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Obviously, this is Russina propaganda. They are jealous of our freedom and prosperity. This is just a try to confuse us into becoming gay communists, so our military degrades and they can use their Mexican and Canadian proxy cells to take over our god-given country.
Ghisline Maxwell’s dad published our textbooks
i don’t hate communism. i hate the version of it that has left lasting damage on my country after 45 years.
Not all communism must be authoritarian. Any and all authoritarians must be burned at the stake for the common good. Only then can we have a peaceful society.
I hate the version of it that was explained to me by my father who lived in it.
Same logic:
You don’t hate capitalism. You hate the version of it taught to you by someone who took the easiest educational track possible.
I think a significant number of us hate whatever system we are living in right now, no matter what it’s called.
actually, i do hate capitalism with all its complexity too. imo the market is a useful tool when kept in check by having to compete with planned, government-subsidised alternatives, but private ownership of capital is what generates 99% of the problems with it. either the workers should own the capital or the public should. the best option is probably somewhere between the two.
I agree - but the workers and the public should be the same entity!
imo the distinction is between the workers of that particular organisation vs the public as a whole. there’s still value in the people actually close to the work making the decisions (a lot of the failures of the soviet system can be attributed to party officials overruling experts) but it should be counterbalanced by the public looking out for each other, so that no single org or collection of orgs stand above the rest of society.
I know that old people and children are not workers in the strict sense of the word, but in a broader definition they are. Everyone should be part of “the workers” in my opinion. In an ideal “soviet” system workers are organized in councils and democracy a grassroot endevour. The problem is the way to get there. At first every socialist system will be attacked by reactionist forces. Lenin argued that it is therefor necessary to have a communist party. This contains the danger of it getting corrupted and establising an authoritarian system. There seems no way around that. Lenin argues that in a capitalist world, it is not possible to just jump to a communist utopia. The state has to wither away.
Actually I hate it cause my parents and grandparents suffered under it in the GDR. None of them own yachts or houses either.
Socialism isn’t far enough. We need anarcho-com.
Anarchist tendencies have some inherent philosophical and practical flaws unfortunately. Anarchism relies on a naive, idealistic view of human nature, falsely assuming people are inherently good and cooperative once state authority is removed. Selfishness does stem from capitalist competition and private property, meaning solidarity cannot simply be unlocked by abolishing the state, but must be consciously organized through a new economic system.
Good point but what your parents and grandparents went through was not just socialism and to pretend that it was only socialism is disingenuous at best and propaganda at worst.
Had an exchange that went like
“The workers don’t know how to run the business”
“Did the owner tell you that?”
“… shit.”
Also workers don’t have to run the business, they can elect / delegate someone to do that.
If that owners managerial skills are truly necessary for the business’ survival then they should have no problem explaining that to their fellow workers and getting elected to manage. They just won’t get all the profit…
I’ve worked for some small businesses that the owners themselves could not be trusted to run operations without fucking everything up.
Size of organizations really is an important factor. For small-medium businesses, the owner probably needs to have the skills to operate things themselves, for medium-to-large the owners skills set changes to people managment (see the Peter Principal). Then you get to the places where the CEOs job is less managing people but setting directives at the request of the board and being the cult of personality/fall-guy for the investors.
Its that last one where I get why it works that way, but its baffling how an organization gets there without someone asking if thats a bad idea.
These were auto shops with 8-15 employees, the owners had started the business when you wrote appointments on a desk calendar and there were three oil filters on the shelf, one for Chevy, one for Chrysler and one for Ford. Ask them to make an appointment or order the correct oil filter for a 2016 Kia Sedona was expecting too much.
What’s more depressing than socialist architecture? Homelessness and starvation in a land with plenty.
you don’t find children dying of exposure because they refuse to put those little hands to use inspiring?
May I add the “owning vast media conglomerate mega-phone allowing the yacht owner to blast said explanation to the entire world” part?
