American try to care one iota for your fellow man or really anyone other than yourself challenge (impossible):
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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During covid, going to a rural area in the US really got to me. The population is so individualistic / freedom-brained / "i do whatever I want all the time", that their grandmothers all dying meant nothing to them. I got mine keeps meaning smaller and smaller groups of people.
Which is surprising because up here in Canada, the socialism started with the farmers. And it's still going on with coop feed and grain silos and harvester sharing. Farmers don't let other farmers starve, in Canada.
I got mine keeps meaning smaller and smaller groups of people.
What does this mean?
USonians used to be more community-focused. In the 1950s polio was eradicated due to massive community efforts, showing that they were willing to do things to benefit their community.
Nowadays they won't even do the same to benefit their extended families.
I think all "western" countries were considerably more community focused in the past.
I am in rural Australia and as a kid our supermarket and hardware store were owned by farmer's co-ops and the hotel is still community owned and puts profits back into local sporting clubs. I have old pictures of some of the community fund raisers in the past and they looked extravagant for the time for a small population. Everyone pitched in to help building sporting clubs or other community facilities or to fight natural disasters. One old timer said they thought the US influence of entrepreneur clubs (Rotary, Lion's, Apex) was one of the first things to divide the community as the shop owners started to do their own thing separate from everyone else. We still have local community run child care, aged care and hospital. Increasingly people send their kids to the religious private school for social signalling despite the government school being well supported by parents and having excellent facilities and standards. The US funded churches are everywhere competing for customers and preaching hate and division. The disconnect between how people here naturally chose to build a community and what they are told to believe is interesting. I saw a silly old bugger wearing a MAGA hat last year. His parents probably came back from fighting fascists and helped build this community through unimaginable hard work and sacrifice.
back in the 80s my father worked for the largest state-owned bank here in brazil. apart from all benefits and a generally more laxed culture back then (goals were not that enforced, for example), the employees were more of a closely-knit community. they had clubs and were involved with it (the bank still has but not everyone care for it, the one we had in my home town was closed), organized a coop supermarket in state capitals during the inflation years, they were friends usually helped and cared for each other, the families used to visit each other, organized parties for the children, barbecues and the sort. in the 90s, there were heavy talks of privatization, people were fearful for their jobs, layoffs, and the bank generally had a lax policy on security at a time when robberies became more common. the employees slowly began to leave the bank and the few who were admitted to their places had not that culture, were more individualistic. it happened to other state owned companies, and all hell broke loose when many of them were actually privatized (state-level banks, telephone companies, electric distributors were among the most significant examples). now it seems that we're getting more and more individualistic and losing the meaning of community and society.
"Fuck you I got mine"
But when he says “smaller and smaller groups of people” does he mean that this kind of mentality isolates people to increasingly smaller groups?
It used to apply to different groups in the past.
Fuck you, my community got ours
Fuck you, my friend group got ours
Fuck you, my family got ours
And now we're finally at
Fuck you, I got mine
As the number of people who got theirs diminishes, "Fuck you I got mine" will eventually decay to just "Fuck you"
Dont you love individualism 🥰 /s
Lisa's only mistake was saying yes.
Just do every single thing in socialism, but change every single word. Call it Americanism.
Proletariat? No, just "worker".
Bourgeoisie? No, just "elites".
Capital? "Stuff". Like how in baseball they say a pitcher's got good "stuff". Use your human stuff.
Class Consciousness - "common sense".
Dialectical Materialism - Idk I'm still trying to figure out wtf that one means.
Dialectical materialism -> Scientific materialism to distinguish it from the common usage of the world "materialism"
about what youd expect for a country thats been the global epicenter for anticommunist propaganda.
Meanwhile, socialist Norway's wealth fund could maintain everyone's standard of living for 400 years if they stopped working right now.
norway isnt socialist. they just excel at exporting capitalism's issues to the third world.
In a democratic state, things like universal healthcare are also called "socialized medicine" because it is an example of the people owning the means of production in that particular industry.
