I left reddit for Lemmy because I was fed up with how auth-left that site was becoming. I thought that Lemmy, being still new would be better balanced and less hostile for a regular pro-market classical liberal like me.
And this is the level of shit I find in here. Fuck ya’ll I’m out.
hhahaha this is what does it for ya? Barbie broke ya?!
and its all ’ im done with thousands of servers, cuz i saw something i didnt like on one of them"?!
Don’t let the door hit ya.
Any criticism of capitalism is the same as historical communism and therefore always wrong. Accept your fate, citizen.
That’s just historical capitalism. I can fix him!
Real capitalism has never been tried!
Real capitalism would require:
- Flameout Professional Fire Services (i.e. no publicly funded fire department)
- Johnny’s Good Eats Certification (i.e. no FDA testing to keep food safe)
- SuperStonk Seal of Approval (i.e. no SEC regulating private companies, just for-profit companies doing that job)
- Rodney’s Roads and Trails (i.e. all roads are private, you need a payment plan to use them)
- Policing by Pinkertons (i.e. all policing is private and for-profit)
- Job Insurance, LLC (you pay for private job insurance when you have a job, you hope for benefits if you lose it)
- 401(k), or starve (you didn’t contribute to your 401(k), that’s too bad)
- Only private health insurance, no medicare, no medicaid, no Obamacare, no CHIPs, etc.
You could still have a military, but injured soldiers would be treated by private MASH units, soldiers would be fed by Taco Bell (paid for out of pocket), on base housing would be contracted out to AirBnB, aircraft maintenance would be contracted out to Boeing, and of course Veteran’s Affairs wouldn’t exist.
Basically the fascist Chile of the Chicago Boys’ and Pinochet’s wet dreams.
Except, even there, it was only a dream. Fascism may have elements of capitalism, but fundamentally if the leader is above the law, then private individuals don’t own the means of production, it’s only the leader who truly owns everything, and so it’s not really capitalism.
But imperialism is really cool if you’re on the benefiting end of it
All the time
This was literally the next post in my feed, lol:
You can also take deductions for costs relating to criminal activity!
That’s it, I’m done for today. Nothing can top that.
I really dont see any Romans pressuring me around here.
Rome didn’t have aircraft carriers and tactical nukes.
Rome lasted long enough to find its own ancient artifacts.
I like this new meme format
This question is being posed to centrists and conservatives, right?
Liberals too, I would imagine. Maybe even SocDems.
No, because the majority of people do not live in the US.
So the amount of influence is the same from the US and Russia and China.
We aren’t as uninformed as this meme suggests about the concept. We know it has positives, but we also know the negatives, of which there are many.
What negatives? Do people turn evil, or do tools stop working, if tools are owned by a collective?
Yes. You see, if most of the profits aren’t taken from all the people making them and given to like, just a few people to keep for themselves, we’d have mass hysteria!
I shudder to think of what the workers might get up to if they had more of the money they created, or more of a voice in their workplace. They might start doing dangerous things that benefitted themselves instead of the stonks, and that idea is just disgusting to me
By “socialism”, are we talking:
A. Worker-controlled economic system, or
B. What American liberals think is socialism, which is just a capitalist system with welfare.
OP is definitely in camp B…
Why? OP clearly states “worker controlled systems,” it’s not difficult to see what they’re talking about.
Neolibs are very easy to spot, comrade.
I agree, but nothing in this post is calling for deregulation and privatization, rather the opposite.
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Either.
Aka socdem vs demsoc
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism[1]
[1] Eatwell & Wright 1999, pp. 80–103; Newman 2005, p. 5; Heywood 2007, pp. 101, 134–136, 139; Ypi 2018; Watson 2019.
1 ↩︎
In practice, social democracy takes a form of socially managed welfare capitalism
Today I learned that Socialism is when you do Capitalism in a nice way.
Oh wait, no I didn’t, because Capitalism and Socialism are completely different modes of Production.
No, they’re not.
They’re economic systems, not modes of production.
Today, you’re still refusing to accept reality.
It’s right there before your eyes. You’re too brainwashed to see it.
In your own words, they are economic systems. What do you call a system built on Capitalism, but with a slightly larger welfare net? Socialism? No, you call it Capitalism.
You’re calling me brainwashed for correctly pointing out that Capitalism is Capitalism, even if you dress it up nicely?
A.
Language is however most people define it. When the definition changes, you make new words or fight a losing battle.
Not from “the west” from “the rich”. There are rich people in every type of economy that use their money to gain more power. One of the many ways that is done is with propaganda to convince those with less that the rich in power are not the problem.
Just look at the oligarchs in Russia.
Not every economic system, economic systems that place significant barriers against ballooning of individual wealth off exploitation see less disparity, and thus less of an impact of money on politics. Beaurocracy becomes a new kind of power currency, which is why much of the Politburo in the USSR was corrupt, though its worth noting that their disparity levels were lower than currently in the Russian Federation.
The Russian Federation’s “Oligarchs” are a spooky word for Capitalists that dodges the fact that they are Capitalists that took advantage of the collapse of the USSR to gain massive outsized power and wealth. The Russian Federation is Capitalist, not Socialist.
Not every economic system, economic systems that place significant barriers against ballooning of individual wealth off exploitation see less disparity, and thus less of an impact of money on politics.
You say not every economic system, but then you say less disparity, less impact.
Less disparity means there is still disparity. Less impact means there is still impact.
Because like I said, as long as there are human beings who want more power, there will be a struggle in any economic systems to prevent disparity.
That is because it isn’t the economic system that deregulates or undermines protections.
