It’s a meme
How exactly? Other than excessive bloodshed, which - other than edgelord tankies - most people would neither want, nor have the stomach to pursue.
Agreed, lets just keep doing whatever the capitalists demand until their insatiable greed destroys them and us.
It’s not like it’s gonna take that long. And if not climate change, the AI they don’t fully understand but are trying to monetize. And if not AI, CRISPR derived vectors they don’t fully understand but are trying to monetize, etc.
Lets just stay the course. It will all work out in the end, at least for the planet, and that’s ultimately what matters.
I understand the bitterness, but whoever said the commenter wanted to do what capitalists demand? They just wanted to avoid bloodshed.
There are always options like general strikes, massive voting movements, etc. It’s just a matter of figuring out what will work and how to do it.
If you’re arguing that capitalists will respond with violence, that’s fair, but then the blame is on them, not the workers
These people don’t actually care about statecraft or political science. It’s all about fan service for them.
That isn’t what I said and I think you know it. Next time just say you don’t know the answer either and save yourself the effort.
I know what humans are going to do by our track record. Kick the can until there is a physical obstruction preventing it.
We will talk the biggest of games claiming otherwise the whole time, though. Surely rhetoric will save the day this time!
Revolutions have happened and will continue to happen regardless of how much smug liberals will bloviate about edgelord tankies.
Okay sure, so what examples do you have of a successful modern revolution?
Bonus points if you can name one where the winners didn’t just immediately change the rules and continue fucking over the little guy.
Another bonus point if you can name an example where a revolution didn’t result in disproportionate civilian deaths relative to the ‘bad guys’.
Then again, maybe you’re one of those ‘the end justifies the means’ kind of guys, who fantasizes about saving the rest of us by way of firing squad. If that’s the case, I’ll expect you to be on the front line to fight the government funded military force that shows up.
Or maybe, just maybe you’re another lame ass tankie who talks a big game, but would piss their pants if someone so much as gave you a dirty look IRL.
Soviet revolution in Russia, Revolution in China, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in Laos, in Nicaragua, just to name a few.
Bonus points if you can name one where the winners didn’t just immediately change the rules and continue fucking over the little guy.
None of the above examples did anything of the sort as anybody with even a modicum of historical literacy knows.
Another bonus point if you can name an example where a revolution didn’t result in disproportionate civilian deaths relative to the ‘bad guys’.
Define what’s disproportionate and how you decide on what’s proportionate.
Then again, maybe you’re one of those ‘the end justifies the means’ kind of guys, who fantasizes about saving the rest of us by way of firing squad. If that’s the case, I’ll expect you to be on the front line to fight the government funded military force that shows up.
Then again, maybe you’re one of those people who are benefiting from capitalism and don’t care about the suffering of other people as long as you got yours.
Or maybe, just maybe you’re another lame ass tankie who talks a big game, but would piss their pants if someone so much as gave you a dirty look IRL.
Or maybe, just maybe you’re an ignorant dronie who is as illiterate as you’re ignorant.
And they will continue to become stuck in the dictatorship phase until you acknowledge that you cannot create political agency via mass murder of innocents.
Creating political agency via mass murder of innocents is the basis for the western system of government buddy.
other than edgelord tankies
Maybe you shouldn’t use terms if you don’t understand them, liberal.
There’s nothing cringier than right-wingers who pretend they aren’t right-wingers… ie, liberals. For people who can be called leftist with a straight face, “liberal” is quite the insult.
Wanna see what MLK had to say about liberals?
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
The women of Iceland went on strike in 1975, they stopped doing literally everything, walked out of the home, left the kids, to demonstrate how much the system would crumble without them, how important they are to everything being able to function, and ask for equal pay. They flipped everything overnight.
The current system is all the workers do all the work, and the profits from that work go almost entirely to some douvhe who won birth lotto. The system is already rigged. Unrigging the system would look like walking off the job, but globally. It’s going to happen. Society is squeezed too tightly, there’s going to be havoc.
Take the route California is taking and educate the kids about worker’s rights. Teach them it’s not okay to be exploited at the work place and encourage them to tell their parents about it. Civics classes should also be taught to learn how the government works and what people’s rights are under the Constitution. Encourage people to unionize now that they know how the system works.
