• dartos@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    Yeah but capitalism also made reddit great, before making it terrible.

    There’s a balance in there somewhere. What we got ain’t it tho.

    • ProxyTheAwesome [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Reddit was never great lmaoo

      It was a pedo networking tool reknowned worldwide for it’s jailbate and non-consensual creepshots. These moderators received awards from admins. Then it got too much attention and got a PR workover, burning a woman CEO at the stake to satiate the gamer-fascists before becoming a bland Atlanticist CIA sockpuppet front of bland corporate posts.

      At no point during this entire thing did it ever approach anything comparable to greatness

    • Bobby_DROP_TABLES [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      There is no balance though, the shit-ification that happened to Reddit is a necessary function of capitalism. What we saw as Reddit at its best was, from a capitalist’s perspective, Reddit at its worst. I’m sure you’ve noticed a similar process taking place in lots of other areas as well.

      • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        What we saw as Reddit at its best was, from a capitalist’s perspective, Reddit at its worst.

        And capitalists will allow this “at its worst” phase in order to capture the market, before squeezing it. This pattern is consistent in many industries.

      • dartos@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        I may be wrong, but I don’t see socialism and capitalism as hard opposites.

        I see capitalism and communism are like hard opposites with socialism somewhere in between.

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Capitalism is the state controlled by the capital owners with the workers repressed.

          Socialism is the state controlled by the workers with the capital owners repressed.

          They are literally hard opposites. One is a bourgeoise-state and the other is a proletarian-state.

          • dartos@reddthat.com
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            1 year ago

            I learned that “capitalism” is an economic system, not a system of government.

            So you could have a socialist state that funds essentials like healthcare and transportation through taxes with a market (capitalist) economy.

            • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              That’s not a socialist state. It’s a capitalist state with welfare. If the political structure of the state itself has not been reworked to put the workers in power what you’re describing is just a state where the bourgeoisie (who control power) have decided to do welfare, usually for their own benefit such as reducing revolutionary energy by providing the workers with concessions (the welfare state). That is social democracy.

              You do not have socialism without overthrowing the hierarchy that places the bourgeoisie as the ruling class:

              Capitalism = Capitalists in power. Proles repressed.

              Socialism = Proletariat in power. Capitalists repressed.

              Communism = No more classes, only 1 class because the bourgeoisie have been completely phased out.

              • wewbull@feddit.uk
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                1 year ago

                All of this sounds at odds with representative democracy. What political system would you see working with socialism as you describe it?

                • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  Representative “democracy” alienates the common man from the political process while maintaining a semblance of democracy. For this reason it is the ideal political form for capitalism, an economic system which alienates power from the masses and concentrates it in the hands of a few.

                  Class interests are the primary axis on which all political activity turns. Getting the working class to vote does not help them, it helps those in power.

                  • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    Representation is necessary as a matter of scale, though. There are other issues with small r republicanism that are more specifically nefarious, like the legalization of bribery, the tilting of power towards land owners via the senate, etc.

                • very_poggers_gay [they/them]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  What about the absolute lack of “representative democracy” we experience under capitalism?

                  I’d argue that the capitalist system is more at odds with representative democracy than other systems mentioned. Most workers have no say in what is produced, who produces it, how they are paid, how much products are sold for, etc. Instead, we end up with figurehead CEO’s and nameless investors making all of those decisions, and of course they do everything to minimize costs, maximize profits, and disempower workers so that they can collect billions of dollars at the expense of the workers who actually make their companies run. If we had representative democracy do you think we’d have billionaires?

                  • wewbull@feddit.uk
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                    1 year ago

                    Literally “whataboutism”.

                    I’m not interested in how the current system is broken. That’s obvious. What do you have in it’s place?

                  • wewbull@feddit.uk
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                    1 year ago

                    The people en-masse being in control. Representative democracy, by it’s nature, creates a “ruling class”, the representatives. Only a direct democracy asks the people what they think of each and every issue, but that is impractical in my opinion.

                    …and I don’t feel that leaders of state owned capital are particularly any different from leaders of privately owned capital. Both are individuals in privileged positions of power that work to maintain themselves above the workers. To me it’s not the ownership that matters but the fact you have a ruling class at all.

                    Hence, what political system is required for a truly equal society?

            • Ho_Chi_Chungus [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              I learned that “capitalism” is an economic system, not a system of government.

              Consider for 3 seconds that what you “learned” about the world is a product of the system that produced it

              Capitalism is a system of government, and in capitalist countries, they teach their citizens that capitalism is at at odds with the state and not working in conjunction with it

            • drlecompte@discuss.tchncs.de
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              1 year ago

              Amazed that I had to scroll down this far to read this. Capitalism does not magically create a fair society through the creation of value (which seems to be what its proponents keep saying: investors generating economic activity and wealth). But similarly you could have a socialist economic system, with no real democracy. Which, as we’ve seen, devolves into a corrupt oligarchy. We’ve seemingly lost this perspective in the decades since WWII, but a solid representative parliamentary democracy and separation of powers are the best way to create and maintain a fair society. It requires some other conditions too, like good education, free press, etc. but the core is a system where power is distributed and temporary, depending on democratic processes (elections). This democratic legitimacy is what we should be defending at all costs, imho. It’s not sexy, though.

          • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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            1 year ago

            Capitalism is where everything is owned by an individual

            Socialism is where only the means of production are owned by the state, but the individual still has private properties

            Communism is where everything is owned by the state

        • ThereRisesARedStar [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Okay, well, I’ve studied everything from all sorts of marxist tendencies to syndicalism to anarchism, to classical economics, and I think you’re either using terms wrong or have the wrong idea. Can you define your terms or rephrase what you mean?

          I apologize if this is too blunt.

          • dartos@reddthat.com
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            1 year ago

            So I understand total capitalism as an entirely market driven economy with no government influence

            And total communism as an entirely planned and government prescribed economy

            And socialism as some of the economy is market driven and some government planned.

            • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              Viewing it entirely in economics is incorrect. All of the above can be done under capitalism. The key difference is not what form of economics are employed but which class controls power and puts the resources of the state to use.

              The capitalist state is a state where capital owners hold power and use that power to exploit more capital.

              The socialist state is a transitionary state in which the workers have seized power and use the state to repress the bourgeoisie and put resources to their own use.

              The communist state is what occurs when capitalism is entirely defeated, all nations are socialist, conflict is eliminated and material abundance is achieved, at which point states start to stop existing as the resources within them that are put towards repressing the bourgeoisie through violence are put towards other things when there is only 1 class in society.

    • space_comrade [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Yeah but capitalism also made reddit great

      Engineers and designers made it great. Reddit could very well exist without capitalism (see Lemmy). What fucked up Reddit was explicitly capitalist incentives.

      • dartos@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        Lemmy would not have existed without Reddit. Lemmy is a clone of reddit!

        Plus reddit put all the work intro attracting users and communities in the first place, before driving them to places like lemmy.