Open war is a dangerous thing. So easy to begin, yet impossible to end. Once the missiles start flying and the tempers rise, enormous amounts of death, destruction and military spending are inevitable.
There has to be some threshold of escalation, but it can’t be “two people we suspect may be linked to the Russian government set fire to a municipal government building”.
Ukraines government is either so backed against the wall
Probably this. They can start worrying about morality and integrity once their existence is no longer on the line. I don’t blame them for prioritising their own survival.
I’d like to clarify off the bat that I’m not suited to advocate communism, specifically, as the solution to our problems. I wanted to point out the distinction between economical and political government systems. But I do think we need to clarify this point:
At its core, capitalism is about freedom to trade.
Capitalism is about private ownership of goods and infrastructure required to produce other things, allowing the owner to charge others for the privilege of using them. Once you own enough, you’ll be able to live off of the work of others without having to raise a finger yourself.
These aren’t synonymous: You can have free trade without paying vampires for having money. If companies were owned by worker collectives, for example, they could still trade freely.
The defining characteristic of capitalism is the accumulation of capital. All those rules you propose are restrictions on that, as in: no longer pure capitalism. If the solution to the problems of capitalism is to curtail the accumulation of capital, perhaps we need a different name for the resulting system.
I don’t think limiting a company’s upper number of employees is a great idea. Part of the prosperity-generating mechanism is the economy of scale, which would be curtailed. I see the issue of monopolies (which I believe you’re trying to tackle here), but I think they can and should be combated differently. More on that below.
I would also get rid of shareholders entirely. Being rich should not entitle you to getting paid money for nothing, and that’s exactly what shareholders are. Worse yet, so long as that mechanism of “be rich -> get richer” exists, the system will be under threat by actors seeking to bend its rules by manipulating lawmakers and judges.
If companies need initial funds to get off the ground, those funds shouldn’t come from private investors. Universal Basic Income would go a long way to reduce the hurdle already, because you need to worry less about being able to survive and can focus on building something to thrive instead. You could more easily bring other people on board with your project, because they don’t need to worry about the company going under and leaving them without a livelihood.
Public credits, to be repaid through taxes on revenue, could help you acquire the tools and resources you need. Profit could be split between the workers, which allows them to afford luxuries beyond the necessities of survival. That desire for luxuries will still encourage profitability.
If the funding comes from the public, that would make the public the owners of these companies (presumably through representatives, but I’ll abbreviate that here). That eliminates the cycle of incentives wherein the shareholders will reward the CEO for making them more money at the expense of employees and customers, because employees and customers are shareholders too.
If the public owns companies, monopolies through acquisitions become a matter not of who has the most money, but whether the public decides to fuse two companies it owns.
Likewise, the public could regulate the actions of monopolistic companies to avoid the detrimental effects of monopolies. They could also split companies to provide redundancies in case of disaster. They could fund competitors. They could make and break monopolies as is warranted.
And if the company goes under? Well, its assets belonged to the public, any money it “wasted” was spent on goods and services the public produced and UBI keeps the people out of poverty so they have a chance to build something new. That particular project was a dud, so you learn and try again.
Heavy taxes on for higher brackets would offset attempts to enrich yourself. I’m not convinced I’d go 100% as you propose, but 90% isn’t unprecedented. Wealth Tax also needs to be a thing, to encourage re-investing your gains (that is: buying the things other people produce so they can afford luxuries too). A well-funded and -run IRS to ensure those taxes are properly complied with will also be necessary.
The one thing all this hinges on, that any system hinges on, is the government / management. As soon as you put people in charge of decisions, you place trust in them. There need to be mechanisms that effectively hold these decisionmakers accountable to the general public. That is the most crucial part of any system that should serve the people. That is the most vulnerable part, which conservatives have been attacking and eroding for decades.
No matter what we want to accomplish, no matter where our aims may diverge down the line, we must work together to ensure public accountability first and foremost.
Godspeed to you, all of you.
The other comment is definitely far too simplicistic in its proposition, but I’ll point out that Communism doesn’t have to be authoritarian. That’s just the result of violent revolution, necessarily carried out by people so convinced that their ideology is right that they’ll use violence to assert it. Revolution requires unity, so dissidents present a real risk to a nascent movement.
Combine those two and you have a recipe for authoritarian suppression of all who disagree with the dominant ideology, or the dominant leader figure supposedly best representing it. What they might initially see as a necessary step to a better world then becomes a feedback loop: Anyone who argues that they’re past the point where this policy is still necessary and justified is a dissident by definition.
Conversely, authoritarian policy also doesn’t require communism. It’s perfectly possible to have a non-communist ideology in power that suppresses all opposition. The problem isn’t communism, it’s violence: once started, it’s hard to reign in again and keep on the right track.
I intentionally make up horrors and monsters to lurk in the shadows or under my bed. Sometimes when I can’t fall asleep, I stare at a corner of the room, imagining some unsettling creature that could be lurking there, staring back at me (if it has eyes at all). I imagine something reaching up to grab the leg I’m stick out over the edge.
But they can’t actually get me. They’re created, sustained and dispelled by my will. They may stare at me, reach for me, but they’re powerless. When I’m done with them, I send them back to the half-existence in the collection of ideas I built them from.
It’s a cruel power fantasy, to make up monsters incapable of understanding that they’re the lesser horror between us, but it’s fun.
It also seems to help me sleep, but that might just be the fact that focusing my brain on one thing quiets all the background noise.
Well, the only social media profile I have under my name is a decade-old facebook profile, if it still exists. Then again, they might not believe that, or otherwise not trust someone with no social media presence.
Aside from the obvious fact that I wouldn’t want to give them any pins, passwords or blood samples either.
It’s a shame because I’d love to visit some places and people in the US some time, but not for the foreseeable future…