Corporatism is capitalism. A free market will always consolidate, monopolize, and expand its power. It’s not going to let some government get in its way. That’s why they become the government like in the US today.
Corporatism, at least in this current style is more than capitalism. In capitalism we let failed companies fail, in corporatism they are too big to fail so their failure is socialized and they are encouraged to suckle at the teat if the public purse.
Governments could take back control but they are run by weak people who are easily bought for pennies.
Governments have never “just let business fail” because under capitalism and its drive to consolidate and monopolize, the government will become an arm of corporate power. The weak and corrupt politicians are by design. The corporate welfare is by design.
This has been been seen throughout the history of capitalism and is the logical conclusion to its processes and theories. If you have a system based on infinite growth and profit seeking, the system will always devolve to exploitation, monopoly, and government control. Why? Because it’s profitable.
The very foundation that corporations working in their self interest will be a benefit to society is rotten, and has been shown to never work time and time again.
The only progress we have seen has come from public endeavors, independent actors, and the people. Never corporations. Only thing we get from corporations is 35 different types of Oreos and 20 different types of toothpaste all owned by the same company.
In America nothing means anything anymore. It’s just soggy cardboard deteriorating. It can’t be fixed. It’s dead and not coming back. This is life now.
Making this meme took longer than opening a book to understand what communism actually is.
What everyone points to as “communism” shares more in common with capitalism than anything else. They had authoritarian rulers and a small wealthy class that lords over the rest of the populace.
There is nothing “worker owned” about these examples and it only serves to spread FUD about moving away from capitalism towards a more human centric economy
But this is the no true scotsman fallacy. Is there any evidence that your definition of communism is possible to attain, without devolving into things similar to real world countries that attempted to become communist? And couldn’t an ancap just as easily claim that all of the negative sides of capitalism are communist because they are all in some way a perversion of a freely negotiated deal?
The Red Scare is still working it’s magic I see. I don’t think many people think that communism is the perfect system. Even the ones who support it. It’s just that after living in a capitalist hellhole our whole lives and watching the world burn, some of those ideas start to look like they are worth trying.
Star Trek is a good example of what the endgame of communism is supposed to look like. It’s just the process of getting there that is hard to figure out.
Looking into it again, you are right. I am not a big trekkie. I just always thought it was a good example of a moneyless stateless society, but the post scarcity definitely changes things. Thanks for the correction.
I guess we are on the brink of reaching post scarcity, and we kind of already have with our basic needs, just not our luxuries.
I don’t know if communism or socialism is the actual answer at all, btw. I’m just not scared of it and willing to see what good ideas might be in there even if it is a flawed system. I hate the authoritarianism that always seems to inevitably come with it. I just think we probably have outgrown capitalism a bit.
Star Trek isn’t even communist. It’s a Post-Scarcity society which has traded physical currency for the currency of position and rank. Wealth becomes the power you are able to wield as everyone has access to everything from their synthesizer. Until such a device is feasible communism and socialism are just crackpot plans made up by deranged idiots that don’t want to work.
Since China is communist like tankies believe, you also forgot a fascist police state with total control over the internet tot he point where you’ll get a police visit if you post a meme critical of the government.
Why are there so many Chinese people reading American news and posting memes on WeChat? They just keep getting arrested and censored while being able to post in jail, and no one removes their old or new posts?
Answer the question. Why are all these Chinese people reading foreign news with a VPN and posting memes on Chinese sites (with their real name and info attached) with no punishment? Even people in North Korea have seen how American cops treat black people, and they weren’t punished for finding that information. How did all these people do it? How did they dodge the government while using their real face, name, cell info, and identity attached?
Reading arguments about these concepts while many people completely disagree what their definitions are feels like treading water waiting to exhaust myself and drown.
Maybe the point is the policies and anyone who argues about words is part of the problem.
Well the definitions are pretty clear, some people might just be uninformed because mixing the two has been very common in the right’s communication for decades.
Your first and second point combined basically means that everybody has to live in some government designed and funded flat. If you don’t like that, there’s nothing to be done. Same with food and everything. Oh you don’t like the government mandated 1500kcal protein slurry per day? Sucks to be you then… Of course it doesn’t have to be bad, but you are enabling a system where it could be bad and nobody could do anything about it.
Yeah, I don’t see why #2 is necessary. Make the government have to compete with the free market. If you’re poor, you get a government-funded apartment, but if you’re wealthy, you can afford a luxury condo.
There are food banks in my city, and nobody believes that they’re a threat and they’re going to put supermarkets out of business. You could just have standardized, ubiquitous food banks run by the government.
I think they mean all this business with water and housing. Investment properties are a plague all over this country. They inflate the price of housing so that someone can make a living off of someone else’s need for shelter.
The standard of living cratered in many of the former soviet countries. It turns out, while communism as implemented by the USSR had it’s downsides, in general, the populace as a whole were better off.
Every time I see something like OP’s post, I’m reminded that oil companies can’t stop destroying the earth because stonks must go up. But yeah, communism is the boogie man.
I have read your sentence 4 times and I got no clue what are you trying to say here. Are you really trying to say that Yugoslavia was more stable under communism than it’s individual states today?
I’m aware there are some Yugoslav countries are unhappy today. But, seeing the difference between how well the country is doing today and it’s population memories about communism would also tell us a lot IMO
The question was not asked in the Baltic states or Uzbekistan. The question was also not asked in Soviet puppet states like Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, etc.
Most of those are also authoritarian. Tossing out one dictator for another is not going to leave people very satisfied.
The least racist westerner has logged on. Fuck what majority of people who lived in USSR think, it’s the people with blond hair and blue eyes whose opinions really matter.
Comments like this radicalize the right and alienate people on the left, you achive absolutely nothing, just culture war fuel for the right, people from the Warsaw pact are not subumans, you don’t even understand that you support a race biased perspective with a mentality like this
Nah, pointing out racist shit scumbags say here is not radicalizing the right or alienating anybody who is actually on the left. The fact that westerners focus on the opinions of predominantly white people in eastern europe over those in the rest of USSR is racist as fuck.
As I said Warsaw pact people are not subhuman, judging from your comments they are, and even if you want to go into pseudo science race theory, the poles are white slav like the majority, russian and the ukranians, Georgia is another state that is in the poll, yet is a white majority, so why did they left some of the biggest and most populous part of the USSR? You are the perfect example of extreme race ideas, just not the white mainstream ones, race is a social construct, used to divide the people to let them fight against each others, you fit the role perfectly, if you were communist you would say that racial war is a distraction to class war, or am I wrong?
You’re just making a straw man there because nobody said anything about Warsaw pact people being subhuman except you. What was actually said was that the opinions of white people in European parts of USSR are prioritized over those who lived in the rest of USSR in the west. Nobody is talking about any race war here except you. You keep trying to call me a racist for pointing this out shows the depths of your intellectual dishonesty. I’ve got nothing else to say to you.
Are you that fucking stupid? There are a ton of Russians, Belorusyans, and Ukrainians who are blond haired and blue eyed. They also did not include 36 million people in Uzbekistan which has very few blond haired blue eyed people. You know who also is not blond haired and blue eyed? Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan who see it as a benefit that the shitty Soviet Union broke up. But I guess you do not give a shit about them. That seems pretty racist of you.
It’s not racist to recognize that ignoring the over 100 million people that live in states that were either Soviet or Soviet puppet states kind of fucking skews the results.
Your argument makes no sense. Go back to summer school, child.
Oh and finally, this study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
That Pew Research poll is 13 years old during a global financial crisis. A much more recent one (2019) shows that 7 in 10 Hungarians approve of the shift to a market economy.
That same poll showed that over 90% of Germans are happy with reunification. The article from Der Spiegel is 14 years old during a global financial crisis. I lived in Berlin around that time. There was a little bit of Ostalgie but honestly a lot of them were little more than neo Nazis and ended up supporting the AfD. If those are the communists you want to hang out with, be my guest.
Not sure why you devote so much space to the blond hair blue eyed Russians. Seems pretty racist.
Yugoslavia was not a Soviet puppet state nor Eastern Europe so not sure why you are bringing it up. There was also a lot more to Yugoslavia than Serbia.
Things haven’t gotten better in these countries in the past 13 years, and current pro western governments are looking pretty shaky as a result. Seethe and cope there child.
I literally grew up in USSR, and majority of citizens of these countries do agree with me as plenty of surveys show. You’re just an intellectually dishonest bootlicker who’s doing all the seething and coping here.
News flash bud, these financial crises happen every decade like clockwork under your precious capitalist system. And each time things get worse for the majority of the people, that’s why there’s civil unrest brewing all across the west. Meanwhile, pretty adorable you don’t understand that every government is fundamentally authoritarian because it derives authority from its monopoly on violence. You just happen to prefer capitals authority over you, and that’s what makes you a bootlicker.
Recessions tend to happen every decade roughly, yes. Financial crises do not. It is clear you do not understand what a financial crisis is.
You also don’t appear to understand what authoritarianism is either nor what a bootlicker is. You were almost certainly born after the fall of the Society Union considering how childlike your understanding of pretty basic concepts is.
A ten year old poll, that happened before some important recent events, and is mostly from Russian client states in central Asia and the Caucasus because it only encompasses countries that were part of the Soviet Union is disingenuous, at best, in response to this post about eastern Europe.
Try that poll again today in Albania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, former East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Balkans. See how that goes.
Edit: I don’t know how I overlooked the Baltics, I was just in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia for a few weeks this spring. If the museums are anything to go by, their responses to this question would definitely contradict your narrative and they were part of the USSR.
No sane people would agree. You should talk to actual people from east Europe and not look at these stupid articles, everybody around me hate soviet union
Estonian here. Soviet period was very problematic, and if you claim here that criticism of communism is fascism, then you are greatly mistaken. The crimes of communism during the Soviet period are well documented. E.g. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_crimes To point out that many Russians are longing for communism is quite possible, but these are the same Russians who are currently “liberating” Ukraine.
Damn it’s almost like unprecedented economic collapse on a global scale gets people to wear the rose tinted glasses. There’s a million of these surveys done every year and for the past 7-8 it’s always been over 50% positive. This is cherry picking data at its finest.
If a vaguely populist leader started outright talking about supporting fascism, that would quite rightly bring to mind at least Italian Fascism if not German Nazism, and arguing that they just meant the idea of close mutual support and people being stronger together (like a fasces) would not work.
But weren’t those states actually fascist? Close mutual support and being stronger together are fairly universal values that aren’t exclusive to one ideology, whereas democracy in the workplace is actually something specific to left wing ideology.
The US has a blend of public and private infrastructure. Cities like Chicago sold the rights to their parking to private companies. Red light and speeding cameras are also privatized. Some states have sold their turnpike system to non public entities. Busses are unreliable in most metro areas because bus systems don’t turn a profit.
Amtrak, America’s only passenger train system, operates nearly entirely on private tracks. Its nearly always as expensive or more for a train ticket than it would be to just fly. At that the system is unreliable with trains constantly having to wait hours for freight trains to pass because they have the right of way on private tracks.
Nearly all utilities (power, water, gas) are ran by for profit companies. Americas “social safety net” reads like a punishment most of the time. Seniors living on social security eat cat food to get by. Politicians want work requirements on food assistance. Homelessness is at epidemic levels, in a more liberal area there are some depression era hoovervilles built. Conservative areas just buy bus tickets to the liberal areas.
China is socialist under Primary Stage Socialism with development emphasized. Social safety nets and public infrastructure are not automatically steps towards socialism (in the first place because the U.S. is imperialist and finances these gains with the wealth of other nations with the aim of pacifying conflict rather than ushering in genuine positive change). This spectrum approach ignores political and developmental realities, in the first place with China being a dictatorship of the proletariat and the US being a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and with private businesses subordinated at every step to the popular mass party (and with the final goal of expelling them when socialism is fully developed (1949/1950), since China is a backward nation that did not undergo a capitalist period before developing the DOTP. The “more state or more private” dichotomy is imo an incorrect way of looking at things.
