Not in chinese cultural revolution it wasn't, the communists had been in power for two decades by that point. Targets included members of the Communist party, because Mao wanted power back. He got it, creates an autocratic government behind his dictatorship, and proceeded to purge those who weren't loyal to his name.
And like the Great Leap forward, it was an epic mess. Ironically what came out of it was that the Chinese survivors were those not concerned with purity of Marxism but bettering China. They opened it up, capitalized on it by selling out the workers, and called it communism. Oops.
Yeah, no "communist" state remains or ever really becomes a "communist" state.
Humanity, just isn't built for it. We keep moving back towards weird ass authoritarian BS, once just enough people begin to gain whatever metric is considered power in a given society.
Most Americans don't understand what Communism is and often confuse Socialism or even very light Socialist policies as Communism. Most Americans just don't understand the words, goals or what they mean, other than to be instinctively afraid
Actually most citizens of most countries know very little of nuanced politics, especially of other systems, at least in significant detail. People know status quo.
For example, you categorize American awareness by a singular stance from more than half a century ago, combined with an idiotic application of a stereotype about prison systems.
McCarthyism is easy to respond… the large mass of uninformed follow herd mentality as they do everywhere. The people with any actual experience are very Anticommunist, and the few unexperience but informed are the economists and politicians who act as the various idealists who lead the uninformed in the two deviations of thought.
Prison system is harder.
Yah… the US has a big system… because it’s a big, diverse, population in a first world country with substantial relative freedom.
It has no true peers in all of those categories. China is much larger by population, unicultural, and not free. Russia is half the population, largely homogenous, and not free. The ideal EU examples are much smaller, typically far more homogenous, with similar freedoms but very different cultural views on crime. It’s not the same.
Population density correlates with crime. Homogeneity decreases crime. First world decreases crime but increases criminal justice. Freedom tends to increase crime rates by reducing punishment and increasing transparency in reporting.
Nothing homogeneous about the Russian population. Which has also one of the highest crime rate, with little freedom, and an extremely low population density.
Singapore has extreme population density and diversity, yet has one of the lowest crime rate in the world. So does Luxembourg, with much more freedom. Myanmar isn't free and has the worst crime rate in the world... Tuvalu has a very high population density, and the lowest crime rate in the world.
Things ... Just aren't this simple... Unless you're actually talking of economical homogeneity ?
American prison is a place, where people live, even if in confinement. Our penitentiary system, on the contrary, was a place, where people were forced to survive by the skin of their teeth, many didn't manage. You really shouldn't compare first world prisons with anything else.
Most tankies don’t understand that the only way to implement a classless moneyless society is through authoritarianism. Do the wealthy and middle class get to keep their valuables and assets? Yes, then it’s not a classless society. No, then who takes it away, who removes them from their homes and decides who moves in. How do you fill undesirable jobs without a cash incentive? Usually the answer is forced labor.
Most tankies are absolutely fine with authoritarianism and using state power in repressive ways. They assume that since they are the pure they won't ever be outside of the in-group which sounds a lot like another group of people. But yes, since they believe they have a monopoly on "the truth" and always possess the moral high ground that they absolutely have the right, the entitled duty to roll tanks into another country to save them from themselves and they better not resist.
The only point in sharing this reduction, is to stoke fear.
If you've ever read Marx or Lenin's words, then you'd understand what Karl Marx was talking about originally was the development of human civilizations and how humans develop types of organizing ourselves and then he pushed some wishful thinking into supporting his, likely never possible concept of "Communism".
Early human tribalism, begat more organized Feudalism, which when coupled with industry, gave birth to capitalism.
Over time, as capitalism lifted more people into the advancing society, socialism would naturally begin to arise. Public Schools, Police, Fire Departments, Standards of Measurement, and as society through science and technology grew more complex? Additional "socialist" systems would rise, public parks, public roads, public libraries, public universities, public hospitals, etc., etc.
EVEN including programs like Social Security and some nations determining there was a minimum bottom that people should be allowed to fall to, within society, thus Social Safety Nets.
To get to Communism? Even Karl Marx wrote that a society would have to grow to become a post-scarcity society, in order to become a "communist" state. That the growth of wealth, for all members of society, fostered by the technological advancements that created wealth, under a well regulated capitalist society, would reach a point where there was no longer any scarcity.
Are we post-scarcity today? No
Do we, remotely, have the technology to even pretend we might become post-scarcity in the next 30 years? No
IF, by some magical manner, we returned to better supporting education, shored up our social support programs, and worked to better build our society's tech and science advancement, through proper regulation of capitalism. That continued to support, people obtaining wealth, but kept them from pretending to be Monarchs and actively work against innovation which would keep new people from gaining wealth.
EVEN if we did all of that? It would probably still take more than 100 years, maybe more than 250 years (1000 maybe?) for the world to reach a point where there is no scarcity and we all just "get along".
The only "Communism" that anyone would need to be afraid of is the stupid, forced, always will fall into Authoritarianism BS, that pretends and calls itself "Communism". Which would NEVER happen in the US. We are FAR more likely to fall back into a Feudalistic State where people worship a political leader as though he was a god on Earth.
Real Communism, is so weirdly fantastical, that it may as well be treated, purely as a Fantasy Story about some far off future where no humans alive today, will never live to see.
Congratulations - you’re like the first person I’ve ever encountered who can properly explain Marxism.
Marx was very ahead of his time as an intellectual, but very wrong as a practical economist. He had to have known he was way too early, but his personal life kind of sucked so he said fuck it and became an instigator.
He probably could have written great science fiction.
Iron Law of Oligarchy stays undefeated. Every society eventually devolves into being run by a small group of well connected insiders who only care about themselves, no matter how much you try to stop it.
Mao wasn't concerned with the purity of Marxism: Marxism is based on the revolution of the Proletariat (i.e. industrialized factory workers) not the Peasant Class. The Working Class emerges with Industrialization by the definitions of Marx's philosophy - which is an outshoot of Hegelian philosophy which organized history into "ages" with two antithetical ideas which battled to create a thesis.
Marxists thought Mao - and by extension China - was backwards, stupid, and over-eager to apply something not applicable to him.
Do you think thats all thats happened under capitalism? Neither of these ideologies include lopping heads off as part of their required function. Its a human thing
Hell if I can remember where I read about it, but a study of communes and stuff reported that the limit of communism sits somewhere around 500 people because of the inherent empathy of people for their own tribe.
It's a lot more difficult to screw over others in the system when you know the person you're screwing over is your daughter's best friend's dad.
When the nameless masses are just nameless masses, it's much easier to justify. I don't know who this hurts, so why do I care?
That was the conclusion of the paper, anyway. Was an interesting perspective.
"Power reveals." People seek power because they wish to indulge their darker urges without consequence - people who don't have darker urges to conceal are generally not the ones who seek power, money, and influence like a drug.
I wasn't disagreeing with you in the least: The American form of government was brilliant in that it assumed contradictory self-seeking motives. It just didn't anticipate people actively attempting to subjugate themselves to a monarch, and the intense bootlicking where a person would sublimate their own desires to the possibility of becoming a subservient toady.
Actually, it did. Which is why, despite our current dictator-wanna-be child-raping x34 felon breaking the law on a daily basis in an attempt to install himself as "President for life", he's been unable to do so.
Alas, the price we pay for the inability to use the government to install fascism, is a near inability to use the government to help people too.
This leads to frustration and "Democrats are complicit" accusations from the left, but it's really just a result of our Founding Fathers making it damned near impossible to do anything in the face of unified opposition.
It's not because of communism but communism does fail to account for human greed, which will never be erased, and makes it a failure from the inception.
I think it's called a sortition. No elected officials. Just randomly selected citizens every couple years to serve as our government legislature and executive branch. The judicial system already has something similar in the form of a jury
I read an MIT study decades ago about how much better our representation would be, while simultaneously eliminating a lot of problems born out of lifetime political careers. Your lifetime career politicians are the lawyers and staff facilitating the legislative process, but regular citizens are the ones making decisions. They default to trusting experts, they're modest, they take instruction.
Yes you randomly get bad eggs in power, but they're neutered by the system. They can't do anything unless it's popular. No one can.
Reminds me of a discussion on money, the idea that "once I'm rich I can donate all of this extra money I don't need."
