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It's a simple world view
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this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Neither of those are what leftists say. Capitalism doesn't work because of the structure itself, you have problems like the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, and the inherent exploitation within. You cannot have Capitalism without exploitation, and you can't have Capitalism with democratization of production, even if you had a perfectly selfless Capitalist, it still wouldn't be democratic and would still have the same structural issues.
Similarly, Communism isn't "people working for the common good," it's people working to improve their own material conditions. Just because production is democratized doesn't mean it depends on people working for absolutely no reason.
There are non-strawman arguments you could make, but this ain't it.
Same goes for capitalism. Why is it called communism then, if your definition doesn't even contain any reference to anything communal? At the very least, it would have to be "people working together to improve their own material conditions", but that's perfectly acceptable in capitalism as well.
Come on now, if you want to have a debate about this, at least try to make argument that doesn't fall apart at the slightest breeze.
Does your understanding of communism stop at semantics? If you’re going to be strongly opposed to something you should at least know what it is. Otherwise your arguments are limited to being the slightest breeze.
No, I’m merely pointing out that I would be wasting my time arguing with people who do not even care enough to make a semantically coherent argument.
It would be difficult to make a semantically coherent argument for someone who doesn’t know the definitions of the words you’re saying.
You should read that other comment again. The democratization of production as opposed to private ownership is the communal part of communism you were looking for. It’s the profit goes to the workers instead of Jeff Bezos and his investors as in capitalism. If you demand that the root of the word mean something else then of course the argument makes no sense.
Okay, fair enough, I did miss that part apparently.
Is it fair to say, then, that according to your definition, communism is just capitalism but with democratized production?
Those two concepts are incompatible. I’m assuming we’re both American so you’ve probably heard that capitalism means free market exchange of goods and services but that’s actually just commerce and is a feature of every economic system. The defining trait of capitalism is actually that one guy can own the means of production and is entitled to the capital produced. Whereas in socialism and communism there is no private ownership of production.
... what do you think Communism is? It's a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society achieved via abolition of Private Property. That doesn't mean everyone suddenly becomes hippies working in communes or tribes.
Capitalism certainly can have cooperation, it just happens to encourage competition, monopoly, and exploitation of Workers for the sake of profit.
What's your point, exactly?
If capitalism encourages or favors competition, how come there is such a thing as companies? Those generally require some level of cooperation. If everyone works against each other, they would simply fall apart.
Also, why do we often see companies getting bigger and bigger, sometimes even by means of two competitors merging together? If capitalism encourages competition, shouldn’t they both be better off staying separate?
Because the Workers aren't competing, they don't give a shit. The Capitalists are competing for an even larger share of the pie. Instead of everyone cooperating, you fragment everyone into companies, which are like little factions.
Some factions doing well enough to create new kings like Bezos or Musk is also not a feature, given that there's no democratic control.
Really not sure what you're getting at. Why are you even on a platform rejecting Capitslism, rather than Reddit, if you're so sure that leftism is a bad thing?
Does Lemmy as a whole reject capitalism, or is it just individual servers like this one? Because I really don't get nearly as much hate on any other ones, it's always here.
Also, I find it very interesting that if Lemmy or the Fediverse in general are leaning rather left, why did they choose to implement a federated model? This makes every server owner king of their own personal fiefdom, able to allow whatever content and apply whatever rules they please. Therefore, it is impossible by design to enforce that everyone had to reject capitalism.
Yes, there is some measure of democratic control in the defederation mechanism, which allows the community as a whole to somewhat isolate and contain those who don't want to adhere to the common rules, but it doesn't get rid of them entirely. And it certainly enables some amount of competition among instances getting a share of the total userbase.
A for-profit company could even take the codebase and spin off their own reddit clone absolutely for free. This has actually happened at least twice with Mastodon — both Gab and Truth Social are using it internally (of course both are defederated islands, but rather large ones compared to the average server size).
If this is real communism, then perhaps it's accurate to say that previous attempts such as the UdSSR were all failures, and communism by dictatorship doesn't work at all. But perhaps then that also implies that some level of internal competition is healthy and normal, and it is by no means required that EVERYONE has to be on the same page in order for it to work.
Lemmy is a decentralized, FOSS platform built by a Communist explicitly as an answer to Reddit. The people on Lemmy trend leftward, obviously, but that's because the very foundation is a rejection of Capitalism. If you want Capitalist Lemmy, there's Reddit.
FOSS itself is leftist, and a rejection of Capitalism. The ability for the users to simply fork off if they don't like the way something is heading is precisely an advantage of leftist organization, which is impossible with Capitalist Reddit.
