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People confuse “People calling themselves communists killed people” and “communism killed people” which are two very different sentences.
I’ll direct you towards my comment elsewhere, copied here:
“Not real communism” has 2 flavors.
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Western “leftist” edition, claiming all existing socialist states never achieved even socialism
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Marxist edition, pointing out that socialism is a transition to communism, and that communism has not been achieved yet.
The latter is correct, but often gets mistaken for the former, which results in rhetorical gotchas by liberal debatelords.
In other words, communists have killed people and made mistakes, but have played an overwhelmingly positive role. Further, most of the people killed by the communists have been fascists, capitalists, landlords, etc.
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you can never get them to agree capitalism kills.
“human nature” or something.
Ah yes capitalism, famously devoid of corporations
I’ll bite, what’s the source / reasoning behind the .1bil number?
“Not real communism” has 2 flavors.
-
Western “leftist” edition, claiming all existing socialist states never achieved even socialism
-
Marxist edition, pointing out that socialism is a transition to communism, and that communism has not been achieved yet.
The latter is correct, but often gets mistaken for the former, which results in rhetorical gotchas by liberal debatelords.
No it’s not.
This is correct:- Excuses by people who don’t know what actually happened or what the actual critique given is. For example counting millions of killed nazis and taking life expectancy and compare it to a nation completely untarnished by world wars with an abundance of fossil fuels taken from the indigenous people.
One can calculate this way too. I’ll show you.
Since Usonia is capitalist and the population is around 350 million of which the indigenous people is maybe 2 million,
Usonia alone has killed therefore at least 345 million people, since all those people could have been indigenous.That’s fair too, stats fuckery is a time-honored tradition.
You know what they say, there’s lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Still accurate!
Can we discuss this? I don’t believe that Marx’s definition of communism is a form of society that comes after socialism. I think communism exists now within the working class. Its the real struggle against capitalist class owned private property and capitalist directed production and distribution of the historic means of production.
I actually really don’t like the definition of communism as something strictly “out there”. Communism exists just as sure as capitalism exists. Socialism can become communist, but communism goes away when capitalism goes away. Communism is the negation of “bourgeois” private property. The left is already too idealist and prefigurative, and Marx was really against that.
If you ask me, the idea of socialism as the achievement of minimum demands, that leads to communism as the realization of maximum demands, is not a Marxist communist theory of change, it is a social democratic one.
I think you’re getting at the concept of communism as a movement vs. communism as a mode of production. As a communist, I am committed to bringing about communism the mode of production, so in a way this process itself is “communism” from a certain view. However, this becomes very confusing for those not familiar, and so I try to keep things compartmentalized when discussing with those not as informed.
Socialism is chiefly a mode of production best seen as a transition between capitalism and communism. It’s the process of building the communist society where money, class, and the state have been abolished, where private property is no longer a thing. Drawing a distinction between the process of building something, and the object being built, is important. It’s the difference between the movement and the goal.
Yes but I think points of emphasis matter. Socialism may exist in some formal ways and some informal ways, but assuming it does, for example I know that you consider China to be at least partially/mostly socialist, the task is not for a socialist nation to become a communist nation, but for a socialist nation to become a socialist international, topple imperial international capitalist totality, and continually develop mass proletarian international productive forces, etc.,
So yes it is important to delineate “communist society” vs communist movement, in that the communist/proletarian movement actually exists, as it is the embodiment of the revolutionary potential of the working class; where “communist society” does not exist, and will not exist for a very long time.
So why define communism as something that it is not? Like its fine to imagine a better world, but it isn’t practical and it isn’t part of communism as it is inherently prefigurative. Communists concern ourseves with what exists, and what will exist (I’m not a huge fan of predictive Marxism, but knowing where we are headed is necessary for a successful political project) not what should exist.
You’re clearly alluding to the words in The German Ideology about communism being the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. And yet in the same work, and in several others, Marx and Engels also do talk about “communist society” and give some rough descriptions of how it would operate. The notion that communism is pure negativity and that it “goes away when capitalism goes away” (or that “the idea of socialism as the achievement of minimum demands, that leads to communism as the realization of maximum demands, is not a Marxist communist theory of change, it is a social democratic one”) is something you would have to take up with a lot of works, again, but this is most clearly put down in Critique of the Gotha Programme.
And I don’t think Marx would go so far as to say “communism exists now within the working class,” because there is no world-historic struggle by the collective proletariat to <upheave> the present state of things; struggle on the individual level is not communism, as is also made clear in TGI, nor would communism exist within the working class semantically regardless, as it is the <real movement> [which seizes upon the immanent negativity in capitalism and reorganizes production, thereby upheaving capitalist relations of production], it is not some rebellious spirit people come to possess.
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goog guy stays chill and says chill thing, evil guy says thing angrily and shouts. classic
Sure, but it’s rare for my politics to be portrayed as the good chill guy, so lemme have this one حبيبتي
Capitalism, communism, cant we just cherry pick from both what works well for society?
No?
Why not?
Oh, greed and stupidity?
I see.
First of all, the entire discussion depends on what one means by ‘capitalism’ and ‘communism’, since there aren’t really countries that only employ concepts from one system.
Generally, it seems we can mix and pick the best parts of both. So far it’s working quite well in several European countries, especially Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Of course, they’re far from perfect. Perhaps due to still too many capitalist policies, or maybe because mixing capitalism with socialism has its limits and we need a fundamentally different system to progress further.
You must be delusional for stating that the Nordic countries are doing “quite well”. The nordic model was always a lie, and it has been steadily killed by the people in charge since the USSR fell. Capitalism is and always has been only making lives worse for the working people, in the nords as well as globally. An absurd claim devoid of facts based on material reality.
Do you know of a report / article detailing the decline of Nordic Social Democracy? I’ve seen a Nordic comrade or two say the same thing but didn’t go into detail. It would be good to have it on hand to explain why Social Democracy isn’t a solution along with Second Thought’s video.
No, unfortunately I don’t know of any such reports or studies. I’d be interested in reading some for sure
Capitalism and socialism are not slices of a system, but modes of production and distribution. Welfare in the context of a capitalist economy is not socialism, just like limited private property within socialism is not actually capitalism.
As for the Nordic countries, they only “work” because they rely on imperialism and neocolonialism for their safety nets as the price of class collaborationism. The only way to have safety nets that good while also being thoroughly capitalist is to siphon the wealth from the global south, creating what Engels calls a “bourgeois proletariat.”
Socialism and eventually communism is the correct course.
Lysenkoism vs Corporatism.
Lysenkoism was a response to the overwhelming prevalence of race theory among western countries, that were using the gene as a scientific basis for eugenics. Much of science was this way, not just biology, and the soviets were dedicated dialectical materialists. Lysenko wasn’t a random crank, but the Lysenkoist theory of inheritance was ultimately wrong, even if done out of trying to reject eugenics scientifically.
The Soviets were ultimately very scientifically advanced due to dialectical materialism placing such an emphasis on science, and in many ways were beyond the west, who were still trying to biologically justify colonialism with pseudoscience.
