this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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I mean, not around here?
We don't have a lot of dyed in the wool capitalists on Lemmy, so I see a lot less of that sentiment here. On Lemmy we have way more issues with full-on-tankies than right wingers.
The rest of the internet, though? Oh yeah.
User: "we don't have a lot of problems with capitalists here"
Also user: immediately starts to shit on a flavour of socialism
My sentiments exactly. Couldn't have said it better.
*dyed in the wool liberals
Liberalism is the philosophy of capitalism, capitalists are people who owns significant amounts of capital.
Capitalism is owning the means of production - which isn't limited to billionaires. Almost everybody who has a retirement plan is a capitalist because retirement funds invest in stocks, bonds, etc. Everyone with a savings account is a capitalist - they are supplying money the bank loans to other people, which is where savings account interest comes from. To honestly avoid being a capitalist you'd have to have no money or keep it in a mattress.
The term you're looking for is petite bourgeoisie: people who do get some income by owning slivers of the means of production, but who also have to live by selling their labor. Someone who has investments purely for retirement purposes is straining the lower bounds of that definition.
Change in your pocket is not anywhere close to owning the means of production.
If you really think about it anyone with hands is a capitalist.
Usually complaining about "tankies" is just another way to hate Socialism, the Red Scare never ended and being aware of it doesn't make you immune to its effects in any capacity.
Even if you've got a legit beef with 1950s Stalinists, the idea that they've teleported through time to argue with you in English on a 4th rate social media forum is so fucking self-aggrandizing.
Would that Michael Parenti, David Grabber, and Richard Wolfe had been as ravenously consumed by Americans as Milton Friedman, David Brooks, and Anne Coulter.
My friend, there is an ideological ocean between "workers should collectively own the means of production" and "we need an authoritarian state with a monopoly on violence to enforce communism."
I mean this with all sympathy, after all, I used to share views similar to your own before I started taking Marxism seriously, and to dismiss you would be to dismiss myself, and thus the capacity for change. When you simplify Marxism to "workers should collectively own the Means of Production," you remove the entirety of Marxism, as such a thought was common even pre-Marx. When you simplify AES to "authoritarian states with a monopoly on violence to enforce Communism," you assume greater knowledge of the practice of building Socialism than the billions of people who have worked tirelessly to bring it into existance for the last century.
With all due respect, and no "I've read more than you so my power level is higher" nonsense, have you read Marx?
With all due respect to theory, I've seen too much of it shit all over people who lack education, context, or ability to understand, and basically leaves those people out of the conversation and acts like their opinions don't matter because they haven't read the right books or have the right education.
The differences between academic unions and blue-collar unions were always stark to me, and when there was ever any connection between the two, the academics would roll their eyes and be dismissive of the blue-collar people, who may have not always been theory conscious but were good people, a la Samwise Gamgee (in terms of Tolkiens ideas of the kind of good, kind, but simple people he met in WWI). Constantly telling those people that they don't know enough to be involved isn't ever really a positive way forward, in my opinion, and anything where it's forced from the top-down on those people instead of having their input is something I'm against, sorry. You can't explain away taking away people's right to input in their own governance with theory, to me.
I've read some Marx, but never got my hands on an unabridged copy of Capital, nor did I finish it because it was pretty tedious. I personally think Debord had way more profound things to say, and Society of the Spectacle is the most dog-eared book I own. Mixed with McLuhan's Understanding Media, I'm actually partial to think communications might actually be neck-and-neck with commodities in terms of importance of understanding them. I mean, Debord thought that too, which is why he thought he would be remembered for his board game Kriegspiel, (a war game focusing on lines of communication) not for SotS.
Samwise Gamgee isn't a good person, he's a fictitious character in a fantasy novel.
You need to have something before it can be taken away from you.
Then you know the illusion of choice isn't the same thing as a people's right to self-governance. And further, that a movement of people in opposition to a media established regime is not stealing their neighbors' liberty by asserting some of its own.
Not even if all the TVs and radios and newspapers say so.
I am not trying to tell you that your opinions are "invalid" or "worthless." You raise a good problem well known by actual, practicing Marxists among Western "Marxists" that seek to endlessly critique society without changing it. However, it would be a mistake to not learn from Socialists in the past and present who have a wealth of experience and lifetimes of analysis to draw from. Rather, my goal isn't telling you that you don't know enough to be involved, but that I think you are making a critical error in attacking Socialists based on what I believe are misconceptions and misunderstandings, and this hurts leftist movement.
I think if you made an effort to understand what these billions of Socialists believe in and are committed to, you would better understand if their ideas and systems are valid or not. I think without reading theory that you are only going to have an incomplete and partial view, and this, while not delegitimizing your opinions and views, certainly harms the integrity. Celebrating an "end to theory" was something the Socialist Revolutionaries adhered to pre-revolution in Russia, and this was proven a mistake, while the Bolsheviks' strict adherence to theory and mass worker organization proved correct.
We already have one. Americans just need to keep believing the monopoly is working for them, rather than for their bosses, or the system of compliance falls apart.
I swear to god westerners have had over a hundred years to read The State and Revolution and we're still having the same dumb fucking argument.
In the time y'all take to talk shit about any revolution that actually succeeds you could have read about twenty books on the subject.
There's an ideological ocean between utopian socialism and actually-existing socialism, yes. There's a reason why there's not been a successful historical instance of socialism in which workers collectivised without taking the power of the state in their hands.
Calling it "authoritarian state" kinda portrays lack of knowledge at democratic power structures and mechanisms in former socialist countries. Examples for the USSR: highest unionisation rates in the world, announcement/news boarboards in every workplace administered by the union, free education to the highest level for everyone, free healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing (how do the supposedly "authoritarian leaders" benefit from that?), neighbour commissions legally overviewing the activity and transparency of local administration, neighbour tribunals dealing with most petty crime, millions of members of the party, women's rights, local ethnicities in different republics having an option to education in their language and widespread availability of reading material and newspapers in their language... Please tell me one country that does that better nowadays