this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
435 points (83.0% liked)
Late Stage Capitalism
3872 readers
394 users here now
A place for for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited.
A zero-tolerance policy for bigotry of any kind. Failure to respect this will result in a ban.
RULES:
1 Understand the left starts at anti-capitalism.
2 No Trolling
3 No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, anti-communism, or liberalism, liberalism is in direct conflict with the left. Support for capitalism or for the parties or ideologies that uphold it are not welcome or tolerated.
4 No imperialism, conservatism, reactionism or Zionism, lessor evil rhetoric. Dismissing 3rd party votes or 'wasted votes on 3rd party' is lessor evil rhetoric.
5 No bigotry, no racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or any type of prejudice.
6 Be civil in comments and no accusations of being a bot, 'paid by Putin,' Tankie, etc. This includes instance shaming.
Introduction to Socialism (external links)
Marxism-Leninism Study Guide: Basic Course
Marxism-Leninism Study Guide: Advanced Course
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Where is that definition? The way I understand "full communism", is basically anarchism and equality, absence of private property. Common means of production I.e. (and this is probably why it's having a bad reputation) the opposite of autocratism as you seem to define it.
I even dare to say we never had anything close to it on a bigger scale (probably because it doesn't fit in human nature).
The goal is a voluntary state of self-governance, however at a large scale there is usually some committee or authority that is "supposed" to direct everyone towards that.
Historically that power has always been corrupted by the few and communism is never achieved.
Yeah true, I don't deny that, I'm even so pessimistic, to say that even if we have a benevolent dictator giving up dictatorship when the goal has been achieved, that the system is too unstable to exist for a longer time...
So IMO while we should navigate towards a system that is very close to communism, we should probably at least factor in game theory, and try to avoid means that are fundamentally opposed to communism (or at least anarchism), like autocratism (as we have seen multiple times in the past).
anarchy as a model of government in a scale of 8 billion people makes no sense and would be basically the most violent ends up getting everything. As a mental experiment in the rainbow and lollipop world is alright and I would definitely be onboard, but in practice it makes no sense because you need too much power to enforce it, and that is where the corruption would originate.
But my main point was not to only criticise communism, but also capitalism. I don't think communism is achievable and I don't think pure unregulated capitalism is the only crap we can aim for. Hence middle point or just nuance.
Online people, specially online USA people, are very prone to "choose a team and die for it" or "we have to go full communism or it doesn't make sense" or "communism is bad so let's do 100% uncontrolled capitalism". There is no middle point for these wankers (which is very convenient for the politicians and wealthy people, as they get to abuse the argument of reducing everything to the absurd)
That is why I said "doesn't fit human nature". At least on a bigger scale, probably too much encoded "survival of the fittest" (group of humans if you will) , that seems to clash with real communism (when trying to explain it based on evolutionary terms). This can and does work on a smaller scale though (might've even be a thing evolutionary, hunter gatherers etc.).
Btw. Reality is already more nuanced, as there's no pure *ism, it's almost always a spectrum of various idiologies. Even USA, although it's probably closest to what most understand of "capitalism".
USA is a sad example of propaganda, probably because of late stage capitalism messing with the reward system (e.g. social networks), leading to among other things, polarity...