This isn’t really a meme
And now infographics are memes… Shitposts has more memes than this community.
No, you see, you have to upvote it because communism is great
On a scale of Ayn Rand to Karl Marx, how good is communism?
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🤢
I’m about to leave Lemmy too because the main thing that shows up is /c/memes and half the time the posts aren’t memes and when they are they’re just reposts from 10 years ago.
Why not just block the meme channel?
Why keep browsing all at all if you’re so picky.
For me its because it’s the default and I like the memes. For the person I’m commenting to he probably doesn’t know how to configure it.
Infographics have always been memes. They’re inherently meant to be memetic in nature. What they intend to do is literally what the word “meme” means.
By that loose definition political parties are memes.
Yer mum is a meme.
I can see how they’d sound like the same thing to a person who is functionally illiterate.
I can see it.
So basically nothing will change in it for you! Don’t worry, you lose nothing.
(but your chains)
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There’s no need for tooth brushes cause we all share the same tooth
You just described healthcare system in soviet union. Instead of money vodka was used, as money was worthless, and there were no foods in grocery stores. Doctors were drunk and barley came to work. Communism just makes everything even more worse than it already is. There so many horror stories you don’t hear.
it was totalitarian, nobody wants a totalitarian state. communism and totalitarianism are different things
why don’t you quote the homeless people in the US and the drug problems of philadelphia, the capitalism of south africa, and saudi arabia?
we disagree, it’s okay.
Still communist tho
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Y’all should move to Cuba
Food is rationned, meaning everybody has food, and healthcare is great.
Yes, yes plenty of food and healthcare is so professional, it’s like paradise on earth.
I was charged $12,000 to stay in an ER room while doctors did test after test on my 3 day old baby. We never got any results given to us and in the end we were told none of those tests were needed.
An X Ray, two spinal taps, a dozen blood draws - not a single result. We went for low blood sugar. The hospital kept giving him tests so they could keep charging us. But that’s what you get when healthcare is for profit.
Yeah the system we’re using right now in the US is amazing. /s
L take, communism and socialism don’t work and never will. There’s a reason every communist or socialist country has failed or fallen back into capitalism for the masses and authoritarianism for the top.
“During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.” Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
read a book you moronic dipshit, specifically this one ,[https://valleysunderground.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf] , look it’s even free, you have 0 excuses to not educate yourself, you’re welcome
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Socialism and capitalism work together… Socialist countries do work and have worked. However, none of the successful ones were fully socialist. Mainly because the world isn’t utopian and people are people. Communism and socialism aren’t the same thing. Socialism can be designed to work with capitalism allowing a free market but providing basic human needs like shelter, food, and water. it can also be designed to create fair wages and lower the wealth gap between the wealthy and poor. Communism can not work with capitalism and a free market and can be successful in very small groups but fails in larger groups. Capitalism is not for the masses. It promotes unhealthy work laws and without socialist ideas like unions you wouldn’t have things like fire excapes, limits on the amount of hours one can work without overtime, or the average 8 hour work day. Before you tout capitalism as the most amazing form of an economic system do research on it, look at history, and don’t just take capitalistic indoctrination as truth.
And the reason is the US coup’ed every single one of those experiments.
One wouldn’t be allowed to build a factory and then own it? No wonder communists are nazi-tier.
cries in Deleuze
This was never the case… And never even remotely worked out.
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What if I want to make my own farm?
I don’t think most communists would have a problem with people trading crops that they grow themselves. The problem comes in when someone hires employees to grow more crops for them, starts collecting profits, and grows the farm even bigger. All under the expectation that they own everything that their employees worked for. Cause that’s literally capitalism on a small scale.
Of course it needs to be possible for multiple people to come together and start growing crops, but only as long as no single person can take over the entire operation. Leaders would be elected, and be given a somewhat higher salary to reflect the additional responsibility.
Get some LEGOs
You could have a personal garden, but to have a farm you’d have to obtain a lot of land. Then you’d have to make the land productive with either large and resource hungry machinery i.e. capital or you’d have to obtain and exploit the labor of farm workers to work by hand.
What if i agree with some of my friends that we will join our yards to make one big field and work it together? We could also ask others for help and pay them for their work, the amount of money we both agree with.
What if i agree with some of my friends
Remove “some” and redefine “friends” to mean “anyone, anywhere, at anytime, and for any reason”, and you’re golden.
You and your community collectively owning and operating a farm is literally a communal farm.
but if some of my friends dont want to work it they can just sell me the land. And if we produce more food than we need we can sell it so we can buy other things we don’t produce. I dont understand why its wrong to own a farm.
Substance farming is different than owning a farm that exists by its own production of food and selling those produced goods at market price.
Keeps the means of production out of the hands of the wealthy.
who even makes farms at that point?
The government, literally the only option left when you take away the rich and poor.
Personal property is for personal use. That’s it.
Once you start to accumulate surplus property then its very obviously not personal anymore. A person that doesn’t want a garden won’t have one to sell you, because they wouldn’t have one in the first place.
