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Everyone here is saying Communism to define some pseudo-socialism used as a means of harsh control by a dictator. Is it Communism because they call it Communism? Is the DPRK magically a democratic republic because they call it that?
That’s… incorrect at best.
Well the thing is that the utopian communism people idolize does not, will not, and cannot exist in reality.
Human beings are not capable of it.
This is also how I feel about the concept of societal anarchy.
The things is that a lot of communists take Soviet Union as a good example, consider Stalin a positive, use Soviet symbology, etc.
The way I read this, is whatever was in USSR, at any stage, is ok by them and is representative.
And then my lived experience have a bone to pick.
So I don’t mind yer opinions on organization of society, but as soon as I hear something along the lines of “akshully Stalin gud”, that’s a huge red flag (ba-dum-tssss)
and whatever it was before the cia
Not just the CIA but “business” leaders everywhere.
Capitalists always love to come out of the woodwork to defend it whenever someone discusses communism as a good thing.
Capitalism having issues doesn’t mean communism is good. Learn the history ffs
that and watching the soviet version of it crash and burn
Careful, communist stans here don’t like lived experience
let em eat borscht
I know this is an impossible mission for the internet, but hear me out:
what if we don’t speak in absolutes?
Full communism is shit because by definition a few people decide what acceptable for everyone to live, and EVERY TIME in history that few people ended up oligarchs.
Full uncontrolled capitalism is shit because everything degenerates into monopolies and corrupt politicians, and then a few wealthy and corrupt individuals become the oligarchy.
Maybe we need to settle into some kind of middle ground, where people are allowed to own stuff but there are rules to level the field so too wealthy people can’t take over.
When I was younger I had the utopic view of communism being the theoretically ideal scenario, but getting to know some people that lived on communist countries, and seeing how things have happened in practice, have make me back down quite a bit.
Like I get it, you are young and want to be cool saying edgy things, and being raised in a capitalist country being communist seems the edgy thing to do. But don’t go from one monster to another just because you think the grass is greener.
I’m gonna be clear again because I know the internet has a problem understanding basic words: for me USA is as dystopian as Russia (now and when it actually was communist).
At the end of the day is doesn’t matter what -ism you prefer, they all suffer for corruption and rot.
Maybe we need to settle into some kind of middle ground, where people are allowed to own stuff
You’re right that we shouldn’t necessarily be looking at extreme ends of any spectrum, but this isn’t a thing. Communism has issue with private goods - goods owned BY A COMPANY/STATE used to make profit. It has no issue with PERSONAL goods - things an individual owns and uses.
I get the knee jerk reaction to the extreme positions, but it’s best to characterize both correctly, instead of relying on literally the propaganda talking point of “there’s no personal owners under communism”.
cool, so if an individual owns a factory for personal use thats fine, right?
Yes? Once they start employing other individuals, it goes from personal goods to private goods, and those other individuals who use the factory (the means of production) should have a percentage of ownership in said factory. That’s… That’s how this works, yes.
That’s means of production and should be owned by everyone working in it.
Marx said it. Does anyone read?
Full communism is shit because by definition a few people decide what acceptable for everyone to live
Where is that definition? The way I understand “full communism”, is basically anarchism and equality, absence of private property. Common means of production I.e. (and this is probably why it’s having a bad reputation) the opposite of autocratism as you seem to define it.
I even dare to say we never had anything close to it on a bigger scale (probably because it doesn’t fit in human nature).
The goal is a voluntary state of self-governance, however at a large scale there is usually some committee or authority that is “supposed” to direct everyone towards that.
Historically that power has always been corrupted by the few and communism is never achieved.
anarchy as a model of government in a scale of 8 billion people makes no sense and would be basically the most violent ends up getting everything. As a mental experiment in the rainbow and lollipop world is alright and I would definitely be onboard, but in practice it makes no sense because you need too much power to enforce it, and that is where the corruption would originate.
But my main point was not to only criticise communism, but also capitalism. I don’t think communism is achievable and I don’t think pure unregulated capitalism is the only crap we can aim for. Hence middle point or just nuance.
