You must log in or register to comment.
I had this experience growing up. People in the US kept telling me communism was bad without ever substantiating why. It just is!
“Communism has killed trillions of people!”
Meanwhile… in an American tent city or under your nearest American freeway…
A famous alt-right politician in Brazil was in a podcast once and said the quiet part out loud. He’s one of the main “next generation right wing” representatives and he said, live:
“… you know we are lucky the average Brazilian is too dumb, if they started reading and thinking they’d vote for the left, God blessed us with this idiocy”
His voters couldn’t parse this sentence and understand what he is saying.
Yeah cuz right-wingers are uneducated savages
Tankies bad
Commernism is when John Lennon starved A bazillion people and you have no freedom!
Capitalism is when tiddies burger truck football!
You forgot beer, hell yeah
It’s like you were present at every one of my conversations.
TBF there’s not a lot of anti-commie music, but there is a lot of anti capitalist music. If you ignore the pro capitalist music we’ve at least kinda got the music.
Because the right is completely devoid of creativity
A system is just a system.
It’s the people enforcing it and shaping it that make it a positive or a negative.
Only to a degree. A terrible system like chattel slavery or fascism is always going to be terrible. Likewise, the wealth inequalities that capitalism creates will likely regress a country into an Oligarchy if given enough time.
Communism isn’t bad. Socialism isn’t bad. Capitalism isn’t bad. It’s what humans do with them that is bad. Don’t be a greedy dick and they would all work fine.
Capitalism is definitely real fucking bad.
Capitalism isn’t bad. It’s what humans do with them that is bad. Don’t be a greedy dick and they would all work fine.
Capitalism demands greed and infinite growth in a finite and resource-limited world. It’s inherently contradictory, regardless of your ethics.
They’re all just finely tuned creations from whoever is in charge. They can be all of those things, or none of them.
In the end, it’s been oligarchs everywhere, so far.
Man is it refreshing to read some good takes on this. Spot on rumba.
Any ideal stretched to ‘black and white’ is going to go badly, just differing on what startegies the ‘winners’ must employ to game the system.
To the ‘infinite growth’, that’s actually possible, because we define ‘growth’ with this currency abstraction and with a whiff of inflation, the numbers can grow without end, satisfiying the “must do better than last year” itch while being able to stay level or even ertract in practical terms.
Yup. Type B personality disorders will ruin any economic system you can think of.
Yay, fuck minorities. Am I right?
Socialism is democracy expanded to the economy. And I hope we can all agree that democracy is better than feudalism / oligarchy. The unchecked power disparities that capitalism creates betray every ideal that democracy stands for
We don’t really have ‘pure’ socialisim and we don’t also have ‘pure’ capitalism, which is for the best really.
Capitalism cannot model societies needs. Collective risks and fundamental human needs in the moment are areas that socialism is a decent starting philosophy.
The things that societies ‘want’ is often better done with capitalism. Entertainment, luxuries, some sorts of technological advancements.
Key thing is to apply nuance to get the best out of whatever system we choose to game ourselves with.
Capitalism doesn’t create disparities, people are making those choices. They don’t have to and many don’t. The problem is some do and those individuals who do would make any type of society have tough issues to solve.
Capitalism doesn’t create disparities, people are making those choices
Wealth naturally accumulates under capitalism. If I own your house, and every month you pay me 1500 dollars, and we both work normal jobs, I will always have more money than you at the end of the month, which I can put towards using that money to make more money; acquiring a greater portion of the wealth created by your labor, say by buying shares in the company you work for or buying more properties so I can raise rent across the board. Now could society as a whole choose to not buy and sell capital? I guess, but then you wouldn’t have capitalism.
You’re pretending that humans are 100% rational actors and not animals who react to our emotions most of the time. Capitalism incentivizes greed and wealth hording. Of course capitalism is bad and leads to people making bad decisions.
People would suddenly stop wanting extra in a pure socialist society? Ending millions of years of ingrained tendencies? Of course they wouldn’t. Some would find a way to take over or take advantage. It’s why we can’t have nice things…I mean it’s why we can’t all have a nice thing.
