Under capitalism, workers are exploited due to them being forced to exchange their labor for wages, while the capitalist class profits by appropriating the surplus value created by the workers. Workers, despite receiving wages, lack control over the means of production and decision-making, leading to an unequal power dynamic. Any worker who identifies with capitalists is suffering a form of Stockholm Syndrome, where they align with their oppressor due to systemic conditioning and societal norms.
Old Soviet Joke
At a large rally, the speaker asks:
Comrades, what is capitalism ?
The crowd roars back:
The exploitation of man by man !!!
The speaker then asks:
what is Socialism !!
and the crowd roars:
The Reverse !!
@failedLyndonLaRouchite
I guess the joke is that the crowd is uneducated on what Socialism is, since that's the only way this joke makes sense.
Well, not really.
The joke is that the then-really existing socialism is/was just as exploitative as capitalism - which it was. But, this is precisely because it was not "socialism" - quite on the contrary - it's because, for the most part, Bolsheviks & other Communist parties that took power actually *perpetuated* capitalist production relations, by substituting their nomenklatura into the role of the capitalist, maintaining their rule and privileges by continued skimming off the surplus value of labor, this time of the working people of the entire state.
(Things were more complex, of course, and there were many notable achievements e.g. in socializing education and health, but to the first approximation, this was it.)
So the joke is, at the same time, a legit criticism of the Soviet & related systems, and a very shoddy response to @Radical_EgoCom's comment. What it points out, correctly, is that Soviets never succeeded in, and ultimately were never serious about, dismantling the relations of production criticized in the original post - and the criticism is left standing on its merits.
And, while I'm here mostly dismissing @failedLyndonLaRouchite snarky response as ungrounded, I am also *very* wary of portraying workers as "uneducated". Working people can think with their heads just fine when they're not spoonfed propaganda, thank you very much. They could see very well the differences between, say, where they could afford to go to the vacation and where Party leaders did, how easy it was get officials to look the other way if you could bribe them, and I could go on. Oh I could.
The joke with overthrowing this snakes' pit of hypocrisy that called itself "socialism", and few were sorry to see it go, was that it got much worse before it got better - and while people's lives eventually got more materially comfortable, they remained more precarious than before, and exploitation never ceased.
@reviewer2 @Radical_EgoCom
difficult for me to say how dis interested I am in your long long toots
but it is a free interent; you can say what you want
sincerely, good luck to you