Think of the post office, or amtrak, or the NY subway, or public schools. They provide shit service at outrageous cost, and with all of that they aren't even profitable counting the public teet as "revenue". And they don't need to be because their customers aren't the people relying on their services, their "customers" are nameless bureaucrats spending other peoples' money.
Companies aren't inherently good, it's just that in a free market the bad ones are allowed to die.
@olmitch > state owned companies sold off seems like there is something of a mess in here somewhere shouldn't a 'company' be profitable enough that it doesn't need to be sold to stand on its own :blobcatderpy2:
@incognitum@icedquinn@olmitch socialist activists seem to pretend that abolishing capitalism means that corporations and industry would cease to exist, in a "food comes from a grocery store" mindset. In reality, it means that companies are nationalized and seized by the state (which communists call "the workers" or "the people") and become state-owned corporations.
State-owned corporations operate on a different set of incentives: money and growth of their corporation don't come from profit (revenue minus costs) or happy customers, it comes from The Party (bureaucrats with politically-correct opinions). Therefore state-owned corporations tend to be very inefficient, very polluting, miserable to work for, an miserable to buy from.
The post office is a good example, with the expression "going postal" coming from how happy their workers are with their jobs. In terms of customer satisfaction, I'd point to the VA (Veteran's Administration) as the state-owned corporation for single-payer public-option healthcare. Public school teacher low salaries, public school teacher child abuse (and inability to be fired for it).
Socialists seem to think that all industry and corporations should work that way, and point to the most regulated and government-controlled industries as examples of how capitalism is failing, demanding even more merger of state and corporate power as the solution. Socialism was never about ending corporations, it was always about making them too big to fail and then incorporating them into the government.
Full-blown communism is when you have to go to work and your shitty abusive job, and refusing to do so is unpatriotic and criminal. There is no unemployment or homelessness in communism because they're rounded up and put in sweatshops. If they refuse to work, they're imprisoned and enslaved and sent to more remote areas. Look up "Wrecking" in the USSR.
@thendrix@icedquinn@incognitum@olmitch the CIA is fascist and therefore benefits from socialism. I forget who said it but it went like "The very portrait of fascism is the man sitting at the FBI desk at Twitter".
You can't have an FBI desk at every fedi instance admin's house. That's why they need a monopoly that needs to be regulated such that it becomes illegal to run a fedi instance. For instance, legally requiring real-time moderation that is impossible for anyone but a megacorporation to do, and removing the concept of "posts are property of their respective users".
Consolidation of the market under a few giant umbrella companies is great for the government, and is worth bailing them out as they get less and less competitive. Everything gets shittier, but the fascists gain increasing control over an ever-shrinking pie. If Marxist revolution comes, it'll just be a CIA coup to remove the remaining publicly-elected officials and non-government power, and crown themselves (the TLAs) kings, making what they were building all along official.
@icedquinn@incognitum@olmitch I'm sure there was some of that because the CIA is evil and should be destroyed. But also communists lie and blame the CIA for literally everything. The USSR did the vast majority of it to itself.
@aven@incognitum@olmitch there are those old anticommunist print manuals they gave out. they basically detail how to deliberately create inefficiencies and bureaucracy so a working group can get as little done as possible.
sadly it seems they then used it domestically because a lot of stuff here looks exactly like how they told anticommunists how to crash production :blabcat: