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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.
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.
All communist states were/are dictatorships (Soviet Union, China, North Korea).
What the society really needs are strong democracies with a free, well regalemented market and strong social welfare (mixed economy). This is already happening in northern europe with great succes.
Those aren’t/weren’t communist so per the post their leaders worked for the CIA
All communist states that survived early CIA coup plots were/are dictatorships
09/11 Chile vibes
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
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.
Worker owned cooperatives would go a fair way to seizing the means of production.
Kinda. They are nicer to work at, but aren’t what Marx is talking about, as they still retain classes due non-coop people having different property relations to those in the coop.
And it often comes into being because of a CIA financed coup
It’s like the chicken or the egg question.
You can tell redditors are flooding in when you find absolutely braindead takes like this.
When has the CIA ever financed a communist coup?
Never … the communists / socialists / democratic groups usually reacted because of a CIA financed coup
not the same thing but this may be related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag
Death to America
Any one party political system can either fail or be maintained through violent oppression. People need to have a say in who represents them and what their values are.
A more sustainable solution than soviet style communism is to have proportional representation and work on instilling socialist virtues such as kindness, social responsibility, and fairness in the population. over time, the people in government will start to reflect those values.
It doesn’t matter what ideology. If the people running it are rotten, any system can be corrupted.
Deeply anti-materialist take.
Can you explain how you disagree? Is it about incentives to be corrupt (or against) depending on the system?
If you do not believe in great man theory™ and think that all political developments happen because one person can magically steer entire countries and the world, in geo-political terms, or idealists in thinking that if you have the correct ideas, you can magically steer the entire rest of the world to whatever you think, by having the correct thoughts. Then your theories of political developments are non-materialist, like this comment is objecting to. The system sets the conditions of who is going to be empowered or rewarded for their actions and positions.
People in this context appears to be plural, thus I don’t see how Montreal_Metro’s take is Great Man Theory.
The system sets the conditions of who is going to be empowered or rewarded for their actions and positions.
Ultimately, any system is operated by mere mortals who will arbitrarily reward and punish people based on their own bias, morals and desires. Systems only work so long as the people manning them follow the rules. Systems only last if the people running it punish rule breakers.
According to all of history, corruption, apathy, and pure human greed and ingenuity will gradually eat away any system, economic and political, until it collapses. Only for the failing system to be replaced by a “better” system, which begins the cycle again.
The fact that it is attributed to a very few actors and not a literal, singular actor does not negate great man theory.
The issue is that this is arbitrarily flattening of the actual material conditions. You can point out that nearly all political systems, on a long enough timeline lead to some form of collapse (Joseph Tainter is a good reference on this). But all of these things are dependent, not independent, of the systems and conditions they find themselves in. The timescales and forms can vary drastically depending on the material conditions actors find themselves in.
What came first? The chicken or the egg?
Did the system that created the conditions people find themselves in come first. Or did the people running the system create the conditions that they find themselves in?
It is not that there isn’t some flow both ways, but that the material conditions is much more dominant than people coming up with ideas and mechanations moving things in ways contradicting the conditions. The system setting the conditions is in fact dominant. The way corruption and self-dealing manifests is different between where you can just create a private corporation and lobby for a government contract to justify being given a 500 million dollars of tax payer money, versus trying to massage Gosplan to syphon off several million Rubles of excess spending, versus tricking a sovereign wealth fund to hand over several billion dollars for some supposed innovative building company to create innovations for Neom.
They didn’t seem to express an argument or value judgment in their comment regardless of their actual opinion.
Don’t feed the troll.
I am not that person, but I guess you wouldn’t like the ambassadors of fascism to be efficient and competent.
So then the solution is to decentralize so everyone is running it.
And have a way for it to be trustless as well
It’s simple: teach everyone to make everything they need for themselves, so they can’t be expoited
Sure bro lemme teach my aunt to make her insulin, her own needles, her own glucose test strips and all that cheers
There is a group actively working to open source Insulin manufacturing to make it practical to self produce.
That’s good work for a lot of reasons, but there’s a world of difference between “open source and theoretically DIY” and it being anywhere near realistic for everyone to actually do it themselves.
