this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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What's wrong with socialism? I like socialism.
I want to seize the means of production as much as the next guy but it gets kinda boring after a while if that's the only content available
Sometimes there are cats! That's always fun! Some of those cats want socialism too, but they're still cats!
It doesnt get boring hearing about how judges demolish bodily autonomy of women and commit other atrocities in the name of corporate freedom.
Ah you mean in the US? I see, well there's also the rest of the world
If this was [email protected] you would've been banned for this comment
When you assume anyone complaining about .ml and Hexbear must be a liberal
There's a massive overlap between being anti-Marx and being liberal. Doesn't mean all anti-Marxists are liberals, but most are.
Tankies are authoritarians and therefore cannot call themselves socialist
I'm just sick of the fucking tankies telling me World War 3 will finally give us workers rights.
If both sides are the Democratic Party and the tankies, then yes, both are bad, and both are far less bad than the Republicans so vote Democrat please. Drag doesn't like it when Trump kills all the trans people and women.
Tankies are fake communists who worship dictators.
I don't think there are real communists honestly. I don't think communism is ever really a "viable" solution unless you suppress freedoms. Also someone will always rise to the top. Communism is just one big corporation that you can not leave.
At the risk of starting another argument, I have heard it described thusly—
Suppose you have some number of apples and some number of people who want the apples.
Now, this quote was originally used by capitalists to mock communism, but I think it's really not a bad analogy. Think about it: Star Trek, another beloved Lemmy staple, takes place in a communist society. Everyone works whatever job they want contributing to society and in return, everyone gets whatever they need provided for by the state. It's not truly post scarcity, since human greed always outstrips any finite amount of resources. But there is no distinction of rich or poor in Star Trek. People are judged by their intelligence, skill, and merit, and rewarded proportionally. At the same time, there is no concept of money, mostly (except when the plot needs it). What good is money when all your necessities are taken care of? All but your wildest desires can be conjured up at a snap of your fingers, and all the state asks in return is that you do what you can to contribute. It is a mutually beneficial relationship that most people have learned to be content with. That, my friends, is an ideal depiction of communism.
Then you don't know what communism is. I've never met a non-socalist who knows what socialism is, or can describe how or why socialism has failed in the past.
Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, the Phillippines, Crimea, and Ukraine (just to name some ongoing conflicts)
But sure, its all the west with their "mutual defence pacts" and their "incentivizing diplomacy through trade", Those beligerent bastards.
Also, though, whataboutism in the face of their dogshit ideology.
I don’t think you’ll find too many bOtH siDEs accelerationists among the liberals, but don’t let this get in the way of some good ol’ fashioned uninformed ignorance!
Hilarious! Thanks for that.
Drag disagrees.
I mean that's why they are called tankies :P It's a derogatory word originally used to describe "socialists" defending tanks being sent into ukraine by the soviet union, and then was quickly used to describe all "socialists" defending genocide, imperialism, and authoritarianism.
Nine times out of ten it’s incorrectly defined by idealists that haven’t figured out that a fair amount of American sociological and economic standards are already steeped in socialist services, and the rest of the rhetoric that defines socialism would absolutely fail if attempted in America.
In short, nine times out of ten, a socialist has absolutely no fucking idea what they’re talking about, but just parroting smug bullshit that they think makes them look edgy and educated.
If you believe this to be true then you don't understand what socialism actually is. You seem to be of the mind that any publicly funded service or welfare is socialist, and I don't blame you for thinking this since it is what the mainstream American political discourse would have you believe.
When you say this immediately after demonstrating that you actually have no idea what you're talking about it's a pretty bad look. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
Drag thinks the means of production should be owned by the workers. Drag is curious why you think the American workers own "a fair amount" of the means of production.
Or they are arguing against democracy
socialism itself is just, kinda weird. From a philosophical perspective it makes sense and has clear distinctions. But from a practical view it's just sort of. Capitalism but if it was more confusing for some reason. If you go too far into one direction, it's just communism, and that's not socialism, obviously. The other direction and it's literally just capitalism, so it has to sit in this weird space between where you can't engage with the best parts of capitalism (or it just weirdly handicaps parts of capitalism) and communism.
and then of course you've got people (probably grifters) like hasan piker who claim to be socialist while having millions of dollars, but doing literally nothing with it, because investing it wouldn't be socialist, and you can't really just give it away, because well, it's a lot of money. I mean you could, but it's also just, sort of redundant at that point.
Realistically he should be investing that money into a lot of different things, increasing returns on revenues, and creating a content creator collective or something silly like that, but to my knowledge he hasn't probably because he's either stupid or lazy. I don't blame him for either of those things though.
socialism, particularly modern western socialism that's based on capital needs a fundamental proof of concept work-through before we can really do anything with it, i think.
Capitalism, while it has problems, it at least makes sense on a fundamental human perspective. I own things, you own things, we own things, that also applies to capital as well. It's so fundamentally tied to the human experience and history that it's just sort of hard to deviate from. Even china does a lot of capitalism.
man that was much longer than i anticipated. Apologies in retrospective lol.
Anyway for the second part of the admittedly very old and dead joke by this point in the post. It's a meme about socialism on the internet. (particularly a farther left space on the internet)
It makes perfect sense if you understand how nuance works. But I think there is where the problem lies- YOUR confusion stems from your inability to understand it.
They’re not wrong. And I’m not going to apologize for not feeling like explaining it to you, but I’ll advise that you start by learning what nuance actually means.
well yeah, i'm reading economic socialism down through the lense of capitalism. Obviously it's going to be a little bit restrictive, this is lemmy, not a PHD thesis.
i've seen socialism defined as anything from early USSR under lenin, to capitalism but if private ownership of capital isn't a thing anymore.
