Literally yes. Housing, employment, education, healthcare and pensions are guaranteed in Cuba, and were guaranteed in the USSR, both in theory and in practice. What are you exactly talking about?
Capitalism literally encourages human greed to accumulate wealth and destroy the societal system. Even if you tax and regulate them that’s still what’s encouraged, as its literally the entire point of the system
And regarding “only some species share resources…” Yes. Us. That’s literally what society is. How do you think humans grew to become the most successful species on earth? If you win I do not lose. It’s not a zero-sum game. Cooperation is literally a win-win. Do you think technology and science would thrive and prosper in a cutthroat society where people kill and steal from each other over any tiny advantage they can get?
I mean, do you know what socialism is? Do you know what capitalism is? It’s not really extreme in the objective sense, what is extreme is that someone can own a thing that they don’t even use, and hire other people to use for them, and then them profit just because they own it. Or own land and make others pay to use or live on that land, just because they own it. I mean, I find that to be absurd in the grand scheme of things, but that is what capitalism is.
Capitalism just feels like a very anti-social economic system
I agree with what you say except the last part about the entire concept of life being capitalist. It is not. All life in the natural world is in equilibrium. There is give and take but all work in tandem. Parasites are the capitalists, taking until there is nothing left to give and ultimately killing their host.
Yup. I once saw a grey-jay standing atop a relatively humongous pile of moose guts trying to protect it from thieves. The natural world is actually a good metaphor for the plausibility of ideal capitalism but breaks down for RL capitalism because human nature and ingenuity destroys the system’s ability to reach equilibrium.
The entire concept of life itself is very capitalist — You have to exploit all resources available to you so you can survive and thrive. Only some species share resources — that too if they are in abundance for them.
This is an incredibly inaccurate way to describe nature and you feed into narratives that capitalism is “natural” that stop us from thinking critically both about nature and humanity when you frame things in this way.
Apart from that every multicellular lifeform is a collective. True, those multicellular organisms prey on each other and fight to keep their species thriving. They don’t knowingly harm their own fucking species like capitalism does.
What you have accomplished is to introduce a completely arbitrary and reductive continuum and stated both ends are bad… so what?
I don’t care either way what you think about capitalism, I am telling you to stop comparing capitalism to nature because it exposes that you clearly don’t know anything about nature.
I gave you a plethora of actual evidence of human rights in an actually existing socialist country, and you went with the “gommunism impossible because hooman greed”.
But please elaborate: why is the nationalization and collectivization of means of production so vulnerable to greed? A system in which power is distributed among all workers is actually less prone to greed issues than one in which a single human is in control of the whole company. The whole “human greed” argument is a hollow sophism without any actual analysis of everything.
How is it more sustainable to maintain an elite of wealthy company owners with interests opposed to those of the workers than to maintain a worker controlled state? You are witnessing with your own eyes the disintegration of the western capitalist system, the fascists entering power in USA, Italy, Finland, and probably soon Germany and France and Spain will follow, likely UK too. All the “center-left checks and balances” with strong union membership in the 1960s-1980s disappeared overnight when the threat of global communism disappeared in the 1990s and capitalism didn’t need to appear to be better anymore.
Source: émigré gusanos living in Madrid, Spain. Life expectancy is higher in Cuba than in the USA, and that’s despite the island country suffering the most comprehensive and long lasting economic blockade in human history. The blockade itself, according to the Office of the Historian of the USA, was put in place, and I quote: “to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”. Seeing you’re so concerned with poverty caused by economic blockades, you may be interested to know that according to recent medical research US and EU sanctions murder above half a million humans per year since 1971.
USSR […] its internal economy was so shit…
…so shit that it took backwards feudal Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, etc. where 85% of the population were destitute peasants with a life expectancy of 27 years in 1929, and by 1970 turned into the second world power, rose life expectancy to close to 70, and did all this without exploiting the global south.
Totally terrible economy, much worse than anything before or after, right?
Also they supported the Nazis during Poland’s invasion
Wrong, wrong and more wrong. I’ve answered to that in a separate comment because of how wrong that is, feel free to read it and give me a well-informed opinión afterwards on my comment. “Le evil Soviets invaded poor wittle Poland” is pure historic revisionism that you’re regurgitating from some other Lemmy comment you’ve seen.
