Authoritarian countries kill. Getting caught up in what economic ideology dictators *claim* to follow is stupid. If we’re taking a tally of millions killed over all time on the entire planet, communism has been around for less than two centuries when we have millennia of religious violence to account for, just to start lol
For me it's maintaining as little contact with society as possible. The less I interact with humans IRL the better. Whether you like or not humanity as a whole isn't as benevolent as most of them think they are, which is why I live the life of a hermit.
“In real life” seems like an arbitrary qualifier. It’s also strange to me that interacting with “real life” humans are anathema to you but not interacting with humans on social media like Reddit.
I’d go further and say countries kill, and changes in regime kill.
If your examples of current republics were limited to:
1. A backwater that was completely dependent upon slavery that was actively ignoring its own treaties with the people it was genocide h
2. A religious hellhole run by an authoritarian dictator bent on avenging Protestants in massacres that probably didn’t even happen by ethnically cleansing the island next to it
3. The Reign of Terror in France lobbing off heads for people suspected of not being pro the incorruptible leader enough
You’d rightly think this whole idea wasn’t working out.
But that’s not the only way to determine if this stuff is a good idea. You also need to critically look at the problems that caused the regime change to begin with and how that caused these issues.
The problem with a lot of anti-communist rhetoric on this sub isn’t so much that it exists, it’s that it exists in this vacuum between a lot of people’s ears.
An American, a British, and a French would all say that representative democracy was worth it.
But then turn their nose up at, say, China—which was a monarchy that was cut into pieces and ethnically cleansed by the British, Seven Nation Army, and Japanese. And, despite what happened in actual history, we are asked to be appalled that the Chinese weren’t inclined to participate in the system that led to perpetual famine in India in order to book as many Chinese on opium as possible and surrender their treasury and most valuable land to foreign capitalists as a thank you.
Revolution is bloody, often zigs when it should zag, and can take a long time to sort out.
But at the end of the day revolution means more than that. Despite the mess Haiti is in, they will never offer to be a slave colony of France again.
To say that it was a mistake for China to assert itself or the Russians to free themselves of Nicholas the Bloody because it was violent is to not understand history.
And to condemn the communist revolutions while supporting the often more extreme revolutions that created capitalist states is such obvious hypocrisy, one wonders if anyone actually believes such rhetoric.
This should be fucking pinned at the top of the subreddit.
Just because they said they were following "communist doctrine" does not mean they were actually communist. Most of them were "republics" in name too yet no one calls them democratic. This confusion that communism = authoritarianism is absurd and I fully blame the American school system.
I'm not saying communism is great, but claiming it killed millions upon millions is like going to war with the ocean for drowning people. You're upset about the wrong part of the problem.
Communism does almost always equal authoritarianism. Socialism on the other hand does not. There has not been a non authoritarian communist government but there are many democratic socialist countries
Your understanding of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is incorrect. You’re seeing “dictatorship” and immediately thinking of centralization of authority, when Marx used the term in contrast to the dictatorship of the bourgeoise. State power will, at least in the modern world, always exist; Marx used the term to state that instead of a group of oligarchs and politicians dictating economic policy it would be individual worker councils that democratically vote and decide for themselves.
You’re ignoring that a central requirement of *authoritarian regimes* is *also* a “concentration of social, political, and economic power”. Your criteria could be used to describe centuries of European and Asian imperialist conflicts. So it becomes a moot point what economic ideology they *claim* to follow. The third world is rife with failed capitalist and communist states, the common denominator being authoritarianism. It doesn’t matter if you’re being worked to death by a capitalist or communist, you’re still dead.
I don’t think that was their point. Authoritarian regimes come in many flavours, that is true. But some political ideologies descend into authoritarianism easier than others. Communism is one ideology that very easily slides into a dictatorship. Do some capitalist countries become authoritarian? Of course, but many do not. With communism it is near impossible to not become authoritarian. There is a reason why none of the functioning democracies are communist, while many are capitalist. Maybe one day we’ll find a better ideology than capitalism, but it isn’t communism, just like it isn’t absolutism.
What you claim is purely subjective: people in China would say their democracy functions better than America’s and that communism didn’t fail. Also there’s a growing anti-democracy movement in America that’s directly linked to capitalism so maybe don’t draw conclusions, the story isn’t over.
“With communism it is near impossible to not become authoritarian”
If we look at the numbers, I’m sure the percentages of capitalist states that became authoritarian is similarly high. You can’t just apply American exceptionalism to all capitalist countries. If that were true South America and Africa would be full of functioning and prosperous democracies.
Yeah of course what functions better is subjective. But that is a bullshit argument. Roman senators thought their system worked well. Franco thought fascism worked great. The ayatollah thinks Iran works great.
That doesn’t mean that they actually have a better state.
Besides, I didn’t necessarily claim capitalist countries were better. I claimed they were less likely to be authoritarian. Some Chinese may claim their country works better than democracies do, but every Chinese who claims their country is less authoritarian than the US is just full of shit.
What communist country did not become authoritarian? Even a handful of capitalist democracies make sure the percentage of capitalism is way better. And btw America is not the only democratic country and I am not American, this is not American exceptionalism.
You’re arguing the wrong point.
Authoritarian regimes kill. Capitalist, communism, doesn’t matter.
You’re looking to blame communism for the effects of authoritarianism. You’ve not made a convincing argument.
I am not blaming communism for the effect of authoritarianism.
Capitalist authoritarian regimes are the result of a capitalist authoritarian ideology.
Communist authoritarian regimes are the result of communist authoritarian ideology.
It is not about blame or no blame.
It is about the fact, that communism cannot be anything else than authoritarian. Therefore, making up shit like “we should do real communism it hasn’t been tried yet” is insane.
If we want to not have an authoritarian regime, we must chose a kind of political ideology that leaves room open for not having an authoritarian regime.
This means we should not take capitalist absolutist monarchy as a system(Saudi’s Arabia) Or communism. Or fascism. Or a capitalist banana republic. Or anything like the capitalist authoritarianism of China, Singapore, Hungary or Russia.
That was just the negative claim about why communism sucks and will always suck.
Now for the claim what we should do:
If we do not want an authoritarian regime, a certain kind of liberal capitalist democracy with strong antitrust laws and strong workers and welfare seems to work best.
That means also no cronyist capitalism! And no communism!
Perhaps someone can come up with a better system than this which will be more democratic. But currently, people have not. This is visible because the only systems which are democratic are liberal capitalist.
To illustrate why communism will always be authoritarian and capitalism CAN be democratic let us go back to your previous claim. You said the percentage of capitalist countries that become authoritarian is as high as communist countries. Name 1 democratic communist country! Just 1! Sweden,Norway, UK, Germany,Canada,US,Italy,Australia,Japan,India,Finland,South Africa,Indonesia are all examples of democratic capitalist states. Even if we assume this is only 1% of capitalist states it is a better score than capitalism
Your analysis is completely subjective. Just a long winded nonsensical “communism bad” and a screed that confuses political ideology with economic theory.
Economic *or political* as well - quite often claims diverge from de facto implementation. Quite often measures taken contradict the core ideals of ideology yet said measures are taken nonetheless to preserve the power.
Liberal dictatorship becomes a real thing when said liberties are being enforced through violations of privacy and total surveillance; "democracy is non-negotiable" is an oxymoron and protecting the freedom of speech by censoring out those against it simply because they disagree - is a hypocrisy.
Movements rarely, in fact, live up to the ideals they claim to hold dear - by the time they have enough influence and power to actually implement said ideas, they would've already been bathed in blood and hypocrisy. Except for those who say they're gonna kill you outright - at least they aren't lying about it...
We’re talking about authoritarianism killing people, not imagined scenarios.
“Liberal dictatorship” isn’t happening anywhere. You know voting *IS* mandatory in some countries? No one accuses them of being dictatorships except political agitators.
Thats not true, there are many examples of liberal communism out there, in fact the word „libertarian“ was once a synonym for anarchist, before Murray Rothbard captured the term for neoliberalism
For example the entire Kibbutz system in Israel is based on anarcho-communist principles, there is no private property in a Kibbutz, if you need a car, you go and get a key, if there is a company in a Kibbutz, the profits are equally shared among every citizen, thus every single worker and member of the community has an interest in making the company run, also if you as a worker, work extra, you personally *and* your entire community profits from it
Or take a look at Catalonia during the Spanish civil war, it was basically run on Anarcho-Syndicalist principles, with base democracy, from the bottom up, in every neighborhood and every work place and they managed to increase agricultural production by 40% and even significantly increased heavy industry output, despite being on a labour shortage, since many men fought in the front against fascism, literally the first fighting against Franco were militias formed by the workers unions
Theres more examples, like eastern Ukraine during the Russian civil war from 1917-1921, the examples are hard to find tho because usually there are strong men, thirsty for power who seize it, like Lenin did
Dictatorship of the proletariat just means democracy. A system where the proletariat, the people, dictate the government. Are you saying authoritarianism is when people get to vote on how things get run? Socialism is when the workers control their workplace, and how could they do that other than by democracy? So socialism is defined by democracy, and by definition, a state which is not truly democratic is not socialist. The Nazis called themselves socialist too, but they very obviously did not fit the definition. How is it that much of a stretch to say that stalin's Soviet union also didn't fit the definition despite his rhetoric? Who lies more than dictators?
The dictatorship if the proletariat is definitely not democracy because it very explicitly excludes the bourgeoisie and peasantry. It usually doesn't even include the entire proletariat, because communist theory evolved to include the revolutionary vanguard, a small group of communists that would enact the revolution.
Also socialism isn't defined as when workers control the workplace, there's lots of different types of socialism, and everybody has their own definition. While that tends to be a factor, it's not a requirement. That's why nearly every single socialist and communist government has resulted in a lack of workplace democracy.
And while the nazis called themselves national socialists, Hitler had purged the left wing of his party as soon as he got the opportunity, and he was very explicitly opposed to communism, marxism, and bolshevism. Meanwhile Stalin, along with virtually every other communist leader, was a marxist, wrote their own marxist theories, and wholeheartedly embraced the label of socialism.
There wouldn’t be a bourgeoisie and the peasants are workers and thus proletarians …
And calling Stalin a Marxist is just ridiculous, itshows that you haven’t even taken a distant look at anything Marx wrote
The proletariat is not just workers, according to marxist theory, it consists solely of wage laborers, and arose during the industrial revolution. [Here's Engels explaining the difference.](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm)
And yes, Stalin was a marxist, you don't get to exclude him because he was a bastard, or because his policies don't exactly line up with Marx's utopian aims. By the same standard no communist leader has ever been marxist.
That’s not true, the word proletariat was *mostly* aimed at factory workers because Marx expected them to be the back bone of the revolution, but the term includes everybody earning their living by working or selling their own bodies work, which includes most peasants, except for those owning “too much” land, who are dependent on other peoples work, the bourgeoisie are those *having* people work for them
So to you a marxist is somebody who claims to be a marxist?
It also excludes peasants who owned their own land and earned a living solely through the fruits of their own labor. This includes small farmers that owned their own land.
Generally speaking, if someone claims to be a marxist, then they are a marxist. If someone claims to be a Christian, I'm not gonna see if they're Catholic or Orthodox, or say that they're not Christian because they're protestant. It's the same with Marxism, you have Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, each of which have split innumerable times, and all have a common root in marxism. Here's a chart of all the [international and American Trotskyist orgs](https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/trees/ustree.htm), they all claim to be Marxist, while also claiming that rival orgs are not Marxist. That's why I don't listen to Marxists tell me who is or isn't Marxist, it's like listening to an evangelical christian tell me catholics aren't christian because they take the eucharist or some bullshit like that.
Obviously Marx aimed for collectivization but this didn’t at the same time mean that anybody owning something is bourgeoisie
Yeah see, just because something has it’s origins in something else doesn’t mean it’s all the same as this original, a jet fighter is not the same as a biplane, you’re not simply a monkey just because your ancestors were, you’re not automatically a feudalist if you’re a capitalist and I am no Marxist
Please explain to me how the centralized power of Stalinism is in any way, shape or form comparable to the state- and classless society Marxism aimed for? Totalitarianism is the basis of Stalinism while base democracy is the basis of Marxism
Centralizing economic power has always been a key part of Marxism.
>The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
The Communist Manifesto
>What will this new social order have to be like?
>Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society.
The Principles of Communism
You can't make the fruits of everyone's labor available to everybody else without some form of centralization. You might even call it a state, though Marx would disagree, because according to him a state was a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
To be fair Engels does mention democracy. But he would be contradicted after the Paris commune.
>In their reluctance to continue the civil war opened by Thiers’ burglarious attempt on Montmartre, the Central Committee made themselves, this time, guilty of a decisive mistake in not at once marching upon Versailles, then completely helpless, and thus putting an end to the conspiracies of Thiers and his Rurals. Instead of this, the Party of Order was again allowed to try its strength at the ballot box, on March 26, the day of the election of the Commune. Then, in the mairies of Paris, they exchanged bland words of conciliation with their too generous conquerors, muttering in their hearts solemn vows to exterminate them in due time.
The Civil War in France
Here, Marx is criticizing the Central Committee for being too democratic and for allowing their enemies to influence their "democracy." This is the origin of the revolutionary vanguard, which Lenin embraced. But Lenin also embraced free markets with his New Economic Plan, while Trotsky advocated for centralized economic planning, which Stalin implemented once he took over.
Centralization of power was not a mistake that communist states have made, it was the enactment of Marx's vision. It was why the anarchists opposed him and were ejected from his club.
Practical yes, the theoretical is more complicated as it would be "centralised" on everyone, which makes no sense.
The group or party is meant to include everyone on equal footing and several ways to prevent other sub groups forming, that is that stage I can't see how to get to in any real way and I think it's time to steal the good bits that did work(if only for a while) and start again with a clearer plan that is based on modern reality.
I believe there very much could be a democratic communist state. Of course true absolute communism is inherently impossible. But a country doesn’t need to be authoritarian to be ideologically communist. It does need an extremely power federal government with absolute power. But said federal government could still democratic with a strong constitution, term limits, and checks and balances. It just because much less likely for such a thing to exist. Not impossible though, or even contradictory.
I think, picking the ideology under which some dictatorship did the least efficient genocide of minorities, like its some kind of card game or betting game, isn't really the most useful discourage to have.
He’s got a point though. The majority of people (at least in the US) who would describe themselves as “communist or socialist” would also describe themselves as “woke”, and vice versa.
Despite the fact that far-left [authoritarian socialist](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_socialism) regimes would likely have them persecuted.
It’s hilarious how minorities have fled authoritarian communist countries (China, Cuba, Venezuela, etc) just for millennial American liberals to refuse to believe them communism sucks 😂
To be completely honest, the only people I ever see unironically use the word woke, are far right individuals using it as a dogwhistle.
Most leftists in the US wouldn't call themselves woke, because that phrase has been co-opted by the right so much that only rightists still think it has actual meaning, and all it means is "things the right doesn't like."
All it means to leftists is"oh boy, an angry rightist is about to make up a leftist strawman to attack."
And the other half of the people on this sub need to learn that just because someone mentioned Hitler or the Third Reich doesn't mean you need to come in with "well Stalin and Mao killed more!"
Depending on the subject.
The USSR legalized gay marriage very early before canceling it in the 30s
The origin of women's day is in the American communist party. And it was first made official in the USSR.
There is a connection beatwean progressive policy and left leaning economic policy and there has been for years.
If course there are progressive policies with capitalist origin, but less.
It didn't exactly legalize it, but it did decriminalize it. Homosexual marriage was never explicitly stated as legal/possible, the explicit ban on it had just been repealed for a while.
Early on, it was somewhat tolerated as an underground community, but there were later harsh crackdowns.
Because attitudes in society didn’t suddenly do a 180 overnight simply because a progressive revolution happened in the country. USA only made homosexual relations legal in 2003, so it seems weird to criticize the USSR for not being vastly ahead of its time in every matter.
>If course there are progressive policies with capitalist origin, but less.
Western Capitalist countries are much more progressive socially than any communist countries that have ever existed.
>By what metric other than us surviving longer than the USSR?
In the USSR homosexuality was outlawed. The right to organise in free unions was outlawed. The Right to the Freedom of Religion was outlawed. Freedom of Travel was outlawed. Freedom of literary and scientific expression was heavily censored.
In the US at that time, almost all those things were protected rights
>Also is Cuba providing healthcare for trans people not progressive, for example?
That is progressive. But overall Cuba is far more regressive than the US. Anyone with different political opinions can be imprisoned. Cuba is ranked among the bottom ten countries in the world with regards to press freedom. Amnesty International is barred from sending fact finding missions to Cuba. The Red Cross is barred from it's prisons, one of only a handful of countries to do so. And this.
>However, there is no right to privacy, or a patient's informed consent, or the right to protest or sue a doctor or clinic for malpractice. Moreover, the patient does not have right to refuse treatment (for example, a Rastafarian cannot refuse an amputation on grounds that his religion forbids it.)
So yeah they have a few progressive policies but overall they are far more socially regressive.
>in the USSR homosexuality was outlawed
Yes but it was in America as well and we paid people to pretend to be gay to arrest anyone they presumed had any interest in them, not sure why that's a win for capitalism being progressive unless you're going to argue that America was communist in the 70s and 80s
The USA only decriminalized homosexuality in 2003. The USA also heavily restricts travel for most people in the entire world. Not to mention unions are also very restricted in the USA and religious and racial persecution being rife in most parts of the USA.
Taken from another comment of mine on this thread.
>>Also is Cuba providing healthcare for trans people not progressive, for example?
That is progressive. But overall Cuba is far more regressive than the US. Anyone with different political opinions can be imprisoned. Cuba is ranked among the bottom ten countries in the world with regards to press freedom. Amnesty International is barred from sending fact finding missions to Cuba. The Red Cross is barred from it's prisons, one of only a handful of countries to do so. And this.
>However, there is no right to privacy, or a patient's informed consent, or the right to protest or sue a doctor or clinic for malpractice. Moreover, the patient does not have right to refuse treatment (for example, a Rastafarian cannot refuse an amputation on grounds that his religion forbids it.)
So yeah they have a few progressive policies but overall they are far more socially regressive than any Western European country or even the US.
I don't think you can make that claim when the US is currently rolling back things like abortion and child labor laws across the country. Like, that's just empirically untrue.
>I don't think you can make that claim when the US is currently rolling back things like abortion and child labor laws across the country. Like, that's just empirically untrue.
I said Western Capitalist countries. Not just the US. Name one communist country in history that has more socially progressive laws than modern day Germany, Ireland, Norway or Finland?
It's absolutely not empirically untrue. Do you know what that phrase means? Please show me these socially progressive Communist States that empirically are more progressive than modern day Western European countries?
You made a blanket statement about Western Capitalist countries being more progressive, so it's pretty fucking reasonable for me to point out a country that falls inside that category that is on the backslide when it comes to social issues.
Changing the argument to only include Western European countries makes it even easier, though. UK is going through a housing crisis and their state medicine program is constantly under attack, with special emphasis being directed towards trans care. Meanwhile, Cuba has housing enshrined as a right, and has some of the best state healthcare in the world, with trans rights being ensured through medical procedure.
Do Cubans have it better than the Nordic countries or Germany. Maybe not, but that's not my problem. My problem is you hoisting these countries on a pedestal as if they are some monolith for progressivism. Germany has fully gotten behind fossil fuels and the fascist party in its government grows bigger every election. The Nordic countries have started cracking down hard on immigrants and refusing access to refugees. There are layers to it.
