I am from Eastern Europe and I share this sentiment when I see anyone from the West defending communism. The issue is complicated but, to put it bluntly:
No, Timothy, communism didn’t fail in Eastern Europe because it was implemented wrongly. This is a very complicated topic but the tldr summary is “It is a broken idea, it did not work and it will never work. The natural and logical outcome of any attempt at Marxism is a bloodbath followed by autocracy.”
That being said, communism isn’t the only way to achieve a more equitable society. You have social democracy (in Lennin’s words - communism’s greatest adversary); organized labour movements; collectivist anarchism; communitariasm, etc.
Communism, as applied in the 20th century, violently fought against or oppressed all of these movements and is incompatible with any of them.
Not to mention that in most countries nowadays orthodox communists have been hugely discredited for excusing the Russian war of annihilation against the Ukrainian people.
In conclusion, if you live in the USA or Western Europe and you are unhappy with how corporate greed has ruined society, don’t look to communism for answers. There are many other proposed solutions out there - go and research these. Communism is very well known, which makes it easily accessible to people who want change - but it is never, ever the solution.
At the same time I had a colleague that had to immigrate to Canada from Yugoslavia in her 40s and she told me life there even as a Serb + Catholic couple was the best she has ever experienced until things started to go bad in the 80s…
being from eastern Europe doesn’t automatically make your position on communism any more credible, especially when statistically most of your peers disagree with you
Also it’s really hilarious how you claim that communism is more accessible to westerners than social democracy, like ???
Yeah, in the West, we are suffering from unregulated capitalism and it’s hurting us badly. But that certainly doesn’t mean communism is good, especially authoritarian communism (which is exactly what we have historical examples of). We need social safety nets, better taxation, and fucking choices in the west.
Communism is authoritarian by nature. If everyone doesn't subscribe to the communist ideology, then the model simply doesn't work. This means you literally have no choice in a communist society but to be subjected to it. You also need some sort of authority to enforce the redistribution. Who decides who does that, and who gets what? My opinion is that the only way it'd work is maybe with AI, but even then, those in power will likely just manipulate the technology to continue to benefit themselves.
On the same hand, even if you don't subscribe to capitalist ideology you're forced to participate.
We (at least in the U.S.) have no real safety net for people who are unable to provide for themselves for whatever reason. Capitalism is great if you're the one with the capital but if not the world can be a brutal, uncaring place and you can quite literally die on the street.
Crime is endemic to capitalism and I feel like better social safety nets would pay huge dividends in a lot of ways.
Capitalism is not an ideology though. It's just what naturally happens when humans interact with each other. Saying it's an ideology is like saying atheism is a religion. No, it's what happens when there is no religion.
Crime is also not endemic to capitalism. It happens in all societies, including communist ones.
There are many many primitive societies with no concept of capital or capitalism so I think I'd take issue with your assertion that capitalism is "just what naturally happens when humans interact with each other."
Absolutely. There is nothing “natural” about capitalism. It sprung up in some place of the world (not all) a couple of centuries ago. Thousands of years of humanity and no capitalism before that.
There is nothing natural or inevitable about capitalism. Historical determinism is plain wrong. Capitalism is just one of many ways to organize a society. Its time will pass in due course. Probably not in our lifetimes, unfortunately.
Luckily this is a forum and we can all contribute to the discussion. If you read the comment you replied to you'll see they mentioned living under unregulated capitalism; I was adding to what they'd said.
What does “praising” mean? Being critical of what we learned in school about the USSR?
What does “communism” mean here? Advocating for the type of social democracy that’s done pretty well in much of Europe?
I mean I know tankies “exist” but I rarely see them. Just because we’re all critical of capitalism doesn’t mean we’re all dumb enough to want to re try what the soviet union did. It’s almost like our kids will die under capitalism so we’re willing to think outside the box for once.
I’d love for the west to embrace more communist/socialist ideas into it’s democratic system (and some would be wildly popular) but ya the people praising China and the former USSR like they are/were amazing are delusional. The communist sublemmy is freaking coocoo. It’s just a bunch of china shills screaming into an echo chamber about how amazing China is and that the rest of the world are liars about China. I seriously saw someone making the claim that China is basically perfect and there’s no criticisms that can be made.
