Seize the memes of production
Citizens of the Fediverse unite!
Raises and crosses a computer keyboard and a rubber chicken over their heads
I’ve always been partial to this one
Arbeit macht memes
I miss the IT Crowd.
I have a weird relationship with The IT Crowd. I haven’t watched a lot of it, and didn’t really enjoy it when I watched it, hence why I stopped.
…but having watched it, I find myself really enjoying when people made references to it. Like it was more enjoyable referentially than it was to actually watch.
Honestly it’s not all great, lots of it I kinda check out through, but there are some great bits that make the whole show worth it for me at least.
But yeah being in on references to it is honestly great because of how original/memorable some of the bits are, I think.
Similar situation with some of the less popular Monty Python movies or sketches, while watching I’m just like, ok this is weird, then while you’re explaining it or talking to someone who knows you’re just cracking up…
This is how I feel about a lot of shows in this vein, The Office, Parks and Rec, Sienfeld etc. They have really funny and quotable/refrenceable bits but actually watching whole episodes or seasons can get oddly depressing.
I have this relationship with the Old Gregg video. Hated it the first time I saw it, love it now (it gets funnier every time), don’t really care for the show
I felt exactly the same way about the UK version if the office - great in jokes but waay too cringe inducing for me
I tried rewatching recently but I could not go past the recorded laugh.
Yh I kind of feel it was hyped up so much for me that it was always going to be disappointing.
that sounds like something a communist would say…
You wouldn’t steal the means of production
What if I just download the means of production?
no need, i’ll simply keep the surplus value of my labor
no, but I’d pirate it.
You don’t know me
Maybe just spread it around a little bit. Managers do do some work…
You wouldn’t execute 700,000 landlords…
You’ve got Aunt Irma visiting?
No! I’m a man! You’re a man! We’re men! pounds on chest like gorilla
… you think the carpet pissers did this?
Man, I absolutely love that show.
It’s the IT Crowd, for anyone wondering.
British humor can be weird sometimes, but it can also be brilliant like in this show :)
Sorry, are we on the same platform? All I see from the communists are cringe memes and even cringier “debates” that would get them laughed out of a middle school debate club.
I’ll bite.
Communism has always been about the future. When Lenin and Marx wrote their books and birthed their movements, they wrote about manufacturing processes EVENTUALLY eliminating material needs and displacing most people from work. They were kinda right at the time seeing the textile industry replace thousands of weavers with machines and the advent of powered farming equipment. What they didn’t account for was the industrial revolution actually adding jobs to the workforce and for a time, jobs being replaced were reliably being replaced with other skilled positions.
But that hasn’t been true since the 90s, since then there has been a marked trend towards automation replacing jobs, and slowly, a lot of the human populace is becoming useless.
I think most serious full on commies like myself understand that it’s still a future form of governance that’s inevitable if we want livable conditions. If we continue to have the almost pure and unbridled capitalistic system we have in the US when automated driving, AI, and general purpose robots really kick off, there will be some pretty serious issues.
Without getting too into doxxing myself, my family runs a construction company and builds houses. Have you seen the concrete 3d printers by chance? My dad was smart enough to get 2 a few years ago. Not only did it cut material costs by about 50% in construction, we went from running a 20 man crew to a 4 man crew when running those things. On top of that we can do what we did in weeks in a few days at best. We still run traditional crews, but those days are numbered, for sure.
We’ll need communism because, one day very soon, a huge number of us are going to be unemployable. Hell, DEEP BLUE out of IBM already has a higher diagnostic rate than human doctors. The US Department of Labor and Goldman Sachs are estimating 300mil - 600mil will be replaced with current AI tech, the biggest losses will be in call centers, and what’s left of secretarial workers.
This is my one obsession. Fear of how we can’t possibly all be employed, because of automation, and how the resources and power will keep concentrating in the hands of those who own the automation. I’ve had this argument with friends that aren’t as left leaning as me, and what i’m told over and over again is that i just lack the vision. That this has been a scare since forever, and yet look at how new jobs keep popping up. “There’ll be jobs you can’t even imagine right now”, they say. “Fearmongers like you have been around since forever”. “Employment is actually going up”.
In my mind though, we’re like the horses when the engine was invented.
It’s funny that the people who usually say someone else lacks vision are the people keeping themselves blind. They assume that things must stay good because that’s what they’ve experienced. They can’t imagine the case where things are different, which most of the evidence is pointing towards.
Your friends are provably wrong. I’d have to look up the actual numbers and dates again, but since around 1994-2000 automation and industrialization has replaced more jobs than it has created, and has in every year since at an exponentially increasing rate. Unfortunately while it would be nice to do this peacefully, the first Rosie the Robot is likely to cause a mass upheaval. Stupid people will try to ban them outright, the smart ones will simply tax the companies that make them and control them providing universal basic income from the revenue.
It’s hard to comprehend what 8 BILLION people really means as well. All of these social systems. Religion, governments, anarchy, empires all existed before there were even one billion people. Before globalization, before instant communication. During the fascist revolutions in China in the 70s there only a third that many people on the whole planet and no one had a cell phone.
