- cross-posted to:
- leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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."
You must log in or register to comment.
Keynesian economic policy resulted in unprecedented prosperity for 60 years. It ended by Reagan’s trickle down supply side economics.
Seems now there’s a false dichotomy between supply side economics (which is an obvious failure) and communism (which was an obvious failure).
Crazy idea, maybe we should consider using economic policy that was proven to work? I guess that makes me hated by both the “right” and the “leftists” (two peas in a pod). So where would that put me in your made up political spectrum?
communism (which was an obvious failure)
Compare any communist country to a capitalist country at the same level of technological development and the communist country comes out ahead in wealth and happiness. Communism only seems like a failure because US and EU propaganda does a trick where they compare isolated (often literally blockaded) Communist countries to the wealthiest empires on the planet and say “look how much more money we have! Our system must be better!”
The trouble with Keynesian economics is that it created the conditions for Reagan’s neoliberal revolution to occur, and any country that tries to recreate that economic system will fall into the exact same trap that America did, because the fundamental underlying problem in Capitalism is the ownership of Capital. Capitalists accumulate wealth, and they use that accumulated wealth to capture the system that is supposed to keep them in check, and they sabotage that system for their own profits, and they will do that every single time.
Politically speaking, I don’t believe there’s such thing as “right” or “left” except in the relative sense. Even then it’s questionable.
Edit: I’m really curious about what people downvoting think it fundamentally means for there to be an absolute political “center” from which there is an objective “right” wing and an objective “left” wing. Furthermore, I’d like to know what advantages this model has that makes you value it so much.
Story of my generation
You can’t post this often enough.
Being right-wing isn’t even a bad thing. Problems occur if you go too far to the right.
I know its hard to believe these days but nuanced beliefs exist.
Capitalism is the fundamental belief in private ownership. That I can own a factory, a store, a restaurant, and therefore be entitled to the profits produced from them. Modern capitalism is inextricable from consumerism, from business, and from stock exchanges.
Capitalism is any resource or good harvested or produced that is not shared by all who produced it. Capitalism is the idea that some labor is more deserving of the fruits of production than other kinds of labor. Capitalism is violence against the working class. Capitalism is the means by which a new ruling class was created over the past 200 years that presently controls the entire world while utterly ravaging our environment and wasting more resources than we literally every could have thought possible.
You are NOT a leftist if you support capitalism. You are ANTI-WORKER if you support capitalism. If you want to support workers and if you want to support progressive leftist causes, ORGANIZE. Join your local anarchist community. Agitate, push leftist politics. Start mutual aid networks for vulnerable workers in your community. Support unionization efforts. Support striking workers. Participate in civil disobedience. Show up at protests. Organize demonstrations.
The world has never been changed by accepting the crumbs they threw at our feet. It was changed by those who refused to bow their heads. By the communities who resisted oppression and fought for their fellow workers. By people who fought for us all to live better lives. Count yourself among them.
Meh, I don’t necessarily disagree with the sentiment, but don’t like black/white dichotomies (though I’m personally anti-capitalist). Unions most definitely care the businesses they work for make money. The more money the better, since union members can bargain for more. They have incentive to be pro-consumerist and to protect their business/industry. Even at the expense of others.
Unions are workers coming together to advocate for their rights. I don’t know what you mean by the unions having an incentive for companies to make more money. Companies making more money does not translate to increased wages for workers. It translates to increased profits for shareholders. And unions do not own companies. Unions are a form of collective action against the capitalist ruling class. Workers who are a part of unions are making commitments to each other to fight for their rights as a group. They have nothing to do with what capitalist ceos or shareholders do. Not unless a union has been corrupted and is being manipulated by ruling class forces.
I am not a syndicalist, but I do think that the widespread unionization of workers is objectively a good thing. Tenants unionizing against their landlords, workers unionizing against their bosses, the working class as a whole unionizing against the ruling class.
I also push back against this notion of capitalism not being a hard and fast specific ideology that takes specific actions at the expense of workers. It is the truth. In countries that are more socialized but still maintain capitalist systems, less capitalism is still an improvement for the material conditions of workers. Private ownership of the means of production is still problematic even if there are more regulations from local government. Those things could still be collectivized and made worker owned so that everyone can have the fruits of production. And so that everyone has the same political power as everyone else.
I think unionization is very important, and I personally lean toward anarcho-syndicalism, but unions are not hardline anti-capitalist institutions. I guess the term I should have used is that unions definitely want the companys’ “revenue” to increase, not necessarily profit to increase. Nearly every person I’ve known that worked in a union job was conservative (probably more of a reflection of where I lived), and many were very emotionally attached to the company they worked for. I’ve known several Ford plant workers that would disallow any member of the household to own a vehicle from any other manufacturer. I’ve heard that if a worker drove a car from any other manufacturer to work, it would likely get vandalized in the parking lot.
