Schmoo @ Schmoo @slrpnk.net

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16

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894

Joined

2 yr. ago

There is no such thing.

The CCP acts like just because the state owns major enterprises then the workers - through the state - own the means of production. That doesn't hold up when the state does not adequately represent the will of the workers. Never is this contradiction more clear than when the Chinese state suppresses workers' attempts to organize on their own terms.

China is communist in the same way that the US is democratic, which is to say that it's a sham to keep up appearances that is suspended when convenient for the few who hold real power.

Hyperindividualism and car culture explains it all. Americans don't trust each other (especially not their neighbors) and want to put as much distance between themselves as possible. We're also mostly NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard) and have very strict zoning laws that prevent commercial and residential buildings from coexisting in the same area. This is great for the auto industry because it means you can't do anything without driving, and they lobby the government to block any attempt to change things.

Our suburbs are liminal spaces that more closely resemble purgatory than actual communities, which is why everyone who grew up in them is at least slightly insane.

This is a small town. We don't call them villages, we call them towns for some reason.

The word village implies community, and we don't do that kinda thing in the states.

The media is compromised. People are organizing but you're not hearing about it for the most part. No one's talking about it on public forums for obvious reasons. You will start hearing about it when things come to a head.

Holy shit you sound like a member of the rich white family from Get Out who were body snatching black people for the "advantages." Living out in the country I usually only see the loud and ugly kind of racism, but your kind of racism gives me the creeps.

This happens to me just because I'm a man with white skin who dresses country. I do love throwing them for a loop when it happens though.

These are extreme times, people are going to hold extreme views. Most people are going to have a problem with those who are anti-extremist to the point that they imply moral equivalence between the extreme left and the extreme right. Yes, violence is generally bad. No, not all violence is equally unjustified.

Take this quiz and see if you can tell the difference between Nazism and Zionism. I bet you can't.

Don't you find it interesting that I only said I was anti-capitalist and you immediately assumed a ton of things about what I believe without bothering to ask? I find it interesting, it reveals a lot about your mindset. Even though you've decided to be overtly hostile towards me for no reason I'll take the time to respond, because I believe you think you're being reasonable.

Hey tankie, I've had conversations with other tankies that believe no business should be making a profit and there is no such thing as a good company.

Profit is just the excess labor value that your employer withholds from you. The problem is not that businesses make money, the problem is that the people who produce the value do not get to decide what to do with it. Instead, the capital owner has the ultimate authority and is able to use it to enrich themselves at the expense of those who did the actual work, with no way to hold them accountable. It doesn't matter if the boss is a "good person" or not because the employer-employee relationship is inherently unequal.

They think a business should provide services for free, while they sit on their ass and collect UBI. UBI is something I support, but if I create a business that aims to help people one way or another with a product or service, I'm not doing it for free.

This is a gross misrepresentation of what socialists believe. Socialists believe that workers should have control over their company. I don't think workers should provide services for free, I think they should be paid their worth and have the freedom to decide what to do with the excess rather than having it taken from them by capital owners. In the current system it is actually the capital owners who sit on their ass and collect welfare in the form of profits.

The reason socialists also advocate for welfare such as UBI is because we believe that the excess labor value should be reinvested into the community to improve everyone's standard of living rather than paying for the boss' 3rd yacht and 5th vacation home.

There are other forms of societal framework and I'm sorry, but Marxist Lenonist communism isn't it. There's a reason communism always devolves into authoritarianism.

I'm not a marxist-leninist, I lean more towards libertarian socialism / anarchism. I do wish you would have made an attempt to find out where I stand on things before starting with the name-calling. I agree that marxist-leninists have authoritarian tendencies, but I believe that results from their belief that power should be centralized under the state to establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat," not from their socialist economics. It is possible (I would actually argue that it's necessary) for power to be decentralized under federated collectives that practice socialist economics. This is sometimes called anarcho-syndicalism, but I believe there's more to it than that.

And we don't need to go back to feudalism, which is primarily what has been throughout history, which you ignore.

The political and economic systems that existed prior to capitalism were far more complex than you're giving them credit for. Feudalism was actually the precursor to capitalism, and was not the dominant political system for most of human history. Before land was stolen by feudal lords, most of it was managed and held in common by small communities. The process by which landlords stole land and began rent-seeking is called the enclosure of the commons.

Again, I cannot recommend enough that you do some reading on anthropology. I'm not asking you to read political theory, but if you don't have an understanding of the many different ways that humans organized themselves in the past it limits your ability to imagine ways that we could organize ourselves in the future.

You can be anti-capitalist without being a "tankie." It seems like your position is driven by your aversion to those you perceive as being to your right and to your left rather than on a consistent ideological framework.

I'm educated enough to know how the world actually works and that things can't be free and other people won't do stuff for free.

This is capitalist realism. Your education has not made you smart enough to see that capitalism is reality, it has made you so set in your constrained worldview that you've become incapable of imagining anything outside of the framework of capitalism. For the majority of time that humans have existed on earth they have organized themselves in a myriad of different ways without the need for private property and exploitation of others. I recommend reading some anthropology, I personally prefer David Graeber.

I would fund community-led projects that align with my values such as:

• mutual aid collectives
• community-run gardens, libraries, and clinics
• labor and tenant unions / cooperatives
• intentional communities
• food pantries / soup kitchens
• parks and other 3rd spaces
• art collectives
• sustainability initiatives (rooftop solar, heat pumps, microgrids, rewilding, permaculture / indigenous farming practices, etc.)
• public multimodal transportation infrastructure

My focus would be on empowering people to help each other even after the money runs out.

Capitalists have always repackaged and sold our liberatory art back to us, that isn't new.

"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." Is a quote paraphrased from a saying attributed to Lenin.

The writers are genuine in their messaging, the corpos just don't care. When someone slips a revolutionary message into the stream of "content," the appropriate thing to do is to consider it, turn off the TV, and act accordingly.

We've been over this before, no point in rehashing it. That you consider Harris to be anything close to a "perfect choice" is enough on its own to tell me you're not reachable.

They're not incompetent, they're complicit. They care more for their career and finances than they do for any cause.

You're defending the establishment dems while they collaborate with fascists by standing in the way of anyone who tries to resist. You're the one ignoring reality, but sure, keep playing dead. That'll really show 'em.

What a profound lack of class consciousness and knowledge of political repression.

All of those people did things that if you saw them today you would be saying the same things about them that you're saying about protestors now.

MLK in particular organized a lot of traffic-blocking protests.

The communities that incubated this were on reddit. His lemmy.world account only made a few comments and posts 2 years ago and then never again. He created an anti-natalist community on lemmy.world in that time but it never became active.

trekkies and other dubious types

Why, I am a dubious type, thank you for noticing. 😘