378
marx didn't give the capitalists hell. he just told the truth and they thought it was hell
(slrpnk.net)
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
378 points (96.3% liked)
solarpunk memes
6040 readers
135 users here now
For when you need a laugh!
The definition of a "meme" here is intentionally pretty loose. Images, screenshots, and the like are welcome!
But, keep it lighthearted and/or within our server's ideals.
Posts and comments that are hateful, trolling, inciting, and/or overly negative will be removed at the moderators' discretion.
Please follow all slrpnk.net rules and community guidelines
Have fun!
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Even if we acknowledge capitalism is responsible for the rising tide of the last 100+ years (and even that is highly situational), it's obviously not working anymore and without a way to externalize the costs of capitalism to people and places that "dont matter" those tools meant to externalize damage are now pointed inwards and the rewards fail to trickle down. now we're all losing more than we put in, with that surplus value going only to the owners.
Citation needed. It works pretty well where I live.
pretty funny how nearly all pro-capitalist notion comes down to "I'm privileged enough to be happy with the status quo"
Considering communism was voted out in fair elections here and noone wants it back, your argument is invalid.
Fascism has been voted in unfair elections, and now refuses to be voted out, turns out "fair" and "elections" are a political abstraction that hides the fundamental class antagonisms, god somebody should look into this
Wait wait wait. When Trump lost against Biden he claimed unfair elections. Once Trump won against Kamala Harris you claim unfair elections? That's actually hilarious.
Lol. This is what I meant by "political abstractions." I'm talking about actual things in the world, you're talking about these ideas like a middle schooler, and so the only position you can even imagine, is the opposite of your baby ideas. But the opposite of abstract and idealist, is practical and specific. You have ideas, and I have experience.
I'm not talking about Trump and Harris. Also, did you just accuse the USA president of being a fascist? I'm pretty sure people are being put in camps for that, better be careful with that incendiary rhetoric, lol.
Both parties are corrupt and complicit.
First past the post is totally rigged for the two party system, both parties captured by elites and don't represent regular people
USA electoral system makes sure many voters cant vote. one of the two major political parties (Republicans) actively campaign on making it harder for people to vote.
Our culture, which is controlled by our media, is objectively depoliticizing unless you want to identify with one of two political perspectives that oppose each other but don't represent people or even reality most of the time.
States, and all elections are handled on the state level, are deeply gerrymandered. In my state, on 2 separate occasions, citizens voted for redistricting in our state and ratified it into our constitution. Both times, the constitutional mandate was ignored. The third time citizens tried to pass another constitutional amendment to un fuck our districts, the Republican controlled board of elections changed the wording of the actual amendment as it would appear on peoples voting forms and made it appear like voting for redistricting was actually making elections less democratic.
In 2016 and 2020, a popular left candidate was dequalified from running by the Democrats, through maneuvering and electoral manipulation. The problem isn't just with Republicans.
Other structures of American politics are undemocratic and corrupt, such as the Senate, lobbyism, the two party system, the incredible influence foreign governments have on our policy, not to mention corporations, justice system illegally corrupted by business at the highest levels, plans like project 2025 being carried out despite them being extremely unpopular and obviously made to hurt people. On and on.
You're not serious.
Sorry about your capitalism brainwashing.
Sorry for moving from utter poverty to powerhouse economy rivaling UK. That wasn't the plan.
So you're Polish? Before you ask how I know: Poland is the only big economy which has improved somewhat in the 35 years following the dissolution of socialism. You're ignoring the hundreds of millions of Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Moldovan, Yugoslav, Hungarian... lives who went to shit after socialism was dissolved.
Somewhat? It went all the way from shit hole to super wealthy in 30 years.
Soviet union did both a shit job at transitioning to capitalism, and has one of the most propaganda shaped societies in the world. Ukraine also struggles with fucking war with Russia right now.
There's a research around communism nostalgia, and in countries that did transformation correctly, it isn't really a thing.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/10/15/key-takeaways-public-opinion-europe-30-years-after-fall-of-communism/
So, yes, you're just ignoring the hundreds of millions who suffered and suffer immensely, thanks for answering my question.
Said the Pole lmfao
The population collapse in Ukraine began way before the current war, it has only intensified. And, believe it or not, the current war is happening in capitalism, not in socialism! Formerly, Russia and Ukraine were sister nations, that have only been separated through geopolitical mires by capitalism, leading to the horrible outcome we see now.
Technically the "current war" started in like 2016 with Crimea being conquered by hyper aggressive military expansionist dictatorship: Russia.
I just spat my coffee at screen. Have you even read about holdomor?
If you had sister nation with war crime list like this you wouldn't need enemies. You'd have all the war crimes and abuse in great abundance for life.
Part of the population collapse is migration. Millions of Ukrainians traveled to work in Poland even before the war. I imagine it was even bigger number if you count all other migration destinations.
More than you, as a matter of fact, you can't even spell it apparently. The academic consensus is that it was a famine (commonplace at the time in the region) which happened unintentionally as a consequence of the policy of rapid collectivization and reindustrialization.
