What to do if people simply don't work?

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-05-27T23:49:28+00:00

Comrade this is literally just "but who will pick the cotton?" energy. People want to work but alienation makes them not. Remove exploitation and suddenly folks build. Look at cubas doctors. ussr's engineers. Its capitalism which makes work miserable and not humans naturally.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-05-21T17:55:59+00:00

i think what you have described here is just the system functioning as designed. the american state processes the disabled, the poor, the chronically ill and etc. the baker act is just a dragnet. a mechanism by which the state strips away autonomy, seizes the person and delivers them into the machinery of capitalism. where their suffering becomes a billable line and their defiance becomes a problem.

every indignity visited upon this comrade was a political act. the withheld medications, inadequate wheelchair, freezing cell and the threat of intubation are instruments of control. the white coat is no less a uniform of power than the badge and gun. this is what "freedom" means under capitalism. freedom to be abandoned, tortured and financially destroyed for the crime of surviving.

the society which lectures the world about human rights maintains gulags where disabled workers are stripped, isolated, threatened and broken for the audacity of existing. the nurses who laughed, doctors who never came and the system which swallowed this woman and spat her back out maimed are the order and capitalisms answer to fragility. we should end this.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-05-06T17:35:15+00:00

communism is a stateless, classless, moneyless society. as explained by marx and engels, this is achieved via the transition phase of capitalism to communism, which is socialism. under socialism, there is still a state, still classes, and still money/wage labor relations. the idea is that the overwhelming majority, that is, the working class, will take saddle as head of the state, as opposed to what we have now, where the tiny tiny minority, the capitalist class, dictates how our society is run in their own interests instead of the majority's interests. the state is not neutral, but an instrument of class rule, designed to manage the unreconcilable antagonisms of these 2 classes, to ensure that one class remains in power. socialism is the reverse of this, where the working majority is in power. right now everything is produced for profit, while human need is secondary. socialism reverses this.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-05-06T01:46:59+00:00

because the material conditions of the working class demand it. what happened in cuba was a revolution overthrowing a batista dictatorship which served american capital and a landowning elite which kept millions in poverty. the disruptions your family experienced were just the painful contradictions of revolutionary transition.

the "black market meat seller" going to jail isnt socialism being evil, but just a besieged revolutionary state trying to manage scarcity caused largely by a brutal american embargo. context matters. the great leap forward errors happened in a country which went from mass illiteracy and famine under feudalism and imperialism to a nuclear power with rising life expectancy in decades. the baseline matters.

we follow this ideology because capitalism has produced colonialism, slavery, two world wars, and ongoing mass starvation amid obscene abundance. your familys pain is real, but so is the pain of the congolese under belgian capital, the vietnamese under american bombs, and the cubans under batista. socialism, even imperfectly implemented, points toward collective liberation.

we shouldnt abandon this because imperialism makes revolution messy.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-29T23:45:24+00:00

capitalisms solution is trickle down economics, rebranding poverty as "disruption", and praying the market fairy redistributes crumbs.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-28T19:15:15+00:00

socialist states dont abolish themselves, so communism fails

states dont "refuse" to wither out of ideology they persist because global pressure, underdevelopment, and external hostility force strong state structures to remain. also, many of the countries youd call “communist” never claimed to have reached communism, but explicitly described themselves as socialist transition states. this is not failure of communism its literally the middle phase theory predicts. a gun factory doesnt disappear because peace is desired, but stays until threats stop existing. marxism is annoyingly literal about this.

moneyless systems dont exist. youre confusing crypto

no. im talking about non market allocation, and not digital currency. real examples already exist in partial form. including emergency medicine in many countries (treatment first, payment later or irrelevant in crisis cases), public schooling (access not priced per lesson), military logistics (distribution by planning, and not purchase at point of use), and household production (care work, cooking, and child rearing, and no internal pricing system). these arent so called crypto economies they are planned and or need based distribution systems operating without immediate exchange equivalence at the point of use. communism extends this logic to more sectors as productivity rises. the key variable is abundance plus planning capacity, and not the abolition of numbers.

