Poland? UA? WTF?! What are your sources, sir? This looks and very likely is bullshit. My grandparents would never vote for the communists.
EDIT: Tankies are persistent and I did not want to write where I live so here it goes. Czechia is utter bullshit. We still have Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia and it has been recently voted out of parliament. Finally. 30 years too late.
The sources are quite literally listed and in some countries more than 50% said no. Sounds like your grandparents are some of the no’s represented in the data. I’m not sure what point you think you’re making?
If you read the actual articals, they’re not saying they want to return to communism, like at all. They’re saying they’re not satisfied with the EUs extent of democracy, and want to become more democratic.
I also like how there’s no data for like the most anti soviet regions. Searching for the source at the bottom only gave me the same picture in a ifunny post so I’m assuming this is bullshit.
…did you read this whole thing? Or just take the numbers and run with it?
Overall, residents who are more educated are less likely to say the collapse harmed their country and more likely to say it benefited them. Kyrgyzstan is the exception.
Residents who say that “most people” in their country are afraid to openly express their political views are more likely to say that the collapse harmed their country than those who say that “no one” is afraid. This suggests the freedom they thought they might have after the fall of the Soviet Union has not materialized – and in some cases, the situation may be even worse. Under the strict regime in Tajikistan, for example, 61% of those who say most people are afraid also say the breakup hurt their country, compared with 35% of those who say no one is afraid.
Also:
Overall, residents who see opportunities for their children and themselves to succeed are more likely to say the breakup benefited their country than those who do not. Thirty percent of residents of these former republics who say children in their country have the opportunity to learn and grow say their country benefited, compared with 18% who do not think children have this opportunity. And in all countries, residents who say people in their countries can get ahead through hard work are twice as likely to say their country benefited (29%) than those who do not think they can get ahead (17%)
How is any of this proof that these countries should return to communism? It sounds like education, freedom of political expression and those who see opportunity in themselves and their children are all factors in people turning their backs to communism.
residents in seven out of 11 countries that were part of the union are more likely to believe its collapse harmed their countries than benefited them
I just quoted literally verbatim what the pollers said. You can deep dive looking for cope all you want but the fact remains that people see the change to capitalism as making their countries worse. If you want to get more upset you can read my other longer comment.
I did go back and go through what you posted. At the end of the article about Hungary. There’s a “read more” link, which expands the article to include this:
However, these findings do not mean Hungarians are rejecting democratic values. In fact, as the survey illustrates, they are more likely than other former Eastern bloc publics to say it is very important to live in a country with democratic rights and institutions. But few believe Hungary currently has these democratic freedoms.
However, when reviewing these gloomy findings about the state of democracy in Hungary, it is worth remembering that they do not mean Hungarians are abandoning democratic values. To the contrary, Hungarians continue to want democratic rights and institutions — in fact, they place a higher premium on these things than their post-communist neighbors. When asked to rate the importance of six key features of democracy, Hungarians stand out for their strong embrace of democratic values.
The challenge for Hungary is that, while most Hungarians want democratic values and institutions, few think they have them. For instance, 70% think it is very important to live in a country with honest multiparty elections, but only 17% believe this describes Hungary very well. Taking the median percentage saying these values are very important in each country and comparing it with the median percentage saying these values describe their country very well gives us an overall “democracy gap” for each country. The gap is large throughout Eastern Europe, but is widest in Hungary — evidence that Hungarians, who once pioneered the transition away from communism, are not turning their backs on democracy. Instead, they are frustrated by the fact that democracy has yet to fully flourish in their country.
So they absolutely aren’t saying they want to return to communism. Like, at all. They’re just frustrated that joining the EU isn’t the democratic form of governance they were hopping for, and are dissatisfied with that.
…are you just ignoring what I just wrote above? Lol. They don’t correlate with greater support for communism. The numbers don’t mean they want to go back to communism, they mean they want more democracy.
They want more democratic results that represent the people. Something they had under communism, and something that no liberal democracy actually provides. In a bourgeoise-democracy you get a choice between multiple parties none of which represent the people. In a proletarian-democracy you get proletarian results. Such is the nature of dictatorships of class.
You seem to be outright lying (to yourself, perhaps?) In the face of evidence against your claims. Communism only provides “more democratic results that represent the people” in a utopian setting, of which Hungary under communism certainly did not. The artical outright states that the people behind the dissatisfaction numbers believe they don’t have a democracy, which makes so much sense now that u/maynarkh has explained that the very same elite under under communist rule solidified themselves into Hungary’s new government. Jesus. No wonder they’re unsatisfied.
Listen, I know it’s no fun to have your beliefs shaken, heaven knows that’s happened to me a few times and it sucks. But instead of digging your heels in and trying to twist the words of the articles you linked that you honestly believed backed up your claims, either find ones that actually do, or drop this one, cause anyone with a brain can figure out it actually doesnt.
You claimed in an earlier comment that those of us against communism outright lie to reach our claims. I honestly didn’t think you’d get offended if I suggested the same of you, so I apologize if I offended you.
Your willingness to cut off our conversation due to being offended over the suggestion you might be lying to yourself is pretty convenient. I was hoping you’d read what I wrote and think about it. You don’t have to change your views or beliefs, certainly, but engaging in these conversations is how you hone and are able to defend your beliefs on general.
I understand that up until now, Lemmy has been mostly made of anti-capitalists, so it can be jarring when pro-capitolists flood the space and push back against what’s essentially been an anti-capitalist circle-jerk. Totally understandable.
There’s always worse. In the early 2000s there was a movement calling for a state referendum on abolishing a particularly stupid institution that basically allowed every Hungarian politician to claim as much expenses as they wanted, without limit or even a need to show receipts.
The movement was successful in collecting enough signatures, but the government just abolished the institution before the referendum, re-establishing it under a different name just months later, so the signatures didn’t count.
Those signatures collected however show up for nominations for micro-parties no one heard about which divide the opposition vote. Mind that 20 years have passed, and many signatories are dead. The leaders of these micro-parties get public funds for campaigning, which they always steal, and the party is always disbanded before any serious investigation would happen. The government is okay with this.
The head commissar of the National Police from communist times is the current Minister of Interior. Also, he was a board member in Hungary’s largest bank during the brief time he wasn’t in the government in some way.
Half a dozen ministers from Orbán’s government shared a dorm room with him back when he was secretary for the Young Communists.
Unlike most neighbouring countries, the documents detailing covert interior security agents have not been publicly released. The people of the old Hungarian State Security who were tasked with finding out, torturing and killing counterrevolutionaries are now occupying seats in the parliament, government and opposition alike.
So lol yes, they are. Except they now pretend to be fascists instead of pretending to be communists.
Under capitalism the political class are subservient to the financial elite. You are making a hierarchy error, these people are puppets to the real elite.
Orbán is the richest man in Hungary. He is the financial elite. There was one person who has been used by him as a strawman and thus was in the same league financially, and then he tried to go against him. The guy is out of the country and has been stripped of most of his money.
You’re applying US patterns to places you don’t understand. In Hungary, the old communist elite saved their power and transferred it into the new capitalist system, that morphed into the current hybrid regime. It resembles Russia more than anything else, with the same pattern that you can’t be independently wealthy in Hungary.