That's why most countries are what we call "mixed economies", that mix elements of capitalism and socialism.
Norway mixes in a higher ratio of socialism to capitalism than most countries. But they don't export any more of capitalism's issues to the third world than other countries. It's something to emulate, not discredit.
and in a demoratic world norway wouldnt be doing tax-free extrativism in my country (and others'), so that you can pay for your socialized medicine in a capitalist economy, where the money to finance it has to come from the poor. in this case we are your poor.
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No. "Socialized medicine" is not "people owning the means of production"
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That’s why most countries are what we call “mixed economies”, that mix elements of capitalism and socialism.
No. They are capitalist.
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Whenever people say this they neglect to point out that all the money came from selling oil.
They forget to point out that only dumbfuck yanks would consider Norway to be socialist, so the comment, in a meme community, is misleading from the get-go.
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I can't remember where I copied this from originally but it seems pertinent here
Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. they know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism.’
Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions.
This is is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores.
An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete.
They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone too irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover).
One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services.
But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy.
Wait, isn't socialism all about class solidarity? "Working together regardless of class to fight a common enemy" sounds more like nationalism where at the end the upper class profits most. Unless we are talking about a classless society but that's not "regardless of class" but "with no class distinction" which sounds very similar when I think about it.
Sounds more like social democracy, which can include managed capitalism and cooperation between workers and owners. To a degree.
Every character there is working class, so I'm imagining in this case "regardless of class" is implicitly "regardless of perceived class"
Socialism is about the government playing a central role in the economy to ensure wealth and resources are distributed more fairly, rather than being concentrated in the hands of corporations or individuals. Socialism can still allow for private businesses and a market economy, but key industries and services are often publicly controlled to prevent excessive inequality.
Socialism is not about the government's size. Socialists, particularly Marxists, emphasize using the state and nationalization after proletarian revolution to reflect the working class' interests and build socialism, but the size of the state itself is not what makes something socialist, both because (1) socialists seek to eventually end the state itself once productive forces and consciousness are sufficiently advanced and (2) capitalist states can also have large governments, generally to serve the interests of the ruling class, albeit sometimes in a roundabout way.
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Socialism is about making the working class the ruling class. It is explicitly about oppressing the bourgeois class, which is itself the current ruling class oppressing the working (and other) classes. The idea is to take the means of production and run it for ourselves rather than the profit of a class defined by merely owning factories, buildings, tools, etc.
The cartoon may be confused.
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"if we all work together regardless of class" collaborationism is bourgeoisie propaganda and is not tolerated here, Comrade. Please face the wall.
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"All classes working together" as a counterpoint to socialism? Where have I heard of this before.....?
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Of course, you could just talk about "Tax The Rich" or "Bring Back the New Deal" but then how could people know you read Karl Marx?
I've been thinking a lot recently about how to rephrase socialist ideals as capitalist bills for the sake of America.
I want to propose a "Proof of Economic Viability Bill" somewhere if I can find the right influence point.
Basically, financial advisors suggest that people should pay no more than 30% of their income towards living expenses. Knowing that the vast majority of Americans only have income from their primary job, this means that any business should be expected to pay no less than 30% of their income, evenly divided across the entire workforce (cart pusher to CEO), as a "living expense allotment" to prove they can afford to pay their workers enough to live and stay afloat. This will push out companies who are doomed to fail because of a lack of available workforce, allowing more economically viable options to reign king.
Edit to add: you can make this sound a little nicer to the maga crowd by telling them they can reduce wages by doing this. I don't necessarily care that you're paying minimum wage as long as you can afford to put your worker in a home and fill their stomach.
Stop using polysyallabic words like "proletariat" when trying to appeal to the American working class who read at a 5th grade level.
Seriously. Like the guy in Severance said. Apologize for the word. It's too long.
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You just described what the minimum wage was supposed to be, and plenty of red blooded American patriots already hate that.
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