It’s good that I have access to advanced technology without having to have learned how to build it from the ground up. That’s the whole point of civilization – doing more together than we could do apart.
Maybe we should all specialize, and pay each other with our own goods, or better yet, a sort of representation of goods we all agree is valuable, so you can get one persons goods with anothers.
Kinda seems unfair that somebody’s aunt should have to purchase insulin she needs to survive, like she shouldn’t have to work harder to have the same lifestyle as someone without a disability. Maybe we should just give her the insulin she needs to survive, and compensate the people who make it out of some sort of common pool of resources everyone is required to contribute to, in order to distribute the costs more fairly.
When I was younger, I tried to design an universal constructor.
Unfortunatelly, I was using Roblox studio to do this.
How’s that for insanity?
I also carved a log with a knife, hacking off pieces in an attempt to make a 3D printer
It’s not insane! 3D printing is making huge strides. You were just a little ahead of your time.
If we can run Doom on 16 billion crabs, then you can carve a 3D printer.
That’s basically what happened before money was invented. Imagine being a shoe maker and wanting to get some food, can you convince the sellers to take new shoes for the food/groceries EVERY DAY?
Something something darwin
What does Darwin have to do with enslavement of the human species?
Like how people were gifted ability to have more knowledge at their hands than previous generations and rapid communication, and then came to the conclusion that the earth is flat, vaccines are poision, and facism is holy?
Humans are dumb fucks. They will inevitably fuck up even the most perfect utopia they arrive in short of some mass hive mind brain washing Equilibrium style. i don’t hold that high an opinion of human society.
Leave the world to the animals. Humans are a failed experiment and a virus to the world.
Start from yourself
This is some eco-fascist ass rethoric. You’re not taking into account how all the issues you listed are only possible to exist in a capitalist society, where misinformation and anti-intelectualism is accepted and allowed to grow instead of directly addressed.
Environmental issues did in fact exist before capitalism. Human arrival coincided with mass extinction in the Americas and in Australia. That’s certainly not to say these issues are unavoidable or that socialism isn’t the solution (because it 100% is) but we should see environmental issues as transcending others so I disagree that I would place this in an eco-fascist lens. Rejection of science certainly occurred in feudal societies as well
You’re right, I should have been more specific in saying that current anti-intelectualism is deeply linked to capitalism and not that it is something that happens only in capitalism, my bad.
Also, I wasn’t referring to that as the eco-fascist rethoric, but rather to the commenters last phrase about how humans are a “failed experiment and a virus to the world”.
ah yes let me just manufacture my own toilet paper on my 50m2 apartment
Communism by any other name would smell as sweet
A co-operative ?
And likewise, oligarchy calling itself communism smells just as rancid.
Communism is more about centralization, Anarchism is the one about decentralization as a rule.
The difference between communism and anarchism isn’t the aims, but whether the state could immediately be abolished or that there must be a transitional period.
Anarchists don’t want a fully publicly owned and planned global republic, Marxists do. Anarchists want networks of decentralized communes, Marxists do not.
The “state” for Marxists is the oppressive elements of society that make up class distinctions, such as private property rights and the current police structure, whereas for Anarchists its usually seen as a form of hierarchy entrenched with violence.
Chiefly, a decentralized network of communed does not get rid of class, but entrenches petite bourgeois class structures where each commune owns only what is within its commune, whereas Marxists want to abolish class by making all property equally owned by all in a highly developed and complex economy.
There’s never been any real communism. If a country has money then it is inherently a capitalist society .
Money and trade are not Capitalism. Capitalism is a specific Mode of Production that rapidly expanded with the Industrial Revolution, surrounding the M-C-M’ circuit of production.
Socialist societies have existed and continue to, such as the PRC, Cuba, and former USSR.
Says there’s communist countries, lists off all capitalist countries instead.
All of those countries have used money, had a class system, have used wage slave labour and are nation states. All of that combined makes a nation capitalist in my view. Just because a country says it’s “communist” doesn’t mean anything when all those countries are playing the capitalist rule set. It’s like saying you’re going to play candy land but you have the rules of monopoly. It just doesn’t work to call those countries communist or socialist when they are still playing the capitalist rule set.
