this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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these are not two sides. The system is working as some intend so needs to be dismantled, at least large parts of it, to fix it.
People always forget, nuance exists.
You can't fix capitalism, though, that's the point.
we don’t have capitalism. But fuck any ism, just find the broken shit and fix it. People think there’s one trick, one system, one thing that will fix shit. Nothing will but work, time, effort, good judgement. What worked yesterday, won’t work tomorrow, at least without updating it.
Yeah, capitalism is fucked. I don’t want to put in another fucking ism, I want to buckle the fuck down and fix the shit that’s wrong.
The western world absolutely has capitalism. We don't need to say "fuck -isms," we need to understand what works and what doesn't, and what works is socialism. You can't just fix critical flaws with capitalism like the tendency for the rate of profit to fall or the profit motive.
It has a corrupt form of capitalism. It also has corrupt socialism.
So, do the good shit and I personally belive a socialist style system will result. It’s the work against the corruption that is the hard part.
Capitalism and socialism aren't like yin and yang, they describe over-arching systems. Capitalism is best described as a mode of production where private ownership is principle and capitalists in control of the state, and socialism where public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the working classes in control. Western countries are capitalist, socialist countries include Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, etc.
I’m well aware. I guess good luck instituting socialism then. I bet you get far.
To not be a dick. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. We have don’t have a coherent system, we have aspects of many, but the western ‘cult’ worships at the alter of capitalism. But we have a very corrupted version of it, that includes socialist, and authoritarian, and fascist tendencies. Things are far too entrenched to simply say, replace the system we have with this other one.
No system has ever been instituted to its definition, there is always unique challenges and differences and personalities. Spending time instituting a whole scale replacement, is time that will be wasted. Instead, we need a strategy of implementation through attrition. Forget the isms, just work on addressing the problems, and eventually we can build a better system.
I don't think you're understanding me. There's absolutely nothing socialist about western countries. Western countries don't have a "corrupted" version of capitalism, that's just capitalism in action.
Ideologies like Marxism-Leninism are useful because they help us better understand the world, and what we need to do to move onto a better world. Destroying the capitalist state, replacing it with a socialist one, and gradually appropriating and collectivizing all production and distribution is a time-tested method for doing so.
I AGREE! We must return to a more pure form of capitalism by repealing the Chimney Sweepers Act 1788! Boys younger than eight should be allowed to be apprentices! Master sweeps should be allowed to take them on without getting their parents' consent, a four year old young man is able to make his own decisions!
How do you people manage to be so ignorant but also do confidently wrong?
🤦 To say that is to say you don’t have even a Wikipedia-level understanding of capitalism.
No, people don’t think that.
Correct.
Correct.
People who don’t learn or develop theory can buckle down all they want, but they’re not going to get very far because they don’t understand anything.
It is a lot of work, time, and effort, and some of that is necessarily intellectual work, if you actually want to succeed in changing the world. Otherwise it’s like saying you want to be able fly without developing theories of physics, aerodynamics, and internal combustion engines.
I’m not going to reply to any more stupidity in here. Go theorize all you want. I’ll just leave one comment.
Check a history book, that’s precisely how we started flying.
The Wikipedia page for the Wright brothers suggests otherwise. Preceding theory informs practice, which in turn informs theory, ad infinitum. They wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without standing on the shoulders of giants’ previous theories, or without creating/updating theories from their experiments and then putting those theories to the test in practice.
Marx, Engels, and Lenin didn’t sit in a room and build castles in the sky. They (1) learned their predecessors’ theories, (2) deeply investigated the contemporary moment of the world, (3) updated preceding theories and developed new ones based on those investigations, (4) tested those theories in the real world, and so on in a dialectical manner.
The Wright Brothers did not know everything about flying, physics, engines, etc. They knew enough to do it, and did. In the years since we have written millions more pages and tried so many more things that if I want to fly, I don’t need to reinvent the airplane. This is the superpower of humanity, we don’t have to reinvent every time.
We all know enough about capitalism, socialism, etc. to act. Instead we prefer to sit and wank longer about the best possible society; meaning all we can do is endlessly talk about the best possible society.
The only way to actually build one is to learn what’s needed and act. Who cares what label it has, who cares if the theory is sound or not. If it doesn’t work in practice, you iterate forward.
And how are you going to fix things with no framework to analyze and determine how? You're just going to "buckle the fuck down" and...? What? What specifically are you going to do to "fix the shit that's wrong"?