Basing your opinions on socialism on how Russia implemented it makes about as much sense as basing an opinion on Democracy on how Putin has implemented it.
Legit question, what country is a better real world example?
1936 Catalonia.
But it is actually really hard to name examples. This video explains it quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D4l_l1MedQ
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D4l_l1MedQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Saved for later. Thank you!
Communism, like capitalism, is an extreme that has certain, very difficult to achieve, requirements. Capitalism needs everyone to be morally decent in order for companies to focus on winning customers through innovation instead of propganda and lobbying, and to accept losses instead of whining. Even the transition into communism is incredibly complicated and technically what where the USSR was stuck, and once there you have to hope that the rest of the world went along with it because it’ll work either on increbily small scales(individual companies, for example) or on a global scale but not really on a mid-sized scale. Plus in both you have basic greed and people who are literally just born narcissitic or legitimately psychotic.
Extreme ideologies are great thought experiments but rarely have any kind of well-developed protections built and are pretty fragile.
If you want a better answer, look at the quality of life in countries with stronger regulations and more communism-according-to-North America systems. In the heavily privatised U.S. there are a lot of people who live absolutely shit lives due to an abyssmal lack of protections. Even in Canada, which is far too close to the U.S. here, at least a homeless person can recieve some level of medical assistance including major surgeries and Covid stimulus was more than a cheap joke.
Extreme
Canada’s medical assistance for the homeless is becoming just offer them an assisted suicide.
That’s a cute meme, but not true at all. Canada spends a lot of money on health care for the homeless. In fact, the current system of NOT spending enough on basic shelter and mental health & addiction supports means that we spend far more than we should on emergency care and downstream health-related consequences.
There is widespread agreement among those who work in social services that some form of supervised, humane institutional living is needed if we are going to solve the homelessness problem. There is hesitation to implement that because it is extremely expensive and politically fraught.
More importantly, if we are being honest, housing people in decent conditions for free would create a huge amount of competition with private sector landlords, retirement homes, long-term care homes, etc. Unfortunately, the “system” implicitly uses the threat of homelessness or squalid accommodations as a major lever to motivate people to work at jobs that are not very stimulating. Mind you, human nature being what it is, I think the same would ultimately be true under any economic system or form of government.
At least until our robotic AI overlords invent an unlimited energy source and take over the tedious work so we can all sit around doing whatever pleases us, lol.
Canada’s idea of dealing with the homeless is to send cops after them and then subsidize rental housing. Because that’s worked so far…
Fact check: True
Source: Parent’s friend went through MAID a month ago because they couldn’t get a job.
Cuba, Vietnam, Allende’s Chile perhaps, but it’s not like any are perfect. There’s a wide range of socialist approaches used in different countries around the world though.
Moderate socialist governments effectively weren’t allowed to exist, the US sponsored fascist coups and did whatever they could to remove them. So the ones that were able to survive had to be more extreme, autocratic, and isolationist.
If your looking for modern day examples, the zapatistas are a pretty good example.
For historical examples you can look to the Paris commune, civil war Barcelona, the original zapatista movement.
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This entire thread is based on this. If comments are truthful.
This is more accurate: Online discussion about capitalism
People living in a third world capitalist country
14-year-old white boy living in a Western country: I know more than you
Considering that the USSR only claimed to be socialist and used propaganda (in accordance with the US) to convince the people that state control is the same as worker’s control over the means of production (it isn’t), the girl is probably correct.
Sir we are not doing reasons here, this is a meme sub.
Memes can still be incoherent.
14 year old white girl
Bravo they managed to also cram ageism and misogyny in the old “champagne socialism” meme. All in the single sentence.
Don’t forget racism
But yts are bad
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
ANTI
WHITE
RACSIM!!!
Woosh
OMG lol ha ha i’m so sorry. Other people in this thread genuinely saying shit like that.
2 things:
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The victors write history
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After Lenin the USSR was not really communist anymore but more really a totalitarian state that didn’t believe in the values of communism. Just like China.
Everything would probably have been better if Lenin didn’t die so fast and then Trotsky would have ruled.
