#socalism

[whereserpentswalk]

Don't trust any "leftism" that treats working as moral and not working as immoral. Definitely don't trust "leftism" that wants to give extra rights or privileges to people who work "more"/"harder"/"at all". It's based in very Christan and very capitalist ideas that will be used to take away people's rights, it is not real leftism, it is trying to use leftist structures to create a more efficient version of capitalist ideals of 'work or starve' wage slavery. It will also always arbitrarily divide work into "real work", or "fake work" based on arbitrary and often very conservative standards.

Actual leftism must be based on the idea that you have a right to exist without having to prove you provide something for society. If you don't have a right to be a complete burden on society then you don't have rights at all.

Also, it's just a known fact that people will work without anything forcing them to.

#196 #my thougts #leftist #leftism #left #socalism #libertarian socialism #socialism #work #marxism #anarchism

[wronggalaxy]

I'm as anti landlord as anybody, probably more than a lot of people after having me, my parents, and five of my siblings ages 3-10 forced to the streets by our old one when I was 5 because he couldn't up the price until we were gone, but y'all need to realize not every landlord is a millionaire renting out two dozen houses just because they want to. Some of them are just normal people who have no choice but to rent out their dead parents old house so their children don't starve to death. And until you recognize that, we can never end poverty or give everyone a house.

#poverty #impoverished #growing up poor #anti capitalism #end homelessness #landlords #renting #renting a house #socalism #everyone should have a home #the truth #hard pill to swallow #anti landlord #anti renting

[squwooshk]

I wrote this essay for another platform, but I want to share it here.

Capitalism is killing art, in every part of the process. From the creation, the consumption and finally the preservation. In this serious of essays, we'll be looking at the preservation in particular. Looking at the ending of the process, and working backwards, will help give us a stronger understanding of the concepts and powers at play in the production, for the preservation and consumption directly effect the creation. This first part of the series will look into the effects of capitalism, and private property, more specifically intellectual property, on the preservation of art and the methods of art preservation that are at odds with capitalism.

Emulation & Video-game Piracy

An important part of the process of preserving art is making sure that the art work can be experienced by as many people, for as long as possible. When it comes to video-games in particular, there's plenty of fans who are dedicated enough to the art for to make sure retro games are always playable for a more general audience, and with as much accuracy to the original experience as possible. These dedicated fans create emulators, software programs that are able to replicate the functions of older video-game consoles, in order to allow older games to be easily playable to modern gamers.

Emulators themselves, are fully allowed under the law[1], however we do encounter a problem. The data that emulators are designed to read, is often illegal to distribute on the internet. The spread of this software, the actual data of a particular video game, is considered digital piracy, a theft of intellectual property[2]. This is an argument often used by corporations like Nintendo to shutdown websites that host these data files[3]. However, these same corporations often give no good alternatives to emulation, and in extention this piracy.

Many of these companies do not re-release these games, at best they may remake them or occasionally offer a limited selection on their own emulators, which can often have errors or be tied to a subscription service, as is the case with Nintendo.[4],

The preservation of these games often come down to an effort from the fans, an effort that is in direct conflict with the intellectual property owners. Without emulation, many more obscure games, and a good number of games with complex licensing agreements, would be permanently lost to time.

I would like to take the time to look at two examples in particular, Metal Gear Solid (Game Boy Color, also known as Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babel in Japan) and Mother 3. These examples are far from being the only examples worth talking about, but I think they both greatly exemplify the ideas I wish to discuss.

Metal Gear Solid (Gameboy Color) which I will refer to as Ghost Babel for the rest of this essay, for simplicity and to avoid confusion with Metal Gear Solid (PlayStation) which is a completely different game, is a game released in 2000 by Konami for the Nintendo Gameboy Color. The game was a spin-off of the Metal Gear Solid series. The game has never been re-release.

This is primarily due to the lower sales of the release brought in compared to any mainline Metal Gear Solid game (all of which have been re-release and remastered many times) and the little market demand, especially in the AAA gaming world that Konami is a part of, for 2D stealth action games. There is little profit to be found in porting over Ghost Babel to more modern systems, so it just isn't done. Art that isn't profitable is cast aside by the capitalist.

