466
Freedom
(lemmy.ml)
Also, all those brands of shampoo are owned by one or two firms.
I've just realized that this is much like having multiple identities.
A way to deceive market reputation mechanisms.
Should be made illegal, there should be one main brand seen on everything, then whatever secondary brand they want is possible, but you should clearly see that those 3 niche-optimized goods are from one corp.
So that the choice were, eh, real.
Which shareholders are majority Black Rock and Vanguard group so it doesn't matter what company because they have the same owners anyway and that goes for 90% of all publicly traded companies globally so yeah
Freedom is when toothbrush.
Also "free speech" that doesn't apply to corporate platforms. Which is, you know, all of them. Love when a liberal says "that doesn't count, they're a private business" whenever you point out the blatant censorship in the West.
Whole fuckin country is a private business
Well private entities should always allowed to choose what content they want to platform. It's only a problem if we used these privately owned platform as an official communications channel (like government relying on X to announce stuffs).
That's not the only time it's a problem. It's mainly a problem because these privately owned platforms control so much communication.
and this logic applies even within bourgeoisie political parties https://observer.com/2017/08/court-admits-dnc-and-debbie-wasserman-schulz-rigged-primaries-against-sanders/
Valid criticism, but let's not pretend socialism leads to better outcomes for freedom of speech or press either.
Newspapers in the USSR had the legal obligation of responding to letters from readers in the span of 2 weeks. Every workplace had its own announcement board and journal/newspaper written by workers in the worker's union. Imagine being able to publish an article to all your coworkers criticising the administration of the company and not getting fired for it.
There was freedom of press to a larger degree than in any western society because people literally made and consumed their own press.
Didn't they ban factions (perhaps this was Stalin's time)?
We can move the conversation there if you want, but I don't see how that's related to worker-owned press
It's related to the subject of fascism and censorship
Censorship, we can argue about it. Fascism, no.
The USSR had free universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, equality under the law for everyone, respect for ethnic minorities and promotion of their languages and their representation in society, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed housing at 3% of the monthly salary on average, heavy subsidization of basics like foodstuffs, affordable and high quality public transit, guaranteed pension plans, abolition of private companies and landlordism, and the highest rates of unionization in the world at the time.
I happen to be a Spaniard, and my ancestors had to endure fascism for 40 years. There was no universal free education, no universal healthcare, no guaranteed jobs, no guaranteed housing, no right to unionization, militarized police defending landlords and private companies, extreme racism and ethno-nationalist-catholic propaganda, colonialism in Morocco, repression of minority languages and ethnicities without a right to an education in them (see Basque and Catalan, compare them to Kazakh or Uzbek), no guaranteed pensions...
The two systems were the polar opposite, it's the reason why the first thing fascists will do is executing every communist.
Ok so the points coming to mind areas follows: The censorship in the USSR.
This doesn't seem to align with my understanding of the USSR. Didn't the USSR fail horribly, leading to its collapse? Bureaucratic corruption, inefficiency, not being able to compete internationally, and the oppression of marginalized populations (such as queer people ) had been my impression of the USSR's legacy.
As for the last point, that comes off as hypocritical since communist countries do the same thing. North Korea has executions and Cuba throws journalists in jail.
As for the last point, that comes off as hypocritical since communist countries do the same thing.
Killing and repressing fascists and other reactionary forces is good actually. Progressive forces being killed and the masses oppressed is bad.
Comrade @Cowbee@lemmy.ml has already responded better than I possibly could, so I'll just point you to their comment instead. I can only add: I suggest you to look at the population over time (you can find this on the respective Wikipedia "demographics of X" articles) for: Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Belarus and the exceptions of Poland and Estonia, and see what happened to their populations after 1990. Literal tens of millions of demographic losses.
Equally important, is the fact that socialism literally saved Eastern Europe from slavery and extermination at the hands of Nazism. If it weren't for the socialist industrial revolution kickstarted in 1929 in the USSR, there is absolute certainty that the Nazis would have blitzkrieged their way to the Urals and genocided all non-German peoples in a similar way (but scaled up in speed due to the industrial development of Germany) to what the US did to native Americans.
Freedom of press only applies to the wealthy, how do I benefit from it as a worker when all media in my country perpetuates comprador propaganda and I'm too poor to make my own press?
For sure— I'm not saying freedom of press actually exists under capitalism.
My point is that socialism doesn't have freedom of press either. Censorship and surveillance by the vanguard state (see China, Cuba, historical USSR) is routine.
"Dictatorship of the proletariat". Unfortunately, dictatorships do not have a tendency to allow for freedom of press.
The proletariat is the majority in most if not all societies, arguing the dictatorship of the proletariat is undemocratic merely because the word "dictatorship" doesn't make sense. Democracy is [ideally, not what it is in practice] is a dictatorship of the majority, and the proletariat are the majority, surely you see how saying democracy is undemocratic makes no sense.
States are instruments of oppression weilded by classes, they are all "dictatorships" in the sense that a class oppresses the other; the question in state is, is it the capitalists oppressing the working class, or the other way around
Except in practice it's not proletarians doing these things, it's bureaucrats who end up forming their own class and class interests in the name of the proletariat. The average proletariat isn't actually the one who makes these rules or checks or applies censorships. See China, USSR, Cuba.
There shouldn't be classes to begin with. Eliminating hierarchies in lieu of anarchism deals with the issue without it being "another dictatorship"
forming their own class and class interests in the name of the proletariat.
That's not how class works, it's not like starting a new club. Class is defined by your relationship to production, not some nebulous title like "beauraucrats"
There shouldn’t be classes to begin with.
Genuinely, what is your suggested approach to rectifying this and what real world data is it based on? How do you expect to abolish class without a clear understanding of what creates it? How would a scientist expect to cure a disease without understanding what it is?
That's the socialist definition of class, that is not how I understand class.
I didn't say it's like "starting a new club".
Calling bureaucracy "nebulous" doesn't invalidate any of the reasoning I provided.
Suggested approach: anarchism.
I didn't disregard the importance of understanding class, merely that I disagreed with the reductive socialist definition of class.
That’s the socialist definition of class, that is not how I understand class.
I can decide to understand gravity as a color if I want to, but it doesn't make me right.
Calling bureaucracy “nebulous” doesn’t invalidate any of the reasoning I provided
I'm calling the term you're using (beauraucrats) nebulous, because it is, because you haven't defined it. You haven't provided any "reasoning", you've just said "I think this happens" with nothing at all to back it up.
Suggested approach: anarchism.
That's cool, but some of us feel like living in a society that doesn't get rolled over by a capitalist military whenever they feel like it. Some of us enjoy functional supply chains, too.
I didn’t disregard the importance of understanding class, merely that I disagreed with the reductive socialist definition of class.
Yeah I'm not saying you don't think it's important, I'm saying you don't understand it. Please tell me what you think is reductive about the definition of class used by the people who have radically transformed multiple feudal societies into world powers, because your own track record does not make a compelling case for abandoning it.
"Ha nice try! That is not real capitalism! You think workplaces would just give workers health insurance under a free market? They would just tell sick workers to figure it out themselves and replace them with healthy ones if needed!"
"Some of the first evidence of compulsory health insurance in the United States was in 1915, through the progressive reform protecting workers against medical costs and sicknesses in industrial America. Prior to this, within the Socialist and Progressive parties, health insurance and coverage was framed as not only an economic right for workers' health, but also as an employer's responsibility and liability—healthcare was in this context centered on working-class Americans and labor unions." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_United_States#The_rise_of_employer-sponsored_coverage)
If it would have stopped at "quit a job you hate" the example wouldn't have been USian-only and I could relate, while also setting a much better standard for freedom.
Lots of countries tie basic rights like health to your job though
Not “somehow”. Quite easily. Advertising works. People are easily influenced. It wasn’t sudden; it happened little by little over a long time.
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2026
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