Sorry if this might come as rude or elitist - not my intention as I’ve been there, but I’d really recommend reading some theory if you’re interested in this kind of stuff. Even some shorter works of Marx & Engels will dispel A LOT of misconceptions a leftist might have about socialism/communism/what’s actually the problem/etc that one might get just via osmosis of the popular discourse.

Now to respond to some of the points (though not all, too tired right now):

My point about workers not getting full value from their labor mostly targets the wording in the meme, it’s pedantry. Whether you think it’s fair to count taxes or not isn’t really relevant, but the fact that you have a system where whether you like it or not the state will take away some of your earnings from your labor means that you cannot really receive the full value of your labor, something always will get deducted. Though there was a better example of this I should have used, directly related to labor that you end up making:

Agreeing with your fellow workers to take home less pay to keep the factory viable is not exploitation.

Taking less pay in order to compete in the market economy is literally what capitalists do on behalf of workers - take their surplus value to expand production and remain competitive (and ofc live off of this surplus value themselves individually). In a coop, this would also happen under a market economy as you yourself say, and this money will come from the value of the commodities they produce as in the fruits of their labor they’re supposed to be getting “full value” of. See how it doesn’t make sense?

Also, I admit I should have asked this previously, but what exactly is socialism defined by for you? Based on your comment, I gather that few things exist in this socialism, and those are:

• Commodity production and markets remains in place
• Surplus value is still being appropriated, but democratically
• Getting taxed by the state to help the community via public services
• Money remains in place as value form, meaning capital accumulation is still possible
• Something that can be achieved through reforms if enough people believe in it? (idk about this one but that’s what i’m inferring)

Now I might be wrong about these and maybe you have a different definition in mind, but this is pretty much identical to a social democracy which is still fully capitalist. Coops exist within capitalism right this moment in some countries - individual companies where workers collectively own the means of production, but they still have to play within the rules of capitalist mode of production.

Sure, it might be better but socialist/communist goal isn’t to make things better, but to change the current state of things entirely. This is why actual socialism, which is defined by figures like Lenin, Marx and other non-falsifier communist theorists has markets and commodity production already abolished. Before socialism after workers take power, there is a period of transition where commodity production at least partially remains in place as a way to distribute goods while productive forces (like factories and infrastructure) are still being developed so everyone’s needs can actually be met during socialist stage.

Money gets abolished in favor of labor vouchers that get discarded after being used up (so there’s no more accumulation of capital), things start being produced for use - there’s still a long way to go towards communism at this stage, but this is how you actually stop being capitalist and create a separate mode of production instead of just making things a bit better but still fundamentally capitalist.

Anyway yap yap nobody reads this as seen from the amount of upvotes, still had to leave one as it would have felt rude if I didn’t and just left you hanging there

Fully automated luxury gay space communism

That’s Communism, not socialism. Sure, socialism has some similarities to Capitalism, that’s because Socialism was never the end goal, but a transition period between Capitalism and Communism.

Yes, never said that was socialism, only that’s how a fair society can only operate. Also, depending on the socialism in the context, it might not even be a transitionary period but rather bourgeois socialism that Marx criticized thoroughly in Critique of Gotha Programme, which is where 99% of my comment comes from

Workers don’t ‘exploit’ themselves, workers decide if it’s worth doing the work for what they can reasonably expect in return or not. If they decide it is worth it, it’s something they chose for themselves, not even close to the same thing as a Capitalist squeezing every last cent of ‘profit’ from you as they possibly can and basically forcing you to do it by making it impossible to survive if you don’t.

The market forces workers to exploit themselves, given how the primary way cost cutting happens is through decrease of wages, as most production costs are set in stone (like materials needed or machinery upkeep

They still get the full value of their labor. Taxes used to benefit the community benefit workers as well, because they are members of the commuity. Capitalists under capitalism still (are supposed to) pay taxes- and so do workers. Workers who are more fairly compensated for their work and have to pay taxes are better off than a wage slave who isn’t fairly compensated and still has to pay taxes.

