I’m south african. My government has the means of production for electricity seized (they own Eskom which has a monopoly.) It is well known that while the regular person has to deal with load shedding, the government officials do not
Add the issues with South African Airways and I would not like all the means of production to be owned by the government
Owned by the government is specifically NOT “owned by the workers”. That is definitionally not socialism, and it’s not communism either.
I seriously hate how no one even knows what socialism or real communism is… Only in stupid authoritarian “communism” like China do you have the government own much of anything directly. Hell, in proper Communism, there’s not supposed to be much of a government at all. Nothing like the giant armies of beurocrats and politicians most places have today, anyways.
That’s kind of the point of most people who don’t think communism can function in current society, the government represents the people, right? So “the people” owning the means of production just becomes “the government” owning the means of production.
Which is why all “communist” states that have ever existed function identically to their fascist counterparts, because regardless of what you call it, the state owns everything.
That is because most people literally lack the imagination. Literally incapable of understanding. Extreme communism doesn’t even have personal property or a main government, so to fail to see anything other than government ownership is a big tell on ignorance. Yes, most people are ignorant, and those in charge LOVE that fact.
I think most people (correctly imo) don’t see how a large enough company can operate without some hierarchy, which seems to run up against the idea of being entirely equally employee owned.
There’s always going to be leaders (manager or just someone who others listen to) That person necessarily has more responsibility and control than his peers and is justly compensated more (otherwise nobody would put in extra work, say, to train as an engineer or doctor)
That person has their own interests that don’t always line up with the company and may use their influence to guide the company in a way that benefits them.
Suddenly you have a worker class and a bourgeois-esque class.
Most people (incorrectly imo) think that the “unbiased” checks and balances in government counteract that.
If there’s another option that accounts for hierarchies in large employee owned and operated companies let me know…. please
Again, people are implicitly strawmanning things. No one except extreme anarchists believe in zero hierarchy. Why does everyone always try these insane notions? I didn’t say “abolish hierarchy”, yet here you are using it as an argument.
If you think executives that make literally hundreds of times more than the lower workers are actually working hundreds of times harder, you are fucking stupid.
If you think they’re taking all the risk, then you are fucking stupid. If the company goes under, EVERYONE has to find a new job. If it’s a dangerous job, it’s the laborers who are taking basically all of the risk.
Just because you can point at specific companies doing good things DOES NOT adequately defend the status quo.
Only full blown anarchists and extreme libertarians don’t want a government at all. It is utterly foolish to think all leftists wouldn’t support ‘an’ enforcement agency, regulations, and laws…
Well that’s just a complete and utter misuse of the term, then. Possibly an effort by tankies to remove meaning from the label.
A tankie is a fake “leftist” who idolizes leftist policies and ideals, but does it via worship of the past efforts, like the USSR, or even specific “socialists” or “communists” like Lenin and so many other horrible dictators… in so doing, they completely and utterly fail to live a single leftist ideal and in reality end up idolizing fascists and authoritarians like Mao. This makes them functionally identical to fascists whilst they claim leftist motives.
Tankies realize leftist ideas are good, but utterly and completely fail to connect wishes with meaningful action, thus want some power figure to do it for them. They’re too stupid, ball-less, and self-centered to realize the actions they want to take are at best representative democracies, and at worst fascist dictatorships.
Tankies are wonderful to learn to properly identify, because it makes it sooo much easier to discard them and look for real leftists instead of idiots who use the same words.
You live in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, i.e. a liberal democracy where the bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production) dictate the laws.
State owned companies work for the interests of the ruling class, in this case the bourgeoisie, so you can bet it is subsidized by the people and the ruling class (and their businesses) benefit off it. (Socializing losses and privatizing profits)
If it was owned by say Elon Musk, it wouldn’t be any different for the regular working class people. Only the relations between the bourgeoisie may change.