As for the rest of your comment I won’t bother because it’s just more “hooman greed” nonsense.
As for Molotov-Ribbentrop and the invasion of “Poland”: I’m gonna please ask you to actually read my comment and to be open to the historical evidence I bring (using Wikipedia as a source, hopefully not suspect of being tankie-biased), because I believe there is a great mistake in the way contemporary western nations interpret history of WW2 and the interwar period. Thank you for actually making the effort, I know it’s a long comment, but please engage with the points I’m making:
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.
As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won’t find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.
The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:
“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:
The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?
Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.
All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:
“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)
You claim communism is impossible to implement yet you have no issue in attempting to implement a democracy that capitalism won’t be able to pervert, despite one never having existed before and it being impossible for one to exist.
It sounds less like genuine rationality and more like rationalising a status quo bias. Even worse when people are claiming capitalism to be the natural order of life, despite existing for less than 0.0000001% of it and humans being egalitarian for far longer than they were capitalist.
Peak homoeconomus experiencing “capitalist realism.” They even colonised your dreams.
No, you’re just rationalising sociopathy with thoroughly disproved social-Darwinism. Contrary to what people think, it was our sharing of resources that set us appart from our competitors, not competition within our species. That’s basic human evolutionary history.
People had to be beaten, whipped, staved, dispossessed of their land and forced leave their egalitarian lives to endure capitalism, making it the opposite of human nature. You just don’t know the history of capitalism.
Again, can you name one single country that hasn’t had its democracy utterly perverted by capitalism? We both know you can’t and that’s why you refuse to answer. Can you even name one check that hasn’t been perverted? As you can’t, why do you think any could magically work now?
Believing it to be human instinct is just telling on yourself for you lack of empathy, believing everyone else has as little as you do.
We were egalitarian for 10s of thousands of years. That’s real human nature whether you like it or not. Just because we happen to be ruled over by the most greedy and sociopathic people in society, it doesn’t make it our nature.
You can’t name a time capitalism hasn’t perverted democracy and failed the 99% but think failing that way only applies to communism. Like I said, peak homo economicus experiencing capitalist realism. You fell for the first lie you were told and refuse to hold it to account.
The way I see it, between left and far left the direction is roughly the same, that’s the means and end point that differ (i.e. revolution or not and how far we go into sharing resources). This is an important difference and they should thus not be mixed.
In a naive attempt to “meet everyone’s basic needs” sure, but in practice it would almost certainly end up enriching and entrenching a new ruling class, or collapsing under external pressure even if there are some early wins.
Many things sound simple from the outset. But tearing down and rebuilding an entire society isn’t something you do without significant (and often lethal) force and with plenty of intended and unintended casualties along the way (and there’s still a very good chance we’d screw it up).
If it’s not “the good guys” wielding overwhelming force, it’ll be “the bad guys” stepping in. Every political system ultimately rests on the realistic threat/application of force; the only question is who controls it and how accountable they are.
I’m not inclined to trust anyone waving guns in my face, nor encourage situations that make that more likely. So, things would have to get a lot worse for me (and I’d venture most people) to want violent overthrow of my current (far from perfect) political and social system. That said … at some point, for many people in many countries, it may be too late. Apathy isn’t appropriate either.
I couldn’t agree more. Although I’ll add that education and basic health/social support is also needed for long term stability, or large swathes of the population will be manipulated by fear and dis/misinformation, and will likely end up voting against their own interests. Social cohesion is important, which is why it is used as a weapon by nation states and other political actors.
but in practice it would almost certainly end up enriching and entrenching a new ruling class
Damn, seems like real-world data contradicts your preconceived notions. Now, as a responsible adult, you’ll surely retract and reflect on why you’ve been misled to believe that communism perpetuates inequality, right?
Are you trying to say that communism leads to a failed authoritarian state resembling the US in terms of income inequality? Do you have the same stats for wealth inequality too?
Do you have the same stats for wealth inequality too?
I don’t but they’re irrelevant. The only possible way to get money in the USSR was through labor and income, since there was no capitalist accumulation or return rates on investment by design. The highest paid individuals in the USSR were actually highly trained professionals such as university professors, members of research institutions and high profile artists and media personalities.