Capitalism is failing because it’s a pyramid scheme that’s becoming flattened by the monstrous scale of the base. It makes it so clearly obvious what’s going on now.
I feel like most of our attempts so far aren’t equipped for the scale we’re talking about. I hope someone with the resources to help can figure out how to educate the right people with the right perspective to come up with an alternative… but probably not in my lifetime. Which is a bummer.
We definitely need to figure out how to average out the access to resources and influence. Lots of people think I mean communism but I don’t. That’s an old idea that we should consider borrowing from though.
We’re simultaneously the horse and the rider. We’re centaurs, lol. It would be like if centaurs invented cars. They could still run for fun or for exercise, but at some point they have to accept the car is better at certain things.
A reduction in economic opportunity will naturally be met with declining birthrates which we’re already seeing. People who aren’t thriving don’t want to have children. I don’t expect that to change, I expect it to accelerate as automation reduces opportunity further and further.
You don’t need genocide, you just need to wait 80 years.
Great plain language breakdown for the uninitiated. Doesn’t disregard socialism as a solution to the problems outlined, but that’s a whole other discussion. Frankly at this point in history, it’s largely academic IMHO.
a lot of the human populace is becoming useless.
Emphasis mine. This would be my only edit. Useless only as a consumer and worker. Still imbued with dignity and capable of generating meaning and experiencing a worthy life.
My bad, I did mean useless in terms of a production standpoint.
I’ve never personally had a problem with being useless. The time I value most in my life is the time I spend idle because it feels like I have so little idle time.
Now it’s my bad. I didn’t mean to imply anything about your intent. Your goodwill is pretty clear from everything else you wrote. Just wanted to add a little asterisk there, for other readers.
Great plain language breakdown for the uninitiated. Doesn’t disregard socialism as a solution to the problems outlined, but that’s a whole other discussion.
I’ve always pictured socialism as more a middle step toward full blown communism. I also recognize the value of private enterprise and competition. So whatever communist society we end up with still needs to find ways for that healthy competition to thrive.
But like… We can easily meet human needs at this point for everyone. It’s unjust and stupid not to do so
I feel like if we could get everyone’s basic needs met, then human ambition would fill in the gaps. Not for everyone of course, but that’s the case right now - needing money doesn’t necessarily make you more ambitious.
Socialism in the traditional Marxist path is a transitional step to Communism, yes. Communism, however, is fully anti-market, and as such is anti-competition. Communism is a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society, perhaps you meant to say a system like Market Socialism should precede Communism, rather than some impossible form of competitive Communism?
I think we might be mixing up our micros and macros. Seems like some people will enjoy competition and outdoing each other no matter the extrinsic (or lack thereof) rewards. That’s how it is now, anyway.
Competition, sure. Sports, competitive cooperation, and other methods can be had. Market competition would not exist.
I could be saying the same thing you’re saying though, so correct me if I’m misunderstanding please.
I don’t think we’re disagreeing, but I’m thinking of like a somewhat friendly rivalry between, like, two teams of tool makers to outdo each other in design or production efficiencies. Like the kind of stuff that people get up to at work or play, naturally.
I’m no economist, but that doesn’t sound like market competition to me. At least there is no driving force behind it, other than human nature, or maybe like an ad hoc competition for kudos or esteem.
But is it really easily if only one yacht? /s
Have you seen the concrete 3d printers by chance? My dad was smart enough to get 2 a few years ago. Not only did it cut material costs by about 50% in construction, we went from running a 20 man crew to a 4 man crew when running those things.
This is where the gaps in your perspective start, concrete 3D printing is incredibly niche, and would usually take more higher paid labor to be used in places that replace concrete methods. That’s not to mention the significant labor in their design and production.
That’s the same with medical AI, AI in general has a massive hallucination problem, but for diagnosis especially, just as many doctors are actually needed for the core part of their job- treatment and running the tests to gather the data for the AI in the first place.
The economy functions on people exchanging the product of their labor for the product of other people’s labor. The amount of useful things produced per hour of a humans labor going down is a good thing. It means we have to work less to live comfortable lives. Capitalism has been remarkably effective at that, it allows people to be as lazy as possible. Communist societies on the other hand, have had no incentive and therefore have not minimized human labor. Why invest in ways for people to work less? What benefit would the planner see in that, if they already have the people to fill those positions?
The one of the most arguments in favor of capitalism is innovation, and then people point to the several clear examples of centrally planned countries inventing something- but that forgets the equally important innovation. Innovation in production, which no centrally planned society has ever excelled at.
This is where the gaps in your perspective start, concrete 3D printing is incredibly niche, and would usually take more higher paid labor to be used in places that replace concrete methods. That’s not to mention the significant labor in their design and production.
Uh… I literally grew up in a family that runs a construction business and have been heavily involved with both the actual construction of houses AND the business management aspect side of things.
So let me tell you right now that you’re totally and completely ignorant. Running one of these things takes 1 skilled person who makes sure the machine is extruding correctly by maintaining the proper water/concrete mix, and 3 unskilled people to smooth the concrete layers out.
