- cross-posted to:
- leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
ID: WookieeMark @EvilGenXer posted:
"OK so look, Capitalism is right wing.
Period.
If you are pro-capitalism, you are Right Wing.
There is no pro-capitalist Left. That’s a polite fiction in the US that no one can afford any longer as the ecosystem is actually collapsing around us."
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It’s not perfect, but it’s they best we’ve been able to make work with so far. What he have right now is unbridled capitalism which isn’t good even for those at the top because it will lead to total economic collapse. Capitalism works best under tight regulation. Which we don’t have right now.
Lmao. “Capitalism is right wing. Period.”
Braindead.
Lmao. “Braindead.”
Braindead.
Your eloquent way with words convinced me op is wrong goddamnit. /s in case your braindead ass can’t understand sarcasm
Politically speaking, I don’t believe there’s such thing as “right” or “left” except in the relative sense. Even then it’s questionable.
Edit: I’m really curious about what people downvoting think it fundamentally means for there to be an absolute political “center” from which there is an objective “right” wing and an objective “left” wing. Furthermore, I’d like to know what advantages this model has that makes you value it so much.
Right and left is a very rough but easy to understand model. In the US it represents the two big parties somewhat okay. You can also put political ideologies on this scale:
fascism - conservatism - liberalism - social democracy - socialism - communism
Centrism is more related to the Overton window, so what’s currently accepted by society as acceptable mainstream discourse. That means the center can include conservatives, liberals, and social democrats. However as the Overton window changes, centrism also adjusts. Centrism strives to represent a supermajority majority consensus.
I agree, politics aren’t a line where some are in the right, some in the left and the center is some kind of mythological beast (if they are we are screwed, but they aren’t)
Politics are complicated, politicians are simple. Capitalism isn’t an ideology it’s an economic system, it’s as good or as bad as the mechanisms put in place to govern/control/rule it. It’s supposed to be free but it can’t be because no one can’t trust corporations, it’s also not supposed to be controlled by the State but when they inject money in it that’s what they are doing.
Capitalism can work in any kind of environment, and fail too.
Personally I believe democracy is failing, technofeudalism is coming in hard for it. In my country we replaced nobility with politicians and they are the caste, the president is the King, if you defy the party stand you are kicked out, they claim to be socialdemocrats but all the social aspects are worse than 5, 10, and 20 years ago and although keynesian economics plays a part on the reason I believe it’s democracy’s fault.
Capitalism isn’t an ideology it’s an economic system
Well, it’s both. All economic systems are ideologies with specific values and concerns.
it’s as good or as bad as the mechanisms put in place to govern/control/rule it
This implies that economic systems can’t be good or bad in themselves. But every implementation of capitalism (or any other economic system) is going to reflect that system’s values, and those values can be judged to be good or bad. So I think it’s reasonable to label different economic systems as “good” or “bad”, so long as you precisely define the system and its values before judging it.
This implies that economic systems can’t be good or bad in themselves.
That’s right, it’s how we use it, well, to be honest I believe there are only two economic systems and human greed won’t allow the second one to succeed so, right now, there is only one and it’s as good as our leaders make it to be (which is pretty terrible, certainly worse than when my parents had my age)
And yes, even an absolute monarchy with a fair and just king could be good.
And I say this while I understand the current capitalism model is broken, the whole economy is based on lies, I hate banks and I a firm believer of the Christian concept of “money lending with interests is a sin”
“Perfect being the enemy of good [enough]” is also rhe argument republicans use against any liberal/social policy. If there are any flaws, we should do nothing at all.
Liberals also love saying that to justify “vote blue no matter who.” But what have the Democrats been doing differently other than giving breadcrumb policies?
Sorry liberals, but the truth is that you guys also benefit from the status quo at the expense of the working class but don’t want to admit. Senior Democrat leader, Nancy Pelosi is, after all, the biggest player in the stock market earning millions. If America has a multiplural party system and could articulate their positions better, the Democrats are centre right and would be very much described as close to centrist French president’s Macron neoliberal ideology. Socially liberal but economically conservative, and he’s one of the most unpopular president in French politics. He dislikes the far right, and yet does nothing policy-wise to alleviate the working and middle class concerns which only slowly nudges them to the far right. Doing nothing economically and telling people to support the status quo is tacit support for the far right despite hating them on the outset.
