Do the people saying that communism is bad think capitalism is good?
Some do
you knoe there isn’t only 2 choices right? Thay can both have good and bad sides. Maybe try some mix of it fisrt
Dialectical Materialism. Right now, they are. You either work towards communism or capitalism moves towards consolidation of capital. Those are your choices.
also there are more than 1 proposed way to achieve communism, even though i tend to favor socialism.
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there’s capitalism and its variants (the current system), and there is anti-capitalism in various flavours. (socdem, ML, anarchism)
you can choose your favorite flavour, but its either moving towards capitalism, or moving away from it.
I would like a third pill.
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its take it or leave it i guess.
At least we’ve still got cyanide pill when red or blue doesn’t cut it.
Yes. It’s just those are the two mentioned, and I’m slightly communist. So there’s some bias.
We did that already. We could do it again.
thats not a mix though, it was just a bandaid over capitalism, borrowed from socialistic ideas. the capital accumulating class was never extinguished, eventually leading to the same problems today all over again.
hence why we advocate for a systemic change, if you can’t accumulate capital, you can’t buy back the system again like it is rn. this is pretty much the crux of the issue here.
No
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Can’t we just nuke people we don’t like….like my neighbour or Elon Musk?
As usual the best answer lies somewhere between the two extremes
we tried that before though, improving things temporarily, but it will never be permanent until we extinguish the owner class.
Yes, we must have a middle ground between having parasites and not having parasites. Thank you enlightened centrist.
I think capitalism is good, but not perfect. Communism is bad.
Why do you think that way?
I think human nature is inherently greedy and selfish, and capitalism is best equipped to use this in a way that benefits society. Workers are motivated to work harder and learn new skills to find the most rewarding job they can. Businesses are motivated to create products and run as efficiently as possible. Consumers are motivated to get as much value as the can out of their money. Everyone in the equation is acting selfishly and in their own self-interest (which I believe humans are inclined to do anyway) but when applied on a societal level, everyone benefits. However I will concede that this is a balancing act that requires some level of government regulation to maintain.
On the other hand, I think communism only works when everyone acts altruistically. Which is noble, but unrealistic.
Lol, lmao even. Capitalism rewards greed it doesn’t mitigate it. You’ve got it twisted.
It’s the inability to see the forest for the trees. We were raised in a capitalist economic system, as were all of our past family members. The failings of capitalism appear to be the failings of human nature. In reality, meta analysis of multiple studies on human greed show that people will be inherently more kind to each other than be cruel. Quick search will bring up many articles on these studies. Plus, exchanges in material goods within communities where money hadn’t been invented would show that people didn’t barter, they gave their goods away to their neighbors, and the good deed would be remembered and reciprocated in times of need. You can look up “Gift Economy” in Wikipedia.
I also highly recommend reading or listening to the audiobook for The Dawn of Everything A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wingrow. It is extremely interesting and eye opening.
Explain open source, free software, linux community, lemmy / the fediverse, and many many other things not formed around profit, largely maintained by people in their free time motivated by community over profit.
People aren’t inherently greedy. People are born into a system that rewards greed, and punishes altruism. There have been many different societies with many different political and economic systems, and capitalism is a fairly new one all things considered.
Rational self interest is irrational. If only a few can succeed, chances are you fail. If everyone only looks out for themselves, then everyone fails. Humanity’s biggest strength — what set us apart from many other animals — is our ability to work together and look out for each other.
Capitalism doesn’t work, and is destroying the Earth.
You brought up open source and linux, but how many are maintainers vs. freeloaders?
If communism could be upheld by a select few and enjoyed endlessly by everyone… Utopia.
Freeloaders, like large corporations taking open source and then not giving back, is yet another symptom of a system that rewards extraction and self interest.
FOSS exists despite capitalism. The fact that people are willing to work on something out of their own passion, or sense of community, directly contradicts the fundamental assertion of capitalism.
Humans are not inherently greedy.
Not going to downvote, but I do think you’re lacking quite a bit of insight into the reasons human society exists at all. Cooperation is the reason human society exists at all, so saying we’re inheritly selfish is kinda laughable in that context.
I would encourage you to look up information on dialectical Materialism and the necessity of capitalism as a stage in that dialectical.
Capitalism had a purpose, and it’s past time for us to move on.
Let’s concede the point: humans are inherently greedy and selfish.
