this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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At a small scale, sure. When you reach the size of a country, not so much.
Maybe. We’ve also never had a classless country, so we don’t know for certain how very large groups of humans interact when we are free from the exploitation, division, and oppression that is inherent to class structures.
Why have we never had a classless country?
Because countries didn’t exist when humanity’s mode of production was primitive communism, and then since the agricultural revolution the means of production has always been held by individuals, which necessarily creates at least two classes, those who have, and those who have not.
There have been a few attempts by the people to seize the means of production, but they have always existed within the context of a global class system that prevents any attempt at a truly classless society. (IE, a strong centralized state is necessary to survive reactionary attempts to take back control, but a strong state creates a class system of those who have control vs those who don’t.)
Most Marxists actually acknowledge that after a socialist revolution you will still have class contradictions that society will have to work through, like the potential abuses a strong state can inflict. We generally agree though, that the key first step to creating a classless society is getting the means of production out of the hands of private individuals.
Seems to me if it was our natural tendency to treat everyone in the world the same way we'd treat our family, then it would have prevailed in some capacity, somewhere, after all this time.
Instead, it seems like we're good at participating in that kind of communism you mentioned within smaller groups, and those groups can cooperate with other groups in increasingly less familial ways as this network of groups grow larger and larger.
I don't see any evidence that our natural tendency is towards communism.
Right, and my point is that it’s not surprising that you don’t see that evidence (assuming you live in the US or elsewhere in the imperial core), given the effects that class dynamics have on social behavior. By its very nature capitalism alienates people and turns them into individualist consumers. If you travel to more communally-minded places, it’s clear that human nature is very much place- and context- dependent.
And my point is that such evidence doesn't appear to exist.