Even from people that never lived in a communist state
edit: im 17 and i hate communism
Especially people who never lived in a communist state
Lemmy, the social network, started off as a leftist hangout spot.
From the perspective of “Open Source developers who are anti-Reddit pro-Fediverse”, it makes a lot of sense for Leftist/Communist and anti-corporation leaning people to hang out.
After all, the more extreme the viewpoint, the more driven to action (ie: write tens-of-thousands of lines of code and release for free) people get. In some regards, its the nature of Open Source + volunteer effort to attract a more extreme ideology. IE: Free Software is driven by ideology, not by money. So you get ideological people, especially when the software is small and niche.
The July 2023 Reddit Blackout was a big challenge for Lemmy’s old community and the new community, as the new community basically “invaded” a large scale leftist hangout spot. But hopefully we all learn to work together and the nature of our neighbors moving forward.
I think anyone here (likely everyone?) is at least on the anti-corporate anti-Reddit side of the discussion. Which is enough of an alliance to keep us together, for now.
It does mean that we’ll have to keep up with the far-left old-timers on this network who wish to push their viewpoints. But they are the legacy and the start of Lemmy in some respects, even as the hypergrowth (starting in July 2023) has moderated the community pretty severely.
I don’t see the problem with people having communist views…capitalism isn’t great.
In my experience in lemmy these same people have a very big problem with you not sharing their communist views
A leftist world view is the correct world view in my book. What I can’t stand are people who defend Russia and China.
My problem with communist views is they’re unproven and have only lead to authoritarian governments when put into play.
Capitalism has regularly gone off the rails … but not to the degree communism has. Capitalism has been defending democracy for the last few centuries, not communism.
These are the nations that identify as communist:
- China (PRC)
- Cuba
- Laos
- North Korea (DPRK)
- Vietnam
These countries were previously communist and (of that has that) have pretty much only improved since transitioning to democracy with capitalist economic systems:
- Afghanistan
- Albania
- Angola
- Benin
- Bulgaria
- Congo
- Czechoslovakia
- Ethiopia
- Germany (GDR)
- Grenada
- Hungary
- Kampuchea
- Mongolia
- Mozambique
- Poland
- Romania
- Somalia
- Soviet Union
- Tuva
- Yemen (PDRY)
- Yugoslavia
That’s not to say that capitalism doesn’t have its problems, people here aren’t angry with it over nothing. However, if you really look at the problems it’s had, they all come down to voter manipulation and/or apathy “things are going good, why do I need to worry about politics?”.
We didn’t just wake up with weakened labor unions, weakened voter rights, weakened infrastructure, etc; we got their because of generations of apathy and frankly electing the wrong people. People that cut taxes, asked “are you better off today than you were four years ago?” (short term gain), allowed our unions to be broken up, allowed jobs to be exported over seas to communist China (which is now one of the greatest international threats), bought the cheapest products (from mom and dad at the store to the executives running major corporations) without asking why they’re cheap, etc.
The “common people” cast the votes that ultimately lead to corporations being people. The “middle class” cost votes that ultimately lead to the middle class shrinking.
I think it’s naive that communism somehow automatically makes those problems go away/means we’ll never end up with similar problems. Especially when communist countries are consistently doing worse/falling into authoritarian rule.
We need to expand our social programs, reign in our billionaires, and reign in our corporations and we’d be a lot better off. Capitalism works so long as you don’t let anyone or anything get “too big to fail.” Capitalism doesn’t have to be capitalism without limits. The reigns of power will always be challenged no matter what system we find ourselves under, only an educated vigilant population can stop that.
Capitalism “going off the rails” completely understates it. The history of the last 500 years is soaked in the blood of the capitalism. Voter apathy has nothing to do with it. Enthusiastic voters gave us genocide of indigenous peoples of North America, the nuclear bombing of Japan, and currently a 75 year genocide of Palestinians. Not to mention things that voters do not have even the semblance of a choice, such as CIA activities in the 20th century which led to bloody coups in Indonesia, Chile, and Iran, just to name 3.
