The Chinese government has built up the world’s largest known online disinformation operation and is using it to harass US residents, politicians, and businesses—at times threatening its targets with violence, a CNN review of court documents and public disclosures by social media companies has found.
The onslaught of attacks – often of a vile and deeply personal nature – is part of a well-organized, increasingly brazen Chinese government intimidation campaign targeting people in the United States, documents show.
The US State Department says the tactics are part of a broader multi-billion-dollar effort to shape the world’s information environment and silence critics of Beijing that has expanded under President Xi Jinping. On Wednesday, President Biden is due to meet Xi at a summit in San Francisco.
Victims face a barrage of tens of thousands of social media posts that call them traitors, dogs, and racist and homophobic slurs. They say it’s all part of an effort to drive them into a state of constant fear and paranoia.
It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Lemmy is rife with these trolls. And I’m not just talking about the tankies.
I will never understand people who advocate for communism as opposed to democratic socialism. Every major country that has ever gone down the communist road has ended up a dictatorship. That’s not a bug of communism, it’s a feature. I get the criticism of capitalism, I really do, but we can enact socialist laws that rein in the excesses and extremes of capitalism without sacrificing our democracies for one-party governments.
I think this is semantic(definitions) confusion. Please let me explain. For example communism by definition is a stateless society. Meaning a state cannot be communist. The countries you are thinking of have all called themselves socialist not communist. Socialism does not necessitate dictatorship or democracy. It’s simply economical. Socialism is an economic system that abolishes private property which marx defined as different from personal property. Personal property includes your place of living your tv your clothes all your personal shit. Private property refers to owning the means of production. So under socialism you could own your house but not a factory or Google ect.
The countries that are exploited the worst have sometimes had socialist revolts in the past. These countries are typically not functioning democracies beforehand. The USSR had a tsar. China’s last emperor ended up joining the socialists once he was overthrown. Cuba had a U.S. backed dictator before Castro’s popular revolution. These countries were not made into dictator ships because of socialism. You have the idea in your head because of capitalist propaganda.
Democratic socialism is just capitalism with a nice welfare state built on it. Despite the name it doesn’t necessitate having democracy or socialism. Infact it’s incompatible with socialism. These states are nicer then usual capitalist states but often backslide. For example Britain moving closer and closer to privatizing their healthcare.
I hope that makes some sense.
You are missing the contemporary academic basis for democratic socialism though. Orthodox socialists view capitalism akin to a malevolent force, whereas democratic socialists view it as something like an inevitable byproduct of scarcity, something contemporary history seems to have more support for. It’s very much a modern vs postmodern take on the same issue.
At the same time, democratic socialists prioritize a degree of individual liberty and human rights as an ideological basis for government. The ideological basis for orthodox socialism is honestly a bit more flimsy and often in conflict with itself, which is a big part of the reason why the modern demsoc movement doesn’t have the same outward hostility towards certain forms of regulated capitalism. The idea being that with the right regularly framework in place, you can effectively resolve scarcity and capitalism withers away. This is actually not incompatible with Marx, and is also very similar to Dengist technocratic state capitalism, but without the obligate autocracy.
Thanks for the info.
No problemo 👈😎
Marx’s definition of socialism is unhelpful, has been detrimental, should be ignored. He did advocate for socialism, but in a specific way. He saw socialism as a step towards communism. Marx believed that after a workers’ revolution, society would first enter a socialist phase where the workers control the government and economy. Then, eventually, this would lead to communism, where there would be no need for a state and everyone would share everything equally.
The United States regulates businesses, provides welfare. Those are socialist ideas. China, controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, has rich and poor people. It isn’t communist.
Marxs definition of socialism is the important definition because it’s his word. Marx did think socialism would be the next step after capitalism and that communism would eventually follow. But he thought communism would follow in a far off future.
“The United States regulates businesses, provides welfare. Those are socialist ideas. China, controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, has rich and poor people. It isn’t communist.”
Socialism is not when the government does stuff. I know you have been conditioned to think that but that’s not what it means.
Social systems aren’t all or nothing. Government run health care: socialist/communist. Government regulating businesses: socialist. Enabling competition among businesses: capitalist.
Engels and Marx believed an all-in approach was best, but even they believed in the value of incremental improvement. We don’t have to implement an entirely pure socialist government before we can say we’ve adopted any socialist ideas at all.
While I don’t think full-on Marxism is necessary and am in agreement on the democratic socialism, I think the reason for this is really more towards the political end of it than the economic.
If a country practicing a communist economy had a more representative/democratic political system from the start, I’d like to see how the results panned out. And I’d also like to see which came first, the dictatorship, or the communism. The former being first makes more sense than the latter.
