It’s a meme
bread 👍
Look there, Zach, a message on the toast!
And in the coffee? Revolution.
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Time to stop blocking the people who post this stupid shit.
dbzer0 has been probably one of the most consistently low quality posting instances not ending in .de
Did you mean to say start?
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This seems political
Seems economic to me.
You’re allowed to post political memes as long as the mods agree with your view.
Same as everywhere, really.
You already have a mean of production in your hand. But the only thing you produce is stupid memes.
I’m pretty sure phones are not all that is involved in commodity production.
But they are. Because we live in a service economy and the only thing you produce are services. Phone is enough. Use it wisely.
Yeah. Hold on, I’m just going to build a house, get access to fresh water, and produce food with my phone. After that I’m going to get vaccinated with my phone. And after that I’ll make some clothes with my phone.
Go read the first few chapters of capital on means of production.
Yeah, you can build a house with a phone. Your few chapters are a bit outdated, by about two centuries. The world has moved on.
Please demonstrate how a house is built with a phone.
That does not demonstrate how a house is built with a phone
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/@AutoFocus
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Even if they did produce something, Jeff Bezos would steal it as soon as it started making a buck.
Seizing the means of production made sense when that was the leverage the owners used to strip the surplus value from you.
Today, they use gatekept platform and a captive audience with AI manipulation to insert themselves between you and the customers and strip you of your surplus value.
Now pay Bezos’ 40% tax until Amazon basic is ready to outcompete out of the platform entirely. Welcome to the second page of Google !
Lolwut? You’re delusional, mate.
I’ve debated people at length on this topic and have concluded that this is a half-baked idea that is impossible to implement without destroying society in any form that has been presented to date.
We can have the perpetual pain of subsistence and servitude to the oligarch club until it collapses under the weight of its own manipulation and propaganda after generations of needless suffering of our children and children’s children necessitating the painful work of rebuilding, or we can destroy the society built from the ground up as a capitalist exploitation trap and do the painful work of rebuilding.
This society perpetuates the misery and exploitation of the many to serve the whims and desires of the few. You act as if it’s worth saving. Go to one of your local tent cities, where we throw our fellow humans, aka defective capital batteries, to die of exposure and police harassment. This system is rotten to its core and will have to be torn down and rebuilt, the only question, just with climate change, is do we let the gaping wound continue fester, hoping it will be the next generation’s problem to amputate? Or do we take on the painful necessity of repairing the boomer’s greed plague for the future they didnt care about at all?
I’d rather our species be destroyed than continue to commit itself further and further to greed and greed worship. I consider greed far worse than hate. At least people that kill out of hate cared about who they killed, in that they want them dead. A capitalist that poisons children’s drinking water to make private shareholders a few extra dollars doesn’t even care to know those children’s names, they were just speedbumps to glorious profit. To me it is the darkest we can go to hurt others for profit. And our society’s core value above all others is greed. That’s worth saving?
Your opinion is all feelings and no solutions. Morally, I can’t contend that it would be nice to help people who can’t help themselves and that we should definitely fix the human impact on the environment. I also agree that the Boomers caused a ton of shitty issues with poor policy choices stemming from greed. However, I don’t think that your solution is well thought out. It seems juvenile to simply say that the workers should assume the means of production. That in itself does not equate to a full working solution. Here’s an example of potential incremental changes that would help your cause: 1) Put term limits on all legislators. 2) Allow only one Supreme Court nomination per presidential term, adding a new judge to the pool. A retiring judge is replaced by a vote of the judiciary themselves. 3) Campaign finance reform with capped election funding. High salaries for politicians and steep penalties for kickbacks and bribery. Politicians with financial interests in a vote must recuse. 4) UBI. 5) Strict enforcement of antitrust laws. 6) Caps on higher education costs at public institutions. Federal loans only for public schools with capped interest rates. Your UBI will be tapped instead of a reliance on salary. 7) Reinstate a modernized Fairness Doctrine in order to ensure that people aren’t pigeon-holed into a narrow understanding of current affairs. 8) Create a pathways to citizenship for all with roots in the country then close the borders. Make a transparent immigration system with many more types of work visas. Strictly enforce the new policies. 9) Eliminate the electoral college in favor of direct ranked choice voting.
See, real changes. Not, “Let’s eat people and steal shit!”