Is this a memes community? Or a soviet shit hole? I escaped reddit because it was shit and the ultra gatekeeping communists shitfaces, I hate to leave lemmy because of this as well, not many capitalists around this site -_-
Love how you just assume I’m from the west. I’m eastern european, my family is also, and we lived through everything - and I’ve yet to meet someone other than western investors and young kids who thinks things are good/better now
Sooo there aren’t any examples of communism working but it totally is going to when done right! I could counter with “if capitalism was done right nobody would be oppressed and everyone would want for nothing”.
Communism is based on worker enfranchisement and abolition of the commodity form. Where is the inherent incentive for autocracy, and what examples would you care to cite?
Capitalism, on the other hand, naturally favours monopoly thanks to factors including economic power acting as political power, first mover advantage, and economies of scale. Capitalism has no inherent need to even be democratic. Your democracy is polluted by economic influence, your workplace is autocratic. What is there to get right that stops any of this?
… But more importantly, how do you oppress everyone in an economic model focused on worker enfranchisement?
I’m genuinely curious - what do you think communism is? There’s been a lot of definitions over the years and a lot of confusion over the subject, so I’m really interested to hear what do people such as yourself think communism really is that makes them hostile to the idea.
You’re not genuinely curious. You are looking for the person’s view point so you can dismiss, ridicule and rebuff it with some half assed bullshit commie revisionism propaganda.
That’s what you lot do, you lie and take advantage of the disadvantaged. That is the REALITY of what Communism is. I don’t give two shits about your 1st year political science student’s view of Das Kapital.
It’s had over 100 years to prove it doesn’t lead to authoritarianism, brutality and oppression. And it has proved the opposite every fucking time.
Hey pal, stress is bad for the body. Can be as bad as chain smoking if you have chronic stress.
Lemmy is full of leftists, and that looks like a trigger for ya. Just be safe out there.
Also, grouping all communists together is exceptionally inacurate. Lots of variety in leftism. Obviously, if you are discussing politics with a leftist they’ll likely want to discuss the merits of “socialist ideals” with you.
Different cultures, education, experiences and upbringings lead people to have different interpretations of and feelings towards various ideologies. IMO It is only fair for OC to establish the definition first, rather than unknowingly discuss something completely different with the other user.
Responses like this are why a shit ton of users on these platforms do your username and don’t interact with anything
norway isn’t socialist, but a social democracy where they move all the unethical labour somewhere else. it’s miles better than neoliberalism, but it’s still capitalist
Best solution for Norway is to continue exporting undesirable labor like they’ve been doing, until the oil runs out, out demand dries up. Not sure what you’ll do then but you won’t be alone anyway.
It’s not best for everyone, by any means. But it’s best for Norway.
Not hexbear but aren’t you Norwegians an oppressive oil state? You guys were bombing brown people for fun a couple of years back. Isn’t Stoltenburg one of your guys? He just admitted to intentionally provoking the Russian invasion.
Say hi when you meet our little black sparrow-sized drones. All you have to do to earn a visit is mention how we fucked over the Sami, we really don’t like those things. Oh, and don’t insult Jern-Erna if she gets back in power, she’ll divebomb you and leave nothing but a crater. Say what you will about Støre, he’s a soggy twig.
Bruh, we have oppressed people in Norway. Did you forget that our own supreme court ruled that some of our wind mills at Fosen are in violation of UN law of civil and political rights (source in Norwegian). That was two years ago and they are still standing, which is especially bad due to the historical repression and attempts at ethnic cleansing of Sámi people in Norway, that was going on for a disturbingly long time. Now, as a quick caveat I will add that on a global scale we are doing pretty alright. However, that you are fortunate and well, for which I am glad, does not mean that the sentiment of the meme is wrong. Since the 70s much of the good systems we built have been demolished by laissez-faire politics and politicians, like your beloved “Jern-Erna”, lowering corporate taxes and allowing for privatization of public services (our railway system, healthcare and so on). I also don’t think many people from Hexbear are deluded enough to believe in imminent revolution in Russia nor conflating the Russian government with the Communist Party of China (though I might suspect you do), making your comment either worthless or in bad faith (we both know it is both). Either way, I support seizing the means of production and voted for my convictions today. Even though I believe I probably fundamentally disagree with you, I hope you did too. Leave the “all communists are tankie fascists” idea at home please. It only makes you look ignorant and a bad representative for our nice little country.