They didn’t say you’re American, they’re saying you’re applying US patterns to places you don’t understand, which you certainly don’t have to be American to do.
I didn’t say that, only that there is no one “capitalist” system with patterns that apply everywhere. You said that the government of Hungary is subservient to its financial class, but there is no financial class in Hungary that’s separate from the government.
Didn’t the USSR just do state capitalism, and not actual communism or socialism? And weren’t they also totalitarian & also not a democracy? Are people actually asking for what was happening in astern Europe or something else?
In Germany the left leaning parties want that shit. It sucks. They side with Russia atm as well and a lot of them just have this odd nostalgia for the time
Which is what you describe, is once again based on Marxism-Leninism (some would want to shove a little dong after another hyphen, but it still remains the same shit regardless), and can go rot in hell.
I don’t question your good faith (in regard to your other comment). But I can’t point you to such a country, because unfortunately, all we’ve seen of communism at such a scale until now has been based on this Marxism-Leninism pile of crap (Stalinism, Maoism, and whatnot). That’s the unfortunate truth, and why the simple mention of communism makes people’s blood run cold. It’s a meme at this point to say “real communism hasn’t been attempted” but there’s a part of truth in that; only a specific current has been, and each time proved that said current is a pungent pile.
Since communism is a dialectic philosophy, we could think that ML would’ve been thrown to its rightful place, the trash bin, but alas, some people are too attached to following a dated and distorted dogma to actually respect the ever evolving imperative of the movement.
The core problem with communism is humanity itself, it goes directly against the human nature. There is a 0% possibility of it working with humans.
The theory may sound appealing, but in the end its less sustainable than any other political system. One will always take advantage of the obvious flaws in the system.
I couldn’t disagree more, I see human nature as something more nurtured than innate, and traces of healed wounds on bones found on archaeological sites rather demonstrate that caring for the weak, the community, prevailed over selfishness. Let’s pretend it is as you say: even then, our nature isn’t something immutable, else, males would still drag their female to the cave by the hair whenever they want to mate, and it would be seen as socially acceptable. This can change through time and conscious efforts (even negatively, and it won’t surprise you if I say that it’s how I see our current individualism and glorification of power-mongering).
Personally, I don’t see a forceful change as viable; it should be done slowly and steadily while ensuring that outside forces don’t hinder the movement, or distort it to their own benefit. But first, we should throw away this warped crap that is Marxism-Leninism once and for all, draw the useful conclusions from its failures, and adapt the movement accordingly; evolving is after all supposed to be one of communism’s core components (just like humans, dare I say).
Your points make little sense regarding human nature.
In a world of houndeds saving one is a necessary thing for the groups survival.
In a world of Billions, you just replace a lost one with the next, just like we replace broken parts in a Mashine, its a unfortunate truth that everyone is replaceable now, even if we hypothetically clean a entire country out of existence, it would barely impact the rest of humanity, shure it would be in the news a few days, but after that… I doubt you feel actually sorry when hearing or even seeing death to strangers, same with misery, you might think about it for a few weeks, but it goes away and your life goes on. Thats why communism is absolutely impossible.
What is possible is a social market economy, wich is a democratic system but with limitations on capitalistic problems to ensure that even the lowest of society aren’t treated like human garbage. But even that is hard to implement in places like China or USA.
There is no perfection, especially in Politics, there will always be pros and cons to everything.
The Way we chose and will choose will always be paved with corpses and misery. It will never change unless we change the human itself.
Your points make little sense regarding human nature.
I kindly throw that ball back at you. To humor your vision of an immutable nature, it urges us more to run naked in the woods among our close relatives than to form planet-scale social structures. But again, I’ll pretend it’s how things are (accounting for the whole comment, not just the quoted part): the answer appears as evident as reducing the scale of our social structures, and work towards degrowth; and hey, it just so happens to be the form of communism I’m advocating for! 😛
I doubt you feel actually sorry when hearing or even seeing death to strangers
Just wanted to specifically touch on that: first, I find it detrimental to a sane analysis to assume our own vision of things as the norm, you’d be better of if able to detach yourself further, but you do you.
And second, do you need a strong emotional response to something in order to care about it? Having been emotionally numb for as long as I can remember, it’s something I genuinely can’t understand. Seeing things through an analytical lens as well as my values is enough, I don’t need to feel outraged by something to keep in mind at long term that it should be addressed: envisioning a feminicide, a school-shooting, or a mining accident as the result of (to grossly and simplistically summarize) a lack of education, lack of proper mental care, or lacking/exploitative policies, and acting accordingly at my level seems, to use the term once again, more sane.
Ah, here’s the issue: my mind was set on a casual exchange, yours on wanting to come out on top.
you have the same mindset as a conspiracy theorist
Would you mind elaborating on this, even succinctly?
Edit: well then, I’ll have to guess that it’s bouncing off and answering when in a discussion, as well as advising to take a step back when analyzing, that makes me the same as a conspiracy theorist 🤣
Every single one that isn’t more interested in installing a new bourgeoisie (so themselves) than giving power to the people. And most ironically, Marxism, since old beardo’s ideas have been practically more perverted by his own partisans than by his opposition…
Okay, what’s one of them, though? Can you point to a country that currently has this going on? I’m not trying to do a gotcha here, I’m genuinely curious.
That’s kind of the point of horseshoe economics, “the people own the economy” is impossible to implement without an intermediate agency to actually oversee the day to day of said economy.
What’s that entity? The government. Any conceptual type of non-state entity would just be governance in nature regardless of title, and therefore still essentially operate as “a state” if not the same state that the federal government exists as.
Though as someone who works in modern IT I foresee the future of robotics and AGI allowing for the kind of economic automation that would make communism inevitable eventually as jobs are reduced over time in the course of the next hundred or two hundred years.
Though as someone who works in modern IT I foresee the future of robotics and AGI allowing for the kind of economic automation that would make communism inevitable eventually as jobs are reduced over time in the course of the next hundred or two hundred years.
Yeah, I thought that too, but now that we’re getting some rudimentary functional AI and robotics, what we’re seeing is companies using it to save them money - basically automating work that would be done by highly paid specialists, contractors, or outside companies. And they are not investimg in it to automate low paid rote work because the human labor is cheap enough that a big automation investment only yields gains long term - and businesses have been focused on short term gains for the last few decades. So, automation, in the short term at least, is really just limiting our opportunities for more satisfying work.
What’s more likely to happen in the short term is that the pressure to adopt new tools will fall on the worker. AI and robotics won’t take your job, but someone using them will.
You talked about the long term, hundreds of years, and it’s difficult to speculate how our society would work then. But… work and money is a form of social control. There will be significant pressure as jobs disappear to ensure the populous is still working to earn something that the ruling class has more of. Nothing short of a looooonnnnnnng term political change or violent upheaval of power dynamics will change that. Now, is that possible in the time scale of hundreds on years? Maybe, but I find it hard to believe that those in power would easily give up the very thing that gives them their power.
if the government owns the economy (i.e. plans it) and the people don’t control the government (i.e. no or bad democracy), then it is state capitalism.
Critical thinking needs a bit of work there buddy. That’s exactly my point: the USSR did not have communist policies, it wasn’t even based on communism. It was an authoritarian state-capitalist regime which called itself socialist (not even communist), much like North Korea calls itself a democratic republic.
