- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmygrad.ml
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Socialism in america only exists for corporations. “Hey bankers! Screwed up again? Here’s more money to play with.”
I appreciate the sentiment, but the public sector supporting the private is not “socialism.” Socialism describes an economic formation where public ownership is primary in an economy, ie where large firms are publicly owned and controlled. Segments of an economy cannot be Socialist or Capitalist just like an arm cannot be a human, it can only exist in the context of the whole.
Socialism, in reality, refers to a broader economy where public ownership is primary, while Capitalism refers to a broader economy where private ownership is primary. All Socialist societies have had public and private Capital, and all Capitalist societies have had public and private Capital, it matters most which one has the power.
I recommend reading my post here on common problems people run into when determining Modes of Production.
Original commenter: jokes in class solidarity
Response: « I appreciate the attempt, but what you said was wrong on sooooo many levels, in this essay, I will… »
There is legitimately a problem with miscommunication on the Left, getting on the same page helps information flow more effectively.
I understand what you mean, really. I just think the methods of circulating that info can sometimes seem or feel ecclesiastic.
In my opinion, context and rhetoric matter. That’s why I joked a little. But I don’t mean no harm, truly. And I appreciate what you do.
That’s of course a fair point, and I did laugh, I am extremely guilty of “essay posting” and try to minimize that when I can while still getting my point across. And I appreciate the compliments, too! Right now there is a big influx of new users from Reddit, so I’m being more of a stickler than usual as in my experience this legitimately does have an impact on the broader stances on Lemmy, given its size.
I see ! Thank you for that :)
No problem! Have a good one! 🫡
That’s state welfare/insurance, not socialism.
A rose is a rose is a rose. I get your point though. Terms must be defined specifically in order to hold academic discussions. Welfare is called socialism by some.
deleted by creator
European countries aren’t Socialist, though, and they depend on Imperialism to fund their safety nets like the US does, it’s just that in the US this money goes pretty much straight into the pockets of the bourgeoisie outright, instead of also funding safety nets.
The USA actually spends several billions, if not trillions on Medicare (meant for the old) and Medicaid (meant for the poor, and single mothers, and young children) combined.
In 2023, the federal government spent about $848.2 billion on Medicare, accounting for 14% of total federal spending.
source - and that’s just Medicare.
I agree with you that it’s weird that corporations get a bailout, instead of selling the company to competitors, but no need to act like the USA doesn’t spend a TON of money on its citizens, keeping their head above water :)
SpenT
Don’t make me laugh, it’s not socialism! it’s bro-ism, 'cause, I got you bro. If everyone got their bros and we all bros then we can do absolutely anything bro!
I like to swap out “ism” with “frame”. In this case broism becomes broframe.
Unfortunately, socialism discourages and eventually kills off broism.
You don’t get, socialism doesn’t exist, it can’t hurt you, it was just a boogeyman created by the billionaires so you’ll go back to the wagie cage. There’s only bro-ism
I live in a post soviet country so I experience the impact of socialism to this very day. It’s appalling.
You experience our destruction, we stole the world from you are we’re coming for seconds. Let us in more, let us finacialze you, your dreams will have advertising in them, we will strip whatever is left of your public transporter for copper, we will put your nana in the streets after converting her house into empty condos and stealing her pension. This is what happens when you let to imperial powers come in and loot your dwellings.
😨 …
Fuck pensions btw, pensions are communist shit and should be abolished.
That just means your pension plan is a deer slug
I can’t remember where I copied this from originally but it seems pertinent here
Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. they know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism.’
Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions.
This is is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores.
An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete.
They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone too irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover).
One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services.
But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy.
She’s got a work on her sales pitch. “Probably one of the greatest… Oh it’s not for you, it’s more of a Shelbyville idea…”
about what youd expect for a country thats been the global epicenter for anticommunist propaganda.
Whats funnier is that when you count how many times Homer went to the hospital… unless if lives in a « socialist » country… he would be homeless
He has health insurance. That’s what the union episode is about even
Maybe that’s why Lisa is spreading socialist propaganda. Bc her family directly benefits from it
I live in the USA and its so bad i just cant interact with most people. They are basically entirely vibes based. They dont research anything if they hear a new claim they decide if its true based on if they feel like its true. You can literally show them evidence and most will be like “nah thats bs”. I made a comment on 小红书 recently about how 54% of americans read below a 6th grade level and my replies are FULL of americans saying “uh i can read” … can you really?
Truth is literally just your belief. What’s your problem with people “feeling like it’s true”?
Truth is material reality. People feeling like magic is real doesn’t make it so, and if you cede ground to these solipsists then you can’t get anywhere as a society.
Uhuh. Let’s say truth is material reality. What is material reality?
What actually exists in the real world.
So I guess there are things that don’t actually exist in the real world. They exist in some other worlds? What are other worlds except for real world? What are the criteria to determine if somehing exists in the real world or not.
You’re trying to make an argument for solipsism, and against science. If you truly believed this, then you’d have no problem walking in front of an oncoming truck, as it may as well not be “real,” but you and I know that’s not true. Instead, we can know the real world through testing and confirming material reality and how it works through the advancement of science.
You’re trying to make an argument for solipsism, and against science
- No, I don’t. I’d actually call myself a primitive realist.
- Science and solipsism is not a dichotomy.
If you truly believed this, then you’d have no problem walking in front of an oncoming truck, as it may as well not be “real,”
Believed what? At what point in our conversation did I state my beliefs?
Instead, we can know the real world through testing and confirming material reality
Maybe stop spawning unnecessary entities? Here you say there’s real world and then there’s material reality. Wtf are those and what’s the difference between them? Are there other worlds? Are there other realities? Just stop for a second and try to comprehend what you’re writing.
