And now infographics are memes... Shitposts has more memes than this community.
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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No, you see, you have to upvote it because communism is great
🤢
I'm about to leave Lemmy too because the main thing that shows up is /c/memes and half the time the posts aren't memes and when they are they're just reposts from 10 years ago.
Why not just block the meme channel?
Why keep browsing all at all if you’re so picky.
For me its because it's the default and I like the memes. For the person I'm commenting to he probably doesn't know how to configure it.
This isn't really a meme
L take, communism and socialism don't work and never will. There's a reason every communist or socialist country has failed or fallen back into capitalism for the masses and authoritarianism for the top.
"During the years of Stalin's reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that "socialism doesn't work" is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history." Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
read a book you moronic dipshit, specifically this one ,[https://valleysunderground.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf] , look it's even free, you have 0 excuses to not educate yourself, you're welcome
No cars though. Fuck cars.
I'll never understand how owning guns is normalized.
Note, the idea doesn't support the idea of carry permits. Personally, dont have an issue with a hunting rifle or shotgun kept in a safe at home, but carry and especially cc permits are absolutely insane. You do not need a firearm that can be hidden for either home defence or hunting.
Colt didn't call it the great equalizer for nothing. Imagine being a 90 lb woman facing rape or death by a 200 lb man. Don't think for a second anything but a gun will allow her to save herself.
Pepper spray for example. Will it stop all people that would be stopped by a gun? No. But on the other side, it would lower this number at least.
It was normalized in the US because white settlers always had to be ready to commit genocide against indigenous people or put down slave revolts - that's what the 2nd amendment was really all about. In a socialist community, firearms will be necessary because there will always be nazis about (not to mention their ex-cop friends).
What if I want to make my own farm?
You could have a personal garden, but to have a farm you'd have to obtain a lot of land. Then you'd have to make the land productive with either large and resource hungry machinery i.e. capital or you'd have to obtain and exploit the labor of farm workers to work by hand.
What if i agree with some of my friends that we will join our yards to make one big field and work it together? We could also ask others for help and pay them for their work, the amount of money we both agree with.
You and your community collectively owning and operating a farm is literally a communal farm.
but if some of my friends dont want to work it they can just sell me the land. And if we produce more food than we need we can sell it so we can buy other things we don't produce. I dont understand why its wrong to own a farm.
Personal property is for personal use. That's it.
Once you start to accumulate surplus property then its very obviously not personal anymore. A person that doesn't want a garden won't have one to sell you, because they wouldn't have one in the first place.
Don't think in terms of "right" and "wrong". Think materially.
Substance farming is different than owning a farm that exists by its own production of food and selling those produced goods at market price.
I don't think most communists would have a problem with people trading crops that they grow themselves. The problem comes in when someone hires employees to grow more crops for them, starts collecting profits, and grows the farm even bigger. All under the expectation that they own everything that their employees worked for. Cause that's literally capitalism on a small scale.
Of course it needs to be possible for multiple people to come together and start growing crops, but only as long as no single person can take over the entire operation. Leaders would be elected, and be given a somewhat higher salary to reflect the additional responsibility.
you going to manage a 10 acre farm by yourself and eat everything?
you can grow a few vegetables in a garden, but as long as people help you do it, it's not really personal property
10 acres is very very small and is not even a full time job for a person. Are you assuming this is all done without machines? like small hobby farms are all Amish or something? (actually even the Amish farm way more then 10 acres per person, they are not lazy)
(EDITING TO ADD THIS IS WRONG AND I MESSED UP THE CALCULATIONS. IT SHOULD BE 40 TIMES OR SO MORE)
Also just because this bugs me in a strange way.
10 acres of land growing wheat produces about 600lbs of harvested wheat a year. That is about 900,000 calories a year. Even of you ate nothing but wheat gruel you would just manage enough food for one person (about 900,000 calories assuming 2500 a day).
I think like a lot of people you have no idea the scale of farming required to feed the world. Is this why Holodomors happen?
Yes. But don't worry, one of them just assured me that communist countries "never make the same mistakes as their predecessors," so if we starve it'll be slightly different than the holodomor or killing all the sparrows, so we got that going for us.
Also the holodomor was totally an accident and not malicious or abject stupidity, just a goof-em-up!
I’m glad you answered in their stead. Obviously you’re the kind of person to steel man arguments to truly show their weaknesses and strengths. You’d never regurgitate boiler plate talking points from people opposed to the ideology.
Never look up how many famines have been overseen by capitalist countries btw. It’d make your comparison lack any meaningful difference. India was run by the east India trading company when they had the bengal famine after all. And don’t forget how the Irish “potato” famine happened. (The British made it a crime to keep any non potato crop for themselves).
Here's the main difference:
"Yes that happened, and it was bad. We shouldn't repeat those mistakes, though we do not have to abandon capitalism entirely."
It's a little different than "nuh uh, real capitalism has never been tried that was imperialism/colonialism. Real capitalism is only when everything is perfect forever under free market capitalism so if anything bad happens it was never real."
Actually I bring this up because when talking about famines people love to downplay the strife caused by capitalists maximizing profit and socializing loses.
Ironically your last paragraph is a pretty accurate paraphrasing of the usual dialogue around capitalisms faults.
You just described healthcare system in soviet union. Instead of money vodka was used, as money was worthless, and there were no foods in grocery stores. Doctors were drunk and barley came to work. Communism just makes everything even more worse than it already is. There so many horror stories you don't hear.
it was totalitarian, nobody wants a totalitarian state. communism and totalitarianism are different things
why don't you quote the homeless people in the US and the drug problems of philadelphia, the capitalism of south africa, and saudi arabia?
we disagree, it's okay.
Y'all should move to Cuba
Food is rationned, meaning everybody has food, and healthcare is great.
How's about a website that generates money, like Facebook or YouTube? Can you own that?
What about products that designed to create ongoing streams of revenue, like a patent on an invention or a piece of art you can collect royalties from every time it is displayed? The USSR famously took ownership of Tetris away from its creator.
Under communism, how does the stock market work? I'm not a big fan of it, but it's pretty hard to imagine getting rid of it now that the global economy is pretty much dependent on it.
Today, five countries exist that can be said to be communist: China, Russia, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba. Of those five, none have achieved actual communism, and several have inarguably embraced capitalism to a great extent. All of them have essentially authoritarian governments. Which is unsurprising, since a dictatorship of the proletariat is central to the Marxist vision of how to create a communist society, and involves the creation of a single-party transitional government that forcibly suppresses all its critics and rivals.
I'm not big into capitalism and I think we should implement plenty of socialist reforms, but I will never understand why some people on the Left—or anyone for that matter—think communism is what we should be striving for.
"Today, five countries exist that can be said to be communist: China, Russia"
Tell me you have no idea what you are talking about without directly telling me you have no idea what you are talking about. In what way can today's Russia "be said to be communist", and how does its current, very explicitly anti-communist government, contribute to the point you are making?
Those websites are highly capitalistic and never brought any innovation, all technologies related to the internet were researched by public money.
Look into patent trolls. Patents are bad, publicly funded research is always better, but it doesn't prevent people from spending money to do research, but it doesn't entitle them for the profits.
I'm not advocating FOR communism, I'm just trying to dispel myths.
Socialism is soluble with capitalism.
Never brought any innovation? VP9, AV1, zstd, GraphQL, React, and many more were made/contributed to by Google/Facebook specifically to improve those services. We benefit from this as they release these programs/formats.
Programs and format are not research. Nothing new was invented, they're just alternative to existing things.