I call bullshit on this one
I’d say 1 person owning most of the money made at the company is the problem
To solve it everyone just needs to form or join a private unionized cooperative that doesn’t go on stock market for sustainable growth and so everyone at the company is making a lot of money too
Then collectively you all grow the pot that is available for all of you. Better to all be making 1,000,000 each and then grow it together to become 10,000,000-100,000,000+ for each of you
That is the root issue. Not enough of that
This doesn’t solve the systemic pressures within Capitalism, nor does it describe how to get from A to B. Your idea still depends on your one firm outcompeting other firms, which is difficult in saturated markets.
I recommend you look into Marxist theory, I have some recommendations I can make.
yeah instead of having all the money controlled by a few billionares, lets have an extremely powerful govt have that kinda power. great idea /s
It is better for the economy to be controlled by the public than by private interests, yes. You can study the democratizations of the economy made in AES states, and how the lives of the working class made the largest improvments.
True but at least it’s a good step to take. More stuff will be useful as well
I’d say it would be a good step to take if I thought it was legitimately possible in the current system. If it succeded, it would be good, but such a strategy has never worked before and there’s no evidence that it will.
Last I checked the USSR didn’t do so well financially, and Russia is basically a criminal empire.
The USSR did fairly well until liberalizing part of its economy, as well as struggling to recover from the immense cost it paid to win the Eastern Front and beat the Nazis while under the oppression of the Cold War.
The Marxist-Leninist tradition is still carried forward by many states, including the PRC, which is on its way to surpass the US as world superpower.
The PRC is barely communist nowadays, and the USSR did not do well, the liberalising was a last-ditch attempt to save it.
The PRC is more classically Marxist than under the Gang of Four, when they abandoned materialist analysis and attempted to implement Communism through fiat. Large firms and key industries of the PRC are firmly in the public sector, while small firms, cooperatives, and sole proprietorships make up most of the private sector.
Marx didn’t think you could abolish private property by making it illegal, but by developing out of it. Socialism and Communism, for Marx, were about analyzing and harnessing the natural laws of economics moving towards centralization, so as to democratize it and produce in the interests of all. This wasn’t about decentralization, but centralization.
Markets themselves are not Capitalism, just like public ownership itself is not Socialist. The US is not Socialist just because it has a post-office, just like the PRC is not Capitalist just because it has some degree of private ownership. Rather, Marx believed you can’t just make private property illegal, but must develop out of it, as markets create large firms, and large firms work best with central planning:
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i. e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
I want you to look at the bolded word. Why did Marx say by degree? Did he think on day 1, businesses named A-C are nationalized, day 2 businesses D-E, etc etc? No. Marx believed that it is through nationalizing of the large firms that would be done immediately, and gradually as the small firms develop, they too can be folded into the public sector. The path to eliminated Private Property isn’t to make it illegal, but to develop out of it.
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital;[43] the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
This is why, in the previous paragraph, Marx described public seizure in degrees, but raising the level of the productive forces as rapidly as possible.
China does have Billionaires, but these billionaires do not control key industries, nor vast megacorps. The number of billionaires is actually shrinking in the last few years. Instead, large firms and key industries are publicly owned, and small firms are privately owned. This is Marxism.
As for the USSR, its economy worked quite well for most of its existence. I recommend reading Do Publicly Owned, Planned Economies Work? by Stephen Gowens, who goes over what went right and what went wrong in the Soviet Economy, including why it was dissolved. Further, GDP growth was positive throughout the near entirety of its existence, collapsing when it liberalized:
I recommend doing more research on Marixsm and the economies of the PRC and former USSR.
Tldr
PRC is Marxist, and the USSR’s economy was flawed, but ultimately worked rather well given its conditions. Read the comment for the justifications for both claims.
Your boos mean nothing. I’ve seen what makes you cheer.
No you haven’t, you’re too lazy to read enough to.
I didn’t downvote you, for what it’s worth. I save that for more unreasonable people.
Sad to say, but humans are the root of evil. Atrocities have been done in the name of all sorts of things, but it’s always humans carrying it out.
I thought memes were supposed to be funny… this just looks like a propaganda poster
I mean, propaganda is technically a type of meme, isn’t it?
