I do want free stuff. And I'm okay to work for that
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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I think their point is that this is not why "the little people" votes for socialism.
That being said they use it to tarnish the reputation of idealists as populists trying to grab the vote by offering free stuff.
I mean this isn't untrue but I think the real message should be that capitalism isn't oriented on human happiness and the rules of money need to be controlled by the will of the people.
Free stuff? Like poking a hole in the ground in 1859 and getting a 100 times the energy back in an instant?
The arguments against socialism are always just things that are already happening with capitalism.
Capitalists and Socialists both agree you shouldn’t be allowed to freeload a ton of money off everyone else without producing anything of value. They just disagree on who it is that’s doing the freeloading.
I mean I like free stuff too
Yeah, there should be free stuff. Housing, education, healthcare, food, water. All the basics should be covered in a society.
Like, we already produce enough value to turn the people in the tops of our organisations into million-and-billionaires. We're on our way to get trillionaires. You can't convince me that the status quo is somehow better than ensuring everyone has their needs met.
They only became trillionaires by doing activities that make millions of people's needs unmet.
Yeah, people think socialism means that someone is gonna come and take all your stuff and give it to someone else. News flash, none of your shit is that special, unless you have literally hundreds of billions of dollars, in which case, is essentially impossible for you to ever be Anthony other than rich. Once you get a certain amount of money, capitalism basically breaks down and stops functioning because you literally can't spend/lose money fast enough to be at any real risk
The purpose of a system is what it does. Capitalism is functioning perfectly fine.
Capitalists want free stuff and they constantly get free stuff and they’re bankrupting the country to get as much free stuff as they can before the country collapses and then they’re going to move to their genocide city in Israel to hide
Capitalists just want legal screening for their organized mass theft.
But... But... But my piece of paper says that I own everything you produce!
This is true.
...but if you've never been in a group project where one person does nothing and demands equal praise, compensation, etc.. you're lying.
That's one of the big theoretical problems with socialism, you want equality, but plenty of people think they're helping when they're doing jack and then they get defensive when you suggest they do something for the community too.
And that's not about people who genuinely need help and support and actually can't be expected to deliver the same work as someone who objectively doesn't need that help. People who need help should be helped.
Brother, the people are describing are literally the owning class, the billionaires.
Well, in the current system, the people who contribute nothing are called “CEOs” and they receive far, far more than equal compensation. And I think we’re working way, way harder to pay for their yachts than we would be to care for these lazy people who we think won’t chip in as much as they should under socialism
Sure and I agree with that.
But this isn't a situation where you can point to a different group of lazy twats. They all should contribute, and pointing to those where it's especially egregious doesn't touch on everyone else's obligation to contribute in any way.
Listen, i apologize if this isn’t your intent, but you seem to be arguing against socialism under the point that “some people don’t work hard enough to deserve the fruits of others labor”
…so in what way does that excuse keeping a system where an owning class takes the vast and ever-increasing majority of the fruits of everyone’s labor, whether they work hard enough or not?
Why do you think we must dangle a person’s survival before them to induce subservience to the state or the economy? This is in fact psychotic behavior. This is indicative of a system which knows it is holding us hostage to a losing situation because “that’s just how it is”. We are the richest country in history, but only because of a handful of individuals? That’s not a rich country, that’s a slave colony in disguise.
Where money is power and the rich are nerfed less and less by the government through taxation to prevent them from overwhelming the very state meant to protect the people?
Let them earn a wage as the rest of us do as management and let the profits build us schools, hospitals, and homes. Let’s fix roads, build railroads, cover the land in solar fields, underneath which we grow shade crops or graze livestock.
No company nor person should ever be so valuable that it can take our country from us.
Kind of.
…so in what way does that excuse keeping a system where an owning class takes the vast and ever-increasing majority of the fruits of everyone’s labor, whether they work hard enough or not?
It doesn't.
But if I have the choice of either supporting the current system that exploits me and unfairly distributes my labor to rich people who don't deserve it, and the alternative is a system that also exploits me and also unfairly distributes my labor, just to people who also don't deserve it, they're just not rich...
That doesn't exactly motivate me to support a system change, because from my point of view, it's effectively the same system.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not without empathy. I'd just like to limit my support to those who are actually victims of chance in an uncaring universe instead of those who are self-sabotaging and crying me a river about it.
Well, that's a fucked up comparison.
People that do nothing are very probably unmotivated, depressed or simply not good at that particular skill.
Given the opportunity, the vast majority of human beings don't want to sit around doing nothing.
The capitalist world we live forces people to do jobs they don't like to pay for things they don't need.
With our level of technology we should all be living in a post scarcity society, doing fulfilling things that we like.
The only beneficiaries of this system are the deranged money and power hoarders that suck the life of everyone else.
They created this narrative that people are lazy and sadly it has been very effective.
They created this narrative that people are lazy and sadly it has been very effective.
That's not me falling for a narrative, I've been in group projects, that's my lived experience. I'm telling you I've seen it and you're telling me that's actually not true and theoretically impossible. Which is ridiculous.
Also, being useless doesn't equal being lazy. People can be very busy and work themselves to the bone and accomplish nothing. But I've also still seen people be lazy and wanting to earn credit for my efforts.
Maybe I didn't explain myself.
Your comparison of the whole human workforce with group projects is insufficient at best.
People in group projects might not want to be there at all, that doesn't mean they are lazy thou.
Furthermore stressing the importance of a free and fair workforce market, in which each person talent and interest is well remunerated valued.
What we have is a lot of overpayed professions that steer the workforce to them, whether they like it or not.
Ex.: I would probably be much happier fixing appliances but that doesn't pay as well as well as Software development so I ended doing that.
And I can tell you without a doubt which of these professions should be most regarded.
…but if you’ve never been in a group project where one person does nothing and demands equal praise, compensation, etc… you’re lying.
In grade school this guy is called a slacker.
In B-school this guy is called a smooth operator
In the corporate world this guy is called the CEO.
That’s one of the big theoretical problems with socialism, you want equality, but plenty of people think they’re helping when they’re doing jack and then they get defensive when you suggest they do something for the community too.
In business, there's a classic problem - The Principal–agent problem which tackles the disconnect in incentives between the person demanding a service and the person providing it.
Capitalists like to pretend they've solved this problem with Profit Motive. But, in practice, they've simply stacked the deck in favor of the politically savvy, at the expense of everyone else.
Socialists also recognize the existence of the problem. They try to attack it by linking social status to socialist orthodoxy, with mixed results.
But the benefit of socialism is, at its root, ideological. People imprint on a moral compass that demands universal equity and develop a sense of justice predicated on egalitarian economic results. They revolt at inequality and organize in opposition to fascist tendency.
By contrast, capitalists reward individualism, scorn egalitarianism, and adopt eugenics theories to justify their class strata. They organize in favor of fascist policies and oppose even the appearance of egalitarianism.
it’s not a theoretical problem at all - it’s been discussed and resolved. cf: kropotkin and marx.
Do you have something specific I can read by them that addresses this?
Peter Kropotkin — The Conquest of Bread (chapters on mutual aid and social organization)
Karl Marx — Critique of the Gotha Program (especially the section on “from each according to his ability…”)
I'm not sure I agree with this analysis. It's certainly true that mutual aid is a natural instinct that causes people to support their direct social network. But it does not always lead them to help more distantly connected people as substantially. At the scale of a whole society or world this could be a problem. The key of a successful socialism would be designing an economy where people are sufficiently motived to produce and share enough to support a prosperous society. I don't think this is impossible but I also don't think it will be automatic either. It may require careful thought and experimentation about how those incentives will arise and be cultivated in the new economic system. Ideally they should be cultivated with minimal coercion, lest the new economy be hardly better than the old one.
If people would come around on degrowth it would probably be a lot easier. A lot of our labor currently goes into trash that doesn't meaningfully improve people's lives, so doing less of that will require a lot less labor and therefore motivation.
i mean also to be fair it’s never been really implemented- there is a long way to go and the convos now are a lot of, imho, “world building.”
Absolutely. That's why I think experiments with building new economic relationships within our current societies are the best way to test our ideas about these issues.
Yeah, I will also ask for a source on the "resolution" for that, if you have it.
