Nowhere did I claim that "free market" policies led up to this point, nor did I claim that government intervention didn't lead up to this point. However I did claim it was due to the capitalist mode of production and so far I haven't been refuted on that point.

Many "decent" jobs require at least a university degree, which almost always entails taking out a loan. So while you don't have to "pay" large amounts of money, you may need to loan it and then pay it back later.

What is capitalism other than the system of predominant wage-labour, private ownership of socially productive property (supported by the state), capital accumulation and class society? The idea that capitalism cannot be blamed for the fact that people are required to obey the whims of speculators in the market, to tailor their ambitions such as to maximise wage rather than to pursue enjoyment and the replacement of relations between people with relations between commodities is absurd.

Capitalism "supports" whatever will make a profit; in this case, student loans turn profits. Why would this system of student loans not occur under government intervention? There clearly exist private loan agencies.

To be clear I'm not speaking in favour of the Cuban system, so please don't assume that I am.

Another commenter remarked that the Cuban system is set up to keep the people at the top in power, the American capitalist system less obviously so. I wonder what other methods of Socialist organisation may be explored other than the capitalist wage-labour system we see in both Cuba and the US. The idea of labour vouchers has always been interesting to me.

I remarked elsewhere that the art of dialectic was at some point lost; in Plato's dialogues the method was used to free the other person's soul from contradictions by advancing questioning of their assumptions and models. On mass platforms this cannot arise, as one's reputability (which should be irrelevant) comes into question via the usage of downvotes, and further the downvotes do not advance the dialectic, they aim to put a halt to it. It were as if there were, in the time of Socrates, a man sitting at the table during a diologue who did not engage but merely remarked "That's wrong!" or "I disapprove!".

Socialism since its inception was never about redistribution of capital gains, it was about the ownership of society's means of production by the working class, i.e those who survive mostly or entirely from the sale of their labour-power. This definition stretches back to even before Marx, as does Communism. Your definition of "Socialism" is what it is thought of in the US, i.e Socialism is where the government spends money on social programs which it acquires via heavy taxation. This, as many point out, is actually social democracy, a form of economic management practiced most notably in Scandinavian countries.

So if what I have said is true, you may ask: What is the purpose of the word "Communism"? The truth is that 19th century authors used the term "Socialism" and "Communism" interchangably; this can be seen in Marx and Engels, Bakunin and Oscar Wilde's works. Although they were separated into higher and lower stages, the practice of calling the lower stage as "Socialism" is an invention of Vladimir Lenin who sought to describe his country as "state Socialist" in an effort to convince people of the idea that the means of production were communally owned by the working class.

Communism is further not about party control; the idea of the vanguard party again originates from Lenin; but here we must make a distinction - Lenin did not seek to modify what his theoretical predecessors meant by "Communism", he sought to create a model of praxis, that is, to ask and answer the question of: How is Communism achieved? Lenin's own idea to this was the usage of the vanguard party, which is a group of highly educated Communist intellectuals which guides the masses of the working class toward revolution and Communism.

You are conflating Communism with praxis (thus making a category error) and further conflating that specific Leninist praxis with Communism in general. The evidence that this is a conflation rests in two facts: there exist and have existed through history democratic Socialists who not only used the terms "Socialism" and "Communism" interchangably as I have already mentioned but who sought to establish Communism not via representation of the working class themselves but via the normal methods of parliamentary democracy. An example of this praxis in use is various Socialist parties which compete in local and national elections in Europe and elsewhere. Further, there exist today several varieties of Communism, within academia the meaning of Communism can be stretched much father than you may have anticipated; Badiou writes, "where there is a State, there is Communism to oppose it". This is known as the Communist hypothesis.

On to the definiton of capitalism, the main factor is the private ownership of social means of production. By this I mean that the majority apparatus used to produce goods which society exchanges and uses are owned by individuals who seek to make a profit. This is echod by Smith, Ricardo, Marx and Keynes. Other factors which contribute to the definition include the predominant usage of wage labour and the goal of capital accumulation.

Whether this is possible now, I don't know, but I think it should be fostered. In the same way, I think attachment to views is the cause of many arguments, which I am guilty of engaging in.

