They weren’t shy about defending “sustainable capitalism.”
C. They are horrible people who are winning based off the current system and don’t care who gets hurt in the process.
I feel very personally attacked right now. Anyway, no ethical consumption under capitalism, right gang?
Gang?
depends how you define success, ive successfully helped over 100 homeless people with various things and tbh im a slacker could really be doing more
It's almost like people hit hardest by the failures of capitalism are more likely to hate it. Who'd have thought?
I've heard a few "you don't have to read theory to be a socialist" takes among the dirtbag left, and honestly I low key disagree. If you understand literally zero things about political economy or history, you'll almost certainly end up supporting some form of liberalism with socialist aesthetics.
I disagree. I think neither capitalism or any other system is really good as one catch all way of running society. I think capitalism has it's place, but only with tight regulation by the citizenry and when socialism is a strong base of the civilization.
It's frustrating to see people who think like this especially when the end results of their beliefs is still just capitalism
It's frustrating, but Marxism/communism are forbidden topics in American culture. This is how I used to think till I realized that socialists were already having the discussions that I wanted to be happening (cause discussions about topics like "wtf are we supposed to do when 80+% of the jobs needed to feed/house/clothe people are automated?" are completely inadequate within the bounds of liberalism ["people will simply find new jobs that they will work at for ~40 hours a week"]). Hopefully this person is on the right track.
We rightly dunk on soc-dems and the like all the time, but we need to remember that many (though probably not a majority) manage to educate themselves over time (Peter Daou has obviously been doing this, for instance), but as they move left, there are people filling in right behind them. Sometimes it appears that succ-dems constantly succ (once again, a ton of them do), but a lot of them only succ temporarily.
It's also because people don't understand that personal property, markets, trading etc. are not necessarily capitalist
Markets make absolutly no sense without privat property and commodity production. Market economies are capitalist economies it's literally the same thing. Markets make only sense if money exists and then obviously the goal of every rational individuum is to maximise profits, increase surplus value production, crush the competition and so on...., because that gives you the most money and money gives you all the things including human labour you can use to make more surplus value (thats capitalism). A socialist economy is an economy were production isn't mediated by markets but already part of a societal plan of prodution and consumption.
I typed out a longer reply, but my point was that markets have existed much longer than capitalism and does not necessarily equate to a market economy.
I used an example of people advising planners whether they wanted saris or tshirts with votes on their personal preferences (up to an predetermined limit based on the appropriate resource use) and said that this was essentially a market in a broad sense.
I would appreciate any insight you have on what better phrasing would be.
Right, it took me several years to understand what socialism and Marxism are and are not. Some things go hand-in-hand (markets and capitalism, wealth redistribution and socialism), but that does not make them the same thing.
wealth redistribution and socialism
Wealth distribution is a socdem thing, it's only a meaningful concept to any significant extent as a band-aid applied to an exploitative system. A socialist/communist economy has a fundamentally different management of resources and production (democratic control, central planning, production-for-use) in the first places; instead of letting commodity production and free-markets have control and using taxation/spending policy to affect outcomes by tweaking parameters and plugging holes.
Yeah I guess it's more accurate to say that under socialism the wealth is already distributed in an equitable manner, so it doesn't need to be redistributed. Nonetheless, most socialists will advocate for redistribution under capitalism unless you're going for the accelerationist angle. That's why I'd say they go hand-in-hand (maybe there's a bit more distance than that), but they are definitely not synonymous, like you said.
Yeah, that was actually my comment they were replying to with that (but don’t tell).
"Bob can slam his head into a spreadsheet 10 hours per day without snapping; guess that means he's the type of person we want running society!"
i intend on just blowing a bunch of money on houses and adopting a ton of kids and giving them their own areas. so in some way i can ensure that things are being treated well by being everyone's mom and they can just keep the maintenance and stuff up on it. then when they get their own families and so on just slowly turn it into a housing commune
When there is no actual outlet for your political imagination or building towards your goals, the "just do a bunch of charity" fantasies creep in.
I know, I have them too. Hopefully someday we'll have built enough of a movement that there's too much to do in that arena to think about a quiet life where I just give what I can away.
I've talked a bit about it on here before, but as cool as guillotines and such are, the path of least resistance (especially in the short term) is to simply buy the bourgeoisie out. The key follow up to that is to decommodify property (especially housing) and key industries (and keep working from there ofc), so that it becomes incredibly difficult to stretch that 5 million bucks into any sort of generational wealth. After a few generations it'd have to be spent and gone.
A violent revolution may be necessary (the threat of one definitely is), but it has a higher potential to lead to right wing radicalization that socialists would have to deal with for decades (if not hundreds of years). Maybe that's the better option, but we aren't in any sort of place to make that sort of decision right now anyway.
Yeah I think you (or someone) posted the Rosa quote last time this came up. It's good that she emphasizes that buying out the bourgeoisie is not a revolutionary act in itself. Hopefully I implied that in my comment, but whateva
"fuck the bourgeoisie" i say as i start my own business
starting a business isnt inherently exploitative. they could be sole proprietorships or coops
the "i own property" bit is evidence that this is probably not gonna be either of those lol
yeah 'property' as a word is sus, why not just say business or a house
Well they could be using the word in a left-wing sort of way, referring to having a house or something.
Yeah, this particular business will not be either of those. People asked and they clarified that it will basically just be a run of the mill business that doesn’t underpay its employees as much as it could. And to my astonishment and dismay, the reception was still generally positive. I even saw one “congrats, comrade.” Uggh, fuck off.
Whats the problem? Engels was a factory owner no? It doesnt matter what class you are but the class whose interests you are fighting for
Yeah but they're out there in Reddit saying contradictory things, they're saying it's cool and good to be successful in the capitalist sense of starting a business and owning labor, but also condemning the bourgeoisie. They would be in the clear if they weren't painting it as a good thing that they own a business.
Maybe they don't, I read the comment negatively because of how it's presented here. I just have a heavy inclination to believe that this person does not include themselves in the bourgeoisie if they are so willing to go ahead and condemn it.
Tbf if the couple are the only employees it isnt exploitative
yeah but they're on reddit do u think that they understand that wage labor is exploitative
it turns out they do talk about it, reddit as a website is just designed to silence their voices