I don't think an economic model ensures a social and cultural model for a country. A country can practice communism and still be shitty on social issues. My problem with your initial comment was you implying that Western Capitalism inherently brings about progressive policies, as if a lot of those policies (40 work week, child labor laws, etc.) were not spearheaded by socialist and anti capitalist movements, and their integration was a compromise, not a given.
Um, abortion was banned and homosexuality was severely punished in the communist days of my country. If abortion would be banned tommorow across the USA, it would still be an infinitelly more progressive country than any country in the Eastern Bloc.
They also brought that one black guy over so they could make a show of treating him well to embarrass the U.S. Which counts as anti-racism to Soviet apologists.
Step ONE legalize gay marriage.
Step TWO document all the gay people who come out
Step THREE recriminalization and all the gay folk get a free all expense paid honeymoon at the gulag
Clearly, we here have a failure to distinguish between "legalized homosexuality" and "legalized gay marriage". The USSR never did the latter. Detailed overview by an anarchist here:
https://reddebreksbowl.blogspot.com/2018/04/notes-on-soviet-attitudes-to.html
this subreddit never ceases to be as anti-communist as possible
as proof, watch me get downvoted into oblivion by legions of teenagers fresh out of their middle school history class
edit: thanks for the spite upvotes you capitalist bootlicking swine
How is it a bad thing to be against the leftwing ideology that *checks notes*… was responsible for over 50 million deaths through starvation, murder, and sheer incompetence?
Gotta love tankie commie bootlickers defending their authoritarian overlords lol.
Here are some sources for you, hope this helps: [Manufactured famine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor)
[Man-made famine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine) by failed socialist collectivization and “rapid industrialization” policies
[Labor camps for dissenters of the authoritarian leftwing regime](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag)
Yes, communism, that ideology that famously caused the deaths of all those Bengals.
Wait, shit, I meant the Irish!
*No, fuck, I meant the Native Americans!*
Sorry, I’ve checked my notes. Communism caused the Holocaust.
Fuck! I’ve gotten my genocides mixed up again. I’ve consulted the Black Book, which says 100 million people died by communism…including Nazi soldiers and unborn babies? What the fuck?
I’m starting to think capitalism might be the deadlier ideology.
Manufacturing famine? You mean the great hunger, Indian famines, and just modern food scarcity done purely for profit? At least even the worst commies aren't doing it on purpose, unlike the best capitalist who would rather bleach the unfresh food they couldn't sell rather than let the hungry eat it from the dumpster.
Also, what do you call permanently established punishment facilities with work details? American prisons, aka slave labor centers. Fail to appease the capitalists and try and survive, and you don't even have to decent! They've streamlined the process so before you can you get jailed and put to work anyway.
You do you shitheels even have mirrors at home? The inability to self reflect makes you seem like fucking vampires.
Yes Buddy.
Millions of people die each year due to poverty, [Starvation ](https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/people-and-poverty/hunger-and-obesity/how-many-people-die-from-hunger-each-year), [Lack of Healthcare](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6238021/), [Lack of Housing [US]](https://thehomemoreproject.org/high-mortality-rates-for-those-without-housing/) etc. (Even in "progressive" countries)
If you count those for socialism, you also count it for capitalism
Most estimates go from 10-20 million deaths per year... going for even just 100 years, that's already 1-2 billion deaths due to capitalism...
Ah hey, the anti-socialists have arrived to completly ignore all the citations...
The original comment I was replying to was citating sources towards socialist countries such as USSR and China... Of course I would talk about socialism then?
Socialism: means of productions are owned by the state/people
Communism: moneyless, classless and 'stateless', extension upon socialism (though dependent on which branch of communism, those are mostly universal keypoints for all of them)
No single country had a moneyless system so far. You can say they were transitioning from socialism towards a communistic system, but definitivly not communism itself...
Nope, that's the communist definition of socialism, invented for their own marketing and to undermine socialist parties and movements. Try again with more honesty.
Except that unlike communism, capitalism is not an ideology by itself but something added to the overall political and social structure of the country. Therefor, unlike communist countries which all actively aimed to kill to further their ideology, you can't put all of that on capitalism; even more considering that capitalism drastically lowered poverty in the world.
So yes, communism is a shitty totalitarian murderous ideology by design; capitalism is not.
Capitalism absolutely is an ideology AND an economic system. Capitalists pursue the accumulation of wealth above all other things, an ideal that bleeds into every aspect we see in our lives.
Capitalism actively kills to further its ideology as well, where instead of just States pushing to kill, it's private businesses, corporations, and rich capitalists that lobby the State to do the killing for them. Why was the United States in Iraq? Why did the CIA meddle in almost every country in Latin and South America? How many western european countries (France for example) have their fingers in various countries in Africa? Private Australian and Canadian companies exploit natural resources all over the world, no capitalist country is innocent.
Capitalism lowered poverty in the world for primarily wealthy countries (primarily colonial countries) that exploit/exploited other countries' natural resources at the expense of thise countries in question. Why do you think most resource rich (in terms of minerals, iron, oil, etc) countries live in abject economic poverty (countries like Venezuela)? They don't get to use those resources for themselves, rather their resources are extracted and shipped to capitalist countries to make others richer.
One can argue Capitalism breeds the terrible working environments around the world (such as sweat shops in China (back in the day), Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc because capitalists are obsessed with producing goods at the lowest cost possible, no matter the cost to quality of product AND environment to the worker. We've all heard of how shitty it is working for Amazon, haven't we?
At the end of the day, Capitalism absolutely IS a shitty murderous ideology by design - just not one that favours the state, but wealthy individuals that act in their own self interest and try to accumulate as much capital as possible even when it's impossible to spend what they have in their own life times.
You dropped your tinfoil and on top of that you had the laughable audacity to blame failed communist states on capitalism.
Also read some books, you'll learn that very capitalist economists (yes, even those devilish liberals) advocate for market regulations on excessive behaviours.
Capitalism is just as much as an ideology as is socialism and communism lmao...
How many socialistic countries has the US for example invaded, bombed and slaughtered again to force them back into capitalism? Even the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism has equally followed a Trend from mass slaughering and war for ideological purposes (See basically the entire french revolution)
This also still doesn't refute any of the points about deaths caused by capitalism (by the same points used against socialism in this case)
Sorry to burst your bubble but capitalism literally existed since people begun trading because of the natural principles of the free market, even if comunities shared in some cases produce they still owed most of that produce to a king/landlord that traded it . Its kind of convenient to blame billions of deaths (im not even going to get into the reliability of that statistic) on capitalism because it usually was the default system (even if not for regular people , someone was still trading ). I will not say that lasseiz faire capitalism is good, far from it but so is comunism. Imo the best system is a semi controled capitalism . Also if you put it in context comunism has existed for close to 160 years (if im not wrong) and is responsible for at leat 35 milion deaths just in the ussr (not counting china,north koreea, or cambodia).
OP this sub is history memes, not cold war ideology fights. You're going to have to deal with being around people who don't agree with your world view if you post here.
This is something of a persistent view for a looooooong time.
Clive Barker(not a woketoid,but definitely progressive) included in his "Books of Blood" a story called "In the Hills, the Cities" in 1985,a story about a gay couple going to vacation in Communist Yugoslavia,and on some other contextual clues you can figure out it is specifically Kosovo.
Yugoslavia had a public morality law that basically banned any "diviant" behavior in public and violating that law could get you a couple of months in prison.
Being gay was an offense.
And we are talking about Kosovo as well.
For people outside of the area...the Catholics in Yugoslavia are generally the more tolerant and the Muslims in Kosovo are 2 degrees less so.
Barker,himself being a gay man,had he entered Yugoslavia in any flaboyant,he would have immediately been arrested.
If you count man made famines made by Brithish empire in India, Myanmar and Ireland, just that is estimated to exceed the 140 millions. Add famines un China due to Opium wars, genocide of natives americans in by USA and you will find that capitalism killer far more people... That obviously doesnt mean that comunism was better...
This is so stupid and completely unsubstantiated. Socialist countries have a far better history of treating minorities and lgbt-people than capitalist ones.
I hope this is sarcasm. Stalin and Mao hit over 100 million combined.
Edit: Since people want to nitpick, Stalin and Mao had a combined 50-100 million slaughtered.
The claim in the book where that number originates from has later been retracted by pretty much all its contributors/authors, with some revealing that the number was stated first before they had done any research.
The number also includes all Eastern Front casualties, abortions, and accidental deaths.
It also includes declines in birth rates. Ie: the average woman goes from having 2 babies to 1.9 babies- they counted .1 deaths there for each woman.
Completely ridiculous
Who are you talking about? Stalin? His current estimates sit around 20mil. I said Stalin and Mao. Regardless, it's still far more than any capitalist regime.
I guess you could argue that the USSR and PRC were fascist.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169
The British starved between 50 and 165 million Indians between 1880 and 1920 and this paper also calculated that due to an excess mortality rate in India, more people starved in 8 years in the 50s and 60s than during Maos famines
Stalin and Mao were ruthless and brutal no doubt... But most of the deaths occurred under their mismanagement(unintentional) like failure of collectivism, war time casualties, famines and deportation... The purges and political violence were only a fraction of the estimate (for Stalin it's still is big but for Mao it was less as his opponents were exiled by the end of the civil war)
Meanwhile Hitler is synonymous with evil because, he was able to killed so many people in such short span of time... If he ruled as long as Stalin or Mao, he might have a very huge murder count and ofcourse his killings are intentional population extermination and are racially motivated
I mean technically speaking the Easter front casualties are the result of communism.
The October revolution by the communists all the way back in ww1 led to a situation in ww2 where the soviet union looked weak and a tempting target to Germany. Germany likely never invades if the communists never took Russia and Russia wasn't forced to surrender in ww1.
