this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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Late Stage Capitalism
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What's annoying is that socialism and capitalism are not opposites. Yes, capital is needed to produce more than before, but If a community bands together to buy a factory to build clothes better and faster, that's socialist capitalism and works well. The problem is people gaming the system and stepping on peoples faces to keep all the capital for themselves.
That's not capitalism that'd be market socialism I'm pretty sure. Capitalism is a very specific form of market economics that evolved out of a type of mercantilism.
We saw how "well" East India Trading company went and decided thats what we wanted for humanity lmao
Socialist capitalism does not exist, they are polar opposites. Trade does not equal capitalism.
Yeah but they're also sociopaths that have bought into "effective altruism" and thus believe their becoming more rich and more powerful not only feels great for them, but it's also a net good overall in a moral sense.
The problem overall IMO is sociopaths. They game every system. The only fix is legal and structural changes to eliminate
or at very least greatly lessen
their ability to do so.
Effective altruism doesn't deserve to be slandered like this. It's what the better billionaires were into, and few and far between. Some may have given it a bad name through some weird personal guilt trip, but it was generally the good thing on the label.
I generally agree that we need heavy socialist controls on capitalism. I'm a capitalist, yeah, but "pure" capitalism isn't a thing and is clearly dumb. If you don't have controls, billionaires will use money to corrupt/change the rules. THIS is the biggest thing you have to prevent. We can argue about how to do so, but there shouldn't be argument that it needs to be done.
Dude, effective altruism sucks. A movement is what it does, and what this movement does is spawn cults and give sociopaths cover for getting rich via any means possible.
I've said something along these lines before but that was when I was much newer to socialism.
Now I'd say that if a community owned the means of clothes production that is not capitalism. If they give/sell them that also does not have to be capitalistic as long as the goal is not using commodities to make money for money's sake.
If you take that money and put it towards building other commodities thats also fine, ~~any~~ most political systems need a way to make new things. Marx called this C-M-C where you sell a commodity (C), transform it into money (M) and then use that money to get a new commodity (C). This makes sense because a commodity is only as valuable as you can use it, it's use-value BUT if the end goal is money. Then it becomes a M-C relationship. Now the goal is money. Money is spent to buy stuff for the sole purpose of making money, there is no desire to use it only to extract the markup costs
Lastly the people working there must own it. If a state-like figure owns it and makes the decisions in a heavy top-down fashion and profit is not openly shared then I think that is just state capitalism.
They are diametrically oppositional and anyone who says otherwise is completely ignorant of political theory.
Capitalism is an economic system which utilizes a system private ownership over the means of production. Socialism is a system of collective ownership. You cannot have private and collective ownership simultaneously.
Do not confuse capitalism with commerce.
Well, there is state capitalism like China, where production is theoretically owned publicly via representatives of the people, but in practice is more like private ownership with extra steps.