That's not toast? It's bread.

There’s a meme of a frog puppet drinking tea, and a meme of a pootoo, and a meme of some beans. It can be literally anything.

Seems to be to serious for this community.

i think the meme is the lazily edited stock photo

Nor will the rich be able to see anything after we bring out the guillotines

Take the route California is taking and educate the kids about worker's rights. Teach them it's not okay to be exploited at the work place and encourage them to tell their parents about it. Civics classes should also be taught to learn how the government works and what people's rights are under the Constitution. Encourage people to unionize now that they know how the system works.

Once the basics have been taught, elect people who care about government reform for social policies by paying for them with higher corporate and personal wealth taxes. Reform the tax system the wealthy have been using to hide their money. All their money is tied up in stocks and they're living off of multimillion dollar loans? Fuck them, tax a big percentage of the loan. All these things can be done to indirectly seize the fruits of their production at least.

General strike (like the writers guild, except everyone) until the distribution of (a part of the) dividends to the workers is enshrined into law.

Sounds pretty doable to me.

Start by talking about your wages. Most people won't even do that, for fear of reprisals. Even though it's protected federally.

Casually bringing up support for unions, and those on strike.

This is base level, and in many places, will take a long time to see movement.

i'd do some intellectual property reform.
some banking reform - more local / peer group/long term lending requirements, less fickle international finance. (and less fucking mortgage bubbles!)
some small business support / starter initiatives - link that in with how banks work.

i'd consider lobbying for some government sposored work to generate open source plans and enable production processes for useful tools - Okay that isn't going to happen , , ,

but it's not all or nothing, but you can do things to help some more workers control and access more of their tooling even if its not outright ownership of the end to end production process.

(By the way i'm basically arguing for a more "free" market in the ecnomic sense (easy access for a large number of small scale producers). . . which is exactly not what large-scale capitalists want.
They want a market "free" from any thing that might regulate their attempts to secure economic power and their abiity to use it to generate supernormal prices/profits.)

Progress doesnt happen in 4-5 year political cycles thats a hard one to improve without an electorate capable (any maybe secure enough) to thing about the longer term. Odd that it was extreme econmic and political uncertainty that brought out the likes of FDR and other post-war that people were most willing to think long term when it came to their governemnts - I guess it brought out all sorts of "crazies".

The big one in terms of bloodshed is land reform - and it has been done in a few places - sort of post-colonial type situations - but granted it does ususally have blooodshed. It's a personal judgment what degree is "excessive bloodshed".

The women of Iceland went on strike in 1975, they stopped doing literally everything, walked out of the home, left the kids, to demonstrate how much the system would crumble without them, how important they are to everything being able to function, and ask for equal pay. They flipped everything overnight.

The current system is all the workers do all the work, and the profits from that work go almost entirely to some douvhe who won birth lotto. The system is already rigged. Unrigging the system would look like walking off the job, but globally. It's going to happen. Society is squeezed too tightly, there's going to be havoc.

Agreed, lets just keep doing whatever the capitalists demand until their insatiable greed destroys them and us.

https://www.vice.com/...

It's not like it's gonna take that long. And if not climate change, the AI they don't fully understand but are trying to monetize. And if not AI, CRISPR derived vectors they don't fully understand but are trying to monetize, etc.

Lets just stay the course. It will all work out in the end, at least for the planet, and that's ultimately what matters.

other than edgelord tankies

Maybe you shouldn't use terms if you don't understand them, liberal.

THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

You're allowed to post political memes as long as the mods agree with your view.

Seems economic to me.

Not 100% sure why, but i love this. Thank you

Make your own bread I guess.

It means they want to shit on anyone who suggests any mechanism for social change that might actually work instead of wanking about some glorious revolution that'll never happen. Just another way of maintaining the status quo while pretending to be a revolutionary.

You incentivize the same way unions are growing now. Just show people the benefits and constantly shout it from the highest mountain tops.

So bb, tell me more about those sweet, sweet employee-owned companies for other readers' benefit.

Tell me more about how employee owned companies are better at long term planning. Tell me more about how they're concerned about balancing profit for survival's sake with societal good. Tell me more about how they participate in the benefits of the free market via competition while not becoming all-consuming, profit-driven monsters. Tell me more about how they avoid stakeholder-chosen, sociopathic leadership in favor of leaders wanting the best for the company's mission and its employees. Tell me more about the coffee shop branch that was shut down by its company and reopened as an employee-owned cafe. Tell me more about AAA. Tell me sweet nothings, bb

(And yes, I'm explicitly not talking about communism because it's an emotionally charged concept, and i want to focus on things maybe people don't know so much about)

Encouraging employee owned companies is where it’s at.

