• AlDente@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    For the anti-capitalists, I have a genuine question (sorry, I couldn’t find an “ask a commie” community):

    In the capitalist system there is a movement called Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) where people commit to living frugally in an effort to maximize savings and investments. The goal is to achieve a balance that allows you live off a safe withdrawal rate (around 3.5-4%) and then leave the workforce at an earlier than normal age. Some people commit to a life of minimalism and lean-FIRE with under $20k in investment income per year. I believe there is significant overlap with the van-life crowd and other nomadic lifestyles.

    Is this lifestyle compatible with, or is there a similar lifestyle within a communist system? To expand, can those with a different set of priorities trade away their later working days in exchange for less material things?

  • pizzahoe@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    These capitalist and billionaire cocksuckers sure love socialism when they socialise their losses and fucking take our tax payer money to bail themselves out. if you’re working class and don’t support socialism, you should look into it more. Propaganda from these blood sucking billionaire ghouls have made most of us blind to the better life socialism can offer us.

    • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      That isnt socialism, thats the capitalist state doing its job of protecting capital. Socialism is when the proletariat own the means of production.

      • pizzahoe@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yes i agree. Just pointing out the fact there’s no free market. When they lose, they still win by taking our hard earned money and using it to further their interests. I’d be happier if it were used for our welfare instead.

        • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Id argue that the free market incentivizes the capture of politicians but I think we are on the same side here.

    • Gabu@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Capitalism can never work, because it’s self defeating. The point of capitalism is to maximize immediate profits, nothing else - as a result, it will gladly destroy its own means of growth if as a result instant profits increase.

    • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Does anyone here own capital? As in being haut bourgeoisie? Probably not.

      If you support capitalism and you’re not a capitalist you’re just a bootlicker.

      • huge_clock@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You wouldn’t be any better off on a socialist system. The people at the top of the party would control everything and the working class would be even poorer than they are now. You’re just licking the left boot instead of the right one.

        • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          This is empirically untrue, but also just nonsense. Politicians do not have the same class relationship as capitalists with the proletariat.

          • MashBoilPitch@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Dang, for a moment I considered that you might have independent thoughts. This LemmtGradChatGPT BS ruined it.

          • huge_clock@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Oh I’m sorry i didn’t realize there was empirical evidence for socialism. Please send me a link to some of these successful socialist societies.

            • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos for starters China went from a century of humiliation to a superpower in less then a century thanks to socialism. The USSR was better than the feudalism before it or the dictatorships of the bourgeoisie that came after it by a wide margin. For a place much poorer than the US, they had similar nutrition, better education, more rights for women both legalistically and practically.

              Oh, throw in east Germany too. Do you know what the Stasi did to the lgbt movement that they saw as subversive? Destroy it by ending discrimination against gay and trans people, including a massive education campaign to eradicate homophobia and transphobia and state funded gay bars. Compare that to how the US was treating gay people at the time.

        • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Okay, that at most makes you petite bourgeoisie not haut bourgeoisie. But I’m guessing you can’t live off of your passive income so you’re still proletariat. You have more in common with the proletariat than not, and you have more to gain by overthrowing capitalism then preserving it.

            • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Yes, the goal posts of definitions created by a guy who has been dead for more than 100 years. Clarifying a misunderstanding on a basic concept of Marxist analysis of capitalism written more than 100 years ago is moving the goalposts.

              Also, can you live entirely off your passive income? If not, youre not even petite bourgeoisie.

      • WrittenWeird@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        How do you define “capital”? I own a paid-off vehicle. That’s my biggest single asset. Am I therefore evil? It’s parked in the garage of this home I rent. Used car market right now means it’s worth a bit more than it would be otherwise.

        Oh, and I’m also a shareholder in my employer. Gasp!

        All this talk is highly dangerous us-vs-them, black-and-white divisive crap that isn’t going to go anywhere productive. Stop it. Grow up.

        • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          How do you define “capital”? I own a paid-off vehicle. That’s my biggest single asset. Am I therefore evil?

          Oh my god, we aren’t coming for your toothbrush. The idea that owning anything makes you a capitalist is absurd. We are talking about businesses that alienate workers like yourself from their labor.

          Oh, and I’m also a shareholder in my employer. Gasp.

          And if you had enough shares to live off of you wouldn’t be renting. You’re a member of the proletariat, not even the petite bourgeoisie who still have more to gain by overthrowing capitalism.

          All this talk is highly dangerous us-vs-them, black-and-white divisive crap that isn’t going to go anywhere productive. Stop it. Grow up.

