Curious about how this goes but not masochistic enough to enable comment notifications...
Hope some enjoy!
The main issue with these online communism vs capitalism debates is that people seem to always take the most extremist position of each ideology.
Marx was in favor of being paid for your hard work, and Adam Smith hated monopolies and the accumulation of wealth.
We can both agree that we hate oligarchs and dictators and find a common ground in between.
I wish it were that easy, but how do you find a common ground with a group that sucks Putin's dick and genuinely believes that censorship is a good thing? Can't even agree with them on the most universally agreeable concept that both are awful.
Censorship / free speech is hard to get right, especially in the online world.
I'm for an individual standing on a pulpit and expressing their views, so long as they can be held to account. If they put the lives of others at risk, spread dangerous lies or harrass others unjustly, and there is legal recourse through an independent legal system(s) .. no problem, because there are checks and balances. Many countries have a healthy foundation to support free speech.
OTOH, I am for restricting mis/dis-information campaigns by governments (also my own), corporations, special interest groups, and billionaires. We know it's possible to effectively manipulate people and it's really just another form of psychological warfare. The challenge is how to police such things (and when/what/how to educate/censor/fine/ban), with so much money and influence working against it ... all without infringing on citizen's rights.
Shit, we can't even get like 30% to agree with literal objective reality.
We can both agree that we hate oligarchs and dictators and find a common ground in between.
I really like this take. I pray it's the attitude we adopt for the midterms.
Yes and the US is much more socialist than the pure capitalist hell people claim it to be, while Europe’s great social democracies still run on capitalism.
There’s NO exemplar of pure capitalism or pure socialism to point to. Anything worth having is a blend of the two, and 99.99% of what is needed on this topic is to figure out how to move the US from 12% socialist to 18% socialist, while Europe contends with how it’s going to pay for 22% socialism.
Any actually helpful words on that? Anybody?! … Back to arguing about ridiculous ideals then.
I think it's a little funny that you're arguing for percentages while claiming we already have that and look how great that is.
A key element that makes it socialism is worker ownership of the means of production, we don't have close to that in any of the countries you're talking about. Social programs are not socialism
Did you really just make a purist gripe in a comment thread about how people deal too much in the extreme forms of these concepts? Funny, indeed.
No that's not what happened
Everything from AI bubbles to private equity to healthcare issues isn't coming from some version of capitalism that leftists only have in their heads. It's the system we have right in front of us.
Somewhere between 8 and 634 assassination attempts on Castro.
Iran once and Nicaragua twice, as well. And some of the Haitians the US deposed were probably socialist.
And how is capitalism working? We never want to talk about the needless wars, deaths, dictators, and literal slavery sanctioned by capitalism. Capitalism has been the dominant system for some time now: it has had every opportunity to reform itself into a fair and equitable system. Instead it exploits the global south, prioritizes profits over people, and puts a paywall on necessities that we now mass produce-- forcing the working class to generate more profits for the wealthy. It is a barbaric, corrupt, hypocritical system that forces us to sell ourselves, by the year or by the hour.
This feels like a post hoc fallacy. Capitalism is not the cause of those things, societies that organize into dominance hierarchies, regardless of economic organization, cause those things. Slavery, wars, dictators, barbarism, deaths, corruption, and hypocritical systems were present before and in absence of capitalism. The Soviet Union formed into a dominance hierarchy (bureaucrat class instead of capitalist class), and inevitably displayed the same attributes.
No, it is not a post hoc fallacy. The claim is not simply that death and dictators occurred after capitalism rose to dominance. The claim is that the economic incentive of infinite profit explains why these events happened. Specific wars were fought in to protect the interests of multinational corporations; the CIA installed dictators (e.g., South America, Africa), in order to stop the spread of socialism; there are slave laborers mining minerals in the Congo so that Tim Cook can make another billion.
If you want to get philosophical, perhaps we could agree that it is a category error to say that an economic system of commodity production caused death and dictators in the technical sense of causation. It would be better to say that these events find their ground or explanation in the incentives of capitalism. But I doubt most people care about this distinction.