It's incredibly broad depending on how you want to apply it. And technically, communism is actually a subset of socialism.
Capitalism is likewise pretty broad as well, but generally the ownership of capital is traceable and has some form of root ownership. Even things like stocks still have clearly defined ownership. Loans are weird, but the ownership there is clearly defined.
Under socialism loans may not even be possible, depending on how aggressive with it you are. Unless you lent to a third party, like a separate state/country i guess.
IDK what definition you're working with here, but there isn't much flexibility allowing you very much room to differentiate it here. I'm really not sure how you're going to work out of this one to be honest.
Like philosophically, socialism is theoretically simple. it's the implementation that's hard. The idea is pretty simple, it's the concept that there is no singular ownership, but collective ownership. You could define this as something like "anybody who has any investment in any product/good or service has ownership" but this gets sort of confusing. If i buy product from the goods company, does that mean i now own a "share" of the goods company? If i can, does this mean buying literal shares of the company would be "negative" shares? Or is this backwards, buying product produces a negative share, while investing provides a positive share. Does this influence the "shares" of the employees of the company? Are these the same shares? Can i simply out own the shares of any employee with (literal) capital? Or is buying product not applicable in this scenario. That seems reasonable to me, so we'll omit that.
Where does currency even come from? The government? The global trade market? Who owns that? Since the money is in my possession, and it's doing work for me, i must own it, at least partially, but it's also capable of doing work for others, so do other people also own a part of the capital that i hold? That would be weird so let's simply ascribe capital as a means of temporarily holding "schizo" capital.
so now we have a socialist society, that has private capital, and relatively isolated businesses. The employees own a share of the business. We still havent determined how that's proportioned. But we can assume they do, so we have a relatively capitalist market, as that's generally how a market is going to work most effectively (also that would literally just be communism at that point), unless you are either god, or the worlds most powerful supercomputer that can simply predict the needs of a market at a whim. Or you just allow no flexibility in the market (surely this won't cause problems) with companies that don't have direct ownership, which is not dissimilar to how the silicon valley works, minus the VC funding.
So we've basically just created capitalism, but different. Not that this is a bad thing. It's just, an odd problem.
At the end of the day, it's either going to approach communism, or capitalism, there is no distinct mechanism of socialism. I generally refer to this as an "approaching zero problem" as it has no clear definition, and if you go far enough you're just going to end up back where you started, one way or the other.
I feel like if I told you to go and read a book on socialism, and how it functions, and what some theoretical structures for it would be, that would be kind of useless and repetitive, since you've probably gotten that before, it's a pretty popular response. But I think that would probably be the best solution for your confusion here, any given book you decide to pick up or get recommended on the subject will probably be able to inform you better than some random person's re-translation of the book.
If you have gotten that response before, then I gotta ask, along with everyone else that would've gotten that recommendation and then not done so, why you'd still be talking about a topic that you're not willing to invest like, I dunno, 7-8 total hours in. Probably could've read das kapital, and taken notes on it, and then shot those notes at a professor or other talking head online or even just some other random commenter, and then probably been done with it in the amount of time you've spent talking about that shit on lemmy. And that's probably the most dense and fundamental book on the subject if we're not getting into weird french postmodern bullshit.
Random half-baked schmucks from all walks and different schools of socialism and communism are going to present you with a litany of different explanations as to what the system actually entails, that they're probably half-remembering and then regurgitating from youtube videos, or whatever random collection of academic works they've gone in for. That's obviously not the best way to learn about the system, or really to learn about anything. Means that you'll get weirdass definitions like:
Which sounds pretty much completely incoherent at its face. I have no conception of what that would look like, because the ownership of capital is a foundational enough belief in capitalism to be what the system is named after. It's like socialism but without any socialized stuff, or communism without communal ownership.
Like, I've never heard of socialism entailing that you buying a product a company sells entitles you to shares in that company. You're not a worker at said company, that doesn't really make any sense. You also later on talk about "schizo" capital (?), shit about where money comes from (you can answer this one in capitalism, as well. Also, money =/= capital), and the economic calculation problem, which, I dunno man. I'm not going to say so much that that shit's made up, but it's not really a big problem, and it's also a problem that capitalism still basically has to reckon with at a fundamental level, it just ignores it and then decides to crash every decade or so, so that the market can "prune" itself or whatever bullshit. Go hit the paul cockshott vape pen, or go read the book about walmart or whatever.
Also just like. I dunno, maybe we don't need 15 brands of peanut butter at the supermarket which are superficially different but fundamentally the same. Maybe we can get away with just having chunky and just having smooth. Maybe the measure of an efficient economic system isn't that there's shelves full of a range of insubstantially different products and then also that 30-40% of the food is wasted, maybe there's a better measure of "efficiency" there. You can't assume that the decision making choices of people in the market are 100% rational, maybe by assuming that they're rational we just leave the corporate propaganda apparatus totally unacknowledged, which is exactly where that apparatus likes to be. You can't assume that there aren't externalized costs that aren't factored into the initial price, like how suburbia is subsidized, like how climate change is happening. You can't assume that there's no monopolies, which are just going to sit on top of a singular element of the chain, do all the calculations completely internal to themselves, not communicate that with anyone else, and then effectively be a centrally planned authoritarian state for that particular sector of the economy which they and they alone control completely.
Most of all, I think that you can't assume that the government isn't totally conscious of all of these flaws, and have decided to ignore them at the behest of corporate donors. The can gets kicked down the street.
Drag has never heard of that. Then again, drag has never heard of wet deserts or bland spices either.