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“Capitalism does not work because people are selfish, and selfish people are incentivized to harm their fellow man by capitalist structures. Under socialism, selfish people will work toward the common good because working toward the common good is the easiest way to earn recognition and status”
“People are selfish, and it is in 99 percent of peoples self interest to overthrow capitalism in order to improve their material conditions”
You can cooperate with others toward selfish ends. That’s literally how pack animals like humans work.
Right now it is in everyone’s self interest except for the bourgeoisie to stop capitalism and create a more equitable system. If you just want to be on top, that is being selfish and not understanding how odds work, not being selfish.
It’s funny because most communists seem to want to be the ones on top by trying to impose communism on everybody else.
According to who, capitalist media? Have you ever actually exposed yourself to what communists think and believe, or are you afraid of a spectre?
Why not start at the bottom and learn how to cooperate with people there?
The communists, infamous for avoiding rank and file and mass line strategies, as well as other strategies that relied heavily on creating popular support
Make some friends at work and see if they can help you get a better job.
I’m already super cushy in my job, I dont want involuntary homelessness to exist, and I also don’t want homeless people to be killed. I want kids to be able to go to bed and not be hungry. That isnt possible under capitalism.
Put that philosophy into practice in the here and now instead of dreaming of some grand utopia where everyone willingly cooperates with everyone else everywhere and all the time.
We don’t think it will be utopia. We don’t think everyone will willingly cooperate all the time. If you think this is what communists believe, you haven’t read a lot of communist thought. It feels like you are just throwing cliches at the wall and trying to box with a strawman, and it is kind of weird to watch.
Do you understand the notion that people will generally cooperate when it is in their mutual selfish interest to cooperate? Does that make sense to you? Or do you reject even that notion?
I’m being exposed to it on Lemmy nearly every single day.
Okay, then explain the difference between scientific and utopian socialism, what what differentiates labor from labor power in the context of surplus labor value extraction?
The low bar there is my fault though, I should have asked if you were educated on what communists believed.
Volunteer at a soup kitchen, donate to a homeless shelter, etc.
Put a bandaid on a gunshot wound while you’re at it.
Yes, that totally makes sense. But in my experience, this works best when people freely choose to cooperate because they realize it’s in their own self-interest, instead of having cooperation imposed on them by force.
That has literally happened, can you name any successful socialist revolution that didn’t involve education and the creation of mass popular support?
Chinese communism: ~15-55M dead in the Great Famine
Even with these inflated numbers, they are no match for the numbers of people intentionally killed by capitalism and feudalism, let alone starvation under capitalism and feudalism.
Plugging the book “late Victorian holocausts”
Cambodian communism: >1M dead in the Killing Fields
inb4 not real communism
If you believe the Cambodians were communists, you have to believe that the nazis were. Except in Pol Pots case, he only claimed to be socialist for a few years of their decades long operations. I am choosing you believe you’re not that gullible so I must assume you are ignorant of their history.
Muh “you can’t criticize socialism because you don’t understand THEORY”. You probably don’t understand capitalism either outside of socialist critiques of it. Then how can you be so certain of what capitalists believe?
Literally took years of capitalist economics in high school and college, it is one of the reasons I’m a communist.
“I can’t help EVERYONE so I’m just not gonna help ANYONE”.
More like “the issue is systemic and requires systemic solutions, not charity”
*goes off and tries to convince people to follow an ideology that only works if everyone believes in it.
Chinese feudal landlords didn’t believe in socialism, that didn’t stop the communists from doing land reform.
Can you name one socialist revolution that hasn’t involved massive amounts of murder and violence?
By definition revolutions involve violence. Are you condemning the capitalist revolutions that threw off the monarchies? The status quo involved comparatively massive amounts of violence then, and it does now.
But also, an example of socialists gaining power through the ballot box was in Chile. The US ended up funding, training, and equipping right wing death squads to kill (and worse) Chilean communists, teachers, trade unionists, indigenous people, and random people. Chile became an extraordinary violent right wing capitalist dictatorship.
I mean, Hitler very clearly wrote in Mein Kampf that he DID take inspiration from socialism, except that, like all other communist dictators before or after him, he thought that HE had found the missing ingredient to make it work.
He also very explicitly said that the nazis weren’t socialist, and all of the parties policies were hard capitalist.
