The last panel should have an and, not an or
Just putting it out there that “property owning” is not the class deliniator! I “own” my house/property and the only differences are that i pay rent to a bank instead of a landlord, and i can knock holes in the walls if i want to.
I’m still pretty much paycheck to paycheck, squarely in the working class.
We dont want your toothbrush dude
Eh?
Tis the difference betwixt private and personal property, we don’t want your toothbrush but your toothbrush factory however…
If you’re paying rent to a bank, you don’t own your house, at least not yet.
Of course you’re working class. It’s about the owners of Capital property. Does your house that you own (which I doubt since you imply you have a mortgage) make money for you?
It’s us versus a very small number of them.
Well technically thanks to the rising housing cost crisis I’ve gained about 50k in equity in the past 3 years. Does that count?
I would say no.
do you get to spend that money and keep your house?
🥲
No. Rent and mortgage are two different things. One is a fee for service and one is a loan.
If your home that you own doubles in market value and you decide to sell it, you pay off the mortgage (loan) and keep the profit (capital gain). If you are renting and the home is sold, you gain nothing.
If your home that you own burns down, you still owe the bank the money you borrowed for purchase (mortgage). If you are renting the home that burned down, you don’t owe anybody money. There is to service to pay a fee for anymore.
Like sure, fuck capitalism. But we don’t need to misrepresent how these systems work.
Yes of course there are actually a lot of differences, being a homeowner after renting for years I am very aware. My comment, partly in jest, was focusing on practical day-to-day differences. But also, getting equity in your house is actually not that big of a windfall if you sell, because you still have to live somewhere and the other houses/rentals have all gone up in cost to match. I suppose if I was to move in with someone… but I dont plan on doing that ever.
But anyways yea fuck capitalism
It’s not about stopping climate change anymore. That ship has sailed and sunk.
Now its about surviving long enough to witness very bad things happening to very bad people.
witness very bad things happening to very bad people.
Yeah, not gonna happen in this life. Karma is a happy accident, not a rule
I honestly hate this rhetoric (nothing personal). Thing is, it gets worse and worse, the less we do, it’s not binary, and while the planet will not be able to support close as many people as of now, humanity will survive. But it’s very dependent on the actions we do now, how many will…
Whether humanity will survive really is an open question. Despite all the rhetoric and protests and promises the annual CO2 emissions have continued to increase steadily. It’s wishful thinking to imagine that we are going to do anything about this before the consequences of our choices force our collective hand. Any report or scientific paper that includes a phrase like ‘there is still time’ is just not accepting the reality of the situation. A year ago James Hansen published Global Warming in the Pipeline where he wrote “Equilibrium global warming for today’s GHG amount is 10°C”. A 4–7 degree rise over 5000 years ended the last ice age, Ocean levels rose 400 feet. A 10 degree rise in a century or so would be way too fast for most species to adapt. It would inundate the majority of our most populated cities. I could go on, but I get depressed writing about this.
Yes it’s absolutely depressing. Also just thinking about the idiocratic/authoritarian/right-wing movement that doesn’t want to do against or even wants to accelerate climate-change.
But apart from good things that are happening right now (as I just watched it https://youtu.be/vUA1kFSJnYQ)
Think about it, there are what > 8 billion people in a highly developed /technological advanced world, how realistic is it really that everyone of them will die for good? Evolution took all kinds of measures to avoid it. There will likely be humans (unfortunately likely those that mostly caused climate-change) that will survive. We can already create artifical climate, there’s vertical farming that can be isolated from the outside. Even if we’re approaching a hell like planet with > 10 C warming, it’s not that we don’t have very cold places that may be suitable for living then. Yes it will be a lot less people but I don’t believe in a total collapse. We have all kinds of redundancy with data storage etc. know-how won’t just be lost.
Also while all of this is happening rapidly on a geological timescale it’s still slow for humanity and it’s ability to adapt. We’re still talking about centuries, for the hellish kind of development. It’s getting uncomfortable the next decades, but likely so that humanity will finally grasp the fuck up, and takes effective counter-measures. Also the probability that we advance quick enough to sequester carbon so fast (and find safe geoengineering), to reverse at least some of the tipping points is still on the table.
If anything, society collapses and the very wealthy carve out fiefdoms for themselves and re-create medieval feudalism. They tell people they have a God-ordained to rule over the “small folk” and they continue on living like kings, albeit in a post-apocalyptic setting.