Online people, specially online USA people, are very prone to “choose a team and die for it” or “we have to go full communism or it doesn’t make sense” or “communism is bad so let’s do 100% uncontrolled capitalism”. There is no middle point for these wankers (which is very convenient for the politicians and wealthy people, as they get to abuse the argument of reducing everything to the absurd)
OP’s post history is very very US centric. And that’s usually a big problem because the US paradigm is just as unhinged as stalinist communism.
A lot of countries do exactly what you describe. Controlled capitalism, strong social and workers rights.
yeah I hear you, as European is very tiresome and surprising to listen to the USA binary logic… I just hope is “just” the online USA people, otherwise they are cooked (although it would explain the second victory of trump)
The more I learn about different systems of government the more it seems clear the best one would be a mixture of a couple different ones.
Pretty much every time someone offers an extreme as a solution it’s a case of “easy answers to hard problems”. The real optimal solution is almost always very nuanced, but dumb people just latch onto extremes because they’re easier to understand.
Take farming as an example. Under the Soviet Union it was a textbook communism command system, and it was insanely inefficient with massive food shortages. But conversely you don’t want it to be 100% privatized either because then it will devolve into a few mega monopolies that just grow cash crops like almonds which destroy the local ecosystems.
Ideally there would be a combination of private farmers with government oversight to prevent negative social externalities. But your average Fox News junkie or tankie doesn’t have the patience or rationality to understand that.
Schrodinger’s Soviet Union, simultaneously starving AND eating better than Americans
Schrodinger’s USSR, simultaneously the best and most effecient way to organize labor while relying on western grain imports to prop up their food supply for all 70 years of its existence.
It must have been the dirty capitalists which forced them to purge all agricultural institutions in the one of the most fertile breadbaskets in the world. The completely unqualified land management couldn’t have been from party aparatchiks, must have been reactionary sabotage. Wait a minute, which one of you dirty bourgeoisie pigs is feeding all of our USA grain to cattle and but slaughtering the breeding stock? Well yeah you need to meet the impossible state quota… but not like that!
That… Is not what bleys said at all…
And hold on… Are you seriously just using 1983 as proof that there were never mass food shortages in the USSR? Because that’s a hell of a picked cherry there.
Vavilov would turn in his grave, if he were actually given a proper grave, and if he had any muscles remaining after Stalin starved him to death in a Gulag for trying to solve the USSR’s famine problem.
Well, yeah, this corroborates @[email protected]’s point. The Soviet citizenry consumed less of the types of foods that are highly demand and which are difficult to produce, which indicates that there’s industrial inefficiency. It’s just that people make terrible & short-sighted choices about what to consume. Yes in this case it’s debatable whether that’s better, but this same general process led to other incapacities too which resulted in its failure to compete with western industry and its eventual collapse.
I’m personally grateful to the people of the Soviet Union for experimenting and showing us the strengths and weaknesses of this method of socialist labor organisation, and that its ultimate endpoint is abject failure. But, probably best to leave it in the dustbin, yeah? Got a world to win.
@[email protected] fumbled the mention in my prev comment, so making sure I’m not stealth-mentioning you
that’s why governments should act as a counterweight to capitalism by redistributing ressources
They literally always are
No one has really tried socialism, except for the rich for some shitty reason.
No, and as usual liberals love to infantilize people they disagree with. There is no good mix of socialism/communism and capitalism, they are polar opposites on the political scale.
