Communism in theory is amazing, but in reality no such thing can exist, since our species are not able of this kind of cooperation. Socialism on the other hand is pretty much possible, but we have a long way to accomplish that.
Both are bad one (captlism) is slight ok but communism just pure garbage
Related meme:
I’ve had quite a few people say I’ve been brainwashed by Chinese or soviet propaganda, a thing I do not encounter often, and then slowly explain the most bog standard white Australian nationalist narrative to me. I wish I was better at confrontational social situations
I mean, I’ve checked out a few English language Chinese news programs out of curiosity. Not really anything vitriolic I’ve seen, if anything they all seem a bit more chill and relaxed and maybe even a bit boring. It’s obvious that some of it is propaganda but they don’t really bother to hide it behind this facade of “NO SPIN” and “TOTALLY RELIABLE” or controlled oppositional pushback that American corporate news (aka propaganda) feels the need to project.
It’s very easy to not look like propaganda but still push a message that spins things in a certain light.
Many news agencies practice this, Al Jazeera, RT, the BBC, etc.
It’s not just east and west, it’s common practice.
The extreme vitriol we get here in the states is because SHOCK sells domestically but if you want to sell your message globally you say it politely and calmly and often in a soft spoken way.
The point of foreign facing news is to seem reasonably so you can push another narrative.
Not necessarily saying “foreign” news is bad, in fact I recommend everyone take a peep but always remember with whatever information you’re consuming someone has their bias in it
My grandparents would like a word, since they barely escaped communist rule, while their siblings/other family members didn’t.
They could tell you first hand what it was like.
So go ahead and call me brainwashed.
I also have some startling journals from my ancestors, apparently they’re all faked by the cia or something 🤷. It’s clearly all propaganda.
That’s okay mods, you can absolutely hide all the ample evidence of suffering under communism.
It doesn’t change the truth of the history or the words written in my great grandfather’s journals, highlighting the horrors that came with living in communist Russia.
Edit; I hope it hurts you everyday that the entire world can see right through your bullshit. Communism has as much a chance at working as you do getting paid for modding here 🤷
Haha,mods removed my comment about my grandparents escaping communism.
Hypocrite much, mod? Gonna ban me from here now because you can’t handle the truth?
I never got to meet my great aunt because standing survive things like the Holodomor.
If you say so. Let’s see your great grandfather’s journal entries about the horrors of communism.
Communism has as much a chance at working as you do getting paid for modding here 🤷
I don’t know why you think that we think that we’d get paid, or that we’re here to make a profit on a free site with no ads. What a weird, failed analogy.
Go dig him up and you can talk to him.
I’m not then one tongue this in.My family,yet people like you want to call me a liar.
OK, Pol Pot.
Sad mod has to edit history to fit their narrative.
Big sad .ml has fallen so fucking low.
Your parents were greedy cowards
Okay, you’re brainwashed
Viewed from hexbear this thread has 27 comments lol
Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: Artificially upvoted😂 There is a spectre haunting Lemmy — the spectre of communist bots & trolls 👻
But have you considered iphone vuvuzela
If communism worked, there would nation using it. There’s none.
Mix of capitalism and communism is best. Go too far in any direction and you’re fucked.
This is like the opposite experience I had. Everyone said capitalism is bad and I get down voted to die if I say I disagree.
Any current examples of “communism good”?
It’s been democratically instituted many times. And every time America marches in and “liberates” them.
It’s difficult to provide good examples when they’re all actively destroyed.
Cuba. Cuba has the most educated population in North America, more doctors per capita then almost any other nation. The only reason they’re struggling is because America’s embargo. They want stuff too.
There is a Brazilian right-winger moron that said this golden statement: “there is only three things that works in Cuba: Security, Education and Healthcare”.
For him that’s a bad thing btw.
Mostly this, although Vietnam is doing quite well, especially considering their circumstances.
Cuba is also really interesting…not thriving, to be sure, but you have to end the US blockade before you blame them for their own hardships. And in spite of everything, they have democracy like we’ve never seen in the west.
Edit: also what beejboytyson said about Cuba.
The US dropped more napalm, and bombs, and agent orange on vietnam (a comparatively small country) than it did during all of WW2. Lots of its people are still suffering from this atrocity.
Sadly true. And most people aren’t aware that they did pretty much the same thing to Laos, who they weren’t even at war with. They just carpet bombed the whole country, “just in case.”
Fuck the USA. They’re literally the evil empire from star wars.
Fuck Kissinger.
May he have pineapples shoved up his arse in hell, right next to old hitler.
It’s so funny that george lucas was like: “the rebels are the vietnamese communists, and the empire is the USA (its soldiers the storm troopers)” and somehow a lot of modern star wars fans are extremely pro-US, and never connect the dots.
IMO the biggest critique of star wars, its that lucas didn’t focus at all on the lives of the stormtruppen, and force its audience in the imperial core to look in the mirror, at their values, their chauvinist culture, their pro-war ideology and news media.
Still gotta keep blaming the rebels for all the world’s problems.
That’s true, the storm troopers and stuff are basically presented as automatons. I guess some audiences like not having to think, but it would have been much more impactful to show them as people with their own beliefs and motivations and stuff.
There’s a lot of short stories about that in various books, though they tend to overuse both the tropes of banality of evil and the cackling evil maniacs.
You could’ve just typed “No”.
All the other things you’ve typed is nonsense anyways.
How so?
In the “I disagree but can’t articulate a cogent reason for it” sense of the word “nonsense”, of course. 🙄
Might be worth reading up on history to put some facts behind those feelings. Either you’ll find out you’re right or you’ll update your beliefs to be more correct.
Democratically instituted communisim? For all the uppity yall get when someone suggests democratic socialist policies, you sure can’t seem to find the line you blurred.
My country was on the path of the democratically instituted socialism thing. Well, it tried but the United States instigated, funded and armed a military coup and the military dictatorship that followed.
Guess it’s better to have torture camps than gobbunism
Democratic Socialism is alive and well in many countries without any U.S. intervention. You must be referring to the fascist kind.
Ah, yes, the United States famously only interferes in fascist countries and not for benefit of plutocrats.
Also, which demsoc countries are you talking about where the means of production are controlled by the working class?
What is “Democratic Socialism” in your eyes?
Yeah but all forms of government are constantly attacked. You’re like a multicellular organism crying foul because bacteria and other pathogens are trying to invade it.
One of the reasons capitalism wins is it produces enough wealth to win wars. Consistently. The same wealth that leads to ever-lower levels of poverty also wins wars.
Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism causes wars.
WWI was an inter-imperialist war. WWII was two wars: on the Western front it was an inter-imperialist war and on the Eastern front it was largely a war to crush socialism. Most of the wars since then have been imperialist wars of aggression against imperialized states, many of them by the United States, the global imperialist hegemon that has over 750 overseas military bases.
The same wealth that leads to ever-lower levels of poverty
Where have you been during the last 40 years of neoliberalism and neocolonialism?
And explain this: United Nations, 2019: Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s FoundingI have bad news for you about the rate of poverty…
The title of that video is wildly misleading click bait. We should just switch to approval voting and be done with it.
Our current attempt at democracy—the methods we’re using to elect our leaders—are fundamentally irrational.
They are rational, and they work as intended, it’s just that they’re not popular democracies, they’re bourgeois democracies, designed by & for the capitalist class and against the working class. They’re not meant to represent us.
Take the US, which has has been ruled by the bourgeoisie since the 1776 bourgeois revolution. The wealthy, white, male land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers intentionally constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority.” It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (who aren’t disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
Ah yes my favorite authoritative source on the mathematics of democracy: a YouTube video.
Fuck off
Veritasium is legit, they cite their sources and explain concepts exceptionally well.
However, I don’t think the conclusion of the video is “Democracy is mathematically impossible”, but rather “perfect representation in a democracy” is mathematically impossible (but can still be much much better than FPTP).
The video basically goes through all the top voting systems and explains their pros and cons and the history of the mathematicians who invented the systems.
but rather “perfect representation in a democracy” is mathematically impossible (but can still be much much better than FPTP).
It’s not even that. The more accurate title would be “Ranked voting types cannot mathematically meet all of the requirements of democracy this one guy made”
The whole video I wanted to yell out “so switch to approval voting”.
The dude makes some pretty legit videos. He has a PhD in physics education research. Using YouTube is just a sign of the time we live in.
Mathematics is, in a sense, about abstraction and generalization, and the video covers an ideal, or set of axioms, you’d want from a voting system. This perfect system was proven to be impossible and the researcher was granted the Nobel prize in economics. In short, there can be no perfect voting system. You can also say mathematics is about proofs, and, no matter how unintuitive something might seem, it leaves no room for doubt. It doesn’t hardly matter if the source comes from a YouTube video.
Open source software is like communism. Held in commons, free to use, contribute to, and benefit from.
Here you go, and before you say China is not really communist. That’s true that China is in a socialist stage of development led by the Communist party. However, it’s very clear that it is developing very differently from capitalist countries.
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&locations=CN&start=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
Then there are the massive poverty alleviation programs in China that have no comparison in the US https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/07/5-myths-about-global-poverty
China also massively invests in infrastructure. They used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2014/12/05/china-used-more-concrete-in-3-years-than-the-u-s-used-in-the-entire-20th-century-infographic/
China also built 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade https://www.railjournal.com/passenger/high-speed/ten-years-27000km-china-celebrates-a-decade-of-high-speed/
Such massive infrastructure projects directly improve the standard of living for the people of the country.
