Haha, funny way to say “working in the lead mines”, comrade.
Comrade, we all know lead poisoning and the need for safety gear are capitalist propaganda! Now, get back in the mines! Production must increase 50% this year, and your state-appointed union representative says it can!
Capital successfully fought to put lead into American’s blood and lungs for a century after it was known to be poison. To this day they’re still fighting to keep it there.
I think the hexbears probably fucked OP irl or something. Guy is going full mental illness mode.
You know, it took until 2003 for Russia to remove leaded gasoline from stations. The Soviets never did it LMFAO
but nice try
EDIT: based on another commenter, OP’s claim isn’t even factual.
And it took the US until 1996 (after fall of USSR)? Not to mention that it was capitalism (General Motors) that spread the hoax about leaded gasoline being safe, under the guise of scientific research in 1921.
This is not the gotcha you think it is.
If it was all an evil capitalist conspiracy, why did the communists go along with it? Hmm?
It was not uncovered until much later that this scientific research was in fact a hoax to promote General Motors’ business.
This is very easily verified with a web search. I would be happy to guide you to specific sources and readings as well.
So, the Soviets couldn’t do their own research. Got it
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Did chatgpt not include this or…?
https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/a/1473/files/2020/09/sovenv.pdf
Nevertheless, the Soviet Union took effective action to protect the population from lead exposure; it banned lead-based (white lead) paint and it banned the sale of leaded gasoline in some cities and regions. While leaded gasoline was introduced in the 1920s in the United States, it was not until the 1940s that leaded gasoline was introduced in the Soviet Union (5). In the 1950s, the Soviet Un- ion became the first country to restrict the sale of leaded gaso- line; in 1956, its sale was banned in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Baku, Odessa, and tourist areas in the Caucasus and Crimea, as well as in at least one of the “closed cities” of the nuclear weap- ons complex (6, 7). The motivation for the bans on leaded gaso- line is not entirely clear, but factors may have included Soviet research on the effects of low-level lead exposure (8), or sup- port from Stalin himself (5). In any event, the bans on leaded gasoline in some areas prevented what could have been signifi- cant population lead exposure. In the United States and other OECD countries, leaded gasoline has been identified as one of the largest sources of lead exposure (9, 10). Lead-based paint is another potentially significant source of population lead exposure.
Bonus: a great example of capital at work,
Along with a number of other coun- tries, in the 1920s the Soviet Union adopted the White Lead Convention, banning the manufacture and sale of lead-based (white lead) paint (11). In the United States, however, the National Paint, Oil and Varnish Association successfully opposed the ban, and lead-based paint was not banned in the United States until 1971 (12).
Two generations of Americans.
You say that like lead paint isn’t in American buildings still.
Great point, and regulation is still being fought by the real estate industry.
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Textbook whataboutism
What textbook?
And your point is?
Please do share an example of industrialization that somehow doesn’t include unforseen negative health effects.
Go on now, we’ll wait.
My point is that capital has successfully fought to put lead into American’s blood and lungs for over 100 years.
So in other words you are unwilling to answer the question.
Got it.
This is precisely why I say that you aren’t intellectually serious people.
You have one question in your previous comment on the very first line, and it was answered.
Your statement on the 2nd line doesn’t really make sense, as I don’t think anyone blames people for unforseen negative health effects.
What people are upset about are the forseen, proven, endemic negative health effects being purposefully spread for over a century.
What a crock of shit!
Why would capital willingly poison its workforce as a deliberate policy? That makes zero sense.
I can see capital writing it off as a necessary side-cost of doing business, but I can’t see it as a deliberate policy.
Again, it makes no sense. Capital wants a relatively healthy workforce, not one that’s falling apart due to lead-caused neurological decrepitude.
Name a better duo then tankies and whatsboutism
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You’re right, America did bad thing, clearly this completely overrides the wrongs of other countries
The first commenter is talking a hypothetical scenario of socialism being bad, so the second commenter (the one you responded to) responded with actual example of that same hypothetical scenario happening, but except by a capitalist power (the US). I don’t think your response makes sense at all here.
No, his response is calling out the whataboutism fallacy. The US doing something bad does not in any way, shape, or form make socialism any less shitty. It’s poking fun at the delusional people who still think it’s a good ideology despite the overwhelming evidence.
Calling something “Whataboutism” infers a belief in American exceptionalism. You should question that belief.
No, you’re just an idiot. Whataboutism is simply a fallacy. It doesn’t infer anything outside of inconsistent logic. If you feel threatened by it then it just shows that you’re disingenuous.
He was joking, save your whataboutism for “serious” arguments
They are not joking. You can see them continuing here: https://lemm.ee/comment/3563759
And this isn’t whataboutism (not that it matters). The first commenter ridiculed socialism by using a hypothetical scenario. The second commenter showed with evidence this hypothetical scenario is actually real under capitalism.
When a liberal loses an argument they yell “whataboutism” it’s their little white flag
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The Glorious Leader has declared that we have too much lead. You’re now reassigned to be in front of the firing squad.
The gold standard are urainum mines. Lead are for those with good behavior.
Tbh I’d rather work in a uranium mine, it’s less toxic than lead in the quantities you’d be exposed to
If you are not dead by end of month from radiation, you will be executed for failing to mine the required quantity of uranium.
Remind me, what did they do to indigenous people when they were trying to get uranium for the Manhattan project?
This nonsense is just western projection.
What is it with these commie types that they believe communism will leave everyone to become hippies who can do whatever they want and all required resources just magically arrive when they need.
It really is watching children believe in Santa Claus
If we didn’t all work to produce excess wealth for the super wealthy, we’d have 20 hour workweeks. People can do a lot with that extra time.
Yeah I don’t think pure communism is the answer, but neither is pure capitalism.
Let’s find a compromise between “equality” and “fuck you, all for me”.
That’s just a false compromise argument promoting a middle ground that doesn’t exist
Capitalism for when there is scarcity (building hi-tech for example) state controlled “socialism” for things needed by everyone (schools, hospitals, roads, internet) seems like a smart start.
Food could go under capitalism if heavy regulated, govt can sponsor art etc. Vote for what suits you.
Yeah and no more lobbying or mega rich(like 10M€ max until at least everyone can eat, read and go to the hospital for free).
The thing is, when someone starts getting very wealthy, they inevitably errode the checks and balances put in place to curtail their power and to protect the poor. For example, electricity used to be nationalised in my country until a few years ago. The state company in charge of it would seek to stay near the floating line, not to make profits, and power was very affordable. Before the pandemic, it got privatised and prices went through the roof, we’re talking 1000% increases in some cases, because now they had to make money for the shareholders.
This could only work if the people were very conscious and politically educated, so that they could prevent these things from happening. But just one bad generation can see those hard earned protections and rights erroded.
Basically, it only works if you can keep greedy people from expressing their greed. Evidently, not happening right now.
Exactly. That’s why simply regulating capitalism won’t work. It has been regulated before, and eventually, little by little, greed wins out, politicians take bribes to lower regulations, and this tension raises again until we earn back what we lost. Rinse and repeat. It’s not sustainable.
when someone starts getting very wealthy, they inevitably errode the checks and balances put in place The solution there is to not let ANYBODY get that wealthy. Tax the shit out of the rich until their net worth is in an acceptable range. Let’s say that we set a minimum level. If you don’t meet that level, government helps you. Helps you with a house, food income, etc. Then allow the richest person to be worth 10x that of the poorest. If your worth goes over that, taxes will rise to 100%. You simply don’t earn anything more until your worth lowers.
Its a very rough idea, but its just to, well, get the idea. Communism does NOT work, never has, never will. It requires stripping all freedoms, loads of coercion, lots of horror and terrorizing of the population to make it work. Too many people always dream of working in a vegetable garden under communism. Are they really THAT naive? Are they 5? Dear god, read some history.
I fully agree with you that capitalism, as its currently running unhindered, is a BAD thing. It needs to be limited, curtailed BY A LOT. But in its core its not bad. It gives people the freedom to trade directly, unhindered by government to get things done in the most efficient way. And like it or not, its a success story. Its why the west became as dominant as it is. Leaving people free to do things the way they want to do it is nice AND efficient. Problem is that you need to put limits, like “Don’t dump industrial waste, you make it, you recycle it” which now we don’t. THAT is the problem
Capitalism didn’t get the west wealthy. That was all the colonialism and imperialism taking wealth away from other places through slavery and exploitation. Capitalism just profited off of the fact Europe was already rich and powerful to further that divide.
Historically socialists have been better at utilizing scarce resources. Look at the 50 percent economic growth per decade achieved by soviet centralized economic planning before calculators and machine learning were a thing.
IDK but I feel like the winners of WW2 didn’t really need to put a strain on anything to go forward extremely easily compared to before.
I don’t think you can judge how the superpowers advanced in the 1950-60-70 having the control over about everything versus how it is today. Also personally I’d like everyone to be included, not just the west + this or that but Africa, south America, etc. etc.
This was before ww2, during the great break.
Look at the 50 percent economic growth per decade achieved by soviet centralized economic planning
Look at this where? In which metric are you measuring economic growth?
I think you need to look in his ass, where he pulled that number from. These communist types really believe all this nonsense and just handwave all the famines, civil terrors, or just the fact that no communist system ever became a success. its all just for the common good, right?
Pretty sure I got it from growth crystal, a very dry economics book. I dont remember by which metric but you could probably find it within the first few chapters.
… What?
I’ll partially repaste a reply I posted to another post for you. Communism SUCKS at resource management because one centralized corrupt system doesn’t know shit about what its doing whereas capitalist systems allow individual people to get the most efficient solutions possible. IT. WORKS. Yes, there are problems, fix those problems. Read the following. don’t TL;DR; because if you do then you just don’t care about reality, you just want to should slogans
why are so many people starving?
There are loads of reasons for people starving, but in democratic capitalist countries, people typically don’t starve. Don’t agree? Name one. There is poverty in the US for sure and capitalism in the US is an absolute shitshow, nobody would deny that. But people in the US rarely starve to death.
Wanna talk starvation? Lets talk starvation! Warning: All following links are wikipedia but have stomach churning content. Here be dragons, but please do read because you need to learn. Also note: All the following is from within the last century.
1: Russian famine: about five million deaths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921–1922 (famine caused directly by communism)
Quote from that page: The famine resulted from the combined effects of economic disturbance from the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and the government policy of war communism (especially prodrazvyorstka). It was exacerbated by rail systems that could not distribute food efficiently.
Fun quote: canibalism
Communism is awesome!
2: North Korean famine: estimated between 600,000 and 1 million deaths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine (Famine caused directly by communist government policies)
Quote: Economic mismanagement and the loss of Soviet support caused food production and imports to decline rapidly. A series of floods and droughts exacerbated the crisis. The North Korean government and its centrally planned system proved too inflexible to effectively curtail the disaster.
Fun quote: uses of words such as ‘famine’ and ‘hunger’ were banned because they implied government failure
Communism is awesome!
3: Chinese famine: 15 to 55 million deaths (yay!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine (Caused directly by communist government policies)
Quote: The major contributing factors in the famine were the policies of the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) and people’s communes, launched by Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong, such as inefficient distribution of food within the nation’s planned economy; requiring the use of poor agricultural techniques; the Four Pests campaign that reduced sparrow populations (which disrupted the ecosystem); over-reporting of grain production; and ordering millions of farmers to switch to iron and steel production.
Fun quote: Cannibalism, AGAIN
Communism is awesome!
Want to know more?
Communism wouldn’t have an upper class of “bosses”.
… I don’t even know where to begin with this one. What are you? 5?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekism a nice side effect of communism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chekist < I F*$#king double dare you to watch that movie about the non existing upper class of bosses
In conclusion?
Communism sucks and causes nothing but suffering. There is not even a fucking silver lining about it and people need to stop hippy-dippying communism. Its fucking evil.
Yes, capitalism as it currently runs is fucked up with problems. But at its core its the driver of success that got you your mobile phone in your hands. Use that mobile phone to fix those problems instead of dreaming of perfect mass murdering societies.
You’re literally blaming all these societies for famines where intense external causes are cited. And capitalism kills 20 million people a year, currently. Also, read Victorian holocausts
Yes, capitalism as it currently runs is fucked up with problems. But at its core its the driver of success that got you your mobile phone in your hands.
20 million deaths a year.
You know the Soviets came up with a lot of the tech that led to smartphones, with the rest of it coming from publicly funded research?
Use that mobile phone to fix those problems instead of dreaming of perfect mass murdering societies.
Isn’t trying to reform capitalism dreaming of perfect mass murdering societies?
You mean its impossible to tax people? Because it is. You just need better politicians. “There is no middle ground” is no argument, because there is. You just have your fingers in your ears shouting “LALALALALAA I CANNOT HEAR YOU”.
Communism is a laughingly naive argument. There are no communist success stories. There are loads of torture horror porn stories though, if you’re willing to read history. Maybe watch a good movie! Get “The chekist (1992)” somewhere. Then sit in a closet in fetal position for about a week or two (I never managed to finish it, its horrible, but a great movie nontheless) and when you come out maybe, just maybe you can understand a little bit about what communism really entails
We’re a dying species on a planet that will heat up until we’re all gone, do I really need another horror story ?
You mentioning the chekist is just the old and tired whataboutism where you point out horrors committed by the Soviets to justify your point of view. I could give you horrific stories where people were tortured and/or killed because of corporate greed and/or imperialism. What good will that accomplish?
Will hearing that people were locked inside a sweatshop while it caught on fire change anything about your view of capitalism ?
People falling in poverty because they can’t pay medical bills, killing themselves because of their job, getting tortured for information they don’t have, seeing their leaders get overthrown and living in a military state because of that.
Are you capable of seeing the horrors wrought by capitalism, not just those in the past but also those we see every day, and answer the question “Would that have happened if the redistribution of resources was fair ?”
If you want a movie recommendation “Sugarland” (2014), it’s just a fun movie about sugar, showing how insidious and pervasive capitalists can be, don’t worry no torture porn here but you’ll still feel like shit at the end.