Once the basics have been taught, elect people who care about government reform for social policies by paying for them with higher corporate and personal wealth taxes. Reform the tax system the wealthy have been using to hide their money. All their money is tied up in stocks and they’re living off of multimillion dollar loans? Fuck them, tax a big percentage of the loan. All these things can be done to indirectly seize the fruits of their production at least.
i’d do some intellectual property reform.
some banking reform - more local / peer group/long term lending requirements, less fickle international finance. (and less fucking mortgage bubbles!)
some small business support / starter initiatives - link that in with how banks work.
i’d consider lobbying for some government sposored work to generate open source plans and enable production processes for useful tools - Okay that isn’t going to happen , , ,
but it’s not all or nothing, but you can do things to help some more workers control and access more of their tooling even if its not outright ownership of the end to end production process.
(By the way i’m basically arguing for a more “free” market in the ecnomic sense (easy access for a large number of small scale producers). . . which is exactly not what large-scale capitalists want.
They want a market “free” from any thing that might regulate their attempts to secure economic power and their abiity to use it to generate supernormal prices/profits.)
Progress doesnt happen in 4-5 year political cycles thats a hard one to improve without an electorate capable (any maybe secure enough) to thing about the longer term. Odd that it was extreme econmic and political uncertainty that brought out the likes of FDR and other post-war that people were most willing to think long term when it came to their governemnts - I guess it brought out all sorts of “crazies”.
The big one in terms of bloodshed is land reform - and it has been done in a few places - sort of post-colonial type situations - but granted it does ususally have blooodshed. It’s a personal judgment what degree is “excessive bloodshed”.
I’ve debated people at length on this topic and have concluded that this is a half-baked idea that is impossible to implement without destroying society in any form that has been presented to date.
You can’t call an idea with 200 years of history and hundreds of books on the subject “half-baked” without explaining what about it you think is unfeasible. Either you have never actually talked to a socialist, or you’ve simply never listened.
So, a few questions:
- Why is it “half-baked”?
- What ideas does it propose?
- What is wrong with those ideas?
- How is it “impossible to implement”?
- What methods are proposed?
- What prevents those methods from working?
- What do you mean by “destroy society”?
- What exactly do you define as society?
- How would socialism “destroy” that?
The factory has owners. It would be unfair to not compensate them for their capital investment. You are describing a situation where you disallow private enterprise, but all systems describing this type of agreement to date have resulted in terrible outcomes. It will destroy competition. I am reminded of hearing about my brother’s visit to the Soviet Union when he was younger. He went with his group to an ice cream shop and asked what flavors they have and they said vanilla. As in, this limits options and provides a shitty quality of life. It also leads to issues where people who are able to provide a high value to society are not rewarded at a higher rate than a lazy or dumb person. The incentive is gone. These are issues that no text has reconciled. Even Plato’s dreamed Utopia, he knew that such a thing only would work if you brainwashed people generationally to value the idea of communal ownership. He basically left it at the leaders not being able to own things, but having all that they need while other classes under them could still own things. In essence, his utopian society was totally unrealistic in any meaningful timeline and still formed different classes of people.
It destroys society to take away people’s possessions because we built a system where property ownership is a central component. Having possessions is such a basic human construct that your are living in a pipe dream if you feel that you can remove that. The idea that people would share with one another and not get what they are worth to society is salient in describing why socialism as a whole crumbles. You can have socialized policies, but destroying the whole economic system doesn’t work. See my reply later in this thread for examples of real incremental changes.
Under postcapitalism, the factory would be commonly-owned. The company that operates the factory would worker-controlled. That being said, there is nothing wrong with the holder of the building even in common ownership setup being compensated. What is unfair is to demand control rights over the firm for this capital and make the workers at the company your employees. Not everyone against capitalism is a communist. There can still be economic incentives for productive activity
Let’s start with your first assumption. Why must a factory have individual owners? Why not instead have it owned by the workers who are the ones actually producing?
Also, don’t conflate private and personal property. If you are indeed talking about private property, it is very unlikely you have any to begin with. The vast majority of private property is owned by a few billionaires.
Lastly, people do not need money to incentivise work. Boredom, creativity and the desire to help and or contribute to society does that well enough. Given a stable level of comfort, people will seek work that matters to them.