It’s pretty clear that you haven’t read Marx, and think Communism means “immediately implement a far-future, highly developed society devoid of any remaining class antagonisms” through fiat, by pushing a button, but this would make Marx howl with laughter.
A Socialist system is one where public ownership of property is primary in society, and in all of those societies this is true. Having money, wages, even classes is indeed contradictory to late-stage Communism, but they never claimed to be. Socialism is the long, drawn-out process of erasing those contradictions, which cannot be waved away but must be erased through building up the productive forces and erasing their foundations, and the method of doing as such is to hold all large industry in the control of the public, and increase this control over areas that develop into large industry.
I recommend checking out my Marxist-Leninist reading list, at least the first couple of sections, before trying to take an authoritative stance on Marxism.
I have read Marx, thank you very much and you even said I was right about what communism means so maybe you should take a look at your own reading list.
No, your belief that Socialism must be devoid of any contradictions is anti-Marxist and goes against Dialectical and Historical Materialism. By that definition, “Real Capitalism” hasn’t existed anywhere either, as all Capitalist systems have had single proprietorships, public ownership, and more that contradict the Capitalist system.
Explain this quote from Marx himself, in Critique of the Gotha Programme:
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and with it also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but itself life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
Wait, I thought Socialism couldn’t have contradictions, according to you? Why is Marx saying even Communism would have contradictions? Why is Marx talking about society as it develops, and not as magically appearing with the touch of a button?
I’m being sarcastic, of course. If you want to learn more about Marxism I can help you along, but without accepting that Socialism is a lengthy process of working out contradictions, and that therefore it is categorized by Public Ownership being primary, you’ll end up walking yourself into endless traps.
What if a country has money but you also need monthly issued talons to get most goods?
Isn’t that just called a paycheck?
No, it’s called a ration stamp
So access to food and drink which you can’t get otherwise you’ll starve. Sure sounds like a paycheck to me.
Upvoting this just because it made me laugh.
the world understander has commented
I read this as communism has never failed
trvth nvke
Well there’s never been any real communsim on earth yet so that’s technically correct.
What no theory does to an mf.
I don’t think money makes a society inherently capitalist, money predates capitalism by a loooong time, but I agree that if it has money it isn’t communist. It can be on its way to communist, a transitonary state, and depending on your definition it can be socialist, but communist is explicitly a moneyless, classless, stateless society. So, yeah, if it’s got it money, it’s not communist, but saying it’s capitalist is to create a false dichotomy of there only being fully realized communism or capitalism, with nothing outside of or in-between the two.
Eta: replied to the wrong person in the thread. Whoops. Meant to reply to the original commenter on this thread.
The comment your replying to (or meant to) has to be being purposely dense. There is obviously a difference between being a communist, having a communist party take power, and “achieving” communism. No one with a brain would think the OOP was talking about the last use of the word in that sentence.
It’s a common “dumb guy that thinks they’re being smart” take because they haven’t actually ever read a book in their life. They just read the definition of communism once.
I hope this comes across as a genuine question, despite the thread itself getting a little jacked up. Like many of us, I’d like to find better systems of governance / better solutions to the problem of needed / beneficial coordination.
How does a communist society as you’ve described defend itself against opportunistic, hierarchical forces that would subsume and control it? What is the (de-coordinated? If you’ll accept my term?) answer to such a problem, pragmatically?
The “State” for Marxists is largely the elements of government that upold class society, like Private Property Rights. Social workers and government would still exist, moreover hierarchy is only a problem for Anarchists, Marxists understand it as a necessary tool.
That’s a dramatic oversimplification, but I can elaborate on whatever you wish, or provide a Marxist-Leninist intro reading list I made.
Oh Lord, ask someone smarter than me! Lol. I was clarifying terms more than anything else. Communism is an end stage, an eventual goal. That’s the big sticking point between anarchists (hi!) and communists. Communists believe in capturing the state so that it can be transformed and eventually wither away to become a communist society, anarchists believe in dismantling the state and creating communism directly. There are other differences, including how we define terms such “the state,” but that’s the jist.