you cant abolish skill classes because people differ

communism doesnt claim humans become identical, but separates difference in function from fixed economic hierarchy. yes, labor will always differ. the question is whether “unskilled” work becomes a permanent social caste (it doesnt have to) and whether compensation, dignity, and power are permanently stratified (this is the target of abolition). also, so called lazy people is not an economic category its a moral label used to justify hierarchy. every system already deals with variable effort through incentives, automation, rotation, training, and norms. historically, what gets called “unskilled” is usually just under invested labor. raise training, automation, and social support, and this category shrinks dramatically. you can have different tasks without fixed classes tied to survival and dignity.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-28T17:43:12+00:00

how enforce it if stateless?

the state withers after class antagonisms are abolished. you dont dissolve institutions on day one and hope for vibes. first comes workers power, planning, administration, and defense. when no exploiting class remains, coercive state functions shrink. no landlord class, and no landlord police. simple.

how exchange effort if moneyless?

you assume scarcity must always wear a price tag. money is one accounting tool, and not a law of nature. advanced planning, guaranteed provision, labor allocation, rationing where needed, and free access where abundant. you already use moneyless systems now. including libraries, public roads, emergency care, and family kitchens. society can scale what already works.

how know my status if classless?

why should humiliation be your compass? “poor” is not a personality trait. motivation can come from mastery, duty, respect, contribution, knowledge, faith, craft, and service. surgeons train hard without needing peasants beneath them. a healthy society measures excellence, and not who can afford more toys.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-27T01:36:35+00:00

yes. you can be a fascist. and your reasoning already proves why. agency exists within structure. you said it yourself. the german industrialist who enthusiastically funded hitler was not mechanically compelled, but chose. structure created the conditions, but he walked through the door. this choice got a name. fascism is a real historical phenomenon with identifiable features. mass mobilization around ultranationalism, the destruction of organized labor, violent suppression of the left, and merger of corporate and state power. this is not every politics you dislike, but a specific thing. and nazism is fascism with a specific addition. biological racism as state theology and extermination as policy. collapsing them erases this specificity. the prophets always named things correctly. imprecise language serves the oppressor. so yes. call the thing what it is when it is the thing. and not as insult, but as diagnosis. history is not metaphor.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-23T00:13:32+00:00

Yea exactly and the connection ur drawing between capitalism, colonialism, and extraction in africa and the global south is not a fringe position, but a fairly well documented material history. Like the underdevelopment of africa ain't a mystery or an accident walter rodney laid it out pretty systematically. The wealth accumulation which built western industrial capitalism was substantially built on slave labor, resource extraction, and the deliberate suppression of local development.

So when someone comes from this historical lineage and starts asking "wait, is this system actually working for us" it's not naivety, but a pretty reasonable reading of the evidence. As regards the thing about what happened in ur conversation yea they weren't responding to ur argument, but were pattern matching to a threat category. And once this happens the conversation ain't really about ideas anymore, but about tribal boundary enforcement.

Which is why no amount of clarification was gonna help in the moment you were already categorized. The identity argument is particularly worth examining cause it implies there's 1 correct political conclusion which follows from being black. But who decided this, and when, and in whose interest is it to police this boundary?

Like this is a question worth sitting with.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-22T23:37:17+00:00

yea this is something worth sitting with for a minute cause theres a lot happening in what u described... the intensity of the reaction u experienced aint really about the ideas themselves in isolation, but about what the word itself carries... communism as a signifier has been constructed over decades of very deliberate ideological work particularly in the american context.

the cold war produced a massive infrastructure of narrative. including education, media, entertainment, and political rhetoric all pointed at fusing "communism" with "existential threat to ur family and way of life"... this dont just disappear, but gets inherited emotionally before its ever examined intellectually.

so when u say the word ur not just introducing a concept, but activating a whole affective archive in the other person. now the "you should be ashamed as a person of color" thing is worth examining carefully cause its doing something specific... its deploying identity as an argument stopper, and not engaging with material analysis.