At least socialism doesn’t inherently reward such behavior like capitalism does. Like, isn’t that a good first step? Stop incentivizing sociopathy?
I agree it’s a great step but I am not sure humans can do it. A few select humans who choose to live that way like a commune maybe but a society like that for everyone I don’t know. I don’t have that much faith in humanity…especially at the moment.
Humans definitely can’t do it if we insist on a system that rewards greed.
"“Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.”
It’s a pithy quote that doesn’t mean anything.
Don’t be a greedy dick
Sure thing… it’s not like capitalism is fundamentally designed to empower the pathologically greedy or anything, eh?
No i get their point.
Unchecked capitalism evolves into evil. But capitalism itself just a concept. Concepts are not evil.
It might be possible to transfer the dynamics to something that isn’t the economy, my favorite example is “as a game mechanic” or “as a sexual fetish” the big one is that all participants/players consent to it and have the right to stop and retract consent without losing the means to live and survive.
I can argue the same thing with consensual (Mussolini) fascism, which arguably already has an ethical expression within master/slave bdsm role play.
I hate the “unchecked capitalism is bad” bullshit. It’s such a cop out.
It is inherently bad.
sigh
I mean you only just entered the conversation i recon.
I have spend rather a lot of time today to clarify the philosophical reasoning that in reality “inherent evil” does not exist and borders on religious dogma. Evil is emergent of how people use/act/express and not the tool/systems themselves, which could have undiscovered ethical uses.
You can look trough my comments history if you want. I mainly learned not to debate philosophy in a popular meme community, even if I believe its important and relevant to anarchism.
Lol! “Unchecked capitalism,” you say?
Do tell, genius… who is supposed to do the “checking” in a society enslaved by the capitalist mode of production?
In a society enslaved by a capitalist mode of production there clearly does not exist any checked capitalism. No chance even.
My best bet is some undiscovered more enlightened aliens. Just because we don’t have it does not mean it can’t exist. Or if you want me to repeat the example from my tiresom discussion below. The gamemakers who try to sell a story with it, the scientists who try to simulate it to explore the concept academically.
For the record i do not desire or am trying to create “ethical capitalism” so i dont care about who would need to check it. I fucking hate it for all the harm humans have committed trough wrongful expression of it.
But if some day some humans do find a way to incorporate the capitalt concept in some harmless way i will neither be suprised nor call for purging that entire community. Which is what i am getting the feeling some people would do. The devil isn’t real.
Bro, read some theory. This is borderline stream of consciousness.
That may actually just be how talk. I do read theory and its somewhere in here but it doesn’t replace my actual thoughts. A problem i have with theory (inspirational as it is) is its rather old and limiting.
Old is fine. I started with the Communist Manifesto like most people. But Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin is “required” reading now.
If you hate reading old stuff that much https://mander.xyz/post/38822770 join the dbzer0 reading group.
Concepts are not evil.
Bigotry is a concept. Evil itself is a concept.
It is believed that bigotry was beneficial in very primitive humanoids: If you don’t know germ theory (or any biology tbh), bigotry helps against spread of diseases (while it might lead to incest… so you gotta balance it!)
Your immune system shows signs of heavy bigotry.
Evil is a category. Lion’s survival is “evil” to a gazelle while it is “good” to its offsprings.
Look at this guy defending bigotry.
How can I make my text better so you see that I’m trying to show that concepts themselves are not evil and only how you use those concepts make them evil to some subset of living beings?
I thought making fun of incest was enough.
We see what you’re trying to do, you’re just failing to convince anyone. There are some objectively bad concepts.
How can I make my text better so you see that I’m trying to show that concepts themselves are not evil and only how you use those concepts make them evil to some subset of living beings?
Your comment sounded like a defense of eugenics, dude.
Bigotry and general evil as attributes of the bad guy in a tabletop rpg where such settings was communicated beforehand and your right to opt out at any point respected by all players and the dm.
If people do not express a concept in a way that harms people and overrules there consent then there is no harm at all.