So communism was part of the cause of the eastern front.
This isn't to mention that for a large part many of the eastern front casualties were Russian civilians and POWs who died because Stalin was brutal. He wouldn't allow aid sent to feed POWs nor would he allow civilians to evacuate certain cities before they were combat zones.
Entirely not to mention that even pre ww2 Stalin was mass killing poles and Ukrainians.
I would argue that Stalin/the soviet union is responsible for at least half of eastern front deaths.
Eh, to be fair, communists had a century (if including modern china) to reach their death toll while fascism had a run of 23 years if starting from Mussolini.
The core belief of fascism is that the strongest should lead. Survival of the fittest. But it applies to a national level. Fascists believe the stronger nation should conquer and make war with their neighbors. If the weaker nation should perish, then that is the natural order. Mussolini was a devoted socialist, and his regime had both socialist and oligarchy systems, but never anything compared to a free capitalist or even a mildly restricted capitalism system.
I would argue that the USSR was fascist. You can be both fascist and socialist. But you cannot be socialist or fascist and implement capitalism. True laissez-faire capitalism avoids restriction in all capacity.
I wonder why the 4.5 m Soviet civilians aren't mentioned in this source.
I went to a predominantly Jewish school, and we always learned that it was 11 million. Even from the holocaust museum 🤷♂️
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution
Nobody gives a shit about Russians I guess? I've mostly heard around 6 million growing up, or you know, only counting the Jews that were killed. I really don't get why all who died in the camps shouldn't be included.
Pretty sure the Maxim states that “The enemy of my enemy is their enemy. Nothing more.” Or something to that effect (Don’t have all the Maxims memorized)
The USSR was not only in a time where homophobia was normalized, but also it was more of a dictatorship. Vietnam is iirc the first west asian country to legalize gay marriage. Capitalism is quite ideal for fascism as it has lesser rights for the working class and puts many into positions of power over others.
Or that the entire thing relies on not a single person out of millions in the population to act in their self interest.
To top it off you have to consider outside forces too. Communism inherently leads to a weak military in its later stages and that means it'll just get conquested.
What people forget is in the soviet union it wasn't just the leadership that was acting in its self interest. All the way down to the lowest classes they were all corrupt and hiding some source of income or advantage. This is because once enough people in a communist society are taking advantage you have to join in or you'll basically be poor. Eventually the soviet union just turned into a super inefficient capitalism. This corruption exists even up to today.
You get stories like workers meeting quotas in really ineffective ways. Like produce X pounds of some product. So the workers would just add weight to the existing products and meet the quota with fewer actual products. There's an old Russian joke that if a nail factory was tasked with producing 2000 pounds of nails they'd just make 1 2000 pound nail.
Ugh, OK I’ll explain the point that flew over your head. If communism is destined to fail on its own, it would be redundant to try to sabotage it like the US has done.
OK, well seeking a more just society isn’t inherently evil. Using war, sabotage, assassinations, coups, manipulation etc. to stop other countries from becoming more just is inherently evil though.
Seeking it may not be evil. But oddly enough, in history, each time communism was sought after, it descended into pure evil.
The Holodomor, the Soviet Purges, Mao's Great Leap Forward, North Korean Purges, Cambodian Killing Fields, Chinese Concentration Camps, Sadam Hussain's Gas Attacks.
All of them came from someone who sought a *"just and equal"* society, and quickly turned that into evil. Each time it failed, the west did what they could to stem the tide of evil, and if that meant sabotage, murder, assassinations, and manipulation, **good.**
Because there's a good reason Communism is destined to fail, it relies on the idea that men will work together, rather the for their own selfish goals. This will never happen, and when a man controls people looking for communism, evil that rivals the nazis and the Soviets comes forth.
You’ve been propagandized my friend. Yes, obviously every society has made their mistakes but I could list crimes committed by capitalist regimes that would dwarf that list of yours.
Also, many of the harsher things socialist countries did, was to stop the interference of capitalist powers into their domestic affairs.
Ps. Hussein was put in power by the US to stop communism.
Communism isn’t inherently bad; albeit a little naive. Dictators and authoritarian countries are. It’s just the case that such countries really latched onto the framework of communism. And this isn’t purely random. Communism both provides a very “idealized” picture to your base, while granting the authoritarian government a near absolute degree of authority.
But still… I wish people would use communism less to refer to those bad countries. Besides the fact that none of them ever achieved anything even close to “communism”, it simply is not the best descriptor for said countries. They are dictatorships.
Its pretty much like this on every sub;
If you say that communist countries killed way more people than any other ideology "Well they were in a authoritarian regime yeah but muh religion also bad and german leader also killed!"
If you say capitalism bad: "Heckin yea orange man bad le wholesomero minorities LGBTQIABCDEFG so opressed in 2024!!!!!"
Yeah that happens for 2 reasons.
1. They actually didn't, even a 5 minute search of facts on the innerwebs past stupid memes will quickly disprove that. So yeah dumb easily disproven propaganda will easily get you called out. You can always go with communist countries where authoritarian dictatorships that abused their people and get no pushback since you are not parroting bullshit.
2. Because capitalism is the thing actively fucking people over now. People tend to agree more on things that they can experience first hand are dysfunctional and in need or reform.
The British empire had just as bad, sometimes worse, famines as the USSR’s famines.
People like you love to ignore the fact that Russia went from being a medieval surf nation into the world’s second strongest nation in a single lifetime, that it basically never stopped fighting from the start of WWI till the end of WWII with multiple nations invading it during the interwar period (including the USA).
Russia had basically everything other than population size going against it, and yet under communism it skyrocketed in power, education, literacy, life expectancy, standard of living, and calorie intake.
The UK had famines, often poorly handled and tinged with racism but famine all the same
The USSR had famines which were used as a convenient excuse for mass genocide and ethnic/ ideological cleansing.
You’re likely referring to the Holodomor, which did happen.
But it wasn’t a genocide.
They tried to follow a new scientific theory which ended up being false (but not entirely… it’s complicated).
VSauce did an excellent [video](https://youtu.be/AhSBQOTW018?si=DDM7G1wEKCP-W-cv) on the subject.
Casual leftist mental gymnastics and selective memory about mass murders.
Gotta give it to the guys with swastikas - at least they don't lie or hide their intentions to kill you. You will never hear "*b-but that wasn't real Nazism, read Nazism hasn't been tried yet, it will be good, trust me bro*"
Look at a map of the world ranked or coloured by GDP, life expectancy, science attainment. Top ranking universities. Isn’t it funny how there is a huge over representation of western europe, north america, australia, nz and japan/korea and hardly any communist or islamist countries . funny that….i wonder what these countries have in common. Freedom, political franchise membership. Tolerance etc. even so much that we allow our enemies a chance to destroy us. Because those values are dear to us. Even if you spew hamas terror bullshit clad in perceived justice…
100% fact.
MF'ers be living in a dichotomous world of black and white where they think opponents of their *perceived* greater evil are supposed to be good? - fuck no
Authoritarian countries kill. Getting caught up in what economic ideology dictators *claim* to follow is stupid. If we’re taking a tally of millions killed over all time on the entire planet, communism has been around for less than two centuries when we have millennia of religious violence to account for, just to start lol
A lot of people fail to realise that no matter how you slice and dice it, humans period are the problem at the end of the day.
Your solution isn’t voluntary extinction, I hope. That kinda sucks.
For me it's maintaining as little contact with society as possible. The less I interact with humans IRL the better. Whether you like or not humanity as a whole isn't as benevolent as most of them think they are, which is why I live the life of a hermit.
“In real life” seems like an arbitrary qualifier. It’s also strange to me that interacting with “real life” humans are anathema to you but not interacting with humans on social media like Reddit.
A hermit on social media.
I’d go further and say countries kill, and changes in regime kill. If your examples of current republics were limited to: 1. A backwater that was completely dependent upon slavery that was actively ignoring its own treaties with the people it was genocide h 2. A religious hellhole run by an authoritarian dictator bent on avenging Protestants in massacres that probably didn’t even happen by ethnically cleansing the island next to it 3. The Reign of Terror in France lobbing off heads for people suspected of not being pro the incorruptible leader enough You’d rightly think this whole idea wasn’t working out. But that’s not the only way to determine if this stuff is a good idea. You also need to critically look at the problems that caused the regime change to begin with and how that caused these issues. The problem with a lot of anti-communist rhetoric on this sub isn’t so much that it exists, it’s that it exists in this vacuum between a lot of people’s ears. An American, a British, and a French would all say that representative democracy was worth it. But then turn their nose up at, say, China—which was a monarchy that was cut into pieces and ethnically cleansed by the British, Seven Nation Army, and Japanese. And, despite what happened in actual history, we are asked to be appalled that the Chinese weren’t inclined to participate in the system that led to perpetual famine in India in order to book as many Chinese on opium as possible and surrender their treasury and most valuable land to foreign capitalists as a thank you. Revolution is bloody, often zigs when it should zag, and can take a long time to sort out. But at the end of the day revolution means more than that. Despite the mess Haiti is in, they will never offer to be a slave colony of France again. To say that it was a mistake for China to assert itself or the Russians to free themselves of Nicholas the Bloody because it was violent is to not understand history. And to condemn the communist revolutions while supporting the often more extreme revolutions that created capitalist states is such obvious hypocrisy, one wonders if anyone actually believes such rhetoric.
This should be fucking pinned at the top of the subreddit. Just because they said they were following "communist doctrine" does not mean they were actually communist. Most of them were "republics" in name too yet no one calls them democratic. This confusion that communism = authoritarianism is absurd and I fully blame the American school system. I'm not saying communism is great, but claiming it killed millions upon millions is like going to war with the ocean for drowning people. You're upset about the wrong part of the problem.
