My younger brother:

"I consider myself a Marxist..."

In other words you identify with an ideology which has caused the deaths of over 100 million people in the past century and the destruction of entire nations and their history, probably because you think that living in a Marxist society will give you free things or you won't have to work.

In an actual Marxist society you would be much worse off than you are now, likely almost starving to death, and in fact if you were living under a Marxist revolution you would be shot in the back of the head for being a "counter revolutionary," with your thousand dollar coat and hundreds of dollars in watches.

I like how you mention due process in your email, and yet in any nation where communism has been tried, there was no due process for its victims. The communists in Cambodia decided that people who simply wore glasses were bourgeois and had them killed.

Why don't you get an understanding of history before you glibly identify as a Marxist?
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Me:

Lmao I'm sorry Timmy, but that's a hilarious reductive and condescending view of why I'm a Marxist. It's not why btw. If you'd like to have an honest discussion about why I consider myself a Marxist, I'd be happy to have that discussion with you.

I consider myself a Marxist because I think that historically societies progress into new forms of economic systems, and there's problems inherent in this one which cannot be addressed by the system. I wrote a paper on why capitalism isn't sustainable. It's unfortunately all too clear that the environment is being destroyed. 80% of the forests on earth are gone, we are in the 6th mass extinction of animals, there is almost more plastic in the ocean than fish, and the runaway greenhouse effect could threaten to wipe out most of civilization. As I said in my paper I just wrote, the police can only address the symptoms of poverty, which are desperation and violence. They cannot address the underlying cause of it, which is capitalism. I have given you you statistics on how wealth inequality has effected America, in things like the death rate of uninsured people, the fact that we pay the most for health care in the world and rank as one of the lowest in modern nations. The fact that college debt is so high when small under developed countries can provide quality education. These are all a problem with the leeching of capitalists, and I see no reason why enlightenment values cannot be mixed somewhat with Socialism.

This is a problem with your view of socialism, Timmy. You seem to have this ultra fundamentalist idea of what capitalism should be, and what you feel that socialism is. No one likes the USSR or China who isn't a Tanky or something. Those people aren't ones I respect intellectually, I agree with you that authoritarian regimes cause a lot of damage to the world. I'm also aware that there's a lot of socialists and socialist experiments which didn't result in deaths, but they were often quickly crushed by larger capitalist countries. The United States and the CIA has been complicit in the toppling of foreign governments simply because they are socialist. The USA called the USSR socialist when a lot of people wouldn't call it actual socialism. You have to understand what it is you're attacking Timmy, before you go ahead and attack it. What you just did is create a straw man of socialism for yourself to knock down.

Here's the thing. Socialism ideally does not does not exist in the world as we know it which is dominated by capitalism. Because it is clear that capitalism is not the best system possible, it clearly has room for improvement, I am happy to join with others like me who critique capitalism and have in mind a different system than the one we have in place right now. One which doesn't exploit cheap labor in the third world to prop up quality of life, exploit it's own citizens with health care industries that profit off of people's health care which should be single payer. One where imperialism doesn't cause mass immigration crisis all around the world, and socialist nations aren't allowed to develop. You are not wrong that past so called "socialist countries" have turned out disastrously, and a lot of socialists really don't think those are good examples of socialism. I want to explain to you a little more about the health care industry.

I want to address something about quality of life with you as well, Timmy. Whenever you point to starvation in capitalist systems, you point to countries which either weren't really socialist (in the egalitarian, libertarian sense), or very poor under developed countries. You need socialism to work on a large scale for quality of life to be good, one which eliminates consumerism and creates a sustainable world where wealth inequality and exploitation doesn't exist. I realize that the quality of life that I live in right now is propped up by imperialism and exploitation of the third world very largely, and whether or not I buy stuff in a capitalist system is irrelevant, because you will not change capitalism by changing your consumption habits. There's nothing to say that you wouldn't have high quality goods in a non-consumerist based system. In fact, you could have a less alienated labor force which creates quality things which are necessary, instead of creating a bunch of unnecessary things which are disposable and of low quality. Artisans and craftsman could be very useful for this, and things could be made to last, and since all the resources aren't going to the leeching parasite, they can be allocated into things which people can actually use and need, making them of a higher quality. You cannot change the mode of production by changing your consumption habits, you need to change the mode of production.

