Memes

The thing is, when someone starts getting very wealthy, they inevitably errode the checks and balances put in place to curtail their power and to protect the poor. For example, electricity used to be nationalised in my country until a few years ago. The state company in charge of it would seek to stay near the floating line, not to make profits, and power was very affordable. Before the pandemic, it got privatised and prices went through the roof, we're talking 1000% increases in some cases, because now they had to make money for the shareholders.

This could only work if the people were very conscious and politically educated, so that they could prevent these things from happening. But just one bad generation can see those hard earned protections and rights erroded.

Historically socialists have been better at utilizing scarce resources. Look at the 50 percent economic growth per decade achieved by soviet centralized economic planning before calculators and machine learning were a thing.

We're a dying species on a planet that will heat up until we're all gone, do I really need another horror story ?

You mentioning the chekist is just the old and tired whataboutism where you point out horrors committed by the Soviets to justify your point of view. I could give you horrific stories where people were tortured and/or killed because of corporate greed and/or imperialism. What good will that accomplish?

Will hearing that people were locked inside a sweatshop while it caught on fire change anything about your view of capitalism ?

People falling in poverty because they can't pay medical bills, killing themselves because of their job, getting tortured for information they don't have, seeing their leaders get overthrown and living in a military state because of that.

Are you capable of seeing the horrors wrought by capitalism, not just those in the past but also those we see every day, and answer the question "Would that have happened if the redistribution of resources was fair ?"

If you want a movie recommendation "Sugarland" (2014), it's just a fun movie about sugar, showing how insidious and pervasive capitalists can be, don't worry no torture porn here but you'll still feel like shit at the end.

Set it up with a nice graphical interface, label it "Logistics Simulator 2024" and you'll have people fighting each other for the privilege

It's also 24/7 so there'd be people working weird hours. Capital gets that work done even in communist countries (capital or direct coercion).

Why would you need to hire someone? If it's a farm meant to provide food for people then it's commonly owned and the people who work there are state employees, the purpose of the farm being to make food, not profits.

If it's something you do because you want to and out of passion, then why would you hire anyone? Sure, you might want some help, but then you just get people who are passionate about it as well, and you share the produce. Like a community garden.

I would suggest you look into socialism more because it seems to me you are mistaken in some aspects.

Capitalism is the economic system in which individuals can own the means of production themselves, so basically an entrepreneur owns a company and everyone working there are employees with no or very little ownership over the business.

Socialism is the economic system where the workers themselves own those same means of production. What you think of as socialism is most likely the Marxist-Leninist version implemented in the USSR.

Their thought process went like this: the people all own every business, but if everyone was the boss, nothing would get done. So they considered that since people, at least on paper, vote for their leader and the state supposedly represents the people, then if the state owned all businesses it would basically be the same as if everyone owned those businesses. The issue here is that the politicians and bureaucrats who make decisions regarding those businesses, being human themselves, will tend to skew them towards their own interests. Personally, I still think it is better this way than having billionaire leeches that drain the wealth from multiple countries, but that's besides the point.

This isn't the only socialist system imaginable, though. It could be as simple as the workers that are employed somewhere get a share of the company for as long as they work there instead of wages. That way, you get paid a portion of the profit, and as a shareholder, can vote on decisions about the business. It's important though that only people who work there get those shares, no outside investors or sketchy things like that to take away the power from the people. There's no business owner in this since everyone basically owns their workplace and bosses are democratically elected. This is market socialism, you'd still have market forces and all that entails, and I think it would be the easiest change to make if we wanted to give up on capitalism.

Then there's syndicalism, in which unions and syndicates own their sector or industry and manage them themselves. Every worker joins the union when they get hired, and they vote for stuff like leadership, rule changes, charters and the like. These syndicates then coordinate with eachother to ensure everything is working as intended and produced at the rates they are needed at.

As for the 20 hour workweek... it's very reasonable if you look into it. Each one of us not only has to work hard enough to earn for ourselves, we also have to earn for those who are unfortunate and cannot work through taxes, which is a good thing, but we also have to work hard enough to earn for the leeches doing nothing, like the billionaires on top. Every employee has to get paid less than ehat they're worth, since if the employer would give them every bit of money they produce, they wouldn't be profitable. And that's not even getting into people working jobs that don't help society at all, such as landlords, insurance agents, marketing people, etc. If everyone worked in fields necessary for society to function, we would all work 20 hours a week.