this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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[โ€“] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

at least the way a socialist teacher taught me in primary school (and i don't completely agree with him but it's a good charactherization) you have desirable values of freedom and equality and they are in conflict. again I don't necesarrily agree with that and it boils down to the fact that when equality is implemented is always by averaging down everyone which is at the expense of freedom. anyways so supposedly you have capitalism as a system that places freedom above equality and communism as a system that places equality above freedom. so it's not really about good and bad but a conflict of virtues.

it's completely besides the point but i do rank freedom slightly above equality. in reality i would like to ensure some minimum level of support for everyone , i think that should be a pretty low level of support. just the bare minimun e.g. ensured education and equal chance at success at life, and health care depending on the actual amount of resources that can be allocated to it, nothing unrealistic but just the minimum to live without suffering, including other stuff like food and clothing and shelther as well. and then to have the freedom so that if anyone wants more than the minimum they should work for it. I'm sure that the people that wanted to work would be able to produce enough value to provide that minimum life support for everyone. so about 80% freedom and 20% equality.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Capitalism isn't about freedom, it's about exploitation. The "freedom" it prioritizes is the freedom of individuals to lay private claim to the value of public resources (land, natural resources, etc), then use their control of those resources to lay claim to the value of the labor of others (the employee/employer relationship). It's literally parasitism.

Capitalism is the "freedom" to extract profit. Profit is the difference between the price you sell something for, and the cost to produce it. It naturally results in paying employees less than the value of their labor, and/or charging the customer more than the value of a product. It is fundamentally a grift, profiting by skimming off value as a middleman. The freedom of the capitalist comes fundamentally at the restriction of freedom of everyone else, the majority "averages down", that's just a mathematical truth.

The longer capitalism exists, the more "freedom" is siphoned into generational wealth, and the more extreme inequality becomes. Capitalists gain the freedom to live a luxurious life without actually doing any work, while everyone else loses the freedom to use land and natural resources. It's literally just "dibs" metastasized.