>My dude, it is absolutely you who is playing the semantics game by refusing to use or even recognize a word in its common definition which is agreed upon by everyone except you.

Nobody discussing political theory uses the word that way, but do go on dodging the actual points I made.

>But I guess there is no point in continuing this debate, seeing as how we are apparently speaking different languages.

Not only did you get hung up on a thing I addressed twice, you're now pretending like I didn't.

Capitalists are very few, whereas their capital has been used to brainwash a whole lot of workers into supporting a system diametrically opposed to their material interests.

>No, you are deliberately conflating two different definitions of the word capitalist to suit your argument. I hate to be the guy citing a dictionary, but since your definition of the term is not one shared by everyone else, let's consult Miriam-Webster:

Dictionaries are notoriously terrible when it comes to political theory, precisely because of widespread incorrect use of political definitions. I gave you a form of the Marxist definition, which explains what a capitalist is and why.

>>Capitalism: noun > >>1: a person who has capital especially invested in business > >>2: a person who favors capitalism > >You are saying that only definition 1 is valid and that definition 2 does not exist (even though it's the one that more relates to discussions of philosophy, and is obviously the meaning I intended in my comment).

The second one is clearly contradictory, people have just used it wrongly time and time, likely due to repeated wrongful use by capitalist media in an attempt to think your pension savings makes you a capitalist or a beneficiary of capitalism.

I also highly struggle with why you thought this semantic battle was necessary even after I addressed your point or why how a person self-identifies ideologically has any impact on the material truth of their class relations.

>You do not get to gatekeep how the word is used or decide which definition is or isn't useful. You also do not get to tell other people what their beliefs are. Sorry.

I gave the only meaningful definition of the word in a philosophical place. A capitalist makes their income from capital, juxtaposed to workers who are forced to sell their labor-power in order to procure a wage necessary to purchase the means of subsistence.

Way to go to purposely miss every point I made or outright ignore them by playing a game of semantics though.

>I don't believe these two "extremes" are the only possible alternatives, and the problem with both of these seem to be that the people who have the most knowledge don't get to choose the best course of action.

Private ownership and dictatorship of capital or common ownership and the dictatorship of the working class are actually the two only options, unless total apocalyptic collapse of all of society happens. There quite literally are no possible other options, given how class society functions and develops.

>People make choices against their own interests all the time and the actual day to day interests of a cleaning lady are most likely contrary with the best possible outcome for everyone.

Care to give any concrete examples? I don't see how letting people have democratic control over their lives could possibly be worse than letting the demonstrably genocidal and ecocidal profit motive. If people elected their bosses, they would likely choose the guy who organized the place so that you could go home earlier with more money in your pocket.

Today, workers are forced to take the jobs that exist at market rates, with anywhere from 5 to 50% unemployment with desperate workers ready to undercut your meager income just do they can eat or sleep safe another day. The goal of socialism is to guarantee everyone gainful employment, until the day that labor has been automated to such a degree that nobody needs to work anymore.

Given the inevitable thought of automation, I implore you to do a thought experiment what the Bezoses, Musks, Kochs and Rockefellers of the world would do to the working class should their labor no longer be necessary for all development.

>Innovation requires more than just education; it requires sacrifices of the immediate desires.

I'm saying the foundation is education, and there is no reason to believe people would work less hard or less innovatively if you give them more power over their working lives, as well as direct control over what to produce and when.

We have subscription-based heating in cars now, and 5 or so mega-corpotations designing the same 10 phones with minor differences, developing the same technologies multiple times for absolutely no use or reason other than locking people in their brand ecosystems.

This is not to speak of the funding of fascism, endless wars of aggression and conquest, or coups against anyone who dares seek true sovereignty for their nation.

>My gripe with this democratic decision making with everything is that it is only desirable if all the actors would be experts on whatever they are deciding on.

Workers are literally experts at their jobs. If you've ever had a job I'm sure you're aware of shitty micro-managing bosses or company-wide rules that make absolutely no sense for your particular store, but still have to be mindlessly followed because corporate said so.

>I'm fairly confident that majority of people aren't able under any circumstances to make the best decisions for the good of the whole.

The alternative we're currently working with, we know none of the decisions are taken with anyone's except the owners best in mind. All that is taken into account is profit, whether millions of people die and large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable.

>I'll give a silly example off my head: Do you really believe that it would be desirable that the vote of the vain cleaning lady (who believes in energy healing) had the same weight as a doctor on what medical devices or new treatments the hospital should invest in?