You need to incorporate class analysis or else nothing makes sense. Why do American voters get shitty choices that reduce their power to the advantage of the wealthy oligarch class? Why are there oligarchs if capitalism doesn’t tend to monopoly? Does voting actually do anything? Why does the electoral college still exist? Why did Americans support the Iraq War? What role did the media serve?
I think it’s naive that communism somehow automatically makes those problems go away/means we’ll never end up with similar problems. Especially when communist countries are consistently doing worse/falling into authoritarian rule.
Communism doesn’t automatically make anything go away. The point is that the ruling class of capitalists are an obstacle to making things go away. I’m not sure what is your criteria for authoritarian rule. Capitalist countries are authoritarian too, it’s basically a meaningless signifier coming out of cold war propaganda that said communism = dictatorship and capitalism = muh freedom. The democratic processes in China and Cuba of example are lightyears ahead of what you can find in the US or European parliamentary so-called democracies.
The history of the last 500 years is soaked in the blood of the capitalism.
That’s a pretty hot take to blame all the conflict that’s happened in the last 500 years on capitalism. I think it’s likely a significant oversimplification at best. For instance, you can argue many things caused (just) WW2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II
Voter apathy has nothing to do with it. Enthusiastic voters gave us genocide of indigenous peoples of North America, the nuclear bombing of Japan, and currently a 75 year genocide of Palestinians.
That’s provably wrong. The voter turn out as a percentage of population is abysmal historically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections#/media/File:USA_Presidential_Elections_Turnout_by_Share_of_Population.png
I also find some of your examples, e.g., the Native Americans similarly a red herring. The plight of the Native American peoples is far more complicated than “blame capitalism.”
Not to mention things that voters do not have even the semblance of a choice, such as CIA activities in the 20th century which led to bloody coups in Indonesia, Chile, and Iran, just to name 3.
Voters control who is elected. Those that are elected control whether or not the CIA exists. The CIA would disappear tomorrow if only folks that believed the CIA shouldn’t exist were in congress.
You need to incorporate class analysis or else nothing makes sense.
No you don’t, it makes plenty of sense without “class analysis.”
Why do American voters get shitty choices that reduce their power to the advantage of the wealthy oligarch class?
Because of the people who vote a fraction of them bother with primaries and because it’s hard to find good people to run for office that want to do the job (for a myriad of reasons)?
Why are there oligarchs if capitalism doesn’t tend to monopoly?
It’s not an objective thing that “there are oligarchs.”
Does voting actually do anything?
Yes, voting matters. See policies under Trump vs policies under Biden. See Net Neutrality. See Climate Change Policy. See EPA Policy.
It’s frankly anti-intellectual to claim that “voting doesn’t do anything” or even imply as much.
Why does the electoral college still exist?
Because people vote for representatives that don’t want to get rid of it?
Why did Americans support the Iraq War?
Because people vote for representatives that supported it? Because the general population was not adequately educated and engaged in politics to understand the facts of the situation and was mislead?
What role did the media serve?
What role didn’t the media serve? What role should it have served?
You’re asking leading questions to argue your point similar to a flat-earth or giant-ism conspiracy theorist. Like, these questions do have answers and those answers go far beyond people’s economic classes and dive into a number of cultural, period, regional, and global factors. There isn’t one answer, and the one answer certainly isn’t “because the rich people made us do it.”
I’m not sure what is your criteria for authoritarian rule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism
Literally, the criteria for authoritarian rule.
Capitalist countries are authoritarian too
No, they are not. Some may be, but the vast majority of western capitalistic societies are nowhere near authoritarian rule. The US is creeping towards it and (as elections do matter) may creep closer this year; time will tell.
it’s basically a meaningless signifier coming out of cold war propaganda that said communism = dictatorship and capitalism = muh freedom
That is provably false. Look at the governance models of the countries above. They were not “communism = dictatorship” they were “communism and authoritarianism.” For some reason people can’t explain away, those two things go hand and hand.
