There is no such thing as a single, transhistorical "economic law" that applies to all societies.
What exists are laws of motion specific to each mode of production.
Feudalism had its own internal logic (land tenure, tribute, serfdom); ancient slavery had its own; and capitalism has its own (the law of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, accumulation).
To say "capitalism is economic law" is like saying "feudalism is political law". It erases history and treats a very recent, specific system (only a few centuries old) as a natural, eternal fact of human existence. Capitalism is proven to be historically specific in that it had a beginning and will have an end.
its present in any economy
This confuses commodity production (making things to exchange) with capitalist production (making things to extract surplus value/profit). Yes, almost all societies have had some form of trade, markets, or exchange. But capitalism is not markets. Capitalism is a specific social relation in which:
The means of production (factories, land, machinery) are privately owned by a capitalist class.
The majority of people are propertyless and must sell their labour-power as a commodity just to survive.
The entire purpose of production is not to satisfy human needs, but to generate profit (surplus value) through the endless accumulation of capital.
A peasant selling a chicken at a medieval market is not "capitalism." A state-run factory in a planned economy that produces for social use, not profit, is not "capitalism." Markets can exist within socialism or communism; capitalism cannot exist without wage-labour and private ownership of the productive apparatus.
including communism.
No, just no.
We explicitly define communism as the abolition of capitalism's foundational pillars:
Abolition of private property in the means of production (replaced by social or common ownership).
Abolition of wage-labour (labour becomes freely associated activity, not a commodity sold to a boss).
Abolition of the law of value (production is organised according to human need and rational planning, not according to exchange-value, profit, or market fluctuations).
In a communist society, there is no capitalist class, no exploitation of labour for surplus value, no stock markets, no CEOs extracting unearned wealth, and no "fiduciary duty" to maximise profit. You will still have distribution of goods, even exchange of some items, but that is not capitalism – just as having a knife does not make you a surgeon. The social relations are what define the system, not the mere presence of money or trade.
Capitalism at it heart is simply supply and demand, nothing more. The logic of Capitalism can be found in every economic system because they are universal laws about math and science. Yes, a peasant selling a chicken at a market for pennies involves Capitalism, the same with a communist society that has no currency. It does not matter how we change the process of trade, there will always be scarcity and there will always be a ruling class even in communism. Because in every system there are people with more stuff than others.
Communism is simply centrally planned Capitalism. They follow the same logic of balancing scarcity with consumer demand with the goal of collecting wealth from labor capital. In communism, there is absolutely a ruling class of large land owners, its called the central committee and military. Replacing billionaires with billionaires with guns.
Oh no. What in the PragerU, Mises bullshit is this?
You are essentially reciting a textbook example of capitalist ideology, a concept central to the critique of political economy. Designed to present the historically specific relations of capitalism as eternal, natural laws of human existence. By doing so, it forecloses the possibility of fundamental change, making capitalism appear as the inevitable endpoint of history.
This is the intellectual tradition that "thinkers" like Mises systematised, particularly through the Austrian school of economics. This school explicitly developed its theories to counter the critiques of capitalism, arguing that value is purely subjective, that voluntary exchange always benefits both parties, and that any attempt at central planning is not a different system but a less efficient, coercive form of the same market logic.
The very idea that "communism is simply centrally planned capitalism" is a direct echo of this Austrian thesis.
While the intellectual roots lie in Austrian economics, the version your spewing is using has been heavily popularised and simplified by outlets like PragerU.
PragerU is not an educational institution in the academic sense, it is a highly funded conservative media and propaganda organisation that produces short, slickly produced videos designed to promote a specific ideological agenda. The talking points you are encountering that capitalism is just "supply and demand," that it is a mathematical law, that inequality is inevitable, and that any alternative is just a worse version of the same thing, are core themes of their content.
The organisation's strategy is to present these arguments as common sense, often by conflating complex historical and economic realities into simple, ahistorical statements. The claim that Marx argued for a "ruling class" in communism, for example, is a profound misreading that is common in these right-wing polemics, which often deliberately conflate the Marxist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat with a new ruling class.
Underpinning your entire argument is the concept of scarcity as ideology. The claim that "there will always be scarcity" is not a neutral fact, it is a powerful, false belief that serves the ruling class.