Yes, but if they pay a portion of value of their labor, they don’t get the full value. It’s an involuntary payment that is good and necessary, but the point is that getting full value is impossible under bourgeois state and commodity production society

I asked my insufferable pet cat about this, and they dropped a wall of text on me:

It’s not socialism and this exact notion that “socialism is when workers get compensated fully and fairly for their work and when they own the means of production” has been thoroughly called out for being nonsensical. Workers merely owning their means of production is a minor improvement, but it doesn’t abolish capital or exploitation given how markets and commodity production still exist.

Now, in order to compete within that market for profit, workers have to exploit themselves by reducing their wages, increasing their own work hours to produce more goods to outflood their opponents so they essentially turn to collective capitalists.

A person under this system also can’t make full value of their labor, simply because there’s taxes that are used to fund public sectors such as education, healthcare, etc (it’s necessary though). People also are different, some can work more intensely with higher tempo due to how they’re built, and others might not be able to put in the same amount of labor, thus it’s impossible to have “fair compensation” without uprooting commodity production, doing away with money completely and instead producing things to fulfill everyone’s needs. Only then can things truly be “fair”.

America is already socialist, sorry granny

There are a ton of people like that, but they’re mostly found on real life, facebook and other similar social medias and not lemmy or reddit or twitter - those are terminally online echochambers, but I’ve seen one or two people going “thoughts and prayers” or “all violence bad”.

Also, my position is more complex than “violence can’t solve problems” - it can, but it must be organized, with clear goals in mind and people already behind and actively part of the cause.

If you just go in lone wolf style like Luigi or something and gun down a CEO, you expect for the public to see this, get inspired to take up arms of their own and start Years of Lead where rich people are fearing for their lives and suddenly we have a revolution like in some sort of Hollywood movie, but that’s not what happens in reality.

Instead, media tries to demonize the shooter by saying how good the victim was and how their family is grieving (happening right now) to tug on heart strings which will at least turn some people against them, the shooter being made example of in court which essentially throws their life in the bin, the CEO being replaced by someone else in a week’s time and people forgetting about all of this after news cycle moves on. I genuinely only see Luigi mentioned on lemmy here given how he’s the liberal larp darling here, and nowhere else I visit or IRL.

Also, if we’re talking history here, then here’s a fun factoid - some Anarchist burnt down Reichstag in opposition to Hitler and his Nazi party, but this fire was later used by Hitler to expand his powers, suppress civil liberties and was pivotal in establishment of Nazi Germany. Of course, this is only something to think about with more brutal regimes, but nothing like that will probably come out of this shooting.

A good example of organized violence is probably that of the Bolsheviks pre-Russian revolutions - they had bank robberies, political assassinations that were used to fund the revolutionary underground and destabilize the regime, and not merely some bouts of individualized violence.

To answer the question, it didn’t make things better, but it didn’t make things much worse either - the status quo is preserved as always. The concentration camps that Trump is boasting about (such as the Alligator camp or whatever it’s called) were previously opened by Biden, ICE was also being maintained to forcefully deport people, Israel is still being funded all the same by the US whether it was Trump or not, the only difference that Trump is being more open about these things and are expanding these operations which isn’t good at all but doesn’t shake the status quo at all.

Harris didn’t address any of these things, in fact she promised to expand on anti-immigration as part of opportunism.

At the same time, that’s the wrong question to ask - merely making things better isn’t enough given how it can always be reversed when wind blows a slightly different way no matter the party. What needs to happen is for the present state of things to change entirely, that’s the only way towards permanent improvement for the majority, which is what I meant in my original comment.

I love it when some shooting or tragedy happens, if it’s workers then all they get is one line at best and their lives get abbreviated to a statistic, but when some capitalist dies every news site writes about how great and authentic they were for a couple days.

Though given how this shooting was an example of lone wolf adventurism, it’s quite dumb to support it - the CEO will be replaced by an identical cog in the machine like always, a decent part of the public will get alienated thanks to anti-violence culture and media narratives (as seen in articles like there) and the shooter just threw away their life.