What did you think "seize the means of production" meant?

But to be honest I’m not sure how you would incentivize that.

Oh, that's simple - you get rid of the police.

Even if they did produce something, Jeff Bezos would steal it as soon as it started making a buck.

Seizing the means of production made sense when that was the leverage the owners used to strip the surplus value from you.

Today, they use gatekept platform and a captive audience with AI manipulation to insert themselves between you and the customers and strip you of your surplus value.

Now pay Bezos' 40% tax until Amazon basic is ready to outcompete out of the platform entirely. Welcome to the second page of Google !

I'm pretty sure phones are not all that is involved in commodity production.

Did you mean to say start?

I think your worries are misplaced. I work for an employee owned cooperative with about 60 employees. I think half of the employees are also owners. There's still a CEO, chosen by the board of directors, who are elected by the employee-owners. Day to day operational decisions are made by whoever is in charge of the relevant department, just like a shareholder-owned corporation. Bigger decisions, like long term strategy or how to distribute profits among employees, are voted on by all of the employee owners instead of shareholders. It's been in business for about 20 years and makes enough money to share profits with all employees regardless of their ownership status. So essentially this business operates like any other, but the profits are shared with the employee-owners and employees instead of going to shareholders or insane CEO salaries (compressed pay structure).

It is a straw man that democracy means every problem is put to a vote. Workers can jointly decide to delegate decision-making to executives and managers. The difference in worker coops is that these executives and managers are ultimately democratically accountable to the people doing the work

That's every bureaucracy that ever existed.

Do you think the shareholders are active in problem solving? Workers include basically everyone but the shareholders. The tech guys, the executives, the managers.

You can't call an idea with 200 years of history and hundreds of books on the subject "half-baked" without explaining what about it you think is unfeasible. Either you have never actually talked to a socialist, or you've simply never listened.

So, a few questions:

1. Why is it "half-baked"?
   • What ideas does it propose?
   • What is wrong with those ideas?
2. How is it "impossible to implement"?
   • What methods are proposed?
   • What prevents those methods from working?
3. What do you mean by "destroy society"?
   • What exactly do you define as society?
   • How would socialism "destroy" that?

I’ve debated people at length on this topic

...and lost every time, it seems.

We can have the perpetual pain of subsistence and servitude to the oligarch club until it collapses under the weight of its own manipulation and propaganda after generations of needless suffering of our children and children's children necessitating the painful work of rebuilding, or we can destroy the society built from the ground up as a capitalist exploitation trap and do the painful work of rebuilding.

This society perpetuates the misery and exploitation of the many to serve the whims and desires of the few. You act as if it's worth saving. Go to one of your local tent cities, where we throw our fellow humans, aka defective capital batteries, to die of exposure and police harassment. This system is rotten to its core and will have to be torn down and rebuilt, the only question, just with climate change, is do we let the gaping wound continue fester, hoping it will be the next generation's problem to amputate? Or do we take on the painful necessity of repairing the boomer's greed plague for the future they didnt care about at all?

I'd rather our species be destroyed than continue to commit itself further and further to greed and greed worship. I consider greed far worse than hate. At least people that kill out of hate cared about who they killed, in that they want them dead. A capitalist that poisons children's drinking water to make private shareholders a few extra dollars doesn't even care to know those children's names, they were just speedbumps to glorious profit. To me it is the darkest we can go to hurt others for profit. And our society's core value above all others is greed. That's worth saving?

Why have you concluded that?

Let's eat this guy, too

Who do you think built the means of production in the first place? I've never seen a rich guy in a suit laying down bricks all day to build a factory.

The workers built the means, they just never owned them.

Let me guess, you think Steve Jobs made the iPhone because he pulled it out of his pocket on a stage and took the credit of engineers standing on the shoulders of publically funded basic research? Steve jobs couldn't engineer his way out of a wet paper bag, and that is well documented.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=u1gpQV57doM

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Literally sharing nazi propaganda from Hearst press lol

Anyway, capitalism is known for never having famines or economic crises, especially not cyclical ones

What’s the other option? Continue to be fucked by a system the privatizes everything and destroys our environment? Continue to be fucked harder by the billionaire class?

Which past is this that you speak of? And how is the present a better option than anything at all, really?