This is more accurate: Online discussion about capitalism
People living in a third world capitalist country
14-year-old white boy living in a Western country: I know more than you
2 things:
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The victors write history
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After Lenin the USSR was not really communist anymore but more really a totalitarian state that didn’t believe in the values of communism. Just like China.
Everything would probably have been better if Lenin didn’t die so fast and then Trotsky would have ruled.
- The victors write history
Flashback to stories of Rus conquests written by the Rus that said the people asked to be conquered
Trotsky would have ruled.
Mask off trot lmao
Trotsky was as much a tyrant and potentially even more blood would have been spilled. Trotsky was a strong proponent of war communism which was brutal towards the Russian civilians.
Stalin believed in the values of communism, he just also believed everyone was out to get him. Economically he followed Lenin’s plan of nationalization and collectivization even more zealously then Lenin would have. Lenin wasn’t as paranoid as Stalin and probably wouldn’t have killed and gulaged millions of “suspicious” people but he was still very much a dictator and was willing to use any means necessary to achieve his goals, same with Trotsky.
With any of them the super structure of the state and how it’s organized may vary a bit, but it would have all been built off a nationalized and collectivized base. Whether you want to call that base communism is up to you, but you can’t say one is and one isn’t.
Lenin did put plenty of people in Gulags. Communism = fascism.
He did but not nearly as much as Stalin.
Equating soviet style communism and fascism completely ignores the base. Yes the structure of the government is similar but in fascism the underlying economic system is still capitalistic and market based, while in Soviet style communism it is nationalized and planned. It also ignores ideology, fascism is about asserting national and racial supremacy to the detriment of inferior races, communism is about seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie and giving control to the proletariat. Even if the government structure is similar, the policies those governments enact are wildly different. Thats like saying reddit and lemmy are the same because they both work on up voted content percolating up.
Yeah, right, fascism is so capitalistic! This is why Mussolini forced labour unions and nationalised 75% of the Italian economy. What a capitalist!
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“History is written by the victors” is a tired cliché that doesn’t always hold up super well if you spend a moment to consider it.
Who conquered Rome? Surely, it was a people remembered for their great military prowess, right? Nope, still commonly remembered as barbarians thousands of year later.
The Mongols had one of the largest empires in history, and yet in much of the lands they conquered, they’re remembered as being monstrously ugly brutes, which is where words like “mongoloid” and “mongrel” come from.
Just like China.
And Cuba. And North Korea.
One of those funny coincidences that keeps happening.
To be perfectly clear: I’m not strongly opposed to what any “14-year-old white girl” means when she promotes communism. I understand leftist goals as distinct from what these countries actually did. But the fact these countries had those goals, and then did this shit instead, demands a better explanation than ‘that doesn’t count.’ Especially when leftist philosophy has a lot to say about liberals and capitalism inevitably producing terrible outcomes.
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Just like China.
Which is also a dictatorship.
Turns out literacy or whatever doesn’t cancel out being a dictatorship.
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It’s a dictatorship of the Castro family, in a way America’s representative democracy isn’t one at all.
It was literally modeled on the Soviet Union, well after all y’all insist the Soviet Union stopped doing anything communism-ish and was a straight-up dictatorship. Again - quoting the initial mook I replied to - “just like China.”
Boring goddamn tankies think it’s a zero-sum game where one thing being bad means the other must be flawless.
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Fidel is dead and Raul is 90 and you’re playing gulag apologia.
We will never speak again. Waste someone else’s time.
Until the next tyrant came along. It’s a system that is always bound to fail.
It is a system that never gets transitioned to fully. It doesn’t fail because it has basically never existed. If I invade your house, kill your father, and make you call me the milk man, that doesn’t make me a milk man.
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14 year old white girl
Bravo they managed to also cram ageism and misogyny in the old “champagne socialism” meme. All in the single sentence.
Pretty much Lemmy. I grew up in a communist civil war, hosing blood off my sidewalk was a weekly chore, the neighbors vanishing cause they pissed someone off and were labeled red. But yeah, Lemmy teens, you guys know all about it! /S
Did you still use money to buy goods and services? Was your father able to do speak up at work? Change jobs? Go on vacations?
Just because something called itself communism didn’t make it communism. The state owning everything is the opposite of communism. In extreme communism, there isn’t even a damn state as we know it.
The people in the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea do not live in a democracy nor a republic.
So communism = god?
A fictional impossibility
In many ways, yes. It is absolutely an ideal that is not compatible with current reality.
That’s why anyone who’s remotely realistic about it understands it’s an end state of pushing for anarcho-socialistic policies, one that maybe cannot be achieved. Like saying, “Humanity will walk on the moon.” when it’s 1910. Conceivable? Kinda’. Possible? Hell no.
This certainly never happens with liberalism. Africa has never seen war since democracy and liberalism freed it obviously. And putin is the prime example of a communist I guess.
Erm pushes up glasses that wasn’t real communism because real communism works.
Well it’s the same for the free market really. On paper it’s a nice idea, but in practice it makes the world miserable because people are, in general, fucking selfish assholes.
What people who lived in the Soviet union and other socialist states have to say:
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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
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
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Hard agree. Our government will wreck the economy just to die on two hills: social conservatism (EU funding says hi) and russian reliance. Russian gas, russian atom (x2) because they want to build Paks II. They also gerrymandered the everliving fuck out of electoral districts so they can win their precious supermajority. I hope they fail on at least one of the aforementioned hills so they can drop the ball like the now-opposition did in 2006. As for communism, well, the 72% seems very wrong. Sure we had dictatorship-lite, but 1956 happened beforehand, to which we lost many of our schools for example. Plenty of (grand+)parents’ tales paint communism like it was the worst thing that could possibly have happened. Also, if 72% of people preferred communism, then surely the dem. socialist party would Poll higher than 3%.
Reminder that fidesz (the govt party) was originally anti-communist. (I am Hungarian if it wasn’t obvious).
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God how hard it will be for people to realise how fucking stupid making more russian reactors and signing more russian gas contracts are. Our electoral system is in shambles1. social issues are overwhelmingly conservative here. The bigger green party is anti-gLObaLisM. The neo-na**s have the same amount of seats as green party number 1.
1: 2022: Popular vote: 54,13% Fidesz-KDNP; 34,44% United Opposition; 5,88% Our Homeland (neo-na**s). cf district votes: Fidesz-KDNP 87, United Opposition 19.
Mixed system so parliament makeup (199 seats) is 135 seats - 67,84% for Fidesz-KDNP; 57 seats - 28,64% for United Opposition; 6 seats - 3,02% for Our Homeland; and 1 seat for German national representation thing.
So yeah, shit’s fucked
The trajectory Hungary took after transition to capitalism mirrors what happened in most post USSR states. This just further supports the point that the communist system was better.
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What happened in countries like Hungary and Poland is a direct result of the transition to capitalism however. What’s more this transition happened under the best possible conditions. The transition happened largely democratically without any violent revolutions, and these countries got support from the west to soften economic impact of the transition. Yet, despite all that we see that majority of post Soviet countries end up going in a similar direction under capitalism. Again, Hungary isn’t an outlier here.
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Thing is that bad management, corruption, and so on, have happened in every human society that has ever existed. A political system isn’t magically going to change that. What a political system can do however is create different selection pressures for behavior. Capitalist system selects for different kinds of behaviors than a communist one. As we see with the case of transition from communism to capitalism in eastern Europe, the selection pressures of capitalism result in far worse things happening than under communism.
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Ah yes, “communism”. Op show me 1 country with communism. Dictatorship with ‘communism’ in their name don’t count.
Wait are you telling me the Democratic Republic of North Korea is neither Democratic or a Republic?? Like they’d just lie?
I can name several countries that tried to do a communism, and wound up being what communists insist doesn’t count.
I can show many democracies in Africa like that! :D
Rule of thumb: If the US is sanctioning or at war with them, they’re communist.
Communism IS a dictatorship. There’s no other way.
Every single IWW member is reading this comment and going “NO!!!”
I thought that dictatorship masked themself as Communism
Communism, especially Marxist-Leninism, seems to require some sort of benevolent dictator who is willing to work towards destroying their own power, which obviously never seems to happen. ML theories state the need for a Vanguard state, which is a dictatorship that is supposed to be there to simply enforce the rule of the working class until a time when it is no longer needed.
So the idea of dictatorship is built into the major form of communism that has been tried, basically. One of the main problems with this is that the steps a nation has to take before it gets to “true communism” in ML theory are ripe for abuse, and hard to get through without someone corrupt seizing power.
I think there are some good theories in Marx writings, it’s just the methods for attempting to implement it definitely need to be reexamined because they don’t work.
The vanguard state is a mean to reach communism, it is not communism itself. That’s a pretty big difference.
The difference is the same with the gouvernement révolutionnaire in France during the revolution, and you can make parallels with US revolution too. I’m pretty sure the US government is very different from what it was during its war against UK.
Thanks for that. Astute and insightful.
We all know a 14 year old black girls know their shit about communism.
I think ops the teenager here.
Quick plug for this guy’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UshankaShow
Not really political, just interesting first-hand accounts of life in the USSR (Ukraine specifically) with a bunch of period photos mixed in.
What does the red symbol next to the username of OP mean?
Hey, not sure since I couldn’t see it, but I got arbitrarily banned, so maybe it was that. Gotta give it to the admins, they’re taking their LARPing seriously
For the USSRs faults I wouldn’t bet on older people hating their time under it. They did their complaining about the Soviet system in the few years before it got replaced with half a dozen oligarchies.
Also Love how this meme is a prime example of misogyny in how I remember the original meme not mentioning the gender of the teenager, but now since Girls = stupid idealists someone rewrote the caption to explicitly mention the communist being female (so we know that communism = stupid too)
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OP really be asking why the meme is being anti-white racist 💀
This is such poor logic. Being around when something happens doesn’t mean you somehow know a vast amount about that something. People later can study that something and known much more about it than people who were living during those times.
Ask the average American who was alive during the Cold War what the effects of it were on America and its population, they’ll say some generic shit they heard mouthed to them by politicians. Ask any 21 year old college student who just finished a course on the Cold War and its effects on America, and they’ll have much deeper understanding.
Being old and alive during something doesn’t make you knowledgeable about that something than someone younger and educated. You’d know this if you weren’t all idiots, but so many of you are dumbass motherfuckers.
Here comes the perpetually online Tankies. TAKE COVER!!🪖
