this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Same goes for capitalism. Why is it called communism then, if your definition doesn't even contain any reference to anything communal? At the very least, it would have to be "people working together to improve their own material conditions", but that's perfectly acceptable in capitalism as well.
Come on now, if you want to have a debate about this, at least try to make argument that doesn't fall apart at the slightest breeze.
Does your understanding of communism stop at semantics? If you’re going to be strongly opposed to something you should at least know what it is. Otherwise your arguments are limited to being the slightest breeze.
No, I’m merely pointing out that I would be wasting my time arguing with people who do not even care enough to make a semantically coherent argument.
It would be difficult to make a semantically coherent argument for someone who doesn’t know the definitions of the words you’re saying.
You should read that other comment again. The democratization of production as opposed to private ownership is the communal part of communism you were looking for. It’s the profit goes to the workers instead of Jeff Bezos and his investors as in capitalism. If you demand that the root of the word mean something else then of course the argument makes no sense.
Okay, fair enough, I did miss that part apparently.
Is it fair to say, then, that according to your definition, communism is just capitalism but with democratized production?
Those two concepts are incompatible. I’m assuming we’re both American so you’ve probably heard that capitalism means free market exchange of goods and services but that’s actually just commerce and is a feature of every economic system. The defining trait of capitalism is actually that one guy can own the means of production and is entitled to the capital produced. Whereas in socialism and communism there is no private ownership of production.
Actually, if we go by the name, then the defining trait would have to be the use of capital as a means of production (i.e. capital producing more capital all on its own). In other words, usury.
You are correct that commerce or a free market aren't exclusive to that system. Nor is usury required to have a free market exchange of goods. But when you combine that with a market for capital, it kinda puts the whole thing on steroids, because it introduces massive amounts of leverage, and with that, all kinds of speculative activity.
If you don't have access to capital markets, the only thing anyone can invest into anything is their time. And everyone gets exactly the same amount of that, 24 hours each day. Of course that doesn't mean that the results will be just as equal, but there's only so much you can do to multiply the productivity of your time, so the results will probably be in a more narrow spectrum overall.
However, if you can get access to massive amounts of cash at the stroke of a pen, you can effectively buy a lot of time from other people who are wiling to sell theirs, but since you have to pay that money back with interest, you are now forced to make them deliver more value. What if THAT is actually what's causing the kind of exploitation that communists are lamenting, and they're simply misplacing the blame from those who are running the game to those who are merely playing it?
You can make assumptions about things based on their names, but it will often lead you astray as we have already covered. Koala bears aren’t bears and life insurance doesn’t keep you alive. Believe it or not, there is a lot of information accessible to you about these concepts other than their names.
... what do you think Communism is? It's a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society achieved via abolition of Private Property. That doesn't mean everyone suddenly becomes hippies working in communes or tribes.
Capitalism certainly can have cooperation, it just happens to encourage competition, monopoly, and exploitation of Workers for the sake of profit.
What's your point, exactly?
If capitalism encourages or favors competition, how come there is such a thing as companies? Those generally require some level of cooperation. If everyone works against each other, they would simply fall apart.
Also, why do we often see companies getting bigger and bigger, sometimes even by means of two competitors merging together? If capitalism encourages competition, shouldn’t they both be better off staying separate?
Because the Workers aren't competing, they don't give a shit. The Capitalists are competing for an even larger share of the pie. Instead of everyone cooperating, you fragment everyone into companies, which are like little factions.
Some factions doing well enough to create new kings like Bezos or Musk is also not a feature, given that there's no democratic control.
Really not sure what you're getting at. Why are you even on a platform rejecting Capitslism, rather than Reddit, if you're so sure that leftism is a bad thing?
Does Lemmy as a whole reject capitalism, or is it just individual servers like this one? Because I really don't get nearly as much hate on any other ones, it's always here.
Also, I find it very interesting that if Lemmy or the Fediverse in general are leaning rather left, why did they choose to implement a federated model? This makes every server owner king of their own personal fiefdom, able to allow whatever content and apply whatever rules they please. Therefore, it is impossible by design to enforce that everyone had to reject capitalism.
Yes, there is some measure of democratic control in the defederation mechanism, which allows the community as a whole to somewhat isolate and contain those who don't want to adhere to the common rules, but it doesn't get rid of them entirely. And it certainly enables some amount of competition among instances getting a share of the total userbase.
