- cross-posted to:
- flippanarchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- flippanarchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36828107
ID: WookieeMark @EvilGenXer posted:
"OK so look, Capitalism is right wing.
Period.
If you are pro-capitalism, you are Right Wing.
There is no pro-capitalist Left. That’s a polite fiction in the US that no one can afford any longer as the ecosystem is actually collapsing around us."
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The down votes just mean it needed saying
“People saying I am wrong prove I’m right!”
When the topic is “people are overwhelmingly misinformed on this specific issue”, then yeah basically that’s how it goes.
If I made a meme about how too many people associate vaccines with autism or whatever, and I got a bunch of comments from anti-vaxxers saying just that, then yeah I think the comments would provide additional evidence, yeah.
I’d say the downvotes are because it’s so obvious it’s not even fiction
That’s the Overton Window I’m talkin’ about
Yes it is right wing… Obviously? Any other big news?
This is controversial and possiblt world-shattering to many who exist entirely within the American political bubble.
Well I’m from Germany
Some of the works of your greatest national authors are still fairly unknown here even after 150ish years
To be fair so are a lot of american works.
Seems almost intentional.
(Michael Perenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)
This isn’t changing people’s minds about crapitalism. Amerikkkans will keep calling liberals, “the left,” and liberals will keep loving crapitalism. This only shows how right wing Amerikkka is as a country. Liberals would much rather be forced to identify as right wing than as anti-crapitalist. These distinctions only bother the keft as we get conflated with liberals constantly. Nobody else gives a shit.
The number of defensive whining from libs in the replies to the OP beg to differ lol, they clearly very much do give a shit. So you keep slapping them in the face with reality until they can’t hide from it anymore, and they have to make a choice, pick a side, and be comfortable with their own decision, and the consequences it brings (including *shock horror*, being called what they choose to be - right wingers and fascism enablers, meanwhile the rest of us have the consequences of said fascism to face).
Leftists coddling liberal feeling is just as productive (E: to progress) as liberals coddling fascist feelings, that is to say - it isn’t, at all. We’re long past the point of prioritising privileged feelings over marginalised lives.
How will communism fix anything? I have never seen addressed the fact that psychopaths want to rule
I have never seen addressed…
Because you’ve never actually looked in good faith and without your glaring bias.
? Great answer? Nickyoung.gif
My glaring bias against authoritarians? Lmao
A lot of ink gets spilled around this kind of bullshit, when most of communism is focused more directly around anti-capitalism and economic theory.
Effectively, the preventative mechanism against authoritarianism is just democracy, but extended towards parts of the economy which, under capitalism, are conventionally privatized, and thus, are kind of ruled in an authoritarian, “meritocratic” manner. Then this authoritarian capitalism infiltrates and rules the public, democratic portions of society, as we’ve literally just seen right now with the kind of, explicitly corporate-backed trump administration. I mean, as we’ve been seeing for maybe the last 80 or so years, right, in a slow ramp up. Which isn’t to say the US really had much of a democracy to begin with, it was sort of, designed from the inception to be more of an kind of joint-corporate state ruled by landowners, so in a roundabout way we are actually making america just as it was at inception. You could maybe contrast this situation of authoritarian capitalism with co-operative corporations, which sort of exist at various levels of democratic ownership, and exist to mixed success in a capitalist market context. Or union activity, maybe.
More specifically and directly to answer your question, you’d probably wanna use a Condorcet method, I’m partial to the Schulze method, and you’d maybe wanna set up certain factions of the economy to be voted on by those with domain-specific knowledge so as to not be overly politicized, weaponized, or met with undue interference by other portions of society. You want your railroad guys to be in control of the railroads, basically, rather than having to frame everything for the perhaps relatively uninformed general public. You want to avoid just using the public as a kind of rubber stamp where their approval of your program is contingent on how well you’ve phrased your proposal, because it just sort of meaninglessly increases costs for no reason. You want engagement to be legitimate rather than taken advantage of by cynical forces. Hopefully, by breaking up these specific sections of society, and giving them agency over their specific domain and nothing else, you can prevent a massive overly centralized and thus more authoritarian hierarchy from arising.
The other criticisms, say, of democracy itself, socialism doesn’t quite do as well with. Say, with majoritarian rule slowly shrinking over time, or, the lines and borders that you draw up around particular domains creating a kind of insular and exclusive self-interest of a given class. Which conflicts explicitly with the previous idea, right, of splitting the economy into more and more factions so you can have each of them operate in their domain more efficiently. These would sort of be, more anarchist criticisms of socialism. Communism is sort of, depending on who you ask, some theoretical end state of all this which puts all of these questions out of mind, where everything is as flat as possible.
Realistically, these all tend to be kind of overblown as criticisms anyways, and the much bigger problems stem from the real world circumstances of trying to establish a communist state in a global capitalist hegemony, which is an inherently isolating, hostile, and cruel context. It’s hard to do effective democracy in such a context, for the same reason that it’s hard to have democracy on a pirate ship when you’re getting shot full of holes, while, in other times, the ship would actually be ruled democratically.
it doesn’t. Communism hasn’t even had a good white paper written about it. Just some random eastern european schizo writing about the rich people or whatever.
man i love satire, satire is my favorite.
Calling liberals and progressives pro-capitalist is less true than calling self-proclaimed leftists tankies.
The tankies are the ones making shit up and painting liberals as the bad guys and the tankie movement will remain a joke for as long as that continues.
At least libertarians had the balls to go try libertarianism, sure it results in bears but tankies will never try because it’s a victim mentality.
This is the dumbest shit I have ever read. My brain hurts and I almost feel bad for you, but that would require way more emotional labor than this reply is worth. I would honestly be fine with it if tankies would purge the liberals.
I would honestly be fine with it if tankies would purge the liberals.
Thank you for proving my point. Liberals aren’t trying to purge anyone. Seems like the main distinction between them and every other ideology.
The anti liberal stuff seems the same kinda brainrot trumpers have. Or as i like to call it The Dead Brain Sickness
capitalism is right wing, correct.
but not all pro-capitalists are capitalists.
a pro-capitalist could be right wing, or they could be a victim of the powerful capitalist propaganda machine. this is how we get “bootlickers” and “temporarily embarrassed billionaires.”
more generally, OOP commits the sin of trying to wedge a specific category with economic meaning into a broad unspecific category which can have various economic manifestations depending on who you ask and at what time.
it’s an okay post. not particularly insightful and could use some workshopping.
object oriented programming <3
Acting as if the terms left and right aren’t completely arbitrary.
I was told it was because of the French revolution. Imho, I think the terms are mostly rigid concepts.
They aren’t. Right wing is oriented to tradition and hierarchy while left wing is oriented to progress and equality. This has been understood since the concept originated during the French Revolution.
So that’d place capitalism, oligarchy and democracy left for the most of the globe?
I can’t see how the left wing being oriented to progress and equality would mean that capitalism and oligarchy would fit that. Could you explain your thinking?
Capitalism and oligarchy would be a shitton of progress for religious autocracies, covert monarchies, unapologetic monarchies and dictatorships. Those dozens of counterexamples countries for which they’d mean a regress are statistical outliers and shouldn’t be counted.
Sure, I’ll agree with that. Liberalism, despite being fundamentally right wing, is definitely not the furthest right economic system or social philosophy. The only thing about it is that many of those countries existing in that state (or were made into countries at all) exist in the context of global white supremacist capitalist hegemony (AKA “The West” or “The Global North”) and would not exist in their current forms without the West installing figureheads and funding conflicts to loot their natural resources, so I would argue that many of these neo-colonies are still capitalist without any of the benefits of hosting the capitalists.
For example, whatever government existed in India under the British Mandate, they existed in a Capitalist system which exclusively benefitted the British. Millions died of famine not because of India, but because of Britain.
Many, but not all. There are authoritarian states and dictatorships on both ends of the colonialism export/import spectrum, small and large. But yeah, for a while “The West” has been… expansive.
This thread is exactly why leftist unity communities need to make it clear to liberals that they aren’t leftist.
Because otherwise you end up with what you see in these comments: a bunch of people in your “movement” who are completely willing to acquiesce to Capital
Let’s wittle down our coalition until it’s the size of the student communist group from disco elysium
Removed by mod
You could also be called a biologist. Capital is the equivalent of teeth and claws.
LEFT…LEFT…LEFT, RIGHT 'O LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT…
Greed is really the problem. Capitalism is just another apparatus without the means to solve it.
I’d say that Capitalism encourages greed and amplify it.
I think this is not really true. Capitalism means that even if you are not greedy you are forced to destroy all rivals and collect all capital for yourself… otherwise you will be destroyed.
yeah uh, that’s why we invented government homie.
So what? You don’t like the voluntary exchange of goods and services? Trade = capitalism. Furthermore you’d rather trust the government than the average individual? Yeah I get the desire for socialized medical care and welfare. Whatever. But even countries with socialized public services have private sectors. So let’s get more fundamental.
Capital = having money. Capitalism = engaging in trade, that is exchanging one asset or services for another for mutual benefit. Fascism != Capitalism. Government != Fascism Fascism = government + capitalism. More specifically there are certain hallmarks of fascism that sadly are showing up in western society. But capitalism alone does not equate to that. You don’t get an authoritarian regime by engaging in trade. You need to pass laws in order to get that. You wouldn’t even have corporations without government support.
