I’m just curious for the new or existing people? Lemmy.ml has taken a hard turn to the right since the reddit exodus. There’s been a lot of pro-imperialist propaganda being posted on world news, and a lot less diversity of opinion. It feels more neoliberal and neo-con to me.
Does anyone want to share what their political leanings are?
I’ll start; I’m anti-imperialist pro-state regulated capitalism. I believe we should have usage based taxes (toll roads, carbon tax) and luxury taxes, and I disagree with wealth taxes for people with less than $250 million. The state should spend more money on consumer protection in all industries (environment, health, finance, etc.) I believe in multipolarity vs. US hegemony.
I have no idea what box I fit into.
- I am generally anti-capitalism. The current system does not benefit human. We are constantly exploited in the name of profits
- vital industries and services need to be nationalized. Capitalism is a race to the bottom when it comes to providing the bare minumum, cutting corners etc.
- people should be free to do what they please as long as it doesn’t hurt other people. To this end, I am pro-inclusion of all walks of life, except for bigots.
- we are rapidly running out of time to prevent an ecological apocalypse. Everything must be done to avoid it
we are rapidly running out of time to prevent an ecological apocalypse. Everything must be done to avoid it
I think we more or less are either too late to stop it or are unable to stop it. I think we should instead be focused on planning mitigations for the future. I expect at some point in the next century or two there will be large migrations of people from the equator going to the north (places like Russia or Canada).
While I think your right, mama didn’t raise no quitter.
Both will be necessary but it’s worth noting that the more we’ve emitted, the more damaging each additional unit of emissions becomes. So arguably it’s even more important to focus on emissions reductions because it’s too late to completely stop warming at this point. Even a small reduction in emissions may have cause a meaningful reduction in human suffering.
I’m with Track_Shovel on this. No particular political orientation, but I agree on all the issues listed.
This is me too
Depending on if you think Capitalism should be totally abolished or not, you could be a Social Democrat all the way to a
Libertarian Socialist.Edit: gotta have a state to nationalize things. So could be Dem Soc/Market Socialist to as far left as ML. But MLs typically are a little less pro-individual liberties, so probably not ML.
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True.
Welcome, marxist!
I agree with this. I tend to be more of a “California hippy” as my far more conservative friends tell me.
Necessities need to be taken away from people who profit from them. At the very least. Realistically, probably less things should fall under capitalism, but if we start with transportation, medical, housing, education, fuels, electricity, etc we would be doing much better.
I agree that people should be able to do as they please, with a caveat. As long as it doesn’t affect other people. Guns are a pretty good example here (I’ll get back to this).
The environment is screwed, and I truly don’t think we can stop the spiral, but agree we need to try.
I’m waiting for all the angry replies to this one. Guns need to go away. Not completely, but we need to move to where they are only kept and used by highly licensed and highly insured people, or at highly regulated and insured clubs/establishments. Everyone having guns doesn’t work. Just look around.
And while I’m at it get all money out of politics. Bye bye lobbying. Close loopholes for all government officials that use their insider info to benefit their bank account.
Uhhh…
Uhhh…
Social Democrat.
Lots of anti monopoly pro consumer regulations. But freedom to have private enterprise. High income and corporate tax. Free healthcare & education. Even rare diseases and university. Corporations can only lease and never own land. Govt ownership of essential industries like electricity, water, gas.
I get the reasons for most of your points from a perspective of moderate “leftist”. But why “Govt ownership of essential industries like electricity, water, gas”?
You seem to somewhat believe in private enterprise, so why prevent it from providing those services at competitive cost/quality?
Markets work best when there are a number of firms that must compete with one another. For some goods and services, that level of competition is impractical or impossible because of the high amount of infrastructure required. It wouldn’t make much sense for each company to build a completely separate set of water purification and distribution systems—it would be very expensive and take up a lot of space.
In many areas of the US we have a bizarre setup where there is a government enforced monopoly where a single company can reap all of the profits. This often leads to poor service because the company has very little incentive to provide value to its customers. Government owned services can be flawed as well but at least they are directly accountable to their citizens instead of a board or shareholders.
As I said in reply to other person, in my country there’s private businesses providing those services for cheaper price than the government alternative. Infrastructure for the most part is provided by 3rd party.
Also I keep hearing this talk about “government accountability”, but what mechanism of accountability does government have? Private firms at least can go out of business or sued. Government in worst case will just pay you some of its “tax money”
What specific services are you referring to? If there are multiple firms and the government competing then that really doesn’t sound like the situation I was describing.