Are you trying to say that communism leads to a failed authoritarian state resembling the US in terms of income inequality?
No, that’s what the end of communism leads to, to a return to capitalism. That was only possible because communism began in a 400-million pool of people in backwards and unindustrialized Eastern Europe, the cold war was uneven from the start.
I’d love to see a utopia, but I don’t see communism making any sustainable inroads anywhere in the world… that is, unless things get much much worse, to the point that your average man is willing to pick up a pitchfork (or other weapon of choice) and participate in overthrowing ruling class by force… but nowadays the masses are so divided and confused that they’ll probably start killing each other for scraps of food rather than the billionaires for a life of dignity. Even then, it’s just temporary until capitalism and/or authoritarianism takes hold again.
Who talked about utopia? The USSR was far from a utopia, it was a state with flaws and lots of mistakes were made in the process. It is still demonstrably significantly more fair, egalitarian and less exploitative than anything we have in the west, which relies in the exploitation of the global south to sustain itself.
The whole “Utopian socialism” thing is a 200 years old argument that was dismantled back then, by the way. Engels himself has an essay called “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, explaining how early branches of socialism followed utopian goals and methods, but Marxism is scientific socialism based off historical materialism and empiricism. If you look at my comments above, I’ve talked about historical evidence with hard data, not about good wishes for the future.
I don’t see communism making any sustainable inroads anywhere in the world
That is if you ignore the main industrial powerhouse of the world (China), the island of Cuba, or the nations of Vietnam and Laos.
unless things get much much worse
As if, for example, the west started to support a genocide that murders over half a million people (most of them children), or if militarized police started kidnapping and disappearing random citizens without due process in the USA, or if fascist governments linked to Nazism and Fascism started to win elections in Italy or Germany?
Even then, it’s just temporary until capitalism takes hold again
To quote Ursula K. Le Guin: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings”
The USSR is dead and cold, replaced by an authoritarian warmongering machine. It had its moment in the spotlight, but it failed, and it failed its russian and former citizens.
China promotes many good principles (in many ways so did the USA, cough cough), but it is heading in the wrong direction under Xi. It’s Communism with a human exploitative flavour, with the occasional public fig leaf of justice. That said, it could offer an umbrella of security for some more interesting experiments in the years to come. Watch this space, I guess.
Circling back to my original point, I maintain that communism isn’t going to gain popular support so long as the only viable way to achieve it is through violence and oppression, and so long as it buckles so easily under the pressure of outside forces.
I will continue voting and protesting for sensible left-leaning policies that promote fairness and well being for all, while steering clear of the extremists and simpletons who promote hate or explicitly or tacitly support genocides, wars of aggression, etc. The scales may tip enough one day to justify radical action, but not today - the risks of it going terribly wrong are too high.
How? I’m the one preserving peoples rights here. No one in my country is enslaved. Everyone has basic rights AND we have the freedom of ownership and democracy. Everything convincing point socialists have can be achieved in a capitalist system.
Wrong. Your country has homeless people without a right to housing and your country has unemployed people without the right to work. As for healthcare and education, your country is dismantling those systems in favour of private ones and worsening coverage, and the same can be said about pensions. This is almost universally true for capitalism except for a few countries in Latin America which manage to maintain rights for now (until right wing gets reelected). Now, tell me, what country are you from?
Wrong. The homeless people in my country choose to be homeless as they are offered free housing and community support workers. My country is currently expanding their public healthcare and increasing the salaries of nurses as well as expanding publicly funded gp vists. This is all done within a capitalist system with no large wealth funds and we are not particularly rich as a nation.
You shouldn’t speak so confidently when you seem to have no idea of the world outside America.
“…and to achive that, you will do the job we pick for you, you will work the hour we decided, you will be paid not in money but in basic needs, and any excess you have will be confiscated.”
Let’s not pretend we didn’t have the example for far left.