Look at you. Just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks? Why don’t you just go ahead and mention the Clinton’s while you’re at it. Someone who has retired from politics and someone who isn’t even a US politician is your argument? “Butwhatabout! Look! Over there! Someone else did something!” If you’re going to span the globe for comparisons I’m sure I could find plenty of right wing theo- or other fascists who have destroyed countries.
Well the retired Democratic leaders still benefit from it. “You scratch my back I scratch yours.” Hillary Clinton got the DNC nomination in 2016 primaries because she paid off DNC’s debt; even though Bernie Sanders is the more popular candidate. The Clintons are out of politics but they are comfortable retired from the money they made while the country burns.
Speaking of Clintons, it is under Bill Clinton who started the outsourcing. Hence, why Trump ran on the platform of re-shoring jobs and is one of the main reasons he won out of many (but his approach to it is very brash by imposing tariffs in order to coerce American companies to re-shore). Neoliberal policies did not offer any alternatives and cast aside their concerns, which made the working class welcome the embrace of a demagogue. Ancient philosophers have made the same observations before about what makes demagogues popular but people never learn.
Anyhow since you are asking if there are any current liberals in politics who can be blamed, why not ask the current DNC on why they haven’t picked Alexandria Ocasio Cortez for the Oversight committee? That’s right, they don’t want a progressive so as not to ruffle the feathers of the same oligarchs who support Republicans.
I don’t think you’ll find anyone here defending Nancy Pelosi, she can go against the wall with the rest of them.
I’m not even sure the liberals you’re talking to are on lemmy honestly.
There are many on Lemmy, but they tend to be down voting instead responding when you criticise the thirty years of neoliberal policies of outsourcing and de-investment of public services is what made the working class, especially those in rust belt and others, embrace the far right. Instead, liberals blame people as being plainly stupid. Even if some respond, they shy away when you mention that jobs outsourcing without offering alternatives, and lack of affordable healthcare and houses are what made the poor vote for Trump. American liberals are remarkably similar in behaviour with those in Europe. They wonder why the far right is gaining ground, but are tone deaf even from experts who say the lack of jobs and affordable housing is what makes populist on the rise. The most obvious reason is that liberals don’t want affordable housing because it brings down the value of their property. In California, it’s the same NIMBYism and so is here in Europe. It’s the socially progressive and yet economically conservative (this is what liberalism in the classical sense means) property owners do this as much as the right does. The former express sympathy for the homeless, but when there is proposal to build affordable housing they would object. Liberals just don’t want to admit it.
Story of my generation
You can’t post this often enough.
You’re right capitalism is healthy and good for us
What is Finland though? Social democracy seems pretty good but still fits in with capitalism as far as I can tell
Finland still pollutes the world at unsustainable levels, exploits the global south for raw materials and cheap labour, and is on a downwards trend to fascism like all of Europe. Liberal democracy only has one conclusion, and it’s fascism.
Since people don’t work for free and some people have more money than others, finland is obviously an extreme right wing faschist oligarchy where people live in miserable slavery and needs the proletariat red army invasion like right now. Wouldn’t even be hard for a landlocked nation. The capital Reykvetsvhik would fall in minutes thanks to the liberated people welcoming their saviors.
Yes im American, how could you tell? /S
Whatever social safety nets and programs they have will be dismantled as Western capitalism devours itself. As is happening all around Europe
Can you point to any sources or are you just making it up?
We already see a lot of talk of Cutting back on social spending in favor of military spending.. There’s also the pension and retirement changes most of Europe has already implemented to some degree. It’s likely we’ll see changes as drastic as what the UK are doing right now in the coming years, specially if the war in Ukraine doesn’t go the way of NATO.
The changes in pension spending all over Europe are caused by demographic changes, not capitalism. There are more and more retirees becoming older and older, while the working population stays the same or shrinks. A socialist state would have the exact same problems to pay for that.
So there is nothing saying that it will happen and that all welfare will be gone.
Will we be worse off for a while? Yeah, Europe isn’t in a great situation now with the fairly recent COVID outbreak, economic problems, the attempted invasion and ongoing war in Ukraine, energy problems, and climate change. While the future isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, it isn’t as bleak as you made it in your earlier comment. There isn’t anything pointing to the total collapse of welfare and/or the entire economy.
So I make the fairly mild claim that capitalists will destroy the public sector when profits go down. You ask for sources of that claim (even though I’m just making a prediction based on past trends). I then show you that these talks of cutting back spending are already happening, and you dismiss it because I can’t predict the future? And I am the biased one here?