That’s the same with medical AI, AI in general has a massive hallucination problem, but for diagnosis especially, just as many doctors are actually needed for the core part of their job- treatment and running the tests to gather the data for the AI in the first place.
Again wrong. My mom is a nurse and has worked with IBM as well. Currently nurses feed in all the data, and it spits out a diagnosis, then a doctor reviews it’s diagnosis and rolls with it. Considering it’s almost 99.9% accurate in diagnosis already it’s better than the doctors.
Capitalism has been remarkably effective at that, it allows people to be as lazy as possible.
Lol yeah fucking right.
You are 100% bonkers man, the fact that you can spout this much bullshit is pretty incredible in and of itself.
You shouldn’t have taken the bait. You’re talking to a sea lion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
I like your idea that we need to move in the direction of a more social communist environment over time. That makes sense.
Looking around at the world and arguing that everything is fine and saying no one could possibly thing of something better is so mind boggling ignorant.
You shouldn’t have taken the bait. You’re talking to a sea lion
Evidence? ;p
I will deny it of course, but there’s no point. Like Chomsky said, the person who throws the mud always wins. I haven’t asked for an infeasible amount of evidence, just any amount of evidence for a claim, and if anyone wants evidence for my claims I’m happy to provide it.
Looking around at the world and arguing that everything is fine and saying no one could possibly thing of something better is so mind boggling ignorant.
Who said that? (Is this sealioning? Asking for evidence of you accusing me of saying something I didn’t say?)
His other other parent actually runs the sealioning database and has records of you looking like a sea lion.
💀 I’ll ask my dad who owns MongoDB and my mom who invented SQL to delete it.
Removed by mod
More evidence that all types of people came from Reddit
I too can pull the “I am closely involved in the industry so therefore I’m right without evidence card”. I’m literally an industrial automation engineer(and software developer).
Running one of these things takes 1 skilled person who makes sure the machine is extruding correctly by maintaining the proper water/concrete mix, and 3 unskilled people to smooth the concrete layers out.
I’m not merely talking about the operation of the machine, also the onsite assembly, maintenance, loading, etc. Do you have any citeable evidence that concrete 3D printing is more effective and efficient than traditional concrete methods in common scenarios? Because I just have what’s available on the internet which all points to it not being more effective or efficient currently.
Again wrong. My mom is a nurse and has worked with IBM as well. Currently nurses feed in all the data, and it spits out a diagnosis, then a doctor reviews it’s diagnosis and rolls with it. Considering it’s almost 99.9% accurate in diagnosis already it’s better than the doctors.
How is that me being wrong? You’re not explaining how that removes human labor. You’re just saying it improves the quality of care, which is an undeniably good thing. I guess the only error was that I didn’t specify doctor or nurse gathering the data or doing the treatment.
Lol yeah fucking right.
You are 100% bonkers man, the fact that you can spout this much bullshit is pretty incredible in and of itself.
Yeah I love ad hominem and just insulting.
Your probably the only serious communist I’ve came across. So I’m curious how do you expect innovation to happen in a communist world. I know we live in a corrupted capitalist society. But while we have had many counties try and fail to make a thriving socialist society. We have had capitalism thrive and make everyones lives better. We’ve had many people call amarica today late stage capitalism, but that implies that it’s inevitable that society will be corrupted by blind brand loyalty and companies will buy out compition. So why do you think we should change to communism, instead of eradicating blind brand loyalty and cracking down on wealth gained through stifling others.
I want to comment on this first:
… while we have had many counties try and fail to make a thriving socialist society. We have had capitalism thrive and make everyones lives better.
First, socialist countries haven’t been allowed to thrive. They’re a threat to the established capitalist status-quo. That’s what the entire red scare period was about; undermining leftist nations so they fail. See the Guatemala coup for example. The country removed their dictatorship and formed a democracy. It happened to elect a leftist president who implemented a minimum wage and began granting land to peasants. This pissed off the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) who were benefiting from cheap land and exploiting labor. They had the US overthrow the democracy and instate a dictatorship (which ended up committing a genocide).
This has happened many times. The only leftist nations that were able to survive this are ones with strong governments and cultural hegymony (basically dictatorships with strong restrictions on citizens). This doesn’t mean that’s the only possibility because that’s the only ones that survived, it just means those are more stable when undermined by a powerful external force. It’s like asking why everyone who has been shot in the head has died. It’s not their fault someone else shot them.
(Also, many capitalist nations have failed, and that equally is not a sign that capitalism is destined to fail.)
Now for this:
So I’m curious how do you expect innovation to happen in a communist world.
Innovation happens all the time without capitalism. In fact, capitalism often hinders innovation. The requirement of capitalism is profit seeking. If you don’t think something will make a profit, you shouldn’t invest in it.
I think it’s penicillin that almost didn’t exist because of capitalism. (This is from memory, so some parts may be wrong) The company was trying to create a certain drug. During the experiments penicillin was found. The company told them to move on, but the people running the experiment saw an opportunity and continued developing it on their own. Under capitalism, you shouldn’t persue unlikely but potentially beneficial, though possibly not profitable, possibilities. Can you imagine the number of times this has happened and the people involved listened to what they were told?
