this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
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Murdered by Words
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No that's literally the name of capitalism, as capitalism refers to a system where socioeconomic power is primarily concentrated in the hands of a capitalist class, what you call "the rich and powerful." Their power stems from their richness, and their richness stems from their private control over the means of production, and thus the ability to extract surplus value from the labor of others. As Smith put it, wealth is ultimately the ability to "command" the labor of others.
I mean, if they did, that's not the fault of "socialism" but of a charlatan opportunist pretending to be one to trick the workers to enriching themselves.
This would be an equivalent fallacy to claiming that republicanism is equivalent to monarchism because some republican did not actually overthrow the monarchy but kept it in power while benefiting from it. That doesn't prove that republicanism is a lost cause or equivalent to monarchism, only that the specific republican was a traitor to the cause.
The existence of scarcity doesn't imply that your society must be ruled by unelected oligarchs who rule at the expense of everyday working people. Genuinely I have no idea how you make that logical leap.
Please point out the example of a truly socialist or even communist society that wasn't just cover for another oligarchy.
While you are technically correct about the definition there is no basis in reality for anything other than wealthy rule. The only revolution that even approached ending this was the Haitian. The rest are just the wealthy using people as pawns.
There is no such thing as "true socialism." There is just "socialism." "True" things, in their ideal form, don't exist in the real world.
If you think a socialist society was just "another oligarchy," then by definition it is not a socialist society, so your wording disallows me from citing anything at all, because you'll just claim it wasn't "true socialism."
No. Capitalism is a system where socioeconomic power can be sold and bought in the form of "capital". It's true that this inevitably leads to a concentration of power, as those with lots of capital can easily get the means to buy more capital while those with less capital need to slowly sell the little they have just to scrape by, but skipping that part and just saying "capitalism is about being evil" is unhelpful because then people will say "we'll, I'm not advocating for just being evil for evil's sake, I'm advocating for allowing free trade of capital"
I didn't say capitalism is about being evil. You just blatantly lied about something I wrote, invented a false quote out of whole cloth, and are confusing a system with an individual action.
When you state, "Capitalism is a system where socioeconomic power can be sold and bought in the form of 'capital'," you are basically defining it as "a system where an individual can do X." No, that phrase is itself incoherent, because systems are not defined by what individuals can do, they are defined by what the system actually does. That is to say, to be capitalist, then the defining characteristics of capital accumulation, i.e. commodity production and the extraction of surplus value by the capitalist class, has to be the dominant mode of production in that system, in the real, physical world.
You are using idealist definitions whereby a "system" is defined by what is written down on paper, and not what exists in real, physical reality. This is a flaw many liberals like yourself have: seeing things in terms of legislative ideas and not what physically exists. It is nonsensical to define a socioeconomic system in terms of potential individual actions allowed for on paper, but they instead have to be defined in terms of the real-world dominant structure of the system as it exists in reality.
Blatantly lying and claiming this topic somehow had anything to do with moralism" and calling someone "evil" doesn't make your "definition" any more reasonable.
Your idealism stems from liberal philosophy in general. Liberals are historical idealists, they believe in human "free will" and if individual humans have free will, then surely, a collection of humans, i.e., society, has "free will," and thus society has the "freedom" to choose whatever it wants to be, regardless of material circumstances. You thus have a hyperfocus on understanding systems based upon the ideas and ideals written down on paper by the people who run it, because that is ultimately seen as the determining factor for the whole system.
But that is not how Marxists see the world. Human societies are physical machines built in the real, physical world, built upon real material circumstances. These unconsciously dictate the structure of the basic structure of that socioeconomic system, and the legislation that is later enacted is only there as post-hoc rationalization for something that already, for the most part, pre-existed.
The aim of political economy, then, is to objectively study these physical structures as they arise, and to document them as they really exist in the real world. The ideals and morals of the leadership of a society in what they write down on paper or legislation or say in their speeches is not of primary concern. The primary concern is actual material system that exists in the real, material world.
The rich don't give up power easily, but they do steal words and concepts in order to undermine them and keep doing what they've always done. Your society never got rid of the rich and powerful, and you called it socialism anyway. That's your problem.
Yeah just like capitalism/merchant guilds didn't actually boot out the aristocracy. It shook things up a bit, but they hung on by doing a rebrand.
Let me guess, you're from Mexico and 15 years old, and want to tell me about the horrors of living under socialism.
Like after the French Revolution other people just became the rich ruling class.
But its not the "ism", it's the corrupt people that gain and warp the power to benefit of themselves.
Most revolutions are just the upper classes playing musical chairs while the lower classes are only allowed to operate the record player.
This is a jaded but correct view.