If you were just guessing you should just have said so in the first place.
Neoliberal, just like the rest of the “socialist” nordics (E: having socialised aspects to the state and or economy, or even being a “social democracy” does not socialism make), which are all on the exact same trajectory as the rest of us, only a few years behind.
Do you have an example of a properly socialist country that is doing better than the nordics?
Otherwise, perhaps we should look closely at the politics in the nordics for inspiration of what to do that actually seems to work?
Capitalism is the fundamental belief in private ownership. That I can own a factory, a store, a restaurant, and therefore be entitled to the profits produced from them. Modern capitalism is inextricable from consumerism, from business, and from stock exchanges.
Capitalism is any resource or good harvested or produced that is not shared by all who produced it. Capitalism is the idea that some labor is more deserving of the fruits of production than other kinds of labor. Capitalism is violence against the working class. Capitalism is the means by which a new ruling class was created over the past 200 years that presently controls the entire world while utterly ravaging our environment and wasting more resources than we literally every could have thought possible.
You are NOT a leftist if you support capitalism. You are ANTI-WORKER if you support capitalism. If you want to support workers and if you want to support progressive leftist causes, ORGANIZE. Join your local anarchist community. Agitate, push leftist politics. Start mutual aid networks for vulnerable workers in your community. Support unionization efforts. Support striking workers. Participate in civil disobedience. Show up at protests. Organize demonstrations.
The world has never been changed by accepting the crumbs they threw at our feet. It was changed by those who refused to bow their heads. By the communities who resisted oppression and fought for their fellow workers. By people who fought for us all to live better lives. Count yourself among them.
Meh, I don’t necessarily disagree with the sentiment, but don’t like black/white dichotomies (though I’m personally anti-capitalist). Unions most definitely care the businesses they work for make money. The more money the better, since union members can bargain for more. They have incentive to be pro-consumerist and to protect their business/industry. Even at the expense of others.
Unions are workers coming together to advocate for their rights. I don’t know what you mean by the unions having an incentive for companies to make more money. Companies making more money does not translate to increased wages for workers. It translates to increased profits for shareholders. And unions do not own companies. Unions are a form of collective action against the capitalist ruling class. Workers who are a part of unions are making commitments to each other to fight for their rights as a group. They have nothing to do with what capitalist ceos or shareholders do. Not unless a union has been corrupted and is being manipulated by ruling class forces.
I am not a syndicalist, but I do think that the widespread unionization of workers is objectively a good thing. Tenants unionizing against their landlords, workers unionizing against their bosses, the working class as a whole unionizing against the ruling class.
I also push back against this notion of capitalism not being a hard and fast specific ideology that takes specific actions at the expense of workers. It is the truth. In countries that are more socialized but still maintain capitalist systems, less capitalism is still an improvement for the material conditions of workers. Private ownership of the means of production is still problematic even if there are more regulations from local government. Those things could still be collectivized and made worker owned so that everyone can have the fruits of production. And so that everyone has the same political power as everyone else.
unions having an incentive for companies to make more money
Unions have an interest in the economic success of their workplace. To redistribute wealth it has to be created in the first place.
You talking about unions sounds like you’ve never actually talked to people active in unions.
Unions can negotiate for all kinds of stuff. For example in a time where the company isn’t doing well, even a reduction in wages might be accepted, if in return nobody gets fired.
Unions can also have detrimental wider impact. One example is unionized workers in fossil industries pushing for continued use of fossil fuels.
Unions can also block necessary changes in a company, that over time can lead to its bankruptcy.
I have worked in a worker owned coop and it has the same problems. The meetings and votes were pretty exhausting and didn’t have better outcomes overall, in my experience. A democratic workplace means political campaigns, parties, and populism play a role.
Privately owned enterprises have the advantage of being able to make decisions quickly, including unpopular ones. That helps innovation and adaptation to change.
Something you left out is state, city, or other public ownership.
I’m an anarchist. You shouldn’t be surprised to find out I’m strongly opposed to electoralism.
You seem not to have read the last bit of my comment where I mentioned that unions like any other kind of network can become corrupt and manipulated. Within a capitalist system it goes without saying that capitalists will manipulate everything they can.
I agree that fruits of production must exist to be redistributed, but would argue that in most contexts the amount of labor being stolen by management and shareholders is so vast that there will rarely ever be a context where a union must push a company to increase production. I’m sure it happens but it’s definitely not the norm.
Unions are not necessarily tied to companies. They often aren’t.
