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 then 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.
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.
This entire thread is based on this. If comments are truthful.
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.
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GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
ANTI
WHITE
RACSIM!!!
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OMG lol ha ha i’m so sorry. Other people in this thread genuinely saying shit like that.
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 accord 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.
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
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
“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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Tell that to anarchocommunists.
I’m sure it will be news to them that they will want to hear.
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.
Every single IWW member is reading this comment and going “NO!!!”
Tell that to communes.
Rule of thumb: If the US is sanctioning or at war with them, they’re communist.
Yeah, like Iran
I can show many democracies in Africa like that! :D
What people who lived in the Soviet union and other socialist states have to say:
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Adult mortality increased enormously in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union when the Soviet system collapsed 30 years ago. https://archive.ph/9Z12u
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Former Soviet Countries See More Harm From Breakup https://news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
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The trajectory Hungary took after transition to capitalism mirrors what happened in most post USSR states. This just further supports the point that the communist system was better.
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What happened in countries like Hungary and Poland is a direct result of the transition to capitalism however. What’s more this transition happened under the best possible conditions. The transition happened largely democratically without any violent revolutions, and these countries got support from the west to soften economic impact of the transition. Yet, despite all that we see that majority of post Soviet countries end up going in a similar direction under capitalism. Again, Hungary isn’t an outlier here.
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Thing is that bad management, corruption, and so on, have happened in every human society that has ever existed. A political system isn’t magically going to change that. What a political system can do however is create different selection pressures for behavior. Capitalist system selects for different kinds of behaviors than a communist one. As we see with the case of transition from communism to capitalism in eastern Europe, the selection pressures of capitalism result in far worse things happening than under communism.
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Hard agree. Our government will wreck the economy just to die on two hills: social conservatism (EU funding says hi) and russian reliance. Russian gas, russian atom (x2) because they want to build Paks II. They also gerrymandered the everliving fuck out of electoral districts so they can win their precious supermajority. I hope they fail on at least one of the aforementioned hills so they can drop the ball like the now-opposition did in 2006. As for communism, well, the 72% seems very wrong. Sure we had dictatorship-lite, but 1956 happened beforehand, to which we lost many of our schools for example. Plenty of (grand+)parents’ tales paint communism like it was the worst thing that could possibly have happened. Also, if 72% of people preferred communism, then surely the dem. socialist party would Poll higher than 3%.
Reminder that fidesz (the govt party) was originally anti-communist. (I am Hungarian if it wasn’t obvious).
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God how hard it will be for people to realise how fucking stupid making more russian reactors and signing more russian gas contracts are. Our electoral system is in shambles1. social issues are overwhelmingly conservative here. The bigger green party is anti-gLObaLisM. The neo-na**s have the same amount of seats as green party number 1.
1: 2022: Popular vote: 54,13% Fidesz-KDNP; 34,44% United Opposition; 5,88% Our Homeland (neo-na**s). cf district votes: Fidesz-KDNP 87, United Opposition 19.
Mixed system so parliament makeup (199 seats) is 135 seats - 67,84% for Fidesz-KDNP; 57 seats - 28,64% for United Opposition; 6 seats - 3,02% for Our Homeland; and 1 seat for German national representation thing.
So yeah, shit’s fucked
Shhh we only believe facts that back up what we were told to think
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※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
… apart from that it’s also most unlikely it’s 14 year old girls who are the people writing this in online discussions.
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
I know it’s a meme but if your points are this reductive you might not be making an intelligent or rational argument.
We all know a 14 year old black girls know their shit about communism.
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.
