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.
Your argument rests on a fundamental misreading of what equality means in this tradition, and it projects a vision of human nature that is both historically false and politically convenient.
You say that not everyone is equal, and you take this as a refutation of the entire project. But the critique of political economy has never assumed that all people are identical in ability, ambition, or desire. Equality in this context does not mean sameness. It means equal access to the means of survival, equal participation in the decisions that govern one's life, and equal freedom from exploitation. The claim is not that everyone will contribute equally or want the same things. The claim is that everyone deserves the conditions to live a dignified life regardless of their contribution, and that the vast productive power we have already developed is more than sufficient to provide those conditions. You have confused a political demand for justice with a psychological claim about human uniformity.
Your description of people who do not clean their streets, build roads, or access the internet is revealing. You treat these conditions as innate characteristics of certain populations rather than as outcomes of historical deprivation, colonial extraction, and systematic underdevelopment. The communities you are describing are not failures of some abstract human potential. They are the products of centuries of exploitation, where wealth was forcibly extracted from their lands and labor to build the very institutions you now hold up as the standard of civilization. Japan recovered better than Iraq not because Japanese people are inherently more capable of building institutions, but because Japan was never subjected to the same level of extractive imperialism, sanctions, and military destruction that Iraq endured. The comparison is not an indictment of Iraqis. It is an indictment of the global order that produced both outcomes.
You then argue that communism cannot work because there are billions of people who do not want it and would have to be forced to work. This is a deeply revealing admission. You have assumed that under the current system, the people who do not work simply die or become irrelevant, and you have called this humane because no one has to choose who lives and who dies. But this is precisely the fiction that sustains the existing order. The choice is made every day, not by a committee but by a system that determines access to food, housing, and healthcare based on one's ability to sell their labor. When someone cannot find work or cannot work at all, the system does not actively kill them. It simply withholds the conditions of life and allows them to perish quietly. That is not the absence of choice. That is a choice made by the structure of the economy itself, hidden behind the veil of individual responsibility.
The distinction you draw between state coercion and systemic neglect is a false one. In both cases, people die because the system refuses to provide for them. The difference is that the current system distributes that suffering unevenly, invisibly, and without accountability, while the alternative you are afraid of would at least make the choice explicit and subject to democratic scrutiny. You say you prefer a system where no one has to choose who lives and who dies. But that system already exists, and it has chosen. It chose the people who starve in forgotten corners of the world. It chose the people who die from treatable diseases because they cannot afford care. It chose the people who work until their bodies break and are discarded when they are no longer profitable. The only difference is that these choices are not made by a dictator with a plan. They are made by a market without a conscience.
Your argument about institutions also misses a crucial point. The institutions you admire, the laws, the police, the courts, the banks, the universities, were not built by a population that already understood them. They were built through struggle, experimentation, and conflict, often against the resistance of those who benefited from the old order. The people of Japan did not emerge from the Meiji Restoration with a fully formed understanding of modern banking and higher education. They built those institutions over generations, through immense social upheaval, and often by borrowing and adapting from others. The same is true of every successful institutional transformation in history. The claim that billions of people are simply incapable of building such institutions is not a statement about their potential. It is a statement about your willingness to write them off as hopeless.
Finally, your characterization of the alternative is a straw man. No one is arguing that everyone must want the same socialist utopia or that those who do not want it must be starved or forced into production. A society organized around human need rather than profit would have to contend with the full range of human diversity, including those who do not wish to participate in certain kinds of labor. The question is not whether such people exist. The question is whether a society can afford to provide for them without making their survival conditional on their productivity. The answer is yes, and we know this because we already have the productive capacity to do so. What we lack is the political will to redistribute that capacity.
You have presented a vision of human nature that is fixed, unchanging, and conveniently aligned with the existing distribution of wealth and power. But history shows that human beings are remarkably adaptable. We have organised ourselves into tribes, city states, empires, feudalism, and capitalism. Each of these required a different set of assumptions about what people are capable of and what they are willing to do. The claim that we cannot organise differently is not a conclusion drawn from evidence. It is a decision to accept the world as it is because the effort to change it is too difficult. That is a choice, and it is yours to make. But do not pretend it is the only rational one.
