I love when people describe a system better than capitalism when trying to make communism look bad.

Just have to shift from disposable mace, a spray can full of pepper spray; to a reusable mace, a long ass handle with a big fuck off spikey ball at the end

What does this mean though?

Hmmmmmm

So true

Interesting how all these paid actors are right wingers, to believe Lemmy Russian bot hawks, the bot accounts are all fake leftists and tankies

Aw crap they tricked us with money again

It is frustrating in almost every way! I can summon a lot of optimism for the project of socialism and the historic role of the working class; but when it comes to the day to day its too easy to get disillusioned. Its supposed to be disillusioning! The tragic reality in the west is that in our alienation, our exploitation appears to us as comfort. Hang in there and take care of yourself!

You have to learn to distinguish cool liberals, who are for individual freedom, democracy, progressive society; from the bad liberals who always side with private property against those things. The people in the first category are just confused; the people in the second category are actual class enemies. I acknowledge that these aren’t discreet categories and there will be some overlap, but winning people to your ideas slowly, over time – because these ideas are based in their material reality, which they need to test against their existing views – is the only way to get through to people. Sometimes the process is quicker, sometimes its slow, but its the only way to help people see the world for what it really is, and that together we can actually bring the fight to the ruling class.

Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, colorized

Does anyone else hear that? Its the worlds smallest AI violin playing the saddest song composed by an AI

Looking forward to this dystopian technology being pushed out to all retailers and then never working so I still have to swipe my card anyway

Lol when I got banned from a major comm for defending a trotskyist comrade, after two years of participation on the instance, I learned all about the wholesomeness of your “non-sectarian” instance.

I’m not sure what’s going on in this comment but I like it

Who are they in debt to? Mostly their own state-controlled Industries. So when China is 1 trillion in debt to their productive capabilities they are failing, but when the US is 35 trillion in debt to international finance capital (via the federal reserve) that’s a healthy economy.

No you see China’s economy has to be failing, if it isn’t then it would be a good market to find businesses to invest in. If a large enough segment of the small capitalists – for whom the great superstructure of American cultural reproduction is geared toward – began investing heavily in Chinese industry and saw large enough roi, they would structurally oppose anti-Chinese domestic policy. Not to mention other economic consequences like creating a more robust and durable class of small capitalists. If small capitalists felt greater economic security as a result of Chinese investment, it would damage not only the foreign policy aims (war) of a large segment of the ruling class who wants to destroy Chinese (lets call it) political republicanism and raid it for its resources and labor a la early 90s Russia; it would also threaten ideological temperament of small capitalists who inform aspiring small capitalists and legions of lumpen workers, who always feel the pressure of capitalism’s natural tendency to crush their classes during economic downturns. If these layers don’t feel threatened by China, if the west can’t successfully blame them for problems we created, then those layers whose exploitation is so crucial to the various profitability schemes of the ruling class might be more amenable to social democracy or maybe even socialism.

The hate that westerners feel toward China is part fear that we will lose our social status, and part hatred of the conditions that allow Chinese markets to operate successfully and independently of our ruling class. Therefore, the Chinese economy must collapse, any day now…

Ideology is a hell of a drug

Hexbear doesn’t even have down votes, you were doing nothing

My friend is a medical librarian and stumbled across two full real skeletons being thrown away, she took their skulls. So yeah ethically sourced and she actually had a website where you could order different human bones left over from cadavers. So they’re not that hard to source, a lot of people donate their body to science, which is good.

That “abstraction” is the alienation. I don’t want to have like, a symmantical argument or anything. Like you say, surplus value appears to them in stocks, which is just a form of capital; but it also appears on profit and loss reports. They don’t actually starve the poor, but the existence of the starving and destitute is a great motivation for working people to consent to their own exploitation. they don’t actually build or drop the bombs – but they invest in the companies that do, and profit when they drop, like you said about venture capital for example. Big corporate landlords look at their income and try and figure out how to increase profits year on year, but they never have to see how it affects peoples lives when they raise rents. Consumers don’t see where or how the things they buy are made, it just appears in a retail space. Workers don’t make an entire commodity like a craftsman might, they interact with a machine (owned by the capitalist) that mass produces some little spring or whatever that is integrated into the final commodity, and the capitalist has purchased the workers time to operate it, thus the workers are alienated from the product of their own labor.

So maybe you don’t want to use the word alienation and you’d rather call it abstraction. Alienation is the word Marx used to describe it, abstraction is something different, so that’s what I call it. But I think its the same concept.

1000%

It isn’t greed, the system is coercive. There aren’t people at the top pulling the strings of the system, they wield incredible political and social power but they’re alienated from the system the same as everyone else, its just the system delivers to them our stolen wages in the form of profits which makes them want to preserve the system whereas conscious workers want to see it ended. The fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalism: opposing interests of workers vs owners.

If there is an avenue to pursue profit that is morally wrong or whatever, and company A’s executives don’t pursue it, that works for a while until competitor B emerges who can take advantage of it, and reap all of the profits. If executives from company A still refuse they can be replaced by the board until they deliver competitive profits to their shareholders. If not they probably just get bought up by company B in the next recession for cheap.

This is why the working class is the revolutionary class. All competition under capitalism is a feature of the system, corporate malthusianism is the norm. Different industries are more or less affected by this at different times, so it is an uneven process of development, but its baked into every interaction. The only thing that has ever worked to force the system to make reforms or brought it to a halt is worker solidarity. When the workers say “we won’t work for the capitalists anymore” and stay the course, that’s it. The only remedy for a system of forced competition is a system of voluntary solidarity.