My personal take is that when you take away ownership, ownership doesn’t disappear, it just means the state is the owner. So you go from “the rich people and the government officials own the means of production” to “the government officials (that are the rich people) own the means of production” (which is exactly what happened in China).
The democratic processes in China and Cuba of example are lightyears ahead of what you can find in the US or European parliamentary so-called democracies.
That’s straight up bull shit. A mono-party rule is not under any circumstance democratic.
Can you explain one thing about how the Chinese or Cuban elections work without looking it up?
Would it change any of your opinion if I did?
But yes, I can (for China), I can explain the important part … which is that the CCP required to rubber stamp any nomination to run for office. There is no democracy when your rule can not be meaningfully challenged.
This is furthered by the infringement of rights that is the great firewall.
EDIT: For anyone who actually is reading this and wants a source instead of “he (I) said, the other person said” here’s some information fairly well compiled: https://decodingchina.eu/democracy/
Yeah, the problem is that you have instances like Hexbear and Lemmy.ml that tread more into tankie territory, where if you argue anything less than the complete annihilation of the West and hail China, you’re likely to get harassed. I think rational people can agree that there’s a pretty gap between “The current system is corrupt” and "anyone who thinks differently than me should die,’ but I’ve seen plenty of irrational leftists.
I don’t agree with that crowd at all politically, but I don’t agree with everyone on all Web forums out there, all subreddits, all Usenet groups, or such either. We can share an Internet without it being a problem, I think. Just means that I tend to avoid a couple of instances and communities.
l’d be more worried about influence attempts, astroturfing, than people who openly take a position. Having a hexbear or lemmygrad home instance is being pretty open about one’s positions.
Those places are basically just The_Donald for people who think they’re more clever than to fall for the typical bullshit that was found in The_Donald.
They’re not.
Just to point out, Lemmy.ml isn’t really like that, with a few exceptions. Before the big influx of Reddit refugees, it used to be the default Lemmy instance, and so has quite a few non-political communities.
It’s Lemmygrad.ml that’s the super tanky echo chamber.
I mean, I’m currently getting a ton of downvotes in .ml for suggesting the radical idea of voting for local leftist politicians over destabilizing all of Western civilization.
I’m even outwardly for the destabilization of all civilization, but apparently “actually trying to enact meaningful change” isn’t what they’re interested in, unless it involves someone else dying in their revolution.
You can’t just say “in .ml”, is my point. Which specific community?
If you’re talking about like say, worldnews@lemmy.ml, then I totally understand, but my point is that if we are talking about instances as a whole, then Lemmy.ml is quite mild in its “tankiness”.
Came here to make this point.
The CCP’s version of “communism” is almost a textbook example to me of how an interesting system that can work beautifully on the local level can be completely betrayed and turned in to something much more like an oligarchy.I don’t understand how someone of reasonable knowledge and judgement could possibly be a tankie in 2024.
Even if you adopt hardline Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as an ideology, the modern state of China has applied so much pro-capitalist revisionism to it that it’s a shell of its former self. Today, Maoist parties are suppressed in China.
I’m not a Maoist by a long shot, but I can at least appreciate the fact that the ones shouting “revisionism!” the most are the ones who have most bastardized their own texts.
it’s a shell of its former self.
And from my reading, its former self was little more than a dictatorship with ‘communist trappings,’ anyway. Mao was a monster, and nobody to be emulated from what I’ve learned.
He killed more people than almost anyone else in history. Maybe the most.
Because they’re paid shills using communism as a facade to spread Kremlin and CCP propaganda.
Eh, if by tankie you only mean literal communist tankies, that’s just a single aspect of human nature.