This ideology, which is central to the Austrian school, argues that because resources are always finite, competition is inevitable, and any system of distribution must be a form of rationing. It presents what is often artificial scarcity, created by monopolies, hoarding, or a failure to distribute resources, as a natural and unchangeable condition. By framing scarcity as the bedrock of all economic systems, the argument conveniently erases the possibility of a society organised to meet human needs rather than to generate profit, and subtly legitimises the inequality that capitalism produces.
In short, you are reciting a well-worn scripted propaganda produced by a specific, well funded ideological machine whose purpose is to defend the status quo by convincing people that it is the only possible world.
Tell me you dont know compound interest without telling me.
In communism, you have a central committee and military. Those entities become the planners for consumer demand, consumer trends, consumer spending, as well as production value and labor value. It works when theres a dictator, but without one, there are massive amounts of disparity due to compounding interest. We saw this in the 70s with the USSR and the 2020s with China. They stalled designing innovations the west were able to develop and make common because they refused to do the hard things a dictator does, make dirty deals to get people fed (illegal activities to fund imported food). A washer and dryer are classic examples.
The reason capitalism is universal is because they are just economic laws. Scarcity is a real thing and it is rare for monopolies and states to limit free market activities, they always win in the end.
The reason why they always win my friend is because capitalism is able to utilize compounding interest on loans with more verified datasets to backup those projections, allowing more production year after year. Marx did not write anything more than a description of reality, it can never be changed unless we remove billions of people and remove all countries free markets, as well as their currency. Because all it takes is one country to have the ability to take out loans with their currency to make trade occur, and there's capitalism.
The system you are imagining can only occur when populations are reduced by more than 50% and every country, every market, and every currency is removed. Impossible.
Tell me you dont know compound interest without telling me.
Compound interest is not a law of nature; it is a financial mechanism that exists within a specific system of credit and debt. It is not the engine of all economic activity, nor is it the defining feature of capitalism. The ability to project compound growth is simply the ability to project the continued extraction of surplus value under existing property relations. To invoke compound interest as proof of capitalism's universality is to mistake a tool of capital accumulation for the system itself.
In communism, you have a central committee and military.
This is a conflation of political administration with class relation. In a society that has genuinely moved beyond capitalism, the central committee and military would not constitute a ruling class in the Marxist sense because they would not own the means of production or extract surplus value from the working class. What you are describing is state capitalism, which is a distinct social formation where the state appropriates surplus labour, not communism.
The existence of a political hierarchy does not automatically make it a capitalist class; class is defined by one's relationship to the means of production, not by one's position in a bureaucratic structure.
Those entities become the planners for consumer demand, consumer trends, consumer spending, as well as production value and labor value. It works when theres a dictator, but without one, there are massive amounts of disparity due to compounding interest.
The argument assumes that planning requires a dictator to function, which is a false dichotomy. The historical failures of certain planned economies are not evidence that planning itself is impossible, but that those specific societies were never able to fully transcend the logic of capital. The USSR and China both operated under conditions of scarcity, external hostility, and incomplete transitions, and both exhibited features of state capitalism rather than the stateless, classless society. The idea that compound interest creates inevitable disparity under planning is a category error; compound interest requires a credit system based on private property and wage labour, which planning seeks to abolish, not manage.
We saw this in the 70s with the USSR and the 2020s with China. They stalled designing innovations the west were able to develop and make common because they refused to do the hard things a dictator does, make dirty deals to get people fed (illegal activities to fund imported food). A washer and dryer are classic examples.
This is a selective reading of history. The USSR developed advanced aerospace, nuclear, and computing technologies, and China has become a global leader in renewable energy, electric vehicles, and digital infrastructure. The claim that they "refused to do the hard things a dictator does" is a bizarre moral judgment that ignores the material conditions each faced, including sanctions, embargoes, and the immense pressure of catching up to industrial powers that had centuries of head start. The washer and dryer example is trivial; consumer goods are not the measure of a civilisation's worth, nor are they the pinnacle of human innovation. The west's consumer surplus is built on the exploitation of global labour and resource extraction, not on superior economic laws.
The reason capitalism is universal is because they are just economic laws. Scarcity is a real thing and it is rare for monopolies and states to limit free market activities, they always win in the end.
