This is beside the point but also fuck Trotsky. Trotsky’s basic idea consisted of applying military methods in the economic field and of turning the entire population of Russia into a vast army of labour, destroying the trade unions and forcing the workforce into jobs they could not leave without the permission of high authorities. Any shirking of duty or unauthorized absence from work was to be punished on the same basis as desertion from the army. Fuck that guy.
The problem is that so many people can’t see that there are any shades of grey between Trotskyist communism and free market capitalism. Like it has to be one absolute or the other. Such bizarre black-and-white thinking.
Hell yeah. Democratic Confederalism, Proudohnism, Council Communism… there are so many potential systems of anti-authoritarian socialism that have failed to flourish due to circumstance or conspiracy that could make life so much better for so many people.
Could consider that one of the effects of the capitalist west’s active intervention to prevent any form of socialism and communism during the last… can just say century at this point but especially post-WW2 by sponsoring fascist intervention, is that it applied a selection criteria on which forms of these states could actually survive.
Marx also viewed capitalism as a necessary intermediary step towards achieving communism and saw it as an improvement to what existed before it. An amazing thing about the Russian Revolution and USSR is they went from feudalism to a modern communist state in less than a generation. In that context it was incredible what they were able to achieve in the time they did and we can recognize areas it worked independent of the rest.
There’s been some pretty good discussion about whether capitalism or communism has resulted in more deaths overall, and the value in that isn’t to arrive at some final tally to find who wins.
A lot of what Marx wrote about the two stage revolution was written in direct response to the failure of the Paris Commune. Marx also saw socialism as the inevitable successor to capitalism. But there are socialist traditions that predate his theories and there’s nothing to say he was wrong on some things.
Yeah like his labor theory of value has basically been disproven but that doesn’t have to negate his critique of modernity and his view of class conflict, notion of private property, exploitation, etc. Historical materialism is hugely influential even today. Marx didn’t outline some rigid framework for a communist utopia either.
Hegel’s idealism as well… Marx began as a Hegelian in Germany and increasingly became critical of Hegel’s dialectic. His concept of dialectical materialism is a response to Hegel and turns it on it’s head. The notion that material conditions aren’t shaped by human ideas and values but instead that human ideas and values are a response to material conditions.
Careful, plenty of insane revisionists who go deep into the "Actually Caligula was just hated by the Senatorial elite in a way that none of his claimed actions explain and that isn't repeated with any other Emperor, including the much-hated Nero and Domitian, both of whom retained significant and influential loyalists after their deaths, unlike Caligula"
Just cause the USSR wasn’t as bad as the US claimed doesn’t mean it was as good as the USSR claimed. Praising Stalin implies that the good he did outweighs his death toll
The woke mob was crying liberal tears about his reasonable solution to the Holodomor crisis, so of course the lefties who run Facebook refuse to let him have his equal say.
You see, communism, in theory, is great. The biggest problem is that it requires a benevolent authority to determine what is provided based on what is needed and wanted.
This is a problem because usually communist countries are structured at authoritarian, where the head of state, a person, usually some guy, is in charge of such things, generally with the help of those in the government. Being human and innately flawed and selfish, all communist systems thus far, seem to follow the same trend of exploitation and indentured servitude for the majority of the populous, meanwhile the “upper class”, mainly the elite and the person’s that make up the government live in luxury. More for them and the bare minimum for everyone else.
If this human factor problem could be resolved, then communism would be a great system. Everyone shares in the wealth and success of their countrymen. But since people are the cornerstone of any government, the system will always be prone to exploitation of the people.
As for Stalin specifically, I don’t see him or his actions as notably different than any other communist dictator. They are all equally terrible people for very different human rights crimes.
I like the idea of communism, but I wouldn’t trust any single person to be in charge… I wouldn’t even trust a coalition of people to run it. It would need the involvement of enough people from the population from all different walks of life to essentially vote on policy changes constantly in order to ensure that no individual or group of individuals is unfairly benefiting from the situation, which, that, in and of itself, would be a nightmare to try to put together, manage, coordinate, and abide by.
Capitalism under democracy isn’t a picnic, but at least there’s enough responsibility imposed on the system by the population that is being governed, that any exploitation is generally slowed at least, or eliminated at best (often the former and not the latter).
AI inherits the flaws of the people that program it, and feed it training data.
Further current AI doesn’t understand jack shit, or even think. At a very gross oversimplification, It’s a very complicated decision tree looking at patterns, what it doesn’t about those patterns depends on what it was programmed to do
I genuinely don’t think state-communism is possible without deep corruption and exploitation, or humans not being in charge. 100-odd people in a commune working together can make it work together, but then you’re just easy pickings for bandits/gangs, or state violence from outside conventional forms of government.
