You can tell that this audience is primarily American because they still defend capitalism, even after being shafted by it over and over. Careful everyone, big bad socialism is going to take your kids and your wife!
Don't dare dream of something better, instead keep swallowing the propaganda of the state and its controlling elites.
Man socialism keeps sounding better and better they will even take those pesky wife and kids off my hands/s.
But in serious most Americans don't know shit about socialism our capitalism they live under. Dumb fucks look at you with surprise when you mention our highway system would be considered socialist program.
American here and fuck capitalism.
Hey now, that's unfair!
As à Canadian, I can attest that we also blindly defend capitalism.
We are poor and our freedoms are exploited, but at least we're free!
If I don't swallow the propaganda, I don't swallow anything. We're hungry, man.
You can swallow my 🍆 instead 😉
Why complain when capitalism ruins something that it created? Isn't that how it works? Something else will come along and don't better or differently and people will flock to it until it sucks too.
Communism does not have a good track record in places like Poland. After the absolute shithole that the PRL was, I dont kniw how you except people to defend communism.
Depends on what you mean by socialism. All systems have upsides and downsides. Late stage capitalism in the US has a lot of downsides, but workers taking over the means of production does not have a good track record.
Finnish person here to say fuck socialism.
What are your criticisms of how Finland is run?
Is there a communism society that has succeeded? Lol
That would be a decent question if we had examples of socialist experiments that were actually left alone to develop and not invaded 2 sevonds after america heard about them
I like capitalism. It is cool sometimes.
(Comment gets downvoted to oblivion)
Edit: would someone care to explain why there are no cases in which capitalism is cool?
Anti-capitalism is centered around removing power from holding capital. By tying power to capital, there is an incentive to accumulate capital in disproportionate exchange.
Anti-capitalism is NOT anti-market. Markets are an economic tool used in all economies. Socialism is offered as an alternative to shift power to collective agreement through direct vote (direct democracy) or reprentative agreement (republic). By not granting economic goverance to a democratic government, there is a limitation on the ability to keep commodities responsibly sourced and consumed.
Capitalism means that we vote with our dollar and when those with capital have more votes and those without, they control policy generation and governance.
Workers should control the beans of production.
Rise up! Seize the beans of production!
Rice up*
Damn, a lot of capitalist bootlickers in this thread
Lol, enshitification of these services are happening because the owners want to extract as much money as possible from the users. Workers would do the same even if they owned it. How many people would turn down millions of dollars because users don't like the change?
Yeah I'm not sure why it's nowadays common to simplify socialism as "workers owning the means of production". It's not exactly wrong, but it is often misunderstood.
A company being owned by it's employees is not necessarily "socialism". In today's global capitalist economy, there are worker-cooperatives as well, but they too exist within the capitalist economy and have to follow its rules, which is above all the profit motive. If you don't orient yourself based on profit, you will be out-competed eventually.
Traditionally, when socialists talk about "workers owning/seizing the means of production", they are not talking about individual workers or individual businesses.
Workers means "the working class", which would be pretty much everyone ("the 99%"). Means of production means industry and the economy overall, not individual factories and businesses.
What makes FOSS special is that the software is not privately owned by anyone, not by the devs, not by a couple of programmers, not by a company. It is commonly owned, anyone can use, copy and alter the code however they want without any artificial barriers. This of course makes it a lot harder to extract money from users.
Ah, yes, we can see it with all the communities running their own Mastodon servers and extracting the maximum of wealth from their users. /s
You must think that humans are inherently greedy and/or are projecting what you would do in a scenario where you're part of a worker co-op. Most workplaces aren't worth millions. Most folks who round themselves in a worker co-op would most likely try to better the operation for everyone.
I see you haven’t met my co-workers. Or my neighbors.
