Cowbee

@Cowbee@lemmy.ml

Actually, this town has more than enough room for the two of us

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

Cowbee ,

Progressives are excessively difficult to win support from the Dems or Reps due to campaign interests and media spin. The only candidates that recieve enough backing are the ones that pose no danger to the wealthy Capitalists.

Cowbee ,

How do you get media and financial backing if you fundamentally go against that which maintains their funding?

I agree that leftists should organize, but more along the lines of the Black Panther Party or other groups actively making a difference first.

Cowbee ,

I agree that organizing is fantastic, but the sheer difference in quantity of Capital is why it is necessary for a leftist party to focus primarily on delivering needs externally to the system before attempting to win over local and state level elections. Grow from the bottom up.

Cowbee ,

Yes, directly supporting and feeding children, supported gay rights, and promoted leftist theory and community building is good.

Hating on the Black Panther Party is about what I expected of you, funny enough.

Cowbee ,

Helping children not starve isn't anything substantial, got it. They had a lasting impact, and the US murdered Fred Hampton because the organization was effective.

Never said I was an ML, but you sure do love lying about others when you get scratched.

Cowbee ,

Voting blue is the best route to maintain it. It's likely it would get worse under Trump, sure, but the Democrats have no material interests in going against their donors.

Outside pressure gets change.

Cowbee ,

I never suggested it did, lol.

Cowbee ,

It'd be more correct to say that they all own the totality of the candy gathered, because they share the bucket, and as such can democratically allocate the candy.

Cowbee ,

Based. Also teach em to share the buckets so they can distribute the candy democratically.

Cowbee ,

Sure. Out of the 50 pieces gathered by 5 children, each will recieve 1. The owner of the bucket needs to be compensated for their risk, after all!

Cowbee ,

Communism isn't about equal distribution. Communism is about addressing everyone's needs from everyone's collective abilities.

Cowbee ,

The collective. Democratic processes and councils.

Cowbee ,

What's the alternative?

Cowbee ,

Not at all, Capitalism would be abolished.

Cowbee ,

Where did I say you couldn't change jobs or decide what to do?

Cowbee ,

You don't seem to understand basic concepts of democracy, Capitalism, or Socialism.

Workers democratically deciding policy and electing leaders is fundamentally different from Capitalism, where they have no say over production, nor what they are worth.

Cowbee ,

Having democratically accountable managers and production based on use and not on profit is entirely different.

Cowbee ,

You can vote them out, lol.

You're deeply unserious.

Cowbee ,

Yep, the US is not a democracy.

Cowbee ,

Yes.

Cowbee ,

Maybe posting is praxis after all!

Cowbee ,

It's a fundamentally different stage of class society with fundamentally different mechanics.

Cowbee ,

They don't have the same foundation. Aristocrat/serf dynamics are entirely different from Bourgeois/Proletarian relations.

Reading Marx would help you.

Cowbee ,

Serfs have a certified existence, they do not sell their labor in a market. They work their land, without participating in Capitalism.

Proletarians do not have a certified existence. They compete against each other in a labor market.

The difference is stark despite both being working classes.

Cowbee ,

Unlike serfs, workers must compete with each other as well as Capitalists. The Market protects nobody but the interests of Capital.

Cowbee ,

I wonder why a site built by Marxist-Leninists to answer the failings of Capitalist Reddit due to the profit motive has a bunch of anti-Capitalists. Who knows?

Cowbee ,

Hey, if you read theory, it becomes obvious that Capitalism is unsustainable! Either we all die, or the future will move beyond it!

Cowbee ,

You can overthrow Capitalism, it weakens itself.

Cowbee , (edited )

Why do some people become assholes?

Cowbee ,

Some of that is adventurism, so I would say organizing comes first. Sinking yachts does little without a mass leftist movement to take advantage of the damage.

Theory is great too, it makes your practice sharper.

Cowbee ,

Based.

Cowbee ,

The founding fathers would be applauding, lol. They were slave owning Capitalists.

Cowbee ,

That's all Cryophillia does, lol. Attempt to rewrite definitions and history.

Cowbee ,

Theory and practice are one and the same, if they divert then the theory or practice is wrong.

Cowbee ,

You beat it with Socialism. By changing production from a profit motive to a needs motive, and collectivizing ownership, you can democratize industry.

I'm curious why you think Socialism is more prone to corruption than Capitalism.

Cowbee ,

We do examine the practice, under Biden Imperialism is getting worse and Capitalism is crumbling.

Cowbee ,

A salient issue is his continued hawkish support of Israel, which is done to solidify US interests in the Middle East. He has also protected US megacorps with recent tariffs, which continues this global exploitation.

Again, I have said that by allowing Capitalism to continue to Fester, he has allowed Imperialism to continue to worsen.

Cowbee ,

In general, it has worked like that when it has been done. You already agreed that the USSR and PRC were vast improvements on their previous systems, even if they were highly flawed.

Can you tell me what specifically you mean when you say Communist practice has not met the theory?

I would personally say that the US was always more of a Capitalist dictatorship and was founded on state-endorsed genocide, it's a settler-colonial project. I would say the USSR and PRC, though obviously not free from tragedy nor atrocity, were not founded in the same manner.