Literally everything you just proposed is beyond a pipe dream under the current rigged system. The owners bribe the Republicans and Neoliberals to dictate their preferred economic policy as they stoke social issues to keep the peasants divided. The oligarchs that bribe both major parties will never permit UBI, they spent decades systematically legalizing political bribery culminating in citizens united, they are the reason Antitrust laws on the books aren’t enforced, they are the reason the fairness doctrine was abandoned for private profit, and they like us fighting over abortion, immigration, guns, etc because it stops us from uniting against them.
Also the idea that even without the oligarchs that politicians would regulate their own term limits is absurd. Why do you think they exempt their pay from government shutdowns and have lifetime universal healthcare just for themselves?
The last, last, last chance to do any of what you suggest using the constitutional tools of the system would have been to soundly and firmly reject the Reagan grift, trickle down economics, and the Jack Welch dehumanization of the economy 50 years ago. Instead they convinced their “opposition” party to take the bribes and the peasants not to engage in “unseemly” class war as they won without a fight. We’ve lived under class occupation ever since. This system is beyond all salvation.
Don’t worry though, the half of the peasants that have been indoctrinated from childhood to believe what you believe will protect that occupation against their own interests to the bitter end, so you have nothing to fear from us tankies.
Unfortunately for you, the sycophants, and capitalists, and everyone else including me, climate change is the physical reaction to our careless actions, and is completely immune to any and all pathetic attempts to obfuscate, blackmail, bribe, assassinate, or otherwise con it into backing down, despite all the vaporware like clean coal, corn ethanol, hydrogen, and planet scale carbon filter the capitalists try to make another buck on before last call. But oowee, they’re trying to bullshit their way out of it to darkly hilarious effect.
You want too drastic a change. I believe a political evolution is still possible without throwing the baby out with the bath water.
There is no baby in this bathwater.
Your opinion is all feelings and no solutions
So try actually reading the Communist Manifesto - get it from the horse’s mouth, it’s very short. Then, if you still feel like there isn’t enough detail and that the reasoning isn’t detailed enough, try Kapital. And then, how about the decades and decades of theory that came after? You can keep claiming that socialists “don’t have any solutions”, but please realise that this is an absurd claim when the field of socialism has so, so many detailed and comprehensive theories based on observation, experimentation and further research - scientifically so.
I will. I make it a point to read everything that people suggest to me. I’ll likely come back here to shit on it though.
Here is a short introduction to an argument for all companies to be controlled by the people that work in them:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-the-case-for-employee-owned-companies
It establishes an inalienable right to workplace democracy and an inalienable right to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of your labor
Manifesto of the Communist Party - Marxists Internet Archive https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf
Capital Volume I https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf
You can’t call an idea with 200 years of history and hundreds of books on the subject “half-baked” without explaining what about it you think is unfeasible. Either you have never actually talked to a socialist, or you’ve simply never listened.
So, a few questions:
- Why is it “half-baked”?
- What ideas does it propose?
- What is wrong with those ideas?
- How is it “impossible to implement”?
- What methods are proposed?
- What prevents those methods from working?
- What do you mean by “destroy society”?
- What exactly do you define as society?
- How would socialism “destroy” that?
The factory has owners. It would be unfair to not compensate them for their capital investment. You are describing a situation where you disallow private enterprise, but all systems describing this type of agreement to date have resulted in terrible outcomes. It will destroy competition. I am reminded of hearing about my brother’s visit to the Soviet Union when he was younger. He went with his group to an ice cream shop and asked what flavors they have and they said vanilla. As in, this limits options and provides a shitty quality of life. It also leads to issues where people who are able to provide a high value to society are not rewarded at a higher rate than a lazy or dumb person. The incentive is gone. These are issues that no text has reconciled. Even Plato’s dreamed Utopia, he knew that such a thing only would work if you brainwashed people generationally to value the idea of communal ownership. He basically left it at the leaders not being able to own things, but having all that they need while other classes under them could still own things. In essence, his utopian society was totally unrealistic in any meaningful timeline and still formed different classes of people.
It destroys society to take away people’s possessions because we built a system where property ownership is a central component. Having possessions is such a basic human construct that your are living in a pipe dream if you feel that you can remove that. The idea that people would share with one another and not get what they are worth to society is salient in describing why socialism as a whole crumbles. You can have socialized policies, but destroying the whole economic system doesn’t work. See my reply later in this thread for examples of real incremental changes.
The factory has owners.
Fuck the owners.
but all systems describing this type of agreement to date have resulted in terrible outcomes.
Prove it.
It will destroy competition.
What competition?
a high value to society are not rewarded
What value does Donald Trump bring to society?