But greed and selfishness are bad, right? We want less greed and selfishness in the world.
Given these two assumptions—humans are greedy, greed is bad—shouldn’t we architect society to explicitly disincentivize greed?
Even if it was true that human nature was inherently greedy and selfish then it would be an argument for creating systems that discourage such behaviors. What you’re arguing is akin to saying that you should encourage a person struggling with alcoholism to drink more.
Thank you for answering. The problem with capitalism is it’s got out of control.
I agree. Businesses and owners have too much influence. I want more unions, trust-busting, and consumer protections. Workers seem to be organizing more at least, which is a good start.
Delaware gave corporations the right to vote…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
Wow they sure got a lot of landlords
People are starving every damn day under Capitalism and there is no famine going on. This isn’t the dunk you think it is.
No it isn’t, but it does highlight the main issue:
Communism would work if it weren’t for people trying to co-opt it for power
Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism is the end goal (since, it being automated, means there should effectively be no way to hijack it), but we ain’t getting there for a long time. Let’s go for socialism first and work from there
Communism would work if it weren’t for people trying to co-opt it for power
As long as there exists a way to gain power over others, someone will do it. That’s just the reality of our nature, unfortunately.
No it isnt.
“No, Wrong”
Thank you Donald, very cool!
That’s just human nature unfortunately. We like to help one another and hate to see another human being suffering because we know that could be us. But capitalism has conditioned and limited us out of our human nature to help one another, because either there is no profit in helping the poor or destitute, or we lack the means to help.
That’s such a wide eyed idealistic view of the world. Let’s all come together and sing kumbaya.
All people throughout history have always tried to just help each other out, right?
This goes into a fight over philosophy of human nature. However, since the days of the Roman republic over 2000 years ago where capitalism wasn’t even a concept, people have used political systems to consolidate and gain power over others. It is undoubtabele that there will be people who try to co-opt the system for their personal gain
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“Nuh-uh!”
I’ve been to Capitalist countries, I’ve been to Communist countries.
Guess which system has their people immigrating to the other system on rafts with their children, just to try the other system. Guess which system builds walls to keep people IN, guess which system has beggars asking for milk for their children instead of money.
Your comment isn’t the dunk you think it is when it brushes up against the harsh truth that is reality.
Bruh I’ve seen families begging for food outside of grocery stores in the United States of America. Now what communist countries had beggers asking for milk?
China has over 3 million starving homeless people.
https://havanatimes.org/cuba/child-beggars-a-growing-problem-in-holguin-cuba/ Cuba has a huge child starvation problem.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66924300 Laos has a huge poverty and homeless problem.
Vietnam has over 23k homeless street children https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/oct/05/saving-hanoi-street-children-vietnam-from-abuse-hunger-and-self-destruction
So to answer your question, every current communist country has a huge poverty and homeless problem.
Every source i can find puts homelessness rates in China at max 1,000,000 and all of them say that they live in shelters, not on the streets.
Cuba had been under embargo from the USA since 1962.
Laos has a massive poverty proborm because of debt which is a capitalist construct.
That statistic on Vietnamese homeless Children is 16 years old, and every source ive found states they have been making great strides since then to fight poverty and homelessness.
Lol, you extreme communists are hilarious.
You Capitalist Apologists are so blind to reality it is pathetic there are 18 capitalist countries with higher homeless populations than China. You literally have to divorce yourself from reality to attack Communism. You might as well be covered in shit, while mocking someone for having toilet paper stuck to their shoe.
Those famines happened every 10 years before communism, they happened ONCE during in each location and not again since.
In the meantime capitalism had that death total due to forced starvation every 7 years on average.
Famines happen regardless of political system.
Socialism is usually built from the remains of a previous brutal regime. Starvation doesn’t end overnight.
This is the case for both Russia and China. After stabilizing they had an unprecedented improvement in nutrition, longevity and such.
The same can’t be said for the vast majority of capitalist states, who still experience starvation despite being perfectly capable of feeding everyone.
And here’s the list of 3.3 million landlords killed by communism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin
Theoretically, anyway
Yeah. Nobody’s ever done real communism on a national scale. As in, not just being a dictatorship in charge of everything that funnels money and power to the top while giving communism lip service and the people get screwed.
I was in my early 20s when the Soviet occupation collapsed here, the victims here were everyone not high up in the party.
