Then everyone has won…?
I’m making the assumption, and I know it’s correct from past experiences, that you have fallen for the capitalist propaganda of basically “there has to be a underclass in order for YOU to have a nice/decent life. If you advocate for making things equal, you advocate for bringing yourself down, essentially.”
I could be an asshole (but correct) and compare this to the same ideology of white supremacists of the past and still today who essentially said “rights for non-whites means you have less rights.” This is basically half of YouTube now days with a mixture between inserting women, LGBTQ people, and non-white people/PoC gaining slightly more political power and white (mostly) cishet dudes crying about some perceived slight against them.
But I won’t do that. [inserting the third world very broadly for one of the aforementioned marginalized groups domestically].
What I will say instead is simply: that assumption is wrong and it’s propaganda told to you in a way to illicit fear, firstly, and secondly to crush whatever humanity exists within you and harden yourself to the fundamental problems of the world, brought on mostly to benefit the first world, and yes that means the poor of the first world as well to a degree.
The easiest way to alleviate any reservations is pretty simple if you understand magnitudes and waste. Magnitudes as far as a hypothetical person making (in USD for simplicity) $1000 a year vs $10000 vs $100000. Ten times factors. Pretty big differences. But when you consider there are humans who acquire wealth 100 times, 1000x, 1000000x (100K x 1M = 100B) purely from doing not laboring but rather shoving numbers around (at best). Does Elon Musk or Bezos labor a million times harder than some guy making $100K a year? What about someone in the third world who may get $10K equivalent a year? Does he work 10 fucking million times harder? It’s absurd on the face of it! What’s my point? Short version: you, possibly $100k guy, are insanely closer to $10k than either of you are, combined, to even low level capitalists but especially the billionaires. This does not justify the existence of millionaires either. And did I mention they don’t fucking labor for their wages? In the US you specifically have capital gains taxes (on stocks and such) and then you have earned income taxes (kinda gives the game away huh?). The names themselves betray the nature of capital gains as unearned income. These people very obviously have high interests in keeping the system the way it is. So they tell you “you like your life? It’s ok huh? Well, if you advocate for mr $10k guy, guess what? Maybe you’ll get it. But you’ll make $50k and so will he.” Conveniently never entering into the equation are those who suck value from society and hoard it for their benefit.
And I’m kinda tired of typing, so, shortly on waste. Think of all the time energy and wealth of nations, drained from their human populations, poured into war, bullshit means tested programs, purposeful waste to keep commodity prices high, the list is essentially infinite. Capitalism is waste. By design. When you have a system centered around increasing profits as to enrich the capitalists then you by necessity will ignore more efficient but less profitable options. I mean the easiest thing I can probably point at in the US is the complete lack of mass transit which is insanely efficient in favor of personal vehicles which is insanely wasteful. One makes auto companies money and one obviously does not. Again, infinite examples of poorly implemented societal solutions. Not having Nationalized healthcare, insanely wasteful. Same for no public housing. You cut allllll this waste, you cut out the capitalists, and I hope you see that there is absolutely no reason everyone on earth can’t live a life of dignity and respect. We already have all the technology we need. We just have to remove the biggest impediment to achieving it… the vampiric class of capitalists.
To add on to this, a quarter of food goes to waste in the world yet almost a billion people can’t afford adequate food. If the world were socialist we wouldn’t cut the world’s food consumption to food those who aren’t fed leaving everyone slightly deficient. We would allocate the surplus food that goes to waste now to make sure everyone has plenty to eat.
I’m making the assumption, and I know it’s correct from past experiences, that you have fallen for the capitalist propaganda of basically “there has to be a underclass in order for YOU to have a nice/decent life. If you advocate for making things equal, you advocate for bringing yourself down, essentially.”
Wow.
Elaborate on what’s wow here
I was dead on right?
Or you didn’t see the quotes?
You think it’s ridiculous?
Wow
What’s that supposed to mean? It was an overgeneralized statement that you were influenced by the spread of the dominant views of capitalist society? Some may get their ideas by interacting with the world and take up intentionally propagated views but you were born with all your ideas?
I have absolute faith that should you put your mind to it, you can figure it out.
my god it's like you walked out of the cast of the fucking newsroom I didn't know you people actually existed
We appreciate good faith questions and engagement at Lemmygrad. If that is why you are here, welcome; we do not want to put you off. However, your question/post/comment includes problematic claims/statements that are not conducive to good faith discussion. The problem might be: anti-communism, historical inaccuracy, revisionism, reactionary talking points, bigotry, liberal propaganda, a loaded question, assuming that we will all agree about what you might think are uncontroversial facts, or something else. If you re-word your question we can have a more productive conversation.
( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning )
We appreciate good faith questions and engagement at Lemmygrad.
No, you don't. You've seen the negative score on my question, right? And the various replies I got attacking me for asking it?
However, your question/post/comment includes problematic claims/statements that are not conducive to good faith discussion.
False. It is a question with no claims in it; the only claim I make not in the original post is that I can be credibly accused of presupposing workers can get rich.
( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning )
Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence. I did not ask for any evidence.
What I did was ask a question alluding to OP seemingly assuming the workers and the rich had to be distinct entities; I questioned what would happen should they be the same. That's it. I think maybe one or two people earnestly tried to answer me; everyone else immediately went on the attack.
