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‘Capitalism’s not working’: why Democrats are turning to socialism (www.ft.com)

submitted 1 day ago by VetOfTheSeas@discuss.online to c/politics@lemmy.world

37 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Once the fringiest of marginal groups, the DSA now has close to 130,000 members, up from 5,000 15 years ago. And its members are winning Democratic primaries across the country.

Megan Romer, national co-chair, said its growth reflected a deep frustration with a system she said was failing young people. “People are, like, well, OK, capitalism’s not working,” she said in an interview. “So what else is there?”

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[-] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 9 points 3 hours ago

My son is 27, and his entire adult life has been under MAGA, or weak Democrats that allowed MAGA to flourish.

Is it any wonder that young people like him have gravitated toward a system that promises to serve them, instead of exploiting and blaming them, so they can favor the super wealthy at our expense?

I'm old, and it's clear that our current system is a MASSIVE failure. We need a comprehensive reconfiguration of all of our systems, with the emphasis on serving the Citizens. Now that MAGA has wrecked so many of our systems, and they will have to be rebuilt anyway, it's the perfect opportunity to start over, the right way.

That dipshit Jeffries wants to go back to the same system that let MAGA rise, and re-rise, and if we do it again, MAGA will just re-rise AGAIN, and be even WORSE this time.

We need to support candidates who want to take the party in an entirely new direction, and it starts with removing Jeffries from being Speaker.

[-] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 7 points 10 hours ago

Capitalism works, just not for us. That's not what it was designed for.

[+] Lord_Fartwad@feddit.uk -14 points 7 hours ago

The only people who support socialism are people who never lived under socialism. I did. (no, Norway is not socialist in any way). I wish the supporters of DSA to get all they want.

[-] StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago

Which country was this?

[-] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 6 points 3 hours ago

You didn't live under Socialism, you lived under an authoritarian government who claimed to be Socialist, but weren't. Most governments are not what they claim to be.

[-] Lord_Fartwad@feddit.uk -3 points 3 hours ago

Or correct, I forgot that there is Jo true Scotsman!

[-] AHamSandwich@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I think you don't understand this fallacy. Here's an example.

Person A: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
Person B: "But my uncle Angus is a Scotsman and he puts sugar on his porridge."
Person A: "But no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."

In this case, Angus actually is a Scotsman, but the person making the claim suggests he is not by using an altered definition based on their argument instead of the commonly accepted definition. The logic is circular.

This situation is akin to the following:

Person A: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
Person B: "But my uncle Andrew is a Scotsman and he puts sugar on his porridge."
Person A: "Your uncle Andrew is a third generation US citizen, descended from one Scottish immigrant grandfather, who makes this ancestry a substantial part of his identity despite having little knowledge of Scottish culture beyond 'bagpipes, kilts, and haggis' and what he has seen in movies."

It this case, despite identifying as a Scotsman and utilizing some elements of Scottish culture, by the commonly accepted definition he is not a Scotsman, even in part. Therefore, any observations of Scotsmen based on Andrew are likely incorrect.

For your situation, given there have never been true socialist countries, only mixed systems, it strains credulity to believe that your experience with a mixed system is representative of a true socialist state, just as my experience with labradoodles is unlikely to be representative of Golden Retrievers or poodles.

[-] bitteroldcoot@piefed.social 26 points 1 day ago

From the article: "is increasingly popular with younger voters sick of the traditional remedies for America’s ills. "

What "traditional remedies"????

I'm 70 and neither party has done shit to help people since FDR.
There were the two blips of obama care and medicare prescription drug. Neither works particularly well, and both were crippled by the insurance and drug industries.

Pretty obvious which side FT is on. As if we didn't already know.

[-] GolfFoxtrotLima@ani.social 4 points 7 hours ago

It’s time to make the Democratic Party the party of FDR again

[-] bitteroldcoot@piefed.social 2 points 7 hours ago

I agree. Anything is better than the current shit show.

[-] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 3 points 6 hours ago

Did you realize that FDR was a socialist right? All of the popular policies that he instituted were socialist policies.

[-] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 points 4 hours ago

Yeah, and his Socialist policies were the only thing that made post-war America livable.

Now that we've had decades to compare Socialist policies with Sociopathic Capitalist policies, Ill take the Socialists.

[-] bitteroldcoot@piefed.social 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

So?

If it works it's good, if it doesn't it's bad.

Neither capitalism or socialism is inherently good or bad. They are just systems. Stop treating them like they are religions.

People and their actions make them good or bad systems.

[-] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 points 3 hours ago

Any effective government is going to be a combination of the best element of multiple systems. Every system has good and bad ideas. Keep the good ideas, ditch the bad ones, and tweak it until it works. But it's dumb to keep the bad ideas, just so you can have the good ones. We can do anything we want.

[-] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

Name a bad socialist idea. Keep in mind that socialism and communism are not the same or interchangeable in any way.

[-] bitteroldcoot@piefed.social 1 points 3 hours ago

Exactly, a hybrid systems will always be the most resilient and effective.

[-] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago

And yet it's funny how all the people who see capitalism as the perfect system are always the ones trying to dismantle the socialist systems that were put in place. Those same socialist systems that everybody relies upon for our society to run in a non-dystopian fashion.

