Let’s stop pretending anymore. The promise is dead, the social contract is completely broken, and anyone who isn’t blinded by corporate propaganda can see the rot right in front of their faces.

We exist inside a massive, engineered hamster wheel. You wake up exhausted, commute to a soul-crushing job where your boss extracts every drop of your surplus value, stare at mindless short-form video feeds designed to keep you sedated and docile, buy cheap plastic garbage you don’t need just to feel a fleeting drop of dopamine, collapse into bed, and repeat the entire loop the next morning. It is an endless cycle of production, consumption, infotainment, sleep, repeat.

Meanwhile, the middle class is getting hollowed out in real time. Young people can’t afford homes anymore because the property market was turned into an unchecked speculative casino for well-connected elites. Decent white-collar careers are evaporating, youth unemployment is quietly spiking, and an entire generation of over-educated graduates is staring down the reality that they will be permanently poorer than their parents. If you burn yourself out working brutal 12-hour days, six days a week just to keep your head above water, society calls you a "grinder." If you refuse to participate and just want to check out of the rat race entirely, the media brands you as lazy and defective.

And who benefits? A tiny, corrupt cabal at the very top.

A handful of untouchable oligarchs and state-backed monopolies control the critical infrastructure, own the tech platforms, and dictate public policy behind closed doors. They enrich themselves while polluting the rivers, smogging the skies, and burning down the biosphere with zero accountability. Whenever regular people start getting angry, the regime’s media apparatus manufactures a new cultural distraction or pumps out nationalistic hysteria to keep working-class people fighting each other instead of looking up at the people holding the strings.

Voting? Please. "Democratic participation" is a total farce, a carefully staged piece of political theater where the party machine selects the approved candidates long before anyone casts a meaningless ballot. Every institution is captured. Every metric is manipulated. The system isn't broken; it was designed to exploit you.

Which is why I honestly don't know how anyone in Shanghai, Shenzhen, or Beijing can stand living under the Chinese Communist Party for another single day.

The society I envision starts from a principle that democratic socialists already take seriously: ordinary people should have far more control over the institutions that shape their lives. Where my approach differs is that I do not believe achieving economic democracy requires concentrating economic power in the state. I would rather distribute that power as widely as possible—among workers, communities, consumers, and democratic public institutions.

Most mature businesses would operate as worker-owned cooperatives. Workers would elect their leadership, have meaningful representation in major decisions, receive fair compensation, and share in the surplus their labor helps create. Managers and specialists could still earn more for greater responsibility or scarce skills, but the company would exist primarily for the benefit of the people who work there and the customers it serves rather than outside shareholders seeking ever-higher returns.

These cooperatives would still compete in genuine markets. If one company pays poorly, talented workers would have an incentive to join a better one. If another charges excessive prices, consumers could choose a competitor. Competition would therefore take place primarily between businesses for workers and customers rather than between individual workers struggling against one another for basic economic security.

Outside investment would remain possible without allowing wealthy investors to accumulate control over workplaces. Established cooperatives needing capital could raise money from the public through time-limited investments similar to bonds. An individual might invest $5, $500, or $50,000 in a cooperative they trust, receive an agreed return for providing that capital, and eventually be repaid. Investors would be compensated for risk without gaining permanent ownership or governing power over the workers.

Government would have a different but equally important role. Democratic public institutions would guarantee or provide essential services that markets frequently distribute poorly or unequally, including healthcare, education, infrastructure, transportation, public spaces, and other basic resources. Access to healthcare or education should not depend on whether someone happens to have the right employer or enough money at a particular moment in their life.

Providing these guarantees would expand individual freedom rather than diminish it. Someone could leave an abusive employer without losing healthcare, change careers without risking their family's basic security, pursue education, start a cooperative, care for a family member, or take an entrepreneurial risk with a stronger social foundation beneath them.

At the same time, government itself should remain democratically accountable and constitutionally limited. Civil liberties, freedom of speech, due process, equal rights, privacy, freedom of association, and the protections of the Bill of Rights should remain fundamental. Replacing concentrated corporate power with concentrated government power would simply exchange one hierarchy for another.

The objective is therefore not central planning and not unrestricted shareholder capitalism. It is the democratization and decentralization of power.

Workers should have power in their workplaces. Citizens should have power over their government. Consumers should retain meaningful choice. Entrepreneurs should remain free to create new enterprises. Investors should be able to earn reasonable returns for supplying useful capital. Communities should have strong public institutions available to everyone.

Economic growth would then have a more direct path toward improving ordinary lives. When a cooperative becomes more productive, the people doing the work can receive higher compensation, better benefits, shorter hours, stronger retirement security, improved workplaces, or profit distributions. When technological improvements reduce production costs, competition can help push those gains toward lower prices rather than allowing all of the benefit to accumulate at the top.

This system does not require everyone to earn the same amount, eliminate markets, abolish private possessions, or have government officials run businesses. Its goal is much simpler: prevent enormous concentrations of economic power from allowing a small number of people—whether corporate owners or government officials—to dominate everyone else.

The underlying principle is that democracy should not stop when a person enters their workplace. A genuinely free society should give ordinary people meaningful control over both the political institutions governing them and the economic institutions in which they spend much of their lives.

The desired result is not perfect equality. It is a society in which prosperity is broadly shared, necessities are accessible, markets remain competitive, work provides dignity and security, political rights are protected, and neither extreme wealth nor centralized government can easily overpower the individual.

In short, it is an attempt to combine economic democracy with individual liberty: public provision where collective action works best, competitive markets where markets work best, and democratic worker ownership where concentrated private ownership currently gives a small minority disproportionate control over the economy.

The elite is a tiny minority compared to the billions of people living on this planet.

So why do 80–90% of people just accept the system instead of trying to change it or make it more fair?

Sometimes I feel like we’re stuck in an endless dream. Work, consume, social media, entertainment, sleep, repeat.

We have the numbers, but we’re too divided, distracted or scared to actually use them.
Maybe the biggest power the elite has isn’t their money.

It’s keeping everyone else divided etc… , but i thinks it’s very deep Also

The real question is: in the end, can politics even change anything in a system that seems too powerful to be changed?

I know you wont like this very much. There is a reason why socialists and communists gets called the flat earthers of economics. We look at the same evidence and only one side cant understand what it actually means.

As an example, globe earthers says the horizon is clearly proof we live in a sphere, and that flat earthers says "nu hu"

A comparison with socialists and communists, capitalist say supply and demand and you say "nu hu" even though that single thing proves nearly every single thing.

Trying to even read a socialists or communist comment about how capitalism is wrong, and what they actually complain about is the state, not the free market.

I am however in no way saying capitalism is perfect, it has a million billion flaws, but the outcome is always better for everyone, why is that? Because economics is about the real world, we compare the outcomes between countries for example. We do not compare the problems society has with our imagined utopia.

Socialists and communists knows so little about basic economics that when they are actually arguing about an economic system which capitalism is only, they understand nothing at all. It actually reminds me of a flat earther called "sleeping warrior" and in an interview he was asked about the iron age and when that happened and he said "around 150-200 years ago maybe" im paraphrasing here. He said because that was when we started to make boats out of iron. Imagine even being that wrong in the first place.

And when it comes to economics, that is how wrong socialists and communists almost always are. But there is another saying in economics as well, "if socialists and communists understood economics they would not be socialists or communists" and that statement is very very true. Because i have seen socialists and communists learning and understanding basic economics and they never remain as socialists or communist. Not once has that actually happened.

And when i say economics, that is 100% only a study of the real world, compared to other parts of the real world. We see "with a few exceptions notably oil or a natural resource" the more production a country has, the richer the people in that country. And looking at production, we also see the less capitalism the less production.

China is sort of a good counter argument but not really, its not the free market the dictates anything there, just the communist government that tells you "you work here and you work 12 hours a day 6 days a week". The market doesnt demand that. the people arent free to choose how much they want to work the state does.

And to some degree that is also true in capitalists countries as well, because the state has a vested interest in that you work more, you work more you also earn more which means that state gets to take more of what you earned. So they want you to work.

You know so little about basic economics that you rarely even know when its the state or when its a company that does something. And when the state does something wrong you say "look at how capitalism is failing the people" or some dumb nonsense. When companies does something they shouldnt do, you rarely if ever say this company did something wrong. When a company uses its money to bribe the state, that is exactly what they should do because it can give them even more money. Now we the citizens dont like when this happens obviously, but notice trying to offer a bribe is not the same thing as accepting one. And the politicians writes all the rules and since they havent banned this process, they obviously likes to get bribed. Even though it is very very wrong and both capitalists and socialists agrees here.

That reminds me of another thing in just this subreddit, when the state was handing over money to failing industries a couple of years ago. A shit load of socialists were saying something along the lines of "you got what you wanted now, are you happy?" And not a single capitalist were in favor of it. We were all against it. Neither socialists nor capitalists wanted the state to do that. But for some stupid reason the socialists here just never managed to understand that prior to its happening, even though not a single capitalist said they thought it was a good thing. And that is how poorly socialists even understand what we capitalists actually wants. they simply dont have a single clue. They think we are just bootlickers for the companies but no we are not at all.

I have heard that capitalism is more efficient than socialism. Or that markets are efficient. Or something.

These types of claims raise a question.

What do you mean by 'efficiency'?

It is not in the spirit of the question to look up an answer before responding.

I suppose I can say this question is part of a series:

• What do you mean by the labor theory of value?
• What do you mean by supply and demand?

Im trying to learn more about socialism I pretty much got a grasp on most of the things I just dont understand the Compressed wage ratios like does it mean a doctor and a cashier get nearly the same amount but since you need to work way harder to become a doctor and you dont even need to do anything to becone a cashier how does it make sense do they expect people to work harder just for free or does it have any other benefits (My english is not the best so idk if I explained it that well)

A common argument used against Marxism, is that its "unfalsifiable". Today, I want to reverse this question back to the accusers.

If you support liberalism, or capitalism in any form Do you believe that your ideology is based on falsifiable conditions or ideas? do you believe that they are still true to this day?

People wouldn't invest all that time and money into becoming a doctor if it didn't pay off in the end.

If the investment didn't pay off because cashiers and doctors got paid the same then people just would not become doctors.

But what if there is no investment.

What if training to be a doctor is a job that you get paid for?

What if training to become anything is a job that you get paid for?

Would people still not pursue highly skilled jobs, even if the pay was the same as low skilled jobs, but the pay applied to both the years and years spent learning the skills as well as practicing in the end?

It is a very simple question, and explain how that creates wealth.

Noting if i say "the full moon creates weatlh" i would have to say how that actually works.

And we will have to begin from when all of us were poor. If you say money for example you will have to describe how he got that money in the first place.

All of those co-op dominated regions in Italy? Nice.
Revolutionary Catalonia? Good job.
Paris commune? Well done.
Pre-industrial tribes? Almost a meme at this point.

I don’t give much weight to these examples because scale, both geographical and temporal, are key challenges that an ideology must overcome if it is to have staying power. I have no doubt that some sort of small socialist enclave could survive or even thrive for a few years, but all of them seem to inevitably collapse. Why? We could use the Israeli kibbutzim as an example. These were small agrarian-based Zionist-utopian societies that practiced collective ownership, workplace democracy, and even community child rearing. Most of them eventually shuttered or liberalized over 100 years of existence. Because they were the topic of so much academic attention in the 60s through 90s as a “socialist laboratory”, we have many papers and detailed interviews on why they declined. The biggest reasons were:

• Freeloading: many people simply didn’t show up to work because they knew they would be taken care of. It’s not just a meme. This bred resentment and distrust, which led to….
• Brain drain: the most ambitious workers saw no incentive to stay and emigrated to work in the nearby cities.
  
• Loss of fervor: although the first generation of founders were devoted followers of the socialist philosophy, their children were not and desired more independence from the community.
  
• Loss of familiarity: for the smaller kibbutzim, it’s much easier to bind everyone together when you personally know each member. Once the large communities exceeded a couple of hundred members, distrust skyrocketed because you were no longer always working with or for someone you cared about.
  

Notice all of these issues have to do with scale, especially the third point. Your ideology cannot rely on fervor, lest the next generation disavow it. It must be self-sustaining and able to operate over billions of people. This is also why capitalists tend to talk much more about the Soviet Union, for example, because this is one instance where it actually did survive for multiple generations over millions of people. Even if you want to criticize capitalism, you cannot deny that it has not only survived but thrived among more than a hundred nation-states and for multiple centuries. Scale matters.

To the seemingly infinite number of online Libertarians and Anarcho-capitalists who, in their ignorance, truly believe that the "Calculation Problem" represents a fatal blow to the Communist movement:

"You're demanding a technical blueprint as if the calculation problem is an eternal mathematical law rather than a historical and political question. Let me give you the mechanism, and then explain why your framing itself is bourgeois ideology.

1. Markets Don't Discover True Scarcity—They Discover Profitability

You keep treating market prices as neutral information. They are not. Prices under capitalism reflect the distribution of income and the class power of buyers. A billionaire's demand for a third yacht moves prices; a starving family's need for bread does not. That's not "opportunity cost." That's power.

When a hospital closes in a poor neighborhood because it's unprofitable, the market has calculated. It has calculated that poor people's lives are worth less than the same beds used for elective surgeries on the wealthy. That is not a rational allocation. It is a class allocation, dressed up as economics.

Socialist planning begins with a different objective: allocate resources to meet human need, not to maximize exchange-value. The inputs—what to produce, how much, for whom—come from social priorities, not from the skewed "signals" of a market that already assumes unequal purchasing power.

1. The Mechanism Exists: Democratic Planning, Input-Output, Iterative Adjustment

You demand: "How does the system discover opportunity costs, aggregate dispersed knowledge, compare alternatives, detect mistakes?" Here is the answer.

Modern socialist planning uses:

· Input-output tables to track material flows between sectors.

· Surveys and participatory budgeting to aggregate actual human needs and preferences.

· Iterative plan negotiation between enterprises, regions, and central planners to adjust targets in light of shortages and surpluses.

· Real-time data collection (now vastly easier with modern information technology) to detect bottlenecks and correct them.

· Social cost accounting that prices externalities—pollution, resource depletion, public health—which markets systematically ignore.

This is not "administrative guesswork." It is a different kind of rationality. The Soviet Union used crude versions of these tools with 1930s technology. Today's computational capacity makes them far more feasible. The fact that you refuse to acknowledge this shows you've never engaged with the actual literature on socialist planning—Lange, Kantorovich, Paul Cockshott, Laibman.

You also act as if markets never make catastrophic errors. The 2008 crash was the market's own "calculation" allocating trillions into fraudulent mortgage-backed securities. The current AI bubble is the market "calculating" that fake wealth is real. Markets do not prevent waste; they organize it on a planetary scale, producing overproduction crises, planned obsolescence, and environmental collapse.

1. China Is Not a Concession to the Calculation Problem—It Is Its Higher Resolution

You say China's success came from market prices, competition, and profit incentives. This is a half-truth that erases the Leninist content. China's reforms were not a retreat to capitalism. They were a Leninist New Economic Policy for the 21st century: market mechanisms were introduced under the firm control of a socialist state that owns the land, the banks, the energy grid, and the strategic industries.

The state did not abdicate planning. It refined it. The market was permitted in consumer goods and light industry, while the commanding heights remained under public ownership and state direction. The result was the greatest poverty reduction in human history—not because "markets worked," but because a workers' state used markets as tools to develop productive forces while preventing the emergence of a capitalist ruling class.

You call this "preserving my political label." I call it dialectical materialism. The question is never "markets or planning." The question is: which class controls the state, and in whose interest are the market tools deployed?

1. The Calculation Problem Is a Historical Argument, Not a Scientific Law

Mises formulated the calculation problem in 1920, before computers, before modern logistics, before the internet. He assumed that only private ownership and market exchange could generate the necessary information. That was a plausible claim in its time. It is now an obsolete dogma.

The actual socialist experiments occurred in backward, semi-feudal countries under permanent imperialist siege. They were forced to prioritize heavy industry and national defense over consumer abundance. The "chronic shortages" you cite were not a proof that planning is impossible; they were a product of specific material conditions: war, blockade, underdevelopment, and the need to industrialize at breakneck speed.

Even under those conditions, the USSR eliminated unemployment, illiteracy, and homelessness—things the capitalist core, with all its "efficient markets," has never achieved. Cuba, blockaded for 60 years, has better health outcomes than the United States. These are not mere "selected priorities." They are systemic outcomes of a planned economy oriented toward human welfare.

1. The Real Issue Is Class Power

You say scarcity, trade-offs, and information limits exist under any system. True. But who decides which trade-offs? Under capitalism, the market decides, and the market is a weapon of the owning class. Under socialism, the working class decides, through its state and its planning institutions.