I disagree with your analysis that central planning has worked out way worse than Capitalism, and want to know why you say that.

Cowbee ,

Support for Israel is purely economic. Why do you think the US funds genocide? For fun?

Continuing to allow global megacorps to support slave conditions outside the US is Imperialism.

I never said they were the most significant, you asked for examples.

It seems more that you just don't care and have been fishing for a gotcha.

Cowbee ,

What? When did I say that? I didn't say that.

I think that the standard of living increased dramatically in both, as scientific advances that provide standard of living became more widely distributed worldwide, and I think their previous systems were pretty abysmal.

What.

the benefit of any central planning that accelerated their industrialization was dwarfed by the nightmare of having a single strong central government that can kill millions of its people at the drop of a hat or throw them in prison for literally just a single sentence when they spoke the wrong thing.

The US did the same thing when it was industrializing, they just weren't counted as citizens. Even at the peak of the USSR's incarcerations, they were lower in number both per capita and in total than the US Prison system.

I don't think that the fact that they came from feudalism and so therefore there were aspects of coming into the modern world and some form of modern government, that were good things, means that the model they chose was at all the right one, and I don't think that's a good argument for moving the US from its current state to a similar model.

Explain why you believe Capitalism would have been better. Secondly, I did not say the USSR is what the US should copy, I explained the issues with Capitalism and how Socialism solves them.

The specific examples I brought up were how it's worked in the only two huge countries like the US that have tried a fully communist economic model (and the central control of the country that necessarily seems like it goes along with it). What they got was gulags, cultural revolution, Tienanmen, great firewall of China, mass starvation in both countries (because of mismanagement, which is very very different from the earlier mass starvations that were caused by crop failures or war), modern Russia after the total unsustainability of the USSR system led to a total collapse, Uyghur re-education camps.

And yet the US is worse.

Yes, the US does lesser versions of all of the above that are still to a level that's horrifying. I think we should fix those things when the US does them. But I think treating those even worse outcomes as non-events, because in theory the system that produced them has some good features, is a mistake.

Explain why you believe the US did lesser versions of the above when they have been higher in total quantity and per Capita.

This is just vibes, lol.

Cowbee ,

Yes, so at the absolute peak of the Gulag system, right after an influx of imprisonment from returning POWs being imprisoned (which I never claimed to support), the US currently does not imprison as much. Wow, what a shocker!

The vast bulk of deaths in gulags came from starving POWs after the Nazis invaded Ukraine, the USSR's breadbasket. The reality is that just like American prisons, the USSR had vastly different conditions depending on severity of crime and location.

All this digging and still not a single point about why the atrocities that happened in the USSR are necessary for Socialism or supported by Socialism. It's clearly all vibes-based analysis from a lifetime of Anticommunist propaganda and an unwillingness to look at systems within the context of trajectory and as built upon from previous conditions.

Cowbee ,

It's pretty clear by my wording that I was referring to when they were contemporaries, not the peak right after WWII to modern US, lol. Again, silliness.

I think you're making statements without caring whether they're true (just basing them on whether they feel right to you), and shifting your definitions around, and refusing to clarify what you mean or the details of what you're advocating.

Here's a mirror, lol. You haven't answered my questions and constantly duck and weave.

Here, I'll extend an olive branch. I can list several things, and you can tell me where you disagree.

Capitalism has the following flaws:

  1. Ownership of Capital by individuals results in a class conflict between Workers and Owners, resulting in a tumultuous society

  2. Production of commodities for profit rather than use results in products designed to make profits rather than fulfill uses, ie enshittification

  3. Capitalism cannot exist forever because of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, which leads to Imperialism and eventually fascism and collapse

Cowbee ,

You're on the right track, but haven't taken it to the logical conclusion. The Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall happens beause of competition, and the floor is subsistence. The less labor constitutes the overall value of commodities due to automation, the lower the profit. That's where Imperialism comes in, and as the global south also automates, rates of profit crumble. There's no scenario where Capitalism is maintained.

Socialism gets rid of that issue by abolishing competition and the profit motive. Rather than for exchange, goods are produced for use.

Cowbee ,

This is some spicy historical revisionism, haha. Liberals sided with the fascists in Nazi Germany, not the other way around.

Mind sharing some numbers?

Cowbee , (edited )

Unions can't fight back against competition being a thing. I think you're confusing RoP with wages.

The Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall has been absent from every Socialist country.

Cowbee ,

So the Social Democrats did side with the Nazis instead of leftists, got it.

Thanks for the numbers, again though the vast majority of deaths were due to mass starvation during WWII aftet Ukraine was invaded by the Nazis.

Cowbee ,

Rather than joining up with the leftists, they sided with the fascists. This was after the SPD had sided with the Kaiser and had constantly made an enemy of the KPD.

By the way, you were mistaken about what happened after WWII, you may wish to read more.

Cowbee ,

The SPD was the KPDs biggest enemy because the SPD betrayed the revolution, laying the groundwork for fascism in the first place. The SPD broke the line.

I agree with you, there's a good chance I will end up in a US death camp. You already know I told you I plan on voting Biden, I just believe that unless we can overturn this system, within the next few presidencies this will happen regardless of party.

I have spent as much time as I want to spend trying to talk sense into you.

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