People like to innovate. Just look at makers online. They make all kinds of stupid shit that won’t ever make money just to see what will happen. Profit is not the thing that creates innovation. Human ingenuity is. If you give humans enough resources to persue what they want, they will innovate.
Also, generally communism or other leftist ideals aren’t advocating for equality in outcomes. They’re advocating for equality in opportunity. If you’re born wealthy, you shouldn’t get special access to thing that an average person doesn’t have access to. You shouldn’t be allowed to persue your goals when an average person can’t. However, if you create something that makes your life easier or better, that’s not going to be removed from you. There’s equal opportunity to improve your life, but not everyone will persue things equally.
So why do you think we should change to communism, instead of eradicating blind brand loyalty and cracking down on wealth gained through stifling others.
Personally, I’m more towards anarchism than communism, but I see value in both and they share so much in common.
How would you go about eradicating “eradicating blind brand loyalty and cracking down on wealth gained through stifling others”? Those are fundamental aspects of capitalism. The goal of capitalism is to increase profits by any means possible, which includes breaking laws when it’s more profitable to do so. Eradicating brand loyalty is only possible if you elemenate labels, but that also creates the opportunity for cheap alternatives to undercut on quality. Exploiting labor is also fundamental to capitalism. If the goal is profit then you should pay as little as possible for as much as possible. If you don’t then someone else will undercut you and you’ll fail while they exploit.
There’s no avoiding it under capitalism because the fundamental goals are misaligned with morality. The only choice is a system that favors morality, potentially by making moral options profitable or just not prioritizing profit. You can’t really “fix” capitalism. The fundamentals are rotten. You can improve it, but it’ll always be misaligned with what we want. There may be a place for capitalism under another system, but capitalism as the foundation is never going to prioritize humanity, good, and doing what’s right.
It’s worth pointing out that the vast majority of innovation comes from students, researchers, and people working in tech, who, alongside their generally higher education, also aren’t working 9-5, on-site jobs.
Innovation is not only new products, innovation is in optimization
I agree. I’m adding on to the parent comment to provide an example of a real situation in which people who could generally make ends meet while doing very little work are instead producing the bulk of our new technologies, discoveries, and (as you mention) optimizations.
Kudos on the respectful questions instead of dissolving into rhetoric. I love these sort of conversations.
But while we have had many counties try and fail to make a thriving socialist society. We have had capitalism thrive and make everyones lives better
Hold the phone. We have thriving socialist societies today, unless the EU is doing a lot worse than I thought. In fact in France and Germany they’re nearly 100% nuclear and renewable and in France’s case have secured enough nuclear fuel to power their society for centuries. All of them have socialized medicine, and judging by the new heart surgery techniques out of France lately they’re not lacking for innovation just cause the government is footing the bill. Furthermore, have ALL capitalist countries stood the test of time economically? I can name quite a few that exist right now like Fiji, which is certainly capitalist, but does NOT help their people in being capitalist (selling their water has harmed their environment, and the profits really are not passed along to their people).
Why would you think innovation would disappear?
Let’s take the socialist (communist) medical systems in foreign countries. There is still IMMENSE value in winning the government contracts that use your medicine. And I’m a weird communist who still values personal property and intellectual property, I still see that as integral to the process. So like, if you invent the cure for cancer you can still demand $X per treatment, we’re just talking about who’s footing that bill in the end. I’m just cool with the government being able to design a competing product/treatment. That’s kinda really it.
NASA is purely government funded and non-profit. If NASA had been able to charge for half the stuff they gave the world for free they’d be the richest corporation on the planet, since the MRI, CAT scanner, and a whole ton of other technology was made by them. Yet NASA doesn’t profit on any of it, and is one of the most innovative entities in the world. Kinda puts a dent in your ‘well there’d be no innovation’ right? I dunno man, have you ever met scientists and engineers? I’m convinced if you just gave them all unlimited budgets and material all our problems would be solved overnight, and most of them would refuse anything beyond the satisfaction of having made something new and decent living wages and conditions.
And that seems to be working wonderfully for the EU countries who’ve already adopted this system, and for the Chinese, it’s not like innovation just dissipated from there, hell they’re beating us in a few areas right now.
Couple things, here.
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Define “thriving,” even the most famously abusive Socialist economies like the USSR managed to double life expectancy, and achieve other good metrics like free Healthcare and education, which even modern Capitalist economies struggle with.
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“Capitalism” did not make everyone’s lives better. Development did. That’s why the USSR, in spite of its top-down, brutal structure, managed to double life expectancy.
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Simple “blind brand loyalty” and monopolization are not the only hallmarks of “Late-Stage Capitalism.” Other hallmarks include rampant consumerism, bullshit jobs, stagnating wages with respect to productivity, further alienation from labor, increased Imperialism, and more.
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Blind brand loyalty isn’t the issue here, and you cannot “fix” Capitalist exploitation within Capitalism, only make it more bearable.