There’s absolutists, extremists, and (frankly) sociopaths in every political/ideological grouping. The more you get towards an extreme, the more you run into militant examples of the group. Tankies are just the communist bloc of the crazies.
But, there’s folks like me that are all for revolution, but draw the line at unlimited killing to achieve it, or the eradication of groups in the name of the cause. I’m an extremist by most peoples’ standards, but they’ve never been exposed to the real crazies of any extremist bloc.
You run into the bonkers adherents of communism, anarchism, nationalism, or religious extremists, and they’re essentially the same mentality because it’s a human failing that some of us are willing to kill indiscriminately for a belief. We’re just lucky that that degree of extremism is split up, keeping them from being a serious, constant threat rather than the intermittent threat that they are.
Seriously, if you ever spend time around people that are working towards a goal like a change towards socialist thought, you’ll run into the batshit ones on the edges. You hang around the wrong places, you’ll run into right wing militants as well. They, none of them, are avoid knowledge, judgement, or reason. They’re zealots, and they’d be the same no matter what ism infected them because it’s about the fire, the anger, not the actual thing they’re using as their obsession.
Fuck, I’ve met a couple of people involved in pacifist movements seriously express the idea that “we” should just rise up and kill until all the warmongers are gone. People, humans, are always going to have zealots like that, no matter what.
I mean, I don’t have much problem with people disagreeing with me. But I’m pretty openly pro-capitalist, though I’m not a dumbass libertarian.
I recognize the need for the “capitalist edge cases” (externalities, monopolies, etc. etc.) that must be regulated and fixed for the system to work. I also recognize that we’ve failed to regulate externalities (ex: CO2 emissions), and failed to regulate monopolies / anticompetitive behavior (see Google).
So I’m a “capitalism works, but only if we work to make it work” kind of person. I think at the moment, Reddit and many other social networks are falling into the well known and well studied failures of raw capitalism, but somehow today’s society has forgotten all the 1910s era solutions that we did (ex: Jungle, etc. etc.) where we regulated the hell out of the shitty behavior and fixed the most blatant problems, for the better of America.
We just gotta do the same thing today.
Overall, I accept that the commies / tankies were here first, and the history of Lemmy makes it clear why that happened.
So I’m a “capitalism works, but only if we work to make it work” kind of person. I think at the moment, Reddit and many other social networks are falling into the well known and well studied failures of raw capitalism, but somehow today’s society has forgotten all the 1910s era solutions that we did (ex: Jungle, etc. etc.) where we regulated the hell out of the shitty behavior and fixed the most blatant problems, for the better of America.
Right there with you.
We just gotta do the same thing today.
We also HAVE to teach the kids how to protect it better than people did 100 years ago. Most of our problems today stem from people voting to remove “useless red tape” (that was put there for damn good reasons).
The Marxist answer to why the red tape is removed is not because people directly vote for it, but that the State serves the bourgeoisie.
I think anyone here (likely everyone?) is at least on the anti-corporate anti-Reddit side of the discussion.
I don’t particularly have any problem with Reddit beyond the fact that (a) I don’t like their “new” Web UI and (b) the fact that one of the moves that they made to monetize their service was to ban third-party clients, which is a tradeoff that I’m not willing to make.
I mean, I was expecting that at some point, Reddit was going to have to have to shift from growth to monetization. I just didn’t agree with the particular tradeoff that they chose to make.
Are you okay with the advertising? That’s another thing that I find unacceptable.
In the beginning, I was okay with the ads on Reddit. But then, Reddit just kept making stupid decision after stupid decision on the official app’s UI, so I switched to a third party app, that happens to also have no Reddit ads. When Reddit killed the apps and continued making the official experience worse, I bailed Reddit and came here because I’m not supporting a greedy platform.