Is it, though? I certainly don’t see the Chinese political leadership needing to put in considerable labour for their income. In practice, they don’t look so different from American business and political elites, to me.
US being a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
Look I understand where you’re coming from with this, and when you’re talking about America in particular I’m relatively on board. But I suspect this was intended to refer to western capitalist democracies more broadly, and while I understand what you mean, I simply don’t agree that it’s fair to call a democracy using a serious democratic system running free and fair elections a “dictatorship” in the same paragraph as you’re calling China a dictatorship, as though the two are comparable.
Yeah, FPTP is fundamentally anti-democratic, and most democracies have some flaws in how free or fair they are, with the result being that they’re less than perfectly democratic. The US is particularly bad, but even worse is a place like Singapore, which barely pretends to be a fair democracy. But if you mean to suggest the same of countries like Australia, France, and Germany, I’m just not on board. To pretend even America is on the same level of being a dictatorship as China is ludicrous.
I say this as someone who is rather anti-capitalist in general. In theory, I think the ideals of socialism are fantastic, and from what I’ve seen socialists say about how the system could work, I don’t disagree.
But then I see socialists do things like pretend America is just as much of a dictatorship as China or (as I saw the creator of the explicitly socialist Second Thought YouTube channel “Second Thought” do on his news channel) side with Russia (or at least, against NATO and Ukraine) in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or blame America for China’s aggressive policy towards Taiwan. And as much as I’m on board with socialist economic ideals, I also fundamentally believe in the rights of individual freedoms afforded by liberal democracies.
I don’t think that these have to be in conflict, but for some reason every time I see someone espousing socialism they seem to end up supportive highly oppressive regimes like China and Russia. It makes it very hard (read: impossible) to actually take that final step into embracing the label of “socialist”.
Dictatorship, to Marxists, refers to the ruling class. After Feudalism, the class character is either proletarian, capitalist/bourgeosie, or Napoleonic. In this case, all liberal democracies are dictatorships. If it’s a state, it requires dictatorship by a class or class relationship. If the dictatorship was deemed unncessary, or the contradiction between classes fell, then no states would be necessary. As far as your point on Taiwan, almost all countries recognized by the UN observe One-China policy as required by formal relationships with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which has territorial claims to Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, even though they have their own distinct governments. To recognize formal relations with Taiwan is to also recognize China, only in that case meaning the Republic of China (ROC) rather than the PRC. As for NATO? There are plenty of videos to watch if you are curious, but NATO itself is tied to its history with the Operation Gladio, and its purpose was to be an alliance against the USSR. Now that the USSR is long gone, any use of NATO is extremely questionable, as if arming and funding fascists wasn’t bad enough.
Yeah, all these sources pushing communism aren’t telling them how the Bolsheviks killed everybody that knew how to do anything: farmers, lawyers, doctors because they were deemed part of the problem, probably because they were the only ones saying “this is a bad idea.”
Then the soviets were back in the dark ages, and only got up to speed because of Germany fucking with them in WW2, and not accounting for the winter. So they were saved by the winter, and Stalin, under threat, threw everyone into the machine.
Millions of the workers were being killed - overworked to death - to get the Soviet war machine up to snuff in factories producing ammo, weapons, planes, whatever. No food, no water, just munitions to fight Germany, then to build bomb, then space flight, the. Collapse.
But, to be fair, all that stuff crippled the US too. In 1970, when everything started going tits up, that’s when it caught up with us, and we’re still paying the bill with ious to the Chinese. When those loans come to call, there will probably be another revolution, or at least war because some asshole is going to say “Look what China is doing to us.”
As someone from postsoviet state, I could not agree more. Those pushing soviet union as example of comunist project are really not doing any good for the comunist projext.
If I spent the time to dump the human boss off my back, I would not turn around and give that power to a computer. Worker controlled labor puts the power in workers’ hands.
