[idle_zealot]

I tend to shy away from that sort of rhetoric on HN. Saying that the problem is capitalism and we need socialism or whatever gets you downvoted to hell. Making the underlying arguments that lead to that conclusion gets you upvotes, exposing more people to those ideas.

People, even smart people, especially in the US, hear socialism or communism and immediately think of the USSR or Maoist China. The terms are very unpopular. The ideas are the important part though, and they're pretty popular.

[throwup238]

You don’t need to jump to political extremes and it doesn’t help when discussing capitalism as the successor to mercantilism rather than its own political system. The answer to the problem of capitalism isn’t necessarily communism or socialism or a wholesale change of political system but lots of small solutions like well regulated markets with strong labor laws and trust busting, a more robust safety net, increased anticorruption and white collar crime enforcement, better consumer protection, and so on. Ones that can be mostly implemented regardless of the political system, given the political will.

[idle_zealot]

We had those tweaks. They got pulled back because they're inconvenient for capital owners. The fundamental problem is one of class divide: if you can draw a line between people helped by a policy and those harmed by it, and and power is concentrated on one of those sides, then they'll get their way eventually. Money is power. Therefore, if there's a policy that people with more money prefer then eventually that policy will be law. No amount of "keeping money out of politics" can get around this. You don't have to call it socialism if you don't want to, but if you want to be able to run a democracy that operates to the benefit of its people then the only way to make that stable is to enact whatever policies you need to ensure that a wealth gap and subsequent class divide doesn't form. A simple way to do that with minimal changes is to enact steep redistributive taxes that effectively cap individual wealth, and therefore individual influence gained through the market. An individual can still have power to change the world, but only through the democratic process. You still have money and a profit motive, but it can't get blown out to extremes. Basically put the economy through a sigmoid function. Market signals still work, but get weaker at high values, resulting in less extreme fluctuations and concentration of wealth.

[const_cast]

I don't even think we necessarily need socialism.

So far, we've been pretty good at identifying where capitalism just doesn't work and then bandaiding that area with legislation.

For example, capitalism has no solution for disability. In a capitalist system, everyone must work. Those who don't work should, then, be filtered out - die.

But that's obviously bad, so bandaid - SSI. We say, if you're disabled, we'll give you little socialism, so you don't die. We'll put a communal responsibility on keeping you alive because that's what's most beneficial for society.

There's no rule anywhere saying we have to just let AI make the world a worse place. No, WE decide that, even in a capitalist system.

[krapp]

You say we don't need socialism then give an example of where we need socialism.

Socialist activism is the reason we have labor rights and a minimum wage and eight hour workdays. Socialists are the reason American companies no longer field private armies to shoot striking workers dead. Socialists are the reason American schoolchildren get free lunches. Socialists died to make life in the US something more than grist for the mill for anyone who wasn't rich.

I'm going to say yes, we need socialism. And we need to admit that we need socialism. And we need to stop acting like socialism is a bad word.

[const_cast]

I mean, I agree - it's just a very tough sell. A much easier sell is demonstrating areas where we already use communal reasoning to supplement the failures of capitalism.

[sangnoir]

The best time to have moved the Overton window was decades ago. The second best time is now. It's also relevant to this age, as the current strain of capitalism is showing its ass, and everyone can see it.

[saubeidl]

I think one core issue in capitalism is that it's really hard to decide things that go against the interest of capital. See Big Oil, but also Big Tech these days.

Sure, theoretically a democratic system would allow us to make all sorts of changes to curtail the worst excesses.

In practice though, once the capitalist class has accumulated enough power, nothing that goes against their interest actually happens. They buy off politicians. They manipulate the public, be it through ad campaigns or even just straight up buying the media (Bezos buying WaPo, Musk buying Twitter).

Capital distorts democratic decision making until it becomes completely unviable to curtail their power.

[groby_b]

It's not that the terms are unpopular, it's that every system that doesn't have strong capitalist roots has lost out to more capitalist systems.

