Accepting the existence of class mobility doesn’t imply freedom. Freedom to exploit your fellow workers and become a class traitor isn’t freedom. It’s just a fact that social mobility has increased significantly

If you don’t open or shift the overton window, no change is possible.

the point of capitalism is to make it so that there’s no longer a reason to have profit.

That’s gotta be the stupidest take I’ve seen in the whole 28 days I’ve been in Lemmy, congratulations. The whole point of capitalism is the revalorization of capital, i.e., a capitalist owner having $1mn, and investing it into a company or finance or housing to turn it into more than $1mn. In what universe is the objective of capitalism to eliminate profit??? It’s the polar opposite…

I want to abolish private property, as in “private ownership of the means of production”. I don’t want to abolish personal property such as your house or your toothbrush, neither does anyone, which is proven by the home ownership rates in communist or post-communist countries hovering or being above 90%, compared to the sad 50% of Germany and slightly higher values in the US or UK.

I don’t consider Capitalism as having anything to do with governance

Then you don’t know what capitalism is because you haven’t cared to educate yourself about it.

Capitalism is a market system

No, it’s not, it’s a social system which defines class relations, and markets are only part of it. There were markets in late feudalism but there was no capitalism. Markets are a necessary condition for capitalism, but not the only one.

Capitalism is the system where the means of production are owned by private individuals called bourgeoisie or capitalists, and they’re worked on exchange for a wage worth less than what they produce by other private individuals called workers or proletariat. The class relations are by means of legal and theoretically voluntary contracts enforced by a government, as opposed to, for example, the god-given right of a king to put his peasants to work during feudalism.

that uses competition to drive efficiency of creation of satisfaction of needs and luxuries both

It doesn’t “use” competition, competition is sometimes a condition, but capitalism works actively against competition. Free markets and competition initially mean that some companies will fare better than others, and of those which fare better, some will invest more in increasing their productive capabilities and their efficiency, through technological means and through economy of scale. The foundation of capitalism is that capital has to revalorize itself, which is equivalent to saying bigger companies will necessarily either become bigger or die. This ends up in monopolies, oligopolies, trusts and cartels, as we see in the case of Google, Amazon, Walmart, car manufacturing, computing, or basically every single sector of the economy at this point.

If your democratic system of laws is being leveraged by highly efficient non-state entities

It is, because they can lobby politicians and corrupt them, and because the media are owned by these powerful owners of capital.

then you should really fix that shit, but fixing it doesn’t require abolishing private property

Ok, any other historical solutions that have worked? Progressive democratic movements such as Salvador Allende in Chile, or the Spanish second republic, or the Iranian secular progressive government of Mosaddegh (I could go on for 500 lines citing examples but you get the point), were historically ended by fascism when the owners of the means of production see that their profits are going to diminish in favour of the majority. More recent examples are the lawfare cases against Lula da Silva in Brazil, or against Podemos in Spain, or the coup in Bolivia against Evo Morales. Can you propose a realistic and historically proven method of preventing this from happening other than workers organizing (as socialists defend) and leftists taking control of the institutions?

nor would that end corruption.

Nobody claims it would end corruption, the fight against corruption is permanent, and the best ways to deal with it are the highest possible degrees of transparency and democracy. Private companies aren’t democratic by their nature, and aren’t required to be transparent. In fact corruption in most cases isn’t even defined in private companies. Nepotism isn’t a crime, it’s my company I’ll hire whomever I want. I need a renovation in my building, I’ll pay my friend to do it even if it’s more expensive because I owe him a favour, it’s my company. So yeah, can’t have corruption when it’s legal right?

You can always move to Senegal and enjoy capitalism!

The only thing stopping people from ending the system is lacking the knowledge that they should end it, and lacking the knowledge that they can collectively end it. Pushing for hope towards the end of the system is positive

They’ve described the opposite. A collective, grassroots, democratic institution in which people can freely discuss their thoughts and political opinions and direct the policy of their country in that way, is less reminiscent of top-down political parties with representatives voted every 4 years as in liberal democracy, and more reminiscent of worker democracy or direct democracy as anarchists or communists defend.

That’s why there’s been an entire century of revision to that model to incorporate more democratic forward values

How is a representative election every 4 years in a system where mass media are owned by the capitalist class more democratic than the ideas of Marx? The Soviet Union started out as the name implies, as a union of republics in which soviets, or worker councils, had the decision power. The fact that international interference and civil war (such as 14 countries invading the USSR militarily and many more sponsoring the tsarist loyalists or the anti-revolutionary Mensheviks) didn’t allow for a high degree of work democracy without extreme risk to the stability or the country, has more to do with the material and historical conditions of the USSR than it has to do with the ideas of Marx and Lenin.

This isn’t good historical analysis. The feudal class society, with its aristocracy, church and peasants, was highly rigid in terms of class mobility. Peasants stayed peasants and aristocrats stayed aristocrats. The current dominant class, the capitalist owners, exert their power not by god-given rights over the population, but by legal control of the means of production. The current exploited class, the workers, aren’t tied to a lord anymore and pay tributes in kind on exchange for land and protection, but instead are “free” to work where they want for a payment in cash, and unable for the most part to have ownership of the means of production they themselves work.

Kings have disappeared, classes in society haven’t

Your comment portrays a lack of reading of Marxist literature. Lenin, as far back as 1916, talks about this surplus being reallocated to workers through political pressure. He describes the leftists who pursue this as “opportunist socialists”, and explains why this is only possible in imperialist countries which exploit the resources and labor of other countries. It’s why basically all socialist revolutions have taken place in less developed countries, whether it be democratically like Chile under Allende or Spain and its second republic and Iran under Mosaddegh, or a coup as happened in Libya, or a bloody revolution as in the USSR or Cuba.

Protesting what exactly?

Protesting monster trucks becoming the default go-to vehicle to go run an errand or drive to work. You don’t need a “child-destroyer-3000: now Electric!” taking 3 lanes of width, weighing 20 tonnes, and occupying 4 parking spots, to go to your bakery or pick up the kids from school.

What exactly is moral about vandalizing these cars?

If certain vehicles end up costing more to manufacture/protect/repaint than the revenue upon sale, the company will stop manufacturing them. Same idea as deflating SUV wheels which are parked on the street: make lives for SUV drivers inconvenient so people won’t want an SUV.

Also this notion that protests are only effective if they’re disruptive is a myth. If that was the case then the George Floyd Riots would’ve led somewhere or the pro Palestinian encampments would’ve led somewhere or all those climate protesters damaging historical monuments and art would’ve led somewhere or all those animal rights activists blocking streets would’ve led somewhere… but they haven’t. All they’ve done is lead people to resent them.

“What did the resistance to Nazi occupation by the Polish people lead to? It didn’t work, genocide happened anyway, and all they did is making Nazis resent them”.

I’m sure you’re aware that people engage in challenges they don’t know for certain they can achieve, right?

Not only right wing, but mostly right wing. The left isn’t the side mostly denying the science of climate change, or the medical consensus of vaccines and gender reassignment therapy.

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