I don’t really know what ads they showed, as I used an ad-blocker. I’d believe that it’s probably annoying, but the same is true of most websites that show ads. Reddit Gold provided a commercial ad-free option, so it wasn’t a requirement even without blocked ads. And unlike most companies, it was possible to purchase Reddit Gold without linking to one’s financial data, since they provided purchase options bounced through cryptocurrency and such. As web services go, I suppose it was probably a fair bit better than the average.
I’d have probably been willing to buy commercial Reddit service – I mean, I’ve subscribed to Usenet service, have commercial email hosting service, have commercial VPS service. I don’t have a problem with commercial service, as long as it’s something solid. The value-for-money was probably pretty good, given how much I used it. I just don’t want to be obliged to run their binary code on my systems and have data extracted from my system and be data-mined other than what they get from my web browser or open-source client.
They’re starting to roll ads into AI-generated comments, and are selling off user data. It really does suck.
What are you on about? “its the nature of Open Source + volunteer effort to attract a more extreme ideology”? Aside from your first sentence, this is just baseless word salad.
I mean just that.
Open source developers are not paid in money. One of the other major motivators is ideology, so that becomes a major motivator in practice.
All I can say is that you clearly have no familiarity with open source development or the active contributors within it.
Because fascists are mostly content with gobbling Fox News cock.
deleted by creator
Gobbling cock is great. Fox News cock, though? Have some standards.
U/TheUncannyObserver there is a lesson in there…
Oh, there’s plenty of fem fascists out there too.
Why’d you assume it was gay?
I don’t observe any homophobia in that comment. Their statement is that fascists submit to anything Fox News says, and makes no remarks about oral sex beyond the graphic metaphor. Also fascist is a genderless term so there is no way to know if the fascist is gobbling on same or opposite gender cock.
You apparently don’t like getting up votes either.
If under communism everything is shared, that would have to include political power.
So that would make communism a direct democracy. Which communist country was a direct democracy?
No. Most communists don’t think everything is or should be shared. One basic distinction is personal property vs. private property. If you do a web search and spend 10-15 minutes reading, you can learn how various groups think this ought to work.
(Even if you dislike communism, it’s still worth learning what you’re talking about.)
Whoa, whoa, definitions have no power here.
I don’t think its possible to be on social media of any kind without encountering propaganda of some kind. what frustrating about news nowadays is more the stuff that is not an outright lie. just leaves out things and lines things up for a particular narrative. So you can’t be like. This right here is an outright lie (I mean oftentimes you can but not always) and instead have to be like. this ignores this or does not take this into account. etc.
Lmao you don’t have proper political opinions at 17
why not?
Way too little life experience
Well, at 17, it seems they know better than most of this entire community.
That depends entirely on your life.
Nope. Not unless you’re an interstellar traveller and are experiencing the effects of time dilation and have lived the equivalent of 32 years.
Your endocrine system hasn’t even let go of the controls in your brain yet. Don’t let a guy who is so prone to substance abuse make important decisions. Once the night shift takes over a lot of your “airtight and very clever” philosophies will seem simple, trite and one dimensional.
One day you’ll be in the shower getting ready to start your day. Nothing particularly significant will have occurred to you the day before, but the “perspective shift” happens and all of a sudden, you won’t know why you ever felt the way you used to. Scary as shit, comes out of the blue, and definitely doesn’t happen to us all. But it’s a cool achievement to unlock and lets you respec for a conceptualization bonus.
If that does happen, I hope you remember this thread and have replay. See if you are still the same you as you were.
I’m 52 and I think communism sucks. Do I not have a proper political opinion at my age? Because if all it takes to know better is to be older than-
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Tons of young people are communists. OP being politically illiterate doesn’t have to be for their age, though that’s likely part of it.
Tons of young people are communists?
Source?
“I’m 14 and very edgy.”
Ah yes wanting a better system not built on the capitalist exploitation of the working-class is “edgy”
Do you even know what you’re talking about?
Found them!
Sounds like you probably are
Guys please check the list of the communist countries and come back to me to tell if you want to live in there, ok?
Desiring Communism isn’t because people overwhelmingly desire one form of production over another, the draw is for what these modes of production allow for and who they benefit.
It’d be cool to live in an AES country, sure, but what would be even better is to transition existing Capitalist states towards Socialism. Having more international trade between like-minded Socialist countries would benefit these countries massively.
Yeah, I do. My wife lives in China as we speak, in fact. Why would I not want to live in one of the safest countries on earth with the highest level of automation, easily accessible and cheap housing and food, mandated workers democracy, and high speed rail to and from nearly everywhere of note?
Have you ever been to China? It’s better than the US in many, many ways. I make 4x the minimum wage in my state and can’t afford a one bedroom apartment. My wife makes min wage in her province and can afford her own place. I can’t afford to get medical care even with nice insurance because it’s a scam, my wife got daily IV treatments at a high quality clinic for three weeks for under $300 without insurance. She works today (International Workers Day) and is receiving triple overtime pay for it. I could literally go on for hours.
You’re young, don’t be so self-assured.
I heard that people work a lot and don’t have a choice, and enjoy the iron fist of Xi Jinping
My wife doesn’t even work full time and can afford to live in the city center of her 20 million person city. Lots of people work a lot in many places, I work full time making 4x min wage and can’t afford to rent a one bedroom apartment. My boss works 60 hours a week, and in fact, most restaurant workers here work 50+ hours a week. She’s working as we speak, and making triple overtime. Food, shelter, healthcare, and medicine are so cheap and accessible there that I literally cried the first time I went and realized how shit the US is in comparison. Riding the subway cost me ¥2, less than 1/10 the cost of one hour of minimum wage work. Even getting premade food delivered there is cheaper than going to the grocery store to make your own food in most western places.
On your other point, one of my closest friends there is a vocal critic of the Chinese government, he’s never been arrested, or even talked to by the government. Their prison population is far too low for such things to be true. Their police kill an average of 2 people a year in a country of 1.4 billion.
Can you imagine why capitalist states would have an incentive to trash talk China? Why they would be lying about a country that’s safer, cheaper, and produces the majority of the world’s goods while providing cheap, and easy to access housing and amenities?
Genuinely, go visit China. Spend some time there, it’s safe as hell, the food is amazing, the people are kind and helpful.
Fucking hell.
“one of the safest countries on earth”.
Yeah, the country where you get beaten and tortured if you don’t agree with the State.
China isn’t fucking communist, it’s at best an authoritarian socialist government with a LARGE class gap between the party and the people.
The other shit you described are already standard for people living in the EU etc. Only the U.S. is too shitty to have them.
Stop praising China just because they say they are communists.Really now? Which European country can you afford to rent an apartment as a single person making minimum wage in a city center? Which European country mandates worker democracy in all public and private companies? Which European country can I take a 500+kmph train hundreds of miles for under $20? No ones getting beaten or tortured for not agreeing with the state, maybe quit slurping down propaganda. People are being beaten and arrested in multiple European countries and the US as we speak for standing up for Palestine against their governments. China has been on the right side of the Palestinian occupation for literally 5+ decades, even back when they were extremely poor. China doesn’t even have militarized police on the level of Germany, France, or especially the US.
Nearly all poverty alleviation in the 21st century has happened in China, while nearly all European countries and the US have seen a resurgence in poverty. 800 million people were brought out of extreme poverty with guaranteed housing, food, medical care, electricity, clothing and water.
China is so safe shop owners will leave their goods outside with their WeChat QR code when they close and people will buy on the honor system, in 20 million person cities. Their police kill an average of 2 people a year, in a country of 1.4 billion people. hundreds of western women have talked about how safe they feel there, including wandering around in the middle of the night alone in the largest cities in the world.
You’ve never been, clearly, or you wouldn’t hold such nonsensical views of it.