Again in bdsm there even exists roleplay of force/rape. But with safewords to indicate real consent the expression of rape becomes harmless play. (I dont understand this btw but i a wont kinkshame and its an interesting social case)
One of my biggest gripes with capitalism (besides that i simply dislike the profit win game) is that it no longer appears optional, to provide for myself and my family i have to partake in it. My consent is overruled without option to not play the game and still survive in health.
I’m sure you consider bigotry and evil just fine in all contexts just like you do the worst of capitalism.
What the F hell, absolutely not! The current dystopia is literally killing me.
I am a genderfluid autist, you think i am ok living in this world that has been harmfull to me non stop?
I just also a philosopher and like to know how reality works and what i discovered is that “evil” is an emergent concept from how humans express themselves in ways that overruled others consent. From being forced to listen to insults by the boss to physical assault.
You could not have judged me more wrong friend(?).
Not op that you replied to, but i find it funny to read your comments. I distinctly remember as a kid that i was playing with lego and i then realised that things like “justice” and “evil” are just in the eye of the beholder.
The good guy wanted to “protect his people and slay evil” (very hero-ist of the king lol) while the bad guy wanted to “have justice for being exiled and have better living conditions”. I realised they were both, essentially, the same thing. Both involved evil acts ( killing and fighting ).So reading this chain of comments reminded me of that memory, and how true it is, at its core.
When we add factors like humans and power things gets vastly more complicated, but the core is the same.
Just like how current AI at its core, is interesting and super cool, but its been twisted and turned into something terrible because of humans, power and moneyThe current dystopia is literally killing me.
Dystopia exists in cyberpunk fiction, therefore it is harmless and you’re fine.
There’s nothing morally wrong with being greedy by itself. If someone does a good thing for selfish reasons, that’s still a good thing. If I decide to become a doctor because I selfishly want respect, admiration, and social or monetary capital, the world is still better off for me doing so. Sick people will get better.
Greed only becomes bad when you empower people to use violence to keep themselves on top. Most often it is the threat of state violence that forces people into situations where abuse occurs.
No, you can’t disassociate from my factory because I own the patent (says the state), I own the land (says the state), and I own the distribution liscences, (says the state). If you violate my state given rights, the police will come and beat you. I can abuse you, and you can’t leave because the state will punish you if you do. It’s against the principals of the free market.
There’s nothing morally wrong with being greedy by itself.
Says who?
It’s against the principals of the free market.
What other mythical things do you believe in, liberal?
The tooth fairy, perhaps?
Self interest is a massive part of the open-source movement which is inherently anti-capitalist.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/self-interest.en.html
https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6540-the-selfish-contributor-revisited/
Self interest isn’t greed.
For example, philanthropy is usually done entirely in self interest.
Read about mutual aid. “Survival of the fittest” isn’t the only mode of evolution, even in other animals/organisms in nature.
Right, but greed is just the term for self-interest that is harmful to others. My point was that the “non-harmful” greed that knitwitt was talking about is the same constructive self interest that drives society in both capitalist and socialist systems.
And you are conflating self-interest with greed because… ?
Do you genuinely not understand the point that @[email protected] and I are making, or are you just wasting everyone’s time Charlie Kirking?
Again - you are conflating self-interest with greed because… ?
Emotions are inherently amoral. You clearly have an excess of them.
Do you take issue with the definition of the term free market or are you trying to imply that a system where private entities engage in trade largely without government regulation doesn’t exist?
Come liberal, don’t be shy… tell me all the magical thinking you engage in on a regular business.
I’m willing to bet the ridiculous idea of a (so-called) “free market” isn’t even the worst one you’ve swallowed.
Cringe.
Are you a flat earther, perhaps?
Howzabout “chemtrails?” You get panic attacks every time an aircraft flies over at high altitude?
Every system of government is designed to empower the shitheads who came up with it.
Marxism is explicitly not designed that way. Like it’s the entire fucking point.
And yes, I’m aware of how attempts at Marxism have gone.
There are always fools who can be tricked into thinking the new group of tyrants will be different but the results speak for themselves, and much analysis has pointed out the factors in Marx’s ideas that led to these outcomes.
So I stand by my statement.
What do the pathologically greedy do in a socialist or communist system? They find a way to gain power except they have almost no competition.
They find a way to gain power
And where’s your proof?
All of history.
I didn’t need to do research because i already knew about these successful societies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Family
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Autonomous_Administration_of_North_and_East_Syria
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Oaks_Community,_Virginia
My guess is you where trying to refere to the ridiculous attempts by the soviet union which to my understanding where designed to fail to set an example. (Look it up)
The core issue is that a nation has a centralized government that is always opposes to disbanding itself. Lenins vanguard party was a fascist takeover of marxist decentralized principles. (look it up)
You didn’t list any socialist societies. The first is a group of people who go camping annually together then go back to their real lives(in a capitalist society). Second is an authoritarian society which bans independent media and the third is another group where you vacation in this society until you get tired of it and just leave to your real life so that another can join(they also ban media).
Unless banning types of media is ok now for socialist societies?
None of them are an actual socialist nation. I wouldn’t be thinking of the Soviets, no. There was nothing socialist about them other than an initial. I wasn’t hinking of any in particular because there are not any. I wish there were and I hope for one but there isn’t one yet.
I have no contacts within the latest two but there are absolutely people in the rainbow family who live like that all year round with their entire family.
They are nomadic, have no homeland. There is no leadership, no scarcity (they often have leftovers they don’t know what to do with) its pure anarchistic communism.
Also dont trust to much from what you see online, these communities are aware bad actors and governments dislike them. You need to be invited for actual whereabouts.
This may be a possible reason why the syrian group may democratically ellect against media presence. What i found most interesting about them is that its one of the first Islamic communities i heard of that explicitly calls for equal gender rights.
Which parts of history, exactly?
The parts where legitimate attempts at a socialist society has been attempted anywhere in the world…of which all failed for human dickish reasons.
How did the anarchist collectives “[fail] for human dickish reasons”? Is outside pressure from fascists a problem inherent to socialism?
legitimate attempts at a socialist society
And where would those be?
Just downvote the sea lion and move on.
Mmm capitalism is definitely bad.
Capitalism fosters/rewards the bad.
Socialism/Communism rewards corruption.
No? Socialism literally removes incentives to be corrupt. Why would you accept a bribe f.ex if your needs are covered and money is either gone or no longer useful to hoard? That’s not to say that any sort of socialist society would be free of all bad actors, but there’s less reason and less ways to abuse socialism because that’s sort of the point. The goal of socialism is to remove abusable systems via more democratically and collectively controlled ones.
And in fact, in communism, acts of corruption would stick out more and can be responded to easier.
The main conflict is the inability to maintain constant awareness and involvement in all aspects. It’s so prevalent, it has been easily weaponized.
People can’t care about everything equally. We have bias and we will act in service of that bias whether we realize it or not. And it is why an egalitarian society cannot last long. What you care about and what i care about will unavoidably come into a conflict harsh enough or enough times that resentment becomes the only answer. And that is enough for any few bad actors to steer an unwitting populace into a downward spiral towards decay.
Right now i think it doesn’t matter as much the form of government because people need an incentive to care. Having their needs met means it’s not something to care about and so won’t care about it. People care when they don’t have their needs met. The point is getting them to act on it.
Get the people to act and it won’t matter which government exists because there is no government without the people to govern.
Having their needs met means it’s not something to care about and so won’t care about it.
A big part of why the US is struggling so much is people don’t have the time and energy to care because they are too busy working.
Protests and riots also either happen either because A: people have time to do them, or B: people have time to do them because working no longer provides enough money to live off of.
You are right however that misinformation isn’t being countered and that any would be free society would need to work on ways to help people see through such things, and to not allow misinfo to be freely spread the way it is now. It’s another core part of the problems we face now, but it’s made worse by people literally not having the time to get involved in any way with politics, and with news being motivated purely by profits. Writing good articles isn’t profitable anymore, but eye-catching headlines is, regardless of how true they are. If you are concerned about the quality of information today you should also be concerned about news being profit driven.