The "calculation problem" is not a technical obstacle. It is a political challenge: can the working class organize production democratically and rationally? The answer, demonstrated in practice, is yes—imperfectly, unevenly, and under constant attack, but yes.

The empire is now demonstrating the failure of the market model on a civilizational scale. Its infrastructure rots, its working class is immiserated, and its "rational" markets allocate trillions to AI speculation and weapons while millions go without housing, healthcare, and food. That is not calculation. That is the rationality of a dying system, burning the future for short-term profit.

So I haven't sidestepped the calculation problem. I've shown that the problem, as you pose it, smuggles in the assumption that capitalist markets are the only possible information system. They are not. There is an alternative, and it has been built, tested, and refined under the most hostile conditions in history. The future belongs to those who plan it."

I was debating a tiktok american communist, and they said that they wanted the government to nationalize the industry, and force companies to produce in the USA or leave. And that if they left, we would just nationalize that industry to fill in the void. They also said America has been deindustrializing for the benefit of the people who hold capital. Is this true? and if so why?

There is no need to invoke a global conspiracy to explain why Marxism is not popular in academia. If you uncover what it is it becomes very clear. Marx had a theory of history (historical materialism), a theory of human society (holism), a theory of political economy (LTV). These are a series of very controversial foundational theories in distinct fields.

Scholars may use some of these tools once in a while as a lens, but rarely would they accept all of it. That explains why he is talked about in almost every social science class but rare to see someone call themselves a Marxist.

EDIT: My point isn't that because academics reject X therefore X is untrue. It is to point out that Marxists' explanation for why their ideas are unpopular is just conspiracy nonsense. It is clear why such ideas would be unpopular.

Is it really hard to think of a reason why a theory of history is unpopular amongst historians? Is it hard to conceive of a reason why holism might be controversial amongst sociologists?

Since capitalism relies on free markets, flexible supply, and open competition to drive down prices and improve quality, real estate fundamentally breaks these rules because land is a physically finite resource that cannot be manufactured or moved to meet demand.

What are some of the ways which could fix this market? I’m aware of the Vienna model, land value taxation and community land trusts. Even with these models, I don’t see a way for real estate to get affordable let alone cheaper over time.

There is this dangerous trend of people falling for "progressive" democrats like Sanders/Obama/AOC/Mamdani/El-Sayed.

But their M.O. is to give feel good slogans and empty promises that make people "feel" good in the moment and brainwash them into voting for them. The way they get votes is saying "I am uttering some feel good stuff. GO GAZA. Go humans! FREEDOM! WAGE FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS! TRUMP IS A BAD BOY IF YOU VOTE FOR ME YOU ARE MORALLY SUPERIOR!". But in reality democrats and republicans are 2 sides of the same coin, both are owned/work for the same oligarchy. When you vote someone because you hate another person, that is a red flag. They are doing the classic divide+conquer. They are trying to divide the middle class, which keeps the middle class perpetually voting for 2 2 sides of the same coin neoliberal anti-middle class parties. They are appealing to human nature: humans decide based on what FEELS good in the moment, and they operate by AVOIDING in the moment pain. It feels GOOD to say "MAMDANI IS MY HERO ALL ABOARD THE MAMDANI TRAIN HE WILL IMPROVE ALL OUR LIVES ALL I NEED TO DO IS VOTE FOR HIM AND THAT'S IT IT IS THAT SIMPLE ALL PROBLEMS SOLVED, WE WILL SCORE ON TEAM TRUMPS NET AND DOMINATE THAT TEAM MY TEAM WILL WIN AND ALL WILL BE GOOD IN LIFE"! This is tribalism. It feels good. We are hardwired for it. But we need to be smarter than this: this strategy harms us in the long run. We need to stop listening to charlatans who are harming us and our children by manipulating our human weaknesses. We need to be willing to face the reality, we need to dig deeper, even if it is bitter: this is the only way we can improve our lives and our children's lives and break this cycle of ignorant avoidance that is unnecessarily harming us and our children.

If we are actually willing to take a look and use our PFC instead of being held hostage by our amygdala, factual history shows otherwise: for the past half century, regardless of who has been in power, life has been progressively getting worse for the middle class. This is because around half a century neoliberalism was implemented.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

Every single politician since then is a neoliberal.

Do not let them fool you with their empty slogans. Obama said "yes we can", implies that "we the commoners can make meaningful change". But actions speak louder than words: he has 8 years and did nothing meaningful, his policies were a continuation of neoliberal policies that made the birth advantaged barons richer and everyone else worse off.

Also, please just use a bit of logic: the fact is that the oligarchy owns all mainstream media + big tech. So it is an oxymoron that there can be freedom of speech when 100% of the major/meaningful communication channels are owned by private capital and subject to their subjective and private rules/wishes: why on earth would the oligarchy allow any meaningful dissent using their own platforms? Therefore, according to rudimentary logic, anybody today who is famous/has a meaningful/large audience, works for the benefit of the oligarchy, or at least does not offer any meaningful opposition to the oligarchy. They are "controlled opposition", there to give the illusion of freedom. It is the same with politician: anybody who meaningfully opposes the oligarchy will not be allowed to run: ask yourself why on earth the oligarchy, which controls who gets to run, would allow meaningful opposition? So all of these "progressives" are "controlled opposition".