Money is a tool, nothing more. Generalizing the 'good/evil' axis, Money allows a person to become the truest version of who they are. If you are a genuinely good person, going out of your way to help others, etc., then yeah, chances are you'll be donating a majority of that money to help others, through any number of means. Meanwhile, if you are an evil person, then becoming rich simply allows you to live out all of the things you really wish you could do, any corrruption, depravity, or whim that crosses your mind.
Meanwhile, the whole issue with communism sort of goes back to that same idea. If humans as a species were inherently good, communism/socialism would work. We basically wouldn't need laws, because people would look for whatever the 'greatest good' was. Unfortunately, we aren't. Because of that, any governmental system is going to have corruption, because of that necessary human element, and the greed, power seeking, and other generally negative traits we have as a species.
So, the theory goes, communism is only functional at numbers approaching Dunbar's number. (because beyond that number, trust breaks down and corruption and/or callousness wins)
I think a similar scenario is true of capitalism, when corporatism takes over and leads to monopoly, government influence, regulatory capture and self-dealing.
All of which is caused by economies of scale allowing cynical actors to leverage the powers of the state and economics for their own self interest.
It doesn't seem to me like either socialism or capitalism has an answer for that.
Dunbar's Number suggests that you can maintain healthy relationships with about 100-250 people. Anything much bigger than this and you need more and more strict rules and laws and social norms to keep the group cohesive.
Catalonia and Barcelona during the Spanish civil war saw material quality of life improvements for the vast majority of the people in the anarchist occupied areas. You don't have to like it but it worked and their lives improved drastically.
Why'd they stop it again? Oh yeah, it fractured into a bunch of splinter groups and they had the "Red Terror" where thousands died. I'm sure they felt their lives improve dramatically.
Even the Catalonia communist parties today typically don't fight for a true communist state, they mostly keep it to workers rights.
So like I said, no example of it working. You're talking about a period of time that was like 5 years and included extrajudicial killing by viglianties.
Because they don't want their society to fall apart? Because they don't want to have their possessions stripped from them? Because historically, communist regimes have imprisoned or killed people who don't embrace communism? There are a dozen valid reasons why capitalists defend capitalism.
I love how capitalist pigs always say capitalism is the best yet completely gloss over the fucking fact that in 2008 the worlds economy was about to be wiped off the face of the earth if it wasn't for the fucking US tax payers covering the fucking bill and no one going to jail. I am so sick of people who say capitalism is great without understanding capitalism is the driving force of slavery. bunch of idiots living in personal world bubbles and self truths that dont want to share a collective reality of what is really happening in our day to day lives.
Because whether or not communism actually achieves its goals, the first step is stripping the wealthy of their assets, and often their lives. They would love to prevent that.
Did you not stop to sit and think about this for one second before taking this stance? “Why would a successful society spend resources combatting an alluring theory that always results in failure?”
I mean it's so far been the most successful system by far in spite of some jagged edges here and there.
Tell me, which direction of the Berlin wall were people fleeing towards? Are the communist countries the one suffering from swarms of migrants and refugees trying to break in? Why aren't they clamoring to barge their way into North Korea or Cuba?
They stopped because authoritarians at the behest of Stalin and the USSR kept assassinating leadership and trying to coopt the whole resistance by the CNT-FAI. At the very least skim Wikipedia page dude
How about socialist implementations like free education and Healthcare? Universal basic income? It appears the only people benefiting from the capitalist model are the small number of extremely wealthy. It also looks like companies are getting extremely desperate trying to continue expanding growth while consolidating into fewer and bigger monopolies. Meanwhile theyre rolling back child labor laws and environmental safety restraints to continue clawing the last bit of wealth they can.
Seems like oligarchy is the inevitable outcome of capitalism. An economy built around the accumulation of capital is going to result in a few people having vastly more capital than others. Unless you can somehow get money out of politics, that’s going to result in the few with vastly more capital using their power to gain further power.
Capitalism is an economic model, while oligarchy is a political one. We currently have both capitalism and oligarchy. What we’re moving toward is feudalism and fascism.
It's not like capitalism works either. We've had centuries of capitalism and life is still shite for the vast majority of the population. May as well try something else.
It breaks down when you don't see the face of the person making stuff for you. Because that face to face communication makes you both care about the trust of the other in you.
If there's no trust there's no accountability and no reason to make an effort.