Just because you’ve been blessed from limited exposure to lemmygrad (a Lemmy instance) doesn’t mean everyone has been so lucky.
Yes, they literally pine for the USSR. Yes, they literally venerate Stalin. They’re not just saying “capitalism bad”, they’re saying “the specific implementation of social and economic policies of the USSR is what we want”.
Look at state’s created in the image of the USSR, like China. Everything they are doing today is correcting every single mistake made by past Communist leaders, both within China and the entire existence of the USSR from start to finish. You can’t recreate the USSR, even if you wanted to, anyways. Unique conditions are unique. Anyone who tries to repeat the creation of something like the USSR without the same conditons as 1917 Russia would create a state that would be overthrown in a matter of months or maybe a few years.
I’ve never seen anybody advocate for recreating USSR the way it existed. What people actually say is that USSR managed to accomplish a lot of positive things despite the problems it had, and there are a lot of valuable lessons that can be learned from it both positive and negative.
It’s also absurd that people keep fear mongering about existing Communist projects because each one of them is rooted in history, culture, and material conditions that it arose of. It’s pretty obvious that if socialism ever came to the west then it would have its own unique characteristics based on western culture and values. These are idiotic arguments designed to shut down discussion and scare people away from even thinking about communism as an alternative to the capitalist hellscape they live under.
Because the single only way to do communism is how the UdSSR did it, there’s no other way.
And of course it’s only possible to either agree with the whole of a specific ideology, or none of it. There’s no “good parts of communism” or “bad parts of capitalism” it’s only ever all good or all bad.
Fuck Communism and fuck unchecked capitalism. People deserve basic human rights. Free heallthcare, education, insurance and liveable basic income is a must. It doesn’t make your society full of freeloaders instead it gives all the people a chance to become what they want in the society. I hope that people can see this basic difference and we can work towards for a better future as humanity instead of whatever country title.
Honestly, I think the way we argue over labels hurts us. If I use heavy regulation and government aid to limit the abuses in a capitalist system, at what point does the label change to “socialism”? I think we do ourselves a disservice to create these strict conceptions of systems like capitalism, socialism, or communism. Then when one fails we get to say “well that wasn’t true x”. And the labels allow people to boogeyman an idea. And worst of all, we eliminate the possibility to take good lessons from multiple different systems and incorporate them into our system. I think we would be better served promoting policies on a case by case basis instead of using these huge words. And to be clear, I’m a bit of a hypocrite here. I’ve been mostly telling people I’m a “social democrat” or that I support “capitalism with heavy regulations”. But even those words can get picked apart and don’t really capture nuance. My main point is that I think this thread is a perfect encapsulation of how these arguments stop us from getting behind good policies when we bicker about the definitions of words that mean different things to different people.
People deserve basic human rights. Free heallthcare, education, insurance and liveable basic income is a must.
I think the irony is that a significant portion of conservatives (not only in the USA, I speak from Brazil) see that as “evil commienism”. That and anything that even remotely attempts to reduce inequalities, like taxing the rich.
No, no it does not. Competition for nearly everything exists, sure there might not be enough but saying "always leads to monopolies" is a lie. Anyway communism usually has monopolies too, just monopolies operated by the government
will always be in conflict with workers.
By workers I presume you mean employees. Yes, greedy people will try to abuse their workers but as the person you're replying to said "unchecked capatilism is also bad", we have minimum wage for a reason, and then there is also competition and if you have a valuable skill they can't afford to exploit you
The very concept of a free loader best represents the ruling class of capitalists interests. The ruling class does not contribute in any way to society, and instead steal billions of dollars of labor value from the working class and use it in ways that benefit only themselves. Allowing people to survive even without providing a capital benefit to the ruling class wouldn’t enable free loading, it would mean society actually does what its supposed to and looks out for the wellbeing of all people.
You shouldn’t have to work to exist. You shouldn’t have to be useful to anyone else to be a part of a community. Food and shelter are human rights. Water is a human right. Healthcare and education are human rights.
Toppling capitalism and wage slavery is the only way to a just world. Socialism doesn’t inherently belong to the soviet union. And the soviet union did not categorically fail at every single thing they did. Don’t mistake my words for endorsement of stalinism or of any of the many horrible things they did. But there were other aspects of their society and governance that were actually pretty great. Its not all black and all white. Life isn’t that simple in reality. A flat condemnation of communism is rooted in propaganda more than it is in reality.
