American try to care one iota for your fellow man or really anyone other than yourself challenge (impossible):
During covid, going to a rural area in the US really got to me. The population is so individualistic / freedom-brained / “i do whatever I want all the time”, that their grandmothers all dying meant nothing to them. I got mine keeps meaning smaller and smaller groups of people.
Which is surprising because up here in Canada, the socialism started with the farmers. And it’s still going on with coop feed and grain silos and harvester sharing. Farmers don’t let other farmers starve, in Canada.
I got mine keeps meaning smaller and smaller groups of people.
What does this mean?
USonians used to be more community-focused. In the 1950s polio was eradicated due to massive community efforts, showing that they were willing to do things to benefit their community.
Nowadays they won’t even do the same to benefit their extended families.
“Fuck you I got mine”
But when he says “smaller and smaller groups of people” does he mean that this kind of mentality isolates people to increasingly smaller groups?
It used to apply to different groups in the past.
Fuck you, my community got ours
Fuck you, my friend group got ours
Fuck you, my family got ours
And now we’re finally at
Fuck you, I got mine
Dont you love individualism 🥰 /s
Socialism is the complete opposite of that. Socialism destroys horizontal connections and institution of family.
Lisa’s only mistake was saying yes.
Just do every single thing in socialism, but change every single word. Call it Americanism.
Proletariat? No, just “worker”.
Bourgeoisie? No, just “elites”.
Capital? “Stuff”. Like how in baseball they say a pitcher’s got good “stuff”. Use your human stuff.
Class Consciousness - “common sense”.
Dialectical Materialism - Idk I’m still trying to figure out wtf that one means.
Dialectical materialism -> Scientific materialism to distinguish it from the common usage of the world “materialism”
Dialectical Materialism
How about “a tug-of-war between owners and workers for jobs, resources, and technology”
Three examples:
Factory Work and Labour Unions
Early 20th-century factory jobs involved long hours, low pay, and unsafe working conditions. When workers tried to unionize, factory owners often resisted, viewing unionized labour as a threat to profits. This created a direct conflict: owners wanting to keep costs low vs. workers demanding better wages and safer workplaces.
Automation in Warehouses
Warehouses (e.g., Amazon fulfilment centres) are increasingly adopting robotic systems to speed up sorting and packing. Employees might feel pressure to meet higher performance metrics set by a partly automated workflow, while also fearing that further automation will reduce human jobs. Here, the “tug-of-war” is between technological efficiency (and profit) vs. workers’ job security and well-being.
Tech Industry Outsourcing
Companies sometimes outsource tech-related jobs to countries with cheaper labour costs. This lowers expenses for the company but can lead to local layoffs and economic hardship for employees in higher-wage regions. The conflict revolves around the benefit of increased profit margins for the company vs. the material needs of domestic workers who lose their livelihoods.
Too long, I’d suggest “boss-busting”, after “rentbusting”. Or “bosses keeping workers hostage”, maybe?
about what youd expect for a country thats been the global epicenter for anticommunist propaganda.
I can’t remember where I copied this from originally but it seems pertinent here
Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. they know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism.’
Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions.
This is is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores.
An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete.
They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone too irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover).
One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services.
But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy.
Socialism in america only exists for corporations. “Hey bankers! Screwed up again? Here’s more money to play with.”
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The USA actually spends several billions, if not trillions on Medicare (meant for the old) and Medicaid (meant for the poor, and single mothers, and young children) combined.
In 2023, the federal government spent about $848.2 billion on Medicare, accounting for 14% of total federal spending.
source - and that’s just Medicare.
I agree with you that it’s weird that corporations get a bailout, instead of selling the company to competitors, but no need to act like the USA doesn’t spend a TON of money on its citizens, keeping their head above water :)
SpenT
That’s because the American healthcare system is infected with middle men parasites.