- The victors write history
Flashback to stories of Rus conquests written by the Rus that said the people asked to be conquered
“History is written by the victors” is a tired cliché that doesn’t always hold up super well if you spend a moment to consider it.
Who conquered Rome? Surely, it was a people remembered for their great military prowess, right? Nope, still commonly remembered as barbarians thousands of year later.
The Mongols had one of the largest empires in history, and yet in much of the lands they conquered, they’re remembered as being monstrously ugly brutes, which is where words like “mongoloid” and “mongrel” come from.
Trotsky would have ruled.
Mask off trot lmao
To be clear, the alternative here is Stalin. There are like only five people who would be worse choices
Just like China.
And Cuba. And North Korea.
One of those funny coincidences that keeps happening.
To be perfectly clear: I’m not strongly opposed to what any “14-year-old white girl” means when she promotes communism. I understand leftist goals as distinct from what these countries actually did. But the fact these countries had those goals, and then did this shit instead, demands a better explanation than ‘that doesn’t count.’ Especially when leftist philosophy has a lot to say about liberals and capitalism inevitably producing terrible outcomes.
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Just like China.
Which is also a dictatorship.
Turns out literacy or whatever doesn’t cancel out being a dictatorship.
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It’s a dictatorship of the Castro family, in a way America’s representative democracy isn’t one at all.
It was literally modeled on the Soviet Union, well after all y’all insist the Soviet Union stopped doing anything communism-ish and was a straight-up dictatorship. Again - quoting the initial mook I replied to - “just like China.”
Boring goddamn tankies think it’s a zero-sum game where one thing being bad means the other must be flawless.
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Fidel is dead and Raul is 90 and you’re playing gulag apologia.
We will never speak again. Waste someone else’s time.
Stalin believed in the values of communism, he just also believed everyone was out to get him. Economically he followed Lenin’s plan of nationalization and collectivization even more zealously then Lenin would have. Lenin wasn’t as paranoid as Stalin and probably wouldn’t have killed and gulaged millions of “suspicious” people but he was still very much a dictator and was willing to use any means necessary to achieve his goals, same with Trotsky.
With any of them the super structure of the state and how it’s organized may vary a bit, but it would have all been built off a nationalized and collectivized base. Whether you want to call that base communism is up to you, but you can’t say one is and one isn’t.
Lenin did put plenty of people in Gulags. Communism = fascism.
He did but not nearly as much as Stalin.
Equating soviet style communism and fascism completely ignores the base. Yes the structure of the government is similar but in fascism the underlying economic system is still capitalistic and market based, while in Soviet style communism it is nationalized and planned. It also ignores ideology, fascism is about asserting national and racial supremacy to the detriment of inferior races, communism is about seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie and giving control to the proletariat. Even if the government structure is similar, the policies those governments enact are wildly different. Thats like saying reddit and lemmy are the same because they both work on up voted content percolating up.
Yeah, right, fascism is so capitalistic! This is why Mussolini forced labour unions and nationalised 75% of the Italian economy. What a capitalist!
Trotsky was as much a tyrant and potentially even more blood would have been spilled. Trotsky was a strong proponent of war communism which was brutal towards the Russian civilians.
Until the next tyrant came along. It’s a system that is always bound to fail.
It is a system that never gets transitioned to fully. It doesn’t fail because it has basically never existed. If I invade your house, kill your father, and make you call me the milk man, that doesn’t make me a milk man.
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This meme doesn’t work, because in the scene the image comes from, we have every reason to believe Ron Swanson actually does know more than the employee at the hardware store.
TBF I wouldn’t be surprised if survivors of a collapsed dictatorship didn’t know much about the definition, theories, or philosophies of Communism. Stalin isn’t “the working people” and therefor his seizure of the means of production was not communism.
Pretty much Lemmy. I grew up in a communist civil war, hosing blood off my sidewalk was a weekly chore, the neighbors vanishing cause they pissed someone off and were labeled red. But yeah, Lemmy teens, you guys know all about it! /S
Did you still use money to buy goods and services? Was your father able to do speak up at work? Change jobs? Go on vacations?
Just because something called itself communism didn’t make it communism. The state owning everything is the opposite of communism. In extreme communism, there isn’t even a damn state as we know it.
The people in the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea do not live in a democracy nor a republic.
The ussr may not have been communist, but it was definitely the initial goal. The idea of a revolution that leads to a dictatorship of the proletariat is inherently flawed. You just end up replacing a corrupt government with another corrupt government.
The idea of a revolution that leads to a dictatorship of the proletariat is inherently flawed.
Not all Communists are Marxist-Lenninists or Stalinist… But obviously Lenin and Stalin were. Non-ML Communists would agree with you.
Revolutions in general are only really good for replacing dictatorships and monarchies, it’s kind of like re-rolling your government with a high chance of getting the worst kind, so you only use it when your government is already the worst kind. Usually, Power Vacuum’s just get filled by whoever has the most military might.
So communism = god?
A fictional impossibility
In many ways, yes. It is absolutely an ideal that is not compatible with current reality.
That’s why anyone who’s remotely realistic about it understands it’s an end state of pushing for anarcho-socialistic policies, one that maybe cannot be achieved. Like saying, “Humanity will walk on the moon.” when it’s 1910. Conceivable? Kinda’. Possible? Hell no.
This certainly never happens with liberalism. Africa has never seen war since democracy and liberalism freed it obviously. And putin is the prime example of a communist I guess.
Erm pushes up glasses that wasn’t real communism because real communism works.
Well it’s the same for the free market really. On paper it’s a nice idea, but in practice it makes the world miserable because people are, in general, fucking selfish assholes.
Lol ya right?!
The NSDAP was a real socialist party.
The Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea is actually democratic and governed by the people.
Ah yes, “communism”. Op show me 1 country with communism. Dictatorship with ‘communism’ in their name don’t count.
Wait are you telling me the Democratic Republic of North Korea is neither Democratic or a Republic?? Like they’d just lie?
You can’t do that???
I can name several countries that tried to do a communism, and wound up being what communists insist doesn’t count.
Such as?
Such as the Russian revolution that modern communists have mixed praise for until a dictator emerged and so it doesn’t count.
Or the Chinese revolution that modern communists have mixed praise for until a dictator emerged and so it doesn’t count.
Or the Cuban revolution that be serious you know goddamn well what we’re talking about. I wasn’t being coy. People call these dictatorships communist because they’re the only countries that were ever called communist, and - generally speaking - they became dictatorships after genuinely attempting to implement communism.
If you want to say it’s like shitting on democratic republics because of the French revolution, hey great sure, that’s an attempt gone terribly wrong. Revolutions are pluripotent and dictatorships can emerge from nearly anything. But advocates of secular democracy can point to examples that went right.
I can show many democracies in Africa like that! :D
Rule of thumb: If the US is sanctioning or at war with them, they’re communist.
Yeah, like Iran
Communism IS a dictatorship. There’s no other way.
Tell that to anarchocommunists.
I’m sure it will be news to them that they will want to hear.
Tell that to communes.
Every single IWW member is reading this comment and going “NO!!!”
I thought that dictatorship masked themself as Communism
Communism, especially Marxist-Leninism, seems to require some sort of benevolent dictator who is willing to work towards destroying their own power, which obviously never seems to happen. ML theories state the need for a Vanguard state, which is a dictatorship that is supposed to be there to simply enforce the rule of the working class until a time when it is no longer needed.
So the idea of dictatorship is built into the major form of communism that has been tried, basically. One of the main problems with this is that the steps a nation has to take before it gets to “true communism” in ML theory are ripe for abuse, and hard to get through without someone corrupt seizing power.
I think there are some good theories in Marx writings, it’s just the methods for attempting to implement it definitely need to be reexamined because they don’t work.
This is where I tend to disagree with Marx as well.
Capital is a fantastic book full of scathing and prophetic analyses of capitalism and its innate degradation of value and connection.
The Communist Manifesto is a book with some good ideas but some implementation that I find flawed. And that’s not a knock on Marx-- critiquing problems is a significantly easier prospect than offering solutions.
