Under capitalism

Anyone care to argue against generic opinions generated by bots? If so, you are in the right place.

Can confirm. I'm on disability and cannot afford food and medication and bills at the same time. My Internet will be cut later this month because I did the crime of paying for my medication so I didn't want to kill myself. I am starving but at least I didn't feel like my soul was being drained.

It's just depressing that if I want to feel slightly okay I have to not eat for days so I can justify getting my medication. Or dumpster diving to supplement food, which I'm gonna be doing in a couple hours.

Life is suffering and I'm tired of it.

If you're in the US, the Affordable Connectivity Program is available to low income families and it covers $30 a month off your existing internet bill.
PCsForPeople (not sure if I can provide links on Lemmy) offers a free mobile hotspot plan with unlimited data that you can use as home internet, if you qualify for the ACP.
Just an FYI, since there are programs that help, but not everyone is aware of them.
- Alas I am not American, but I appreciate it.

It’s not a bug that capitalism is based on greed, it’s a feature. It works (relatively speaking) because it leverages humanity’s shittyness.

Communism has failed to operate without corruption or authoritarianism, because it depends on people actually giving a shit about each other long term.

They both fail, but the problem isn't the system. The problem is people. People try to put themselves into positions of power, retain their position of power and exploit that position of power. Capitalism and communism are simply attempted solutions, however unfortunately they don't adequately deal with the human problem.
With capitalism, people exploit the value exchange. They lie about how much something costs to source or produce, then lie about how much someone else should pay for it, and also about how much a worker's time is worth. Such that you end up with people doing a lot and getting nothing and people doing very little if anything but getting lots.
With communism, people put themselves in positions of power to decide how things should be distributed, then vigorously quell and dissenting voices that ask whether things are being distributed fairly. The end result is more or less the same as capitalism - a small portion of people getting a large portion of wealth.
Any solution must take into account human tendencies to abuse the system, and make efforts to prevent it. However quite often perfection ends up being the enemy of progress - we don't try new things because they might be abused, and end up sticking with the current system which is definitely being abused. This only benefits the abusers. Rather, we should aggressively try new social systems, but also regularly review and either reverse or continue to improve upon them. If nothing else, the changing system will disrupt abusers, as they have to constantly develop new methods.
- I think it is interesting that when talking about systems designed to organize people, their labor, and what to produce, that you are blaming people. It's kind of like blaming water for flowing down hill when you want it to go up into your kitchen sink. Maybe use pipes and pressurized water instead.
  If these systems don't work, the issues are with the systems and not with the people.
- Thanks for the thought provoking reply!
  My impression is that all systems fail long term and need to break down and be renewed after crisis. Once it becomes entrenched, I think odds are heavily against being able to try social systems.
  Have you seen a system like you describe, where a structure to continue change and experimentation is built in? To me capitalism with strong controls seems the most stable and successful (assuming your benchmark is population qualify of life not just GDP), e.g. some European systems.
- I feel like you're misrepresenting or misunderstanding what communism is. You might base your opinion on the soviet union but they never actually achieved communism, and some would even say it was state capitalism and not even socialism. In fact it's unlikely we'll ever see what an actual communist society would be because it's very much a vague utopia, and just a goal to strive towards.
  Communism by definition actually isn't very clear because Marx never actually got into the details of how a communist society day to day life would look like. But he did postulate the primary idea of communism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." One idea of communism is that it's stateless and classless, meaning there literally couldn't be a small portion of people getting a large portion of wealth. Marx himself actually said that future communist institutions should be designed to be decided democratically by the people.
Part of the issue with this take is that communism isn't a system for organizing government, but rather that of labor and resources. It is not true that communism has failed. Rather it is true that communism under totalitarian regisms has failed. True Communism requires that the people have the power, which in turn would require a true Democracy
- If a certain type of government is not possible to install is that a feasible form of governance?
- In theory, sure, but it’s a very brittle system if it requires true Democracy, which is pretty much fantasy.
Has capitalism operated without corruption or authoritarianism?
- In a way: when you legalize the most common forms of corruption and gaslight people into thinking of your favorite kinds of authoritarianism as normal and necessary, suddenly you don't officially have a problem!
  That's how the US and many other supposedly free and uncorrupted capitalist nations do it, anyway.
- has any economic system ever operated without corruption?
- Relatively speaking, I’d say yes.
  The communist systems I’m aware of have failed hard on these due to not having built in outlets for negative human characteristics.

During the pandemic I watched grocery stores buy poison to dump on their trash, which they paid armed people to guard. They then paid other people to haul it away. All this to prevent poor people from taking it away for free.