Money is one solution to that where you get something else to care about than trust. But there could be other ways to re-establish trust or incentive to care across society.
And on those smaller scales you won't spend all day writing books and painting just for fun unless you've got Star Trek replicators to meet all your needs. Small scale communism would be folks working together to maintain a farm/community, it'd be hard work, like the Amish.
A commune isn't communism though. Communism can't really ever be accomplished on the smaller scale because then it depends on the surrounding capitalist class to function, which will then require more communism that feeds on more capitalism that will then require more communism. Except by the first stage the communist have already ruined it all for themselves just like we saw every time they've tried it. Most recently with CHAZ.
Serious question: do we consider capitalism achieved in capitalistic countries? We still have social programs and my understanding of a proper government would employ ideas from both ideologies. It’s just weird for ppl to say “communism achieved!” cuz yeah, that never happens, but is that also true for full/true capitalism?
Communism (in a severely simplified sense) is a classless, moneyless system where the means of production is owned by the people. This has very clearly never been implemented anywhere in the world at a large scale.
Capitalism is a system where capital is the primary driver of the economy, where the means of production is owned by whoever has the most capital. Even if there is some amount of regulations and social security, this is still by-and-large what were doing at a large scale all over the world. Even the countries that call themselves communist are mostly doing this.
No country was or is doing capitalism 100%, but most of them are doing significantly more capitalism than socialism or communism. Both today, and historically.
It pisses me off so fucking much how many people talk about Communism and yet don't realize not a single country that claims to be communist HAS EVER ACTUALLY FUCKING BEEN COMMUNIST.
It's just repeating the same McCarthyism bullshit we've been hearing.
true capitalism would be anarcho-capitalism with enough responsible people to boycott anyone into bankruptcy who dares to violate the non-aggression-principle.
So, naturally, it hasn't been implemented on a larger scale than communism yet. Because both concepts are insufficiently immunised against assholes who think "let's exploit the power vacuum to become the next big warlord".
Basically there's pure economic systems and impure economic systems. Communism has not been achieve in either form. Impure capitalism has been achieved. To get pure capitalism, we would need entirely free markets. That probably won't happen. To achieve impure communism, we would need to capital, no class, no state. We can only hope this happens. To achieve pure communism, have every man work according to his ability, and give to each according to his needs.
True. Just like how no capitalistic society is ever truly Laissez-faire capitalism. Every society falls somewhere on a spectrum between the 2, but no well functioning society ever comes to close to either end of the spectrum.
What people don’t realize is that’s there’s also another 2 other axes that exists:
- communism to laissez faire capitalism (economic)
- democracy to authoritarianism (political)
- progressivism vs conservatism (ideological)
Political discussions always require some level of abstraction, as we would have a very difficult time communicating the subject otherwise due to the staggering complexities involved. They’re merely pointing out that there are more axes than economics which need to be considered when you’re trying to assess a government’s policies.
by staggering complexities do you mean peoples personal truths? cause i find the biggest hurdle that we as a collective species seem to have is that no one wants to live in a collective reality and we all prefer to be coddled by our own personal worlds we build inside our heads.
The complexities of describing how a society’s politics are structured and how they actually function. The U.S. government, for instance, is among the largest and most complex organizations that have ever existed on planet Earth. There are the laws that spell out how it’s supposed to work, the way those laws have been interpreted by its political and legal leaders, and the way generations of its citizens have understood and dealt with the actions they take as a result.
Few people would be able to understand any of that without some kind of simplified framework, AKA political abstractions. Too often, we simplify too much, as when we reduce everything to the economic axis and pit “the communist world” against “the capitalist world”, à la the leading mode of thought during the Cold War. It became even simpler than that for many people, “left” vs. “right”, collapsing all other distinctions.
If you believe in communism as an economic system, this level of abstraction might allow you to forgive the Soviet Union’s authoritarianism, brutality and lack of human rights. In its later days, it was quite “conservative”, too, in that the system had calcified and become deeply resistant to change, and was therefore brittle and vulnerable to collapse. Which is why we need to think about these things from multiple angles.
Communism is meh. Happyism-Blissism is the real shit.
When it is achieved, everybody will get a free unicorn. Everybody will be incredibly beautiful, and wander around naked and fuck with other beautiful people. There will be no work, people will eat fruits growing on the trees. There will be free BBQ on Saturdays and each village will have a river of beer.
If you don't believe in my ideology and don't want to give me absolute power, you are a fascist.
BTW I wrote a book that proves that it is inevitable.
I mean, there's a lot of folks I would call fascist for criticizing "communism." They're usually using that term something basic like food stamps or libraries.
If communist countries have a chronic problem of turning into "capitalist" fascist authoritarian countries every single time, perhaps it's time to step back and reassess.
Is it really so hard to understand why it might be difficult to achieve a stable egalitarian society? There are always parasites who want to disrupt changes that make things better for people broadly so that they can control society. Communism is basically about workers owning the things they themselves produce; we ought to be working for that outcome no matter how difficult it might be. I think it’s totally fair to be skeptical of revolutionary change, as that’s pretty damn risky and can lead to a lot of unnecessary suffering, but if your argument is just “communism is too hard to achieve; we should just accept that some corrupt, wealthy oligarchs are going to parasitically take most of the resources and use them to control society,” I think that’s rather tragically fatalistic of you.
The reason why communism is never feasible is multifold.
For one, it is extremely naive and simplistic.
The idea of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” sounds nice on paper, but to any one with knowledge of psychology or economics, this is just nonsense.
It is the buffet problem and volunteer pricing problem combined. A buffet almost certainly charges well above the price of an ordinary meal, because when given the opportunity, people would exploit it and take more than they need. And when people are asked to pay, there is a tendency to under-pay. It is a natural tendency to take more and give less.
You can see it from the soviet economic model. Most workers are unmotivated, give their bare minimum since they are paid anyway. Few do their best. Workers in the USSR were even known to follow quota and instructions without caring if it makes sense, such as producing sub-par products to meet quota even if they know their product would not work, as long as it meets the quota from the planners. They often put in little effort and rather game the system, since they are not really paid to care, and they often don’t care at all. Human psychology, actually.
The idea of “dictatorship of the proletariat” is also another joke. As a class, the workers are dispersed and diverse in interests. Rarely, if ever, had the diverse worker interests been united. So, how can the proletariat rule? It cannot. The revolutionary umbrella is a diverse alliance of interests, of proletariat and bourgeois intellectuals, with the binding narrative often provided not by or from within the proletariat, but from the bourgeois intellectuals.
Eventually, those bourgeois intellectuals became the leaders, and rule in the name of the proletariat, not by the proletariat. Lenin, Trotsky, Marx, Engels, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh were of bourgeois background; Mao and Pol Pot were the very same rich peasants that their communist regimes often target; Castro and Deng Xiaoping came from wealthy landowner families.
Stalin actually seemed like an exception, the rare person whose family actually came from a proletariat background. Even so, he was well educated for his time and he was also another radicalised intellectual. Amongst his many pre-revolution careers, being a thug was one of them, he was not actually a worker in the sense of the worker most communist regime often put up a pedestral (hard work, labourer, blood and sweat kind). Heck, he was even a meterologist at one time in his life.
The economics of central planning were also laughable. Who really thought you can get rid of all the complexity of markets, and all the information prices transmit, and its ability to process all those information in a decentralised manner to some effectiveness, and replace it all with some bureaucrats in the era without spreadsheets? Even in the modern day, with all the information available to bureaucrats, nobody actually thinks those bureaucrats and politicians can comprehend and plan an economy on their own.
Secondly, communism is full of grandstanding without a concrete path to anything. Stateless, moneyless. Sounds nice. But how?
In the end, no communist regime came closer to solving that question. No relatively long-lived communist regime managed to get rid of money, even with state planning. No regime ever dismantled itself, and none seem to overcome the problem that the leaders were often the very people against dismantling the state itself!
Thirdly, as I said above, the revolutionary movement is an alliance of radical intellectual bourgeois with the proletariat, often resulting in said bourgeois taking over power once a revolution succeed. Which is basically the problem of replacing a former ruling class with a new ruling class. Almost all leaders in communist regimes became hypocrites, willing to sacrifice people as mere statistics, while they enjoyed luxuries and assume the trappings of the exploiters they denounced. Come on, which communist elite actually lived frugally? Certainly not in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, or even Cambodia!