I guess firstly, I should probably out myself that I’m not a Marxist leninists, but more along the lines of a syndicalist or platformist. Council communist is a semi appropriate term. I also don’t believe the same system that would work in rural Tennessee would be viable for urban New York. I believe in democratic, worker control. Consensus democracy and direct democratic control. The trouble is, I, and many others, don’t believe that communism is possible in just a single area. It would be subsumed, attacked, overthrown. It, by necessity, must be either a world wide movement to achieve True Communism™, or it would need to be isolated, insular, and completely or near completely self sufficient. The latter option is, frankly, kind of shit, and in my opinion, when combined with more authoritarian means and the “capture the state” side of things, leads to dictators and shitty conditions.
Not to be mean, but this is actually wrong. Anarchists and Marxists don’t simply disagree on means, but also on ends. Anarchists want full decentralization, as they see hierarchy as the chief problem, whereas Marxists want full centralization, as we see Class as the primary issue. Communes don’t get rid of class, as they create different groups that share ownership of their MoP but not other communes, ie everyone becomes petite bourgeoisie.
I can elaborate more and offer readings if you’d like, I’m a former Anarchist (syndicalist, specifically) and am firmly a Marxist-Leninist, so there’s common ground there. Really, I am not trying to be rude, it’s more that I think your characterization of Marxism as wanting the same thing as Anarchists in the end is a pretty common but entirely untrue notion that unfortunately makes things difficult.
Doesn’t come across as rude! Always happy to be educated.
Okay, so, it was my understanding that the ultimate end goal, say, 200 years after the revolution, the society would be practically the same between anarchists or communist. That just the means and transitonary state would be different. Once the state has withered away, once we have achieved classless, stateless, moneyless, it would be virtually or actually, and definitely practically, the same.
I’d love to know to more if that’s not the case, and how they would differ. To be honest, I knew more 5 years ago, but I’ve forgotten a lot of theory and checked out pretty substantially for a while.
Perfect, thanks for asking!
Speaking in over-generalized strokes, most Anarchists want some form of horizontal network of Communes. The Marxist critique is that this doesn’t get rid of class, it makes everyone a petite-bourgeois owner of their commune’s MoP, and further this isn’t a natural progression from Capitalism like (Marxian) Socialism is.
Marx’s core critique of past Socialism, such as the Owenites, is trying to design an ideal society in a lab, and create it, rather than continue to build up society and erase contradictions gradually. Capitalism centralizes, because production becomes incredibly expansive and complicated, ergo he believed it would eventually be necessary for the government to take over just to run it, and that this government must be of the workers to properly handle it as Capitalists outlive their usefulness.
I recommend checking out my introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list, at least the first few sections, for more on this.
Communist can run a society that is not yet achieved communism. Not sure if you’re being purposely dense or not.
Also, currency does not define a society as capitalist. We’ve have currency long before capitalism ever existed.
Look up the gift economy, that was a society with no problems before currency took over.
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To be clear, primitive Communism and Marxian Communism are just about polar opposites, one is the smallest unit of society and the other the largest and most vast, one full decentralization the other full centralization.
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That isn’t the “core,” of Communism. It’s more of a side-effect and possibility only truly achievable in Upper-Stage Communism.
There are alternatives to Marx, but I’m not convinced of any of them.
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Well, I would say Marx has generally been proven spot-on. He didn’t predict the way Imperialism would function, or what impact that would have on revolution, but we have Lenin for that. What, exactly, did you think was wrong with what Marx wrote? I find it puzzling that you say he seems focused more on the far-flung, when it was the opposite, he focused on analyzing Capitalism and arming the Working Class with the knowledge of how to overcome it by knowing its laws.
Either way, I bet Marxists end up correct, the PRC is the world’s most developed Socialist state and it’s also becoming the world’s power as the US and EU crumble.
Communism isn’t bad, it just crumples as soon you put anything but saints in charge of it.