State Capitalism a term used exclusively by a vocal minority of leftists to gaslight, revise and no-true-Scotsman historical events to fit their ideological world-view.
As a term, communist state is used by Western historians, political scientists, and media to refer to these countries. However, these states do not describe themselves as communist nor do they claim to have achieved communism, as it would constitute an oxymoron—they refer to themselves as socialist states that are in the process of constructing socialism.
Finally someone understands. Read the DPRK’s constitution, and it makes perfect sense. They are ran by a working class party and you’re free to vote for outside parties if they represent your interests more. Free/cheap healthcare, education, and housing. Working abroad programs. Many religions are practiced, and you may learn English or Mandarin alongside Korean to boost your opportunities.
I guess that’s the best way put it I saw in this post. I’d just add that after growing up in soviet and postsoviet state, and later coming to western Europe, my first impression was that they somehow almost managed to build here what “communist” soviet party tried to build so unsuccessfully.
Even Marx thought that path to communism is through capitalism, what soviet state did is something very different.
Didn’t the USSR just do state capitalism, and not actual communism or socialism?
The Soviet idea was that 1) if it’s state-owned, then it’s people-owned and not capitalism, 2) it’s people-owned, because USSR is a union of soviet republics, where soviet is a democratic (initially) entity, 3) it’s socialism, not communism, as we’ve not built that yet, 4) it’s still socialism as we use money to buy things and not receive them as we need automatically, as the planning precision doesn’t allow for this.
(A soviet is initially like an elected body, where every member on level zero is elected by constituency, like certain factory’s workers or inhabitants of some street, as this thing was static in the USSR, or on every level above zero by an underlying level soviet ; the main difference between this and normal democracies is that those factory workers or that underlying soviet can vote anytime to recall and replace their representative, which turned out to make it more authoritarian all by itself ; well, also obviously these in fact decided nothing in the USSR anyway, the party structures did).
Yup. Also shot the anarchists, that worked with them and wanted democracy, in the back of the head during a meeting, The USSR then also did imperialism in their neighboring countries, deported a ton of people from those countries to death camps in siberia and allied with the nazies dividing Europe in their treaty
I wish we could look at what the ussr did right and how it worked around its restrictions without rose tinted glasses. Some central planning of efficient railways and large industrial machinery might not be a bad idea. Lezz a fair doesn’t always produce great results. Walkable neighborhoods and commie blocks aren’t such a bad idea but fascist dictators are.
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bïtch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.
Say what you will about the USSR, but it took a bunch of peasant farmers under exploitative monarchy and literally rocketed them into a global superpower in, what, 2 generations? While weathering the immediate tangible effects of two world wars, and staying competitive against the capitalistic world power that remained virtually untouched in both wars and casually claimed industrial supremacy by virtue of that fact.
How great can capitalism be if the capitalists had a multi-century head start, better natural resources, advantageous geography, a bigger population, and it was still close?
it took a bunch of peasant farmers under exploitative monarchy and literally rocketed them into a global superpower in, what, 2 generations?
Russia was a superpower to begin with. The communists took over the Russian empire and it nearly lost them ww2 (in the beginning). What are you talking about?
They did lose WW1 because of the revolution, that’s true, or rather stepped out of it, but that’s not what I was talking about. I meant the beginning of the WW2 and the Russian invasion which was a huge disaster overall. They managed to come out of it on top, but the cost was ridiculous. (Edited my original comment for clarification).
I’m calling them a superpower even if they were not on par with UK, France and Prussia, they were a bigger power than the Austro-Hungarian empire or the Ottoman empire at the time.
I’m not praising tzarist Rusia. It was a shit place, a reminesscence of feudalism after the industrial revolution. I’m simply trying to argue the fact that it was communism which allowed them the progress. They started from pretty high up to begin with. In fact, the two major examples, China and Rusia, while in some sort of identity crisis when they switched to communism, were historical powerhouses to begin with.
Other, no power houses who went communist didn’t fare so well. Cuba, North Korea, countries in the Balkans …
I don’t think you can really compare pre and post industrial superpowers, especially measured specifically against the ridiculously advantageous position of the mid century USA (perhaps I should have said nuclear superpower, or space-faring). And pretty much everyone in the hemisphere “nearly” lost WW2
pretty much everyone in the hemisphere “nearly” lost WW2
I reread my comment and it was ambiguous. I meant nearly lost the war in the beginning due to lack of leadership which they basically executed early in the revolution.
You’re right, nearly all of Europe lost in that war. The only two winners were USA and USSR
History is rife with "nearly"s. The USSR had to content with y’know, actually being in the middle of both world wars and suffering the material consequences. And then went on to go toe-to-toe with the golden child of capitalism (safely nestled on its distant continent, far from the material consequences of war, with all the post-war industrial economic advantages that wrought).
The US had a freakish advantage, no one should have gotten even close. And the USSR got smacked down bad through both wars. And yet, they were stiff competition. It’s like gloating that your thoroughbred greyhound barely beat out a half-blind, 3-legged street dog in a race. The fact that it was close should be your sign.
That’s a very narrow view of what happened after the second world war. URSS occupied half of the European continent. It basically was the last empire in Europe with all the resources and human capital at its disposal to do anything it wanted. Not to mention war reparations.
And it lost. The ideology wasn’t working. It took 40 years for that empire to collapse, but collapse it did because it was built on the wrong principles.
I asked for examples of international sanctions which USSR & their allies couldn’t match. That book is about CIA and US crappy foreign policy. If you say that CIA actions where themselves sanctions against USSR, then surely KGB should have solved the issue.
The book is very clearly focused on US intervention directly against the USSR and other socialist regimes. Did you even glance through the table of contents?
Are you suggesting that we ignore this significant, direct interference from an abnormally advantaged superpower as a contributing factor to the USSR’s downfall? That’s simply illiterate.
No, I’ve already dismissed the narrative that poor little USSR had a disadvantage against the big bad US when I pointed out that they abusively occupied half of Europe at the end of WW2 and had influence over a lot more of it. If you’re bringing up secret services and you’re saying that the US one was better at its job, then you’re simply pointing out that the USSR one was incompetent.
In one corner, an uninterrupted economy bolstered on the global scale by not being a smoldering pile of ashes. In the other, the ruins of post-war Europe, juggling reconstruction and revolution.
Your analysis is either deliberately disingenuous, or feeble-mindedly impotent. I’m not interested in either. Read a book.
Oh spare me of that song played on the world’s smallest violin. That’s the stupidest take an the whole situation that I’ve ever seen. “Read a book”… yeah, the poor little witch being burned alive by Hansel and Gretel… Is that how you view that story too?
Exploit the global poor and extrajudicially unseat duly elected leaders around the world to subvert the democratic will of foreign citizens and maintain capitalist hegemony? Who did your daddy tell you the hungry witch was?
That was you, but your reading comprehension is not surprising. Maybe try some sources besides right wing propaganda. Good luck in life, you’ll need it.
You’re obviously taking pleasure in debating an idea. Obviously so do I. However, you need more training. You have to add more support to your arguments and contradict the opposing arguments with facts that hold up. You have to concede points and counterpoint when possible. And most importantly, you have to bring datapoints to your claims.