Governments can also be sued though they sometimes grant themselves immunity. But utilities really can’t go out of business, can they? Generally they are providing what are considered essential services, so if they fail, the government will generally bail them out because they are the only provider and the loss of those services would be catastrophic. So there really is very little accountability. Just ask PG&E customers how much say they have in that company’s practices.
As far as government accountability, that’s what elections are for. Do you not have those in your country?
Governments can also be sued
My point is they don’t lose hard earned money, they just pay you money they collect forcefully from people. Basically it’s not a deterrent, but simple restitution
As far as government accountability, that’s what elections are for.
It’s quite rare for any candidate to talk about utilities in their campaign at all.
People here tend to not associate govt owned corporations with the government itself. And when someone brings it up, they just make some kind of excuse about what terrible person you are for accusing such a benevolent government of incompetence when they don’t fix their stuff, and increase price 2
And besides, chances of reelection are so slim I doubt any politician actually going for it. It’s much more profitable to simply lie about your promises
But utilities really can’t go out of business
They should declare bankruptcy and be sold to someone
loss of those services would be catastrophic
Government failed to consistently provide power — no catastrophe. Government failed to provide any water at all — no catastrophe (some people just started to pump and sell underground water)
So why private buisness not providing just one of those services for the period before it’s bought, must result in catastrophe? (Just for time reference, the absence of water I described earlier already lasts longer than a year)
Governments can also be sued
My point is they don’t lose hard earned money, they just pay you money they collect forcefully from people. Basically it’s not a deterrent, but simple restitution
As far as government accountability, that’s what elections are for.
It’s quite rare for any candidate to talk about utilities in their campaign at all.
People here tend to not associate govt owned corporations with the government itself. And when someone brings it up, they just make some kind of excuse about what terrible person you are for accusing such a benevolent government of incompetence when they don’t fix their stuff, and increase price 2
And besides, chances of reelection are so slim I doubt any politician actually going for it. It’s much more profitable to simply lie about your promises
But utilities really can’t go out of business
They should declare bankruptcy and be sold to someone
loss of those services would be catastrophic
Government failed to consistently provide power — no catastrophe. Government failed to provide any water at all — no catastrophe (some people just started to pump and sell underground water)
So why private buisness not providing just one of those services for the period before it’s bought, must result in catastrophe? (Just for time reference, the absence of water I described earlier already lasts longer than a year)
That sounds like a pretty insane situation that would not be tolerated in most developed countries. Generally lapse of service for essential utilities is considered a major problem that would absolutely be relevant to local elections in my area. It sounds like your government is very poorly run and needs dramatic changes—such changes could be implemented through elections. In the meantime it’s good that private entities are filling the gap but I doubt they are able to provide the same level of service as most people expect from utilities.
[govt] changes could be implemented through elections
We have elections. I’m not sure how it should correct the govt. They’ll just go fo the problems mostpeoples know/talk about to boost their approval rate. (Democracy is about support of the majority after all)
In my example they basically promised that as soon as Kherson is liberated they’ll start fixing their infrastructure. Fast forward many months after liberation, nothing is done, but they give huge amounts of money to repair infrastructuree damaged after dam was destroyed. (Most probably) because people actually know and talk about it, so it’s “cheap public support points”
I’m not the person you replied to and this isn’t well thought out. Just trying to think this through myself.
How would something like an electric company offer competitive cost or quality? There’d have to be at least two options serving an area in order for there to be some kind of competition. So do each of those companies build their own infrastructure, power stations, power lines, etc? So a neighborhood would have two sets of power lines? That seems wasteful and would get pretty ugly as more competitors came in. So maybe instead the government builds the infrastructure and the competing companies lease the usage of the infrastructure. But then what are the companies going to offer as a competitive advantage? I don’t know. They need to make some kind of profit in order to justify their existence. And they have to pay for the usage of the infrastructure. And they don’t want to lose money. And let’s assume the government doesn’t pick favorites and charges each of them the same. So we end up paying them more than what it costs them to lease the infrastructure. So why can’t we just cut them out, i.e. cut out the middle man, and pay the government directly. I guess this all just assumes that there’s nothing extra an electric company can offer on top of the electricity being supplied.
What you’re describing kind of exists here in Portugal, the transmission lines are owned by the state but the actual electricity generation / internet service / whatever is left to private companies. So you can go onto a web portal and change your supplier to a different electric company or ISP or whatever, without needing to physically do anything at your house. Just maybe exchange a router or something like that. But no builders coming out to the property or whatever. And where I live near Lisbon there are like 8-10 available suppliers.
In my country private companies provide their service much cheaper than government alternative. And, yes they use shared infrastructure.