And then surely people will start doing logistics for your fantasy farm in their free time right?
I mean, if they want to, sure. Point is society wouldn’t be reliant on that since everything necessary for society to function would be taken care of during the said 20 hour workweek. I don’t care if somebody wants to set up a tomato farm or a donkey ranch or whatever on the side, as long as they don’t exploit or mistreat anyone.
Logistics would be the job dedicated to moving goods and services around to the place they need to be in. It’s not something that would appeal to most but it is a critical job in any modern society.
Set it up with a nice graphical interface, label it “Logistics Simulator 2024” and you’ll have people fighting each other for the privilege
Throw some drone trucks in there and baby, you got a stew going.
Until you spend thirty five minutes explaining to the receptionist for the intermittent carrier why rerouting through Chicago makes no sense when carrying freight from NYC to Hoboken NJ.
You act like there wouldn’t be multiple plans submitted with obsessive communities arguing about best practices and min/maxing efficiencies before accepting routes.
It’s also 24/7 so there’d be people working weird hours. Capital gets that work done even in communist countries (capital or direct coercion).
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Why would you need to hire someone? If it’s a farm meant to provide food for people then it’s commonly owned and the people who work there are state employees, the purpose of the farm being to make food, not profits.
If it’s something you do because you want to and out of passion, then why would you hire anyone? Sure, you might want some help, but then you just get people who are passionate about it as well, and you share the produce. Like a community garden.
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Are you dense? I said everyone would have a regular job like they do now for 20 hours a week, except with more control over the workplace. The farm mentioned is something you would do in your free time because you want to.
What you describe is controlled capitalism. People can decide themselves what they want to do and try to get things done in the most efficient way directly without government interference.
The problem current capitalism faces is that there is too little control, too much allowance for monopolies, that sort of shit. Tax the crap out of the rich, limit what you can do “if you create polluting materials, you have to recycle them yourself”, “you cant corner more than 10% of a market”, etc, but allow people to freely do what they want to do. That would be capitalism, actually.
everything necessary for society to function would be taken care of during the said 20 hour workweek
Yeah that is not how society works, that is not how anything works at all. You don’t work 40 hours a week just to make somebody rich even richer. If they could pay you only for 20 hours, they would. You work 40 hours because you CAN have a job which is because they need somebody to do that work. If they don’t need you, they won’t pay you for nothing dummie. If you work on something not required, congrats, you have a dumb boss that wastes resources and you lucked out. Most people just have normal jobs that NEED to be done. Just saying “lets do communism and we only work 20 hours a week” is beyond naive. Reality is “Lets do communism and half of us will starve to death!”
I would suggest you look into socialism more because it seems to me you are mistaken in some aspects.
Capitalism is the economic system in which individuals can own the means of production themselves, so basically an entrepreneur owns a company and everyone working there are employees with no or very little ownership over the business.
Socialism is the economic system where the workers themselves own those same means of production. What you think of as socialism is most likely the Marxist-Leninist version implemented in the USSR.
Their thought process went like this: the people all own every business, but if everyone was the boss, nothing would get done. So they considered that since people, at least on paper, vote for their leader and the state supposedly represents the people, then if the state owned all businesses it would basically be the same as if everyone owned those businesses. The issue here is that the politicians and bureaucrats who make decisions regarding those businesses, being human themselves, will tend to skew them towards their own interests. Personally, I still think it is better this way than having billionaire leeches that drain the wealth from multiple countries, but that’s besides the point.
This isn’t the only socialist system imaginable, though. It could be as simple as the workers that are employed somewhere get a share of the company for as long as they work there instead of wages. That way, you get paid a portion of the profit, and as a shareholder, can vote on decisions about the business. It’s important though that only people who work there get those shares, no outside investors or sketchy things like that to take away the power from the people. There’s no business owner in this since everyone basically owns their workplace and bosses are democratically elected. This is market socialism, you’d still have market forces and all that entails, and I think it would be the easiest change to make if we wanted to give up on capitalism.
Then there’s syndicalism, in which unions and syndicates own their sector or industry and manage them themselves. Every worker joins the union when they get hired, and they vote for stuff like leadership, rule changes, charters and the like. These syndicates then coordinate with eachother to ensure everything is working as intended and produced at the rates they are needed at.
As for the 20 hour workweek… it’s very reasonable if you look into it. Each one of us not only has to work hard enough to earn for ourselves, we also have to earn for those who are unfortunate and cannot work through taxes, which is a good thing, but we also have to work hard enough to earn for the leeches doing nothing, like the billionaires on top. Every employee has to get paid less than ehat they’re worth, since if the employer would give them every bit of money they produce, they wouldn’t be profitable. And that’s not even getting into people working jobs that don’t help society at all, such as landlords, insurance agents, marketing people, etc. If everyone worked in fields necessary for society to function, we would all work 20 hours a week.
It’s pretty clear that basic economy lessons have failed you.
They I have good or bad news for you, depending on your stance. We don’t. You may, depending on the company which you work for, but generally speaking most people don’t.
Yes, yes, YES. Capitalism is evil, pitchfork and torches! Reality check: Capitalism is also the very big reason why you have a computer on your desk or in your hands in the shape of a phone to write about the evils of capitalism. Capitalism is at its core about the freedoms to share and acquire resources in the most efficient way possible. Does it have big BIG problems with runaway effects where a single person can suddenly pheewwww shoot into the sky and start resource hogging? Absolutely. Should that be legally limited and curbed? Absolutely! Is that currently done well? Absofuckinglutely not!
But none of that means that “communism will save us”. Dear god, please please don’t be THAT naive, don’t believe in santa claus.
If you want to spend your free time in a commune to help hippies or whatever it is that you want to do, I applaud you. Seriously, well done. But you WILL have to work for a home. You WILL have to work for food, and that computer you have in your hand to curse the evils of capitalism. And you have to work so that when we all do that, that resources get moved over the world so that the farmer gets his equipment that he needs to farm the grains that he sends to a supermarket that gets bought by a baker which you then buy in the shape of a bread loaf… We all work together.
Again, is there a shit tonne of abuse going on? Of course. Nobody denies that. Is that abuse being curbed? Nope. Should we hang the ultra rich that have been abusing this system? Nah, lets not hang people. I’m not for violence. But should we tax them 100% of their income until their posessions are within a reasonable range? Absolutely.
But communism is not the answer, please learn some history about the “successes” (meaning ALL failures, no exceptions) of comnunism. Read about the famines, the suppression, the torture, the corruption and the crap that comes with that to make it work. I like my freedom. I don’t need piles of cash and people generally should not be allowed to have piles. You do that with laws and taxing and enforcing. Lets focus on that instead.
No, you would be working 12 hours per day every day in uranium mines.
Ah yes, because everything you do is to meet societal needs and not to make more money for the 1%. That’s why 34% of wealth in Canada goes to the top 1%.
Wall Street:
Then tax the crap out of them. Communism is NOT the answer, its the cause for an order of magnitude more suffering than capitalism will ever be able to cause. These sesame street types that really believe that communism will give them a vegetable garden to work in just should stop using the internet. You are using a frikkin mobile phone, a device that is the frikking epitome of capitalism and science to bitch about the evils of capitalism (and loads of people do the same with science too).