Little Bobby made a full, coherent sentence, amazing!

Capitalism is on of the worst thing happening to humanity. :( It promotes greed and punishes people who aren't greedy. It makes more problem than it answering problems.

And yet people are saying that the system isn't the problem but people. When it's the system that creates and promotes those people.
- Those people are correct. Capitalism is a reflection of our collective misery. Look at how many people are on anti-depressants today, how many are suffering from mental health issues. Our ability to engineer the world to our advantage is not the problem here, that is something human beings are extremely good at. The problem is that we lack the ability to engineer ourselves.
  https://youtu.be/L9-WwLCy8XY

I will be stepping down in ~7-14 days any suggestions on how to find someone that could take care of this community better than me? Thank you.

I've enjoyed your memes the past couple weeks!
- I think that I will maybe stay as a head mod just in case and will just respond to repots and such. But I don't see myself as a person capable of steering the community in the right direction because I don't have any deep knowledge about how society works. All I know is that the current society is not a good place for non-capitalists (people that don't own assets that generate money). I just want for the world to be a better place for everyone, this is why I created !antiwork@lemmy.fmhy.ml, !fuckcars@lemmy.fmhy.ml and !righttorepair@lemmy.fmhy.ml. I'm still going to actively work on the other 2 subs but !antiwork@lemmy.fmhy.ml is something beyond my capabilities. I'm still very happy that I managed to create this community and kicksart it. If it goes actually mainstream I will even be in a postiton where I could brag that I'm the one that started it here. Something like that doesn't happen often haha.
  But I'm totally going to still post there, even if I step down.

farmers let rot there vegetable in field to save labour cost and inflate price , supermarket in us throw away food eveyday that can feed millions and lot of them pour chemicals or lock the dust bin in cage so homeless dont take food from it

supermarket in us throw away food eveyday that can feed millions
It opens one up to liability to donate past-date food, even though past-date food is perfectly edible. Change the laws around food donations and you will see quite a bit more of it. Governments could even buy the past-date food and many places would be happy to sell it for very cheap.
- This isn't true and is a stubborn myth with absolutely no underlying evidence.
  Liability protections for food donors and non-profit recipients exist so long as the food donated is in compliance of federal food safety and labeling rules and is donated in good faith without gross negligence.
  Some states call them food donation laws, other states call them Samaritan protection laws, but laws exist at both the federal and state level to protect people who are donating food.
  They don't donate food because they don't want to. They don't want to because they are monsters.

This is part of the reason that the governments pay farmers to grow various crops etc.

we need food it needs to be as cheap as possible

They also pay farmers not to grow crops if they're afraid a surplus will negatively affect the market.
Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
From my experience my government likes to play with how this money is distributed and gets a good media coverage without media mentioning problems with how things are done.
we need food it needs to be as cheap as possible
I agree that we need food. Why do you say it needs to be as cheap as possible? The cheaper it is the less value people will give it and the more food will go to waste.
- It needs to be cheap so poor people don't die of starvation.
  I don't understand how some people don't get this. I think they don't see the poor as humans.

What does Bobby Manhattan have to do with that?

Im14andthisisdeep

That’s because you’re 14
- Little bugger never learned to swim.

A note: Most countries subsidise their farmers because those countries realise that leaving food security up to the market is a bad idea.

The gains from capitalism have dropped the costs to produce foods to previously unheard of levels. The productivity of a modern farm is incredible compared to farms of 25, 50, 100 years ago. The amount of labor and land needed to produce the food humanity needs has dropped considerably.

I realize these are not the statements that people posting here want to read, but that's reality. Take the good with the bad because regular capitalism is not bad. Unfettered capitalism is the problem.

