The problem is that in order to unite the left it is necessary to agree to the ideological level, very difficult, to unite the right it needs just a briefcase of money.
to unite the right, all you have to do is say “so, we all hate Black people and immigrants, right?”
I wish. You’re giving right-wingers way too much credit. Most of those craven idiots do it for free for the opportunity to lose themselves in a gaggle of other morons. They are vulnerable in a way that is easy to exploit for people who know how to do it.
Where do I fit in, I want capitalism with massive regulation and oversight and no corporation protection for board members?
Sounds like SocDem, the problem with that is you want to give Capitalists all of the control of key industries and large firms yet somehow not also have control of the state.
Where do you fit in? Do you own capital? Are you a business owner or a factory owner? If not then you are a tool for capitalists to exploit as they wish
Sounds like SocDem.
Which movie is this from?
I’m pretty sure it’s Shaun of the Dead.
Shaun of the Dead
I swear bro the next capitalism actually works, bro trust me, bro without capitalism you wouldn’t have iphones bro.
bro i promise, with social democracy capitalism is equalitarian. yes bro i promise. bro, no more oppression! please don’t look at the global south
bro capitalism is the best we’ve got, trust me bro despite its flaws it’s the only one that works bro, bro just accept this as truth, bro don’t question it bro.
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I love the iphone thing because they are literally all manufactured in the most successful socialist country still existing.
Yeah, and the most capitalist part in them is the outrageous price tag and planned obsolescence. But yeah, keep talking about “muh technological development”
Don’t forget privatizing an IP that was only made possible through government funded research. Literally the only “innovation” jobs made was taking a bunch of existing tech and being like, “what if we made a media player that is also a phone with a touch screen”
And don’t get me started on how much I fucking hate touch screens. Whoever decided all cash registers should be touch screen only and took away my 10-key is going to beg for me to kill them once I am done with them.
Stealing other peoples’ work and selling it as your own for your profit, the sacred art of the capitalists (it just works!)
Yeah, I work as a bartender and have occasionally had to deal with register/payment terminal combos that are basically just Android based devices with a receipt printer. I hate them, because it’s completely possible to swipe up and close the app, or double press the unlock button and open the camera, or accidentally input something and trying to undo anything without starting over is a pain 'cause the buttons are too small. And occasionally those things will just not work, and the battery drains real fast.
The luddites were right.
True
There’s a huge difference between capitalism and oligarchy. What we have is oligarchy. All the worst parts of capitalism. 19th century robber-baron “capitalism.”
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Capitalist economic systems will inevitably lead to oligarchy
The “oligarchy” of today is not distinct from Capitalism, but Capitalism at a later stage in its life.
Capitalism today looks nothing like capitalism in the 1950s. Back then, a family could easily survive on the income of one person. With money left over to pay for college education, a car and a house.
That is not the situation today, where most Americans have NO retirement savings. Unless you’re redefining what capitalism IS, then that’s a problem caused by the people in charge (oligarchs).
You literally do not know what capitalism is. Capitalism is not commerce or economy, capitalism is a social relation system that is defined by private ownership of the means of production and prioritizes commodity production for profit by way of wage labor and class antagonism. Maybe you should read more before you state your factually incorrect statements.
The erosion of safety nets is a product of ever-further monopolization and the dissolution of the USSR, as well as the liberation of many colonies. I am not redefining Capitalism, the Capitalism we have today is the natural following point of earlier Capitalism.
Same underlying system, different levels and scale.
So back then capitalism had working colonialism and now many colonies freed themselves, and now we are the ones getting exploited
I’ve never come across anyone who calls themselves a “Stalinist.” Maybe that’s what some horseshoe theorists call Marxist-Leninists.
The only people I call Stalinist are people who intentionally go about delaying or postponing things. They gotta quit stalin for time.
You could say that but you could also say that they’re biden their time
Is this horseshoe theory?Lmao post this in dad jokes please
I must confess to have stealing this meme from elsewhere and didn’t even notice that lol
This is one of my favorites https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX8GeXpw84c
Oh that’s gold.
The modern revisionists and reactionaries call us Stalinists, thinking that they insult us and, in fact, that is what they have in mind. But, on the contrary, they glorify us with this epithet; it is an honor for us to be Stalinists for while we maintain such a stand the enemy cannot and will never force us to our knees.
What would it even mean?
Kinda like Marxism-Leninism, but in a one-man cult-of-personality police state and if you as much as look funny at the leader, you get disappeared/shot?