The incentive is gone.
Prove it.
These are issues that no text has reconciled.
Prove it.
work if you brainwashed people generationally
You mean completely unlike people brainwashed into believiing “capitalism gud?”
Having possessions is such a basic human construct
Stop conflating simple possessions with private property, genius.
why socialism as a whole crumbles.
Socialism seems perfectly alive and kicking to me - despite the uncountable amounts of treasure spent violently crushing it.
See my reply later in this thread for examples of
real incremental changes.no change whatsoever.FTFY.
Fuck the owners.
Fine
Prove it (terrible outcomes for socialism)
The USSR, Cuba, PRC is better but for some reason they are very authoritarian.
What competition?
Granted there are many industries that don’t have good competition, but the vast majority do. Look at clothes makers, construction, pharma.
What value does Donald Trump bring to society?
He bought real estate where there was more demand than people expected, and took advantage of that. There was no apartments in the empty plot before Trump Tower, now there is and people want them.
Prove it. (innovation)
The USSR did have great amounts of innovation in the beginning, but once you get to a certain point, it just gets pretty much impossible. Look at the second person’s answer.
Prove it (reconcile)
While it is dumb to say that there are no texts to reconcile these issues. It is crazy how the USSR didn’t implement any solution except rewarding innovation to drive innovation. I’d say that is enough evidence to say with confidence that there are no existing solutions to the mentioned issues.
You mean completely unlike people brainwashed into believiing “capitalism gud?”
Sure there is some brainwashing in the right where they think capitalism is great in and of itself. I think that people also recognize that capitalism needs some good amount of regulation that would curb the failures there. It’s not perfect as it exists now, but it sure as shit better than any socialist or communist nation.
Socialism seems perfectly alive and kicking to me - despite the uncountable amounts of treasure spent violently crushing it.
If you’re gonna make enemies with the most powerful nation in the world, that usually happens. The USA saw a threat to their influence and took action.
The USSR, Cuba, PRC is better
You’re going to have to name examples where the working class actually controls the means of production - it can’t actually be socialism otherwise, can it?
Granted there are many industries that don’t have good competition
Funny… it’s almost as if capitalists talk about “competition” a lot to justify their parasitic existence - but in reality they absolutely seem to hate the idea of competition. Must be purely my imagination, though.
He bought real estate
In other words… nothing. Do you have any real examples of capitalists being anything other than parasites?
The USSR did have great amounts of innovation
The USSR allowed the innovation that suited the CPSU’s interests. In the exact same way, the US only allows innovation that suits the interests of the ruling elites - that’s why you can buy an expensive new smartphone every month but you can’t buy a cheap lightbulb that will last you thirty years that is based on hundred-year-old technology. Humans do not require "incentivization* to innovate - in fact, capitalism’s need to repress innovation that doesn’t suit the interests of a capitalist elite is thoroughly understood.
It is crazy how the USSR didn’t implement any solution except rewarding innovation to drive innovation.
See the answer above.
I think that people also recognize that capitalism needs some good amount of regulation
The myth that you can “fix” capitalism through regulation is pure propaganda.
but it sure as shit better than any socialist or communist nation.
Nope. There are lots of people in the US that sure wishes they could have Cuba’s healthcare system - and Cuba’s healthcare system isn’t even socialist nor communist.
If you’re gonna make enemies with the most powerful nation
The US is “most” at a lot of things - none of them are worth bragging about. And it has utterly failed to crush socialism even within it’s own borders, never mind anywhere else in the world.
Anti-capitalism is not necessarily socialism or communism. Anti-capitalism does not necessarily imply supporting the USSR’s particular policies. The mistake that the USSR and others made was not using market mechanisms when they make sense.
Trump participates in the systematic denial of people’s equal claim to land and natural resources with his real estate empire. Land and natural resources should be commonly-owned.
There is no reason innovation can’t be rewarded under postcapitalism
What if I refuse to work?
Then… nothing.
Under postcapitalism, the factory would be commonly-owned. The company that operates the factory would worker-controlled. That being said, there is nothing wrong with the holder of the building even in common ownership setup being compensated. What is unfair is to demand control rights over the firm for this capital and make the workers at the company your employees. Not everyone against capitalism is a communist. There can still be economic incentives for productive activity
That’s kind of how a business works though. People show up at the entity that you’ve orchestrated, work via your guidelines, and get paid.