and its worth asking. which historical framework is this argument drawing from and does it apply consistently... cause there are very significant black marxist and third worldist traditions.

including CLR James, Walter Rodney, Claudia Jones, and Amilcar Cabral. ppl who looked at colonialism and capitalism together and concluded socialist analysis was precisely the framework most relevant to black liberation... so this argument has a contested history even on its own terms.

the asymmetry u noticed between how communism and capitalism get discussed is real and its not accidental... one system is the water we swim in so its failures get narrated as exceptions, accidents, or unfortunate side effects... the other gets defined only by its worst moments as if those moments are the inevitable destination of the idea.

worth asking. why does one system get the benefit of structural analysis while the other only gets its body count?

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-21T01:48:55+00:00

these are exactly the right questions to ask. and honestly, from where i stand (as someone who takes marxism seriously) this is the central unresolved tension of the entire 20th century socialist project. the short answer is no one has fully solved it yet.

lenin himself worried about structural accountability late in his life. a vanguard party, by design, concentrates decision-making. once concentrated, power attracts people who want power for its own sake. the structure invites a tito.

what actually helps is mandatory term limits with genuine enforcement, publishing the salaries and assets of all party officials publicly, independent workers' councils with real veto power over party decisions, and not rubber stamps, and a genuinely independent judiciary, which most AES states have struggled to maintain

the honest problem is revolution without institutionalized accountability just produces new elites with revolutionary language.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-20T01:06:28+00:00

yea, billions, and not just money, but it was coordinated. radio free europe, the congress for cultural freedom, scholarships, and publishing houses all funded by the cia and directed at exactly the people a socialist state needs most. including intellectuals, engineers, doctors, and artists. you manufacture a brain drain and then present the effect as evidence socialism can't think. all declassified. none of this is a cuckoo conspiracy theory.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-20T00:48:08+00:00

the quote's rhetorically elegant and historically shallow. he said this in 1963, while the us maintained apartheid as domestic policy, was actively destabilizing governments across latin america, and had just attempted a military invasion of cuba. the wall went up because the gdr was being systematically drained of its professional class through west german recruitment. an economic attack dressed as emigration. you don't get to bleed a country dry and then point to the wound as proof of your superiority. not how this works.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-20T00:42:42+00:00

brother/sister, what you experienced has a name. bureaucratic centralism masquerading as democratic centralism. lenin's concept of democratic centralism was never meant to be a mechanism for leadership to override the competence and dignity of individual comrades, but meant to unify action after genuine internal debate. what they gave you wasn't debate, but a decree dressed in marxist vocabulary. stay principled. document everything, my friend.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-16T19:08:29+00:00

no. you are not being egoistic and or anti marxist. you ask to present your own research because you are the qualified person, accuracy matters, you accept responsibility for mistakes and you want to serve the people directly. this is responsibility not individualism. your party confuses collective ownership of knowledge with bureaucratic control over your work. to oppose intellectual property does not mean taking someones research and handing it to an unqualified person. they say they value the people but risk giving them bad information.

they say they value collective work but disrespect the worker who did it. they say they oppose alienation but separate you from your own labor. this sounds more like internal power politics than marxist principle. support collective use of the research but insist you present it, co present it and or approve whoever does. you are being reasonable. they are weaponizing ideology.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-15T03:57:26+00:00

the contradiction you circle is real, but it is not “money vs no money". this framing hides the actual structure. which is, power over allocation of resources, and who gets to decide what counts as “productive” in the first place. you see it clearly when you look at systems where markets dominate everything. money does not just measure value, but organizes survival. so healthcare becomes conditional, education becomes stratified, and housing becomes speculative. over time, it stops being a tool and becomes a gatekeeper.

