Do the people saying that communism is bad think capitalism is good?
you knoe there isn’t only 2 choices right? Thay can both have good and bad sides. Maybe try some mix of it fisrt
Dialectical Materialism. Right now, they are. You either work towards communism or capitalism moves towards consolidation of capital. Those are your choices.
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Imma be honest chief, pulling out DiaMat with non-Marxists is going to fall on deaf ears. I agree, but something softer might work easier.
Imma be real, chief, I don’t think DiaMat is going to work on Non-marxists, even if I agree.
Yes. It’s just those are the two mentioned, and I’m slightly communist. So there’s some bias.
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I would like a third pill.
Feudalism?
Traditionally the “Third Way/Position” is fascism. So, ultimately, kinda, but with race science.
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At least we’ve still got cyanide pill when red or blue doesn’t cut it.
We did that already. We could do it again.
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As usual the best answer lies somewhere between the two extremes
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The trick is not falling for the lie that social democracy is meeting socialism in the middle.
Social Democracy is just liberalism with enlightened self interest. Is it better than other capitalists models?
Sure. That doesn’t make it the end goal.
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I think capitalism is good, but not perfect. Communism is bad.
Why do you think that way?
I think human nature is inherently greedy and selfish, and capitalism is best equipped to use this in a way that benefits society. Workers are motivated to work harder and learn new skills to find the most rewarding job they can. Businesses are motivated to create products and run as efficiently as possible. Consumers are motivated to get as much value as the can out of their money. Everyone in the equation is acting selfishly and in their own self-interest (which I believe humans are inclined to do anyway) but when applied on a societal level, everyone benefits. However I will concede that this is a balancing act that requires some level of government regulation to maintain.
On the other hand, I think communism only works when everyone acts altruistically. Which is noble, but unrealistic.
Lol, lmao even. Capitalism rewards greed it doesn’t mitigate it. You’ve got it twisted.
It’s the inability to see the forest for the trees. We were raised in a capitalist economic system, as were all of our past family members. The failings of capitalism appear to be the failings of human nature. In reality, meta analysis of multiple studies on human greed show that people will be inherently more kind to each other than be cruel. Quick search will bring up many articles on these studies. Plus, exchanges in material goods within communities where money hadn’t been invented would show that people didn’t barter, they gave their goods away to their neighbors, and the good deed would be remembered and reciprocated in times of need. You can look up “Gift Economy” in Wikipedia.
I also highly recommend reading or listening to the audiobook for The Dawn of Everything A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wingrow. It is extremely interesting and eye opening.
Not going to downvote, but I do think you’re lacking quite a bit of insight into the reasons human society exists at all. Cooperation is the reason human society exists at all, so saying we’re inheritly selfish is kinda laughable in that context.
I would encourage you to look up information on dialectical Materialism and the necessity of capitalism as a stage in that dialectical.
Capitalism had a purpose, and it’s past time for us to move on.
Let’s concede the point: humans are inherently greedy and selfish.
But greed and selfishness are bad, right? We want less greed and selfishness in the world.
Given these two assumptions—humans are greedy, greed is bad—shouldn’t we architect society to explicitly disincentivize greed?
Even if it was true that human nature was inherently greedy and selfish then it would be an argument for creating systems that discourage such behaviors. What you’re arguing is akin to saying that you should encourage a person struggling with alcoholism to drink more.
Thank you for answering. The problem with capitalism is it’s got out of control.
I agree. Businesses and owners have too much influence. I want more unions, trust-busting, and consumer protections. Workers seem to be organizing more at least, which is a good start.
Delaware gave corporations the right to vote…
Theoretically, anyway
Yeah. Nobody’s ever done real communism on a national scale. As in, not just being a dictatorship in charge of everything that funnels money and power to the top while giving communism lip service and the people get screwed.
I’m sure they were able to pick themselves up by the bootstraps right?
Nice…
Stalin: “Why not both?”
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I was in my early 20s when the Soviet occupation collapsed here, the victims here were everyone not high up in the party.
Sure, capitalism fucking sucks but pretending the USSR was anything other than just bourgeoisie rule is delusional. The oligarchs were just called the communist party then.
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Yea, no shit, nothing to do with what I said though.
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You should look into south america in the 70s and 80s. The CIA’s unrestrained human experimentation in the regiom perfected this ideological soft power superweapon or “strategic ideological construct”. Trying to find exactly what these kinds of things are called.
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Yea and I was commenting on how things were in a country under the occupation of the USSR. So both temporally and geographiclly unrelated.
I don’t understand why anything anti capitalism these days is automatically communism. It’s such a large swing from one side to the other. I just want my taxes to pay for healthcare, infrastructure, and education instead of wars and prisons. I want to stop getting fucked by corporations that have infinitely more money than I can ever imagine. I don’t think that makes me a communist. I’m just anti-fucking-the-people. Capitalism can fuck people. Communism can fuck people too. I support Corpo-Politico-Celibacism. Stop the fucking.
Edit: Okay, fuck the people. You guys must have this figured out.
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Let’s see: Communism A system of government where the country’s wealth is concentrated into a small, ruling class of billionaires, who use the media they own to keep the lower classes fighting with each other while they . . . the rich . . . run off with all the farking money.
Oh wait. that’s capitalism. I don’t know how I got those two systems confused.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
Wow they sure got a lot of landlords
People are starving every damn day under Capitalism and there is no famine going on. This isn’t the dunk you think it is.
I’ve been to Capitalist countries, I’ve been to Communist countries.
Guess which system has their people immigrating to the other system on rafts with their children, just to try the other system. Guess which system builds walls to keep people IN, guess which system has beggars asking for milk for their children instead of money.
Your comment isn’t the dunk you think it is when it brushes up against the harsh truth that is reality.
Bruh I’ve seen families begging for food outside of grocery stores in the United States of America. Now what communist countries had beggers asking for milk?
China has over 3 million starving homeless people.
https://havanatimes.org/cuba/child-beggars-a-growing-problem-in-holguin-cuba/ Cuba has a huge child starvation problem.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66924300 Laos has a huge poverty and homeless problem.
Vietnam has over 23k homeless street children https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/oct/05/saving-hanoi-street-children-vietnam-from-abuse-hunger-and-self-destruction
So to answer your question, every current communist country has a huge poverty and homeless problem.
Every source i can find puts homelessness rates in China at max 1,000,000 and all of them say that they live in shelters, not on the streets.
Cuba had been under embargo from the USA since 1962.
Laos has a massive poverty proborm because of debt which is a capitalist construct.
That statistic on Vietnamese homeless Children is 16 years old, and every source ive found states they have been making great strides since then to fight poverty and homelessness.
Lol, you extreme communists are hilarious.
You Capitalist Apologists are so blind to reality it is pathetic there are 18 capitalist countries with higher homeless populations than China. You literally have to divorce yourself from reality to attack Communism. You might as well be covered in shit, while mocking someone for having toilet paper stuck to their shoe.
Those famines happened every 10 years before communism, they happened ONCE during in each location and not again since.
In the meantime capitalism had that death total due to forced starvation every 7 years on average.
Famines happen regardless of political system.
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Bruh i see people starving in the streets of America every damn day.
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Nobody starves under capitalism /s
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There’s never be a full communist or capitalist society. What wears arguing over how far towards either we should go. Also, FYI for those that don’t know The USSR and China are not communist. Both are/were dictatorships that call themselves communist.
Look up dialectical Materialism. China is ‘communist’ as they are progressing along the roadmap Dialectical Materialism provides towards achieving communism.
So the tens of millions of people that died under communism were all landlords? Wow, what are the chances of that
What is with the tens of millions dying under capitalism
That’s different, because of reasons. When someone dies within a communist system that is communism’s fault. When someone dies in a capitalist system, that’s their own fault for not tugging on those bootstraps.
Is that what you saw or are you just parroting 1950s propaganda?
No alot of them wete Nazis.
The “black book of communism” includes german soldiers who died during WW2, it includes people who might have had 4 kids but only had 2, it includes victims of the US in vietnam.
Communism is a bit different than what those “communist” countries had. If anything it was socialism, but that still doesn’t fit completely. These “communist” countries are just one-party states in which the government controls the economy. The idea of putting the working class in power is useless if you create a government that can make decisions against the opinions of the working class. Socialist one-party state ≠ Communist democracy
ew a revisionist, it was REAL socialism led by REAL communists and it was based as fuck and the one that are still around are real and they are based. also theres no such thing a one party socialist state that is a myth at most u could say past and present socialist countries has a dominant political party but by no means was there only one, and other parties were and are allowed in those countries.
Yeah. You don’t get to revise away anything uncomfortable. USSR and China were socialist experiments that succeeded in raising quality of life and transforming rural countries into industrial, scientific states. If people wanna talk about what went wrong, great. Pretending they “don’t count” just puppets capitalist apologia and doesn’t help
From a theoretical point, they don’t count as communist. They entirely dropped the all-important aspect of giving power to the working class.
Both the USSR and China, in their self-described “communist” periods, were ruled with absolute power and directed by a head of state. The USSR collapsed, and modern China is about as communist as North Korea is democratic.
i was a little worried there comrade but im glad to see u have a good unstanding of just how great the PRC is, after all what could be more the democratic than the glorious DPRK.
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I really can’t tell if this is /s. Could you please clarify
“Communism but not like that. Or that. Or that. Or….”
Do you have a real-world example of a successful communist state? Because you may not like it, but those “communist” countries are humanities best attempts at enacting communism and they resulted in millions of people dying.
Millions less than the previous government forms, like Feudalism. Famines disappeared quickly and industrialization allowed for life expectancy to double in the USSR and Maoist China, despite issues like Civil War, World Wars, and so forth.
Did a lot go wrong? Absolutely. Were they massive improvements? Also yes.
No. But that doesn’t mean something like a socialist democracy couldn’t be achieved. Socialism isn’t bound to have a certain type of government and if we get rid of capitalism I would still like to have a say in what happens next
Communism only works on paper because it assumes that the people in power are going to just happily share everything equally. Humans don’t work that way, we’re selfish, greedy, and will hurt others to get ahead. There is no difference between a capitalist and communist leader. They both live better, eat better, make more money. There’s no equality there
That’s an astonishingly immaterial, idealistic analysis.
Communism assumes people work in their best interests, and because ideas come from material environments and not from some idea of “spirit,” Humans are more cooperative in cooperative systems and competitive in competitive systems.
A Communist leader is one that is democratically accountable and production is owned by the state, therefore all “profits” are reinvested into the economy for the benefit of all, rather than an elite few. Corruption is possible, yes, but so too is legislating protections against Corruption. In Capitalism, this corruption is required to function.
I don’t disagree but this meme is ass lmao
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I’m pretty sure the leftcommunists and anarchists and worker councils requesting for power to be really handed to the soviets which were purged by Lenin and Trotsky weren’t actually landlords. But you never know, people from .ml may think people unwilling to obey the bolsheviks get labeled landlords too.
Weird, I was under the impression that the purges happened after Lenin died. Can ghosts lead a purge?
Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror#Industrial_workers
Do also take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Russian_Constituent_Assembly_election
And this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Revolutionary_Party
Selected quotes:
The SRs were agrarian socialists and supporters of a democratic socialist Russian republic. The ideological heirs of the Narodniks, the SRs won a mass following among the Russian peasantry by endorsing the overthrow of the Tsar and the redistribution of land to the peasants.
In the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly held two weeks after the Bolsheviks took power, the party still proved to be by far the most popular party across the country, gaining 37.6% of the popular vote as opposed to the Bolsheviks’ 24%. However, the Bolsheviks disbanded the Assembly in January 1918 and after that the SR lost political significance. (…) Both wings of the SR party were ultimately suppressed by the Bolsheviks through imprisoning some of its leaders and forcing others to emigrate.
Following Lenin’s instructions, a trial of SRs was held in Moscow in 1922, which led to protests by Eugene V. Debs, Karl Kautsky, and Albert Einstein among others. Most of the defendants were found guilty, but they did not plead guilty like the defendants in the later show trials in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and the 1930s.
Note that these guys won the elections because they were the actually existing socialist movement in Russia and had been for decades. Lenin only led the government instead of them because he had the organization to overthrow the Mensheviks, not because the Bolsheviks were a better representative of socialism.
That’s not true at all. The Mensheviks wanted to cooperate with the bourgeoisie and were therefore a bad representation of socialism. Lenin formed the Bolsheviks because the Mensheviks were being stupid. The country was also fractured after the revolution and many groups of counter-revolutionary groups were trying to overthrow the barely formed government. Meanwhile famines were ravaging the country. Understanding the historical context of Russia in 1917 and the economic struggles the people were dealing with is very important to understanding why things happened the way they did. Looking at the aftermath of a revolution where everyone is vying for power and killing each other doesn’t automatically make the winner of that power grab the bad guys.
How about you read anything of what I’ve sent you and you realize that I’m not talking about the Mensheviks
It was many factions. I’m just saying all of them were trying to have third revolutions while the people starved to death. At some point, revolutions end with a unifying government that isn’t trying to murder each other. Lenin was not the villain you’re painting him to be.
Keep in mind that many Americans don’t know Socialism from Communism, as they’ve been schooled that everything responsible for happy Scandinavians is somehow bad.
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ITT: That doesn’t count!!!
Well. Stop using strawmen. Communism is defined by progress through dialectical Materialism. Has any nation finished that progression?
Communism is a goalpost on wheels, that’s why no nation has “finished that progression”
No. Moving goalposts means there is no definitive measure of completion. Communism has one. If you’ve read anything at all about it, you would know that. But hey you were told it was bad in school, and thinking for yourself is difficult. You do you.
‘We’re only defending the imaginary ideal!’
That’s not how words work. Things mean what they are used to mean.
Y’all understand this perfectly when describing “capitalism.” That word becomes synecdoche for every level and aspect of modern reality. By definition, capitalism is only really the part where having money makes money, but nobody has any trouble understanding what you mean when you refer to its consequences and implications. Nor would you respect if libertarians split hairs about “corporatism.” Like oh, this isn’t capitalism, because it lacks X and Y and Z, which have never existed, so how dare you talk about bad things that actually happened.
It’s more that anticommunists judge Socialist states by their inability to fulfill Communist ideals at the level of development AES countries are at, as though they exist in a perfectly frozen picture absent history and trajectory.
Yeah sure dude, existing in a context is why people condemned police states.
‘People who don’t know the difference between these terms must be using the more-recognizable one as an oblique criticism of the gap between theory and practice’ is the most .ml take I have ever seen.
Condemning the USSR and PRC for not achieving a global stateless, classless, moneyless society is ridiculous. This isn’t a gap between theory and practice, lol. Communism isn’t anarchism.
… do you understand that criticism can come from outside your own belief set?
Yep, but I also understand what Communists actually advocate for and understand that countries building Communism should be judged like every society: with respect to trajectory, not as a snapshot.
Communism isn’t a goal because it is stateless, classless, and moneyless. Rather, Communism is a goal because the process of getting there is to create a society benefitting all and directed for the working class, by the working class.
I just got permabanned for evading ban on alternative account on reddit. |
Fuck reddit
Fuck wallstreet.
People fleeing communist countries en mass sure is a mystery. Who could ever know why they built the Berlin Wall or why Cuban families risk their children on rafts to get to a capitalist country
You are aware that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants are coming to America from other capitalist countries right?
This reply perfectly highlights why people who have issues with basic logic support communism.
What issues with basic logic do supporters of Communism have?
What issues with basic logic do people who support Communism have in common?
Living conditions for the majority of the population in Cuba are far better than in any capitalist Latin American country. This is despite the brutal blockade on Cuba by the burger empire. Please go make a clown of yourself elsewhere.
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The kind of abject poverty you see in Latin American countries simply does not exist in Cuba. Everyone has access to basic necessities, education, and healthcare. Cuba has even higher life expectancy than US.
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Of course, the blockade is doing incredible amounts of harm. My point is that even despite that, Cuba manages to do a better job ensuring a minimal standard of living than capitalist countries in Latin America. What this shows is that communism performs better under extreme stress than capitalism does under best conditions.
This might help to explain the siege mentality of socialism.
People move to areas with better material conditions. Assuming that is the fault of Socialism and not of countries being in different stages of development is immaterial and ignores the trajectory of nations, as well as the geopolitical landscape.
For example, in the GDR, education was high quality and free, but wages were lower than in West Germany. Many highly educated people in GDR attempted to leverage their free education for higher wages in the West.
As for Cuba, people fleeing are typically the people prosecuted during the revolution, ie plantation owners. People still flee from less developed to more developed countries, which is why people flee from Capitalist states to other Capitalist states.
