posiwid
The system is working even more efficiently than ever intended and needs to be dismantled and buried so it can never return
Where did you find this picture lol
I want these glasses you’re advertising.
Okay but those glasses actually go so hard.
Why do you have the netscape logo?
Because it’s cool. When I first made my Lemmy account, I was looking through my computer’s saved images. I had this saved from earlier because it looked so cool. It felt right because federated social media feels like a return to the old web in some ways, prior to the abundance of walled gardens. So a retro logo felt like a cool choice. But it was really just because I saved it when I saw it somewhere so it just happened to be here when I made my account!
lenin lenin lenin
The GOAT
The system worked like that for a few millennia. We’re just looking at not even a century that’s the exception and assume it’s the new norm. No, it’s just reverting to the old state now that the period of cheap and easy resources is gone.
Capitalism is only a few centuries old, and capitalist imperialism only really solidified around 1900. The era of US Imperialism (not just settler-colonialism) truly came into existence after World War II. It’s not that this is an exception, it’s a rapidly declining system.
Yes, with a short golden age roughly between WWII and the seventies, and going downhill for most people since then.
Not exactly. The “golden era” was financed off the backs of the global south, causing untold misery on Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Palestinians, Iraqis, and much more. Now, the global south is doing more south-south trade, escaping unequal exchange, and China is rising as the world’s most advanced socialist state. The west is dying, but the global south is rising.
The system has always oppressed somewhere and has never been good.
In the past I’ve heard the second opinion primarily from people who say that a system is intended to work in the way that it does. Which makes the statement tautological: The system is working exactly as it works. I find this view unconvincing.
POSIWID is a reminder to analyse the system the way it is, not the way it should be.
There is a difference is saying “I does what it does” and “what it does is per design”. The latter assigns a responsibility.
In OP Aziraphale gives socienty the responsibility to fix a broken system incrementally and Crowley gives the people in power the fault of intentionally creating a bad system and calls for revolution.
But you don’t need to misuse language to assign responsibility. It is their responsibility for breaking the system. Saying the system was always designed for this removes responsibility.
The system being broken by design doesn’t absolve anyone acting within it from the responsibility of their actions. No one is forcing anyone to game the system as effectively as possible to the detriment of the majority. Acknowledging the system itself is fundamentally broken is pointing out that its design rewards bad actors; bad actors are still acting badly and are responsible for those actions.
But you don’t need to misuse language to assign responsibility.
What? I am interested… How else would you assign the responsibility to people that designed something intentionally bad, if you cannot used language?
“Misuse [of] language” is a concept I cannot even begin to wrap my head around…
Do I loose the warranty if I use language in unintended ways?
It is their responsibility for breaking the system.
You just ‘misused’ language to assign responsibility to people for breaking the system.
Saying the system was always designed for this removes responsibility.
No? Responsibility is not a binary concept. Someone can kill someone else, and would be responsible for that death, and the people around that killer could also share responsibility for not noticeing their unusual behavior. And the system could also be responsible for not giving the killer the support they needed, which drove them to kill someone. And the people that designed or constructed that system could also be responsible for not caring enough about these kinds of deaths to prevent them systemically.
Things are working great and you people need to quit complaining
I’d like to purchase some PORNOGRAPHY :)
Bit of both.
Where’s the 2nd one from
Both from good omens, I think
Yep, top is Aziraphale and bottom is Crowley.
no way, Aziraphale is definitely the bottom, he wouldn’t be able to top to save the world (except that one time when he terrified everyone in hell)
these are not two sides. The system is working as some intend so needs to be dismantled, at least large parts of it, to fix it.
People always forget, nuance exists.
You can’t fix capitalism, though, that’s the point.
we don’t have capitalism. But fuck any ism, just find the broken shit and fix it. People think there’s one trick, one system, one thing that will fix shit. Nothing will but work, time, effort, good judgement. What worked yesterday, won’t work tomorrow, at least without updating it.
Yeah, capitalism is fucked. I don’t want to put in another fucking ism, I want to buckle the fuck down and fix the shit that’s wrong.
The western world absolutely has capitalism. We don’t need to say “fuck -isms,” we need to understand what works and what doesn’t, and what works is socialism. You can’t just fix critical flaws with capitalism like the tendency for the rate of profit to fall or the profit motive.
It has a corrupt form of capitalism. It also has corrupt socialism.
So, do the good shit and I personally belive a socialist style system will result. It’s the work against the corruption that is the hard part.
Capitalism and socialism aren’t like yin and yang, they describe over-arching systems. Capitalism is best described as a mode of production where private ownership is principle and capitalists in control of the state, and socialism where public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the working classes in control. Western countries are capitalist, socialist countries include Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, etc.
I’m well aware. I guess good luck instituting socialism then. I bet you get far.
To not be a dick. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. We have don’t have a coherent system, we have aspects of many, but the western ‘cult’ worships at the alter of capitalism. But we have a very corrupted version of it, that includes socialist, and authoritarian, and fascist tendencies. Things are far too entrenched to simply say, replace the system we have with this other one.