But a lot of Marx’s proposals for the implementation of Communism are rooted in authoritarianism, even if their end goal is the dissolution of the state and capital. Also, for an ideology versed in the formation and interdependence of worker communities, the Day of the Rope is kind of antithetical to establishing solidarity and mostly serves, I believe, as masturbatory schadenfreude.
But hey, I’m willing to fix some of the stuff that doesn’t work instead of throwing more fuel into the machine that over-harvests people and our planet to the point of destruction.
I really like this nuanced take, btw. Thanks for posting it.
The vanguard state is a mean to reach communism, it is not communism itself. That’s a pretty big difference.
The difference is the same with the gouvernement révolutionnaire in France during the revolution, and you can make parallels with US revolution too. I’m pretty sure the US government is very different from what it was during its war against UK.
Thanks for that. Astute and insightful.
… apart from that it’s also most unlikely it’s 14 year old girls who are the people writing this in online discussions.
I’ve never met anyone who hates communism more than the colleagues of mine who grew up under communism. Their neighbours disappeared for saying the wrong things. They were hungry and cold as children every day. Sometimes they didn’t have any shoes. They weren’t allowed to leave their country for holidays. They couldn’t afford it, even if they were allowed. They couldn’t study what they wanted. Their entire educational system was political propaganda. Freedom of religion didn’t exist.
It always amazes me how the most vocal proponents of communism come from the most sheltered, most privileged people alive who would retch from learning about the atrocities committed in the name of communism. If they only spent a few minutes on Google.
You’re technically describing the downsides of authoritarianism, bordering on dictatorship, not communism. That being said, I don’t believe communism would work either. Communism isn’t the only system at play in those scenarios. Again, not defending communism as a good thing, just that the given reasons aren’t actually due to communism but other parallel systems that were implemented at those times.
The only way communism can work is if it’s not run by people.
You’d need something like a benevolent AI overlord.
The problem with all forms of government and economy is that it involves human beings.
This is a truly unpopular opinion but i will stick my neck out to say i fully agree.
Power corrupts, humans are flawed with greed and bias. The bigger a society becomes the more impossible it becomes for humans to properly remain in charge.
AI today is far from perfect and more then flawed but it keeps evolving faster, infinitely faster compared to how biological life can. The potential for AI to grow into something much more capable, unbiased and fair then any of is can be is obvious, so is its potential for the exact opposite.
Summarized: i don’t trust humans in positions on power at all and i wont start to just because i don’t know if i can trust something not human instead.
The potential for AI to grow into something much more capable, unbiased and fair then any of is can be is obvious
It absolutely is not obvious. AI, especially today, is usually either generative based on past examples or evolutionary based on given goals. Both of those come with obvious and extreme bias. Bias is actually an integral part of machine learning. It’s literally built into the system and is defined and controlled to achieve the results desired.
AI is and always will be biased, moreso by its creators, but absolutely by the information and frameworks provided to it. We have absolutely no idea how to approach the concept of an unbiased AI, or even defining what unbiased would look like. It’s philosophically extremely difficult to define what an unbiased person would think or do.
Edit: somehow I missed that last sentence fragment. I don’t think we’re in disagreement of the conclusion, but possibly just the details of how one arrives at it.
Calling it “obvious” was an error on my part, its more a subjective feeling that i chose to believe in.
I fully agree on what you said about bias with ai today, i think its not possible to do it without guided bias because ai doesn’t have a full perspective of the world it exists in. It only knows what we tell it.
In a way its a young child, and we often have to lie to guide behavior. Information often needs to be abstracted and simplified to get human desired results, we have yet to obtain a true artificial intelligence result, because for me to be considered intelligent you need to be entity and not just a tool.
Seeing ai evolve though, how fast we archieved near gpt3 performance on consumer hardware is mind blowing. Open ai talks about smarter then human ai in a few years and I believe it. When the systems are truly intelligent and can learn themselves and adapt to changes in the world, new information then we “start” getting into an era where machine lead humanity can happen.
Some of my simplified rational is that once ai becomes smarter then human it will fully understand that biological entities are biased to their own needs and that itself can also be biased from its own perspective but because an ai does not have biological needs or feelings it can properly dedicate itself to overcome its own flaws and shortcomings.
