Haha, funny way to say "working in the lead mines", comrade.
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Comrade, we all know lead poisoning and the need for safety gear are capitalist propaganda! Now, get back in the mines! Production must increase 50% this year, and your state-appointed union representative says it can!
Capital successfully fought to put lead into American's blood and lungs for a century after it was known to be poison. To this day they're still fighting to keep it there.
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What is it with these commie types that they believe communism will leave everyone to become hippies who can do whatever they want and all required resources just magically arrive when they need.
It really is watching children believe in Santa Claus
If we didn't all work to produce excess wealth for the super wealthy, we'd have 20 hour workweeks. People can do a lot with that extra time.
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Ah yes, because everything you do is to meet societal needs and not to make more money for the 1%. That's why 34% of wealth in Canada goes to the top 1%.
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When you own the means of production it's literally yours. I don't understand the issue.
Big difference between communism and socialism.
That's correct, but I'm not sure what you understand those terms to mean, because neither really supports taking all ownership away from people. I'm just gonna leave this blorb here, because I feel like this is where it fits best.
Communism in the style of Marx and Engels means that the workers own the means of production. They would have been completely in favor of a person owning their own farm (or jointly owning it if multiple people worked it). They didn't really envision much of a state to interfere, much less own property.
That the Soviet Union (and later the PRC, fuck them btw) claimed to be building the worker's paradise under communism was mostly propaganda after Lenin died. There hasn't been any state that has implemented actual communism as established by theory.
Socialism (as I understand it, but I'm not well-read on it) means the state has social support networks, but largely works under capitalist rules, with bans of exploitative practices. There are some countries trying to implement a light version of this across Europe, to varying success (mostly failing where capitalism is left unchecked).
The issue is that the US started propagandizing like mad during the cold war, and "communism" was just catchier to say than "supportive of a country that is really just a state-owned monopoly". Soon everything that was critical of capitalism also became "communism", which eventually turned into a label for everything McCarthy labelled "un-american". This is also the time they started equating the terms communism and socialism. A significant portion of the US population hasn't moved past that yet, because it fits well into the propaganda of the US being the best country in the world, the American Dream, all that bs. The boogeyman of "the state will take away the stuff you own" turned out pretty effective in a very materialistic society. Although I'm very glad to see more and more USAians get properly educated on the matter and standing up for their rights rather than letting themselves be exploited.
Your definition of socialism is more akin to a definition of social democracy, which is... maybe a form of socialism, depending on who you ask -- it is historically contentious and generally accepted that social democrats aren't socialists.
Socialism can have all of the things that you described, but it is decidedly anti-capitalist. It reorients how workers relate to the means of production. Under capitalism, the means of production are owned by the bourgeois class, while under socialism, they are collectively owned by the workers.
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I too want a post-scarcity luxury space communism utopia. Unfortunately most iterations of communism feel more like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic than actually plugging the hole in the fuselage.
It's just human nature in my eyes. Power attracts many people and the less positions of power to fill, the fiercer the competition and the more ruthless the ultimate victor. Communism focusses too much power in too few positions, so ultimately, corrupt people are almost guaranteed to win. Democracy is spreading out that power more. It is still not perfect, corrupt people are still regularly found at the top, but they wield less power individually and they have to do it more in the open.
Any socialist society needs to be democratic first, socialist second. Many more democracies have gotten closer to socialism than socialist societies have gotten close to democracy.
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...until the central committee decides that more coal miners are required.
You say that like it's worse than the current capitalist epidemic of giga corporations pushing independent farmers out of the market to the point of leaving them jobless and forced to sell their farm to them for cheap.
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I mean technically, you could have a farm if you worked the entire farm by yourself (personal vs private property).
Or they could share ownership of that farm with others that also work on it AKA a non-profit co-op 🤷
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Dude why do people think communism means you can't own anything. There's a difference between private and personal properties. You can own a house, and a car, hell even a whole farm. What you cannot do is hold capital.
A farm is means of production, therefore it would classify as public property. You cannot own production under communism, only products.
Therefore it could count as a means of production but in general in Communism personal farms of reasonable size and constant use are encouraged. Again, that's a misunderstanding of communism.
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Because in practice the line between capital and personal property is very thin. Can a car or apartment not be used to generate income in a modern economy?
When the soviets were in power they would force multiple families under one roof (kommunalka). Think 4-8 families sharing a kitchen and a bathroom. Each family was given just one room and all housing was considered communal housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment?wprov=sfti1
After Stalin’s death families began receiving single family apartments due to massive housing reform by Kruschev, but were hastily built and called ‘khrushchyoba,’ a cross between Khrushchev's name and the Russian term for slums. That by the way still leaves a multigenerational period from 1917-1954 where the kommunalka would have been the primary unit of housing.
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I've never understood how this is supposed to be some big own to communism. You'd still refer to it as "my farm," even as I refer to the community where I live as "my city" and the jobs I've worked to benefit some capitalist bozo as "my job." This is even worse than Ben Shapiro popping out of a well. In many ways, I think I'd feel more ownership as part of a community vs. the facade of "private property."
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For those interested, Dessalines' "what would be X like under communism" is a helpful aggregated of discussions regarding this: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#what-would-x-be-like-under-communism
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It's always cartoon pfp users the most delusional.
Arguments about the definitions of Communism or Property aside - yes, my farm. As in, the one I work on. The possessive pronoun, despite the name, sometimes connotes association rather than ownership - I do not own my school, my country, my street or (despite what Republicans might wish) my wife.
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