In publicly-traded corporations, long term wealth extraction isn’t the goal. Getting sales up next quarter is. Employee-owned cooperatives are more likely to think long term. Plus, I’d vastly prefer to trust the average worker to do the right thing in a coop situation vs a manager doing it in a situation where they’re legally required (as standard publicly-traded corporations are) to prioritize the financial gains of shareholders above all other interests. Maybe you’ve lost so much faith in people that you think no one would ever choose to be slightly less rich for any reason. But plenty of people know there’s such a thing as enough, that there are interests as important as next quarter’s profits. They just don’t usually get MBAs.
Yah, if workers own a tiny portion of the means of production, as they do now in various co-ops around the globe, they will be either (1) required to operate on the basis of profit in order to outcompete entities that are not worker-owned, or (2) cease to exist because they get outcompeted by those who operate on the basis of profit.
This forces all existing co-ops to behave in line with capitalism as a whole. The point is to overcome that system of socio-economic relations: When calls are made for workers to own and operate production, as in this meme, they mean that the class constituted by workers — the proletariat — should be in control of all productive means. Not just that some workers should start co-ops, for this primary reason.
The idea that owners would sacrifice their profits if their business were merely a co-op is, I agree, not necessarily true. (Though workers in co-ops who are directly connected to the point of value production would definitely be more willing to sacrifice profits for decisions that enhance social value.) The point, however, is to move beyond an economy owned and operated for profit and forge a society in which profit is not the basis for operation in the first place. If, for example, workers' needs were guaranteed, the impetus for profit-seeking would evaporate, though will not be absent, at least while the artifacts of capitalist society persist in us and our institutions.
In the case of social media, the users are also the workers.
That's not exactly how things be.
If means of production were all owned by workers, then that means they are operating them for their own benefit and the benefit of their communities. Why? The profit motive is not quite as strong. You are no longer needing to amass wealth to live a happy life. Because those who control the local farms are part of the community. Those who control local factories are workers that are part of the community. Each of those operates the means of production to fulfill their own needs, and their community
Commie memes on my front page? This place is cool AF
Attention, people of Bikini Bottom! You have been cheated and lied to! The gentle laborer shall no longer suffer from the noxious greed of Mr. Krabs! We will dismantle oppression board by board! We'll saw the foundation of big business in half, even if it takes an eternity! With your support, we will send the hammer of the people's will crashing through Mr. Krabs' HOUSE OF SERVITUDE!
KRUSTY KRAB IS UNFAIR!
MR. KRABS IS IN THERE!
STANDING AT THE CONCESSION!
PLOTTING HIS OPPRESSION!
What the heck does that mean?
Amazing how many people will step in to defend the ownership of everything to a small minority. They will not reward bootlicking yet yall continue.
What I learned from observation is that they tend to believe that, one day, they will be part of the "small minority". The American Dream!!!1
“It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it”
Goes without saying. Look at the profits of the companies providing essential resources like energy. They most certainly didn't let a good crisis go to waste.
Yes, or at a bare minimum, CEO-proof everything and put more power in the hands of users of monolithic infrastructural utility products like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit
Capitalism generally allows for a range of ownership structures, including traditional privately owned businesses, publicly traded corporations, and worker-owned enterprises.
I guess an argument would be that privately owned companies are already too wealthy to allow for fair market competition, but in worker owned companies nothing is stopping them from becoming large corporations that can also do everything a private lobbyist company does. If you don't believe me, just look at your democratically elected capitalist government. Just because something is democratic doesn't mean it will be ethical or fair internally or externally.
As if workers give a shit about customers.
Workers don’t give a shit about customers because that’s how the incentive system is set up. Give workers the profits, you give them a good reason to give a shit about how clients feel.
As well as ensuring those profits will keep flowing through their retirement, and you get the long term planning incentive.
That would be an improvement actually, because the customers of these companies are not users, they are other companies looking to advertise or buy users personal data. The users of for profit social media are in fact the product, not the customers.
Great counterpoint. This is what Reddit has been missing for the last 6-8 years: actual thought instead of regurgitation.
Alienation isn't limited to the workplace anymore. It has found it's way into the platforms we spend our free time on.