In other words, what’s happening to the USA minus the Marxism-Leninism?
How about, “are anyone of you qualified to do open heart surgery on an entire country?”
Yet you participate in a society, curious, etc etc
Liberalism and capitalism is the best system in the world.
for the rich? absolutely.
For every single person
just because we have shiny new inventions every year doesnt mean its working for everyone. the entire system of capitalism is based on taking advantage of the poor. to the point of killing them directly and indirectly en mass, through war and poverty related illness. so that the rich can own more property and assets.
its a horrible system.
Yeah… thats not what capitalism is based off but a nice vibes based analysis none the less.
You think married people have it way worse?
For the bourgeoisie, perhaps, but only temporarily. We can see that out of every country right now that it’s the Socialist PRC that is making the most dramatic and rapid improvements and growth.
It’s interesting how many China stans have popped up in the past few weeks.
That’s the normal stance on Lemmy.
It was founded by communists, so you’d better get used to it
We’ve been here for, like, four years…
I’ve been pro-PRC for years, but more people have started shifting their opinions based on the latest trade war and how China is standing up to US bullying.
Lemmy is developed by Communists, there are going to be Communists.
The PRC is a capitalist country but not liberal. They have good growth but they lack a lot of the freedoms we enjoy in liberal society.
Also its funny to me how when you wanted to pick which system was “the best” you selected economic growth.
The PRC is Socialist, large firms and key industries are firmly in the public sector, while the private sector is largely cooperatives, sole proprietorships, and small firms. This is classically Marxist. I elaborate more on this here.
Economic growth is merely one vector. The PRC saw the largest reduction in poverty on the planet, has strong democratic control from the people, very high approval rates, high confidence in improving conditions, and regularly increasing purchasing power for workers. The PRC is also leading the green revolution, and isn’t Imperialist like the liberal countries you claim to work so well.
I guess it just depends on what your metric is.
Unfortunately one of its leading metrics is its contributions to human suffering. It certainly is the best system in the world at spreading suffering.
Stalinists, Maoists and Socialists (at least the reformist ones) are pro-capital, just under a different form. They love their commodity production and wage labor…
Marxism-Leninism (which I presume you mean by the term “Stalinist”) is more classically Marxist than those who think they can abolish commodity production over night. I elaborate more on that in this comment.
While I do like your writing style and think you’re quite talented at it, that’s just a bunch of ML revisionism/State capitalist (Dengist) apologetics that misrepresents Marx.
Not gonna thoroughly debunk it cause it’s a wall of text, but ownership =/= mode of production. Marx never said that public ownership alone makes something socialist, what matters is how things are produced: Is it for exchange or use? Is labor still waged? Does surplus value still exist and get extracted? If yes - that’s still capitalism therefore not Marxist.
You also claim that “Marx didn’t think you could abolish private property by making it illegal” which is true cause else it would be idealism, but then you use this to spin it into “that’s why we need to let firms develop then make them public” while in reality what Marx meant is that we should abolish capital relations, not co-exist with capital and preserve businesses until they’re “ready”.
You’re also trying to spin the “by degrees” quote from the manifesto to act as if Marx argued for gradual market-led process of evolution from Capitalism to Socialism (or in other words, keeping Capitalism and Markets for decades after the revolution) and not a revolutionary process of abolition of Capital entirely.
That isn’t Marxism, but maybe I’m just too ideologically pure and idealistic. Still, I think being more honest that it’s not actually “classical Marxism” wouldn’t hurt.
Serious question: has communism ever been proved to work at scale? (not communist regimes, the communist ideology)
No, it gets destroyed by a CIA-funded coup every time. (Read Jakarta Method)
But look at Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Kerala, China, Burkino Faso for modern attempts at Socialism/Communism
They’re all ‘one-party states’ aren’t they?
Opposite of democracy… so whether they work well economically is irrelevant, since you’re relying on the party not to become totalitarian. 😬
The USA has one party: the capitalist party. They do not represent you, they represent corporate interests. Your vote doesn’t even really matter because of the electoral college, and other racist relics such as the Senate, giving ridiculous power to to just a handful of “swing voters”.
Voting once every 4 years for either the capitalist war monger or the other capitalist war monger, while they both ban 3rd party candidates from the ballot, does not make the USA “democratic”.
Edit: also who cares if it’s one party? In each of these cases the party has brought the entire population out of abject poverty (usually the result of capitalism exploiting them), increased education surpassing the USA, brought healthcare to all, have higher home ownership rates than the USA, etc.
