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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."
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)
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
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
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.
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.
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?
Capitalism is like fire. Unchecked, it will happily consume your house. Never the less, it’s an excellent tool for certain tasks. It must be handled with care and contained appropriately.
Right now, a lit of the world looks like London during the great fire. Capitalism has been allowed to run unchecked, and has gotten completely out of control. The massive dilemma is how to reign it in, without collapsing large chunks of society.
Abandoning Capitalism completely is almost as bad as letting it run unchecked.
Marx identified that capitalism by necessity leads to an endless cycle of collapses. There is no way to avoid suffering under capitalism.
A fully planned system has also shown to become highly inefficient.
The the key phrase there is “under capitalism”. My point is capitalism can’t be the top level. If it is, then it will run away, exactly as Marx saw.
At the same time, it’s an incredibly effective tool. It allows for dynamic value assessment in a system that has minimal trust. It’s a perfect method of fairly distributing luxuries. It’s akin to a fire being useful when trapped in a fireplace, or a blast furnace. The problems occur when it’s allowed to run amock.
How would you go about fairly distributing limited luxuries, particularly when the value to a given person varies?
Firstly, I challenge the assumption that efficiency is the most important goal. This was addressed very convincingly almost 70 years ago in The Affluent Society:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society
This book explains that we should not use the same policies for a society which is constantly struggling on a knife edge between starvation and death. That was not the reality 70 years ago and is much less tha case today.
Even if we assume that efficiency is the most important goal, what you are actually arguing for is well-designed markets as the tool to achieve that. I question even this, since a profitable company is by definition less efficient than one that makes little or no profit, since profit is the extra wealth that the company extracts after paying all bills.
Even if we assume that a for profit market is the best way to manage resources and achieve efficiency, capitalism is fundamentally a bad model for that, since practices like hiding information from consumers or capturing regulators are great ways to increase profits without improving efficiency or managing resources effectively.
tl;dr fuck capitalism. 😉
I agree that a hyper focus on efficiency is a bad plan. At the same time, we would need some corrective mechanism.
A good example would be food preference. Say you have 3 food options, A,B and C. A is the easiest to produce, but bland. B and C are more difficult and so more limited. Some people love B but hate C, others vice versa. Some people would happily just have A, and use the excess value on other luxuries. How do you resolve this?
A limited capital based system would find it easy. Each person has an assigned value. They can choose how to distribute it. This dynamically finds the fairest distribution. By passing it to the farmers, they can choose how to direct effort.
As for regulatory capture, etc. That’s a sign that capitalism is getting out of control. It’s akin to your curtains starting to smoulder. It needs to be used like fire on a wooden ship, with extreme care and control.
I guess we’ll never know if the system you describe here would work, since it has never existed. Companies have been using induced demand, loss leaders, cross subsidies, bundling, marketing, and a million other similar tricks to limit consumers access to knowledge and confuse them since long before Adam Smith fantasized about capital as the best of all possible worlds.
How would you go about fairly distributing limited luxuries, particularly when the value to a given person varies?
I don’t think it should matter, at least not until we’ve guaranteed everyone their human rights. Nutritious food, safe shelter, clean water, medical care.
I don’t think we can afford to worry about luxuries until we solve the problem of affording people.
Right now, we have more than enough to support basic necessities for everyone. It’s mostly a distribution issue now. It’s also being fucked up by run away capitalism creating artificial scarcity.
You will have a hard time getting anyone to join a system that others nothing more than gruel, a grey jumpsuit and a dorm bunk.I would strongly suspect such a system of funneling thr excess to a few elites.
The question is, how to judge values, without a capital based system at all. What is a lead brick worth in corn, or bananas?
Of all things why would a lead brick or bananas or corn need value?
Give corn and bananas to people for free, give the lead brick to whatever science lab or nuclear power plant needs it for free.
If you want to talk about luxury value in a post-scarcity economy, choose something like coffee.
A fully planned system has also shown to become highly inefficient
Nobody was arguing that.
I don’t think you understand what actually is meant by the term “capitalism”. Capitalism does not mean free markets. Capitalism primarily means the ownership of the means of production in private hands. You can come up with a system which is highly regulated, to some degree even planned, which can still be considered capitalistic.
On the other hand, it is easy to imagine a socialist system whose economy consist solely of companies fully owned by the people that work there, i.e. the workers, while the companies themselves engage in a competitive and free market. It would be just like today, except workers have a say in who leads the organization, and how, in a democratic process.
In short capitalism != free market and vice versa.
Tf is this nonsense? Why do you think “a little capitalism” is a good thing? Just a sprinkling of exploitation to keep things spicy?