That’s it? That’s the meme? That’s just a piece of toast with the words “The workers should seize the means of production” written on in it.
yeah you call it a meme and put it on the meme community but I don't see a meme here
Seems to be to serious for this community.
i think the meme is the lazily edited stock photo
Nor will the rich be able to see anything after we bring out the guillotines
How exactly? Other than excessive bloodshed, which - other than edgelord tankies - most people would neither want, nor have the stomach to pursue.
Take the route California is taking and educate the kids about worker's rights. Teach them it's not okay to be exploited at the work place and encourage them to tell their parents about it. Civics classes should also be taught to learn how the government works and what people's rights are under the Constitution. Encourage people to unionize now that they know how the system works.
Once the basics have been taught, elect people who care about government reform for social policies by paying for them with higher corporate and personal wealth taxes. Reform the tax system the wealthy have been using to hide their money. All their money is tied up in stocks and they're living off of multimillion dollar loans? Fuck them, tax a big percentage of the loan. All these things can be done to indirectly seize the fruits of their production at least.
General strike (like the writers guild, except everyone) until the distribution of (a part of the) dividends to the workers is enshrined into law.
Sounds pretty doable to me.
Start by talking about your wages. Most people won't even do that, for fear of reprisals. Even though it's protected federally.
Casually bringing up support for unions, and those on strike.
This is base level, and in many places, will take a long time to see movement.
i'd do some intellectual property reform.
some banking reform - more local / peer group/long term lending requirements, less fickle international finance. (and less fucking mortgage bubbles!)
some small business support / starter initiatives - link that in with how banks work.i'd consider lobbying for some government sposored work to generate open source plans and enable production processes for useful tools - Okay that isn't going to happen , , ,
but it's not all or nothing, but you can do things to help some more workers control and access more of their tooling even if its not outright ownership of the end to end production process.
(By the way i'm basically arguing for a more "free" market in the ecnomic sense (easy access for a large number of small scale producers). . . which is exactly not what large-scale capitalists want.
They want a market "free" from any thing that might regulate their attempts to secure economic power and their abiity to use it to generate supernormal prices/profits.)Progress doesnt happen in 4-5 year political cycles thats a hard one to improve without an electorate capable (any maybe secure enough) to thing about the longer term. Odd that it was extreme econmic and political uncertainty that brought out the likes of FDR and other post-war that people were most willing to think long term when it came to their governemnts - I guess it brought out all sorts of "crazies".
The big one in terms of bloodshed is land reform - and it has been done in a few places - sort of post-colonial type situations - but granted it does ususally have blooodshed. It's a personal judgment what degree is "excessive bloodshed".
What does bank reform mean? Banks already give loans to small bussinesses.
You can start a company that does what you want them to do. You can create all the innovative processes you want and open source them in the existing system.
The women of Iceland went on strike in 1975, they stopped doing literally everything, walked out of the home, left the kids, to demonstrate how much the system would crumble without them, how important they are to everything being able to function, and ask for equal pay. They flipped everything overnight.
The current system is all the workers do all the work, and the profits from that work go almost entirely to some douvhe who won birth lotto. The system is already rigged. Unrigging the system would look like walking off the job, but globally. It's going to happen. Society is squeezed too tightly, there's going to be havoc.
Agreed, lets just keep doing whatever the capitalists demand until their insatiable greed destroys them and us.
It's not like it's gonna take that long. And if not climate change, the AI they don't fully understand but are trying to monetize. And if not AI, CRISPR derived vectors they don't fully understand but are trying to monetize, etc.
Lets just stay the course. It will all work out in the end, at least for the planet, and that's ultimately what matters.
I understand the bitterness, but whoever said the commenter wanted to do what capitalists demand? They just wanted to avoid bloodshed.
There are always options like general strikes, massive voting movements, etc. It's just a matter of figuring out what will work and how to do it.
If you're arguing that capitalists will respond with violence, that's fair, but then the blame is on them, not the workers
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
This seems political
You're allowed to post political memes as long as the mods agree with your view.