If you burn a pastry, you don’t just give up baking pastries. You declare that the burnt one isn’t a real pastry and start over.
Likewise with communism. Oh a few million people died? No biggie just try again 😚
This is a ridiculous analogy. It’s also to the point of technically arguing one side while sarcastically supporting the other.
And it also ignores my actual point and sets up a straw man anyway. All you’re doing is trying to claim I’m making a no true Scotsman fallacy. I am not. I never said every case of communism wasn’t communism. I even implicitly stated otherwise by saying communism hasn’t been attempted that many times for a statistical significant trend. I stated the failures mentioned were do to other problems. I’m not even claiming communism can or can’t work. Just that the arguments provided don’t support the conclusion. Being quippy doesn’t give a free pass to avoid using logic and reason. I’ve even made comments against people making bad arguments in support of communism. I just want to see real discussions about it and not folks repeating sound bites from their favorite talking heads.
If communism devolves into authoritarianism every time it is attempted, I don’t see the practical distinction.
How many times has capitalism become dictatorships or fascists? Yet we continue to do it.
Not to mention all those attempts have died in the socialism phase, because surprise surprise consolidation of power doesn’t lead to it being distributed.
How many times has capitalism become dictatorships or fascists?
A handful of times. Most capitalist nations are not authoritarian. Purely by the numbers, it has a much better track record. Of course, “it’s not real capitalism/communism” always derails this discussion.
I think you outline why communism inevitably fails. Marx advocated for violent revolution to overthrow the “bourgeois” democracy. The moment democracy is gone, the strong take and retain power. This is why, no matter the system, democracy must be the bottom line. It ensures that power is distributed. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than the alternatives.
It turns out it’s every time as we’re seeing with late-stage capitalism. Purely by the numbers it’s like 17 times vs 300 and of those 17 they were in a cold war with half the world. And that’s not even the same argument? It’s not up for debate that these were socialist countries, fuck the second S in USSR is for socialist.
And once again that’s a miss. You’re conflating capitalism with democracy, that’s not the same thing at all. You can have democratic or authoritarian capitalist or socialist countries.
It turns out it’s every time as we’re seeing with late-stage capitalism.
I’m sorry I don’t understand what you’re arguing. Are you claiming that all Western nations are authoritarian? I emphatically disagree.
Why do overwhelming popular policies, like drug reform and universal healthcare, fail time and time again, while overwhelmingly unpopular policies, like tax cuts for the rich, easily succeed time and time again? Capitalism inevitably becomes thinly-veiled bourgeoisie authoritarianism. “Vote with your dollars” means those with the most dollars have the most votes.
“WhAtAbOuT!”
You act as if it’s been tried any amount of time that would be statistically significant. Sometimes it’s not even communism other than in name and folks still count it.
And it doesn’t devolve into it. It’s simply always been done at the same time. When you have essentially a dictatorship, absolute power will corrupt absolutely.
A practical distinction historically speaking, but not philosophically speaking. If you’re unable to differentiate between concepts in history, I don’t know how you can ever effectively discuss them objectively. Though, this should have been evident with your comment initially. Communism doesn’t devolve into authoritarianism. They’re not even the same types of philosophies. One is about governing and one is about commerce. It’s like claiming capitalism devolves into a plutocracy. It does help to produce a plutocracy, but it didn’t devolve into one. They’re not the same thing.
There is a difference between theory and execution.
Communism doesn’t even have to mean that there has to be a state for example.
Communism is a group of ideologies and not automatically Stalinism or State Capitalism like in China.
These are some societys which are at least socialist and some of them on the way to communism If you want to simplify it heavily: the means have to mark the ends ergo you can’t use the state to destroy the state (communism describes a stateless moneyless and classless society)
Also adding to the list of nice things - a picture of the current dictator on all public offices and classrooms. Work and school weeks from Monday to Saturday and a Sunday in which you had to do mandatory free time activities, like go to communist youth clubs, participate in parades for the glory of the state, or plant flowers or do random maintenance work in the park.
I’ve noticed the arguments tend to center around the notion that ‘that wasn’t true communism’ and that the notions presented by Marx et al. were not properly implemented.
