[Atlas667]

Almost as if capitalism makes everything into a market, and the profits make it self sustaining.

How many will see the connections between this and our capitalist mode of production? Probably few since modern lit/news is allergic to systemic analysis.

The blatant flaws of capitalism can't be ignored for much longer.

[orbital-decay]

All people in my extended family were Soviet scientists and engineers from multiple fields, and outside of experimental physics it was the same or worse. Same publish or perish pressure, same amount of fraud and lack of reproducibility. A ton of papers were made up. My father's lab lead was an absolute fraud (biochemistry), everybody knew that, and my father was unable to speak up until the late 90's.

When I was a kid I thought it was the issue with USSR rotting to the core (it was), but when it crashed and later when the web appeared, it became obvious that it's a common problem with academia and its incentives.

[Atlas667]

The only way to curb something like that is more democratization. Fraud is a common problem in any system anywhere. A reputation score on top would help, only if it can be kept democratically controlled.

There is no single solution, but public fund usurping is basically a law of capitalism, which is why I critique it in this context. Public money laundering is a developed industry in capitalism.

[pooooka]

What I get from this is that the professional academic community -- as a whole -- has hit critical mass, which has produced a cottage industry of paper mills and fraudulent services to support said surplus.

Socialism wouldn't be the answer to this because socialism is famous for struggling with surpluses and shortages. All socialism would do is clamp down (hard) on academic's, which case you wind up with the famous shortage where not enough PHD's are available to produce research for an industry.

And that's not a problem specific to just socialism, that's the fallacy of central-planning. The US government clamped down on welfare fraud and the result were freak government social workers sniffing people's bed sheets and rooting through drawers and forcing everyone to document partners.

This is the situation where there needs to be a market correction because the alternative could be far worse.

[Atlas667]

It's the tax-payer funded business model, the NGO trap. Subsidies, grants, tax-breaks, credit, deductions, exemptions, etc. A whole class of profiteers live in this sector. Even though academia funding isn't strictly categorized as an NGO, it still fits/foots the bill. Public funding of private gains is the oldest trick in the book. Ask any capitalist, they know. And I'm not saying I'm against public funding, but this is often codified into a mafia of sorts when enough money flows through.

The real problem here is the fundamental lack of democratic control over our agencies. That our political organization is intensely lagging behind our productive organization. That our whole political will involves TRUSTING strangers to not be corrupt instead of directly democratizing these processes as much as possible.

But besides that, you cannot remove history from historical analysis. The reason socialism countries struggled in the beginning wasn't an inherent flaw in its organization, but the fact that they were under constant war war by capitalist countries through out their existence. Also keep in mind that most socialist countries did NOT have a whole section of the world where-from to extract riches through murder (S.America, Africa, Middle east, etc), like western capitalist countries had. This is convenient for you to ignore. Maybe because you don't know, or don't care about the super-exploitative history of these places and how they tie into western capitalism. But they are inherent to western wealth and these countries' whole history is struggle against this exploitation.

Not to mention that most of the countries on earth are capitalists and are very very very poor.

To add: Socialism has nothing to do with "clamping down" on X or Y industry, as you hypothetically claim would happen. Socialism is almost exclusively about removing the need to generate capital from production. It unleashes production from its historical ball and chain that is profiteering.

In a single sentence: Instead of production being held back by capitalists generating wealth we can produce for our own needs. It is self sustaining production.

Central planning is not fallacious. Your problem is with corruption, not democratic central planning. The US Govt is a pro-capitalist entity that pro-capitalists try to distance themselves from (ironically). So using them as an example isn't saying anything at all.

Central planning is not "allow a small group of people to decide things", as happens in the US Govt. Central planning is to take into account all sources of information on production to plan said production democratically.

This will always beat the highly highly inefficient speculation of capitalism. Where trillions vanish on a whim and cause of a tweet, where crisis occur every 8-10 years, and where its whole trade market is built to hide that it is mostly insider trading. Again, your problem is with corruption not democratic central planning.

And the way to deal with corruption is to create more democratic bodies where avg people hold real power. I don't see you asking for that either. We call that socialism.

[s08148692]

Capitalism certainly is hugely flawed and yet it is far less flawed than any other economic system we know of. Experimentation with the foundations of society is about as risky as it gets. You could end up with a utopia or you could end up with another USSR. History tells us which outcome is more likely

[Atlas667]

People say that because they are not aware of what Marxism is.

Marxism isnt "lets try something different based on ideas of justice"

Marxism is "Society evolves through general stages: primitive, slave, feudal and capitalist, this is determined by the level production. Capitalism is holding back its current evolution into a society of plenty."

Good luck backing speculation and profit gatekept production.