The only way to play this game, and comply with the laws of a capitalist society, is to own a Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance or a DS (but not a DSI or 3DS) and an original physical copy of the game. All these items are no longer being produced, they are all in the second hand market, and as the supply will never rise, the prices can tend to get high pretty quickly.

Not only is pricing an issue, but these objects will not last forever. The cartridges used to store the data of Gameboy Color games have batteries that will one day die, preventing saved data from being written on them[5], and the electronic parts in these systems, and in the cartridges, will one day fail as any other machine will without constant maintenance. Preservation through the ownership of the original hardware is limited in scope, and is doomed for failure.

The only method of preservation that solves all these problems, the problem of limited supply, high prices and degradation of hardware, is digital emulation and piracy. This is however, in direct conflict with the intellectual property of the capitalist. The capitalist wishes to actively suppress these acts of preservation in the name of preserving their intellectual property[6]

Mother 3 is a video game created by Nintendo that has never been released outside of Japan. The reason for this is once again a profit one, Mother 2 (know simply as Earthbound outside of Japan) did not sell well at all when it first came out and Mother 1 was never released outside of Japan untill way later, where it got a digital release, do to the growth in a western Mother Fandom. The Mother series has a very particular style and humor, that doesn't always sell as well with western audiences, making localization a process that yealds little profit, thus the localization is never made.

For anyone who lives outside of Japan, the only way to play this game is illegally. You must rely on fan translation and emulation. No one other than Japanese people, or people who know Japanese, own a Japanese Game Boy Advanced, and have a copy of the game, can play it without going in direct violation of the interests of the capitalist and violating their intellectual property rights.

Music preservation and Intellectual Property

Video-games are far from the only art from that's preservation is at threat from capitalism. Music is another art form that has been plagued by intellectual property. From songs that quote passages of other songs, to song that uses samples with licensing issues, so much art has been altered, limited or destroyed by capitalism. I'll be looking at three different examples.

The Gun Song by Car Seat Headrest has two versions, the original version of the song, and the No Trigger Version. The differences between these two versions is pretty simple, the no trigger version is what you'll find on streaming services, and the original thay is only available on the Bandcamp version of the album. The reason for this is a lyric change due to copyright issues.

The original version of the song end with the lyrics "Down by the river, I shot my baby" sung with the same melody as the song Down by the River by Neil Young. Do to the shared melody and lyrics, this caused copyright issues. All releases of the song, other than the original independent release, have been altered to cut this part out. This song, as it was intended to be heard, has become difficult to access for most people.

The album Everything is a Lot by Will Wood and the Tapeworms was drastically altered when it was remastered, because all the samples used in the original ran into licensing issues. This lead to the more accessible version of the album (the only version getting physically releases) missing important parts of songs, in particular, the vocal send off on the track "Thermodynamic Lawyer" which originally opened with a sample from the movie Liar Liar, but now just opens immediately into the song, removing a lot of the punch of the original

The Faces mixtape by Mac Miller has faced a similar treatment to that of the Will Wood album, but on a more severe scale. The version of the album available on streaming has been gutted of many of it's samples (at least 9).

Intellectual Property & Profit Motive

Now, it's time to talk about how all these issues are an intrinsic part of capitalism. Capitalism as a system prioritizes one thing above all else, capital. Capital is itself a form of private property, and intellectual property is an idea or artistic expression turned into private property. The property holders will defend their right to profit off this property using the violence of the state, using the power of law to punish those who violate their property.

This become a problem for art when the profit motive gets involved. Profit is the driving factor behind all of these anti-preservation decisions we have discussed here today. With video-games, companies want to continue to indefinitely make a profit off of their old creations, but fail to offer an adequate way too, and often prioritizes only the cash cows. When the public tries to take this into their own hands, out of the love of art, they get punished. Their preservation is a threat, because they allow all games to be preserved and experienced freely, even the cash cows that corporations don't wish to abandon.

As for music, record labels (and in some of these cases film studios who own sound bites) want to profit off of royalties. When a song uses a sample, a good bit of the profit made on that song goes to the owners of royalty licenses, despite the fact that their intellectual property often makes up only a fraction of a truly transformational work. When they can't make their royalties, they leave the work to die.

