Something tells me the aliens would be smart enough to ask questions like, “How do the factories get here to begin with?”

Even though I lean heavily toward socialism and believe an open source society is our future, we’ve got to move beyond memes and kindergarten oversimplifications of capitalism. Every industry and business empire ultimately starts with clever individuals working very hard on ideas that turn out to be better in some way than what’s already around, so they can grow and grow to become giant corporations. Over the course of time a lot of people get involved who don’t work any harder than a normal person but are just paid a lot more, and others simply inherit the money. Those are really ones everybody gets upset at,. The innovators and entrepreneurs deserve recognition and reward, we just have to find a way to do that without creating oligarchs and vast blocks of wealth.

So I say somewhere else that one shouldn’t bother with this comic because its assumptions are flawed, but let’s point out exactly how because otherwise Marxists will live in the flawed understanding that their pov is unchallenged or inherently correct.

— the alien assumes for some magical reason a property cannot be owned, specifically a factory. A factory is not a natural product of the world, there’s not tree growing factories. Someone put in an investment to create it, and the work they allocate in that factory is a recoupment of that factory building investment.

— the workers obey “pieces” of paper because that’s what society decided is civilized behavior. The alternative is one where a factory owner decides to kill people for trying to take what’s theirs, or the workers decide to kill the factory owner to take over. Either way, there is violence and bloodshed.

Marxist believe, for whatever magical reasons, that the violence will stop once they seize the means of production. But why should it? Why wouldn’t another subgroup of Marxists constantly want to challenge the committees who want to run that specific factory? The answer is that without a rule or agreement (piece of paper), various groups will constantly try to seize what they think should be theirs.

— the alien believes that agreeing to work with someone is slavery. Here I have two things to say: 1) for someone who doesn’t want to work, then any kind of work will appear to be slavery, and that’s not a a capitalism problem, that’s a self actualization problem for some people. 2) in reasonable economies, people have choices for places to work, or unions which ensure that employers cannot abuse them, or laws which ensure protections.

The fact is simply this, whenever two people interact, they will have disagreements. We make laws to not kill each other over those disagreements. If you want to experience what it’s like living in an authoritarian state, try living in china or Vietnam. Rule of law means little or nothing in such places, whereas in democracies you can still get some recourse via the courts, or via regulations. Have kleptocrats and oligarchs ruined democracies, yes definitely.

— being a larger class doesn’t necessarily mean anything in violent conflict. I think any philosophy which relies on violent conflict to achieve its goals is tacitly admitting that it cannot win the hearts and minds of people via ideas alone.

Edit to say, I have a busy day ahead so I wont be responding lol, but doesn’t mean I agree or don’t want to challenge this vapid Marxist pov

And once more: lol @ downvoters constantly butthurt that their Marxist pov is challenged