Wanted to share this here
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
A404 to 
Lefty Memes
Nothing is stopping you from forming communes all over the place
The USSR, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam famously forming unopposed. Capitalists and feudalists famously did not try to invade them and overturn their elections.
I would gladly run off and form a commune with a bunch of my like-minded friends, too bad we're all broke workers and can't afford even a house between us, let alone a plot of land big enough to support ourselves
There is, in fact, a lot stopping people from forming communes all over the place
Namely, capitalism.
...and if you do, hoooooo boy. I hope you like a coup, because you are going to get a coup.... or sanctions... or a blockade... or all three.
And don't get too big or the FBI or ATF is on their way
"Nothing stopping you" except the government. "Which government?" Most of them.
The CIA would like to know your location
"Nothing is stopping you" - actually not true, you need government permission and they will just say no.
To them communism is what capitalism is to us
In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici proposes that even before the 1500s as a process of primitive accumulation, proto capitalist used the witch purges in Europe to usher in the family structures required to begin capitalism, killing hundreds of thousands of women in the process.
I love a good quote with source! Isn’t the actual figure highly disputed?
where do they explicitly teach that communism is bad?
that feels like - real bad.
I was explicitly taught as a child that communism was a self-destructive framework of ideas that threatens our future prosperity. For this reason we won’t be studying the ideology but instead study the harmful effects such as famines.
And that’s as far as I understood it for more than a decade.
It's especially ironic considering the Dustbowl Years came about due to bad farming practices (thanks to capitalism).
They didn't do that in your school? I tought that was standard practice.
we actually had an AFD member as our social studies teacher (AFD is one of the right-leaning parties in germany).
and... yea, he was fin guy. but most importantly: he was open to talking about stuff.
we had some genuine discussions about capitalism and communism and how things could work out. and... surprise surprise, we ended on the exact same values: capitalism is looking really shoddy rn, but if somehow everyone on earth would turn into a nice peep with altruistic values, high amounts of empathy and a drive ti genuinely make the world a better place and make people happy - capitalism may work well.
im very sorry fir saying that. iguess... Germany's social democracy dumbed me down to believing there could be a good world under capitalism - aaaawhoppsie- (sorry)
So how is that different from what, for instance the Mongols or the Romans did?
Neither were a threat to the biosphere
What an odd thing to say. Is that the bar you think we need to clear?
It was an honest question. I'm looking for a good faith answer. What sets the British empire apart from those that came before or after it?
Not too familiar with the roman systems, but here's a relevant text from a wikipedia article on capitalism:
The economic foundations of the feudal agricultural system began to shift substantially in 16th-century England as the manorial system had broken down and land began to become concentrated in the hands of fewer landlords with increasingly large estates. Instead of a serf-based system of labor, workers were increasingly employed as part of a broader and expanding money-based economy. The system put pressure on both landlords and tenants to increase the productivity of agriculture to make profit; the weakened coercive power of the aristocracy to extract peasant surpluses encouraged them to try better methods, and the tenants also had incentive to improve their methods in order to flourish in a competitive labor market. Terms of rent for land were becoming subject to economic market forces rather than to the previous stagnant system of custom and feudal obligation.
