We have lost all sense of self preservation. Almost like we the gipity. Which came first the gipity or the ape? I swear chain smoking monkeys driving cars.
The people who currently own the means of production really really like having control over everything.
Rich people don’t want to give anything up.
Assholes don’t want their out-group to have anything nice. Even if it means they suffer.
Many people don’t know shit about fuck, and they’re just trying to get through the week.
It’s not crazy, you just have to examine who is telling you it’s crazy.
Just this morning, I took my kids to a restaurant and was seated near someone who I know for a fact has a net worth well into 8 figures - a bourgeois business owner who sold his business for a fortune (it’s a small town). He was complaining to his friend about how Mamdani was about to “ruin NYC” and how the DSA wants to “indoctrinate kids” into socialism. Most of what he said was just boring Fox News talking points. But really what struck me (and I thought this before I saw this thread) was just how completely shocked he was over the idea that anyone was even considering socialism. It’s like, the fact that right here in capitalist America where “anyone” (i.e him, because these people don’t care about anyone but themselves and maybe their family) can get filthy rich, to advocate for socialism is like saying there’s cheese on the moon, in the bourgeois mind.
If you’re one of the few winners at capitalism, then socialism really does seem crazy. Not only do you have riches beyond what most humans have ever dreamed of thanks to capitalism, but you have likely insulated yourself in a bubble that reinforces the idea this is the best system - the only economic system possible is the one that has enriched me. These capitalists (and maybe some of their acolytes) are the only ones who really think socialism is “crazy”. Seeing socialism as the rational way forward is understood by those who actually examine the economic systems we live under, or those who experience its cruelty.
Don’t let them make you think YOU are the crazy one. The only ones who think capitalism is a good and sane system are the capitalists themselves.
Communism is when we all share a toothbrush
No seriously I had an old woman, good friend of our family, tell me that democratic socialists wanted to make illegals live with us in our houses that we paid for. Like that was their plan, they were going to force homeowners to house migrant families.
What the fuck have they been smoking in this country? That’s not how ANY of this works!
My grandfather actually had to share his own house with five other families in Bulgaria in the forties after the revolution.
If he had a house that could fit five families and was occupying it alone then good
My great grandpa had to give up all his slaves in Cuba after the Revolution 😢
Because the ruling class ideas are the ruling ideas, they control education, public spaces and media (and also the repression apparatus in case the former is insufficient). It’s not about the sense of self preservation, we are not so different than ancient or medieval commoners who found questioning the divine rights of kings to own everything, a crazy idea.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.
― Karl Marx
Because the people who own everything want to keep owning everything and because they own everything they have the resources to propagandize the idea that them owning all the things is actually good.
I think a good question worth asking yourself when it comes to evaluating claims made by someone is “Would they still have a reason to say this if it weren’t true?” Would rich people, the politicians whose campaigns were backed by rich people, and media outlets owned by rich people have a reason to support the system which makes them rich even if their claims about it being good for everyone else were not true? Yes.
Because more than half of people don’t really understand what the means of production is in the first place.
We do to the extent you own stock.
Equality gives a feeling of helplessness. There is no hope for a high status person with the knowledge and skills to solve the hard problems.
The more global warming and nuclear threats create uncertainty the more people feel the need to find somebody who resolves their problems. With their power and status symbols billionaires trigger the feeling that they are what we need to create a better world. If we distribute their power it feels like we destroy our only hope.
We could start resolving our problems by ourselves, right here, right now. With digital goods the means of production can be created from nothing. (But) Who dares to say how we should start?
on paper it sounds legit, but eventually it comes down to who has control of it.
Speaking of USSR, there’s going to be responsible person assigned for that place, whether it was collective farm or any manufacutring plant. And everyone who is in that place will have an personal interest in abusing that power. Ordinary workers took whatever they could find to home, it was known that if everything is owned by everyone, therefore it is also mine. I think shared ownership goes against human nature and to live in altruistic and self preserving society would mean to overcome it. When we think of ourselves part of humanity and not part group/nationality/political view or individual maybe we will be one step closer
Human nature is to eat, fuck, reproduce, and work together in small tribes of 100 people. We are hyper social apes, almost as social as ants.
