Speaking for myself, personally, I also don’t like the maximalism. It is (should) also (be) okay to talk about your depression, anxiety and issues, if you aren’t at all suicidal and in no risk of becoming suicidal. Imagining reading something like this as past me, who was more stuck in depression than today, I’d read it as “okay, I know I am not at all suicidal, so I better not talk about my issues so that the ones that are can have all the resources, as I am not worthy of them.”

The truth is: Professionals (including specialised hotlines) and really, really good friends (and ironically, sometimes strangers on the internet) are the only truly mostly reliable places to vent and find support without risking being misunderstood, and/or them not following through at all. And you have to build from there, with their help.

Personally, I don’t think even Merz is at the point just yet to outright create a coalition with them. However, that they did push a directive and try to push an actual law through parliament with AfD votes already is a sign of the direction things may end up going. Who knows, in a few months or years, there might just end up something happening like trouble in the most likely coming coalition of CDU/SPD, where the CDU just says they “had no choice” but to introduce a proto-fascist law that they and the AfD support, but the actual ruling coalition did not, resulting in legitimising them more and paving the way for an actual coalition.

Yeah, sorry, but that is like looking at the map in 1930 from these ones and saying “the NSDAP voters come from East Prussia only, don’t complain about the Nazis in Germany!”

I heard that argument often, and it’s true that the same way and same “we essentially keep the old constitution alive completely and change laws in ways that were technically legal” as back then won’t work.

However, fascism - also in the 1930s already - also has strategies like: “Just doing illegal things and overstepping what your posts are allowed to do, knowing you can only be stopped by force, even if judges and your superiors disagree.” That one was a massive part of how Hitler quickly outmanoeuvred von Papen, even though Papen was chancellor and Hitler “just” vice chancellor. The NSDAP-adjacent ministers, police chiefs, judges, etc. simply did not report to Papen, no matter what the law and constitution said.

What I am getting at: One should never think the laws on paper are some kind of shield and holy fact, only the laws as the executive (cops and courts, essentially) protects and enacts are what really matters, and those are corruptible, no matter how good the constitution is. (Another often quoted example: The constitution of North Korea also guarantees a lot of freedoms and rights, but no one would say, that protects the people there.)

It really isn’t, but as long as those resources are distributed through a market, there are problems even if you add money. Say the billionaires truly are incorruptible angels and put all their money to providing food and shelter, the not-yet-billionaires in the market suddenly have incentives to raise prices, withhold food to the market while prices are rising as a speculative gambit, stuff like that.

That’s one of the mechanisms through which the system itself, that produces billionaires, makes it at least hard or - imo - even impossible to truly undo the damage it does to create such billionaires, even when you have those billions. Another example is corruption: As soon as you put a lot of money into an issue, it creates an incentive there to funnel money away in secret, to provide false solutions that don’t solve anything, to scam, etc. A friend of mine worked on projects providing water infrastructure in countries in Africa from philanthropic and international aid funds, and he did get often frustrated telling how some projects simply vanish halfway through, because someone down the line had basically run off with the money (not that the projects were wholly useless, either, but they failed to fundamentally solve things by just throwing money at them). Someone like Bill Gates, as another example, has been unironically doing a lot of good as a philanthropist, but all his money still wasn’t able to truly tackle the root causes of the problems in the countries where he supports healthcare and such things - and inevitably, some of the funds he provided were used on glamour projects or ineffectual, nice-sounding strategies, or ended up in outright corruption. And at the same time, the question remains, what the system that made him a billionaire caused in damages to begin with.

That’s why I still think you can’t really tackle all these problems without doing away with a market structure, exchange value, capital accumulation, etc. - i.e., why I remain a dirty commie, instead of just arguing for redistribution (redistribution and more social-democratic, beneficial investment is still good, but you gotta always aim for the abolition of private property and capital accumulation as an end goal, imo).

Oh, and I just realised my ramble kind of missed OP’s point, which is also important: All the money caught up in the three-digit multi-billionaires net worth? It’s not representative of true goods and labour, it is what Marx would have called “dead” capital. As soon as it is used for anything but as financial capital, it can drive inflation massively, which connects to part of my first point.

EDIT: Another example that just came to my mind for how this can impact things - Mansa Musa and the stories surrounding his lavish spending during his Hajj, basically crashing the local economies. So, even pre-capitalist systems had to deal with these dynamics.

This is an interesting conundrum, actually. The big question at its core being:

Can you ever do enough good through philanthropy, so that it offsets the damage you had to do, in order to become a billionaire? Can even all the billionaires in the world do enough good with their money, to offset the damage done by a system, that allowed for them to become billionaires?

I, personally, don’t think it is possible.

To give an actual answer: I think, the world would definitely be better, but unless those billionaires collectively used all the power their money provides, to do away with money and the possibility of billionaires altogether, I don’t think it would amount to all that much.

It’s obviously because the internet is so daft, I heard they even upvoted beans.

Something good keeps getting better, thank you all for your work!

Oh, thanks for the info, that is great to know!

As far as I know, from when this was discussed after the first Reddit exodus, only commenting and posting makes you an active user. So the number is somewhat deceivingly small, as the vast majority on platforms like this are lurkers who maybe post/comment every once in a while at most.

This is the way, after all, Lemmy has lots of great mobile apps.