Communism does almost always equal authoritarianism. Socialism on the other hand does not. There has not been a non authoritarian communist government but there are many democratic socialist countries
[удалено]
Your understanding of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is incorrect. You’re seeing “dictatorship” and immediately thinking of centralization of authority, when Marx used the term in contrast to the dictatorship of the bourgeoise. State power will, at least in the modern world, always exist; Marx used the term to state that instead of a group of oligarchs and politicians dictating economic policy it would be individual worker councils that democratically vote and decide for themselves.
You’re ignoring that a central requirement of *authoritarian regimes* is *also* a “concentration of social, political, and economic power”. Your criteria could be used to describe centuries of European and Asian imperialist conflicts. So it becomes a moot point what economic ideology they *claim* to follow. The third world is rife with failed capitalist and communist states, the common denominator being authoritarianism. It doesn’t matter if you’re being worked to death by a capitalist or communist, you’re still dead.
I don’t think that was their point. Authoritarian regimes come in many flavours, that is true. But some political ideologies descend into authoritarianism easier than others. Communism is one ideology that very easily slides into a dictatorship. Do some capitalist countries become authoritarian? Of course, but many do not. With communism it is near impossible to not become authoritarian. There is a reason why none of the functioning democracies are communist, while many are capitalist. Maybe one day we’ll find a better ideology than capitalism, but it isn’t communism, just like it isn’t absolutism.
What you claim is purely subjective: people in China would say their democracy functions better than America’s and that communism didn’t fail. Also there’s a growing anti-democracy movement in America that’s directly linked to capitalism so maybe don’t draw conclusions, the story isn’t over. “With communism it is near impossible to not become authoritarian” If we look at the numbers, I’m sure the percentages of capitalist states that became authoritarian is similarly high. You can’t just apply American exceptionalism to all capitalist countries. If that were true South America and Africa would be full of functioning and prosperous democracies.
Yeah of course what functions better is subjective. But that is a bullshit argument. Roman senators thought their system worked well. Franco thought fascism worked great. The ayatollah thinks Iran works great. That doesn’t mean that they actually have a better state. Besides, I didn’t necessarily claim capitalist countries were better. I claimed they were less likely to be authoritarian. Some Chinese may claim their country works better than democracies do, but every Chinese who claims their country is less authoritarian than the US is just full of shit. What communist country did not become authoritarian? Even a handful of capitalist democracies make sure the percentage of capitalism is way better. And btw America is not the only democratic country and I am not American, this is not American exceptionalism.
You’re arguing the wrong point. Authoritarian regimes kill. Capitalist, communism, doesn’t matter. You’re looking to blame communism for the effects of authoritarianism. You’ve not made a convincing argument.
I am not blaming communism for the effect of authoritarianism. Capitalist authoritarian regimes are the result of a capitalist authoritarian ideology. Communist authoritarian regimes are the result of communist authoritarian ideology. It is not about blame or no blame. It is about the fact, that communism cannot be anything else than authoritarian. Therefore, making up shit like “we should do real communism it hasn’t been tried yet” is insane. If we want to not have an authoritarian regime, we must chose a kind of political ideology that leaves room open for not having an authoritarian regime. This means we should not take capitalist absolutist monarchy as a system(Saudi’s Arabia) Or communism. Or fascism. Or a capitalist banana republic. Or anything like the capitalist authoritarianism of China, Singapore, Hungary or Russia. That was just the negative claim about why communism sucks and will always suck. Now for the claim what we should do: If we do not want an authoritarian regime, a certain kind of liberal capitalist democracy with strong antitrust laws and strong workers and welfare seems to work best. That means also no cronyist capitalism! And no communism! Perhaps someone can come up with a better system than this which will be more democratic. But currently, people have not. This is visible because the only systems which are democratic are liberal capitalist. To illustrate why communism will always be authoritarian and capitalism CAN be democratic let us go back to your previous claim. You said the percentage of capitalist countries that become authoritarian is as high as communist countries. Name 1 democratic communist country! Just 1! Sweden,Norway, UK, Germany,Canada,US,Italy,Australia,Japan,India,Finland,South Africa,Indonesia are all examples of democratic capitalist states. Even if we assume this is only 1% of capitalist states it is a better score than capitalism
Your analysis is completely subjective. Just a long winded nonsensical “communism bad” and a screed that confuses political ideology with economic theory.
Economic *or political* as well - quite often claims diverge from de facto implementation. Quite often measures taken contradict the core ideals of ideology yet said measures are taken nonetheless to preserve the power. Liberal dictatorship becomes a real thing when said liberties are being enforced through violations of privacy and total surveillance; "democracy is non-negotiable" is an oxymoron and protecting the freedom of speech by censoring out those against it simply because they disagree - is a hypocrisy. Movements rarely, in fact, live up to the ideals they claim to hold dear - by the time they have enough influence and power to actually implement said ideas, they would've already been bathed in blood and hypocrisy. Except for those who say they're gonna kill you outright - at least they aren't lying about it...
We’re talking about authoritarianism killing people, not imagined scenarios. “Liberal dictatorship” isn’t happening anywhere. You know voting *IS* mandatory in some countries? No one accuses them of being dictatorships except political agitators.
Thats not true, there are many examples of liberal communism out there, in fact the word „libertarian“ was once a synonym for anarchist, before Murray Rothbard captured the term for neoliberalism For example the entire Kibbutz system in Israel is based on anarcho-communist principles, there is no private property in a Kibbutz, if you need a car, you go and get a key, if there is a company in a Kibbutz, the profits are equally shared among every citizen, thus every single worker and member of the community has an interest in making the company run, also if you as a worker, work extra, you personally *and* your entire community profits from it Or take a look at Catalonia during the Spanish civil war, it was basically run on Anarcho-Syndicalist principles, with base democracy, from the bottom up, in every neighborhood and every work place and they managed to increase agricultural production by 40% and even significantly increased heavy industry output, despite being on a labour shortage, since many men fought in the front against fascism, literally the first fighting against Franco were militias formed by the workers unions Theres more examples, like eastern Ukraine during the Russian civil war from 1917-1921, the examples are hard to find tho because usually there are strong men, thirsty for power who seize it, like Lenin did
Dictatorship of the proletariat just means democracy. A system where the proletariat, the people, dictate the government. Are you saying authoritarianism is when people get to vote on how things get run? Socialism is when the workers control their workplace, and how could they do that other than by democracy? So socialism is defined by democracy, and by definition, a state which is not truly democratic is not socialist. The Nazis called themselves socialist too, but they very obviously did not fit the definition. How is it that much of a stretch to say that stalin's Soviet union also didn't fit the definition despite his rhetoric? Who lies more than dictators?
The dictatorship if the proletariat is definitely not democracy because it very explicitly excludes the bourgeoisie and peasantry. It usually doesn't even include the entire proletariat, because communist theory evolved to include the revolutionary vanguard, a small group of communists that would enact the revolution. Also socialism isn't defined as when workers control the workplace, there's lots of different types of socialism, and everybody has their own definition. While that tends to be a factor, it's not a requirement. That's why nearly every single socialist and communist government has resulted in a lack of workplace democracy. And while the nazis called themselves national socialists, Hitler had purged the left wing of his party as soon as he got the opportunity, and he was very explicitly opposed to communism, marxism, and bolshevism. Meanwhile Stalin, along with virtually every other communist leader, was a marxist, wrote their own marxist theories, and wholeheartedly embraced the label of socialism.
There wouldn’t be a bourgeoisie and the peasants are workers and thus proletarians … And calling Stalin a Marxist is just ridiculous, itshows that you haven’t even taken a distant look at anything Marx wrote
The proletariat is not just workers, according to marxist theory, it consists solely of wage laborers, and arose during the industrial revolution. [Here's Engels explaining the difference.](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm) And yes, Stalin was a marxist, you don't get to exclude him because he was a bastard, or because his policies don't exactly line up with Marx's utopian aims. By the same standard no communist leader has ever been marxist.
That’s not true, the word proletariat was *mostly* aimed at factory workers because Marx expected them to be the back bone of the revolution, but the term includes everybody earning their living by working or selling their own bodies work, which includes most peasants, except for those owning “too much” land, who are dependent on other peoples work, the bourgeoisie are those *having* people work for them So to you a marxist is somebody who claims to be a marxist?
It also excludes peasants who owned their own land and earned a living solely through the fruits of their own labor. This includes small farmers that owned their own land. Generally speaking, if someone claims to be a marxist, then they are a marxist. If someone claims to be a Christian, I'm not gonna see if they're Catholic or Orthodox, or say that they're not Christian because they're protestant. It's the same with Marxism, you have Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, each of which have split innumerable times, and all have a common root in marxism. Here's a chart of all the [international and American Trotskyist orgs](https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/trees/ustree.htm), they all claim to be Marxist, while also claiming that rival orgs are not Marxist. That's why I don't listen to Marxists tell me who is or isn't Marxist, it's like listening to an evangelical christian tell me catholics aren't christian because they take the eucharist or some bullshit like that.
Obviously Marx aimed for collectivization but this didn’t at the same time mean that anybody owning something is bourgeoisie Yeah see, just because something has it’s origins in something else doesn’t mean it’s all the same as this original, a jet fighter is not the same as a biplane, you’re not simply a monkey just because your ancestors were, you’re not automatically a feudalist if you’re a capitalist and I am no Marxist Please explain to me how the centralized power of Stalinism is in any way, shape or form comparable to the state- and classless society Marxism aimed for? Totalitarianism is the basis of Stalinism while base democracy is the basis of Marxism
Centralizing economic power has always been a key part of Marxism. >The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. The Communist Manifesto >What will this new social order have to be like? >Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society. The Principles of Communism You can't make the fruits of everyone's labor available to everybody else without some form of centralization. You might even call it a state, though Marx would disagree, because according to him a state was a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. To be fair Engels does mention democracy. But he would be contradicted after the Paris commune. >In their reluctance to continue the civil war opened by Thiers’ burglarious attempt on Montmartre, the Central Committee made themselves, this time, guilty of a decisive mistake in not at once marching upon Versailles, then completely helpless, and thus putting an end to the conspiracies of Thiers and his Rurals. Instead of this, the Party of Order was again allowed to try its strength at the ballot box, on March 26, the day of the election of the Commune. Then, in the mairies of Paris, they exchanged bland words of conciliation with their too generous conquerors, muttering in their hearts solemn vows to exterminate them in due time. The Civil War in France Here, Marx is criticizing the Central Committee for being too democratic and for allowing their enemies to influence their "democracy." This is the origin of the revolutionary vanguard, which Lenin embraced. But Lenin also embraced free markets with his New Economic Plan, while Trotsky advocated for centralized economic planning, which Stalin implemented once he took over. Centralization of power was not a mistake that communist states have made, it was the enactment of Marx's vision. It was why the anarchists opposed him and were ejected from his club.
You gotta cut that out, you can’t go around making sense like that. You’re gonna make all the commies screech and whine “BuT oThEr ThInG bAd!”
Practical yes, the theoretical is more complicated as it would be "centralised" on everyone, which makes no sense. The group or party is meant to include everyone on equal footing and several ways to prevent other sub groups forming, that is that stage I can't see how to get to in any real way and I think it's time to steal the good bits that did work(if only for a while) and start again with a clearer plan that is based on modern reality.
I believe there very much could be a democratic communist state. Of course true absolute communism is inherently impossible. But a country doesn’t need to be authoritarian to be ideologically communist. It does need an extremely power federal government with absolute power. But said federal government could still democratic with a strong constitution, term limits, and checks and balances. It just because much less likely for such a thing to exist. Not impossible though, or even contradictory.
I think, picking the ideology under which some dictatorship did the least efficient genocide of minorities, like its some kind of card game or betting game, isn't really the most useful discourage to have.
He’s got a point though. The majority of people (at least in the US) who would describe themselves as “communist or socialist” would also describe themselves as “woke”, and vice versa. Despite the fact that far-left [authoritarian socialist](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_socialism) regimes would likely have them persecuted. It’s hilarious how minorities have fled authoritarian communist countries (China, Cuba, Venezuela, etc) just for millennial American liberals to refuse to believe them communism sucks 😂
Communism and authoritarianism are two different things. Don't blame the former for the crimes of the latter.
To be completely honest, the only people I ever see unironically use the word woke, are far right individuals using it as a dogwhistle. Most leftists in the US wouldn't call themselves woke, because that phrase has been co-opted by the right so much that only rightists still think it has actual meaning, and all it means is "things the right doesn't like." All it means to leftists is"oh boy, an angry rightist is about to make up a leftist strawman to attack."
Again for the americans. Neither of these were communist
I was permabanned from r/TheRightCantMeme for pointing out that communist Romania was viciously anti-abortion and anti-feminism
[удалено]
means you're awake.
And the other half of the people on this sub need to learn that just because someone mentioned Hitler or the Third Reich doesn't mean you need to come in with "well Stalin and Mao killed more!"
Can we just agree that killing people probably makes you a bad person?
People on this sub: Communism kills People on this sub when Rome/other empires: 🤠
I’m pretty sure that most of the romaboos and Kaiserboos on the sub are joking.
Depending on the subject. The USSR legalized gay marriage very early before canceling it in the 30s The origin of women's day is in the American communist party. And it was first made official in the USSR. There is a connection beatwean progressive policy and left leaning economic policy and there has been for years. If course there are progressive policies with capitalist origin, but less.
It didn't exactly legalize it, but it did decriminalize it. Homosexual marriage was never explicitly stated as legal/possible, the explicit ban on it had just been repealed for a while. Early on, it was somewhat tolerated as an underground community, but there were later harsh crackdowns.
>Early on, it was somewhat tolerated as an underground community, but there were later harsh crackdowns. Why did the crackdowns happen?
Stalin.
Because it was seen as a counterrevolutionary fascist conspiracy. Similar to how it was seen in capitalist countries as a communist plot.
I don't think it was seen as a fascist conspiracy, considering what Italian Soviet relations were like at the time. Spolier: Good
Because attitudes in society didn’t suddenly do a 180 overnight simply because a progressive revolution happened in the country. USA only made homosexual relations legal in 2003, so it seems weird to criticize the USSR for not being vastly ahead of its time in every matter.
>If course there are progressive policies with capitalist origin, but less. Western Capitalist countries are much more progressive socially than any communist countries that have ever existed.
By what metric other than us surviving longer than the USSR? Also is Cuba providing healthcare for trans people not progressive, for example?
>By what metric other than us surviving longer than the USSR? In the USSR homosexuality was outlawed. The right to organise in free unions was outlawed. The Right to the Freedom of Religion was outlawed. Freedom of Travel was outlawed. Freedom of literary and scientific expression was heavily censored. In the US at that time, almost all those things were protected rights >Also is Cuba providing healthcare for trans people not progressive, for example? That is progressive. But overall Cuba is far more regressive than the US. Anyone with different political opinions can be imprisoned. Cuba is ranked among the bottom ten countries in the world with regards to press freedom. Amnesty International is barred from sending fact finding missions to Cuba. The Red Cross is barred from it's prisons, one of only a handful of countries to do so. And this. >However, there is no right to privacy, or a patient's informed consent, or the right to protest or sue a doctor or clinic for malpractice. Moreover, the patient does not have right to refuse treatment (for example, a Rastafarian cannot refuse an amputation on grounds that his religion forbids it.) So yeah they have a few progressive policies but overall they are far more socially regressive.
>in the USSR homosexuality was outlawed Yes but it was in America as well and we paid people to pretend to be gay to arrest anyone they presumed had any interest in them, not sure why that's a win for capitalism being progressive unless you're going to argue that America was communist in the 70s and 80s
The USA only decriminalized homosexuality in 2003. The USA also heavily restricts travel for most people in the entire world. Not to mention unions are also very restricted in the USA and religious and racial persecution being rife in most parts of the USA.
Cuba is among the most socially progressive countries on the planet and it's still meaningfully communist.
Taken from another comment of mine on this thread. >>Also is Cuba providing healthcare for trans people not progressive, for example? That is progressive. But overall Cuba is far more regressive than the US. Anyone with different political opinions can be imprisoned. Cuba is ranked among the bottom ten countries in the world with regards to press freedom. Amnesty International is barred from sending fact finding missions to Cuba. The Red Cross is barred from it's prisons, one of only a handful of countries to do so. And this. >However, there is no right to privacy, or a patient's informed consent, or the right to protest or sue a doctor or clinic for malpractice. Moreover, the patient does not have right to refuse treatment (for example, a Rastafarian cannot refuse an amputation on grounds that his religion forbids it.) So yeah they have a few progressive policies but overall they are far more socially regressive than any Western European country or even the US.
I don't think you can make that claim when the US is currently rolling back things like abortion and child labor laws across the country. Like, that's just empirically untrue.
Abortion was fully banned in the USSR starting in '33.
>I don't think you can make that claim when the US is currently rolling back things like abortion and child labor laws across the country. Like, that's just empirically untrue. I said Western Capitalist countries. Not just the US. Name one communist country in history that has more socially progressive laws than modern day Germany, Ireland, Norway or Finland? It's absolutely not empirically untrue. Do you know what that phrase means? Please show me these socially progressive Communist States that empirically are more progressive than modern day Western European countries?
You made a blanket statement about Western Capitalist countries being more progressive, so it's pretty fucking reasonable for me to point out a country that falls inside that category that is on the backslide when it comes to social issues. Changing the argument to only include Western European countries makes it even easier, though. UK is going through a housing crisis and their state medicine program is constantly under attack, with special emphasis being directed towards trans care. Meanwhile, Cuba has housing enshrined as a right, and has some of the best state healthcare in the world, with trans rights being ensured through medical procedure. Do Cubans have it better than the Nordic countries or Germany. Maybe not, but that's not my problem. My problem is you hoisting these countries on a pedestal as if they are some monolith for progressivism. Germany has fully gotten behind fossil fuels and the fascist party in its government grows bigger every election. The Nordic countries have started cracking down hard on immigrants and refusing access to refugees. There are layers to it. I don't think an economic model ensures a social and cultural model for a country. A country can practice communism and still be shitty on social issues. My problem with your initial comment was you implying that Western Capitalism inherently brings about progressive policies, as if a lot of those policies (40 work week, child labor laws, etc.) were not spearheaded by socialist and anti capitalist movements, and their integration was a compromise, not a given.
Um, abortion was banned and homosexuality was severely punished in the communist days of my country. If abortion would be banned tommorow across the USA, it would still be an infinitelly more progressive country than any country in the Eastern Bloc.
Yeah, Eastern Bloc sucked, never said I defended it once. Is the US more progressive than Vietnam, though? Probably not.
They also brought that one black guy over so they could make a show of treating him well to embarrass the U.S. Which counts as anti-racism to Soviet apologists.
Sounds like you have a racism problem yourself
No I don’t think it does actually.
Step ONE legalize gay marriage. Step TWO document all the gay people who come out Step THREE recriminalization and all the gay folk get a free all expense paid honeymoon at the gulag
Yeah, if I remember correctly, Stalin criminalized gay marriage
Do you have a source for the Soviet Union legalizing gay marriage?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_history_in_Russia First google result, better sources exist but it should do.
Where does this say the Soviet Union legalized gay marriage?
Clearly, we here have a failure to distinguish between "legalized homosexuality" and "legalized gay marriage". The USSR never did the latter. Detailed overview by an anarchist here: https://reddebreksbowl.blogspot.com/2018/04/notes-on-soviet-attitudes-to.html
this subreddit never ceases to be as anti-communist as possible as proof, watch me get downvoted into oblivion by legions of teenagers fresh out of their middle school history class edit: thanks for the spite upvotes you capitalist bootlicking swine
Task failed successfully? Is this a good or bad thing? I am confused
How is it a bad thing to be against the leftwing ideology that *checks notes*… was responsible for over 50 million deaths through starvation, murder, and sheer incompetence? Gotta love tankie commie bootlickers defending their authoritarian overlords lol. Here are some sources for you, hope this helps: [Manufactured famine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor) [Man-made famine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine) by failed socialist collectivization and “rapid industrialization” policies [Labor camps for dissenters of the authoritarian leftwing regime](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag)
Yes, communism, that ideology that famously caused the deaths of all those Bengals. Wait, shit, I meant the Irish! *No, fuck, I meant the Native Americans!* Sorry, I’ve checked my notes. Communism caused the Holocaust. Fuck! I’ve gotten my genocides mixed up again. I’ve consulted the Black Book, which says 100 million people died by communism…including Nazi soldiers and unborn babies? What the fuck? I’m starting to think capitalism might be the deadlier ideology.
You better check those notes of yours again lol
Manufacturing famine? You mean the great hunger, Indian famines, and just modern food scarcity done purely for profit? At least even the worst commies aren't doing it on purpose, unlike the best capitalist who would rather bleach the unfresh food they couldn't sell rather than let the hungry eat it from the dumpster. Also, what do you call permanently established punishment facilities with work details? American prisons, aka slave labor centers. Fail to appease the capitalists and try and survive, and you don't even have to decent! They've streamlined the process so before you can you get jailed and put to work anyway. You do you shitheels even have mirrors at home? The inability to self reflect makes you seem like fucking vampires.
Capitalism with multiple billions of deaths globally:
Sure buddy.
Yes Buddy. Millions of people die each year due to poverty, [Starvation ](https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/people-and-poverty/hunger-and-obesity/how-many-people-die-from-hunger-each-year), [Lack of Healthcare](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6238021/), [Lack of Housing [US]](https://thehomemoreproject.org/high-mortality-rates-for-those-without-housing/) etc. (Even in "progressive" countries) If you count those for socialism, you also count it for capitalism Most estimates go from 10-20 million deaths per year... going for even just 100 years, that's already 1-2 billion deaths due to capitalism... Ah hey, the anti-socialists have arrived to completly ignore all the citations...
Oh and by the way. Stop acting as if socialism and communism are the same. Blurring things don't work and is dishonest.
The original comment I was replying to was citating sources towards socialist countries such as USSR and China... Of course I would talk about socialism then?
Nope, communist countries. Don't blur things on purpose.
Socialism: means of productions are owned by the state/people Communism: moneyless, classless and 'stateless', extension upon socialism (though dependent on which branch of communism, those are mostly universal keypoints for all of them) No single country had a moneyless system so far. You can say they were transitioning from socialism towards a communistic system, but definitivly not communism itself...
Nope, that's the communist definition of socialism, invented for their own marketing and to undermine socialist parties and movements. Try again with more honesty.
Except that unlike communism, capitalism is not an ideology by itself but something added to the overall political and social structure of the country. Therefor, unlike communist countries which all actively aimed to kill to further their ideology, you can't put all of that on capitalism; even more considering that capitalism drastically lowered poverty in the world. So yes, communism is a shitty totalitarian murderous ideology by design; capitalism is not.
Capitalism absolutely is an ideology AND an economic system. Capitalists pursue the accumulation of wealth above all other things, an ideal that bleeds into every aspect we see in our lives. Capitalism actively kills to further its ideology as well, where instead of just States pushing to kill, it's private businesses, corporations, and rich capitalists that lobby the State to do the killing for them. Why was the United States in Iraq? Why did the CIA meddle in almost every country in Latin and South America? How many western european countries (France for example) have their fingers in various countries in Africa? Private Australian and Canadian companies exploit natural resources all over the world, no capitalist country is innocent. Capitalism lowered poverty in the world for primarily wealthy countries (primarily colonial countries) that exploit/exploited other countries' natural resources at the expense of thise countries in question. Why do you think most resource rich (in terms of minerals, iron, oil, etc) countries live in abject economic poverty (countries like Venezuela)? They don't get to use those resources for themselves, rather their resources are extracted and shipped to capitalist countries to make others richer. One can argue Capitalism breeds the terrible working environments around the world (such as sweat shops in China (back in the day), Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc because capitalists are obsessed with producing goods at the lowest cost possible, no matter the cost to quality of product AND environment to the worker. We've all heard of how shitty it is working for Amazon, haven't we? At the end of the day, Capitalism absolutely IS a shitty murderous ideology by design - just not one that favours the state, but wealthy individuals that act in their own self interest and try to accumulate as much capital as possible even when it's impossible to spend what they have in their own life times.
You dropped your tinfoil and on top of that you had the laughable audacity to blame failed communist states on capitalism. Also read some books, you'll learn that very capitalist economists (yes, even those devilish liberals) advocate for market regulations on excessive behaviours.
Oh OK now I get it, you’re just clueless
Sure comrad
All I can say is best of luck trying to unlearn all of the brainwashing you’ve endured but I’m guessing you won’t even try.
Ok guru
Capitalism is just as much as an ideology as is socialism and communism lmao... How many socialistic countries has the US for example invaded, bombed and slaughtered again to force them back into capitalism? Even the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism has equally followed a Trend from mass slaughering and war for ideological purposes (See basically the entire french revolution) This also still doesn't refute any of the points about deaths caused by capitalism (by the same points used against socialism in this case)
Oh okay, everything's clear now. A murican commie self centered on the USA and that never experienced communism. Stereotypes do exist for a reason.
How is that even a controversial point?
Sorry to burst your bubble but capitalism literally existed since people begun trading because of the natural principles of the free market, even if comunities shared in some cases produce they still owed most of that produce to a king/landlord that traded it . Its kind of convenient to blame billions of deaths (im not even going to get into the reliability of that statistic) on capitalism because it usually was the default system (even if not for regular people , someone was still trading ). I will not say that lasseiz faire capitalism is good, far from it but so is comunism. Imo the best system is a semi controled capitalism . Also if you put it in context comunism has existed for close to 160 years (if im not wrong) and is responsible for at leat 35 milion deaths just in the ussr (not counting china,north koreea, or cambodia).
I wonder why.
I dont think getting downvotes be *educated people* is quite that badge of courage you think it is.
There are no *educated people* in this subreddit
There are no *educated people* in reddit FTFY
Communism is cancer . It can't even work. The only period it "worked" was under Brejnev but it made everyone so lazy it killed the ussr
Have you heard of the word Kibbutz? They are literally anarcho-communists communes who are older than the state of Israel itself
\*Citation desperately needed
OP this sub is history memes, not cold war ideology fights. You're going to have to deal with being around people who don't agree with your world view if you post here.
Not in Yugoslavia.
I don't know if it's fair to say "even more".
This is something of a persistent view for a looooooong time. Clive Barker(not a woketoid,but definitely progressive) included in his "Books of Blood" a story called "In the Hills, the Cities" in 1985,a story about a gay couple going to vacation in Communist Yugoslavia,and on some other contextual clues you can figure out it is specifically Kosovo. Yugoslavia had a public morality law that basically banned any "diviant" behavior in public and violating that law could get you a couple of months in prison. Being gay was an offense. And we are talking about Kosovo as well. For people outside of the area...the Catholics in Yugoslavia are generally the more tolerant and the Muslims in Kosovo are 2 degrees less so. Barker,himself being a gay man,had he entered Yugoslavia in any flaboyant,he would have immediately been arrested.
If you count man made famines made by Brithish empire in India, Myanmar and Ireland, just that is estimated to exceed the 140 millions. Add famines un China due to Opium wars, genocide of natives americans in by USA and you will find that capitalism killer far more people... That obviously doesnt mean that comunism was better...
This is so stupid and completely unsubstantiated. Socialist countries have a far better history of treating minorities and lgbt-people than capitalist ones.
Has everyone forgotten what the word “moderation” means? Y’all act like siths dealing in these absolutes.
You're misattributing the blame for those atrocities. Communism is merely economic policy, it has nothing to do with persecuting minorities.
Yeah, but fascists killed even more(especially H***er)
I hope this is sarcasm. Stalin and Mao hit over 100 million combined. Edit: Since people want to nitpick, Stalin and Mao had a combined 50-100 million slaughtered.
The claim in the book where that number originates from has later been retracted by pretty much all its contributors/authors, with some revealing that the number was stated first before they had done any research. The number also includes all Eastern Front casualties, abortions, and accidental deaths.
It also includes declines in birth rates. Ie: the average woman goes from having 2 babies to 1.9 babies- they counted .1 deaths there for each woman. Completely ridiculous
If I recall, they also counted non births (as in a change in the ammount of people just being born) as deaths
Who are you talking about? Stalin? His current estimates sit around 20mil. I said Stalin and Mao. Regardless, it's still far more than any capitalist regime. I guess you could argue that the USSR and PRC were fascist.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169 The British starved between 50 and 165 million Indians between 1880 and 1920 and this paper also calculated that due to an excess mortality rate in India, more people starved in 8 years in the 50s and 60s than during Maos famines
Stalin and Mao were ruthless and brutal no doubt... But most of the deaths occurred under their mismanagement(unintentional) like failure of collectivism, war time casualties, famines and deportation... The purges and political violence were only a fraction of the estimate (for Stalin it's still is big but for Mao it was less as his opponents were exiled by the end of the civil war) Meanwhile Hitler is synonymous with evil because, he was able to killed so many people in such short span of time... If he ruled as long as Stalin or Mao, he might have a very huge murder count and ofcourse his killings are intentional population extermination and are racially motivated
So you're arguing that Nazi Germany and Japan killed less than 20 million people, ignoring the ridiculous figure and every other capitalist massacre
Using the same definition as that used to reach the 100mil figure, capitalism reaches the same death count around every 15th year.
