Yes, my friends: capitalism has nothing to do with capital, the law of value, generalized commodity production, or wage labor! No! What capitalism really is is basically this nice, happy little place where all of the shopkeepers are completely honest with everybody and they never exploit anybody and the customers are always happy with their goods (which, presumably, are always perfectly harmless) and there is never anything obligating anybody to work for somebody or to steal anything!

In other words, a fantasy.

You can all say that I exaggerated with my description, but that is still essentially to what this image amounts: a utopia. It’s an obvious redefinition that’s so blatantly self‐serving and utterly ahistorical that it isn’t worth taking seriously. If you don’t believe me, go look through some public domain dictionaries (on, say, Google Books) and count how many times you found either this redefinition or anything similar to it in them.

It is these anticlimactic ‘solutions’ to serious problems that are one of the many reasons why I can’t be an anticommunist anymore. Who cares if Fascist Italy preserved and expanded wage labor, businesses, capital, exchange value, and the profit motive? The government interfered in the economy (sometimes). That’s what really counts. Thus, anticommunists can sit back and relax, ignoring everything important that they find agreeable by just focusing on some trivia that they find disagreeable. But unlike them, I’m not so easily placated. That’s why I taught you about international oil sales to Africa Orientale Italiana whereas anticommunists taught you bupkes about the subject.

There is plenty more that I could address, such as this little nugget of wisdom:

We should care about the poor. Most capitalists would agree. We’d even say that’s why we’re capitalists.

But to be honest, it’s so easy that I think that you can safely try it yourselves.

Finally, I just want to say that that forum is barf… I mean, it isn’t one of the worst communities that I’ve ever encountered, I’ll admit that, but it’s still an unpleasant, toxic community and I see that it hasn’t improved much since I first noticed it one dozen years ago. If you have better things to be doing, do yourselves a favor and don’t read it.