Conclusion

Capitalism, primarily through the medium of intellectual property, a form of private property, actively disrupts the preservation of art. It seeks to destroy methods of preserving art that would eat into the profits of capitalist, without offering a viable alternative except when it seems financially beneficial to the capitalist.

Bibliography

1.https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/njtip/vol2/iss2/3/

2.https://www.howtogeek.com/262758/is-downloading-retro-video-game-roms-ever-legal/

3.https://kotaku.com/nintendo-orders-rom-site-to-destroy-all-its-games-or-1847487357

4.https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/nintendo-switch-online-is-terrible-and-its-only-getting-worse

5.https://forums.atariage.com/topic/193374-battery-life-of-old-game-cartridges/

6.(to actually gain access to this you'll probably have to prepend it with 12ft.io/) https://www.scribd.com/document/709016504/Nintendo-of-America-Inc-v-Tropic-Haze-LLC-1-24-Cv-00082-No-1-D-R-I-Feb-26-2024

#politics #socalism #anticapitalism #capitalism #communism #anarchism #art #art preservation #video games #music #emulation #piracy #leftism #essay

[northern-punk-lad]

Gonna upset some people with this some

#politics #socalism #liberals

[easternblocrelics]

Sport betting and Lottery Directorate 1981

#lady #lottery #lotto #betting #gambling #vintage #ad #advertistment #Hungary #eastern bloc #socialist #socalism #calendar #pocket calendar

[the-local-bohg-witch]

hello fellow socialist, communist, anarchist ect

im looking for resources on how a socialist, communist and or anarchist society could work or anything along those lines for a school project

would appreciate any recs <3333

#socalism #anarchism #communism #socialist #poltics #leftist #leftism #anarchist #communist

[missmayhemvr]

I am probably going to ruffle a lot of feathers saying this, but I don't think liberals can actually be allies to anyone. Hear me out on this tho because I don't believe im the first to say this and that those before me often had their meanings or purposes twisted.

So first gotta define what a liberal is, I'd say it's someone that believes in capitalism first and foremost, that it can be reformed or suite the needs of many or that it isn't inherently evil or contradictory. A liberal by this definition can want social changes then right? But this means that capitalism has to remain in the end.

This is a stumbling block, this is a thing that means so much yet in the end it will not ever by definition be able to help us all and will always come back to be an oppressive force on the lives of anyone that has been marginalized, colonized, or harmed for the sake of capital.

For example let's look at wealth distrubution in the US, we all know the top earners and we all know they didn't get there from hard work. When you look at who is the poorest in the nation you see which groups, indigenous people and black people, those historical dispossessed of their land and those dispossessed of their labor. Black people have an average family weath (meaning assets transferable, houses cars, business) of a few thousand dollars. I believe it's similar if not worse for indigenous people here. A liberal thinking themselves an ally would seek to address such ills in the confines of capitalism and political electoralism which means vote for the right people and they will even the playing field (higher taxes on the rich better social safety net end legalized discrimination) all of these things however will only address symptoms and not causes. You can raise the min wage, have good social security and be allowed to vote all you want but it will never give reparations to black folks for the labor or suffering we have been put through, it will never bring the average wealth of us to be that of or white counterparts (unless through a means I'll get to later) and it will never result in the control of the land back to the hands of indigenous peoples here. This is because at the end of the day capitalism naturally prevents these things. Under capitalism is indigenous people want their land back what is their one way of doing that? Purchase, high min wage among a peoples that have faced 100s of years of genocide isn't going to get you the billions or trillions you'd have to pay and that's if they were willing to sell. And even more so if they were willing to hire you.

A similar situation becomes clear when you look at the black belt or the hood, you're not gonna make back enough for it to ever matter if you arent Beyonce and even then the structure is working against you.

Finally we look globally towards Africa and south America where regardless of the nation the population size or the volume of rare and pricy minerals or oil, these countries not only remain rather poor but the economy tends to still be run by the very nations or corporations that colonized in the first place. Because by no rule of capitalism will you ever be able to buy your way out of this oppression.

