Capital is very important, but it's also a massive undertaking, it literally takes years to finish if one engages with it properly, taking notes. I'm still getting through it myself slowly myself and it did debunk a ton of "leftist assumptions" I had.
Though when it comes to wages, how they work and how they are exploitative, instead of Capital I'd recommend Wage Labour and Capital. It's only around 1 hour read, and gets to this exact point much sooner as a result.
What you're describing is essentially Keynesian economics which we had till the 70's or 80's, and it did fall out of favor, replaced by neoliberalism that we know now.
The reason why was essentially capitalism - historical conditions why high rate of profit that allowed keynesiasm disappeared (such as war which tends to lead to massive profits via destruction of capital, still expanding global markets and US hegemony over the economy), so the rate of profit fell. People lost jobs, wages couldn't be raised and state couldn't really do much about it without pumping a ton of money via intervention, so instead what we got was attacks on labor organization, privatization and deregulation.
The only chance to return to that kind of economy (and by that I mean if everyone collectively forgot about neoliberalism too) would be through another world war and its unprecedented destruction of capital. Even then it'd be temporary again until rate of profit declines, as it does with capitalism regardless of economic system.
How the hell do you have 4k comments in 2 months
They're fighting Trump though! I've peeked a couple of times at the Democrat subreddit and it's always "some democrat saying some MEAN one-liner towards Trump during some hearing! #resist".
50 more of those one-liners and Trump will feel soooo bad and quit being a president, which will fix literally everything (great man theory)!
Only if he starts telling jewish and dirty jokes completely unprompted
We had liberal politicians fight fascism in the past, and it was great!
Not only did they welcome fascists who opportunistically saw where things were going with open arms, but also forced workers to accept monarchists and reactionaries who repressed and brutalized them constantly as comrades in arms and 2 days after Fascism fell in Italy, Fiat for instance had ordered guards to fire into insubordinate workers if they didn't start working in 5 minutes.
Workers got so fucked that you could upload the retelling of the events on PornHub
Bowser (evil billionaire who owns multiple castles) has paid Nintendo big bucks to make games about him and include him into Mario Party.
Sorry but this is true
Congratulations, you've written probably the most hitlerite comment I've seen on Lemmy so far, and I'm genuinely concerned.
Instead of investigating what makes people act this way in terms of material conditions, incentives and values that are promoted, maybe the way power is organized and how it leads to inevitable opportunism or this being an inevitability of a class dictatorship that we have now, you instead go for the "undesirables" angle.
People didn't vote for the candidate you wanted because they were irredeemably evil. What do we do, kill all MAGA voters now for having the wrong human archetype? Prohibit them from voting? That only seems the natural conclusion from everything you wrote.
Communism is changing the state of things entirely, not merely changing or redistributing as your conception says - what you describe is closer to social democratic welfare state which is still fully capitalist.
The world is complicated, when it comes to economics you can go into the minutia all day and night but to summarize what communism actually is and how it differs from capitalism in simple terms, it'd be:
The transformation of the mode of production. Instead of right now where you produce commodities to be sold on the market and that essentially dictating what to produce, goods would be specifically produced to fulfill needs, basically what is socially necessary for a society and its people to thrive, and all this would be coordinated via economic planning. The current system is incredibly inefficient, we overproduce a lot, workers can't physically buy all the goods on the market leading to waste or companies competing with its own unsold goods which decreases profit and leads to crisis where industry no longer becomes profitable, leading to unemployment. No more profit, no more things to buy, just make what people need.
The abolition of money and private property. Not to be confused with personal property such as your home or car or toothbrush, access to wealth accumulation and private ownership of factories or land inevitably leads to monopolization, exploitation of labor (with factory ownership) or just parasitism where a person contributes nothing to a labor process, yet has the full right to everything produced by said labor.
Kind of implicit in previous point, but abolition of classes entirely. If there's no way to privately own means of production or land, or accumulate a mountain of money that you can invest to get another mountain of money and snowball to oblivion, that would eliminate the aforementioned capitalists, landowners - no person would be superior to another due to their economic caste. Of course, a level of hierarchy would remain like foremen managing workers, but economically they'd be in the same position of having their needs met.
Hopefully that makes it easier to conceptualize that a different kind of system can theoretically exist that isn't capitalism - after all, we went from antiquity to feudalism to capitalism, all production modes of whom are drastically different, so why not communism?
Granted, we're yet to have communism given how it must be global, or at least on a very large scale. Capitalism itself is a global system, it relies on global trade and countries that decide not to participate (e.g. go autarky) suffer heavily, and communism which is primarily a "meet the needs" type of system cannot interact with global capitalist trade given how it produces and values goods in a much different way. Also, a single country cannot really have access to all the necessary resources to meet the needs with, so global cooperation is required, and this cooperation would ensure safety too given how prone Capitalism is towards imperialist wars.
As for other questions like "how would government look like" and stuff - that's mostly relevant for the transition towards it post-revolution given how this kind of society is simply unachievable in a capitalist dictatorships, liberal or otherwise, that we have today. While communism and its ideas are quite frankly weakest that they've ever been in terms of support, there's still multiple parties around the world, each having a different plan for the government.
Sorry for the wall of text, and do keep in mind that this is an oversimplification. Transition towards communism is equally as important, but I didn't want to go full hog explaining it given how it'd make it even more unreadable.
It's easy to blame Russia and China, but it's not really that. It's clear that this is a symptom that something is wrong, and that is stagnating or worsening living conditions, unhappiness with how society operates and people hearing that turn to reaction.
Left doesn't have an answer given how marginalized they are, all you get are center-lib parties that pretend everything is okay or that focus on liberal middle class issues. It's no surprise
They still heavily compromise, only targeting very specific sectors.
Besides, billionaires aren't a monolith - they also have differing interests. Someone might have a heavy stake in solar power for instance and no stake in oil, in which case they'd support greens.
Ok but have you considered that if literally every person on the planet did this, climate change would immediately be fixed??
You're just a HATER of practical solutions....... /s