this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
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Late Stage Capitalism
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In communism, the people do all of the work and the government and kleptocrats take all of the benefit.
I'm capitalism, the people do all of the work and the oligarchs and plutocrats take all of the benefit.
In socialism, the people do all if r work and the people take all of the benefit.
I chose socialism.
This is empirically and demonstrably false. You've been lied to. Example: USSR, an Actually Existing Socialist state (what you call communism):
As for who was this top 10% and top 1%, the highest paid people were actually highly trained personnel like university professors, prominent artists, researchers, etc.
Communism definitionally does not have a government.
I prefer to imagine the people and the government are one in the same. It's an easier leap
And yet...
Yeah, and yet westerners blasted with anti-communism propaganda 24/7 seem to believe that communism is something which it isn't. Shocking, I know.
No. And yet every single really works example of communism had a central government filled with kleptocrats who stole everything from the workers and gave them crumbs to survive on. Communism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin.
This is a lie. Example case, USSR, the first ever communist state to exist:
Actually existing socialism, every single time, has reduced inequality to the lowest levels seen in the regions where it's been applied, and provides better outcomes at equal levels of development in most key indices (life expectancy, education access, access to healthcare, housing, employment, inequality)...
Compare the average life in China vs India, and how it's changed in the last 75 years or so. You can do the same with Russia and Cuba.
One side is getting a hell of a lot more than "crumbs", and they haven't even achieved communism yet.
There is no communist country on this planet, all examples you are thinking about are countries which have achieved socialism to some degree. Most of them are ruled by parties which want to achieve communism eventually (and thus call themselves communist parties). Nobody is claiming that those countries have achieved communism.
And also, working people in those countries have it much better than their capitalist neighbours. There is a very clear difference if you look at speed of quality of life changes, HDI improvements, wealth distribution, or minority rights.
The ideal of communism is an impossible utopia. When people talk about communism they're talking about the examples we've seen in practice.
If you only want to talk about utopias, capitalism has one just as good and just as impossible. You could say that true capitalism has never been seen yet.
What you mean to say is every people or group of people reaching power promising to establish a communist regime so far ended establishing a sovietic dictature, and that curiously looks like a direct jump to late stage capitalism.
That's not what I meant to say but it's not far off reality. Communism has been co-opted in every case by authoritarians and kleptocrats which makes it virtually indistinguishable from late stage capitalism.
Isn't that argument literally a meme? No true Scotsman and all that
No, it isn't. Nobody in their right mind claim that any country has achieved communism. For now it is just a utopic idea of how humanity could exist post-capitalism.
What has been achieved by some countries to varying degrees is socialism (worker ownership on the means of production via a centralised economy).
Makes sense, thx
To call something communism requires advanced "productive forces" (industry/energy/automation) that will enable advanced "production relations" (property/capital/opportunity) where everyone will do what they can and will use as much as they need. The USSR and all so-called communist states were underdeveloped countries where "productive forces" were at a very low level and it was not possible for them to have "communist production relations". They were autocratic kleptomaniac states, nothing more. The closest example of a communist society is Star Trek. That's how far humanity is from communism. Today it seems like a utopia, but I suppose that to people who lived in the year 750, the possibility of free movement, choice of representatives, choice of work, opportunity for education seemed like a utopia
You keep using the word "kleptomaniac" to refer to Actually Existing Socialist states. Can you provide data regarding inequality in, say, socialist Cuba, USSR?
Nobody in their right mind would claim USSR had achieved communism. It did achieve socialism to some extent.
USSR was ruled by a communist party, i.e. a party striving to achieve communism. Lenin postulated that in order to achieve communism (stateless, classless, moneyless society), first one has to achieve world-wide socialism (worker ownership on means of production via a state-managed centralized economy), and then transition by withering away the state. Stalin reduced the ambition to just "socialism in a single country", with the goal of eventually achieving communism at some later date. This was the prevalent ideology of CPSU until the dissolution.
Based on what? USSR had many great technical achievements, and the industrial base was pretty good at the time too. Planned economy tended to not focus on consumer stuff (which was a mistake in some ways), but industrial&military production was on par with the west if not better.
Stalin himself did not do this, materialism made the CPSU realize this after Lenin's death. When Lenin died, there was big debate in the party about whether socialism in one country should be pursued first, and the party as a whole, seeing how they had been invaded by over 10 nations during the civil war for the unforgivable sin of being communists, realized that they needed to first focus on industrializing the country in order to resist further onslaughts by capitalist forces in the future.
Trotsky was opposed to this and represented the opposition to Stalin's socialism in one country, but ultimately the party as a whole opted for socialism in one country, not because Stalin somehow lied to everyone and took dictator powers, but because it was the most logical thing. The USSR proceeded with the plans for rapid industrialization after 1929 (when the economy had fully recovered from the civil war destruction), grew industrial production and GDP at 15% per year, and ultimately laid the foundations for the industrial might that was able to save Europe from Nazism, at the terrible cost of 25 million Soviet lives.
you're gonna wake the tankies
Top o' the morning' to ya! Yeah, disinformation wakes me up ngl