Sure, capitalism fucking sucks but pretending the USSR was anything other than just bourgeoisie rule is delusional. The oligarchs were just called the communist party then.
shock therapy was not a socialist, but a capitalist plan after the ussr ended.
Yea, no shit, nothing to do with what I said though.
shock therapy happened upon the collapse of the ussr
You should look into south america in the 70s and 80s. The CIA’s unrestrained human experimentation in the regiom perfected this ideological soft power superweapon or “strategic ideological construct”. Trying to find exactly what these kinds of things are called.
i think we are talking about different things here
Yea and I was commenting on how things were in a country under the occupation of the USSR. So both temporally and geographiclly unrelated.
Not really. You’re talking about what happened after the USSR. Which yes, was horrible for the quality of life of people who lived in numerous countries all over the globe, but that’s more of an indictment of capitalism than communism. The looting of the government coffers to privatize everything and create oligarchs was a result of the post-USSR shock therapy.
I was literally talking about the time before the USSR collapsed also it was applied to Russia, not to the countries it occupied.
Ah, I misinterpreted you. Sorry about that. But it’s hard to tell exactly what you’re talking about without more details. Afghanistan, maybe? I get if you don’t want to dox yourself, as someone privacy minded, but it’s hard to know how to respond without more context.
I don’t understand why anything anti capitalism these days is automatically communism. It’s such a large swing from one side to the other. I just want my taxes to pay for healthcare, infrastructure, and education instead of wars and prisons. I want to stop getting fucked by corporations that have infinitely more money than I can ever imagine. I don’t think that makes me a communist. I’m just anti-fucking-the-people. Capitalism can fuck people. Communism can fuck people too. I support Corpo-Politico-Celibacism. Stop the fucking.
Edit: Okay, fuck the people. You guys must have this figured out.
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Stalin: “Why not both?”
He did adopt a tougher stance, because of the looming world war. However, Stalin wasnt nearly as much of a tyrant the west paints him to be. Not to the honest working class.
Also victims of communism: anyone aged 1-99 who happens to be the wrong family, who practices wrong think, who has family members who practice wrong think, who have an opinion, who like to be different, and I can go on for a while…
People like you should maybe watch 'the chekist". Once you’re done and not crawled up in fetal position while crying maybe you can think for a little bit about what it is that you really want.
Seriously, you tankie types are nauseatingly naïeve.
That’s just regular authoritarian statism, tribalism and human herd behaviour.
Anyone unfortunate enough to have lived through high school knows how dangerous the little human empires are.
Yeha, I could also point far right authoritarian governments and say that capitalism is bad… But that would be stupid.
Somehow I assume you don’t associate capitalism with chattel slavery and apartheid. But you do associate corrupt authoritarianism with economics when it is system that you don’t like.
Slaves are e human capital. So by definition weren’t plantations capitalist?
I think they are very much capitalist. And then surely the Civil War that poors fought on plantation owners’ behalf should also be blamed on capitalism?
What is it with people here thinking that earning a wage is slavery? That requires either a complete lack of understanding what slavery or just some serious impressive mental gymnastics.
I associate corrupt authoritarianism with communism because it’s an inevitable outcome. Communism only works of you remove individual freedoms and force people into it. This, by design, requires a dictatorship. Dictatorships foster corruption because you can’t have transparency.
Rent seeking behavior is wrongthink. Being Royalty is practicing wrongthink. Communism is built on Critical Theory making criticism of society its bedrock. I dont consume propaganda, I try to stick to primary sources as close as possible and make my own.
Seriously you Capitalist Apologists are so brainwashed by literal Cold War Propaganda its pathetic.
The USSR had a minimum sentence of 5 years of forced labor for being gay. Being gay is also apparently wrongthink.
That’s been an issue in constant capitalist countries, too. That’s not an issue of communism and is an unrelated complaint.
Yea, I know, I’m not defending capitalism. I’m saying every attempt at communism has been fucking horrible for not just landlords and capital owners.
And a lot of attempts have also been great at raising the standards of living for the general population, as well as for economic development in a relatively quick amount of time.
In the USSR those improvents were for Russia, not so much for their colonised regions where they exported resources from. Industrialisation also helped but that’s not really unique to anything.
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And socialist nations like the GDR were better on gay rights in the late 80s than capitalist nations are now.
And Cuba has the most lgbt equality of anywhere right now
And China is opening state sponsored trans Healthcare clinics, including for children
Meanwhile in the US if you’re trans you can’t live in half of the country and you’re worried about getting hatecrimed in the other half. And you have pundits of the capitalist class calling you pedophiles and “the jews of gender”
Also, gay liberation movements in the imperial core were mostly led by communists, you can’t give credit to capitalism for being forced into granting concessions.
Advocating for Communism is not Advocating for the USSR.
You say that but there are numerous people in the comments defending both the USSR and Stalin.
The USSR did good things and bad things but reactionaries like to pretend it was all bad. There are hard numbers about life expectancy increasing, better life for women, research achievements, general quality of life and happiness metrics, and more that increased. There was lots of bad parts, but same in the US.
There were anti gay laws on the books for the US, and towns you couldn’t even walk in while black. Hell, there are still some sundown towns in places in the US. If you just point out that stuff, or if you lived in such a horrible area or had family who did spreading their stories, then it will just come off as a hell hole. The US does suck, but it’s not just Skid Row, the projects, lynch mobs, coups, wars, etc. Same for the USSR. There were good things we can save and build on, and bad things we need to avoid for future socialist projects.
It’s not like the first attempts for democracy went well, either. But I wouldn’t diss it in the Middle Ages and say we can only do monarchies, the pinnacle of political achievements, just because " it never succeeded. It fell in Greece and the Roman Republic and every other time it’s been tried, and has never worked ever and thus is always doomed to fail."
My problem with people citing those metrics is that they are true for Russia itself while ignoring that a large reason for those improvements was colonialism done to the occupied regions. Industrialisation was another thing that improved those metrics but that was hardly unique to the USSR. Some of those regions may have had benefits but here in Estonia it was pretty much all around bad. After the occupation ended the quality of life here improved rapidly.
As far as examples for socialism I’d say the USSR was an all around failure but people still defend it and even Stalin who basically guaranteed it’s failure as a socialist project. In the baltic region the word communism is basically poisoned because of the USSR.
You need to look at the referendum to maintain the soviet union before you say shit about imperialist Russia. Non-russian SSRs were most enthusiastic about keeping the USSR around.
I’m sure they were able to pick themselves up by the bootstraps right?
Nice…
Let’s see: Communism A system of government where the country’s wealth is concentrated into a small, ruling class of billionaires, who use the media they own to keep the lower classes fighting with each other while they . . . the rich . . . run off with all the farking money.
Oh wait. that’s capitalism. I don’t know how I got those two systems confused.
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Bruh i see people starving in the streets of America every damn day.
Russian and Chinese famines weren’t intentional though. In China, because they were literally coming out from being the hungriest country in the planet, and decided to change too much too fast, you can’t really turn such a huge country around overnight. In Russia because they needed to collectivize really quickly in preparation for WW2, and the landlords at the time decided to literally burn grain and kill cattle instead of handing their big estates. The numbers offered by western authorities on both are greatly exaggerated without adequate proof.
After the tragic events, both countries saw unprecedented improvements in quality of life, nutrition and life expectancy. These events didn’t really repeat after they stabilized, something that can’t be said of most capitalist countries to this day.
In capitalism the owner class needs people to be in despair for them to be willing to work such shitty, desperate jobs. Millions of poor and starving people have to exist either in your own country, or elsewhere in a neocolony for one billionaire to be able to steal so much accumulated capital to himself. It’s common to see them taking decisions that help with their accumulation at the expense of everyone else (eg. Oil companies covering up climate change). We are already making more food than we would need to be able to feed everyone fairly, yet capitalist countries don’t.
You could do that with any country that’s had famines and disasters.
United States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
Ireland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
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Nobody starves under capitalism /s
There’s never be a full communist or capitalist society. What wears arguing over how far towards either we should go. Also, FYI for those that don’t know The USSR and China are not communist. Both are/were dictatorships that call themselves communist.
Look up dialectical Materialism. China is ‘communist’ as they are progressing along the roadmap Dialectical Materialism provides towards achieving communism.
Are they making actual progress on that path, though? They have tons of billionaires, lots of people go bankrupt there from medical bills or are homeless (unlike some other communist countries). The state owns a lot of businesses, but then so does Norway. All their initiatives seem to be related to hurting gay people or making it harder for kids to play video games. They’ve arrested some rich people and cracked down on some corruption, but that also sounds like it could come from a capitalist country. I can’t really find any sort of long-term plan.
The problem is that you won’t ever get a full communist country, at least not for a very, VERY long time, because you always get those few fartweasels who end up hijacking it and turning it into a dictatorship. You need to eliminate that problem first, and with how the world is sliding into fascism, it doesn’t look like we’re any where near close to solving that dilemma
Read ‘State and Revolution’ by Lenin. It’s quite short and not that bad a read. Addresses exactly what you are talking about.
I thought I was still on Lemmy.world and was wondering why this thread was going so hard on theory. Carry on.
Upvote for fartweasel.
Even when they don’t turn it into a dictatorship, they may just turn it back into capitalism, like Russia did. And when that happens, they just sell all the old estates to the highest bidder, making them richer and turning them into oligarchs. And that becomes functionally equivalent to a dictatorship of the bourgeois.
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Keep in mind that many Americans don’t know Socialism from Communism, as they’ve been schooled that everything responsible for happy Scandinavians is somehow bad.
Which is probably why they often confuse Socialism with Social Democracy.
Should I also keep in mind that most people don’t know how nice Communist counties were to live in? Seriously, give me one, just one country that did communism successfully and where all the people could live in freedom and pursue happiness. Just a single example.
There’s no country where every single person lives in freedom and happiness. But there are numerous countries that have significantly improved the quality of life for the vast majority of people compared to what they had before, including Cuba, Vietnam, and China.
It may be true that in some cases the quality of life is higher in capitalist countries. But there’s a good reason for that! Historically, the countries most prone to socialist revolutions… were countries with some of the lowest standards of living in the world!
Despite this, China has recently eclipsed the United States in life expectancy. If you compare the two countries’ life expectancies before the Communists came to power, no one would expect that to happen! Why? Because for the average rural Chinese person, their way of life was virtually unchanged since ancient times with a life expectancy of 35, comparable to that of the Roman Empire.
Anti-communists would have us compare communist countries against either an imagined utopia, or against countries starting from a significantly higher level of industrial development. But those comparisons are not relevant to the question at hand! In order to evaluate the efficacy of socialism, the relevant comparison is the system that actually existed before, and what it was on track to do! And in cases like China, we can clearly see that the quality of life was miserable and stagnant for the vast majority of people, until the communists came to power!
Why do Westerners fail to account for this vital evidence? Because people used to a higher standard of living would take these improvements for granted! For a village tailor, being able to afford a sewing machine could be life-changing - but someone living in the imperial core would have no relevant experience to relate to that! The only thing they would notice is how poor the person still is, regardless of how much or how quickly their life is improving!
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Yeah, try just about all northern European countries. Are there people that have fallen off the band wagon? Of course there are, shit happens everywhere. However, everyone there loves better and more meaningful lives than in ANY communist country.
I don’t recall the last time in northern Europe (second world war aside) where literally everyone except a few elites (hello Russia) had to stand in line for hopefully some food
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First of all, communism isn’t utopian. Even communists don’t think it will be some paradise where all worries disappear. You’ll still have to fight racism, sexism, bad weather, famines, etc.
But it’s often better for an average person from a country of a starting equal level of economic development. You’ve got to give it the “If I was reincarnated in a random person’s body, where would I want to be?” test. US is a good answer, but it’s got a way higher level of economic development with a big headstart. Even then, you could end up in the hood and die early and stressed. When you give the test comparing countries of equal starting economic development, it becomes a lot more muddled.
Like, would you rather randomly live in Cuba, or Somalia? The place where you get free education, health care, etc or a place that is also extremely poor but you don’t get that stuff? You could reincarnate as some rich, warlord there, but would you want to take that chance when you could reincarnate in Cuba as literally anyone and not be worried about ending up homeless? When giving realistic comparisons like this with proper historical context, and you do it over and over again, they tend to come out on top.
So the tens of millions of people that died under communism were all landlords? Wow, what are the chances of that
What is with the tens of millions dying under capitalism
In fairness, everyone dies in every political system. Yes I’m fun at parties
No they die under F R E E D O M.
Freedom to die on the street baby
That’s different, because of reasons. When someone dies within a communist system that is communism’s fault. When someone dies in a capitalist system, that’s their own fault for not tugging on those bootstraps.
Is that what you saw or are you just parroting 1950s propaganda?
No alot of them wete Nazis.
