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Capitalism creates scarcity, suffering, and poverty.
Socialism targets those systemic problems.
Exactly.
Communism is about making everyone equal. Because people don’t really want to be equal it implodes. You can’t eliminate relative poverty.
Democratic socialism is about eliminating absolute poverty.
Socialism done right means:
Nobody has to die of preventable disease.
Nobody has to be homeless.
Nobody has to go hungry.
It does not mean that the person who works hard and earns their expensive vacation doesn’t get to go on that vacation, for example.
(The uber-rich are a different thing. I’m absolutely in favor of taking some of their money away from them to achieve “nobody has to”. They’re only using it to keep score).
Communism is not about ‘making everyone equal.’ Neither socialism nor communism are, at least in terms of their fundamental demands, about poverty or the distribution of wealth. Those are secondary matters that are dealt with as a consequence.
There has been a massive and disturbing rearrangement of definitions about communism and socialism in recent years that’s a result of decades of Red Scare propaganda, and this is just one example of that confusion.
Socialism and communism don’t concern themselves, primarily, with just ‘rich and poor.’ It isn’t about poverty, it isn’t about being super rich. It is about the means of production, who controls them, and for what purpose they are utilized.
The means of production are things like land, mines, factories, tools - the things we use to produce other things. The extraction of raw material from the earth and the refining of that material into goods.
A capitalist society places these means into the hands of the private sector, specifically the Bourgeois class. The Bourgeois are defined as those who own the means of production, to the exclusion of others, and do not work those means themselves. This is different from the Nobility, or Aristocracy, who may own land, but it is not strictly to the exclusion of others, and it is only land they own: not factories or farms or fisheries or mines or any of that. A capitalist system follows the tune of the interests of these private forces, who in turn obey the profit motive - because if they don’t pursue the profit motive, someone else who does will buy them out or otherwise run them out of business. In other words, the entire economic force of a society is geared towards a single class of people who turn said economic force towards the creation of profit.
A socialist society places those means of production into the hands of the Proletariat, the working class. The Proletariat are those who actually work the means of production; the factory laborers, the farmers on industrial-scale farms, the miners, etc. Those who produce the wealth are the ones who determine what happens to it. Marx called for this to be handled by worker’s unions and the state apparatus hand-in-hand, Lenin approached it with a strong centralized state apparatus, syndicalists propose a fusion of state and union where the unions are the state... there’s a lot of ways to make it happen, but the point is NOT just something as simple as universal healthcare or universal housing. The point is that the workers are the ones in command of the wealth they are creating, and that it is used in the public interest, as opposed to private interest or the profit motive.
Communism is something far more profound. Communism is stateless, classless, usually thought of as moneyless. A communist society no longer has enough distinction between people to even classify them into classes like Proletariat. The means of production are therefore no longer even held in specific hands, but rather held in common, that is to say, that everyone and no-one owns them. Like socialism, produced wealth is produced and used in the public interest, but unlike socialism, communism is usually imagined as having no need for unions, state apparatuses, or other such centralizing forces, as available wealth is so plentiful, and the production of wealth is so easy, that there is no longer any need for such broad-reaching coordination or administration. That isn’t to say it’s utopian, in fact, when Marx wrote his Manifesto, it was specifically to differentiate modern communist movements from ‘utopian’ communist movements; the idea isn’t a society free of trouble, but rather one that has moved past the artificial troubles we impose on ourselves, like homelessness when there are houses and hunger when there is food.
The reason why I can’t help but huff and puff over seeing something like this is because it shows such a fundamental misunderstanding of both communism and socialism. “Rich and poor” stop existing as concepts under either. And I can’t help but ask, why does anybody want to be rich? Why is that such a big deal? If you are housed in a good and homely house, provided good nutritious and ethical food, if, in short, you have all the comforts a human being deserves as an heir to the legacy of our ancestors, what more wealth do you want? How much more wealth do you think the Earth can give?
Regarding the example about vacation time:
An oft-cited fact among the Left is that productivity over the decades has skyrocketed. What that means is that our efficiency at creating wealth is immensely greater; thanks to technological improvements and new techniques, we can produce as much in a day as it took our grandparents to make in a week. (That isn’t a strict statistic, just a rhetorical flourish; I don’t recall the exact improvement of productivity and therefore can’t give an exact comparison)
This is the bedrock that Marx built his theory of history on: That constant improvement will make certain modes of production, certain ways of structuring society’s economy (and therefore the levers of its power) obsolete. It happened to feudalism as farming became easier and food became more available and the production of more advanced goods shifted from rare, skilled artisans to the mass-producing proletariat. By Marx’s reckoning, it should’ve happened or will soon happen to capitalism as the ability to provide the everyday needs of people stops being the toil of a year and starts being the toil of a season, a month, a week. Whether Marx was right about that is iffy, but also not strictly relevant to this.
So if we make enough wealth in a day as our grandparents did in a week, why are we still working the full week? Why do we need to ‘work hard’ to earn time off, or to earn the money needed to travel to someplace nice for a vacation? If it took our grandparents, say, a month to make that kind of money, we can make it in, say, a week.
This idea is true writ large. So much of the misunderstanding about socialism and communism comes from this capitalist propaganda that things require hard work no matter what. They don’t. Do you know how easy it is to build a house with modern technology and building techniques? They housed every scientist for the Manhatten project within a week or so, that’s thousands of people, hundreds of families; . We don’t even need more houses, we just need to let people live in them! Do you know how simple it is to set a broken bone, or treat preventable illness, without the clusterfuck of market rates and administrata? The easiness of transporting from one place to another, when the proper infrastructure is in place?
That is the point of socialism and communism. They aren’t a good, moderate version and a bad, extreme version of the same idea; it isn’t a matter of ‘poor and rich’. They are two different stages of evolution, predicated on the growth of technology and the refining of the production of wealth (which I’ll clarify isn’t money, it’s roads and food and houses and tools and everything that makes life easier and better). As it becomes easier to provide for people, society should restructure to allow that easiness to manifest, and part of that is leaving behind the very idea of poverty and richness, and embracing the inheritance of ease, leisure, and joy that our ancestors have built for us.
I’m glad to answer questions if this late-night ramble fails to maintain cohesion. I also recommend some reading like The Communist Manifesto and The Conquest of Bread (both easily found online) to get more of an idea of what I’m talking about from the dudes whom I heard from.
Wait how the hell does she have two different bangs at once
You cannot comprehend the powers of an italian woman from new jersey
![This artist was murdered by Israel on October 13, 2023 Artwork posted: GAZA PEACE, Heba Zagout, 2021 [@/ artistsofcolour on X. 12/28/23.]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/9d15b6bfa5194ced489041f4f9b6353a/8827bb636090892d-75/s1280x1920/6d4b16a22261406cefb04cb2e2e05894cbd2a7cd.jpg)
Im currently working on archiving this channel's videos on archive.org, but I dont know a lick of arabic and I cant quite tell what the videos are meant to be. Can anyone who knows arabic lend a hand? I dont need you to translate each video completely, I just need to know what each video is in order to categorize them properly when I upload them. Thanks!
Liu Xiaodong (Chinese, b. 1963), Three Transsexuals, 2001. Oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm.