Liberals commitment to capitalism will always be greater than their commitments to people. A system which the only equality it can ever truly provide is by dispossessing few that would be seen as middle class and putting them in the same level of poverty as bipoc. Liberals as such will always push against us when we choose to fight back in meaningful ways and would rather ally themselves with fascist if and when able as they don't challenge the system of capitalism but just reinforce it. You can see it would the people's of various African nations sought to take back the farm land being used for cash crops so they could feed the people and not be reliant on other nations, liberal people and institutes sided with the settlers who stole the land in the first place. You see Biden who is truly the face of liberalism literally holding the hand of an Italian fascist turned pm.

So I don't think bipoc, queer or oppressed nations can trust liberal allyship. As it confines us more than uplifts us.

#black liberation #Indigenous liberation #black lives matter #indigenous lives matter #decolonialism #anti imperialism #socalism #anarchism

[juice-from-17776-football]

yes to be political but like trump and biden are genocidal, deranged, senile fools and to be completely fucking honest i dont WANT to vote for either of them.

i dont want to vote for genocide joe and i will sooner kill myself than vote for trump. morally i despise the both of them.

and i'm sorry if i come off as ignorant but i suppose that i am, because ive never voted before. i guess i have to go do research but i dont even know where to start. help me leftists what do i DO

#pro palestine #leftism #leftist #socalism #voting #im mentally disabled if you call me stupid for this ill kill you. i am so confused and i need help.

[triple-tree-ranch]

#socalism #liberalism is a mental illness

[phoub]

hey guys isn't it kind of funny that socialism is more democratic than democratic socialism

#phoub #socalism

[whereserpentswalk]

Remember, that it is a common soft-bigot talking point to frame the queer community as being mostly middle class white people while "real working class people" are cishet. It's especially common among tankies and conservatives.

Its completely fair to criticize the fact that white, middle class, (and useally gender conforming and cis) queer people are the ones who get the most representation, or how people don't understand how queerness intersects with other identities. But when you step into the category of saying things like "the queer community/liberation movement is a bunch of privileged white kids" then you've fallen into one of the narratives that homophobes use to try to separate the queer rights movement from more established rights movements.

#leftist #leftism #my thougts #196 #praxis #my thoughts #marxism #libertarian socialism #socalism #socialism #queer #non binary #bisexaul #bisexuality #biseuxal #bisexual #trans #gay #lgbt #lgbtq community #lgbt pride #queer liberation

[wronggalaxy]

I wish people would stop choosing one thing to make them look liberal and then ignoring not just everything else, but also the truth about that one thing.

For example: people talk alot about non-white not being drawn/painted/etc very often, especially by white people, which is very true and something we DO need to talk about. But then you have certain people who talk about that on the surface level without meaning it or doing anything else anti-racist.

I just saw a post talking about black people in art works(OP did nothing wrong to be clear, they aren't the type I'm talking about, their post just triggered me thinking about this), or more accurately the lack of them, and it reminded me of the time a few months ago someone got Mad, capital 'm', at me because none of my art features a non-white person. Ignoring the fact, a fact they knew to be clear, that I don't make that kind of art.

Example of my type of art: right now I'm making a sculpture(I believe that's the right word) by gluing old medicine cups and a picture I colored of Christmas candy similar to what my elementary school gave us every winter and sales papers from my nearest Food City and such to a shoe box as a representation of what it's like to be a disabled, impoverished, teenager.

My art features 0 humans, MAYBE myself, but I haven't done anything like that since kindergarten. The closest thing to a person I've made were a brain, a finger, and a couple eyes out of clay. The only one of those that were explicitly white was the finger, and it was based on the coal miners I see all the time(I live in Eastern Kentucky), so it HAD to be white(though you couldn't half tell under all the 'blood' and 'dirt' and 'coal dust').

To make it worse, she was white, I am not.

#racisim #racism #mixed race #semi rant #art #art tumblr #small artist #native american #cherokee #white people #anti racism #liberal ideas #leftist #leftism #socalism #socialist #disability #disabled #impoverished #poverty #growing up poor #eastern kentucky

[wickedwiccan9]

#relatable quotes #hobbitcore #weirdcore #goblincore #socalism

[squwooshk]

I love the fact that They Might Be Giants are like this zany Geek Rock band, but they're also very outspoken leftist. Like, even from their first record they've been making songs making fun of the absurdity of life under Capitalism. They've got several unmistakably Socialist songs, and they aren't afraid to share their opinions.