Social mobility happens to be really high as well https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html
Furthermore, people in China see their country working in their interest and hence view it as being far more democratic than people do living under the dictatorship of capital
- https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democracy-most-us-say-america-isnt-1711176
- https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2021/0218/Vilified-abroad-popular-at-home-China-s-Communist-Party-at-100
- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-26/which-nations-are-democracies-some-citizens-might-disagree
- https://web.archive.org/web/20230511041927/https://6389062.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6389062/Canva images/Democracy Perception Index 2023.pdf
- https://www.tbsnews.net/world/china-more-democratic-america-say-people-98686
- https://web.archive.org/web/20201229132410/https://en.news-front.info/2020/06/27/studies-have-shown-that-china-is-more-democratic-than-the-united-states-russia-is-nearby-and-ukraine-is-at-the-bottom/
Do you live in china?
sadly no
May I ask why not? And if I’m not being too intrusive I’d be interested to know which country you do live in (I’m in the us)
Also really weird I never got a notification from your reply
I live in Canada, my family moved here back when I was still in school. I’d like to move to China one day, but it’s unlikely that I’d be able to do that in the foreseeable future. My parents are old and I’m not just going to abandon them to move half way across the world. That’s the main thing holding me back. In general, it’s not easy to just uproot your whole life and move to a different country to start anew. For example, I find even the language to be a challenge, I’ve been learning Mandarin for the past two years and I’m still not fluent in it. Getting a job in my field without knowing a language would be unlikely.
Very interesting thank you for sharing, so I gather that if you could make it work you would but it isn’t in the cards right now. I wonder how hard it would be to immigrate there.
It depends a lot on whether you can get a job. If you can, then you can get a work visa and you’re fine. A friend of mine lived in China for a decade, and he liked it. We both work in IT, there are a lot of jobs in that area, but also pretty competitive. From what I’ve read, China’s been recently relaxing immigration laws as well and they’re looking at creating a program similar to the green card in US. https://www.semafor.com/article/07/23/2024/china-is-considering-a-green-card-scheme-to-attract-more-foreign-scientists
From your first source
Figure 1 shows that China had very low inequality levels in the late 1970s, but it is now approaching the US, where income concentration remains the highest among the countries shown
sure, and that’s happening while the standard of living for the poor people continues to rise dramatically with each and every year
It’s hard for me to look at % increases or “X out of poverty” or “This person makes 1+ what they did before!”. I get fed the same stuff about how great America is doing because of our “numbers”. Without being there it’s hard to grasp if what you’re saying is anything better, worse, or just par for the course of a developing nation with such a high output with manufacturing.
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
Seeing this statement and reading the link, they have absolutely nothing to do with each other and you make it seem like it’s a “quote” from the article (I’m guessing it’s from the 93 page research paper I’m reading through). They would’ve just been better off publishing whatever data they talked about researchers definitely having, the whole thing read like an Elon Musk press conference…
“To sustain poverty reduction gains, China will focus more on achieving endogenous development in areas that have been lifted out of poverty and introduce vigorous measures to support rural revitalization. Our goal is to achieve common prosperity and high-quality development including through the rural revitalization strategy with a focus in five key areas: industry development, human capital, culture, ecological environment and local governance.”
It’s interesting and kinda disconcerting reading through the policies and how no real figures are presented for what the policy should be, such as the “common prosperity” they hope to achieve be 2030 (link page 15)
China has set a new goal of achieving significant progress toward common prosperity by 2035.1 While no particular income target or poverty threshold is attached to this goal, it can help keep the policy focus on the vulnerable population over the coming decade.
It makes me wonder if setting an elusive “goal” of a policy is better to get members on board and then slap them with the real numbers after they have already signed on and can’t openly complain about (bad for corrupt sectors of government though). There’s also just not enough information as stated in the paper to actually understand what is going on,
Finally, this review of China’s poverty reduction experience leaves a number of questions open for further research…
- the interplay between poverty reduction and growth deserves further analysis to understand the extent that poverty reduction measures may, in turn, help less-developed areas grow faster
- a deeper analysis of China’s use of policy experimentation at the local level combined with high-powered performance incentives may contribute to our understanding of models of decentralization and public service delivery
- an evaluation of China’s targeted poverty alleviation experience in recent years would benefit from further analysis of individual policy interventions and their interactions to better understand not just the effectiveness but also the efficiency and sustainability of the program.
- An analysis of the costs and benefits of policy intervention would also be warranted in a broader sense, helping to systematically account (suan da zhang in the Chinese term) for factors such as the impact of infrastructure investments on poverty reduction or the merits of the hukou system and man- aged urbanization policies. In all these areas, active exchanges between researchers within and outside of China, and between academics and policy makers, should be encouraged, and the data needed for high-quality empirical work should be made more widely available. These actions will help ensure that China’s poverty reduction achievements get the attention and understanding that they deserve.