Though I won’t lie that it doesn’t make the day a bit better to see capitalist get gunned down

If these are the progressive reformists, then it’s probably time to realize that status quo won’t change if them or DSA were magically put in charge. They’re still part of the ruling class and have their interests, the only way to achieve actual change is via workers themselves organizing and making change happen - that’s the actual role of the left, not praying that some kind capitalist candidate brings about change for them (they won’t as seen historically).

But at the same time, workers aren’t likely to “have enough” and organize on their own, instead opting to keep clinging onto this false hope and keep rallying behind “least bad” option, so the situation is abysmal.

The quality of life is already fucked, and that’s what caused those people to rally behind current regimes who promised to fix everything using whatever opportunistic buzzwords like immigrants or national volk, turning to reaction.

Sorry sir, we’re all out of feudal aristocracy to execute and proletariat is too busy rallying behind their favorite ruling class public figure, so the best you’ll get is ruling class on ruling class violence, with workers being the ones who die the most as a result and status quo not changing

I can assure you, most of them still don’t care.

just because they break each other’s balls all the time doesn’t mean they can’t be friends

I literally didn’t say anything you’re arguing against, so I’m kind of confused.

I’m unsure you know anything about economies either given how you only scream about hierarchies - sure, some economic systems support hierarchical structures such as capitalist market economy supporting itself and the class society that comes with it.

However, regardless of whether hierarchy exists or not, there will have to be an economic system in place, so we know what to produce and how much of it, else you either overproduce and create a fuck ton of waste or underproduce and have people starve.

Under both communism and anarchism, things would be produced to satisfy needs, rather than for profit that is seen within market economies. There would be no commodity exchange, things being distributed to whoever needs it and during production, you’d have a set amount of goods you need to produce to satisfy those needs AKA planned economies which is something you think is worse than hitler given your response. Of course, there’s also niche anarchist sects that are mutualist/ancom or voluntarist (which are the laughing stock within Anarchists themselves who actually read), but that’s another can of worms and really besides the point.

Whether you have a centralized unit managing the production and distribution of everything or if you have each commune manage their local production and communicating with other communes to get what they can’t produce, it’s still a planned economy - it can be both decentralized and centralized, organized in different ways.

Maybe don’t make onboarding new people to the left any harder than it has to be?

I’m not here to onboard people, but rather educate on topics I know something about.

Yeah, there’s mixed economies too and other models, forgot to put an etc in there.

Yeah, apart from the voodoo magic such as finance and whatever economic models economists talk about, which when failed they use more voodoo shit to justify why.

Economy in terms of distribution and production, that’s real and will exist from mercantilism to communism and maybe beyond given our globalized economy.

Economy is very much real, and it’s funny to see Anarchists say shit like this, can’t beat the stereotype. Production and its distribution is global, you have to know what and how much to produce either via the use of markets (capitalist) or planned economies (socialist/communist) or via other modes of production and distribution.

You could previously make most things locally so these concepts didn’t exist, but that’s only because people were mostly living the life of a peasant, but now you have tech, advancements in medicine, and not every state has these kinds of resources.

However, the mainstream economics and its models are bullshit, the more complex people make them the more de-attached from reality they are

My god, stop putting words in my mouth that I’m some kind of anti-communist as a whole due to not recognizing China as being Socialist. Sorry for viewing things through historical materialism and it not passing the sniff test I guess.

That comment was referring to the private model which, you’re right, is not the exact same in execution but it’s remarkably similar in principle given both systems’ state dominance in key economic areas with the co-existence of private ownership.

Fascist Italy did hold a significant portion of state ownership in heavy industry/shipbuilding/banking/infrastructure by 1930, so it wasn’t entirely driven by private ownership. China economy isn’t necessarily public either (at least depending on who you ask) given how it’s state owned with state acting as the surplus-extracting capitalist and having the final say rather than collectivized and owned by the workers.

Relax, it’s just a joke given how the image essentially is “communist is when many trains, capitalism is when one bad train”. Making a reference to Mussolini, one of the most famous liberals of all time is always gonna be funny

pretty much how I got into my first relationship lmao