It doesn’t have to work like that. Instead of capital hiring labor, labor can jointly hire capital and structure the firm as a worker coop. There are good ethical reasons for organizing production in a worker coop as well
Let’s start with your first assumption. Why must a factory have individual owners? Why not instead have it owned by the workers who are the ones actually producing?
Also, don’t conflate private and personal property. If you are indeed talking about private property, it is very unlikely you have any to begin with. The vast majority of private property is owned by a few billionaires.
Lastly, people do not need money to incentivise work. Boredom, creativity and the desire to help and or contribute to society does that well enough. Given a stable level of comfort, people will seek work that matters to them.
I own private property and am not a billionaire, so not sure what you are on about with that statement. I got educated and have a decent living situation with a nice corporate remote job. I’ll have my student loan paid off around 40. These things were all easy to do. The people with issues do this to themselves. Sorry you are lazy and want to leach off my success.
It’s like you’re ignoring everything I say. Unless you’re a landlord or the owner of some business, you probably don’t own private property. If you can sit back and let other people make money for you without your input, you own private property.
Your comment reads like a copypasta. Why are you callibg me lazy? Did I say I don’t want to work? Of course I want to work. You’re not paying attention. There are huge barriers to people being able to succeed, and getting past thrm requires immense effort, luck or privilege. And the last one is the only guaranteed win.
I learned ro code from handmedown computers at a young age and worked my way up the corporate ladder. I own a nice big home and am a millennial. I completed a part time MBA while working and am able to take vacation every three months or so. Nothing is stopping you all from being successful, but yourselves. I agree that the system has massive flaws, but destroying capitalism isn’t the answer. The risk-reward system works.
Sounds like you don’t own any private property, then.
Because the workers didn’t find the money to buy a whole factory…
And what system do you think is keeping the workers too poor to do that?
What system makes it so that work must involve the buying of private property in the first place?
Also, here’s a perspective you might not hear often: why should the owner bear that burden and risk alone? That seems like too much pressure for one person. Poor capitalist. Doesn’t he realise he needs help?
Even if we ignore the artificially increased transaction costs and hold out problems associated with private ownership that make acquiring means of production more expensive, this point only justifies some sort of compensation from the workers as part of the negative fruits of their labor in production. It does not justify the capitalist appropriating 100% of the positive (legal right to produced outputs) and negative (legal liability for the used-up inputs) fruits of the workers’ joint labor
The workers get money for their labor…
Property’s moral basis is getting the positive and negative fruits of your labor. Capitalism denies the workers this as the employer solely appropriates the positive and negative fruits of their labor. The core of property’s moral basis is the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. Receiving wages is not sufficient because the workers remain de facto responsible for the whole (positive and negative) product of the enterprise and are entitled to it on that basis
- Why is it “half-baked”?
Why have you concluded that?
Let’s eat this guy, too
What does that even mean? Give us some practical advice
It means they want to shit on anyone who suggests any mechanism for social change that might actually work instead of wanking about some glorious revolution that’ll never happen. Just another way of maintaining the status quo while pretending to be a revolutionary.
Because it worked to well in Zimbabwe, Sowjetunion 1, Sowjetunion 2, China, and many more
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try, try, try, try, try again, and also blame everyone else that you had to kill your own people for the good of the whole…
Classic communist tactics, Tovarishch, and if it fails you just didn’t believe hard enough…
Needs to be more like the women of Iceland in 1975
Make your own bread I guess.
NO they hug tree
I made a bunch of Dalle pics on this topic last night:
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They need only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it.
Here a nice example what happenes when you give the means of production to “the people”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1gpQV57doM
Because it worked to well in Zimbabwe, Sowjetunion 1, Sowjetunion 2, China, and many more
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=u1gpQV57doM
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Literally sharing nazi propaganda from Hearst press lol
Anyway, capitalism is known for never having famines or economic crises, especially not cyclical ones
Well, actually I am sharing “Wikipedia Propaganda” but if you want to call Wikipedia Nazi-Propaganda…
And yes, the only pro-Western nation ever falling into a serious Food-Crisis was… Haiti.
See, I know we are doing something right. I am not sure what we do right and there is enough things we don’t do right but… the right things we do amazingly right. If that is because the Ghosts of Hitler are possessing us all or that we are just not a bunch of utter idiots - you call.
And yes, the only pro-Western nation ever falling into a serious Food-Crisis was… Haiti.
Read Late Victorian Holocausts if you want to be less wrong.