I can’t dispute that. I hear people claim that in my country too. But I just wonder how they can know that for a fact. Like okay, maybe they’ve seen a service provided by a private entity for X amount and a comparable service provided by the government for Y amount more. But how can we know what’s going on behind the scenes? Is the company being subsidized by the government? Is the government charging more for this service to offset and lower the price of some other service? Or is the government charging us more for the overhead of having thousands or millions of customers where on the other hand, it can charge a company to lease the infrastructure for less for the reduced overhead of only having that company as a “customer”? I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud. I just question where the motive comes into play for private companies. Their motive is to make money. Do they have us in their best interests? They can cut costs and have huge failures like what happened in Texas with their power grid. But then there can be huge government failure too providing these services like with what happened to the water system in Flint, MI. I’m not really educated on either of these so it’s possible I’m totally misrepresenting these. And I’m not claiming that there isn’t waste, abuse and corruption in government either. At the end of the day, public and private entities are run by people. But anyway, thanks for indulging my stream of consciousness.
In practice, I’m a common social democrat.
At heart, I’m an Anarchist. I don’t have enough knowledge and confidence to believe it would work but I believe it would be beneficial for us to try to make it work, even if it ends up failing
I’m a Marxist-Leninist, I believe that the means of production should be owned by the workers and that the purpose of work is to produce things we all need to meet our collective needs.
Capitalism is a dead end ideology which leads to concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority by design, and this minority of oligarchs exploits the rest of the people to subsidize their lavish lifestyle.
Furthermore, any system based around constant growth and consumerism is fundamentally incompatible with our continual survival as a species. We need a system that strives for sustainable use of our resources.
I’d like the GOP and right-wing media to be vaporized in its entirety, and I’d like the establishment/corporatist wing of the Democratic party to be smashed to pieces. Maybe then we can hurry up and get going on some stuff.
Some of my friends think I’m an idealist but I’d argue that’s the point. I vote for whatever would allow us to get to the Star Trek: TNG version of earth. A Post Scarcity society where humans want to better themselves and their communities through each individuals pursuit of their interests unrestricted by any “system”. To get there, I care about improving the lives of the entirety of humanity equally while doing away with the disparity inequality we see. It is undoubtedly true capitalism did raise the average QOL of many many people of the entire world, however, others it put into modern slavery.
I like this idea, but I disagree with the last sentence. The improvement in the average quality of life does not come from the capitalist system, but from technological and scientific progress.
But was that also spurred at least in part often times for the pursuit of profit? I don’t disagree, you have a good point!
Consider how quickly USSR developed after the revolution. It went from an agrarian society to being the first in space while doing most of the work in WW2. USSR accomplished a century’s worth of capitalist development in a few decades.
Sure but the USSR was effectively a product of capitalism. The development of a working class, Marx’s labor theory of value, Lenin’s ideas about the state, and even modern science are all possible because of capitalism. I don’t think Marx or Lenin would dispute that. That of course doesn’t mean capitalism is inherently a better system than socialism.
Capitalism set the stage for socialism and USSR. However, USSR itself was not capitalist, and the development that happened in USSR was not happening under capitalist relations. The point I was replying to was that the profit motive spurs innovation, and USSR clearly demonstrates that you can have plenty of innovation and rapid development without a profit motive.
This is honestly my favorite part of Star Trek. I don’t know what label to give myself, but I’ll vote for the candidates that I think are getting us closer to this reality.
Marxist-Leninist. Of the type that would probably unironically be referred to as a tankie.
I don’t see capitalism as a sustainable model for the world, you cannot grow infinitely with finite resources, and there is no way effective way to “reform the system from the inside”. Capitalists will actively sabotage such efforts as they go against their own best interests; they are dead set on convincing labor that it is also against their best interests, and have been depressingly effective at doing so.
I believe that humanity will naturally move towards a more communist world order as a unipolarity gives way to a multipolar world. Probably not within my lifetime, but either humans will get there eventually or we will die out trying.
I’m a Marxist-Leninist, member of an organized group.
I believe countries try to shape and weaponize citizens’ opinions about other countries, so I refuse to defend or criticize them unless I can argue that doing so is beneficial to my ideas (i.e., not based on feelings or ethics). Thus, I’m neutral towards most countries and defend multipolarity.
I tend to doubt my ideas as much as I can.
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What about slightly angled communism?
Anarcho communism I think neither corporations nor the state works gor the people
Bloody peasant!
Syndicalist. A federation of industrial unions could run society as a whole in a way that benefits all.
just to better understand that point of view, would there still be a place for democratic elements in that ideal society, or would I not get a say in policy making if I don’t work and am therefore not a part of any union?