The issue isn’t that I don’t like socialism as most proponents describe it. I also like Hogwarts as the books describe it. The issue is I still think trying to build Hogwarts is dumb. Just like trying to implementing socialism the way people described it to me. It just clearly wouldn’t work, because people don’t magically stop being selifsh and greedy for money and power when you change economic systems.
I’ve said this a few times before, but it’s wrong to think that most people are greedy/selfish. The capitalist class and the political figures they buy are extreme outliers. We over-index on them due to a mix of negativity bias and the fact that they say everyone is greedy to justify their own positions of power.
Just think about it: Humans are an inherently cooperative species. We developed language so that we could work more effectively in groups and slowly built up complex social relationships that lead to us becoming wildly successful. The fact that some psychopaths learned to take advantage of our group dynamics shouldn’t damn everyone they are exploiting.
This isn’t even about being selfless/altruistic: The vast majority of us just straight up do better when we support each other. Even if the other person doesn’t directly reciprocate, living in a society where it is the norm to help others comes around to help you at some point.
But beyond that, there just isn’t a lot of value in essentializing people like that. Very little about modern society is natural. We aren’t born knowing how to do math or drive cars, but we have the capacity to learn those things. We’ve grown through social evolution, not biological. That’s why a critical part of building socialism is raising class consciousness. We aren’t just changing the structure of society, we’re changing the people to be able to create that new structure. Just as serfs learned that they need not be subservient to their lords before they were able to self govern, we must teach people that they have the power and the right to turn over the current hierarchy and create something better.
Wait so the fact that the more money I have the more giving I feel is actually normal ? I thought I was unique. I couldn’t understand how billionaires weres constantly handing out thousands of stacks of hundreds to the homeless.
I’m not sure I believe it. Or maybe most IRL folks I know are just assholes.
You are right - one has to look at ALL of human history. Most of it was in cooperation. Give, take, share and everyone has plenty. Feudalism and after that capitalism have shrunk our peer group further and further and told us selfishness is the core of the human psychology - it is not and we will overcome this.
So much word salad and none of it is relevant. Who cares if politicians and bilionaiers are extreme outliers or not? They exist. Capitalism as we have it now does not deal with them properly. But every socialist system I have ever seen concentrates power even more than capitalism. At least there is some split of interest between billionaiers, politicians, and milionaiers. Plus billionaiers are not a very cohesive group as their interests also do not align with each other perfectly.
In pretty much every socialist system I have seen proposed, all power is handed to elected politicians. And by human neture, the outliers will get elected, just like they do currently. No magical fix for gullible voters in socialism. That is why you never have “real socialism” in history. It turns to autocracy because of how the system interacts with human nature.
“No matter what points you make I’m dead set in my beliefs and I’m never changing them no matter what.”
There, I shortened your walls of text for you.
I am very concerned by the number of liberals on lemmy who seem adamant about not wanting to read more than a tweet’s worth of text. It’s not like I write books. In theory they’re adults. They should be able to read a couple paragraphs if they want to have a serious conversation.
Ah, thank you! So much more readable than the 4 pagaraphs from darthelmet.
I dont disagree with the notion that a “changing of the guard” won’t fix everything. It just means there’s different people that risk being corrupted, assuming they weren’t already. Like how after the French Revolution it just meant there different rich people in control.
But to say something we shouldn’t even try because a certain percentage of the population is greedy, or psychopathic, or whatever other trait you want, isn’t that great of an argument. You could say capitalism will never work because people are too dishonest and will lie to fool investors. Which is something that actually happens right now. Enron. FTX. Theranos.
This is THE issue imo. How do we deal with these people? I dont think ANY political philosophy can address that effectively. The original idea of splitting power into three houses wasn’t bad, but these past two years have shown it wasn’t enough.
But to say something we shouldn’t even try because a certain percentage of the population is greedy, or psychopathic, or whatever other trait you want, isn’t that great of an argument.