Computers can help with communication of needs, but power should stay with workers.
But the power is not with the workers, it’s with a representative body. And in a perfect union, the body would be able to consider and weigh workers needs with production costs. So why not let a computer do it?
As AI gets more involved in decision making, the politics of AI will become a big point I think. Reponsibility, accountability, and maybe something resembing rights, or maybe access capacities. It may be a tool, but it is gaining something like an agency. So the polics of AI might be communist one.
Most people who praise communism don’t know what communism is, and no, there have been no communist states ever, it’s just impossible for such system to exist.
Socialism is the step before the communism you describe, and the people who support it are communists. Go read Marxist theory instead of relying on hearsay arguments like that.
I am pro socialism and I call myself socialist, not communist. Communism is a wet dream, not possible for our species to accomplish, just because majority of people will always want to have more than others. It’s just our nature, you can’t change that.
And even true socialism is far away, just because people are greedy and short-sighted.
What do you mean by socialism? Because the goal of socialism is to gradually arrive at communism. I don’t know a lot of Marxist theory but what you say doesn’t make much sense. No one (except for anarchists and maybe “new leftists”) wants to jump to communism directly.
I will try. Communism is utopia in its base. Good start? No state, money, no police(yes, you do need law enforcement to have a running society). Under Communism, you would work in the factory and then you would go into a shop and take the bread that you exactly need. Am I doing a good job at it? There would be no need to reeducate anyone, because absolutely every person would educate themselves about communist ideals. Does this sound like something that should ever work? Communism treats people like robots.
What’s utopian is painting a picture of the minutia of what communist society will look like, that’s what you’re doing now and what every Marxist repudiates
No state, no money, sure, because that’s seen as a resolution of the contradictions in class society and therefore a logical conclusion
No law enforcement? Factories and shops? You’ve made up your own image of communism in your mind and have decided that’s what everybody else thinks, and use your own utopia to discredit scientific socialists
Why would someone living under communism have to educate themselves on communist ideals? People living under capitalism don’t educate themselves on capitalist ideals, they take it completely for granted because that’s the status quo
I admit that I have made 3 mistakes. 1. I tried(still do) to explain communism to communist, 2. above post is from the top of my head and 3. we will not change our minds, because 1.
“What’s utopian is painting a picture of the minutia of what communist society will look like, that’s what you’re doing now and what every Marxist repudiates” I smell butthurt. If you think that stateless(without any autority) and utopian society is possible today or in future for human species(we know today. Power-hungry, greedy, selfish and materialistic, which then turns into power-hungry rulers that always use communist ideology for their gain. Always dictatorship. Always tyranny.) then there are the doors and go say this fairy tale to some idiot.
No law enforcement? I cannot find this now, but police is literally tool of state. It would have different form in truly communist society and that society would basically treat itself as one big family so I am lazy to think how this would work at all.
Factories and shops? You do realize that you would still work under real communism, right? Communist regime here prided itself at work. Everyone had to work. We even had anti-parasitic laws where police would start to look for you, if you missed the job for 3 days. It might have different form (so not factory or shop), but that is how it would roll. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. You work and then you take what you need. Like one big family. Does not work. Even family has authoritative figure that “corrects” your needs. Also, common ownership in family only works, because you know them. I assume we are both workers and I give exactly zero shit, if you are alive or not, which means that I will never share property with you, because I have no reason to do so.
“You’ve made up your own image of communism in your mind and have decided that’s what everybody else thinks, and use your own utopia to discredit scientific socialists” COPE and ideological language. “scientific socialists” sounds like another cope. Let me guess. Bogus science, bogus theory, bogus future predictions.
Why would someone living under communism have to educate themselves on communist ideals? People living under capitalism don’t educate themselves on capitalist ideals, they take it completely for granted because that’s the status quo
First, there are no capitalist ideals. Capitalism does not intend to go somewhere. Capitalism just wants to consume and use everything around in the most efficient way(when regulated!!!). In fact, if there ever is some higher society, my bet is that capitalism will get us there, which means that I do not have to do anything(especially worship ideology that killed millions), because we already make ground breaking discoveries in biology(?) every year + advancement of AI. I think that no amount of “evil elite”(populism by the way) would ever be able to stop the inevitable progress.