At the moment you’re only putting out ideas with very little data. When I asked for examples of sanctions and international pressure, I was expecting something like this which is concrete. The “Killing Hope” is a really bad data point because it doesn’t support your claim directly and it is “fictional” 3rd party data from a biased source.
With the examples of actual sanctions, I would have pointed that USSR and their allies which included China and strong economic ties with India had its own access to resources and economic development and could impose sanctions of their own. In fact, I can point out that USSR controlled by itself a land area comparable to the entire NATO alliance today and that between them and China, they occupy considerably more landmass and have considerably more population.
In fact, those sanctions were not going to make any dent in the actual USSR economy. That wasn’t the goal (since it was impossible to achieve). They were meant to weaken the relationship with the communist buffer states such as Romania, Poland, Hungary and they did to a certain extent.
But, of course, USSR was doing the same thing in what has been the US back yard: South America. Countries like Argentina, Uruguay, Brasil were being aided by the USSR with loans, technology and technical leadership in order to remove them from the US influence sphere. And USSR was more successful than USA at doing this. In fact, Romania, Poland, Hungary only became US allies after the collapse of the USSR while the south american countries were closer to USSR since the 70s.
The discussion from here either goes backwards in history to how Russia had a late start or goes into economic details for a while, but ultimately it always ends in the same place: one model collapsed, one didn’t.
I grew up in eastern europe. I’m intimately acquainted with the philosophy, propaganda and history of the area. More than just 3rd party information. I’m also familiar with the Russian culture and arts. This was the only foreign culture allowed to be imported into my country for obvious reasons before the 90s.
I’ve had similar discussions through my life and I’m frankly disappointed in this one. But keep practicing, you’ll get better at it. A hint: learn from the facts presented by others even if you don’t agree with the interpretation. It helps in the long run
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
A lot of eastern Europeans actually miss/look back fondly on the USSR days… I’m not exactly a fan of them or other “communist” regimes, as they were all basically thinly veiled dictatorships, but standard of living was higher for most of the former block countries.
I really don’t get all the china dick riding going on. I gotta think it’s driven by bots and Chinese netizens. The west is a little unfair on their views of China, but they grab descenters with secret police and quash any form of opposition to their one party system. People who praise them and act like that’s a better system are crazy. Really wish we could build some decent highspeed rail network in America though…
Yup. There’s basically never been a true communist state. Theyve all been dictatorships that attempt to establish communism. Which is a long drawn out process. The dictatorship gets entreched and never really gives up power.
The ruling class/wealthy if a country will never willingly agree to communism. They have too much to lose. So it always happens by revolution, which will always have a strong military leader to succeed. Human nature makes this always play out in a similar fashion regardless of that leaders initial intent.
The political climate in china is a lot more complicated than we in the west generally understand. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around a lot of the pro-china stuff I see in online left spaces. I don’t feel prepared to make any for or against points in regard to China, but when you start asking more precise questions about Chinese government and society it becomes easier to see the bigger picture. Economically, they’re very odd, but a lot closer to a socialist economy than the US or Europe is. My biggest criticisms are social issues, the Uyghur concentration camps, LGBT rights, the COVID lockdowns, etc. But to simply call them fascist is incorrect
So what reforms have they enacted the last decades that could be considered socialist. To me the chinese communist party seem closer aligned with the ideals and actions of the NSDAP.
I’m from an ex soviet country and I can tell you that the people who miss it are the ones who got free apartments and property from people who were kidnapped and sent to the soviet death camps in siberia. I have not met anyone else who misses that time when you had to live in constant fear being deported and worked to death and when your culture and language was basically criminalised.
That never happened in a lot of ex soviet countries. Not saying that type of communism was good but there were enough positives under that system where normal people benefited in some ways and that is why a lot of older people remember those days fondly even if they were just normal unconnected wokers.
It’s possible some ex soviet countries didn’t get their dose of ethnic/cultural cleansing and maybe even had a good life under it but by no means were living standards better back then unless their countries have really gone down the toilet now and most countries are doing better now.
I can’t say older people mentioned food was higher quality which might be true due to how modern companies minmax the quality of it for profit and housing market today does feel slavelike. It’s probably overall better due to more freedoms but not as good as it should be due to corruption and lobbying.
Huh? Food was incredibly one sided in soviet times, that’s like the one thing that everyone knows if they know anything about the soviet occupation. Like you had to have connections to get any variety. My parents for example made their own vodka and cooking greese and traded it for more varied food. What the soviets did good was apartment design because before apartments didn’t commonly come with a kitchen and bathroom.
Also housing was different then, you usually got an apartment with your job and you kept it while you had that job but most of Eastern Europe still has affordable housing. Like I bought a newly built 3 room apartment in the capital for 100k euros fairly recently.
I have no idea what it was in Soviet Union but other countries have a variety of foods and candy made by local companies and people that ate those in those days and eat current ones say the quality is worse. This is backed up by the companies changing the recipes and ingredients. Though this basically happens everywhere now. 100k is fairly cheap other countries and capitals costs way more than 100k. I doubt you would get something like that even in the cheaper boroughs.
You can check Estonian real estate sites if you don’t believe me. You can get a cheaper apartment easily. Like the cheapest 1 room ones are like 40k and outside the capital it’s way cheaper still or it was last I checked but that was no more than 5 years ago.
Local candies and food production is definitely a thing here now but according to my parents it was less prominent during the soviet era because you were obligated to give some of your production away to the occupiers. The most famous local candy companies is definitely still running and taste the same according to my mom, they are called Kalev if you wanna look them up.
I looked at Prague prices and it’s insane and Nestle bought a ton of candy companies in the EU and cheapened the product which is as expected from Nestle.
You can get a cheaper apartment easily. Like the cheapest 1 room ones are like 40k and outside the capital it’s way cheaper still or it was last I checked.
??? No idea what this is referencing, as far as I know nothing like that has happened. The soviets gulaged a lot of people and many fled during that occupation but nothing as dramatic like half the population.
Not really. A lot of Russian citizens left or where made to leave when Estonia got it’s independence back but outside of that I don’t think there has been a major population shift.
According to the Estonian census it dropped between 1990 - 2015 (period after we got our independence back) and has been on an uptick since then. Though the massive drop right after 1990 is when soviet citizens left.
No idea why that graph is predicting that the population will halve in 80 years, seems a little ridiculous considering Estonian birth rate is fine and the population has been increasing for like 8 years.
A lot of eastern Europeans actually miss/look back fondly on the USSR days…
Being from here, I can say that those are are people who either 1. Look back fondly just because they were young back then, and now they’re old, or 2. Were connected enough to the party to be privileged.
Grandparents from one side of my family were the latter, and their political views nowadays are strongly pro-Russian these days, while everyone else(whose lives were improved after fall of USSR) is pro-Western. Funny how that works.
From my eastern block friends they are very confused how the USA could have allowed homelessness, they remember the bread lines so it’s not all great memories, but they do talk about how everyone at least had a home, a job and some standard of living - where it seems the standard of living is higher in Western countries.
From my eastern block friends they are very confused how the USA could have allow homelessness
Yeah, looking from the outside, the USA seems like it’s in a mess that it needs to fix.
but they do talk about how everyone at least had a home and some standard of living - where it seems the standard of living is higher in Western countries.
It is easy to look back at worse times in the past with pink glasses of nostalgia… Yes, everyone did have a home, but the standard of living was piss-poor - except for people with connections, who had it much muuuuch better, like my aforementioned grandparents.
I’m from one of the Baltic states, and honestly the standards of living now are much better for the vast majority of people than it was in the USSR, even for minimum wage earners.
Just speaking to the first one as I have some experience regarding that, the reason people feel Hungary has been a better place to live under communism might be because of any of the following:
First and foremost, Hungary was living beyond its means after 1970. The ruling communist elite (this term should be an oxymoron, but somehow it seems it isn’t) fearing an upheaval because of the global economic downturn, started to take out loans to keep the country placated. Hungary was never able to repay this, and indeed its liabilities only grew under the communist regime.
The current set of idiots changing one another actually have to have the country repay all that money. So yeah, Hungarians feel that living in a mansion bought on a loan so to speak was much better than having to pay for it and getting evicted.
Speaking of the current idiotic leadership, Hungary never really ousted the communist regime, so they transitioned into the new elite. Most current Hungarian politicians were well positioned in the previous system, or were outright party members.
Regarding the current leadership and why people feel that the EU is bad for them, Hungary spends more money on anti-EU propaganda than its whole education system and has done so for more than the past decade.
In no other Central or Eastern European country surveyed did so many believe that economic life is worse now than during the communist era.
No other Central or Eastern European country is so blatantly serving the interests of Russia and China over its own and (that of its aliies’) either. Maybe that’s not a coincidence.
Just 46% of Hungarians approve of their country’s switch from a state-controlled economy to a market economy
Calling Hungary’s economy a “market economy” would imply that the majority of Hungary’s capital assets is not captured by government aligned interests.
I don’t personally have experience with the rest, but what you’ve written implies Hungary would be better under communism. The truth is, Hungary has a huge voter bloc that wants to go back to communism, and they elect fascists that promise to do it. The result is obvious.
Oh, the transition to communism wasn’t simple either, Hungary set the still-unbroken world record for hyperinflation in the fist years of communism, when they managed to inflate their whole money supply to a collective value of 0.3 US cent. So those guys were obviously saying “we were better under the monarchists!”. And they were in clear majority, before communist elites in Hungary called in Soviet troops to reestablish the repression.
It’s truly bizarre to me how when eastern Europeans like us talk about our countries, our opinions don’t matter because some poll contradicts us. You know far better than I do what was and is going on in Hungary, but talking about Romania like the streets were paved in gold during the communist period is utterly bizarre. Many families spent their life savings on getting smuggled out of the country via Serbia, the government covered up pogroms against the Roma, many Hungarian minority towns were intentionally disadvantaged, and Jews, while initially huge supporters of the Romanian communist movement (for obvious reasons), were later systematically purged from any position of power and the government eventually came up with a deal with Israel to get Israel to pay thousands of dollar per Jew allowed to leave.
None of these sound like the hallmarks of an equitable, safe and stable society.
To be honest, I think most of these people are edgy contrarian Western people if not straight up agitators. Yes, the current US system does abhorrent things. Yes, it is often hypocritical against Russian and Chinese policies. But the mental gymnastics required to go from “US imperialism and worker exploitation bad” to “Russian / Chinese imperialism and worker exploitation good” is a huge leap.
I can’t speak to the rest of it, but about Romanians who “would have voted for Ceausescu”: they overwhelmingly tend to be village hicks or people directly hurt by the mad scramble during the post-soviet period where communist party officials sold themselves everything that wasn’t nailed down for nothing.
It’s also worth mentioning that PSD is overwhelmingly the old communist party under a new name, and they are despised by a large number of Romanians.
EDIT: Also, to address the “better off” part: yes, that is true. If you were white, male and ethnically Romanian. Minorities like the Hungarians and Roma had a really bad time. To be a “good communist woman” you were expected to be a baby factory to increase the population and denied birth control.
It is clear just exactly who ruled the party during communism when you look at PSD’s policy. Being in favour of a privatised energy sector is not very socialist at all. To me this just shows how little value they put on socialist values and paradigms back then too.
No socialist project can work long term when built with a small number of people at the top, determining everything. Power needs to be as spread out as possible.
I mean acting like Poland was communist or socialist under Stalin and the USSR is like saying north Korea is a democratic people’s republic under the Kims. Regardless of the merits of or against socialism, this argument is pretty silly.
Idk if I speak for other people here but being critical of capitalism doesn’t necessarily mean you want to copy paste North Korea. Or the Ukrainian SSR.
weed is legal in north korea. in the United states i was busted for pot. lost my right to vote, can only work in fast food now, am subject to search and seizure with out warrant.
i am am now basically a noncitizen
Lithuanianz have just never lived in a capitalist police state
classic grass seems greener on the other side.
can someone help me get my rights back (i. e. become a refugee in north korea)
Well in North Korea you do not have a right to vote, work where they tell you to, and you are subject to imprisonment without a warrant or any probable cause. And make sure to not get pregnant in your prison camp since the guards have no qualms tying you to a tree and cutting it out of you.
But sure, be a refugee in North Korea. Sounds fun. /s
I kind of doubt you do live in the US. My information comes from people who have been in prison camps there. I really do not give two shits about your testimony.
Doesn’t create a global and national elite of rich people
For a long time I’ve seen communism, as in: planned economy, and no ruling class (the latter the USSR failed to achieve, it seems) as the solution. But nowadays I don’t know. I don’t know if marxism in it’s original form is enough to explain society, and I don’t think anarchist communism, collectivism, mutualism whatever can work on a large scale. Social democracy doesn’t seem like it’s enough, either.
What do you mean “now what?” lol. Assuming an American-centric or Euro-centric point of view, they would use their extremely expensive military armaments that can’t be purchased in large quantities by private organizations, and crush the rebellion. The government is the government because they have a monopoly on violence.
I mean, really. Their money is in banks subject to the oversight of the countries they’re trying to raise an army against. People may be relatively cheap, but they still need to be paid quite a bit to attempt to fight the military head on. Freeze their accounts and they’re screwed. Musk’s entire fortune isn’t even a single years worth of funding for the US military, and even if all the billionaires pooled their money it would take years to accumulate the excess hardware that is allowed to be sold and then train their PMCs on hardware. Years that they wouldn’t have if a bill was passed to cap wealth inequality.
We may yet reach the corporate dystopia where businesses can directly challenge governments, but we’re not quite there yet. At least not in the first world. Russia may have shot itself in its confusion, but that’s because the rich already are the government there.
To authorize repelling a slowly gathering military coup? That’s an incredibly low bar to commit treason, since honestly, even at the highest levels military bureaucrats aren’t going to be much wealthier than 10 mil. Unlike Congress, there’s a much closer eye kept on the finances of military leaders because they’re paranoid about foreign nations bribing them. It’s physical national security, which is one of the few areas that money doesn’t hold absolute power.
