within the states right now, under a capitalist system. So clearly that flaw is a flaw among most economic systems and is not exclusive to communism.
It's also much easier to cynically dismiss all proposed solutions, which is the path you've chosen. The things you mentioned before - free healthcare & strong social safety net - have only ever been implemented because people dared to dream bigger. The New Deal in the US was advanced in response to revolutionary socialists as a means of appeasement. Without the international socialist movement we would not have gotten the short break from unfettered capitalism that is now coming to an end.
In addition, it's a gross oversimplification to characterize the revolutions that established the USSR and PRC as total failures. No serious student of history considers these in isolation from the context of what came before. Though flawed, the first socialist states were a marked improvement over the oppressive Tsarist regime and chaotic rule by several Chinese warlords.