Wait, isn’t socialism all about class solidarity? “Working together regardless of class to fight a common enemy” sounds more like nationalism where at the end the upper class profits most. Unless we are talking about a classless society but that’s not “regardless of class” but “with no class distinction” which sounds very similar when I think about it.
Yes, you’re correct here. Class collaborationism is a Social Democratic tendency, not a Socialist one.
Socialism is about making the working class the ruling class. It is explicitly about oppressing the bourgeois class, which is itself the current ruling class oppressing the working (and other) classes. The idea is to take the means of production and run it for ourselves rather than the profit of a class defined by merely owning factories, buildings, tools, etc.
The cartoon may be confused.
Sounds more like social democracy, which can include managed capitalism and cooperation between workers and owners. To a degree.
Every character there is working class, so I’m imagining in this case “regardless of class” is implicitly “regardless of perceived class”
Moe is bourgeois.
What if was socialism, but for a nation? What could go wrong? /s
You joke, but this is a real thing, PatSoc movements like the American Communist Party (not to be confused with the CPUSA), also known as “MAGA Communism.” Essentially Imperialism combined with Communist aesthetics.
Meanwhile, socialist Norway’s wealth fund could maintain everyone’s standard of living for 400 years if they stopped working right now.
norway isnt socialist. they just excel at exporting capitalism’s issues to the third world.
of course not, you can bet that “wealth fund” is invested in institutions that leech of the global south.
I upvoted for the first sentence, don’t know enough about Norway to have a critical opinion on the second one. It does sound like imperialism though. When they don’t any more resources to exploit nationaly, capitalists must go elsewhere
for the second part: i’m not well versed in norway’s specifics but northern europe in general uses brazil as a resource colony, i know norway engages in oil extrativism here, in some delicate areas of the amazon rainforest that really shouldnt be disturbed right now.
i’m willing to bet good money they do it to many many other regions too.
Norway funds its safety nets off of super-exploitation of the Global South, ie Imperialism. It is firmly Capitalist and in no way Socialist, private property is the primary driving aspect of Norway’s economy, the higher standard of living comes from acting as a Landlord in country form.
Hmmm, interesting. But what if we gave it all to one guy?
Norway isn’t socialist. And by “everyone” you mean just Norwegians, even though Norway’s wealth was built on the backs of people in the global South.
Not to mention that Norway’s public wealth is being claimed by the capitalist class, just like in every western country
Can’t eat money
Whenever people say this they neglect to point out that all the money came from selling oil.
They forget to point out that only dumbfuck yanks would consider Norway to be socialist, so the comment, in a meme community, is misleading from the get-go.
Norway is not socialist in the least
Norway is a capitalist country. It us an OECD hanger-on to the US-led imperialist world order.
thats not something to boast about, it tells how deeply embedded the nordic socdems are in financial parasitism aka imperialism.
living off interests is parasitism
“if we all work together regardless of class” collaborationism is bourgeoisie propaganda and is not tolerated here, Comrade. Please face the wall.
america is a classless society because even the upper class is still powerless in the face of the corporatocracy
Genuinely a “what reading no theory does to someone” bit.
You contradict yourself by saying “classless” and then “upper class.” Additionally, the “corporatocracy” is just Capitalism functioning.
If you want to get started with theory, I keep an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list you can check out if you want.
democratic centralism is when all the tankies simultaneously miss a joke
I don’t really see the humor in what you said, though.
How come you picked that instance over tankietube?
Oh they give 20 gigs of space, I made a tankietube account after but already started posting on this instance so just kept going with it.
Tankietube has unlimited storage
oh nice, I’ll start posting on there at some point
“All classes working together” as a counterpoint to socialism? Where have I heard of this before…?
It’s because it’s impossible. The classes will always be in conflict until the communism is reached, so it depends which class is in power.
“All classes working together” is called capitalism
Yep, this is the concept behind “Social Democracy.” Class collaborationism is a myth used to justify the perpetuation of Capitalism, not ending it.
The mob is absolutely right
In what manner?
Lisa is trying to sell socialism to people under the pretext of “all people work together”, greater good for all mankind and other fairytales. She’s just feeding them propaganda. Fuck Lisa.
Socialism is certainly the necessary path forward, I don’t think that amounts to just “feeding people propaganda.”
There’s no path forward. We are not moving forward. That’s just socialist progressivist belief. Some believe in Buddha, some believe in Allah, socialists believe in path forward.
And OF COURSE socialism is the only path forward according to socialism. Who would’ve thought.
“Forward” as in progressing in complexity of production and improving key quality of life metrics.
My name is not “Socialism,” Socialism is not a living, breathing being either.
What’s a complexity of production? Why do we want to progress in complexity of production? Shouldn’t we be trying to reduce complexity? And who defines the “key quality of life metrics”? If socialists define those, then surely socialism is necessary to improve those metrics. But I guess different people can have different metrics. Catholic Church, for example, may take the percentage of people going to heaven after death as a key quality of life metric. In this case, socialism would be absolutely devastating for quality of life.
You can simplify where you can, but as technology advances it gets more complex to manufacture. You can’t reasonably build a cell phone in your garage from base components.
As for quality of life metrics, things like literacy rates and life expectancies, home ownership and mortality rates. The Catholic Church should not determine this as they do not base their beliefs in known material reality.
I am fairly certain that you’re a troll, though, so I don’t see much point in continuing this.
What about anarchism?
Anarchism is preferable to Capitalism, of course, but as a former Anarchist I find Marxist theory and historical practice to be more evidently effective.
What type of anarchism?