And lithobreaking is technically a form of deceleration, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a safe way to land a rocket.
who is the anti bad thing propaganda poster hurting?
Since when are memes just about humor?
Memes aren’t just about humour. But this is no humour at all
Don’t got to political Memes then. Some of the worst propaganda slop there
Thank god I’m not the only one.
That’s the .ml experience
Communism is a shitty alternative.
In what way?
Ask any post soviet country how they liked it during the USSR
if you gave a shit what they wanted you wouldn’t have overthrown them in a violent coup
The vast majority believe they are worse off now than under Socialism, which makes sense because the reintroduction of Capitalism resulted in skyrocketing rates of poverty, prostitution, drug abuse, homelessness, and an estimated 7 million excess deaths around the world.
Over 15 year old data at this point. And in countries that don’t have a free press.
It’s still well-documented and consistent. Socialism worked better than Capitalism. Plus, no press is ever “free,” either private interests dominate it or public interests do.
Private interests do align, but rarely. Meaning you have more chance at opposing narratives forming. Public is monovoiced. Without an opposing voice its data becomes suspect.
Private is controlled by large corporations, and often gets state funding. All press has bias. Really, you don’t have anything against the data other than you feel like it could be wrong.
Oh my fing god, I thought lemmy is only full of extreme liberals, but it’s also full of wannabe comunists. Dude, have you ever asked yourself why USSR fell if everything was better than in the west? Why people risked their lives jumping over the Berlin wall? Why there was a whole black market of importing goods from the west into ussr? Why people didn’t enjoy being sent to Siberia by the millions to die of hunger and of forced labor?
Or was Cuba a success?
Lemmy is developed by Communists, the Communists were here first.
Secondly, the dissolution of the USSR was driven instead by numerous complex factors:
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Liberal reforms that gave the Bourgeoisie power over key industries
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A firm dedication to planning by hand even as the economy grew more complex and computers too slow to be adapted to the planning mechanisms
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A huge portion of resources were spent on maintaining millitary parity with the US in order to dissuade US invasion
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80% of the combat done in World War II was on the Eastern Front, and 20 million Soviets lost their lives, with no real economic support from the West in rebuilding despite taking the largest cost of war
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An enclosed, heavily sanctioned economy relied on internal resource gathering, closed off from the world market
Countries like the PRC have taken to heart what happened in the USSR. As an example, the PRC shifted to a more classically Marxist economy, focusing on public ownership of only the large firms and key industries, and relying on markets to develop out of private ownership. This keeps them in touch with the global economy without giving the bourgeoisie control of key industries, and thus the bourgeoisie has no power over the economy or the state.
People left the DDR after getting good educations for free, and higher wages in West Germany. They got the best of both worlds.
Millions were not sent to Siberia.
Cuba is a resilliant success story given its brutal embargo and sanctions, yes. It has astounding metrics in areas like life expectancy despite being intentionally impoverished by the US Empire.
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A Medium.com post isn’t a source, dude
Medium.com isn’t the source, it references the sources. Here’s Wikipedia referencing many of the same sources.
As opposed to the source you provided, which was nothing
I guess you can say Ukraine is now worse off than in the USSR, Back then they weren’t at war. The current situation isn’t exactly the fault of capitalism (or Ukranie for that matter)
This data was pre-Russo-Ukrainian war.
Ever seen Communism working as intended? There’ll always be power hungry assholes ruining these things for everyone.
I’d say all AES states have broadly managed to achieve their goals. There have been troubles and struggles faced internally and externally, none have been dreamlike utopian wonderlands, but seemingly only non-Marxists are the ones that require that of Marxist movements.
I had to google that first. Had no idea what the sahel states had to do with socialism or communism.
Those AES states are mostly highly corrupt though. I wouldn’t refer to north Korea as a livable place, plus the leaders are bathing in money while the populace dies from hunger. In Vietnam, if you know someone in politics, you can get whatever you want. I know this (nearly) first-hand. Laos, lol. And why the hell is China on that list? They’re way too deep in the capitalist game to be on that list, no? People also don’t mean shit to the ones in charge. Their people are executed by the thousands every year and they like to keep minorities in concentration camps. I’m sorry, those states are failed states in my opinion.
