Comment on Hrmmmmm
rarsamx@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
The reason of the confusion is clear.
The US propaganda has always equated Communism and totalitarianism.
It is bonkers that people in the USA cannot distinguish between an economic system and a political system.
Those two are distinct things. True communism is very democratic. But reading the Communist manifesto is heretic in the US and you are left with what your leaders tell you.
The Russian Revolution was communist but the USSR was never communist.
Right wing totalitarian dictators also use starvation of their own people as means of control.
What you are experiencing in the US is totalitarianism and while it hasn’t gotten to USSR levels, it is going on that direction.
Food for thought: study the political system in China, you’d be surprised how it’s actually more democratic than the current USA. Yes, the CCP controls the nominations. Now, tell me if there is true plurality in the US, two right wing parties selecting their candidates without any real popular input.
Really you’ve been bamboozled to think there is real democracy in the US.
You are missing an important point.
The Russian Revolution was communist but the USSR was never communist.
Yes. But what does that mean? If I have a recipe for potion of immortality, but anyone that drinks the resulting potion dies instead, it’s a bad recipe even if the promise of immortality sounds good.
If every time you have a communist revolution, it ends up being authoritarian, what does that say about the communist political system?
More like every time there’s been democratically elected socialists or communists, western powers intervene with staged coups, assisinations, or embargos.
Even if that’s true, so what? Immortality being impossible does not make the recipe from my example any more useful. You are just pointing out one possible reason why communism doesn’t work in reality. Still doesn’t work.
This is like saying the idea of solar panels is bad because capitalists work against them to destroy their reputation. Judging a system based on the assumption that theres someone else trying to destroy it is very simple minded.
In many of these cases, the political system which couldn’t withstand coups were democracies. Does this mean that democracy isn’t useful? Are you saying that democracies should forbid socialists from being elected since if they get elected then america will intervene and the democracy will cease to be useful? Sounds like you don’t care for democracy and self-determination of nations. Bonus points will be awarded for being able to make your point without a potion metaphor.
You’re discussing with brainwashed tankies who can only answer “what about xyz in the west” to any kind of, even constructive, criticism.
Lots of anarchists are like that too, a shame because there is surely something to take from those kind of ideas.
The capitalist apparatus requires emmense effort to maintain. Military, police, propaganda, bailouts,… Its not self sustaining and its not natural. For comparison, cooperative, democratically controlled workplaces, have greater survival rates than their conventional, privately owned firms. Not to mention workers or more likely paid a living wage, have greater job stability and satisfaction, and just as likely, if not more so to lead to innovation. Its literally proven a better economic system, but yet some still think it offers empty promises.
Every time a capitalist system is implemented the oligarchy grows and seizes power and some corrupt oligarchs usurp the power of the people. What does that say about capitalism? I think your generalized question is terribly bad faithed when every can point out the US system and straight capitalism is a failure also. Rather then generalized ideas and theory we look at all the systems and see what does work and how we can keep the power in the hands of people
I think the issue is corruption, power, and control. To have a capitalist society you must allow businesses do what they want or they will seize power. In a communist society power is centralized when it is focused on the state as a communistic in which power and control when questioned or control loosened gets cracked down.
Democratic Republicans are great but there is a few problems when they move so slow. One, what if the charter is never fixed when we add more rights. We just tack it on as precedent and never amend the charter.
Second,if the population is growing is it still representing people properly. I think having a representative for every 1 million people is to huge. And the fact we have disparities as large as 1 to million but then some have as low as 1 in 250k. Is unequal.
Third. I don’t think as long as businesses hold power over an individuals life businesses should have political power. They hold to much currently. Also the fact through a business they can unlimitedly donate money but i as an individual can only spend $2,500(somewhere around there is the campaign cap)on a candidate is insane power wise.
Fourth a mixed economic/ business system would be wonderful a more planned economy by what citizens need would be nice. Also economy and business shouldn’t be running the country. The individual people should.
Fifth States are stupid unless they can leave. The lines/borders are arbitrarily stupid and the fact the power federal is based on the lines fucks us up. If so chooses states should be able to break apart and make local states of the people so it is easier to have democratic control over your local area. Yes this means almost every state would become major cities and then the rural areas. Unless they want to partner with a city.