It is those who seek more power who deregulate and undermine protections.
And those people exist in all types of economic systems.
Even capitalist America had a point in history where disparity was low and the middle class and lower class thrived.
That is no longer the case because of those who removed regulations and changed the laws to suite themselves. And again, those people exist in every type of economy.
I did not say you could not eliminate the influence of money on politics, did I? You did. I countered it, and now you’re implying that it’s impossible to completely get rid of.
You can account for bad actors and power-seekers woth egalitarian distribution of power and a prevention against gaining in power.
You can account for bad actors and power-seekers woth egalitarian distribution of power and a prevention against gaining in power.
How? Without stating how this is accomplished, you’re response is only really saying,
‘you can account for bad actors and power-seekers by living in a perfect world where bad people don’t exist’
If there were an economic system that achieved that it would be a utopia. I don’t know of any utopias on earth.
Equal ownership of the Means of Production. Socialism.
There are still hierarchies in socialist economies. Thats why there is still disparity in socialist economies.
Do you have an example of one of these socialist societies where everyone has equal power?
What hierarchy? Statist hierarchy? That’s why the goal of Socialism is Communism, and nobody has reached Communism yet. Do you think we live at the end of history?
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Do you guys realize the world is larger than the memeverse and there are real people who lived under “socialist” governments?
Jesus H. Christ, all you need my dear is a holiday in Cambodia.
I may not want the USSR at all, but a large majority of Russians want it back: https://www.statista.com/chart/7322/25-years-soviet-union-collapse-ussr/
Now, a large part of this is also obviously due to wanting to be a part of a more powerful state, which the USSR was in comparison to the Russian Federation, but this point isn’t great. I could make the same point and say that we should send pro-Capitalists to Somalia, it just doesn’t work well logically.
Large majority of Russians also want Ukrainians dead in a most fascinating ways. Weak argument.
Large, overwhelming majorities of Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians (hope it’s a word), Moldovans, Estonians, Poles don’t want to let USSR come closer than a shot distance.
Do the actual Russian citizens want that, or are they just silenced? I remember hearing about protests in Russia over the Ukrainian war, but that just leads to a bunch of arrests.
Hur Hur Hur Russians good Putin bad. This argument aged like milk since before any of the commenters here were born.
Let me know where in my comment I lost you. I didn’t say Russians good Putin bad. I said there are Russians that don’t agree with the Russian authoritarian government. What a revolutionary concept.
My argument isn’t that Russians want good things, but that many people who lived under systems that can be considered Socialist absolutely do want them back. Of course the Ukranian war is unjustified, but that doesn’t mean that we can make up ideas about what people living in now-Capitalist states believe.
Again, this is the Somalia argument. You can find people in Capitalist nations that hate it too, does that nullify your point?
Ok let’s try to revisit it again. Of all the countries that freed themselves of a Soviet dictatorship literally zero want back, or are building ‘socialist’ economies. How about taking their experience as a measure?
Full disclosure, I’m living in a Western social democratic nation and am horrified by the capitalist and/or neoliberal ideologies. I am of a strong belief that neither of opposite ends of political philosophies bring good and prosperity for ordinary people.
Many do want the USSR back, because it was generally a better organization of the economy than what Capitalism and in some cases fascism has done for these countries. People who lived farther from Moscow had it far worse under the USSR, of course, but the people legitimately seem to have more of a longing for the USSR than anything else.
If approval rating was anything to go by alone though, then we could say Mao, Putin, and Kim Jong Un were some of the most successful leaders in history, and I don’t think either of us are saying that.
My point is firmly against the idea that Socialism is bad because many people who lived in one form of Socialism hated it, that’s an incomplete logical chain.
For what it’s worth, I’m firmly pro-Socialist, just not pro-USSR. I firmly believe that workers should own and control the Means of Production.
Primo, I respect you and your point of view even if I find it wrong.
Secondo, first sentence is factually incorrect and there are plenty of evidence. In particular about soviets, for starters I recommend you reading memories of Zara Witkin.
Tertio, you find opinions of russians valuable, and simply discard reference to the half a dozen of Independent nations who (willingly or not) share origin story with USSR
I’ll mirror your point and say I respect you and your point of view, even if I find it wrong.
Secondly, I’ll also mirror you and state that the majority of Russians that lived in the USSR that are alive today want it back. 1932 was just the beginning of the USSR, barely a quarter century from Feudalism! Absolutely nobody is saying they want to go back to a developing country.
A more accurate look would be what the USSR looked like post-WWII, pre-collapse.
Blackshirts and Reds is a pretty good book, not too long, that might give you a different perspective. Additionally, Robert Thurston is a historian who actually lived in the USSR and participated in local elections, despite not being a citizen, because he was a Worker. Additional, conflicting views, if you want to check.
Again, I’m not pro-ussr, but I am trying to dispel some myths here.
Information provided by the Levada Center, which is currently declaring an 82% approval rating for Putin.
Gonna go ahead and say that this isn’t a reliable statistic.
Putin is a dictator, and a terrible fascist leader, but he does legitimately have a high approval rating, mainly because you can’t go against him without putting yourself in trouble. I would not say that that means an unrelated question isn’t reliable, especially because Putin is a fascist and the USSR was Socialist, if anything it’s anti-putin to want the USSR back,
That… isn’t legitimate.
So… Your answer is no?
Oh time for my link
Frame Canada
Wendell Potter spent decades scaring Americans. About Canada. He worked for the health insurance industry, and he knew that if Americans understood Canadian-style health care, they might… like it. So he helped deploy an industry playbook for protecting the health insurance agency.