And I’m an anarchist, before you accuse me of being a tankie. I do not advocate state communism. But to say “fuck communism” and be done with it just shows your bias towards socialism.
you shouldn’t have to work to exist, you shouldn’t have to be useful to anyone else to be part of a community
While I largely agree with your points (or at least some of the core of them) I think you’d have to flesh this out. For anything alive to exist, work needs to be done. And for anyone to be in a community people must mutually agree on membership. The “freeloader” problem isn’t a problem of ability where individuals “not useful” (and that gives me chills as much as it probably does you) to society can’t work, though it’s often framed that way to varying extents from both sides. I feel that it’s a problem where a large enough segment of the population would not be productive at what they could be doing simply because they don’t have to.
Our brains are literally wired to seek out more for less energy.
Again, I agree with most of your points, but these two could probably use a bit more explanation (at least to me)
We live in a time of unprecedented efficiency and automation. We over produce how much we require massively. Optimized, no not every human has to work. Work should be voluntary and without exploitation. Food water and shelter should be shared resources that no one is deprived of. We have the abundance to do this, we only don’t because of the capitalist economic political and social systems which promote wage slavery (the concept that you don’t deserve to live if you’re not capable of producing labor value for capitalists).
Everyone should be encouraged to work and contribute. But no one should face death for being unable to do so. All work should be voluntary and people should be encouraged to work for their benefit, their family’s benefit, and their community’s benefit. Universal basic income should exist (in our society today) so that if you’re being exploited you don’t face either further exploitation or literally death. Supporting yourself and your family and society should be done because you believe in those things and you see the direct benefits of your contributions. The problem is capitalism has indoctrinated people to believe that work is not a mechanism of direct survival. It is a mechanism for attaining capital value, which is traded for direct survival.
It goes beyond that even, they indoctrinate us to believe that:
Capitalism is natural and can be found in nature.
Human beings are inherently uncooperative and hate each other. Plenty of human beings are uncooperative, but capitalism literally makes people uncooperative by continually reinforcing the hopelessness of helping others. How can you cooperate when your own survival solely depends on you being willing to give your labor value to capitalists in exchange for indirect survival?
The homeless, the mentally ill, the addicted, all those who are unable or unwilling to give up their labor value to capitalists - they’re all the picture of sin and vice and they are to be derided and hated for their inability to provide labor value to capitalists. That they are worthless, and should be treated like wild animals.
On that note, they also indoctrinate us to believe that homelessness is natural. That its a personal failing.
When examined separately you can see that they pre-construct people’s opinions to cooperation among the labor force. “Don’t be a failure by not giving us your labor value.” “Don’t help those who we deem failures.” “Being a failure, by our definition, is a personal choice and not a product of exploitation.” “Our system is natural, the natural world has capitalist-type hierarchies. So it is unchallengable.”
Bear in mind that politically I am an anarchist. In my eyes no society has ever done nearly enough to create real equality. And I fundamentally disagree with all social hierarchies.
You shouldn’t have to work to exist. You shouldn’t have to be useful to anyone else to be a part of a community
I guess I’m not well versed enough on communist principles but how does this work even on the simplest level? Work has to be done for a person to have shelter, food, etc and that is pretty much unavoidable for now.
How can people both be not obligated to provide anything to the community, while the community is obligated to provide things for them? Is it just assumed that enough people will still want to work to keep the system sustainable?
Automation and efficient machinery have made most labor significantly easier and require significantly fewer people. The rise of corporate desk jobs and call centers pretty well represents this. A huge portion of society is already doing meaningless work that only serves capitalist interests.
This means a couple things. First off, far fewer working hours are required to maintain a community. People don’t have to work 40 hour weeks just to get by. Secondly, people can rotate what jobs they’re performing based on how they feel like investing their efforts. I’m an anarchist, not a communist, so my beliefs surrounding division of labor are different from, for example, a marxist-leninist.