And this comment was strictly about unions so I didn’t mention other forms of redistribution. My comment prior to the one you’re responding to does mention those things.
I think unionization is very important, and I personally lean toward anarcho-syndicalism, but unions are not hardline anti-capitalist institutions. I guess the term I should have used is that unions definitely want the companys’ “revenue” to increase, not necessarily profit to increase. Nearly every person I’ve known that worked in a union job was conservative (probably more of a reflection of where I lived), and many were very emotionally attached to the company they worked for. I’ve known several Ford plant workers that would disallow any member of the household to own a vehicle from any other manufacturer. I’ve heard that if a worker drove a car from any other manufacturer to work, it would likely get vandalized in the parking lot.
I’d say that leans towards what I said at the end. Any form of worker organization can be corrupted. Symptoms of a greater problem, not one of unions specifically. Consumerism and corporatism have made identities out of brands, like in the Ford case you mentioned. That brand and those workers’ associations with it became ways for them to exert a kind of social power. But that could’ve happened whether those workers were unionized or not.
Companies making more money does not translate to increased wages for workers.
In a unionized company with periodic collective bargaining, it definitely gives workers the potential to earn more money, if the union is doing its job right.
But, overall I agree with you. The potential drawbacks to unions are small potatoes compared to their real benefits. I think they’re one of the most powerful ways for the working class to take power back from the parasitic owning class.
Capital means money. Capitalism is an economy that is centered on money. Socialism OTOH centers the economy on the people.
You may want to read up a bit, and stop using socialism as an umbrella term. Socialism as in European social democrats, traditional socialists, Communists? Any of the other variations? Because both Social Democrats and Communists use the Socialist term.
This is very stupid.
Not all capitalism is completely unrestrained.
I do love when idiots insist the world must conform to their own internal definition.
The problem is the idiots never realize you’re talking about them when you say this.
You obviously need to read more theory until you can ignore praxis and reality completely. /s
14 upvoters don’t realize they are the idiots. 7 downvoters suspect this comment may be talking about them.
Left and right are completely arbitrary semantic categories so you can define them however you like, as long as it has a clear and internally consistent definition.
I’ve even seen ancaps who have almost the same definition as I do but completely reversed which is pretty funny but also gives me a headache.
left = not capitalism
right = capitalism
this definition has formed since more or less (…) since the french revolution and has consolidated along with capitalism itself.
Absolutist monarchism is right wing and not capitalist. Fascism often has anti-capitalist policies.
Absolutist monarchism is right wing and not capitalist. Fascism often has anti-capitalist policies.
I wouldn’t go that far, in a lot of ways capitalism was the left wing at the time. That was a liberal, ie capitalist, Revolution. Basically all the revolutions between the American Revolution up to 1848 were liberal and capitalist revolutions.
Woll, not that far back, after all the terms came later, but it was fairly set by the turn of the century.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
I think it’s important to clarify that markets and the use of money are not exclusive to capitalism. Under capitalism, the point of markets is to accumulate money absent of any actual project or goal, and money is the way the capital holding class keeps score. In other systems, the point of markets is to connect people who have some item with people who need or want that item and money is the means of exchange. Markets are fine for distributing excess materials and labor, once people’s basic needs are met.
Markets can efficiently allocate resources and they also foster competition. That enables decentralized innovation and optimization.
A major error of many leftists is to see markets as undesirable. There are always markets. Rightwingers often confuse an unregulated market with a free market, which is very misleading. Markets need regulation in order to be free.
Markets are fine for distributing excess materials and labor, once people’s basic needs are met
You can achieve that for example by having the market for housing and food be dominated by publicly owned enterprises.
Definitely something people forget when talking about money in general. Capitalism warps the meaning of “value”, money is just the closest we have to display a certain value in a tangible form. In itself, money is merely a tool for universal exchange of goods. A tool that’s unfathomably useful no matter the system it exists in.
Imagine we treat money like US citizens treat measurements. “Yeah, I’d like to buy these produce for about the value of 1 middle-sized football field”. What.
“Pro capitalism” and harm reduction are not the same thing. Some form of capitalist-like economics will exist until we achieve post scarcity economics. The best we can do until then is work towards that end, while also working to minimize the harms imposed by material and labor scarcity.
This is just another stupid purity test by people who care more about their own righteousness than actual action. You can call my praxis whatever you want. I don’t care.