The “black book of communism” includes german soldiers who died during WW2, it includes people who might have had 4 kids but only had 2, it includes victims of the US in vietnam.
Communism is a bit different than what those “communist” countries had. If anything it was socialism, but that still doesn’t fit completely. These “communist” countries are just one-party states in which the government controls the economy. The idea of putting the working class in power is useless if you create a government that can make decisions against the opinions of the working class. Socialist one-party state ≠ Communist democracy
“Communism but not like that. Or that. Or that. Or….”
ew a revisionist, it was REAL socialism led by REAL communists and it was based as fuck and the one that are still around are real and they are based. also theres no such thing a one party socialist state that is a myth at most u could say past and present socialist countries has a dominant political party but by no means was there only one, and other parties were and are allowed in those countries.
Yeah. You don’t get to revise away anything uncomfortable. USSR and China were socialist experiments that succeeded in raising quality of life and transforming rural countries into industrial, scientific states. If people wanna talk about what went wrong, great. Pretending they “don’t count” just puppets capitalist apologia and doesn’t help
From a theoretical point, they don’t count as communist. They entirely dropped the all-important aspect of giving power to the working class.
Both the USSR and China, in their self-described “communist” periods, were ruled with absolute power and directed by a head of state. The USSR collapsed, and modern China is about as communist as North Korea is democratic.
i was a little worried there comrade but im glad to see u have a good unstanding of just how great the PRC is, after all what could be more the democratic than the glorious DPRK.
I really can’t tell if this is /s. Could you please clarify
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Do you have a real-world example of a successful communist state? Because you may not like it, but those “communist” countries are humanities best attempts at enacting communism and they resulted in millions of people dying.
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Communism only works on paper because it assumes that the people in power are going to just happily share everything equally. Humans don’t work that way, we’re selfish, greedy, and will hurt others to get ahead. There is no difference between a capitalist and communist leader. They both live better, eat better, make more money. There’s no equality there
Humans do work that way. In the wake of disaster, and tragedy, and scarcity, we see people sharing resources and helping each other.
It’s the sociopaths who seek power that don’t work that way. The biggest success of capitalism is that the sociopaths have normalized their behavior and cast kindness as a flaw or disorder.
Humans do work that way. In the wake of disaster, and tragedy, and scarcity, we see people sharing resources and helping each other.
And also opportunists that will take the opportunity to loot and steal, then happily abandon anyone behind them still in the disaster.
If your baseline assumption is reliant on people doing… well, much if anything outside of being self serving it will break down fast.
That is exactly the sociopathic propaganda I mentioned, that simply isn’t backed by evidence, but casts people with empathy as ignorant.
It’s not propaganda to acknowledge shitty people exist and will try to take advantage of any situation, it’s just basic reality when you’re out from behind a keyboard.
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No. But that doesn’t mean something like a socialist democracy couldn’t be achieved. Socialism isn’t bound to have a certain type of government and if we get rid of capitalism I would still like to have a say in what happens next
I’m pretty sure the leftcommunists and anarchists and worker councils requesting for power to be really handed to the soviets which were purged by Lenin and Trotsky weren’t actually landlords. But you never know, people from .ml may think people unwilling to obey the bolsheviks get labeled landlords too.
Weird, I was under the impression that the purges happened after Lenin died. Can ghosts lead a purge?
Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror#Industrial_workers
Do also take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Russian_Constituent_Assembly_election
And this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Revolutionary_Party
Selected quotes:
The SRs were agrarian socialists and supporters of a democratic socialist Russian republic. The ideological heirs of the Narodniks, the SRs won a mass following among the Russian peasantry by endorsing the overthrow of the Tsar and the redistribution of land to the peasants.
In the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly held two weeks after the Bolsheviks took power, the party still proved to be by far the most popular party across the country, gaining 37.6% of the popular vote as opposed to the Bolsheviks’ 24%. However, the Bolsheviks disbanded the Assembly in January 1918 and after that the SR lost political significance. (…) Both wings of the SR party were ultimately suppressed by the Bolsheviks through imprisoning some of its leaders and forcing others to emigrate.
Following Lenin’s instructions, a trial of SRs was held in Moscow in 1922, which led to protests by Eugene V. Debs, Karl Kautsky, and Albert Einstein among others. Most of the defendants were found guilty, but they did not plead guilty like the defendants in the later show trials in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and the 1930s.
