It’s the kind of argument made by someone who only learns socialism from non-expert sources (breadtube etc) where theoretical precision is sacrificed for popular appeal. If you only ever listen to those people, and never read Marx directly, you are likely to end up with the most confused ideas.

This particular idea might have originated with Richard Wolff, who I’ve previously complained about so I’m not surprised if it did start with him.

Understanding capitalism in terms of workplace relationships differs from how others define capitalism. […] Using my definition instead, the last century’s epic struggle was not between capitalism and another economic system. That is because both capitalism and 20th century socialism relied upon basically the same employer-employee relationship for their workplaces’ organization. The difference was who the employers were: private persons in capitalism versus state officials in socialism.

This is why no one should listen to Wolff.

Thanks for sharing the tip about uBlock. The taglines don’t bother me that much, but I agree with your point that we should feel empowered to control our experience online.

I have similar thoughts about interaction at the device level. Modern operating systems use a push philosophy when presenting information to the user. This manifests as feed algorithms, spontaneous system notifications, app badges, and so on. But it is mentally healthier if your device works according to a pull philosophy, in which information is exposed only when you ask for it. That way you aren’t bombarded with more than you can handle. This can be further improved by reducing, as much as possible, all attention-grabby “features” like oversaturated colors and overstimulating animations. Maybe I’ll compile these ideas and post it.

badposting

But its the best comm??????

Don’t threaten me with a good time!

You need to be somewhat educated before you can be re-educated

I think it's nice to see a take like this that you can't engage with, it's like exposure therapy. The big problem with Internet arguments is that the other person is right there being wrong and you can type at them until your fingers fall off while they continue to get more and more wrong.

Exactly. Marx never really used the term capitalism as such, except as an adjective e.g. capitalist mode of production. The point wasn’t to define an abstraction but to explain a concrete, historical form of society, in terms of its particularity (the capitalist form) and how that is the manifestation of the general or universal (the mode of production) which is independent of the form of society.

Some early Marxists tried to generalize it as a theory of commodity society or of money but even that is imprecise, as Rubin explains in his essays, partly because commodities and money can and did exist outside of capitalism. Capitalism is about capital.

I didn’t mean for the post to be a referendum on taglines, but I’m glad if it can open up a conversation. There are a few improvements that could be made:

• opt-out in user settings
• a “talk page” for each tagline (maybe exposed as a small info button) where users can discuss, give feedback, or even ask to remove the tagline
• user-specific hiding of specific taglines so they dont come back (ideally this is not needed at all)