- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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The school-selected candidate went on to sell all of the class’s supplies to buy the principal a golf club
Something like this happened in my school. We had surplus budget so we all got to write in suggestions on how to use it and vote on them. EVERYONE wanted the skatepark to be upgraded, like across social groups and ages, we all loved the skate park even though it was a shitty little corner of the parking lot with a tiny ramp and concrete blocks. We just wanted like, one ramp and a grind bar.
When it came time to vote, a lot of the suggestions were obviously not from students and skate park upgrades weren’t on the list, so we conspired and wrote it in as an extra option anyway.
Guess what won? Fancy new concrete garbage cans. We broke them out of spite.
Good on y’all. It’s preferable to have no democracy than to have no democracy plus a false front that there is one.
school: Whoa whoa there pal… We love free speech, but not that kind of free speech.
They’ve never loved free speech and have to be reminded that minors still have civil/constitutional rights from time to time.
Two of my favorite Erika Kirk memes. Hopefully it brightens someone else’s day like it did my own.
his righteous work
I will never understand this clumsy, ham-fisted, last-minute, posthumous religious pivot they gave this guy. There’s a way to martyr someone and they’re so far off base, it’s like a parody of itself.
Everyone grieves differently… And some ways of grieving are just way more lucrative than others, apparently.
Those monsters that criticize her just never let her grieve in her privacy, even when she was on her privacy barn storming tour.
the memes made on kirk made it impossible for me to take them seriously.
His actual dialog made it impossible for me to take him seriously.
His actual dialogue made me take him seriously as a threat to civil rights.
Good point. He did have a big fan base that ate the shit he was spewing.
He died as he lived. Spewing.
And that was what got him killed since he turned on the genociders which made them furious.
That fact doesn’t get attention.
No, let’s focus on the grifter woman.
It’s actually scary how people will never say it but understand perfectly that communism would lead to poor people doing better and that they will absolutely never allow that to happen.
Its not the poors getting a better outcome that they are against, its the fact the 1% will no longer exist.
Let’s be honest. It’s both.
people will never say it but understand perfectly
I think you’re vastly overestimating what people understand.
lol this was a perfect opportunity for the school to teach about the dangers of populist liars but they bottled it
communism is nice on paper, not in real life, because people suck. China is not truly communist.
It’s always China this Soviets that with the fucken examples. No one ever fucken talks about the Yugoslav mixed system, Communalist towns, Black Ukraine, or even when Syndicalists took over neighborhoods. Just as capitalism can range from late merchantslism, social democracy, and laze fare so can socialism or communism.
Laissez-faire not laze fare.
It means to let be in French.
100% agree with you.
I think it’s Lace fear, the fear of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps
Autocorrect has a bias against French apparently.
Because none of those never amounted to anything of significance. Because it doesnt scale.
I mean, don’t it? The CIA did a lot to squash anything resembling a little bit too much like an experiment on the matter- foreign or domestic, ally or foe.
Yugoslavia existed for decades before it was torn apart by ethnic tensions which would’ve happened regardless of what economic system they used.
Communalist towns were largely stable up until they basically aged out of functioning due to birthrate issues. Lots of them were weird little religious communities which are just kinda subject to population collapse.
Black Ukraine didn’t last long enough to really do much of anything because of the Bolsheviks, could’ve failed or succeeded but it’s impossible to tell which what would’ve happened.
Syndicalist neighborhoods were almost all wiped out by the Pinkertons. But the ones that lasted the longest were well on track to democratically seizing some cities and townships.
I chose my list the way I did because none of them failed due to the system themselves, they either collapsed due to pre-existing social issues or were destroyed by outside forces.
What is communism?
The US government would not spend so much effort stamping out communism and murdering communists if it wasn’t an effective threat to capitalism.
And yes, China is not truly communist because they are socialist, the intermediate stage between capitalism and communism. And if you think they aren’t socialist, then you haven’t done enough research into how China actually functions.
China is not truly communist because they are socialist
Is a one party dictatorship part of socialism?
Dictatorship doesn’t really have any meaning. The US is supposedly a democracy, yet for its entire existence the government has acted solely in the interests of the wealthy. The US is effectively a dictatorship of the bourgeois. China in the other hand is a dictatorship of the proletariat, ie, it acts in the interests of the vast majority of its people. This is why the CPC has a 90%+ satisfaction rating in China. The people recognize that the government actually works for them, and not for the capitalists.
😂
Well, we don’t live in the magical realm of wonderful smelling farts and platonic forms. There’s no true capitalist countries and no true communist countries. Reasonable people know how to read from context. When we talk about communist and capitalist countries, you know damn well what we’re talking about.
There are no communist states anywhere, because Marx defined communism as a classless stateless society.
It would be wrong to pretend that there are currently any large scale “communist” societies in the world, the closest would probably be smaller communities like the Zapatistas or Rojava. Soviet style “communism” has always been a bastardization of all actual communist ideas and pretending, that that is the best version of communism that we could get is utterly delusional.
Because at the end of the day, Soviet Russia just replaced the bugoirsie with party officials and it was just red fascism.
It’s not about it being the “best” version. It is the version that exists in real life.
Trying to have a battle over which fictional utopia is better is pointless.
There are no true societies.
That doesn’t mean descriptions are not useful. There’s no such thing as a capitalist society, yet communism’s entire foundation is built on critiquing it.
There are no true societies. There’s no such thing as a capitalist society
Please elaborate?? If you make claims, that stray far from the understanding of these terms by most people, it would be really useful to know, why you see it that way.
That doesn’t mean descriptions are not useful.
Descriptions are only useful when they tell you anything useful about the things, they are describing. The Soviet Union was neither communist nor socialist, because the workers didn’t control the means of production. The state did. This is fundamental to both of these systems. Sometimes, false labels can also be harmful, because they give the other person a false idea of what you are talking about. For example, it would be wrong and also really bad, if you were to describe the Nazis as socialists, just because they were called the “national socialists”.
Explain what Elon Musk(and all the other billionaires are for that matter) is if there is no such thing as capitalistic society.
You missed the point entirely. You can’t with one side of your tongue say there are no true communist societies while saying there are true capitalist countries with the other. Every country exists through a combination of both free market and government intervention in the economy. Yet, for some reason, only the platonic ideal true communism counts as communism, but the applied version counts as capitalism. I’m a leftist myself, I just think the double standard is fucking idiotic.
Communism isn’t government intervention.
Exactly, people suck so giving them too much choice backfires. Even in the US, the best times were when we had 90% top tax rate and heavily regulated industry coming out of WWII. Since then we’ve cit taxes reduced regulation and it’s just been steadily getting worse over the decades.
communism would lead to poor people doing better
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
If successful all but the wealthiest would be better off, would they not? Are you thinking of the “communism” that happened in the Soviet Union.like?
im not discussing economics in this place anymore, it’s pretty clear you guys are always talking about capitalism as a way to say America, and communism to mean whatever random notion of socialism you dream up that definitely hasn’t been tried before
Well you are in the clear as this
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
doesn’t count as fucking discussion anyway.
I always wonder why one emoji isn’t enough. It’s always spammed in multiples of 3 or 5, as if they’re cloning themselves. One gets the point across just fine.
🙆♂️
🤣 there is plenty of other communism is great circle jerks around here, I’m sure you’ll find one where everyone agrees with you shortly
I’m not even a communist. I just try not to dismiss people with an attitude like that.
As you said, sometimes it’s not worth engaging, but… you did, and were a jerk about it.
If you can’t acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, the poor and downtrodden banding together to advance their own interests might improve their lives, I dunno what to say. That it might not? That they’d just be stopped? That human nature will prevail and tear it all down?
Maybe. Might be worth trying. I know that’s a pipe dream, and so do you, but let people have their goddamned dreams. Maybe someday they’ll turn into something more.
👍
Then why bother commenting at all?