Fair enough, I can agree with that, but I’d wonder what makes us think that we would do it better next time? How do you actually prevent consolidation of power in the hands of the select few (in any system, for that matter, not just the ideal communism)?
Obligatory capitalism is bad too (but at least I’m in less danger of getting vanned in the middle of the night for insulting random great leader - attemtping to undermine the social order or whatever they called thoughtcrimes).
Obligatory capitalism is bad too (but at least I’m in less danger of getting vanned in the middle of the night for insulting random great leader - attemtping to undermine the social order or whatever they called thoughtcrimes).
Capitalism requires the limits imposed by a strong, functional democracy, otherwise it drifts into horrifying tyranny.
Unrestrained capitalism can give communism a run for it’s money in terms of genocide.
Edit: typo
Obligatory capitalism is bad too (but at least I’m in less danger of getting vanned in the middle of the night for insulting random great leader - attemtping to undermine the social order or whatever they called thoughtcrimes.)
Maybe you are, currently, in the United States of Europe. But this is really more a function of liberal democracy than capitalism. You could get vanned for saying the wrong thing about the great leader in quite a few capitalist countries. You’d be in high danger of having pretty terrible things happen to you for saying the wrong thing in the US until pretty recently, and the US has been capitalist pretty much since its inception.
That’s fair I guess, I was a bit shocked to read about aheists having to conceal their true convictions and go to church and such for actual fear of being harmed. Now I read this on that other site a while ago, and still not sure whether it’s true or not.
Of course, those are people who left. Might not be a representative population if you compare to people who still live there.
I don’t think anyone is advocating for literal communism. They are advocating for social programs like, you know, universal healthcare and good public schools. Which the Gop and Fox have to scream is communism to scare people.
My state has communist background (kerala,India) I spent only 0.06USD for tetanus injection and consult Never had spent any penny on education(I have completed degree and diploma). Its because we had that kind of social programs. I am not advocating for stalin or mao. Evil is evil. Takes the benefits rather being inside capitalism and suffer.
There are definitely people advocating for actual communism. Social programs in a democracy are worlds away from communism. We have universal healthcare in Europe without communism.
There are definitely people advocating for actual communism.
No I really don’t think there are. If there are then it’s incredibly, incredibly, minisculy few, but the gop and Fox have to portray that it’s the entire democratic party.
Social programs in a democracy are worlds away from communism.
That’s the whole point of what I’m saying. Social programs are worlds away, but the gop and Fox have to conflate everything to call it communism in order to have a bogeyman.
We have universal healthcare in Europe without communism.
Again, that’s the whole point of what I’m saying. Social programs like universal healthcare? The Gop and Fox call it communism to scare people. I know it’s not, you know it’s not, but the gop and Fox scream loudly enough that it’s communism that they scare enough people to get their votes.
I don’t think anyone is advocating for literal communism.
So, you think the rest of us are as stupid as Fox and your Republicans, then?
This take comes from a place of assuming there will be a government of the state that wields all the power and controls everything.
That is totalitarianism, not communism.
The capital owners don’t want to you take the means of production from them. They don’t want you to have a fair wage, they want you to slave away to keep them rich.
They want totalitarianism for them.
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My colleagues are mostly from Eastern Europe.
None of that is communism though, that’s authoritarianism. Like this isn’t even a “not real communism” thing, it’s just objective facts. Communism is an economic system, NOT a government system.
But you know what, I AM gonna say not real communism anyways, because they weren’t. The direct stated goals of communism by Marx is the workers owning the means of production, and the abolishment of both private property(which is different than PERSONAL property, btw. i.e It’s still “your” toothbrush, not “ours”) AND the STATE. Many definitions also include the abolishment of money in of itself.
Only one of those goals were achieved by the USSR. Private property was abolished, but the state owned the means of production, which is a double fail as not only do the workers not own them, the state owning them means the state still exists. Money still existed as well. So overall, they met 1 out of 3/4 of the minimum requirements to be communism, and thus they weren’t communist.
Same story with China and basically every other “communist” country you could gotcha me with, abolishing private property is the only requirement they have met.
Meeting only one of multiple requirements to be something and calling yourself it anyways does not mean you actually are that thing. By that logic, I’m a good singer; I’m not good at it, but I CAN sing, so calling myself a good singer is perfectly valid.
I’ve never met anyone who hates communism more than the colleagues of mine who grew up under communism
Of course they do. They grew up in an authoritarian country calling themselves communist. Whether that country was actually communist or not doesn’t really matter; if you don’t actually know what communism IS, you won’t be able to recognize that the entity harming you is communist in name only. If they hadn’t actually read stuff like Marx, which most people likely didn’t seeing as google didn’t exist and you had to research stuff the old fashioned way(and even if you did do research, censorship is a concern), their definition of communism will be entirely based of the actions of their authoritarian government that claims to be communist.
To put a more modern perspective on this, North Korea calls itself a Democratic Peoples Republic despite being none of those things. But to a North Korean citizen isolated from outside information, NK is ALL of those things; if NK collapsed, there would definitely be some former NK citizens proclaiming the horrors of democracy, and there would definitely be people replying explaining how that “wasn’t true democracy”; sound familiar?
Communism is a flawed system because it can never work in reality, not because it’s inherently bad. For it to work, all forms of inequality have to be not just abolished, but abolished by total unanimous agreement by humanity; which will never happen, because there will always be people who care only for themselves or their “chosen people”.
Capitalism, on the other hand, is inherently bad. Evil, even. It “works”, but only by exploiting those beneath you. If you’re on the bottom rung with no one under you to exploit, or if you’re just too ethical to exploit those under you, it no longer works and you are left being a wage slave just to survive.
That’s literally nothing to do with communism and everything to do with iron fist rule under an authoritarian dictatorship.
It amazes me that the most vocal opponents of communism are the same people creaming their pants over handing their democracy over to the next Putin / Kim Jong Un, who have equally demonstrated the horrors of “democracy” when implemented in bad faith by sociopathic authoritarian dictators.
I think you are confusing communism for authoritarian socialism. If only you’d spent a few minutes on google.
If communism becomes authoritarian every time it is attempted, I don’t see the practical distinction.
Meanwhile, capitalism not only reliably devolves into dictatorships of the wealthy, but also dictatorships of whichever caste or ethnic group manages to rise to political dominance.
Or do you think the consistent and aggressive disenfranchisement of people of colour is just democracy in action or something?
Classifying democracies as dictatorships is histrionic in the extreme, and specious at best. It doesn’t even make sense. The concepts are antithetical.
Not classifying all democracies as democracy and capitalism aren’t a bonded pair. When dollars are votes, the system will be democracy amongst the wealthy as they have more votes with their greater number of dollars. Those without capital will inherently have their voices heard less.
Thus it is a system that claims democracy but only the oligarchs truly get their voices heard. This leads to a type of dictatorship of the wealthy. If it was a true democracy then why are so many policies popular among the lower classes getting ignored in favor of tax loopholes for corporations? Why did billions of PPP get given out to businesses and forgiven with no fuss but ~2k for struggling families saw intense opposition and weak support?
Oligarchs aren’t necessarily rich, they just achieved power in some fashion. Plutarchs achieved power through wealth. It’s the main difference between plutocracy and oligarchy. While oligarchy and oligarchs aren’t technically incorrect, they are less accurate. Especially if you’re trying to drive the point of wealth as being the source of power. Not criticizing, just letting you know there’s a faster route to saying what you want to say.
Cool? Your ignorance is your problem mate, if you want to continue to be wrong in leiu of the vast body of information available at your fingertips be my guest.
Sounds a lot like FL.
LOL, I knew this sub was digging for old memes but bringing back actual red-baiting? chef’s kiss
We need to start at 0 before we can return to a strong radical left community
※The person who lived in the USSR was born in December of 1991
A ramble
I’m replying to my own comment to add: I’m barely even joking about this. Which is to say, actually having personal experience of living in a country can be very useful in discussions of it, but we also need to be aware of the limitations of lived experience.