Just now seeing and trying to wrap my head around the Hukou system. I’m not here arguing good/bad communism, I just like the information and think that many forms of government can work out with protections in place (regulations, corruption detection, etc). I just wanted to point out your article mention and link didn’t really fit together with how you presented it. I did enjoy the reading and will continue today, but I take it all with a grain of salt. I don’t really 100% trust any source these days, which in this technological era should really be the default for everyone. Definitely let it sink in and contemplate the realities of others, but you only have your own reality to work within for any type of effective action.
you put a lot of work into that word salad
oh wow, ok. Thought you posted links for actual discussion and would’ve been interested in someone reading through wanting to talk about it lol. This just a copy/paste warrior kinda thing you’re doing? Weird way to try to insult back after everything you posted, thanks for letting me know not to continue the conversation!
It’s pretty clear you’re not interested in any actual discussion given that you just dismiss everything by saying you don’t trust anything. You never explain the reason for this distrust or provide any sources that contradict anything said there. I’m pretty sure that no matter how much evidence you’re provided with, you’ll just keep moving goal posts and repeating how you don’t trust the sources. It’s not very original.
Dawg, it is a direct quote from the Forbes article. Read it again I guess?
Meanwhile, if you want a historical example then look no further than USSR.
Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:
- https://wid.world/document/soviets-oligarchs-inequality-property-russia-1905-2016/
- https://wid.world/document/appendix-soviets-oligarchs-inequality-property-russia-1905-2016-wid-world-working-paper-201710/
USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%:
- http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/PubEdUSSR.htm
- http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/anglosov.htm
- http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0000/000013/001300eo.pdf
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960’s, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Union
- https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5054/index1.html
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
- https://www.scribd.com/document/430076844/CIA-RDP84B00274R000300150009-5-pdf
- https://artir.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/compar1.png?w=640
USSR moved from 58.5-hour work weeks to 41.6 hour work weeks (-0.36 h/yr) between 1913 and 1960:
USSR averaged 22 days of paid leave in 1986 while USA averaged 7.6 in 1996:
- https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1994/94B09_66_englp2.pdf
- https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm
In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67 and the average (not median) retiree household in the USA could expect $48k/yr which comes out to 65% of the 74k average (not median) household income in 2016:
- https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1994/94B09_66_englp2.pdf
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/could-you-get-by-on-the-average-americans-retirement-income/
GDP took off after socialism was established and then collapsed with the reintroduction of capitalism:
The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US:
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http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0735675784900482 (sci-hub for access)
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USSR defeated a smallpox epidemic in a matter of 19 days https://www.rbth.com/history/331857-how-ussr-defeated-black-smallpox
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The Social Consequences of Soviet Immunization Policies https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1997-812-03g-Hoch.pdf
So, how do people who lived under communism feel now that they got a taste of capitalism?
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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
The Free market paradise goes East chapters in Blackshirts and Reds details some more results of the transition to capitalism.
*crickets*, as usual.
tried actually having a conversation with the person, they’re just unresponsive to actual discussion.
USSR Angola Cuba China DPRK Ethiopia Mongolia Vietnam GDR. I cant understand how people can look at a country that dramatically improved its peoples standard of living brought democracy and freedom, and not see it as a good thing.
You could probs add Burkina Faso to that list too.
dramatically improved its peoples standard of living brought democracy and freedom
Hahahaha, oh man, you Tankies ARE high on your own farts
u can listen to the propaganda or u can look at reality.
u can listen to the propaganda or u can look at reality.
No u
America Bombs North Korea and Vietnam to smithereens
Communism bad?!
Hey that’s not accurate. France bombed them too.
Those were freedom bombs, duh.
USSR Angola Cuba China
Ok, I guess you could argue the point that these countries
DPRK
What the absolute fuck are you talking about.
check their post history.
What the absolute fuck are you talking about.
On this subject more than any other the western brain is completely destroyed by propaganda.
The crazy shit you will and have believed about Korea without any evidence is stunning and can only be explained by racism.
You actually believed when they said the whole country had to get the same haircut?
Some school districts in Japan already do this to kids tbh. There was a kerfuffle a while back and some schools dropped some limitations after lawsuits. Like if your kid has naturally curly or blonde hair you’d need to prove it. (Haven’t gone deep on fact checking, take it with a grain of salt)
I’d say it’s not unreasonable that if you have a manufactured preconceived (racist) notion about a place that you would believe it.
South Korea and RoC actually did the mandatory haircuts on occasions (though in case of RoC it was justified and was more like one particular haircut was forbidden). It’s always projection.
The DPRK is by no means perfect, but it’s also not some hermit kingdom where the peasants push trains to make them move.
If you have 20 minutes, I recommend you watch We Went to North Korea to Get a Haircut, it’s humanizing and helps dispel a lot of modern myths about the DPRK. Again, it’s by no means perfect, but the West has absolutely mythologized its existence to lunacy.
The war sure explains why they have a reason to be antagonist towards South Korea and USA – in a similar way as WW2 explains why Finland is very wary of Russia still in 2000s.
But it doesn’t explain why they insist on keeping their system in the same horrible broken state. Germany and Japan were ravaged by a war and they didn’t go permanently crazy at state level.
Why don’t you tell the audience who got the OK from Stalin to start this war?
The side that didn’t collaborate with fascist Japan in WW2 and then go on to commit the bodo league massacre.
whats wrong with the DPRK? I have family that has been there and they thought it was a fine place certainly doing a lot better than the median capitalist country.
Its a current enemy for not being destroyed (like the US tried to do), so a bunch of western-supremacist-brained people believe literally anything negative said about it, as it confirms their racist biases.
Vietnam is a bit of a shit show. Corrupt and is still very capitalist.
having a market does not make a country capitalist. And yeah there is corruption as there is in every 3rd world country (and most 1st world countries just in different less noticeable ways), they are certainly doing more about it than most capitalist countries, and all indicators of standard of living are far better than is the vast majority of capitalist countries so i wouldnt call it a shit show, i mean its hard to recover from having just about every fucking building in ur country destroyed and ur forests and farms poisoned and millions murdered and even more displaced only 50 years ago especially when the country that did all that continues to actively try to fuck u over. They are doing well great even.
It is not capitalist. There has been corruption and those corrupt official have been executed, as they should.
Large-scale, actual communism with no authoritarianism? Not that I’m aware of. It’s hard to implement true communism effectively on a large scale because most people have to care enough about others to willingly contribute for it to work.
Good thing you striked out current, or you wouldn’t have got any answers. Communism starts good and then gradually becomes dictatorship. While it accomplishes lot of basics right, like housing, food and education generally, further it goes, it starts carving into personal freedom and makes everything worse. So we don’t have any current communism good.
While it accomplishes lot of basics right, like housing, food and education generally, further it goes, it starts carving into personal freedom and makes everything worse.
Can you explain what you mean by this, and why you believe it despite direct evidence to the contrary, such as in Cuba?
The country in which 86% of the population live in poverty? But at least there’s doctors and literacy so that’s great. Classic communism win.
What definition are you using for “poverty?”
That’s not a definition of poverty.
Well, I’ll give you that, I was expecting you to come up with a reason why my source was wrong, not to just ignore it and say “nah”. Thanks for making this shorter.
If you ever been to a commune where people share food, resources, bills. They go under the radar.
Just like Capitalism you aren’t going to find any examples of the system in the world today
When people actually lived in communes it was cool though
Just like Capitalism you aren’t going to find any examples of the system in the world today
About to have my brain turned into soup by asking this question:
Are you implying that there are no examples of capitalism in the world today?
Yeah, what country rewards jobs based on hours worked rather than assets owned?
What people refer to as “late-stage capitalism” is no different than the system capitalism was supposed to replace
Just because it is (and always was) a complete lie that capitalism would lead to prosperity for working people, that doesn’t mean that capitalists aren’t doing capitalism. Capitalism hasn’t been corrupted from some ideal system into something else, this is what capitalism is and it’s been known as such for over a century and a half.
Since the beginning but not because that’s what capitalism is, it’s because the mercantilist lords wanted a rebrand when peasants started killing them
If a country decided to switch to communism, that elite rebrand would still happen. Animal Farm paints this, China having more inequality than Japan or South Korea also paints this it’s what allows people to say true capitalism has never been tested and the elite can exploit that to increase inequality
Animal Farm is garbage and Orwell was a racist, antisemitic, homophobic, backstabbing snitch: Orwell’s list.
Animal Farm was Cold War agitprop, which the CIA airdropped on eastern Europe and made it into an animated film that you may have seen. The CIA funded the film adaptation of 1984 as well.
You’re even aware you don’t have an argument so you went after the author’s character which is irrelevant then started talking about the cia
As per the original point: you’re inability to understand that the rich are greedy doesn’t mean they aren’t
I’m genuinely curious about this, as well.
Obesity isn’t a problem in North Korea. They’ve met their BMI goals.
Can you find a legitimate example of “communism bad?”
^ this is a bad faith engagement
“[citation needed]” is bad faith now? I guess Wikipedia should pack it in, then.
Only if you’re an idiot crybaby.
I inverted the burden of proof to put your side of the argument on the offensive.
If it’s so ‘n’ difficult to find a communist country that is good out of many examples, it should be ‘1/n’ difficult to do the opposite.
You fucking idiot crybaby.
Can you take the negative energy you’re spewing elsewhere? It would be nice to not have this place turn into another reddit cesspool. Thanks.
“Sir you’re being entirely too hostile towards my genocidal arguments and beliefs”
The tone policing liberal
And you’re accusing other people of arguing in bad faith? Just lol, dude. Take that tankie shit elsewhere.
You say, from a Lemmy.world account, very much intentionally trying to create a Reddit 2
No true Scotsman
That’s not a No True Scotsman fallacy, they legitimately are recreating Reddit intentionally.
Lol I saw the comment that was removed. The comment couldn’t have been more neutral saying people who ignore the problems in the most Communist historical societies reduce the perceived integrity of it’s proponents.
This mod is the exact antithesis of this meme. Pure censorship.