The incentive is that resources are lootable, that doesn’t change by swapping out one ideology for another. We can point to the post-WWII eastern bloc, Cuba, and Afghanistan as examples of USSR installing dictators. Ideologies tend to be too myopic in their understanding of reality, all systems have a tendency to form into dominance hierarchies, that’s the core issue. Fortunately, all systems decay over time and after collapse there is a period of time where a decentralized, democratic system can exist for a period of time.
I won't brush away the missteps and abuses of certain leaders. We must, however, place these injustices in their proper context.
Socialist countries faced opposition from the most economically and politically powerful nation in the history of the Earth. Given the successes that socialist economies did achieve -- in providing healthcare, housing, transportation, food, jobs, etc. -- can you imagine how much more successful they could have been had the United States helped instead of destabilized them at every turn? But the US could not peacefully allow us to develop socialist production of goods for direct consumption. This economic model is a direct threat to the capitalist's appropriation of profits.
Fortunately, all systems decay over time and after collapse there is a period of time where a decentralized, democratic system can exist for a period of time.
I hope you're right, but time will tell.
I think Castro was incredibly popular in Cuba from the beginning. They were not forced into communism.
So if we argue against hierarchies, we're still arguing against capitalism and still arguing for communism, just more of an anarchocommunism. Communism isn't just the countries that tried, just like capitalism isn't just the usa
No, because it would form into a dominance hierarchy. It’s the iron law of oligarchy, and communism does not have any mechanisms to prevent its formation. Unless humans evolve beyond their own nature, “anarchocommunism” is not in the realm of possibility.
Oh you're right, I have total faith in the "iron law" created by someone who went on to join Italy's National Fascist Party
That would be a genetic fallacy if you are basing validity on origin instead of content. Would you prefer the social dominance theory? It’s broader in scale but still explains the inevitability of hierarchy and concentration of power.
Yes you know all your vocab words. These are just philosophical theories that have plenty of detractors. They aren't true just by virtue of their existence. And I think the political party of the source is relevant when it's a political theory. It says a lot about the conclusions that theory leads to, and when it leads to fascist Italy then clearly something went wrong
We aren’t talking normative philosophy or metaphysics. The iron law and SDT are based on observable phenomena supported by empirical evidence. I’m not going to accept an Agrippa trilemma argument where nothing can be proven absolutely true. I understand these concepts about hierarchy may be uncomfortable to one’s ideological fantasy, but it’s not productive to minimize these things because they are uncomfortable.
Just because I don't think those theories are true doesn't mean I think they couldn't be proven true. Anarchism is also a political theory based on observable phenomena supported by empirical evidence. It is very contradictory to the theories you bring up which means they can't all be true, even though they're all published theories. We could do a big experiment to figure it out though. We'd just need to first get to a communist society, then we can see if it can sustain itself or if hierarchies naturally dominate without outside influence. I'm willing to be proven wrong, are you?
That's the first time I've ever seen a "law" called an "iron law", which is kind of wild for a law of political science. Kinda like they had insufficient evidence and had to resort to PR instead, like "look, it's an iron law, you have to believe it".
Marx never intended for communist revolutions to start with agrarian nations such as Russia and China. Marxism was built on the assumption of a nation that had spent centuries developing its capitalism, such as France or England.
The nations that attempted socialist revolutions were the ones that were liberating themselves from colonisation and imperialism that was performed for profit under capitalist and mercantilist systems.
Also, no large-scale modern society has ever been communist. Many have proclaimed themselves to be so, and nations like the USSR claimed themselves to stride towards it, but communism is fundamentally an ideology with an absence of the state.
He modified his views later when speaking to Russian revolutionaries such as Vera Zasulich. He entertained the possibility of an agregarian society skipping over capitalism if, and only if, it was accompanied by a socialist revolution of capitalist societies.
Marx envisioned seizing the means of production when that was a big industrial machine, an object which could be seized.
What would the “means of production” even be in a modern services economy? The workers themselves? Critical infrastructure?
Marx never intended his ideas for agrarianism, nor for modern services economies. You might conclude that the time for his ideas came and went, and those ideas never manifested as anything good during that time.
But they’ll be appealing fantasies forever.
The idea is that all businesses are cooperative ones. Every worker is the owner of the business, being it an industry or a restaurant or a radio station or...