Well, actually I am sharing “Wikipedia Propaganda” but if you want to call Wikipedia Nazi-Propaganda…
The holodomor was originally fabricated by a hearst press associate at a time when Mr Hearst and the third Reich were openly collaborating on spreading nazi propaganda in the US. The famine was bad but the myth that it was a genocide needs to die as it is literally nazi propaganda and was used as a justification for collaborating with the holocaust in Eastern Europe
This is in fact the mainstream academic position. You may look to Conquest, Davies, and Wheatcroft, who are genuinely anticommunist historians, for their analysis (they all say it wasn’t a genocide)
In what way is the Late Victorian Age “Pro-Western”? In the same way Dschengis Khan was “Pro-Western”? Besides, ONE book is quite vague for such an assumption as your claim isn’t even listed in the list of great famines.
Oh, and you claim the Holodomor didn’t happen? Well, let me guess, Stalin also didn’t got 30 million sowiet people killed?
Tovarishch, your lies gave away whose bread you eat.
Late Victorian Age
It is literally a book about western liberal democracies committing genocide, including through intentionally creating famines.
Oh, and you claim the Holodomor didn’t happen? Well, let me guess, Stalin also didn’t got 30 million sowiet people killed?
Listen if you want to believe nazi propaganda that was used to justify collaborating with the holocaust you can be my guest. You just won’t be in line with the mainstream academic concensus on the subject.
Suuure… Stalin was an agent of the West, send to kill Russians. Just like Dschingis Khan and Mohammed. All Agents of the West.
Thank you for making me aware of everything.
I will repeat:
Listen if you want to believe nazi propaganda that was used to justify collaborating with the holocaust you can be my guest. You just won’t be in line with the mainstream academic concensus on the subject.
but capitalism still has issues mabye ecofashisim is the way for as minimized issues as possible?
Oof, too real, you have to add a sarcasm tag
“Seize the means of production” is a communist’s rallying cry because they know that they can’t build anything on their own
Who do you think built the means of production in the first place? I’ve never seen a rich guy in a suit laying down bricks all day to build a factory.
It was a group effort
On the part of labor. No matter how causally efficacious capital is. It can never be de facto responsible for anything because responsibility is imputed through the tools back to the workers using them.
Which group?
Capital and labor, both are intertwined and cannot exist without the other
Sure, but labor consists of the de facto responsible actions of persons while capital is a dead tool. When thinking about assigning legal responsibility for the positive and negative results of an action, we only look at the de facto responsible party and lay the legal responsibility for the whole result on them. For example, if a crime is committed with a gun, the gun isn’t held liable. Inanimate objects conduct responsibility back to the persons using them and cannot be responsible
Yeah, a group effort, lol
The laborers planned and built the stuff, and the owners took the profits. Good job team!
The workers built the means, they just never owned them.
Let me guess, you think Steve Jobs made the iPhone because he pulled it out of his pocket on a stage and took the credit of engineers standing on the shoulders of publically funded basic research? Steve jobs couldn’t engineer his way out of a wet paper bag, and that is well documented.
Remember when bill gates bought dos and used his moms connections to sell it IBM?
Remember when apple was given their entire gui by xerox?
Remember when xerox exects threw what would be the modern “PC” in the trash because they are only good at collecting money and wouldn’t know revolutionary technology if their own R&D made it?
I think Steve Jobs made the iphone by coordinating and funding a team of engineers to develop and produce the phone, then marketed it using his own name for brand recognition.
He could not have done it without those engineers and workers, and they would not have made the phone without Jobs.
used so many words to tell us that you’re an ignoramus
That’s it? That’s the meme? That’s just a piece of toast with the words “The workers should seize the means of production” written on in it.
That’s not toast? It’s bread.
deleted by creator
What sort of bread is it?
Sliced.
What sort of sliced bread?
It’s not toast until it goes through the toaster. Out of the bag it’s just baked. Quit.
What sort of bread is it before toasting?
“Wheat” I assume
What sort of wheat bread?
Of the rectangular cuboid shaped variety
Has it been prepared in some way? With some sort of heat, perhaps?
Has it been prepared in some way? With some sort of heat, perhaps?
Why yes, of course. At least twice! Once with low heat (well more like “warmth” around 37°C if I remember correctly) to help the dough rise and then a second time to bake it.
That’s undercooked toast
I feel very sure that there’s no way it’s any kind of toast. I will never concede this argument
Raw toast?
There’s a meme of a frog puppet drinking tea, and a meme of a pootoo, and a meme of some beans. It can be literally anything.