All in all, lots of assumptions with no ground to stand on. As a leftist, I think it’s safe to say that democracy is generally a good thing, as is decentralization, so a better system than top-down Capitalism would be an economy with democratic participation from the bottom-up. Communism can achieve this.
I’d define thriving by peoples control over their lives. Like working class people being able to persue hobbies and afford luxury items. Yea it’s quite possible to make people live long lives but from what I’ve seen in my home state of Vermont living a long fulfilling life is much harder than having a long miserable life. From what I understand I didn’t know that people lived longer in the ussr but I’m aware the average jo didn’t have a color tv or a car much less a car with climate control, radios, automatic transmissions, convertible tops or a sense of fashion. I’m even told a toilet that flushed was quite the lugury just as it is in China. I can buy that people who didn’t get disapeared could live long lives but it couldn’t have been pleasant lives. Seriously American consumer products were so good that many of us are still using tractors from the 50s houses from that same time are just now starting to rot. Even today Japan is making cars that are far more reliable and efficient than any other countries. Tiwan is leading the way in high quality computer chips. Chips that are used in both weapons and lugury products. Henry Ford forsed all car companies to make cars for average folks. Then other companies were able to force Ford to make cars that aren’t the model t.
I think your biggest issue is that you’re comparing a developing country that was severely underdeveloped before the USSR rose with a developed economy, as though they can be meaningfully compared. If your metrics for thriving consists of looking at people’s access to luxury commodities in a country that saw the bulk of the fighting in WWII, was founded in a Civil War during WWI, and was a backwater, feudal landscape that hadn’t even reached full Capitalism yet, then I’m afraid you aren’t being honest.
Let this be clear: I am not a Stalinist, nor am I saying the USSR was “good.” However, my point is that even in the USSR, the principles of Socialism are so sound that it dramatically improved people’s lives over what came before, and since becoming Capitalist, wealth inequality skyrocketed and life expectancy sharply dropped until the last decade.
As for control over their lives, the citizens of the USSR in many ways had more freedoms, and in many ways less freedoms. They couldn’t go against the party in any meaningful way, but the Soviet Democracy meant that they generally had more local control than workers in Capitalist workplaces. I would personally like to have the best of both worlds, more democracy, without top-down Capitalism.
Edit: as an example for the last point, George Lucas famously said that he was jealous of filmmakers’ freedoms in the USSR, as he claimed that creating movies for profit was even more constricting than not being able to criticize the Communist Party.
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I’m not a communist, but I agree. I think most people would agree communism/socialism would only work if there is abundance, which in this case will be brought by automation. This is exactly what Star Trek predicts-- if global warming doesn’t get to us first.
I’d argue that the people who think Socialism can only work with abundance, even Communism, fail to understand that Socialism and Communism must be built over a long time, and imagine concepts like “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” must be applied to a pre-existing Capitalist economy.
Really, they just don’t see the timescale. There’s no meaningful reason Socialism cannot happen today with current productive forces.
Good point. We actually already have abundance, even going as far back as twenty years ago. The EU produced so much food that a term was coined “wine lakes and butter mountains”, as so many agricultural goods were left rotten in warehouse storage.
These food produce could be sold or sent to poorer countries or elsewhere. However, doing so would “upset” the market, and to be fair outcompete local farmers in developing countries. We’ve actually solved world hunger long ago!
I think for an equitable solution, there has to be a global single market and/or world government to manage resources. And before anyone objects says “1984” or as predicted, communism wants to take over the world indeed, no, I’m not positing a totalitarian state. Just think how the EU is not a fully authoritative institution, but more like a loose agreement of different countries. That could be replicated on the global level to manage the abundance we have and achieve some sort of socialism.
Oh I agree, one fully unified, decentralized “government” would be best, organized bottom-up.
This is a good empathetic arguement for socialism. Unfortunately many terrible people like the second solution of just killing off the unemployable in various ways. This was usually done through invading neighbors which increases ones own power and reduces your own unemployable workforce. If you don’t want to kill off your own people, you may also have a minority group in your borders that can be put on trains for removal in various ways. Unfortunately the Karl Marx saw a common issue in history and proposed an empathetic way to solve it, but most people I know are assholes and prefer the second option.
Unfortunately many terrible people like the second solution of just killing off the unemployable in various ways.
No communistic / socialistic people actually believe that garbage, the whole point of communism and socialism is to provide for people’s basic needs. I’ve never once met someone that seriously talks about communism who would actually suggest using people like that. And communism doesn’t mean democracy, the best systems are obviously ones where people have equal opportunity to voice their opinions and needs equally.
It’s actually a bad faith argument by capitalists who struggle to see the use of a human being beyond how much labor they can be used for.
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More like spouted something that had nothing at all to do with communism on any level other than some bogeyman scare tactic propaganda bullshit designed to pathetically attempt to make communism look bad.
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Isn’t that the thing, we needed capitalism now to be able to have communism in the future?
…sorta. I think the better question is to what degree should we be communist? Should people be homeless and hungry in 2023? Do people have the right to a doctor, access to free education, and communication through the Internet as basic human rights?