Yes … There is no way to adopt socil principals into a market economy … I mean social security cant be done ? And worker coops (aka the means of Produktion being controller by workers aka communism) cant exist in capitalism …
/s just to make sure …
It can temporarily but what is happening to all of those things (dismantling of social pension, destruction of unions, continually rolling back labor rights, etc) is an inherent and natural conclusion of capitalism
By accruing capital as the goal you will inherently incentivize consolidation and open many avenues for corruption. Even if you said “capitalism but no billionaires” or some other regulation all it takes is time. People who reach the max will cheat to gain even more, whether that’s hiding wealth, exerting pressure on politicians to change laws to their favor, etc. you’re handing control of the state to the wealthy
The things you described happen in spite of capitalism and the natural conclusion is that they will be dismantled to serve a select few extremely greedy individuals who would rather increase net wealth by 0.02% than stop scores of people from suffering
Wait, so you are saying that government cannot balance the two? There has been no successful balancing of capitalist and socialist principles in any country in our existence?
Effectively managing an empire off the backs of third world labor is not “success”.
No, society cannot have 2 entities that own the means of their production. It either belongs to the working class or it doesn’t.
I agree about the infantalizing part, but not the mixing. There can and should be different factions able to secure space for how people want to live. Majority rule with respect to the minority. Communes should be just as enabled to exist as other groupings, organizations, and jurisdictions.
My dad often said (and I think it’s a quote) “if you’re not a communist at 20 you have no heart. But if you’re still a communist when you’re 40 you have no brain”
latest epstein distraction. McArthy hearings will legitimize more anti-communist ai data-centers. it’s the new woke label
Read “The Brothers”, about John Foster and Alan Dulles.
This has everything you need to know about why you, if you’re an American, think the things you do.
Americentrism
Doesn’t matter where you live, US culture and politics affects you. That’s just how global empires work, it’s not anything-centric to recognize verifiable facts.
I hate communism, because I was born in a communist country and had a horrible childhood.
Your shitty childhood had nothing to do with communism, get a therapist
Idk, I know a few people that had pretty traumatic childhood experiences. Like my close friend whose family got evicted from their flat on Christmas because some local official noticed that they had four rooms for two adults and a child younger than three years old and they should have a maximum of three. A few months later he turned three and they would have been within the margin but that wasn’t important to the official in charge so he had the cops knock on Christmas because that tradition had to be ignored, too.
Sounds like capitalism
???
This is simply the product of rational planning by the proletariat state! That’s the supposed to be the opposite of capitalism! Are you saying the oppression inherent in the inhumane proletariat dictatorship sucks ass in the same way as a state driven by the cold rational pursuit of profit? I’m gonna need to see your tankie card
Was it actual communism, or a communism for everyone apart from this group of special people in government
I’m sure you know it’s the second one. All of them are.
There in the history of the world has been no communist countries, there’s been govs that self-identify as one, but they all missed the core thing - no Bourgeoisie
Ahh yes. The goalpost movements
No, that’s the actual, textbook definition.
The biggest propaganda, which you can see all over this thread is:
“We tried communism, some people lived through it and it’s horrible Russia and China? Horrible.” And in the same breath “How did Russia and China pull themselves out of feudalism to literally become 2 of the 3 “great powers” in the world? Well that’s because they weren’t really communist they were just capitalists using communism as a populist mask while they secretly engaged in capitalism. Communism doesn’t work economically.”
But the people who lived through these oligarchies lived under communism.
How did Russia and China pull themselves out of feudalism to literally become 2 of the 3 “great powers
Russia:
- industrialization
- exploitation of its own working class
- stealing wealth from satalite conquered countries
China:
- industrialization
- exploitation of its own working class
- foreign capitalistic empires investments, looking for cheapest exploited workforce
USA:
- industrialization
- war profiteering
- gunboat diplomacy
- conquering other countries.
- and of course exploitation of working class.
That concludes my ted talk.
You could exchange USA for Russia and it would still be accurate…
But you have a point
It seems exploiting the working class has been true since the times of the pharaoh.
Yeah, it can’t be reconciled with supporting the USA or Europe as examples of doing it “properly” The best reckoning is that the cards fell such that “the west” (so-called) imposing sanctions and trade blocks on “the east” was materially more powerful. Which isn’t true anymore since we can see China has started growing.
Also your formatting is messed up, it’s a lot easier to read when I’m replying.
Most countries they say are communist are socialist and all have had the CIA interfere with them heavily to ensure their eventual collapse.
East Germans beg to differ.
As do Romanians.
Romanians, Poles, Czechs, Sloviakians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvianians… Ukrainians.
How horrible it must’ve been to contain their nazism for a few decades after losing the war.
Glad they can fully show their true colors again.
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you can leave
should be “you only hate communism because you fell for the propaganda that calls right wing authoritarian fascist dictators communist”.
Incorrectomundo. I hate communism because my family was repressed by Stalin.
I mean, i wouldn’t say that stalinism is communism
Well when interacting with people on ml, stalinism and whatever China and Russia is right now is the best communism.
Well that type of communism is the only one we’ve seen so…
Cuba is the same for example, or China.
China is the worst example, they are capitalists who implemented a few communist ideas, generally, every single one of them are not communist, they just call themselves like tgat because they took 2 or 3 communist ideas, that’s it
Have you heard about Mao? There is more to china than how it is today.
Your family definitely had it coming
Exhibit A
You probably also have it coming
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Probably will with the way the US is bringing back old diseases
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Lol cope
Come at me. I may die, but I’m taking twenty of you with me.
Lol sure you are
Larp lol
💀
Yeah
So you had a family of Nazis?
Stalin repressed a lot more people than just Nazis.
He was even best buddy with Nazi Hitler & Co. Until Hitler attacked the Soviet union that is.
Never forget, Stalin and Hitler started WW2.
Never forget the USSR ended the war while the US protected us capitalist interests in Germany.
USSR didn’t do shit until they got betrayed and attacked by their Nazi buddies.
If we’re going to attribute the success of the war to any one country, it would be the UK/France, since they were the only ones to give a shit and help the Polish.
Ask any Pole if they see the USSR as saviours…
Never forget the alliance ended the war.
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They got deleted because they were a troll like yourself
I think an old crusty cumsock could have a better take than that.
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Nazi adjacent then?
What’s wrong with you? Are you trolling to abuse your mod “powers”?
What a life you must have.
There are only 6 rules and this mother fucker managed to break everyone of them
Maybe but what’s about you treating everyone as a nazi if stalin attacked them?
Clearly because everyone Stalin repressed deserved it, lmfao.
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Can’t follow rules they gotta go
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Stalin saved eurpoe from the Nazis, lol.
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If you’re an ahistorical imperial propaganda enjoyer, sure, I guess?
Double genocide theory is literal fascist propaganda, which even has its own Wikipedia page, lmao.
a term used to refer to the claim that the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union against Eastern Europeans constitute a genocide that was equivalent in scale and nature to the Holocaust, in which approximately six million Jews were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany. The theory first gained popularity in Lithuania after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991
Scholars have criticized the double genocide theory as a form of Holocaust trivialization.
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And you’re saying that that excess mortality is the same as the systematic genocide of over 10 million people by Nazi Germany? That makes you a Nazi apologist and a holocost trivializer. Very lib of you, lol.
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Lmao. To know someone as stupid as you thinks I’m a moron makes me immensely proud. Re read that double genocide theory page and understand that you are repeating literal historically documented fascist propaganda.
After having a secret pact with Hitler to split Europe. For countries like Poland the WW2 occupation didn’t end until 1989, because USSR “saved us Nazis” by imposing their own regime.
The reason why Russia doesn’t even recognize WW2 and call it The Great Patriotic War that started in 1942 is exactly because Stalin worked with Nazis through Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Hitler backstabbed Stalin via Operation Barbarossa.
And then Stalin defeated the Nazis, right?
With US equipment and waves and waves of Ukrainians.
Lol. The US barely helped at all in the grand scheme of the USSR VS the Nazis.
He allied with nazis first, and when that became unsuitable, turned on them. Get your facts straight. And my fam was persecuted and demolished in early 1930s.
I don’t know what kind of bloodthirsty maniac you have to be to support fucking Stalin. It’s like supporting Hitler.
They were best buddies when they started WW2.
Never forget.
