I’m having an easier time arguing with tankies then I did with right wingers. Right wingers don’t even believe themselves, so they shift the goal posts around to suit their needs.
Oh, I saw the futility of talking to them lonnnnnnnnng ago. You might as well try to convince a christian that they’re wrong. You know why that is? Because they’re both cults.
Communism entails the collective ownership and administration of all means of production and the absence of social classes, while socialism advocates for worker control over means of production within a democratic society, allowing for some individual ownership and social stratification.
I agree with what you’ve said. That’s how I saw it too. Communism is the last stage, while Socialism is a transition period, as a Communist friend once told me. P.S. WTF am I getting downvoted for asking a question?
In addition, there are different levels of socialism. “Some” individual ownership turns people off. “The State owns the house I worked so hard to pay off?” You can have full private ownership of your things AND have single-payer health care, top-tier public education, reining in predatory banks, etc. We want to be Norway, not Venezuela.
Your government is directly responsible for Venezuela’s instability. Your government’s entire foreign policy is destabilizing different parts of the world to float the Dollar as the main currency and you the citizens benefit the most from it, this is why I cringe inwardly when Americans complain of Capitalism’s adverse effects, if you enjoyed it while it was good, you must enjoy it while it gets bad.
As a venezuelan, no. What happened and still happens here was the sole responsibility of the socialist party’s government and the ultimate reason why I don’t trust leftists as they don’t own up their failures and just disregard them as “not true socialism”
The government of Venezuela isn’t blameless but to think that American sanctions didn’t affect the Venezuelan economy are the words of a true partisan. Your kind set up piano wire and beheaded civilians on motor bikes in Venezuela and I find that despicable.
You literally jumped to call names on me and accused me of murdering people when you don’t even know me. You call me rich as if that means anything, and to top it You justify yourself with ignorance. You don’t knowing my ethnicity is the least of the issues here and frankly not knowing things about me is not stopping you from engaging with me in an uncivilized manner.
I find you despicable and a true rich asshole just given your behavior
😄😄😄 I’ll give you this you made me laugh. But in all seriousness, stop supporting the killing Venezuelans based on your political beliefs so you can have a lower tax rate. Please. It’s just greed and that’s a sin.
Not sure where you got that information but the right wing in Venezuela have been begging the USA to overthrow the democratically elected government in Venezuela for a couple decades now. They can’t win the elections fair and square so they assassinate politicians and kill Venezuelans during riots. It’s all documented on sites like Venezuelanalysis and CommonDreams. There’s been a massive propaganda campaign against Venezuela since the late 1990’s to try to get Venezuelans to give their resources to US corporations and their rich greedy Venezuelan opposition leaders (often who refuse to participate in elections the EU and other international bodies have called free and fair.)
I can’t tell if you’re being disingeneous or not so I’ll probably stop engaging but I think Henrique Capriles, Guaido, the US State Department, and that crazy lady who wants the US to assassinate Maduro would disagree with your statement there is no right wing opposition in the country. Which BTW can and do participate in elections. They just pout and incite violence when they don’t win.
socialist venezuelan government to stop murdering civilians left and right.>
Repeating something doesn’t make it true.
I encourage you to read up on what’s happening on Venezuela from multiple news sources. Try Venezuelanalysis.
Communists believe in abolition of capitalism through communist revolution and eventually want to reach a Communist society. Given that such vision has not actually happened yet, Communists often support Actually Existing Socialism (AES).
Socialism is some varying degree in between that and capitalism. On the one hand, there are democratic socialists like Bernie. On the other, there’s also AES countries (e.g. USSR, China).
(P.S. If any other communists see any problems, feel free to correct my mistakes.)
While democratic socialism is a variety of socialism, Bernie isn’t really a democratic socialist, but a social democrat. Social democracy is the left of capitalism, which is right of socialism in any form.
Before some moron turns up, Nazism is not socialism.
In general, I find the term “democratic socialism” to be pretty cringe. It’s like saying right up front “I’m not like those OTHER socialists!” Socialism is a liberatory project. Socialism is the auto-emancipation of the working class. THAT is what democracy looks like. Rule of the people.
Liberation comes hand in hand with revolution though. Socialism will certainly NOT be very democratic for the people who own vast amounts of real estate, productive machinery, and propaganda media empires. Those people will certainly need to end up on the wrong side of a gun for the project to succeed. The wise ones among them won’t force us to pull the trigger.
It will be a hostile take-over. It will be a break from the constitutional order. It will be a break from the “rule of law.” When the ruling class starts losing the game, they will flip over the table. All your precious civil liberties will be torn to shreds. Fascism is simply capitalism under crisis.
The Liberals commit themselves to playing by the rules even when the fascists never would. Salvador Allende (the world’s first elected Marxist head of state) tried to do this, and in three years it ended in his death and a fascist military dictatorship. There is no room for idealism in revolution. The stakes are very real. You need to crush your enemies by any means necessary. Maybe you don’t give Rupert Murdoch the freedom of speech. Maybe you don’t respect Jeff Bezos’s property rights. Maybe you stuff all the Proud Boys into a mineshaft.
A lot of people whine about authoritarianism in the English speaking left, but the English-speaking left has no power to speak of. Just a bunch of very online sectarians bickering. We run around trying to cancel internet forums which amount to little more than fucking book clubs, as if they were the embodiment of high Stalinism.
Wow, I disagree with every single word of this. You seem to be saying that it’s worth sacrificing liberal rights to attack the right (which you are falsely claiming to be fascists - fascism is a specific ideology, not just an insult for anyone on the right). But in doing so, you become worse than the right.
As a social democrat, I am willing to support and ally with democratic socialists. While we have some differences, we’re both pulling in the same direction. Your revolutionary leftism, on the other hand, is further beyond the pale for me than any liberal ideology.
If this is what your project requires to succeed, then may your project fail.
A theoretical question: How do you think social democratic politics could be implemented in a peripheral or semi-peripheral country? In the core countries, it’s evident that successful social democracies are built not only on national resources but also on the exploitation of the periphery and semi-periphery, through which corporations and capitalists generate profits which are then taxed back into the country. So, what would make a social democratic world fairer than other forms of capitalism? There have been attempts to implement social democratic economies in peripheral regions, for instance, the often-mentioned Venezuela and Bolivia are much closer to the Norwegian economic model than to Cuba.
What could a peripheral social democratic government do at all if, after winning an election, the capitalists would simply withdraw their capital from the country and/or sabotage the government, while using their media to portray every measure taken by the government in a negative light?
I’m gonna leave out utopian communism because it’s not what we’re talking about and isn’t really relevant.
Communists are working toward a classless, stateless society. Viewing the world through the lens of class struggle, they see the state as a tool of class repression and seek to use it to get to that stateless classless society. Its important here to recognize that communists want to use the tools of capitalism to develop the productive forces on the way.
Socialism is worker control of the means of production.
Social democracy is a set of policies enacted by bourgeois societies to keep people from revolting.
Most Americans definitely do not want socialism. People simply want things to be affordable, and be able to live with the social services we need readily available, and to have the freedom to do what they want. That’s not socialism, that’s a well functioning democracy with a strong economy.
A lot of Americans “definitely do not want” Obamacare either, but they sure don’t want to give up the improvements that came with the Affordable Care Act.
In other words, Americans hate the label, but not the policies.
(By the way, regarding your other comment: FDR doesn’t get to decide what words mean. It doesn’t matter whether he called himself a socialist or not; what matters is whether he acted like one.)
Where’s the nuance in simping for an authoritarian state-capitalist regime? It’s like the people who unironically think the DPRK is more democratic than the US.
Fuck China, and fuck the United States I live in. The nations of the Nordic region and a few other developed nations have my respect because they respect and value their citizenry. Their economy is a tool that is used to facilitate the distribution of goods and services for the benefit of their society and its citizens, what an economy is supposed to be, instead of doing it ass backwards as we do, hurting citizens to protect the beloved fucking economy and the growth/metastasis expectations of the owner class.
China/The US/Russia are the world leaders in exporting the notion that their citizens should be exploited to stoke the growth of the economy for the benefit of their respective elites. Whoever wins, their people lose.
Why should I go rah rah America when most stakeholders in our society are not meaningful institutional shareholders in the value society produces?
It shouldn’t be about saying simon says or coming out of a rich vagina or if not making perfect economic decisions and kissing ass from age 18, begging to be included and killing yourself for masters who were born into wealth for a small chance of being included in the prosperity of the prosperous nation you’re supposedly a member of.
And don’t you just love the class traitors here that come out to celebrate the failures of citizens who tried? oh you took out student loans in a subject that in hindsight didn’t pay dividends, haha loser. Oh you just started working and didnt get an education and are stuck in the underclass, haha loser. That’s what it means to be an American, rooting against one another as the owner class laughs.
I’m someone still recovering from republican/libertarian capitalist brainwashing. Would you know of a good book or two on this subject? It’s fascinating to me.
I would recommend David Graeber or however it’s spelled writing. Any time you read anyone’s opinion take it with a grain of salt but Debt and Bullshit Jobs address many things, some of which can be taken as criticism of capitalism.
James C Scott is another anthropolgist and his most accessible book is probably seeing like a state. It’s relatively even handed in it’s critques of capitalism as it focuses on states including the USSR. It highlights quite well how markets and states can crush humanity because they have wildly different goals to people.
You probably don’t want to jump right into hardcore theory so this might be a gentler intro into asking why society is the way it is and how it might be different without expressly pushing a particular political theory.
To me, the definition of a 3rd world country is about how the poor are living there.
You can live a nice life in literally any country, if you have enough money. But how do those live, who don’t have anything? That’s what differentiates between a decent country and a 3rd world country.
I’m pretty sure most of it is on the lemmynsfw instance, which some instances have defederated with out of either prudishness or a ridiculous notion that all porn is inherently exploitative. Maybe you’re on one of those? 🤷
Accord to status.lemm.ee, lemm.ee is federated with lemmynsfw and I even personally sub to a couple lemmynsfw communities. I also have NSFW enabled and unblurred in settings, and still I never see porn unless I actively seek it out. I want surprise titties, goddamn it!
Damn, that sucks. Maybe if you use a lemmy client that lets you mark communities as favorites you’ll be more likely to have some thrown into your feed now and then?
I’m using Thunder, which has that. Can’t say for sure how effective it is yet, though, as I only found out the day before yesterday and haven’t done any measured testing…
Hey, I don’t love my client yet, so I’m down to check out Thunder. Thanks for the recommendation, whether it ends up not helping me find my sought-after surprise titties or not 👍
Sorry for the late reply. It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I double-checked and it isn’t defederated. I think maybe no one had ever looked up content from the server before so it wasn’t showing up. It hadn’t federated yet. Now that I’ve pulled in posts with a search, I might have opened the floodgate. LOL.
I haven’t seen any porn at all. (And I checked the NSFW checkbox.)
I do see posts about how China is the greatest country on earth and how they will save the planet from global warming. Which is funny to me because they are the biggest contributors to climate change, global warming, pandemics, terrorism, suppression of free speech, murdering their own citizens with tanks, but I don’t seem to recall clicking that checkbox.
I think I could count the number of porn posts I’ve seen in the last month on one hand. Where do they claim all of it is coming from? I wouldn’t mind more porn tbh.
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