I’m not entirely sure anything works better in a long-term scenario though :)
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Oppressing the former oppressors is necessary, and famine was ended, not caused, by Socialism.
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The 1930s famine was the last major famine out of wartime in the Soviet Union, same with the Great Chinese Famine, in countries where famine was common and regular before. Life expectancy doubled under Socialism in both the USSR and PRC as a consequence in the first few decades.
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Communist policies played a part because Communists were in power while they happened, and the Communists ended the famine. I never made anything up.
Lemmy has Marxists, the lead devs are Marxist-Leninists and some of the biggest instances are Marxist-based.
Famines had been commonplace occurrences in feudal China and Russia, which the communist states brought an end to. And those final famines occurred under post-war conditions, and under disastrous crop seasons that affected neighboring states as well.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China
- https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000300150009-5
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I really didn’t expect lemmy to be already filled with russian trolls and tankies.
We’re not trolls, and many of us are socialists. Actual socialists, not “capitalism with a social safety net” like Bernie Sanders or the Nordic countries. I understand if it’s a bit of a shock to leave the echo chamber that is imperial core corporate social media and hear different perspectives for once. Lemmy is “already filled with” socialists because it was created by socialists. You are in our anti-capitalist space.
Lemmy is a free software, GNU (A)GPL makes no distinction between ideologies. Your “anti-capitalist space” is only in your head or at maximum on a few server instances.
Also Lemmy creator last time I looked was no socialist but die-hard tankie, listing Stalin and Castro as his recommended reading.
Marxism-Leninism is the guiding ideology of every existing Socialist state. The leaders of some of these states have unique viewpoints that should be studied critically.
Moreover, anti-Capitalism dominates Lemmy, even if Marxism-Leninism isn’t the only manifestation of that.
Okay, horseshoe theorist. I also would recommend Stalin and Castro[1][2][3], as would others in this conversation.
Yeah, capitalist Britain, France, and America were terrible in their use of famines and genocides. The problem with capitalism is that eventually you run out of other people’s land and food.
Almost as if every economic system is capable of causing famines and genocides.
Almost as if every person is capable of shitting their pants, and I will baselessly assume, does so regularly like me. As always, there are differences in degrees and causes. Outside of capitalism, famine actually correlates to not having food to feed people, rather than markets saying that food has to be wasted while people starve because it is not profitable to feed them (e.g. the Dust Bowl and Great Depression for American examples). Also ignoring how it was intentional in colonial powers.
It’s almost as if the material conditions of a determinate place do not change overnight.
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Yeah, as someone with Lakota, Irish, Bengali, Kurdish, and Iraqi friends and opiate and meth addicted family, I am not sure whether to laugh or cry at children of your kind. I am sure the 1990s and the introduction of capitalism was a great and prosperous time.
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American Capitalism? I invoked multiple genocides and political repressions that weren’t American. I am sure that 1840s Hungarians and Irish, 1930s Bengalis, and 1990s and 2000s Iraqis are glad to know that capitalism isn’t repressive or intentionally creating starvation because the people creating the repression and starvation said that they aren’t. Even though China gave up on most communist ambitions post-Dheng and Cuba has been strangled by American blockades, both have not been nearly as active in war mongering as “Western Nations”, nor as repressive, despite active propaganda about them. And Western repression is much more tied to their economic modes than other nations. You have to kill anti-war protesters (e.g. Kent State) because if not full colonialism, we need neo-colonialism, so pro-Vietnamese protests can’t be tolerated. And we need to support Israel, so “anti-Semitic” a.k.a. anti-Zionist protesters can’t be tolerated and have no rights, because of their ties to the military and arms industry. Such as Mahmoud Khalil, who needs to be disappeared and sent to an undisclosed location to try to push fascist anti-protest, anti-speech laws.
China did not abandon Communism, they pivoted from their Left-deviationism that was based in idealism, not materialism.
It was right-deviationism of using markets and foreign capital investment to build up productive forces.
Even though China gave up on most communist ambitions post-Dheng
No they haven’t.
What is the “civilised world”?
Well, let’s thank Trump for destroying the CIA!