I’d say that leans towards what I said at the end. Any form of worker organization can be corrupted. Symptoms of a greater problem, not one of unions specifically. Consumerism and corporatism have made identities out of brands, like in the Ford case you mentioned. That brand and those workers’ associations with it became ways for them to exert a kind of social power. But that could’ve happened whether those workers were unionized or not.
Capital means money. Capitalism is an economy that is centered on money. Socialism OTOH centers the economy on the people.
You may want to read up a bit, and stop using socialism as an umbrella term. Socialism as in European social democrats, traditional socialists, Communists? Any of the other variations? Because both Social Democrats and Communists use the Socialist term.
I think it’s important to clarify that markets and the use of money are not exclusive to capitalism. Under capitalism, the point of markets is to accumulate money absent of any actual project or goal, and money is the way the capital holding class keeps score. In other systems, the point of markets is to connect people who have some item with people who need or want that item and money is the means of exchange. Markets are fine for distributing excess materials and labor, once people’s basic needs are met.
Definitely something people forget when talking about money in general. Capitalism warps the meaning of “value”, money is just the closest we have to display a certain value in a tangible form. In itself, money is merely a tool for universal exchange of goods. A tool that’s unfathomably useful no matter the system it exists in.
Imagine we treat money like US citizens treat measurements. “Yeah, I’d like to buy these produce for about the value of 1 middle-sized football field”. What.
So where do Co-ops fall, one where all the workers own everything equally and vote on hiring and firing etc?
Isn’t a co-op just an individual organization where the workers have already seized the means of production and share it fairly among themselves? With every worker having a say right? Sounds like socialism on a small scale to me.
Socialism. Plenty of models that use or aspire to that system, especially when it’s part of a larger capitalist society and one can’t expect the workers to change it all.
Few large coops are truly equal partnerships or that democratic though.
Generally speaking, what prevents it from falling under capitalism is non-transferable ownership stakes. Otherwise the workers can sell their stake and the system inevitably declines into capital interests hiring employees instead of a partnership.
Lmao. “Capitalism is right wing. Period.”
Braindead.
Lmao. “Braindead.”
Braindead.
No lies detected.
What is Finland though? Social democracy seems pretty good but still fits in with capitalism as far as I can tell
Finland still pollutes the world at unsustainable levels, exploits the global south for raw materials and cheap labour, and is on a downwards trend to fascism like all of Europe. Liberal democracy only has one conclusion, and it’s fascism.
Whatever social safety nets and programs they have will be dismantled as Western capitalism devours itself. As is happening all around Europe
Can you point to any sources or are you just making it up?
We already see a lot of talk of Cutting back on social spending in favor of military spending.. There’s also the pension and retirement changes most of Europe has already implemented to some degree. It’s likely we’ll see changes as drastic as what the UK are doing right now in the coming years, specially if the war in Ukraine doesn’t go the way of NATO.
So there is nothing saying that it will happen and that all welfare will be gone.
Will we be worse off for a while? Yeah, Europe isn’t in a great situation now with the fairly recent COVID outbreak, economic problems, the attempted invasion and ongoing war in Ukraine, energy problems, and climate change. While the future isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, it isn’t as bleak as you made it in your earlier comment. There isn’t anything pointing to the total collapse of welfare and/or the entire economy.
So I make the fairly mild claim that capitalists will destroy the public sector when profits go down. You ask for sources of that claim (even though I’m just making a prediction based on past trends). I then show you that these talks of cutting back spending are already happening, and you dismiss it because I can’t predict the future? And I am the biased one here?
Neoliberal, just like the rest of the “socialist” nordics (E: having socialised aspects to the state and or economy, or even being a “social democracy” does not socialism make), which are all on the exact same trajectory as the rest of us, only a few years behind.
Since people don’t work for free and some people have more money than others, finland is obviously an extreme right wing faschist oligarchy where people live in miserable slavery and needs the proletariat red army invasion like right now. Wouldn’t even be hard for a landlocked nation. The capital Reykvetsvhik would fall in minutes thanks to the liberated people welcoming their saviors.
Yes im American, how could you tell? /S
Well, now that Simo is dead anyway, they couldn’t take Finland last time! They uh…also didn’t fight the nazis until '44-'45, there was also '41-'44…
Left and right are completely arbitrary semantic categories so you can define them however you like, as long as it has a clear and internally consistent definition.
I’ve even seen ancaps who have almost the same definition as I do but completely reversed which is pretty funny but also gives me a headache.
left = not capitalism
right = capitalism
this definition has formed since more or less (…) since the french revolution and has consolidated along with capitalism itself.
