Flippant Anarchism. A lighter take on social criticism with the aim of agitation.
Post humorous takes on capitalism and the states which prop it up. Memes, shitposting, screenshots of humorous good takes, discussions making fun of some reactionary online, it all works.
This community is anarchist-flavored. Reactionary takes won't be tolerated.
Don't take yourselves too seriously. Serious posts go to !anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Rules
If you post images with text, endeavour to provide the alt-text
If the image is a crosspost from an OP, Provide the source.
Absolutely no right-wing jokes. This includes "Anarcho"-Capitalist concepts.
Absolutely no redfash jokes. This includes anything that props up the capitalist ruling classes pretending to be communists.
No bigotry whatsoever. See instance rules.
This is an anarchist comm. You don't have to be an anarchist to post, but you should at least understand what anarchism actually is. We're not here to educate you.
Join the matrix room for some real-time discussion.
ID: WookieeMark @EvilGenXer posted:
"OK so look, Capitalism is right wing.
Period.
If you are pro-capitalism, you are Right Wing.
There is no pro-capitalist Left. That's a polite fiction in the US that no one can afford any longer as the ecosystem is actually collapsing around us."
Compare any communist country to a capitalist country at the same level of technological development and the communist country comes out ahead in wealth and happiness. Communism only seems like a failure because US and EU propaganda does a trick where they compare isolated (often literally blockaded) Communist countries to the wealthiest empires on the planet and say "look how much more money we have! Our system must be better!"
The trouble with Keynesian economics is that it created the conditions for Reagan's neoliberal revolution to occur, and any country that tries to recreate that economic system will fall into the exact same trap that America did, because the fundamental underlying problem in Capitalism is the ownership of Capital. Capitalists accumulate wealth, and they use that accumulated wealth to capture the system that is supposed to keep them in check, and they sabotage that system for their own profits, and they will do that every single time.
Could you name an example of this happening?
North Korea was ahead of South Korea in economic development up to the 1960s, IIRC. Happiness is of course mandated by the party.
This has little to do with communism though. Centrally planned economies can transform an economy rapidly from agrarian to industrial, improve education and healthcare immensely. The Human cost for this is can be extremely high though.
I found this article on the subject which was pretty interesting. It seems they did develop faster right after the war:
Since then, obviously, they have fallen far behind
The Soviet Union also did pretty well overall. The Russian Empire went from a backwards feudal agrarian society and economy to a world superpower in a handful of decades. It wasn’t clear if the Soviet system might have superior outcomes until the 1970s. The Soviet Union ran into huge difficulties after the introduction of semiconductors and computers.
Happiness wise of course it’s mixed. The lack of political, artistic, and economic freedom made people‘s lives smaller and more grey. There was a huge desire among the population in the Soviet block to leave to a western country. The millions who died from hunger, forced labor, horrible conditions from the 1920s to 1940s certainly weren’t happy.
That sounds more like "pretty well initially" than "pretty well overall"; I guess it's an effect of the authoritarianism that they get stuck after a while, as people can stay in power even if they're not doing well
If there’s a ton of low hanging fruit to be picked and large developments possible just by sheer brute force, you can achieve quite remarkable effects. These brute force economic developments were effective, but not efficient.
A huge issue for the Soviets was the immense coverups of failures and underachievements. The plan demands a factory make 10,000 widgets per year. Failure is not an option, because you might get thrown into gulag as a saboteur. So they sacrifice quality or outright lie to meet the quota. If you get that all over the system, you end up with bad data and thus bad decisions.