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Why Both Communism and Capitalism Have Failed to Humanize Society [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-28
This topic was selected because it relates directly to the Trump/Musk led coup threatening our Country’s very existence.
A Very Brief History of the World
We are a species that progressed initially through the discovery of cooperative agricultural means of food production. Enabling developing societies to support much larger populations and to free some of them from strictly crop growing labor and lowering the need for maintaining groups of hunter gatherers.
Early farming methods
Organized food production freed others to pursue other types of labor, like building dwellings, making tools, diverting streams for irrigation, building fire pits and anything else labor could produce or create.
The Death of Free Labor
With these advances came a fundamental problem, which exists to this very day. A developing society with large labor and agricultural forces produced wealth in the form of food and tool surpluses, places to live, tools to use, etc. More egalitarian methods of wealth distribution eventually became challenged by those who wished to exploit the benefits of this work without having to perform the often hard, primitive and sometimes dangerous labor that work often required.
The Bottom Falls Out
Throughout all of history, war has been predominant.
Classes and patriarchy developed along with qualitatively different relationships to the labor surpluses that could be produced and the requirements to wage brutal wars, which propelled men in more of a leadership role and into fighting armies while women remained a priority to stay at home to produce babies.
Violent patriarchal means of coercion also developed to maintain class privileges along with forms of reproduction of offspring which could maintain those privileges within familial groups.
Wars began to develop when differing groups desired the property or land of other such groups. Labor, often forced, was predominantly done by the oppressed lower classes or slaves of conquest for the privileged minority.
Distributing Wealth: Still our Number one Problem Today
Who’s not to say that in one form or another, this war-like patriarchal nature is still true today in modern day advanced industrialized capitalist societies, and also is inherited in aspiring socialist societies.
It also cannot not be denied that, in advanced industrial societies, any attempt to alter the distribution of wealth towards more egalitarianism is typically resisted by the elites in control or formerly in control of society, in the latter case I’m referring to those taken over with left leaning governments claiming to have socialist goals.
Why Socialism Fails
Most labor is still compulsive and exploitive.
The other material obstacles are both the former inherited dominance of a predatory capitalist culture and way of life which praises and affirms the accumulation of property and wealth via the exploitation of labor and associates it with concepts of freedom and democracy. While it condemns any and all socialist reforms pertaining to wealth distribution as evil dictatorial communism.
Socialism Goes Against the Grain
The “undesirability” and “evils” of socialism are hammered into most working people’s heads in a capitalist society at every possible opportunity, in every manner possible. Through movies, television, schooling, the military, the internet and even for some at church on Sunday. In the 21st Century it’s presented in a “me-first” fashion with the political classes often relying on it to repress any of our more decent tendencies. Trump and President Musk emphasize greed, selfishness, me-first and envy as virtues every chance they get, trying to cover the fact that their inherent predatory nature makes us the victim of their mega me-first policies, which since Trump was sworn in has been increasing been directed toward the working classes and their own MAGA base.
Freedom = Capitalism?
Lunch at the factory.
Collective ownership of the majority of a societies wealth and services, even if some individual wealth is still permitted, is condemned in advance as inherently authoritarian, “communistic” and anti-democratic as opposed to “true freedom and democracy,” which can only exist, we are told, under capitalism.
Truth be told, most attempts at socially modifying a society have sadly failed, largely because these societies tend to form privileged, patriarchal elites themselves in much the same way as in capitalist societies, reproducing the same internal inequalities and separation of industrial laboring classes from having a true say as to who runs society. They wind up maintaining the privileged, propertied classes firmly in control. They also falsely assume, in some cases, that they themselves can be trusted to serve as authentic representatives of worker’s interests in the form of the ruling party.
Recommendation: Donate to Ukraine Safely.
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