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I don’t hate socialism.
I hate socializing.
Ghisline Maxwell’s dad published our textbooks
It’s true.
A lot of people are capitalists when it comes to chipping in but are socialists when it comes to getting a hand out
Obviously, this is Russina propaganda. They are jealous of our freedom and prosperity. This is just a try to confuse us into becoming gay communists, so our military degrades and they can use their Mexican and Canadian proxy cells to take over our god-given country.
And all the bad consequences they told you would result from it are pretty much what capitalism is doing all the time.
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I personally hate socialism because I was born in a socialist country and had a shitty childhood. Inb4 someone from hexbear or lemmygrad explaining me that my experience is not valid because it was “not real socialism”.
All those versions have the same problems if horrible, greedy people are at the helm.
Capitalism under an oppressive ruling class would have 99% not owning anything, and necessities priced out of reach.
I was born in a socialist country and had a shitty childhood
Why does it not actually being socialism not bother you?
Could say the same about “not actually capitalism”.
I see, you don’t care to engage with the inaccuracy of the claim but, instead, choose to deflect.
It doesn’t have to be Laissez-faire capitalism to be capitalism. Fascism with red trim isn’t socialism. Hope that helps.
I feel like capitalism with strong regulation and social safety nets is the way to go tbh. Good laws that allow for the thriving of coops and stuff. It’s just kinda hard to maintain that without a recent memory of a cataclysmic war, ig.
so capitalism where capital doesn’t bestow social power. maybe the capital should be owned by the people so it can’t be exploited against them.
we are in an manmade mass extinction event.
Terms like Capitalism and Socialism mean different things to different people. Yes, there are official or academic definitions you could reference. I’d argue that the larger movement of socialism is less about a well-defined prescription of how to run a society and more about criticism of capitalism, its consequences, and finding better alternatives. It’s about diluting the power of the wealthy (the capitalist or owner class, those who are hoarding the power and wealth) as much as possible and using democracy to distribute that power among the working classes to create a more fair and just society.
What aspects of capitalism make you feel it is a better way to organize society?
What aspects of socialism make you feel it is inferior?
I hate the version of it that was explained to me by my father who lived in it.
Your father lived in the United federation of planets?
FYI: Star Trek is fiction
So is the idea that socialism ever actually existed. As such, they must have lived in a fictional world.
If it didn’t work, then it wasn’t real socialism. Heard that one a million times
I wouldn’t boast about hearing it a million times and still failing to understand it personally but you do you. It wasn’t socialism because it wasn’t socialism.
I wouldnt boast about repeating emprically proven mistake.
But maybe thats the way? Maybe you need to taste it yourself with all the conseqences for reality to finally breach the propaganda barrier in your brain?
I mean, you’re doing the equivalent of saying “well, my daddy grew up in North Korea and he’s told me all about how democratic republics are really bad” and you actaully expect to be taken seriously.
You’ve even declared it to be empirically proven too. How are we not supposed to laugh at you?
It’s funny. My dad worked for Exxon in the 1970s. He’d go to St. Petersburg on business during the Detente Era. Learned the language. Had a bunch of Russian friends. Promised to take us there when we were older, because he had a real dream of a world united in peace and prosperity.
But then the 1980s happened, the price of oil tanked, projects were cancelled, the USSR collapsed, Dad got laid off, we had to downsize our quality of life significantly, and all those dreams went up in smoke.
Dad got a lower paying job in Houston. He started watching Fox News. His opinions on foreigners, on socialism, and on world peace soured significantly. He got incredibly angry when I went off to college and started learning world history, particularly “Marxist” history that failed to venerate the US. He also became a QAnoner and COVID denier. His last years were incredibly rough.
I guess I learned a lot watching his opinions shift over 50 years of life. Idk if it was “Communism Bad” though.
Promised to take us there when we were older, because he had a real dream of a world united in peace and prosperity.
My father did the exact opposite, and miraculously managed to get permission to leave the country to work abroad, and be “exploited” by these filthy capitalists at 10x wage he’d earn for the same job in socialist “paradise”. Then state fucked him over with income tax, then he fucked them back by asking for tax payment plan spread over two years. Inflation that state falsly claimed to be very low eaten most of the debt within first year. Welcome to Poland in the 80s, country that couldnt design their own car so they had to license fiat 500 design from the 50s to be produced from mid 70s onward.
Your father didnt live in that system, he just saw very tiny piece, that wasn’t representative of the whole.
Had an exchange that went like
“The workers don’t know how to run the business”
“Did the owner tell you that?”
“… shit.”
I’ve worked for some small businesses that the owners themselves could not be trusted to run operations without fucking everything up.
Size of organizations really is an important factor. For small-medium businesses, the owner probably needs to have the skills to operate things themselves, for medium-to-large the owners skills set changes to people managment (see the Peter Principal). Then you get to the places where the CEOs job is less managing people but setting directives at the request of the board and being the cult of personality/fall-guy for the investors.
Its that last one where I get why it works that way, but its baffling how an organization gets there without someone asking if thats a bad idea.
These were auto shops with 8-15 employees, the owners had started the business when you wrote appointments on a desk calendar and there were three oil filters on the shelf, one for Chevy, one for Chrysler and one for Ford. Ask them to make an appointment or order the correct oil filter for a 2016 Kia Sedona was expecting too much.
Also workers don’t have to run the business, they can elect / delegate someone to do that.