Even if they stood to lose a few million, there are plenty of genuine patriots, as well as people smart enough to realize that overthrowing the government by force does not mean the law instigating it gets repealed, but that the entire legal structure of the United States is no longer functioning. That’s fifty different militias reporting to states, Naval, Army, and Marine branches with hundreds of billions of dollars in ordinance that’s explicitly empowered to not follow unethical or illegal orders. It’d be a disaster for the coup throwers unless they managed a movie villain level simultaneous takeover of the Pentagon.
I’m not saying a coup is impossible, but the idea of rich people successfully overthrowing the American government by “hiring an army” is so cursed to failure that I almost don’t know where to even start. Could they cause unprecedented chaos and potentially kill a large portion of the government? Possibly. Could they succeed? Absolutely not.
Also, this whole chain completely ignores the fact that Congress would never set the cap at 10 million. I doubt they’d set it at a hundred million. My bet would be one billion, where it wouldn’t actually affect any of them. Were they to actually pass a 10 million dollar cap, the world would be such a different place that we wouldn’t need to worry about a handful of grumpy generals inciting treason.
That’s a bit of an arbitrary figure. Also wealth isn’t really money as much as it is things.
Take a house, for example. You only really need one. The monetary value of the house depends on a few factors, but it’s primary value is that it gives you shelter. It probably fluctuates in monetary value but the actual value doesn’t change. If you cap wealth based on monetary value, how do you deal with homes in different places that are valued differently? I think it’s going to be more complicated than it seels at first glance.
Assuming you mean dollars, since everyone on the internet is American. 10mil seems like a lot all together. But if you had to feed your entire family for the rest of your life on 10mil you might struggle, depending on where you live.
Maybe you mean 10mil income per year and not overall wealth. That’s different, but I can understand this. A progressive tax system could impose a cap of sorts but tax avoidance (the legal kind) would render it useless.
I don’t have any answers, just felt like continuing the thought train.
1st, don’t read to deep into this, It’s not even a pipe dream is a barely thought that crossed my mind but ain’t smart enough to even process in any meaningful way, but thought it would be ok to vomit here.
I mean total wealth including houses, cars, personal belongings, clothes, groceries, bank accounts, shares at some company, pocket change, everything. Yes, I was thinking dollars. It could be per person. And yes, it’s a VERY arbitrary number, but it could be adjusted.
It would be like a rolling cap, if you’re at the limit, you could buy food, and after you eat it, that expended budget would be available for you to earn more money again.
There is no such thing as no ruling class, and generally, anyone who sells you that is aiming to become the ruling class themselves. In the best case scenario, they want to be a benevolent dictator, and we might have seen a few people get close to that over the course of history but no benevolent dictatorship lasts longer than two generations and many fail even sooner than that. In the worst case, they are just riding on this political train and aim to be a not so benevolent dictator themselves.
Any system that does not account for human nature and build an incentive structure that guarantees the maximum possible equality/equity while assuming everyone involved is selfish is a system that’s ill suited for humanity. And if you force an ill-suited system, someone will inevitably swoop in and use it for their personal gains. Like as bad as our current system is with wealth inequality, the soviet system had an even slimmer and richer elite, they just hid it well.
I agree with all of your goals, but we need to do this the smart way, and that involves setting the priority exactly as your list goes and actually accounting for how people behave. The result might not be perfect, but we can do better than we do currently, I think that should be the goal rather than going for perfection and falling for snake oil on the way.
A really good perk in Eastern Europe is that the brief period of communism flattened inequality and nationalised all infrastructure, and both have been kept under democracy and capitalism. Which means that those countries now kinda have the best of both worlds. Although with the snowballing of wealth that is inevitable under capitalism (unless regulated), it is a question of if, and not when, that starts to change.
No one said Marxism was all done and finished out of the box… feel free to workshop it as needed since it’s barely been attempted to put into practice at all.
Well, neo-marxism is a thing, but I have barely seen any movements based around it. Sometimes it seems that the intellectuals that build these new ways of understanding society don’t really care about putting it into practice, so that’s another thing.
Do you know of a community to discuss this? I feel like people stop criticizing economic systems once they benefit from it, and so people just default to communism or capitalism without actually considering the game theory behind it all.
Western politics already has a vehicle in which to accomplish your 3 bullet points called regulation. The problem is children in charge and the voters apathy to hold their feet to the fire.
People should get mad, not at each other but at their “masters” that aren’t supposed to exist. The powers that be want us to argue amongst ourselves
I seriously believe we must build an A.I. to replace human leadership since we proved time and time again that we are corruptible, and that when that happens you start getting your poor and elite classes and rampaging exploitation of resources and its refusal to imorove to better technologies and processes (ie oil companies). We need something avobe humans to administer resources and solve politics since we just made both into ridiculous games that are alreaddy fixed so that everybody , exept those that a where winning already, loosses. I believe that the survival of the human race hinges on this.
I think that such A.I. should be build with the principles of sustainability of resources, the preseevation of human and animal life inluding but not limited to mental health, phisical health, fullfilment, and perception of freedoom. When it comes to penalties while i would like to get rid of any type of penal system i understeand its nececity due to people being people, so i would like for that system to focus on rehabilyitation rather than punishment as long as its possible and if not then just on keeping bad actors from causing any more harm into society. It should distribute resources to the human populance according to their necesities when it comes to basic needs being housing, energy, plumbing, food, medical suplies and services, clothing, transport, entertainment, social fulfilment, etc. when it comes to other things like nicer furniture, software, specialiced tools or anything on the frivolous nature or customisation then it shouldnt be a problem asking the a.i. as long as requests are reasonable since resources should be exploited sustainably enough so that this tyoes of needs could be fullfiled, like what i mean is “i whant a wooden table like this design i found” would be fullfilable request and not " i want a chair that looks like this made out of plutonium" since plutonium is toxic and should be used with care and only for cientific and energy producing porpuses. It should have as a goal to automate as much labor as posible, from agriculture, metallurgy, transport,etc. all the way to accounting, administration, executive decisions, software design, and even science, in the way as to research technologies and other fields for the benefith of humanity be it medical, technological or even space travel, all of this would leave humans to pursue more recreative activities like self fullfilment, socialising, pursuing artistic endeavours like music, painting, literature, cooking, plastical arts, teather (traditional or movies) and cientific research and studying, or just living it with their loved ones, friends or alone in the woods, if anyone whants to labor because they hate themselves (i mean in an ironic way) then they very much can. Also while it would sound bad, it should have control over all weapon and defence systems in the world and have the ability to create more if the need arises and be able to operate them at discretion in case of an external attack on humanity. It should also be able to better itself and self preserve and be abble to feel love for humanity but in a good way so that it doesnt turn against us. Look what im proposing is that we create god pretty much since its the only way we are gonna survive global warming and end war between ourselves for ever. But since your comment is givving me the vibes of being in a condecending manner in the: “AHA GOTH YA DAM LIB” sence, i dont think you are gonna read any of this and if you do you are probably gonna argue that i didnt tell you exactly step by step how to build an A.I. overlod so to that i tell ya of course i wouldnt because i dont know how since im just some dumb dumb on the internet, and while i would like to work building A.I. thats kinda far away from me at this point in my life. And if the down to upvote ratio on my original comment and your response is telling of anything, then its probably gonna validate any point you are gonna trow against mine since im the unpopular one and every one is gonna be able to rule me out as some jerk with a wrong opinion so have fun with that i guess.