Peter Kropotkin — The Conquest of Bread (chapters on mutual aid and social organization)
Karl Marx — Critique of the Gotha Program (especially the section on “from each according to his ability…”)
Marx doesn't resolve it at all, he doesn't even bring it up and there are no chapters on mutual aid in the conquest of bread.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/23428/pg23428.txt
see?
have you read it? cause i got an understanding of those concepts from those writings
I did read the critique of the gothaer program, I'm not going to read an entire book to maybe find an argument that supports you.
My position is that both Kropotkin and Marx didn't talk or solve the issue I'm talking about, and if you want to prove that wrong, I want you to find a specific quote, page or chapter that does contain that argument. I'm not going to prove your point against me for you.
i am not going to reread it again because the entire or bulk of the book is quite literally his opinions and world building with these subjects in mind. it’s not a source-able concept like in a science journal, because it’s an opinion piece with argumentation. however here are some chapters to consider:
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Chapter 3: Anarchist Communism
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Chapter 8: Ways and Means
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Chapter 10: Agreeable Work
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Chapter 12: Objections
The objection is known. “If the existence of each is guaranteed, and if the necessity of earning wages does not compel men to work, nobody will work. Every man will lay the burden of his work on another if he is not forced to do it himself.”
later
“Well-being, that is to say, the satisfaction of physical, artistic, and moral needs, has always been the most powerful stimulant to work. “
In capitalism, that one person is most often a billionaire. And they don't do it with one group project at a time; they do it with hundreds all at once. And they say, "I'm kinda famous for how many As that I get, you should probably put my name first on the assignment."
In socialism, instead of giving out a bunch of worthless letter grades, everyone gets water, fruit, and a piece of candy at the end of each day! When the person with dragon sickness gets to the head of the line, they're given their food and drink. When they get back in line and tell the teacher, "but I worked on multiple group projects," the teacher tells them, "yeah, you did nothing a bunch of times. You should have only worked on one, and maybe then you would have been productive. Now fuck off, everyone gets one allotment daily. If I see you get back in line, I'm sending you to the principal for trying to defraud the distribution system."
And then when that person complains to their classmates, the classmates tell them to shut up and kick them in their shins. Eventually, that selfish little bastard learns that if they're gonna continue pursuing thievery, then they're going to have to steal the goods that people purchase by trading their extra pieces of candy, or directly steal the pieces of candy. But stealing is illegal, and they get arrested instead of praised as a genius for trying to game the system.
I mean at the same time there is communism which is the free stuff kind of economy. Even tho i think socialism is a better system, i dont really care whether its socialism, communism, social democratism or whatever else that beats capitalism, i just want to get rid of it. Unfortunately a lot of socialist and communists hate eachother but they dont understand that in any case, anything other than feudalism is better than capitalism. Just get over that fucking bar and then after that we can figure the rest out.
It’s true, at least feudalism didn’t destroy our environment, just made us all sharecroppers. Anything is better than thoughtless exploitation .
European feudalism absolutely fucked up the environment tho. Europe used to be covered in beautiful lush forests, now it's mostly a patchwork of fields.
Sorry I wrote this long response I couldn’t help myself, no pressure to read it tldr I agree farming has always been damaging but I’m mad at enlightenment era culture for taking away all moral qualms with raping the land.
— — — Yeah unfortunately farming has been damaging the environment for a long time. Indigenous methods of clearing land like burning large sections of forest to create more grassland for hunting also made a lasting impact in a lot of geographies. Mercantilism, which I always picture as the direct precursor to capitalism, accelerated exploitation hugely though. This is when people didn’t just clear land for farming they traveled to find forests to clear cut just so they could float them overseas and flip the wood for cash. No more medieval ‘everything living thing has a soul’ following Aristotle, instead the enlightenment embraced the secular version of science where the earth is just calculable resources to be exploited and we stand outside of it not as part of it. Imagine clear cutting those old forests in Germany or the Redwood forests in California. Those people should have known better deep in their souls when they looked at those beautiful places before and after, but society gave them a logic that allowed them to ignore a bit of sullying of the soul.
No impression of man as stewards of the environment survived the enlightenment which gave way to a version of utilitarianism that was tweaked to be amicable to capitalist logic (originally utilitarian calculus claimed if we wanted to decide the best use for one dollar we should figure out where that dollar would go the furtherest—one dollar is much more valuable to a poor person than to a rich one).