Yeah for sure, but I think it’s a bit misleading to make it sound like only owners of capital (be it corrupt haute bourgeoisie or human trafficking capitalists) get executed. I don’t know the numbers but I’d assume since murder and drug trafficking are also punishable by death, that means most of the people executed are workers, not capitalists.

but in the case of China it’s largely for corrupt CEOs and sexual assaulters.

Isn’t drug trafficking and murder also punishable by death?

Just my own perspective, but I don’t think it’s really accurate to say that latinos of mixed descent always stop being settlers. Some are indigenous as you say, but I think most of us still count as settlers. We definitely aren’t indigenous (except in the context of the colonial relationship between our countries and the imperial core) in the strict political sense, and we live in (predominantly) unceded territory. I don’t know if there’s a single country in LatAm that isn’t a settler colony as a result of these facts, I’d probably hazard to say no but there’s a few I’m pretty ignorant about.

It’s interesting, in Puerto Rico I’ve often heard the term “North Americans” used to refer to inhabitants of the 50 states, even though North America is a region that includes other countries and even PR itself.

The whole thing where you gotta copy a sentence from Principles of Communism to join makes it pretty clear, but yeah maybe it ought to be signposted more. It seems like lemmy.ml isn’t really the “default” lemmy instance anymore, so IMHO it would come at little cost to be transparent about its ideological tilt.

Disclaimer: this is my alt account and I’m not really a .ml user, I don’t want to come across as an authority on this matter

anti-Western dictatorships are actually the good guys and all working together (somehow, despite visibly hating each other a lot of the time).

I’m from Hexbear which is generally more extreme than .ml and this idea seems absurd to me. Who is saying that e.g. Russia is a close ally of Ansarallah?

There’s another side to this. I’m originally from Hexbear and only started checking out what the experience of someone on an instance that isn’t massively defederated looks like. Lemmy.ml’s meme comms are full of tankie ragebait, but then there’s multiple .world communities that are the same, but they’re liberal ragebait. The difference is that .world’s ideology is hegemonic while .ml’s is fringe. But to someone who isn’t a liberal, looking at a Lemmy front page when .world is on that front page also has a lot of propagandistic content with little news or entertainment value; you probably just don’t realize it.

Edit: A period of time where the proletariat organizes power to eliminate the bourgeoisie in order to get rid of those previous class divides, is not authoritarianism.

Ok, so how can this be done in such a way that it is not? Were the Soviets, Cubans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans, Venezuelans, Laotians, Grenadians, Nicaraguans, Tanzanians, Angolans, Zimbabweans, and Burkinabes just not quite smart enough to figure it out?

what is the difference between socialism and communism?

I remain at the same place, yet to understand how one can be a communist and not authoritarian. And I feel like you’re failing to interrogate whether your concept of authoritarianism is being used with any amount of consistency or if it’s just a club you wield against people who have positions you disagree with for other reasons.

Anarchists are cool, but they’re really only a minority of communists worldwide. Whatever you think “authoritarianism” is (as far as I’m concerned if you believe in having a state at all, then that state will exercise a monopoly on violence and will be repressive) it describes almost every single communist on planet earth. The game of splitting hairs on what does and doesn’t count as a “tankie” achieves nothing but divide a movement that has common cause.

If I’m being forthright, I’ll just go ahead and ask: if anarchists are the only communists, why even have the concept of “tankies” at all? Why not just say you’re pro-anarchist and anti-communist? From my perspective, all that the whole thing of saying that there supposedly are communists who aren’t “tankies” achieves is create two categories:

• Real people who exist in the real world and have actual, flawed political movements
• Imaginary perfect people that only exist in your head

Then because you can find real examples of the first category, you can find the flaws they have, and compare them to the ideal people in the second category. But maybe I’m wrong, maybe there really are a ton of Marxists out there that figured out the secret to having a perfectly consistent anti-authoritarian ideology that is still distinct from anarchism. If you could let me know who they are, that’d be awesome.

If you disagree that .ml are communist and insist that they’re “tankies” instead, it seems to imply that not all communists are “tankies.” However, every single communist I’m aware of is called a tankie. What does a communist who isn’t a tankie look like? Are there examples of such a thing?

Osama Bin Laden and I happen to have the same position that the end of the USA as a political entity would be a positive thing. I probably also agree with him that breathing and having meals is necessary for survival.

Are either of those propositions made less true by virtue of Osama also believing them?

It seems like something is kinda happening in response. People are buying guns and joining orgs like PSL. Maybe not enough people, but looking from afar it kinda seems like there’s interest in moving beyond the democrats for people who don’t want to accept this crap.

I can’t answer that question unless you answer mine. The answer is contingent on the rate at which you rent it out.

I suspect a lot of the people making basic errors in this thread get their knowledge of politics from memes. A lot of people saying stuff like “big corporations are the problem, not mom & pop landlords” which, if they read something like this single page from Wage Labour and Capital they’d understand is false. Capital is capital, and its relation to labor is the same regardless of its size!

cause on one hand, buying property to rent out is one of the ways out of wage slavery

This is not complete thinking. It’s not a way out of wage slavery when you’re just pushing the can down the road and making the condition of someone else’s wage slavery worse. You have to realize that your condition as a worker and a potential tenant’s condition is one and the same, and the way to abolish that condition is to unite as a class to seize and exert political power.

I also don’t really think the answer is all property being state-owned, but what do I know

It really doesn’t have to be. There’s already countries where they have a 95% homeownership rate and that’s been achieved by heavy regulation of housing and real estate speculation, and expropriation programs (also a lot of liquidation of the landlord class).

You’re right. It’s also true that if I don’t wish to expend my labor power in exchange for compensation, I can also buy a factory where I buy materials and labor and sell them for more than they cost.

Can you think of any reason why, when done at scale, these sorts of activities create a class system where not everyone can simply buy a plot of land and build a house, or be an industrial entrepreneur? That there will actually have to be many times as many people who have to sell their labor and pay rent?

Can you think of a way in which the possibility to create profit out of land adds value to that land that is unrealizable to someone who buys it and just lives in it, and is realizable for someone who plans to rent it at market price?

The $8000-9000 municiple taxes, utilities, upkeep, are all supposed to be paid by the landlord at a net loss.

Can you link to the comment where anyone said this? On my own, all I’ve said is that if you do rent out a property and generate a profit, that profit is appropriated surplus value.

The part where you call any and all profit theft

Who is generating the surplus value, then?

Also the part where you are attacking individuals for trying to improve their lives while the entire mess is caused by corporations and billionaires.

I’m not attacking anyone, I’m explaining how the system works. I explained in another comment that I believe the solution to this problem is the abolition of private property, not stringing up anyone who has ever made any profit in a transaction.