Hah, imagine getting a “capitalist” education from people who don’t have to worry about their own job security because they have tenure. Isn’t that just like getting a communist education from a Wall Street CEO?
We live in a capitalist society. Any attempt to claim this isn’t capitalism and we have a shift toward actual capitalism is an attempt to sell you fascism.
Also pretty sure most of them were adjuncts.
Yes. The secret ingredient was (and always is) called violence.
Yes. When they removed the secret ingredient, the landlords could not maintain their property relations with the peasants. That is correct.
Yes, I condemn all violence, capitalist or otherwise. But I honestly don’t experience capitalism as particularly violent.
Well then either you’re really sheltered or you haven’t been paying attention.
My biggest successes all came through non-violent means, by educating myself and improving my technical and people skills. Amazingly, it turns out that if you’re willing to learn what others will pay you for, more often than not, they’ll actually just hand you money without you having to make any threats about taking over their whole company.
Oh, well if it worked for you, I guess those slave laborers can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And all those genocide victims should have just spent more time educating themselves.
That isnt the primary mode by which the assignment of sex happens in our society. Stop being an idealist around what sex is, and actually grapple with how sex classification practically happens within our society.
When doctors mutilate intersex babies they don’t wait for a chromosome test.
Actually the idea comes from feminism from literally the 1980s-1990s, from well respected feminist theorists. But thank you for illustrating how tied together the rights and oppression of cis women and trans people are.
Read “Bodies that matter, on the discursive limits of Sex” from Judith Butler.
Also understand the definition of a social construct. Social construct doesn’t mean fake, it means falling into a classification scheme that is socially manufactured. Something that is 12 inches long isn’t “fake” in its 12 inch longness because measuremenr systems are socially constructed, it just means that it can become 10 inches long or 14 inches long if the length of an inch is redefined. And you would be wrong if you told someone that no, it is incorrect to call it 30.48 centimeters long. People can apply different classification schemes/social constructs to the same physical object and still be correct. They could also call it ten blagards long and be internally consistent within their classification scheme, but that wouldn’t have utility within a social context because the meaning of blagard hasn’t been socially constructed.
An inch isn’t some innate objective truth, it is a common standard.
The sex binary is a commonly applied standard, but it is arbitrary and harmful (see how women are treated rooted in myths around sex, the prolific mutilation of intersex infants, and the “trans panic defense”). If inches being the length they were started resulting in engineering failures that killed people we would change how we measure things.
Well, it does and we don’t, but you get the point.
I would suggest reading “Bodies that matter, on the discursive limits of Sex” from Judith Butler.
Pointing out how intersex people don’t fit into the constructed binary is easy to dismiss, sex essentialists just call those people defective men and women.
(Which gets into how if you can’t have kids or you can but you don’t look a certain way you’re “defective”, which is a value judgement and doesn’t have some universal or biological basis)
Before people start thinking there is an innately male or female brain, please remember that environmental conditions including social ones influence the way the brain is structured due to neuroplasticity.
And think about how boys are encouraged to eat and girls are encouraged to watch their weight, and how child body growth relies on building up periodic fat reserves in order to happen, and you need to eat a lot of protein when building muscle mass, and what the physical implications for that are and how it contributes to our social definition of sex. And how that contributes to cis women being more vulnerable to physical violence.
Do you mean that just like we have defined inch the length that is exactly 25.4mm (where mm is the length light travels in 1/299792458 seconds in a vacuum, seconds being whatever the fuck they are), we have also defined animals with XX chromosome females, and if they’re human, women, while recognizing that there are rare exceptions?
Two things:
A) you’re not thinking procedurally. Doctors do not generally check chromosomes when they determining sex generally. So it would be more accurate to say “in infants, doctors define sex by looking at genitals, in adults, by looking at a variety of characteristics. We use chromosomes in medical circumstances to look for potential conditions that may explain symptoms, and sometimes we can use that as a category in determining sex” The definition you are using is really most applicable in people who are doing research, not clinical work, or interacting with human beings in a social context.
B) cool, so we’ve established that is what you think sex is. Other communities define sex differently. You can’t claim inches are some universal innate biological truth and those heathens over there using centimeters are wrong and need to accept the wisdom of inches. And while inches might be more useful to you, centimeters may be more useful to them.