I think shared ownership goes against human nature
I think the vast majority of things are shared. Air, water, soil… roads, schools… your education… the bathrooms at the supermarket… the murals/sculptures that make your town look less like a shithole…
It’s perfectly in line with human nature, actually, to share things. People who amass hoards of wealth and fight for power and control… those are the weirdos.
How can you say this about industry, but not something already publicly owned, like police, fire departments or military? And yes, yes, I know how well some of those are run, BUT, would they be better under private control? Hell no. In fact, I’m pretty sure they’d be better without the corrupting influence private wealth has on our political system.
Fire Depts are generally pretty well run tbh
This is a nice sounding sentiment but in practice you get the same system anyway.
Who is the “public”? It might start with councils, co ops, group discussions, but eventually it always gets consolidated by the most cunning people, doesn’t matter the system, it’s a long standing historical cycle.
Democracy with peaceful transfer of power is new, America was always considered an experiment, and it seems like that it might be failing because the forces of accumulation, power, and control are too pathologically overwhelming.
The cycle always ends with bloody revolution, new government, the new government is usually an autocracy wrapped in a flag of something populist sounding, things get marginally better for people for a time then the accumulation cycle kicks in again because a new set of cunning people enter that can take action on a freshly born populace and around and around we go.
The only thing that has a prayer of keeping anything in check is a citizenry that stays aware, mistrusts whatever the government is, understands the cycle, and continuously fights for rights by making it a credible threat that the people WILL revolt unless the leaders do the right thing.
Modern day leaders have incredible tools available to passify and stupefy at scale, I’m not sure how this can be fought back against now.
Bottom line though is socialism, democracy, capitalism, communism, monarchy, despotism they are all just systems run by people. It’s up to people to hold people accountable no matter what you’re running. If people aren’t willing to keep fighting for justice and they stay complacent ALL systems trend towards corruption.
I’m so sick of this patronizing head-pat “everything else is just as bad, we tried” response.
The fact of the matter is that the easiest way to do this under our system is making companies employee owned.
I worked for one for several years, and yes it was subject to many of the same administrative issues as every other company, but every single employee earned stock every month that kept increasing in value. A guy who had worked there for about 30 years as a worker -not a manager- was retiring with a stock portfolio worth millions. They also had the normal crappy 401k and social security they could have earned anywhere else, but because it was employee owned, they had all that company stock too.
So we have shown it can work to have the workers own the means of production. Is convenient to present government ownership as the same thing so it can be easily criticized, but it isn’t really.
How does that work for the next generation of employees, the ones that weren’t there from the beginning? Doesn’t it mean privatisation as people retire and sell off their shares? And doesn’t it mean dilution of value for new employees as their shares represent an ever smaller portion of the company?
How do they approach those issues?
You don’t get to take the stock when you go, you get cash value in a retirement account and the company reclaims the stock for future accrual by employees.
What determines cash value in that case?
The company has it’s value reassessed each year by an accounting firm that specializes in these evaluations. That determines stock price.
Thanks for that. I was always curious how they were able to survive staff change
Hey employee owned companies I agree with. I agree with trying something new for sure, my main point isn’t to patronize it’s to highlight that we need a system that keeps everyone engaged and educated.
Elites will always try to tell people not to worry, to sell their shares to them, the trust them. This needs to be prevented and discouraged structurally and culturally.
Let’s try, it’s worth trying always, I’m not saying to give up, I’m saying the cycle will cause another revolution, what we do with that new chance is important to understand what is turning the wheel.
Democracy with peaceful transfer of power is new, America was always considered an experiment, and it seems like that it might be failing because the forces of accumulation, power, and control are too pathologically overwhelming.
Americans really are the most propagandized people on Earth