The concept of dialectic is so powerful it was applied to many processes, usually as thought experiment. For example, Engels wrote:

>Species of grain change extremely slowly, and so the barley of today is almost the same as it was a century ago. But if we take a plastic ornamental plant, for example a dahlia or an orchid, and treat the seed and the plant which grows from it according to the gardener’s art, we get as a result of this negation of the negation not only more seeds, but also qualitatively improved seeds, which produce more beautiful flowers, and each repetition of this process, each fresh negation of the negation, enhances this process of perfection.

Voters rarely make decisions as to who is in power; they are forced to select from a small group of candidates which have come so far already, and then a committee choses which candidate is best and makes them compete for election. I do not think that a system based on the agency of people rather than the agency of ideas is a good system.

Sometimes the voters don't actually get their say; a national organisation overrides their will. Sometimes the democratic pathways are blocked by media misinformation. These are problems of the situation in which democracy is placed, and they have been recognised at least as far back as Marcuse wrote in the 1960s. The problem is less to do with whether people get candidates in power, it's more to do with how well people are informed as to the true nature of their reality. It may sound as though I'm saying "people don't know what they want", but my intention is to advance to the super-democratic status of "people must obtain the information they need".

Marcuse puts it better than I ever could:

>The liberating force of democracy was the chance it gave to effective dissent, on the individual as well as social scale, its openness to qualitatively different forms of government, of culture, education, work--of the human existence in general. The toleration of free discussion and the equal right of opposites was to define and clarify the different forms of dissent: their direction, content, prospect. But with the concentration of economic and political power and the integration of opposites in a society which uses technology as an instrument of domination, effective dissent is blocked where it could freely emerge; in the formation of opinion, in information and communication, in speech and assembly. Under the rule of monopolistic media--themselves the mere instruments of economic and political power--a mentality is created for which right and wrong, true and false are predefined wherever they affect the vital interests of the society.

Not that I support it, but if Twitter were a paid platform they would have more accountability to the users, not beacuse they have finally realised their place as a setter of massive trends and social control, but because the users hold the shareholders ransom by way of threatening to take away any profit.

Very much this, though I must also recommend his Comments on it, for the reader who has a hard time penetrating the critique. I have a short list of related books at the bottom of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15299592

An example to what you're referring to would strengthen your case, though my own experience has been almost exactly opposite; although many works are certainly difficult to read not only for the obscurity of the terms and the form of content used but also for their disturbing and socially challenging content, I don't think they rely on sloppy reasoning; take Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man for example; he speaks in terms the reader can identify with, not using formal logic.

For example, an enlightening passage on freedom under the idea of freedom of enterprise:

>Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. The technological processes of mechanization and standardization might release individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity. The very structure of human existence would be altered; the individual would be liberated from the work world's imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own. If the productive apparatus could be organized and directed toward the satisfaction of the vital needs, its control might well be cen-tralized; such control would not prevent individual autonomy, but render it possible.

As we can see, he uses no historical examples (at least not yet), he uses no logic or even dielactic. It's philosophy which prompts the reader to think about their own situation and what that freedom means to them.

Ultimately all action begins with the thinking subject; if we restrict ourselves to strictly empirical forms of knowledge then I think we throw out too much as it relates to how people actually live. I would much much much rather than we and academics continue to search and define boundaries, as almost everybody recognises the relevance of critiques delivered by the likes of Debord, Marcuse and Baudrillade on the social side of the Marxian coin.

It's also true that I don't need a job, but I'm being pressured to get one for the idea that my parents will at some point stop giving me money, and that I need something to put on my CV/resume (I don't think Deliveroo is all that impressive personally).

My other options are things like working in a fast food joint, or something like a cinema. But I don't know if I can do that and fit in my education at the same time plus have some free time to relax myself, play a video game or whatever. It's honestly worrying and I feel pushed into a corner by all this.

I hope that's some insight as to why it's attractive to some people. If you know anything more about Deliveroo or other places I could look for jobs I'd be grateful, as it would really aid my search.

As a side note, I despise the way it is called the "sharing economy"; it's no sharing at all, and I wish this term were reserved for ideas I regard as more noble, like the gift economy, or a model in which people chip in a certain amount to a shared product on a large scale (such as democratic management of the economy).

Apparently not being an anti-semite is being "PC"?