My great-grandpa actually had to hide from the Gestapo during those years, and my great-great-uncle died in a Nazi prison, so I have some family bragging rights I guess.

Those bragging rights unfortunately don’t feel nearly as good, when I realise I might end up in the same situation with how things are going…

So, it isn’t the exact same situation, but just as a reminder: von Papen, the conservative guy who ultimately put Hitler into power, initially thought he’d be savvy and cede only “not that important” posts to Hitler and the NSDAP. After all, a silly, comically insane upstart like Hitler would be easily outmanoeuvred by knowing the law and how statecraft works, right?

Well, the Nazis just used those posts in illegal ways, overstepped their official authority and refused to report to von Papen at all (whom they should at that point have been subservient to) - knowing full well no one was going to stop them anyway. Shortly thereafter, von Papen was out and Hitler was chancellor.

Von Papen managed to live until 1969, and wrote an autobiography that was derided by historians for having a terribly naive lack of understanding politics, lack of principles and being full of vanity.

I get the sentiment, but no lie, I often have had health anxiety that I could actually calm down by googling symptoms. Because more often than not, the really bad stuff does not really fit into the symptoms I had, at least not properly.

The fact the doctor wears clothing implies the patient decided to go to his appointment completely nude.

Do you mean China? So, just to frontload this - I don’t think China or any Marxist-Leninist states managed to be properly communist, outside of symbolism. There’s material reasons for that, too, mostly that the cycle of capital accumulation from labour -> reinvestment into productive forces continued in an exploitative way. Both Mao and Stalin wrote things trying to justify that dynamic persisting, Mao’s most damning comment comes from a footnote on a document from 1953, which can be found as “On State Capitalism” on marxists.org. Stalin meanwhile wrote “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR”, which has intersting stuff like “The Law of Value Under Socialism”, and was very influential in China.

But at the time of the Chinese Civil War and Mao’s faction winning out, the US simply wasn’t the powerhouse of international meddling it was, yet. Even so, western allies tried to focus their support on the Chinese Nationalists and KMT, but they proved to be too incompetent and disorganised at the time. When the US started to court the People’s Republic of China again much later, it was because of the conflict between the Soviet Union and China, as well as there being a huge market for industrial and consumer goods, as well as for investing accumulated (dead) capital beckoning.

Point being: It’s a bit of a fallacy to imagine the US as this omnipotent international imperialist, especially before the Cold War. Not that they don’t do a lot of meddling, but they aren’t able to just do anything to anyone everywhere (even though secret services, be it CIA, FSB or Mossad - they will always want you to believe in their omniscience and omnipotence).

Treat my answer as what it is - hearsay - but the way I remember reading about it being explained, there is indeed sign-language poetry, and gestures having similar or complimentary movements were considered rhyming, which I guess also makes intuitive sense.

Even just as a technicality, the 1% have not always existed, most tribal societies did not have class divisions like that. Both anthropological studies of existing tribal societies show examples of that, and the archaeological record, too, lays out it was common.

And I understand feeling like that, but it is a pretty weak argument, tbh. It is even hard to engage with, because it’s basically starting at a completely different outset of concepts and understanding. Firstly, it reduces socialism to only systems of perfect equality of power - when even Marx acknowledged that this is not only impossible but also undesirable.

Then it just packs all kinds of class arrangements into “The 1%” and “the worker class”. Was European feudalism like that? Ancient palace economies? Tribal gift economies? Pre-historic tribal arrangements? The Incan/Andean planned economy? Each with their own complexities, class relations and all showing that the basic idea - humanity evolving along it’s material capabilities and necessities - hold true.

Lastly, related to the idea that proper socialism would mean perfect equality of power - sure, corruption in some way has probably always existed. People will also always murder each other in some way. Using that as an argument to say it is impossible to establish a system that minimises murders is how your reasoning sounds to me.

And the system is always what limits or enables the way this corruption and gaming the system plays out. How much property and/or power can be concentrated? Capitalism concentrates vastly more wealth and capital than the systems before it, both for good (e.g. the development of productive forces has enabled many things) and ill. Just because perfection may not be possible, does not mean a system without exchange of value and capital accumulation is impossible (has existed before for sure, yes, even for more complex economies than a small tribe), and it does not mean it has to exist in a way that is more barbarous than the current state of affairs.

That notional aspiration to socialism is basically the ideological smokescreen. It was much more effective in the Cold War era, but it condenses down to: “Suffer through our version of (state) capitalism and exploitative labour for our capital accumulation” - be it by state institutions or even state-sponsored billionaires - “and at the end of it, we promise, there will be communism.”

But that “communism” then tends to be like nuclear fusion - always 20 years away.

Personally, I handle it like this: Killing people is never right, but it isn’t always the best decision to do “the right” thing. The right thing, morally, would have been, to collectively not create a system that has CEOs and billionaires. Just like, the ideal revolution would only depose and take the power from the ruling classes and would have no need for terror. But it’s usually impossible to follow a completely ideal situation.

I think the distinction is important, mainly because the enjoyment of revenge for revenge’s sake and violence for violence’s sake is pretty real and can become very dangerous to the success of revolutionary action. So it is good to remind yourself of the ideal situation (no killing), as to curb any excesses if at all possible. It does not mean you cannot go against those ideals - in the end, ideals are trumped by material reality and its necessities.