But if no one has to struggle, how will we know who’s beneath us??
their con man idols tell them that the reason their lives are shitty is because of the mexicans, gays, black people, women, librarians, immigrants…everyone except the people who are literally paying them nothing and laughing at them for it.
and the people are all too happy to believe it
I think a lot about something i read somewhere - “you hate every piece of capitalism but won’t connect the dots to see that’s the picture”.
Everything always boils down to people being dumb and if magically the people would become smart, all problems would just get fixed.
Not even smart , in a genius-like sense. I’d settle for merely cooperative.
Like if people could drop the petty “movement purity” squabbles and just rustle up that meme energy “apes together strong” for each other as the working class, instead of individualizing their struggles and settling for misery, we could really get somewhere!
People will point out that it makes more sense to punch up than to punch down but the later is significantly easier and better paid.
Punching down gives the monkey brain that sweet squirt of dominance when you see the suffering of your subject. Punching up is unrewarding because you don’t get results unless everyone else does it, and then you have to share the victory with everyone else.
Focusing your wrath where it belongs doesn’t make the million year old monkey brain squirt the reward chemicals.
These is why the alt right pipeline for women is transphobia/TERF shit.
Sexism is real, lots of teenage girls and young women feel frustrated and powerless, but they get easy wins going after trans women. They can’t get Dobbs reversed, but forcing trans people to detransition is an explicit goal of conservative power structures. They get to feel like they “won” with that UK court ruling - that “women’s rights” were won by something that did nothing to actually meaningfully help women.
I’m chill with safety nets for poor people and regulations on large companies
what I consider far left is when people start saying that the govt should own everything and there shouldn’t be private property. that’s an extreme and I am against that.
edit: all of you downvoters are actually far left commies and I’m completely correct
The rational left (i.e. not the authoritarians) only want the “government” to own everything insomuch as the “government” is a profoundly democratic representative body, in an administrative capacity.
Don’t confuse “private property” (industrial machines and other means of production held privately by an investor class in order to extract profit via the arbitrage between the productive value of employees and their flat wages) with “personal property” (your house, car, clothes, dishes, toothbrush, etc.). There aren’t many leftists who think there shouldn’t be personal property.
Private property that isn’t personal is someone elses property, and if I want to have my own property it makes sense for others to also have it
I don’t want the govt owning my home, or having to rent from a govt, and I dont want to drink water from govt owned companies because at that point it truly is authoritarian simply because the govt has way too much power over your life
There aren’t many leftists who think there shouldn’t be personal property.
I’ve been on .ml before and theres more than a few people than think NK and Stalin are/were good, and are anti-private property
edit: I honestly kinda think some of you are downvoting this because other people have downvoted this. these aren’t unpopular or insane ideas, and anyway I only used water as an example of govt ownership because that’s the first thing that came to my mind. a better example would be that I wouldn’t want my food to be grown by the govt
I dont want to drink water from govt owned companies because at that point it truly is authoritarian simply because the govt has way too much power over your life
Been drinking tap water straight from government-owned companies for decades. Taste is okay (a bit hard for geological reasons), but it couldn’t be healthier.
Still, though, you’re right that the question of the state not owning everything is a very serious one that needs to be addressed.
What are your thoughts on cooperatives, libertarian socialism, or anarchist communism?
Private property that isn’t personal is someone elses property
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Everyone is entitled to personal property, the things they have for personal use (e.g. your house or toothbrush). Private property is not someone else’s personal property, it’s the things for group use which generate value to the group (e.g. the industrial equipment necessary to create your house or toothbrush) which under capitalism are owned and controlled by investors.
The leftist position is that those “means of production” being owned and controlled by investors leads to the investors paying their staff as little as possible while charging as much as possible, so that they can thrive on the difference between prices and wages.
The leftist solution is for those “means of production” to be owned collectively by the people who actually use them to produce things. There’s a whole spectrum of exactly what that looks like.
On one side are those who think the government should own everything. The argument being that, assuming you can trust the administrators to not be corrupt, that is the best way to coordinate resources. This is logically sound, since the resources which would be wasted on marketing, and redundant R&D in competing companies, and other capitalist inefficiencies, could be directed productively. The flaw is in the “assuming you can trust the administrators to not be corrupt” part. That’s a big reason why the USSR failed.
On the other side, there are those who think that the basic concepts of market economics are sound, the problem is simply the capitalist-worker relationship. The argument being, capitalism can be subverted while retaining the benefits of market economies through co-ops: instead of revenue being paid in part to wages with the remaining profit being divided along shareholders, the revenue after costs is divided totally among the employees, who are themselves the only shareholders. This preserves the competitive innovation of the market, while excising the parasitic capital class.
Only the most extreme zealots in the Soviet camp ever push for abolishing personal property. That’s a fringe position even for the left.
You’re a liberal then, pro-market with regulation, maybe a social democrat using Nordic countries as an example? With the overton window changing so much you’re not really a leftist anymore
.ml folks aren’t far left, they’re full on authoritarian dictatorship apologists. They’re no more leftist than China is communist
I dont want to drink water from govt owned companies because at that point it truly is authoritarian simply because the govt has way too much power over your life
I’m pretty sure private for-profit water is absolutely worse than government run water. Everyone can at least nominally vote to change the government. A private org is beholden to no one except shareholders (if they have any), and maybe laws (if they exist, are relevant, and are enforced).