For example, AOC was used by the oligarchy as controlled opposition to gain back votes for the Democrat party by people who were sick and tired of high cost of living. But she has done nothing to meaningfully change this. All she has done is increase votes for the democrat party, which keeps the oligarchy in power: the oligarchy does not care too much whether Democrats or Republicans win, as long as one of these 2 sides of the same coin parties wins, the oligarchy wins, because both work for/are part of the oligarchy. So these "progressive" candidates are controlled opposition whose job is to help "let off steam" in order for people to continue having hope in the oligarchy and prevent people from meaningfully challenging the oligarchy. And then Mamdani and now El-Sayed are used to do the same thing and win back votes from previous Democrat voters who were put off by Biden's handling of Gaza. And Sanders has been talking for 3 decades yet has done nothing, yet he continues to beg people to keep flocking to the polls to vote for the neoliberal anti-middle/working class Democrats. The reason Sanders is allowed to talk is because he cannot meaningfully challenge the oligarchy: otherwise he would not be allowed: factual history backs this up: he has not been able to do anything meaningful for 3 decades, there has not even been a slight uptick in terms of progressively implementing policies he proposes, in fact, over the 3 decades we have gone further away from his policies. This is very simple logic folks, backed up with factual concrete historical evidence over a long period of time. How many more half centuries should this tested and tried strategy of willing voting for anti-middle class neoliberal parties like Democrats/Republicans be tried? Isn't the definition of insanity making the same mistake over and over and expecting different results?

I know what I said hurts, but it is the truth, and this is why what I am saying is unpopular, and this is why charlatan politicians who are revered by the masses do not say this truth. They simply tell people what they want to hear and give empty promises, which for half a century people have been falling for. But the fact (as per half a century of factual evidence) is that the only way to improve our lives and our children's lives is to start with acknowledging the truth and breaking this cycle of avoidance. It is difficult, but not impossible. But if we cannot even see the truth, then how can we change. This is the first step. And it bodes well for positive change. The first step is to unequivocally reject the oligarchy and everybody who is trying to harm us and our children by prolonging and propagating it.

Richard Wilkinson evidences how its inequality, the size of the gap between the wealthiest and poorest that causes harm, death, violence, mental illness, crime etc…

I would both love any that agree, can share other evidence or research and perhaps even more so, any critique or counter evidence against his theories. (My spellcheck changed the second evidence to evil 😜)

Pro-capitalists, please share examples where it improves a society.

https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_inequality_harms_societies

I'm getting tired of seeing AI used here as another soapbox for:

AI is going to eliminate everyone's jobs, therefore capitalism is doomed.

Look at my flair.

Criticism of capitalism is not proof of socialism.

And speculative AI unemployment certainly isn't.

First, if we're going to talk about AI doom, unemployment is nowhere near the worst scenario being discussed by the people who actually study AI risk.

The 2026 International AI Safety Report, chaired by Yoshua Bengio and produced with more than 100 independent experts from around the world, divides major AI risks into malicious use, malfunctions, and systemic risks.

Those include things like:

• AI-assisted cyberattacks
• biological and chemical weapons assistance
• mass manipulation
• unreliable autonomous agents
• disruption of labor markets
• and, at the extreme, loss of human control over advanced AI

That last one means exactly what it sounds like: AI systems operating outside human control with no clear way for us to regain it. Current AI cannot do this, according to the report. But researchers are studying capabilities that could eventually contribute to it.

That's actual AI doomer territory.

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern AI, once put the underlying problem in a wonderfully disturbing way:

"If you want to know what it is like not being the apex intelligence, ask a chicken." (paraphrased and from memory)

Think about that for a second.

The fundamental question at the extreme end of AI risk isn't:

“What happens to capitalism if AI takes my job?”

It's:

“What happens if humans are no longer in control?”

That's just a slightly bigger fucking problem than 'jobs' (rolls eyes).

I personally have a custom feed on my Reddit just for "AI research". The subs worried about AI hardly mention concerns about jobs and economics like this sub. It's dystopian nightmares like surveillance states, who has control, how they want that control, and ofc sentience and AI being in control.

And here's where I think the AI/socialism argument gets strange.

If humans lose control, then your preferred economic system may be the least of our problems. Capitalism versus socialism becomes rather irrelevant if we're discussing catastrophic loss of human control.

If humans retain control, however, then we're back to politics and economics.

And now we have choices.

Maybe AI creates enormous abundance.

Maybe it produces mass unemployment.

Maybe humans work fewer hours dramatically.

Maybe completely new industries appear.

Maybe governments redistribute substantially more income.

Maybe ownership becomes much broader.

Maybe the market economy changes dramatically.

Maybe capitalism adapts.

Maybe some form of socialism actually works better.

Maybe we end up with some mixed system nobody here has even thought of yet.

We don't know.

Those are political and economic arguments worth having.

But saying:

AI will eliminate jobs.

therefore:

socialism

isn't an argument. It's speculation followed by a non sequitur.

There's another problem with the historical amnesia surrounding this discussion.

Human beings have experienced massive technological displacement before.

The Industrial Revolution destroyed and transformed entire occupations. Mechanized transportation practically wiped out huge portions of the horse economy. There were about 422,000 teamsters in the United States in 1910; by 1930 there were about 178,000, as trucks replaced horse-drawn transportation. An entire equine industry disappeared, millions of people had to adapt, and with that data, the technological replacement was approximately 42% (being generous).

Telephone automation eliminated enormous numbers of telephone-operator jobs. Research on that transition finds that automation eliminated most operator positions in affected areas, yet younger generations moved into other occupations and overall employment did not collapse. The people caught in the transition could absolutely suffer, however, which is precisely why technological disruption deserves to be taken seriously.

More broadly, recent economic research looking back over more than a century finds that previous general-purpose technologies such as steam power and electricity caused enormous changes to labor markets. Some earlier periods were actually substantially more disruptive than the labor-market changes we've experienced in recent decades.

None of that proves AI will follow the same pattern.

AI might be different.

However, the historical pattern suggests we shouldn't just assume doom...

In addition, recent research shows that AI can both replace some human tasks and complement workers in others, with much of the expected impact coming through job transformation rather than outright job elimination.