Note that these guys won the elections because they were the actually existing socialist movement in Russia and had been for decades. Lenin only led the government instead of them because he had the organization to overthrow the Mensheviks, not because the Bolsheviks were a better representative of socialism.
That’s not true at all. The Mensheviks wanted to cooperate with the bourgeoisie and were therefore a bad representation of socialism. Lenin formed the Bolsheviks because the Mensheviks were being stupid. The country was also fractured after the revolution and many groups of counter-revolutionary groups were trying to overthrow the barely formed government. Meanwhile famines were ravaging the country. Understanding the historical context of Russia in 1917 and the economic struggles the people were dealing with is very important to understanding why things happened the way they did. Looking at the aftermath of a revolution where everyone is vying for power and killing each other doesn’t automatically make the winner of that power grab the bad guys.
How about you read anything of what I’ve sent you and you realize that I’m not talking about the Mensheviks
It was many factions. I’m just saying all of them were trying to have third revolutions while the people starved to death. At some point, revolutions end with a unifying government that isn’t trying to murder each other. Lenin was not the villain you’re painting him to be.
I don’t disagree but this meme is ass lmao
memes are usually all ass
ITT: That doesn’t count!!!
Well. Stop using strawmen. Communism is defined by progress through dialectical Materialism. Has any nation finished that progression?
Communism is a goalpost on wheels, that’s why no nation has “finished that progression”
No. Moving goalposts means there is no definitive measure of completion. Communism has one. If you’ve read anything at all about it, you would know that. But hey you were told it was bad in school, and thinking for yourself is difficult. You do you.
‘We’re only defending the imaginary ideal!’
That’s not how words work. Things mean what they are used to mean.
Y’all understand this perfectly when describing “capitalism.” That word becomes synecdoche for every level and aspect of modern reality. By definition, capitalism is only really the part where having money makes money, but nobody has any trouble understanding what you mean when you refer to its consequences and implications. Nor would you respect if libertarians split hairs about “corporatism.” Like oh, this isn’t capitalism, because it lacks X and Y and Z, which have never existed, so how dare you talk about bad things that actually happened.
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Yeah sure dude, existing in a context is why people condemned police states.
‘People who don’t know the difference between these terms must be using the more-recognizable one as an oblique criticism of the gap between theory and practice’ is the most .ml take I have ever seen.
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… do you understand that criticism can come from outside your own belief set?
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People fleeing communist countries en mass sure is a mystery. Who could ever know why they built the Berlin Wall or why Cuban families risk their children on rafts to get to a capitalist country
You are aware that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants are coming to America from other capitalist countries right?
still
>many cases of people fleeing from communist countries to capitalist ones
>far less cases of people fleeing from capitalist countries to live under communism
most people don’t want communism, that’s why there are no democratic elections in communist countries and wrongthink is persecuted
Under communism wrongthink is wanting to profit off the labor of others.
no, under communism being gay is wrongthink, apparently
Lmao no it isnt.
didn’t the USSR prosecute gays?
>inb4 “b-but it wasn’t REAL communism, akshually”
So did the United States untill very recently, what is your point? Advocating for Communism isnt Advocating for a return of the USSR you absolute ham sandwich.
This reply perfectly highlights why people who have issues with basic logic support communism.
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Living conditions for the majority of the population in Cuba are far better than in any capitalist Latin American country. This is despite the brutal blockade on Cuba by the burger empire. Please go make a clown of yourself elsewhere.
im on latin america and despite being bad over here, i’m a bit skeptical on this one. the blockade is currently making sure cuba can’t even get basic medication in sufficient quantities.
i’d say its safer to say they are much better in some aspects, the ones they can control.
The kind of abject poverty you see in Latin American countries simply does not exist in Cuba. Everyone has access to basic necessities, education, and healthcare. Cuba has even higher life expectancy than US.
when it comes to inequality i can agree its probably among the best, if not the best.
but despite efforts to provide it, they don’t always get basic necessities because of the embargo. there is a not insignificant amount of poverty in cuba too.
Of course, the blockade is doing incredible amounts of harm. My point is that even despite that, Cuba manages to do a better job ensuring a minimal standard of living than capitalist countries in Latin America. What this shows is that communism performs better under extreme stress than capitalism does under best conditions.
the Berlin Wall
That was fascism.
or why Cuban families
That’s kleptocracy.
This might help to explain the siege mentality of socialism.
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