Marx distinguishes between abstract and concrete labor in Capital Vol. 1. After developing his concepts using concrete labor, be returns to abstract labor in Volume 3. After all, they had scientist and teachers who created surplus value.
So what would be the means of production? Not the workers since they are the ones who uses the means to produce something of social value. The means of production are still made of instruments and subjects. Let's take teachers as the workers. They work to educate their students. The students are the subjects of labor. The instruments used to do this are textbooks, classrooms, desk, school yards and more.
As I answered in another comment, Marx was open to an agrarian to socialist revolution under specific conditions. He was cautious though.
The teachers, the janitors, ... would be the owners of the school.
Communism is young. At this point in capitalism's history, it was all colonization, genocide, and slavery. Apples to apples, I'd rather live in the Soviet Union under Stalin than a South Asian under the Dutch East India company.
Not to mention that many capitalists nations had the benefit of established industry whereas the Russians and Chinese had to transition from an agrarian society into socialism.
Soviet Union was a colonial state. North Asia (also known as Siberia) were its colonies and continue to be colonized by modern day Russia
I'd rather live in the Soviet Union under Stalin than a South Asian under the Dutch East India company.
Congrats this is the dumbest and least useful take I’ve ever seen on the subject. I can’t argue with it, really. It’s so absurd I’m speechless.
Why is it absurd
As much as tankies are imperialist shitheads, this entire post is just starting shit for no good reason. Fascists are killing people. Liberals abandoned pretenses of valuing popular politics over donors and democracy abroad for genocide enabling imperial interest. The only "socialist" states are major contributors to global capitalism and sliding deeper into fascist culture war bullshit like everywhere else on earth.
Ideology never fucking mattered. The Cold War era "horrors of communism" were caused by the boring old tactics of genocide and violence to strengthen the imperial core. The democracy that America brought the world was only for a small minority, while everyone else got dictators we trained and paid for. There is no "moral state" and the least bad one is based on circumstance, not the philosophy they tell you matters.
When hierarchy minded people gaze upon this nihilism, they decide they might as well join in on the collective rape of humanity. They decide to be the "strong men" who only see negative sum solutions where they have more power than the rest. They give up on peace and embrace brutality as the winning move; never wondering if maybe they're breaking themselves as they break other people to keep some king atop his throne. And that's assuming they're on the winning side in the war of the empires; that the fighting never comes home.
Maybe making the rich richer will work this time
Show me the country that attempted communism and I'll point out why it wasn't communism.
My uncle Angus is a true Scotsman
Exactly. “That wasn’t really communism!”
But then communism fans have another problem. Then they’re advocating for a system that’s never been tested, never succeeded anywhere, and which can’t even really be described in much detail because we have no working examples to look to.
But it’s still the solution! Capitalism is the fantasy! LOL
No country attempted comunism. Communism is a type of socirty, not a regime stance. Various countries attempted socialism, with varying degrees of success. The same thing can be said for capitalism. How many capitalist countries do you see succeeded? Because if I'm not mistaken, no capitalist country that "succeded" did it without exploiting other countries. Although, to be fair, it is more easy for the later to suceed, since it is not designed to make a life worth living, just to make money for very few hands.
Replace the word "communists" with "capitalists", and the joke works every bit as well.
My own views are a bit idiosyncratic, but I don't think capitalism has ever existed as a real thing in practice. The framework of ideas of what it's ostensibly supposed to be has never matched any real existing system, and I see communism in the same way (albeit at least in the case of communism they explicitly state that a system must be socialist first before evolving to their ideal endpoint).
But whatever you want to call the prevailing system that does exist, it needs to go, and it should be perfectly clear that the framework of capitalism as a template is long overdue to be scrapped. How many times does an idea have to fail before everyone recognizes it's time to move on?
but I don't think capitalism has ever existed as a real thing in practice
What an absurd claim. Stop fooling yourself. We are living in the "best" form of capitalism. This is the end game for capitalism. It always has been.
It feels like "communist" can mean a lot of things (or many of those things (or nothing at all?)) depending on who says it. Additional clarification is required! If an old colonizer is referring to people as "pagans" that doesn't really convey much about the pagans in question.
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images