The factory has owners.
Fuck the owners.
but all systems describing this type of agreement to date have resulted in terrible outcomes.
Prove it.
It will destroy competition.
What competition?
a high value to society are not rewarded
What value does Donald Trump bring to society?
The incentive is gone.
Prove it.
These are issues that no text has reconciled.
Prove it.
work if you brainwashed people generationally
You mean completely unlike people brainwashed into believiing “capitalism gud?”
Having possessions is such a basic human construct
Stop conflating simple possessions with private property, genius.
why socialism as a whole crumbles.
Socialism seems perfectly alive and kicking to me - despite the uncountable amounts of treasure spent violently crushing it.
See my reply later in this thread for examples of
real incremental changes.no change whatsoever.
FTFY.
We can have the perpetual pain of subsistence and servitude to the oligarch club until it collapses under the weight of its own manipulation and propaganda after generations of needless suffering of our children and children’s children necessitating the painful work of rebuilding, or we can destroy the society built from the ground up as a capitalist exploitation trap and do the painful work of rebuilding.
This society perpetuates the misery and exploitation of the many to serve the whims and desires of the few. You act as if it’s worth saving. Go to one of your local tent cities, where we throw our fellow humans, aka defective capital batteries, to die of exposure and police harassment. This system is rotten to its core and will have to be torn down and rebuilt, the only question, just with climate change, is do we let the gaping wound continue fester, hoping it will be the next generation’s problem to amputate? Or do we take on the painful necessity of repairing the boomer’s greed plague for the future they didnt care about at all?
I’d rather our species be destroyed than continue to commit itself further and further to greed and greed worship. I consider greed far worse than hate. At least people that kill out of hate cared about who they killed, in that they want them dead. A capitalist that poisons children’s drinking water to make private shareholders a few extra dollars doesn’t even care to know those children’s names, they were just speedbumps to glorious profit. To me it is the darkest we can go to hurt others for profit. And our society’s core value above all others is greed. That’s worth saving?
Your opinion is all feelings and no solutions. Morally, I can’t contend that it would be nice to help people who can’t help themselves and that we should definitely fix the human impact on the environment. I also agree that the Boomers caused a ton of shitty issues with poor policy choices stemming from greed. However, I don’t think that your solution is well thought out. It seems juvenile to simply say that the workers should assume the means of production. That in itself does not equate to a full working solution. Here’s an example of potential incremental changes that would help your cause: 1) Put term limits on all legislators. 2) Allow only one Supreme Court nomination per presidential term, adding a new judge to the pool. A retiring judge is replaced by a vote of the judiciary themselves. 3) Campaign finance reform with capped election funding. High salaries for politicians and steep penalties for kickbacks and bribery. Politicians with financial interests in a vote must recuse. 4) UBI. 5) Strict enforcement of antitrust laws. 6) Caps on higher education costs at public institutions. Federal loans only for public schools with capped interest rates. Your UBI will be tapped instead of a reliance on salary. 7) Reinstate a modernized Fairness Doctrine in order to ensure that people aren’t pigeon-holed into a narrow understanding of current affairs. 8) Create a pathways to citizenship for all with roots in the country then close the borders. Make a transparent immigration system with many more types of work visas. Strictly enforce the new policies. 9) Eliminate the electoral college in favor of direct ranked choice voting.
See, real changes. Not, “Let’s eat people and steal shit!”
Literally everything you just proposed is beyond a pipe dream under the current rigged system. The owners bribe the Republicans and Neoliberals to dictate their preferred economic policy as they stoke social issues to keep the peasants divided. The oligarchs that bribe both major parties will never permit UBI, they spent decades systematically legalizing political bribery culminating in citizens united, they are the reason Antitrust laws on the books aren’t enforced, they are the reason the fairness doctrine was abandoned for private profit, and they like us fighting over abortion, immigration, guns, etc because it stops us from uniting against them.
Also the idea that even without the oligarchs that politicians would regulate their own term limits is absurd. Why do you think they exempt their pay from government shutdowns and have lifetime universal healthcare just for themselves?
