this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024

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Capitalism creates its own gravediggers (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (26 children)

Read Marx, everyone, especially people that don't think they need to.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Speaking of, a new translation of Capital I just dropped.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Is a free pdf available?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

https://annas-archive.org/md5/abebaa739c328a6b12f7e42c1e5f25d0

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Annies archive.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I would like to add David Graeber to that, and Kropotkin even. I don't mean to start a snowball effect that turns this into a huge list, but I feel like not enough people (especially the average person) know about them; especially Graeber who is a lot more modern.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Kropotkine was a sweetie.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago

Communism A system of government where the country's wealth is concentrated into a small, ruling class of billionaires, who use the news media they own to keep the lower classes fighting with each other while they . . . the rich . . . run off with all the farking money.

Oh wait. that's capitalism. I don't know how I got those two systems confused.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Oh, the sharpening of that French tech for just such occasions.

[–] jaggedrobotpubes 7 points 2 months ago

Long-windedness is the soul of wit.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I disagree, I think socialism can and will beat capitalism eventually.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

This meme isn't saying Socialism will not prevail. Rather, it's saying that even though Socialists can't individually beat Capitalism right now, as Capitalism decays Socialists increase in number and Capitalists weaken in strength, making Socialist victory more probable over time.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And a strongman dictator usually beats socialism

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

true the world's capitalist countries are not susceptible to this

[+] [email protected] -7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Beat or being able to flourish once the Goth Galadriel is gone?

Because historically the revolutionary forces (the one toppling the bourgeoisie) are extremely shitty governors (just continuing mass murdering & plundering which kinda makes sense if you think how & what they have been through).

In very few historical instances of regime changes all the previous actors as well as anyone involved in the revolution were prohibited in forming the new structure. This helps a lot to actually change the system.

You wouldn't want to move from a czar to a dictator, thats long term the same bullshit, only makes things better in short term.

Same with any oligarchy, if it exists and has power than it matters little what kind of regime it technically is.

Edit: I might have chosen poor words but I didn't mean that the ideologies behind revolutions make for poor government, just literally the force of a few 100 or 1000 people directly involved in the forceful part of the revolution. The fighty-fighty people.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Because historically the revolutionary forces (the one toppling the bourgeoisie) are extremely shitty governors (just continuing mass murdering & plundering which kinda makes sense if you think how & what they have been through).

Historically this is false 👍

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

No, I meant the immediate people involved in the revolution, those often don't fair well & don't last long (eg people in a party, not necessarily main headline names). Iirc Russia changed almost everyone in charge in the 20s & 30s to a more stable structure afterwards.

In such system changes the country often goes through another (lesser) system revolution a few years after the first one (when the focus is to just keep shit running) & it's better that people involved change at that point too.

Like what happened with Robespierre (~Jacobins), the early two or three years under Lenin, and I think Slovakia or Poland when they transitionv away from communism they forbid running for office to anyone that held any official power under the previous regime (the same people that formally facilitated the end of communism since it as that kind of revolution).

What you showed is what happened after after that, so the point of revolution. And I couldn't agree more with that. My point was not in that. It's that you need admins and regular politicians to run any system smoothly, and the few 1000s of people revolutioning arent usually the best at tirelessly debating a monetary policy or what road laws to use.

(Oh, the "plundering" part - yes, perhaps the wrong word to use, I meant that fairly literally, irl taking things, not doing it in an organised legal manner which is how "the 1% gets to exist" – and you can se that clearly in the Russia chart too, 90s capitalism was the framework for that, so "paper" not raiding rich houses)

[–] WoahWoah 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yes, the socialists have definitely been winning this epic fight.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The point of the meme is that as Capitalism deteriorates, and it must deteriorate, more Workers become aligned with Leftists and at some point there will be a shift from quantitative to qualitative, ie at some level there will be a dramatic change, like the boiling point of water.

[–] WoahWoah 2 points 2 months ago

Cool cool. LMK

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

So much winning

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Was there some new supercasper series or something?

[+] [email protected] -7 points 2 months ago (4 children)

You guys have been predicting the collapse of capitalism for like 150 years. At some point you have to admit that your theory was wrong and go back to the drawing board. This is just sad.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Capitalism has been struggling with the problem of collapse, and in fact it did from pretty early on in that history you mention, with Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, and so on. The problem isn't just going to go away, because a system that needs infinite expansion in a finite world necessarily will collapse. It can sometimes "innovate" its way into having more time, and modern imperialism is just such an example of that innovation, pushing much of the poverty capitalism demands into the third world, but that just changes the specific circumstances of the problem rather than eliminating it. The US as we speak is continuously losing its grip on its hegemony as the imperial periphery and semi-periphery develop sovereignty. History will not end.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

The fall of Rome took over two and a half centuries.

Sometimes you need to accept things are broken and move toward fixing them, not blindly stumble forward expecting everything to right itself.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Capitalism is less than 400 years old, and feudalism took probably triple that to fully die out. These are world-historic processes taking a long time, involving new energy sources, technological developments, and declining surpluses.

Capitalism has had many crackups already, and is now in its late stage in most of the world. Even most of the populations of capitalist countries, when polled, are pessimistic about their future.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

You're not wrong, capitalism has a million failings, but the people running the show always find new ways to keep the status quo. They can buy the system whenever needed, while the masses can, at best, get a free beating from the cops

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