Cowbee

The joint leadership of the peasantry and the proletariat as the ruling classes of the USSR. The peasantry are symbolized with the sickle, the proletariat, the hammer. The H&S is used as a symbol for socialism, communism, Marxism-Leninism, etc.

You're confused on 2 primary accounts:

1. That I am saying we can accomplish better, more equitable housing within capitalism. I'm a communist, I want socialism, and that's the first step towards communism. I am not pointing out exploitation and a solution to it as some actionable goal within capitalism, but to point to the fact that a better world is possible, and we get there through revolution.

2. There has never been a society where people could not work to get better housing. Not in the USSR, with the famous soviet housing, not anywhere. Public housing does not mean all housing is the same, just that fewer people go without. Further, your wages are being taken from you, in socialism that isn't a problem, so you won't have to put in a decade of renting to get something nicer.

The landlord was still exploiting you and taking a ton of the wages you keep, which are already being stolen from through capitalist exploitation. If you prefer renting, then it would be a much better system to have publicly owned housing that isn't run to make a profit, or even with the expectation that cheap or free housing is a social cost.

Then I think you should reread @[email protected]'s comments with that understanding. We all agree that management is a necessary part of the social production process, but that it is ownership that entitles people to stealing from the working class.

Oh, I was accidentally right then, haha. Does that make me double wrong? 😅

Essay? Article? Don't know what the word for it is, excerpt is wrong though now that I think about it.

Management is labor, sure. It all adds to the collective labor expended necessary for producing a widget, say, 1 hour of cumulative labor expended through dead labor (the percentage of tools used up) and living labor. Let's put constant capital at .5 hours, and variable at .5 hours. The value of the widget is 1 hour of socially necessary labor time, and it is sold for this price on the commodity market when supply meets demand.

Where do profits come from, then? From living labor. The price of the commodity labor-power is regulated around the average cost of subsistence. A worker may only need to truly work for 3 hours in a day to produce their social consumption, but they are paid for those 3 hours as spread out over 8, 9, 10, etc. hours. The difference between paid hours and the unpaid hours forms the surplus value extracted, which is the chief component in profit (though not the same).

That's an oversimplification, but the point is that ownership adds no value. Management and administration can, but not ownership alone. It is only ownership of the constant capital that the owner entitles themselves to the profits, participating in a Money -> Commodities(means of production + labor power) -> Production(combination of MoP and Lp) -> Commodities' (greater value than original commodities) -> Money' (greater sum of money than originally fronted, fresh for the surplus to contribute to subsistence of the capitalist as well as expanded production). This is just a Money -> Greater Money circuit, which exponentially grows, the only action being buying and selling from the owners perspective (and this is often automated by having others do it).

Great excerpt! Definitely helps to show his method in action.

As @[email protected] said, there's a huge difference between selectively using Nazis for their knowledge on R&D while keeping them on a tight leash, imprisoning, and even executing them, and what the West did, which involved giving them cushy jobs, erasing their crimes, and putting them in the highest seats of leadership of organizations like NATO. The West loved the Nazis (still does), the Soviets hated them.

This isn't really accurate. Communism is about full, collectivized ownership, not tiny cells of cooperatives. Everyone across society should have equal ownership of production across society. We should certainly work towards sublimating private property and eliminating class, but we shouldn't say that factory A worker A is the only one that has a say about what goes on in factory A, that would go horribly with central planning.

Castro himself took the blame for the mistreatment of the LGBTQ community in early revolutionary Cuba, calling it a "great mistake." Thanks to Cuba's adoption of Marxism-Leninism, and generally putting a focus on the people, Cuba has made fantastic strides. Cuba's current Family Code is one of the most LGBTQ friendly codes in the entire world. It was thanks to Che, Castro, and the revolutionaries in general that a more progressive society came to be.

Lemmy's primary devs are Marxists, as are a ton of its users.