No system has ever been instituted to its definition, there is always unique challenges and differences and personalities. Spending time instituting a whole scale replacement, is time that will be wasted. Instead, we need a strategy of implementation through attrition. Forget the isms, just work on addressing the problems, and eventually we can build a better system.
I don’t think you’re understanding me. There’s absolutely nothing socialist about western countries. Western countries don’t have a “corrupted” version of capitalism, that’s just capitalism in action.
Ideologies like Marxism-Leninism are useful because they help us better understand the world, and what we need to do to move onto a better world. Destroying the capitalist state, replacing it with a socialist one, and gradually appropriating and collectivizing all production and distribution is a time-tested method for doing so.
It has a corrupt form of capitalism.
I AGREE! We must return to a more pure form of capitalism by repealing the Chimney Sweepers Act 1788! Boys younger than eight should be allowed to be apprentices! Master sweeps should be allowed to take them on without getting their parents’ consent, a four year old young man is able to make his own decisions!
we don’t have capitalism.
🤦 To say that is to say you don’t have even a Wikipedia-level understanding of capitalism.
People think there’s one trick, one system, one thing that will fix shit.
No, people don’t think that.
Nothing will but work, time, effort, good judgement.
Correct.
What worked yesterday, won’t work tomorrow, at least without updating it.
Correct.
I don’t want to put in another fucking ism, I want to buckle the fuck down and fix the shit that’s wrong.
People who don’t learn or develop theory can buckle down all they want, but they’re not going to get very far because they don’t understand anything.
It is a lot of work, time, and effort, and some of that is necessarily intellectual work, if you actually want to succeed in changing the world. Otherwise it’s like saying you want to be able fly without developing theories of physics, aerodynamics, and internal combustion engines.
Ok centrist
Lemmy politics i find a bit confusing and maybe i dont understand it very well but all forms of black and white communism /marxism-leninism always seemed to have lead to totalitarian states… like correct me if wrong, its fair and completely normal to say that whatever the west amd especially countries like USA an UK are bullshit and need to dismantled atleast large parts of it… but i dont understand why they jump instantly to models of china and Russia… like i said maybe i dont understand it well enough…
The vast majority of Marxist-Leninists in the west only gradually come to understand and accept existing socialism, like the former USSR and current PRC. It’s usually a years, even decades-long process of studying Marxism-Leninism, existing socialism, and peeling back layers and layers of anti-communism instilled from birth.
AES countries are not “totalitarian,” at least not evenly. They have all been dramatically liberating for the working classes, while being horrfying for capitalists, landlords, fascists, slavers, etc from their prior systems. In the west, we get an exaggerated boogeyman version of these countries beamed into our heads, from the ruling class perspectives, to prevent us from seeing how we could benefit by learning from them.
Marxism-Leninism is by no means black and white. Nuance is build into Marxism, its key philosophical outlook is dialectical materialism.
Thanks for ur perspective, i think they r fair points, but you are giving up a lot of personal liberty and freedom of expression if you are OK with systems of something like PRC, but i suppose that can be classified as a choice However I think that the censorship that goes around such countries also makes it harder for us to know anything other than for example China might want to show us, we dont really have much idea of how internal dynamics work there and if u choose to believe personal testimonies its not pretty…
I’m not a capitalist, the amount of freedom I’d have if I lived in the PRC would increase dramatically. Despite popular misconception, we do have a good idea of what goes on in China. They have english-speaking news like CGTN, their processes are observed and reported on, and if you believe personal testemonies it’s actually fantastic:
The problem is that western media obfuscates or slanders a lot of this reporting. It’s a much more insidious form of censorship, it pretends it doesn’t exist. China controls and censors the speech of capitalists and wreckers, yes, and this is approved by the vast majority.
I dont think even you would agree that china is democratic tho… not to say the west are perfect democracies, and the data u provided reflects people thoughts… the china one raises some questions…
China is democratic, though. Why do you say they aren’t? They elect officials, have large feedback polls and national suggestions for Five Year Plans, and there are local and regional governments with their own autonomy. Popular support in China is well-documented.
Peoples satisfaction isnt a metric of democracy, are a lot of people happy with chinas government? Maybe, minorities certainly arent tho But the reason its undemocratic is that there isnt really anything to challenge the CCP or its policies, and dissent is punished and censored, people have historically been happy under monarchs, but doesnt make them democratic…
People always forget, nuance exists.
Amen.
(to noticing and remembering nuance exists)
(ps, Good luck with that other conversational cascade here… recent experience taught, that one’s not at all inclined to nuance, open minded conversation, or entertaining ideas (nuanced or otherwise), or anything other than unreasonably repeating dogma with fallacies galore.)
You dodged my arguments and got a LLM to do your arguing for you. It hallucinated points and continued to dodge every single one of mine.
