“I never experienced another system and suddenly realize that the current system isn’t perfect. My solution: let’s tear everything down”
– every teenager who just started to understand the world
Yeah also don’t understand that any system involving humans is never going to be perfect because people will find a way to screw it up. That doesn’t mean you give up on improving it of course, more the opposite. Every system will constantly require effort to improve or it will degrade over time.
There is no such thing as a perfect system, but that means there will always be ways to improve the existing system, no matter what the existing system is. The “tear it down and start over” mentality makes people useless in efforts to actually make things better. Perfect is the enemy of good.
Not just that but there is no “THE system” it’s more of a stew made out of dozens of systems working around and with each other. You can’t just throw out the stew and start over because it’s already got all of us and everything in it. I don’t want to go too far with that metaphor but you get the idea.
Yeah you think as I do.
Speaking of stew… the SYSTEM is involved with distribution of food. I don’t have land to farm, so if we’re going to destroy the system, I’m gonna need the new system that replaces it to be functioning and somehow distributing food to me in about a week.
Historically there have been many times revolutions that have resulted in famines. And most revolutions end up with basically the same kind of system as before, just with different people in power, once they’ve run their course.
Somebody should go back in time and explain to George Washington that he can’t just throw out the stew
“The boy was sanctimonious as only youth can be when descrying the faults of their elders.”
I read that once and always loved that quote.
Don’t get me wrong: I think nothing is more healthy for a society than a rebelling youth and all the “trouble” that comes with it. We’ve all been there.
But in times were edgy elders vote for Trump and carry no vision, morale or understanding besides mere platitudes like “tearing down everything”, “draining the swamp”, “building a wall” etc., all those calls for radical destruction without offering an alternative annoy the shit out of me.
deleted by creator
In the past, angsty youth might have complained, but their living standards were still better than previous generations.
What’s different now, is most youth are actually experiencing multiple issues that are new, and caused by policy choices from older generations in government.
And yet, these youth still experience a higher standard of living than any generation before them.
deleted by creator
Citation needed
Nah
I never experienced another system and have come to the gradual realisation that the current system is inherently exploitative, values some people above others, and leaves very little hope for a future as it continues to render the planet’s surface less habitable by the year. My solution: let’s tear the system down before it tears all of us down with it.
FTFY.
My solution: let’s tear the system down before it tears all of us down with it.
“…without having any clue about what comes next, blindly hoping that it will rule out injustice and inherent exploitation although there is no precedence or vision by anyone.”
This is not a fix. It’s calling to kill the complete herd for a few sick animals while others take enormous efforts to find a cure.
Where did I say that? I think it’s really funny how when I corrected an obvious strawman, my correction was strawmanned.
Where did I say that?
I quoted the very part. Are you trolling? You can’t have missed my quote.
when I corrected an obvious strawman
You didn’t fix anything. You just explained the meme keeping it’s original ignorance.
my correction was strawmanned.
Read up what a Strawman is. I didn’t change the original argument - since there was none.
Best you could say is that I used a hyperbole so you understand how people who actually care about politics perceive your helpless destructive whining.
deleted by creator
I never said anything about not knowing what to do next. Syndicalism, for example, offers an appealing alternative to the capitalist system. If my tone comes across as flippant, it’s because there’s a bunch of dumbfuck liberals in this thread who are so steeped in their capitalist realism that they just assume that anybody who isn’t one of them is coming from a place of childish naïvete.
The original meme’s ignorance? What ignorance? You haven’t established how it’s ignorant. It claims that the system is intentionally structured to create the outcomes it does, and that that’s bad. That seems like an accurate assessment to me.
I know what a strawman is, you condescending arsehole. It’s a wilful misinterpretation of somebody’s point that misconstrues it such that it’s easier to dismantle. For instance, if I say that capitalism is inherently bad and should be dismantled, and then someone comes along and pretends like I said that it should be supplanted by something even worse, that’s a wilful misrepresentation of my position, is it not?