I don’t see how what you write relates to what I write other than what-aboutism directing attention to (non-fatal) issues of capitalism instead of addressing the fatal issues of communism.
“everyone is an American”
Ill be the patsy: You can’t make rules to eliminate human greed / lust for power?
I’m very simplistic with this stuff and haven’t studied it, but that seems to be the fundamental limitation with communism. Would work great with robots but we’re more ‘complex’ with our subconscious bias, unexamined motives and insecurities driving our actions.
I read a Chinese visual novel where society actual DID manage to eradicate humanity’s greed/lust for power.
The biggest issue with the depicted society is that people live out their lives in ways deemed safe by the state. No one who lives in the society sees any problem with this, since their needs are cared for, and they’re allowed to freely pursue interests the state considers safe. The society determined that any culture that existed before their rise to power has to be destroyed or locked up - introduction of such items can have a majorly destabilizing effect, and bring greed/lust for power back.
Even if “greed is human nature” weren’t complete bullshit, the best economic system is definitely not the one that most aggressively incentivizes greed
I think it says more about how Lemmings and other westerners understand authoritarianism. Because capitalist countries are way more authoritarian than any communist country has ever been. Y’all have just been fed lie after lie until you start repeating them yourselves.
More like you have a simple and easy to follow recipe for cake. You and a friend are following it dutifully. Just before the last step of the recipe your friend gets a call from their partner. Your friend then pushes you out of the kitchen and locks you out. The cake is served frosted in your friends freshly cut hair clippings.
The Russian Revolution was communist but the USSR was never communist
Hard disagree. Universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, lowest wealth and income inequality in the history of the region, guaranteed housing and abolition of homelessness and unemployment, life expectancy skyrocketing from a meager 28 years to 70 in the span of 40 years, abolition of private business, redistribution of land to peasants, and saving Europe from Fascism really seem like communist traits to me. There were defects and policy failures during some of the hardest times in history, don’t get me wrong, but simply by achieving all of those wonderful goals without ever having colonies or engaging in imperialism, that’s very communist to me.
What you are experiencing in the US is totalitarianism and while it hasn’t gotten to USSR levels, it is going on that direction
The US has had, for decades, the highest prison population in the world, both in absolute and relative terms. In absolute terms, the US has nearly as many prisoners as the USSR did during WW2, the historic highest for obvious reasons (25 million Soviet citizens were killed by Nazism). You have literal fascist police disappearing people based on the colour of the skin, and the US has literally bombed black people for their ideology in US soil.
You’re damn high in American exceptionalism and anticommunist propaganda.
without ever having colonies or engaging in imperialism
That’s only because the USSR lobbied hard in the UN so that colonialism is defined as having overseas colonies. The “near abroad” is/was a colonial empire.
The USSR was definitely imperialistic, see Hungary 1956, where it crushed a revolution which was not against communism, the revolutionaries were in fact communists, they just wanted to be free of Soviet occupation.
Not debating the accomplishments of the USSR though, it was definitely and improvement on the Russian Empire.
The “near abroad” is/was a colonial empire
The USSR was definitely imperialistic, see Hungary
You’re spitting in the graves of the tens of millions of murdered by colonialism by comparing it to intervention in Hungary. Colonialism isn’t “maintaining an aligned bloc”, colonialism is the plunder, enslavement and murder of millions in the name of wealth and resource extraction. Go tell the tens of millions of enslaved Africans, of murdered Congolese and Native Americans and Palestinians how what happened in Hungary was colonialism. Disturbing the definitions of western colonialism in order to dunk on communism is honestly a disgusting attitude that trivializes the suffering of the millions upon millions of wretched of the Earth.
Holodomor. Katyn. Gulags. Literal alliance with the Nazis.
You disgust me, up on your high horse, clutching your pearls and discounting millions dead because theyre politically inconvenient for the economic system you glaze. You accuse other people of spitting while you piss with your Shapiro-like disingenuity. Gross.