Or at least have them be publicly owned common good, owned by multiple countries with editorial independence from the get go and funded through taxation. That would be a start.
today I learned an important new word
common Lemmy W
No, it means that the users should own the services, which is what the F in FOSS means
Which turns the users into the workers in this equation since those services need to be maintained and contributed to.
Based meme, beautiful praxis.
Communism works nice in theory, and in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. But we e can definity re-shitproof internet based services.
ಠ_ʖಠ
Not that I disagree but please define what "should" means in that sentence.
I miss lemmy.ml before the reddit API changes. Not nearly as many bootlickers.
When you say "workers" do you mean the actual workers or some vanguard party of intellectual champagne socialists who make decisions on the workers' behalf?
Actual workers. If we made a society where people are taken care of, we'd find most folks would be enthusiastic about their work. Saying "people don't want to work" is often taken at face value when the reality is that most people do want to work, because it helps them feel a sense of purpose. They don't, however, want to be exploited/work under capitalism because that is soul crushing.
Oh I agree completely with all of that. I just have been duped before by MLs saying worker ownership and what they really mean is their particular political party controlling everything. If everything is run by workers' councils with no existence of a vanguard party, that would be paradise for me.
I would also go beyond saying that labor (not "work," as IMO the word "work" implies labor under capitalism) gives people a sense of purpose in that it gives communities a sense of purpose and connectedness. When we are all sharing in common labor toward the goal of enhancing our community and generally improving lives, we feel a more collectivized responsibility for one another.
This is what I think every time I see this socialist / capitalist dichotomy set up:
also I know Im not using the meme right.
Allowing capitalist relations to persist, even if basic goods like food and homes were nationalized, enables a society in which capitalist profiteers continue to operate. History shows pretty explicitly that Capital will use the levers of power that exist, like The State, to eat away at or overturn any socialistic advances. E.g., suddenly the luxury capitalist corporation that sells idk, pearls, is lobbying (bribing) their way into privatizing beaches from which they operate. Slowly but surely the socioeconomic relations produced under capitalism foment and claw their way back to their former position. This requires a constant, indefinitely revolutionary society to keep capitalist relations at bay; that sort of momentum is not possible to sustain, certainly at the current moment.
It's necessary to abolish capitalists as a class because leaving capitalist systems of relations alone enables them to continue to re-produce themselves.
That doesn't preclude this sort of dual-economic setup from being a good thing, just insufficient.
yeah I guess from my point of view all the systems for distributing resources and power 'fairly' fail on their own. Mostly because they usually silo power in 1 or 2 mechanisms, so power concentrates and corrupts over time.
Also from a systems engineering standpoint -I dislike 'purity'. I prefer blended systems with backups and counter-measures. If I want to know which systems work best I look at what is delivering the best results and right now for me thats the nordic socialist democracies which still have plenty of capitalism.
Im not saying we've arrived at the best and should stop improving, but Im not interested in the endless hypothetical arguments about which ideology would be best if perfectly implemented. They are never perfectly implemented so best design something that can withstand reality.
TL:DR; You want to eradicate capitalists, I want to relegate them to a lower rung of society but accept they will exist
I mean, we first need to define what a luxury and what a necessity is. For some things like food, shelter, water, healthcare it's pretty straightforward. But for resources like energy or communications it's less obvious.
I'd argue that the internet is now a necessity rather than a luxury, but many people to this day still don't have or choose not to have internet access (due to geography or religion). Energy is the same way, if we take an obviously bad example, but say you're socializing electricity for everyone, what's to stop someone from mining cryptocurrency on everyone else's dime ? That person would be profiting off of the social net. Where do we put the cursor between "luxurious" energy use and "necessary" energy use ? It's a tough thing to figure out.
Furthermore, for most people you need an incentive to work, right now it's survival, which is not great, but if all of your needs basic, and more are taken care of by the state, you only work for the luxuries, which would greatly reduce the available workforce. It's again a tough balance to find.