Objective quality of life measurements all surpass the USA.
Having one party doesn’t mean you aren’t democratic. Democracy is about fulfilling the needs of the people based on their input, ie it’s more important that the people be able to impact policy than party. In the US, you can change parties, but not the policy, in countries like the PRC, you can change the policy, but not the party.
Yes, The PRC, DPRK, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and former USSR all are examples of Communist parties over Socialist systems. Communism, the post-Socialist, global fully publicly owned economy hasn’t been achieved yet, but thus far Communists have been able to successfully build Socialism, its necessary prerequisite.
Have to get past American and western interventionism to figure it out. But socialism lifted millions out of poverty look at Chinese and Russian history. Both countries went from feudal and monarchal society to industrial powers houses lead by peasants and workers, rivaling the United States in mere decades. So I’d say yes socialism does work. Also both those societies went from a near totally illiterate society to a 100 % total literacy within a generation. Free healthcare, housing, education and unemployment was non existent. Just to name some more achievements of socialism.
Socialism yes. I’ve always thought that capitalism regulated with socialist policies is the way forward. That way you can still encourage entrepreneurs to get going.
But we’re still left with the r > g problem (money attracts more money).
Communism is the extreme end of socialism isn’t it? And I’ve always thought that extremes never work. Extremism is a circle…
I’m open to being educated on this though…
Entrepreneurs are usually known as useless scammers in my line of work
There are a few clarifications to be made and some fallacies in your understanding of communism and socialism here. I’m not the one to clear all of this up, because I’m not going to put the effort and time needed into these subjects, but I’ll try to guide you in the direction of some resources to help.
Some quick clarifications:
Socialism and communism are the same thing. Communism is the end goal, but you cannot just jump directly to communism from capitalism, so we fall the transition period socialism. Communists often use the terms interchangeably, but any actual differentiation is a distinction of progress, not the goals of the project.
Communism is no more extreme than socialism and politics are not a horseshoe or circle where the far ends are the worst. This is a thought-terminating notion meant to keep you boxed within the status quo so that those who are currently in power stay in power, meaning you will remain relatively powerless. The same thing goes for trying to stay in the middle of a conflict: you end up not taking a side, meaning you remain on the side of the status quo, meaning you stay on the side of the oppressor. Your oppressor. As much as people argue communism is extreme, communists can argue that “the middle” or “liberalism” or “other leftists” are extreme. These arguments are always made for the purpose of getting you to stop thinking about those topics, to stop considering their validity. They are not trying to convince you those are wrong, but that they are not worth even considering. I implore you to do the opposite: do some reading and interact with what “extremists” are saying in good faith, then decide what you believe. I’m sure you’ll agree with some parts and not with others. We are all humans and most of us are of the same class. The “extremism” of communists is that we say working class people should run the world and the rich leeches should be oppressed in a sense that they cannot oppress anyone else through the use of their extreme wealth. We want to flip the system on its head to use an overly-simplistic metaphor.
Capitalism cannot be mixed with socialist policies. What you are probably referring to as socialist policies are actually welfare programs and state regulation . This is what we call social democracy, which is still capitalism. Socialism is differentiated more by who owns the means of production, how the economy is organized, and what class is in control of the state. That aside, socialists think social democracy is insufficient to curb the problems of capitalism because you don’t remove the roots of the problem. Most of the successes of social democracy in addressing wealth disparity and living standards are the result of countries trying to stave of socialist revolutions at home due to their workers seeing the success of nearby socialist republics in improving the quality of life of their people. These are capitalist concessions and if you look at the social democracies that exist in Europe, you’ll see that all of these concessions started getting rolled back AFTER the fall of the USSR. They were temporary relief (at home, not in their colonies), but the profit motive always demands more. If capitalism can’t steal enough from the global south, it will turn inward and eat itself like the US and UK are currently doing.