Nothing wrong with alternatives, but for that we need to let go of "let's make it just like the thing that also fails". We also need to acknowledge that socialism assumes that humans are fundamentally good, and that ignores that many are fundamentally not. We need to acknowledge that the core idea of socialism, the common good, is ill-defined. (Just like, while we're on AI, ideas of alignment on one value system suffer from that ill definition)

So, no, you don't get voted to hell for saying that the problem is capitalism. You do get downvoted for sloppy thinking if you simply propose "socialism will save us" because it's long established that in this form, the statement is not true.

Ultimately, the issue is that HN is not made for that discussion. You'd need nuanced political debate, and the internet does not seem conducive for that. That's the second reason for downvotes - HN is not interested in contentious political debate, for better or worse.

But no, it's not because we just all immediately think of the USSR/Maoist China.

[dragonwriter]

> It's not that the terms are unpopular, it's that every system that doesn't have strong capitalist roots has lost out to more capitalist systems.

The system with the strongest capitalist roots (i.e., the dominant system of the industrialized West of the mid-19th century which is the system for which “capitalism” as a term was coined to describe) progressively lost out over the time since that name was coined for it by its socialist critics to a more socialist system, the modern mixed economy, through changes largely driven by socialist critics.

> We also need to acknowledge that socialism assumes that humans are fundamentally good.

Socialism does not assume this. I would even argue that the idea that “humans are fundamentally good” is even a coherent claim that can be right or wrong requires a concept of a particular kind of external mrorality that is difficult to reconcile with the premises of socialism.

> We need to acknowledge that the core idea of socialism, the common good, is ill-defined.

The core idea of socialism (like that of democracy in the political sphere, because socialism is exactly democracy without an artificial divide between political and economic spheres) is less “the common good” as it is “the common good is ill-defined, while the interests of individuals are known to the individual more than any third party, and fairness requires equal empowerment of individuals to pursue their interests.”

[sangnoir]

> It's not that the terms are unpopular, it's that every system that doesn't have strong capitalist roots has lost out to more capitalist systems.

The arch of history is long, and we are naturally biased to think of the present as the culmination of history - but it's just a point in time. I do not think "socialism will save us" - but I believe there is a breaking point where society simply will not accept a - as you put it - "more capitalist system".

Politics and economic systems go hand in hand, any economic system, practiced in extremis will be destabilizing. I posit that theoretically the "more capitalist system" wins over the less capitalist one, up to a point, where winning comes at the cost of killing the host society, and thus itself. This is simply a thought experiment, I am not making any declarations on where the US is on this axis.

[dingnuts]

those stupid ignorant Americans who associate the United Soviet Socialist Republic with socialism. where did they ever get the idea that socialism has ever been tried???

don't worry, I associate Marxism with REAL socialist regimes, like Cambodia

[saubeidl]

Just like we associate the Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea with democracy and republicanism :-)

[dragonwriter]

> those stupid ignorant Americans who associate the United Soviet Socialist Republic with socialism

It was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not the United Soviet Socialist Republic, and if you believe that ideological faction and their naming of governments, I want to see your face when you learn about the German Democratic Republic and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

[I_dream_of_Geni]

Pssst: or the DRC

[saubeidl]

I find that part of being intellectually curious and a good engineer is questioning systems.

If we had a systems architecture in an engineering project that kept leading to bad results, we would consider rearchitecting how said system is run.

I believe it is important to make it clear to people that capitalism, too, is just a (imo deeply flawed) systems design. It is not a natural constant. If we find it leads to negative outcomes (which I strongly believe), we can and should talk about rearchitecting.

[kiba]

What people describe capitalism is really just monopolies. Capitalism meanwhile is an utterly useless label. People have their own conception of what capitalism mean.

Monopolies are connected to the housing crisis as to privileges like copyright. They're unwarranted or undertaxed government granted privileges.