Truth Social and Gab are built on Mastadon, yes. FOSS itself is a rejection of Capitalism, Capitalists going in and taking advantage of existing leftist infrastructure doesn't mean the infrastructure itself is Capitalist.
Your last paragraph is a complete non-sequitor. Much of the USSR was indeed a failure, there was a ludicrous amount of corruption at the Politburo level, and the further up you went the less democratic it was, as only local Soviets were purely democratically accountable to the Workers. With each rung you went up, it was less accountable to the Workers. However, absolutely none of what you say about competition, the USSR, or otherwise follows logically.
Communism itself doesn't depend on everyone following in lock-step, Capitalism does.
Again, I find such statements very interesting, especially given that you so firmly rejected competition as inherently capitalist and undesirable. Because being able to just take something and fork it actually encourages competition. If I don't like where a project is headed, and I can take their code and make my own version, and if I do a better job at it than the original maintainers, I could even outclass them. Isn't that exactly the type of stuff you hate about capitalism?
No, but it isn't inherently anti-Capitalist either, and that was my point. Also, they're both playing by the rules and making their source code available as required by the GPL, although AFAIK it DID take some legal threats before they complied. Commercial exploitation of FOSS is something that's explicitly allowed by most licenses, and Lemmy's is no different. They could have chosen one that forbids such things, but they did not.
Your style of argumentation and tenuous grasp on logic never fails to baffle me. So you agree that Soviet Russia was an abject failure and had nothing to do with "real" communism, and you also seem to agree that the Fediverse is a much better representation of it, but then you simply reject all my other conclusions without feeling the need to even explain that at all. Sorry, but I find this entirely unconvincing.
But if everyone ISN'T in lockstep then there might be... dare I say it... competition? And I thought that was a capitalist concept entirely.
I don't hate competition for the sake of competition. The goal of FOSS is cooperation until something becomes less than desirable, as the goal is a good product. With Capitalism, the goal is profit, and as such destabilization and competition are required. With FOSS, a new fork is only done for a better product, not for profit-seeking.
Commercial exploitation of an anti-Capitalist option does not mean the option is not anti-Capitalist. FOSS is a rejection of IP a la Capitalism, and a rejection of the profit motive.
I understand that trying to argue with sound logic is difficult for you, after all, nothing you've said has logically followed. Enough of being cheeky, though. The USSR was a specific model of Marxist-Leninist Socialism, they never reached Communism as Communism is a Stateless, Classless, moneyless society. They did many things right, like giving workers far more control, and providing free Healthcare and education. They also had many huge problems, like massive corruption at the Politburo level, and atrocities committed by government officials like the Katyn Massacre and Stalin's Purges. As such, I believe the USSR provides a wealth of information on what aspects did work, and what aspects were terrible. I do not want to recreate the USSR, nor use it as a template. I want to learn from it and create something far better.
You're confusing market competition for Capitalism. Capitalism requires competition and rejects cooperation, Socialism has both when it needs to. Capitalism cannot function without competition.
I understand that leftist theory can be hard to understand if you aren't at all familiar. I suggest reading leftist theory before trying to talk about it on social media as though you're saying something profound. It only comes off as profoundly ignorant.
"Capitalism does not work because people are selfish, and selfish people are incentivized to harm their fellow man by capitalist structures. Under socialism, selfish people will work toward the common good because working toward the common good is the easiest way to earn recognition and status"
"People are selfish, and it is in 99 percent of peoples self interest to overthrow capitalism in order to improve their material conditions"
So you admit then, that in order for socialism to work, people have to overcome their own selfishness first and learn how to cooperate with others?
You can cooperate with others toward selfish ends. That's literally how pack animals like humans work.
Right now it is in everyone's self interest except for the bourgeoisie to stop capitalism and create a more equitable system. If you just want to be on top, that is being selfish and not understanding how odds work, not being selfish.
It's funny because most communists seem to want to be the ones on top by trying to impose communism on everybody else.
Why not start at the bottom and learn how to cooperate with people there? Make some friends at work and see if they can help you get a better job. Put that philosophy into practice in the here and now instead of dreaming of some grand utopia where everyone willingly cooperates with everyone else everywhere and all the time.
According to who, capitalist media? Have you ever actually exposed yourself to what communists think and believe, or are you afraid of a spectre?
The communists, infamous for avoiding rank and file and mass line strategies, as well as other strategies that relied heavily on creating popular support
I'm already super cushy in my job, I dont want involuntary homelessness to exist, and I also don't want homeless people to be killed. I want kids to be able to go to bed and not be hungry. That isnt possible under capitalism.
