I mean, the idea of socialism has certainly seen setbacks since the end of the last century, hasn’t it? While gross inequality is still a huge problem, and I hope it will be solved somehow, the Lenin/Stalin version of socialism feels like it has basically lost.

A good, quick read if you don’t want to dive into books is the article Why Public Property?

I hadn’t seen this one before, thanks for that. There’s some great examples in here, on the subject of monopolies.

This phenomenon only continues to be proven true over a century later. The United States today has a far greater concentration of industry than it did during Lenin’s analysis. The small business sector has also consistently been on the decline. This is an observable reality. [Accompanied by a graph]

Monopolies and particularly oligopolies are having a moment, but the chart only goes back to the 70’s, and implicitly shows total company number going up (why is hard to say, it’s a paywalled article, and they mixed data from two other sources). If you go back further, I think it would look pretty different - the old gilded age ended, Standard Oil was broken up, and some of the giants of the postwar era got knocked down a peg or more. Further, the trend is pretty uneven by sector. Mom and pop shops are dead now, but independently owned franchises and publicly traded whatevers are hella dominant, and contractors (or “contractors”) are everywhere.

A clear modern example of this would be the smartphone industry. Competition has made cellphone manufacturing more and more complex over time. A cellphone these days is far too complex to be created by a small business. One requires access to enormous factories, machines, and supply chains. According to The Wealth Record, “the net worth of Samsung is pegged at $295 billion.” This is roughly the amount of capital one would need to acquire to even begin to be a serious competitor to Samsung.

I actually know quite a bit about semiconductor manufacturing. It may be the most capital intensive endeavor of all, but you don’t quite need to be Samsung to do it. If you want to build your own at scale, a fab might be “only” a billion dollars. That’s a lot, but many startups have raised it (for other things), so it’s a different story from being Samsung on day 1.

If you just want your chip design made, it’s way easier. TSMC exists to build other people’s designs. Companies like Sam Zeloof’s new enterprise exist for small scale printing of your prototypes. Most of the basic design tools can be found open source.

The network effect has made some genuine monopolies and definitely many oligopolies, but other things are less affected. Individual rich people get rich by chance (if you don’t mind me introducing my own source, which happens to be my favourite one).

All this to say, I don’t think concentration is going to kill capitalism in the near future, or even come close.

It is easy to look backwards at prior systems, such as the feudal economic system or the slave economic system, and then figure out how that system developed into the system afterwards. Adam Smith, for example, already explained in detail in his book Wealth of Nations how capitalism developed out of feudalism long before Marx.

It’s a tangent, so I’ve separated this out, but this is also an interesting claim. The end of feudal economics is an actively researched bit of history, and was far from neat and tidy. IIRC some of those old fealty-type agreements lasted into Marx’s time, if being mere formalities by their end. And I’m not sure why we (correctly) decided slavery was bad after doing it since before recorded history, either.

Well, to go back to my OP, good luck with that.

No, no it hasn’t risen since - unless your definition of socialism has expanded far more than I agree with. Meanwhile, economies elsewhere have gotten more and more market-oriented and financialised.

Yeah, and I’m still not sure how that happened or if democracy is here to stay, honestly.

I can’t really see things going back there economically, though - modern technology is just too good, and isolated illiterate peasants can’t make it.

Edit: Unless we really fuck up and cause nuclear winter or something. I suppose if we’re starting from scratch being agrarian again is on the table.

For a while, and then it failed. Meanwhile, the Western world got more and more free market.

I just like, don’t believe it. Capitalism is hundreds of years old, and it’s only gotten stronger.

Spontaneous revolution/organisation for revolution has been promised for a long time, and is no closer to happening.

Uhh, just in the sense of being a weak democracy that backslid? Lots. The OG fascists in Italy come to mind. In the really long run they tend to own themselves. If they survive, it’s by turning into the tried-and-true aristocratic autocracy.

Spain made the transition back to democracy peacefully, because Franco set it up to go that way once he died, and there was a lot of outside cultural influence to support it. That being said, I don’t know all the details there, and it’s a pretty unusual case. Italy got owned in war. Lots get owned by a series of coups, like Yakubu Gowon’s Nigeria, for one example.

The US is a new thing, though, in that usually the new dictator isn’t a crayon-eating moron, and never before has it happened somewhere with no living memory of authoritarian politics (which seems to make a huge difference). It’s not going to be exactly like anything else. I answered how I did because Orbon was elected but doesn’t really have a clear ideological agenda beyond power, while Hitler used his executive power non-subtly to shut everyone else down, which seem like the inevitable near-future features of new America.

In the US? Probably Hungary, with a bit of Germany or Chile mixed in because Trump is too dumb to be Orban successfully.

The exact breakdown between the two is hard to say in advance.

Sus.

Okay, have you considered old-fashioned “photoshopping” (preferably with GIMP)?

Yeah, in heavily left-wing spaces guns give people the wigglies. Even if it’s not rights, the general fact we live in a world with them is something people try to memory hole.

I can’t even follow the logic behind this one.