So again I’m hesitant to throw in with the pro government movement when half of this whole fascism/corporate problem is government. I mean I’m against the whole monopoly on violence to begin with but saying voluntary interaction is bad but violence is good seems rather counterintuitive to me. You don’t need government to decentralize things or return the means of production to the people or whatever but still such things should be voluntary. That’s why open source is so revolutionary. It’s essentially a gift economy and doesn’t use transactions or violence. People give their time and labor away and everyone benefits. Code ensures transparency and decentralized distribution. Furthermore without patents and copyright from the private sector we wouldn’t have copy left and open source software. Just some food for thought there.
Capitalism is not defined by free trade. Capitalism is defined by the ownership of the means of production. Capitalism is a system in which Capitalists, or investors, own the means of production while they purchase labor from workers to operate the means of production on their behalf. Socialism is a system in which the workers themselves own the means of production. Free trade may exist in either system.
Uh no. Where are you getting these definitions?
The workers are private individuals, they own property privately. So even if they are part of a cooperative and each own a share of the company and all vote on its direction for example that’s still capitalism. The means of production is still privately owned.
Socialism is defined as a society with social ownership. You can do this a couple different ways. You can use the GPL model and licence something free for everyone. You can do what Canada has done with its water and other crown assets and declare they belong to everyone (which is why Nestle is trying to exploit it and American Nestle food products are going to go up in price thanks to terrifs). You can tax everyone and redistribute the assets in services and public works (but this requires a monopoly on violence). Or your culture can simply declare some or many things just can’t be owned. But the more collective ownership you have the more risk you run of dictatorship. No communist country has managed to pull off its classless ideal. In fact the closest examples I can think of are the First Nations with their various models of living in harmony with nature and not taking ownership of it in the first place. How can you own land if you constantly move around, let alone owning land in absentia. In fact I think Equador outlawed owning land in absentia outright so the concept isn’t that radical. But my point is social ownership isn’t just grabbing the means of production. A worker IS a capitalist. A business owner is a capitalist. A self employed independent contractor is a capitalist. Capitalism is not limited to big corporations and fat cats earning million dollar paycheques. Socializing ownership doesn’t negate that.
When does one stop being a “worker” and start being a “capitalist”? When they start their own business? When they make more than $15/hr? When they hire their first employee? When they bring in more than poverty wages? When they earn $10k a month? 50k? 500k? 1M? When does an individual trading goods and services become a “capitalist”? When do these “capitalists” seize the means of production if not through trade? And how would you propose to decentralize said means of production without violence save by through trade and innovation once more?
In short how would you propose to achieve decentralized ownership without the use of a monopoly on violence?
This is not a difference of opinion, it’s a difference of the commonly understood meaning of words.
Very straightforwardly from the Encyclopedia Britannica website:
Capitalism is a widely adopted economic system in which there is private ownership of the means of production. Modern capitalist systems usually include a market-oriented economy, in which the production and pricing of goods, as well as the income of individuals, are dictated to a greater extent by market forces resulting from interactions between private businesses and individuals than by central planning undertaken by a government or local institution. Capitalism is built on the concepts of private property, profit motive, and market competition.
As for Socialism:
System of social organization in which private property and the distribution of income are subject to social control; also, the political movements aimed at putting that system into practice. Because “social control” may be interpreted in widely diverging ways, socialism ranges from statist to libertarian, from Marxist to liberal.
Uh no. Where are you getting these definitions?
From actual political theory and not Rothbard-esque ancap bullshit
Disagree, but I propose this: the universe is infinite, maybe then we should just have a planet where the socioeconomic system is capitalist, and another one where the socioeconomic system is communist/marxist. I don’t care about winning or being right. I want to live freely, and I want that for others as well.
Better nations on Earth already use what’s known as the Nordic model to help offset the adverse effects of capitalism. Cue (and queue) people who’ll say that “that only works because the ‘imperialists’ exploit the global south”. So again, let’s just make it easier for people who don’t want to live in a world like that.
Have you considered politics rooted in reality rather than a star trek writer model?
The Nordic model, but authoritarian people only care about winning, not solutions.
Edit lol @ downvoters constantly butthurt that their Marxist pov is challenged
I mean it seems like you know my criticism of the nordic model, but hand wave it by saying we would simply make an off world without that bit. I’m not really convinced.
Because I think the people who criticize the nordic model are simply biased towards achieving an outcome where the workers seize the means of production. That’s why, to them, anything else is wrong, or simply an untenable solution. I am saying that their point of view is not only incorrect, but also lacks insight outside of their own way of thinking.
Considering the criticism of the system was more rooted in the reality of past and neo colonialism, do you have a defense of it beyond its critics are biased?
