Another person shot dead this time at a rally and counter protest clash in Denver

TheMysteriousGX

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I love how every example of hypothetical not-capitalism failing already happens at a macro scale under capitalism.

Means we got the *best* system
 
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Trunkage

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Damn those bread lines
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Yep damn them. We’d never see such a thing in a Capitalist system

Edit Just to be clear, there has always been bread lines. Every day. Millions of people in the US. Even before the pandemic. Covid just made it news again. And we don’t have a competing economic system needing some propaganda
 
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Iron

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Ever get to talk about this ideological stuff with real people outside the internet?
 

Dwarvenhobble

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So it is better that people starve to death because they are poor because the rich should be able to choose which baker to buy bread from?
No. Better no-one starve in reality but better to be able to actually use money for something other than collect it but then not actually be able to get basic things with it at all.


Ever get to talk about this ideological stuff with real people outside the internet?
Very rarely in my student days normally while everyone was very drunk.
 

Iron

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No. Better no-one starve in reality but better to be able to actually use money for something other than collect it but then not actually be able to get basic things with it at all.



Very rarely in my student days normally while everyone was very drunk.
I find this stuff is usually fully submerged in a person's imagination, which means that their ideas never get challenged. Talking to an avatar doesn't change your mind. Justifying your head-cannon does.
 

Terminal Blue

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A lot less of them and even then there are people who help them to try and stop it happening
I feel like people who believe capitalism works assume that capitalism is a closed, autarkic system that is self-contained within a small number of relatively wealthy nations.

In reality though, capitalism is a global system. The primary beneficiaries of capitalism today are transnational corporations which operate all over the world. Goods and services are exchanged all over the world through international trade.

Globally, 820 million people suffer from some form of malnutrition and 7 million a year will die from it, about 12% of all deaths in the world. These deaths, for the most part, occur in countries with capitalist economies, which are part of that global system for exchanging goods and services along capitalist lines.

Those countries do not benefit from that economic system because their inhabitants do not have capital to invest, they only provide labour. Under capitalism, labour has almost no value. The real value lies in capital (hence the name), so the inhabitants of poor countries only receive a tiny proportion of the value of what their labour produces, often not enough to feed themselves. The rest of that value goes to investors, people who already had the capital to invest, and who tend to live in richer countries where they can use their wealth to enjoy a higher standard of living.

That is why you can have entire economies which barely actually produce any quantifiable resources, because the purpose of those economies is merely to service the needs of wealthy corporations and investors who take most of the rewards from global capitalism. That is why we call them "service economies". For those of us living in service economies, it might seem that things are pretty good. A lot of people are wealthy, we have access to a good standard of living (provided we can pay) and while poverty exists few people seem to be actually starving (although more people than you might think).

That is because the starvation has effectively been outsourced to poorer countries so that rich people don't have to see it and be inconvenienced. It's all part of the service.
 

Cheetodust

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I feel like people who believe capitalism works assume that capitalism is a closed, autarkic system that is self-contained within a small number of relatively wealthy nations.

In reality though, capitalism is a global system. The primary beneficiaries of capitalism today are transnational corporations which operate all over the world. Goods and services are exchanged all over the world through international trade.

Globally, 820 million people suffer from some form of malnutrition and 7 million a year will die from it, about 12% of all deaths in the world. These deaths, for the most part, occur in countries with capitalist economies, which are part of that global system for exchanging goods and services along capitalist lines.

Those countries do not benefit from that economic system because their inhabitants do not have capital to invest, they only provide labour. Under capitalism, labour has almost no value. The real value lies in capital (hence the name), so the inhabitants of poor countries only receive a tiny proportion of the value of what their labour produces, often not enough to feed themselves. The rest of that value goes to investors, people who already had the capital to invest, and who tend to live in richer countries where they can use their wealth to enjoy a higher standard of living.

That is why you can have entire economies which barely actually produce any quantifiable resources, because the purpose of those economies is merely to service the needs of wealthy corporations and investors who take most of the rewards from global capitalism. That is why we call them "service economies". For those of us living in service economies, it might seem that things are pretty good. A lot of people are wealthy, we have access to a good standard of living (provided we can pay) and while poverty exists few people seem to be actually starving (although more people than you might think).

That is because the starvation has effectively been outsourced to poorer countries so that rich people don't have to see it and be inconvenienced. It's all part of the service.
And a lot of people assume it will never happen to their country. Even though they want to eliminate minimum wage laws, fight against tenant protections and UBI and want to slash the tax liabilities of corporations and the wealthy. Making their own country rope for that kind of exploitation.

Ireland was one of those service economies for decades and we're actually heading toward greater rates of poverty than we had then. Like people get that money is a finite resource right? It would have no value otherwise. For someone to have far too much money someone (or millions of people) have to have far too little. More and more wealth is being held by fewer and fewer people. How do people think that's a sustainable system. Like all their wealth has to keep getting sucked from somewhere else. And I mean fine, you don't care that right now because that somewhere else is brown people in a country you can't point to on a map but like the entire point of capitalism is to reward capital and devalue labour. If you don't have capital and your labour eventually becomes completely valueless you're going to get fucked. That's not a glitch, that's the end goal of capitalism.