The British popularized the phrase, which gives away the playbook. The rich and powerful use this playbook time and again to divide the masses. Education should help, but siloed propaganda is really effective to counter even education because propaganda uses fear & hate to bring out the animal in you, and when you're angry and scared you forget all reason and all education.
The British did a 'divide and rule'. Religion was the tool used to do the division 75 years ago at the time of separation. Religion is the same tool used today to divide the country internally and manufacture hate and consent for war.
Greed finds a way to get too big. However, it is self-destructive and therefore short-lived. Greed is so selfish, it eats itself alive till there is one last malignant tumor cell standing, and with him ends the entire disease, sometimes only to reappear a few decades later when old memories have faded and the wisdom wasn't fully taught and/or learned. Like a body fights a foreign body, humanity collectively needs to isolate, acknowledge, and curb the evil of greed. Humanity will eventually evolve to learn this important lesson and make sure this mistake isn't repeated.
I've had similar experiences - endless tiring bad faith discussions. I sincerely believe market socialism is a realistic step we can take to improve human condition, but they seem convinced against it and hell bent on 'revolution'. It's clearly a cult with group think, they've arrived at their conclusions by reading theory, not from personal experience, self awareness, empathy & logic.
Hey, I've argued this exact stance with my Marxist brothers a few times here and here. They seem sure of revolution and against market socialism. Anyways, I've created a community for us to talk more about it here - Collective Cake
And what a coincidence today being a Collective Cake day!
Haha, and if you look in the diametrically opposite direction, you will find God! And clearly, God will kick the Devil's ass, always has and always will!
PS: this coming from an anti-thiest
Climate change, wealth inequality, fascism, war, the global epidemic of loneliness & depression aren't distinct disconnected problems. They are a singular globally connected problem. And it requires a singular globally connected solution. We'd need a few things -
We will need to take care of all human essential services like healthcare, education, food, banking, technology etc. Only things that add positive value to society. We can have a singular globally coordinated effort.
We will need an economic engine, so as to provide a UBI for all, reasonably paid based on cost of living. To generate income we can sell our products & services at a markup to non-union members.
We will need an army because the enemy has one and we need to defend ourselves.
Decentralization is also a defence mechanism. Don't build 1 giant bank, build a million connected credit unions all utilizing the same backend tools & processes. It's such a nice defense mechanism that we might even be able to skip the army altogether, which bank are you gonna breakup when we can open a hundred more tomorrow.
Everyone alive right now must have ancestors who very literally did live & survive though the stone age and the ages before and after that. Wish I knew what my ancestors did to survive stone age, or better still if I could like watch them in a time lapse video. I guess I might have run away from stone lifting to go be a shepherd or something.
There is no evidence of cooperatives being capable of out-competing the megacorps of today in a system already controlled by megacorps. There is no growing systemic pressure for cooperatives to overwhelm megacorps, only further proletarianizaton and social stratification.
Nature tells you the power of cooperative working, look at ants, bees, fungi. The fediverse is a smack in the face of Reddit, Unix in the face of Microsoft. These things only grow, never shrink. There are more people in credit unions in America than any private bank. There are so many cooperatives in the agriculture space you wouldn't believe. Look up mondragon, the largest cooperative employer with over 70k employees. Look up IFFCO, the largest agriculture cooperative connecting farmers in India, which has a revenue of over $7 billion/yr. These are behemoths, a force for good. They are not being overwhelmed by megacorps, rather they overwhelm the megacorps.
You are correct, we are already in Capitalism. Replacing the entirety of the firms within a Capitalist system with cooperatives is a monstrous task without first overthrowing the State to help facilitate things
Disagree, cooperatives already exist. Everywhere! We just need more and more, one at a time. Bigger and stronger! Where is the need to overthrow the state?
Secondly, I do not want to start over. I want revolution, then a nationalization of key industries like the banks, railroads, airlines, energy sector, raw materials, telecommunication, etc. Not a replacement, but a nationalization. Additionally, large firms will be nationalized, ie Amazon, Google, Meta, Nvidia, other huge firms that dominate the private sector will be folded into the public.
And I want the same level of nationalization as you here, but you are still asking for a revolution as a starting point, i.e erase the entire drawing board and start over.
You're the one in the fantasy land. We're already in capitalism, I'm only adding cooperatives, you know the whole workers owing the means of production that you advocate for. I'm literally taking us from where we currently are to a better place, A to B. You want to erase the whole drawing board and start over.
My brother, I gave you a version of capitalism where workers globally own the means of production. We'll even put measures against monopolization, labor exploitation, and short term profit seeking. Hell even add 100% taxation over a billion dollars so nobody gets too big. You'll still won't like it because it ain't communism.
The British popularized the phrase, which gives away the playbook. The rich and powerful use this playbook time and again to divide the masses. Education should help, but siloed propaganda is really effective to counter even education because propaganda uses fear & hate to bring out the animal in you, and when you're angry and scared you forget all reason and all education.