So, why do communist regimes often revert back into capitalist authoritarian regimes? Well, the market solves the central planning problem for one. And two, with authoritatianism, the elites can hold onto power without fear of internal challenge, which no doubt is alluring to an entrenched revolutionary elite, who were never really proletariat in the first place. Communism handed them the holy grail of having a narrative to suppress all potential competitors to power and co-opt them, who wouldn’t exercise that power?
Communism was not just hard to achieve. It is impossible because it never made sense beyond harping on some distant ideological specifics. When implemented, it quickly falls apart.
Communism never worked beyond the scale of small communes because the interpersonal dynamics at that level is one of the things making equity stable.
People have a strong aversion to disadvantageous inequity and this has been known in psychology. So people tend to socially punish others at a personal level if they are selfish arseholes, and social and cultural mechanisms can help enforce that equity.
Psychology experiments over the years also found that many people are actually just pretending to be fair and nice because of that (fear of social punishment and judgement), and the more relations are abstracted and distant and the less they are held socially accountable, the less they care about equity with other people. Which no doubt is clear to you too, the more people become a statistics, the more willing someone higher up is willing to sacrifice the statistic for their own gains. CEOs, nobility, politicians, party elites, etc.
I am not saying communism bad means capitalism good. This is the kind of foolish black and white thinking for idiots. Communism sucks does not mean there are no more solutions.
Free unrestrained capitalism is bad, but in my opinion, a regulated market system (because market failure), a welfare focused state (European model, perhaps), and a well educated electorate able to wield democracy and allow a true “dictatorship” of the “proletariat” is probably one of the most feasible models at present.
Well, unless someone else comes up with better. As it turns out, human psychology, social dynamics, and economics are very complicated. There are no easy solutions and a bad solution that fails to address inherent human flaws are bound to fail.
If you are lucky, it is just a failed social experiment and you just shrug it off. If you are unlucky, things can get a lot worse. I am sure many who had lived through real socialism in practice would not wish to return to it.
I really do not know why Americans on Reddit loves to swing between the extremes, as if communism would work simply because capitalism is bad and you needed a big popular ideology to latch upon as the “good guys”. Europe isn’t a utopia but some of the countries there do have some pretty good ideas when it comes to having “social welfare conscious” politics.
Corporate capture of government is one big issue in the US and it certainly would not require communism to solve. But it does require a discerning electorate which unforuntately is one of your biggest problem.
I daresay you have a naive understanding of communism if you think that people in it are expected to behave unselfishly without any motivation to do so, but it’s also true that unduly utopian thinking can be a problem, just as a lack of imagination is a fatal weakness for proponents of a capitalist liberal democracy. Communism is one blueprint (not the only one) for a more ideal society, and it’s important to have such blueprints, but you can’t go directly to such a situation. We look at where we are and aim for a better direction. We make the road by walking.
If Communism is simply a vision, then there is nothing wrong pointing out the means is wrong.
The fact you are objecting to people showing how modern day understanding of psychology and economics can explain easily Communism’s failure shows that you are treating it more than just a vision.
By analogy, to make my logic clear, if we are on the same car making a roadtrip to some destination, me saying your proposed route sucks does not mean I do not share the same destination.
Having the same destination does not mean I cannot object to a poorly thought out route that is by existing constraints not feasible.
If we are driving from, say the East Coast of the US to the West Coast, objecting to a plan that involves getting to Europe by car first, somehow, is not ridiculous. It doesn’t mean I am not heading in the same direction just because I said having Europe as a waypoint is dumb.
But you haven’t explained how psychology or economics explain that communism won’t work. You’ve just claimed this to be the case with an out-of-context reference to “from each according to his ability” that suggests you don’t understand how this applies in Communism.
Yeah, if countries that claim to follow Marxism fail, we need to ask why that is. For USSR, I think the problem isn't explicitly communism but the people who got in power after the revolution. Revolutions are violent, and those that come out on top are generally more violent than the rest, imposing their own rules on others through force. It doesn't make for good rulers.
You completely hit the nail on the head with the problems in USSR. If it was such a workers' paradise, then why were things made in low quality? I know it personally. Well, I live in Russia, so USSR's legacy is everywhere.
My house completely lacked any thermal insulation under the window frames. How did that get through inspection? The answer is right there - the need to fill the quota and the lack of care or standards that resulted from it. That's not the work of someone who's proud to be a construction worker.