#they might be giants #politics #socalism

[hardpacker]

Fellow workers,

Hitherto the Irish in the United States have almost entirely supported the Democratic Party, but the time has come when the majority of thoughtful Irishmen are beginning to realise that as the causes that originally led to that affiliation are no longer existent, the affiliation itself must be reconsidered. Political parties must thrive or fail according to the present development of the class in society they represent, and cannot be kept alive by a mere tradition of their attitude in past emergencies.

No; fellow countrymen, political parties are the expression of economic interests, and in the last analysis are carried to victory or defeat by the development or retardation of economic classes. The Republican Party is the political weapon of advanced capital, of great trusts and mammoth combination of wealth. Hence as during the last decade the whole trend of industry has been toward greater concentration of capital we find that the Republican Party has grown stronger and stronger and its hold upon the political institutions of the country has proportionately tightened. To-day the governmental machinery of the United States is completely in the hands of the servants of capital, and Senate and Congress are but instruments for registering the decrees of the trust magnates of the United States. On the other hand the Democratic Party is the party of the small business man, and of those narrow ideas upon economics and politics which correspond to the narrow business lines and restricted economic action of the middle class in general.

We Irish Workers are then not under the necessity of considering ourselves as bound by tradition to the Democratic Party; political parties are not formed by traditions, but by interests. Where then do our interests lie? Certainly not in the Republican Party – that is the party of our employers, and as our employers we know do not allow their actions to be governed by our interests we are certainly not under any moral obligation to shape our political activity to suit the interests of our employers. Where then? To answer that question properly we must ask ourselves why are we Irish here at all in this country, instead of in Ireland. Certainly we have no complaint to make against our native land, and we for the most part did not come here for pleasure. We came here because we found that Ireland was private property, that a small class had taken possession of its resources – its land, its lakes, its rivers, its mountains, its bogs, its towns and its cities, its railways, its factories, and its fisheries. In short, that a small class owned Ireland and that the remainder of the population were the bond slaves of these proprietors. We came here because we found that the government of the country was in the hands of those proprietors and their friends, and that army and navy and police were the agents of the government in executing the will of those proprietors, and for driving us back to our chains whenever we rose in revolt against oppression. And as we learned that since that government was backed and maintained by the might of a nation other than our own, and more numerous than us, we could not hope to overthrow that government and free our means of living from the grasp of those proprietors, we fled from that land of ours and came to the United States. In the United States we find that every day the condition of matters for the working class drifts more and more in the direction of the conditions we left behind. Here the resources of the country are also in the hands of a small class – the land, the rivers, the lakes, the forests, the fisheries, the towns, the cities, the factories, the railroads, the entire means of life of eighty millions of people are in the hands of a class which every day grows smaller and whose rapacity and greed and lust for power grows as its numbers diminish. Here also we find that government is but the weapon of the master class, that the military and police forces of the nation are continually at the service of the proprietors in all disputes just as in Ireland, and that the ‘rifle diet’ is served out to workers in America oftener than to peasants in the old country. But here the analogy stops. In Ireland the government was a foreign government.

We appeal to you then, fellow countrymen, to rally around the only banner that symbolises hope for you in America as in Ireland – the banner of Socialism. Cast off all your old political affiliations, and organize and vote to reconquer society in the interests of its only useful class – the workers. Let your slogan be, the common ownership of the means of life, your weapons the Industrial and Political Organization of the Wage Slaves to conquer their own emancipation.

— James Connolly, during his time living in the US 1903-1910, writing in the 1908 issue of The Harp (the newspaper of the Irish Socialist Federation he founded in the US.)

#james connolly #séamas ó conghaile #éire #reading #quotes #quotations #socalism #marxism #irish republicanism #labour #liberation

[easternblocrelics]

Garzon furniture line Hungary

#furniture #garzon #design #style #interior #vintage #socialist #socalism #hungary #eastern bloc #ad #advertistment #magazine