Inflate the population and then all sorts of sociological problems crop up that require intra-system violence/coercion to prevent the whole system crumbling down when everyone wants to be a grief councilor or artist, but all these mfs need to eat so a lot of somebodies are working the fields against their will.
The ills of capitalism are obvious to those living under it, but talk to someone who lived in the USSR and they’re very likely not charitable about the government they lived under either.
exactly the points i always make. at the moment, our best shot is a democratic society with well-regulated capitalism (be it by workers unions, trade limitations like the japanese car import limits in the US, and things like universal healthcare and monetary aid for unemployed people)
I... have a lot to say and not enough energy left to say it.
I would suggest that you're conflating communism with Marxism-Leninism, which is a common mistake, since the SovUnion spent a good 70 years trying to make them synonymous (and their capitalist enemies being more than happy to assist), and that you should look into non-ML systems.
Your main critique is the same reason capitalism doesn’t work, eventually money begets power which buys up competition, markets get cornered and it turns into cronyism.
Yep. People are the problem. Plain and simple. As the old saying goes, power corrupts.
Taking the USA as an example, since they’re the most vocal about capitalism and democracy, the fact that it took them as long as it did to identify that smoking causes cancer and a slew of other ailments because of tobacco group lobbying is the most direct and pure example I can find of how the system is both corrupted by the people who run it, and balanced by the fact that the people still have a say. For years, the dangers of tobacco products, which we have and share as common knowledge, were either obfuscated or downright refuted by those in power to do anything about it. The fact is, tobacco is bad for you. But for years, even doctors would prescribe cigarettes to relieve common ailments…
In current times, I’m certain many of the same type of situation is happening, it will just be years before it’s made clear who was falsifying information and trying to deceive the public into believing that things that are actively harming the public, are actually good, or vice versa. IMO, this is happening with the environment right now, global warming and the electrification of most things like vehicles and whatnot. I have my own theories on who is lying and who is telling the truth, and who is ultimately responsible for the rising global mean temperature and destruction of the environment, which I won’t get into right now. Simply put, these situations have existed for a very long time and eventually the truth does emerge… At least, it has so far. That speaks to my point that democracy can, at the very least slow down the damage that otherwise could be caused.
It’s an interesting phenomenon to watch unfold, again and again. It would seem that the majority does not learn from history and is therefore doomed to repeat it, taking the rest of us along for the ride.
I’ve been to Cuba. I’ve never seen such a shit show in my life. There were still wealthy and the large majority were dirt poor. Police everywhere. Military everywhere. Havana smelled horrible and there were massive food shortages.
That said the people were friendly. They talked how they wish they could go to America but they can’t.
It was sad. My polish friends described polish communism the same way and they were fairly high up in the party. As soon as they had the chance to defect they did.
I don’t know where in my post you thought I was in support of communism in general beyond the idealistic concept of what it could be. In every way, it is a shit show mainly because of the people that are making the decisions.
In no way am I advocating for communism over capitalism/democracy. I’m just giving an analysis from a fairly neutral viewpoint.
Funny, because data shows almost the exact opposite. Conditions in Ex-Soviet countries were worse for decades after the collapse, and some of them still haven’t returned to pre-collapse levels. The majority of people in the majority of former USSR republics hold positive memories of the Soviet Union, and majorities even believe that life was better when the Union was around.
I’m pretty damn left but I’ve never understood people who can engage in revisionist history with Joseph fucking Stalin. I’m sure he had some great ideas and wisdom interspersed between his widespread bouts of systemic enslavement and murder. But frankly I just find the whole “systemic enslavement and murder” kind of casts a pall over any interesting ideas he may have had lol
I mean, shit, I'm pretty anti-ML and I can still admit that Lenin has some interesting thoughts here and there. But Stalin? Joseph fucking Stalin? The man who never met a paranoia he didn't like or a policy he wouldn't reverse? Insanity.
Kind of unrelated, but I can’t ever read about Lenin without thinking about all the hilarious propaganda that basically said “he has such a big head because he’s so smart and he is always thinking of the party and the workers” lol
I feel that Lenin understood compromise, and Stalin just saw that as weekness. Some of the early Bolshevik policies where insane and I think Lenin mostly believed in them, but when the people turned around and said no thanks, Lenin would compromise. Anyway that's just my amature take
I almost wish everyone hadn’t defederated from hexbear so that we had more stories of the mental gymnastics justifying continues support of Putin after he banned being gay.
lemm.ee has hexbear, and I can feel the admin writhing while he allows them to persist - even after they banned me entire for “capitalist apologia”, “Genocide denial” and “Pro-zionist Lib , Get f*cked Ben Hazir !!!” - all of which would classify as the crime of defamation.
