Commiunism

Whoops, that’s what you get when you don’t read what you write

There wasn’t really a material need to invent concepts such as agriculture, debt and other kinds of concepts we recognize as part of documented human history and development. There’s no need to farm if few humans there are can sustain themselves via hunting and gathering, neither do you need wheels for transportation. Once there was a historical need due to higher populations or weather not allowing foraging, that’s when the concepts got invented and allowed us to build on that with other discoveries and concepts that led us here.

Yes, but also ML’s that come from “Deprogram” podcast who uncritically support China/Russia/Nationalism and liberal types who rally behind capitalist political figures for “more liberalism” and who consider it class consciousness (like what’s happening in Turkey and Serbia).

Not necessarily calling these movements and groups bad, there might be class conscious particles in them even, but they ultimately reinforce our class society and the ideas/mechanisms of it.

Nah, we’re still light years away from class consciousness given how much stupid shit the self-proclaimed “class conscious” people write and who they support.

There is, but it isn’t the liberal middle class that’s some arbitrary amount of money you earn as a salary, but petty bourgeois or in other words small business owners.

They’re in an unique position where they both own a business and live off of that income but are also forced to work in these businesses alongside their employees due to them not being wealthy enough to fully offload everything about it to the working class.

As long as the concept of CEO’s exist, these healthcare CEO’s will keep getting replaced like heads of a hydra. After Luigi’s murder, that CEO was replaced in a week with an identical cog in the machine. In other words, this is literally pointless or even counter productive if governments decide that this has become an issue and give them special privileges/protections or create some anti-terror squad that would suppress actual future movements for change.

However, if actual change is not a goal then fuck yeah let’s kill more capitalists for sport

This isn’t limited to two party systems, but liberal democracies in general in the entire world. There hasn’t really been any change of the status quo for who-knows-how-long anywhere whether it’s 2 or 10 parties on the ballot

The post is ambiguous enough where it could very well be pro sex work, and there’s a surprising amount of comments here having this reading too like sex work being some liberatory, empowering thing as opposed to a form of commodifying yourself

Yes, and what do you think those distribution sites do in exchange of distributing your content? Perhaps extracting surplus value from the profit they generate for housing sex worker’s videos? It’s literally the thing I’m talking about - the website is acting as a pimp in this case.

If you mean self-hosting or starting a small business selling your “sex work” on sites that you own, then that would bypass this exact point. However, that’s pretty much impossible given two things:

1. How the fuck are you going to get discovered by people not aware of who you are
2. Who the hell would visit a separate site entirely just for one porn star when a gazillion centralized alternatives that already contain thousands of videos exist

It’s a non-solution, and there is absolutely a reason why the biggest porn stars out there just use onlyfans or phub or whatever to host their content, even if it means getting exploited as a result.

You can ask them.

The problem isn’t individual preference or whatever - there are definitely people who’d love to bang around, money or not. The problem is the structural coercion, the fact that you’re doing it for an essential resource required to survive in today’s society, so there’s absolutely no way. It isn’t done purely out of free will or for fun as some people would suggest.

Actually no - sex work is literally like any other work, with pimps extracting the surplus value from your labor instead of proper capitalists. The pimp can be a pornographic website hosting your videos, so investors can literally get money for it.

The one’s demonizing it often do so out of opportunism, to appeal to the traditionalist voters, not because it doesn’t produce profit or something.

Actually no, both have been normalized to a somewhat equal level, though being employed and selling your labor power is a bit more accepted given how essentially every prole has to do it, and how the entire early life is preparation for it.

The defenders of such concepts though are coming from the exact opposite sides though - exploitative jobs where you sell your labor power is seen as virtuous by the right, where it’s the natural state of things or whatever. Porn industry, prostitution and whatever is seen as virtuous by the left, giving freedom to women to use their bodies how they want and self-expression, plus it’s an easier way to make money.

The correct position here though is the centrist one - both sides are morons and should be killed with hammers.

For selling your labor power, you have no practical choice in the matter - you have to be employed for some capitalist to extract surplus value from your work while they actively fight against workers rights using that gained capital. If you don’t, you don’t get money which is a commodity used to buy other commodities to survive, meaning you’re risking becoming homeless and without food if you have no support net holding you, and if you do then the wage you get is usually just enough for you to survive + thrive enough to reproduce, bringing more workers into the world. As edgy as it might sound, this is literally just slavery with an illusion of freedom.