I’m pretty sure we can do these things, we just don’t.
That is legitimately one school of thought, as I’ve heard it, yes. I’m not so sure about it myself, but we’ve definitely got capitalism – no one’s going to argue that – so we may as well use it to the advantage of human flourishing.
So our world is literally dying, we’re living in the greatest mass extinction event ever, and instead of anything being done this process is actually accelerating by every conceivable metric we have. A friend of mine works on coral reef preservation. Most of the people in that field have given up on actually preserving wild coral as it exists today. His group switched to trying to preserve and grow as many samples as possible in private environments in the hopes that one day the oceans can again support coral reefs. If people knew in how bad shape our oceans and natural spaces really are there’d be a lot more panic.
All because capitalism exists solely to consume endlessly until there’s nothing left.
Making a lightbulb that lasts forever is a terrible business decision because you’ll sell less lightbulbs. In 2023, replaceable batteries have all but disappeared because once the battery dies in a modern day device people see it as time to replace that. Building to last, building renewable, building self-sustaining, that will NEVER be a core tenant of capitalism, because none of those things are profitable. So is building multi mile long fishing nets which indiscriminately catch everything, up to the point where they’re too worn to use, then they’re cut free and rest across the bottom of the ocean where they pin everything they land on and go on killing more sea life. Our oceans are literally coated in those nets because that’s what’s profitable.
We’ve got capitalism, yes we do, and people have cancer and aids, it doesn’t mean we should all just learn to work with cancer and aids. People falsely tie a lot of ‘positive’ things to capitalism, but in the end, capitalism is all about making a quick buck no matter what the cost by any other metric.
Making a lightbulb that lasts forever is a terrible business decision because you’ll sell less lightbulbs.
If you’re referring to the Phoebus Cartel, they had legitimate reasons for limiting lightbulb life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY
TLDW: While they undoubtedly made more money because of their actions, shorter life (incandescent) bulbs shine brighter, and with a “better” colour mix than longer life ones.
I wonder if we would have gone in that direction without a profit motive, or if I dimmer bulb would have been “good enough” if it meant we’d have to spend less resources on bulbs (and making them) overall.
Agreed. Rereading it, I now see how my statement about “using capitalism” sounds like I’m advocating maintaining it in some capacity. Poor phrasing on my part.
I meant simply that it’s uncontroversial to recognise that we’re living under capitalism presently, but that’s just our starting position. That even if you think socialism or communism “needs capitalism” (debatable, academic), well that’s step #1 out of the way already, because we’ve got it, so now what?
While everything you said is true, another fact is also true. We could have already automated away almost 2 billion middle and upper management jobs worldwide. They refuse to deploy that automation because that would eliminate all of the crony capitalist jobs that exist, and they, the ultra rich, could have saved themselves trillions of dollars in the last decade.
They prefer to automate the jobs that are harder to automate, so they can drive all the “poors” further into poverty. Every economic analysis in the last decade has shown that the rich refusing to embrace automation and a fair minimum basic income, have cost them at least $100,000,000,000,000 dollars in the last 45 years. Yeah that’s 100 trillion dollars in growth that they just threw to the wayside, knowing it was there, just to see how many of us they can kill before we decide to kill them.
Not sure why this was voted down. It’s a great contribution and a reasonable point of discussion.
As you can see from your upvote/downvote ratio, most of the vitrol towards communism here is rightly directed at the Tankies, as theres a LOT of them spewing braindead takes that are the weirdest mix of SJW (For lack of a better term for nice sounding but low thinking social takes) and authoritarian… as if authoritarians or violent revolutionaries are ever going to care for any minorities past getting into power.
…the fuck is a tankie? I’m almost afraid to google it.
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to communists who express support for one-party communist regimes that are associated with Marxism–Leninism, whether contemporary or historical.
–Wikipedia
anticommunist nonsense
I am not reading all that shit dog
How would you know it’s dog shit unless you read it? People like you are infuriating. It’s never “what you said is wrong because…” but always “I’m not reading this [because it’ll cause me too much cognitive dissonance].” You can’t actually engage in a discussion, instead assuming you must be right because it’s the ideas you were taught as a child. It’s a religion, where you’d rather have unquestiining faith instead of engage the argument.
If you’re correct, there’s nothing to be afraid of. If you’re wrong then maybe your ideas will be improved instead of staying in ignorance.
Lol I don’t care what you have to say commie
If that makes you feel better…
It doesn’t make anything you believe correct or accurate though.
Replying again to note you just said this: “People are straight up slaves to consooming. They’ll find any excuse to justify it even on a damn piract sub.”
You’re here complaining about communism while also talking about consumption being unethical…
I’m assuming you’re just a troll, but if not what’s going on? Do you need someone to talk to? Are you OK?
And here, everyone, is exhibit A as to why critical thinking is going down the drain globally.
Are you talking about people who critique capitalism and its bandaids from the left, or people who chose a collection of countries with red flags to simp for?