We already had a gilded age where we learned how low for-profit entities will go. We had saw dust in bread, chalk in milk, and worse.
For profit food production is giving us price gouging and a water crisis. Would government do better? Well, given the current administration maybe not.
I’m getting the feeling that you’re from the US based on your distrust of the government, which in your case, I guess is fair.
But I think the person you’re replying to probably has in mind a situation that is much better than the current one in the US before we even start seriously considering buying up private property for the commons. The obvious first candidate would be utilities like water/power/internet. Without a profit motive or investors to pay off, they will offers the best service at the lowest price. Not to say private alternative wouldn’t exist, but that you would always have the cheaper public option to fall back on, and also keep the private alternatives from jacking up prices only the make a profit.
Public housing could work in a similar way, where you have the option out there on the housing marketing, in addition to banks and private sellers. For instance, in my city, we have public housing that is $8/mo. I lived in one of these public cooperatives with my folks until my teens, and it was great. Really gave us a leg up when we needed it.
PS. I recommend turning off visible vote counts. Downvotes were getting under my skin too, but now all I see are comments.
Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement – in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods. (Friedrich Engels, Principles of Communism, 1847)
Communists ain’t taking away my beaten up electric bass and my microwave oven
One of my friends described it as there’s difference between private property and personal property. Your toothbrush is personal property. No one cares about that. Your factory where you assemble widgets is private property, where you’re paying people to convert labor into stuff you can sell.
I should read more left-wing theory. It made sense when he explained it.
How does that apply to things like computers? My personal PC can also double up as a server from which I run the applications that I sell to people. The PC is the means of production, and it is mine, but I don’t necessarily write all the code myself.
You’re certainly entitled to you opinion, and we’re chill on the same things, but I do think more industry – especially the kind which are utilities – should be nationalised. I’m even open to the abolishment of private property. But I think we need updated democracies (better representation, maybe try local direct democracy nodes?) before we start getting close to seriously considering these questions as policy.
And of course it may turn out that these solutions (nationalising, all property publicly owned, etc) aren’t the best ones for human flourishing, so then we just course correct.
As long as we don’t get tooo attached to any particular ideology, and focus on outcomes, I think we could make a much better world. Kind of borrowing the Meliorism aspect from liberal democracy and running with it here, I guess…
i think a one of the largest problems with democracies nowadays is the influence of money on them. if that were removed we could actually move to a more reasonable world
You’re absolutely right. There’s so much broken with our existing democracies at the higher levels (and municipally as well, I’m sure), that it is maybe too optimistic to try and extend to influence of the political class into more industries.
I have a hunch that workplace democracy (usually in the form of unions) is one of the lowest hanging fruits to improve the situation overall, and it’s still hypothetically within our reach in much of the global North. That is, it’s still a risk, but it’s unlikely that the army will be called in the open fire on strikers (yet).
Sure but we must ask how much should you be able to afford in this position?
What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist – the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.
Wow, such a powerful quote.
It touches on something I’m worried about in our time: How we’ve started to monetize hobbies as “hustles” and watch other people enjoy them in our place because we’re too busy to do them ourselves.
It feels like enjoying “the sun and music and art” is now the job of an entertainer, who the audience lives vicariously through, between their shifts. Whether it’s all these shows about celebrities who get to travel, or so simple as streamers getting to sit down and play games…
As the screenshot said, enough to pay for rent, bills and groceries. That’s is, enough to not be homeless, starving or unable to afford healthcare.
Uh. One? Then if two people had basic jobs…Maybe two?
Maybe someone is able to claw their way above minimum wage and the other can quit entirely, whatever.
Nobody’s demanding McMansions for McDoubles. They just want the concept of a job to be more than an endless void that arbitrarily takes exponentially more than it gives.
Working two jobs and being one major illness or injury away from losing it all is a sick insult to humanity, for all it has achieved up to this point.
I know a lot of people around here aren’t a fan of cars, but minimum wage workers need to be able to afford one. And even used cars have gotten crazy expensive. Even if you can find a cheap used shit box it’ll need expensive repairs quickly.
I know there are places where this isn’t true, but where I live, if you don’t have a car, you can’t get to work, the grocery store, or anywhere really. If you try to ride a bike, you will die. If you try to ride an escooter you’ll get ticketed for riding it in the driving lane, and even if it were legal it wouldn’t be an option in the winter when they don’t even clear the whole road of snow and ice. People go homeless before they give up having a car.
Needing cars is caused by the same capitalist system that produces jobs below livable wage, so I totally get it. But if we were able to push for better salaries and working conditions, surely we’d also be able to push for better urban planning and public transport.
I think that if a new style of government is created, free transport and fuel should be an universal right. The government just lends a basic small car for free to people. Once that person buys a fancier car, the rental is returned to the government to be loaned out to someone else in need. Bus passes and passenger rail is free.
This greases the wheel of economy, along with easing pressure on people.