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American capitalism, for all its defects, was always a mass oriented endeavour in constrast with Continental Europe. The mantra was sell more, more, more and m

American capitalism, for all its defects, was always a mass oriented endeavour in constrast with Continental Europe. The mantra was sell more, more, more and more, and to do that, you need to sell things to poor people to. A French enterpreneur would be happy selling phones only for the upper middle class and above. In America the idea was to install as many landlines as possible and gain with scale.

legitster 6mo ago
> American capitalism, for all its defects, was always a mass oriented endeavour in constrast with Continental Europe. I think it's important to call out that the "capitalism = more stuff" idea is a bit of historical revisionism. Soviet leaders very specifically saw the goal of Communism was to create abundance and a post scarcity society. There are lots of quotes in particular from Khrushchev about this: “The socialist system will outstrip capitalism in labor productivity. It will provide the people with more goods, more cultural benefits, and ensure a higher standard of living.” “Communism is the highest form of organization of society for labor. On the basis of powerful productive forces, it ensures the highest productivity of labor and abundance of material and cultural values for the whole people.” And it's worth pointing out that that this isn't a Soviet invention. Marx himself made it a central point that material deprivation was an ill (not a feature) of captialism: "After the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety…” “The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially… but guaranteeing them the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties — this possibility is now for the first time here.” When communist abundance failed to materialize, there was a concerted effort to reframe the promise of communism to be purely one of egalitarianism and turn overconsumption against the West as a criticism.
- ethbr1 6mo ago
  The irony is that, in contrast to their relative positions in the 1960s, communism (in the political-economic Marxian sense) vs capitalism (in the 2026 sense) is now more true to the original communist view above. To wit, that end stage capitalism has become an ouroboros eating its own tail that profits off artificial scarcity, while communism's primary defect (an inability to execute economic planning at a pace, scale, and granularity required to run a country well) is now technologically-feasible. Though the greatest enemy to communism was always the people who made up the party and their fallibility as human beings.
  - mc32 6mo ago
    So you’re saying China is in the drivers’s seat to make Marxist-Communism a reality?
    - throwway120385 6mo ago
      I bet if they wrote a 100 year plan then taking a detour through selling things to Capitalist countries is part of the plan to getting to a Marxist utopia.
    - elzbardico 6mo ago
      I would say that OpenAI, Anthropic and Donald Trump are the vanguard of the proletarian revolution.
      - encrypted_bird 6mo ago
        Is this sarcasm? Please tell me this is sarcasm.
        elzbardico 6mo ago
        I didn't say that this is their intention. But it surely looks to me like they are accelerating a movement towards a giant crisis of the capitalist system.
- elzbardico 6mo ago
  Soviet Ideology and Lenin in particular deturpated Marxism. For Marx, capitalism is historically revolutionary precisely because it expands productive forces at a scale impossible under feudalism. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels explicitly say the bourgeoisie created “more massive and more colossal productive forces” than earlier generations, and then argue that capitalism becomes self-contradictory because those productive forces outgrow capitalist property relations, producing crises of overproduction and destruction of wealth. We can even say, that is a strict reading of Marx, communism is impossible if the problem of scarcity hasn't been solved before. Marxism requires abundance as a material precondition for higher communism
  - tpm 6mo ago
    > In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels explicitly say the bourgeoisie created “more massive and more colossal productive forces” than earlier generations, and then argue that capitalism becomes self-contradictory and then left this thought (every system outgrows itself and becomes self-contradictory) applied to communism as an exercise to readers, which gave us Lenin and Stalin's (and Mao's) permanent bloody revolution as a pupil's halfbaked attempt at a solution, because their attempt to create communism contradicted itself way before it succeeded.
- scottyah 6mo ago
  > I think it's important to call out that the "capitalism = more stuff" idea is a bit of historical revisionism. As always with communism, there's the lofty ideals and quotes on what it should be, but then there's the contrasting reality of Continental Europe's run at communism producing way less stuff.
ethbr1 6mo ago
Exactly. The deeper wisdom is that the current bifurcated US economy reveals the malaise at the heart of modern America. When a company can make more profit by catering to the ultra-rich-only than selling a quality mass-market product at a reasonable price to masses, that says a lot about the economic segmentation of those masses.

legitster 6mo ago

> American capitalism, for all its defects, was always a mass oriented endeavour in constrast with Continental Europe. I think it's important to call out that the "capitalism = more stuff" idea is a bit of historical revisionism. Soviet leaders very specifically saw the goal of Communism was to create abundance and a post scarcity society. There are lots of quotes in particular from Khrushchev about this: “The socialist system will outstrip capitalism in labor productivity. It will provide the people with more goods, more cultural benefits, and ensure a higher standard of living.” “Communism is the highest form of organization of society for labor. On the basis of powerful productive forces, it ensures the highest productivity of labor and abundance of material and cultural values for the whole people.” And it's worth pointing out that that this isn't a Soviet invention. Marx himself made it a central point that material deprivation was an ill (not a feature) of captialism: "After the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety…” “The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially… but guaranteeing them the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties — this possibility is now for the first time here.” When communist abundance failed to materialize, there was a concerted effort to reframe the promise of communism to be purely one of egalitarianism and turn overconsumption against the West as a criticism.

ethbr1 6mo ago
The irony is that, in contrast to their relative positions in the 1960s, communism (in the political-economic Marxian sense) vs capitalism (in the 2026 sense) is now more true to the original communist view above. To wit, that end stage capitalism has become an ouroboros eating its own tail that profits off artificial scarcity, while communism's primary defect (an inability to execute economic planning at a pace, scale, and granularity required to run a country well) is now technologically-feasible. Though the greatest enemy to communism was always the people who made up the party and their fallibility as human beings.
- mc32 6mo ago
  So you’re saying China is in the drivers’s seat to make Marxist-Communism a reality?
  - throwway120385 6mo ago
    I bet if they wrote a 100 year plan then taking a detour through selling things to Capitalist countries is part of the plan to getting to a Marxist utopia.
  - elzbardico 6mo ago
    I would say that OpenAI, Anthropic and Donald Trump are the vanguard of the proletarian revolution.
    - encrypted_bird 6mo ago
      Is this sarcasm? Please tell me this is sarcasm.
      - elzbardico 6mo ago
        I didn't say that this is their intention. But it surely looks to me like they are accelerating a movement towards a giant crisis of the capitalist system.
elzbardico 6mo ago
Soviet Ideology and Lenin in particular deturpated Marxism. For Marx, capitalism is historically revolutionary precisely because it expands productive forces at a scale impossible under feudalism. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels explicitly say the bourgeoisie created “more massive and more colossal productive forces” than earlier generations, and then argue that capitalism becomes self-contradictory because those productive forces outgrow capitalist property relations, producing crises of overproduction and destruction of wealth. We can even say, that is a strict reading of Marx, communism is impossible if the problem of scarcity hasn't been solved before. Marxism requires abundance as a material precondition for higher communism
- tpm 6mo ago
  > In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels explicitly say the bourgeoisie created “more massive and more colossal productive forces” than earlier generations, and then argue that capitalism becomes self-contradictory and then left this thought (every system outgrows itself and becomes self-contradictory) applied to communism as an exercise to readers, which gave us Lenin and Stalin's (and Mao's) permanent bloody revolution as a pupil's halfbaked attempt at a solution, because their attempt to create communism contradicted itself way before it succeeded.
scottyah 6mo ago
> I think it's important to call out that the "capitalism = more stuff" idea is a bit of historical revisionism. As always with communism, there's the lofty ideals and quotes on what it should be, but then there's the contrasting reality of Continental Europe's run at communism producing way less stuff.

ethbr1 6mo ago

Exactly. The deeper wisdom is that the current bifurcated US economy reveals the malaise at the heart of modern America. When a company can make more profit by catering to the ultra-rich-only than selling a quality mass-market product at a reasonable price to masses, that says a lot about the economic segmentation of those masses.