Why do you think the choice is socialism or do nothing? I am arguing for doing something else, namely focusing on reforming democracies and breaking up mega-corporations into smaller companies while keeping the basics of capitalism.
This is THE issue imo. How do we deal with these people? I dont think ANY political philosophy can address that effectively. The original idea of splitting power into three houses wasn’t bad, but these past two years have shown it wasn’t enough.
If you believe this, then you are paying too much attention to the US and not enough to the EU. The EU is semi-working and a lot of the things that aren’t are US corporations and other foreign interests messing things up from the outside while not being fully under EU jurisdiction.
This is THE issue imo. How do we deal with these people? I dont think ANY political philosophy can address that effectively.
Effectively is relative. I don’t think any philosophy can address it perfectly (outside something crazy sci-fi like handing power to an AGI). But clearly some approaches work better then others. Look at Netheralnds, Norway, … They have issues but they work well enough.
What is crazy to me is there being clear examples of countries with systems that work well enough to give great living standards to their people and people saying “fuck that, let’s try a system that doesn’t work even on paper and always resulted in horrible suffering when tried. I am sure this time will be better.” Like why?! Even if you believe there is a way it could maybe work, why take the risk over systems that have proven themselves?
When it comes to the french revolution the answer is easy: This was not a workers revolution - it was a bourgeois revolution. It means that feudal lords were replaced with capitalists. As you said, the power went from one small group to another small group, but it still changed an economic system - feudalism to capitalism. The russian revolution is still the better example that should be studied. It abolished feudalism and got a step further to a form of socialist experiment.
I guess there will always be bad people that are hungry for power and have no morals, as you said - no matter the system. Corruption will always be a thing, but it is important to have a system that sanctions it properly and that allows society to have a clear moral stance on such behaviour.
But every socialist system I have ever seen concentrates power even more than capitalism.
Billionaires go to prison and get executed in China, because power is concentrated in the Party and politics are in command.
That seems pretty fucking good to me.
Executions without fair trial sound good to you? Yep, .ml
Believing billionaires deserve to live? Yup, reddit.world
Just say you hate democracy and you love boot.
The people explaining it to me: no yacht but username@lemmy.ml
It is a pity, because socialism doesn’t need to be what Marxist Leninists get a hard-on for.
You don’t have to have a centralised hierarchical system where the workers are but “considered” instead of having democratic control.
And they’ll do it with a straight face.
Me personally, I think it the workers don’t have control over society, it’s not socialism.
No, they hate “the other” would get treated kindly like them. There are some vengeful/racist garbage that have this “out group” damning thing, which sets us all into the pain with high ass premiums and shit. They paint over their rationalization as “rugged individualism,” but it’s basically “no, <out group> doesn’t deserve the services that I should get.”
And yes, above.
Imagine your politician showing up at the Ford dealership telling you you’ve been cut off. You can’t buy another Ford F-150 King Ranch they say. You look up at the American flag and it is red with yellow stars.
I don’t hate it, I just don’t think it works
Can you elaborate?
I believe when you centralize all economic power in a government it will very likely breed corruption, nepotism and eventually fascism, making it impossible to transition to worker owned means of production.
Socialism is literally when you decentralize economic power. What you are describing is state-capitalism.
That’s Communism, Socialism is the intermediate step before reaching that, at least according to Lenin, Marx used Socialism and Communism interchangeably
You’re doing a meme right now. This isn’t what socialism is, textually, like, not even related.
What is it then?
Spoiler alert: you will probably describe social democracy
Do you often operate in a world where words have no meanings, and people just use them whatever? Why would I use the word that has a definition and a meaning to describe other thing that has different term for it?
Isn’t anarchism a form of socialism though? It doesn’t have to be centralised.
I don’t think a trans person from Twitter has a yacht
Caitlin Jenner has entered the chat.
bad platform example.