Seems economic to me.
Look there, Zach, a message on the toast!
And in the coffee? Revolution.
Not 100% sure why, but i love this. Thank you
What does that even mean? Give us some practical advice
Make your own bread I guess.
It means they want to shit on anyone who suggests any mechanism for social change that might actually work instead of wanking about some glorious revolution that'll never happen. Just another way of maintaining the status quo while pretending to be a revolutionary.
Because it worked to well in Zimbabwe, Sowjetunion 1, Sowjetunion 2, China, and many more
I made a bunch of Dalle pics on this topic last night:
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They need only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it.
Directly seizing I don't think would end well. I think it's one of the short comings of communism.
Encouraging employee owned companies is where it's at. But to be honest I'm not sure how you would incentivize that.
You incentivize the same way unions are growing now. Just show people the benefits and constantly shout it from the highest mountain tops.
So bb, tell me more about those sweet, sweet employee-owned companies for other readers' benefit.
Tell me more about how employee owned companies are better at long term planning. Tell me more about how they're concerned about balancing profit for survival's sake with societal good. Tell me more about how they participate in the benefits of the free market via competition while not becoming all-consuming, profit-driven monsters. Tell me more about how they avoid stakeholder-chosen, sociopathic leadership in favor of leaders wanting the best for the company's mission and its employees. Tell me more about the coffee shop branch that was shut down by its company and reopened as an employee-owned cafe. Tell me more about AAA. Tell me sweet nothings, bb
(And yes, I'm explicitly not talking about communism because it's an emotionally charged concept, and i want to focus on things maybe people don't know so much about)
A better case for worker cooperatives is just pointing out they satisfy the moral principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. The workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs, but in a capitalist firm, the employer holds sole legal responsibility for 100% the corresponding legal claim to the positive and negative result of the enterprise while employees receive 0%. In a worker coop, this mismatch is corrected
Encouraging employee owned companies is where it’s at.
What did you think "seize the means of production" meant?
But to be honest I’m not sure how you would incentivize that.
Oh, that's simple - you get rid of the police.
Seize the means of production comes from a conceptually separate part of anti-capitalist critique then workers' control/workers' self-management. It is common to conflate these two strands of anti-capitalist thoughts. It is technically possible to have common ownership of the means of production without workers' self-management and workers' self-management without common ownership of the means of production. Universal worker coops only requires abolishing wage labor not private ownership
You already have a mean of production in your hand. But the only thing you produce is stupid memes.
Even if they did produce something, Jeff Bezos would steal it as soon as it started making a buck.
Seizing the means of production made sense when that was the leverage the owners used to strip the surplus value from you.
Today, they use gatekept platform and a captive audience with AI manipulation to insert themselves between you and the customers and strip you of your surplus value.
Now pay Bezos' 40% tax until Amazon basic is ready to outcompete out of the platform entirely. Welcome to the second page of Google !
Lolwut? You're delusional, mate.
They are bitter and stringy and taste of used currency - not at all worth eating, but for use as fertilizer.
NO they hug tree
Time to stop blocking the people who post this stupid shit.
Did you mean to say start?
bread 👍
Genuinely speaking, do you really think Amazon will continue to operate if the "workers" took it over from the (evil) executives and owned all the power?
In my opinion, it'll fall apart in no time, because not a single decision will be made to progress work and to solve problems, and every problem will be a vote to people who don't understand the consequences and will prefer to serve their personal needs. Am I wrong?
I think your worries are misplaced. I work for an employee owned cooperative with about 60 employees. I think half of the employees are also owners. There's still a CEO, chosen by the board of directors, who are elected by the employee-owners. Day to day operational decisions are made by whoever is in charge of the relevant department, just like a shareholder-owned corporation. Bigger decisions, like long term strategy or how to distribute profits among employees, are voted on by all of the employee owners instead of shareholders. It's been in business for about 20 years and makes enough money to share profits with all employees regardless of their ownership status. So essentially this business operates like any other, but the profits are shared with the employee-owners and employees instead of going to shareholders or insane CEO salaries (compressed pay structure).
