this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
465 points (77.7% liked)

Memes

45536 readers
800 users here now

Rules:

  1. Be civil and nice.
  2. Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
465
quick reminder (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 100 points 1 year ago (10 children)

And now infographics are memes... Shitposts has more memes than this community.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

No, you see, you have to upvote it because communism is great

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (9 replies)
[–] [email protected] 87 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This isn't really a meme

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No cars though. Fuck cars.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (10 children)

I'll never understand how owning guns is normalized.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Owning a personal weapon has been a thing since humans evolved

load more comments (9 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (19 children)

What if I want to make my own farm?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You could have a personal garden, but to have a farm you'd have to obtain a lot of land. Then you'd have to make the land productive with either large and resource hungry machinery i.e. capital or you'd have to obtain and exploit the labor of farm workers to work by hand.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What if i agree with some of my friends that we will join our yards to make one big field and work it together? We could also ask others for help and pay them for their work, the amount of money we both agree with.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You and your community collectively owning and operating a farm is literally a communal farm.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (66 children)

but if some of my friends dont want to work it they can just sell me the land. And if we produce more food than we need we can sell it so we can buy other things we don't produce. I dont understand why its wrong to own a farm.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Substance farming is different than owning a farm that exists by its own production of food and selling those produced goods at market price.

load more comments (65 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I don't think most communists would have a problem with people trading crops that they grow themselves. The problem comes in when someone hires employees to grow more crops for them, starts collecting profits, and grows the farm even bigger. All under the expectation that they own everything that their employees worked for. Cause that's literally capitalism on a small scale.

Of course it needs to be possible for multiple people to come together and start growing crops, but only as long as no single person can take over the entire operation. Leaders would be elected, and be given a somewhat higher salary to reflect the additional responsibility.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

That's a paddlin'

load more comments (16 replies)
[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)

How's about a website that generates money, like Facebook or YouTube? Can you own that?

What about products that designed to create ongoing streams of revenue, like a patent on an invention or a piece of art you can collect royalties from every time it is displayed? The USSR famously took ownership of Tetris away from its creator.

Under communism, how does the stock market work? I'm not a big fan of it, but it's pretty hard to imagine getting rid of it now that the global economy is pretty much dependent on it.

Today, five countries exist that can be said to be communist: China, Russia, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba. Of those five, none have achieved actual communism, and several have inarguably embraced capitalism to a great extent. All of them have essentially authoritarian governments. Which is unsurprising, since a dictatorship of the proletariat is central to the Marxist vision of how to create a communist society, and involves the creation of a single-party transitional government that forcibly suppresses all its critics and rivals.

I'm not big into capitalism and I think we should implement plenty of socialist reforms, but I will never understand why some people on the Left—or anyone for that matter—think communism is what we should be striving for.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (7 children)

"Today, five countries exist that can be said to be communist: China, Russia"

Tell me you have no idea what you are talking about without directly telling me you have no idea what you are talking about. In what way can today's Russia "be said to be communist", and how does its current, very explicitly anti-communist government, contribute to the point you are making?

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Stock market? The thing where you buy tiny fractional ownership of of a company, too small to influence it, then try to sell that legal construct for a little more to someone else later? Why would you need that at all?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (6 children)

The USSR famously took ownership of Tetris away from its creator.

He developed the game on company time. If he'd lived in a capitalist country, the government wouldn't have taken control of Tetris, but the company would have. Every software company contract I've ever heard of has a clause that says the company owns any code you produce while working there.

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (13 children)

No you can't own a platform like youtube or facebook, but you could make content on it, intellectul propriety is not a thing as you don't have to produce art just to get a monetary return, but just because you enjoy doing so, there's no need of a stock market in an ideal communist world because everyone gets what they need based on what they can provide, but if it's just a country i guess it's the government who takes care of it.