20 years? Jamie pull that up.
Well it was 25 years in 2019, and I’d round down since we’re in September so yeah, 20 to go.
Damnit, Gritty!
Covid ended any hope I have. We couldn’t get people to put on a fucking mask or get vaccinations when the disease was right in front of us killing millions of people.
There’s absolutely no way we’re gonna get people on board with fighting the climate disaster. Humanity will be lucky if it survives itself.
The west is not all of humanity though.
20 years? Not 25? I thought 2060 was when things would really crumble due to climate change is we continued business as usual (which is what we’re doing).
Does it matter? Ultimately, these are estimates. Educated, data backed estimates, but still estimates.
One larger than expected volcanic eruption, coral reefs dying faster than expected, whatever, all it takes is one or two things to not go the way they’re expected and everything speeds up.
20 years or 25 years, the point is we’re all kinda fucked unless we do something about it.
What we need to do has been and will continue to be debated ad nauseam, but we know we must do something.
20 years before we die from climate change? Given the hellish climate we’re enduring here in south america, 10 years would be more believable
Simple solution: take power, ban the right-wing parties and their financers, if they protest use acid cannons, blackmailing and censorship towards them and coup every country with a right-wing government.
How do you plan to take power? And if you manage, how do you plan to stay in power long enough? The average voter is a moron being fed propaganda for years. You will not take power democratically. And you will not stay in power democratically.
That’s the point bruh. Fuck democracy, right-wingers need to be treated like Pinochet treated socialists at this point. Censorship at max until we get out of this mess.
If you come at things from such a completely misanthropic point of view, you firstly are unlikely to get off the ground, but even if you do, you’ll just be creating what liberals think socialism is (a very bad and ineffectual thing)
What part of “far-righters get their ass open wide and rich people get their assets seized and if they complain Secret Services will “talk” to them in a “calm and mannered way”” isn’t socialism?
It’s a form of socialism in the broadest sense of the term, but what you’re describing has nothing to do with socialism as it has ever existed in the world and not something that should exist. Socialism must be democratic or it’s just a holding-state for fascism and, as you describe your “system,” an engine of gleeful murder.
Bro, you people are the first to want to eat the rich alive and when I propose a government that actually does that you all go “no, man, democracy is the way, peace and love”? Fuck that, I want revenge for this shitty world I’ve been given and a better world in the meantime, and the elite who caused this must pay dearly.
I guess I’ve discovered an “unreconstructed” socialist. I think an autocracy is bad even if it kills rightists, but that doesn’t mean I want to make peace with the rich. If the government isn’t bound by a popular mandate, then it’s just guided by the whims of whichever assholes are in charge, and you’ve basically reverted to monarchy.
Mao’s purging of the landlords was a great achievement, but it only worked because he left it up to the people rather than having the PLA go to every plot of land and dictate what is to be done with it. Likewise, it was also a great achievement that he was able to rehabilitate Puyi, the last Emperor of China, rather than resorting to killing him. Turning people into productive members of society is always the most preferential option, it’s just that it often simply isn’t viable.
Revenge is an idealist notion that doesn’t accomplish anything. It’s just sadism and leaves justice completely aside. Sometimes it is correct to kill people (and in times of war, unfortunately frequently so), but that is for the material difference that makes (e.g. diffusing threats) rather than because it rights some imaginary cosmic ledger.
Yes, we must seize power from the reactionaries, and that will require incredible violence and lead to lots of purging, but if we are separate from the people, we are just a military dictatorship like any other.
All countries have always been governed by the property owning class. With all its faults, capitalism has resulted in “peons” having the most say they’ve ever had. It’s not a lot, but it’s sure better than under classical democracy, feudalism, monarchy, theocracy, and “communism” at least as practiced in the USSR, Cuba, North Korea and China.
(Capitalism is a) brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian - where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone - is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.
Edit: In this they take on the posture of a severely depressed person who views hope as a dangerous delusion.
Capitalism and modern western democracy suck. But, life has always sucked for those without power. Life is/was much worse for people under “communism”. It was much worse under fascism. It was much worse under feudalism. It is/was much worse in a theocracy.
Also, this idea that “existence is evaluated in terms of money alone” is a silly caricature of capitalism. People with power have always been the ones to make the rules. It doesn’t matter if that power is in the form of money, or absolute control over anyone who lives on a certain bit of land, or in terms of absolute control due to being the representative on earth of a god’s will.