And as long as there is corruption, communism is not going to work. It’s a nice theory, but it just takes one black sheep to fuck it up for everyone. I wish it weren’t that way. It’d be nice to live in a world where people work for a purpose and everyone gets the same and no one has to suffer. Not going to happen.
Capitalism is plain evil though, I’ll give you that.
AES as in “Actually Existing Socialism.” The Sahel States are a quasi-Socialist national liberatory alliance. Burkina Faso was briefly Socialist under Sankara, but that time has passed.
The struggles faced in the DPRK are more due to sanctions and embargo than anything else, kinda like Cuba. Unlike Cuba, the US slaughtered 20% of their population and destroyed 80% of their buildings, yet they were economically ahead of South Korea until the 80s. The leadership is not “bathing in money” either.
Vietnam is rising rapidly. It isn’t a Utopia, but is dramatically improving. Same with Laos.
The PRC is more classically Marxist than they were under the late Mao period and Gang of Four, I elaborated on that, here. Further, you’re repeating state department propaganda about them, very silly.
Further, China is democratic. It doesn’t have a western liberal democracy, but it does have a comprehensive Socialist democracy. You can read this article talking about why the Chinese democratic model is in place and why the people support it, or this article on how the Chinese model of democracy works in contrast to western democracy, or this short video on how it works, or this video on how elections work, or this article on the makeup of the NPC.
By what metrics is China not democratic? What mechanically would they have to change for you to accept the opinions of the Chinese citizenry on their own system? I recommend this introduction to SWCC, it goes in-detail about how elections and the democratic model work in China. what mechanically would China have to change in order for you to accept the system that the Chinese have implemented by and for themselves, and approve of at rates exceeding 90%?
Please explain how “one black sheep” would ruin Socialism/Communism. Given that you clearly aren’t familiar with Marxist theory nor how AES states function, this is a telltale sign that your critiques are of strawmen.
TBF Russia is a shit hole and has failed in every type of government they’ve ever had. Honestly it’s probably worse in Russia now than under communism. China was also doing no better before “communism”. Basically countries tend to make the jump when they have nothing left to lose.
Russia is a shit hole and has failed in every type of government they’ve ever had.
The soviets found themselves in a feudal shithole, and elevated it to a global super power.
China was also doing no better before “communism”.
Not sure who claims that China is communist, but it’s definitely not the chines. They have a market socialist system (or more accurately SWCC), which still has class society and its own contradictions.
Educate yourself on basic facts before you speak on a topic and stfu until you do so shitlib
gives way too much power to the govt and replaces monitary incentive systems with ones based on fear and coruption
That’s not how AES states function, in any capacity. Further, people get paid in Socialist states, so I really don’t know what strawman you’re fighting here.
Yeah great, because what we need now is soviet propaganda. This needs to die
I’m going to take a wild guess that posters and downvoters in this thread don’t live in actual communist countries. Endorsing hammer and sickle is just as bad as endorsing swastikas…
The portrayal of the Communists and Nazis as “twin evils” exaggerates the sins of the Communists in quantity and quality, while minimizing the sins of the Nazis in quantity and quality, in order to show them as relatively equal problems. In other words, its Nazi apologia, and historical revisionism. Read Blackshirts and Reds.
The Nazis executed the Communists, Socialists, gay people, trans people, disabled people, Jewish people, Slavic people, and many, many more. It wasn’t simple opposition, it was a racially supremacist ideology.
The Communists executed Tsarists, fascists, and terrorists to the state. They did not create a systematic industrialized murder machine like the Nazis did in order to keep up with how many people they needed to kill.
Soviet propaganda is a good thing, and it’s on the mark here. Socialism is necessary and Capitalism is clearly on the downhill.
Hardly anybody in this thread seems to have arrived at the conclusion that maybe some lower-class people have an interest in and nostalgia for the Eastern Bloc because capitalism is becoming increasingly intolerable.
It reminds me of the chumps who condescendingly explained to feminists that misandry is a serious problem on par with white supremacy and that not all men are awful. What a way to miss the point. Telling a lower-class person that communism is actually horrible doesn’t fix anything and neither does reminding an unhappy feminist that there are some good men in the world.
Yep, plus we need to factor in the fact that in these studies, there are non-working class people polled. Ie, bourgeoisie that enjoy new luxuries and privledges they did not have before. Of course they will say Capitalism is better.
Polling just the working class majority, we can expect even more definitive results pointing to a longing for the stability and safety of the Soviet system.
Soviet propaganda is a good thing
Was the USSR good?
Well, it depends. Are you working class (then yes) or owning class (then no)
What if you were one of the unfortunate ones who simply got starved? If you criticised the government, or if someone simply accused you of being against the system? What if you weren’t even against the system but simply had a higher position (for example in the military, or as a politician) before your country was made part of the USSR? What about the huge lanes in front of grocery stores when they got new food?
Why were there such huge protests, and why did they have to be bloodily shut down? All owning class people?
Lets examine these.
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Food security got much better in the Soviet Union over Tsarist Russia, which is a huge part of why life expectancy over doubled from the start of the Soviet Union gradually as they focused on agriculture, housing, and healthcare for the working class.
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Criticism of government wasn’t an executable offense unless you were forming terrorist cells or causing legitimate political instability, such as Trotsky, who did both.
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The millitary was not purged of everyone in it, those found to be Tsarist collaborators or part of the Tsarist White Army were punished for their crimes against the people. Not all of them were executed, imprisonment was also quite common.
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It is better to feed the people than let them starve. World War II and the years right after it were especially brutal, as the Nazis took Ukraine, the USSR’s breadbasket, causing mass food shortages. 20 million Soviet people lost their lives to the Nazis, but thankfully the Red Army beat the Nazis.
There, generally, were not huge protests. I’d like to know which ones in particular you are talking about, but protest wasn’t that common as until the later years, government approval was fairly high.
ad 1.: much worse than in western counterparts
ad 2.: my great grandfather was sent to a gulag for criticising the DDR’s government
ad 3.: another great grandfather didn’t do anything except being an officer in the Hungarian military, so he got killed in the communist revolution (1956)
DDR 1953
Hungary 1956 (fighting for democracy and freedom), peaceful student protest was shot at, police and Hungarian army supported the protesters, they got a new president who promised multiple parties and free elections, as well as leaving the Warsaw pact. The USSR sent tanks to end the revolution by killing protesters, the new president was killed too, many people in the military (doesn’t matter if they supported joining the movement for freedom and democracy or wanted to stay in the USSR) got killed.
Prague 1968 peaceful movement for human rights and basic freedoms -> USSR sent troops to end it
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Wrong, actually, if you trust internal CIA reports.
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Anecdotes, especially familial ones, are not a replacement for expansive data taking. I have no idea what your great-grandfather was sent to prison for, nor is a single case like that representative of the entire USSR.
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The Hungarian revolt in 1956 was infested with anti-semetic pograms. MI6 funded, supplied, and trained the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries. These counter-revolutionaries were allied with fascists who were lynching Jewish people and Communists.
"The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. “There is no longer any room for doubt,” said the Yugoslav reporter, “it is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,” continued this writer, “coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways.”
“But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing.”
“Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as 'Fascist elements’ …” (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)
“The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-Semtic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary.”
"A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported:
During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: “Down with Jew Gero!” “Down with Jew Rakosi!” or just simply “down with the Jews!”
Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that “Jewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.” Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that “anti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.” This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because “fascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.” Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that “the majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.” The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives."
Further, the CIA also backed Hungarian resistance forces:
Prague in 1968 was a similar fascist uprising in both cases there were some elements of progressive protest, but these were greatly overshadowed by the fascist movements.
I’m not making any accusations here, I want you to elaborate more, but legitimately it sounds like you’re saying your family members were fascists or fascist sympathizers. I want you to clear their names, because Hungary absolutely fought on the side of the Axis in World War II, and the 1956 counter-revolt was against the Communists.