In all seriousness though, I can understand your desire for utopia and for technology to solve all our problems (I desire those things too!), but I think people generally view those two desires as naive. The world’s problems usually don’t have simple solutions, AI is still somewhat of a new area of research with its own potential dangers, and putting all your stock into AI solving our problems ignores the very real solutions that could be implemented sooner rather than later.
But don’t beat yourself up too much over meaningless internet points, learn about what you’re interested in more! If AI is your cup of tea and you want to learn more about the potential issues with creating super powerful AI, I can strongly recommend the channel “Robert Moses AI Safety”. Particularly his videos about The Orthogonality Thesis and Mesa-Optimizers.
I think fundamentally most people would agree with that. The problem with communism though is that it’s not just a staple of the USSR. There is something on the order of 48 countries that have experienced state-sponsored communism in relatively recent times and it has never once succeeded in achieving these goals but tends to exacerbate poverty, class division, and government oppression of human rights, if not resulting in completely failed states.
Some will read this and assume I am advocating for capitalism. I am not. Asserting problems with communism does not imply capitalism is perfect or even good. But if we do choose to abandon capitalism, the wrong decision is to move to a system with a 100% failure rate of achieving its goals over dozens of historical attempts. As the meme suggests, many Eastern Europeans are old enough to have personal experience with those failures.
Where communism can work well is on a smaller, voluntary scale. When people choose to get together and establish their own rules for pooling resources, small communities can sometimes live quite satisfactorily this way. But no, if we are willing to call capitalism a failure based on its history we have to be honest enough to say the same thing about state-sponsored communism.
Another interesting point is whether we attribute the successes and failures of a state on it’s particular social, economic and political situation or it’s ideology as the root cause of anything. Most people, when they agree with an ideology, will attribute the good things to the ideology and the bad things to specific circumstances, and the opposite with ideologies they do not agree with. The more nationalist Americans will tell you that Cuba is poor because it is communist, and that Bush invaded Iraq either because he was corrupt or because he was promoting freedom. However there’s also the argument that Cuba is poor because it is sanctioned to hell by the US, and that Bush invaded Iraq because of American capitalist imperialism. Which one of these you agree with pretty much entirely depends on your ideological opinions rather than what actually happened, and as far as making a valid argument either one is at least a coherent point.
The reality is that you have elements of both the fundamental ideology and the specific political circumstances in every social outcome you see. Which is an idea quite fatal to most of the rhetoric you see nowadays and part of why it’s impossible to have any political discussion with people you have fundamental disagreements with.
I’m not quite sure how to reply to that, because you make some good points. I flatly disagree that communism can’t work. It’s like saying Capitalism couldn’t work because for a whole century the French revolution was failing before 1789. Which is not even the first humanity’s attempt for a capitalist system, but the first well known one. We still have ways to go and failed attempts to try to get it right.
However, the most important thing in my eyes is to learn from the past. Being in a country that was surrounded by communism, tried, and was refused help from the then socialist states, I know very many people that still look back to those times with fondness. From my country and neighboring ones that were parts of the socialist block. But all those implementations had their problems and these same people would be the first to admit that. Our job is to go through all that history and judge it with clear heads, see where it went wrong and how or why, so in the next attempts we’ll fail in a different way, until we get it right. Similar to how every socioeconomically system did so far.
I don’t care about Anarchy or Socialism or Trotskyism or whatever, as long as it gets us to the end goal of a classless system without economic or power elites that see us as data nodes to profit off. Each of those approaches has its pros and cons and there are many others as well.
But saying it failed so we best move on, because the first handful of attempts went wrong is not going to bring any change whatsoever.
Yeah I get you. But it’s important to realize that we’re talking about much more than a handful of attempts. I see the value in learning from history and iterating on processes to try and get better over time. But if we’re honestly striving for the best system for humanity, what we shouldn’t do is say, “I really want it to be communism so let’s just assume that must be the right answer and keep trying it over and over again until it works.” At some point you do have to be willing to try something new.
It’s my opinion that communism has had more than a fair shot and has been eliminated from the running. But I am also not so crazy as to immediately disregard some new communist paradigm that theoretically works in some new way that is designed to fix the problems that continually appeared in communist systems historically. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen it presented yet. And it’s also not what these “western teenagers” (as the meme calls them) are advocating for. They use language and symbols characteristic of very specific brands of communism that were massive historical failures in terms of preserving human rights and eliminating poverty and class divisions.
I disagree about the part of enough attempts and fair share, but honestly, I don’t care much. Could very well be something completely different and as long as it kept the basis of no inequality, no ruling elite, free education and medical care and so on, I’d be in. I just haven’t found anything that does that even half convincingly.
My belief is that similar to how back in the 18th century, they couldn’t see past the following system, namely capitalism, we can’t see and plan for past a classless system now, which for the moment is communism, regardless of the path there. That doesn’t mean that societal evolution will stop there.
In what world is a country with billionaires and an autocratic ruling class in which the workers decidedly do not control the means of production, “socialist”?
I think you must have inferred something from my comment that I didn’t actually say. I didn’t say every communist country ceases to exist. I also didn’t say that communism can’t generate a large economy.
What I said was that it has a 100% failure rate of achieving its goals, where those goals are economic equality, and elimination of poverty and class divisions. Most open pro-communists today have an additional goal of increasing access to basic human rights which communism has historically failed at as well. I did mention that some communist states have failed outright.
In the case of China, which you alluded to, note that China deliberately weakened their communism in the 90s as part of a series of economic reforms that introduced capitalist principles designed to stimulate growth. Specifically, agriculture was de-collectivized, Chinese business were opened to foreign investment, permission was granted for entrepreneurs to start businesses, state-owned industries were privatized, and many price controls were removed. By 2005, the private sector was responsible for 70% of China’s GDP. There is no reason to believe that China’s economy would be anywhere near as large as it is today absent these reforms.
But is that what you personally want out of your system? A large economy? Is that what matters most?
It’s also an oppressive police state where huge portions of the population live in poverty and endure awful working conditions. Oh and they’re actively engaged in genocide against a minority ethnic group. But sure if we just ignore all the downsides it’s great.
Lol no. I’m in Eastern Europe, living standards are way better now. The only good thing the USSR did here was trains and houses and those are better now. Those 2 was not worth death camps and criminalisation of my culture and language.
Weird argument here, because crossing the Berlin Wall was a way for many to escape punishment for their past Nazi crimes. West Germany was also infamous for refusing to complete de-nazification and allowed former Nazis into their ranks, controlling the political system.
And when people who actually lived in these area during that period almost ALL of them say communism was better! But OP and their ilk would rather focus on the imaginary eastern Europeans in their head, or perhaps the gusanos whose family ‘fled’ to the west after their fiefdom got collectivized
And when people who actually lived in these area during that period almost ALL of them say communism was better!
Lol. Almost all of my grandparents and greatgrandparents disagreed and personally told me about their life during USSR occupation, and the two that don’t were well connected with officials and generally lived much better than the average person, enjoying vacations to Cuba frequently, something tue average person could never afford.
Everyone else just lived in pretty poor, if stable, conditions. None of that “communism = starve to death” meme nonsense that some try to push, but it just wasn’t good. After fall of the USSR, things went worse before they became better, but now things are significantly better for the average person.
