You can be fine with the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism and still favor a wealth cap and abolishing laws like Citizens United that give money undue influence on politics. Extreme wealth concentration actually hurts capitalism by starving the spending economy of money. It’s a defect in the system that eventually spoils the system.
Innovation and entrepreneurship is not exclusive to capitalism. People innovated and undertook ambitious projects before capitalism, and they will be doing so after it.
There is nothing inherent to the private ownership of the means of production and the wage exploitation/human rental system we have now that mandates innovation and entrepreneurship. In fact the opposite is visible today, with big companies stifling innovation.
Lots of people on Lemmy forget that the choice between Capitalism and Socialism isn’t binary. Country picks individual policies that are capitalist or socialist in nature. All of the modern countries are a combination of both. Even USA has certain socialist policies. Most of Europe is roughly equally capitalist and socialist.
It’s just making a character build and picking perks. Capitalist policies aren’t bad (for the general public) by default. Depending on how and which ones are implemented, they can be beneficial to everybody.
Europe has many more Social policies than the US, but it is nowhere close to equally parts Socialist and Capitalist.
Socialism means that the Workers own the means of production, and there is no country in Europe where that is the case.
Social policies != Socialism.
It’s not about strictly “owning”, it’s about controlling. Control can be achieved in many different ways, including, but not limited to regulations. Socialism is an economic system, of which you can implements certain parts.
I didn’t say “social policies”. Socialist policies are a more specific subset of social policies, so all socialist policies are social policies, but not all social policies are socialist.
Regarding the European countries’ degree of being socialist, it of course depends on the country. But on average, you might be right, and perhaps using “equally” was an exaggeration.
Socialism is when the government does stuff, and when it does a whole bunch of stuff, its communism.
Hopefully that’s tongue in cheek, but it’s pretty much how a large (voting) segment of the population sees it. Freedom Good, Government Bad.
You’re thinking of Capitalism and Socialism as Private Property and Public Property, and as oil and water. That’s not how systems work in the real world, however. An economic system is determined by what is primary in an Economy, and at scale property relations are entirely mixed and inter-related. Having safety nets doesn’t make the Capitalist EU somehow “a mix,” and having markets doesn’t make the Socialist PRC Capitalist either.
You are partially correct, in that markets are a useful tool at lower stages of development and public ownership and central planning at higher stages, but that doesn’t seem to be where you were going with that.
Thank you, that is such an important point! Many if not most issues in our world are non-binary, but facing this requires thinking beyond memes, which many people don’t want to do. Gotta swipe left or right, those are your two choices, or you’re a shill for the wrong side. It’s really discouraging, almost a New Conservatism - not in a political sense but in an insular thinking and circling the wagons sense.
Funny enough, reducing Communists to rigid thinking devoid of nuance is actually anti-Marxist. Nuance and looking at issues dialectically is core to Communist thought, it’s non-Marxists that paint Marxism as dogmatic and inflexible.
“The truth must lie somewhere in the middle” is one of the most overused and underexamined memes in public discourse this comment is about to collapse upon itself into an irony black hole
The US has a bunch of socialist policies, it’s just that the people who complain about socialism don’t know what it means.