Turn in your mobile phone and go live on a hippie farm (or in a cave) and die of horrible preventable diseases, if that is what you wish, but you don’t get to have it both ways.
Yes, capitalism has a shit tonne of problems that MUST be solved, totally agree. The wealthy should be taxed up to a 100% of income once their income and net worth surpasses a certain level. Just cap it. We should have free education, free healthcare, basic rights on homes and food… A socialist system BUILT ON A CAPITALIST SYSTEM. That is because capitalism, at its core, is allowing people the freedom to trade in the most efficient way possible by themselves. THAT IS STRENGTH and that is the very reason why the west currently rules just about everything. Yes, having it run loose with no restrictions (as we currently try to do for some fucked up reason) is bad, VERY bad. Still not communism bad, though. I 100x rather have our current fucked up capitalist system over living in the fun communistic countries of the USSR (hello famines!), China (heeelllooooo famines with millions of victims!) or Korea (helloo!!!) or… Well, you get the gist. I’m not even talking about the government policing that comes with it.
Captialism has problems, absolute. FIX THEM. Don’t go jackoff over systems that are known for misery, famines, death camps, and just general failure.
How many famines do you think occured in China and Russia prior to communism? How many people do you think died because of famines in the decades prior to communism?
Famine in late 19th century/early 20th century China and Russia were a fact of life. They’d come ever few years, kill a few million, and then leave. That had been the case throughout history because subsistence farming isn’t exactly a very robust system. How many famines do you think occured in the decades before the communist party took power?
How many famines would you guess occured in the decades after the communist party took power in Russia or China? What do you think the odds were that those famines would have occured with or without communist party intervention?
Tax them how? With the government they own?
do whatever they want and all required resources just magically arrive when they need.
“Whatever they want” is creating and distributing those resources, but I suppose labour is magic to you.
Yeah, and distributing resources efficiently is one of the core strengths of capitalism, its the reason why capitalism is so successful.
No, I’m not saying capitalism is perfect nor that it doesn’t cause suffering, nor that it does not need a shitload more limits than it has right now, but communism is NOT known for its efficiency, nor for letting people just do whatever the hell they want to do. Communism forces people to do what the boss says, if you don’t like it you can go to a gulag. If you’re talking about “Communism gives people the freedom to find the most efficient ways of distributing resources” then you’re kind of confusing that with Capitalism.
If capitalism is so efficient at distributing resources, why are so many people starving?
Also, yet another “communism is when capitalism”. Communism wouldn’t have an upper class of “bosses”.
Also, pointing to socialist states as proof communism has leadership is laughable. That’s not communism. It’s socialism. At least do some research.
Efficiency in economics has a particular technical definition.
Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a situation where no action or allocation is available that makes one individual better off without making another worse off
Free markets are great at producing outcomes that are efficient in a particular technical sense, but not especially equitable.
Yes, capitalism is insanely efficient at its real purpose - funneling wealth to the top.
why are so many people starving?
There are loads of reasons for people starving, but in democratic capitalist countries, people typically don’t starve. Don’t agree? Name one. There is poverty in the US for sure and capitalism in the US is an absolute shitshow, nobody would deny that. But people in the US rarely starve to death.
Wanna talk starvation? Lets talk starvation! Warning: All following links are wikipedia but have stomach churning content. Here be dragons, but please do read because you need to learn. Also note: All the following is from within the last century.
1: Russian famine: about five million deaths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921–1922 (famine caused directly by communism)
Quote from that page: The famine resulted from the combined effects of economic disturbance from the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and the government policy of war communism (especially prodrazvyorstka). It was exacerbated by rail systems that could not distribute food efficiently.
Fun quote: canibalism
Communism is awesome!
2: North Korean famine: estimated between 600,000 and 1 million deaths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine (Famine caused directly by communist government policies)
Quote: Economic mismanagement and the loss of Soviet support caused food production and imports to decline rapidly. A series of floods and droughts exacerbated the crisis. The North Korean government and its centrally planned system proved too inflexible to effectively curtail the disaster.
Fun quote: uses of words such as ‘famine’ and ‘hunger’ were banned because they implied government failure
Communism is awesome!
3: Chinese famine: 15 to 55 million deaths (yay!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine (Caused directly by communist government policies)
Quote: The major contributing factors in the famine were the policies of the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) and people’s communes, launched by Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong, such as inefficient distribution of food within the nation’s planned economy; requiring the use of poor agricultural techniques; the Four Pests campaign that reduced sparrow populations (which disrupted the ecosystem); over-reporting of grain production; and ordering millions of farmers to switch to iron and steel production.
Fun quote: Cannibalism, AGAIN
Communism is awesome!
Want to know more?
Communism wouldn’t have an upper class of “bosses”.
… I don’t even know where to begin with this one. What are you? 5?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekism a nice side effect of communism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chekist < I F*$#king double dare you to watch that movie about the non existing upper class of bosses
In conclusion?
Communism sucks and causes nothing but suffering. There is not even a fucking silver lining about it and people need to stop hippy-dippying communism. Its fucking evil.
Yes, capitalism as it currently runs is fucked up with problems. But at its core its the driver of success that got you your mobile phone in your hands. Use that mobile phone to fix those problems instead of dreaming of perfect mass murdering societies.
We just removed the child tax credit which made child poverty soar. The most “pro-union” president forced railroad workers to take a shit contract in December instead of allowing them to strike.
I don’t even know where to begin. That entire comment is full of lies i have debunked before. This is exhausting.
9 million per year. The number that starve due to capitalism.
I have already addressed the Soviet famine. The root cause was a crop blight and Stalin’s lax response ultimately worsened it.
As for china and north korea - any reason to believe the communism they don’t live in is the cause of that? Your own quote claims north korea mainly suffered because the USSR failed to supoort them.
Capitalism is good at raising production, generating lots of products very quickly and efficiently. But it’s notoriously terrible at actually distributing resources in a fair way. Like, that’s it’s biggest weakness and the things it’s worst at.
Communism has the opposite issue of not usually being able to make enough things in the beginning, which is why Marx thought it would happen in already industrialized nations, not poor peasant states like Russia or China.
It seems like they believe they can be a gardener vs a farmer. That’s the only bit that I see that isn’t realistic.
In all likelihood they would be neither. With modern technology, we don’t need a large percent of the population farming. I realize communists typically eliminate the intellectuals and kulaks—those who would actually have useful knowledge—first, but the smart things would be to have the current farmers keep farming. You’d likely be assigned to a factory to manufacture widgets for the rest of your days.
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Eh, so do Communists but they just eliminated them on industrial scales.
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I wonder if there’s a term for how the far right and the far left tend to be similar…
There is but horseshoe theory is not well regarded in political science circles because it hasn’t held up.
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Both can be offensively violent but the types of people drawn to either vary widely. For example I cannot say I know any socialists who were individually racist (as opposed to racist by virtue of being American as structural racism runs deep).