A for-profit company could even take the codebase and spin off their own reddit clone absolutely for free. This has actually happened at least twice with Mastodon — both Gab and Truth Social are using it internally (of course both are defederated islands, but rather large ones compared to the average server size).
If this is real communism, then perhaps it's accurate to say that previous attempts such as the UdSSR were all failures, and communism by dictatorship doesn't work at all. But perhaps then that also implies that some level of internal competition is healthy and normal, and it is by no means required that EVERYONE has to be on the same page in order for it to work.
Lemmy is a decentralized, FOSS platform built by a Communist explicitly as an answer to Reddit. The people on Lemmy trend leftward, obviously, but that's because the very foundation is a rejection of Capitalism. If you want Capitalist Lemmy, there's Reddit.
FOSS itself is leftist, and a rejection of Capitalism. The ability for the users to simply fork off if they don't like the way something is heading is precisely an advantage of leftist organization, which is impossible with Capitalist Reddit.
Truth Social and Gab are built on Mastadon, yes. FOSS itself is a rejection of Capitalism, Capitalists going in and taking advantage of existing leftist infrastructure doesn't mean the infrastructure itself is Capitalist.
Your last paragraph is a complete non-sequitor. Much of the USSR was indeed a failure, there was a ludicrous amount of corruption at the Politburo level, and the further up you went the less democratic it was, as only local Soviets were purely democratically accountable to the Workers. With each rung you went up, it was less accountable to the Workers. However, absolutely none of what you say about competition, the USSR, or otherwise follows logically.
Communism itself doesn't depend on everyone following in lock-step, Capitalism does.
Again, I find such statements very interesting, especially given that you so firmly rejected competition as inherently capitalist and undesirable. Because being able to just take something and fork it actually encourages competition. If I don't like where a project is headed, and I can take their code and make my own version, and if I do a better job at it than the original maintainers, I could even outclass them. Isn't that exactly the type of stuff you hate about capitalism?
No, but it isn't inherently anti-Capitalist either, and that was my point. Also, they're both playing by the rules and making their source code available as required by the GPL, although AFAIK it DID take some legal threats before they complied. Commercial exploitation of FOSS is something that's explicitly allowed by most licenses, and Lemmy's is no different. They could have chosen one that forbids such things, but they did not.
Your style of argumentation and tenuous grasp on logic never fails to baffle me. So you agree that Soviet Russia was an abject failure and had nothing to do with "real" communism, and you also seem to agree that the Fediverse is a much better representation of it, but then you simply reject all my other conclusions without feeling the need to even explain that at all. Sorry, but I find this entirely unconvincing.
But if everyone ISN'T in lockstep then there might be... dare I say it... competition? And I thought that was a capitalist concept entirely.
I don't hate competition for the sake of competition. The goal of FOSS is cooperation until something becomes less than desirable, as the goal is a good product. With Capitalism, the goal is profit, and as such destabilization and competition are required. With FOSS, a new fork is only done for a better product, not for profit-seeking.
Commercial exploitation of an anti-Capitalist option does not mean the option is not anti-Capitalist. FOSS is a rejection of IP a la Capitalism, and a rejection of the profit motive.
I understand that trying to argue with sound logic is difficult for you, after all, nothing you've said has logically followed. Enough of being cheeky, though. The USSR was a specific model of Marxist-Leninist Socialism, they never reached Communism as Communism is a Stateless, Classless, moneyless society. They did many things right, like giving workers far more control, and providing free Healthcare and education. They also had many huge problems, like massive corruption at the Politburo level, and atrocities committed by government officials like the Katyn Massacre and Stalin's Purges. As such, I believe the USSR provides a wealth of information on what aspects did work, and what aspects were terrible. I do not want to recreate the USSR, nor use it as a template. I want to learn from it and create something far better.
You're confusing market competition for Capitalism. Capitalism requires competition and rejects cooperation, Socialism has both when it needs to. Capitalism cannot function without competition.
I understand that leftist theory can be hard to understand if you aren't at all familiar. I suggest reading leftist theory before trying to talk about it on social media as though you're saying something profound. It only comes off as profoundly ignorant.