We’ve been post-scarcity on a global scale for decades if you count the essentials. We’ve been producing all the food that’s needed to feed the world, and that’s with only 2% of people working on agriculture in the developed world.
The reason for housing shortages is also due to policy, not because we somehow don’t have the resources and labour to build enough.
Statistically yes, however any of those calculations I saw were always flawed and intentionally excluded losses that will always build up even in the most fair system (losses in transport, accidents, individual wrongdoing i.e. overbuying and bad cooking, miscalculations, bad harvests etc). And then there’s the rapidly shrinking space for optimal harvests, the climate catastrophe as well as capitalism keep destroying the ecosystem.
Technically we could produce enough to offset that as well, however that would include a global empowerment of… veganism. Or at least a 95% reduction of red meat, it’s the most outrageous resource hog. I don’t need to explain why this won’t happen though.
Capitalism is not a market. Markets have exactly nothing to do with capitalism.
Capitalism is not only not needed before total post scarcity, it prevents it as capitalism requires artificial scarcity to function.
Markets and capitalism usually appear together, but don’t require each other. You can have markets with just worker owned coops just fine.
For capitalist enterprises a free market is undesirable. A monopoly, duopoly, cartel serve to control the market in order to maximize profits.
No lies detected.
So where do Co-ops fall, one where all the workers own everything equally and vote on hiring and firing etc?
coöps are cool, but we can’t just have coöps. their liberatory potential is cancelled out by the fact that they still participate in capitalism and they still need to turn a profit.
Even if the labour of individuals might be slightly transformed by having a vote over the methods and aims of production, the very nature of co-operatives as institutions for the production of commodities renders them a revolutionary dead end. Even enterprises seized by workers during struggle and turned to cooperative production face a dead end if the broader struggle across society does not continue to move forward.
they still need to turn a profit
Creating surplus value is the goal of all economic activity.
Isn’t a co-op just an individual organization where the workers have already seized the means of production and share it fairly among themselves? With every worker having a say right? Sounds like socialism on a small scale to me.
Socialism. Plenty of models that use or aspire to that system, especially when it’s part of a larger capitalist society and one can’t expect the workers to change it all.
Few large coops are truly equal partnerships or that democratic though.
Generally speaking, what prevents it from falling under capitalism is non-transferable ownership stakes. Otherwise the workers can sell their stake and the system inevitably declines into capital interests hiring employees instead of a partnership.
That would be socialism because the power and profit of the company are eventually distributed throughout the workforce regardless of their capital investment.
Everyone is so eager to upheld their extreme positions, that the real work, that need to happen in the middle, by people that work together and are willing to compromise, never gets done.
To be honest, I stopped paying attention years ago. The negative effects of getting pissed by all that stupid shit going on far outweighs the positive change I am able to create. I can’t even be sure that my point of view is right. Why even bother…
Ignorance sure can be bliss.
Ignorance sure can be bliss.
If you’re privileged enough, meanwhile your ignorance and apathy impact those of us who aren’t so lucky.
As for
the real work, that need to happen in the middle, by people that work together and are willing to compromise, never gets done.
I wonder why that might be…
If you could just understand that creating the narrative of you against them doesn’t help at all. Don’t you see how you are pushing everyone away that doesn’t think the same as you?
Now I am the asshole too. What a joke…
A compromise wouldn’t be between the extremists on one side and the rationalists on the other.
It would be between the rationalists on both sides.And being a centrist doesn’t mean you take the exact middle point between two extremists on every issue anyway.
It’s about weighing up the pros and cons of both arguments, and deciding on a solution that minimises the cons of each side.
Ah yes, because the rationalists who want to kill black people are so much better.
That’s clearly not a rational view.
There are extremists and rational people on both sides of the political spectrum, and most rational people don’t associate with the extremists.Bucketing everyone who doesn’t share the same views as you into the same group as the extremists is just a way to feel right about your own beliefs.
“There’s no point trying to reason with the monsters on the other side, they believe [extremist view]!”
This isn’t a personal attack, both sides do it, and it’s a very common mindset in echo-chambers like lemmy.
I just don’t think it’s a productive way of thinking.
well maybe don’t push them away if you want their help. just sayan
News flash: most democrats are very much right-wing.
To people using this as a reason to not vote: It’s going to be capitalism. You have a choice between free for all capitalism with fuck the environment and fuck the workers (GOP), or regulated capitalism with environmental protections and workers rights (Dems). If you don’t vote or vote third party, you just voted for the free for all one.
What fucking dem party are you talking about?
