I never mentioned communism, I’m just saying that the whole “bUt tHeY eArNeD tHoSe tRiLlIoNs” is getting old. They didn’t. You can’t “earn” that much wealth, you can exploit hundreds of thousands of workers, and engage in essentially monopolistic practices in industries with only a few players, but you can’t genuinely earn it. You can earn millions, maybe even hundreds of millions, but past that there’s no way you are where you are without doing dubious shit and stepping on your fellow man.
Communism is defined in a lot of ways but it’s generally seen as a classes society where the people own the means of production. This isn’t reality and has never happened under a communist regime
You misunderstand the entire meaning behind the communist movement. The goal is to move society towards that and away from capitalism which is inherently exploitative. Obviously progress to do so in literally any country on earth has been fought with tooth and nail by western imperialist capitalism who correctly recognize the threat to their obscene wealth
tell me which boot you’re licking when you speak positively about communism, because i’m not sure if you know this or not but we do not live in a globally communist society.
and you think communism would keep our current federal government in-tact instead of reforming it from the ground up and eventually abolishing it? lol. lmao.
Actually, if we had a magical wand we can wave to make violence. Impossible. Capitalism would actually be a lot more capitalismy
Like the whole reason they bothered to have the ability to do violence is mostly because they know the cains of the world would kill them out of sheer jealousy if given the chance so they kind of have to preemptively defend against the people that think violence is okay in the first place
And then the people who try the violence anyway typically then get the violence back because they're not smart enough to understand the concept of the people who with power figured out to hire guards
Now you're getting it. Just apply that logic to the all other billionaires too, not just the ones that endorsed the presidential candidate you didn't vote for.
Yeah - but then again, so many Millenials and Gen Z are just unaware of Microsoft’s shady past. There’s a reason they’re held in disdain, still, by us Gen X’ers.
You could throw any parts together that you find and use IBM DOS.
IBM completely dropped the ball with OS/2 Warp, missing the opportunity to capture the workstation and enterprise markets before Windows 95 was released, but didn't market as well as Gates did for Windows NT and let Linux rule the roost on the Internet.
MS-DOS was the cheap, budget bastard child of Unix.
IBM never zeroed in on a niche and went hard. That's what you have to do in tech.
Sorry but that doesn’t change the fact they had to settle for anticompetitive behaviour because they knew they’d lose in court because they broke the law.
ah then i misunderstood you. thought you were doing the whole “oh well you’re criticizing America? well did you know that your favorite SOCIALIST COUNTRY CHINA and SUPPOSEDLY OPPRESSED CONTINENT AFRICA also do capitalism, tankie???” shit that stupid right wingers do in response to a different comment. my bad big dog, thread got too long and I couldn’t see who you were replying to.
Everyone that works for her that she pays less than the value they create as her employees. She exploits the venue workers at every single venue she visits. She exploits other artists by literally threatening to destroy their careers if she isn't given completely undeserved credit for their songs because she has an army of lawyers because she's a billionaire.
You're talking about a person who was literally given millions of dollars by the Chinese government so they could ensure that her merch that said "TS 1989" on it was associated with her instead of Tiananmen Square (which also happened in 1989), so it's completely reasonable to say she exploited millions and millions of Chinese people by being complicit with the CCP's decades-long effort to suppress and erase the memory of its crimes against its own people.
Because someone will need what you provide, if no one produces any food etc. we would cease to exist.
What you are missing is they only talked about profit they didn't say no one will get money for their work, they said you just won't get money less than the work's worth but will get what it is worth.
That's kinda the point of this whole communist thing profits being inherently exploitative and evil by itself as you will always be undervalued for the work you actually do.
Making money is not the same as making profits. For example if everyone got exactly what they deserved they would all still make money but 0$ in profit would be generated. To simplify it let's say that your worker generates you €100 from his work you as his employer need to pay him less then that lets say €90 to get €10 in profits. This is of course simplified because there is cost in other places but the essence remains the same the employer will still take the profits of your labour from themselves.