I would really suggest that you read “Bodies that matter, on the discursive limits of Sex” from Judith Butler. She literally has a PhD in philosophy and has devoted her life to analysis of the way we as a society conceptualize sex.
It’s not just one nation vs another, it’s also civilians vs the political elite
Breaking it down further: it is the proletariat vs the dictatorship of capital (the mechanisms by which the capitalist class collectively rules) representing the interests of the capitalist class.
I mean yeah, colonialism and capitalism are tied together at the hip, and Palestinians resisting the settler state of Israel is pretty directly related to resisting capitalist violence.
Throwing in the standard disclaimer of “my family was affected by the holocaust and I know several anti-zionist israelis who think Israel doesn’t have a right to exist” because some people get really weird about this opinion.
I don’t think there driving force of the conflict comes down to capital, but a conflict of non-economic ideologies.
Well, you’re incorrect. Israel is a settler colonial venture, that is where the conflict comes from, not a difference in religious beliefs.
But, it’s a very large conflict with a very long history, so not only am I not an expert, but the nature of the conflict may have many aspects that change over time.
The region was really peaceful before the colonial project actually, I mean of course the ottoman empire wasn’t great but there wasn’t a lot of notable ethnic conflict in the region.
They provide the materials, the tools and machinery, the designs that are being made (assuming some sort of manufacturing company for this example).
Other workers made the materials, the tools, the machinery, and the designs. If the owner did they occupy a class position as a worker and owner.
They also carry the risk (unless of course they are a corporation, the ridiculous entity created to reap the advantages of personhood while avoiding all its responsibilities and drawbacks).
The risk that they might be a worker if their venture fails.
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But conversely, if there isn’t a state, what’s to prevent property owners from banding together and protecting their property with violence?
That would literally be a capitalist state in every meaningful sense.
keep in mind that given enough money or gold or whatever, they could also hire mercenaries to prevent workers from rebelling.
Sorta like a police force of some kind?
It really all comes down to who is better at organizing. So it’s possible that in one scenario, workers would seize the means of production successfully, and if they are good enough at keeping it running, they’d operate as a commune, while in another scenario, there’d be a more hierarchical, capitalist structure of organization.
You know what is really fucking organized? A state. It is almost like at the beginning of the country all the large landowners and capitalists got together and made one of those to protect their interests.
You’re simply arguing from a standpoint of “but I like THIS approach better” when it’s a question of “but can you make it WORK?”
Lol. I am literally asking how your hypothetical system would handle class antagonisms, the primary concern of politics. I am very directly asking “but can you make it work”
Are you talking about China? If so, I’m afraid they’re communist in name only. They realized many years ago that Marxist economic theory doesn’t work and began to integrate capitalist principles into their economy.
You’re kind of incredibly ignorant on China. They’re a mostly publicly controlled economy.
The reasoning for a private sector is to prevent economic and technological siege.
Also marxist economic theory is literally just a structured critique of capitalism. It doesn’t have anything to say about socialism or communism, that is marx’s other works.
De facto, China is a capitalist-fascist state more comparable to WW2 Germany than anything Marx ever came up with.
I would really suggest reading “Economy and class structure of german fascism” and comparing it to the political and economic situation of China. (And actually understand those situations, not just passively absorb ideas from anglophone media) This isn’t meant to be a dig, but this level of political illiteracy is embarrassing.
than anything Marx ever came up with.
Have you literally read any book that Marx wrote? (The manifesto is a manifesto, it doesn’t count, but I’d also be interested in knowing if you’ve read that)
I dont know, let’s ask Chinese feudal lords how their ability to enforce private property went after the CPC stopped enforcing their private property rights for them like the old government did.
I’m somewhat confused by your separation of ideology from practical actions. That sounds internally inconsistent.
I am willing to accept a state if it is necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and their toadies, so long as that continues to be necessary. I would prefer we lived in a communist society but we can’t get there overnight and socialism is how you transition to it.
Capitalism is an economic system, while democracy is a political system.
Economics is politics. The two are intertwined in every practical regard.
To repeat myself a bit, my argument is that capitalism can’t exist without collective agreements on legislation, enforcement, and adjudication, along with strong protections for an individual’s rights.