What makes you think every person would be taking every decision? Wages are an obvious example where everyone should ideally get to vote, until money can be abolished. The cleaners should have more power over cleaning, the doctors and nurses etc over the actual medical care and so on. Today we treat those who can afford it and let those who can't suffer and die, because that's what the bottom-line calculator on some insurance schmuck's PC says.

>Many people are stupid and short-sighted on even their own simple life decisions, how could it possibly be desirable to let them have equal say in choices that have complex implications for everyone?

The profit incentive is simple. The economy has to grow or it implodes, and even when it does grow it implodes every 10 years, killing millions and throwing many many more into poverty. What we produce doesn't matter, no matter how bad for the people or the environment, so long as it produced a profit.

Planned obsolescence is also a real gift, where we could make virtually indestructible products but the markets have been cornered by a few monopolists and now they intentionally break their things early to sell more of them.

Then we have the fact that millions and millions of tonnes of food is simply thrown out and has bleach poured on it or it goes into containers with police protection, to stop people from eating and paying less for the maximally marked-up goods that remain for sale. These are the type of inherent contradictions of capitalism that waste billions of working hours, millions of tonnes of food and millions of lives every year.

>Isn't the whole thing a massive assumption? Shouldn't we ultimately favor the system that in reality produces most output and not because it is based on some holy tenets?

Which again and again has been proven in real life to be socialism. China was in a similar position to India in the 1900s and today their economy is 6 times larger in merely 80 years, having eradicated the worst poverty of which a couple hundred million Indians still suffer, not to mention the brutal oppression peasants suffer, as well as the highly patriarchal and socially debilitating caste system.

Even Cuba, suffering the worst economic sanctions in modern history, has higher life expectancy, literacy and access to healthcare compared to the US, let alone nations with similarly low levels of economic development.

>Every single socialist country has faced historically unprecedented levels of starvation. The RSFSR blew well past the Russian Empire's worst famines within 4 years of its foundation, and more than doubled that as the USSR a single decade later. Your argument not only doesn't have any factual foundation, but is based on outright lies. The rest follows.

The countries that made up the USSR had famines often several times a decade for centuries and hunger, illiteracy and homelessness were all but eradicated in a few decades of socialist rule. Since the collapse, hunger, homelessness and poverty has come back in droves, which I'm sure you have an explanation for?

I also don't know what type of history you've been reading if there is no famine today under capitalism (10 million yearly starvation deaths when there's a vast surplus, as opposed to in those newly formed nations straight out of civil, anti-imperial and world war) or that the feudal peasants actually starved less. This is demonstrably false, and efforts to argue otherwise are not rarely based in Nazi propaganda.

>>I don't seek power, but I want to democratically be able to participatein production. I want to elect my bosses and be in equal social standingwith all my co-workers, whether they require extra support at work orif they are the single most productive person there.

>Can you explain why communists and socialists assume that democratic planning of companies would actually produce more innovation or more products for everyone?

It's not necessarily concerned with innovation or more products for everyone, but with balanced power and working on realizing the needs of the people before the wants. If we educate 20 times more people, we will have probably have several times higher innovation, but would have to drastically reallocate the consumption of the most privileged.

>Doesn't it sound crazy that a cleaning lady who doesn't know anything about the company or the product would have equal say in how the company profits should be reinvested or who should be the head of R&D with the people who actually know something about how the business world runs?

Capitalists are very rarely talented in any of the many fields required to run a business, as opposed to the people who actually create the products and services. The cleaners may argue more equal compensation for the value they provide (sanitary workplaces are indispensable to our health) and how they need to do their job, while software engineers may argue how the code structure should look and the economics department on which area of the product needs most improvement to meet some productivity standard.

>Why are they assuming that people wouldn't just make short-sighted and ultimately destructive choices?

Because it's against their interests, as opposed to oil and weapon's lobbies starting wars and literally eradicating life on the planet, simply because it benefits only the owners of such companies.

>Or are the real results irrelevant, we can hinder all innovation and possibly starve to death because all that matters is that we all made that decision?

Innovation comes from education and application of that education, if we educate many times more people and give them power over their workplace, then innovation will 100% to up over time.

>You're nitpicking by only focusing on a single definition of the word capitalist, but substitute whatever word you want for "someone who thinks capitalism is a good economic system" (and I realize the way I phrased that sets it up for some pithy zinger but can we please not?)

It's not nitpicking, this is literally a philosophy forum meant for discussion and I'm giving the only philosophically useful definition of capitalist. There are objective realities of the class-based societies we live in and your direct material interests depend on how you relate to that social system.