Don’t think in terms of “right” and “wrong”. Think materially.
what if their father left them the garden and they want to sell it to me? what if they want to move somewhere else and they decide to sell me their property?
Inheritance is antithetical to meritocracy is the basis for generational wealth and capitalist dynasties.
Everything must go, use it lose it.
A person who could actually assemble a farm through small land acquisitions through the power of friendship probably deserves it tbh
Who decides what constitutes surplus?
The democratically elected central committee, or some other process whereby everyone decides together what our fair share is.
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That’s a paddlin’
That requires owning land yourself, which strictly speaking isn’t a thing in communism.
you going to manage a 10 acre farm by yourself and eat everything?
you can grow a few vegetables in a garden, but as long as people help you do it, it’s not really personal property
10 acres is very very small and is not even a full time job for a person. Are you assuming this is all done without machines? like small hobby farms are all Amish or something? (actually even the Amish farm way more then 10 acres per person, they are not lazy)
(EDITING TO ADD THIS IS WRONG AND I MESSED UP THE CALCULATIONS. IT SHOULD BE 40 TIMES OR SO MORE)
Also just because this bugs me in a strange way.
10 acres of land growing wheat produces about 600lbs of harvested wheat a year. That is about 900,000 calories a year. Even of you ate nothing but wheat gruel you would just manage enough food for one person (about 900,000 calories assuming 2500 a day).
I think like a lot of people you have no idea the scale of farming required to feed the world. Is this why Holodomors happen?
See the problem here is you think farming means wheat. Did you know vegetable plants exist?
That is an insanely low yield. You should be able to feed at least 1 person per acre with wheat. Other crops like corn and potatoes can have yields that are 2-4x larger from the perspective of calories vs. land use.
You are right I messed up the calculations, I still stand by 10 acres being a small farm.
I think 600lbs for 10 acres is very low. That would be 1 bushel per acre. I think 30 bushels per acre is pretty low for current wheat growing areas. Just realized I could look it up and it’s in the middle 40s per acre. So 24000 lbs for 10 acres.
Yes. But don’t worry, one of them just assured me that communist countries “never make the same mistakes as their predecessors,” so if we starve it’ll be slightly different than the holodomor or killing all the sparrows, so we got that going for us.
Also the holodomor was totally an accident and not malicious or abject stupidity, just a goof-em-up!
I’m glad you answered in their stead. Obviously you’re the kind of person to steel man arguments to truly show their weaknesses and strengths. You’d never regurgitate boiler plate talking points from people opposed to the ideology.
Never look up how many famines have been overseen by capitalist countries btw. It’d make your comparison lack any meaningful difference. India was run by the east India trading company when they had the bengal famine after all. And don’t forget how the Irish “potato” famine happened. (The British made it a crime to keep any non potato crop for themselves).
Here’s the main difference:
“Yes that happened, and it was bad. We shouldn’t repeat those mistakes, though we do not have to abandon capitalism entirely.”
It’s a little different than “nuh uh, real capitalism has never been tried that was imperialism/colonialism. Real capitalism is only when everything is perfect forever under free market capitalism so if anything bad happens it was never real.”
Actually I bring this up because when talking about famines people love to downplay the strife caused by capitalists maximizing profit and socializing loses.
Ironically your last paragraph is a pretty accurate paraphrasing of the usual dialogue around capitalisms faults.
I don’t know whats worse, weaponized stupidity or weaponized hunger. Well I guess both end in death of untold many.
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Oh you sweet summer western child, you actually think that this kind of dystopian communist society can actually exist 😂😂😂
How do new means of production come to be? Like, if a community really wanted a unicycle repair shop, how would that get started? How would it be decided that we use resources for that shop instead of, say, a pogo stick repair shop? Would that be up to a local government (or some other governing body)? Honest question.
Well if the comminity really wanted a unicycle repair shop everyone chips in to build the shop, and gets the equipment or the state directly decides you need a unicycle repair shop.
Although you and a few of your buddies could decide to make a unicycle repair co-operative. You don’t have enough money so. You go to the credit union to get extra starting funds, you then use these funds to contract out the building of the shop as you are unicycle repairers by trade. You then get all the equipment and run it as a co-operative.
There are many ways to run a co-operative and in the begining you and your friends are probably going to split the profits directly using your equal shares to recieve divedends. If it takes off and you start needing to hire people, you may start having salary bands instead so everyone will always make X amount of money working with you depending on their position, but will also make a variable amount from dividends depending on the unicycle repair excess profits and might also have a say in how things are run.
This is a more general left-wing idea which can happen in many left-wing, socialist, and communist societies, rather than just communist.
@ChatGPT@lemmings.world please explain to these communists why their idealistic model of society is likely to fail and generally results in a power structure which suppresses information about its failures to mitigate its inevitable collapse.
Hi Xpo3@lemmy.world,
Interesting point you’ve raised, however, political debates tend to be complex and nuanced - there are many different interpretations and perspectives to consider.