He was never an ally to Nazis. That’s ahistorical. He signed a non aggression pact, just like all the rest of the powers at the time.
And he was the last one to do it, because he was begging the UK and France for an alliance against Germany.
The agreement 🤝 also included dividing Europe into spheres of influence. Which makes the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact the only agreement on that list not between two axis powers that can be morally condemned without the benefit of hindsight.
Sounds like he would do anything to buy time to build up an army that would go on to defeat the Nazis.
Like wasting soldiers and ammunition to invade Finland, also giving the Nazis another ally in the process?
You’re blaming Finnish Nazis on Stalin lol?
Like turning over German communists who fled Nazi Germany to Hitler.
And then?
Never happened, try harder halfwit
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He did that only when his own life was on the line. He didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter. The Nazis gave the Soviets a simple choice: fight or die.
Oh, and let’s not forget Barbarossa. Ever wonder how on Earth you can hide the lead up to a campaign as massive as Operation Barbarossa? Trick question. You can’t.
Stalin had at his disposal what was then probably the best intelligence agency on the planet. He just pulled a Trump and refused to believe them. Stalin refused to believe his own intelligence agencies (which he had spent years repeatedly purging of anyone disloyal) when they told him Hitler was about to invade. There were even some German communists who risked their entire lives to defect and warn the USSR about the upcoming invasion. For their trouble? For making such a great sacrifice for communism and the Soviet people? Did Stalin set them up with some nice apartments in Moscow and a state pension? No. Stalin had them shot.
Stalin, famously one of the most paranoid men to ever lead a country. And the one time he decided to finally trust someone? Who is the one person he trusts? Infamous liar and history’s greatest monster himself, Adolf Hitler. The man who never trusted anyone chose to trust Adolf Hitler.
ordered the execution of a German deserter for “misinformation”, though it is unclear if this refers to Liskow or another German deserter
This is completely ahistorical. The entire reason Stalin signed the treaty is because he knew Hitler would attack the USSR eventually, and they needed time to prepare and also didn’t want to fight a war on two fronts (because the red army was busy saving China from the Japanese).
You didn’t address anything I wrote.
They did, and also everything you wrote was fucking moronic
You have poor reading comprehension. I thought you guys loved reading books.
Anyway, my entire comment was about how Stalin trusted Hitler so much that he let Barbarossa unfold as a surprise attack. Everything I wrote dealt specifically with that. FlyingCircus ignored what I wrote and went off on a tangent about the alliance in general.
I said nothing about why Stalin allied with Hitler. I want to know why he took Hitler his word, refused to station defensive troops, disbelieved his own intelligence agencies, and executed German communists who gave their lives to warn the USSR about the imminent invasion.
That’s what my comment is about.
None of that shit happened, get a job
His only choice was to sign a treaty with Hitler, because Britain and France refused to become allies with Stalin. Britain and France thought it best to let the communists and fascists fight it out and hopefully destroy each other.
Stalin signed a non aggression pact and then began rapidly industrializing his country, knowing dman well that Hitler would eventually break the treaty.
Then Stalin defeated the Nazis.
Yeah Hitler forced him to take half of Poland as well right?
The half that Poland took from the Soviets in 1921?
The half the Soviets tried to take from Poland 1918-1921.
Do you think before you type?
Because it sounds like you’re saying it’s okay to ally with the Nazis as long as your motivation is vengeance
Do you not know how to read? That’s not what I’m saying at all, lmao.
You went off on a tangent. My point was why he believed Hitler, not why he allied with him.
Did he? Seemed like he was preparing to go to war with Germany for a long long time, lol.
See my original comment. He executed people who defected to warn the USSR about the incoming invasion. He refused to believe his own intelligence agencies.
My point is that Stalin trusted Hitler so completely that he let the Soviet Union be subject to a massive surprise attack. I said nothing of the alliance in general.
Kay?
Anything’s possible when you make shit up
Classic .ml drivel
History is .ml drivel? Sounds very liberal of you, lol.
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Gargle them yourself, you fucking lazy liberal.