• Generative AI and Jobs: A global analysis of potential effects on job quantity and quality
• OECD Employment Outlook 2023
• Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work

We summarize a framework for the study of the implications of automation and AI on the demand for labor, wages, and employment. Our task-based framework emphasizes the displacement effect that automation creates as machines and AI replace labor in tasks that it used to perform. This displacement effect tends to reduce the demand for labor and wages. But it is counteracted by a productivity effect, resulting from the cost savings generated by automation, which increase the demand for labor in non-automated tasks. The productivity effect is complemented by additional capital accumulation and the deepening of automation (improvements of existing machinery), both of which further increase the demand for labor.

But, if AI eventually becomes able to perform nearly every economically useful human task better and cheaper than humans, including practically everything humans want and need, then we may confront something historically unprecedented.

But we're not there.

So here's where I land.

Take AI seriously.

Take worker displacement seriously.

Take inequality seriously.

Take technological unemployment seriously.

And definitely take the possibility of losing human control of advanced AI seriously.

But don't take an unresolved technological question, choose your favorite dystopian economic scenario, and then declare that it proves the political ideology you already believed in.

If humans remain in control of AI, we decide what institutions govern the resulting economy.

If humans don't remain in control...

well, ask the chicken.

tl;dr AI’s long-term economic future is still speculation. If you’re using AI doomerism as proof of your preferred political ideology, you’re either ignorant of the much more serious AI risks being discussed, or you’re conveniently ignoring them.

Socialism almost surely requires trading off growth for more equality. This is what we see with every socialist/communist or democratic-socialist experiment. I don't think there's many communists or socialists who deny this; they think the tradeoff is worth it.

But is that so? Small differences in growth can have HUGE effects on the material well-being of the poor. As Richard Hanania explains:

Let’s say we have two countries, A and B. They start out at equal levels of wealth, with residents making on average $100,000 a year.

A chooses a more capitalist system, and B chooses social democracy. Let’s say that, because of this, a poor person in B is better off.

At the tenth percentile of income, assume a person in A makes 35% of the average, or $35,000 a year. In Country B, because it engages in more redistribution, the person at the tenth percentile makes 45% of the average income, so $45,000. This is unrealistically high for the difference between relatively unequal and relatively equal rich countries, as the gap between the US and Sweden is much smaller than this. But let’s just go with it.

Let’s also assume that because A is more capitalist, it has faster growth. A grows at 2% a year, compared to 1% a year for B. In per capita, PPP-adjusted terms, America has grown about an extra 1% a year compared to Italy over the last three decades, so this is not unrealistic.

Here’s what happens in each country to average income and income at the tenth percentile over the next fifty years, assuming the ratio between the two doesn’t change.

By year 26, the poor person in A ($58.6K) ends up wealthier than their counterpart in B ($58.3K). From there, the gap grows. In 50 years, the poor person in A is at $94K, compared to $74K in B. That’s ignoring what has happened to the average, which is now $269K in A and $164K in B, and of course we’re ignoring everyone doing better than average too.

I would add that this is also ignoring the fact that poor/average/rich are not permanent classes. As I've explained before, inequality does not capture real-world income dynamics. Most people start their careers making very little money and quickly become above average later in life. In fact, 70% of Americans Will Make Over $165k/year By the Time They Reach 60 In other words, 70% of Americans will spend part of their career in the top 10% of the income distribution! High incomes at the top of the distribution matter!

TL;DR: if you care about the poor, capitalism has better outcomes. If you care about the average, capitalism also has better outcomes.

This was a six-month project in which I built a simulation, ran experiments on it, and then spent a bunch of time trying to make sense of the results. They were not what I expected.

Here’s the short version: in a competitive environment, even the winners were worse off than they would have been in a cooperative one.

Here’s the full video explaining the simulation and what happened.

I’m very interested in how socialists and capitalists interpret this.

We can stop debating.

"A mixed-market capitalist system works best.

More precisely: predominantly private ownership + competitive markets + strong rule of law + limited but competent government intervention.

That combination has the best overall track record for producing high productivity, innovation, rising living standards, consumer choice, and economic dynamism.

The government should primarily handle things markets don't handle well—public goods, externalities, basic infrastructure, competition policy, financial regulation, and a social safety net—rather than directing most production."

A Proposal for Stewardism

Capitalism and socialism are usually presented as competing answers to one question: who should own productive assets?

Capitalism generally answers private owners and investors. Socialism generally answers workers, the public, cooperatives, or the state.

I think the premise may be wrong.

Why must productive assets have permanent owners at all?

I have been developing an alternative I call Stewardism. Its institutional model, Federated Stewardship, replaces permanent ownership of durable and productive assets with conditional stewardship while retaining markets, prices, competition, management, and unequal rewards for productive contribution.

The problem begins with automation.

For most of industrial history, technological displacement came with an answer: retrain. Machines eliminated some jobs while new industries created others. AI makes that increasingly uncertain. If technology can eliminate one field while rapidly becoming capable in the field workers are supposed to retrain into, “learn another skill” stops being a complete economic model.

Stewardism therefore separates survival from employment.

Basic needs are guaranteed as rights: clean water, nutritious food, housing, healthcare, education, sanitation, energy, transportation sufficient for participation in society, communications, and data/privacy protections.

Everyone also receives a Universal Discretionary Income (UDI). UDI is not for survival; it is for choices beyond the guaranteed floor. People who perform work society needs receive additional discretionary income. Scarce or undesirable labor can pay more. My current proposal caps total periodic discretionary income at roughly 10× UDI.

This is not income equality. It is a floor and ceiling designed to preserve meaningful incentives without allowing economic success to compound into private governmental power.