No state is communist, but China is run by the communist party and is in the process of the development of socialism. It continually improves the material reality for its citizens, something most countries have long since forgotten how to do. A still developing country has higher homeownership rates than any western country, lower violent crime rates, higher access to needed technologies like electrification and electric cars, and produces nearly half of all the world’s clean energy.
It’s not perfect, and it’s still developing, but it’s doing a much better job at taking care of its people than any other country I’ve ever been to.
There is no nation state while living in a commune. Communist country is a oxymoron .
You’re getting down voted but no one has answered you.
I’m being down voted for having a good point but they don’t like facts
You don’t have a good point, that’s the problem.
Fundamentally, why do you believe Communists exist, and what do they want? We can start from there.
How can you complain about no one being brave enough to take you on mano-a-mano, but also say this:
The literal stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.
Be careful where you tread here. You must be careful to separate “communists” (people who believe in economic reorganization away from the power of capital) and “tankies” (those who support corrupt regimes that project the illusion of communism).
There are indeed quite a few communists and various other alt-camp political spectrum believers on here. They do have quite liberal beliefs but don’t typically cause much of a fuss, because rational people can coexist with differing beliefs… and i dont mind them one bit. But the tankes, like lemmygrad, hexbear, etc, do stir up an anti-west "commie propaganda"fuss every chance they get, without being related to actual communism, especially if one mentions a hot button like Israel or Ukraine. And if you get into an argument with a tankie, they will just sling mud on you and call you a Nazi.
The cool part is, you can filter a lot of the chaff by just blocking the ugly instances from your user settings page (since Lemmy supports that now), blocking frequent flyers, and trimming/moving your subscribed community list to other, often smaller instances. A minimal amount of effort VASTLY increases the quality of content you’ll see on lemmy.
“It wasn’t real socialism!!1!” lmao
This is the position you get when you understand capitalism is fucked but you still believe capitalist states’ propaganda about socialist revolutions that have actually managed to successfully overthrow the capitalist class, which gets worse the more those states have managed to rival and threaten capitalist rule globally.
There are very few real communists left. On here, it’s going to be pretty much all tankies.
Yeah, unfortunate but true…
There are dozens of us!
I’d definitely describe myself as a communist, but I do realize we never had a proper communist state on this planet, just authoritarian states that acted like communists to win over the workers. Capitalism needs to be regulated as fuck to create a fair society, so for now, I strive for socialism, because I understand going straight to communism probably won’t work.
Sorry if this was uncalled for, I just wanted to show there are sensible communists who don’t excuse Russia and China for the shit they’re pulling. But neither do I excuse the west for a lot of shit we are pulling.
Those states would agree that they have not achieved communism, and they would agree that they are authoritarian, namely the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin, 1917, The State and Revolution
Let’s just skip the euphemisms and use ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’
There is a euphemism for dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and it is bourgeois democracy.
Bourgeois democracy is a separate term. It can describe something like European nations voting between which bourgeoisie will rule the proletariat. The more you know.
The more you know.
Even NATOPedia thinks they’re synonyms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_bourgeoisie
The only time they’re not synonyms is when the capitalist class finds kayfabe democracy insufficient, at which point they deploy fascism. That’s what’s been developing in many Western capitalist states around the world in recent years. The working class is more and more agitated by their deteriorating conditions under neoliberalism. Even the petit bourgeois feel threatened. The far-right surge isn’t organic, though: the capitalist class fuels it to maintain their position.
There is a clear contradiction in this comment.
Capitalism needs to be regulated as fuck to create a fair society, so for now, I strive for socialism, because I understand going straight to communism probably won’t work.
Isn’t this the exact reasoning behind China’s market reforms, beginning under Deng Xiaoping?
If we take this poster at their word, then their disagreement with modern China is not ideological in nature!
Does that mean their disagreement is about the practical implementation? Of course not! That would contradict a key piece of evidence: This World Bank report!