We don't think it will be utopia. We don't think everyone will willingly cooperate all the time. If you think this is what communists believe, you haven't read a lot of communist thought. It feels like you are just throwing cliches at the wall and trying to box with a strawman, and it is kind of weird to watch.
Do you understand the notion that people will generally cooperate when it is in their mutual selfish interest to cooperate? Does that make sense to you? Or do you reject even that notion?
According to history.
I'm being exposed to it on Lemmy nearly every single day.
Volunteer at a soup kitchen, donate to a homeless shelter, etc.
Yes, that totally makes sense. But in my experience, this works best when people freely choose to cooperate because they realize it's in their own self-interest, instead of having cooperation imposed on them by force.
Who's history?
Okay, then explain the difference between scientific and utopian socialism, what what differentiates labor from labor power in the context of surplus labor value extraction?
The low bar there is my fault though, I should have asked if you were educated on what communists believed.
Put a bandaid on a gunshot wound while you're at it.
That has literally happened, can you name any successful socialist revolution that didn't involve education and the creation of mass popular support?
World history.
Russian communism: ~5M dead in the Holodemor
Chinese communism: ~15-55M dead in the Great Famine
Cambodian communism: >1M dead in the Killing Fields
inb4 not real communism
Muh "you can't criticize socialism because you don't understand THEORY". You probably don't understand capitalism either outside of socialist critiques of it. Then how can you be so certain of what capitalists believe?
"I can't help EVERYONE so I'm just not gonna help ANYONE".
*goes off and tries to convince people to follow an ideology that only works if everyone believes in it.
Can you name one socialist revolution that hasn't involved massive amounts of murder and violence?
Even with these inflated numbers, they are no match for the numbers of people intentionally killed by capitalism and feudalism, let alone starvation under capitalism and feudalism.
Plugging the book "late Victorian holocausts"
If you believe the Cambodians were communists, you have to believe that the nazis were. Except in Pol Pots case, he only claimed to be socialist for a few years of their decades long operations. I am choosing you believe you're not that gullible so I must assume you are ignorant of their history.
Literally took years of capitalist economics in high school and college, it is one of the reasons I'm a communist.
More like "the issue is systemic and requires systemic solutions, not charity"
Chinese feudal landlords didn't believe in socialism, that didn't stop the communists from doing land reform.
By definition revolutions involve violence. Are you condemning the capitalist revolutions that threw off the monarchies? The status quo involved comparatively massive amounts of violence then, and it does now.
But also, an example of socialists gaining power through the ballot box was in Chile. The US ended up funding, training, and equipping right wing death squads to kill (and worse) Chilean communists, teachers, trade unionists, indigenous people, and random people. Chile became an extraordinary violent right wing capitalist dictatorship.
I mean, Hitler very clearly wrote in Mein Kampf that he DID take inspiration from socialism, except that, like all other communist dictators before or after him, he thought that HE had found the missing ingredient to make it work.
Hah, imagine getting a "capitalist" education from people who don't have to worry about their own job security because they have tenure. Isn't that just like getting a communist education from a Wall Street CEO?
Yes. The secret ingredient was (and always is) called violence.
Okay, at least you're honest enough to admit that.
Yes, I condemn all violence, capitalist or otherwise. But I honestly don't experience capitalism as particularly violent. My biggest successes all came through non-violent means, by educating myself and improving my technical and people skills. Amazingly, it turns out that if you're willing to learn what others will pay you for, more often than not, they'll actually just hand you money without you having to make any threats about taking over their whole company.
He also very explicitly said that the nazis weren't socialist, and all of the parties policies were hard capitalist.
We live in a capitalist society. Any attempt to claim this isn't capitalism and we have a shift toward actual capitalism is an attempt to sell you fascism.
Also pretty sure most of them were adjuncts.
Yes. When they removed the secret ingredient, the landlords could not maintain their property relations with the peasants. That is correct.
Well then either you're really sheltered or you haven't been paying attention.
Oh, well if it worked for you, I guess those slave laborers can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And all those genocide victims should have just spent more time educating themselves.
I don't think most people are selfish to the point of it being harmful. I think the problem is that a small number of people are, and those are the people who are in charge of things, where their selfishness can do way more harm.
