- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- socialism@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- socialism@lemmy.ml
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Yeah, everything is good in theory.
“Working people should have a good salary and good work conditions”. Does a communist say that or a capitalist?
Communism will end up in an oligarchy, capitalism will end up in an oligarchy, anarchism will end up in an oligarchy and totalitarianism starts as an oligarchy.
Maybe there will be a system that taxes the rich in a progressive manner, will give working individuals freedom, will not tolerate corporations as humans and will keep everything somewhere in the middlem
Maybe we should call this a social democracy or something, but what do I know?
This comment doesn’t say anything at all, really. You just state a bunch of vague things and don’t connect any of them, you just say everything ends in Oligarchy and don’t walk them logically to your conclusion.
Then you just describe a system of “moderation,” as though being in the “middle” of things makes it more correct. That would be like saying the sky must be purple if someone says it’s blue and the other says its red, there’s nothing about being in the middle that makes a position inherently correct.
The world’s “successful” Social Democracies, ie the Nordic Countries, are seeing sliding worker protections, and depend on Imperialism to fund their safety nets. They are essentially landlords in country form.
You’d do well to actually engage with Leftists to see what we think and why, rather than reducing everything to some holy reverence for “moderation.”
09/11 Chile vibes
And it’s a holiday in Cambodia
Where you’ll what you’re told
Holiday in Cambodia
Where the slum’s got so much soul
When people ask me what communist country was successful I usually say all of them until cia decided to go there and spread freedom 🇺🇸🦅
Well… There was this thing called Soviet Union. They decided to try to speed up the transition to communism by using repression and violence. And ended up being a totalitarian state, a direct opposite of what a communist state is supposed to be like.
Of course you can argue that Soviet Union was not communist, it was just a state that had chosen to call itself communist for propaganda reasons… But still, Soviet Union is an example of a communist country that was unsuccessful as a communist project already by itself. Then came outsiders and helped make it even worse, but bad doesn’t become good by some people wanting it to be even worse. Burma is another example. I’d say they hacked away their own leg before anyone else, such as CIA, had time to interfere in their business.
What no theory does to an mf
TheRe Was THiS THinG CallEd The SoviEt UnioN
The russians got sick of dying for the tsar during ww1. They revolted. Six months later, ww1 “ended” (between germans and british, that is) and everybody was redeployed to russia.
Of course a country that’s being invaded is totalitarian, wtf do you expect?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War
The USSR didn’t “do repression and violence to speed up Communism,” they had a successful revolution and established Socialism. By all accounts it was quite successful overall, but we can learn from where they erred and adapt for the future.
The only ones who believe the Soviet Union wasn’t Socialist are generally Western Trots or liberals/Anarchists who already don’t want the form of society Marxists want, which is a government that publicly owns its large and key industries and gradually folds in the new firms that grow to that level until the entire economy is publicly owned.
Have you never heard of bolševiks and menševiks? What you’re explaining is what menševiks wanted, but what happened was what bolševiks aimed for.
And that was inhumane horror.
Least smug shitlib
No, the Mensheviks had a poor understanding of Historical Materialism and didn’t think the Peasantry could truly be allied to the Proletariat. What I am describing is what the Bolsheviks did. To a bette extent the PRC also fulfills this.
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Luckily the US is dismantling the CIA so that’s good news for communism!!!
Is this true?? I suspect something closer to the way the KGB was “dismantled” and then re-assembled around the entire government.