Education was tightly controlled by communists here. After coup in 1948, they basically seized the whole educational apparatus. Especially colleges that were then meant to promote communist ideology. Education is necessary for communist society to run. I am lazy and I am wasting my time on you. I think I already mentioned it above. Human error of communist ideology. You need opposite of what people currently are. Educated, caring, altruistic, etc. Utopia. Then again, under communist regimes in our reality, communists really only used education to control people. Historical revisionism of communists is notorious.
I smell butthurt. If you think that stateless(without any autority) and utopian society is possible today or in future for human species(we know today. Power-hungry, greedy, selfish and materialistic, which then turns into power-hungry rulers that always use communist ideology for their gain. Always dictatorship. Always tyranny.) then there are the doors and go say this fairy tale to some idiot.
Incredible how you call me butthurt but don’t substantiate any of your claims whatsoever, just slinging insults as an argument. My what mechanism would communism always lead to tyranny? What mechanism makes “greedy selfish and materialistic” people destroy socialism from within? Do you think that Marx’s ideology, a strictly and explicitly materialist one itself, wouldn’t consider people are materialistic?
No law enforcement? I cannot find this now, but police is literally tool of state. It would have different form in truly communist society and that society would basically treat itself as one big family so I am lazy to think how this would work at all.
Police aren’t the only form of law enforcement that could ever exist. if you’re too “lazy” to think outside the box, whatever, but don’t blame communists for doing it.
Factories and shops? You do realize that you would still work under real communism, right? Communist regime here prided itself at work. Everyone had to work. We even had anti-parasitic laws where police would start to look for you, if you missed the job for 3 days. It might have different form (so not factory or shop), but that is how it would roll. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. You work and then you take what you need. Like one big family. Does not work. Even family has authoritative figure that “corrects” your needs. Also, common ownership in family only works, because you know them.
Yes I’m aware you would still work under communism, but you are once again using the conditions of capitalist production and just placing them in the communist mode of production assuming they wouldn’t be fundamentally altered by the substantively different economic conditions. You never lived under communism, at best you lived under socialism, and most of your peers statistically prefer it to capitalism.
I assume we are both workers and I give exactly zero shit, if you are alive or not, which means that I will never share property with you, because I have no reason to do so.
Communism is not an empathy-driven system, so your whole line about not caring about me is pretty pointless. What property do you even have to share? Are you going to resort to the “toothbrush” argument?
COPE and ideological language. “scientific socialists” sounds like another cope. Let me guess. Bogus science, bogus theory, bogus future predictions.
Scientific socialism was a term coined by Engels to describe marxism, is this your first time hearing it? You list out a bunch of “bogus” but can’t seem to substantiate those claims. Maybe if you could you wouldn’t have to “guess” that they’re bogus?
First, there are no capitalist ideals
LMAO, patently false. Capitalism is its own ideology too with its own theory and proponents and ideals.
Education was tightly controlled by communists here. After coup in 1948, they basically seized the whole educational apparatus. Especially colleges that were then meant to promote communist ideology. Education is necessary for communist society to run.
Once again you prove your lack of understanding of Marxism by not understanding the distinction between communism and socialism.
I think I already mentioned it above. Human error of communist ideology. You need opposite of what people currently are. Educated, caring, altruistic, etc. Utopia.