Because they like the smell of their own shit I bet
I get the bitterness, communism has struggled. But it’s not the only “not capitalism” option either, a lot of people here are straight up anarchists. And that definitely hasn’t been given a fair chance, no nation can tolerate it!
If both MLs and capitalists hate anarchists, they must be up to something good
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you guys are easy to trigger
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I live in Australia, I’m one of the wealthiest people in the world just by owning a house
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My life is amazing
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Communism sucks
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You havent brought anything of substance to this discussion, so good riddance and dont let the door hit you on the way out.
english not your strong point?
not discussing economics in this place anymore
anymore implies that i did at one point then stopped because of the aforementioned reasons
so you saying i don’t bring anything of substance to this particular discussion is self defeating, i already pointed out why before you pointlessly made your comment
Yeah have you seen how much the state sponsored agriculture, scientific research and medical research has helped poor people in the US? Not to mention the government food and shelter provided by the military. Imagine if it could be extended to everything!
Don’t worry Komrade, we mean real Communism not corrupt Oligarchy Russia.
Yep real communism hasn’t been tried so your ideas are technically all hopes and dreams
And then people wonder why actual economists think communists are a joke
Did you mean to reply to the guy above me?
What the fuck kind of data contains a GDP for the USSR in 2010?
E: Wait it’s you! Thank you again for your insights. I still need to consider the deflationary effects. But also, what the fuck is this data doing after the 90’s?
Soviet block and its successor states obviously. Why would you interpret it any differently?
Because the successor states are not soviet? Does it also include China, Cuba, the DPRK, and Vietnam? Come to think of it, the units don’t make sense either.
Why would it contain them? The others you name are nominally still ruled by communist parties, and more importantly did not do the massive privatization the USSR did.
You see the same pattern in Yugoslavia, which also did the same privatization of previous state controlled industry . . .
The Soviet Union was not communist, so bad example. I agree with the premise though, I am just saying, that we should be more honest with our arguments.
I disagree with many points of Bolshevik and particularly USSR communism.
That said, it was ruled by the Communist Party. So it’s a fine example - and claims that even the flawed state socialist system of the USSR wasn’t more beneficial to the average person is ignoring exactly the natural experiment that Russia was.
When did workers control the means of production in the USSR? When was the state abolished? When was money abolished? When was class abolished?
Communism never existed in the USSR it was run under state capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat never ended.
That’s nice.
Except the post is about the communist party, not communism - and which did run the USSR.
Yes, some american economist says so guys, checkmate.
Alright, then let me explain: There is no such thing as a communist state. Communism, as defined by Marx is a stateless classless society.
It was also not socialist, because the workers did not have any meaningful control over the state, which controlled the means of production. Ergo, the workers didn’t control the means of production and the Soviet Union can much better be described as state capitalism. It was also fascist.
Championing the Soviet Union as a “bull-work of communism” is also falling for American propaganda, because the US loves to portray the cold war as a struggle between capitalism and communism, which capitalism won.
To be truly empowered as leftist, we need to reject their false definitions and actually try to figure out the truth.
It was also fascist.
No, it wasn’t.
You don’t have to like the USSR, but fascism has a particular meaning - and the difference between even the Soviets and fascism was well defined by Mussolini, among others.
It was also fascist.
LOL
you certainly didn’t fall for American propaganda.
IDK what the people using the idiotic term ‘leftists’ to describe themselves mean by it, but they usually aren’t left.
I think you’re far from figuring out the truth.You are not even gonna engage with the rest of the argument? I think that was the much more important part.
Let me ask a very simple question:
What, exactly, is wrong with socialism?
QUICKLY.
What, exactly, is wrong with socialism?
It’s… it’s… it’s SOCIALISM!!!
It’s not the problem with socialism, but communism which most popular version came from USSR, came with authoritarianism and extreme corruption, but so does fascism.
I think social democracy, like we see in Nordic countries is much better. They seem to put a lot of effort fighting corruption.
IMO strength of institutions (whether the society is ruled by law) and amount of corruption is what decides whether the system is good for citizens or not.
Social democratic governments objectively have the best metrics for well-being among all forms of government we’ve tried.
That doesn’t mean it’s the best possible form of government by any means but it does mean you need to make a strong case for why your system should be better.
Personally I think more could be done to reduce the power of the wealthy and the state in those countries, so I’d like to see more experimentation to move towards libertarian socialist policies but I don’t think it’s crazy to start with a social democratic foundation.
The thing that’s wrong with socialism is that we’ve spent almost 100 years teaching everyone’s uncle that it’s bad to give him a conversation topic that was tangentially related to WW2.
It’s not well defined.
People arguing for socialism could fall anywhere on the scale of supporting the UK’s NHs to North Korean style dictatorship.
What, exactly, is wrong with socialism?
Literally and figuratively: “everyone else.” It’s not the ideology, it’s the implementation. Let me explain.
I’m of the opinion that the idea of everyone living on an even playing field, without the capitalistic intent to “exploit and extract”, is noble and worthwhile. On paper, it works brilliantly - just like every other model for government. The problem comes in where it meets the real world, specifically around cultural values and psychology.
Right now, the biggest problems the US has boil down to a lot of people acting in an “my group vs your group” mentality. This is the biggest hurdle to overcome and really kills this whole thing in the cradle. Sometimes the dividing line is ideological, economical, geographical, political, or just plain bigotry of some flavor. No matter how you slice it, this behavior is anathema to socialism. You can’t get people to organize in a manner that helps everyone, if a huge chunk of that group insists that’s not right because it’s fair. Without that kind of organization, you’re left to force those values on people, which will be quite obvious and not without blow-back. Not to mention, doing so requires a governmental body strong enough to act out of unchecked corruption, which usually creates new problems.
Meanwhile, being a stupidly rich country means it’s absolutely worthwhile for our home-grown billionaires to keep a death-grip on the levers of power. In the same way you or I aren’t likely to vote against self-interest, the architects of corruption aren’t likely to let action take place that loosens their grip. I’m not saying the economy needs to take a nose dive to put this engine fire out, but I’m at a loss to describe a way to end this particular part of our collective waking nightmare.
So you can’t just “do a socialism” because of everyone else, and how those people will cite that everyone else is why that’s not a good idea. And the people with the most power right now won’t let it happen because there goes their meal/yacht ticket. So basically, “everyone else”.
I think it’s possible to get there, but there’s no getting there in one big leap. Gradual change and a long period (a century?) of a hybrid model, where we have a little bit of everything going on until “being fair to everyone” wins out.
There should be an actual textbook communist and socialist running in major elections alongside Democrats and
fascistsrepublicans. This way you can actually see the policies side-by-side.Much like some average schmuck should compete in the first round of the Olympics just to give perspective
Provided you don’t get de-platformed (e.g. not invited to political debates), this is a proven strategy. For example, Vermin Supreme is doing this from the other end of the spectrum. Although, he has a run for his money these days.
A post is always great if you put the punchline in the title
This is Brand New Sentence. The brand new sentence goes in the title.
hmm, fair
I’m tired of “clickbait-y” titles. I want the point of the post in the title complete. Especially self-posts.
The goal of capitalism should be to create competition to generate general maximum efficiency. Once that is reached and natural monopolies start to form, they should be socialized into non-profit utilities.
When the only goal left is enshittification and profiteering, it’s time to gobble them up.
We don’t have to have a race to the bottom, we can get the government to freeze things at the peak and keep them there.
We just need a mechanism to break that up again if it stagnates.
The goal of capitalism should be to create competition to generate general maximum efficiency.
You can do that under socialism as well. The problem with capitalism isn’t the competition to generate maximum efficiency, it’s the monopolization of that efficiency for profit rather than actual good. Why should we rely on the private sector to do what is best for society when publicly traded socialist companies can do the same without the dragon hoarding?