Hopefully the ATF too
you know, i tell you what. i’m fed up with all this gringo self-righteousness when you talk about “oh communism was bad, oh people where killed, oh people had no food, oh people had no liberty, oh people could not buy ataris, oh our countries are so democratic”. your countries were democratic during the cold war in the first place because you had people to sort things out for you here in the global south. for each person complaining about how the food rations in eastern europe were not tasty enough, there were 10 dying of hunger or malnourishment here in the global south. for every person complaining they had to wait 5 years in a queue to buy a trabant or an oka, there were 10 who got no school in a range of 50 km. for every person complaining that their 8 hour shifts in state owned factories were overwhelming, there were 10 who were indentured workers. for every person complaining about how the stasi, kgb or the stb had bugged their apartment, there were 10 suffering the most horrific tortures inside black sites of the military of u.s. allies here in the “third world”. for every person complaining about dull standard apartment blocks in mikrorayons, there were 10 who lived in mud shacks and slums, and those are just who were lucky enough to have a roof over their heads. finally, for everyone complaining about chinese sweatshops, which are indeed a problem, there are 10 americans who work and yet cannot afford proper housing.
you wanna complain about how communism was bad? go ahead. you wanna complain how your parents lived under communism and could not drink coke? do so if you wish. but there are still millions of people down here who would give an arm and a leg to have a polish ration, an apartment in a russian gray building, or a yugoslav job. and while the chinese maoist red guard was bad, surely it won’t be an inch closer to the harassement people endured on a daily basis by our police forces.
again: you wanna complain? be my guest. but for me that’s an encyclopedic example of white privilege.
This, so much this. Having a job and a roof over your head is such a luxury in the ‘global south’, the true face of capitalism
Why would you not compare european communist countries woth european capitalist countries? Sure, africans and asians were poorer, but that goes without saying, honestly, what does that even have to do with this matter?
East Germany was poorer than west Germany. That tells us something. The fact that Ethiopia or whatever was poorer does not really tell us much about ehich economic system is better.
Ethopia and the rest of africa got colonized by capitalists, idiot. It tells us a whole lot about which economical system is better.
Of course if you only see the receiving end of theft, you would think theft is great.
West Germany had almost all of the industry of Germany, and East Germany was made to pay harsh reparations for the immense devastation the Nazis wrought upon the Soviet people and countries. Moreover, West Germany was never de-Nazified, and the US and Western Countries heavily invested into its development as a means to destabilize the relations with the East, even threatening to put NATO nukes in West Germany.
Loool it’s easy to say East Germany was poorer when they had to deal with all the sanctions. But be my guest, how many homeless people in USA and how many in Cuba?
If only there was a superpower leading a blok of nations rivaling the west that could have supported east Germany…
Hard to do so in the aftermath of World War II when the Nazis destroyed half your buildings and murdered 20 million of your people. The Soviets did 80% of the combat against the Nazis.
So you claim the USSR did not support East Germany because of anti-german sentiments, while the west invested quite a lot into the reconstruction of FRG. I am afraid I am not qualified to assess how accurate that claim is(the former half of it, specifically). But I am deeply skeptical about this, since it would be quite a useful propaganda tool both domestically and in the west. Also, the east had a communist government and it distanced itself from it’s past. The internationalist ideology of the USSR should have triumphed over the nationalist sentiments that might have existed.
However, I should say, that the main point of my original comment still stands. Of course, there are always many factors at play and it is not the case that the disparity between the east and the west can be attributed to the economic system alone. However, this does not mean that such comparisons are not valid, and I still would say that comparing european countries to underdeveloped countries to say that life in eastern Europe “wasn’t that bad” is quite absurd.
I didn’t say the USSR didn’t support East Germany, I explained the unique struggles East Germany faced compared to West Germany.
Well if you didn’t I do not know how I can possibly explain your previous comment.
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Death to America
as an american, hell yeah!
As an Australian I now understand the contempt of the middle east for America.
Hey I’m European, I have loads of contempt for them too, and same for our sellout leaders.
Just listen to Blowback.
whoops, brazil. we had a budding workers movement that was absolutely crushed by the traitorous brazilian military, in the name of the US of course.
that hasnt stopped syndicalism to take root here and improve our lives a bit, but the communist organizations responsible were all crushed and we see our rights being taken away ever since because no one is left to defend them. we are scrambling rn to see if we can stop fascism.
to anyone who says “why don’t you compare communist eastern europe to democratic western europe?”. sure, first thing to notice is that eastern europe didn’t had companies exploiting underdeveloped nations for their cheap labour and raw materials, their oppression of labour organizations and the support of corrupt rulers. since brazil was mentioned (heh), let us remember that west german companies such as vw or mercedes-benz used to report on syndicalists and communists working and organizing on their plants to the brazilian military during the dictatorship, and sold equipment to the military and police. that siemens sold nuclear reactors to the dictatorship during the late 70s. that many former officials of the dictatorship got leadership jobs in these companies and in basf, hoescht, atlas-schindler, mwm. behind the “economic success” of the rich countries of the west there’s always some degree of exploitation of poorer countries.
I wonder if anyone ever said “Democracy would never work, just look at what happened to Athens”.
Socialism and communism are relatively new ideas. While I don’t believe communism is an effective form of government, it’s still kind of silly to write it off so quickly.
There is a poem in Polish, it goes in fast and dirty translation: “Today you scare us with communists, just as years ago, you scared our fathers with the democrat name”.
The more I study history, the more I see the great wheel of humanity. Communists now, Jews in the 40s, Muslims in the early middles ages, the barbaric Gauls before Christ was even born. It never stops. The people with wisdom die off leaving remnants of their culture and ideas while the next generations tries to piece it all together.
14·19 hours agoSomeone between 1804 and 1830: Democracy doesn’t work, just look at France, it dissolves into an empire
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How, exactly?
Well the ideal end result depends on the person, doesn’t it?
I’m sure Karl Marx and Stalin had very different ideas of what the ideal end result of communism would be.
From my understanding; Marx envisioned a worker’s utopia, while Stalin instead used communism to garner as much power for himself as possible.
Neither is accurate. Stalin tried to resign several times, in fact, but was rejected, and Marx wasn’t a Utopian, but in favor of Scientific Socialism. Now, that doesn’t mean Stalin was a saint or that Marx didn’t have a beautiful vision for the future, but it does mean you should read up a bit more before making judgement calls. I have an introductory reading list for Marxism-Leninism you can check out for that, if you’re interested.
can communism survive in a single country was always a big question.
I think the original idea was to try a world revolution but that didn’t work out.
Us is the main holdout. Russia is basically socialist, EU is basically socialist. China is communist.
Us is the only serious holdout
Russia is Capitalist, the EU is Capitalist, the US is Capitalist, and China is Socialist. Communism must be global, but Socialism is the process of building towards that through publicly owning large firms and key industries. Communism exists as an ideology for now, and hasn’t been achieved yet.
Russia has universal health care and mandatory vacations and many other perks - it’s in Russia constitution in 7.1. Same is EU.
us is definitely capitalist
Welfare and social programs are not Socialism. Socialism is when public ownership is the primary basis of your economy.
For what purpose - for the purpose of providing these social programs. It’s all connected
No, not really. The purpose behind Socialism is that as time goes on, production becomes more and more complex, and eventually must be publicly planned to continue being effective. Social programs are important, but Social Programs in a system dominated by Private Capital are subject to the will of the bourgeoisie, and often done in a manner that supports private profits.
Socialism and Capitalism are descriptors for economic formations, not if a country provides free healthcare or not.
China is a cocktail of socialism, capitalism, nationalism… claiming it’s only one ~ism is probably oversimplifying, but communism is probably a bit far stretch.
China has a Socialist Market Economy, it isn’t so much a cocktail as it is Marxism-Leninism applied to China’s current conditions.
China has a Socialist Market Economy, it isn’t so much a cocktail as it is Marxism-Leninism applied to China’s current conditions.
This sentence is in Chinese constitution and text book for every first grade student. Repeating it doesn’t help any meaningful conversation, unless you are a 7 years old trying to pass exam and get to second grade…
It’s a sentence I made, just because the PRC agrees with describing themselves that way doesn’t mean I’m not adding to meaningful conversation. When you declare that China is a cocktail of Capitalism and Socialism, what does that actually mean? It seemed like your comment was more about not analyzing China’s economy than coming up with a coherent and consistent answer, which is what I pushed forward.
Basically, Capitalism and Socialism are descriptors of overall systems, not portions of an economy, so calling a system a cocktail of each doesn’t make too much sense and adds confusion more than clarity.
Yeah.
The CIA is why the Soviets fell. Not corruption or incompetence.
It was complicated. Kruschev, and later Gorbachev’s reforms really weakened the Socialist system because they didn’t properly retain strong control of the larger firms and heavy industry (a lesson the CPC took to heart), however the CIA and really the US absolutely worked tirelessly to weaken it. The Soviets also had to spend a much larger portion of their production on the millitary in order to keep parity with the US, meaning that development rates began to slow.
What is complicated about it?
The reforms you refer to allowed for political dissent. If the Soviet Union was some worker’s paradise, then allowing people complain wouldn’t change anything.
The simple reality is that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship that only survived as long as it did because it was a dictatorship. Once people had the option of opposing Communist rule, they did. And that is what killed the Soviet Union. Not some conspiracy by the United States or the kulaks.
The reforms didn’t just allow for “political dissent,” they worked against the Socialist system, that was based on central planning. Rather than running in a more efficient manner, it ran against itself.
Further, nobody says the Soviet Union was a “worker’s paradise.” It had tremendous strides for workers, but it wasn’t perfect by any means.
The Soviet Union wasn’t a dictatorship. Read Soviet Democracy. It lasted as long as it did because it had tremendous GDP growth while lowering wealth disparity, free and high quality education and healthcare, doubled health expectancies, full employment, and over tripled literacy rates to 99.9%.
Do you really believe that we could have retained power and have had the backing of the vast masses for 14 years by methods of intimidation and terrorization? No, that is impossible. The tsarist government excelled all others in knowing how to intimidate. It had long and vast experience in that sphere. The European bourgeoisie, particularly the French, gave tsarism every assistance in this matter and taught it to terrorize the people. Yet, in spite of that experience and in spite of the help of the European bourgeoisie, the policy of intimidation led to the downfall of Tsarism.
Exactly, and this didn’t last for 14 years, but nearly the entire 20th century, and is succeeded by other AES countries like the PRC.
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Not at all, plus they are succeeded, like I said, by other AES states like the PRC.
The Soviet Union was, if not a traditional dictatorship, absolutely a totalitarian autocracy. Stalin was a brutal dictator and his successors were chosen by the communist party. Elections in the USSR were for show.
Life was miserable almost from the start of the Bolshevik revolution for most people. The USSR’s implementation of communism was so bad, it’s become cliche.
Life was miserable almost from the start of the Bolshevik revolution for most people.
People like you should be forced to live under conditions like Tsarist Russia.
“Life was miserable almost from the start of the Bolshevik revolution for most people”, said the romanovs.
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Allow me to repeat myself:
The Soviet Union wasn’t a dictatorship. Read Soviet Democracy. It lasted as long as it did because it had tremendous GDP growth while lowering wealth disparity, free and high quality education and healthcare, doubled health expectancies, full employment, and over tripled literacy rates to 99.9%.
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Yep. Democracy doesn’t mean “choose between parties,” it’s about the actual impact you can have on policy. More people in China feel that they have a voice in politics than people in the US, despite the US having 2 parties.
That’s what dissent is.
Nothing you said disputes it being a dictatorship. The people could not choose their leaders, there were no limits on the power of their leaders, er go it was a dictatorship. None of your “pros” matter. And that’s before we get into the lack of freedom of speech and press and total absence of transparency, meaning that I have no reason to trust those supposed accomplishments.
None of your “pros” matter
Healthcare? Doesn’t matter.
Education? Literacy? Reading is how the communist get you, remain illiterate.
Full employment? You don’t need to feed your family.
Life expectancy? Why prolong the suffering?We weren’t debating the quality of the Soviet Union. We were debating whether or not it was a dictatorship.
Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.
A lot of the cold war propaganda about the USSR turned out to be bullshit, now that US & Soviet archives have been released, as contemporary Western academic historians will tell you, like Domenico Losurdo and Grover Furr.
No, that isn’t what dissent is, it was a fundamental liberalization of the economy that favored private property over public.
Secondly, they absolutely chose their leaders.
Finally, you say life expectancy, literacy rates, and worker rights “don’t matter?” That strong, sustained economic growth doesn’t matter? You must be trolling.
As for distrusting the sources, you can look into them yourselves, they are well-respected.
So, you’re denying that glasnost allowed for political dissent?
Second, no they didn’t.
Finally, it does not matter because we were debating whether or not the Soviet Union was a dictatorship, which the literacy rate has nothing to do with.
Well-respected by Tankies, not by actual historians.
Glasnost allowed for liberalism to expand as an ideology, sure, alongside other reforms that weakened the economy and erased its foundations. You can’t cherry-pick the reforms to make it seem like the system worked poorly and only was dissolved because the “people had a choice.” In fact, most post-Soviet citizens regret the fall of Socialism and prefer it over Capitalism.
Read Soviet Democracy.
We were debating a great many things, one of which being the economy and the well-being of the people, because that helps explain why it was democratic.
Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan is quite literally used as a reference on the Wikipedia article for Soviet Democracy. You are incapable of being honest or looking at facts that disprove you because you care more about appearing morally righteous than being correct.
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Bit of a non-sequitor, I could bring up Kent State and use that to say the US isn’t a democracy. The US has a far worse track record than the Soviets.
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Numerous mass killings and/or genocides in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, East Timor, Cambodia, and much, much more.
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The US played a part, I outright stated that it was a complicated situation made more complicated by having the world’s largest Empire, the US, permanently hostile and putting nukes on their doorstep.
lemmy.ml moment
Tbh did you read this thread? lemmy.ml made these capitalists look like completely unread simpletons, it’s genuinely embarrasing on their side
Most people don’t become Marxist-Leninists without doing a lot of reading, in my experience.
The biggest flaw with communism is that you have to actually read instead of trusting a propaganda mill blindly and uncritically to become one.
some utterly propagandized capitalist will read this and think we’re the propagandized ones, hilariously not realizing all they have is strawmen they didn’t even come up with themselves and things they didn’t fact check even the tiniest bit.
There’s propaganda on both sides
yeah in the same way that there’s guns and shootings all over the world but they’re almost all concentrated in one place… american schools.
either way, communists are vastly more prepared to deal with propaganda because in capitalist societies critical thinking is destroyed by nearly every institution that can teach it.
if you go by this thread one side has nothing but propaganda. There was not one valid argument made on the capitalist side when I read this thread, I could’ve better argued for capitalism, it’s pathetic.
closest they got was china is mean to uyghurs, but capitalists do genocide every 5 seconds so that’s hardly a pro capitalist argument. At least the chinese, if they are covering it up, have the decency to cover it up, capitalists brazenly and openly happily do it, and support it!
Your main problem is that you’re saying capitalism = USA. There are a lot more other countries that aren’t involved in genocides
The only arguments I’ve seen in this thread are “but USA corrupted them so it’s entirely their fault” and “but somewhere in the world some people had worse living conditions”
I think we’re all suffering from confirmation bias in this thread
I have to admit I don’t know a lot about communism and geopolitics overall, but so far I haven’t seen a successful implementation of it that would make me want to live there, and the main countries that approaches its definition are a huge red flag to me
The Western Capitalist countries that you’d likely consider “good to live in” depend on Imperialism. In short, they act as landlords in country form. Socialist countries like the PRC are making huge strides in comparison without depending on Imperialism, genocide, etc to sustain themselves.
If the only arguments you’ve seen in this thread are along the lines you’ve described, then you’ve either blocked people or otherwise are defederated from instances like Lemmygrad.ml.