Same applies to sex work - it’s commodified labor like any other, surplus value is extracted by pimps, be it actual physical ones when it comes to prostitution or porn websites with their own cut. A major issue is consent - if what you gain for this kind of work is money which is necessary for one’s survival, how can one truly be sure that what the woman does is out of her own will and would have done it regardless if concept of money didn’t exist? What about tens of thousands of desperate women who aren’t as big as the well-known porn celebs not having an option to say “no” to sex on porn, or being deliberately hooked on drugs to be dependent on their pimp? It’s commodified rape.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Sorry if this might come as rude or elitist - not my intention as I’ve been there, but I’d really recommend reading some theory if you’re interested in this kind of stuff. Even some shorter works of Marx & Engels will dispel A LOT of misconceptions a leftist might have about socialism/communism/what’s actually the problem/etc that one might get just via osmosis of the popular discourse.

Now to respond to some of the points (though not all, too tired right now):

My point about workers not getting full value from their labor mostly targets the wording in the meme, it’s pedantry. Whether you think it’s fair to count taxes or not isn’t really relevant, but the fact that you have a system where whether you like it or not the state will take away some of your earnings from your labor means that you cannot really receive the full value of your labor, something always will get deducted. Though there was a better example of this I should have used, directly related to labor that you end up making:

Agreeing with your fellow workers to take home less pay to keep the factory viable is not exploitation.

Taking less pay in order to compete in the market economy is literally what capitalists do on behalf of workers - take their surplus value to expand production and remain competitive (and ofc live off of this surplus value themselves individually). In a coop, this would also happen under a market economy as you yourself say, and this money will come from the value of the commodities they produce as in the fruits of their labor they’re supposed to be getting “full value” of. See how it doesn’t make sense?

Also, I admit I should have asked this previously, but what exactly is socialism defined by for you? Based on your comment, I gather that few things exist in this socialism, and those are:

• Commodity production and markets remains in place
• Surplus value is still being appropriated, but democratically
• Getting taxed by the state to help the community via public services
• Money remains in place as value form, meaning capital accumulation is still possible
• Something that can be achieved through reforms if enough people believe in it? (idk about this one but that’s what i’m inferring)

Now I might be wrong about these and maybe you have a different definition in mind, but this is pretty much identical to a social democracy which is still fully capitalist. Coops exist within capitalism right this moment in some countries - individual companies where workers collectively own the means of production, but they still have to play within the rules of capitalist mode of production.

Sure, it might be better but socialist/communist goal isn’t to make things better, but to change the current state of things entirely. This is why actual socialism, which is defined by figures like Lenin, Marx and other non-falsifier communist theorists has markets and commodity production already abolished. Before socialism after workers take power, there is a period of transition where commodity production at least partially remains in place as a way to distribute goods while productive forces (like factories and infrastructure) are still being developed so everyone’s needs can actually be met during socialist stage.

Money gets abolished in favor of labor vouchers that get discarded after being used up (so there’s no more accumulation of capital), things start being produced for use - there’s still a long way to go towards communism at this stage, but this is how you actually stop being capitalist and create a separate mode of production instead of just making things a bit better but still fundamentally capitalist.

Anyway yap yap nobody reads this as seen from the amount of upvotes, still had to leave one as it would have felt rude if I didn’t and just left you hanging there

Fully automated luxury gay space communism

That’s Communism, not socialism. Sure, socialism has some similarities to Capitalism, that’s because Socialism was never the end goal, but a transition period between Capitalism and Communism.

Yes, never said that was socialism, only that’s how a fair society can only operate. Also, depending on the socialism in the context, it might not even be a transitionary period but rather bourgeois socialism that Marx criticized thoroughly in Critique of Gotha Programme, which is where 99% of my comment comes from

Workers don’t ‘exploit’ themselves, workers decide if it’s worth doing the work for what they can reasonably expect in return or not. If they decide it is worth it, it’s something they chose for themselves, not even close to the same thing as a Capitalist squeezing every last cent of ‘profit’ from you as they possibly can and basically forcing you to do it by making it impossible to survive if you don’t.

The market forces workers to exploit themselves, given how the primary way cost cutting happens is through decrease of wages, as most production costs are set in stone (like materials needed or machinery upkeep

They still get the full value of their labor. Taxes used to benefit the community benefit workers as well, because they are members of the commuity. Capitalists under capitalism still (are supposed to) pay taxes- and so do workers. Workers who are more fairly compensated for their work and have to pay taxes are better off than a wage slave who isn’t fairly compensated and still has to pay taxes.