[-] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 6 points 19 hours ago

The healthcare market exchange system that ObamaCare comes from and Project 2025 both have the Heritage Foundation in common.

[-] bitteroldcoot@piefed.social 4 points 7 hours ago

The original "force people to buy private health insurance" came from the Heritage Foundation.

That idea moved into two Republican-sponsored bills in 1993, and then into Mitt Romney's 2006 Massachusetts health law.

It was only when a democrat (obama) suggested it that they started objecting.

[-] unitedwithme@lemmy.today 31 points 1 day ago

Capitalism went from allowing competition to drive down prices to companies incrementally increasing prices that everyone follows and repeats.

I can recall this very thing "working well" with retail rewards systems. Best buy would revamp their rewards program actually making benefits worse and raising more spending to hit different tiers, and other similar retailers followed. The "Geek squad" services increased, so did competitors to remain competitive while increasing profits.

Automotive repair shop's cost of hourly labor goes up while the actual mechanics hardly see an increase in pay.

Slowly but surely things have gone up in price while what you're spending money on buys you less. Physical media that you OWN never "expires" but streaming services and buying digital copies in services like Apple TV lose the rights. Games disappear because severs shut down or rights expire.

YOU WILL OWN NOTHING AND BE HAPPY! and the way big tech is treated, well, if buying isn't owning, than piracy isn't stealing.

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 27 points 1 day ago

That was intentional...

Large corporations don't undercut small businesses because vertical integration allows them to take smaller profit shares

They intentionally lose money in some markets so that small businesses get run out of business.

Then, after the small businesses are gone, they raise prices higher than the small businesses were to begin with.

It was a problem when large corps "drove down prices", because that was them running everyone else out of the marketplace.

It's why I hate the term "enshittification", it starts identifying the problem after it's too late to fix. That's why companies are fine doing it, but the time shit gets worse, there's no other alternative.

We don't roll back to before it got shitty, we need to roll back to "when there was competition".

[-] unitedwithme@lemmy.today 6 points 1 day ago

Good point! Well explained!

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Amazon is the end result...

Amazon "guarentees" the lowest prices, and that's true.

If a product is sold on Amazon, that's the lowest price.online. The manufacturer can't even sell it for lower on their own website.

Because Amazon uses AI scrapers to constantly check, if it detects a lower price, it will "you may be overpaying for this item" in big red letters next to it, or even removing the buttons that let someone buy it.

So before they can lower the price anywhere, they have to lower it on Amazon. Because they need the volume that comes with Amazon sales.

Amazon's "lowest price guarantee" just ends up meaning they keep people from getting it cheaper anywhere else. But for an individual, each individual purchase is a better deal at Amazon.

To win we need a drastic boycott where everyone just toughs it out and pays a little more for slower shipping to buy direct again. The manufacturers will make more per unit, and eventually will be able to stop playing Amazon's game.

And that would leave Amazon with just Temu slop, and actually financially impact Bezos.

All we gotta do is get people to think big picture, we could bankrupt Bezos in less than a year.

[-] Buffalox@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago

Piracy literally isn't stealing, the idea that it is is 100% propaganda.
Piracy is copying things that are copyrighted. And is a copyright infringement. It is not theft or stealing.
With stealing the original owner loses what he had when the thief steals it.
With copying the owner obviously still has ownership and possession of what was copied.

Unchecked capitalism on the other hand is very much stealing, where the rich take from the poor. So the rich have more and the poor have less.

Which is why capitalism needs to be heavily regulated, exactly contrary to widely spread propaganda in USA about deregulation being better for all, when in reality it only benefit the rich.

[-] unitedwithme@lemmy.today 3 points 1 day ago

Thanks! And I've seen a lot of people shit on the modern copyright system as it is, because you're essentially paywalling for no real reason. I forget how it was explained, but another comment a few weeks back made better sense than I can recall here.

It's why I've switched to a lot of FOSS apps. Contributions to community driven apps make loads of improvements, and if there needs to be different solutions or goals, they can be forked off to meet different needs. It helps keep applications lightweight vs cumbersome and heavy trying to be a sloppy Swiss army knife.

[-] ramble81@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago

Literally why the phrase “late stage capitalism” exists.

[-] jtrek@startrek.website 15 points 1 day ago

The core of capitalism - "you do work and I keep the profits" - is difficult to see as fair and just. Stuff like lower costs and "innovation" are incidental.

You can have competition and innovation without everything being owned by a few guys who don't even work.

[-] AmyAye@nord.pub 8 points 1 day ago

Who don't even work

Are you implying that Elon Musk isn't creating a trillion dollars worth of value by shitposting AI glamor videos at 3 AM?

[-] MrsVeggies@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Capitalism doesn't lower costs and copyright/patent laws do more to stifle innovation than promote it.

[-] jtrek@startrek.website 1 points 1 day ago

Sure, but people believe they do. They often conflate capitalism with markets and competition

[-] Gates9@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 day ago

Capitalism is eating itself. Personally, I think it’s our “great filter”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

[-] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

We had a socialist run for mayor in my town, but the people who actually vote here are mostly MAGA idiots.

Voting turnout was abysmal, and I think almost no one under 30 voted.

this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026

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