This policy unambiguously is what enabled the Soviets to defeat Nazism (no tanks and rifles = extermination) and save all Slavic peoples (including you) from being genocided by Germany, eternal glory to the brave Ukrainian and Russian workers, peasants and soldiers who made that possible with their blood and tears.
My sister nations (I'm a Spaniard) are Portugal and France, both of which have much, much longer war crime lists than that one, yet we coexist peacefully and even friendly next to each other. My own country has a much longer war crime list.
Part of it, yes, the others just died. The migrations happened precisely because their country was ruined by capitalism, that's exactly my point.
So you claim, that because they starved entire country worth of people "accidentaly" so it's okay? What kind of sick fuck morality is this?
Jeus no. Nazis occupied both territories of Poland and Ukraine during ww2, and they successfully genocided jews who lived there. If they wanted to genocide slavs too, they would.
You sound as if famine that happened before war was somehow necessary part of industrializaton.
I claim that unintentional famine (famine being commonplace in that region at the time) is horrible, but less horrible than being entirely genocided by Nazis if that's the alternative (it was).
You don't know about Generalplan Ost?
"The Generalplan Ost (lit. 'Master Plan for the East'), abbreviated GPO, was Nazi Germany's plan for the settlement and "Germanization" of captured territory in Eastern Europe, involving the genocide, extermination and large-scale ethnic cleansing of Slavs, Eastern European Jews, and other indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe categorized as "Untermenschen" in Nazi ideology"
They did want to murder Slavs, and they did murder them. As a matter of fact, 27 million Soviets died during WW2, most of them being Slavs, so about twice as many Slavs were killed in the USSR alone (not counting Poland) than total Jews by Nazis. And you say the Soviets were propagandized, you didn't even know that the Nazis explicitly wanted to genocide your own peoples and partially did. Fortunately, the brave workers, peasants and soldiers of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan and all other Soviet republics managed to defeat Nazism, although at an immense cost.
It was not a necessary part in the strict sense. The point is that Soviet politicians were aware that rapid collectivization would be chaotic and have unforeseen consequences, but it was the only way to enable the rapid industrialization that was explicitly carried out with the intent of defending the USSR from the inevitable capitalist/fascist invasion. You can read this in the Wikipedia article on the Soviet Industrialization:
"It is significant that even at the 10th congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1921, Lev Kamenev, the author of the report 'About the Soviet Republic Surrounded', stated that preparations for the Second World War, which had begun in Europe"
The Soviets knew what was coming, and knew that their only option for survival was rapid industrialization. Funnily enough, Stalin made the exact prediction of the year of invasion of the USSR in 1931:
"We are 50–100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us." He said this in 1931, operation Barbarossa took place in 1941.
Without the influx of workers to cities from the countryside, which was only possible with rapid collectivization, the rapid industrialization simply wouldn't have been possible. It was literally a wartime decision, and while it had horrible outcomes (such as the famine you refer to), it proved to be the correct choice.
Is the communism that you voted out the Marxist-Leninist, "people's revolution turned authoritarian state" kind? I'd get rid of that shit, too.
There are lots of other stands of anti-capitalism (eg, democratic socialism, anarchism) that are probably worth exploring. Even if we stick with capitalism but soften it with socialist policies, that's still way better than the minimally regulated capitalism we have in the US.
Haven't seen any proposal that would reconcile incentives of large number of egoistic actors. This sort of thing simply doesn't exist.
The economy for the common good is one.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/386481877_Economy_for_the_common_good
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_for_the_Common_Good
Discussion about 16 minutes in. https://sceneonradio.org/s5-e11-change-everything/
Also cooperatives exists, and in many ways are more successful than their traditional capitalistic counterparts, providing a system to help "reconcile egoistic actors" by rewarding cooperation and solidarity rather than competition and utility maximization.
I listened to the discussion so far. The proposed system is still capitalism, but with some tweaks. IMO rather clumsy tweaks since there's no clear definition what common good even is.
And instead of some point system, you can just collect taxes to finance welfare for citizens, which is exactly how EU economies work. In most cases taxation is progressive so it's not like rich CEOs aren't paying exponentially more than avg citizen.
In the US, progressive taxation gets called communism, lol.
But yeah. That's kinda what I meant with my original comment. The more progressive EU economies are, to my understanding anyway, outcomes from the more reformist socialist traditions - using the existing democratic government to round off the excesses of unregulated capitalism. And I would take that any day of the week.
IMO income tax in general does more harm than good. My opinion is that government budget should be financed by taxing consumption.
If you're trying to build your wealth and take advantage of compounding interest, income tax (especially capital gains tax) absolutely crushes it.
@BlackLaZoR @vonbaronhans you might be egoistic, but don't assume people broadly to be so
Point is every society has significant number of egoistic actors. You can't design a socio-economical system with assumption that everyone will just work for "common good"
@BlackLaZoR the difference is that in a hierarchical system (like capitalism, where capital concetrates), those egoistic people tend to be at the top of society.
Capitalism is a horrible bad solution to dealing with egoistic people
First, Egoist =/= Evil and Altruist =/= Good
Worst criminals of history often justified their crimes with "higher need" or some other noble goal.
Second, it's the best solution that has been proven to work. And it's the best solution because it aligns incentives.