Literally making this up. By the 1970s in the USSR, 1 in 10 positions in the economy were open, and people were completely free to change their jobs and move to others without having the threat of unemployment. The only restriction I’ve seen to that, is that university graduates, as a payment back to society (university, as of all education in the USSR, was free and actually included accommodation and upkeep), had to work for a few years on a state-mandated position in their field of study. I’m a Spaniard physicist and 9 in 10 of my friends are unhappy fucks who are either unemployed or hating their lives in consulting.
you will be paid not in money
Tell me one socialist state that hasn’t paid their workers in money. I can tell you that my girlfriend’s mom, in a capitalist country, once got paid in juice boxes because the company didn’t have money for her salary.
any excess you have will be confiscated
Again literally untrue. You’re mistaking capital (private property used to produce goods and services in order to extract surplus value from workers) with personal property (the things you use on your own for your own shit, like your house or your toothbrush).
Have you ever actually talked with a Marxist, or are you just going off what you heard on FOX news?
I must admit i don’t talk with Marxists nor do i know what is FOX news, and i do exaggerated my point, but lets not pretend Mao Zedong and North Korea didn’t exists, whatever you mentioned above is no way closer to far left. Socialism is practiced everywhere, but that doesn’t make them far left.
You’re mistaking capital (private property used to produce goods and services in order to extract surplus value from workers) with personal property (the things you use on your own for your own shit, like your house or your toothbrush).
The excess in your opinion is forbidding rich people from exploiting the poor. There were plenty of people making the same point against abolition of slavery in 200BCE that you’re making right now.
lets not pretend Mao Zedong and North Korea didn’t exist
Under Mao Zedong, China’s life expectancy went from 23 years of age to almost 60, more than doubling. Apply this to 1 billion Chinese, and you get that communism in China saved hundreds of millions of people. China in the early 1900s was a western colony much like India, and it had similar levels of industrialization and economical progress. Comparing the development of India and China since communism, the only possible conclusion is that communism uplifted a billion people from destitute poverty, gave them healthcare, education, pensions, jobs and housing. Mistakes were made during Mao? For sure they were. The balance is still overwhelmingly positive by any metric you want to apply.
As for North Korea, maybe if the USA hadn’t bombed the country using more explosives than in the entire Pacific theater of WW2, and destroyed literally 85% of the buildings in the entire country, North-Koreans wouldn’t have had such an extreme policy of international isolation and self-defense.
Mistakes were made during Mao? For sure they were. The balance is still overwhelmingly positive by any metric you want to apply.
The mistake is millions of death while Mao walks away without any repercussions.
North-Koreans wouldn’t have had such an extreme policy of international isolation and self-defense.
And maybe if nk didn’t self isolate for so long they would’ve recover. Just look at singapore. Did you know North Korea have an embassy in Malaysia? Did you know what happen next? They decided to assassinate Kim Jong Nam in Malaysia, then blame Malaysia for it, and cut all ties. NK might have been a victim of US, but their current situation is 100% their own doing.
Well that conclude my reason of not speaking with Marxist, you guys are nut lol.
The mistake is millions of death while Mao walks away without any repercussions
Let’s look at how many “millions of deaths by Mao” (1949-1979):
India’s life expectancy in 1950: 34 years of age
India’s life expectancy in 1979: 49 years of age
China’s life expectancy in 1950: 40 years of age
China’s life expectancy in 2010: 62 years of age
Whoops, turns out that China gained 22 years of life expectancy where India gained 15, that’s 50% more and applied to the entire population of a country with a billion people, results in hundreds of millions of lives saved! Turns out you were wrong again because your arguments don’t come from real data but from anticommunist discourse vibes.
We’re talking about the ultra wealthy sharing the stockpiles of resources they have stolen and enslaved to gather, and the first spin is that they “aren’t allowed to have private things” and “we aren’t allowed to accumulate wealth”
Yeah, this thread is full of people who have lived their lives under absolute capitalist doctrine and cannot see an alternative and have never considered the underlying philosophy and morality of that system and can’t even imagine another, so they backfill the blanks and rationalize what they have so they don’t have to deal with actually thinking about it deeper because that would require effort and discomfort.
Politicalmemes? Yep, another right wing breeding ground, it always is.
Far left is: “We’re going to destroy the very concept of private ownership and wealth accumulation”
“… to meet everyone’s basic needs”
“…”
“To meet everyone’s basic needs, right?”
/AnakinAndPadmeMeme.jpg
Literally yes. Housing, employment, education, healthcare and pensions are guaranteed in Cuba, and were guaranteed in the USSR, both in theory and in practice. What are you exactly talking about?
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Capitalism literally encourages human greed to accumulate wealth and destroy the societal system. Even if you tax and regulate them that’s still what’s encouraged, as its literally the entire point of the system
And regarding “only some species share resources…” Yes. Us. That’s literally what society is. How do you think humans grew to become the most successful species on earth? If you win I do not lose. It’s not a zero-sum game. Cooperation is literally a win-win. Do you think technology and science would thrive and prosper in a cutthroat society where people kill and steal from each other over any tiny advantage they can get?
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I mean, do you know what socialism is? Do you know what capitalism is? It’s not really extreme in the objective sense, what is extreme is that someone can own a thing that they don’t even use, and hire other people to use for them, and then them profit just because they own it. Or own land and make others pay to use or live on that land, just because they own it. I mean, I find that to be absurd in the grand scheme of things, but that is what capitalism is.
Capitalism just feels like a very anti-social economic system
I mean Russia did put people in space
And china
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I agree with what you say except the last part about the entire concept of life being capitalist. It is not. All life in the natural world is in equilibrium. There is give and take but all work in tandem. Parasites are the capitalists, taking until there is nothing left to give and ultimately killing their host.
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Yup. I once saw a grey-jay standing atop a relatively humongous pile of moose guts trying to protect it from thieves. The natural world is actually a good metaphor for the plausibility of ideal capitalism but breaks down for RL capitalism because human nature and ingenuity destroys the system’s ability to reach equilibrium.
This is an incredibly inaccurate way to describe nature and you feed into narratives that capitalism is “natural” that stop us from thinking critically both about nature and humanity when you frame things in this way.
Apart from that every multicellular lifeform is a collective. True, those multicellular organisms prey on each other and fight to keep their species thriving. They don’t knowingly harm their own fucking species like capitalism does.
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What you have accomplished is to introduce a completely arbitrary and reductive continuum and stated both ends are bad… so what?
I don’t care either way what you think about capitalism, I am telling you to stop comparing capitalism to nature because it exposes that you clearly don’t know anything about nature.
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I gave you a plethora of actual evidence of human rights in an actually existing socialist country, and you went with the “gommunism impossible because hooman greed”.
But please elaborate: why is the nationalization and collectivization of means of production so vulnerable to greed? A system in which power is distributed among all workers is actually less prone to greed issues than one in which a single human is in control of the whole company. The whole “human greed” argument is a hollow sophism without any actual analysis of everything.
How is it more sustainable to maintain an elite of wealthy company owners with interests opposed to those of the workers than to maintain a worker controlled state? You are witnessing with your own eyes the disintegration of the western capitalist system, the fascists entering power in USA, Italy, Finland, and probably soon Germany and France and Spain will follow, likely UK too. All the “center-left checks and balances” with strong union membership in the 1960s-1980s disappeared overnight when the threat of global communism disappeared in the 1990s and capitalism didn’t need to appear to be better anymore.
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Source: émigré gusanos living in Madrid, Spain. Life expectancy is higher in Cuba than in the USA, and that’s despite the island country suffering the most comprehensive and long lasting economic blockade in human history. The blockade itself, according to the Office of the Historian of the USA, was put in place, and I quote: “to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”. Seeing you’re so concerned with poverty caused by economic blockades, you may be interested to know that according to recent medical research US and EU sanctions murder above half a million humans per year since 1971.
…so shit that it took backwards feudal Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, etc. where 85% of the population were destitute peasants with a life expectancy of 27 years in 1929, and by 1970 turned into the second world power, rose life expectancy to close to 70, and did all this without exploiting the global south.
Totally terrible economy, much worse than anything before or after, right?
Wrong, wrong and more wrong. I’ve answered to that in a separate comment because of how wrong that is, feel free to read it and give me a well-informed opinión afterwards on my comment. “Le evil Soviets invaded poor wittle Poland” is pure historic revisionism that you’re regurgitating from some other Lemmy comment you’ve seen.
As for the rest of your comment I won’t bother because it’s just more “hooman greed” nonsense.