Everyone else just lived in pretty poor, if stable, conditions.
That’s the thing, they lived in a poor country. Not strictly because of their political system (as many flaws as it had), but because of global economics, and trade hostility from the USA that intentionally hampered growth. It’s not like they were purposely kept poor for funsies or cause the government were big meanies (sure, they were meanies in other ways). The wealth inequality between modern political leaders and funding sources (where the real power comes from) and the average citizen (particularly in the USA) is far greater than it ever was in the USSR.
Things are better for some and worse for many since then in Russia, but in other places like Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova everyone lost except for the rich guys who pillaged all the private infrastructure.
Back when I was a USSR style tankie I was very open about it and people would talk about communism with me at work. I had a Ukrainian woman join my team and I wanted to make sure I didn’t say anything to offend her because even though I thought at the time that the USSR system was ideal I acknowledged the evils that occured especially against Ukraine. So I asked her to tell me if I ever said anything that crossed a line and that I’d try and make sure I didn’t do that as well. Imagine my surprise when she told me she actually thought communism was great because before the USSR collapsed her city had everything they needed and her family was doing great. Her parents had higher degrees of education for free. It was when the USSR collapsed and capitalism came in that life in Ukraine got super hard again.
People might not like it, but you can watch a couple of people who are living in Eastern Ukraine (yes, the literal warzone) in this video talk about how shit was better until 1991. Cause, you know, they wouldn’t be living in a warzone for one thing. Watch from 03:15 till about 20 minutes in, if you’d like:
Easier to make it seem bad if you were born in that area after 1980ish and washing it all down as Bad Communism instead of the Capitalism that actually made it this way.
So they just built all those museums dedicated to the hardship and terror of those years as a little joke to mess with westerners like me as I traveled through their countries?
Interesting side fact, in places that were occupied by both sides in WW2, some museums could do double duty. The places the Gestapo used to imprison, torture, and murder were often the same places the communists used for the same purposes.
Yes. Turns out smearing communism is very lucrative for powerful people. And no, the only communists that set foot in concentration camps were prisoners there alongside Jews, homosexuals, Romani, and other minorities. EDIT: forgot to mention the communists who liberated the camps too
Your do a great disservice to the tens-of-thousands of victims of the communist states. I spent a lot of time in these places, looking at mugshots and intake forms and reading about what happened to them.
What do you think when you hear about a fascist antisemite standing in front of a pile of children’s shoes in a Holocaust museum saying “it didn’t happen”? Because that’s what I think about you right now.
And I never said concentration camps (edit: although these museums do tell the stories of the tens-of-thousands “deported” to camps in Siberia and other places), I was taking about buildings used for the imprisonment, torture, and murder of mostly political prisoners, but also others that upset the Nazis/communists in some way. Here is one example of many. www.terrorhaza.hu/en
You’re the one conflating Nazis with the very people who did the world the service of defeating them so I think that very thing about YOU right now. Did certain communist organizations overstep their bounds and even commit crimes against humanity? Yes, tragically. And that’s disgusting. Did that happen on anywhere near the scale that Fascists did, or that the current capitalist class IS CURRENTLY DOING?? Not even close, not even in the same galaxy. What you’re condemning is the exception for communism and the rule for capitalism, and I condemn it as well.
I am not conflating Nazis and communists. I am comparing you to a Holocaust denier because of your conspiracy theories about the existence of these places established to educate people about the well documented atrocities of the communist states. I didn’t say they were as bad as the Nazis overall, I pointed out they happily used the cramped cells, torture implements, and kill rooms left behind.
It is very much not the exception in communism. I have been to almost every former Warsaw pact country and a few countries that were part of the USSR and these museums are universal.
To quote a random politician who was talking about the eastern Germany wall: "Capitalism might not be perfect but at least we don't have to build a wall to keep our citizens in"
Capitalist citizens tend to do better because their private organizations & government are willing to oppress the people in other parts of the world in order to extract their wealth. Communists respect the lives of poor people and refuse to take advantage of that, or oppress them further.
If a capitalist nation is completely cut off from the rest of the world they become fascist very quickly (Germany, middle east, etc. etc.), when a communist nation is cut off from the rest of the world they become poor (Cuba, USSR, East Germany, etc. etc.).
I don’t think the argument of “I’m rich therefore I’m better than you” is really a strong one.
When all else is equal, life is better under communism for the vast majority of people, just not the wealthy people of capitalist nations. But even for the capitalist “middle class”, when it comes to the essentials (Food, water, housing, healthcare, equality among women, minorities, etc.), communists still beat capitalists.
If a capitalist nation is completely cut off from the rest of the world they become fascist very quickly (Germany, middle east, etc. etc.), when a communist nation is cut off from the rest of the world they become poor (Cuba, USSR, East Germany, etc. etc.).
North Korea (communist) got cut off from the rest of the world and they became poor AND fascist (well not fascist, they became worse than fascist)
North Korea became fascist? It’s strange how that’s what we call it when you fight agaisnt an attempted genocide by the US that deployed chemical weapons and bombed all major cities.
Funny that you bring up East Germany, since they had some of the best living standards in all of Europe in general. Universal healthcare, right to a job, free daycare AND over a year of maternity AND paternity leave?? Come on. The Berlin Wall was to stop tourism and trade as a tactic in the cold war, it’s not like people were fleeing to West Germany (where many former Nazis were still in power) in droves. Dubious morally for sure, but not what you claim it to be. Maybe that random politician you’re quoting benefitted from the corrupt system he was endorsing? In the words of Assata Shakur, don’t let your enemies tell you who your enemies are,
it's not like people were fleeing to West Germany (where many former Nazis were still in power) in droves
They were though, when it was announced that the Berlin wall would shut down everybody was pretty much camping outside and the guards had to remind people that it would only happen at midnight through force
When stuff goes poorly in a socialist regime it’s always “this is proof of socialisms short comings and shows the inherent inhumanity of such an ideology!” but when it comes to capitalism it’s always “individual people who are corrupted misused the system to do harm, and yeah it keeps happening but it’s not an inherent trait of our system!”
Is Putin in the room with us right now? Don’t worry, he can’t hurt you.
This is completely wrong, because of course Putin absolutely does hurt people. He ordered the invasion of Ukraine and the killing of Ukrainians. His forces deliberately target civilians, or massacre them, like in Bucha. His actions have also killed innocent people from other countries, such as those on board flight MH17, who were killed by a Russian missile. He also orders the murders of people he doesn’t like, such as Alexander Litvinenko and Alexei Navalny (the latter’s murder being unsuccessful, but nevertheless ordered by the Kremlin). And one such assassination attempt, on Sergei Skripal, killed an innocent British woman, Dawn Sturgess. So no, it is clearly untrue to say that Putin can’t hurt someone, unfortunately.
Alexei Navalny, the one who was too far right for the Russian right wingers? The one who compared Muslims to roaches and implied that he would hunt them? The one who openly claims that he lied to gain support? The United States created Russia with Boris Yeltin, and purposely left it unstable. Putin simply fixed the system that the Americans gave him, without returning to socialism. If the USSR was still up, none of this would’ve happened
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.
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