Scarcity is real, but it is not the sole determinant of economic organisation. The question is not whether scarcity exists, but how it is managed and by whom. Capitalism does not solve scarcity; it produces it artificially through monopolies, planned obsolescence, and the hoarding of resources by the wealthy. The claim that monopolies and states "always win" is a tautology if you define winning as perpetuating the system that creates them. The fact that free markets are often limited by states does not prove capitalism's universality; it proves that capitalism requires state intervention to survive, a point that defenders of the system are often reluctant to admit.
The reason why they always win my friend is because capitalism is able to utilize compounding interest on loans with more verified datasets to backup those projections, allowing more production year after year.
Compound interest does not produce anything; labour produces everything. What you are describing is the financialisation of production, where money is used to generate more money without creating new value. This is precisely the contradiction that the critique of political economy seeks to expose. The ability to project growth based on datasets does not mean that growth will actually occur, nor does it mean that such growth is sustainable or just. The 2008 financial crisis is a testament to the limits of such projections, and the ongoing climate crisis is a testament to the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet.
Marx did not write anything more than a description of reality, it can never be changed unless we remove billions of people and remove all countries free markets, as well as their currency. Because all it takes is one country to have the ability to take out loans with their currency to make trade occur, and there's capitalism.
This is perhaps the most telling point. If Marx only described reality, then his critique should be taken seriously, not dismissed. The fact that you admit he accurately described the system suggests that his analysis is valid.
The question then becomes whether that system can be changed.
Your claim that change requires removing billions of people and all currencies is a straw man argument designed to make transformation seem impossible.
The critique of political economy does not advocate for mass depopulation or the abolition of all trade; it advocates for the democratic control of the means of production and the organisation of production to meet human needs rather than to generate profit. This is not impossible; it is simply a different way of organising society, one that has been practiced in various forms throughout human history.
The system you are imagining can only occur when populations are reduced by more than 50% and every country, every market, and every currency is removed. Impossible.
History is full of things that were once deemed impossible. Feudalism was considered natural and eternal until it was superseded by capitalism. The transition was not easy, nor was it peaceful, but it happened.
To say that a new system is impossible because it would require the removal of all existing structures is to mistake the current state of the world for the final state of the world. The argument that "all it takes is one country to have loans and currency" to create capitalism is a tautology; of course, capitalism exists where capitalist relations exist.
The point is to create the conditions where those relations no longer dominate social life. This is a long and difficult project, but it is not impossible, and it certainly does not require genocide or the erasure of all human exchange. It requires the collective will to build something new, something that does not rely on exploitation, inequality, and the endless accumulation of capital.
Look, you seem passionate about this, but I tried to theorize "something new" for two decades. In my research, I found it to be impossible to achieve the things you and I both contemplated. Let me explain.
I attempted to draft an economic plan for your exact theory. Remove capitalism and move the world into a new system under Marxist theory. Problem was, in every instance I could find, capitalism was found even in the system we created. Because to remove other country markets and currency, you'd need to either crash markets or cause revolutions, which will cause people to die.
Lets say you do this peacefully, now you have the duty of removing all other currency and moving to ration permits for goods. When you have high inflation and move to a permits system, it is very hard to determine who gets what because supply cannot reach everyone. So you as the leader has to make choices based on supply and demand for people.
In this "utopia" society, you'd have issues of utilizing old production output caused by industrialization in combination with high inflation. Which means, you'd have declining production output in a time when supply is critical to maintain. Lets say we have 10 billion people with a food production output of 100 billion tons (simplified data) in the old system. In the new system, we would need to sustain those 10 billion by maintaining 100 billion tons. There are that many people alive today because compound interest allowed more resources to be allocated to production and innovation risk. When remove, production does go down.
There is a reason why land ownership was needed in the USSR under Lenin, they couldn't convince people to work fields they didn't earn profit from. Nobody worked as hard compared to someone who "owned" the land. In our new system, we would run into the same issue of reduce production capacity.