Communism weds its system of government with its economic system pretty inseparably. I’m not sure how you’d set up a communist economy without a communist government to manage it. As for the communism/dictatorship chicken-and-egg problem, I’m not sure it really matters when communism predisposes itself so readily to authoritarianism that a dictator is a foregone conclusion.
Well I ask these cause authoritarianism seems counterintuitive to the main philosophy around Marxism. Saying “the proletariat should have greater value and power in a business, since they’re doing the actual labor”, but then rolling over and accepting a dictatorship where the populace has no political say seems nonsensical.
Hence why I suspect the authoritarianism must have come first. So I can’t necessarily agree to “communism predisposing itself to authoritarianism” since it doesn’t make sense for a True-Marxist society to want to accept that sort of government.
As for how to set up the government in a communist-economy state: probably more of a Republic. People elect multiple representatives, and these representatives meet and decide on policies for the country and how to run it
A one-party system is inherently authoritarian; that’s what predisposes communism to becoming a dictatorship. Communism starts with the premise that the old regime needs to be violently overthrown. I don’t know how much clearer a line towards authoritarianism you can get.
I think maybe starting with Leninism, what youre saying may be true, but not with Marxism. I think this comment explains it a bit well:
comment
So the original Marxist idea would lead to withering-away of government, and thus zero parties, not one-party authoritarianism. But due to all the authoritarian implementations, people think of states like the USSR when they hear/see communism
That communist ideal has never been achieved and there are plenty of good reasons to expect it never will be. Communism in the purest sense (a government-less society) has only ever been shown to work in relatively small communities. I don’t think it could ever work on the scale of a nation state.
So, for all intents and purposes, the transitional one-party government system is the only real communist system. That’s what I criticize, and anyone who champions this fantasy of a government-less society—I’m sorry, but I just think that’s deluded.
I’m not sure how many times people have to point out that true communism is stateless for it to stick.
It’s never been achieved, and there are so many good reasons to believe it never will be, so who cares? The transitional phase of communism is actually the end one, so authoritarian rule for life. Great fucking system.
HexBear, Lemmygrad, etc.
It’s obvious you have read no theory. Read the Communist Manifesto, Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds. For anarchism read David Graeber or Rosa Luxembourg.
If you still feel the same after reading, fine. But read first. Instead you wallow in ignorance and declare your opinion informed. It’s not.
Or maybe you could try presenting actual ideas. Do you not know what the books you supposedly read were about?
Basically they are about (specially Blackshirts and Reds) how “libertarian” socialist experiments all failed, and were ultimately destroyed by national and international bourgeoisie.
I think Critique of the Gotha Program by Marx is much better than the Communist Manifesto, as it’s also a critique of the libertarian socialist Germans.
Like, if you want to get very sad, read about the politicides in Indonesia, Korea, South America etc. Communists (and I include anarchists, libertarians socialists, democratic socialists etc. here) have to organize in strong movements to survive.
All communist experiments that lasted more than 1 years were either MLs or Maoists.
We really should look at this and try to learn from it. It’s a fact, it’s just something that has happened.
We have to understand why democratic socialism is vulnerable to being exterminated, and why ML and Maoism aren’t.
https://youtu.be/rRXvQuE9xO4?si=0ngA_o8WYrprce8H
Nobody said he was… that is not the point.
Would you be really shocked if “tankies” agreed the state sucks? They are… gasp… communists after all no? And communism is stateless, moneyless and classless, right?
Like even “tankies” are anti-statists… they just disagree with people like you that we can reach communism without authoritarian revolution, creating a dictatorship of the proletariat, and first transitioning to socialism. And that doesn’t mean they agree the revolution and the proletariat dictatorship will be like in the USSR, Cuba, China etc.
Marxists-Leninists and Maoists understand socialism will look different everywhere it comes, and will adapt to the culture and expectations of the working class of those places… only anti-communist leftists make the mistake of thinking “tankies” idolise the USSR or China. That what they want is an exact repeat of the Bolshevik Revolution…
You very clearly didn’t watch the video. Your interpretation of the critique of the Gotha program is off by a mile.
Posting a lone YouTube video is indicative of a deep and fruitful intellectual bedrock. Lookout: this guy’s got answers 🤣!
I didn’t say anything about what the critique was…. I did make a typo saying libertarian socialist German communes. But I tried writing libertarian socialist German communists, which doesn’t make sense either, but the meaning was libertarian socialist Germans, or libertarian German communists.
In any case, I never said it was the main point of the text either……
I recommend you actually watch the video.
Why should you listen to me when the people I referenced are more knowledgeable? That was the point. Read.
Because I don’t care. And you haven’t made me care.
You have a bit of time here to make some kind of point to make us interested in the hours you want us to spend. You haven’t accomplished that.
It’s like trying to sell someone on coming to your space opera production when all you’ve done so far is sing off key for six seconds.
No? Why would anyone want to voluntarily subject themselves to that. I don’t need to spend five hours of my evening attending your play to know that it probably sucks.
If it were any good, you’d be able to make a small, interesting point out of it.
Do I want to learn more about your hemorrhoids? No. Fuck no, dude. That’s not how I’m spending my evening.
You know while I do empathize with being asked to care about something and being annoyed at that, it’s also annoying to be inundated with takes from people on complicated subjects, who aren’t willing to put in some hours worth of work. Nobody’s going to be willing to personally walk you through the subject matter and do all of the intellectual labor for you specifically, that’s an unreasonable request of them, and frankly, less efficient than just reading.
Sure, but you need to sell someone on why the time is worth spending. Nobody here is asking anyone to walk them through the subject matter, just give an idea of why the subject matter is worth digging into.
I personally have read the The Communist Manifesto, and when paired with what I know about human nature and how it turned out in practice, my conclusion is that it’s a bunch of idealistic nonsense. It can only work in the way described if everyone buys in and the leadership is noble, which is true for pretty much every governmental system out there (dictatorships can work well if the dictator works in the interests of the people). It doesn’t work well when you remove the assumption, because people will game the system and consolidating power is a recipe for disaster.
And that’s why liberal democracy has worked so well. Instead of assuming people are good and consolidating power is beneficial, it instead mitigates the damage bad actors can cause. There are obviously downsides, but the average liberal democracy should be better off than the average dictatorship.
So I’m not going to pitch The Communist Manifesto because I find it uninteresting. I will, however, pitch How Democracies Die, which is an interesting look at how bad actors have subverted or attempted to subvert democracy to turn it into authoritarianism, and it culminates in a discussion about Donald Trump and similar political figures. You won’t find a pitch for an ideal political system, but you will find examples of weaknesses in past and existing institutions, and I think that’s a lot more interesting than a non-existent, “ideal” system that we don’t fully understand.
This is a great example of how you can take complicated subjects and express the ideas in a simple way while still recommending further reading. I’m absolutely more likely to read How Democracies Die now than I am to read anything the tankies have suggested.
If you can’t explain something to a five year old then you don’t really understand it.
I’m convinced the tankies understand less about government than they do about social media techniques and creating a cult.
Hell, I’m even trying to help them. Novel ideas are good for everyone. It’s why we believe in freedom of speech and not banning books. Trying to bandwagon and browbeat and mock people into joining your “cause” is… less helpful.
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We are doomed
If this is the pinnacle of your outreach, I see how you’d come to that conclusion.
I’m not your savior. Find Jesus
Why would it be a book if the information in it could fit into a forum comment? What kind of hollow fluff are you reading?
If you got anything out of it other than a sense of pretentiousness, you should be able to extract and express some ideas from it without going into detail.
Instead you just sound like a cult.
How do you summarize a history book? The detail is the entire point. If simply stating the conclusions would work you wouldn’t tell people to produce sources. All you’re doing is making excuses for yourself to be lazy and anti-intellectual. And you’re making it impossible for yourself to be exposed to ideas that take any amount of time or effort to articulate.
Here’s the entire history of the world in 20 minutes.
https://youtu.be/xuCn8ux2gbs?si=BnEr8MlOIefT4kcI
But hey, you got me. Clearly I’m just too dumb to be as cool as your cult.
just so we’re on the same page, the cult I’m in is people who read and recommend books?
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Seems that fascism hasn’t been successful either or do you consider that capitalism?
They don’t last long. Behind the scenes lemmy servers are active at booting trolls.
Hello? Lemmygrad.ml?
Anyone can make a lemmy server, but that’s an example of a cesspool.
Yes, but a cesspool with first mover advantage. I think its a good example of how Americans have been manipulated to operate against their own interests.
How so? I’m American and it’s easy to just ignore that instance. It’s an obvious troll instance, so I don’t look at any of their posts.
You’re not a democratic socialist, you’re a social democrat
The distinction is only important to those who seek to exclude social democrats from leftist spaces via purity tests.
The absolute nerve of people wanting their ideological spaces to be based on ideology.
I don’t really care what the term is, to be honest.
I don’t understand people who feel the need to open their mouths but don’t care if actual meaning is conveyed
Haven’t opened my mouth here yet!
hurr
I love it when posts like this are made with way more upvotes than downvotes. Sure though, you’re an endangered minority and the commies are out to get you. The most red thing about lemmy are the downvotes that people get for disagreeing with your sentiment.
I’m under no delusions that Western communists have enough popularity or support to actually enact your dreams of a hostile takeover of Europe or the U.S. My only point was that Lemmy is a haven for you and you do make up the majority here, it seems.
I suppose Lemmy allowing for an opinion other than yours to exist makes it a “haven” but I don’t know why you think that’s a bad thing. Something tells me you’d love a dictatorship if it was yours. I bet you also count the deaths of nazis as “deaths under communism”. You don’t know a damned thing about my dreams, and you certainly don’t understand the meaning of “majority” when you think you having way more upvotes than downvotes means people who disagree with you are a majority.
Whether it’s a bug or feature depends on whether you’re trying to hold power or not.
Authoritarianism is often one of the steps on the way to communism, and in theory it makes sense. Once you have unified control, you can start getting everyone and everything to work together.
Problem is, people tend not to do that. If a regular person gets the reins, they are usually unwilling to give them up, and the citizens tend to care more about themselves than the collective
In theory communism works great. In reality it’s the people that fuck it up.
Governmental systems are designed around people, for people. If your governmental system only works if everyone does what they should, your system is broken. Political systems need checks in place to prevent bad actors from screwing the whole thing up.
So if communism doesn’t work with actual people, it’s a worthless system from the start. Maybe some of the ideas can be salvaged. For example, the separation of private and personal property is interesting, and it’s what makes georgism interesting to me, and I think we should be looking at systems like that instead of communism.
The word you’re looking for is “force” and it’s exactly why authoritarianism is a horrible thing. Stop trying to justify it.
Communism doesn’t work because any sufficiently large number of people are going to have disagreements. That’s not a fault of the people, it’s a fault of the system trying to manage them (communism). If your system of government’s only way of manufacturing consensus is violent suppresion, you have a shitty system.
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Omg it’s the guy the article is talking about! Dude, you’re famous!
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Tell Xi to fuck off for me, troll.
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Bro its called lemmygrad look it up.
I’m aware of it. Plenty of commies here too.
Did any communist nations in history try to reduce the disparity in wealth?
The goal of democratic socialism, like all socialism, is communism. My guess is you either meant social democracy instead of democratic socialism (easy confusion to make) or you’ve been made to think communism means stalinism (also prone to happen if you’ve lived under McCarthyist propaganda your entire life).
The goal of democratic socialism is not communism, generally. I’m sure there are a range of individual goals.
Democratic socialism is closer to a fully capatalist system than it is to communism, but attempts to limit capatalism in ways that could be detrimental society (regulation and taxation). Additionally, it implements programs that benefit society (public infrastructure, Healthcare, etc).
A completely capatalist society will kill itself. A fully communist society will grind to a halt. A careful balance between those extremes can deliver many of the benefits of both. Finding that balance is difficult and there are reasonable debates to be had about how. Unfortunately, there are a lot of unreasonable people in power.
You’re describing Social Democracy. As I said earlier, it’s easy to confuse the two.
It is, because it depends on the country and decade that we’re talking about. Best I can tell is that it is a distinction without a difference.
A socialist country will simply kill itself more slowly – any system that accepts the continued exploitation of the planet is unsustainable. Considering how much damage has already been done to the environment, even if we all went socialist today and started driving electric cars we’d only push back the inevitable a decade or so.
An authoritarian “communist” (I use quotes because I don’t believe actual communism can be forced) society will degrade and grind to a halt the same way any system that has positions of power will as the power struggles ensue.
Communism doesn’t imply pacificism. A decentralized anarcho-communist society with a culture that recognized and managed consistently bad actors before they had an opportunity to gain power, and was moneyless (as communism is) meaning those seeking power would have limited ability to pay anyone to back them up seems the only logical sustainable path.
This may seem like an impossibility, but it was arguably the way humanity existed for 200K years before the consistently bad actors got the upper hand, took power and used money to keep it.
Socialism and communism were interchangeable terms historically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism#Etymology
The main problem is that the exact meaning of communism and socialism and all of its derivatives has changed since its creation. Everyone ends up argueing over semantics and using no true scotsman fallacies.
https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/39009/democratic-socialism-vs-social-democracy
https://www.britannica.com/topic/communism
Uh, actually the Wikipedia page for democratic socialism says the exact opposite of this.
No it doesn’t? Literally in the overview section
The only difference between a socialist party and a communist party is branding for people who don’t know what either thing is
You know most people differentiate between socialism and communism now right? It is definitely more nuanced than your argument of all democratic socialism wants to transition into communism.
No, it’s not. Even they differentiated between socialism and communism. But they are correct in their assertion that the ultimate goal of socialism would be achieving a state like communism. Not a state as in a nation. But a state as in a state of being.
Whether or not you think such thing is possible in this moment. And I think most people would say it’s probably still a little ways off. Even you ultimately would like a society in which you were free to do whatever you desired. Whatever stimulated you intellectually and explore your passions. Without having to worry about being a wage slave.
People can call themselves whatever they want to call themselves, but if their goal isn’t a currencyless, stateless society without private property and based on mutual aid they aren’t socialist they’re sparkling capitalists.
Are you sure?
Mr. Philbin, that is my final answer
Thanks for the information.
Socialism and communism are interchangeable terms historically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism#Etymology