Horseshoe theory is bullshit
If I kill its because I’m defending myself, if you kill its because you are violent!
Say both sides…
Are you seriously trying to say that communist governments haven’t committed mass murder on an industrial scale just to fortify their power structures?
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Which one is defensively violent? Hexbears said I should get nuked and they claim to exist on the left (they present as alt-righty if you ask me)
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You are unfamiliar with the altright if you think hexbear is at all right. They are leftists and many are revolutionary leftists but no one there for long is altright.
For fucks sake this al, comes about from the ChapoTrapHouse subreddit getting banned.
defensively violent and authoritarian out of self-preservation
LOL
The irony here is that if you actually had two cows in the late 1920’s USSR you’d catch a bullet.
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“Horseshoe theory”
I believe it’s holocaust trivialization
No it’s a “theory” that has not been demonstrated to hold up and isn’t granted a lot of respect in political science circles.
While certain aspects can be shared, such as a greater appreciation for authoritarianism, the actual beliefs are so incredibly different and the people drawn to them are so different that the “theory” doesn’t work.
I’m calling horseshoe theory holocaust trivialization. Well, I’m linking to a Jewish holocaust expert doing that.
Assuming technology didn’t take a dive bomb that would be automated fairly quickly as well, look at how much robotics already does in manufacturing.
Most people would be reassigned as IT and programmers, robotics technicians, etc. If it was actually done properly.
There’s already like 10 times as many programmers and whatnot then there need to be. Look at how many duplicates apps there are for everything.
More likely they would be booted out as well
The system encourages those people to engage in the arms race for the next killer app to earn boatloads of money and win the game of capitalism. Finding people who are genuinely interested in maintaining the infrastructure that makes any of that possible is the problem.
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Do they eliminate intellectuals? The USSR and China seem to have avoided this. I don’t believe most nations did this other than Cambodia and I will never see that shitshow as socialist.
USSR despised and fought the Intelligentsia, sending them to gulags
They got to the moon using what people exactly?
Do they eliminate intellectuals? The USSR and China seem to have avoided this.
You are fucking kidding, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
And the part where they believe to have any freedoms whatsoever IS realistic? Or the part where they believe to actually be alive and not die in the next famine is realistic?
I see very little realism here…
The Christ was a literal bearded, sandle wearing, hippie that told y’all to go live in communes and protect each other and The Earth, but I guess your omnipotent, omniscient God doesn’t know what he’s taking about.
I love how you just assume that capitalists/socialists are all Christians lol
The fuck do I care what a 2000 year old prophet claimed about an even older warrior god from the middle east?
Im sure that 6000 year old ancient Jewish patriarchs definitely knew the god of the entire universe and it just happened to be the god they selected from their pantheon to be the best god. It’s almost like everyone thinks their god is the biggest god, and none of them have ever proven to exist.
The Christ also is fictional, as is whatever god you’re talking about Were you talking about Apollo, perhaps? Mars? Shiva? Khaless?
In any case, you’re talking about people living in the stone age, dying every day of horrible preventable diseases. Things that were resolved mainly through capitalism, but I guess nobody likes to think about that, can’t admit that “bad thing” can do something positive too, now can we?
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Wasn‘t Marx idea that communism can only exist once industry has been automated to such a degree that an individuals contribution is not mandatory anymore?
We might reach that point of technological advancement. within the next 50 years with the raise of AI. What we make of it is a completely different matter…
Right? Somebody never read Animal Farm.
Sure, the current system is fucked, but it’s tied and proven that Marxism doesn’t work. We need a middle ground.
Animal farm wasn’t specifically about communism, though. The lesson was that any well meaning revolution/societal restructuring will inevitably get hijacked by a smaller group that wants to use it as an opportunity to grab power and seize control. No matter what said group calls themselves, they’re most likely going to end up as the same aristocracy/oligarchy that the revolution fought against.
It’s exactly what happened in the Soviet Union but it’s also potentially what could happen in any other revolution.
Exactly. It’s not an anti-communist book. It was written by a left-libertatian/anarchist, Orwell, who though alongside anarchists and communists in Spain.
Dude literally took up arms for socialism. Reactionaries have no critical thinking and historical analysis skills.
I’m sorry do you think that the point of animal farm is that the animals shouldn’t have revolted in the first place?
That book was written by a socialist.
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Your username is “KillAllPoorPeople” and you’re talking about peoples heads not being screwed on properly. Lol, ok
It’s a joke, calm down.
I mean, it WOULD solve a LOT of problems! And ethics arnt very important to extremists, whether right or left
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Everything you read online is serious and totally not ironic.
Meaning? You think that the world should be communist and then we’d all be happy working in our vegetable garden? I’m responding like that because I get so many facepalmingly stupid responses from people who actually really believe that with communism they would get freedom. I don’t even know how to respond to that, because its so mind bendingly stupid. They complain about all the starvations in capitalist countries.
WHERE!?
I can point to countless famines in communist countries with millions upon millions of deaths. But capitalism? Its currently riddled with problems, yes, we need to do better, tax the shit out of the rich until they are at normal levels… But famines? In a democratic capitalist country? Where?
Its just mind blowing that people can be THIS dumb. Read some frigging history for your own sake.
When you own the means of production it’s literally yours. I don’t understand the issue.
Big difference between communism and socialism.
That’s correct, but I’m not sure what you understand those terms to mean, because neither really supports taking all ownership away from people. I’m just gonna leave this blorb here, because I feel like this is where it fits best.
Communism in the style of Marx and Engels means that the workers own the means of production. They would have been completely in favor of a person owning their own farm (or jointly owning it if multiple people worked it). They didn’t really envision much of a state to interfere, much less own property.
That the Soviet Union (and later the PRC, fuck them btw) claimed to be building the worker’s paradise under communism was mostly propaganda after Lenin died. There hasn’t been any state that has implemented actual communism as established by theory.
Socialism (as I understand it, but I’m not well-read on it) means the state has social support networks, but largely works under capitalist rules, with bans of exploitative practices. There are some countries trying to implement a light version of this across Europe, to varying success (mostly failing where capitalism is left unchecked).
The issue is that the US started propagandizing like mad during the cold war, and “communism” was just catchier to say than “supportive of a country that is really just a state-owned monopoly”. Soon everything that was critical of capitalism also became “communism”, which eventually turned into a label for everything McCarthy labelled “un-american”. This is also the time they started equating the terms communism and socialism. A significant portion of the US population hasn’t moved past that yet, because it fits well into the propaganda of the US being the best country in the world, the American Dream, all that bs. The boogeyman of “the state will take away the stuff you own” turned out pretty effective in a very materialistic society. Although I’m very glad to see more and more USAians get properly educated on the matter and standing up for their rights rather than letting themselves be exploited.
Your definition of socialism is more akin to a definition of social democracy, which is… maybe a form of socialism, depending on who you ask – it is historically contentious and generally accepted that social democrats aren’t socialists.
Socialism can have all of the things that you described, but it is decidedly anti-capitalist. It reorients how workers relate to the means of production. Under capitalism, the means of production are owned by the bourgeois class, while under socialism, they are collectively owned by the workers.
Socialism means the state has social support networks, but largely works under capitalist rules
What you’re describing is “social democracy” — capitalism with safety nets, where production is still controlled by owners rather than workers. “Socialism” explicitly implies worker control of production. “Nordic socialism” could more accurately be called “Nordic social democracy.”
“Communism” refers to a classless, stateless society where everyone has what they need, no one is exploited or coerced, and there are no wars. It’s an aspirational vision for the future, not something you can do right after a revolution when capitalism still rules the world.
Fuck the PRC because… They have state-owned enterprise instead of actual communism? Interesting take.
That’s meaningless if they aren’t democratic
Ah yes, because American democracy is going so well.
Who’s interests are the Republicans representing? Who’s interests have the Democrats protected after being in power for 3 years?
Democracy is meaningless if it doesn’t actually act to benefit the people. After all, the goal of government is to improve the lives of the people over which it governs. All of these experiments into different methods of governance should be evaluated based on how much the quality of lives of the population have improved and how happy the population is with their government.
Yes yes we know America is bad too, now do you have an actual point to make?
You can find a bad example for any form of government. By any reasonable metric of success, the US government is performing poorly compared to non-democratic countries… Even in terms of freedom of speech, given the prevalence of government and intelligence-funded “independent think tanks” that influence policy in Washington.
At least most people in Russia and China can distinguish between the truth and the party line.
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They literally have above 90 percent approval according to international studies from people as conservative as fucking Harvard University.
You’re wrong about their institutions but regardless of what you think of their institutions they have a popular mandate, which is how democracies define themselves as legitimate.
The issue is probably “HahA ComMUnIsM BaD!1!”
*we
*ours
Dude walked right into that one, didn’t they?
we*
Communism is when no toothbrush
The issue of course is that when we reach peak communism we’ll drop possessive language entirely like in The Dispossessed.
I’ll work and teach on the farm we share.
But you can’t own anything in socialism and communism. YOU are owned instead.
It doesn’t sound like you understand these terms.
Under communism, the state owns the resources. People are not the state.
That’s false. There’s no state in communism. See Karl Marx or any Communist writer on this.
Karl Marc is like Marx, but without that dictatorship of the proletariat cope.
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There’s no utopian vision advocated for by Communist philosophers. They talk exactly about how this would come through. So yes, they speak about it as an achievable and feasible thing.
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The idea is that these socioeconomic orders are global. Capitalism today is global. Even if a country today tries to do not-capitalism, it still must engage in the capitalist sphere, doing trade with them, using money system, debt, and producing purely for the purpose of selling. These are aspects of capitalism we stuck with until the global order isn’t capitalism.
So communism would not come about unless it is global. In which case the question of “other countries” would not apply. You can assume that for whatever reason, a breakaway bunch decide to revert back to capitalism, but that would not go well. Why? Why would anyone whose needs are fully met and their entire time is only spent doing things for their own interests and community decide “I actually wish I had to give most my time to a capitalist in exchange for money that allows me to buy my needs”? For one, money wouldn’t exist in communism, so that part would not even appeal you. Capitalism only has the upper hand because it is already the global system. Once it is overthrown, it is the reverse.
Obviously a society will put guards to deal with lunatics wanting to destroy society for ideological reasons (trying to restore capitalism). It would be in their interest to do so.
I hope I answered your question. Unless your question was “how do we prevent resistance during the revolution / transition”?
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Bob: “Guys… if we could get everyone in the whole world working together to efficiently organize labor and the allocation of resources, there would be no more poverty”
Alice: “Wow Bob, that sounds amazing! How do we make that happen?”
Bob: “Uhh… how many bullets do we have?”
There’s no utopian vision advocated for by Communist philosophers. They talk exactly about how this would come through. So yes, they speak about it as an achievable and feasible thing.
And yet it’s been 200 years since the ‘Imminent’ downfall of capitalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_and_claims_for_the_Second_Coming
Same energy
As marx put it, the only way capitalism would survive is by keeping an infinite growth. Tech is a prime example of that phenomena, where new needs are being created out of thin air: subscriptions, software, etc… Cars, phones have begun to be necessary. That’s how capitalism survives still today: growing more and more by creating new needs for the individual. Except this growth is at the expense of finite ressources, and this is where we’re gonna hit a wall.
Maybe this explains we haven’t seen a capitalist collapse yet. But with today’s ecological concerns, it seems closer than ever
This is a pleasant fiction.
You’ve gotta try reading beyond 6th grade level fiction before judging books on socio-economics.
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Myour mistakeYou would be sent to the Gulags in the CCCP for talking like that
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Our* goodness
You’re mistaken, the state is a collection of proletariat meaning you are a part of the state. You may not be the whole state but it is your land as it is everyone elses
Atleast as far as I understand it
Thank you for the correction sharkfucker420
Always happy to help 👍
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I’ve heard same said about liberal democracy too. “State is made up of us voting citizens” etc etc. Feels as hollow
If everyone owns something no one does
How much do you and the average person actually own under capitalism
Did you just watch a Brad Bird movie
I too want a post-scarcity luxury space communism utopia. Unfortunately most iterations of communism feel more like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic than actually plugging the hole in the fuselage.
What if we plugged the holes with the corpses of the workers we had to sacrifice to achieve a hole-free hull?
It’s just human nature in my eyes. Power attracts many people and the less positions of power to fill, the fiercer the competition and the more ruthless the ultimate victor. Communism focusses too much power in too few positions, so ultimately, corrupt people are almost guaranteed to win. Democracy is spreading out that power more. It is still not perfect, corrupt people are still regularly found at the top, but they wield less power individually and they have to do it more in the open.
Communism focusses too much power in too few positions
Literally the opposite of communism
In theory yes, and you are going to say all communist countries were not “real communism” now ? The USSR was known for its ruthless and violent political scenes. Leaders condemning their opponents’ families to discredit them for example. North Korea gives all power to the supreme leader (a communist monarchy lmfao). Communist China is the closest to what you might you believe in but it’s insanely violent in the backstage. The closer you are to higher seats of power, the more in danger you are.
On top of that any individual at the top can effectively enact their preferred policies over everyone. Millions died simply because the supreme leader ordered so.
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Comrade, the ship will not sink if we abuse the workers enough!
The ship is not sinking, the sea level is simply rising to its rightful place
In an orderly manner
…until the central committee decides that more coal miners are required.
You say that like it’s worse than the current capitalist epidemic of giga corporations pushing independent farmers out of the market to the point of leaving them jobless and forced to sell their farm to them for cheap.
But it’s different when a monopoly/oligopoly does it! Surely… The difference here really is that there is no incentive to decide more coal miners are required, whereas our shitty version of capitalism absolutely pushes for companies to fuck over competitors any way possible. It makes it near impossible for small businesses to stand up to established ones with all the resources.
“Fuck over competitors” or “be more competitive”? Competition is an important feature of capitalism that has lead capitalist countries to the highest standards of living in the world.
What kind of competition though? Competing over how little I pay my workers might temporarily boost the standard of living in my own country if I offshore labor, but it seems to turn the standard of living into a ponzi scheme. Where one needs to continually find a cheaper source of labor to maintain the quality of life.