According to the report, 800 million Chinese people have been lifted out of poverty - accounting for three quarters of worldwide poverty reduction! No reasonable person could called that a failed implementation!
If this poster really supports a transitional phase of regulated markets, then why would they be condemning China for successfully implementing the very approach they advocate for?
It might have worked in that regard but at what cost? An authoritarian state that commits genocide inside it’s own borders, so yes it clearly failed in the regard that it does not treat everyone equally, a core principle of real communism.
An authoritarian state that commits genocide inside it’s own borders
Hold it!
Do you have evidence to support this testimony?
Your genocide assertion I won’t touch because it’s untouchable on lemmy.world.
Look man, whether its a genocide or not doesn’t matter. The human rights abuse is well documented and agreed upon by many independent parties. The point is, there is no equality there. So it can’t be actual communism, despite them claiming that it is.
There is not well-documented evidence. There is garbage, Cold War II propaganda “evidence” from Adrian Zenz and from US-backed regime change non-governmental organizations.
A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
Global news communities in instances like beehaw or lemmy.world seem to have predominantly communist and leftist posters. The nazbols congregate on their own famous three instances.
Show me a single comment on Hexbear or lemmy.ml or lemmygrad that promotes nazbols or patsocs or MAGA communists or LaRouchites like Dugin or Hinkle or Haz or Maupin.
Or Juche, Maoism, Leninism, Stalinism…
Given your false reports to the authorities, it seems you like authoritarianism after all.
Were the reports false or were the authoritarians false?
What does a decision to rely on ad hominem display… A deeper stalking would brittle it down tho
The phrase is whittle it down.
This has to be the greatest troll I’ve ever seen or else I’m a filthy commie.
The first instance of Lemmy is lemmy.ml
The ML stands for Marxist-Leninists
I mean, its actually the country tld of Mali
Yeah, but that’s not why it’s being used by those instances.
It was used because it was cheap (possibly free?).
It was free until last year, but the “enlightened” people repeating whatever they feel like, to shit on someone else’s work isn’t something new.
Could be both.
Malian marxist leninists
And .af is Afghanistan, .tv is Tuvalu, and .ai is Anguilla.
But .af is used for “As fuck”, .tv is used for media, and .ai is used for sketchy startups jumping on a bandwagon after they didn’t get rich off of blockchain/crypto.
I haven’t seen any communist propaganda at all but I’ve read many comments and posts like this… Are they just referring to leftwing content?
Oh, there’s definitely a ton of communist propaganda, did you block .ml?
Do you consider anarchism/democratic socialism to not be communist at a certain level, ie, consider “communist” thought only to include authoritarian Marxism?
Clowns think they can beat Mao and Stalin on genociding dissidents and undesirables.
Yes that is a good example of a communist regime
Because there are a lot of communists on lemmy?
Some can be very annoying. If you haven’t blocked hexbear, I highly recommend it. They got exiled from reddit years ago and have been stewing in a tankie echo chamber ever since.
90% of the shit spouted about Hexbear is just baseless nonsense. Soon as you actually try to have a good faith discussion, they’re hecka cool.
Not when I tried it. When shw federated, I tried for about 2 days to talk about stuff. But they kept defending Russia in it’s invasion of Ukraine with super brain dead arguments and holding up North Korea as a shinning example of communism. Plus at the ends of threads, they often just respond with poop emojis. Or even at the beginning of threads. That’s just annoying.
Edit: oh and defending or denying China’s treatment of the Uyghur was also common.
They’re abrasive kinda like Twitch Chat, but many are reasonable.
They got exiled from reddit years ago
Huh, just like everyone else here
It’s weird rather that some people are such bootlickers that they complain about people being socialists/communists after leaving a platform because of capitalism
I complained about them being annoying and tankies.
I chose to migrate.
Hexbear aren’t communists, they’re just using it as a facade to spread propaganda.
