OurToothbrush

Yes, yes. It is cool and subversive to support capitalism, or at least oppose its alternatives.(aka support capitalism) You're part of the cool club of people who act in the interests of the bourgeoisie and not of your own class. A real independent thinker.

(Not that any of us are independent thinkers, but one of us is defending the powers that be and calling the other a chatbot)

Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos for starters China went from a century of humiliation to a superpower in less then a century thanks to socialism. The USSR was better than the feudalism before it or the dictatorships of the bourgeoisie that came after it by a wide margin. For a place much poorer than the US, they had similar nutrition, better education, more rights for women both legalistically and practically.

Oh, throw in east Germany too. Do you know what the Stasi did to the lgbt movement that they saw as subversive? Destroy it by ending discrimination against gay and trans people, including a massive education campaign to eradicate homophobia and transphobia and state funded gay bars. Compare that to how the US was treating gay people at the time.

How do you define “capital”? I own a paid-off vehicle. That’s my biggest single asset. Am I therefore evil?

Oh my god, we aren't coming for your toothbrush. The idea that owning anything makes you a capitalist is absurd. We are talking about businesses that alienate workers like yourself from their labor.

Oh, and I’m also a shareholder in my employer. Gasp.

And if you had enough shares to live off of you wouldn't be renting. You're a member of the proletariat, not even the petite bourgeoisie who still have more to gain by overthrowing capitalism.

All this talk is highly dangerous us-vs-them, black-and-white divisive crap that isn’t going to go anywhere productive. Stop it. Grow up.

Maybe instead of being afraid of shadows you should read what socialists actually believe. We believe that the means of production (aka your workplace) should be owned and managed by the workers (you) and not some board who see the business as a paycheck every month (and probably don't understand how it actually functions) overseen by a democratic body to coordinate between businesses. We claim to live in a democracy but nowhere is this more evidently wrong then workplaces, which are almost always run as dictatorships..what little political agency employees exercise has to be won in conflict to the goals of the system.

We oppose land commodification. People, especially children and the elderly, should not be at risk of being evicted from where they live, and if they have income they should just contribute to the collective maintaining and construction of property which is generally 5 percent of income, not 1/3 of a paycheck like it is under capitalism with all the middlemen leeches.

Okay, that at most makes you petite bourgeoisie not haut bourgeoisie. But I'm guessing you can't live off of your passive income so you're still proletariat. You have more in common with the proletariat than not, and you have more to gain by overthrowing capitalism then preserving it.

How is that an attack? The petite bourgeoisie generally have more to gain from joining the proletariat in the class struggle, and almost none of them have caused suffering at a scale that justifies the same attitude had towards the haut bourgeoisie. (Now people who own multiple car dealerships on the other hand)

It is only an attack if you think being a massive leech on society like Musk or Bezos is a good thing.

Yes. This isn't call of duty where the goal is to kill as many people as possible. The US got its ass kicked.

Do genocide and fail at winning wars against relatively small impoverished nations?

Soviet socialism failed miserably (it turns out, it is very hard to plan an economy).

Did you actually check? Because based on a bunch of metrics I saw the USSR did pretty well compared to the feudalism that came before it and the capitalist "democracy" that came after its illegal and undemocratic dissolution.

Does anyone here own capital? As in being haut bourgeoisie? Probably not.

If you support capitalism and you're not a capitalist you're just a bootlicker.