Everyone on hexbear and lemmygrad is already a communist, so they don’t spend a lot of time trying to convince each other that communism is good and capitalism is bad, although they do post specific examples. It’s mostly current events, venting, and shitposting. A lot of the serious discussion is either in the weekly news megathread or buried in the comments under some shitpost begging xi jinping to nuke the white house.
god I hope he does
But are they leftists?
He probably refers to the hexbear/Lemmygrad Members. Aka the latter
Every debate i have with people on lemmy eventually ends in them resorting to 4th grade insults towards me or just straight up throwing hissy fits.
Lemmy is full of children who think anarchy is really good and has no flaws but they cannot explain how societal flaws would be fixed by it. Anarchy is just an example.I’d take an anarchist over people who think the opposite is better
And I’d rather talk to people with a developed frontal cortex. We both have our preferences.
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Edit: i saw a post another day on an .ml instance just like this I think calling libertarianism bad because it was never tried out in practice meanwhile I feel the need to say this conumimisim has been tried out tons of times and has failed miserably
Good examples of this is pol pots and his Khmer rouge and the failure of his regime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge?wprov=sfla1
Stalin and leninism with the failure of the ussr
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinism?wprov=sfla1
I don’t believe in libertarianism although i do think some of its ideas can be used in practice to good success
but this is my personal opinion. But I think it’s a bit hypocritical to call one political system bad while believing in one which has failed miserably time and time againdeleted by creator
Go touch grass.
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Communism is a trap for the simple minded idealists who are disillusioned with capitalism. In theory, it could be a utopia. However, it takes a few basic assumptions in order to work. The biggest one is that everyone participating in the system truly believes in it and no one tries to take advantage of it for personal gain. But it’s far too easy for someone or a small group of people to seize power and then keep everyone else powerless to do anything about it. This has been the cause of the failure of all communist governments that I’m aware of.
On a smaller scale, communism works extremely well though. For example, in gaming guilds. Sharing resources, allowing everyone to specialize where they want without suffering from diversifying their skills or dumping play time into other areas can help everyone to advance more quickly. I put this into practice in ff14 with great success. Raid tiers release every 6 months when they also release new crafted gear which is the best for raid progression, but requires some new ingredients which are time locked but tradeable. So our raiders would contribute their ingredients to crafters and they would provide them with gear, and food. The arrangement required the raiders to continue contributing ingredients for 3 months which were evenly distributed among crafters, and they would then make items and profit from them. They would return 10% of profit (not revenue) to the guild bank which funded all kinds of things. Everyone got what they wanted.
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While I disagree with alot of this I think this is a very good nuanced take good on you. You bring some strong arguments.
Prehaps its just me but
In my personal opinioni wouldn’t find people trustworthy with my money and resources especially in a gaming guild. I’m sure there have been many good gaming guilds although I’m sure there’s alot of people out there to just take advantageThe big difference between it and real life is you can leave and move somewhere else without a major impact except maybe a tiny bit of time lost. In real life, people either don’t have that option or they do and end up in poverty and having to work 100 hrs a week to make ends meet in their new home.
How would one take advantage of Communism for personal gain in a way that goes against Communism? Have you legitimately thought beyond pure vibes in your head?
How does one “easily seize power” in a democratically controlled system, moreso than a top-down oriented one like Capitalism?
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Got it, just vibes and emotions, then.
- Ban opposition parties
- Create an elite and call it something like “the vanguard”
- Enjoy lifetime presidency
Is that what I said? Do you think I’m talking about Vanguardism?
isn’t there an irony that this comment itself would get laughed out of middle school debate club?
Its just a meme mate
This is an unedited exchange from the show IT Crowd while she’s trying to subtly tell them she’s on her period and they just don’t get it.
Lemmy is full to the brim of commies
And trannies
Really, what more could you want?
Couldn’t have said it better
Tankies are cringe - but in spite of what they’ll tell you, they’re not communists… Just look at how enfranchised workers are/were in the USSR, China and, the DPRK.
Edit: The red fascists are clearly getting upset trying to square their authoritarian single-party states with their LARPing about the proliteriat. American diabolism isn’t a political or economic system, you dopey fucks.
I too love identifying with a word rather than holding my own beliefs. Then when others also identify with that word and do something bad, I say they’re not a real representation of that word.
I like using the dictionary definition, myself.
Are you going to apply this principle consistently and tell me the DPRK is democratic? I ask because that would be a deeply stupid claim to make, but we’d hate for you to be inconsistent.
I don’t indentify with the word democratic. But, I think the difference is it’s pretty clear that very few people would interpret the DPRK to be democratic, whereas clearly many people commonly understood the USSR to be communist. And, the meaning of words comes from how people understand them. That’s descriptivism.
Oh - I get it.
Descriptivism is when you’re wrong. 50% of the participants in this conversation say so, therefore it’s true.
Similarly, if the majority of people take the word “Juden” to mean subhuman monsters of a specific ethnoreligious group that are a threat to society that should be rounded up and genocided. Why are they wrong from the perspective of linguistic prescriptivism?
