Ask people what they hate about socialism/communism and they'll describe capitalism.
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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I get that it's a meme but 85% is delusional. If you think under socialism we could work 15% as much as we do now and maintain the same standard of living then lol, lmao, etc.
The top 10% of households hold 67% of all wealth. If we assume that every worker produces roughly the same value, that implies ⅔ of value produced by the average worker is being taken.
Of course, 33% is not 15%, but I'd say it's roughly in the ballpark. And in certain cases, there are definitely workers who are exploited to that level.
Wealth is not income. You can't derive the rate of exploitation from wealth inequality.
If we assume that every worker produces roughly the same value
I mean lol again. Especially if you need to stretch as far as the top 10%. Doctors, surgeons, electricians, linemen, plumbers, veterinarians, dentists, engineers, etc are all going to be producing more than double the value of your average retail worker.
The only way to create wealth is via work, e.g., income. It's not a perfect measure, I concede, since wealth is static and can accumulate over time. However, I think we can still use it as a rough estimation of stolen income over time.
However, this source claims there is a 70% gap between wages and produced value. That roughly matches the number I gave.
Man I hate it when socialism capitalisms.
For anyone interested, here' a short excerpt on this point from a socialism crash course:
Unlike workers, Capitalists make their living, not by clocking in and being paid a certain fixed wage per hour, but through absentee ownership. Their wealth is earned while sleeping, playing golf, or visiting the mailbox to collect pieces of this wage theft, often in the form of stock dividends. A worker's wealth is dependent on the number of hours they can work; a Capitalist's wealth is based on how much absentee property they can accumulate, and as such can multiply infinitely. Some Capitalists earn an average worker's yearly salary in a single night's sleep.
For example, a Copper mine owner neither physically mines the copper, and (living thousands of miles away) likely delegates day-to-day operations to a hired manager. Yet, because they have a piece of paper that says they own it, they get a large cut of everything that was mined: the ultimate free lunch.
A 1983 report by England national income and expenditures found that on average, 26 minutes of every hour worked (or 43% of labor value added) by English workers across a wide range of industries went to various exploiting or unproductive groups, with workers receiving only 57% of their pre-tax productive output as wages1. In other words, at least 40% of the work you do every day is stolen by Capitalists.
Funnily enough the problem with capitalism is actually that eventually you run out of other people's money.
Tap for spoiler
Capitalism inherently serves to concentrate wealth since the ones with the money make the rules. As wealth disparity increases and people get poorer they can't buy as much stuff and growth dries up. Then the only way for the rich to keep getting richer is to degrade labour conditions, but that's unpopular so you need to blame a scapegoat and enact a repressive regime to enforce it. That's quite a problem, and it's one which might feel familiar to the astute reader.
Hey I recognize this happening.
Then the only way for the rich to keep getting richer is to degrade labour conditions, but that's unpopular so you need to blame a scapegoat and enact a repressive regime to enforce it.
I didn't get this part. Please explain?
The money they collect is the money we pay them minus the money they pay us. If we can't pay them more the only way to get more is for them to pay us less. Gross simplification obviously. Then the typical strategy is to blame immigrants or Jews or whatever for the decrease in living standards, and crack down on anyone who tries to improve things.
Edit: this is sort of a meme-ified version of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall which is the real theory of how economic crises in capitalism come about and not really the same as what I'm describing here, but along some similar lines. It's worth reading about from actual scholars in detail if you're interested in that sort of thing.
Imagine that the entire world is a 100 people neighbourhood and you start selling peanuts, at first you start growing by acquiring more clients but what happens when everyone is already your client? How do you grow at that point?
I wish the watermark said "made with beer" at the bottom left.
itt people who don't know who Margret Thatcher was enough to have seen this misattributed/misquoted from her before.
Well yes, the rich are running out of their worker's money after a while and that totally is an issue for them. Isn't that exactly what they say all the time? I don't get it. 
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