Western society is far too indulgent with many things that cost massive amounts of resources and provide very little in the way of human benefit. Public transportation should be the norm everywhere for instance, because cars and roads are wildly resource intensive for really no reason. Every human being does not need to possess a personal vehicle. It does not actually serve our interests. It just pushes the cost of transportation onto the workers, instead of the ruling class funding actual comprehensive functional public transportation. This is just one example, but the way we approach food is also extremely flawed. Instead of primarily relying on our host ecosystems and local food production to feed ourselves we ship food all around the world at another massive resource cost. We are also over-reliant on resource intensive livestock, when much less resources intensive options exist.
Put all things together, and it becomes firstly apparent that we are wasting the majority of our resources on stuff that has no actual real world benefit to us. So we could stop wasting those resources, and thusly not need to invest as many labor hours into production. So far fewer people need to work than currently do. And labor should be invested locally, into things that directly benefit you your family and your community. Instead of the present case where the majority of your labor hours are invested into things that have little to no tangible benefit for yourself or your community. So its much harder to see how your work is actually helpful.
Part of the propaganda you’re fed by capitalism is that cooperation can never work because everyone is selfish and uncooperative and “exploitation is just human nature”. Those things are not true. Exploitation is not human nature. Humans are naturally social and community oriented. We are naturally codependent and have adaptations for functioning within a community. Capitalism, and more broadly consolidation of power into a ruling class, has upset humans natural tendency to cooperate. Capitalism puts mortal pressure on our ability to expend labor hours for capitalists. You cannot help anyone else because it risks your own personal life, any time you spend money you’re spending your own survivability. It’s what means you can live at all. So people do not want to help anyone else. We are taught through propaganda that being homeless is a personal failing. That being poor is a personal failing. This is specifically to prevent human cooperation from expanding into a genuine desire to improve life for all workers.
So people don’t feel like they can cooperate, which leads to the general perception of human nature as being selfish. The idea that people will work to better the lives of everyone in their community is a completely normal idea.
While there’s a lot I agree with there, it seems like there’s some assumptions made that are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I guess it’s more of a difference in philosophy, but it seems like a core part of your statement is “people given the opportunity to cooperate without risk to themselves would provide enough for everyone, and whatever they don’t end up providing is unnecessary.”
It’s fair to say that there are a lot of things we don’t need, but it seems a bit flippant to say those things are completely useless. I’m all for strong safety nets that allow people to give to others without having to sacrifice their own wellbeing, but it seems like you’re talking about a quality of life decrease for a large number of people in order to achieve that.
True, in some senses I am definitely expecting a relative decrease in some aspects of quality of life for the middle class and upper middle class. Like decreased access to some food types that aren’t local to a community. Significantly reduced transportation and a much heavier reliance on a more robust public transportation system. Less access to new luxury goods and more recycling of technology and resources.
To homeless people, the mentally ill who cannot work, the disabled who cannot work, and to the severely impoverished - to all of them this would result in a huge increase in their quality of life.
Its also not like there would be no pressure to work, simply that you don’t face homelessness starvation and death if you are not capable of work. In that event I do believe most people would willingly work to provide for themselves and their communities.
Also, its only a quality of life decrease from our present perspective. The way our society currently functions will eventually result in total failure of supply chains as the climate crisis that we are causing continues to unfold. Which means people will have to depend on their local community to provide for them anyway. But even without that, I believe a society that consumes far less and is consequently much more effective at providing needs for everyone is possible.
You have the right not to be denied food or shelter… Are you saying everyone should receive free food and shelter? How will that work? I understand small scale communes can mostly work under that idea, but a country with millions of people? Scarcity is the basis of economic theory for a reason.
Why is that food thrown away? You do realise that food can get thrown away for being bad? That at least takes up 10 percentage points, then there's the question on how its measured. Who is throwing this food away? If its your average Joe then I doubt their throwing it away just to make artificial scarcity. How nutritional is the food that gets thrown away?
millions of people experience food insecurity.
The US has hundreds of millions of people those people experiencing food insecurity barely make up anything. Also would that food that gets thrown away even feed everyone?
those people experiencing food insecurity barely make up anything
Then it should be easy to feed them with just a fraction of the food that’s thrown away?? How you could possibly say that and think it helps your point is beyond me.
I said that because the person I was replying to was making it seem like millions of people was everyone and their mother, the truth is if they wanted artificial scarcity they would do it to more people
Capitalism creates scarcity to generate profit. We live and have been living in a time of unprecedented efficiency productivity and abundance. Artifical scarcity is used to keep workers from resisting wage slavery.