Not a commie, but didn’t the Norwegian people nationalize the oil production, leasing it out to companies while keeping a huge share of the profit for the welfare of common Norwegians?
My understanding is that, in a sense, that is exactly what seizing the means of production is about.
Nope. The people making these policies laid the plans for nationalizing the natural resources of Norway while in German concentration camps, where they were sent precisely because they were socialists. They are the primary reason, along with the discovery of oil and gas, for Norway being one of the richest countries on earth per capita. That the extraction of natural resources is under democratic control and under a somewhat high taxation scheme is not evidence of a fascist state-corp merger, but something that should be the default in all countries around the world to combat imperialist capital interests (except that the taxes should be even higher).
Sure! There are multiple claims in my comments, but one can get the gist by reading about the first prime minister of Norway after World War II, Einar Gerhardsen. To back up this new claim I cite the same Wikipedia article linked above:
Many Norwegians often refer to him as “Landsfaderen” (Father of the Nation); he is generally considered one of the main architects of the post-war rebuilding of Norway after World War II.
A better source might be SNL (which stands for the Great Norwegian Encyclopedia and is owned mostly by different Norwegian universities) though this source is in Norwegian only, but should be fine to auto-translate if needed.
The idea of public ownership over natural resources is something that has been a big part of Norwegian identity, and this idea is also manifested in other laws such as the Freedom to roam law, which essentially states that it is
(…) the general public’s right to access certain public or privately owned land, lakes, and rivers for recreation and exercise.
Though I would argue much of this identity has been lost in the last 50 years, I am also proud of some of the accomplishments of Norwegian social democracy and think it shows that the idea that “class collaboration is betrayal of socialist values” is wrong. At the same time it is important to admit that there have been problematic parts throughout its development, such as the treatment of the Sámi people and other minorities and the illegal surveillance of suspected communist sympathizers, to name a few.
Controlling the natural resources a country and leasing it out it private companies is pretty standard practice in most non corrupt countries. Norway probably differs in that they capture more of the economic rent in part due to a more efficient tax and a share of public ownership.
I love how being able to criticize a country you live in is hilarious for you. Says a lot about you really. Doubly hilarious that you think China is fake communist. It’s such an important cope for westies, cause accepting that a communist country does everything better than your beloved capitalism is a hard pill to swallow.
Not sure what point you’re trying to make there to be honest. I’m guessing you’re trying to create some emotional appeal there, but we can find pictures of western regimes committing far worse atrocities today. In fact, US regime alone is responsible for over 300 million deaths nyupress.org/9781583679890/endless-holocausts/
Quite telling that you can’t find anything recent. I love how you just keep spamming these because you think it’s a clever commentary without realizing that it just shows what a little ghoul you are.
And if you bothered actually reading the shit you post, you’d find out that it counts youth unemployment from the age of 16. Being shocked at the fact that kids are going to school instead of working is of course nothing to be surprised about when talking to a capitalism enjoyer.
China is a capitalist country, why else would they be buying western companies?
This is such a hilraiously reductive understanding of what a capitalist country is. Using your “logic”, UK is a communist country because you still have public healthcare for now.
There have been at least two different countries seize the means of production over the years, it didn’t really work out for either of them. Turns out they just swapped one bourgeoise class for another, while the peasants and proles starved.