But, at the same time, I wouldn’t have those bullshit definitions if I didn’t face them head on and call them out for their bullshit, using open modlogs where they themselves can’t hide.
It’s worse than that. They’re totally amoral. They can’t see beyond their stupid idea of the way they think the world should be. They’re pro-genocide when it benefits their ideology. I haven’t heard much cheering on of Israel from Tankies right now, but if Putin or Xi suddenly allied with them? They’d be begging the Israelis to bulldoze more Palestinian homes with people inside of them.
Enemy of my enemy logic, basically. There are people who have such a disdain for the west that they will lionize any political figures who also hate the west, no matter how contradictory their stated ideals are.
Funny thing is they still live in the west. At least stand by your opinion and move to fucking Russia. I think they’re especially welcoming of males in their 20s (only if you’re born a male and live as a male, sorry, their “tolerance” doesn’t run that far).
Many people emigrated or defected to communist Russia. Most of them later regret it 😂. It was especially the case during the purge in 1930s, when American emigres flooded the American embassy in Moscow, demanding their passports back. British spy for Soviet Union, Kim Philby, was exiled to Soviet Union, and he regretted it as his extravagant lifestyle that he grew accustomed to in the West could not easily be had in USSR because of lack of consumer goods.
Oh, it does. As an admin, my “job” is hard enough with the regular spammers, don’t need whole instances dedicated to spamming in my mod queue. Why do I need to make my hobby harder because people want to decide for themselves?
Luckily, this is fediverse and you have options! You can host your own single person instance and federate with everyone. Just be prepared for some child porn federating onto your hard drives.
What do you even do about that? Is that immediately a crime because your server hosted those images? Like obviously you defed from guilty instances asap, but what do you do as the instance owner in the interim? Report and delete?
Report and delete. If you’re lucky, you’re not the one to discover it and it hasn’t federated yet, so you defederate preemptively.
I know at least one admin, who quit because he was afraid of police raids because of child porn. He said that the US police are quite uncompromising in such cases, but I’m not from the US so I don’t know, EU rules seem a lot saner.
You can prevent child porn and everything from federating in, you just have to restrict your instance. lemm.ee does not allow any images to be locally hosted. It becomes a bit of a hassle having to manually host something somewhere else, but that’s how reddit started out so nae bother.
The post is in /c/meta@lemm.ee, though it’s one that I missed.
Non-instance agnostic link (because there are no instance agnostic links for comments or posts): lemm.ee/post/19843583
I really wish instances didn’t links for their comments and posts. lemmy.world/comment/123456 is a different link to lemm.ee/comment/123456, when really it should simply be that lemmy.world/comment/123456 is the same as lemm.ee/comment/123456@lemmy.world.
Some of us prefer the Fediverse to look a little less like 4chan and pigs shitting on their own balls, and a little more like literally anything else. It's the same reason why that one alt-right instance was defederated by just about everyone.
You can’t block entire instances as a user, at least not on Lemmy. You can block all communities (only since very recently) hosted on an instance, but you can’t block the community, that is the users, trolling around the wider fediverse.
Which puts fuckheads like me in a tough spot, since I want a classic “old internet” (read as: 4chan culture of shitheadery) feel to the place, but also don’t want to infringe on people like you’s ability to enjoy a relatively clean internet space.
Given everything, I think having “clean” servers that defederate from toxic ones is probably the way to go just to ensure new users can have a generally good time. Then let more advanced users (like me) go find the “never defederate” instances to sign up to get that old timely feel.
So…uh, yeah TL;DR: I think I’m on the other guy’s side, but also think you have the right of it.
Yeah, the real issue is that I’m too cheap to pay for a domain name / setting up a server, though it is a goal once some other life things straightened out for me.
No one is stopping you from standing up your own instance and quickly learning how legally exposed you are the moment you run a forum the way you’re advocating for.
What do you mean by that? Is that to say that I might be held responsible if my instance picked some other instance that was hosting illegal content as though I were a “redistributor” or something?
Hey man, if you or your instance wants to take a dive into the deep end, I don't mean to stop any of you. I would just prefer the parts of the Fediverse I deal with to be clean of pigs shitting on their balls and the people who spread it.
Stalin did some writing, but depending on which tankie you ask, it's either REVOLUTIONARY AND ASTOUNDING WORK THAT IS UNFAIRLY OVERLOOKED, or just verbose rehashing of Lenin with an (extra) dash of authoritarianism.
I believe his contribution was the idea that a dictatorship of the prolitariate is untenable, and that the state needs a single leader in order to achieve Marxism.
He might have written that but it was Lenin who ended all dissent within the CP and put a single person (Lenin) in control. Arguably the situation at the time was so chaotic and dangerous that this was the only way to prevent the collapse of the revolution.
Add comment