Yeah! Was he Donald Trump -- the person -- president? Or was it "Donald Trump" the legal entity? Is his name capitalized on the documents? Was his presidency valid under maritime law?

I'm with J Lou. Even Marx considered capital a valid input to the production process. He just thought it was being misused.

He believed the workers should control capital democratically. He believed our current treatment of capital (what capital entitles a person to do under our current system) was destroying people's lives and hope and autonomy.

But Marx and Engels actually dedicated several paragraphs of the Communist Manifesto to explaining why capital should not be destroyed during the overthrow of the bourgeoisie -- indicating that they did believe capital to be valuable.

Wait! @Black_Gulaman@lemmy.dbzer0.com isn't wrong. Also, I think we are miscommunicating with pro-capitalists.

Granted, we both know capitalist propaganda labels basically everything positive about human interactions "capitalism" and then scaremongers about how "the left wants to take THIS away from you!" And that is the main source of our problems communicating with pro-capitalists.

But some responsibility (maybe 20% of the responsibility?) lies with the fact that we choose to label "capital" the problem instead of... you know... the fact that our laws and customs favor a zero-sum employment contract between capital owners and workers where there can be only one winner?

Of course the owner of more capital is always on the better side of this contract, (which is why we identified capital as the problem in the first place.) But labeling the problem "capital" makes it look like we don't see any value to capital. Which isn't true. Marx and Engels dedicated several paragraphs of their manifesto to explaining why the means of production should not be damaged, because the existence of capital leads to abundance, and the means of production is valuable. They didn't want the means destroyed: they simply wanted it democratically owned by workers' cooperatives and state socialism.

The problem is employment contracts that are part of how our society treats the individual, private ownership of capital. Not the idea that capital is a valuable contribution to the production process and deserves reward.

🤣 🤣

Look, I promise: I was just annoyed at people talking past each other on the question @o_o@programming.dev asked. And I just wanted to ask the question in a way that might address the problems that o_o's question ran into.

You probably won't see this, but I hope you will amend your definition of capitalism:

Capitalism is defined as a set of rules/regulations that allows people to own ~~the~~ capital ~~that they produce.~~

You know this, right? We all know a trust fund baby is perfectly capable of using the wealth they were born into to buy a factory, mine, apartment complex, or shares in all of the above. (Hence profiting off of value they did NOT produce.) We all know capitalism does not distinguish in any way whatsoever between this form of capital ownership and the self-made variety.

"Capital they produce" and "capital they acquire / inherit / use stolen money to purchase" can both be wielded the exact same way. That's the point of capitalism.

And this is only half of why, "that they produce" doesn't work in this definition. The other half is that it contradicts the definition of "capital."

Capital is literally "any form of property that can be used to collect the value of other people's labor." That is the opposite of "ownership over the things you produce."

The exact opposite.

To "own the capital you produce" one must personally build the means of production. Otherwise, the owner is owning the capital someone else produced.

And you'll find the vast, vast, vast majority of almost every form of capital (patents, copyrights, factories, burger machines, server computers, office buildings, mines, mine equipment, oil rigs, oil tankers, power plants, land, the list goes on) does not belong to the people who turned the screws, drew up the plans, welded the seams, mined the materials, performed the research, wrote the movie script, poured the cement, or otherwise PRODUCED the capital.

It belongs instead to the people who funded it. The people who, under capitalism, own it.

Anti-capitalists are not against people owning what they produce. In fact, in America, there is a distinctly anti-capitalist business model that thrives in numerous cities called a "cooperative" (co-op for short) that is owned by either (a) customers, or (b) workers. And a worker co-op is literally workers "owning what they produce", but is considered market socialism by anyone who cares about using words correctly.

I would love if co-ops replaced corporations. Any anti-capitalist would. Even Maoists would tell you, "a society full of co-ops would be wonderful. The only reason I don't find that sufficient is because capitalists would use violence to crush co-ops just as they have used violence to crush governments that didn't favor US corporations."

All anti-capitalists want people to be able to own what they produce. The system that robs people of their control over what they produce is exactly what anti-capitalists have been struggling to overthrow.

(Aside: many anti-capitalists support a "corporate death sentence" where any company that commits a crime causing more damage than it can afford to repair can have its assets seized and turned into a cooperative and given to its workers. This allows a company deemed "too big to fail, because too many workers would lose their jobs" to be kept running and keep its workers employed while also punishing the people whose decisions caused the damage. The investors would lose their shares, and the CEO elected by the investors would lose their job and their shares. Everyone else would be fine.)