Without really wanting to take a side here, you could explain why his metaphor doesn’t fit your real opinion instead of just saying it was a strawman, if you’d like.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
you’ve never experienced another, vastly superior system (like, for example, Germany)
??? Germany is not another system, it’s just capitalism with some touches of socialism
And they got plenty of their own problems too, it’s nice and I love germany but don’t go around pretending it’s heaven on earth.
any suggestions
I must have missed something. I just read a suggestion to destroy everything in a mediocre anime meme.
This sounds like trying to burn down the school when you got a bad grade but when you’re caught and called to the principal’s office, you claim to be the victim of a coldhearted and overgeneralizing grade system.
Also, no one even mentioned the US.
“I’m such a douchebag entitled narcissist so I’m going to plug my ears and go ‘na na na this is fine’ as the system destroys EVERY GODDAMN FUCKING FACET of society and whatever future these ‘teenagers’ may have. BUT IT’S THE TEENAGERS THAT ARE TO BLAME, RIGHT?”
Get off your fucking high horse. Jesus fucking christ dude.
You know, the post that you’re responding to could just be highlighting a parallel rather than being a criticism of the OP.
and go ‘na na na this is fine’
that’s not what I wrote and you suggesting it tells a lot about how you look at the world and people around you.
Keep on memeing, dude. You’ll surely make the world a better place…
Gonna cry?
I’m gonna put some dirt in your eye
Ooohhhhh… edgy!
Destroyed and replaced by?
People fail to realize that socialism isn’t just an ideology but a process. It involves looking back at previous attempts and learning from their mistakes and improving.
Is every ideology also a process where people learn from their past attempts at achieving the ideology?
Correct, and the beneficiaries of capitalism have learned very well.
Sure, but this is the very core of socialism, or the whole concept of scientific marxism
I think it’s important to distinguish socialism and Marxism here, since you’re referring pretty specifically to Marxist theory.
That said, you’re not wrong - Marx postulates that history moves through a continuous fight between classes, and that on average we move towards a more equal society over time as a result of this fight. The fall of the monarchy was the result of class struggle, but so was the fall of the Soviet union; the Bolsheviks had just replaced the ruling elite, walking on two legs in Orwells terms. In this sense, every revolution could be understood under the logic of Marxism, as “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”.
But then we’re speaking about a Marxist understanding of history, not a socialist ideal for society.
Removed by mod
It doesn’t need to be a unidirectional process - things get worse, the proletariat revolts, and they get better. Then things get worse again, and they revolt again. Eventually we reach a stable point where things are good enough for the proletariat to stop revolting - and that would be the communist society.
That said, while I largely subscribe to a Marxist understanding of history, I don’t personally find historical determinism very convincing. Marx’ theory might even have been a self-defeating prophesy, as it taught the ruling classes the mechanisms of history it needed to defeat in order to stay in power. The American right wing might not be fans of Marx, but they for sure ripped a page from his book to understand the importance of union busting.
Removed by mod
I’d argue the internet was a major opportunity towards distributed knowledge and coordinated social action.
But that peaked in the early 2000s and the tide has been receeding ever since.
The latest developments indicate more and more corporate enshitification is coming.
Hey, you cut it out with that education! How are people supposed to falsly believe that socialism is China or Russia or Vuvuzela if you go around explaining how it’s not?
Vuvuzela, lol. Oterwise im not bashing ya nor your point just thought it sounded funny.
I am from Venezuela and it is indeed a socialist government shitshow
You are right that it’s a political shit show, but that government is nowhere near socialist. Spending a bit of money on social programs whilst existing under a typical corrupted “democracy” that decided to go in to massive debt based on a single-resource export… isn’t socialism. It’s mismanagement.
deleted by creator
That’s what capitalism is for😎
Removed by mod
Sounds like fixing to me
Fixing would be if we had logical productive discussions about these. But the US government is fundamentally broken and it is functionally impossible to fix these things in a reasonable amount of time.
Sure, you can get to a utopia by first destroying the old system, just look at how nice the world is in Star Trek.
It’s going to suuuuuck for you though, living through the apocalypse needed to clean out the old system. It might be quicker overall, but I wouldn’t wish that pain on the current generations of people living in the US.
Rome wasn’t built in a day?
The fun part is that you’re on lemmy and I’m surprised no one has called you a conservative yet. This is because all of your ideas involve keeping the current system, and many people around here specifically want full socialism, Marxism, what have you
Huh? Most of those they listed are socialist ideas. And I’m pretty lemmy would agree with most of them.
