this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
272 points (93.0% liked)

Asklemmy

43956 readers
895 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

How about celebrities and not shitty CEOs. I’m generalizing towards multimillionaires as well as there aren’t that many billionaires. Unless the hate is specifically towards billionaires which I don’t think is the case.

I just took what you put out there. Generally, I'm skeptical that celebrities will really withstand scrutiny, since they tend to be supported by production crew and lesser-paid artists (whether in music or movies) who get regularly screwed over. Perhaps you can make an okay argument with athletes despite them also being held up by the pipeline from the notoriously exploitative college sports industry, playing in stadiums that are mostly damaging to the city, doing merchandising produced from sweatshops, etc.

But I don't really care about those arguments. The reason I don't care is that the conversation is based on an obscurantist metric, that being income. Any decent anti-capitalist is not mainly concerned with how much money someone gets or has, but their relationship to the means of production. That is, they are concerned with whether this person subsists by owning or subsists by working. You displayed what I would consider a good intuition by shifting from CEOs (who generally subsist by owning) to celebrities (who at least kind of subsist by working). It seems somewhat plausible to me that there would be very wealthy athletes, say, in a socialist state, because their job requires a lot of work and, at the top levels, having the talent to accomplish what they can accomplish is rare!

However, i would put money on the off chance that there is at least one billionaire who wasn’t shady about their wealth accumulation

If a machine produces a thousand cubes but also produces at least one octahedron, what would you describe the function of the machine as being?

think Steve Jobs.

When I think of Steve Jobs, I think of someone who put a lot of money and dedication into PR.

As a starting point if you believe that, here's an article that lightly goes over some of his controversies (ignore points 4 and 10). And here's one that I think is somewhat more interesting that incidentally demonstrates how dependent he was on exploitation of the third world.

Unless you consider holding companies to be shady.

Owning a company is just a legal status, it's what you do with it that matters. If what you do with it just happens to be amassing more wealth than many, many people could obtain in a lifetime of labor, you probably didn't get there with clean hands.

[–] GrammarPolice@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I want to say that i appreciate your nuance on the subject. You have raised many good points, and i will take a lot of what you have said into consideration in my future discussions on the topic.

I also want to give kudos on your shift from focus on income to more the relationship with that income which i agree can create problems especially when it comes to power imbalances. The overfocus on the income is as you put it "obscurantist".

If a machine produces a thousand cubes but also produces at least one octahedron, what would you describe the function of the machine as being?

You raise a very good point here as well. One which makes sense with your analogy.

I've also gone through the articles you posted, and there's some pretty eye-opening stuff in there.

I guess this is in some ways an admittal of defeat. I do not know whether i completely subscribe to a "communism is the next best". I think i still need to educate myself more on this topic.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm happy I could be helpful!

I guess this is in some ways an admittal of defeat

There's no need to claim defeat or victory, we're just talking; Success in communication is determined by the extent to which we are able to understand each other, and I think we did alright.

I think i still need to educate myself more on this topic.

I can't claim to represent any perspective but my own, but the text that really helped me to begin to see things differently was Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Feel free to DM me/necropost here if there's anything I can help with.

[–] GrammarPolice@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

Thanks man. I'll be sure to hit you up if i need help with anything!