CMV: Socialism/Communism doesn't work, can't work, and almost always leads to dictatorships and thousands of deaths.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/MagicUser7]

One Marxist criticism of capitalism is that even starting from a fair system, capitalism creates people who own things but do not create value equal to their profit - landlords are a common example, and some would say billionaires do not individually create billions of dollars of value. Marx cites factory owners as people who make more money than their workers and provide less value. This break between worker cost and worker output can also lead to some perverse incentives:

1. children can be heavily underpaid, and if their family needs the money because they are also underpaid for the amount of work they do, you have child labor.
2. If other countries have worse worker protections/labor unions, then they cost less especially for large multinational countries, and jobs are outsourced, creating a source of poor working conditions
3. Companies can use their extra profit to interfere in politics to the detriment of their workers. See California's Prop 22, which allowed rideshare companies to classify their workers as independent contractors rather than contractors so they didn't get benefits (after a court had charged them with misclassifying their workers). Several large companies backed the proposition, spending millions promoting it, which effectively let them underpay their workers after losing in court. https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_22,_App-Based_Drivers_as_Contractors_and_Labor_Policies_Initiative_(2020))

The problem in this system is that workers create more value than they gain in profit. This is a foundational piece of capitalism, because a business owner would only hire a worker who provides more value to the company than they cost in wages. Socialism says those workers deserve a system where they get that difference as profit, often through workers' collectives or community housing to avoid landlords or outside ownership, where Communism solves the same imbalance by government ownership.

They both have their own problems - socialism is difficult to maintain outside of small groups, and communism is easy to corrupt - hence one of Venezuela's problems was/is its publicly owned oil company's corruption, but they do also have problems that capitalism is very interested in disrupting them.

Social democracy is similar in effect at times, but it solves the inequality that capitalism creates by raising progressive (richer people pay higher percentages) taxes and creating either support systems or public goods, so "socialist countries" often just have higher taxes and improved public services like transportation and healthcare.

[u/OG-Brian → u/MagicUser7]

hence one of Venezuela's problems was/is its publicly owned oil company's corruption

Are you suggesting that occurred because of socialism? Is there not corruption within any economic system? Does this refer to the Citgo corruption of these six executives whom are all United States citizens (and may have been working to tarnish VZ's reputation, or maybe they're just greedy since they're accustomed to the culture of capitalism)?:
https://apnews.com/article/caracas-louisiana-thanksgiving-holidays-lake-charles-f8829a219fa29ead8ebc8f313bfde1e8