Employers compete for labourers, so they have to raise wages to attract employers in tight labour markets. Offshoring has been going on for decades but it’s slowing down as developing countries are becoming more wealthy (ie: China)
Right now the UAW is going on strike for those higher wages. CEO of Ford says those wages will bankrupt them. Is he telling the truth?
Not to mention that the whole idea behind the Fed raising interest rates and “cooling off the economy” is to raise unemployment, lower employee bargaining power, and therefore keep wages low.
For the good of the many, we decided to sacrifice a few percent each year.
In comes compound interest…
😬
Well someone has to dig the tunnel beneath the reactor core…
Dude why do people think communism means you can’t own anything. There’s a difference between private and personal properties. You can own a house, and a car, hell even a whole farm. What you cannot do is hold capital.
A farm is means of production, therefore it would classify as public property. You cannot own production under communism, only products.
Therefore it could count as a means of production but in general in Communism personal farms of reasonable size and constant use are encouraged. Again, that’s a misunderstanding of communism.
That’s not a feature of communism, it’s a compromise based on the recognition that private ownership produces more efficient outcomes at scale. According to the collective farming wiki: A Soviet article in March 1975 found that 27% of the total value of Soviet agricultural produce was produced by private farms despite the fact that they only consisted of less than 1% of arable land (approximately 20 million acres), making them roughly 40 times more efficient than collective farms.
No one wants to recreate the Great Famine (The most deadly famine in human history - caused entirely by communism and specifically collectivized farms).
There’s also Holomodor in the USSR which lead to similarly deadly outcomes.
Fun fact for you: The famines were largely caused by Stalin appointing a guy to do agriculture policy who knew less than nothing about agriculture. He forced farmers to plant crops too densely because “communist crops will not compete for nutrients” causing the crops to just die. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
Most dictators are absolute troglodytes and Stalin was no exception.
One point in time does not constitute a robust conclusion. Consider any time before and how collectivism did yield considerable agriculture gains for the USSR. Like do we really think they fought WW2 with the same or less agricultural efficiency they had before their revolution?
This.
“A fledgling Nation failed after the most powerful nations on earth collectively conspired to hold it back and ideally topple it so every similar nation most also fail.” And these people were paranoid for some reason, could you imagine?
Y’all just in here doing good work, absolutely wrecking these guys.
Oversimplified for brevity, but basically: You may not be able to OWN a farm in the sense that the land itself is collectivized (not even always true under socialism, depends on specific policies and also whether you consider the “farm” to be a different entity from the land it’s sitting on, in that case you often own the farm itself, just look at home ownership rates in socialist countries), but you can USE and WORK ON the farm to generate products for yourself and society at large. I don’t see it as that different practically from the perspective of the farmer, since they’re still living on the land and taking advantage of its productivity.
I think that’s certainly better than renting or mortgaging the land and having to deal with landlords and banks. Collectivization usually freed farmers from their obligation to their landlord or private bank and they just continued farming as normal. It’s the landlords who had their “livelihood” taken away (i.e. land that they owned but someone else was living and working on), not the farmers doing the actual work.
Perhaps you have a source on the collective farms of the Great Leap Forward years in Communist China, or a URL that points to the collective farms in the Ukraine and how it made the farmers better off?
Once again I will refer to Dessalines’ links.
https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#on-the-ussr – has links about Ukraine
These are bad links because they are from a biased source and not properly cited.
There are no unbiased sources. Zero. Because that’s not how politics or the world works.
Also, I fail to see how they’re badly cited. It’s literally a giant list of links to books, historical records, news articles, and write-ups by other socialists that are also cited.
The sources range wildly, some are just images and links to podcasts or articles. For example the “How many people did the Great Leap Forward kill” link just goes to a Reddit comment on r/communism where the OP just says “it’s fine… there were famines all the time in China!”.
Because in practice the line between capital and personal property is very thin. Can a car or apartment not be used to generate income in a modern economy?
When the soviets were in power they would force multiple families under one roof (kommunalka). Think 4-8 families sharing a kitchen and a bathroom. Each family was given just one room and all housing was considered communal housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment?wprov=sfti1
After Stalin’s death families began receiving single family apartments due to massive housing reform by Kruschev, but were hastily built and called ‘khrushchyoba,’ a cross between Khrushchev’s name and the Russian term for slums. That by the way still leaves a multigenerational period from 1917-1954 where the kommunalka would have been the primary unit of housing.
You can generate money with a car or a farm. The whole problem with capitalism is getting money without working because you let people work with your stuff. So owning a car and use ist as a taxi is fine with communism. Having a taxi company is not. But you can form a taxi company with others. The difference is no one has financial power over others. No one just profits because he/she is the owner. There are people in charge but they are in charge because they have the knowledge and ability not just because they own everything and can do what they want.
Listen, I’m a worker who saved money through my labour. Why should I not get to use my saved labour by deploying it into an investment?
People accuse leftists of idealist thinking but in what fantasy world are you thinking your personal savings from selling your labor is ever going to come close to what would be considered “capital” in the sense being discussed here?
It’s directly deployed in stocks and real estate, what do you mean?
Most capital is “collectively owned” through public corporations, pension funds, etc.
Not most, in the US around 400 individuals own over 50% of wealth. Similar situation in Russia.
You’re right that wealth is concentrated, but I was saying that the assets are collectively owned. For example I am a shareholder of Amazon, a publicly-traded company that Jeff Bezos owns a large stake in. So Amazon is “collectively owned” but each share gets one vote instead of one person.
Where do you think the value for your return on investment comes from? It’s extracted from the labor of workers.
It’s not extracted it’s combined with labour to produce higher output than labour or capital on their own.
For example a worker with a shovel could only dig a small hole a day, but with the injection of capital (ie a backhoe) they can dig many more holes. The worker can increase their pay compared to what they would’ve made with just a shovel and the person that provided the backhoe can also generate a healthy return for their capital contribution.
healthy return
How is it healthy that some rich investor gets to play golf all day because he can afford to buy backhoes and hire people to use them? How is it healthy that he earns more money if he pays them less, or that he alone is in charge of resources that a whole community worked to produce? What is healthy about any of this?
What you are describing is the entire fucking premise of socialism: workers cannot afford the means of production, so production ends up controlled by a handful of wealthy capitalists with perverse incentives and no loyalty to the rest of the human race. An entire tradition of thought is dedicated to how unhealthy that is.
Why should you get money for doing nothing? I think that is a good question. If your investments are earning money, for example because you invested in real estate, then you’ve driven up the price of rent for the rest of us.
But anyway, in reality almost all of the money in the stock market is held by people who are not like you, people who didn’t save their money by working a nine to five for 10 or 20 years.
Nobody is stopping you from leaving your money sitting in a bank account. Nobody is suggesting you shouldn’t save money.
You keep saying “doing nothing” but I earned that money and now I am risking it in investments with uncertain returns.
You work for your money. But the people making the big investments don’t.
If you want to work to earn some money and then save it and then later spend it, great. But you’re not content with that.
Let’s look at a simple example. Suppose you take your savings and you buy a rental property and start renting it out. You’re taking a risk that perhaps property prices will go down, or that maybe you’ll run into a string of 10 bad tenants in a row, and you might lose some money. All the while, you’re sitting there doing absolutely nothing, and probably you’re getting paid for it. But what about your tenants? What’s the risk they’re taking? They could pay rent on time for decades and yet never be able to qualify for a loan to buy property of their own, because people like you have bought up what used to be more widely available. A huge percent of the population is working paycheck to paycheck, and if they have a string of bad luck that lasts more than a month or two then they’re going to end up homeless. Of course their life expectancy will be slashed in a second. In other words, my friend, you’re risking some extra money while they’re risking their lives.
Also, as several of us have pointed out, most investment money is held by the rich so that they can get richer at our expense. Many people would prefer to get rid of that system rather than try and piggyback on it. There are other ways to structure society so that you can retire in comfort.
Hmm, I got a feeling that there is no such thing called “investment” under communism.
Invest in what?
Why are you hoarding wealth?
Like what else would i do with it? Wreck the environment by spending it on things i don’t need?
Maybe don’t charge as much?
😂
How dare you make fiscally responsible investments and expect some return in exchange for the risk you’re taking on by letting others use your stuff. How. Dare. You. /s
Being responsible isn’t an excuse to own other people’s livelihood.
Risk is an idiot’s justification. Anyone who owns a business knows the whole point of a limited liability corporation is it removes any risk in case of failure.
If Walmart went tits up today the Walton’s would still be rich. It’s the workers who bear all the risk.
The worker can walk away at any time to another job, can even change entire industries.
That was a really fascinating read, thanks. Checked out a few of the other links from the wiki. Do you happen to have or know where I can see interior pictures and floorplans?
I’ll try looking it up myself in the meantime; I love stuff of that nature
So when does a farm go from personal to private property? Is it the moment you rent it or employ other people on it?
It’s an oversimplification, but… Sort of, yeah. Property you “own” to keep from others, and make money from owning it.
actual results may vary
Not sure what you mean
Rule of thumb and there are always exceptions, land that you live and work on is usually personal property, land that you own but someone else pays you for the privilege of living and working on is private property.
One of the thousands of nuanced use cases that generalist communist revolutionaries haven’t even thought about let alone have the skills to provide solutions for.
They have a solution, it’s labor camps or bullets to any citizen who doesn’t follow orders.
Wild how even when they were going full-on gulags , their peak imprisonment rate didn’t surpass the United States. And we’ve got plenty of bullets for those that run or resist arrest.
What about it?
I’m ashamed to admit I had no idea, until I stumbled upon this video. https://youtu.be/Krl_CUxW14Y
Tell that to the kulaks
I’ve never understood how this is supposed to be some big own to communism. You’d still refer to it as “my farm,” even as I refer to the community where I live as “my city” and the jobs I’ve worked to benefit some capitalist bozo as “my job.” This is even worse than Ben Shapiro popping out of a well. In many ways, I think I’d feel more ownership as part of a community vs. the facade of “private property.”
This particular thing was actually tried by the Soviets. Farms were considered excesses of kulaks. Kolhos (collective “farm”) was the replacement.
And yes, it was possible to say “my kolhoz” like people say “my city”, good point. Even if “our kolhoz” was a lot more accepted, since it emphasizes how collective it is.
It is also possible to feel personal affinity to collectively owned space.The difference between usually implied individual “my farm” and collective “my farm” is of course in the governance.
Collective ownership may end up being governed by ineffective unaccountable and irresponsible “people representatives”. E.g. deciding that genetics is a capitalist plot, and planting corn everywhere is the solution to all problems (both cases actually happened on a massive scale).
The result is not very different from what ineffective unaccountable and irresponsible large capitalist landowners do.
Both systems disenfranchise the disadvantaged ones, since decisions can practically never be completely unanimous.
So it’s good if you agree with the party line, but if not - violent suppression comes, no teaching on the farm.
That’s where the feeling of “my farm” breaks down. On a private farm you have a lot more options before you are lost.I get the challenges with governance in capitalism-turining-feodalism which we have now in many cases.
But I do not get it why people imagine that full collective ownership is a good and sustainable alternative.None of this is a critique of ideologies like syndicalism and anarcho-communism, so it’s still a pretty ignorant meme that conflates Soviet communism with all forms of communism.
None of this disproves what people like Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman were writing about, whose worldviews do not disenfranchise such groups.
I also heartily disagree with your take about private farms. The options you think you have with “private property” are a scam.
Most early Bolshevik policies were more situational than ideological. The main priorities were to repel threats and industrialize as quickly as possible. They expected to be crushed by industrialized capitalist powers unless they reached parity.
And to refute OP again, the Maoist Revolution lead to a near equal redistribution of land among the peasantry.
It’s my farm too. We all own farm. Back to work comrade.
Da
For those interested, Dessalines’ “what would be X like under communism” is a helpful aggregated of discussions regarding this: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#what-would-x-be-like-under-communism
Arguments about the definitions of Communism or Property aside - yes, my farm. As in, the one I work on. The possessive pronoun, despite the name, sometimes connotes association rather than ownership - I do not own my school, my country, my street or (despite what Republicans might wish) my wife.
It’s always cartoon pfp users the most delusional.
Socialism vs communism be like
No. You’ll probably be assigned a job that’s required to be done for the good of society.
Reminds me of that one twitter thread “what will your job be in the commune” and everyone said the most useless shit like “I have bad anxiety and can’t work but I can bake everyone cookies 😊” and the one guy who chimed in “I have a background as a Carpenter so probably just keep my construction job” got roasted for being a conservative and capitalist in the replies. I’ll try to find it.
Edit: sorry for the redtit link but here’s a good screencap
https://www.reddit.com/r/twittermoment/comments/pi8asy/the_legendary_whats_your_job_on_the_leftist/
Jesus that was a tough read. Absolutely no real work going to be done in these communes lmao
“Making clothes from scraps” 💀💀 even these people know they’re fucked
Oh, that’s brilliant.
Oh my god that is pure gold. Diaper boy holy shi, brilliant.
Seeing as how in most markets you can’t exactly do what you want for a living (or even close), or acquire the skills because they’re behind a steep pay wall, and the only employment you can find is very limited in scope to what the community wants, what’s the difference? Most jobs might as well be issued in the mail.
It blows my mind the people who think, “after the revolution I’m going to be a dog walker and bake dog treats!” When in reality they will probably die in a labor camp.
Maybe not die in a labor camp, but they won’t be doing what they expected to do, or even wanted to do.
If they don’t have any particular skill, they’ll probably end up being crop pickers or some shit because we really need those.
Basically very similar to capitalism, but they would probably have a better quality of life overall.
Hahahahahahahaha omg… you can’t be this ignorant. You’re joking, right?
Just as communism has been proven to fail in the past so is capitalism. It has been warped to something terrible for the common worker. I think this communism thing is just a way for people to vent their frustrations with the current system. Honestly as long as their is a corruptible person in charge no system will work as intended. And unfortunately everyone is corruptible.