If you're socializing electricity for everyone then you can tell when usage is far outside norms and audit usage
I also don't think money is the ultimate incentive, and most people would work whether or not they needed money to survive. Sure they wouldn't work at some crappy unfulfilling job, but people would still be productive according to their idea of productivity.
Also not having people working all these useless jobs would save energy and resources.
There's lots of study on how humans respond to incentives and money and its not a straightforward relationship at all.
Thats some high quality bruh. FOSS software and communism have very little in common. Yeah sure power for the people, but thinking that everyone should be equal in this enviroment is misleading. Lemmy like every other platform still has to have moderators that are over normal users. The ecosystem itself does not allow abuse. Eg. You can have a strict mod and then host your own instance that is true free speech or whatsoever. If u gonna post nazi stuff or smth like that then they gonna defederate. It's better in some sort because u don't have spam monkey and other extremists but still u get to choose your own poison.
Tell me you don't know what communism is without telling me you don't know what communism is.
This is some LibSoc thinking. See: in early USSR days when they tried more worker-cooperative based ownership they had to stop because the factory workers kept just immediately selling their factories for money now that they owned them.
Is this a communist post? I would live to see someone succeed with that idea but not realistic (see: history)
Lmao, social media sites would be insanely worse if the employees made all the decisions. They would all be left-wing circle jerks, as if you all haven't gotten unhinged enough.
Honestly I don't even know where to start with this, so I'll keep it simple. Enshittification of Twitter, Reddit et al. is not necessarily a result of capitalism, and likewise Fediverse doesn't exist because "workers took the means of production".
For example the disastrous YouTube monetisation policy comes in part from a desire to keep the site "child friendly" (that's why swear words and gore are banned), and in part due to a need to follow existing copyright law.
Even if YouTube was run by a worker co-op, or was a state enterprise those two factors would likely still lead to stringent monetisation rules.
Monetisation rules are a direct result of capitalism. Profits are what motivates the decision making. In a post-capitalism economy it would be the needs and wants that motivates the decision making. One of the failures of capitalism is that we assume wants/needs has a correlation with profits, when clearly the enshitification demonstrates otherwise.
the disastrous YouTube monetisation policy comes in part from a desire to keep the site “child friendly”
Sure, but the reason why they want to keep the site “child friendly” is because content for children is incredibly profitable and because advertisers don't want their ads getting related to "controversial" content.
Even if YouTube was run by a worker co-op, or was a state enterprise those two factors would likely still lead to stringent monetisation rules.
This is the reason why I don't like equating socialism with "workers owning the means of production". Worker-cooperatives can exist in a capitalist economy, which means they have to follow capitalist rules (including the drive to generate profits).
When leftists say "workers", they generally mean "the 99%" or "the working class", not individual workers. When leftists say "the means of production", they mean the economy/industry overall, not individual companies.
If youtube was owned and operated in common, it would not be bound to profitability, but to use.
We can also look at something like peertube, which is essentially a commonly owned version of youtube. Instead of being guided by profitability, it is used based on many different use-cases. There can be peertube instances that are completely private, there can be peertube instances that are used for a specific topic or community (for example kids) and there can be peertube instances which are not for children at all.
Enshittification of those services is a direct symptom of capitalism.
No one is arguing that the fediverse exists because of workers owning the means of production.
You should really look into what "enshittification" means and how it's a direct result of capitalism.
the disastrous YouTube monetisation policy comes in part from a desire to keep the site “child friendly”
Sure, but the reason why they want to keep the site "child friendly" is because youtube
Lmao, social media sites would be insanely worse if the employees made all the decisions. They would all be left-wing circle jerks, as if you all haven't gotten unhinged enough.
No, lol 😂
Listen, socialism doesn't work.
Using socialism as a boogeyman by definition, is a poor argument. There are merits to many different economic systems, many of which have pros and cons, capitalism and socialism included.
The laugh, and "listen" while providing absolutely no reasoning demonstrates a certain level of arrogance, while at the same time demonstrating a lack of knowledge on the subject
What's your definition of socialiam
