this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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I’ve debated people at length on this topic and have concluded that this is a half-baked idea that is impossible to implement without destroying society in any form that has been presented to date.
We can have the perpetual pain of subsistence and servitude to the oligarch club until it collapses under the weight of its own manipulation and propaganda after generations of needless suffering of our children and children's children necessitating the painful work of rebuilding, or we can destroy the society built from the ground up as a capitalist exploitation trap and do the painful work of rebuilding.
This society perpetuates the misery and exploitation of the many to serve the whims and desires of the few. You act as if it's worth saving. Go to one of your local tent cities, where we throw our fellow humans, aka defective capital batteries, to die of exposure and police harassment. This system is rotten to its core and will have to be torn down and rebuilt, the only question, just with climate change, is do we let the gaping wound continue fester, hoping it will be the next generation's problem to amputate? Or do we take on the painful necessity of repairing the boomer's greed plague for the future they didnt care about at all?
I'd rather our species be destroyed than continue to commit itself further and further to greed and greed worship. I consider greed far worse than hate. At least people that kill out of hate cared about who they killed, in that they want them dead. A capitalist that poisons children's drinking water to make private shareholders a few extra dollars doesn't even care to know those children's names, they were just speedbumps to glorious profit. To me it is the darkest we can go to hurt others for profit. And our society's core value above all others is greed. That's worth saving?
Your opinion is all feelings and no solutions. Morally, I can’t contend that it would be nice to help people who can’t help themselves and that we should definitely fix the human impact on the environment. I also agree that the Boomers caused a ton of shitty issues with poor policy choices stemming from greed. However, I don’t think that your solution is well thought out. It seems juvenile to simply say that the workers should assume the means of production. That in itself does not equate to a full working solution. Here’s an example of potential incremental changes that would help your cause: 1) Put term limits on all legislators. 2) Allow only one Supreme Court nomination per presidential term, adding a new judge to the pool. A retiring judge is replaced by a vote of the judiciary themselves. 3) Campaign finance reform with capped election funding. High salaries for politicians and steep penalties for kickbacks and bribery. Politicians with financial interests in a vote must recuse. 4) UBI. 5) Strict enforcement of antitrust laws. 6) Caps on higher education costs at public institutions. Federal loans only for public schools with capped interest rates. Your UBI will be tapped instead of a reliance on salary. 7) Reinstate a modernized Fairness Doctrine in order to ensure that people aren’t pigeon-holed into a narrow understanding of current affairs. 8) Create a pathways to citizenship for all with roots in the country then close the borders. Make a transparent immigration system with many more types of work visas. Strictly enforce the new policies. 9) Eliminate the electoral college in favor of direct ranked choice voting.
See, real changes. Not, “Let’s eat people and steal shit!”
So try actually reading the Communist Manifesto - get it from the horse's mouth, it's very short. Then, if you still feel like there isn't enough detail and that the reasoning isn't detailed enough, try Kapital. And then, how about the decades and decades of theory that came after? You can keep claiming that socialists "don't have any solutions", but please realise that this is an absurd claim when the field of socialism has so, so many detailed and comprehensive theories based on observation, experimentation and further research - scientifically so.
I will. I make it a point to read everything that people suggest to me. I’ll likely come back here to shit on it though.
Here is a short introduction to an argument for all companies to be controlled by the people that work in them:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-the-case-for-employee-owned-companies
It establishes an inalienable right to workplace democracy and an inalienable right to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of your labor
Manifesto of the Communist Party - Marxists Internet Archive https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf
Capital Volume I https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf