I said
"Living in the US is sufficient cause to distrust its government."
You replied:
"I can say the same for China"
I replied:
"Except you literally can’t." Meaning you don't live in China so you can't make the claim with similar level of authority
And then you made the comment I replied to, and I don't see at all how it is connected to the line of conversation.
Idk I like it when the proletariat is able to dictate the course of society
Also your reply contradicts your statement that I first replied to.
Except you literally can't.
Who told you not to trust anything the US said?
Living in the US is sufficient cause to distrust its government.
Do you think socialists are out to collectivize your toothbrush?
No, the siezing of factories and large estates is not equivalent to siezing your sewing needles or your backyard garden. They seize these means of production because their previous ownership was about denying people access to the means of production, not because they don't think individuals should have their own means of production.
At their heart, both capitalism and marxism are ideologies describing how things “ought to be.” Proponents of either of them seek to influence political decision making around economic decisions, but neither is/was/will be reality.
No, Marxism does not just describe things as they ought to be. It's main aspects are:
Anthropological: a methodology for understanding how capitalism happens and how it changes to suit changing conditions (many of which it brings about)
Scientific: a process based ideology for developing an understanding of our local conditions and our ability to change them through sociological investigation, mediated through democratic process
The political program extends from an understanding of those two aspects, and is very variable, because the programs are applied to the local conditions of their environments.
Capitalism postulates that all capital ought to be privately owned and working in individual interest,
No, that strain of bourgeois thought died out as a ruling ideology hundreds of years ago, when state intervention in some failed ventures if the west indies trading company demonstrated that it is more profitable for capitalism to maintain a strong state to protect profits.
Communists dismiss this by pointing out that inequal access to capital causes internal problems in society,
I mean yeah but that's not the main thing. The main thing that Marxists believe is that as capitalism moves into its monopoly stage, it ceases to be a historically progressive force (in opposition to feudalism) and it starts to be fettered by its own issues, just like feudalism was.
Marxists believe that as production becomes socialized and planned, capitalist control makes these socialized production processes inefficient and ultimately leads to a cycle of crises.
And the Olympic gold for comically missing the point by getting strangely defensive goes to...
The former option. Why, would you pick the latter option?
Sure, but it is incentivized by capitalism as a real system that exists and is studied. It doesn't have to exist in capitalist theory for it to be a real phenomenon that has be empirically proven.
One of the most basic economic arguments of Marx's Capital is that 1) firms compete for higher profit margins 2) it is easiest to reduce wages in order to increase margins 3) you only have to pay workers enough that they're able to, as a whole, maintain your workforce (the available workforce in general can shrink though, especially as automation shrinks the needed size of the workforce)
Throw in some accumulation by disposession theory(the need to proletarianize the population, separating them from ownership of their own means of subsistence) in order for capitalism to function, and you have good old social murder, the end result of a system designed for efficient accumulation without consideration for human suffering outside the practical consideration of stability.
Socialism, which is designed to manage the needs of a population through democratic processes, does not have this issue, except in the context of fighting capitalism where accumulation needs to be prioritized to some extent, in order to defend their social project from covert and overt hostility by existing capitalist powers.
I've cited Capital, you only really need the first dozen or so chapters to understand the primary argument. Marx provides detailed figures to cite his arguments. I would also suggest reading about accumulation by dispossession/primitive accumulation, social murder, and siege socialism.
Because killing people through neglect can improve the efficiency of your workforce
No, you said something that didn't make sense.