This is exactly the problem with such discussion. We end up with anecdotes. Yeah, I gotta see that company's financial statements, their business model, and their growth, to decide whether this is a good thing. In fact, the idea that it makes "enough money" doesn't sound good good. This kind of "stability" (I'll call it) is either due to a niche field or a dying company that sooner or later will become irrelevant. It's not how the real world works.
And even with this model you proposed, someone eventually can put their foot down. Those employees can sell their shares if they want, and we're all the way back to the (evil) capitalist model you don't like.
It is a straw man that democracy means every problem is put to a vote. Workers can jointly decide to delegate decision-making to executives and managers. The difference in worker coops is that these executives and managers are ultimately democratically accountable to the people doing the work
So you're saying someone will want to act as an executive, but without getting the executive pay?
Why would anyone want to do that stressful job and responsibility, instead of just being a cog in the wheel and typing on a computer or moving boxes? Who decides who does what? And what happens if the managers disagree with half the "workers/owners" when a decision has to be made that benefits a part but hurts another? Who has the authority to put their foot down for the "greater good" even though half the workers don't like their decision?
That's every bureaucracy that ever existed.
Do you think the shareholders are active in problem solving? Workers include basically everyone but the shareholders. The tech guys, the executives, the managers.
I’ve debated people at length on this topic and have concluded that this is a half-baked idea that is impossible to implement without destroying society in any form that has been presented to date.
You can't call an idea with 200 years of history and hundreds of books on the subject "half-baked" without explaining what about it you think is unfeasible. Either you have never actually talked to a socialist, or you've simply never listened.
So, a few questions:
- Why is it "half-baked"?
- What ideas does it propose?
- What is wrong with those ideas?
- How is it "impossible to implement"?
- What methods are proposed?
- What prevents those methods from working?
- What do you mean by "destroy society"?
- What exactly do you define as society?
- How would socialism "destroy" that?
The factory has owners. It would be unfair to not compensate them for their capital investment. You are describing a situation where you disallow private enterprise, but all systems describing this type of agreement to date have resulted in terrible outcomes. It will destroy competition. I am reminded of hearing about my brother’s visit to the Soviet Union when he was younger. He went with his group to an ice cream shop and asked what flavors they have and they said vanilla. As in, this limits options and provides a shitty quality of life. It also leads to issues where people who are able to provide a high value to society are not rewarded at a higher rate than a lazy or dumb person. The incentive is gone. These are issues that no text has reconciled. Even Plato’s dreamed Utopia, he knew that such a thing only would work if you brainwashed people generationally to value the idea of communal ownership. He basically left it at the leaders not being able to own things, but having all that they need while other classes under them could still own things. In essence, his utopian society was totally unrealistic in any meaningful timeline and still formed different classes of people.
It destroys society to take away people’s possessions because we built a system where property ownership is a central component. Having possessions is such a basic human construct that your are living in a pipe dream if you feel that you can remove that. The idea that people would share with one another and not get what they are worth to society is salient in describing why socialism as a whole crumbles. You can have socialized policies, but destroying the whole economic system doesn’t work. See my reply later in this thread for examples of real incremental changes.
- Why is it "half-baked"?
I’ve debated people at length on this topic
...and lost every time, it seems.
Why have you concluded that?
We can have the perpetual pain of subsistence and servitude to the oligarch club until it collapses under the weight of its own manipulation and propaganda after generations of needless suffering of our children and children's children necessitating the painful work of rebuilding, or we can destroy the society built from the ground up as a capitalist exploitation trap and do the painful work of rebuilding.
This society perpetuates the misery and exploitation of the many to serve the whims and desires of the few. You act as if it's worth saving. Go to one of your local tent cities, where we throw our fellow humans, aka defective capital batteries, to die of exposure and police harassment. This system is rotten to its core and will have to be torn down and rebuilt, the only question, just with climate change, is do we let the gaping wound continue fester, hoping it will be the next generation's problem to amputate? Or do we take on the painful necessity of repairing the boomer's greed plague for the future they didnt care about at all?