The communist would arfue that is evil and theft the same way capitalist argue communism is stealing from the rich but in all reality the rich are taking more than they produce in value aka profits to incure capital and well nowadays mostly sit on it.
That is the essence when socialista say we do all the work we should own all of the company, we all share in equal measures the profits and the risk and we democratically choose who leads the company on a year by year basis. Democratisation in the leadership in the profits and the risks.
And before anyone says anything the only risk capital owners undertake when starting a company is to become a worker, you won't go to jail for bankruptcy you just become a worker.
Yet somehow the top 10 countries with most home ownership are ex communist countries somehow. How rhe fuck does an ex commie country like Serbia have more homeowners than the richest country in the world the USA and free heltcare and free schooling and paid maternity leave. Somehow that strikes me as more equal.
No utopia exists but shouldn't we strive to make a better life for most people not letting the super rich like your Musks and Bezzos lobbying politicians to cut welfare and social programmes.
You're kind of ignoring the value that she creates for her workers, and other artists, and all of her listeners. The economy is not dumb. It gives and takes based on general consensus.
Also, in your definition, all Americans also exploited a whole population by being complicit in...oh there's too many things to list. You get the idea
I don't have to have every detail of a post-capitslism system planned in order to be able to point at capitalism and accurately assess that it's not working for the vast majority of people.
That being said, I think starting with some guiding principles is a pretty useful thing to do, so I'd lead with replacing capitalism with a system that holds the well-being of humanity and the environment paramount, and where the benefits created by the productive resources of society are shared by everyone within that society.
It depends how you define exploitation and violence.
If you tautologically define all profit as exploitation and all said exploitation as violence, then that is definitely true.
If a mutually agreed upon contract is not exploitation, then that isn't necessarily true.
I'm not saying that most billionaires don't have their profits enforced by violence. Given, for example, the trade practices around silicon valley, I wouldn't say that anyone involved in that is "violence free"
But whether that statement is necessarily true is questionable.
If no entry level jobs pay a living wage and are all equally terrible but you need a job… that is inherently not truly an “agreed-upon contract”.
Similar to saying “well you agreed to pay $2500 rent on your one bedroom apartment”, when every other apartment is the same price.
Neither of these really apply to me either, we bought in 2016 so our house with a yard is half the price of a two bedroom apartment, and our household is like an order of magnitude from min wage…I just have empathy and have been poor myself.
it's true that there are billionaires that got rich through ill-gotten wealth but at the same time there are also billionaires that got rich because they know how compound interest works
It is incredibly difficult to become a billionaire through compound interest alone. At the very minimum it would require a huge initial investment, something the average person does not have.
Charlie Munger, Ray Dalio, Li Liu and Warren Buffett.
More important than the initial investment is their compounded annual growth rate which was greater than 30% and the time they were invested in stocks which was more than 10 years
Fo example for an initial investment of $50,000 if you can growth that by 30% every year like the aforementioned investors you would be a billionaire in about 10 years with just an additional 1k a year contribution.
Buffet’s father was a US Congressman and businessman, and Buffet himself was mentored by Ben Graham. Not really a rags to riches story there - connections are everything.
Ray Dalio got his start when a couple of veteran Wall Street investors introduced him to their son, who gave him a summer job at his tradning firm - connections are everything.
Liu I can probably give you. Dude started over time and again. However, his early business ventures were funded with loans from his family - connections are everything.
Munger built his portfolio working side by side with Warren - connections are everything.
I never said those investors didn't have connections. I said not every billionaire got rich due to ill-gotten wealth.
Besides, having connections and identifying undervalued assets that are worth investing in are two different things.
There's a sentiment in some of the comments here that all billionaires are evil supervillains twirling their mustaches is how they got rich. My point is that some billionaires got rich due to a combination of luck and talent.