Meanwhile, socialist Norway’s wealth fund could maintain everyone’s standard of living for 400 years if they stopped working right now.
norway isnt socialist. they just excel at exporting capitalism’s issues to the third world.
In a democratic state, things like universal healthcare are also called “socialized medicine” because it is an example of the people owning the means of production in that particular industry.
That’s why most countries are what we call “mixed economies”, that mix elements of capitalism and socialism.
Norway mixes in a higher ratio of socialism to capitalism than most countries. But they don’t export any more of capitalism’s issues to the third world than other countries. It’s something to emulate, not discredit.
No. “Socialized medicine” is not “people owning the means of production”
It is in a democratic state. Who else do you think owns it?
Pretty sure no one with universal healthcare calls it “socialized medicine”. That’s just a buzzword Americans use to scare each other.
It’s not a means of producing anything other than health. Health is seen as a human right and it makes sense even in most western capitalist countries for it to be extended to everyone.
I’m Canadian. It’s what the founder of our healthcare system, Tommy Douglas, called it.
And yeah, it’s the people owning the means of producing health. Socialist healthcare.
Americans scare people with these references to brutal authoritarian dictatorships that call themselves “socialist” but the real cause of all these problems is that they weren’t democratic, not that they socialized industries.
Anyways, maybe it’s just my autism making me literal as fuck, but I think you guys need to clear that up. This is what the people owning the means of production looks like. It’s always going to be adjacent to capitalism, whether it’s a socialist industry in a capitalist country, or a socialist country in a capitalist world.
Interesting, thanks for the Canadian history lesson Perhaps that’s where the Americans got their weird terminology from.
you guys need to clear that up
Who needs to do what? I’m not sure what I said that somehow gave you the impression I was an American.
My society pays for universal free healthcare, like everywhere in the civilized world.
How is democracy related to ownership?
A democracy is a state in which the government is owned and controlled by the people.
No wtf. Democracy is state that holds elections. Wtf is “owned and controlled by the people”? How are people supposed to control the government? The government is controlled by govt officials. Common people don’t control shit. How can a government be owned by people? Is government even a property that can be owned? That doesn’t make any sense.
So not Norway, or any Western capitalist pseudo democracy.
and in a demoratic world norway wouldnt be doing tax-free extrativism in my country (and others’), so that you can pay for your socialized medicine in a capitalist economy, where the money to finance it has to come from the poor. in this case we are your poor.
Socialized medicine is always cheaper than capitalist medicine. It’s inherently more cost effective for people to pool their money together. It isn’t paid for by some rich miner buying mining rights in some other country.
82·14 days agoThat’s why most countries are what we call “mixed economies”, that mix elements of capitalism and socialism.
No. They are capitalist.
By that logic, socialism cannot exist until the entire planet is socialist.
I’m not sure how that link is supposed to refute anything? It says basically what the comment above says without using the phrase “mixed economies”.
If you meant the power structure and public/private balance is heavily capitalist for Nordic countries then you’d probably want to post something else supporting that statement.
Whenever people say this they neglect to point out that all the money came from selling oil.
They forget to point out that only dumbfuck yanks would consider Norway to be socialist, so the comment, in a meme community, is misleading from the get-go.
Norway is a capitalist country. It us an OECD hanger-on to the US-led imperialist world order.
Norway isn’t socialist. And by “everyone” you mean just Norwegians, even though Norway’s wealth was built on the backs of people in the global South.
Not to mention that Norway’s public wealth is being claimed by the capitalist class, just like in every western country
Don’t make me laugh, it’s not socialism! it’s bro-ism, 'cause, I got you bro. If everyone got their bros and we all bros then we can do absolutely anything bro!
I like to swap out “ism” with “frame”. In this case broism becomes broframe.
Unfortunately, socialism discourages and eventually kills off broism.
You don’t get, socialism doesn’t exist, it can’t hurt you, it was just a boogeyman created by the billionaires so you’ll go back to the wagie cage. There’s only bro-ism
I live in a post soviet country so I experience the impact of socialism to this very day. It’s appalling.