Removed by mod
Within a system where you can hoard wealth and property. You can’t under socialism. Really the big problem is wealth inequality. The less inequality there is the less corruption there is too.
How do you stop someone from hoarding wealth?
Land ownership is the way it is because someone with a polity stick decided that they had the exclusive right to parcel it out at their discretion, despite the fact that all humans are born into the earth with an equal claim to it. The method in which land is distributed is not a feature of either capitalism or socialism, but a matter independent to both.
The truth is the opposite. A concentration of small government power is an incentive for those who seek power(as these types of humans will always exist). Processes are inefficient and slow incentivizing bribes(greed will always exist). A lack of incentive to innovate promotes stagnation and complacency(lazy acceptance of an internal takover).
A concentration of small government power
You aren’t describing what socialism is as you have no idea what it is.
Processes are inefficient and slow incentivizing bribes(greed will always exist).
You keep bringing up greed. Capitalism doesn’t account for greed, it is built on it. It doesn’t stop greed from being abused, instead it rewards greed by allowing the few to hoard property and wealth which leads to those few holding more and more power and influence. Capitalism is literally designed like a pyramid scheme which everyone agrees is bad and doesn’t work.
Socialism is the idea that if you work at a workplace you own it along with everyone else there. It’s the idea that if you live in a home you own it with the other people that live there. It’s the idea that we all own the roads and parks together. It’s the idea that decision making (political power) and property is shared. There are centralized ways to do this, and decentralized ways to do this. The states you think are communist are shitty little oligarchies that pretend they will implement communism in the future yet never do. The problem with these states is that they aren’t socialist, not that socialism is bad.
A lack of incentive to innovate promotes stagnation and complacency(lazy acceptance of an internal takover).
Most scientific advances are state sponsored.
Hostile takeover is a thing that happens regularly in capitalism. Also liberals are always the first to compromise and then form governments with fascists. So that’s more of a capitalism thing I think.
Removed by mod
And capitalism…doesn’t?
I concur: Humans are awful and deserve extinction.
Bloody apathetic planet. I’ve no sympathy at all.
Humans are shaped by the system they live in
Humans built the system.
And humans can rebuild the system.
Yes, and it will be even worse.
Cringe take.
We could easily spend days trying to nail down what you mean by “bad”, and how one ought to assign blame for people’s actions, so I’ll just ask if you think that having a particular mental model of the world influences how you act?
I have decided that empathy is good, and a lack of empathy allows for bad actions.
Greed on its own may be bad, but greed without empathy causes untold horrors.
i feel communism is bein portraid as largely positively in recent times- butaybs thads jus me-
Maybe in Germany? The rest of the world is still deeply anti-communist of all stripes. Lemmy is less so due to its roots, and Lemmy definitely does not represent real life.
On lemmy and some other places online really, but surely not on mainstream tv and news.
hmmm fair-
im jus… hmm- most of the things shown in the image… ive not rlli seen happen- or rathr- ive seen the opposite-
in school, peeps r vrri openly disclosin their political onions, n som r vrri leftist, openly sasinnthad they believe its jus the right way to hav the world work-
or with musics- i havnt rlli heard anti-communism songs… evr. The only thing that gets close wud be som money-celebratory kinda songs-Hmmmm
What the hell is this person saying? Is this English?
It almost reads like an AI pretending to be an adult thats pretending to be a middle schooler.
This thread reads like someone having a stroke and is giving me a headache
Hystorikli th yung hav a’ways bin mo proggers and lefty-leanin.
Te stereo-typings r tey become mo “right” wth age and stop bein nayive.
Me is no yuth thou n ai only got mo left with te times. Te ste-re-o-typings are falling.
on musics def agrd, artist kot tndncy to also be proggers. Butt di notyse trends f pop n markt saturization drwn out the inhrnd kreatif krytyc-ism. Ai bein thay latst to-l n ta ched.
Why- r wi talkn lyk thi? Ai? Pryvisy?
For fun.
