Comment on He was no friend to the middle class
teslasaur@lemmy.world 2 days agoUnlike the communistic system where the political leaders use the system to enrich themselves?
Unlike the communistic system where the political leaders use the system to enrich themselves?
An actually communist system would not have leaders that could enrich themselves, because communism entails the absence of private property. (including money, owning means of production that aren’t directly from solely your own efforts, etc)
I wouldn’t call myself a communist, but even I know this.
Actual communism cannot exist at the level of a nation state. You could maybe get to about the size of a small village before it starts breaking down fundamentally.
They said “communistic” when they likely meant “socialist”. People who haven’t read leftist theory run socialism and communism together. We should educate them on the difference between socialism as a transitionary stage and communism as a classless/moneyless/stateless society.
You miss the point on purpose, or you didn’t read the rest of my message.
balderdash9@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Historically untrue of many communist leaders. Ho Chi Minh mended his own clothes. Vladimir Lenin was practically ascetic.
Capitalism is an economic system that produces commodities: goods that are made to be useful but can not be used until they are bought/sold. Under capitalism, the capitalist owns the means with which to produce commodities and so takes the finished products and ultimately the resulting profits as their private property. The capitalist also makes all the decisions on how workers spend their labor time. On the other hand, the workers, the people that labored to create the commodity, are given a fraction of the value they produce in the form of wages. Capitalism exists here and now, any definition of capitalism to the contrary is idealist.
We have examples of socialist states scaling just fine. Perhaps we could have seen the true potential of socialism (and eventually communism) as an economic model; but countries that reject capitalism faced economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, assassination attempts, and retaliatory wars (e.g., Cuba, Vietnam, USSR, Chile [Salvador Allende], etc.)
You can keep your house and toothbrush under socialism: this is your personal property. The goal of socialism is to turn the private ownership of the means to produce all the things we want/need into public property that the workers own. This is necessary for us to stop producing goods for private profit and start producing them for direct consumption.