Groups generally do not generate the initial idea, don’t execute the initial vision, and are less agile to do so. There should be some incentive for individuals to drive their ideas for a time, and to benefit from that disproportionately, again for a time. Businesses need to go through a few stages: startup regulation to establish a fair profit window, evaluation of an ongoing competitive window, and lastly a review of consolidation and convergence and conversion to a public utility. The idea that some system can be setup such that everyone benefits all the time from some individual’s IP is pie in the sky, but we can certainly greatly improve the hoarding issue. The absolute most important part of that is to decouple big business ownership and power from an individual back into the government, since that’s where the excess influence ends up anyway.
Socializing them would be a boon sure, but I can’t name a single major monopoly that is at any sort of “peak” that couldn’t be re-implemented better if we started from scratch.
Our country has been stagnating in many areas for decades now and the competition that occurred in the past did not push us to realize “general maximum efficiency” - it pushed us to realize a corporate hellscape, with billionaires drinking our human rights like they would a fine wine.
You don’t start it from scratch, you take away the profit motive by folding it into the political machine as a utility. People still work there, it’s still run in a similar fashion, but you take away the stocks and speculation and decision making and regulate it back to the people either via wages or 100% profit tax rate.
You don’t start it from scratch
We need high speed rail for freight and transit. We need actual chip/etc. manufacturing in the US, especially for individuals and (non-monopoly scale) commercial applications. We need facilities to process various materials e.g. rare earths and we need to focus on extracting these resources ourselves without slavery or child slavery, or raping the earth. We need to manufacture our own consumer goods sustainably, instead of exploiting people in other countries. We need to invest into battery technology, so individuals can enjoy safe and cheap energy storage - as well as strengthening and building up our grid. We need to invest into making safer, more performant EVs and we definitely need to invest heavily in public transit. We need to improve our agricultural system and look at our water (mis)use in a general sense, immediately.
I don’t see how we wouldn’t have to start from scratch. Our major companies aren’t focusing especially hard on solving any of the issues humanity faces - unless one believes AI will solve everything for us magically.
US government: we can’t allow a socialist government to succeed, because it proves that we’re just greedy assholes. Go overthrow their government.
CIA: we’re gonna get so much fucking richer, Ican’t wait!
They shouldn’t have bothered. Right after the election is over the communist party would transform into a capitalist dictatorship as its members become increasingly reluctant to actually give any power to the working class.
No, no, not a capitalist dictatorship, socialism with [insert name of high school] characteristics.
It makes me so proud of that school.
“The problem with communists is, they all expect to be the overseer, and not the poor guy working in the field”
The problem with capitalism is that everyone expects to be the billionaire, not the poor guy working full time while homeless.
Socialism without democracy isn’t socialism, in my opinion.
Watch the tankies lose their minds over this…
Maybe tankies will, but they dont need to attack democracy. We did that for them. Democracy is only as good as your median civics and economics education level, it seems.
Who is we here? I don’t think most countries have actual democracy. Certainly not the US. But the problem is not education (though, depending on what country you live in, perhaps that is of serious concern)
Democracy should extend to the workplace, and is only really possible without capitalism. You can never remove the influence of private capital on politics under capitalism.
For clarity. I am a socialist, I just took issue with the idea that socialism = whatever warped idea tankies have.
fr though, coal mining could be really cool if it didn’t kill you, ruined your body and salaries were appropriate. Operating and maintaining giant shearing machines and excavators, drones, explosives.
It’s a real shame it kinda sucks in general.
poor guy
Except that all of their needs would be met, so not really poor huh?
Oh, and those fields work themselves under capitalism? That’s the problem with capitalists: they all expect to be the 1% and not the poor guy working the fields.
Although capitalism has a solution for the fields, right? Prison labor and illegal aliens getting less than minimum wage. A great solution - as long as you aren’t the one on the field.
Although with high unemployment and mass deportations who knows how long Americans can deligate these jobs to these people.
I see .ml is leaking
I see reddit is leaking.
Sorry, it’s congenital
stirring the pot