But that's not because of capitalism, that's because of technological advances. We have centuries of technological advances in agriculture before we even had proto capitalism. There's no reason to believe those advances wouldn't have happened under any other economic system.
- technology advances because people in power pay for it. it doesn't passively increase.
  societies eventually stagnate without capital investments into technology.
- Absolutely false no matter how much you want to believe otherwise. Capitalism brings about the motivation to improve efficiency unlike anything else.
- It is because of capitalism. Capitalism includes price competition, necessity to update farming tools and adopting technology in timely manner for every farmer, reducing worker numbers by replacement with farming tools, free labour movement, meaning less people being stuck being farmers. Tech development competition and tool production is its own capitalistic dynamic too.
  Other forms aren't necessarily centuries behind in effectiveness but they would require very microscopic management and preplanning, hopefully competent leaders and selfless participants.
  Agriculture is in most societies already heavily regulated and intervened by governments and politicians bc of its importance. So even in capitalistic nations, agriculture is never pure capitalistic
Well, those yield gains are from capitalism subsidized with government-sponsored ag research at hundreds of college campuses, and subsidized by intellectual property protections for patents and copyrights, and government price supports, and government crop insurance, and government land-bank programs to pay farmers to not overuse the land, and ag labor subsidized by special exemptions for minimum wage and citizenship verifications, as well as tight border controls and political vilification of the immigrant labor force to keep the wages low.
But yeah, when society throws enough money into capitalism and soaks up the external costs, it sometimes delivers results.
In short, modern US agriculture is hardly a good example of either unfettered markets or unfettered capitalism. Big US ag is privatized profits and socialized losses, like a lot of other US industry, albeit with much better PR than (for instance) the banking industry.
Take the good with the bad because regular capitalism is not bad. Unfettered capitalism is the problem.
The thing is, unfettered capitalism is basically regular capitalism brought to you by Adam Smith & his successors. Bernard Mandeville, who arguably also described capitalism prior to Smith, called it out for its faults and said that it may only be to the public benefit through careful regulation, whereas Smith thought that greed would somehow regulate itself.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Smith is the one more may have heard of today over Mandeville.
- Smith described capitalism, he didn't idolize it.
  He's often misquoted, but skim through the wealth of nations. It most certainly does not say unregulated capitalism just works out magically.
  It describes how capitalism works, and heavily implies the situations where it doesn't. It's not subtle about it either
Listen, just hear me out. I propose we all go back to subsistence agriculture and perhaps a primitive barter system. Who's with me?

Who is the blue space man and where can i find his books?

Capitalism is the greatest expression of human greed.

Dangit bobbi

Just speaking logically, the last sentence doesn't follow from the first. It's just a statement on its own with no justification.

It costs money to produce food.

The more people you want to feed, the more money it costs.

Food production is not free. Food distribution is not free.

If you have an alternative to capitalism, I'm open, but you can't just stamp your feet and go "but it should be free!" It's not, someone has to pay for the seed, irrigation, fertilization, equipment fuel and labor involved in production and distribution.

p.s. Is it just me or is it the same people wanting $20+ hour minimum wage who also think food should be free?

It costs money to produce food.
The more people you want to feed, the more money it costs.
Food production is not free. Food distribution is not free.
Then it should be a task of the State, as "feeding people" is, quite obviously, a task Too Big to Fail. And, as such, the State can (and should) just automatically print the money needed to reward the work done. Feeding the hungry should not depend on a "budget". A budget is basically putting a price on human lives.
- Great, you just caused hyperinflation for everything else and destroyed the economy.
  https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/business-strategy/hyperinflation.shtml
First, I don't think they ever said food should be free. Second, capitalism and communism and all the isms are the inventions of people - humanity makes the rules. Third, there is an awful lot of wiggle room between today's food prices and "free". Put it all together, and you might realize that feeding everyone doesn't have to mean food is free and farmers and distributors go bankrupt.
You call into question whether there are any alternatives to capitalism as if nobody has ever proposed any, and you call out people who want a $20/hour minimum wage as if minimum wage hasn't been falling behind inflation and cost of living for decades. It kinda sounds like you want to pin society's problems on the failure of individuals and don't see anything wrong with "the system".
I don't think anything less than a collective effort to support the vulnerable and dismantle the rotten parts of the system has any hope of improving our situation.
Food should be free though - the basics at least. The same with clothing and housing. These are 3 essential things that any civilised society should be able to provide to all of its citizens.
Beyond that, people will want nice things. People will work for money to buy those nice things. There's this whole fiction about benefit scroungers that doesn't really ring true, very few people spend their entire lives reliant on social welfare, rather it allows them to pick themselves up and make money to improve their position in life.
If people are without food, clothing or shelter they run the risk of basically turning feral. No one should want that for anyone else.
It does however get considerably cheaper to produce more food when production is scaled up. If enough people got together on the "free food" they could potentially do it cheaper than what capitalism provides.
The issue however is that capitalism has already made food really fucking cheap. It's actually too cheap. And that is because someone else is paying the true cost of providing it. Obviously the animals who sacrifice the their lives, but also the human workers who also sacrifice their lives, just to bring food for everyone. Everyone eats, nobody gets paid, except for the owners who also do none of the work.
- On a per capita basis, yes. But the Doritos that sell for $6 a bag come out of a multi billion dollar organization (Frito Lay, part of Pepsi).
  Individuals coming together to produce a single bag of Doritos aren't going to be able to do it for $6. They need the infrastructure of that multi billion dollar corporation to get there.
It cost
<insert human created construct>
to feed people so let's let them starve instead. Nice one.
- It cost human labor to feed people. Can’t be more human created than that
- https://www.scribbr.com/fallacies/slippery-slope-fallacy/
Yes, you are correct, food is not free. So does that mean it is good (per your morality) that people starve? The military is super expensive, but that hasn't stopped us from deciding all Americans need protection and making that happen.
Capitalism has done some good stuff, but it has also done some bad stuff too. It's not an all or nothing proposition. I think if the majority of us agree everyone should have access to food, money should be a detail to solve, not a barrier.
The question is, do you think food should be free? Have you ever thought about it seriously?
- Morality doesn't enter into it. If you want something that somebody else puts effort into producing, they need to be compensated for their effort, materials, etc. etc.
  I guess you could phrase that as a moral demand. You don't have free access to the results of someone elses effort.
  You want to eat without paying someone? Grow your own food. Nothing stopping you. Oh, but you'll have to pay for the land, seed, water, fertilizer, animals. Learn how to slaughter and butcher on your own because you can't pay someone else to teach you those skills. You could learn to hunt, but then you'd have to make your own weapons because even re-loading supplies cost money.
"Our labor has conquered scarcity"... Bro they've conquered scarcity now? I didn't even know! If someone has conquered the universal reality of scarcity they can ask whatever they want as minimum wage. 🤣
- Quick, somebody tell the Playstation and Xbox fans... "Naw, naw, it's cool... we conquered scarcity..." LOL.