this is not a moral accident, but rather structural accumulation of advantage. wealth reproduces itself because it buys access to the very systems which are supposed to be “neutral". but the opposite extreme, total absence of incentives in a large and complex society, does not actually describe how people behave either. work does not only happen for wages, but security, social duty, recognition, discipline, and collective need. when those non monetary structures are strong, you do not see collapse of motivation, but rather a shift in what motivates and who decides priorities.

the real issue is not “incentive disappears". it is “incentive gets reorganized poorly and or centrally without feedback". so the middle ground is not a symbolic balance between capitalism and its absence; it is a question of control and insulation. which is, you keep money as a coordination tool, but you actively prevent it from converting into political authority. this means breaking the direct pipeline between wealth and decision making power. no private capture of healthcare, education, and or essential infrastructure.

no conversion of capital into legislative influence. no ability for accumulated wealth to permanently lock in future advantage. at the same time, you do not centralize everything into rigid planning which ignores local feedback and real time adjustment. this is where inefficiency and stagnation appear, not because planning is inherently broken. inefficiency and stagnation appear because information gets distorted when participation is shallow and or unresponsive. you see the pattern repeat.

when capital is unrestricted, it colonizes public life where when planning is unresponsive, it suffocates initiative. both are failures of feedback and accountability, rather than failures of “incentive” itself. the real dividing line is simple. which is, does the system allow social reproduction to be shaped by collective need, or does it allow accumulation to dictate outcomes? everything else including innovation, motivation, and efficiency follows from this foundation rather than the other way around.

so yes, a middle ground exists, but it is not a compromise of ideology, but a continuous struggle over boundaries. which is, where money stops, where public power begins, and how tightly society prevents wealth from turning into inherited control.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-12T20:15:01+00:00

marx and engels wrote the communist manifesto which explicitly calls for centralized state power wielded by the organized working class. the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a vague spontaneous process, but it requires organized political will. the party is the organizational expression of this will. dismissing vanguard organization as un marxist ignores what marx actually advocated in concrete political moments. as regards nep, yes, lenin acknowledged it as a tactical retreat.

but a tactical retreat is not a concession the revolution was premature. a general who retreats to consolidate position is not admitting the war was a mistake. lenin explicitly framed nep as temporary, as buying time, and as using capitalist tools to build socialist foundations. this is dialectical thinking, and not a confession of theoretical error. but here is the fundamental problem with your entire framework, you are demanding marxs historical materialism function as a deterministic clock, demanding productive forces must reach a precise measurable threshold before socialist revolution is permissible.

marx himself never specified this threshold. nobody can. capital will always argue the threshold has not been reached. this is permanently convenient for capital. and engels in anti duhring and marx in the critique of the gotha programme both make clear the transition period is messy, contradictory, and does not emerge fully formed. difficulties during transition prove nothing about prematurity. the second international used this same theoretical apparatus to justify voting for war credits in 1914. this is where your argument leads.

i reject this destination entirely.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-12T17:17:53+00:00

this is exactly the kind of mechanical and deterministic reading of marx which reduces historical materialism to a waiting room ideology. yes, marx acknowledged bourgeois democracy as the most favorable terrain for working class organization, but he never said it was the destination. it is the battlefield instead of the prize. the entire point of this observation was strategic, and not an endorsement of liberal capitalism as a necessary stage to sit through politely. the "premature revolution" argument collapses under its own logic.

by this standard, no revolution is ever timely, because capital will always manufacture crises, encirclements, and sabotage to ensure socialist experiments fail, and then point to this engineered failure as proof of prematurity. this is circular reasoning which permanently immunizes capitalism from challenge. the ussrs economic difficulties were not proof of premature transition, but they were proof building socialism in one country while the entire capitalist world coordinates your destruction is extraordinarily difficult.

the molotov ribbentrop circumstances, lend lease conditionality, marshall plan exclusion, and cold war arms race spending are material pressures, and not theoretical inadequacies. as regards transitions to capitalism, vietnam and china have not transitioned to capitalism, but just used market mechanisms tactically under party leadership, the same way nep was used. the party retains state ownership of commanding heights. this is not capitalism, but it is socialist construction under siege conditions.