The removed comment was “as a black man”
shut up
Modlog has this comment: My grandparents would like a word, since they barely escaped communist rule, while their siblings/other family members didn’t. They could tell you first hand what it was like. So go ahead and call me brainwashed.
Do people just not believe Eastern Europeans etc exist lol
Only supportive anecdotes allowed here, or else gulag
Mentioning gulag? Straight to gulag.
Am I the only person in the world with reading comprehension? Can you even find a single fucking claim in that? “I knew a guy once who said it was bad so now the conversation is over”
This is the level of evidence that’s sufficient for people brainwashed by 100 years of propaganda.
Doesn’t even specify where. Did they escape Cuba? Is the reason they had to ‘escape’ because their former slaves wanted to kill them? Who knows! Doesn’t matter!
I don’t think anyone took it as some be-all and end-all argument. It’s just an anecdote and reason why the person believes what they do. Removing it as “reason: Typical anti-communist propaganda” as it shown on modlog seem silly.
It’s just an anecdote
It’s not a fucking anecdote. Look up what an anecdote is.
Who? What? Where? When? Why?
Not a single one of those questions answered.
Removing it as “reason: Typical anti-communist propaganda” as it shown on modlog seem silly.
100% justified.
It’s not a fucking anecdote. Look up what an anecdote is.
I’m sorry, I’m not a native English speaker. I just meant that they just mentioned their grandparent’s/family’s experience and how it helped form the view he has now. I don’t get how that makes you so unhappy.
Not a single one of those questions answered.
Well if the comment hadn’t been deleted you might’ve had a change to ask them lol
they just mentioned their grandparent’s/family’s experience
No they didn’t.
Classic “improved democracy”
If only there were some kind of way for it to not devolve into totalitarian dictatorship…
There is, and most have, despite imperial core propaganda to the contrary. Here’s a 1955 CIA report that was declassified in 2008.
Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.
“Totalitarian” is itself propaganda: The Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt came from wealth and so unsurprisingly was anticommunist. Her work was financially supported and promoted by the CIA. “Totalitarianism” is a bourgeois liberal, anticommunist construct for the purposes of equivalating fascism and communism.
Monthly Review, The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited
U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the “Democratic Left” and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.
If fact almost all of the “Western left” (that wasn’t repressed by the red scares) was captured by the imperial core’s propaganda machine: Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism
Rather than placing absolute power of The State in one person’s hands, start with an elected council of members whose number is not divisible by 2. Transition to a Stateless co-op arrangement. Congratulations you just implemented Communism the way it is intended to be implemented, and no dictator could screw it up.
Sounds great. Unfortunately it has never succeeded for more than a few months. The last 100+ years have shown that attempting to transition to socialism in that manner doesn’t work. Each time the bourgeoisie manages quickly regain control of the state. Given that the worldwide capitalist class still holds a great majority of the power, siege socialism is the only method to have had any successes to date.
The Six Nations have been using a form of communism, not Marxism, for somewhere between 15,000 to 25,000 years. Works pretty well for them. Aboriginal Australians have done the same for roughly 60,000 years.
I’d say capitalism is the short lived and failed economic system, considering that it’s about 400 years old and rapidly failing.
The Six Nations have been using a form of communism, not Marxism, for somewhere between 15,000 to 25,000 years. Works pretty well for them. Aboriginal Australians have done the same for roughly 60,000 years.
Sure, they had what Marxists call “primitive communism,” but they don’t now. They’re as captured by capitalism as we.
I’d say capitalism is the short lived and failed economic system, considering that it’s about 400 years old and rapidly failing.
I doubt it will fall on its own any time soon, especially if no one builds something to replace it.
“Primitive communism” is a derogatory term with racist undertones. The dismissiveness towards existing methods of collectivism is IMO one of the biggest flaws of Marxist theory. The establishment of an intelligentsia is an idea rooted in this paternalistic arrogance. If Marx had acknowledged the Russian peasantry as an important political class the Russian revolution might have gone very differently.
“Primitive communism” is a derogatory term with racist undertones.
I suppose it is a problem, thanks to “primitive” often meaning “subhuman.”
It isn’t just the wording that’s problematic, it’s the way Marx was dismissive towards the existing methods of collectivism and horizontal organizing. Yes, subsistence farming is a “primitive” mode of production, but the way peasants and indigenous people organized and collectivized resources is not irrelevant to modern industrial modes of production. Marx dismissed the way peasants and indigenous people collectivized resources as “primitive” and argued in favor of centralized power structures. I believe this to be a mistake.
This is one of the tests of reading Marx, somehow it’s nearly always evident if someone use the term “primitive” about level of development or is just spewing racism. Problem is that liberals, ultras and such cannot differentiate between the two, but i guess it’s their problem.
…and how do you enforce it? No one is going to want to give up the land that they worked for and purchased themselves, or that they developed. Give up your rights or we imprison or kill you?