If you want to learn more about Communism, I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list. It’s designed for complete newcomers, the first section is designed to be self-contained in that it gives you a broad overview of Communism in theory and historically, then it goes through the essentials of Marxist-Leninist theory and practice in the latter sections. There are audiobooks linked as well for most works.
No, all capitalist countries that are nice places to live are guilty of imperialism, colonialism, genocide, or some combination of the three. No exceptions. All you’re noticing is that they have successfully exported their suffering at best.
Communist countries have a massive uphill battle, they have to gain wealth without imperialist exploitation AND fend off the US, who has the same military budget as the rest of the world COMBINED, this combined with the fact they usually started poor makes this a wildly unfair comparison. Only authoritarians can hold onto power when faced with all of these things.
the mere fact that in 75 years china has gotten where it has and the only issues you can really point to are matters of policy rather than fundamental failures of communism tells most of the story, communism can be essentially identical to what china does with freedom of speech, no censorship, and no genocide very easily, as none of those things have anything to do with whether a country is communist or not, with all of the benefits.
in other words capitalists can’t find flaws with communism that don’t apply to capitalism, only issues with particular implementations, the issues communists talk about are mostly fundamental to capitalism.
So I’m scrolling back up to reply to you after reading more. I actually don’t see most of the capitalist comments lol. I see a bunch of replies to removed comments that really don’t tell me anything about how the other side is replying.
You can use the modlog, lemmy’s web interface lets you see it
Could a Communist Nation be considered viable if such a hostile force can take it down? Does it all come down to survival of the fittest (in the best use of the term)?
It does come back to it because the “fittest” nations are barbarians as shit.
Yes and no. The AES ststes of today have learned from what happened to the USSR and other former Socialist countries snd have adapted, such as China’s Socialist Market Economy an stance towards international investment, not closing off but not ceding power.
Human greed destroys all forms of government.
This is one of bourgeois ideology’s last defenses: apathy.
That all the other systems are just as bad.
That it’s just “human nature.”
That there is no alternative.Greed is our evolutionary dead end
This is a good example of one of things people hate about lemmy.
Communism fan boying, implicit denial of genocides committed by communist powers, out in the open on the front page.
You’re going to find Communists on a website made by Communists. Don’t know what you mean by “genocide denial,” but in another comment you were unironically recommending the Black Book of Communism’s chief writer as a legitimate source, you’re doing the “Communism killed 100 million” meme.
And you cited a website that denies the Uyghur Genocide and the Holodomor.
You’re doing genocide denial.
Wow, I wonder what went on there…
Uyghurs aren’t being systematically murdered at scale. There are reeducation camps, but to call it “genocide” isn’t accurate. You should read the UN report.
As for the idea of an “intentional famine,” this is disputed at best. In reality, there was a famine in the 1930s that didn’t have any racial motivations. Nobody denies the famine’s existence.
So no, I’m not doing genocide denial, and I’m correct, you want to appear morally righteous regardless of the real facts.
The UN hasn’t explicitly called it genocide, but if you assume China’s motivation is to reduce their population, it seems hard to argue its actions wouldn’t qualify. Widespread arbitrary imprisonment and certainly forced sterilization would meet at least condition 4 of their requirement. The Genocide Convention’s definition is below, emphasis mine:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
You could argue they don’t actually intend to reduce the Uyghur population, but it’s hard to accept that a surge in the Xinjiang region’s sterilization rate and the birth rate being cut in half over the course of three years are just anti-terrorism measures.
The thing is, I don’t assume China’s goal is to reduce the Uyghur population. The claims of “forced sterilization” are misrepresentations from known liar and propagandist Adrian Zenz, who misread 8% of new annual IUDs going to Uyghur women as 80%. There’s no evidence whatsoever of forced sterilization.
There are reeducation camps, but I don’t think reeducation alone is sufficient to call it a genocide, especially when we know it’s pretty much over as a program and yet no evidence of mass sterilization or murder is here. Uyghurs were actually exempt from the One Child Policy, their birth rate is falling with the rest of China as poverty is reduced and from a higher height as they were actually allowed to have more kids previously.