Regarding those 5 countries i'm not sure of every one of them, but talking about China as you said it's not a communist country but it is not a dictatorship of the proletarian either, as it's not the proletarian class nor their democratically elected representatives who govern the country.

In the end i'll add that greed is not more "human nature" that wishing to kill someone annoying.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We didn’t own Reddit’s platform, but we made content and engagement for that community anyway.

That worked out awesome. Let’s scale it up to an entire society.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I really can't tell if you're being sarcastic. I think so, but Poe's Law

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (12 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Those websites are highly capitalistic and never brought any innovation, all technologies related to the internet were researched by public money.

Look into patent trolls. Patents are bad, publicly funded research is always better, but it doesn't prevent people from spending money to do research, but it doesn't entitle them for the profits.

I'm not advocating FOR communism, I'm just trying to dispel myths.

Socialism is soluble with capitalism.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If it makes money (or some equivalent) then you can't own it. Parents aren't necessarily, if you're supported so that you can invent for the betterment of society or for fun.

Dictatorship of the proletariat is supposed to be a temporary phase, but it is a fundamental weak point in the transition to communism that I think cannot be overcome, because once people get that power, they won't be able to give it up (or they'll be removed by people who don't want to give it up).

So I consider communism sort of an unattainable ideal that we should strive towards rather than actually considering implementing irl.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (10 replies)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (16 children)

How do new means of production come to be? Like, if a community really wanted a unicycle repair shop, how would that get started? How would it be decided that we use resources for that shop instead of, say, a pogo stick repair shop? Would that be up to a local government (or some other governing body)? Honest question.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

My country used to have communism. Niche shops like this barely ever started as small businesses and instead usually started out as specialized departments of large all-encompassing state corporations. Instead of there being a company that specialized in making furniture, the furniture would be made by the logging company. The company that ran a chemical plant would directly sell shampoos, paints, toothpaste, fertillizer, etc. It cut out middle men but the products were usually crap quality because it couldn't focus on each product individually. This stifled progress. My dad wanted to learn programming (this was the late 80s) but because the government was too oldschool to open a computer science degree programme, the only way to get near a computer was to go to a university that specialized in mining and take a programme in mining machine automation.

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Well if the comminity really wanted a unicycle repair shop everyone chips in to build the shop, and gets the equipment or the state directly decides you need a unicycle repair shop.

Although you and a few of your buddies could decide to make a unicycle repair co-operative. You don't have enough money so. You go to the credit union to get extra starting funds, you then use these funds to contract out the building of the shop as you are unicycle repairers by trade. You then get all the equipment and run it as a co-operative.

There are many ways to run a co-operative and in the begining you and your friends are probably going to split the profits directly using your equal shares to recieve divedends. If it takes off and you start needing to hire people, you may start having salary bands instead so everyone will always make X amount of money working with you depending on their position, but will also make a variable amount from dividends depending on the unicycle repair excess profits and might also have a say in how things are run.

This is a more general left-wing idea which can happen in many left-wing, socialist, and communist societies, rather than just communist.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (14 replies)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Honest question, at what point does a workshop transition from ownable to not?

A small garage shop with a workbench and a tool wall is obvious enough, but can you own a separate workshop outside your home? Can it be far down the street, or out in a barn somewhere, or in the outskirts of town among large factories? Can you own a lathe? Can you own a CNC machine?

What tools are ownable and what tools are not? What's the scale-cutoff?

Bandsaws, drill presses, welders, large trucks, small trucks, cranes, sheet metal cutters and benders, pipe benders, etc.

Can you buy material? How much? Should it be limited by something else than your funds?

If you take on jobs that are too much for you to handle on your own, do you have to either make your means of small scale production communal, or give up the job?

Please draw some lines for me here.

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

This was never the case... And never even remotely worked out.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you have your own garden for food?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Yes. What this is saying is large industries that are meant to feed people or provide commodities cannot belong to just one person. We are seeing the effects of monopolization right now in our time.

load more comments
view more: next ›