If that owners managerial skills are truly necessary for the business’ survival then they should have no problem explaining that to their fellow workers and getting elected to manage. They just won’t get all the profit…
Same logic:
You don’t hate capitalism. You hate the version of it taught to you by someone who took the easiest educational track possible.
No, I hate it because all it ever produces are societies run by ultrarich megalomaniacs who rape children.
Wow, talk about USA centric. You know there are a few other counties, right? That are not run by those?
I never mentioned the USA or suggested they were limited to one country. Buzz off troll.
someone who took the easiest educational track
Business?
actually, i do hate capitalism with all its complexity too. imo the market is a useful tool when kept in check by having to compete with planned, government-subsidised alternatives, but private ownership of capital is what generates 99% of the problems with it. either the workers should own the capital or the public should. the best option is probably somewhere between the two.
I agree - but the workers and the public should be the same entity!
imo the distinction is between the workers of that particular organisation vs the public as a whole. there’s still value in the people actually close to the work making the decisions (a lot of the failures of the soviet system can be attributed to party officials overruling experts) but it should be counterbalanced by the public looking out for each other, so that no single org or collection of orgs stand above the rest of society.
I know that old people and children are not workers in the strict sense of the word, but in a broader definition they are. Everyone should be part of “the workers” in my opinion. In an ideal “soviet” system workers are organized in councils and democracy a grassroot endevour. The problem is the way to get there. At first every socialist system will be attacked by reactionist forces. Lenin argued that it is therefor necessary to have a communist party. This contains the danger of it getting corrupted and establising an authoritarian system. There seems no way around that. Lenin argues that in a capitalist world, it is not possible to just jump to a communist utopia. The state has to wither away.
I think a significant number of us hate whatever system we are living in right now, no matter what it’s called.
Actually I hate it cause my parents and grandparents suffered under it in the GDR. None of them own yachts or houses either.
Socialism isn’t far enough. We need anarcho-com.
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Anarchist tendencies have some inherent philosophical and practical flaws unfortunately. Anarchism relies on a naive, idealistic view of human nature, falsely assuming people are inherently good and cooperative once state authority is removed. Selfishness does stem from capitalist competition and private property, meaning solidarity cannot simply be unlocked by abolishing the state, but must be consciously organized through a new economic system.
I would encourage you to read Kropotkin"s “Are We Good Enough?” It’s short, and he addresses your charge that Anarchists have an unrealistic vision of human nature.
Thank you! I did read it today.
Kropotkin wrongly treats capitalist exploitation and wage labor as results of individual moral flaws like greed or slavishness. In reality, they are objective necessities driven by profit maximization and the workers’ lack of means of production.
By claiming that private property or a monarchy would be harmless among “good” people, Kropotkin reduces systemic power structures to mere vessels of individual morality. However, private property and the state are inherently coercive institutions of exclusion and force, regardless of anyone’s personal character.
Kropotkin’s reliance on historical progress (such as the abolition of slavery and serfdom, which actually just transitioned people into modern wage labor) fails to provide a rational argument for communism. The case for communism rests on overcoming the irrationality of capitalist production through planned, need-based labor, not on historical optimism.
Communism is neither a moral training ground to improve human nature nor a shelter to protect people from their own bad instincts. Instead, it is the conscious, collective interest of producers to abolish capital and the state because these systems subjugate their lives to profit and state power.
What’s more depressing than socialist architecture? Homelessness and starvation in a land with plenty.
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I’ve said this a few times before, but it’s wrong to think that most people are greedy/selfish. The capitalist class and the political figures they buy are extreme outliers. We over-index on them due to a mix of negativity bias and the fact that they say everyone is greedy to justify their own positions of power.
Just think about it: Humans are an inherently cooperative species. We developed language so that we could work more effectively in groups and slowly built up complex social relationships that lead to us becoming wildly successful. The fact that some psychopaths learned to take advantage of our group dynamics shouldn’t damn everyone they are exploiting.
This isn’t even about being selfless/altruistic: The vast majority of us just straight up do better when we support each other. Even if the other person doesn’t directly reciprocate, living in a society where it is the norm to help others comes around to help you at some point.
But beyond that, there just isn’t a lot of value in essentializing people like that. Very little about modern society is natural. We aren’t born knowing how to do math or drive cars, but we have the capacity to learn those things. We’ve grown through social evolution, not biological. That’s why a critical part of building socialism is raising class consciousness. We aren’t just changing the structure of society, we’re changing the people to be able to create that new structure. Just as serfs learned that they need not be subservient to their lords before they were able to self govern, we must teach people that they have the power and the right to turn over the current hierarchy and create something better.
You are right - one has to look at ALL of human history. Most of it was in cooperation. Give, take, share and everyone has plenty. Feudalism and after that capitalism have shrunk our peer group further and further and told us selfishness is the core of the human psychology - it is not and we will overcome this.
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But every socialist system I have ever seen concentrates power even more than capitalism.
Billionaires go to prison and get executed in China, because power is concentrated in the Party and politics are in command.
That seems pretty fucking good to me.
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Believing billionaires deserve to live? Yup, reddit.world
Wait so the fact that the more money I have the more giving I feel is actually normal ? I thought I was unique. I couldn’t understand how billionaires weres constantly handing out thousands of stacks of hundreds to the homeless.
I’m not sure I believe it. Or maybe most IRL folks I know are just assholes.
Just say you hate democracy and you love boot.
