Tbf a lot of people just want a petty bourgeois vacation.

I’ve been on a socia media break, but I’ll post some memes.

  • xkyfal18@lemmygrad.ml
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    8 months ago

    This statement has always been crazy to me. Even when I wasn’t a Communist I didn’t really understand this, since for the overwhelming majority of human history, we didn’t even have Capitalism… Capitalism is around 400 years old, meanwhile recorded history is around 6000 years old.

    And I’m not even applying materialism here, this was when I was a lib lmao

    • novibe@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      If you question people who say this they will say “sure we didn’t call it capitalism but people were trading and selling to become richer since forever!”. And you try to explain that markets =/= capitalism and you see their eyes glass over and their brains shutdown.

      We say libs don’t know anything about communism, but they will die on a hill to defend capitalism and they know nothing about it either.

      • QueerCommie@lemmygrad.mlOP
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        8 months ago

        The burden of marxists is that we understand our opponents positions and our own, but they don’t understand either.

      • Houdini@lemmygrad.ml
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        8 months ago

        I maintain that Marxists are better at playing the game of capitalism than “capitalists”.

        Was reading some of Engels letters about the stock market earlier lol

        • SSJ2Marx@hexbear.net
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          8 months ago

          I mean just look at China. They teach Marxism to everyone and embed Communist Party cadres in every company and they’re eating the first world’s lunch as a result.

          • bobs_guns@lemmygrad.ml
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            8 months ago

            Marxists won’t waste as much time and money on fads that won’t create value like NFTs and cryptocurrency either

    • QueerCommie@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      8 months ago

      Libs don’t know what capitalism is, and they haven’t thought it through. “I think there were markets in Rome and markets = capitalism.” “I feel like it’s in my nature to be selfish, so it must have always been like this.”

      • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        A big part of the “selfishness is human nature” thought process comes from Puritan brainworms. The Protestant work ethic and the belief that one’s desire to have the basic necessities of life is inherently selfish form the basis of American capitalism, thus the idea that one must be worked beyond their limits in order to simply continue to live becomes baked into the fabric of society.

        Basically everything wrong with America is John Calvin’s fault at its source.

        • QueerCommie@lemmygrad.mlOP
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          8 months ago

          Yeah. People are also just really confused right now, and don’t seem to think through things politically.

          • xkyfal18@lemmygrad.ml
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            8 months ago

            I think it also comes down to a lot of them simply not wanting to talk about politics or engaging with political content. Some just feel drained and mistreated by the system and just want to try to live a happy life. The depression epidemic is a real thing

            • SSJ2Marx@hexbear.net
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              8 months ago

              I mean you also can’t escape the abysmal state of political education in this country. My high school government class was mandatory and basically wall to wall propaganda - and then when I took polysci in college I was literally taught “socialism is when the government does stuff”. Most people who don’t have the urge to keep digging and learning about politics are going to end their education about it somewhere between those two classes, having learned nothing.

              • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
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                8 months ago

                Oh yeah, political education in the US is oversimplified warmongering dross. And the vilification of anything anti-capitalist that is formed as an organized system is a real problem in the way people get taught politically. Far too many people who will say stuff like “communism sounds nice on paper, but in practice, it was just people pretending to care and then becoming dictators.” Or they’ll say that it’s “idealistic” when the reality is that it’s an obnoxiously scientific exchange between theory and practice and is in opposition to notions of purely “striving to be morally better” as a means of achieving meaningful change.

                It’s far too common in the US for people to be terrified of nations they’ve never set foot in and think they know better than entire peoples and cultures they’ve never met because they read a few news headlines that said what the situation is supposedly like.

              • xkyfal18@lemmygrad.ml
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                8 months ago

                Oh, definitely. While I don’t live in the US (I’m Portuguese) and we never really touched politics in depth in High School (we talked about it briefly in Philosophy class), I can only imagine what’s like in other countries.

                Also, when you start attending high school in Portugal, you can choose between a science course or humanities [is that the right word?] course. I chose the first option, so that might be why I never really had any politics class in high school.

                Lastly, for clarification, I was talking mostly about the average person. Most people (at least from what I’ve seen) that aren’t interested in taking polysci in college tend to avoid engaging with political content or talk about it as a whole.