Well, let’s just see what happened during cultural revolution, sure seems like an improvement over what was happening before pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25495509/
Meanwhile, Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960’s, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67 and the average (not median) retiree household in the USA could expect $48k/yr which comes out to 65% of the 74k average (not median) household income in 2016:
The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US:
These are just some of the biggest technological and social achievements of the Soviet Union.
academic studies on USSR
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possible:
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
Adult mortality increased enormously in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union when the Soviet system collapsed 30 years ago. archive.ph/9Z12u
I love how either no one anwers to these, or they claim they’re made up after pretending that they’re more informed and definitely not living in their own propaganda reality.
I bet the response to this will be that they don’t have time for these walls of text because they’re too busy working.
Probably because nobody is going to read a big wall of text like that, with the sole purpose of debunking. People have better things to do with their time.
Sorry bud, that’s just an incredibly ignorant statement. If China was as capitalist as any other country then we’d see the same things happening in China that we see happening in actual capitalist countries. A good comparison would be with India that started roughly in the same place as China after WW2, but took capitalist route.
It’s also pretty funny that you seem to be suggesting is that you know better than 1.4 billion people actually living in China what their political system is. China is a state governed by the Communist party where Marxism-Leninism is the official state ideology. 87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the party has 95 million members. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that these people do in fact understand what socialism is and what kind of a system they have.
Having special economic zones where capitalism is allowed does not make China capitalist any more than having some social services make Canada communist. One key difference with China is that all the essential industry is state owned, and capitalists do not appear to be in charge of the government. However, even Marx argued that capitalism is likely a necessary stage for developing productive resources needed for socialism and communism to be possible.
One simple test to consider is that China doesn’t suffer from regular crashes seen under capitalism. An inherent contradiction within capitalism is that the capitalists always want to cut pay for their employees to minimize the costs, while they also require consumers with enough spending power to consume the commodities they produce. This is why capitalism results in regular economic crashes when wages fall below the point where consumption can keep up with the rate of commodity production. At that point you end up with overproduction and a crash. If China was capitalist then it should be experiencing these kinds of crashes regularly just like actual capitalist nations are in the Western world.
And a related point is that quality of life in China continues to steadily improve and the government is actively working on doing things like eliminating poverty, creating public infrastructure, providing healthcare, housing, food, and education for all citizens. Chinese government practically eliminated poverty, and in fact China is the only place in a world where any meaningful poverty reduction is happening. If we take China out of the equation poverty actually increased in real terms:
China also massively invests in infrastructure. They used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century, they built 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade. 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. Finally, even NYT admits that people in China enjoy high social mobility unlike people living under capitalism.
These are just a few examples of things that simply do not happen under capitalism.
They literally only claimed to be communist for a few years out of their decades long rule. They had cia connections. The vietnamese communists overthrew them and installed a communist democracy. But sure, they’re communist /s.
Only question is what the fuck was US doing murdering people half way across the world. I guess that’s the whole missionary mentality coming from enlightened Europeans where your tradition is to go around the world to kill and enslave people.
The only thing that’s fucking stupid here is pretending that the west isn’t practising colonialism today and that your standard of living isn’t subsidized by the people literally enslaved by western companies theguardian.com/…/mars-nestle-and-hershey-to-face…
The CCP is literally enslaving and sterilising Uyghurs right now, cretin
Yeah you keep on peddling debunked conspiracy theories there since that’s all you’ve got to wok with. Weird how Uyghur population keeps growing. China can’t even get genocide right apparently. Should probably learn from the brits how to do it right.
Fuck off and learn something instead of spamming my inbox Tankard
After becoming the Communist Party of China’s chief of Xinjiang Province in 2016, Chen Quanguo oversaw a security crackdown that led to a drop in births so sharp that it shocked the world. Some observers accused China’s leadership of committing genocide against the province’s mostly Muslim Uyghur population through forced sterilization and abortion.
Love how you trolls always reach for whataboutism. How dare you hold countries to the same moral standard you say as you adorably stomp your little feets. Meanwhile, here’s what an actual genocide looks like bylinetimes.com/…/up-to-six-million-people-the-un…
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