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?? That’s not what I said at all, I said suck your own nuts, fucking lazy removed lol. Not a big reader are you?
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By “divvy up Poland”, you mean “soviet land that Poland took in the early 1920s”, I’m sure.
Your knowledge of history seems entirely non existent, besides “enemies of my capitalist imperialist genocidal empire are bad and have always been bad, despite literally saving the world from the Nazis”
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Lmao, yeah buddy, any history book. Maybe start with a glance at the Wikipedia page
The Soviets started that war. And then failed to accomplish anything.
👍
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Why don’t you fucking do some reading, and tell me.
Get new material
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He also aided the Nazis in their fight against German communists and hurt China’s revolution.
So a flawed person like the rest of us.
Wtf is this nonsense?
He also aided the Nazis in their fight against German communists and hurt China’s revolution.
Gonna need some sources on both of these.
None of this is evidence, it’s just other people making the same dumbass claims
Given Trotsky is a primary source and the Jacobin article cites a primary source what would constitute as evidence to you?
Actual fucking evidence, duh. Trotsky telling a story is worth as much as you telling a story, fuck all.
Anything’s possible when you make shit up
Stalin was a totalitarian dictator that happened to lead a country experimenting with socialism/communism.
Does Trump’s treatment of certain groups represent the totality of what is possible under capitalism?
To be clear, I’m not a fan of Stalin or Trump. It just seems weird to hate a political theory/ideology because a power-hungry asshole said it was his ideology.
A power hungry asshole was in charge under this “system”. It will happen again. This is what always happens. Those systems do not work.
Which systems? Democracy? Communism? All systems?
Democracy, capitalism, communism.
It doesn’t matter how you change the rules of the game, the psychopathic mass murderers always adjust and find the way to the top.
Oh, but it does.
If the population is kept uneducated, poor, and fearful they don’t have the energy, understanding, or organization to keep the assholes in check. It’s way easier turn a country to dictatorship and/or fascism when everyone is stressed and struggling.
There is no perfect system, but they are systems that can build a population that is at least asshole resistant.
If the system doesn’t matter, then why do you specifically hate communism?
communism is stateless and classless. there is no top
Ideology and education does help though. We need a system with antibodies against self serving sociopaths rising to power.
That’s the sweet thing with democracy, you kick them out without needing a bloody revolution.
It doesn’t seem to be working in the USA now, is it? They find a way to brainwash the masses into voting for them.
Who the hell thinks the USA of all places is a full fledged democracy lol.
Brainwashing starts with deprivation. Those with wealth in the US have been manipulating the system into serving the wealthy at the expense of the rest of the country. It isn’t an inevitability, it’s a flawed underlying system and a capitalist class willing to take advantage of every opportunity to cement their own power.
Stalin was the most popular person in the USSR for his entire time in the CPSU, and could have been ousted at any time had this changed. It would have been antidemocratic to depose him.
-
Does popularity imply ethics? Morality? Soundness of policy?
-
What exactly does “antidemocratic” imply? Are antidemocratic activities intrinsically wrong?
My grandmother in law was dragged before the KGB to answer why her 4 year old had coloured the colours of thier territories flag (before annexation into the USSR).
I think it’s pretty naive to reject that people could genuinely have grievances against a government or government policy. Slavery was popular. Gang rape is very democratic.
Although thier issues were with a government and not the concept of “communism”, I think the onus is on you to charitabley acknowledge that distinction. Being the grown up comes with infinitely more responsibility than privilege… and people who don’t understand that aren’t actually the grown ups.
-
Here’s a fun fact for everyone today: Stalin’s self-serving mismanagement of the Red Army was so bad that troops were still deserting and surrendering to the shambles of the fleeing Wermacht in 1945. I can’t imagine having such shit leadership that I’d rather die in a Nazi prison than live under a winning communist. Thank goodness the Red Army was cruising in a motorized force of 65% American made vehicles and flying American fueled planes to finish the war before it fell apart.
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Anything’s possible when you make shit up
Lmfao