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As for Molotov-Ribbentrop and the invasion of “Poland”: I’m gonna please ask you to actually read my comment and to be open to the historical evidence I bring (using Wikipedia as a source, hopefully not suspect of being tankie-biased), because I believe there is a great mistake in the way contemporary western nations interpret history of WW2 and the interwar period. Thank you for actually making the effort, I know it’s a long comment, but please engage with the points I’m making:
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.
As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won’t find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.
The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:
“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:
The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?
Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.
All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:
“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this
First level headed comment i think ive ever read on lemmy. People need to get out of black and white thinking. It has to be a blend.
We need libraries and fire stations. We also need some competition and industry so we can live comfortably and buy shit; thats just how it is.
We dont need billionaires.
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Civilisation would be impossible to implement if we didn’t criminalise destructive behaviour like murder.
Make greed (hording wealth) illegal.
You claim communism is impossible to implement yet you have no issue in attempting to implement a democracy that capitalism won’t be able to pervert, despite one never having existed before and it being impossible for one to exist.
It sounds less like genuine rationality and more like rationalising a status quo bias. Even worse when people are claiming capitalism to be the natural order of life, despite existing for less than 0.0000001% of it and humans being egalitarian for far longer than they were capitalist.
Peak homoeconomus experiencing “capitalist realism.” They even colonised your dreams.
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No, you’re just rationalising sociopathy with thoroughly disproved social-Darwinism. Contrary to what people think, it was our sharing of resources that set us appart from our competitors, not competition within our species. That’s basic human evolutionary history.
People had to be beaten, whipped, staved, dispossessed of their land and forced leave their egalitarian lives to endure capitalism, making it the opposite of human nature. You just don’t know the history of capitalism.
Again, can you name one single country that hasn’t had its democracy utterly perverted by capitalism? We both know you can’t and that’s why you refuse to answer. Can you even name one check that hasn’t been perverted? As you can’t, why do you think any could magically work now?
Believing it to be human instinct is just telling on yourself for you lack of empathy, believing everyone else has as little as you do.
We were egalitarian for 10s of thousands of years. That’s real human nature whether you like it or not. Just because we happen to be ruled over by the most greedy and sociopathic people in society, it doesn’t make it our nature.
You can’t name a time capitalism hasn’t perverted democracy and failed the 99% but think failing that way only applies to communism. Like I said, peak homo economicus experiencing capitalist realism. You fell for the first lie you were told and refuse to hold it to account.
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Wait, if we can have capitalism with regulations why can’t we just have communism with regulations instead?
The way I see it, between left and far left the direction is roughly the same, that’s the means and end point that differ (i.e. revolution or not and how far we go into sharing resources). This is an important difference and they should thus not be mixed.
Also needs to be a clear distinction between democratic left and authoritarian left.
In a naive attempt to “meet everyone’s basic needs” sure, but in practice it would almost certainly end up enriching and entrenching a new ruling class, or collapsing under external pressure even if there are some early wins.
Many things sound simple from the outset. But tearing down and rebuilding an entire society isn’t something you do without significant (and often lethal) force and with plenty of intended and unintended casualties along the way (and there’s still a very good chance we’d screw it up).
If it’s not “the good guys” wielding overwhelming force, it’ll be “the bad guys” stepping in. Every political system ultimately rests on the realistic threat/application of force; the only question is who controls it and how accountable they are.
I’m not inclined to trust anyone waving guns in my face, nor encourage situations that make that more likely. So, things would have to get a lot worse for me (and I’d venture most people) to want violent overthrow of my current (far from perfect) political and social system. That said … at some point, for many people in many countries, it may be too late. Apathy isn’t appropriate either.
You guys are talking about basic capitalism, right? You all understand that, don’t you?
I may have got carried away in my response to a one line quip. 🤣
Look, nobody here knows what the fuck we’re doing anyway.
You always have this problem if you have people with concentrated power aka a “ruling class”
Only way to prevent this is transparency and tools that the people of country can control the ruling class
Very important for such a setup is, that politics, media, law enforcement and courts are separated and controlling each other
And that private companies are not allowed to fuck with the system
I couldn’t agree more. Although I’ll add that education and basic health/social support is also needed for long term stability, or large swathes of the population will be manipulated by fear and dis/misinformation, and will likely end up voting against their own interests. Social cohesion is important, which is why it is used as a weapon by nation states and other political actors.
