This is a quote from the play The Fever by Wallace Shawn. The play depicts a person who becomes sick while struggling to find a morally consistent way to live when faced with injustice, and harshly criticizes the United States’ record in supporting the murder of communists and socialists. The play ends by saying that only blood spilled on their doorsteps will bring the complacent rich to change their selfish ways (which the NYT didn’t like for being too radical).

Wallace Shawn is a socialist, Jewish actor and playwright who has:

• supported whistleblower Chelsea Manning
• worked as a speaker for Jewish Voice for Peace in October 2023 as an anti-Zionist Jew
• narrated a political ad in April 2024 denouncing AIPAC influence

what the fuck is this it’s fantastic

This is too broad a topic to have any meaningful discussion on in a comment thread, but I’d start with a few things:

1. Are you looking for new perspectives, or are you looking to debate? The former implies you’re willing to change your stance, the latter does not.
2. Define “capitalism”, “communism” and “good”. As a minimum to starting such a discussion, everyone participating should be on the same page regarding the topic, but these are terms that have wildly different meanings for a lot of people (not so much on this instance).
3. Pick a specific theme to discuss - what do you support most about capitalism? What is your greatest issue with communism? Anything you’re specifically interested in? As I said, it’s a broad topic, so in order to have any constructive discussion, it needs to be narrowed down.

We don’t do “debates” here, but if you’re genuinely interested in learning a perspective different from your own, we’d be glad to link some introductory resources.

If you’re interested in learning about communism, then I think reading would be a better place to start than a debate. /r/communism has a Basic Marxism–Leninism Study Plan, personally I started with the Manifesto of the Communist Party since it was the most commonly talked about.

communism is not merely “good”, it is a necessity. But to get an understanding of what that means one has to make themselves familiar with the contradictions inherent to capitalism and understanding that capitalism is fundamentally incapable of overcoming them.

To give an example: Crippling economic crises arise within capitalism periodically because it is incapable of overcoming the contradiction between the “organization of production” in one company and the “anarchy of production” (unguided production) within all of society.

Capitalism can’t overcome this contradiction because the underlying reason for it is the contradiction between a socialized production and a private appropriation. This contradiction is the defining characteristic of capitalism however, so it can’t ever be resolved without abolishing the system. And we see this prediction of Marx play out time and time again.

Now you may think periodic crises are acceptable (why you would think that is beyond me as they are really truly not necessary). However there are many other realities that contradict capitalism like limited resources, limited capacity of our planet to absorb emissions, the inevitability of the global south’s independence and self-determination (very incomplete list)

Whatever type of capitalism you support, it requires some kind of externality that just isn’t real: infinite natural resources, an ocean that doesn’t care how much is dumped into it, an atmosphere that absorbs all emissions, a domestic working class that accepts exploitation, colonies / the global south to outsource exploitation to, etc. all of those things run out. This kind of “externality” is exposed as an illusion of bourgeois thought.

These contradictions (and more) are creating tensions like tectonic plates during a tectonic shift and we will surely see some more earthquakes. Possibilities include:

• Not being able to safe large parts of the planetary ecosystem.
• Countries falling into fascism to guarantee their national capitalists their profit rate as their main profit guarantor, the US, looses its imperial grip on the planet.
• More imperial wars

The alternative is: The abolition of the capitalist system, hence I spoke of necessity.

Or in Rosa Luxemburg’s words: “[It’s] Socialism or Barbarism”

Communism is good because communists want to develop production in order to advance society to a higher stage of development, it do be as simple as that.

i thought this was a shitpost… but you’re serious?

Here’s a video from Prager U that goes into it https://youtu.be/THm1gjjObUk