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Political mindset evolution
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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The capitalist class is no longer able to run society the way that they have. They will run nations into the ground, they will destroy this planet, they will kill millions systematically (as happened recently during the utter failure to deal with covid), they will enslave nations to produce those "goods" an ironic name for the incredible evil done with sweatshop labor. Unemployment is created by the system, which in turn causes the unemployed to suffer and starve in order to keep wages low.
There are no rules that say luxury goods couldn't be produced for consumption, except for the rules made up by the capitalists who do everything they can to destroy the government of socialists, to put them under embargo and sanction, affecting the masses of innocents more than anyone else. They have and will push their country's leaders to invade the country, killing hundreds of thousands or millions if necessary, so that their workforce can be exploited to produce their commodities. They have and will back mass murdering warlords, repressive religious fundamentalists and genocidal fascists to preserve the economic and political system that benefits them. If nations trying to provide support, housing and education for their people are under constant threat and attack from capitalist nations, how exactly are they supposed to dedicate a large part of their consumption to luxury goods? If they can't import goods either then yes it becomes difficult to access luxuries. That doesn't take a genius to understand; but to ignore it and still criticize a socialist nation for it takes a determination to misunderstand. I'm troubled by it and I think you also should be since you are the one who are so determined.
Too much is made, most of it is wasted. We are forced to drive cars while public transportation is dismantled, adding massive waste and pollution to our environment. There are thousands of train derailments every year, too many of them leaking carcinogenic chemicals into water supplies and neighborhoods. Industrial plants leak or dump pollutants into water supplies, making many people sick or worse, and do extensive lobbying and hire big law firms to protect against legislation and prosecution by affected communities. Cops whose job is to protect the private property of capitalists, that should belong to the workers, will beat and terrorize you for speaking out against genocide that your country pays for, all so that countries with mineral and oil resources are destabilized and hence easy pickings for finance and industry, that as I've explained pollutes, exploits, destroys the population of the affected nation.
All for your consumer "goods," your fucking treats. You don't even understand where they come from, you don't understand how the system you defend works, or for whom. I urge you to educate yourself about this, and take seriously the threat of climate catastrophe and likely collapse. I've included a podcast that features an economist where you can begin.
Workers must seize this system and destroy the old structures that underwrite their continued exploitation. I stand with the workers, the planet, the people. You stand with the very rich who exploit you and steal your time, health, energy, freedom. And why do you? I'm very curious.
You're on the right track, but the issue isn't "the capitalist class", it's "humanity". Slavery existed long before capitalism. Waste existed long before capitalism. Getting rid of capitalism won't suddenly make people better humans.
You don't seem to even understand what a luxury good is. A luxury good isn't a great bottle of wine, or a designer handbag. A luxury good is something that is rare and expensive and coveted for those reasons. Luxury goods are older than capitalism, they go back millennia. Important people in stone age groups had "luxury goods" that the rest of the people didn't have access to.
Yes, because it's extremely hard to figure out what people want. Markets (which are much older than capitalism) are the best way we've found to figure out what people want and to meet those needs. You can't get rid of markets, you can only drive them underground. When the USSR was meeting people's needs by giving them the goods that the government decided they should have, the black markets were famous because the things people wanted were not the things that the government had decided they needed.
If the "workers" are as idiotic as you, they'll probably die because they simply have no idea how the world works. I'm not defending capitalism, I'm defending markets, which are much, much older than capitalism. An idiot like you thinks that you can magically replace markets with magic, when the fact is that every system that has tried to replace markets since the dawn of time has failed.
If it makes you feel better to call me "idiotic" then I worry about you, because that is not the sort of thing that people say to each other when they are secure and confident in themselves. I only want to help educate people and challenge them to question the narrative that keeps us unable to change our living conditions. One of the things I would like to challenge is this tendency to otherise people who disagree with us. Its okay for people to have disagreements and lively debates to help each other see and educate. But if you're not used to it it can be stressful and cause people to lash out, blame and name call. So I'm sorry if this has caused you stress. I have discussions like this all the time, and you might not really be used to it, or feel like I'm trying to make you look stupid with my response, which is why you retaliate by calling me idiotic. I'm not trying to do that.