Absolutely agree 🙏🏻
Damn, seems like real-world data contradicts your preconceived notions. Now, as a responsible adult, you’ll surely retract and reflect on why you’ve been misled to believe that communism perpetuates inequality, right?
Are you trying to say that communism leads to a failed authoritarian state resembling the US in terms of income inequality? Do you have the same stats for wealth inequality too?
I don’t but they’re irrelevant. The only possible way to get money in the USSR was through labor and income, since there was no capitalist accumulation or return rates on investment by design. The highest paid individuals in the USSR were actually highly trained professionals such as university professors, members of research institutions and high profile artists and media personalities.
No, that’s what the end of communism leads to, to a return to capitalism. That was only possible because communism began in a 400-million pool of people in backwards and unindustrialized Eastern Europe, the cold war was uneven from the start.
I’d love to see a utopia, but I don’t see communism making any sustainable inroads anywhere in the world… that is, unless things get much much worse, to the point that your average man is willing to pick up a pitchfork (or other weapon of choice) and participate in overthrowing ruling class by force… but nowadays the masses are so divided and confused that they’ll probably start killing each other for scraps of food rather than the billionaires for a life of dignity. Even then, it’s just temporary until capitalism and/or authoritarianism takes hold again.
Who talked about utopia? The USSR was far from a utopia, it was a state with flaws and lots of mistakes were made in the process. It is still demonstrably significantly more fair, egalitarian and less exploitative than anything we have in the west, which relies in the exploitation of the global south to sustain itself.
The whole “Utopian socialism” thing is a 200 years old argument that was dismantled back then, by the way. Engels himself has an essay called “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, explaining how early branches of socialism followed utopian goals and methods, but Marxism is scientific socialism based off historical materialism and empiricism. If you look at my comments above, I’ve talked about historical evidence with hard data, not about good wishes for the future.
That is if you ignore the main industrial powerhouse of the world (China), the island of Cuba, or the nations of Vietnam and Laos.
As if, for example, the west started to support a genocide that murders over half a million people (most of them children), or if militarized police started kidnapping and disappearing random citizens without due process in the USA, or if fascist governments linked to Nazism and Fascism started to win elections in Italy or Germany?
To quote Ursula K. Le Guin: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings”
The USSR is dead and cold, replaced by an authoritarian warmongering machine. It had its moment in the spotlight, but it failed, and it failed its russian and former citizens.
China promotes many good principles (in many ways so did the USA, cough cough), but it is heading in the wrong direction under Xi. It’s Communism with a human exploitative flavour, with the occasional public fig leaf of justice. That said, it could offer an umbrella of security for some more interesting experiments in the years to come. Watch this space, I guess.
Circling back to my original point, I maintain that communism isn’t going to gain popular support so long as the only viable way to achieve it is through violence and oppression, and so long as it buckles so easily under the pressure of outside forces.
I will continue voting and protesting for sensible left-leaning policies that promote fairness and well being for all, while steering clear of the extremists and simpletons who promote hate or explicitly or tacitly support genocides, wars of aggression, etc. The scales may tip enough one day to justify radical action, but not today - the risks of it going terribly wrong are too high.
Except removing those rights is not required to meet everyone’s basic needs
Talking like a slavery apologist from 200BCE
How? I’m the one preserving peoples rights here. No one in my country is enslaved. Everyone has basic rights AND we have the freedom of ownership and democracy. Everything convincing point socialists have can be achieved in a capitalist system.
Wrong. Your country has homeless people without a right to housing and your country has unemployed people without the right to work. As for healthcare and education, your country is dismantling those systems in favour of private ones and worsening coverage, and the same can be said about pensions. This is almost universally true for capitalism except for a few countries in Latin America which manage to maintain rights for now (until right wing gets reelected). Now, tell me, what country are you from?
Wrong. The homeless people in my country choose to be homeless as they are offered free housing and community support workers. My country is currently expanding their public healthcare and increasing the salaries of nurses as well as expanding publicly funded gp vists. This is all done within a capitalist system with no large wealth funds and we are not particularly rich as a nation.