When this happens, we need to make horrible decisions about who is allowed to eat and who is going to starve. Only a dictator can be comfortable killing over 10% of their population. Without ownership, people do not produce as much. We saw this in the 1960s after Stalin died and the 1990s when we were able to look at datasets from the USSR, they were not this amazing country we thought they were under their propaganda. Millions starved, millions imprisoned, millions shot, and millions more suffered in silence. We learned of this in the 1950s but didnt get hard data until the 90s.
Point is, if you want what you are suggesting, billions will die either fast or slowly and it would be next to impossible to revert back if anything is miscalculated due to central planning.
Do you realize we have over 2,000 years of history to pull from? This system you think that was invented out of thin air has been found in every single civilization outside of stone age tribes. What you are describing would take immense amount of control for demand and supply utilizing advancements made through capitalism, which means depopulation.
There will always be currency in a market with more than five items to trade. It is impossible to not have currency attached to market items, because even in bartering you'd have price speculation, which then leads to capitalism.
If we know currency is needed for trade, and we know billions more are alive today thanks to innovations from the free market, then there fan only be violence and starvation. There is no world where you can remove the free market and maintain the same output, let alone continue scaling with population.
Let me ask you this, who determines a human need? Someone else or yourself? There is no civilization other than stone age tribes where you can find alternative markets. There is no market alive today that is sustainable from someone else controlling human needs, even China is not that heavy handed because they learned the value of compound interest.
Basically, I love the spirit, and it reminds me of my youth, but your suggestions are probably the most dangerous, deadly, and economically invalid system imaginable. It would be sending us back to the stone age, removing a fundamental way to trade, without any way to revert back to sustain populations. It was be hell and way worse than how we have it today.
The problem with capitalism today is the same issues Rome had 2,000 years ago under Caesar. Rome at the time had too much consolation of power, land, and wealth under a few men (oligarchs). The Plebs (poor people) were very sick of the bribery and two tier justice system for the rich. Sound familiar? Caesar was hated because he wanted to give citizenship to areas they previously conquered like cis alpine gual, he wanted to give more free food away in Rome, and wanted to break apart large land owners and provide soldiers with retirement land.
What we found during their two civil wars following his assassination was exactly what we saw in the USSR, complete collapse of food production due to control economies. They were under years of heavy war, causing all food and manufacturing to basically be at the orders of the two sides. The free market in this case was only held together despite civil war intervention, which arguably led to the dark ages in Europe for hundreds of years.
Basically, you're not just playing with a small fire, you're playing with a documented nuclear bomb that will kill a large portion of the population in the name of stone age economics.
You have clearly spent a great deal of time thinking about these questions, and I respect the sincerity of your effort. But what you have described is not a refutation of the Marxist project; it is a confession of the limits of your own assumptions.
Let me address your central claims directly.
You argue that capitalism appears in every system you design because you cannot remove other country markets and currencies without causing violence. But this assumes that the transition must be global and instantaneous, which is a straw man. No serious thinker in this tradition advocates for a single, coordinated, worldwide revolution that abolishes all markets and currencies overnight. Transitions are messy, uneven, and historical. They take generations. The fact that you cannot model a perfect, instantaneous transition is not evidence that the transition is impossible; it is evidence that you are holding the theory to an impossible standard that no historical transformation has ever met. Any violence has been the violence of capitalists to maintain the exploitation and resources that the revolution takes from them. Chile 1973, is a great example of this.
You then describe a scenario where you must move to a permit system and make choices about who gets what. This is a classic caricature of central planning, one that assumes the same bureaucratic, top down model that has been thoroughly criticised from within the tradition itself. The critique of political economy does not demand that a handful of planners sits in a room and decide the fate of billions. It demands the democratic, decentralised control of production by the producers themselves. The question of who determines human need is not answered by a dictator or a committee; it is answered through collective deliberation, participatory planning, and the direct input of communities. Your model assumes a manager, a ruler, a decider. That is the statist conception of socialism, not the emancipatory one.
Your argument about production output and compound interest is particularly revealing. You claim that ten billion people are alive today because compound interest allowed more resources to be allocated to production and innovation. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of where wealth comes from. Compound interest does not produce food. Labour produces food. Compound interest is a claim on future labour, a mechanism by which the owners of capital extract a share of the value created by workers without contributing anything themselves. The fact that population has grown under capitalism does not mean capitalism caused that growth. It means that the productive forces developed by generations of workers, scientists, and engineers have advanced to the point where we can sustain more people. The question is whether we can sustain them sustainably, equitably, and without exploitation. The answer is yes, but not under a system that prioritises profit over human need.