This is ahistorical. Colonialism does not require consensus or respect for individual rights and is a central feature of any capitalist system that is successful enough.
If you believe that supposed self-described “socialists”, “communists”, “leftists”, and other “cHaMpIoNs Of tHe PeOpLe” have never been or are incapable of being genocidal maniacs, please promptly fuck your own face with your tankie butt-plug and jump off the nearest cliff.
Oh yeah, socialists have done some horrible things. They pale in scale to the crimes of capitalism. The British empire, the nazi empire, the American empire. Socialism is a less violent system but that doesn’t mean that violence stops.
I will never entertain any authoritarian of whatever economic stripe or their apologists for even a nanosecond.
If you support capitalism you literally support an informal caste system where a small caste owns the collective accumlated fruits of labor of the whole human race stretching back to the start of agriculture, where any attempt to change the state of affairs that has any chance of success gets jakarta methoded. That is much more authoritarian than a red terror.
I consider freedom of the press to just be freedom of speech, which we all have.
The thing is we don’t. There is no such thing as free speech, any speech that meaningfully threatens the government will be cracked down on. See Fred Hampton. Free speech is a legal fiction in our country.
But my point is that the limited bourgeois privileges you get don’t matter if you’re starving on the street. You can’t meaningfully have those privileges without economic security.
As for the homeless chap, it depends on their situation. I’d live in a community that would try to help them. I think we’re ethically obligated to help people in need as best we can, but I’m not comfortable using violence to force you to help them.
So it is more violent to take food from a grocery store because that hurts the owners bottom line than it is to prevent a starving man from taking bread from a grocery store by kicking his ass and throwing him in a box? Is that your perspective on this issue?
Regardless, I think we, as a society, should be there with the bread. It shouldn’t be an issue we have to face.
But you don’t think we should use violence to enforce the idea, so how do you enforce the idea in the transition when former small business tyrants chafe at the idea of sharing? What if they don’t submit to nonviolent methods of control?
They don’t have to submit? We do things the right way and don’t deal with those cunts
Okay but they have the means of survival right now. Not seizing them means people will die while you develop your own.
Also, while developing your own, the movement is vulnerable to getting crushed by them. They historically haven’t had any compunctions with killing millions to protect themselves from communism.
As a gradualist, though, I think we can build up our communities while removing the regulations that enable corporations to operate the way they do while staying profitable.
How though? Do you think the capitalist state is going to just let you mess with its bosses?
When I help my sister pay her rent a small business owner isn’t being evicted. Economics aren’t zero sum.
Can you prevent a landlord from evicting a single mom, when that landlord is willing to use violence to do it, without using violence? Is the idea just "we will pay them all off, using money we definitely have in order to do it?
I think ideas like collective ownership and mutual aid have power without challenging the ruling class.
Then, bluntly, you are ignorant of history. I’m not calling you stupid, I’m just saying you need to actually learn about this stuff before trying to come up with a belief system about it.
Instead we beg daddy to give us more rations.
I dont know what you mean here
I don’t really have all the answers. I know what I consider ethical and try to work within that, but I’m no genius.
You need to consider the impact of your actions in morality, which means understanding what the outcomes of actions have been historically.
know it’s easy to say your answer is violence and we’ll sort it out later, but there’re a lot of missing steps there
That would be an easy and incorrect way of describing my beliefs, yes.
I don’t think there’s a lot of difference between the class consciousness necessary to achieve a gradualist result vs revolution. Gradualism has time to show people the benefit without lining them up against the wall, tho.
I think you haven’t thought about the material implications of this. Giving white supremacists and landlords and capitalists time to come around isnt nonviolent, it is permitting violence to continue for a while because you don’t want to commit violence on the people doing the violence. It is a statement that you dont want to help the oppressed if it is at the expense of the oppressor.
We also live in a world that has a habit of fucking up collectivism. Trade is technology and in a free society we can test the tech and find what works instead of fucking shit up with bullets and famine
Honestly, I think you’ve bought into a capitalist framing on the history of transitional states. The USSR had famines during: a bloody Civil War, collectivization, and right after ww2. It notably did not have any periodic famines that the Russian empire previously had. Communist China had a famine after the Civil War before relations were normalized. They notably ended the periodic famines, especially along the yellow river.
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