          Maybe instead of being afraid of shadows you should read what socialists actually believe. We believe that the means of production (aka your workplace) should be owned and managed by the workers (you) and not some board who see the business as a paycheck every month and probably don’t understand how it actually functions) overseen by a democratic body to coordinate between businesses. We claim to live in a democracy but nowhere is this more evidently wrong then workplaces, which are almost always run as dictatorships…what little political agency employees exercise has to be won in conflict to the goals of the system.

          We oppose land commodification. People, especially children and the elderly, should not be at risk of being evicted from where they live, and if they have income they should just contribute to the collective maintaining and construction of property which is generally 5 percent of income, not 1/3 of a paycheck like it is under capitalism with all the middlemen leeches.

        • EurekaStockade@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Owning a car is not bourgeois. Owning a business is.

          If you could stop going to work tomorrow and still pay your bills because your assets are generating sufficient income to cover your expenses and still accumulate, you’re in the capital class. If you trade your time and labour for income and quitting work would mean your resources will get depleted, you’re working class.

          And if you think that you’re not working class because you sit in an office and work on a computer, then that’s exactly what the ownership class wants you to believe so you’ll be happy with your lot and not rock the boat.

      • Flumsy@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Thats still very much generalizing. What this meme essentially says is that if you’re a capitalist, you’re not part of Lemmy.

        On a seperate note, you cant possibly know how many people on Lemmy actually support capitalism or not. It has a left tendency, yes, but I bet the majority of Lemmx users do support caputalidm in some shape or form.

        • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Does anyone here own capital? As in being haut bourgeoisie? Probably not.

          If you support capitalism and you’re not a capitalist you’re just a bootlicker.

          • MashBoilPitch@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            And you live on your own self-sustaining compound, posting from your open hardware, fabricated in free factories, Libre software OS and applications, with compost-generated power? Didn’t think so. Welcome to the gray zone bootlicker.

  • MenKlash@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Tell me how you don’t know the difference between corporatocracy and capitalism without telling me how you don’t know the difference between corporatocracy and capitalism.

    • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      They’re the same picture.

      To expand…one of the biggest goals of a capitalist is increasing profit. What better way to do this than to take over and manipulate the government of whatever state you’re operating in to cut you special breaks? It’s the pinnacle of capitalist achievement.

      You create laws to regulate it…the capitalists will manipulate them and control your government anyways.

      You loosen regulations to “promote competition” or whatever excuse they use, and then there’s nothing stopping them from fucking you even harder. Capitalism and the state are always intertwined, one feeds off the other. Even the Soviet Union was sometimes said to be “state capitalist”, where basically the entire country was under control of one “corporation”.

      • affiliate@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        this a good explanation.

        capitalist apologists love to invent new terms like “corporatism” and “crony capitalism” that basically just mean “every problem with capitalism”. they then say “capitalism isn’t the problem, the problem is crony capitalism” which makes about as much sense as saying “capitalism isn’t the problem, the problem is all of capitalism’s problems”.

    • DessertStorms@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Tell us you love the taste of boot on your tongue without telling us you love the taste of boot on your tongue…

    • Custoslibera@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      I’d recommend posting a tangentially political meme at some point on Lemmy.

      The amount of people who will come out of the woodwork to tell you ‘don’t post this’ and ‘don’t make things political’ will really be eye opening.

      People don’t want to address systemic issues and think not talking about them is a viable solution.

        • Facebones@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          Don’t even have to go THAT far, I get called a commie for saying a 40 hour work week should provide basic shelter these days. 🤷

          If we want to live in boring reality, it doesn’t happen a LOT but way more than it should.

          • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            I mean that was and is a basic communist agitating point, you might be closer to a communist than you think.

            • Facebones@reddthat.com
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              1 year ago

              I don’t know if this is supposed to be snarky or not but I’ve accepted a while ago that I’m definitely some version of “leftist.”

              I don’t see myself that way necessarily but capitalists are drawing their line in the sand so far to the right that it is what it is lmao

  • Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    Everyone time something controversial is posted, damn I missed out on all the discussion because Blahaj.zone defederated all these capitalist losers so I can just think about being trans and cracking jokes.

  • Facebones@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    Never mind that not a single one of them pipes up when some lazy fascist bullshit gets posted here.

    Only when it’s left of like 1990s Biden then they all lose their fuckin minds.

  • LemmyIsFantastic@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The delusional thought process is fantastic.

    You have, maybe 2k users here, defederate a new insurance a day, and users are constantly finding lack of content; but yeah it’s the normal user who is quite in the corner 🤣

  • Hadriscus@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Mince you into fertilizer 😂 Reminds me of Soylent Green and Oddworld