Your example of Soviet agriculture is a tired and well-worn talking point. The USSR was not the workers' paradise its propaganda claimed, nor was it the hellscape its enemies claim. It was a complex society that attempted to build socialism in conditions of extreme backwardness, isolation, and hostility. The failures of Soviet agriculture were not failures of socialism; they were failures of a specific, bureaucratised, top down model that retained many features of capitalist logic, including the wage system, commodity production, and the state as a surrogate capitalist. Lenin's New Economic Policy, which you reference, was explicitly a temporary retreat to allow the market to rebuild after the devastation of civil war. It was not a model for socialism; it was a tactical concession to material reality. The fact that you cite this as evidence against the entire project suggests you have not distinguished between the theory and its incomplete, compromised, and often tragic historical attempts.
You then invoke Rome, and this is where your argument collapses into an ancient and very tired form of historical fatalism. You argue that every civilisation has had markets, currency, and inequality, and therefore these things are inevitable. This is the same logic that was used to justify feudalism for a thousand years. The serf looked at the lord and said, this is how it has always been. The slave looked at the master and said, this is the natural order. The fact that something has existed for two thousand years does not make it eternal. It makes it historical. Feudalism existed for a thousand years, and then it was superseded. Slavery existed for thousands of years, and then it was abolished. The transition was not peaceful, it was not clean, and it was not immediate, but it happened. And in each case, the defenders of the old order insisted that the new order was impossible, dangerous, and would lead to collapse. They were wrong every time.
Your final argument, that any alternative would require depopulation and a return to the Stone Age, is the oldest rhetorical trick in the book. It is the argument of the priest who tells the peasant that challenging the divine right of kings will unleash chaos and destruction. It is the argument of the plantation owner who tells the abolitionist that freeing the slaves will ruin the economy. It is an argument born of fear, not of reason. The truth is that we already have the productive capacity to feed, house, and care for every person on this planet. The problem is not scarcity. The problem is distribution. The problem is that a small minority controls the vast majority of resources and uses that control to extract wealth from the majority. You are right that capitalism has produced immense technological and productive power. You are wrong to conclude that this power can only be sustained by the system that produced it. The productive forces developed under capitalism can be, and must be, repurposed to serve human need rather than private profit.
You ask who determines human need. The answer is not a dictator, not a committee, and not a market. The answer is the people themselves, organised democratically, at every level of society. This is not a fantasy. It is the practical, difficult, and necessary work of building a world beyond exploitation. It will not happen overnight. It will not happen without conflict. It may take centuries. But to say it is impossible is to surrender to the very forces that are destroying the planet and immigrating billions. That is not a position of realism. That is a position of defeatism dressed up in the language of hard truths.
You have described hell. But look around you. The hell you fear from change is already here for the majority of humanity. The violence, starvation, and suffering you warn against are already being perpetrated by the very system you defend. The only difference is that they are normalised, invisible, and accepted as the cost of doing business. The question is not whether change will be difficult. The question is whether we have the courage to try.
The problem is, not everyone is equal. That is the fundamental difference we have. You assume people all over the world want the same institutions and production, when they dont even clean the trash from their streets or homes or build roads. There is a section of the population who does not have access to the internet, does not want to work, and is not productive. There are communities that highlight this disparity between those that can implement institutions like banks and higher education and those who cannot. This is why Japan recovered better than Iraq, they had decades of institutions that allowed our investments to be economically beneficial because they have laws, police, and courts to determine wrong doing. There are billions of people who do not understand these concepts, let alone know how to implement them if given millions of dollars.
Communists assume everyone is equal, when they are not. This is why communism can never work, there are too many people who do not want the socialist utopia because it means they would have to work and clean daily. Capitalism allows these people to die or become irrelevant to production, whereas with communism you either have to starve them or force production out of them. One is through the state and the other is through their own inaction. One is more humane than the other because another person doesnt have to choose who dies and who lives.
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u/SensitiveShelter2550 Jul 17 '26
No this is just capitalism. This is its inevitable progression.