How do the robots own the means of production?
This is just capitalism with slave labor you don’t have to feel bad about.
slavery is (by definition) an ownership of a person. Robots are not people nor beings with intelligence.
That Americans have to pay to survive in any capacity- food, healthcare, shelter… it’s the sign of a sick society. My daughter asked me why we have to pay a bill to get water in and sewage out of our house instead of just have that be a government thing. She’s only 13 and even she realizes capitalism is fucked up.
That’s not empirically true. I pay for water as a flat rate in Quebec as part of my municipal taxes, as do all of my neighbors, and I don’t see people engaging in flagrant water wastage. Lawns routinely go yellow during the hottest parts of the summer, I rarely see people washing their cars, and low flush toilets are getting increasingly common.
Lots of 13 year olds are dumb, doubly so if their parents are dumb, and think “capitalism is when things cost money”
For profit healthcare would be the same as a for profit fire department. Absolutely insane.
There’s a little bit of nuance here, “for profit” isn’t the same as “for greed”. Organizations of any kind - corps, non-profits, governments - have to remain essentially “solvent” or “profitable” to even operate - they can’t function just perpetually burning through resources. A medical org, even one that’s a “corporation”, can run a profit but not be governed by greed (though obviously that’s not the case everywhere right now).
Every day when I get off work and I go to a local gas station, I see them throw away a bunch of prepared food that passed shelf life. This is a chain, so hundreds of locations do this every day. Tons of food per year, tossed in the trash because it sat in the heat box too long.
Imagine how many people could eat that food. It makes me upset.
I worked at a Dunkin for a summer and they had us throwing away two large trash bags full of food every night. It had to be 50lbs of food.
I started giving donuts to teenagers and an elderly Asian man that was always ecstatic to get a big bag of donuts and bagels. I didn’t have a car to transport it to a shelter, and this was in a rich area. It was disgusting
I once tried to buy a rye loaf from a local grocery store and the cashier couldn’t ring it up because it was one day expired. I said it looked fine to me, but she said the system won’t even let her.
So I said okay, don’t ring it up, just give it to me.
Another guy jumped in and took it, said no, it had to be thrown away.
They were literally not allowed to give me trash I was willing to pay for.
May be they are avoiding getting sued. If someone gets sick. Especially junk food, which is unhealthy to begin with
Italy made it illegal for supermarkets to throw away food and forces them to donate it. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than wasting truckloads of food every day because they didn’t sell it in time.
This has been long debunked. Laws have passed that protect owners from this.
I used to work in a sandwich shop that made it’s own bread fresh daily. At the end of every day the owner started donating the leftover bread and explained how it’s an urban myth.
People just don’t like to share.
There are serious ethical problems with a capitalist system, especially when it comes to the necessities of life, but there’s also ample evidence that other economic systems in practice have been just as bad of not worse regarding food security, eg follow the history of the USSR from the Holodomor in the 1930s to empty grocery shelves and bread lines in the 1980s
I view the problem as us treating a tool as a system of government. Capitalism is an incredibly powerful tool for increasing efficiency (real capitalism as in a healthy free market, not monopoly bullshit). But we should be using that tool to our benefit, not having that tool use us. We can use it as a tool without it being our basis of society. Also, capitalism is not self regulating. That’s a bullshit myth created by elite monopolists. Unchecked capitalism leads to monopolies and monopolies are the antithesis of capitalism. We used to know that. We used to bust monopolies. We need to learn when and when not to use capitalism. Certain things need to be monopolies. Like transportation and the power grid. Since healthy competition cannot prosper we cannot make them capitalistic. We already need to recognize that capitalism is a tool for us to use. It’s ok to break capitalism in special circumstances for the greater good, because the good of the people is more important than perpetuating capitalism. I think abolishing it leads to apathy and inefficiency, but worshipping it leads to inhumanity, and we’re not even worshipping it properly because again, monopolies are not capitalism. Like all things in life it’s about balance.
I cannot comment on communism as there has not been a true communism in the world yet, but dictatorships sure have been bad.
No system be it either communism or capitalism can be applied 100%
If we compare today’s capitalism it’s only fair that we compare it to real world application of communism.
As a Pole that was raised in a country freshly out of this system I can only tell you that you would have to be mentally insane to ever consider communism and expect it to work even half as well is it should on paper.
But that’s not a “real world application of communism” in fact in reality the USSR never even claimed to actually be a communist society, they were just ruled by the communist party.
Communism has a specific definition, primarily its a post scarcity society, with no centralised government or monetary system. So any system that doesn’t meet that basic definition can’t be called communism.
Much like we don’t use places like the Democratic people’s Republic of Korea as an example of ehy democracy is bad, because its not actually a democracy, it doesn’t meet the basic definition of democracy.
You can argue its an example of socialism, but it would be more accurate to describe it as authoritarianism because without democracy a state owned system can’t really be called socialism.
Yes, as with all things it must be balanced. Also, I wish we could recognize that monopolies are not capitalism, it’s just cronyism and there’s no place for that. It’s the antithesis of capitalism and it plagues communism too. It’s just pure corruption.
Okay but like, at least understand why the shelves were empy. Behind the Bastards had a great podcast on the matter. Bad science is bad science, no matter how you trade.
What Lysenko did and the magnitude of it was enabled by and is inextricable from the Soviet systems of government and economy:
Lysenko’s success at encouraging farmers to return to working their lands impressed Stalin, who also approved of Lysenko’s peasant background, as Stalin claimed to stand with the proletariat. By the late 1920s, the USSR’s leaders had given their support to Lysenko. This support was a consequence, in part, of policies put in place by the Communist Party to rapidly promote members of the proletariat into leadership positions in agriculture, science and industry. Party officials were looking for promising candidates with backgrounds similar to Lysenko’s: born of a peasant family, without formal academic training or affiliations to the academic community. Due to close partnership between Stalin and Lysenko, Lysenko acquired an influence over genetics in the Soviet Union during the early and mid twentieth century. Lysenko eventually became the director of Genetics for the Academy of Sciences in 1940, which gave him even more control over genetics. He remained in the position for more than two decades, throughout the reigns of Stalin and Nikita Khruschchev, until he was relieved of his duties in 1965.
Yeah, the problems are just different. A mixed form would be ideal, where basic needs would be handled socially and the rest may compete in a capitalist way. The difficulty is where to draw the line exactly.
“There’s an egg shortage!”
> High egg prices send profits at largest US producer soaring more than 700%
Are you the least bit aware of what caused the egg shortage? There was a super virulent strain of avian influenza (bird flu) that has the potential to infect wild birds and to jump to mammals. You know, like people. The same thing triggered the pandemic in 1918 that killed anywhere from 1% - 5% of the world population.
So to avoid that happening again, they had to destroy (slaughter) millions and millions of egg laying hens, which yes, caused a shortage of eggs relative to normal.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=105576
There are real issues that need to be addressed with capitalism and workers rights. This isn’t one of them and you hurt the real arguments by not educating yourself.