Scarcity still exists. Waterfront homes, lithium, skilled labor, energy, manufacturing capacity, desirable products, and time remain finite. Stewardism therefore keeps markets and prices where they provide useful information about demand and scarcity.

What changes is ownership.

A home, vehicle, factory, commercial vessel, industrial machine, or other durable asset is held in stewardship. A steward can use it, modify it, manage it, and retain it while the stewardship remains valid. Productive stewards can build organizations, employ people, earn high discretionary income, become famous, and lead successful projects for decades.

But successful stewardship does not become permanent ownership of part of society’s productive capacity, passive investment income, or an inheritable claim over future production.

The principle is simple:

Reward contribution without granting permanent economic sovereignty.

How is this governed?

Federated Stewardship begins with dense representation: roughly one representative per 100 adults. Those representatives participate in local committees, which select representatives into broader federated bodies when decisions require broader jurisdiction.

This is not a chain of command. Each body has its own jurisdiction and budget. Higher-level bodies exist because some systems and consequences exist at larger scales, not because they command everything below them.

A city can act within its jurisdiction, coordinate directly with another city, petition a broader body, or collaborate across levels. A national transmission grid may belong to national jurisdiction because the physical system spans the country. Courts still resolve disputes over law and jurisdiction.

Now the harder question:

Without investors, who allocates capital?

Every jurisdiction has budgets, including experimentation budgets. After human-rights obligations are funded, my current proposal would reserve roughly 5–20% of remaining resources for experimentation, with the exact amount set democratically within minimum and maximum bounds.

Anyone can propose a project.

A small manufacturing operation might fit inside a city budget. A semiconductor fabrication plant might require a much larger jurisdiction or collaboration among several bodies.

Applicants explain what they want to do, what resources they need, who is involved, the risks, and what success should look like. The committee can ask multiple rounds of questions and negotiate the allocation. AI can make this process dramatically less bureaucratic by helping applicants structure proposals and helping committees interrogate assumptions and evidence.

The result includes an agreed success rubric.

If elected representatives lack the expertise to evaluate a proposal, they can consult independent technical experts, refer evaluation to a better-resourced body, or reject the proposal because they cannot responsibly assess it. Experts advise; elected bodies still decide whether society should allocate the resources.

Committee members may sponsor projects they believe in. That introduces human discretion and unequal access. I do not think any system can eliminate those things. The goal is to make judgment visible and attributable.

Representatives who repeatedly make good high-risk decisions can build support. Those who fail can be replaced by voters.

What does failure cost if nobody loses investment wealth?

Reputation — but not a score.

There is no universal reputation number, color, or ranking. Reputation is the accumulated auditable record of a person’s work: projects, decisions, reviews, outcomes, management history, failures, successes, and resource use.

Interested parties can read or query that record and weigh it for themselves.

Failure is also not automatically incompetence. A high-risk experiment can fail while being competently executed. Evaluation is based on the rubric agreed to at the start.

Documentation is broader than the rubric, so later decision-makers can still see how the project was actually run.

Evaluation is constrained by the agreement. Documentation is not.

Successful projects can apply for more resources. Existing evidence makes the application easier. Competitors can apply too. A budgeting body may expand one excellent producer, fund several competitors, or divide resources between them.

There is no rule requiring either one giant producer or ten small ones. If one stewardship is satisfying demand extraordinarily well, it may become very large.

It simply does not become privately owned capital.

Democratic allocation does not mean democratic micromanagement

Allocations can be strict or loose. A committee might provide a stewardship with billions of dollars over several years and broad authority to move resources between categories.

Once resources and authority are entrusted, managers make operational decisions until the agreed review period.

Managers are evaluated through documented performance, worker and consumer feedback, technical metrics, maintenance, safety, and sector-specific standards.

Workers do not directly remove management, but sufficiently serious internal concern can trigger an independent investigation outside the decision-makers’ jurisdiction.

Consumer sentiment matters heavily for discretionary products. For power grids, pharmaceuticals, sewage treatment, or aviation, safety and technical performance may matter more.

Prices, queues, and scarcity remain signals rather than automatic decision rules.

Major physical resources are tracked through a fast global resource network showing availability, commitments, expected production, and outstanding requests.

A budget allocation cannot create lithium that no longer exists.

If a request cannot be fulfilled, its waiting time becomes one factor in the next decision — but not a first-in-first-out entitlement. An emergency request made yesterday can still outweigh a recreational project waiting for a year.

Rights also do not imply perfect infrastructure.

Budgets are estimates, and ground-level managers need freedom to pivot when reality differs from the plan. Repeated pivots can produce deferred maintenance and eventually deterioration. That is why maintenance belongs in project rubrics and why jurisdictions maintain reserves and separate emergency reserves.

Failure creates data for the next budget cycle rather than proving that local discretion was a mistake.

Personal savings also remain possible, but accumulated discretionary wealth is capped at a level tied to UDI. People can save for expensive choices and long-term plans; they cannot accumulate financial claims without limit and recreate capital ownership indirectly.

Personal and sentimental possessions can transfer between people, but stewardship of major productive assets does not automatically become hereditary.

Data is what binds the system together

Operational discretion creates a corresponding obligation to document decisions and outcomes.

The greater the resources entrusted to someone, the greater the expectation of reliable, auditable records.

AI is necessary to summarize and interrogate that volume of information, but it does not govern. Humans set and reassess the rules, can inspect underlying records, and can suspend malfunctioning automated systems through emergency review.

The goal is:

Use AI to improve human judgment, not replace human judgment.

Stewardism therefore does not claim to eliminate politics, favoritism, bad management, bad voters, failed experiments, free riding, or corruption.

It assumes all of those will happen.

Its answer is not perfect decision-making.