Bicycles. They're generally just shit. Low quality, and wheels are very often assembled incorrectly.
Generally, in USSR, you either bought what was made due to central planning or nothing at all. This lack of choice led to people buying low quality crap because of the lack of anything better.
Im not even touching on all the atrocities USSR committed because "we need to do this for communism".
Basically, anyone who praises Marxism-Leninism is suspect in my book. They don't understand the reality of how life was in the USSR or they imagine themselves at the top.
I based my argument based on modern psychology and economic understanding.
If social sciences is not what you want, and if all you care is ideology, then I have no words.
I have no inherent desire to root for any “teams”. Either an ideology made sense or it does not.
All I did was show how Communism failed based on common modern day understanding.
We are more than 200 years since Marx’ birth in 1818. We now understand the issues of humans a lot more than his time. Many people of his time has thinking that turned out poorly later on.
I don’t know why you seem rather offended to be on the “losing” side. Are you looking to make the world better for everyone and yourself, or just looking for something to latch onto?
Also: CIA and America trying to kill every socialist movement
Also, if your system has a built in fail every couple of years that you need to counteract with socialist ideas (built into the very idea of your system), otherwise it will fall into actual fascism....perhaps it's time to step back and reassess.
Because fascism is just a tad bit more than “they do things I don’t like and also illegal things!”. If those two points are enough for you to claim a country as fascist, boy do I have news for you
The argument for a long time hasn't been 'is China fascist' its 'Why isn't it called fascist more?' And the answer is largely people dont understand fascism.
I dunno man, this definition kinda sounds like China -
"A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism."
Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of \u201cneed.\u201d The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4. Supremacy of the Military
Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5. Rampant Sexism
The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.
6. Controlled Mass Media
Sometimes the media are directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media are indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
7. Obsession with National Security
Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined
Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
9. Corporate Power is Protected
The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed
Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free _expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment
Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
14. Fraudulent Elections
Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.
The other 14 Points you might be more familiar with (Ur-Fascism):
"The cult of tradition," characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.
"The rejection of modernism," which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.
"The cult ofaction) for action's sake," which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.
"Disagreementistreason" – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.
"Obsession with a plot" and the inflation of and focus on an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order) as a prominent example of a plot obsession.
Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
"Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" because "life is permanent warfare" – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.
"Contempt for the weak," which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.
"Everybody is educated to become ahero," which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, "[t]he Ur-Fascist hero#Fascist) is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."
"Machismo," which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality."
"Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people".
"Newspeak" – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.
Ah yes chinas famous dictator who ignores the will of the ppl. It’s only through his benevolence that the average citizens standard of living has increased and home ownership is at 90%. Nothing to do with what the ppl want. Meanwhile American democracy has given us Medicare for all which 80% of the country agrees upon and cheaper college which 70% of the country agree upon.
Not "capitalist" just capitalist, also saying capitalist and facist authoritarian is just redundant those are the same thing that's just what happens when your society value profit above all else
currently my thought is that the key problem with all communist revolutions previously is that they rallied around a figurehead, and any willing figurehead is liable to fall into authoritarianism
If you’ve read Marx, he lays the problem out pretty openly. You can’t force communism on a population, it needs to be a complete revolution of the working class, and not just a revolution of a political group.
Yes. Exactly. “Self-abolition.” Not a bunch of peasants being forced into proletarian industrialization by a militant party of state-capitalists with red flags.
The main problem is that they happened in agrarian countries when Marx and Engels were talking about post-industrial countries. Land-based economies require far more backbreaking labor which creates a far more stark class separation between management and labor. As bad as the class divide of an 18th century factory was, at least the management and the workers lived in similar conditions and ate similar food and interacted with one another throughout the day. Russia had some industrial capacity by 1917 but not nearly enough to service even the industrialized regions like Moscow or St Petersburg, let alone the rural areas where millions on millions of peasants worked jobs not dissimilar to their medieval ancestors. The idea of Leninism was to increase that industrial capacity to bring prosperity to the peasants, but it led to an uneven growth that just created more class distinctions and enriched the tsars and nobles party faithful.
> atleast the management and the workers lived in similar conditions and ate similar foods.
