this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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Explain Like I'm Five
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I think the standard thing at this point is to agree it's a nice idea, but also say it doesn't work in practice. Edit: And sometimes a certain kind of person will turn a simple disagreement into tribalistic hate.
A version was tried a few times from 1917 on, and it went poorly. So, if you're still for collective ownership of the means of production, you either need to be a denialist about that history, or explain why your version would be better.
There's also people who use a weaker definition not mutually exclusive with capitalism.
tell me where capitalism works?
Depends what you mean by capitalism. It doesn't have one universally preferred definition either.
If you mean markets, even the USSR had one.
If you mean big corporations running everything, we don't live in capitalism right now.
Feel free to add if you mean something else.
Obviously not markets, everyone has those, also communist countries.
They are simply regulated differently.
That is ultra capitalism, the final step before fascism/corporatism which capitalism ultimately leads to by design.
It hasn't existed anywhere before - the OG fascist countries were built on top of fairly typical market economies for the time, with actually had much more interventionism than now, maybe China-level.
You didn't give a third option, so I guess we're done.
Note that most self-described "socialists" aren't literally suggesting we ban the ownership class, declare the value of all stocks to be $0, and force every corporation to operate as employee-owned collectives. They're usually arguing for things like "expand our old-age health-insurance program to just cover everyone" or "make the city buses not charge a per-ride usage fee."
The hate against "socialism" is precisely because Karl Marx and some 20th century communists used it to mean something different, and then the right wing of United States used that label to try and smear every social program since the ban of slavery. Now we have two entirely different and incompatible meanings, and both a lot of bad-faith actors who intentionally conflate the two and a bunch of good-faith actors who aren't even aware there's a difference.
But this is Lemmy, where there's lots of communists, so that's how I interpreted OP's question. (Also, the Marx definition came first)
I think most self-described socialists don't have a very specific idea what they want, but more an idea of who they think is good (public servants) and who they think is bad (corporations). Which is like most voters in general.
You convinced me. We need to get rid of all these failed socialist policies, institutions, and programs.
Here's a few I think we could start with:
This is you. I wasn't talking about that version of the term.