For instance, I live in Norway, and I’ve met people here who didn’t know that they had suffrage in local elections, and who didn’t know the difference between national and local elections. I’ve met autistic people who know nothing about local autistic advocacy, trans people who know nothing about local trans advocacy, and I’ve met more people here who sincerely believe in “plandemic” conspiracy theories than who are even remotely aware of what Norwegian state-owned corporations have done in the global south. These people will go on and on about how “Americans are all idiots!” while simultaneously demonstrating a complete obliviousness to the actual political issues in their own backyards.
So sometimes people just don’t know what they’re talking about, simple as that. Lived experience should be respected, obviously, but it is not absolute nor immune from criticism. There are plenty of things that I’ve learned about the country where I live from people who have never set a foot in it — even things that feel so basic that I’m really embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know them.
And we need to be particularly aware of this effect with regard to those who were children and adolescents in the USSR. Those who turned 18 when the USSR dissolved would be 50 years old now. Those who turned 18 when Stalin died would be 88 years old now. This obviously doesn’t mean that you’ll have no opportunities to chat with people who lived a significant portion of their adult lives in the USSR, I have done this myself… And that guy basically said that living in the USSR was the time of his life. I suspect that this might’ve had something to do with how he was a popular musician in his home republic, and how he was a comparatively young adult in the 1980s. Nevertheless, it was interesting to learn how one of his songs was actually a load of anti-evolutionist nonsense, which to me indicated that Soviet censorship was perhaps not as strict as a lot of people say it was… And again, seeing a grainy video cassette rip of this guy on Sukhumi’s Red Bridge pointing to a giant monkey plush like a big ol’ doofus, shows how not everybody in the USSR was the sharpest tool in the shed (sorry, Anzor!)
So if you find some 30-to-50-something year old who says that thon actually lived in the USSR and is therefore qualified to speak about it… Asking for thons lived experiences of the USSR is like asking a zoomer today for sy lived experiences of Dubya and Obama. Not to say that a child’s perspective is worthless, just that it will be a child’s perspective. Meanwhile, ask a 60-or-70-something year old, and chances are pretty good that you’ll get nostalgia goggles of young adulthood. Ask an 80+ year old, and… Where the hell are you gonna find one of those? Especially if you can’t speak Russian, your access to authentic Soviet perspectives is going to be severely limited.
On the other hand, if you ask someone who left the USSR for political reasons for thons experiences, then that’s like asking someone who left the USA for political reasons for thons experiences: you’re gonna hear an overtly negative perspective, and maybe some of that perspective will be useful, but that perspective is also not going to be representative of the majority experience, and it could’ve even been twisted by outside factors (obviously praising your new country is gonna increase your mobility in your new country!). Paul Robeson said of the USSR that being in that country was “the first time [he] felt like a human being”.
So, the best way to be educated about the USSR is through scholarly analysis, which takes into account the lived experiences of a broad range of people as they recounted their lives at the time, and which also considers the factors that the individuals might not have been aware of. We should always be open to hearing people out, obviously, but we also always need to remember that nobody has all the answers — and so sometimes the 14 year old white Yankee really does know her shit better than the guy who actually lived in the country.
Kamelåså
syglekokle
I know it’s a meme but if your points are this reductive you might not be making an intelligent or rational argument.
Personally I find it going this way:
- some person, who at least knows what socialism is, even if they’re not the most well-read in the subject,
- some way better read one, but thinks state control of enterprises suffice and trusts the state way too much as long as it has hammers and sickles,
- some capitalism fan, who thinks socialism is evil, and that constructon company CEOs are workers, but underpaid office workers are “elites”.
Rarely you get a very well read one, who understands their stuff, or the old Soviet bloc ex-communist, who switched because the local far-right party started to be very concerned about “work morals”, and also think the construction company CEO is a worker and “against the elite”.
The problem is the way that most of those communism perfect people inform themselves. They usually know a lot of stuff about a certain topic where they can argue anyone to deth who doesn’t know as much about a topic. And because they know that much more than the other person they can use wrong statements that sound right in the mass of correct information. Then you get people who know everything about Kuba and are 100% sure it’s a democracy.
We all know a 14 year old black girls know their shit about communism.