People downvoted you because you were interpreted as acting in bad faith as we get a lot of bad faith engagers coming from other instances. I for one never downvoted and hoped you were acting in good faith. I didn’t understand your question but hoped someone would answer you in good faith. Multiple people did and no one attacked you until you repeatedly made vague negative statements without clarifying. Your original question didn’t necessarily seem bad faith, but your subsequent comments have led to it being interpreted as such. You weren’t sealioning, the comment was just a copypasta. However, your short nonspecific comments (“wow” “wiki link”) and then saying “I’m sure you could figure out what I’m saying” instead of explaining are indicative of trolling. I’m still open to good faith discussion, I’m just not sure if you are.
*if
And at this point the answer is basically "who cares cuz it doesn't happen anyway to any meaningful degree"
One is describing capitalism and the other is describing corporate capitalism. This isn't a left or right thing, both are capitalism
Where did you learn that "workers owning means of production" is capitalism? Geniunely curious lol
I am at a loss of words for what you said. The one on the left is the central tenant of Marxism.
A tenant is a person who occupies land or property rented from a landlord.
The core of capitalism is that you own the means of production and what you produce. Corporate/crony capitalism is that you can own things that other people make because you paid them to make it. Under free market capitalism, I don't own the thing until I pay for the thing.
I hire you to make a chair and I'll probably give you some money beforehand to reserve the chair and pay for materials, but the chair isn't mine until you give it to me and I pay
It's almost as if you can't describe an entire economic system in a single sentence accurately. Who knew?
You're on Lemmygrad, we have so many reading lists, they're not there to look pretty but to be used for the information they contain. If you're here in good faith you have no excuse to have absolutely no concept of what these systems of socio-economic relations are.
I'm here by accident, this post keeps getting pushed on me. I'll check out some of the literature and see what it has to say though. If I learn something then thank you in advance
Thank you for responding well once the confusion cleared up. We get a lot of trolls, so please understand that we fight misinformation constantly, and are quick to point it out.
While you can't describe a whole ass mode of production in much detail in a single sentence, the pushback you're getting is because your description is basically the opposite of one of the defining features of capitalism. As another user pointed out, your comments show you do not understand what is meant by "means of production".
you better do some reading before engaging in these discussions, you sound really confused about these concepts. ive never read someone more confused about this.
You don't know what "the means of production" is... like at all.
Do the McDonald's employees own the McDonald's?
You know your “capitalism” will inevitably turn into “corporate capitalism.” If there is a free market and competition then there will be winners and losers and the winners will grow larger while the losers disappear. Eventually there will be so few competitors that monopolies will form which are able to charge monopoly prices while paying workers almost nothing. We define this monopoly version of capitalism as imperialism, but if you describe it as crony capitalism you still can recognize that capitalism will inevitably evolve that way.
If capitalism inevitably becomes imperialism, then wouldn't the evolution of communism into something akin to Soviet Russia also be inevitable? Both are extreme worst case scenarios of a decent idea
I'm of the opinion that overcentralization of power inevitably leads to disaster. The people in New York can't truly understand the issues in Texas any more than the people in Texas can truly understand California's issues and Canada would have an even harder time truly understanding those same issues. The people who are working to fix problems should be close to those problems
The Soviet union allowed for self-governance of regions. The Soviet Union is not an extreme case. That is like saying that the States of the USA deciding to join as a country is an extreme case. Do your reading lad!
Successful socialism has only formed with Marxism Leninism because we understand a state has to be able to defend itself from imperialists. Libya, Bolivia, and others fell because they failed to defend themselves. I don’t see why this is a problem. The USSR and China have achieved vast improvements in quality life and technological advancement all while having collective ownership. The USSR’s degeneration and dissolution are truly tragic, but they can be avoided like China has. Marxists study the mistakes of the past and adopt what works. China realized they could thrive without a strict planned economy and they now have the largest economy, which unlike past largest economies has defeated internal poverty. Are you saying just because mistakes were made it wasn’t even worth it to leave feudalism for socialism?
If capitalism inevitably becomes imperialism, then wouldn't the evolution of communism into something akin to Soviet Russia also be inevitable? Both are extreme worst case scenarios of a decent idea
What are you trying to say here? I think I know what you're trying to say but it's weird that you're narrowing in on the Russian Soviet Republic.
It was kind of a clumsy way of putting it, but I was basically trying to say that you can't just point at one thing and say "this idea always leads here". You can make an educated guess at the general direction if the system is abused, but you can't be certain.
A system needs to be carefully maintained to stay in its best state as long as possible. We haven't invented the perfect system yet, so pretty much everything we have will eventually fall apart. We just need it to last 'til we can make something better
It’s not just making a hasty generalization. Everywhere capitalism has occurred it has evolved into imperialism or the victim of imperialism. Nowhere exists where your ideal capitalism exists. The whole world is either imperialist or industrial capitalist or socialist. How do you expect industrial society to exist with individuals owning their means of production? The only way is collective ownership. The last non-Marxist country that I can think of where everyone owned their own means of production was Libya in Gaddafi’s time, but of course they were invaded by the imperialists and now there are open air slave markets there. It’s funny how every state that meets your definition of capitalism has called themselves socialist in some form or another. Even in early capitalism it wasn’t good. There was slavery and colonialism. Was it only pure in the 1600s? Even then there was colonialism and highly profitable “exploration” and extraction ventures.
