Microblog Memes

I've read Marx. Every smug comment you continue to make just show how incredibly insecure you are about your beliefs. Stay on topic and stop wrapping your ego up into the conversation. Just because I don't buy every single argument made, doesn't mean I'm not well read, two people can read something and come to different conclusions. Maybe you should try reading things OTHER than Marx and see a multitude of perspective before you die on your hill. There is an immense portion of communisms ideals that is in line with what I believe in, but I am not someone that just rides an ideological train without addressing each things on it's own merits. Applying ideology to everything instead of addressing each thing on it's own merits is the antithesis of progress. You sound more like Communism is your religion than it's a structural concept.

1. Worker councils.

Same problem, lack of agility. Worker councils in a system that has no money, or incentives to produce goods at the rate of demand, won't meet demand. Worker councils would inherently be more concerned with the impact to them (the workers) than the impact to demand, and therefor the broad society at large. Again, people would starve.

2. There are no Socialist mechanisms within a Capitalist system, and confusing left and right for how progressive something is, rather than as structural Modes of Production, is wrong.

You don't just get to change how words work because you want to parrot what Marx said word for word like everything he wrote was the word of god. In a modern context calling someone who believes in worker cooperatives, a broad social safety net, workers unions, and heavily regulated capitalism "right-wing" is objectively dishonest.

3. Capitalism is centralization of power into the hands of the few, Communism is by definition a spreading of said power. You don’t need a central leader, lol, you can have worker councils.

Sure, you will have those worker councils until someone with power convivences a bunch of scared people that they need control and then they slowly take over everything. Congrats, you had worker councils for 1-10 years. Welcome to the shortest "utopia" in the world. The lack of centralization is exactly what creates vulnerability. Why do you think Genghis Kahn existed? He saw the power vacuum that decentralized power created in Mongolia, and hated all of the war that it caused, and he incorrectly believed he could have the war to end all wars. One of the larges extermination events, by population percentage, in human history was caused by decentralized power, and that's not exactly the first time. Are you expecting worker councils to stop some dude rolling up in a tank to take over?

4. That’s a lot of talk to essentially ignore what central planning is, lmao. It’s not some guy with a spreadsheet making one wrong move and everyone starves, it’s very decentralized and similar to regular infrastructure. Do you truly think central planning has a single planner, or do you think worker councils deciding at the local level cannot function?

It is functionally impossible to recreate the agility of capitalism within worker councils. Especially in todays globalized systems. It doesn't matter how you do the planning, its the same issue, the incentives are not placed on demand. The incentives only meet what the workers want to supply.

5. That’s Communism, and you claimed Capitalism can nearly get to Communism.

All I said was "You can get to nearly the same place that communism wants to get", I admit that was too broad in hindsight. What I meant is workers controlling the means of production and better outcomes for labor. A worker cooperative can exist within capitalism. The overarching system is capitalism, the micro system is socialist in nature. If I work for a factory that I and everyone else that works for it owns, then I work for a factory that operates on socialist principles. That factory can exist in a capitalist economy.

6. Sorry, you’re the next-level moron here, I’m afraid. Capitalism and Socialism are both Modes of Production, and are mutually exclusive. Either the Workers own the Means of Production, or Capitalists do. Social Democracies are Capitalism with social safety nets, they aren’t a blend of Capitalism with Socialism.

So worker cooperatives don't exist in capitalist economy's? That's news to me, I must be delusional then! Only in their absolute forms could one argue they are opposed, and even then I think that gets into semantics that favor a strictly communist perspective. To anyone who isn't breathing communist propaganda, socialism is both economic and political, and tends to be used in a lot of contexts. People don't get to claim words for themselves, words have the meanings that society generally agrees it has. You might not like it, but playing these semantic games to redefine things to your worldview isn't doing you any favors. You can search nearly any academic publication and you will get that answer, that Capitalism and Socialism are not diametrically opposed because they are not in the same category, they seek to define different things. But we don't have absolute capitalism anyway, and you are well aware that I wasn't stanning for absolute capitalism. But this is a tired semantics argument if your only point in this conversation is to rigidly define words only the way propagandists define them, and not how academia, and the general public defines them. If that's your purpose, then this conversation is entirely pointless. I mean, it's pointless anyway, but it's even more pointless considering your goals of word definitions rather than substance of outcomes.