As others have mentioned, though, a lot of behavior is heavily influenced by the incentive structures people live within. This can apply in very obvious ways: for example, when trying to get from point A to point B, people will use the mode of transportation that makes the most sense for that trip, which is heavily dependent on the infrastructure that exists between those two places, and that's why the Dutch will bike five miles, the Spanish will catch a train across the whole country, and people in Houston will drive across the street. It can also apply in more subtle ways, though, and that's where capitalism comes in. To pick one example, companies that are owned by their workers are more stable and better places to work than traditional privately owned or shareholder-owned companies, but it goes far deeper and gets far more complex than that, too.
People are responsive to economic incentives. If the incentives favor doing good things, then good things happen. Otherwise, you get what we have now.
I think that's both fairly accurate, and seems to be more or less the norm across all cultures for most of history. Regular people are mostly benign, those in power tend to get worse the more power they have.
This poses an interesting question: what if this is in fact the most self-stable and therefore sustainable solution in the long term? And is it actually fair to assume that those in power benefit asymmetrically, or do they pay for it in ways that people without such means or ambition cannot even fathom?
If you live a normal, unremarkable life and generally get along with others, you probably won't have much excess material wealth, but you will also have relatively few enemies. The more you try to compete for the position of the top dog, however, the more you have to watch your back. Is it really preferable to sleep in a palace surrounded by armed guards because you are worried about assassins, just so you can own 50 nice cars you'll barely ever get to drive?
In other words, people who envy the rich and powerful always only ever look at the benefits, never at the price they pay for their privilege.
Then humanity is fucked.
Oh, boo hoo, won't someone think of the poor rich people, having to pay extra to keep their disgusting riches safe from the people they fucked over to get them. I'm sorry, I've been trying not to contribute to the toxicity I see in these threads, but come the fuck on.
Besides, I don't think people envy the rich and powerful the way you're describing, I think people envy the idea of being able to maintain a good standard of living without having to work themselves to the bone to do it, and they begrudge rich people's wealth and power on the grounds that they use it to influence politics and deny a decent standard of living to the working class. I don't want a mansion and fifty nice cars, I want an apartment in the city in walking distance to transit and stuff to do, and then to also save more money at the end of the month than I did at the start. Most people are similar: their specifics might be different, but the broad strokes are the same, especially the last bit.
But do the extremely rich really get to rest and enjoy their spoils the way you think? Just look at someone like Bill Gates or Elon Musk, they just keep working even though they already have far more than they can spend. Gates is especially funny because he’s working full time on figuring out how to spend his fortune. Almost like having all that money just became another problem that now requires solving.
Yes I’m sure it helps not having to worry about the rent or the grocery bills, but everything else is likely just another unnecessary luxury that’ll quickly lose its appeal once you’ve had it.
Okay, see what you just did there? You went from “being able to maintain a good standard of living without having to work themselves to the bone to do it” to having an apartment in the city in walking distance to transit, and I’m willing to bet you’re not thinking of living next to skid row either. And then you want to be able to save money on top of that, too.
Basically, you blew up your expectation of maintaining an acceptable standard of living without too much stress, which is likely more achievable than you think if you’re flexible, to something that’s far out of your reach, all by inflating the meaning of “good”.
Do you NEED that apartment before you can be satisfied with your standard of living? Or is it something that would be nice to have, but not essential?
Bro, I LITERALLY just said I don't give a shit about rich people problems. You can fuck all the way off trying to get me to sympathize with them. "Oh but it's hard to spend all that money!" Then don't fuck over the working class to accumulate so much money you have to work to spend it all! Or do the ethical thing and let the working class eat you. I might keep arguing with you but this is the last this particular stupidity is going to be dignified with a response.
Ah, I should have clarified. American cities are built wrong and need a redo. Please refer to this educational content. I do sometimes forget that not everyone is on board with the reality that cars and car-centric infrastructure is destroying our mental health, our finances, our cities, and our world, so that's on me. The point is, what I described is a reality in several of the dozens of places that aren't the USA, and the fact that it's not a reality here is the direct result of the actions of people like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and just to throw another one in there, Charles Edwin Wilson. Look him up if you don't know him, but he ranks just under Henry Kissinger in terms of worst people in American history. Just to reiterate, if your goal is to get me to feel sympathy for the owner class, give up now.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Please refer to this educational content.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Ah yes, I get it. You want to have a satisfactory lifestyle, but you want to stay mad at the same time.
Good luck with that LOL
Well, it’s not like I haven’t tried, but the problem is that if you ask two leftists what they believe, you tend to get three different opinions, and they’re all based on theory.
Also, few of them can hold an argument, as soon as you present a criticism, they feel personally attacked and tend to become hostile.
Eh, there’s plenty of socialism in practice. But English speaking discourse is dominated by fans of dictators that actively hunted socialists in twentieth century.