On entrepreneurs…most of the time people want to show the benefit of entrepreneurs, it is in terms of innovation and small businesses, so I’m assuming this is your point? Innovation and entrepreneurs do not disappear under socialism, but the way they function does. Innovation does not always need to be driven by profit motive as demonstrated within the USSR, but there is arguably some room for profit motive driving innovation in a mixed economy like China’s. The main benefit of socialism is that innovation is not at the whims of the market, which tends to act as if it is allergic to innovation, ultimately stifling it rather than nurturing it. Small businesses (and thus entrepreneurs) still exist in many socialist countries and will not be nationalized unless they grow quite big or become central to controlling an important part of the economy. In some ways it can even be easier to start a thriving business because you are less at risk of being stamped out by the “health competition” of a mega-corporation with a monopoly on an entire industrial sector. Those get nationalized, fixing the money attracts more money problem. If you remove the profit motive, this power can no longer be abused for profit. Corruption can happen under any system and has to be handled case-by-case, but you’ll find socialist countries have much harsher penalties for corruption to prevent it, unlike a paltry fine that is the cost of doing business. Jail time or up to the death penalty can be applied based upon the severity and circumstances of the crime. Vietnam and China have applied this last one to large-scale corruption within the last year whereas in liberal democracies, multimillion or even billion dollar fraud cases are widespread and normal with little to no repercussions. In some cases, it is even legal!
On education…if you want more, there are many sources available in many formats. I suggest Dessalines’ crash course of socialism and his reading list but there are plenty of others on here who provide lists worthy of mention (but their links are harder for me to look up). Prolewiki is like Wikipedia for socialism by socialists. Search a topic there that you want to know more about. You can also ask for resources on specific topics in lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, and hexbear.net and you will probably get more resources than you care to consume in a year, so long as you approach them in good faith. People in these communities will only troll you if they think you are trolling them. The efforts some of them will go to in order to educate others is ridiculous (in a good way).
I hope this helps.
How do you determine where an "extreme " is on a circle? Democracy was considered extreme once
No system has ever worked at scale. Capitalism is literally destroying the planet we live on, Feudalism wasn’t any better, and no other system was ever applied at such a scale.
Maybe the scale is the problem, and the Anarchists were right all along.Anarchists would still have to deal with scale in terms of trade, production and centralization - after all, not every commune would be able to produce penicillin, insulin, chips, phones, steel, etc as a hobby. In other words, they would still have to replace capitalist system to a decent enough extent to be able to meet all their needs.
(most) Anarchists don’t have a problem with scale, just with hierarchy. We can have democratic and free associations at any scale.
You can’t force your system onto every society and culture on earth, as Capitalism has done, when your system is Anarchism.
That’s true. Imperialist ideologies like capitalism or the state socialism of the CCCP have an advantage in spreading their influence globally. But there’s nothing in principle standing in the way of one world, one federation, a million tribes. Anarchism does scale quite the well in that regard
The USSR was not Imperialist, rather, it supported liberation movements against Imperialism and Colonialism.
no capitalism keeps declaring war on it, the road towards it however… Massive Ws in the soviet union, the prc, dprk, east germany, just tremendous achivements
Capitalism is a global system, it is based on exchange value and things being produced and sold for a profit, not for use (which is known as commodity production), and if you want to trade internationally, you have to follow this capitalist mode of production. Communism, on the other hand, aims to abolish the production of commodities (money included) and instead produce goods for use. Notice how these two systems differ so much, international trade between actual communist and capitalist countries becomes impossible given how differently they value things.
Now consider how today’s capitalist nations are so dependent on trade, and it’s because trade allows nations to prosper, to grow, to have increased standards of living and gives the nations access to materials they otherwise couldn’t have produced within their local borders. If a nation goes full isolationist, it loses access to all of that and the nation becomes crippled.
So there’s three ways for communist countries to go about the global capitalist system:
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Go full isolationist, which would cripple a country substantially.
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Participate in the capitalist market, meaning the country would be forced to produce commodities and participate in capital exchange which would make them, in one definition or another, capitalist. This also heavily risks the country to fall into full capitalism with time (as seen historically).
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Support worker movements internationally en masse and hope they succeed with achieving their revolutions. If they succeed, only then can exchange value be safely abolished, goods be produced for use instead of profit, and international socialist/communist trade can actually happen with people having their needs met.
It’s clear that international communist revolution is pretty much the only viable way forward, and the only opportunity to do so failed (with Spartacist uprising, Hungrarian Soviet Republic, etc being crushed, leaving USSR standing pretty much alone).
So to answer your question with all this nonsensical wall of text in mind, no. Actual communist/socialist mode of production has never existed (therefore whether communist ideology works hasn’t been proven), as any experiments so far had essentially been capitalist.
This isn’t quite accurate. If you maintain public control over the large firms and industries, and the proletariat controls the state, you remain on the Socialist road. Markets themselves are not necessarily Capitalism.
Communism must be global, but we can’t make a fully publicly owned economy simply by declaring private property illegal, the USSR didn’t even manage to do that.
If you maintain public control over the large firms and industries, and the proletariat controls the state, you remain on the Socialist road.
