Is it contradictory to run an anti-capitalist business? Is it inevitable to fail under capitalism? And what would it look like under socialism?

  • diegeticscream[all]🔻
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    10 months ago

    What does an anticapitalist business look like? Is that not a contradiction in terms?

    Plenty of businesses run with radlib aesthetics, or even sell leftist literature/stickers/merch.

    Capitalism is happy to subsume anticapitalist aesthetics into the structure of capitalism.

      • 新星 [they/them/🏳️‍⚧️]
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        10 months ago

        To add to the above point, I give you Lenin:

        During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

        Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution

      • albigu
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        10 months ago

        Contradictions are a natural occurrence in society. You can’t build communism within capitalism neatly like that, but it doesn’t inherently mean that those contradictions are bad, or make the person doing them automatically bad. Which is why it depends on the context. For instance, is it a real estate agency that has the hammer and sickle on the logo, or is it more like an actual communist literature bookshop? I think this question is more interesting than the vagueness of contradiction.