Seize the memes of production
Citizens of the Fediverse unite!
Raises and crosses a computer keyboard and a rubber chicken over their heads
I’ve always been partial to this one
Arbeit macht memes
that sounds like something a communist would say…
You wouldn’t steal the means of production
no, but I’d pirate it.
You don’t know me
I miss the IT Crowd.
I have a weird relationship with The IT Crowd. I haven’t watched a lot of it, and didn’t really enjoy it when I watched it, hence why I stopped.
…but having watched it, I find myself really enjoying when people made references to it. Like it was more enjoyable referentially than it was to actually watch.
Honestly it’s not all great, lots of it I kinda check out through, but there are some great bits that make the whole show worth it for me at least.
But yeah being in on references to it is honestly great because of how original/memorable some of the bits are, I think.
I felt exactly the same way about the UK version if the office - great in jokes but waay too cringe inducing for me
Sorry, are we on the same platform? All I see from the communists are cringe memes and even cringier “debates” that would get them laughed out of a middle school debate club.
Are you talking about people who critique capitalism and its bandaids from the left, or people who chose a collection of countries with red flags to simp for?
Everyone on hexbear and lemmygrad is already a communist, so they don’t spend a lot of time trying to convince each other that communism is good and capitalism is bad. It’s mostly current events, venting, and shitposting. A lot of the serious discussion is either in the weekly news megathread or buried in the comments under some shitpost begging xi jinping to nuke the white house.
god I hope he does
Every debate i have with people on lemmy eventually ends in them resorting to 4th grade insults towards me or just straight up throwing hissy fits.
Lemmy is full of children who think anarchy is really good and has no flaws but they cannot explain how societal flaws would be fixed by it. Anarchy is just an example.I’d take an anarchist over people who think the opposite is better
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Edit: i saw a post another day on an .ml instance just like this I think calling libertarianism bad because it was never tried out in practice meanwhile I feel the need to say this conumimisim has been tried out tons of times and has failed miserably
Good examples of this is pol pots and his Khmer rouge and the failure of his regime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge?wprov=sfla1
Stalin and leninism with the failure of the ussr
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinism?wprov=sfla1
I don’t believe in libertarianism although i do think some of its ideas can be used in practice to good success
but this is my personal opinion. But I think it’s a bit hypocritical to call one political system bad while believing in one which has failed miserably multiple timesLibertarianism has been tried and it was a huge failure…I believe in India or thereabouts (Mumbai?).
We have the Shopping Cart Theory to demonstrate why libertarianism is an abject failure. We also have all those decades during the American Industrial Revolution to show how libertarianism is evil and abhorrant, leading to the creation of OSHA and necessary government regulation of industry.
Go touch grass.
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Communism is a trap for the simple minded idealists who are disilkusuined with capitalism. In theory, it could be a utopia. However, it takes a few basic assumptions in order to work. The biggest one is that everyone participating in the system truly believes in it and no one tries to take advantage of it for personal gain. But it’s far too easy for someone or a small group of people to seize power and then keep everyone else powerless to do anything about it. This has been the cause of the failure of all communist governments that I’m aware of.
On a smaller scale, communism works extremely well though. For example, in gaming guilds. Sharing resources, allowing everyone to specialize where they want without suffering from diversifying their skills or dumping play time into other areas can help everyone to advance more quickly. I put this into practice in ff14 with great success. Raid tiers release every 6 months when they also release new crafted gear which is the best for raid progression, but requires some new ingredients which are time locked but tradeable. So our raiders would contribute their ingredients to crafters and they would provide them with gear, and food. The arrangement required the raiders to continue contributing ingredients for 3 months which were evenly distributed among crafters, and they would then make items and profit from them. They would return 10% of profit (not revenue) to the guild bank which funded all kinds of things. Everyone got what they wanted.
How would one take advantage of Communism for personal gain in a way that goes against Communism? Have you legitimately thought beyond pure vibes in your head?
How does one “easily seize power” in a democratically controlled system, moreso than a top-down oriented one like Capitalism?
- Ban opposition parties
- Create an elite and call it something like “the vanguard”
- Enjoy lifetime presidency
Is that what I said? Do you think I’m talking about Vanguardism?
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While I disagree with alot of this I think this is a very good nuanced take good on you. You bring some strong arguments.
Prehaps its just me but
In my personal opinioni wouldn’t find people trustworthy with my money and resources especially in a gaming guild. I’m sure there have been many good gaming guilds although I’m sure there’s alot of people out there to just take advantage
I’ll bite.
Communism has always been about the future. When Lenin and Marx wrote their books and birthed their movements, they wrote about manufacturing processes EVENTUALLY eliminating material needs and displacing most people from work. They were kinda right at the time seeing the textile industry replace thousands of weavers with machines and the advent of powered farming equipment. What they didn’t account for was the industrial revolution actually adding jobs to the workforce and for a time, jobs being replaced were reliably being replaced with other skilled positions.
But that hasn’t been true since the 90s, since then there has been a marked trend towards automation replacing jobs, and slowly, a lot of the human populace is becoming useless.
I think most serious full on commies like myself understand that it’s still a future form of governance that’s inevitable if we want livable conditions. If we continue to have the almost pure and unbridled capitalistic system we have in the US when automated driving, AI, and general purpose robots really kick off, there will be some pretty serious issues.
Without getting too into doxxing myself, my family runs a construction company and builds houses. Have you seen the concrete 3d printers by chance? My dad was smart enough to get 2 a few years ago. Not only did it cut material costs by about 50% in construction, we went from running a 20 man crew to a 4 man crew when running those things. We still run traditional crews, but those days are numbered, for sure.
We’ll need communism because, one day very soon, a huge number of us are going to be unemployable. Hell, DEEP BLUE out of IBM already has a higher diagnostic rate than human doctors. The US Department of Labor and Goldman Sachs are estimating 300mil - 600mil will be replaced with current AI tech, the biggest losses will be in call centers, and what’s left of secretarial workers.
This is my one obsession. Fear of how we can’t possibly all be employed, because of automation, and how the resources and power will keep concentrating in the hands of those who own the automation. I’ve had this argument with friends that aren’t as left leaning as me, and what i’m told over and over again is that i just lack the vision. That this has been a scare since forever, and yet look at how new jobs keep popping up. “There’ll be jobs you can’t even imagine right now”, they say. “Fearmongers like you have been around since forever”. “Employment is actually going up”.
In my mind though, we’re like the horses when the engine was invented.
It’s funny that the people who usually say someone else lacks vision are the people keeping themselves blind. They assume that things must stay good because that’s what they’ve experienced. They can’t imagine the case where things are different, which most of the evidence is pointing towards.
It’s hard to comprehend what 8 BILLION people really means as well. All of these social systems. Religion, governments, anarchy, empires all existed before there were even one billion people. Before globalization, before instant communication. During the fascist revolutions in China in the 70s there only a third that many people on the whole planet and no one had a cell phone.
Capitalism is failing because it’s a pyramid scheme that’s becoming flattened by the monstrous scale of the base. It makes it so clearly obvious what’s going on now.
I feel like most of our attempts so far aren’t equipped for the scale we’re talking about. I hope someone with the resources to help can figure out how to educate the right people with the right perspective to come up with an alternative… but probably not in my lifetime. Which is a bummer.
We definitely need to figure out how to average out the access to resources and influence. Lots of people think I mean communism but I don’t. That’s an old idea that we should consider borrowing from though.
Great plain language breakdown for the uninitiated. Doesn’t disregard socialism as a solution to the problems outlined, but that’s a whole other discussion. Frankly at this point in history, it’s largely academic IMHO.
a lot of the human populace is becoming useless.
Emphasis mine. This would be my only edit. Useless only as a consumer and worker. Still imbued with dignity and capable of generating meaning and experiencing a worthy life.
Great plain language breakdown for the uninitiated. Doesn’t disregard socialism as a solution to the problems outlined, but that’s a whole other discussion.
I’ve always pictured socialism as more a middle step toward full blown communism. I also recognize the value of private enterprise and competition. So whatever communist society we end up with still needs to find ways for that healthy competition to thrive.
But like… We can easily meet human needs at this point for everyone. It’s unjust and stupid not to do so
Socialism in the traditional Marxist path is a transitional step to Communism, yes. Communism, however, is fully anti-market, and as such is anti-competition. Communism is a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society, perhaps you meant to say a system like Market Socialism should precede Communism, rather than some impossible form of competitive Communism?
I think we might be mixing up our micros and macros. Seems like some people will enjoy competition and outdoing each other no matter the extrinsic (or lack thereof) rewards. That’s how it is now, anyway.
Competition, sure. Sports, competitive cooperation, and other methods can be had. Market competition would not exist.
I could be saying the same thing you’re saying though, so correct me if I’m misunderstanding please.
I’m not a communist, but I agree. I think most people would agree communism/socialism would only work if there is abundance, which in this case will be brought by automation. This is exactly what Star Trek predicts-- if global warming doesn’t get to us first.
I’d argue that the people who think Socialism can only work with abundance, even Communism, fail to understand that Socialism and Communism must be built over a long time, and imagine concepts like “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” must be applied to a pre-existing Capitalist economy.
Really, they just don’t see the timescale. There’s no meaningful reason Socialism cannot happen today with current productive forces.
Good point. We actually already have abundance, even going as far back as twenty years ago. The EU produced so much food that a term was coined “wine lakes and butter mountains”, as so many agricultural goods were left rotten in warehouse storage.
These food produce could be sold or sent to poorer countries or elsewhere. However, doing so would “upset” the market, and to be fair outcompete local farmers in developing countries. We’ve actually solved world hunger long ago!
I think for an equitable solution, there has to be a global single market and/or world government to manage resources. And before anyone objects says “1984” or as predicted, communism wants to take over the world indeed, no, I’m not positing a totalitarian state. Just think how the EU is not a fully authoritative institution, but more like a loose agreement of different countries. That could be replicated on the global level to manage the abundance we have and achieve some sort of socialism.
Isn’t that the thing, we needed capitalism now to be able to have communism in the future?
That is legitimately one school of thought, as I’ve heard it, yes. I’m not so sure about it myself, but we’ve definitely got capitalism – no one’s going to argue that – so we may as well use it to the advantage of human flourishing.
So our world is literally dying, we’re living in the greatest mass extinction event ever, and instead of anything being done this process is actually accelerating by every conceivable metric we have.
All because capitalism exists solely to consume endlessly until there’s nothing left.
Making a lightbulb that lasts forever is a terrible business decision because you’ll sell less lightbulbs. In 2023, replaceable batteries have all but disappeared because once the battery dies in a modern day device people see it as time to replace that. Building to last, building renewable, building self-sustaining, that will NEVER be a core tenant of capitalism, because none of those things are profitable.
We’ve got capitalism, yes we do, and people have cancer and aids, it doesn’t mean we should all just learn to work with cancer and aids. People falsely tie a lot of ‘positive’ things to capitalism, but in the end, capitalism is all about making a quick buck no matter what the cost by any other metric.
Making a lightbulb that lasts forever is a terrible business decision because you’ll sell less lightbulbs.
If you’re referring to the Phoebus Cartel, they had legitimate reasons for limiting lightbulb life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY
TLDW: While they undoubtedly made more money because of their actions, shorter life (incandescent) bulbs shine brighter, and with a “better” colour mix than longer life ones.
As you can see from your upvote/downvote ratio, most of the vitrol towards communism here is rightly directed at the Tankies, as theres a LOT of them spewing braindead takes that are the weirdest mix of SJW (For lack of a better term for nice sounding but low thinking social takes) and authoritarian… as if authoritarians or violent revolutionaries are ever going to care for any minorities past getting into power.
isn’t there an irony that this comment itself would get laughed out of middle school debate club?
This is an unedited exchange from the show IT Crowd while she’s trying to subtly tell them she’s on her period and they just don’t get it.
Couldn’t have said it better
Tankies are cringe - but in spite of what they’ll tell you, they’re not communists… Just look at how enfranchised workers are/were in the USSR, China and, the DPRK.
That and a lot of communists sucking eachother’s dicks over how smart they are.
You’ve got Aunt Irma visiting?
… you think the carpet pissers did this?
No! I’m a man! You’re a man! We’re men! pounds on chest like gorilla
Man, I absolutely love that show.
It’s the IT Crowd, for anyone wondering.
British humor can be weird sometimes, but it can also be brilliant like in this show :)
Welcome to the party!
Resistance is futile ☭☭☭
I do not get the communist comment as Lemmy really is about everything.
Decentralization appeals to leftists, and the founder of Lemmy is a vocal Communist. As such, there are lots of leftists of various flavors, be they Marxist or Anarchist.
Cannot say I have really noticed any more than I did when on Reddit.
Believe me, it’s very noticeable. Perhaps you conflate liberals with Communists and Anarchists?
More likely depends on your subscriptions. Mine are mostly tech related and development.
Sure, if you stay out of the broader Lemmy and stick to niche subs, you’ll likely see more people that go to those niche subs. It’s not that you can’t find Communists or Anarchists on Reddit, they just tend to stick to their subs, while on Lemmy Communists and Anarchists are dominant in the bigger subs.
I think that many of the lefties now use it as a joke, I don’t think comunism ever existed as intended nor will ever work but being progressive and democratic socialist is considered commie for many
Maybe if this was Reddit, but on Lemmy there are vast numbers of Communists and Socialists, not just Social Democrats who want Capitalism with band-aids. The founder is a Communist, and decentralization is core to leftist ideologies.
I feel the OP. Communists are more active around the fedi I think. Nothing wrong about it. It’s just a fact. Everyone should be heard in my opinion. Even thought the majority is still stuck in an ideology with almost 200 years that failed miserably every time it was implemented. Socialism is a bit more evolved. A mix of capitalism and socialism seems to be the sweet spot. My 2cents.
edit: typo
Couple things here: Communism is Socialism, a form of it. Communism has never been “implemented” either, as it’s specifically a post-Socialist stage. The ML states you’re referring to were Socialist, and didn’t reach Communism.
Secondly, the ML states were ML states, and as such were deliberately adapting new theory proposed by Lenin and distilled by Stalin.
I’m in no way a Stalinist, or a simp for the USSR, your comment is just wrong.
By your very same logical chain, Capitalism is an ideology 400 years old that failed miserably every time, as well as Socialism. It’s meaningless word salad.
what are ML states ?
Marxist-Leninist. To simplify, Marx wrote some stuff, Lenin expanded on it and threw a revolution, shortly after which he fucking died. Stalin wrote a couple more sentences then distilled the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. That’s why you have non-Marxist-Leninist Marxists/Leninists like the ICP, as word-salady as that sounds.
The essential factor is the belief in the use of a Vanguard Party to carry out a revolution and build up a Socialist state to whither into Communism.