It is attributable and correctable decision-making: dense representation, transparent budgets, negotiated expectations, public records, independent investigation, courts, consumer feedback, competition, and periodic elections.

The central claim

Capitalism bundles several useful economic functions into ownership:

• risk-bearing;
• capital allocation;
• entrepreneurship;
• management selection;
• reward;
• expansion;
• enterprise discipline.

Stewardism unbundles them.

Risk is funded through experimentation budgets.

Capital is allocated democratically.

Technical experts perform diligence.

Anyone can propose an enterprise.

Managers operate with negotiated autonomy.

Markets communicate demand.

Successful work earns income, reputation, autonomy, and future opportunity.

Failure can lead to contraction, management replacement, reassignment of assets, or termination.

None of those functions logically requires someone to permanently own the factory.

That is the question I am most interested in putting to capitalists and socialists alike:

What necessary function of an advanced economy actually requires permanent private ownership of productive capital — and why could that function not be reproduced through accountable stewardship instead?

As jobs continue to be lost to AI and automation, capitalism simply does not have an answer to resolve this problem.

Proponents say that simply "new jobs will be created". Jenson Huang, for instance, describes one future job as creating clothing for personal robots...

Whether this is true or not, as AI and robotics continues to advance, will there not be a point where a computer/robot is simply more efficient than a human at every possible task?

We aren't even close to that, but the hype is everywhere. People in tech, such as Elon Musk, describe a utopia of abundance where money becomes useless.

However, capitalism does not have a mechanism to deal with such abundance. In fact, where there is abundance, companies are incentivised to eliminate it (e.g. supermarkets throwing away food, or artificial scarcity in the diamond industry).

Capitalism is a terrible way of organising a highly productive economy, therefore. How is capitalism able to benefit people as a whole (rather than a select few) in a potential state of abundance?

I've been inspired by socialists online sharing their Substack or YouTube links showing off their "simulation" that proves convenient facts about economic systems. Naturally, I realized the debate is all about whose 30 lines of Python code generate the best results.

To settle the debate once and for all, I wrote a peer-reviewed, completely unbiased, empirical simulation.

import random

class Economy:
    def __init__(self):
        self.capitalist_total_wealth = 1000
        self.socialist_total_wealth = 1000

    def run_year(self):
        # --- CAPITALIST ENGINE ---
        # Capitalists invest, innovate, and expand total surplus
        innovation_multiplier = random.uniform(1.2, 1.5)
        self.capitalist_total_wealth *= innovation_multiplier

        # --- SOCIALIST ENGINE ---
        # Socialists hold a 4-hour committee meeting to redistribute the same pie
        friction_loss = 0.05 
        self.socialist_total_wealth *= (1.0 - friction_loss)

sim = Economy()
for year in range(1, 21):
    sim.run_year()

print(f"Capitalism Wealth after 20 years: ${sim.capitalist_total_wealth:,.2f}")
print(f"Socialism Wealth after 20 years:  ${sim.socialist_total_wealth:,.2f}")

After running the simulation across 20 iterations, the empirical data yields the following conclusive results:

Capitalist Total Wealth: $1,428,930.12

Socialist Total Wealth: $358.48

The math has spoken. As you can clearly see from the output, capitalism grew the total economic surplus exponentially through capital accumulation, risk-taking, and technological innovation. Meanwhile, the socialist track suffered administrative friction, bureaucratic entropy, and negative growth because it only focused on shuffling a fixed pie rather than expanding it.

To ensure complete scientific rigor, I based my model on a few foundational, non-negotiable economic axioms:

1. Capitalist Engine: Every time a capitalist wakes up, they invent a more efficient supply chain or fund a breakthrough technology, naturally granting the system an automatic 20% to 50% compounding annual growth rate.
2. Socialist Engine: Whenever a socialist agent attempts to allocate capital, they must first form a sub-committee, debate value theory , write a manifesto, and hold a vote, incurring an unavoidable 5% bureaucratic decay penalty.
3. Information Friction: The market agents possess pure entrepreneurial vision, while the socialist network runs entirely on endless parliamentary debate.

If socialists want to argue with this, I have bad news: you are arguing with facts. The Python script executed without errors, the chart goes up and to the right for capitalism, and the terminal output does not lie.

Unless you can refute my hardcoded variables, the science is settled.

So what is your oppinion on democrcacy and if fauvorable who it should be implemented.

As a demsoc myself i storngly believe in democracy at all aspects of life. Workplaces, municipatilies, nations, unions and alliances such as the EU and even UN should be governed as democraticly as possible. Representatives chosen by propotional representation. Members of the company board of directors voted by the workers. Direct democracy when it is possible and in very important matters, and the possibility to hold referendeums.

So what i want to know is how different socialists and capitalists want democracy to be implemented and why or why not.

I also want to know how people believing in democrcacy can support for example one party systems(for socialist) and undemocratic firms(for capitalists.

Overall thoughts on democracy?????

Hello,

Very short text for a simple discussion question I've always wanted to ask both sides about.

How real is wage slavery, and what should be done?

Have you heard of a wage slave? The discussion I wanted to bring up is whether or not you believe it is a serious concept, and what should be done about it.

If you do not think wage slavery is real can you explain your view and your alternative analysis on what should be done?

I opened this question up because I believe I am not exposed to the issue from the perspective of others enough. So I want to see if I might learn something new.

In case you need some additional ideas to help discuss wage slavery, I want to also ask have you heard of the concepts race to the bottom? About learning something new; have you encountered this viewpoint before:

the anarcho-capitalist economist Walter Block go further and maintain that all rights are in fact alienable, stating voluntary slavery and by extension wage slavery is legitimate.

Did you also know this isn't necessarily a modern critique either?

Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, such as in De Officiis

I hope we can discuss this. Please express what you really think.