If you've read all that socialist theory and you are a worker, then you must understand that the organization of power in your favor as opposed to against it would allow you greater freedoms and less alienation.

I did understand what you meant by team capitalism and I reject the idea that socialism doesn't allow for nuanced policy in regards to economic problems.

Choosing socialism only means choosing workers' power and working on undoing these exploitative systems permanently and at the speed in which it is possible to do so. If it is beneficial to workers that some level of private property and profit remains for the time being and in a controlled setting, despite it being socially backwards, then that policy will be chosen.

Both public ideological discussions and scientific experiments would be taken into account when balancing socio-cultural development with the realities of economic demands.

>8.9% percent of malnourished people in the world is not a lot in a historical perspective (though I agree it should be 0%). Certainly not compared to the famous failures of central planning.

It could have been zero for decades at this point, but isn't, precisely because multinational corporations dominate the planet and drive workers and peasants into subsistence level wages.

Every single socialist country eradicated famine within decades of their establishment, whereas capitalism has perpetuated it and directly killed hundreds of million people through starvation since, despite incredible advances in technology and productivity.

This is not to mention the progress held back by a billion people currently eating less than their daily needs as well them and many more being unable to receive adequate education, which every socialist says should be universally available to the highest level without a price tag to the student.

>This is my point in this discussion - markets are useful tools. Even if your goal is communism, ideas that come from capitalism can be a valuable part in getting there, if only for being tested extensively in both mathematical theory and real life and their strengths and weaknesses being known. Like, even if you somehow get the smartest and most compassionate people in the country to run it, Project Cybersyn-style, they may decide that the best way to get fast feedback to their policies from experts and the public is a prediction market with play money. The amount of play money they earned could be a useful parameter to evaluate their performance (alongside holistic considerations perhaps).

Markets predate capitalism by several thousands years and have existed in every single socialist nation so far to varying extents. Capitalism is simply the age of privately owned capital and wage labor as the driving forces of production.

I will agree that even in a best-case scenario for computer planning the results will likely say that for some time that we need markets for some particular forms of production, but that the science of planning needs to be heavily invested in. Planning sciences are largely missing from capitalist academia because the state itself is a class-based institution which will tend to heavily reinforce education that runs along its economic-ideological basis.

As long as the economy isn't actually controlled by the working masses though, none of these measures can be even tested.

So, the reason why I reject capitalism is because workers do everything and control nothing. I was born working class and I will die working class. So will likely you and almost everyone both of us will ever know too. A few of our friends might have successful small businesses if they wish to pursue that life, but almost nobody will be an actual capitalist.

I don't seek power, but I want to democratically be able to participate in production. I want to elect my bosses and be in equal social standing with all my co-workers, whether they require extra support at work or if they are the single most productive person there.

>Shutting out capitalism deprives you of the most efficient method of decentralized resource allocation known to man. (It also means to actively ignore the will and worldview of a vast chunk of humanity, and the working class in particular.)

The one where we throw away 1/3rd of all food while 1 billion are malnourished and millions of children die of starvation yearly as a cause? Its effectiveness is only in relation to profitability, not human welfare, sustainability or peace.

>Having all resources and means of production shared by the public is wonderful, but if you run a lumber mill and there are twenty enterprises asking you for lumber the total amount of which is ten times what you can provide, and you can't just get all of them to sit down and agree how much each should get, then a monetary economic system and a stock market could save everyone involved a lot of headache.

Just because planning isn't already perfect doesn't mean it shouldn't be applied to the degree in which it is useful. Markets should be seen as tools, not means to an end (which again is private property and the profits it generates for the very few who own it.)

I.e. if the lumber business couldn't be entirely planned, plan what can be planned and strive to educate more economic planners, ecological planners and whichever other fields of intersectional study are required to increase resource efficiency and harmony between man and nature.

In any case, the bottom line is to advance worker's rights and freedoms, for shorter and safer working lives, more control over those working lives and a focus on the general growth of social parameters over maximal economic growth.

You don't choose sides, you objectively belong to one according to how your income is generated. Almost everyone is a worker (forced to sell their labor for a wage) and therefore socialism is in their direct interest in terms of power and organization.

If you live off of stocks, renting out surplus housing etc, i.e. if you live off the work of others rather than your own, so then you're a capitalist.

You don't shut out any solutions by shutting out one or the other. Capitalism is the cause and socialism is the solution, if child labor, starvation, disease or climate change is something you're concerned with.

If you own stocks or outright run private businesses that depends on this exploitation to fund your extravagant lifestyle and you don't give a shit what happens to nature during or after your life, then capitalism is the means to your end and socialism is the problem.