Socialist by degree - but he mentions these things but not necessarily replacing the current system entirely. This is basically market socialism, which many (mainly Marxist-Leninists and the like) do not consider true socialism. There are a lot of MLs on lemmy. Hence my saying I’m surprised no one has come in yet to tell him he’s not going far enough. We came close, someone called these fixes with the possible implication that he isn’t going far enough, but not outright
Where?
deleted by creator
Hold up I asked what political sistem would replace it. Lol not what changes we want no matter the system you are on
Another failed system
I will ask the questions, comrade
Versus doing nothing? Lemmy is fucking ass lately, shitting all over hyperbole while rolling over and letting capitalism and pessimism run your sorry, sad fucking lives.
Let’s iterate!
Nothing.
Well, nothing where a human is in charge. I’d rather let Bing AI take the wheel. AI isn’t greedy or ambitious for one so no need to go full totalitarian like every single revolution.
AI isn’t greedy
yet. I heard AIs are trained with data from humans who are… whoops!
Well then I guess we should give up and just line up to suck off billionaires like a circus seal then 🤣
Which is a fix, not possible to implement in the chaos after a revolution, and not remotely a replacement.
I’d argue the only reason it was possible to implement in the first place was the post-war context of having to rebuild everything from scratch; the power dynamics in place before the war were left in the rubble. The father of Norwegian social democracy spent the years before the war in and out of jail, the war years in a prison camp, and the post war years as prime minister.
They also had to contrast the USSR, which had a very good quality of life for most citizens. Without socdem, people would have seen the difference between the USSR and Europe as positive due to things like eliminating homelessness, a right to food, and guaranteed healthcare. In the ~30 years since the Soviet Union fell, the EU is slowly crawling back in line with the US.
you might want to speak with someone who lived in the USSR.
Even if you do, the past is a complicated thing. Plenty of people are nostalgic to the USSR, and many of them might very well have been better off under communism.
That said, in terms of standards of living, I think it’s fair to say the Nordic countries were comparing themselves to the US way more than the Soviet Union in the postwar era. The Finns would rather be dead than associated with the Soviets, which many of them demonstrated quite forcefully during the war. As for the other Nordic countries, the Marshall Plan certainly didn’t weaken the admiration of the US.
If anything, what made the Nordic model such a success was the decision to look away from the Soviets - the influence the Soviet Union had over European socialist parties somehow didn’t catch on in the North. Marxist-Leninist parties existed (and still exist), but they were mostly sidelined (to a degree that is, in all fairness, problematic in its own right).
Maybe YOU should speak to someone who lived in the USSR. 75% of people from the former USSR polled want to live in the USSR again.
that poll is only of people currently living in russia… none of the former soviet states and other parts of the world. and of course we all trust the moscow times. when you do speak with them they mention never having tried fresh fruit until the 1990s, standing in line hours for bread… not being able to leave their apartments because strung out muggers took over the lobbies and always having to take the stairs, and not being able to control the temperature of their homes because the govt controlled the boilers, and having to use rugs as insulation against concrete, and all the drivers were terrible because the drivers tests were just a vodka buyoff, and the cars were constantly falling apart and the movies and music and artists in general were never allowed to criticize anything there, and the news didnt bother trying to be reality based etc
Removed by mod
It definitely is just reforming capitalism tho. If you want it in America you don’t have to overthrow any government, just vote them out of the white house
I can’t think of any successful implementation of socialism following from voting alone. Unionising tends to be where the power comes from.
The historical success rate of overthrowing the government and replacing it with something more ideologically pure doesn’t really inspire confidence either. Sometimes it might be a necessary step on the winding path of history, but in terms of making anything better in the short term the track record is a bit iffy at best.
Does public ownership and maintenance of infrastructure count as socialism? If so, that definitely happened.
Which countries do not have public ownership and maintenance of infrastructure?
And no that isn’t socialism.
Then what is socialism? What does a socialist society look like?
I think by public here you mean “state” ownership. Socialists believe in workers owning the means of production.