You experience our destruction, we stole the world from you are we’re coming for seconds. Let us in more, let us finacialze you, your dreams will have advertising in them, we will strip whatever is left of your public transporter for copper, we will put your nana in the streets after converting her house into empty condos and stealing her pension. This is what happens when you let to imperial powers come in and loot your dwellings.
😨 …
Fuck pensions btw, pensions are communist shit and should be abolished.
That just means your pension plan is a deer slug
Wait, isn’t socialism all about class solidarity? “Working together regardless of class to fight a common enemy” sounds more like nationalism where at the end the upper class profits most. Unless we are talking about a classless society but that’s not “regardless of class” but “with no class distinction” which sounds very similar when I think about it.
Socialism is about making the working class the ruling class. It is explicitly about oppressing the bourgeois class, which is itself the current ruling class oppressing the working (and other) classes. The idea is to take the means of production and run it for ourselves rather than the profit of a class defined by merely owning factories, buildings, tools, etc.
The cartoon may be confused.
Socialism is about the government playing a central role in the economy to ensure wealth and resources are distributed more fairly, rather than being concentrated in the hands of corporations or individuals. Socialism can still allow for private businesses and a market economy, but key industries and services are often publicly controlled to prevent excessive inequality.
Socialism is not about the government’s size. Socialists, particularly Marxists, emphasize using the state and nationalization after proletarian revolution to reflect the working class’ interests and build socialism, but the size of the state itself is not what makes something socialist, both because (1) socialists seek to eventually end the state itself once productive forces and consciousness are sufficiently advanced and (2) capitalist states can also have large governments, generally to serve the interests of the ruling class, albeit sometimes in a roundabout way.
“More fairly” means “more in a way that the said government sees fit”
That’s state socialism, a specific kind of socialism that wants to keep the state apparatus, not realizing that it will always (re)create a ruling class. Different from Libertarian Socialism which unironically want a stateless society, not as a never to reach end goal.
Socialism is always about recreating a ruling class: it is to make the working class into the ruling class.
There is no practical alternative to this. Imagine trying the only way: to immediately end class relations. You’ve won the revolution. Your ideological brethren are in power and the Great Workers’ Council is going forward with your plan. How are you going to force people to end class relations? Won’t it require a state? Who is enforcing the end of relations? If someone buys up an extra-big plot of land and starts charging tenants rent, reinventing semi-feudal relations, who is going to stop them? And what are you going to do about the bourgeoisie who still exist, especially those overseas, and are working against you to reopen your country for exploitation?
All of these basic realities require a state. And you cannot simply end all class relations instantaneously, as the wider public will not all agree with you ideologically. Unless you plan extreme forms of oppression for the entire population, you will need to deal with the remnants of various class relations in various forms, engaging, ideally, in a process that will whittle them away. That entire process will be recreating a ruling class, i.e. the working class, to impose this process on the other classes.
There is no practical alternative to this
An alternative would be to stop trying to overthrow some classes and touch grass
Organizing a socialist movement doesn’t happen online.
What if was socialism, but for a nation? What could go wrong? /s
She’s got a work on her sales pitch. “Probably one of the greatest… Oh it’s not for you, it’s more of a Shelbyville idea…”
“if we all work together regardless of class” collaborationism is bourgeoisie propaganda and is not tolerated here, Comrade. Please face the wall.
“All classes working together” as a counterpoint to socialism? Where have I heard of this before…?
It’s because it’s impossible. The classes will always be in conflict until the communism is reached, so it depends which class is in power.
How come you picked that instance over tankietube?
Oh they give 20 gigs of space, I made a tankietube account after but already started posting on this instance so just kept going with it.
Tankietube has unlimited storage
oh nice, I’ll start posting on there at some point
Of course, you could just talk about “Tax The Rich” or “Bring Back the New Deal” but then how could people know you read Karl Marx?