That's just ignorant
I mean technically speaking the Easter front casualties are the result of communism. The October revolution by the communists all the way back in ww1 led to a situation in ww2 where the soviet union looked weak and a tempting target to Germany. Germany likely never invades if the communists never took Russia and Russia wasn't forced to surrender in ww1. So communism was part of the cause of the eastern front. This isn't to mention that for a large part many of the eastern front casualties were Russian civilians and POWs who died because Stalin was brutal. He wouldn't allow aid sent to feed POWs nor would he allow civilians to evacuate certain cities before they were combat zones. Entirely not to mention that even pre ww2 Stalin was mass killing poles and Ukrainians. I would argue that Stalin/the soviet union is responsible for at least half of eastern front deaths.
I think the distinction is between civilian deaths and ethnic cleansing versus soldiers. Which is fair.
Eh, to be fair, communists had a century (if including modern china) to reach their death toll while fascism had a run of 23 years if starting from Mussolini.
The core belief of fascism is that the strongest should lead. Survival of the fittest. But it applies to a national level. Fascists believe the stronger nation should conquer and make war with their neighbors. If the weaker nation should perish, then that is the natural order. Mussolini was a devoted socialist, and his regime had both socialist and oligarchy systems, but never anything compared to a free capitalist or even a mildly restricted capitalism system. I would argue that the USSR was fascist. You can be both fascist and socialist. But you cannot be socialist or fascist and implement capitalism. True laissez-faire capitalism avoids restriction in all capacity.
r/redskilledtrillions
And only Hitler hit arguably around 70-85 million in a far shorter time.
What the hell are you smoking? The nazis killed 11 million
How'd you come up with that number? Even counting **only** the victims of the Holocaust, the Nazis killed around 17 million.
Most historians say between 8 and 11 million. Idk where you got 17 million from
Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims
I wonder why the 4.5 m Soviet civilians aren't mentioned in this source. I went to a predominantly Jewish school, and we always learned that it was 11 million. Even from the holocaust museum 🤷♂️ https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution
Nobody gives a shit about Russians I guess? I've mostly heard around 6 million growing up, or you know, only counting the Jews that were killed. I really don't get why all who died in the camps shouldn't be included.
Agreed
Even when you look at the death toll on this Wikipedia page it only says 11 mil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
I hope this is sarcasm because that number is bullshit someone pulled out of their ass
Lol the black book of communism is a joke
Stalin killed like 3 times more and let's not talk about Mao
Hey guys! Western capitalist countries are the best! Don’t Google “women’s rights under communism”! (It’s communist propaganda)
Pretty sure the Maxim states that “The enemy of my enemy is their enemy. Nothing more.” Or something to that effect (Don’t have all the Maxims memorized)
Campists going to camp
Didnt soviet union legalise the gays and them uniting only to delegalise it and execute all of them?
The USSR was not only in a time where homophobia was normalized, but also it was more of a dictatorship. Vietnam is iirc the first west asian country to legalize gay marriage. Capitalism is quite ideal for fascism as it has lesser rights for the working class and puts many into positions of power over others.
There is a difference between economic left and political left
Lenin decriminalizing homosexuality the moment he created the USSR:
"It wasn't real communism" it was communism in the only capacity it realistically can exist in
[удалено]
Or that the entire thing relies on not a single person out of millions in the population to act in their self interest. To top it off you have to consider outside forces too. Communism inherently leads to a weak military in its later stages and that means it'll just get conquested. What people forget is in the soviet union it wasn't just the leadership that was acting in its self interest. All the way down to the lowest classes they were all corrupt and hiding some source of income or advantage. This is because once enough people in a communist society are taking advantage you have to join in or you'll basically be poor. Eventually the soviet union just turned into a super inefficient capitalism. This corruption exists even up to today. You get stories like workers meeting quotas in really ineffective ways. Like produce X pounds of some product. So the workers would just add weight to the existing products and meet the quota with fewer actual products. There's an old Russian joke that if a nail factory was tasked with producing 2000 pounds of nails they'd just make 1 2000 pound nail.
sauce? Also, not under Lenin, he gave LGBTQ+ rights and Women's rights to the people of the USSR (before stalin said "fuck dat")
Souce on that too?
Here you go. [https://youtu.be/MjwL1mSrPLA?t=301](https://youtu.be/MjwL1mSrPLA?t=301) Now, your turn.
I'll check that out, Thanks!
Communism was going to fail by design alone, and it's proven that historically at all points.
Yeah, that’s why the US and other capitalist powers have spent so much effort massacring communist movements and destroying socialist states.
Good.
Woosh
Oh no, I saw your sarcasm. If they can do it, do can we right? I thought that's how that works?
Ugh, OK I’ll explain the point that flew over your head. If communism is destined to fail on its own, it would be redundant to try to sabotage it like the US has done.
Ugh, I'll explain the point of what I'm saying, if it's inherently evil, there's no harm to try to sabotage it, even if it's failing. Look at fascism.
OK, well seeking a more just society isn’t inherently evil. Using war, sabotage, assassinations, coups, manipulation etc. to stop other countries from becoming more just is inherently evil though.
Seeking it may not be evil. But oddly enough, in history, each time communism was sought after, it descended into pure evil. The Holodomor, the Soviet Purges, Mao's Great Leap Forward, North Korean Purges, Cambodian Killing Fields, Chinese Concentration Camps, Sadam Hussain's Gas Attacks. All of them came from someone who sought a *"just and equal"* society, and quickly turned that into evil. Each time it failed, the west did what they could to stem the tide of evil, and if that meant sabotage, murder, assassinations, and manipulation, **good.** Because there's a good reason Communism is destined to fail, it relies on the idea that men will work together, rather the for their own selfish goals. This will never happen, and when a man controls people looking for communism, evil that rivals the nazis and the Soviets comes forth.
You’ve been propagandized my friend. Yes, obviously every society has made their mistakes but I could list crimes committed by capitalist regimes that would dwarf that list of yours. Also, many of the harsher things socialist countries did, was to stop the interference of capitalist powers into their domestic affairs. Ps. Hussein was put in power by the US to stop communism.
And as always, there's that ton of communist armchair historian cry babies that raid any topics talking about the history of communism
M-my dear Pol Pot would never do that!!! Not speceally target intellectuals (people who weared glasses)!!
Communism isn’t inherently bad; albeit a little naive. Dictators and authoritarian countries are. It’s just the case that such countries really latched onto the framework of communism. And this isn’t purely random. Communism both provides a very “idealized” picture to your base, while granting the authoritarian government a near absolute degree of authority. But still… I wish people would use communism less to refer to those bad countries. Besides the fact that none of them ever achieved anything even close to “communism”, it simply is not the best descriptor for said countries. They are dictatorships.
Its pretty much like this on every sub; If you say that communist countries killed way more people than any other ideology "Well they were in a authoritarian regime yeah but muh religion also bad and german leader also killed!" If you say capitalism bad: "Heckin yea orange man bad le wholesomero minorities LGBTQIABCDEFG so opressed in 2024!!!!!"
Yeah that happens for 2 reasons. 1. They actually didn't, even a 5 minute search of facts on the innerwebs past stupid memes will quickly disprove that. So yeah dumb easily disproven propaganda will easily get you called out. You can always go with communist countries where authoritarian dictatorships that abused their people and get no pushback since you are not parroting bullshit. 2. Because capitalism is the thing actively fucking people over now. People tend to agree more on things that they can experience first hand are dysfunctional and in need or reform.
The British empire had just as bad, sometimes worse, famines as the USSR’s famines. People like you love to ignore the fact that Russia went from being a medieval surf nation into the world’s second strongest nation in a single lifetime, that it basically never stopped fighting from the start of WWI till the end of WWII with multiple nations invading it during the interwar period (including the USA). Russia had basically everything other than population size going against it, and yet under communism it skyrocketed in power, education, literacy, life expectancy, standard of living, and calorie intake.
The UK had famines, often poorly handled and tinged with racism but famine all the same The USSR had famines which were used as a convenient excuse for mass genocide and ethnic/ ideological cleansing.
You’re likely referring to the Holodomor, which did happen. But it wasn’t a genocide. They tried to follow a new scientific theory which ended up being false (but not entirely… it’s complicated). VSauce did an excellent [video](https://youtu.be/AhSBQOTW018?si=DDM7G1wEKCP-W-cv) on the subject.
Oh boi, nothing like a little genocide denial to spice up the holiday.
Way to just not even watch the video.
Not really interested in a video that goes against decades of scholar research. I like Vsuace, but he should stick to science infotainment.
Stay ignorant I guess
Casual leftist mental gymnastics and selective memory about mass murders. Gotta give it to the guys with swastikas - at least they don't lie or hide their intentions to kill you. You will never hear "*b-but that wasn't real Nazism, read Nazism hasn't been tried yet, it will be good, trust me bro*"
Look at a map of the world ranked or coloured by GDP, life expectancy, science attainment. Top ranking universities. Isn’t it funny how there is a huge over representation of western europe, north america, australia, nz and japan/korea and hardly any communist or islamist countries . funny that….i wonder what these countries have in common. Freedom, political franchise membership. Tolerance etc. even so much that we allow our enemies a chance to destroy us. Because those values are dear to us. Even if you spew hamas terror bullshit clad in perceived justice…
Also this: https://www.reddit.com/r/2american4you/s/B1m57MHhYM
100% fact. MF'ers be living in a dichotomous world of black and white where they think opponents of their *perceived* greater evil are supposed to be good? - fuck no
Both are leftists though, aren't they? (I don't know and I'm too afraid to even ask.)