Our society is not without faults. Our domestic and foreign policies are also often flawed. To correct failings, we need people who point them out, however unpopular that may be. We should be enabling a wide framework of public discourse, not seeking to silence people. To date, we haven’t quite reached the level of hysteria of 1950s McCarthyism, but we are perhaps coming close.
No, it’s because communism is an extremist ideology. You literally can’t go farther left on the political spectrum than communism. That is the very definition of extremism.
By the way, capitalism is not a political ideology. It’s an economic one. I am a capitalist, but a centrist Libertarian one. I used to consider myself left of center, but the insanity of the left since Oct 7, 2023, has caused me to shift right of center.
“Economics” aren’t political?
Using the left and right spectrum is idiotic and not indicative of how extreme an ideology is. It’s like… 6th grade understanding of the nuances and philosophy of political, economic, and social issues and was created to make capitalism seem like a reasonable centrist position.
Actually, it sounds more like you’re dismissing a standard political spectrum model to make communism sound less extreme than it is. Would you feel better if I used the word ‘radical’ rather than ‘extreme’?
So extreme and radical to you are just “the further away an ideology is from our current form of capitalism, the more extreme it is” then?
No, extreme is the further away an ideology is from centrist/moderate ideologies. At one end of the spectrum is fascism, at the other is communism.
And who gets to dictate what defines a centrist or moderate ideology?
Moderate communists.
You contradict yourself.
By your own logic, if capitalism isn’t a political ideology then neither is communism.
The fact that you wrote these in the same comment lets everyone know that either you are ignorant, or you are extremely misinformed on the subject at hand.
Communism is inherently a political/economic ideology. Capitalism is primarily an economic ideology with political implications.
You are misinformed. Communism has ‘political implications’ the same way that capitalism does. See the list of communist ideologies on Wikipedia for a primer.
Okay, it’s become clear that you really have no clue what you’re talking about. You have a good rest of your life man, I truly mean that.
This comment demonstrates what the parent comment said.
Capitalism is indefensible from a libertarian perspective. A central libertarian tenet is that legal and de facto responsibility should match. However, the capitalist employer-employee contract inherently involves a violation of this tenet. The employer gets 100% of the legal responsibility for the positive and negative results of the enterprise. Despite workers’ joint de facto responsibility for using up inputs to produce outputs, workers as employees get 0%
@canada
It’s been a long time since I’ve read any of this stuff - do you have a reference for the claim about legal and de facto responsibility?
That being said, I would argue that they are not incompatible but rather that capitalism acts as a constraint on liberty. That being said, it is the economic system in which liberty is maximized relative to any other system. No doubt that’s why it has persisted.
Article: https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/
Video: https://youtu.be/c2UCqzH5wAQ
Either one introduces the argument against capitalism based on the liberal principle of imputation.
Economic democracy, a market economy where worker coop is the only firm legal structure, maximizes liberty much better than capitalism
@canada
Interesting theory. Does this exist on any large scale anywhere in the world?
https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100
https://www.usworker.coop/en/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
@canada
I understand that employee-owned companies exist (though I think it’s rather telling that I haven’t heard of any of them) but I thought this was a model for economic policy at the societal level. Those companies all exist within a capitalist economy.
The idea is to mandate worker coop structure on all firms.
It’s not that telling. Without a worker coop mandate, there are collective action problems and market failures. It’s harder for all the workers to cooperate to form a worker coop than an employer to hire up all the workers.
No society has a full worker coop mandate because the modern arguments for it were published in the 90s. Some countries do mandate some worker board representation and codetermination though
@canada
Mandating it doesn’t seem to be consistent with individual liberty, though.
Forgive me for being pragmatic about this, but if this was such a good idea and consistent with the interests of the people, you wouldn’t have to mandate it. This is how things would be done.