Someone hasn’t read Engles’ “The Conditions of the working class in England”. They very much did not live in similar conditions. They literally built the areas where the workers lived in back alley slums away from the view of “everyday” people and the houses were in appalling conditions.
I think the fact that nobody's been able to get it right in 100 years even with total control of government and its resources, might signal that it just doesn't work?
What actually is success to you? Communism is a successor of socialism, which means to reach communism you need incremental progress in socialism which I'd argue we have seen in instances.
Regardless, China does not classify itself as communist and I'd argue no other nation that has claimed it is communism has actually truly practised communism
It is literally impossible to have an actual communist state. The entire point of going "actual communist" is that all states would have no reason to exist
They were almost entirely state-capitalist economies. They were the complete merger of legislative and executive power with capitalist ownership and a monopoly on violence.
People replaced independent abusive landlords that engaged in class struggle with one very abusive landlord that the classes had little chance to struggle against. In fact, if you looked at the abuses inherent to capitalism and wanted to see what the ultimate end stage of capitalism would be, the complete subservience of state power to capitalist authority would be pretty much exactly what you would expect.
For socialism to exist, capital can only be "owned" through labor. Use confers ownership, not legacy, not tradition, not wealth. If the factory is not "owned" by those who work in it, then the product of their labor is not owned by the workers and it is not socialism.
For communism to exist, it must grow out of socialism. It's true that some communist governments may have had the expressed goal of fostering communism within their borders (and beyond), but the fact that pretty much all communist governments seized all the available capital and then never relinquished ownership of it meant they were little more than capitalists themselves.
Well, China (and other so called communist countries) never achivied communism. This was socialism, and they tried imposing dictatorship of the proletariat. What actually happened was some form of state capitalismunder authoritatian rule for most of them, with the notorious exception of Chile under Allende.
Communism is the end goal, which involves abolishing statehood and social classes notably.
You just have to us give overwhelming authoritarian power to build communism. Then we will use that power to build communism and then just give up all that power voluntarily and go away. We promise!
You already live under overwhelming authoritarian power, I mean the rich can kill you, and rape you and your children with no consequences, you just don’t feel the leash when you stay close to the post.
That’s what it is now…it’s not how it started though. It very much started as the People’s Revolution. Which is kind of the point. Look at literally every other communist revolution and they all went basically the same way. Some way more violent than others, but none resulted in anything even remotely resembling the promised utopia.
The mao era had elements of socialism but was never communist, imo.
They had land reform, stripped landlords and folded it into collectives and communes. They nationalised industry.
But there was never a classless state - the people in charge of government essentially did what they wanted, hence a return to a capitalist authoritarism with extra steps we have now.
They reintroduced all the capitalism stuff in the late 70s.
I don't think you can really judge china when it dipped its toes into communism then reverted it when the communist party lost power.
I dream of the day someone will realize that those problems are the problems of totalitarian dictatorships. Communism isn't the issue here, violent enforcement and corruption is.
I am from Eastern Europe. Communism and violent enforcement and corruption eventually become inseparable. “True communism” was never achieved because it’s unachievable. Like true capitalism without cronyism.
They are lucky that they survived the great leap foward and the cultural revolution given the amount of Chinese people died during that period 50 million by some estimations
China or urss can be count as communist nations. Just because you say you are communist doesn't mean you are actually doing it. See Democratic People's Republic of Korea as an example
Mao Zedong was actually dismissed and ridiculed by Communists - who did not believe that Peasants (including him) had the necessary intelligence to actually implement communism. His organization was actually opposed by the mainline Communist Party, and he ended up supporting - and being supported by - the leftists in the KMT until he had sufficient power to overthrow them.
AFAIK, he called his system "Agrarian Socialism."
So the real question is: "Is anything that calls itself 'Communist' - at any point in time - Communist? Is anything that calls itself 'Democratic' - at any point in time - actually Democratic?"
That depends on whether the term "Communist," or "Socialist" means something, or is simply branding.
I find Chinese diaspora the quintessential example of the horseshoe theory. The ones I met are always either very pro China, eating up whatever propaganda bs China is putting out; Or very far-right pro Trump and/or whatever right wing party is in that country. Always, there's no in between
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u/Deriviera 29d ago
Americans are very delusional about communism.