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People like you really should be forced to live under the conditions of pre-Soviet Russia. If literal feudalism and a life expectancy of thirty is so great to you, you should have to live it yourself
I’m not saying that was good either, but middle European countries started with a similar situation and got much farther. I recognise the USSR as a lesser evil than tsarist Russia, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. More like an upgrade from 2/10 to 4/10 while other countries went paths that lead to 8/10
I’m not saying that was good either, but middle European countries started with a similar situation and got much farther.
No they didn’t.
but that doesn’t mean it’s good.
K. Your line for what counts as “good” is completely arbitrary and vibes based.
while other countries went paths that lead to 8/10
No they didn’t
I think so, relatively.
Weren’t they better than the Tsarist rule?Like, public healthcare, education and other policies leading to high literacy rates, longer lifespans, low infant and mother mortality etc.
And if we compare them to the other major powers at the time, aren’t they better than those since they made progress without colonies?
You’re spot on. Those who uphold the USSR as an overall force for good don’t think it was a magical utopia, but look at the hard metrics and see that, unlike Western powers, ultimately played a liberatory role globally and a progressive role domestically. Looking at geopolitical conflicts, they were almost always on the “correct” side, the one siding against colonialism, Nazism, and more.
Siding against colonialism: I guess its not colonialism when you’re colonialising your neighbouring countries and using your military to keep them in line / end liberation movements by force?
Siding against national socialism: At first they collaborated to take Poland together, and they made a deal to not attack each other. Only after Hitler broke that deal and attacked, forcing them to fight them, the USSR turned against Nazi-Germany.
… and more?
The USSR never colonized anyone. Further, it supported movements in Cuba, Angola, Algeria, China, Vietnam, Korea, Palestine, and more.
As for Poland, rather than let the genocidal Nazis take all of Poland, the Soviets stopped them from taking all of it. We see the difference in treatment when the Nazis exterminated Polish people and the Soviets did not.
The USSR never sided with the Nazis. They hated each other. The liberal democracies of Europe made similar agreements with Hitler before the USSR, and shot down Stalin’s suggestions of an anti-fascist alliance. Furthermore, US industrialists were directly inspired by Fascist Germany and Italy to carry out the failed Business Plot against FDR. The USA also paid reparations to German industrialists for their destroyed property after the war was over (Yes, even German industrialists who used Holocaust slave labor, like Krupp).
1933 - UK, France, Italy - The four powers pact
1934 - Poland - Hitler-Pilsudski Pact
1935 - UK - Anglo-German Naval agreement
1936 - Japan - Anti-Comintern pact
1938 - September - UK - German-British Non Aggression Pact (Munich Agreement )
1938 - December - France - German-French Non Aggression Pact
1939 - March - Romania - German Romanian Economical Treaty
1939 - March - Lithuania - Non aggression ultimatum
1939 - May - Italy - Pact of Steel (Friendship and Alliance)
1939 - May - Denmark - Non aggression pact
1939 - June - Estonia - non aggression pact
1939 - July - Latvia - non aggression pact
1939 - August - USSR - Molotov-Ribbentrop Non Aggression pact - the only ones libs care about
Stalin with regards to this said:
“Indeed, it would be ridiculous and stupid to close our eyes to the capitalist encirclement and think that our external enemies, the fascists, for example, will not, if the opportunity arises, make an attempt at an attack upon the USSR. Only blind braggarts or masked enemies who desire to lull the vigilance of our people can think like that.”
Even the US state department confirmed Stalin’s rationale for a pact with Hitler
“The Soviets signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany after the British and French rejected Soviet offers to establish a military alliance against Germany”
CIA declassifies its dealings with ex nazis
Stalin ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact’
How the Allied multinationals supplied Nazi Germany throughout World War II
0·19 days agoStalin ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact’
As if they were ever going to.
The Cold War & Its Origins, Vol. I, Denna F. Flemming, 1961, Chapter V:
Final Procrastination. This explicit warning did not increase the tempo in London. It was not until July 31 that Chamberlain finally announced the naming of a military mission to Moscow, to arrange the concrete terms of the proposed alliance. Molotov had named his top military men to negotiate, but instead of Lord Gort and General Gamelin the British-French delegation was headed by an obscure British Admiral, Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, and by a French General of comparable obscurity. Nor did this mission fly to Moscow as fast as planes could take it, to concert measures with desperate speed against the pitiable crucifixion of Poland which was boiling up on the horizon. While the sands were running out for Poland by the minute, the Allied mission took a slow Baltic boat, on August 5, and did not reach Moscow until August 11. Then it transpired, once again, that these men had no power to conclude an agreement.