under communism, food is only produced because the central planning committee set a quota for it. unfortunately, distribution requires resources the central planning committee did not account for and the foodstuffs rot in the fields.

Under modern food production systems that are entirely for profit we have had less famine in the world than any prior generation and especially far less famine in the world than in any communist nation that has tried to go and produce food without profit motives.

Ideas like this one will lead far more people to starve.

@bioemerl Many many more people who would otherwise starve no longer starve. Many many more people who would otherwise have access to nutritional food are now surrounded by food that makes them sick.
I hope we can agree that both are true and there are ways to do better.
We failed with no profit motive and we failed by maximizing profit motive. I don't think this idea would cause any more people to starve. I worry about our ongoing, collective failures of imagination.
No, I don't know how to solve the problem.
- No, I don't know how to solve the problem.
  It's really not hard, You just push for regulations. Problem is, people like their junk food so they are almost always against regulations against it.
  We are a democracy at the end of the day and taking away people's favorite foods is going to cause politicians to get voted out of office, even if it's better for them.
You’re spot on. Furthermore, under socialism/communism countless millions have starved to death due to governmental incompetence. The op has obviously never studied history.

Yikes. Capitalism has its flaws but food production is far from one of them.

Without capitalism, what motivates farmers to do their work? It's miserable work that has yet to be automated, so they certainly aren't going to do it just for fun.

So no, we haven't conquered scarcity. Not yet, anyway.

As someone who grew up in farm country, this is patently false. Many, many, many people, not just farmers, specifically do what they do because they have pride in how it supports their community

Under capitalism there is so much food that most people are overweight. Under communism on the other hand, people can’t afford food and subsequently starve to death.

if capitalism means excess and communism means not enough why is the rate of hunger the same in Cuba and the US? Why has the rate of hunger in Vietnam dropped from 20% to 5% in the last 20 years?
- You’ve got to be shitting me

Under capitalism there is so much food that most people are overweight. Under communism on the other hand, people can’t afford food and subsequently starve to death.

Lmao, gotta call all the people living in the street and starving to death in capitalist countries that it's their own fucking fault, they probably havent noticed they are in a capitalist country and not in a communist one i guess.
- No system is perfect. Which would you prefer, the one where many more people starve to death, or the one where significantly less people starve to death?
Under communism food will be free
"Can't afford" is projection

This is the smartest dumb comment i've ever seen.

Under socialism food isn't produce.

In your fantasy maybe
- And history books
- Name just one socialist country that have produce any :)
produce
they said Peace, Land and Bread, not Peace, Land and Cucumbers

If it's not profitable for a company, another one comes and fills the market gap. Howerever in socialism if it's not profitable, they just let people starve

Haha…yeah. That’s how it works. 🙄
"Profit" under socialism? Lololol
Wage theft is a crime in socialism