Agree, there has to be DOTP directly after the revolution which has to retain some capitalist features, mostly for economic survival purposes.
However, once the military struggle against capitalists are over and economy is sufficiently reorganized, a country has to quickly abolish the value form and actually turn to a socialist mode of production, else it risks either backpedaling to capitalism and/or turning revisionist. This is precisely what happened to USSR, given how they couldn’t transition to socialist mode of production due to their peasant problem + Stalin’s delusions of “Socialism in one state”.
If there’s an active maintenance in post-revolutionary period of capitalist mode of production, then the country is capitalist even if the production is nationalized or owned by workers.
Markets themselves are not necessarily Capitalism.
Historically markets predate Capitalism, so yes, but they’re never socialist or communist given how socialist mode of production does away with commodity production. If commodity production is abolished, then commodity exchange (markets) can no longer exist. This does mean that market socialism is capitalist as commodity production remains, the law of value remains, all that’s different when compared to Capitalism is that the state regulates it which doesn’t magically make it socialist.
I think there’s a problem in analysis of time scales, and the fundamental role contradictions play, dialectically.
If, by “millitary struggle against Capitalists” you mean the immediate revolution and establishment of the DotP, there is then a long and protracted process of building up to a fully publicly owned economy. You cannot achieve this through fiat, it must be developed towards, and markets remain the most effective method of moving from low to high levels of development. You cannot simply abolish the value form with a stroke of a pen, black markets emerge for that which is not provided. Erasing the commodity form is a material and historical process, not a legalistic one.
Socialism in one country is undeniably correct. Had Trotsky’s permanent revolution been adopted, ie abandoning the buildup of Socialism domestically in favor of exporting revolution abroad, we would have had more failed revolutions and the USSR would have been crushed due to a lack of development. The very foundation of Permanent Revolution is on the assumption that the peasantry can only temporarily align with the Proletariat, which ended up being proven false when the Soviet system solidified, rather than fell apart in the first few years.
The biggest issue here, however, is your adoption of the “One Drop Rule.” I wrote a post on the subject, but to simplify, the concept that if some degree of Private Property exists the entire system is Capitalist goes against all notions of Dialectical Materialism and throws away the entire Materialist basis for Socialism in the first place. Just as Public Property in the US is not Socialist, Private Property in a Socialist system does not mean the system is Capitalist.
All systems have contradictions. What matters most is which class is resolving the contradictions via the State, the Proletariat, or the Bourgeoisie. If the large firms, key industries, and State are firmly in the hands of the Proletariat, the system is on the Socialist road. We cannot abolish the small manufacturer or firms, we must develop out of them. The process of building towards Communism through Socialism is through the continuous resolution of these contradictions, as by necessary laws of physics they cannot be resolved legalistically, or with the stroke of a pen.
The idea that the Socialist Mode of Production is unique among all in that it is the only Mode of Production judged by purity, rather than the principle aspect, is an error in classification that ignores the real trajectories we observe in Socialist states like the PRC, which are increasing in Socialization of the economy over time. Rather, we can look all the way back to Marx for evidence to why this is true:
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i. e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
I want you to look at the bolded word. Why did Marx say by degree? Did he think on day 1, businesses named A-C are nationalized, day 2 businesses D-E, etc etc? No. Marx believed that it is through nationalizing of the large firms that would be done immediately, and gradually as the small firms develop, they too can be folded into the public sector. The path to eliminated Private Property isn’t to make it illegal, but to develop out of it.
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital;[43] the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
This is why, in the previous paragraph, Marx described public seizure in degrees, but raising the level of the productive forces as rapidly as possible.
China does have Billionaires, but these billionaires do not control key industries, nor vast megacorps. The number of billionaires is actually shrinking in the last few years. Instead, large firms and key industries are publicly owned, and small firms are privately owned. This is Marxism.
I also recommend What is Socialism? as its an excellent essay that goes more in-depth on the topics I went over.
this.
adendum: in some “primitive” societies, there was no private property of the means of production. marx and engels studied that extensively.
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Not capitalism ≠ communism (or communist ideology). Imagine an interest-free economic system. This could also work completely without communist ideology, but would get rid of the problematic core principle in capitalism that money attracts more money (which for instance might have stopped the Swasticar CEO from even becoming so powerful). This would also improve the value of work compared to just owning money. But maybe I am just delusional and instead the anarchists are indeed right. Dunno.
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Please just cut yourselves off from the fediverse already. Even replying to this drivel has lost it’s fun.