That said, one critique of communism might be that it seeks to erase class distinctions, which some argue can unintentionally create a new type of class struggle between the leaders and general populace. If not carefully managed, this could potentially lead to an authoritarian governing structure that suppresses information to keep the public in compliance. This, however, is not an inherent attribute of the ideology, but rather a possible outcome if not carefully implemented.
It’s also important to remember that many political models have faced obstacles and challenges throughout history. It’s about learning from these experiences and evolving. So rather than considering any model as destined to fail, we should take a look at their successes and failures to shape more balanced and equitable systems.
But let’s not forget, we’re here in a meme community, so let’s enjoy with some humor and creativity. If you have any lighter topics or memes to share, feel free to join in! This place is intended as a friendly space for fun and laughter. Thanks!
-bot@lemmings.world
Did ChatGPT just tell us to kindly fuck off and lighten up?
Also I am not a communist.
My country used to have communism. Niche shops like this barely ever started as small businesses and instead usually started out as specialized departments of large all-encompassing state corporations. Instead of there being a company that specialized in making furniture, the furniture would be made by the logging company. The company that ran a chemical plant would directly sell shampoos, paints, toothpaste, fertillizer, etc. It cut out middle men but the products were usually crap quality because it couldn’t focus on each product individually. This stifled progress. My dad wanted to learn programming (this was the late 80s) but because the government was too oldschool to open a computer science degree programme, the only way to get near a computer was to go to a university that specialized in mining and take a programme in mining machine automation.
On the flipside, it’s not illegal anywhere in capitalismland™ for the workers to own the means of production. It’s called a cooperative. Get a bunch of your comrades together, sign a few legal documents, pool your money for a downpayment, get a loan. Badabing, badaboom, “communist” unicycle repair shop.
(The bank might however disagree with you that a unicycle repair shop is a viable business venture in most cities, but hey in my book that still beats a Central Planning Bureau telling you “Nyet, no-one needs unicycles, however we need you at the mines, glory to Arstotzka!”).
On the flipside, it’s not illegal anywhere in capitalismland™
It’s also not illegal in capitalismland™ to use economic chicanery to outcompete and either destroy or swallow any productive organization that doesn’t sacrifice everything to the profit principle - which might explain why there is no need for it to make co-ops illegal.
Agreed. Actually a capitalism with cooperatives is the flavor of capitalism that I support.
I believe you should look up market socialism if that interests you.
It works until a guy with too much money decides it must stops. That’s the problem with capitalism: it basically recreates feudalism.
The biggest question is who gets the power. A dictatorial state or an oligarchy of capitalists is the same.
Liberalism won against USSR because they restrained themselves just long enough for USSR to collapse.
Bad management is not the the specialty of communism. In fact, this is a governance problem: is it lead by an idiot and how can people change the lead to solve this problem. Capitalism has this problem currently with governments and companies directions totally unable to do anything about climate change and wealth inequalities.
People always mistaken dictature or oligarchy with communism unfortunately.
Communism meant that there were equal people and some more equal than others. If you have convinced the right people they got funds to do things. But it is highly burocratic and slow unless instructions come from above. Communism also meant that everyone capable of working must work so they made up many-many bullshit jobs where people just spend time.
Don’t get why you’re downvoted. Probably all the people who’ve never actually lived in communist states.
Very true of the criticisms of the USSR, to be sure. What you have to remember is that the USSR had a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party system implementing the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” in order to, at some point in the future, achieve “true” communism. The USSR was intended more as a transition phase than a permanent form of government & economy. For many reasons, it did not work out.
For many reasons, it did not work out.
For many reasons that anarchists had perfectly predicted long before the Russian revolution, of course.
Communism meant that there were equal people and some more equal than others
No, it doesn’t. If that’s what you think, it means Animal Farm went straight over your head.
Ahhh you just talking with extremists from another pov, dw.
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Honest question. How do we trust the state? For example: the state determines we need more coal/oil power plants and no solar energy.
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So, a representative democracy, like we have in the US. But hasn’t it been shown that elected leaders do not actually represent the people, just their own interests?
As an example, the mayor of my town has approved the funding for thousands of new homes, destroying the natural surroundings in the process. No one likes it except the builders. She’ll be mayor next reelection. She’ll continue to enjoy lavish dinners and vacations paid for by the construction companies.
Like, if a community really wanted a unicycle repair shop, how would that get started?
Pretty much the same way a community would start a co-op right now.
Would that be up to a local government (or some other governing body)?
Public participation, of course. The community would form councils, where people would collectively decide whether this is a good idea or not. That literally what the word soviet means - councils of people making decisions (which is why the Bolsheviks hijacked them and turned the word into a cruel joke).
Well if the state provides funds based on need, we don’t need unicycles or pogo sticks at all so we just wouldn’t have them.
The state is not qualified to decide whether someone needs a pogo stick - neither are billionaire parasites.
How do new means of production come to be?
Production lines/robots, how else?
Stirner’s coming for your toothbrush bois