Companies would rather sell more product then pretend for it to be rarer (except for stuff like diamonds but those are selled to rich, successful people anyway)
That’s such a naïve thing to say. Artificial scarcity is incredibly common and used as a marketing tool by nearly every industry. My favorite example is when digital content has “limited edition” copies.
Not sure how you are defining them, but they are, and aren’t, the same. Socialism is a transitionary government to communism. It isnt the ‘exact’ same thing, but when a communist party is in charge, they create socialism, with goals to move towards communism.
Socialism is also a lot of things, but all those things are considered communist.
Democratic socialism is what Cuba has for example. Socialism run by a democracy.
Socialist democracy is what Sweden has, currently. It’s still capitalist, so is not communist at all, but regulates capitalism better than America and most of Europe does. They are slowly loosing the fight to Nazis though. Like literal Nazis, they call themselves nazis, That’s not a joke.
They aren’t completely different no. Communism is a form of socialism, socialism being the political movement that focuses workers rights to varying degrees. Communism came first though, and socialism just includes other things like democratic socialism. Socialism when discussing theory is often used widely to mean the global anti capitalist movement as it has existed since the beginning of worker’s rights.
I got to open my eyes more, because I don’t see anyone praising communism. What I do see quite a lot is people praising the ultra rich that have made their fortune through exploitation of the poor and public subsidies.
“The pure (libertarian) socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
boomers destroyed the earth beyond all belief, poisoned everyone with sketchy ass chemicals, destroyed the economy more than once (twice in my life), most of us will NEVER own a home because the housed your grand pappy paid 100k for is now worth 2.5 million and average yearly wage is less than 30,000… among a million other things. The greed and entitlement is baffling, mix that in with delusional red scare propaganda that a ton of people fall for and yall mfers spending time defending all this insane shit.
we effectively live in a corporate government where what the people want doesn’t matter alongside the million other ways we are lied to and exploited. Billionaires and trillionaires run the world and they keep pushing for “the next thing” like the metaverse, blockchain and going mars while most of us cant even afford to fucking eat. Suck it. I guarantee that you cant even define communism and point out how it differs from social policies even on a very basic fundamental level. Fuck dude
And Soviet communism was… better how? Just as (if not more) destructive to the environment, and their “billionaires” were called “party members” instead. What an improvement! Now they can jail/deport political dissenters without even having to pretend to hold a fair trial.
Now of course this is where communists usually go No True Scotsman, but consider for just ONE MOMENT that the concept of wealth inequality is not, in fact, unique to capitalism. Any economic system is vulnerable to greed. And that the countries with arguably the strongest social welfare, highest human development, etc. are… the Nordics. Hardly capitalist, hardly hellholes.
This is why people say communists are angsty teenagers. Capitalism is a deeply flawed system, but all of what you just pointed to is, in fact, not unique to capitalism. That’s just Americana. Pointing to the U.S. as a reason why “capitalism bad” is just as silly as pointing to N.K. as a reason why “communism bad”.
Typical American with a viewpoint so narrow you can’t see further than your nose. I’ve had lots of interesting discussions with French communists, and I agree with some of their viewpoints, but to start with you have to realize that capitalism is not the root of ALL evil, only of some specific systemic issues, which are only a small part of what’s wrong with the US.
Fuck. What did it say? I was deleting comment and did the wrong one or someone did wipe. Tons? Tons of dead people? Yes, communists here murdered literal tons of people and if you intend to deny existence of victims of any regime then we have nothing to further talk about.
Yes literal tons of fascists, Nazis, extreme nationalists, imperialists, colonialists, some of the worst criminals, and CIA agents. If you check the Victims of Communism, that’s literally what you’re going to find btw.
Well capitalism is about making a selfish choice. We have no significant capital, so maybe they cut us in or don’t be surprised when some don’t care for the system.
How dare teenagers not become Neoliberals while growing up in a late capitalist hellscape where climate change can’t be taken seriously because it isn’t a profitable problem to solve.
There’s a lot of space in the left that isn’t stalinism. You can be a communist and have a deep critique of how 20th century communism worked, a learning from it and not wanting to repeat the bad parts.
In leftist circles in the US, weird Stalin and Lenin fans are loud, but ultimately not that common.
Add comment