An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.
If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, updooting good contributions and downdooting those of low-quality!
0. Only post socialist memes
That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such
That means condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Mantic Minotaur" when answering question 2)
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36828107
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."
Marx identified that capitalism by necessity leads to an endless cycle of collapses. There is no way to avoid suffering under capitalism.
A fully planned system has also shown to become highly inefficient.
The the key phrase there is "under capitalism". My point is capitalism can't be the top level. If it is, then it will run away, exactly as Marx saw.
At the same time, it's an incredibly effective tool. It allows for dynamic value assessment in a system that has minimal trust. It's a perfect method of fairly distributing luxuries. It's akin to a fire being useful when trapped in a fireplace, or a blast furnace. The problems occur when it's allowed to run amock.
How would you go about fairly distributing limited luxuries, particularly when the value to a given person varies?
Firstly, I challenge the assumption that efficiency is the most important goal. This was addressed very convincingly almost 70 years ago in The Affluent Society:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society
This book explains that we should not use the same policies for a society which is constantly struggling on a knife edge between starvation and death. That was not the reality 70 years ago and is much less tha case today.
Even if we assume that efficiency is the most important goal, what you are actually arguing for is well-designed markets as the tool to achieve that. I question even this, since a profitable company is by definition less efficient than one that makes little or no profit, since profit is the extra wealth that the company extracts after paying all bills.
Even if we assume that a for profit market is the best way to manage resources and achieve efficiency, capitalism is fundamentally a bad model for that, since practices like hiding information from consumers or capturing regulators are great ways to increase profits without improving efficiency or managing resources effectively.
tl;dr fuck capitalism. 😉
I agree that a hyper focus on efficiency is a bad plan. At the same time, we would need some corrective mechanism.
A good example would be food preference. Say you have 3 food options, A,B and C. A is the easiest to produce, but bland. B and C are more difficult and so more limited. Some people love B but hate C, others vice versa. Some people would happily just have A, and use the excess value on other luxuries. How do you resolve this?
A limited capital based system would find it easy. Each person has an assigned value. They can choose how to distribute it. This dynamically finds the fairest distribution. By passing it to the farmers, they can choose how to direct effort.
As for regulatory capture, etc. That's a sign that capitalism is getting out of control. It's akin to your curtains starting to smoulder. It needs to be used like fire on a wooden ship, with extreme care and control.
I guess we'll never know if the system you describe here would work, since it has never existed. Companies have been using induced demand, loss leaders, cross subsidies, bundling, marketing, and a million other similar tricks to limit consumers access to knowledge and confuse them since long before Adam Smith fantasized about capital as the best of all possible worlds.
I don't think it should matter, at least not until we've guaranteed everyone their human rights. Nutritious food, safe shelter, clean water, medical care.
I don't think we can afford to worry about luxuries until we solve the problem of affording people.
Right now, we have more than enough to support basic necessities for everyone. It's mostly a distribution issue now. It's also being fucked up by run away capitalism creating artificial scarcity.
You will have a hard time getting anyone to join a system that others nothing more than gruel, a grey jumpsuit and a dorm bunk.I would strongly suspect such a system of funneling thr excess to a few elites.
The question is, how to judge values, without a capital based system at all. What is a lead brick worth in corn, or bananas?
Of all things why would a lead brick or bananas or corn need value?
Give corn and bananas to people for free, give the lead brick to whatever science lab or nuclear power plant needs it for free.
If you want to talk about luxury value in a post-scarcity economy, choose something like coffee.
Nobody was arguing that.
I don't think you understand what actually is meant by the term "capitalism". Capitalism does not mean free markets. Capitalism primarily means the ownership of the means of production in private hands. You can come up with a system which is highly regulated, to some degree even planned, which can still be considered capitalistic.
On the other hand, it is easy to imagine a socialist system whose economy consist solely of companies fully owned by the people that work there, i.e. the workers, while the companies themselves engage in a competitive and free market. It would be just like today, except workers have a say in who leads the organization, and how, in a democratic process.
In short capitalism != free market and vice versa.