Yes.
yeah gulags were really great and the world needs more of them
The Soviet prison system varied quite a bit, some with open visitation and no outer walls. They varied quite dramatically in conditions, but many were fairly progressive for the time. I recommend reading Russian Justice.
yeah gulags were great, really progressive.
Read the book.
It’s either socialism or barbarism. That’s why we are back here again.
And unfortunately, USSR falls smack damn on the barbarism side of that divide
you’re just mad they stopped the holocaust
…how could that possibly be your takeaway from what I said? I literally never even compared them to the Nazis, just said they weren’t socialist enough
reading between the lines
Indisputably the opposite, the Soviet Union was the first big Socialist state.
According to American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Kristen Ghodsee, efforts to institutionalize the “double genocide thesis”, or the moral equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust (race murder) and the victims of communism (class murder), in particular the push at the beginning of the 2007–2008 financial crisis for commemoration of the latter in Europe, can be seen as the response by economic and political elites to fears of a leftist resurgence in the face of devastated economies and extreme social inequalities in both the Eastern and Western worlds as the result of the excesses of neoliberal capitalism. She says that any discussion of the achievements by Communist states, including literacy, education, women’s rights, and social security is usually silenced, and any discourse on the subject of communism is focused almost exclusively on Joseph Stalin’s crimes and the “double genocide thesis”, an intellectual paradigm summed up as such: “1) any move towards redistribution and away from a completely free market is seen as communist; 2) anything communist inevitably leads to class murder; and 3) class murder is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust.” By linking all leftist and socialist ideals to the excesses of Stalinism, Ghodsee posits that the elites hope to discredit and marginalize all political ideologies that could “threaten the primacy of private property and free markets”.
I should have clarified that I’m not against socialism, just the hierarchy of states. We should instead pursue more egalitarian socialist expressions like social ecology or kinds of anarchy.
making the perfect the enemy of the good
this is you rn
socialism >> communism is a evolving process, but every time it starts growing and developing, capital asserts itself to dominate and destroy it
the only Actually Existing Socialisms today have nuclear deterrents to avoid this fate, they also have to develop counter-intelligence defenses because just nuclear weapons are not enough to protect from all the myriad threats that capital engages in towards anti-socialist >> anti-communist goals
if you can not understand this material reality of history, and use it to analyze the struggle for liberation in this world, you are lost
Socialism allows for both public and private ownership, individual freedoms, and democratic decision-making, while still aiming for social equality. Communism, in contrast, tends to involve total state control and often limits personal freedoms.
Tell me you’ve never read anything about communism that wasn’t written by anti-communists without telling me you’ve never read anything about communism that wasn’t written by anti-communists.
The state owning the means of production means the people running the state have a shit ton of power. Just takes a handful of bad people to turn that into oppression as we’ve seen in the USSR and China.
If you disagree feel free to explain your reasoning.
The bourgies owning the means of production means a handful of evil vampires have all the power
Makes it always shit
tell me you’re 16 without telling me you’re 16
Well I will agree that your average 16 year-old is more well read then the person I replied to.
That doesn’t even make sense…
😘 be well
You should go back to Reddit, you’d be happier there
be better
Jesus what a mess of a sentence. You really tried to hamfist that one in there.
Limits personal freedoms only for the owning class. If you’re not a landlord or ceo you have nothing to fear.
Tell that to the masses Lenin, Stalin, and Mao killed
I support communes, and Anarcho communism sounds lovely. Once authority is involved, they tend to fail
Yeah I didn’t consider the nazis but they are just lackeys for the landlords and ceos so I mentally put them in there. Ofc nazis have to fear communism too.
The Black Book of Communism was debunked long ago, from including Nazis killed during World War II as “victims of Communism” to literally making up numbers to get to 100 million dead to being outright disproven once the Soviet Archives were opened up.