What’s the linguistic prescriptivist definition of communism? None of what you’ve said has anything to do with definitions - only assigning now meaningless labels.
Descriptivism isn’t about the majority deciding a definition. It’s about communicating to be understood. If you argue that the USSR was capitalist people will disagree, you might be right if you interpret capitalist through your definition though. People disagreeing with your definition doesn’t make you wrong, but it is useless, ineffective communication. Either bundle your definition with your message, or use definitions that others would understand (and that’s where descriptivism comes in).
You’re talking about the application of labels, not shaping a definition. What’s the linguistically prescriptive definition of communism that’s descriptive of these regimes?
If most people think I’m straight, but I’m enjoying getting railed by 10 dudes 10 times per day, I’m not straight - they’re wrong. If everyone agrees that getting railed by 10 dudes 10 times per day is straight, that’s
prescriptivismdescriptivism.Prescriptivismdescriptivism isn’t relevant here.
It’s more like “strong-arm-uments”, amirite?
That and a lot of communists sucking eachother’s dicks over how smart they are.
Resistance is futile ☭☭☭
Welcome to the party!
I do not get the communist comment as Lemmy really is about everything.
Decentralization appeals to leftists, and the founder of Lemmy is a vocal Communist. As such, there are lots of leftists of various flavors, be they Marxist or Anarchist.
Yes, it makes sense.
Cannot say I have really noticed any more than I did when on Reddit.
Believe me, it’s very noticeable. Perhaps you conflate liberals with Communists and Anarchists?
More likely depends on your subscriptions. Mine are mostly tech related and development.
Sure, if you stay out of the broader Lemmy and stick to niche subs, you’ll likely see more people that go to those niche subs. It’s not that you can’t find Communists or Anarchists on Reddit, they just tend to stick to their subs, while on Lemmy Communists and Anarchists are dominant in the bigger subs.
I feel the OP. Communists are more active around the fedi I think. Nothing wrong about it. It’s just a fact. Everyone should be heard in my opinion. Even thought the majority is still stuck in an ideology with almost 200 years that failed miserably every time it was implemented. Socialism is a bit more evolved. A mix of capitalism and socialism seems to be the sweet spot. My 2cents.
edit: typo
Couple things here: Communism is Socialism, a form of it. Communism has never been “implemented” either, as it’s specifically a post-Socialist stage. The ML states you’re referring to were Socialist, and didn’t reach Communism.
Secondly, the ML states were ML states, and as such were deliberately adapting new theory proposed by Lenin and distilled by Stalin.
I’m in no way a Stalinist, or a simp for the USSR, your comment is just wrong.
By your very same logical chain, Capitalism is an ideology 400 years old that failed miserably every time, as well as Socialism. It’s meaningless word salad.
Hey, sorry if I pushed any buttons. I agree, a pure form of any of mentioned ideologies is bound to fail. In my POV and experience btw, we are better off with a free market, competition, and some kind of socialism net in order to not get “game overs”. I don’t know if I’m making sense to you, but again, just my 2cents.
No, I think we disagree here. Pure Communism is a good thing, it just takes time to build it. What the USSR had was a flawed version of Marxism-Leninism, which even if replicated today would not have the same set of issues it faced uniquely due to civil war, WWII, and Stalin. I don’t want a recreation of the USSR either, but I do want Communism as the end goal.
The Free Market is a sham and the profit motive results in stagnation, consumerism, Imperialism, and a lack of choice. Competition is only a good thing in the context of Capitalism and Markets. Social Safety Nets are not Worker Ownership of the Means of Production.
What you’re advocating for is Social Democracy, which is well and good compared to most Capitalist systems, but is straight up inferior to actual Socialism, as essentially its Capitalism but with band-aids.
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I deleted my comment because you’re right, I’m advocating for a Social democracy. I went to Wikipedia after I commented, just to be sure 😅
Apologies.
wiki source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy#:~:text=It is characterized by a,care%2C and workers’%20compensation.
It’s just a shame that this is not fully implemented in my country. We have a lot of means of production controlled by the state and cripple high taxes which promotes poverty, contrary to the end goals of socialism.
what are ML states ?
Marxist-Leninist. To simplify, Marx wrote some stuff, Lenin expanded on it and threw a revolution, shortly after which he fucking died. Stalin wrote a couple more sentences then distilled the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. That’s why you have non-Marxist-Leninist Marxists/Leninists like the ICP, as word-salady as that sounds.
The essential factor is the belief in the use of a Vanguard Party to carry out a revolution and build up a Socialist state to whither into Communism.
Can’t say I have noticed them any more prevelent here than in Reddit and such. Agreed that a balance between capitalism and communism is probably the sweet spot as has been demonstrated in countries with the highest happiness and other such ratings.
I think that many of the lefties now use it as a joke, I don’t think comunism ever existed as intended nor will ever work but being progressive and democratic socialist is considered commie for many
Maybe if this was Reddit, but on Lemmy there are vast numbers of Communists and Socialists, not just Social Democrats who want Capitalism with band-aids. The founder is a Communist, and decentralization is core to leftist ideologies.