Yes, but if they pay a portion of value of their labor, they don’t get the full value. It’s an involuntary payment that is good and necessary, but the point is that getting full value is impossible under bourgeois state and commodity production society

I asked my insufferable pet cat about this, and they dropped a wall of text on me:

It’s not socialism and this exact notion that “socialism is when workers get compensated fully and fairly for their work and when they own the means of production” has been thoroughly called out for being nonsensical. Workers merely owning their means of production is a minor improvement, but it doesn’t abolish capital or exploitation given how markets and commodity production still exist.

Now, in order to compete within that market for profit, workers have to exploit themselves by reducing their wages, increasing their own work hours to produce more goods to outflood their opponents so they essentially turn to collective capitalists.

A person under this system also can’t make full value of their labor, simply because there’s taxes that are used to fund public sectors such as education, healthcare, etc (it’s necessary though). People also are different, some can work more intensely with higher tempo due to how they’re built, and others might not be able to put in the same amount of labor, thus it’s impossible to have “fair compensation” without uprooting commodity production, doing away with money completely and instead producing things to fulfill everyone’s needs. Only then can things truly be “fair”.

There are a ton of people like that, but they’re mostly found on real life, facebook and other similar social medias and not lemmy or reddit or twitter - those are terminally online echochambers, but I’ve seen one or two people going “thoughts and prayers” or “all violence bad”.

Also, my position is more complex than “violence can’t solve problems” - it can, but it must be organized, with clear goals in mind and people already behind and actively part of the cause.

If you just go in lone wolf style like Luigi or something and gun down a CEO, you expect for the public to see this, get inspired to take up arms of their own and start Years of Lead where rich people are fearing for their lives and suddenly we have a revolution like in some sort of Hollywood movie, but that’s not what happens in reality.

Instead, media tries to demonize the shooter by saying how good the victim was and how their family is grieving (happening right now) to tug on heart strings which will at least turn some people against them, the shooter being made example of in court which essentially throws their life in the bin, the CEO being replaced by someone else in a week’s time and people forgetting about all of this after news cycle moves on. I genuinely only see Luigi mentioned on lemmy here given how he’s the liberal larp darling here, and nowhere else I visit or IRL.

Also, if we’re talking history here, then here’s a fun factoid - some Anarchist burnt down Reichstag in opposition to Hitler and his Nazi party, but this fire was later used by Hitler to expand his powers, suppress civil liberties and was pivotal in establishment of Nazi Germany. Of course, this is only something to think about with more brutal regimes, but nothing like that will probably come out of this shooting.

A good example of organized violence is probably that of the Bolsheviks pre-Russian revolutions - they had bank robberies, political assassinations that were used to fund the revolutionary underground and destabilize the regime, and not merely some bouts of individualized violence.

To answer the question, it didn’t make things better, but it didn’t make things much worse either - the status quo is preserved as always. The concentration camps that Trump is boasting about (such as the Alligator camp or whatever it’s called) were previously opened by Biden, ICE was also being maintained to forcefully deport people, Israel is still being funded all the same by the US whether it was Trump or not, the only difference that Trump is being more open about these things and are expanding these operations which isn’t good at all but doesn’t shake the status quo at all.

Harris didn’t address any of these things, in fact she promised to expand on anti-immigration as part of opportunism.

At the same time, that’s the wrong question to ask - merely making things better isn’t enough given how it can always be reversed when wind blows a slightly different way no matter the party. What needs to happen is for the present state of things to change entirely, that’s the only way towards permanent improvement for the majority, which is what I meant in my original comment.

I love it when some shooting or tragedy happens, if it’s workers then all they get is one line at best and their lives get abbreviated to a statistic, but when some capitalist dies every news site writes about how great and authentic they were for a couple days.

Though given how this shooting was an example of lone wolf adventurism, it’s quite dumb to support it - the CEO will be replaced by an identical cog in the machine like always, a decent part of the public will get alienated thanks to anti-violence culture and media narratives (as seen in articles like there) and the shooter just threw away their life.

Though I won’t lie that it doesn’t make the day a bit better to see capitalist get gunned down

If these are the progressive reformists, then it’s probably time to realize that status quo won’t change if them or DSA were magically put in charge. They’re still part of the ruling class and have their interests, the only way to achieve actual change is via workers themselves organizing and making change happen - that’s the actual role of the left, not praying that some kind capitalist candidate brings about change for them (they won’t as seen historically).

But at the same time, workers aren’t likely to “have enough” and organize on their own, instead opting to keep clinging onto this false hope and keep rallying behind “least bad” option, so the situation is abysmal.