When the USSR came to Hungary, they literally exhausted the syphilis medicine supply of the country for two years with the amount of rape, and the country has had collective PTSD from it for generations.
I’m sure others can bring up other countries, I’m more familiar and am more in touch with the culture of specifically Hungary. It is widely researched and not debated actually that it was so bad, suicides and misogyny spiked in the aftermath, as the people who couldn’t defend their loved ones from often repeated often gang rape either committed suicide, or just internalised that “rape is not so bad” to cope.
600 thousand people were also kidnapped (from a country of less than 10 million) and forced into labour camps for decades, with a third never coming home. This also specifically targeted the local German-Hungarian population (which had nothing to do with Germany, it was a diaspora dating back long into medieval times), so it can also qualify as genocide.
There were also examples of brutal torture, keeping people in cells small enough they couldn’t even sit down, and so on. Had nothing to do with communism, some of the direst things were actually done against communists who wanted to be free from Soviet occupation. It was pure Russian imperialism.
And truth be told, we got off easy compared to some other countries.
And finally, colonialism being “western” in an inherently racist way to view the world. East Asian empires also had colonies, so did most empires around the world.
True communism is very democratic
Literately Marx himself called for a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Which would then somehow magically give way to a true democratic government, as if any dictator on earth had ever just resigned out of their own accord.
Who is the proletariat?
The people
I mean in the current dictatorships, where it’s a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by Marxist terms, it is usually one dictator and the setup is fairly hierarchical.
Why is it called a dictatorship then?
If you are familiar with the Paris Commune of 1871, you’d know what was meant by that term, according to Engels.
It is not a call to install ‘a’ dictator to usher in a new socialist world. It is the act of overthrowing the ‘dictatorship of capital.’ The character of the people should be radically democratic, and aim to put all social institutions in the collective hands of everyone who is affected by them. The only magic going on here is the mystification of what has been plainly laid out over the past two centuries, and attempted by numerous cultures across the globe, with varying degrees of success, in no small part due to people who knew what it means to take power away from self-interested tyrants.
“Varying degrees of success” is a great euphemism for “more people killed than several holocausts”
Anything’s possible when you make shit up
Dictatorship of the proletariat literally just means that the state represents the proletariats interests, rather than the bourgeois’ interests (like democracy in the west).
Democracy was supposed to do that. What would prevent a communist state from being usurped by capitalist interests (since capitalists are the ones who pay their bills)?
That is a good question. Keep in mind I’m not marxist, but I have read some of the theory.
In a communist state, the means of production are usually nationalised by the state, for capitalists, all of their wealth comes from exploiting the labor of others, if the means are controlled by the people through a democratic government, the capitalists can’t profit since they don’t control the means.
As such, the idea that capitalists pay the bills of communist states seems wrong to me.
Call me naive if you want but I think we might want to aim for slightly more than another flavor of illusory democracy.
The USSR never intentionally starved its citizens as the US is doing right now.
The USA is a massive country of 330m+. Literally tens of millions of us have no delusions about this.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
At some point, you have to get passed “true whatever” and accept certain institutions already exist.
Also helps to recognize that communism as a movement has been anti-colonialist first and democratic only as it serves the former cause. Communists aren’t receptive to a liberal democracy that allows half the people to sell out the other half.
Folks love to get lost in the sauce talking about what Marxism really truly means, as an ideology, without asking why people adopt it or how they apply it in practice.
bobzer@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Do you actually think that’s worse than the elite deciding who is going to starve and who’s going to be disappeared to maintain their power?
Why bother pretending to return the means of production to the worker only to rob them of their voice?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think that’s how it is accomplished. Divide and conquer.
bobzer@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I think you’ve been living in a broken democracy too long, you can’t examine it objectively anymore.
The alternative is that you actually believe authoritarianism to be morally superior, which is just disturbing.
Valmond@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You’re discussing with a tankie. For them the gulags and the holodomor will only get the response “what about xyz in the west”.
FlyingCircus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You’re hopped up on that US propaganda, bud. The USSR was democratic from the ground up. Working people’s voices had more power there than almost anywhere else at any other point in history.