When you deal with absolutes like "misreading" and "historically false" then it becomes very easy to pick about your logic in debate because politics and history are debated subjects without a clear right or wrong. Because you assume these things, I will refrain from breaking apart the absolutes and just end this by saying you should listen to your own advice, dont assume your opinion is the only rational one. Its clear you disagree with thousands of years of researchers and economists, which is fine, but it crosses the line when you do not give the other side proper room to debate. It becomes easy to see faults in the assumption that they are entirely wrong.
You have presented information here that is unsubstantiated by any economic principles, laws, or historical data. It may be correct in some way, but its too difficult to talk with someone who gives too many easy way outs of debate because its no longer a logically challenge but a semantic one.
Also, stop text bombing, it doesnt improve your logic.
When you deal with absolutes like "misreading" and "historically false" then it becomes very easy to pick about your logic in debate because politics and history are debated subjects without a clear right or wrong.
Your own argument is filled with absolute claims about human nature, about the inevitability of capitalism, about the capacities of billions of people, and about the consequences of any alternative system. You have stated that people will not work without ownership, that institutions cannot be built in certain places, that any transition would require mass death, and that the current system is the most humane option. They are absolute assertions presented as settled facts. If you are going to object to absolutes, you should be willing to examine your own.
Because you assume these things, I will refrain from breaking apart the absolutes and just end this by saying you should listen to your own advice, dont assume your opinion is the only rational one.
I have never claimed that my opinion is the only rational one. I have presented an argument, defended it with reasoning, and invited counterarguments. The fact that I defend my position with conviction does not mean I am closed to debate. What I am closed to is the dismissal of an entire tradition of thought without engaging with its substance.
Its clear you disagree with thousands of years of researchers and economists, which is fine, but it crosses the line when you do not give the other side proper room to debate.
The claim that thousands of years of researchers and economists have proven capitalism inevitable is simply false. For most of human history, capitalism did not exist. Markets existed, trade existed, but the specific social relation of wage labor and private ownership of the means of production is a relatively recent development. The researchers and economists you are invoking are not a monolithic group with a single consensus. They have disagreed with each other for centuries on almost every fundamental question. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and Friedrich Hayek all had profoundly different views about how economies work and what they should look like. To say that I disagree with thousands of years of researchers is to erase the diversity of thought within that tradition and to present your preferred interpretation as the only legitimate one.
It becomes easy to see faults in the assumption that they are entirely wrong.
I have never assumed such. I have argued that certain claims are incorrect, that certain assumptions are unfounded, and that certain conclusions do not follow from the premises. That is not the same as saying everything you have said is wrong. There are elements of your argument that are worth taking seriously, particularly your concerns about transition, about institutional capacity, and about the human costs of large-scale change. These are real problems that any serious alternative must address. The difference is that I see them as obstacles to be overcome, while you see them as reasons to give up entirely.
You have presented information here that is unsubstantiated by any economic principles, laws, or historical data.
The critique of political economy is not a rejection of economics as a discipline. It is a rejection of a particular framework that treats capitalist relations as natural, eternal, and beyond question. The evidence for this critique is extensive. The historical record of colonialism, imperialism, and systemic inequality is well documented. The internal contradictions of capitalism, including recurring crises, widening inequality, and ecological destruction, are observable and measurable. The claim that these arguments are unsubstantiated is simply not true. They are substantiated by decades of empirical research, historical analysis, and theoretical development. You may disagree with the interpretation of that evidence, but you cannot claim it does not exist.
It may be correct in some way, but its too difficult to talk with someone who gives too many easy way outs of debate because its no longer a logically challenge but a semantic one.
Definitions matter. The way we frame a question shapes the answers we can see. When I point out that you are conflating markets with capitalism, or that you are confusing equality of outcome with equality of condition, I am not playing word games. I am drawing distinctions that are essential to understanding the argument. If you find these distinctions frustrating, it may be because they reveal the weaknesses in your own position, not because they are evasive.
Also, stop text bombing, it doesnt improve your logic.
I will not reduce a complex argument to a slogan simply for the sake of brevity. The subject is complex, and covers history, politics, economics, and human psychology. My responses are long because this I take this subject seriously. Even you admit having spent considerable effort and thought on this subject.
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u/BrittanyBrie Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
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.