The first paragraph is literally the same “I can’t justify capitalism but the others are worse” argument again.
The society we live in is an employment based, market fundamentalist society. It just used to be a different kind of fundamentalist theocratic rule is all.
Instead of lashing out and calling it a silly caricature, you can just say “I just plain don’t like that.” It would have had the same effect.
That being said, how much money would it take for you to change your mind about existence being measured in terms of money alone being a silly caricature? Even if you were the type to give it all away, eventually, we would find a number. Not only that, you’d be a multi millionaire and, as such, on that basis alone, your existence would be judged as an inherently good one.
The first paragraph is literally the same “I can’t justify capitalism but the others are worse” argument again.
Which happens to be true. Maybe in the future there will be something better, but so far it hasn’t been found.
The society we live in is an employment based, market fundamentalist society.
Sure, ok. And it’s better than a feudalist society where you’re tied to the land, or a slave-based economy where you’re property.
Instead of lashing out and calling it a silly caricature
I’m not lashing out. I’m just describing it as a silly caricature, which it is. Capitalism is fundamentally about owners of capital competing to make more money by investing in capital and selling goods at a profit. People who don’t own capital have to work in that kind of a system. Similar to how peasants were tied to land they had to work under feudalism, or slaves were required to do whatever their owners demanded in a slave state, but it’s less brutal. Workers can change employers and their bodies are not owned.
Is it fair? Of course not, but no socioeconomic system that has ever existed in reality has ever been fair.
That being said, how much money would it take for you to change your mind about existence being measured in terms of money alone being a silly caricature?
No amount of money would make me change my mind. There would probably be an amount of money where I’d be willing to lie, but what does that prove? You’d lie too if you were offered enough money. That’s human nature, not capitalism. If this were a feudalist system you could be bribed with land. If it were a theocracy you could be bribed by religious titles.
I don’t know what you’re trying to prove. Capitalism is bad, but other systems are worse. There are purely theoretical systems that would be better, but none of them has ever survived an encounter with reality. But, that doesn’t mean we should stop trying. Eventually we’ll find a way to improve on capitalism, just like capitalism improved on feudalism.
What is also true is that its the mentality of a depressive who views hope as a dangerous delusion, as had been said a fair few times now.
It is lashing out, as you can’t refute it or engage it.
Dismissing a legitimate observation of our society as a silly caricature is a far more silly caricature of someone who just doesn’t like what they’re hearing.
Existence is measured in money, under capitalism. Why would you lying about it and not meaning make any difference? As long as you’re doing what you were paid to do, it would have the same appearance and the same effect. I would take the money too, as its the most important thing in society and existance is measured in it. Thats the point here. Why would I care what was in your heart of hearts?
No, none of the other systems survived an attack by a system that cannot tolerate any alternatives to live unmolested. Had any of them failed of their own accord, you might have a point there. You can’t shoot someone in the leg and then declare that their claims of being able to run didn’t survive an encounter with reality.
Trying to improve capitalism has never survived an encounter with reality. All it did was make the rich richer.
Capitalism didn’t improve feudalism. Firstly, capitalism grew out of merchantislism. Secondly, merchantislism had to be forced on people who had been robbed of their homes and were facing starvation. Had they any other option than starving, they would have stuck with feudalism.
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we have less than 20 years to take control of our economic system before we all die from climate change
Yeah… sure. “We all die”.
The earth isn’t going to be hit by an asteroid, it’s just going to have more and more catastrophes. If the earth reaches a tipping point with the melting of the polar icecaps, it will still take centuries for them to melt. The tipping point just means that it won’t be possible to stop it. Humanity will survive, because killing off humanity would be as difficult as killing off mosquitoes or cockroaches. What will happen, not suddenly in 20 years, but gradually over the next few centuries, is that life will get more and more unpleasant. There will be more famines, more disasters wiping cities off the map. More wars over resources. But, some humans will keep living, and they’ll have children, and those children will grow up in a terrible world where survival is a struggle. But, humans will survive, though it might be a very brutal, primitive existence.