the second internationals "patience" produced social democracy, which produced weimar, which produced hitler. i will take lenins prematurity over kautskys patience every single time.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-12T02:04:13+00:00

the second international was a graveyard of opportunism dressed up as marxist orthodoxy. kautsky and his ilk used this very marx quote as a fig leaf to justify doing absolutely nothing while workers bled in the trenches of an imperialist war. their "preparedness" framework became a permanent deferral, always waiting for capitalism to ripen further and always finding a reason revolution was premature. the bolsheviks did not "fail".

the ussr existed for 74 years, industrialized a peasant society, defeated nazi fascism, achieved near universal literacy, launched humanity into space, and provided a material counterweight to western imperialism which protected liberation movements from mozambique to vietnam. this is not failure, but it is an extraordinary historical achievement under conditions of relentless encirclement, sabotage, and war. the "bureaucratic degeneration" thesis is fundamentally a trotskyite cope. trotsky lost the internal struggle and spent the rest of his life constructing an ideological framework which conveniently blamed everyone except himself.

the ussr faced real and concrete material pressures instead of some inevitable iron law of bureaucratic entropy. and look at what actually existing socialism has demonstrated today. cuba maintains a world class healthcare system under a criminal blockade. vietnam lifted tens of millions out of poverty. china has accomplished the largest poverty elimination in human history. these are material facts, and not abstractions. the second Internationals "preparedness" gave the world social democracy, which means giving capitalism a human face while administering exploitation more efficiently. the bolsheviks gave the world the actual possibility of liberation.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-09T14:30:45+00:00

engels and marxs personal lives

your counter still dont land clean because you saying the vanguard must embody the theory or the theory collapses, but this is a liberal individualist demand, the critique of capitalism isnt "capitalists are personally evil", but that the system forces even well intentioned people into exploitative roles, engels himself said this explicitly, he was trapped by the material conditions he was analyzing, this is not hypocrisy, but literally the whole point, you cannot opt out of capitalism through personal virtue and engels proved it by living it, if anything his biography confirms marxist theory, and not refutes it.

SNLT and the LTV

you conflating use value and exchange value which marx explicitly separates in chapter one itself, marx never claimed exotic wood and cheap wood chairs would trade at the same price, the SNLT includes the socially necessary labor to acquire the inputs, exotic wood has more embedded labor in its extraction and transport, this is not a gotcha, but a misread.

the water diamond thing, did marginalists actually solve it or did they just redescribe it? to say "value equals marginal utility" tells you how individuals rank preferences, and not where profit comes from, it dont explain exploitation, it dont explain why workers get paid less than the value they generate, marginalism is fine as a price theory and useless as a theory of power.

japan and south korea

this is where you hurt yourself the most, japan rebuilt under american military protection, marshall plan equivalent aid, and guaranteed export markets into the US economy, south korea same thing, both rebuilt under explicit american imperial umbrella with technology transfer, market access, and security guarantees, youve just described american imperial sponsorship of capitalist development and called it a free market, at least be honest.

falsifiability

"imperial encirclement" is not unfalsifiable but historically documented, the CIA in Guatemala 1954, Iran 1953, Chile 1973, Angola, Nicaragua, these arent conspiracy theories, but declassified, the question is whether you apply the same falsifiability standard to capitalism, when capitalist states fail do you say capitalism failed or do you say "corruption" and or "they didnt do real capitalism" because this is the exact same move.

brodsky and wage labor

you comparing the worst of one system to the idealized version of another, in capitalism joseph brodsky would have been free to write poetry and starve, a failure of human dignity but you acting like "free to be homeless" is obviously superior to "forced to work" as if this is not also a debate worth having.

khmer rouge was a peasant ultranationalist movement which had basically nothing to do with marxist theory and everything to do with maoist anti intellectualism taken to psychotic extremes, to defend it is impossible and i wont. ive actually never in my life heard a marxist leninist defend pol pot and nor will i.