Main point: I think before asking,

why do so many people dislike capitalism?

You need to first ask,

how do people define capitalism, and is it possible for the thing I like (people owning what they produce) to be protected in an anti-capitalist organization or system?

In terms of supporting Biden, I'm sure I'm broadly on your side, but I wanted to note: when I vote for Biden in 2024, it won't be for stability.

Biden's ban on ICE worksite immigration raids takes a miniscule step toward empowering migrant workers.

Biden's decision to keep student loans paused for the entire first 30 months of his term has empowered borrowers by giving them more wiggle room to make decisions like moves and career changes. That translates to higher pay.

The energy efficient home improvement subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act make individual homeowners less dependent on energy companies, and keeps more of their money out of those companies' hands.

Biden's ban on slave labor solar panel imports forces solar panel buyers to purchase from companies that pay their workers. This compounds an already existing labor shortage and gives workers even more leverage.

Like anyone, I was disappointed with the result of the rail workers' strikes. But even there, the IBEW won a few sick day victories in negotiations with rail companies just this June, and their president said,

We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement.

So far from merely defending stability, Biden has been winning ground for workers on dozens of tiny, subtle battlegrounds, and that gives me hope for the future.

A few weeks ago, when I left Reddit, I saw an argument between anarchists and tankies where one of the tankies sneeringly referred to their anarchist interlocutor as an "anarcho-Bidenist"

I know it is not a real economic philosophy. I know it was supposed to be an insult. But after what I've seen of President Biden so far? Count me in.

Yeah, in modern American schools, the students are the product and billionaires are the customers.

That's a lot of the reason why Neosporin or any other antibiotic ointments help you heal faster. There's petrolatum in all those products.

Granted, I'm also straight, white, and male... But there are a hell of a lot of women who support abortion bans AND adore Mr "Grab 'em by the Pussy!"

I know one who doesn't believe God would allow a dangerous, nonviable pregnancy to take hold in (or in the case of ectopic pregnancies, outside of) a woman's uterus. She just doesn't believe something as sacred as a uterus can have that kind of flaw built into it.

And even if you could convince her dangerous pregnancies were real, I think @Ohthereyouare@lem.ee was saying that Republican women would not agree that their ability to survive an ectopic pregnancy is good or worth it if it also helps the "sluts" they despise to have more "convenience abortions."

Surviving might seem pretty good to you and I, but that doesn't make that ability objectively desirable to the people voting against their own interests. And they would be offended if their access to healthcare was deemed "better" in a quality-of-life metric than access to a set of theocratic restrictions.

They would tell you, "well I'm happier. Liberals think they can speak for me just because I'm a woman and my opinion doesn't matter! But if they asked me, I'd tell them I would prefer to live in a place where the sanctity of life was valued! They'd have to censor me and edit me out of their videos because I wouldn't support their narrative!"

Short version? Mix and match the following:

• Pro Xi Jinping
• Pro Joseph Stalin
• Pro Mao
• Pro use of tanks against civilians as in Tiananmen Square in 1989 or Hungary in 1956.
• Pro Vladimir Putin

Basically a tankie is any apologists for government violence against civilians -- usually by claiming something like, "those weren't real civilians. That was a color revolution. The government of [authoritarian regime] responded with no more than the necessary amount of force. Western propaganda is making it look more violent than it was in reality."

From Wikipedia

The term "tankie" was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring uprising, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.

I'm a little lost myself, so take this with a grain of salt, but....

kbin has more complete microblogging integration. I don't understand what it looks like or feels like, but here on Lemmy, I believe you can only post URLs-to and screenshots-of Mastodon posts. Not the posts themselves.

The ActivityPub protocol underneath Mastodon and Lemmy technically supports that kind of interoperability. That's why Mastodon users can comment on Lemmy posts and on Lemmy comments. But Lemmy has not yet adopted that feature. As far as I know.

kbin has.

As far as I can tell by reading the Redditor's guide to how Kbin works (your what/how-to guide) over on reddit, it appears that microblogging posts can be made from within kbin.

Which makes kbin a combination twitter/reddit. And it makes Lemmy a "reddit, but twitter users can find our posts and comment on them using their Twitter account in such a way so that they're visible even to us Lemmy users, and boost our comments and posts to their followers."

Exactly this, yeah. Doing a little debugging.