I'd rather our species be destroyed than continue to commit itself further and further to greed and greed worship. I consider greed far worse than hate. At least people that kill out of hate cared about who they killed, in that they want them dead. A capitalist that poisons children's drinking water to make private shareholders a few extra dollars doesn't even care to know those children's names, they were just speedbumps to glorious profit. To me it is the darkest we can go to hurt others for profit. And our society's core value above all others is greed. That's worth saving?
Your opinion is all feelings and no solutions. Morally, I can’t contend that it would be nice to help people who can’t help themselves and that we should definitely fix the human impact on the environment. I also agree that the Boomers caused a ton of shitty issues with poor policy choices stemming from greed. However, I don’t think that your solution is well thought out. It seems juvenile to simply say that the workers should assume the means of production. That in itself does not equate to a full working solution. Here’s an example of potential incremental changes that would help your cause: 1) Put term limits on all legislators. 2) Allow only one Supreme Court nomination per presidential term, adding a new judge to the pool. A retiring judge is replaced by a vote of the judiciary themselves. 3) Campaign finance reform with capped election funding. High salaries for politicians and steep penalties for kickbacks and bribery. Politicians with financial interests in a vote must recuse. 4) UBI. 5) Strict enforcement of antitrust laws. 6) Caps on higher education costs at public institutions. Federal loans only for public schools with capped interest rates. Your UBI will be tapped instead of a reliance on salary. 7) Reinstate a modernized Fairness Doctrine in order to ensure that people aren’t pigeon-holed into a narrow understanding of current affairs. 8) Create a pathways to citizenship for all with roots in the country then close the borders. Make a transparent immigration system with many more types of work visas. Strictly enforce the new policies. 9) Eliminate the electoral college in favor of direct ranked choice voting.
See, real changes. Not, “Let’s eat people and steal shit!”
Let's eat this guy, too
"Seize the means of production" is a communist's rallying cry because they know that they can't build anything on their own
The workers built the means, they just never owned them.
Let me guess, you think Steve Jobs made the iPhone because he pulled it out of his pocket on a stage and took the credit of engineers standing on the shoulders of publically funded basic research? Steve jobs couldn't engineer his way out of a wet paper bag, and that is well documented.
Remember when bill gates bought dos and used his moms connections to sell it IBM?
Remember when apple was given their entire gui by xerox?
Remember when xerox exects threw what would be the modern "PC" in the trash because they are only good at collecting money and wouldn't know revolutionary technology if their own R&D made it?
I think Steve Jobs made the iphone by coordinating and funding a team of engineers to develop and produce the phone, then marketed it using his own name for brand recognition.
He could not have done it without those engineers and workers, and they would not have made the phone without Jobs.
Cause, you know, it's always worked soo well in the past...
What’s the other option? Continue to be fucked by a system the privatizes everything and destroys our environment? Continue to be fucked harder by the billionaire class?
Which past is this that you speak of? And how is the present a better option than anything at all, really?
Here a nice example what happenes when you give the means of production to "the people":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1gpQV57doM
Because it worked to well in Zimbabwe, Sowjetunion 1, Sowjetunion 2, China, and many more
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=u1gpQV57doM
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Literally sharing nazi propaganda from Hearst press lol
Anyway, capitalism is known for never having famines or economic crises, especially not cyclical ones
Well, actually I am sharing "Wikipedia Propaganda" but if you want to call Wikipedia Nazi-Propaganda...
And yes, the only pro-Western nation ever falling into a serious Food-Crisis was... Haiti.
See, I know we are doing something right. I am not sure what we do right and there is enough things we don't do right but... the right things we do amazingly right. If that is because the Ghosts of Hitler are possessing us all or that we are just not a bunch of utter idiots - you call.