The last, last, last chance to do any of what you suggest using the constitutional tools of the system would have been to soundly and firmly reject the Reagan grift, trickle down economics, and the Jack Welch dehumanization of the economy 50 years ago. Instead they convinced their “opposition” party to take the bribes and the peasants not to engage in “unseemly” class war as they won without a fight. We’ve lived under class occupation ever since. This system is beyond all salvation.
Don’t worry though, the half of the peasants that have been indoctrinated from childhood to believe what you believe will protect that occupation against their own interests to the bitter end, so you have nothing to fear from us tankies.
Unfortunately for you, the sycophants, and capitalists, and everyone else including me, climate change is the physical reaction to our careless actions, and is completely immune to any and all pathetic attempts to obfuscate, blackmail, bribe, assassinate, or otherwise con it into backing down, despite all the vaporware like clean coal, corn ethanol, hydrogen, and planet scale carbon filter the capitalists try to make another buck on before last call. But oowee, they’re trying to bullshit their way out of it to darkly hilarious effect.
Your opinion is all feelings and no solutions
So try actually reading the Communist Manifesto - get it from the horse’s mouth, it’s very short. Then, if you still feel like there isn’t enough detail and that the reasoning isn’t detailed enough, try Kapital. And then, how about the decades and decades of theory that came after? You can keep claiming that socialists “don’t have any solutions”, but please realise that this is an absurd claim when the field of socialism has so, so many detailed and comprehensive theories based on observation, experimentation and further research - scientifically so.
You already have a mean of production in your hand. But the only thing you produce is stupid memes.
Even if they did produce something, Jeff Bezos would steal it as soon as it started making a buck.
Seizing the means of production made sense when that was the leverage the owners used to strip the surplus value from you.
Today, they use gatekept platform and a captive audience with AI manipulation to insert themselves between you and the customers and strip you of your surplus value.
Now pay Bezos’ 40% tax until Amazon basic is ready to outcompete out of the platform entirely. Welcome to the second page of Google !
I’m pretty sure phones are not all that is involved in commodity production.
But they are. Because we live in a service economy and the only thing you produce are services. Phone is enough. Use it wisely.
Yeah. Hold on, I’m just going to build a house, get access to fresh water, and produce food with my phone. After that I’m going to get vaccinated with my phone. And after that I’ll make some clothes with my phone.
Go read the first few chapters of capital on means of production.
I made a bunch of Dalle pics on this topic last night:
Directly seizing I don’t think would end well. I think it’s one of the short comings of communism.
Encouraging employee owned companies is where it’s at. But to be honest I’m not sure how you would incentivize that.
Encouraging employee owned companies is where it’s at.
What did you think “seize the means of production” meant?
But to be honest I’m not sure how you would incentivize that.
Oh, that’s simple - you get rid of the police.
Seize the means of production comes from a conceptually separate part of anti-capitalist critique then workers’ control/workers’ self-management. It is common to conflate these two strands of anti-capitalist thoughts. It is technically possible to have common ownership of the means of production without workers’ self-management and workers’ self-management without common ownership of the means of production. Universal worker coops only requires abolishing wage labor not private ownership
I don’t think the person I was responding to is ready for this level of analysis, okay?
You incentivize the same way unions are growing now. Just show people the benefits and constantly shout it from the highest mountain tops.
So bb, tell me more about those sweet, sweet employee-owned companies for other readers’ benefit.
Tell me more about how employee owned companies are better at long term planning. Tell me more about how they’re concerned about balancing profit for survival’s sake with societal good. Tell me more about how they participate in the benefits of the free market via competition while not becoming all-consuming, profit-driven monsters. Tell me more about how they avoid stakeholder-chosen, sociopathic leadership in favor of leaders wanting the best for the company’s mission and its employees. Tell me more about the coffee shop branch that was shut down by its company and reopened as an employee-owned cafe. Tell me more about AAA. Tell me sweet nothings, bb
(And yes, I’m explicitly not talking about communism because it’s an emotionally charged concept, and i want to focus on things maybe people don’t know so much about)
A better case for worker cooperatives is just pointing out they satisfy the moral principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. The workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs, but in a capitalist firm, the employer holds sole legal responsibility for 100% the corresponding legal claim to the positive and negative result of the enterprise while employees receive 0%. In a worker coop, this mismatch is corrected