And who controls this enforcing agency? The single party government? Because you can’t have multiple parties…how do you prevent the government from taking advantage of their position? Like, I don’t think communism is this magical fix-all that you think it is.
Same for all forms of government including capitalism.
Where has that happened?
Just like, everywhere they’ve tried it.
You must have an odd definition of Totalitarian Dictatorship then, I suppose.
Soviet Union under Stalin comes to mind. North Korea.
That wasn’t totalitarian nor a dictatorship. Soviet Democracy continued to be practiced, and Stalin’s authority wasn’t absolute or all-encompassing.
Where does a state go from a non-totalitarian, non-dictatorship to a Totalitarian Dictatorship?
From the very article you linked:
There, Lenin argued that the soviets and the principle of democratic centralism within the Bolshevik party still assured democracy. However, faced with support for Kronstadt within Bolshevik ranks, Lenin also issued a “temporary” ban on factions in the Russian Communist Party. This ban remained until the revolutions of 1989 and, according to some critics, made the democratic procedures within the party an empty formality, and helped Stalin to consolidate much more authority under the party. Soviets were transformed into the bureaucratic structure that existed for the rest of the history of the Soviet Union and were completely under the control of party officials and the politburo.
Very democratic indeed lol. Can’t wait how they ensure democracy in North Korea next.
according to some critics
Hey look at what the core of the quote you pulled is
I wonder what the ideology of those critics is
Very democratic indeed lol. Can’t wait how they ensure democracy in North Korea next.
Objectively more democratic than the US. In the US you vote for president and they appoint the ministers of every executive agency. In Korea they vote for those directly.
Can’t wait how they ensure democracy in North Korea next
Objectively more democratic than the US.
In Korea they vote for those directly.
They certainly have an interesting method.
Each candidate is preselected by the North Korean government and there is no option to write in a different name, meaning that voters may either submit the ballot unaltered as a “yes” vote or request a pen to cross out the name on the ballot.
A person’s vote is not secret
Uhhum.
Wow you sure did copy and paste from a wikipedia article that doesn’t even bother to source the claim to any of the overtly state propaganda articles at the bottom of the page it uses as a bibliography.
And you didn’t even bother mentioning where you got it so we’re 2 levels of lack of citations deep.
Gee I wonder why leftists constantly criticize anti-communists for being intellectually lazy and dishonest…
I linked the absolute most liberal friendly source for you. Banning factionalism didn’t mean they banned democracy. Banning of factionalism was done when there were literal fascists and Capitalists trying to infiltrate the party and reinstate Tsarism for their profits. You were allowed to have different ifeas, voice them, and vote on them.
It’s very kind of you to have chosen that as a source but it seems to have been an unfortunate pick.
Banning of factionalism was done when there were literal fascists and Capitalists trying to infiltrate the party and reinstate Tsarism for their profits.
It just happens that that was claimed to happen always, so you know, ban was only liften in 1989 as the article mentions lol. Funny how that happens.
You were allowed to have different ifeas, voice them, and vote on them.
Not even mentioning the lack of press freedom but Stalin famously purged a shitload of people on the basis of their political opinions. And voting in a strictly controlled single-party state, it does have the sound of a empty formality as the article had it.
It just happens that that was claimed to happen always, so you know, ban was only liften in 1989 as the article mentions lol. Funny how that happens.
Looks like it was true! Millions of people died when the USSR was illegally dissolved afterwards, and the majority of living former-soviets say they prefered the Soviet System.
Not even mentioning the lack of press freedom but Stalin famously purged a shitload of people on the basis of their political opinions. And voting in a strictly controlled single-party state, it does have the sound of a empty formality as the article had it.
Liberalism and fascism were banned. Additionally, it is not at all an empty formality, unless you think every human being in a political party shares the exact same opinions, which is laughably false.
You were allowed to have different ifeas, voice them, and vote on them.
There’s an entire wiki page dedicated to how the USSR repressed scientific ideas and promoted absolute idiocracy (such as Lysenkoism) because of politics. If something as (relatively) objective as science wasn’t allowing different ideas you can only imagine what was happening in areas that are far more subjective.
And I can tell you that the “democratic voting” was also just a farce. I can’t find the source anymore but voting didn’t really have oversight. It’s in their voting guidebook, the people counting the votes are also the people who verify the votes. That means the voting committee gets to assign votes however they want because they’re also the ones verifying the votes. From a certain political level onwards the political elite chose who gets what political position. Lysenko is actually excellent example of that because the scientific community hated him, but Stalin loved him and so Lysenko got to fuck up science for multiple decades.
There’s an entire wiki page dedicated to how the USSR repressed scientific ideas and promoted absolute idiocracy (such as Lysenkoism) because of politics. If something as (relatively) objective as science wasn’t allowing different ideas you can only imagine what was happening in areas that are far more subjective.
The USSR was overall very pro-science. In it’s early years, it went through growing pains, as their number one task was centered around instilling Marxism in the population. Marxism itself is founded on Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Certain liberal sciences had been, at the time, focused on Idealism, such as Race Science.
And I can tell you that the “democratic voting” was also just a farce. I can’t find the source anymore but voting didn’t really have oversight. It’s in their voting guidebook, the people counting the votes are also the people who verify the votes. That means the voting committee gets to assign votes however they want because they’re also the ones verifying the votes. From a certain political level onwards the political elite chose who gets what political position. Lysenko is actually excellent example of that because the scientific community hated him, but Stalin loved him and so Lysenko got to fuck up science for multiple decades.
Do you have evidence that the Soviets were assigning votes?
lucky u, there is; its called just doing the fucking thing like normal, cuz non of the historical examples did that so u know.
Communism inevitably will always lead to dictatorship and totalitarianism.
In order to become a communist state, you have to: 1.) Get a bit army or group of people to enforce the upcoming rules. 2.) Force people to get rid of private ownership or threaten them to give it up. This will piss a lot of people off. 3.) Get rid of them if they don’t. This will piss a lot of people off. 4.) Realize that you’ve pissed a lot of people off, and that your the only power in the land, you definitely don’t want to give this up. 5.) Enact a single party system…oh, fuck…
Communism doesn’t work on a large-scale, and it’s not sustainable. By it’s very nature it’s extremely prone to abuse, and fundamentally impossible to install any sort of checks and balances on a single party-system. Look how bad it is with a two-party system in the US.
u can believe the cia on that or u can actually fucking learn how these systems work or worked and what people who lived and live in them think of them, imma put it very plainly the percent of Americans who think amerikkka is a democracy is a LOT lower than Chinese people who think China is a democracy. And that hold true for most capitalist countries and most socialist countries past and present.
yesbut did you consider that chinese people are very stupid and brainwashed by 5g havana syndrome /s
Communism doesn’t work on a large-scale, and it’s not sustainable.
Have you ever heard of little thing called “economy of scale”? The bigger scale is - the more sustainable it is.
By it’s very nature it’s extremely prone to abuse, and fundamentally impossible to install any sort of checks and balances on a single party-system.
“checks and balances” do not prevent abuse. They are not designed to.
Look how bad it is with a two-party system in the US.
In my opinion two-party system is worse than single-party system and full pluralism. In single-party system there is only one party to blame, while in many-parties system no party can control discourse. While in two-party system both parties can agree to screw over people and finger-point at each-other, only creating illusion of pluralism.
And that besides societal issues two-party system creates like strong polarization.
while in many-parties system no party can control discourse
As someone living in a country having many-party system, the discourse is perfectly controllable in the same way they are doing it in US, just with tiny extra effort. Since 1989 we didn’t had even a single anticapitalist party in parliament despite having sometimes over a dozen of them for several years. Hell in current term we have the most parties - 17 parties + 42 independent parliamentarists on 460 seats in sejm, and still what we hear from all of them is similar on every base question - no alternative to capitalism, neoliberalism in practice, and complete submission to USA and EU in all manners.
fundamentally impossible to install any sort of checks and balances on a single party-system. Look how bad it is with a two-party system in the US.
Buddy, checks and balances are one of the many reasons why our democracy doesn’t work. I already covered this elsewhere in this very post.
The failure of democratic checks and balances does not preclude the failure of communist checks and balances as well.
Democratic Socialism is where I’d like the US to head. But we have to start consistently winning majorities so that we can fix the disproportionate representation that’s hurting progress and making electing the progressives needed for change difficult.
It’s really simple - centralization = seat of power
The worst flavor of people are drawn to that like moths to a flame. It’s not even a good idea, any potential economies of scale are wasted by communication lag in the bureaucracy
Decentralization is key. You can have a commune easy enough, humans self organize just fine in small enough communities. There’s communes all over the world doing just fine
The question is, how do you knit those small communities together in a way that doesn’t give anyone much power, but still come together when needed?
If only there were some kind of way for liberals to learn the actual histories of AES states…
“devolve”
Big fan of Tsarist Russia, Feudal China, Colonial Japan, and Batista Cuba I take it.
It starts with a high minded idea and promise of freeing people and whatnot, then it just turns around back to authoritarian rule.
Australia had communism for 60,000 years and never developed a dictatorship.
Would you like to provide a link, or any sort of proof to back up this outlandish claim?
Calling it communism may be a bit of a reach, but collectivist social organizing in a variety of ways was and still is a very common element of indigenous cultures around the world.
This link focuses on family and child rearing, but it’s a good window into how Australian aboriginals express collectivist principles.
This is literally on .ml, why are liberals flooding the comments.
Look, I’m no fan of capitalism. Socialist/communist dictatorships are still sort of worse tho… Both have challenges, and bluntly, at least with democracy/capitalism, there’s a chance we can recover from pretty much any horrible crap that goes down.
… For the most part, we won’t, but there’s at least a chance.
Communal/social services, which are technically socialist/Communist, are also not necessarily bad. Look at fire departments, as an example.
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