You shouldn’t speak so confidently when you seem to have no idea of the world outside America.
“…and to achive that, you will do the job we pick for you, you will work the hour we decided, you will be paid not in money but in basic needs, and any excess you have will be confiscated.”
Let’s not pretend we didn’t have the example for far left.
Literally making this up. By the 1970s in the USSR, 1 in 10 positions in the economy were open, and people were completely free to change their jobs and move to others without having the threat of unemployment. The only restriction I’ve seen to that, is that university graduates, as a payment back to society (university, as of all education in the USSR, was free and actually included accommodation and upkeep), had to work for a few years on a state-mandated position in their field of study. I’m a Spaniard physicist and 9 in 10 of my friends are unhappy fucks who are either unemployed or hating their lives in consulting.
Tell me one socialist state that hasn’t paid their workers in money. I can tell you that my girlfriend’s mom, in a capitalist country, once got paid in juice boxes because the company didn’t have money for her salary.
Again literally untrue. You’re mistaking capital (private property used to produce goods and services in order to extract surplus value from workers) with personal property (the things you use on your own for your own shit, like your house or your toothbrush).
Have you ever actually talked with a Marxist, or are you just going off what you heard on FOX news?
I must admit i don’t talk with Marxists nor do i know what is FOX news, and i do exaggerated my point, but lets not pretend Mao Zedong and North Korea didn’t exists, whatever you mentioned above is no way closer to far left. Socialism is practiced everywhere, but that doesn’t make them far left.
Literally the excess i’m talking about.
You don’t know what Fox News is?
Should i?
The excess in your opinion is forbidding rich people from exploiting the poor. There were plenty of people making the same point against abolition of slavery in 200BCE that you’re making right now.
Under Mao Zedong, China’s life expectancy went from 23 years of age to almost 60, more than doubling. Apply this to 1 billion Chinese, and you get that communism in China saved hundreds of millions of people. China in the early 1900s was a western colony much like India, and it had similar levels of industrialization and economical progress. Comparing the development of India and China since communism, the only possible conclusion is that communism uplifted a billion people from destitute poverty, gave them healthcare, education, pensions, jobs and housing. Mistakes were made during Mao? For sure they were. The balance is still overwhelmingly positive by any metric you want to apply.
As for North Korea, maybe if the USA hadn’t bombed the country using more explosives than in the entire Pacific theater of WW2, and destroyed literally 85% of the buildings in the entire country, North-Koreans wouldn’t have had such an extreme policy of international isolation and self-defense.
The mistake is millions of death while Mao walks away without any repercussions.
And maybe if nk didn’t self isolate for so long they would’ve recover. Just look at singapore. Did you know North Korea have an embassy in Malaysia? Did you know what happen next? They decided to assassinate Kim Jong Nam in Malaysia, then blame Malaysia for it, and cut all ties. NK might have been a victim of US, but their current situation is 100% their own doing.
Well that conclude my reason of not speaking with Marxist, you guys are nut lol.
Let’s look at how many “millions of deaths by Mao” (1949-1979):
India’s life expectancy in 1950: 34 years of age
India’s life expectancy in 1979: 49 years of age
China’s life expectancy in 1950: 40 years of age
China’s life expectancy in 2010: 62 years of age
Whoops, turns out that China gained 22 years of life expectancy where India gained 15, that’s 50% more and applied to the entire population of a country with a billion people, results in hundreds of millions of lives saved! Turns out you were wrong again because your arguments don’t come from real data but from anticommunist discourse vibes.
typical
We’re talking about the ultra wealthy sharing the stockpiles of resources they have stolen and enslaved to gather, and the first spin is that they “aren’t allowed to have private things” and “we aren’t allowed to accumulate wealth”
eat shit
Yeah, this thread is full of people who have lived their lives under absolute capitalist doctrine and cannot see an alternative and have never considered the underlying philosophy and morality of that system and can’t even imagine another, so they backfill the blanks and rationalize what they have so they don’t have to deal with actually thinking about it deeper because that would require effort and discomfort.
Politicalmemes? Yep, another right wing breeding ground, it always is.
Its horrible! Where can I go on lemmy thats free of this? Where can I go across the internet?