this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Democrats are all upset over Mamdani because he’s a Democratic Socialist? Why? I don’t get it. What’s wrong with being a Democratic Socialist. It seems like a good thing to me. I thought Democrats embraced socialism.

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[–] Schmoo@slrpnk.net 5 points 17 hours ago

Capitalism describes a system of exploitation by which a privileged few profit from the labor of others. Regulated capitalism (also known as welfare capitalism) has only ever come about as a result of popular labor and social movements (which tended to be explicitly socialist) fighting for labor rights and threatening revolution, causing the owning class to allow reforms and expansion of welfare as a form of appeasement. This happened in the US mid-20th century and it succeeded in taking the wind out of the sails of the movement, and since then the owning class has steadily eroded the welfare state through austerity.

Capitalism should not be preserved because it creates inequality by design; that is its purpose. You can claim that is a childish perspective, but here are some of the people you're calling childish:

  • Albert Einstein
  • Helen Keller
  • Martin Luther King Jr
  • Malcolm X
  • Bertrand Russell
  • George Orwell
  • Oscar Wilde
  • Pablo Picasso

You have a limited perspective right now because you've been conditioned to dismiss alternatives with little thought. So was I, but I've since learned the history of capitalism and how it functions, as well as the various movements against it and what they've accomplished.