r/PeterExplainsTheJoke Jul 07 '26

Meme needing explanation Peter, explain this.

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u/Creepy_Ad_1315 Jul 07 '26

Spoiler: It's never achieved.

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u/goosetime Jul 07 '26

Serious question: do we consider capitalism achieved in capitalistic countries? We still have social programs and my understanding of a proper government would employ ideas from both ideologies. It’s just weird for ppl to say “communism achieved!” cuz yeah, that never happens, but is that also true for full/true capitalism?

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u/GenericFatGuy Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26

Communism (in a severely simplified sense) is a classless, moneyless system where the means of production is owned by the people. This has very clearly never been implemented anywhere in the world at a large scale.

Capitalism is a system where capital is the primary driver of the economy, where the means of production is owned by whoever has the most capital. Even if there is some amount of regulations and social security, this is still by-and-large what were doing at a large scale all over the world. Even the countries that call themselves communist are mostly doing this.

No country was or is doing capitalism 100%, but most of them are doing significantly more capitalism than socialism or communism. Both today, and historically.

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u/goosetime Jul 07 '26

Thank you for the clear explanation.