You have still failed to explain how exactly people not being perfect undermines socialism. It seems like you think you can hide your lack of substance behind snarky self-righteousness but you’re not making any actual criticism besides venting your obvious animosity towards socialists
This will my last response I hope. We disagree. Point 1 Communist ideology always historically led to totalitarianism. It happened here. It happened everywhere else and I think there is nothing to fix about it. If you disagree on this point then I have nothing to say. There are so many examples. It is also complex so I will not expand much. Moving power vacuums from elite into state. Centralisation of power will inevitably lead to someone seizing it. 2)Yes, different law enforcement. No clue how it work in practice. Communists themselves probably do not know either. 3)Holy shit. I do not care about most, but Czechia does not want Socialism. This is tankie opinion push. We recently got rid of successor to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Too late and no one except truly old and connected wants it back. We have been trying to shrug off this culture and corruption for the last 30 years. No thanks. 4) I disagree. 5)I will ignore this, because it is too much waste of time. Science did not properly even exist at the time.EDIT: I meant that terminology was different. Wikipedia. Communist idiot is trying to make me look like idiot. Poor choice of words. Science absolutely existed, but when I quickly checked wiki, it was written there that those words had slightly different meaning. I was in a hurry and I have no clue how that could happen in 19th century. 6) Capitalism has ideals? Turn into one monopol or something? Nothing else comes mind. Tldr? 7)I think I never said socialism in entire post. I was trying to get closer on how real communism should more or less look like. What we had here was socialism. You will say some bullshit about it no being real socialism, but I think I waste time. 8) YOU. PUT. ALL. POWER. INTO. A. STATE. When that happens, people in power take advantage of it. What happens is the only logical conclusion. It happened every single time. What is there to not understand? Do not tell me that we want back this monstrous system. Capitalism is much better for us.
tldr “I don’t care about your opinion because my opinion is right and I don’t have to back it up”
It’s insane how dismissive you manage to be while also not substantiating any of your claims in any meaningful way aside from vaguely gesturing at communism itself or saying that it’s not worth talking about
you keep saying “communists don’t know this or that about communism” and that you’re trying to discover what “communism might look like” when I told you in my first comment that trying to predict the minutia of communism is utopian
science didn’t exist at the time … Wikipedia says that it had different terminology. Where mistake? EDIT: Poor choice of words. I was in hurry to end this. I will summarize what I wrote. Socialism puts all power into state->totalitarianism. No thanks. Czechia truly does not want Socialism. We have here communist disgraces, but they are really just pro-Russia. Nothing communist about them. Trying to predict details of communism is… utopia? Am I translating this right? How are even supposed to build communism when we currently cannot predict it? EDIT: It is also funny how you took that science out of context.
I’m honestly still not sure what you mean by science didn’t exist at the time or what context you might be referring to
You aren’t supposed to build communism, we are supposed to build socialism, only when generations are reared in the social conditions of the socialist mode of production, and the international conditions allow, and the productive capacity allows, can the transition from socialism to communism take place.
Basically we are too far off from communism to build it directly and to predict the fine details of what it may look like, we need to build socialism first
Not at all. I found it entertaining all it took was a simple post to get banned from your echo chamber. Shouldn’t you be posting some Chinese spin on Western happenings? “World News”… Lol
Idk, as a socialist I look at it as a broadly genuine effort to create socialism that came before its time in a fairly unfavorable place which then failed precisely because the conditions weren’t really favorable plus there were no real historical antecedents so by definition they didn’t really know what they were doing.
It merits study, I don’t hate everything I see from the USSR (free healthcare, free higher education, heavily subsidized rents, and a policy of full employment don’t all seem like bad things) but more look to it as a historical example and less as a model.
In some ways I think it could be compared to the French revolution – it’s not that the French Revolution and its collapse into Bonapartism proved that abolishing feudalism and establishing a freer social order was fundamentally impossible, it just proved that the conditions weren’t really in place in France in the 1790’s.
Then of course the USSR heavily influenced most other revolutions that came after it during the 20th century so now we have mountains of data about how that specific approach just doesn’t seem to be very effective.
This is generally the thought process that Marxists have. The USSR definitely wasn’t perfect, but it is the first real example that the proletariat was capable of uniting and other throwing the capitalist system. The USSR is fantastic to study to try and determine why it failed. Similarly China is a great resource to study to understand how capitalism can be re-established from within the party.
Most modern communist groups actively engaging in an attempt at revolution were inspired by the Chinese revolution and the cultural revolution that came after it, but none of them are trying to recreate the USSR or China because as we can clearly see those states failed to maintain a socialist character.
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