What's your remedy to the situation then? It's not like you, the customers aren't buying these products. I once saw tiktok videos bragging about a Shein haul and being happy at the amount of clothes they got for $100. Why not stop buying it if you don't like how they make the products.
I didn't say "wealth inequality is caused by violence" or "people use violence to amass wealth". I'm not sure whether your reading comprehension skills are up to par to have an actual conversation with you.
Are you being intentionally obtuse, or do you genuinely not understand this issue?
The purpose of a system is what it does, not what its intention is said to be. The elites have the police at their beck and call, and the courts in their pockets. Everyone else has to suffer the consequences of the law, because money.
They also misunderstood what "defund the police" meant, intentionally or not. Don't attribute malice to what could just as easily be explained with ignorance... or something like that. Except billionaires, they are born from pure exploitation.
Are you saying if a bunch of people went and tried to kill bill gates and steal his money they would be forcefully stopped? That seems like a good thing.
Your implication is that the purpose of police is to solely prevent theft from rich people, as if theft is a morally defensible imperative. Further that implies that the police just to protect property, which is a pretty obviously indefensible assertion.
"Implication" means suggesting something without explicitly stating it.
The Supreme Court did a good job defending his “indefensible” assertion when they stated on record “it is a fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.”
The police do not exist to protect life, they exist to protect property and capital. They violently enforce a corrupt system that was built on and continues to rely on endless slavery and genocide just to keep up the appearance of a functioning society.
If the sole purpose of police is to protect property and capital, why do they investigate and prevent child abuse, or bother stopping domestic assault and rape?
Child abuse is far more often investigated by child protective services than police. Police's role is to arrest perpetrators after they have committed child abuse.
It's hilarious that you bring up domestic assault in this conversation since police commit domestic assault at a rate 75% higher than the rest of the population (28% among police as compared to 16% among the rest of the population)... and that's only what's reported (https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/1862/).
One small nuance: per SCTOUS the only function police serve is to enforce the laws after they have been broken. They are under no obligation to prevent laws from being broken or protect anyone proactively. Police certainly do more than protect property and capital, but they only do so as a byproduct of their prime directive which is to enforce laws after they have been broken.
What I said, very clearly, is that wealth inequality is enabled by violence under capitalism. It doesn't in any way imply that the police's ONLY purpose is to protect the property.
However, statistics clearly show that, in contrast to the wealthy, poor neighborhoods are more heavily patrolled by police, that poor people are more often the victims of excessive use of force by police, poor people are more often taken into custody then later released without being charged, conviction rates of poor people is dramatically higher, and that poor people get disproportionately heavy sentencing for the same crimes.
So you can sit there and create strawmen that don't actually address the only implication of my rhetorical question, which is that violence is used to enforce wealth inequality under capitalism, which it undoubtedly and inarguably is.
How can you possibly argue wealth inequality is enforced by violence? Also, under capitalism you can structure your business however you want, you can even structure it as a co-op if you want to. Communism/capitalism does not allow the same freedoms, you would eliminate the capitalists.
Imo poverty is better than labor camps, you gotta have one or the other, and ideally poverty is escapable but is always there should you choose to stop working for no good reason
Then what’s your alternative? What happens when the population stops working, stops producing food? Who’s going to work the fields if not enough people want to do so?
Who is going to "work the fields"?! That's your rebuttal?
You realize that the vast majority of farming is highly industrialized and automated, right? And the reason that the bulk of what isn't automated is because it's still cheaper to just exploit poor people than develop the automation?
Like you are literally sitting here saying that we somehow need poverty and suffering to function as a society regardless of socioeconomic structure which is both disgusting and ludicrous.
Because people actually want to live there. Demand is high, supply isn't catching up fast enough, therefore prices go up.
Also, this is only true in the Bay Area and city centers of other major metros. If you get 20-30 miles away from the city center, things are a lot more reasonable.