Here's a thing which you might not totally get about capitalism, Timmy. Capitalism requires the mass consumption of goods in order to sustain itself. It needs to produce a bunch of unnecessary junk in order to create a profit. Most of these profits go to an increasingly small margin of people. We see economic crash after economic crash, and the next one is supposed to be a big one. Capitalism finds itself in a crisis right now of which I fear for the future generations, because I don't think our planet will survive, and I don't think that capitalism can sustain itself, aside from the obvious flaws inherent in the current system which I explained in some detail to you just now. If you care at all about me as a person, which you really don't seem to every time we talk, you would care at least on an empathetic level that I am very scared for the future of the human race. Capitalism will create an apocalyptic scenario. If you really think that I'm just that greedy and retarded that I can't see the brilliant truth of capitalism which you seem so intent on exercising to me in very reductive and condescending ways every time we talk, then at least be considerate of the fact that I'm clearly just a retard and can't come to the brilliant conclusions you've come to. Don't be ableist.

To finish, I just wanted to mention a little bit about why I think that a socialist world would be better. Think about it, workers create wealth for the owner class and the owner class lives in luxury. That is pure exploitation. Because of consumerism, all the junk that we need to create just so that the owner class can live in luxury, we actually work more hours that would be necessary in a non-consumerist based system. We're fed a junk culture which gives is products which it artificially creates a need for, simply so it can create a profit. It's almost nauseating, being constantly bombarded with insidious messages whose sole intent is to get you to spend your money on them. I don't like consumerism, I don't like living in a society where people are alienated from each other, told that their value as people is based on how much they can produce. Yeah, I don't like working that much, and that's because I can see how much work is absolutely unnecessary, but I've gotten As in all my classes, and I do enjoy things which I think are worth while, like reading, which I do a lot of, and writing, which I'm doing for you right now. You say that I'm just lazy and retarded and a leech off mom and dad, or whatever. You're just being inconsiderate and ignorant of all the reasons I have for believing in the things that I do. It's also not easy having anxiety, that has made living in this world rather difficult for me historically. Once again, you don't care. You don't seem to care about a lot of things, Timmy, I wish you did.
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Also me:

My view of a socialist society is basically turning all the institutions we have right now into public utilities, and creating the workplace co-op on small levels, where on a local level there is non hierarchy based worker collectives, and on a larger scale the workers elect a workers councils and they control the command economy. It would be kind of like the economy we have right now, except it would be all command. Aspects of capitalist society actually have a command economy, which is what we put our tax dollars towards when we use our tax dollars responsibly.

This creates a much more efficient society, because capitalism needs growth and creates unnecessary production to grow. Without the profit incentive inherent in capitalism, a lot of jobs would simply become obsolete and the economy could become environmentally sustainable and equitable for all it's people. and without the leeching parasite, the worker can enjoy the fruits of their labor. You would also need to end the banking system, because instead of share holders you would have workplace democracy, where decisions of the company making is held to a vote. Again, this is like what we have right now, where shareholders vote on company decisions, except it would just be the workers, who would not vote for, say, lowering their wages or shipping their jobs over seas. In fact, there wouldn't even be wages, because all the workers would make the direct value of their work. In capitalism, they must extract surplus labor value so they can give it to those at the top.

America has the production power to create a nice sustainable lifestyle, which also requires a lot less work, which is something I believe Karl Marx advocated for. Who who enjoys the finer things in life such as reading, music, documentaries, etc, does not enjoy spending more free time doing things they want to do? Time is the most precious commodity of all, and yet it is wasted with the garbage culture of capitalism.

It is of course, all very theoretical, but that's okay, because as I said, the system we are in right now is incredibly destructive and has so many flaws, that there is no reason why we shouldn't strive to fix it. If you want to have an idea of a socialist society, there are papers people have written on how it would be set up and people who explain what it would look like. It is designed to address all the problems of capitalism I mentioned. This is what intelligent people do, is they look at the problems existing in the world and they try to figure out how to solve them.