Moving on from your subjective impression of my response, there are several things that I feel need to be addressed. One is your tendency to hate and blame "humanity" as if there aren't incentive structures built into our political economic system. For one, capitalism is a system of forced competition, it pits people against each other, from the bottom to the top of the class hierarchy. This can cause people to behave in extremely self interested ways, when modern anthropology has demonstrated that we are innately social creatures, who are creative in nature. This idea that humans behave in self interested ways without any encouragement by the system that we need to interact with in order to live, is the result of alienation caused by capitalist social relations. This is a topic of incredible complexity and I don't trust that you are acting in good faith in this discussion, however of you would like me to explain more I would be happy to. But to put it succinctly, misanthropy is no substitute for history.
Secondly, slavery is one form of production, feudal serfdom is another, capitalist exploitation is another, and socialism is yet another. The engine of all human history is our historical mode of production, which generates classes of humans that exist in conflict with one another. Markets are not capitalism. Mercantilism certainly predates capitalist primitive accumulation by hundreds of years, but mercantilism is not capitalism even if it served as a historical precursor. Markets do not create new value, value is created under capitalism when capitalists pay workers less to produce goods than what they can sell it for in a marketplace. Markets can exist in transitional stage socialism, and probably will, for a time at least. But the means of production will be controlled democratically by the workers, not individual capitalists. The thing that made capitalism historically progressive is that it socialized production. Rather than a single craftsman making something to sell on a market, capitalism industrialized the economy, breaking each step of the production process down so that many workers are used to mass produce one part or step in the production process. However the value of this production process is privately owned. This is an inherent contradiction. Socialism will also socialize production, but it will socialize the fruits of that production for common enrichment. This contradiction is what makes capitalism extremely wasteful and inefficient, despite it being more efficient than feudal forms of productive tithing, which was individual producers giving goods to their nobles. Please look up "anarchy in production" if you want to learn more.
Also capitalism isn't able to meet human needs, it can only generate profit. If cancer medicine can be sold to some rich lady's cat then it will be, whereas under socialism it would go to the people who actually need it, so that they can continue to be productive. Also a great deal of productive labor is unpaid -- capitalist production would never be able to reimburse people for housework, despite it being a necessity for workers to remain healthy and continue to produce goods at their job. And before you say it, anthropologists and sociologists such as Silvia Federici have shown that at various historic times, housework was compensated for, just not necessarily with money (which is a stand in for value and merely allows for the slight of hand that makes these toxic social relations inherent to capitalism practically invisible to the individuated, alienated worker.)
And wrt the Soviet Union, if you would like to debate the conditions which created black markets, then I urge you to sharpen your pencil as I have studied the history of the fSU and other socialist experiments in great detail. Im not a youtube socialist, i have a decade of organizing experience and education, and surround myself with others who make that seem meagre. So don't think you are going to be able to get away with flattening an entire 70 year history of a dynamic, productive albeit deeply flawed attempt at socialist productive social relations, with some hand waving. If anyone is guilty of magical thinking in this regards it is you, I'm afraid.
But please limit our discussion to one topic at a time, as pursuing too many threads will not resolve some of the misunderstandings you have about historical production and socialist experiments in the 20th century. A big reason I study these movements is to understand what mistakes were made, when and why, and who was partly responsible. Indeed I am not without criticisms of the fSU and many 20th century experiments, but I'm not satisfied to just take the word of the people who benefit most from this tragically unjust system, as you seem to be. I have more curiosity and discipline than that. I hope you can be persuaded to take it upon yourself to try to become educated in these matters, or at least be open to the actual history in all its complexity and contradiction, and not just the cliff notes version furnished by wealthy elites and their toadies in the media. Also please limit the insults. I won't be goaded, you will not get off easy. I haven't insulted you as I have no beef with you, I have beef with the system and the fact that you defend it is illustrative of your confusion, which is not your fault but the fault of centuries of concerted effort to obscure these relations and demonize the resources you might access to try and understand them better.