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to rephrase socialist ideals as capitalist bills for the sake of America.
I want to propose a “Proof of Economic Viability Bill” somewhere if I can find the right influence point.
Basically, financial advisors suggest that people should pay no more than 30% of their income towards living expenses. Knowing that the vast majority of Americans only have income from their primary job, this means that any business should be expected to pay no less than 30% of their income, evenly divided across the entire workforce (cart pusher to CEO), as a “living expense allotment” to prove they can afford to pay their workers enough to live and stay afloat. This will push out companies who are doomed to fail because of a lack of available workforce, allowing more economically viable options to reign king.
Edit to add: you can make this sound a little nicer to the maga crowd by telling them they can reduce wages by doing this. I don’t necessarily care that you’re paying minimum wage as long as you can afford to put your worker in a home and fill their stomach.
Stop using polysyallabic words like “proletariat” when trying to appeal to the American working class who read at a 5th grade level.
Seriously. Like the guy in Severance said. Apologize for the word. It’s too long.
No no, you just have to use the right ones that they like. The “magic words” so to speak. Investors really like “economic viability” because it means they can instantly look at a company and see if they can make money off it. Politicians just so happen to be interested in a lot of the same things as investors for some reason.
You just described what the minimum wage was supposed to be, and plenty of red blooded American patriots already hate that.
I realize my other comment didn’t actually properly answer your concern. You are right about this being the equivalent of minimum wage. However, the meaning of wages have changed since the time when those laws were made. We don’t need companies to prove they can pay their people for today, because we have technology that lasts hundreds of years if properly maintained. We need them to prove they are economically viable forever.
You’re absolutely right. However, if you use the right magic words you can convince them that it will be good for them. Constituents will be happy because their bills will be guaranteed to be paid by their company, and investors will be happy because they can look at a company and instantly see whether they can make money off it. It just so happens that politicians tend to be into the same things as investors
I go even simpler.
The New Deal.
Make the GOPs explain why we could pay salaries that let one earner support a family of four in 1940 and can’t do it today.
It’s the opposite, actually.
The people who talk about “tax the rich” or the New Deal don’t actually do anything, they are armchair activists who have no real idea of how they would ever accomplish this outside of pretending the Democratic Party, which constantly opposes them and crushes such ideas, is the vehiclr, and the way to make it happen is complaining on the internet.
Communists know that actually addressing our collective problems is a much more difficult task, nothing less than the overthrow of capitalism, something that would need to survive attempts at cooption by liberal power structures like the aforementioned party. So we build from the ground up, educating one another and developing practice so that we can balance growth, education, and having impact through actions. We go to the meetings, we run the meetings, we teach one another, we organize the protests and marches, we build the strategic mutual aid events, we embed with workers’ spaces and unions, we embed with and build from within the marginalized so as to be of them. Communist organizing is adding a part-time job on top of your other obligations.
Yes, we should definitely not have something like Sweden or the old New Deal. We should let children grow up in poverty, let old people suffer, and let the planet burn while we sit around discussing Trotsky and the Second International in hopes that the revolution will come.
iirc de La Cruz got less than 100,000 votes.
Yes, we should definitely not have something like Sweden or the old New Deal.
I think you need to refamiliarize yourself with what I said, as this is not it.
We should let children grow up in poverty, let old people suffer, and let the planet burn while we sit around discussing Trotsky and the Second International in hopes that the revolution will come.
I said something that is the exact opposite of sitting around, actually. Do your best to read a little more carefully before sharing opinions.
iirc de La Cruz got less than 100,000 votes.
And?
Keep on arguing on the interwebs.
Maybe someone will notice.
Maybe.
Do you think you’re doing something else?
I do stuff offline.
All you guys ever do is argue. Name one thing you guys have done in America in the last 50 years.
You ever heard of the Black Panthers?
What about anarchism?
What type of anarchism?
“All classes working together” is called capitalism
