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How capitalism works
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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Quick, explain this graph:
The graph highlights that during Soviet times at least 20% of wealth is in top10% hands, the party leaders and their cronies. If it was truly communism then the top10% would own 10% of the wealth. The party leaders and their cronies owned a disproportionate amount of wealth. Everyone was equal, but some were more equal among others.
It also highlights how the erosion of social services and a lack of a federal government opposing corporate interests is to the detriment of its people.
Authoritarianism is not the way, and neither is crony capitalism in a farcical democracy.
"True Communism" isn't a thing. You don't measure metrics by how purely they adhere to ideology, but by measurable improvements for the Working Class. There is Capitalism, Socialism (where the USSR stood), Lower-Stage Communism, and Upper-Stage Communism. Each of these phases takes time and looks different. Marxism has never been about equal pay, but the Proletariat taking control and working towards Communism. Communism cannot be instantly lept to, and even if it could, it has never been about equal pay.
Additionally, pay was higher for doctors, engineers, professors, and other skilled workers, as is in line with Marxism. It wasn't just Party Members.
In what way? In the USSR, Healthcare and Education were free, housing was cheap, public transit was highly developed, and workers had more vacation days and earlier retirement than US workers.
Explain what you mean by any of that gibberish.
Top 10% owning 10% of wealth makes no sense as it means perfectly equal wealth redistribution. It is an ultimate goal, but it is not practically achievable. 20% is close enough.
it isn't though. Wealth distribution isn't the aim of communism, just inevitable effect of it. And as such it don't have to be exactly equal. Quoting Lenin:
Also Marx:
As you can see total equality is neither achievable nor desirable under socialism and meaningless under communism.
For all the communism understanders reading this thread: communists still want unequal pay for unequal jobs. The experts and hardest workers collectively owning twice as much as the average workers is acceptable to all of us and desired by some of us.
Our only demand is that you earn the money you generate, everyone earning the same is completely orthogonal and something anti-communists use to steer the conversation and misinform. It would be nice if we were more equal, but it's not what we plan to further with our economic policy. We want everyone to own the means of production, and then you actually gotta do the production to turn that into money.
whats the y axis?
Distribution of pretax national income (before taxes and transfers, except pensions and unempl. insurance)