I’d imagine there would still be a place for non-workers to have a say in policy making in that sort of society, since a federation of unions (or One Big Union) would need democracy at its core in order to work.
Do you have any specific policies we could use for a thought experiment?
hmm, but then what would be the difference to/the advantage over a classic democracy, as long as industries are syndicalized?
say we have only the capacities to build one single railway route this year, and we have to decide if we build it from a town to either a factory or a residential area where mostly retired seniors live, a union-run society would still decide similarly to the current lobby-influenced system, or not?
while I understand that syndicalized industries are better for the workers, the part that still escapes me is why we should let the entire society have be run by unions as a consequence - but maybe I’m misunderstanding something here
I thought I’d be able to express my thoughts a lot more efficiently. The gist of “why syndicalism” for me is because I believe a society that centers around workers rights and proper work conditions would create a culture that would value human life more than a profit centered society.
well, I’ll be honest and say that this really doesn’t convince me, but then again it would be asking for a lot to just get an entire ideology explained in a few sentences by a stranger on an online forum
you’ve awakened my interest and I will look into the philosophy behind syndicalism, it is always nice to learn about alternatives to profit-oriented systems of organizing a society
I believe that a social democracy is the best compromise we can make. The market should be able to innovate but rules set in place to protect workers and the environment. Social safety nets so people do not fall into despair - happy people equals less sickness and more productivity.
I believe UBI can play a role but I’m still not sure how exactly, luckily I’m not a politician.
In the end I’ll always vote more to the left, even though I’m well paid I think a society is healthier when there are less major differences in wealth.
With more automation showing up in all different fields, I’m warming up to the idea of UBI or something like it.
Theoretically, more production is happening per human being, so everybody should have a higher standard of living. But (among other issues) people at the top are hoarding an unfair portion of the profits, and UBI seems like a straightforward way to help offset that.
It’s tricky because yeah in theory more production should be happening. I listened to a podcast recently that talked about how kitchens changed during the years. That the initial idea for stuff like washing machines and ironing boards was that women (in that time) would have to spend less time on chores and could be more free (it was argued from a feminist point of view). The reality was that the expectations just went up. Suddenly people expected the towels to be ironed etc.
What podcast? I like a good podcast.
Yeah, I feel like that phenomenon happens elsewhere too. I read the book B.S. Jobs last year, and it talked about is all the (debatably) useless positions popping up at companies - extra layers of management, assistants to make the managers feel important, corporate lawyers that are only there to cause trouble for the other team’s corporate lawyers. Just a whole lot of man-hours spent not making products/services/whatever.
(I wouldn’t say I’m 100% on board with all the book’s arguments, but it sure made me think)
Did the book discuss how this is a way that cronies prevent competition? If we all have to have useless jobs to survive, and those jobs tire us out and keep us on a treadmill, then none of us have time to start our own thing (that might eventually compete with their thing / or make us more self-sufficient so that we need their thing less)
I don’t recall if it did, but that’s a good point
Sorry for the late reply! It was an episode from 99% invisible: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-frankfurt-kitchen/
i dont think our house had a hot iron even
My views seem to align pretty well with this.
With regards to market regulations, my view is that capitalism is an efficient way to deal with scarcity when the market has competition, demand is elastic, and everyone has perfect information. Because those things are hardly ever all true, the role of government is to regulate to either make the market that way or to shore up the public’s interest (provide healthcare since necessary medical care is inelastic, ensure safety standards because information isn’t perfect, etc.).
A UBI integrates with this view as a way to give an effective baseline for meeting needs in a way each individual sees fit, but still allows for markets to work. Additionally, my opinion is that having a base safety net for everyone would spur more innovation and cause more business formation by allowing lower income people less risk to pursue entrepreneurship.
I think every person should have food, water, and shelter at the very least. Nobody should need to do anything for these basic necessities of life.
I always thought this was a common thought but no, this apparently is a far left radical ideology. People should starve on the street unless they provide value to a capitalist is actually the common thought.
I personally would say Liberal just to overly simplify things.
In reality, growing up in the rural midwest makes it more complex than that. I have a ton of left and right ideologies that contradict them selves, with no compromise in sight.
This is one of the big pitfalls of the two party system in the US. If you fall in the middle, you don’t have an obvious choice of party, or you have a few issues where your party of choice doesn’t represent you.
An example- in Oregon you’ll find many people who are generally very liberal, socially progressive and such, but who don’t support blanket gun restrictions due to the traditions of hunting, trapping and outdoorsy stuff that Northwesterners are into. In a parliamentary democracy, you may have been able to find the “smoke pot and have a hunting rifle” party, but in our model, you have to pick one or the other.