So like, every co-op, worker-owned company, and software company is socialist since their workers own the means of production?
Also, couldn’t you say that if the workers control the state, (i.e. through a democracy) that they own the “means of production”? Or does socialism have a requirement for more direct ownership?
Worker co-ops are probably the closest thing to a glimpse of a socialist workplace under capitalism, yes, but unfortunately these companies must exist in a capitalist economy. This means they still must compete against profit-driven companies and do things that are not in the interests of their workers in order to stay afloat. If you’re interested in learning more about how this directly related to socialism, I recommend this article: https://monthlyreview.org/2015/02/01/cooperatives-on-the-path-to-socialism/.
To your other question, the answer is no. Under a capitalist framework, corporations (the ruling class in Marxist terms) own the means of production in that they are the primary owners of private propery (the factories, machines, offices, etc that produce goods and services). They take the profit that workers generate and keep it for themselves - it isn’t distributed back to the workers. Just because the US is democratic does not mean the workers own this private property or have a say in how it is used.
Yep, just support and vote left for the next few decades. Take a page from the conservative handbook and mobilize a base that will actually turn out to vote. Conservatives have spent the last 50 years fine-tuning their messaging and tapping into a base that will get involved in politics down to a local level and it’s working.
We have conservative schoolboards across the country deciding what will be taught, activist ideological judges waiting for Federalist Society-trained lawyers to bring the next case deregulating another corpo safeguard and religious fundamentalists regulating peoples genitals.
What left? There is no left in mainstream American politics (but that’s what they want you to think so they can get your vote)
Removed by mod
You really think the American Revolution created or had good ideals? Like, it was made by slave owners who wanted to evade British taxes
lol yeah the lib approach of “vote harder” - look at how that goes. the closest thing they had was Bernie sanders and he was railroaded by the dnc. you’re asking the wolf to watch the wolfs.
Bernie Sanders lost by 3 million votes, so yes “vote harder” would absolutely have changed that situation
Worker ownership over the means of production
(Not a huge fan of centralized planning since that tends to lead to authoritarianism)
The system is 10,000x stronger than you, it cannot be destroyed by direct attack. Cast it aside instead and move on without it. It needs you, it will fall.
aka building dual power
YES!!!
This is the kind of stupidity that let’s those Jan 6th criminals justify their treason.
Same terrible message, aimed at a different audience. But ultimately the same shit.
The fun part about memes like this is that they could be posted by anyone, anywhere on the political spectrum. The only hint at intent is in the title or community
The image kind of hints at the audience.
Punchline title.
Good meme tho.
It’s a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty situation. Both viewpoints are correct. The question is: which is easier? Fixing a broken system or destroying the system and creating a new one?
Raze everything to the ground and start new.
Usually the result of that is something just as bad or even worse.
Which is why we should have never fought the revolution: what we have now is worse
No, thanks, I actually benefit quite a bit from the current system.
The systems not broken it was built this way.
That’s the whole fucking joke, bruv
redditors…
Removed by mod
Oh tankies…
deleted by creator
No, but proposing to destroy a system in which you are presumably living relatively comfortably, in exchange for something else is some extremely privileged bullshit to say. E.g. go tell that to the people in Niger.
deleted by creator
…if you have a way to put a new, better system in place to replace the old one.
Historically, has that ever happened?
If I’m not mistaken, the usual cycle seems to be dismantling an existing system due to grievances unaddressed, seeking a consolidation of power, or other political machinations, attempts at forming & establishing new systems for a period of time, until eventually some system emerges that manages to survive for some time but its persistence is not assured.
At least in the US is proveably isn’t working as intended. Section 1983 of the federal code was illegally modified in 1874 by one person that had no authority to do so. That revision is what “decided” Harlow V Fitzgerald in 1982. That case should have found that the 1871 Congress had outlawed any immunity from prosecution for civil servants of any kind.
This is also similar to how “corporate personhood” became a legal fictive, yet legal precedent.
The system isn’t working as intended at all, and the consequences of those two minor “revisions” has allowed the rich to buy the government.
deleted by creator
Precisely
I dont like the whole egg thing and thats were im leaving that at. Otherwise, spot on. Downvotes to the rigth.
