How I tell my friends I'm on Lemmy

https://lemmy.world/post/8169295

How I tell my friends I'm on Lemmy - Lemmy.World

Sorry, are we on the same platform? All I see from the communists are cringe memes and even cringier “debates” that would get them laughed out of a middle school debate club.

I’ll bite.

Communism has always been about the future. When Lenin and Marx wrote their books and birthed their movements, they wrote about manufacturing processes EVENTUALLY eliminating material needs and displacing most people from work. They were kinda right at the time seeing the textile industry replace thousands of weavers with machines and the advent of powered farming equipment. What they didn’t account for was the industrial revolution actually adding jobs to the workforce and for a time, jobs being replaced were reliably being replaced with other skilled positions.

But that hasn’t been true since the 90s, since then there has been a marked trend towards automation replacing jobs, and slowly, a lot of the human populace is becoming useless.

I think most serious full on commies like myself understand that it’s still a future form of governance that’s inevitable if we want livable conditions. If we continue to have the almost pure and unbridled capitalistic system we have in the US when automated driving, AI, and general purpose robots really kick off, there will be some pretty serious issues.

Without getting too into doxxing myself, my family runs a construction company and builds houses. Have you seen the concrete 3d printers by chance? My dad was smart enough to get 2 a few years ago. Not only did it cut material costs by about 50% in construction, we went from running a 20 man crew to a 4 man crew when running those things. We still run traditional crews, but those days are numbered, for sure.

Isn’t that the thing, we needed capitalism now to be able to have communism in the future?
That is legitimately one school of thought, as I’ve heard it, yes. I’m not so sure about it myself, but we’ve definitely got capitalism – no one’s going to argue that – so we may as well use it to the advantage of human flourishing.

So our world is literally dying, we’re living in the greatest mass extinction event ever, and instead of anything being done this process is actually accelerating by every conceivable metric we have.

All because capitalism exists solely to consume endlessly until there’s nothing left.

Making a lightbulb that lasts forever is a terrible business decision because you’ll sell less lightbulbs. In 2023, replaceable batteries have all but disappeared because once the battery dies in a modern day device people see it as time to replace that. Building to last, building renewable, building self-sustaining, that will NEVER be a core tenant of capitalism, because none of those things are profitable.

We’ve got capitalism, yes we do, and people have cancer and aids, it doesn’t mean we should all just learn to work with cancer and aids. People falsely tie a lot of ‘positive’ things to capitalism, but in the end, capitalism is all about making a quick buck no matter what the cost by any other metric.

Agreed. Rereading it, I now see how my statement about “using capitalism” sounds like I’m advocating maintaining it in some capacity. Poor phrasing on my part.

I meant simply that it’s uncontroversial to recognise that we’re living under capitalism presently, but that’s just our starting position. That even if you think socialism or communism “needs capitalism” (debatable, academic), well that’s step #1 out of the way already, because we’ve got it, so now what?