Mainly becauae Lemmy.ml users are tired of Lemmy.ml complaints, I would guess.

The roots of imperialism are in the monopoly stage of capitalism. It isn’t because a few bad individuals exist, it’s a material process.

To be fair, Lemmy.ml is the dev instance, and Lemmy was made very specifically to not have the problems Reddit has.

Once again, Geneva’s normally decent political instincts end up running the wrong way, and is why Geneva should read anti-imperialist theory if Geneva wants to understand how the world works. Attacking Iran is a bipartisan project decades in the making. Trump does not need a distraction from the Epstein files, this was always intended to happen, and by shifting the blame to trying to distract from the Epstein files you miss how this is advancing very rational imperialist goals of eradicating any resistance to western plundering in the middle East.

I hate the argument of “just read theory!” As much as I believe one should read theory, just telling people to do so won’t make it happen. However, there are clear limits to political instincts without solid backing in political theory and this is a prime example of it.

This is phrasemongering class reductionism. The principle contradiction in the world right now is imperialism, which the US Empire is at the head of.

Longer answer: Lemmy was originally founded by a bunch of Marxist-Leninists and socialists of similar stripes (that’s what the .ml stands for)

Technically .ml stands for Mali, and was chosen because the domain is cheap. Ended up being a bit of a funny coincedence.

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Workers sell their labor-power for wages. Owners buy labor-power and raw materials, and sell the commodities created by them for a massive amount of profits. Both “do things,” but workers live by selling their labor-power, not owners.

Norway relies on imperialism to subsidize its safety nets.

Owners do not work for a living, their incomes are not wages but a huge share of profit that comes from surplus value extraction. Doing some work here or there does not explain why their incomes are hundreds to thousands and even more times higher than workers, whose wages do vary but within a much more narrow band.

The EU exports capital to super-exploit the global south for super-profits. The EU lives off of the labor of the global south.

If you have a Real Job where you interact with the material world it is impossible to believe that 85% of the things you physically make or do are consumed by capitalists.

See, once I started working a “Real Job” I saw just how much surplus value was stolen, and turned to Marxist theory to make cohesive sense of it. 85% isn’t an over-estimation, especially if we factor in imperialism. Workers in the imperial core are paid more and exploited less than workers in the periphery.

If you think under socialism we could work 15% as much as we do now and maintain the same standard of living then lol, lmao, etc.

We will probably all work 30-40 hours a week for the next great length of time even in socialism, but with far greater societal guarantees and a less predatory system of distribution.

They did not use an ad hominem fallacy, they said you explained why being anti-genocide is wrong, and then said that that’s typical of Germans. They did not say you were wrong because you were German.

Cool story but I’ve never spoken to a party member, and the historical books I read aren’t from party members either.

It’s not treason, it’s the purpose of the US Empire’s millitary.

Nobody is saying the USSR was perfect, but all you’ve brought is just personal anecdote. I’ve spoken to people that say much the opposite!

Nah

Repeating the same dogmatic claims isn’t evidence. Stalin was definitionally not a dictator, and even offered to resign half a dozen times. The USSR was immensely liberatory.

Not sarcastic, just a communist.

Socialism fundamentally works by creating a system that taxes those who have more than others and goes to those who have less than others.

No, it doesn’t. Socialism is a mode of production and distribution based on public ownership as the principle aspect of the economy, and the working classes in control of the state. The rest of this paragraph isn’t worth responding to, because it’s based on a false premise.

In relation to the last panel, they are saying that they are giving 85% of their labor value to their boss who doesn’t work. There’s multiple problems with this way of thinking. The first and most obvious one is the 85%, which is just an arbitrarily large number to make it feel scary.

Capitalists fundamentally make profits by paying workers for less than the value their labor-power creates.

Second is the claim that the boss (and one can assume owner) doesn’t do any work. That’s obviously not true because 99.99% (I’m being dramatic) of owners work an equal or greater number of hours per week than the rest of the employees.

Nobody is saying owners do literally no labor, just that their obscene wealth comes from stealing from workers, not from their own labor. Otherwise their wages would be about the same as any other worker at that company.

And there’s also the fact that while needing to know how every aspect of the company operates the owner is the one who takes the biggest risks and has the most at stake so it makes sense that they make more than the new hire who has no work experience.

The biggest risk a capitalist takes is in becoming a worker. Workers risk their livelihood.

Yes, you’ll have owners who take more than they “need” but you also have to remember that technically all costs of the company can and are taken out of the owners paycheck because the lower profit the company makes the lower the owners paycheck can be.

Sure, but their paycheck is made up of stolen surplus value to begin with.

Hope this helps!

Can you explain?