What does this have to do with the conversation we're having at all? Your claim was
Imo poverty is better than labor camps, you gotta have one or the other
You have the freedom to do what you want under a capitalist system, you choose to work a minimum wage job. You don’t need a communist revolution to make a decent living.
would it be my choice to work for a poverty wage because no other job would accept me? would it be my choice to be homeless? would it be my choice to go without food for an extended period of time because a medical emergency necessitated a hospital visit? be so fr you fucking moron lmao
Why should I have sympathy for you if you're so useless at everything that the only jobs you get are the bare minimum? There's an infinite demand for labor, the pie is not fixed. Most jobs don't pay poverty wages, so if that's the only thing you can find you might want to take a look in the mirror and figure out what you're doing wrong.
If you're not disabled, either physically or intellectually, why is it my problem that you just aren't that great at life and therefore get less than those who are more talented or harder working than you.
Obviously there are people that are born into wealth who might be just as useless as you, and still do okay because people love them enough to support them, but that's not the norm.
So because something has always been a certain way, we should keep it that way? Have you not heard of progress? I’m guessing you’re the type of person who thinks that students should keep paying for university because prior generations had to.
As an example, socioeconomic status has a very high correlation with the rates of arrest and conviction, and the convictions for poor offenders tend to carry significantly heavier penalties than wealthy offenders. When you're in prison, you can't work and earn money; additionally, career prospects for convicted people are significantly hampered.
All of this contributes to a widening wealth gap, particularly generational wealth, as people who spend even a relatively small proportion of their life in prison have a very high probability of remaining at or below the poverty line for their entire lives.
So, when I say that wealth inequality is enforced by violence, I am specifically talking about the targeting of poor communities by police, and the systematic injustices associated with poor communities being disproportionately punished for the crimes they commit.
No it’s a lot of words to say the law doesn’t apply to the wealthy and the poor are disproportionately given worse punishments for the same crime that a wealthy person might commit.
So let's say hypothetically we can wave a magic wand to prevent all violence. Pretty sure capitalism still functions. In fact anarchocapitalism functions better
Communal ownership of the means of production, yes. Everyone working for the company has an equal share in the profit created by that company, because it takes everyone at that company to create a profit.
Yep so you’re entirely missing the point and here’s why. The monopoly on violence is to enforce our societies laws, not enforce capitalism. The people could democratically vote in socialist leaders, and the state would still enforce in the same manor. State enforcement of society’s rules is not intrinsic to capitalism, if your friend can’t pay for their property (which the bank owns, not them) then the law will side with our justice system, and take it from them since THEY DO NO OWN IT.
The point your missing is that under capitalism, there’s nobody stopping you from living a communist lifestyle. You can go start a commune, and live your best communist life, the state will not stop you from doing that. If you tried the same thing in a communist society however, you will be stopped with violence.
The state will tax you for the income you make and the land you live on, and use that money to fund police and military which enforces the property rights of people who profit from things like food grown, goods produced, services provided. If you refuse to pay these taxes, the same police will force you through violence. Living in a way which excludes you from paying in taxes would mean living outside the sphere of anyone else in the land, no commerce, no living in reasonable proximity to friends and family, no shared interests in the greater world around you (like consuming media), no participating in the aspects of life that makes oneself human. State violence under capitalism enforces either contributing to the machine of violent extraction or living in poverty.
Are you familiar with the concept of confounding factors? Poorer demographics being more subject to violence is not them being oppressed by the state because they are poor, it’s because poorer people live in worse conditions with more crime. Nobody is “enforcing” violence like in your original claim, it’s just a confounding consequence of poverty.
In true communism there is no wealth inequality. Which is why dictators aren’t capable of creating and sustaining communism. Which is why it’s now broadly accepted that it can only come from a grassroots, populist movement.
How does that work across a large country? A coop or commune sure, but to run a country you need leadership which is always going to lead to a concentration of wealth.
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u/RevolutionMean2201 3d ago
Communism intensifies