Skip Navigation

User banner
Cowbee [he/they]
Cowbee [he/they] @ Cowbee @lemmy.ml
Posts
24
Comments
9,622
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • The simplest way to pitch socialism, in my opinion, is that under a system where private property governs the large firms and key industries (ie, capitalism), eventually you reach a point where even the initially progressive elements of markets turn into monopoly, mass disparity, and even imperialism in the case of the global north, who outsources the greatest suffering of the system to the global south.

    The only remedy, is to get to a system where public ownership of the large firms and key industries is principle, ie socialism. It's better for the industry built up under capitalism to be collectivized and planned to suit our needs. Central planning is remarkably effective, even more so over the large industries once markets have "figured out" optimal methods of planning internally.

    How do we get there? Revolution. How can we feasibly have a revolution against the largest millitary in the world? Worker organizing, engaging in party building, and building up unified democratic networks of working class people. Imperialism weakens over time, and as a consequence, so too does the state, allowing the working class party to take decisive action at times of crisis. We have to build that now, because we can't predict when that crisis will arrive, just that it becomes more likely the further weakened the system gets.

    Why can't we reform the system? Because the state will always side with whichever aspect of the economy is principle. This is the class nature of the state, you cannot simply ask Musk to hand over SpaceX and Tesla, nor Bezos Amazon. The working class needs to smash the former state, and replace it with a working class one.

    Those are the bare basics, the reading list I linked in my other reply is for if you want to learn more about these concepts, their underlying evidence, and dive deeper into the reasoning behind them.

  • I'm a Marxist, sure, very openly so. I don't really think anyone cares about who you've sniffed out to be a commie or not, especially considering I have it plastered all over my profile and frequently outright state it. I wouldn't say "pro-Russian," either, the Russian Federation is deeply flawed and has tragically fallen from their far more progressive Soviet heritage.

    I'm very anti-NATO, like the vast majority of Marxists, and I don't fall for the hysteria around the Russian Federation as some ultimate evil, though, so if that's all it takes to be "pro-Russian" for you then that's funny.

  • Gotcha, I'll be sure to only repeat word for word what's in the post. No new angles, no new ways of looking at the post content, just a single 👏 emoji.

  • Social safety nets were stronger and income inequality was lower, largely thanks to the post-war economy retaining a lot of its state planning towards full employment, and largely due to the expansion in safety nets under FDR as a response to the Soviet Union's massive improvement in safety nets. Time was good, if you were a hetero white man. The US was also emerging as the clear imperial hegemon.

    Reactionary rhetoric tries to turn the clock backwards, to when the contradictions of society weren't as sharpened. It's usually a petite bourgeois conception, but can also be a part of other classes. It's the opposite of progressive movement, trying to move the clock forward into the next mode of production, socialism in the case of the US.

  • During the space race, sure, from what I can find.

  • That what? That the US sent animals into space?

    American and Russian scientists utilized animals—mainly monkeys, chimps and dogs—in order to test each country’s ability to launch a living organism into space and bring it back alive and unharmed.

    Per NASA.

  • Am I making up that the US sent animals into space? What claim do you think I'm making up? I already linked my source 2 comments ago.

  • Both sides sent animals into space, and many didn't return. Animal testing in particular isn't something unknown to science, nor was it done out of intentional cruelty nor for the purpose of profits, like the cosmetics industry. I feel like you're narrowing in on something that ultimately isn't an equivalent comparison, especially when compared to the scale of the food industry and its systematized mass brutality every second of every day.

  • The world's bravest and first true cosmonaut.

  • Not actually true, both sides used animal testing.

  • Spaceflight rockets are ICBMs, if we are being pedantic. The space program was the civilian-facing part of the broader rocketry programs.

    Either way, if we exclude them, it is still true, but you can also measure by ratio. It just goes to show that you can manipulate real data to be presented in any way you want, and add or subtract context as needed for your angle.

  • Nedelin was a part of the millitary rocketry program, not the space program. If you want to include Nedelin, then the ICBM disasters in the US should also be included. The space programs and ICBM programs were very closely related on both sides, but if we strictly keep it to the space program the soviets were safer.

  • You can certainly blur the space race with missile development as they were intimately tied on both sides, and if you want to include it then the deaths from the US ICBM disasters need to be included as well, but I do think it's a bit absurd to uncritically report that 100+ people died in Nedelin when official numbers revealed it to be 54. Plus, wherever you sourced this from is clearly generally biased against the soviets beyond the scope of this report.

  • The US doesn't have the industrial capacity, there's a difference between currency and the actual physical industrialization needed to maintain a proxy war.

  • Yep, the soviet space program took fewer lives overall.

  • The soviet space program took fewer lives than the US's program, yet the US constantly made it seem like it was the soviets that didn't care about human lives.

  • Socialism has a better track record than capitalism, but either way, my point is that necessary systemic changes need socialism for them to happen. Socialism isn't a promise, it's a mode of production. Further, countries like the PRC are rapdily electrifying, at the top of solar panel production and infrastructure initiatives, and combatting desertification, that's the power of a publicly driven economy.

  • Why does political content need to be "new" or "fresh?" A lot of the latest events in the world are new developments on very old struggles that have been discussed for a very long time, something fundamentally changing that calculus is rare.