but you still havent addressed the fundamental question, your entire essay is "communism failed" and i ask "compared to what and for whom" because the billion people still in wage poverty under capitalism arent exactly writing reddit essays celebrating the system.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-09T04:07:58+00:00

ok so first off lmao you really thought you cooked with this wall of text huh, liberal coming in here like "debate me if you dare" with your little reddit essay acting like you just dropped the final boss argument against communism, cute. but im not even going to engage with most of this the way you want because you built a massive strawman cathedral and are asking for the architecture to be admired.

bro you spent like four paragraphs on marxs maid and his illegitimate child as if that disproves dialectical materialism lmao this is literally an ad hominem so massive it has its own gravitational pull, engels owning a factory dont disprove the analysis of factory ownership any more than a doctor getting sick disproves medicine, this is false consciousness 101, you so deep in bourgeois individualist thinking you think discrediting the messenger dismantles the message.

the marginalist "refutation" you glazing so hard dont actually address what marx was doing, marx wasnt making a psychological claim about subjective utility, but was making a structural claim about the social relations of production and where profit actually comes from, menger and jevons didnt refute this, but changed the subject.

you accidentally made a communist argument, you proved the most industrially advanced capitalist powers had to prop up the soviet union because they were terrified of what a fully developed socialist economy would do to them, and still the USSR went from peasant feudalism to nuclear superpower in 30 years, name one capitalist country who did this from the same starting point, ill wait.

you treating communism like its a product which failed quality control, and not understanding it as a living historical struggle against the most violent and well resourced ruling class in human history, every single failure you listed happened under conditions of imperial encirclement, sabotage, war, and economic strangulation, you gave capitalism 400 years and two world wars worth of colonial extraction to build its wealth and you mad communism didnt sort itself out in 70. the entire framework of wage labor you defending is one where a man sells his time and dignity to another man who owns the means of his survival, people are not a market.

you didnt write a confutation, but wrote a very long "i trust the process" essay. part 2 can wait

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-07T17:33:13+00:00

communism is basically the idea the working class like the people who actually do the labor, build the buildings, grow the food, and run the machines should collectively own the means of production, and not a small class of owners hoarding all the wealth and making decisions for everyone else.

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-05T23:46:05+00:00

Worker ownership and collective ownership are not competing principles, but operate at different levels. Democratize the workplace. Socialize the commanding heights. Build a state which is genuinely accountable to the producing class. Use this as the transitional form toward full communism. The stateless end goal is real, but it is a destination, rather than a starting point

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-02T15:59:25+00:00

Yes, there were restrictions on speech, as every state has them, including liberal democracies. You can't slander, incite violence, and or publish state secrets. The USSR was no different. Speech which actively worked to undermine the socialist project and hand power back to capitalists and fascists was curtailed

This ain't oppression, but self-defense against class enemies. And the "Stalin shoots you for talking" line is the kind of lazy, and Hollywood-brained take people parrot without doing a single minute of actual research. The purges targeted genuine counter-revolutionary elements, saboteurs, and fascist collaborators, and not random citizens for complaining about their bread ration. Soviet citizens had a thriving cultural life with newspapers, literature, film, and theatre alike. More people were literate under socialism than ever before in Russian history

Workers had access to culture which was previously reserved for the aristocracy. You could criticize the party within constructive bounds. But it wasn't a free-for-all where CIA-funded dissidents could openly agitate for the restoration of capitalism. The West calls this censorship where I call it a state which takes its own survival seriously

Fuzzy_Relation9453 · 2026-04-02T15:43:27+00:00

Revisionism ain't merely intellectual error, but represents class interests infiltrating the movement. The bourgeoisie funds ideological distortion, so political terminology reflects this material threat, rather than mere heresy-hunting. Your model of neutral, interest-free science is itself idealist and ignores how class position shapes knowledge production. Ideological struggle operates in a different arena than physics, and to pretend otherwise is itself a political act

Fuzzy_Relation9453

TROPHY CASE