“Pro capitalism” and harm reduction are not the same thing. Some form of capitalist-like economics will exist until we achieve post scarcity economics. The best we can do until then is work towards that end, while also working to minimize the harms imposed by material and labor scarcity.
This is just another stupid purity test by people who care more about their own righteousness than actual action. You can call my praxis whatever you want. I don’t care.
We’ve been post-scarcity on a global scale for decades if you count the essentials. We’ve been producing all the food that’s needed to feed the world, and that’s with only 2% of people working on agriculture in the developed world.
The reason for housing shortages is also due to policy, not because we somehow don’t have the resources and labour to build enough.
Statistically yes, however any of those calculations I saw were always flawed and intentionally excluded losses that will always build up even in the most fair system (losses in transport, accidents, individual wrongdoing i.e. overbuying and bad cooking, miscalculations, bad harvests etc). And then there’s the rapidly shrinking space for optimal harvests, the climate catastrophe as well as capitalism keep destroying the ecosystem.
Technically we could produce enough to offset that as well, however that would include a global empowerment of… veganism. Or at least a 95% reduction of red meat, it’s the most outrageous resource hog. I don’t need to explain why this won’t happen though.
Capitalism is not a market. Markets have exactly nothing to do with capitalism.
Capitalism is not only not needed before total post scarcity, it prevents it as capitalism requires artificial scarcity to function.
You can’t regulate or eliminate human greed … because there will always be a highly motivated, intelligent idiot that thinks they can become King of the Universe.
We just need a way to outlaw billionaires and keep everyone under an upper ceiling of wealth.
It won’t solve every problem but regulating wealth will sure allows us to deal with every other problem on the planet rather than the current state we are in.
This is very stupid.
Not all capitalism is completely unrestrained.
I do love when idiots insist the world must conform to their own internal definition.
The problem is the idiots never realize you’re talking about them when you say this.
Man, Americans are so confused about how political movements work and it’s spreading.
They should just make up words for whatever it is they are trying to categorize, like “Snurfle” or “anti-sploosh” or whatever and let the rest of us keep talking about politics like normal people.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like everybody else doesn’t have the classic “socialdemocrats aren’t real leftists” nonsense, that part is pretty universal. But at least those guys over here know what the words they’re using typically mean.
If you think capitalism is normal, needed, or functional, you don’t know the definition of capitalism.
Look, the only reason I don’t go around mockingly asking Americans (including purported American leftists) what’s a socialist or a social democrat is that fascists have sullied the “define your concept” idea by being transphobes. Don’t force my hand.
The hilarious part of this little online LARP thing some Americans like to do is that I’ve lived with actual, card-carrying communists being a permanent fixture in congress (and at points in government coalitions) and not once have I heard them spout this stuff. Mock socdems for not being lefty enough? Sure. Accuse them of having the same policies as demochristians on this or that? Totally. Argue and infight about one-off issues until they split so much that they become a fizzy foam of personal parties? Constantly.
But this implication that the immediate and sole goal is some hypothetical revolution that is on the cusp of happening via some marginal political action that doesn’t involve or need to involve institutional participation? “Capitalism/anticapitalism” as a strict binary where no action shall be taken before the dismantling of the capitalist system? Yeah, not even from the strict anarchists operating exclusively on assemby-based decisionmaking, man. It’s like flat Earth stuff, you never know how much of it is genuine human weirdness and how much is trolling.
As a certified not American, dengism is fine once you establish a socialist state, but capitalism by itself without a socialist state that has full control will always turn into fascism. No country has ever become socialist from capitalist peacefully or by working within capitalism. It can’t happen, or if it can it certainly is beyond the top scholars ability to figure out.
Capitalism is a poison. It cannot exist in a future where humans do. The goal of every person should be to dismantle capitalism in every way they can, until we finally agree as a species that there isn’t a master race and there shouldn’t be.
There are only a handful of socialist countries that have survived the constant invasions and assassinations required for capitalism to continue functioning; instead of pretending there’s a different way than what they did, why not learn from them, including their formative mistakes, and work to take the same action?
Real socialists and communists know what happens when you utilize capitalist institutions, especially the paradox that is liberal democracy, to try to third way your way to change. You get killed.
Well, I guess that’s another thing in common with flat Earth. In the absence of evidence you just tend to assume any participant is American and underestimate how badly American cultural imperialism is spreading its garbage elsewhere.
No, all of western Europe tends to think the same as Americans. All your brains were fried by American propaganda for decades to the point the few good ideas you implemented that were stolen from the Soviets you’re starting to abandon. How soon will the NHS in the UK be privatized again?
Yes, you’re all slightly better in that you don’t have laws to arrest communists and you’ve figured out that if you work together good things happen, but let’s be honest billionaires still own your countries, not the other way round.
“We”? “The NHS”?
Who is making assumptions now, not-American?