There were excess deaths, but Communist leaders weren’t mindless butchers, either. And with the introduction of Socialism came numerous benefits for the working class, like a doubling of life expectancy, tripling of literacy rates to 99.9%, free and high quality education, healthcare, and childcare, an expansion in women’s rights, a democratization of the economy, and much more.
Anarchism is a beautiful idea, and I used to be one. However, I am more convinced of Marxism, namely because we have more data that shows the success of Marxism, and because hierarchy and centralization are requirements for expansive infrastructure projects like high speed rail and for complex production, such as for smartphones.
I have an introductory Marxist-Leninist Reading List you can check out, if you’d like to learn more.
How are you going to secure your commune from external enemies without invoking authority?
All this things sound great, we just need humanity to not be shitty to each other.
Both Capitalism and Socialism have room for public and private ownership, the difference is which sector controls the state, large firms, and key industries. The Nordic Countries are dominated by Private Capital, ie it is Capitalist, while the PRC is dominated by Public Ownership, ie it is Socialist.
Communism limits the personal freedoms of the bourgeoisie. All Communism is, is a mkre developed and global form of Socialism, where the small firms that once were private have all grown into the public sector or collapsed.
To paraphrase Bernard Shaw, Communism might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.
Capitalism is a system and just that, it has no moral, therefore cannot be evil. The red hand without the ussr symbol would make this image more unified.
That’s like saying
“Nazism is a system and just that, it has no moral, therefore cannot be evil.”
or
“The Transatlantic slave trade is a system and just that, it has no moral, therefore cannot be evil.”
What are you talking about? Systems are created by people; they don’t just pop into existence.
You said it yourself the systems are created by people, the people can be evil. They are the root of the evil aka anyone upholding capitalism because they profit even tho they know exactly how bad it is for the world and people, just like the people creating fascism the fascist are the root of evil.
Ah, you must be one of the people who say “guns don’t kill people”
Guns have no moral yes
“capitalism is evil”
so what’s not evil?
“a totalitarian socialist shithole, where you got no freedom or human rights”
The caricature in your head of Socialism in practice does not exist. I recommend you read Anticommunism & Wonderland, which despite its title does show a nuanced view of the Soviet Union.
no thanks, I like my free speech
The proper response to being offered something to read, indeed.
What the fuck is up with you people its like you only want to cry about the scary thing you’re so afraid of but won’t read anything about how it may not be so scary
You’re like a child who won’t eat their peas because they are green.
You don’t really have free speech in Capitalism, all of the important media is entirely controlled by private interests to begin with. Further, with what freedoms we do have, why deliberately plug your ears? Do you just want the freedom to ignore inconvenient truths?
You don’t have free speech either way. And in capitalism you may not even know that you don’t have free speech
what a cowardly thing to say. you could have just walked away, but your fragile ego wasn’t done humiliating you.
I like when nazis don’t have free speech
A river floods every year. If someone builds a house next to it and the river takes it, is the river evil, or is the person suffering the consequences of their own ignorance? The consequences of capitalism are predictable and inevitable. The behaviour of a dollar is almost as predictable as that of an electron. Why do people pretend like we don’t know what is going to happen?
Are you bourgeois? Under communism the owning class has no freedom
History says otherwise.
In what manner?
I don’t get why every Reddit alternative needs to be filled with these weird political ideas. Communism, Fascism and every other form of extremism only leads to misery.
I’m sure capitalism is flawed, but you can make it work better. Any of the Nordic countries works as a great example. And no they aren’t perfect but nothing ever will be.
Luigi’s hand doesn’t look anything like that. Someone fix this meme
You’re not going to overthrow fascism, white supremacy or capitalism with random acts of adventurism. If you’re not more organized than your enemy they will crush you.
I leave that to the plumber’s union.
Greed is the evil.
@Cowbee@lemmy.ml i feel like you’re dancing around the issue of authoritarian abuse and centralization of power.
you can’t seriously defend the DPRK Il regime as being good for the workers.
do you think it’s good that Xi has made himself president for life? Is that the mark of a functioning democratic system of the people?
my biggest issue with Leftists is their seeming need to defend totalitarians instead of just writing them off and admitting, “ok, yeah, they suck, but communism could still work!”