As for “capitalism”, it’s not “capitalism” that’s at fault here, it’s humanity. It’s not like North Korea is a bastion of carbon-neutral utopian living. Humans are unable to think and act on a global scale. They’re selfish, and always have been. The difference is that now there are billions of humans, and technology has enabled each selfish human to have a massive climate footprint. Human brains were evolved to exist in small groups on the savanna. The thinking that allowed humans to thrive in that environment has meant destruction now that technology has massively amplified the impact each human now has.
The solution isn’t some random change to a different economic system or a different political system. It’s either destroying most technology so that each human can no longer have such a massive impact, or it’s fundamentally altering the human brain so that people use that technology wisely and with a tiny footprint. Neither of those is likely, so we’re almost certainly doomed.
We’re going to ALL be dead from climate change in 20 years? lol
“communism” at least as practiced in the USSR, Cuba, North Korea and China.
What are you talking about? Research how many rights women and lgbt people lost when the GDR fell for an example of how wrong-headed this line of thinking is.
For those who want light reading, I highly recommend “Why women had better sex under socialism, and other arguments for economic independence”
That’s nice, but the issue was whether they were part of the governing class. The rights the women were given in the GDR didn’t include the right to pass new laws. As for choosing new representatives, look up the term “Wir gehen falten”.
You’re claiming that capitalism is better on having elected women officials? First off, no. GDR and west Germany had similar rates of women in leadership, and women had political organization through the democratic women’s front.
Second off the framing is bad: I care less about smashing the glass ceiling than I care about not being hatecrimed in a rampantly misogynistic culture. I care about having the economic independence to leave abusive relationships, and to date for love and pleasure and not financial security.
No, I’m saying western democracies are better because you got to vote.
You get to vote in socialist democracies like China, Cuba, USSR, etc. You’ve been told you can’t. Who told you this?
If you don’t believe me, look up the process for how the Cuban 2019 constitution and 2022 family code were drafted. Socialist democracy is more advanced and democratic than liberal democracies.
You get to vote in socialist democracies like China, Cuba, USSR, etc
Sure you do, as long as you vote for the candidate that the state prefers. Again, look up “Wir gehen falten”.
Sure you do, as long as you vote for the candidate that the state prefers.
That isn’t how soviet style democracies work. For example, the municipal assemblies of Cuba have multiple candidates for each seat, which are not chosen by the party. Those councils then choose a national representative for their municipality, which is confirmed by a popular vote.
Again, look up “Wir gehen falten”.
Link to what you’re referring to please, I didn’t find anything interesting in the search.
Yes these rights rights were lost, but this paints the GDR in a positive light regarding regarding civil rights when in reality people who showed a smidge of dissent were persecuted.
when in reality people who showed a smidge of dissent were persecuted.
Look up how the stasi dealt with lgbt dissidents after being told to solve the issue and then come back here and say that with a straight face.
Dissidents for “hey we need to fix the problems of socialism” or dissidents for “we have to dissolve socialist democracy and let the capitalists pillage us” were treated very differently.
And the ones arguing for dissolving socialism got what they wanted, and the result is justification enough for their oppression tbh. Better to suppress right wing dissidents than let them oppress vast swathes of the population.
Dissidents for “hey we need to fix the problems of socialism” or dissidents for “we have to dissolve socialist democracy and let the capitalists pillage us” were treated very differently
Do you seriously tell yourself the GDR was a democratic socialist country? The GDR not being democratic was exactly it’s problem and why it couldn’t reform its problems. And yeah, the people only wanted to get oppressed by capitalists when they protested in Leipzig and Berlin. If you really believe that I don’t know what to tell you. Are you some Wessi who doesn’t know shit about life in the GDR?
And the ones arguing for dissolving socialism got what they wanted, and the result is justification enough for their oppression tbh.
Man, they wanted something better than the shit show that their life had become. They had many ideas about how they could reform their country. A new socialist constitution, a emancipated reunion with the West etc. All they knew was that it couldn’t go on with the current SED clique.
How did the SED respond? Fucking off with the last money. They left their population with no help when they negotiated with Kohl. But hey, to you that’s just capitalist propaganda probably. Now it’s the people’s fault that they got screwed by the capitalists pfffff
Better to suppress right wing dissidents than let them oppress vast swathes of the population.
Holy shit bro. Do you think Hohenschönhausen was filled with right wingers and capitalists and that your beloved party didn’t oppress the population? First of right wing networks were left alone all over the country. What we see now in Thüringen and Sachsen didn’t just hop over from the BRD after the wall fell. It merely got reinforced. Second, do you really think only right wing dissidents got suppressed? My father got in trouble because he stepped into the voting booth, NOT casting his vote openly for the SED. Democratic my ass bro, righteous suppression of right wingers lol. 100k Stasi agents 200k informants just for right wing dissidents, yeah right
Man, they wanted something better than the shit show that their life had become. They had many ideas about how they could reform their country. A new socialist constitution, a emancipated reunion with the West etc. All they knew was that it couldn’t go on with the current SED clique
They didn’t get something better though. They got capitalism, worse living conditions, and a bourgeois democracy that didn’t represent them either
How did the SED respond? Fucking off with the last money. They left their population with no help when they negotiated with Kohl. But hey, to you that’s just capitalist propaganda probably.
The SED literally lost influence and that let reunification happen. You’re blaming an organization that was trying to prevent something disastrous from happening for the thing happening disastrously.
Now it’s the people’s fault that they got screwed by the capitalists pfffff
Pretty sure it was the fault of the power dynamics at play, as reunifiers had taken control of the government and led to a massive looting of the GDR. And as for the SED “fucking off with the money” you get that the big impoverishment of east germany was that all the nationalized industries were given to private individuals, mostly people in West Germany who used to own(or whos parents owned) the industries prior to nationalization, right?
Also, I ask again: how did the Stasi respond to the lgbt movement in the 80s? Because that shit runs entirely contrary to the propaganda you’re trying to spew.
Countries are defined by land-hoarding class, because the nomadic people define themselves by their group instead of the land on which they live.
Without hoarders (landlords), we wouldn’t need to put as much effort towards regulating land use, instead we could focus on regulating behaviours. Ex: “this land is a national park, you are not allowed to trash it. Go next door, there you are allowed to pour the trash from your industrial process into the ground, because it’s your private land”
Highest pollution generating countries are communist 😂
Are you referring to China? Because that would be an exceptionally bad example.
April 15th 1989
The Hillsborough disaster?
“Pick Me” vibes
Nope, just being right about the CPC.
Tianamen Square was not about pollution so is unrelated.
We could be nuked today
I agree, we should focus more on climate change, though.
Climate change cannot be sufficiently addressed without oveethrowing capitalism. China built more solar capacity last year than the entirety of American installations and both American candidates support fracking.
Join a local socialist org!
Lol they also built more coal plants than the rest of the world combined in 2023
I swear you tankies are a hilariously ignorant bunch.
China did not start industrialization until 1949. Climate Change effects have been known since 1896 or 1824 depending on how you look at it. China literally did not start the fire 🔥
Lol China didn’t start the fire, but they’re literally pouring gas on it… it’s those damn western capitalist faults.
You seem to have misunderstood what I wrote. I said they installed more solar power than the US’s entire history, not a single year.
China is fulfilling its internationally-agreed climate commitments while the major imperialist countries do not.
You should find a more sustainable way to fulfill whatever drive makes you seek out this level of pointless smugness and guesswork gotchas.
The fuck are you talking about, they get 70% of their power from coal, they built 6 new plants in 2023. What the hell makes you think they’re going to fullfil their agreements?
It sounds like you have made no attempt whatsoever to understand. I will wait for you to tell me that you have spent five minutes looking for the relevant information. If you can’t, just tell me you couldn’t fins it and I will gladly show you.
What type of response is that…if you have proof from a factual source, then post it. Stop talking like you’re some wise tankie jedi.
Actually this is a very low bar but you managed to not clear it. This has confirmed a simple fact: you are here to fight and have no interest in the truth or learning. Obviously this was implied from the prior bad faith responses, but now we have cut to the chase.
Why should I waste my time?
China
socialist
LMAO SRSLY?
Do you think you have fairly characterized my comment?
I didn’t say that. Wrong comment chain.
I’m a communist. You guys came to debate yourselves.
?
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-of-worlds/
I don’t remember the quote directly but it’s somewhere in the area of that;
We have gotten so used to living in the shadow of annihilation that we’ve forgotten to fear the constant threat of global destruction that nuclear war is.
This podcast really gave me some perspective on that.
Nuclear war didn’t happen and climate change is.
I see no reason why we can’t have both.
I don’t want any, that’s the point.
C’mon where is your sense of adventure.
I. don’t. want. bad. things. I. Want. A. Good. Life.
Fair enough. I hope you get it.
