☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆

  • 34 Posts
  • 471 Comments
Joined 6 years ago
Cake day: January 18th, 2020
  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What's a Tankie?
    151·
    2 days ago

    You seem to be missing the fundamental definition. Capitalism is a system where a class of owners exploits those who must sell their labor. A capitalist is a factory owner or a landlord who profits solely from their ownership, not their work. In a socialist state, a worker’s labor has direct social value. They are building a society for all, not generating passive income for a separate class of owners.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Asking Lemmy for a concise write up about why Corporate Social Media can't work ?
    9·
    13 days ago

    Public forums should be publicly owned. These are essential social tools that allow us to have discussions with each other and shape our views and opinions. These forums must be operated in an open and transparent manner in a way that’s accountable to the public.

    Privately owned platforms are neither neutral or unbiased. The content on these sites is carefully curated. Views and opinions that are unpalatable to the owners of these platforms are often suppressed, and sometimes outright banned. When the content that a user produces does not fit with the interests of the platform it gets removed and communities end up being destroyed.

    Another problem is that user data constitutes a significant source of revenue for corporate social media platforms. The information collected about the users can reveal a lot more about the individual than most people realize. It’s possible for the owners of the platforms to identify users based on the address of the device they’re using, see their location, who they interact with, and so on. This creates a comprehensive profile of the person along with the network of individuals whom they interact with.

    This information is shared with the affiliates of the platform as well as government entities. It’s clear that commercial platforms do not respect user privacy, nor are the users in control of their content. While it can be useful to participate on such platforms in order to agitate, educate, and recruit comrades, they should not be seen as open forums.

    Open source platforms provide a viable alternative to corporate social media. These platforms are developed on a non-profit basis and are hosted by volunteers across the globe. A growing number of such platforms are available today and millions of people are using them already.

    From that perspective I think that open and federated platforms. Instead of all users having accounts on the same server, federated platforms have many servers that all talk to each other to create the network. If you have the technical expertise, it’s even possible to run your own.

    One important aspect of the Fediverse is that it’s much harder to censor and manipulate content than it is with centralized networks such as Reddit and BlueSky. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries and jurisdictions.

    Open platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. It’s also more difficult for third parties to collect data since it doesn’t all conveniently live on the same server that some company owns. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads and tracker bloat.

    Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook or Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another.

    On the other hand, a federated network that’s developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network. More users joining Mastodon is a net positive for Lemmy because we get more content and more people to have discussions with.

    Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it’s actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens.

    Marxist theory states that in order to be free, the workers must own the means of production. This idea is directly applicable in the context of social media. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored by corporate interests.

    No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it’s going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn’t suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform.

    On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they’re developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them.

    It’s time for us to get serious about owning our tools and start using communication platforms built by the people and for the people.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•do you remember a time when societies were so polarized and shifted so much to the right like today? How long did it last?
    20·
    14 days ago

    Just look at Europe at the start of the 20th century and the rise of fascism. We’re seeing a very similar dynamic unfolding in the west today. It lasted until USSR broke the back of the fascists in WW2. It’s also important to note that right wing extremism gets a lot of support from the rich normalizing their views.

    It’s also dangerous to think that such right wing movement can be stopped simply by voting. German nazis never won more than 37% of the vote while there were still democratic elections in place. Once these people get in power the mask comes off.

    First chapter in Blackshirts and Reds discusses the rise of fascists in Italy and nazis in Germany, and it’s hard not to draw parallels with what we’re seeing happening across the Western sphere right now:

    After World War I, Italy had settled into a pattern of parliamen­tary democracy. The low pay scales were improving, and the trains were already running on time. But the capitalist economy was in a postwar recession. Investments stagnated, heavy industry operated far below capacity, and corporate profits and agribusiness exports were declining.

    To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut - measures that might sound familiar to us today. But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921 , many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boy­cotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.

    To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.

    In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusi­ness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the “March on Rome,” contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy’s top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist “revolution”- really a coup d’etat - took place.

    In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.

    During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown­ shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had con­cluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with gener­ous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July 1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.

    In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bour­geoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.

    In the December 1932 election, three candidates ran for president: the conservative incumbent Field Marshal von Hindenburg, the Nazi candidate Adolph Hitler, and the Communist party candidate Ernst Thaelmann. In his campaign, Thaelmann argued that a vote for Hindenburg amounted to a vote for Hitler and that Hitler would lead Germany into war. The bourgeois press, including the Social Democrats, denounced this view as “Moscow inspired.” Hindenburg was re-elected while the Nazis dropped approximately two million votes in the Reichstag election as compared to their peak of over 13.7 million.

    True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party’s proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds. Meanwhile a number of right-wing parties coalesced behind the Nazis and in January 1933, just weeks after the election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.