Even from people that never lived in a communist state
edit: im 17 and i hate communism
Do you even know what communism actually is? I mean do you know where it came from, and why?
If you’re 17 and in America, there isn’t a lot of hope that you have been told about this in a non-biased manner. Young people especially are susceptible to the ideology that they can make it in life through hard work and equal opportunities. You might even already have felt some success in this regard, was able to achieve a goal because you worked for it. And it all makes sense to you.
And you think, In some way or another, that communist are perverting this, maybe by giving away shit for nothing or worse want to take shit from you.
But that’s not true.
Socialism wants you to fully get your complete value of your labour for you, instead of most of it going to a boss who didn’t work. And communist want to make sure that the system doesn’t allow for bosses to make decisions about the conditions workers live in.
I think it’s because my rent is a third of my income and im not allowed to function without not only feeding the parasites but making them morbidly obese.
so first you choose these parasites and then you hate them? How unfortunate…
Sadly I was born in the world in which they had a massive head start and already own a lot of apartments making it more difficult for me to own one. Ever played monopoly? Thats what it’s actually about.
It’s not really a choice. If you don’t want to be on the streets then you have two options: buy or rent. (There is a third: squatting, but that has its own downsides.) Presumably riodoro1 can’t buy (or has chosen not to for some other reason) and doesn’t want to be homeless or a squatter.
First you choose to be a wage slave and then you hate your bosses?
Rent is only a third of your income? You lucky bastard.
Half for me :(
Because fascists are mostly content with gobbling Fox News cock.
Why are we getting homophobic?
Why’d you assume it was gay?
Oh, there’s plenty of fem fascists out there too.
Gobbling cock is great. Fox News cock, though? Have some standards.
U/TheUncannyObserver there is a lesson in there…
I don’t observe any homophobia in that comment. Their statement is that fascists submit to anything Fox News says, and makes no remarks about oral sex beyond the graphic metaphor. Also fascist is a genderless term so there is no way to know if the fascist is gobbling on same or opposite gender cock.
That’s just a distraction. The real question is why are there so many articles about heat pumps?
Why aren’t there more?
If you’ve never lived in a communist state you’re much more likely to favour communism. People who have (lived in communism) don’t.
'Mercans believe that social healthcare is communism - until they get seriously ill whereupon they opt for moving to a ‘communist’ country: UK or Canada or go for the US healthcare provider called gofundme.
Lemmy, the social network, started off as a leftist hangout spot.
From the perspective of “Open Source developers who are anti-Reddit pro-Fediverse”, it makes a lot of sense for Leftist/Communist and anti-corporation leaning people to hang out.
After all, the more extreme the viewpoint, the more driven to action (ie: write tens-of-thousands of lines of code and release for free) people get. In some regards, its the nature of Open Source + volunteer effort to attract a more extreme ideology. IE: Free Software is driven by ideology, not by money. So you get ideological people, especially when the software is small and niche.
The July 2023 Reddit Blackout was a big challenge for Lemmy’s old community and the new community, as the new community basically “invaded” a large scale leftist hangout spot. But hopefully we all learn to work together and the nature of our neighbors moving forward.
I think anyone here (likely everyone?) is at least on the anti-corporate anti-Reddit side of the discussion. Which is enough of an alliance to keep us together, for now.
It does mean that we’ll have to keep up with the far-left old-timers on this network who wish to push their viewpoints. But they are the legacy and the start of Lemmy in some respects, even as the hypergrowth (starting in July 2023) has moderated the community pretty severely.
I think anyone here (likely everyone?) is at least on the anti-corporate anti-Reddit side of the discussion.
I don’t particularly have any problem with Reddit beyond the fact that (a) I don’t like their “new” Web UI and (b) the fact that one of the moves that they made to monetize their service was to ban third-party clients, which is a tradeoff that I’m not willing to make.
I mean, I was expecting that at some point, Reddit was going to have to have to shift from growth to monetization. I just didn’t agree with the particular tradeoff that they chose to make.
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I don’t really know what ads they showed, as I used an ad-blocker. I’d believe that it’s probably annoying, but the same is true of most websites that show ads. Reddit Gold provided a commercial ad-free option, so it wasn’t a requirement even without blocked ads. And unlike most companies, it was possible to purchase Reddit Gold without linking to one’s financial data, since they provided purchase options bounced through cryptocurrency and such. As web services go, I suppose it was probably a fair bit better than the average.
I’d have probably been willing to buy commercial Reddit service – I mean, I’ve subscribed to Usenet service, have commercial email hosting service, have commercial VPS service. I don’t have a problem with commercial service, as long as it’s something solid. The value-for-money was probably pretty good, given how much I used it. I just don’t want to be obliged to run their binary code on my systems and have data extracted from my system and be data-mined other than what they get from my web browser or open-source client.
They’re starting to roll ads into AI-generated comments, and are selling off user data. It really does suck.
In the beginning, I was okay with the ads on Reddit. But then, Reddit just kept making stupid decision after stupid decision on the official app’s UI, so I switched to a third party app, that happens to also have no Reddit ads. When Reddit killed the apps and continued making the official experience worse, I bailed Reddit and came here because I’m not supporting a greedy platform.
What are you on about? “its the nature of Open Source + volunteer effort to attract a more extreme ideology”? Aside from your first sentence, this is just baseless word salad.
I mean just that.
Open source developers are not paid in money. One of the other major motivators is ideology, so that becomes a major motivator in practice.
All I can say is that you clearly have no familiarity with open source development or the active contributors within it.
I don’t see the problem with people having communist views…capitalism isn’t great.
Yeah, the problem is that you have instances like Hexbear and Lemmy.ml that tread more into tankie territory, where if you argue anything less than the complete annihilation of the West and hail China, you’re likely to get harassed. I think rational people can agree that there’s a pretty gap between “The current system is corrupt” and "anyone who thinks differently than me should die,’ but I’ve seen plenty of irrational leftists.
Just to point out, Lemmy.ml isn’t really like that, with a few exceptions. Before the big influx of Reddit refugees, it used to be the default Lemmy instance, and so has quite a few non-political communities.
It’s Lemmygrad.ml that’s the super tanky echo chamber.
I mean, I’m currently getting a ton of downvotes in .ml for suggesting the radical idea of voting for local leftist politicians over destabilizing all of Western civilization.
I’m even outwardly for the destabilization of all civilization, but apparently “actually trying to enact meaningful change” isn’t what they’re interested in, unless it involves someone else dying in their revolution.
You can’t just say “in .ml”, is my point. Which specific community?
If you’re talking about like say, worldnews@lemmy.ml, then I totally understand, but my point is that if we are talking about instances as a whole, then Lemmy.ml is quite mild in its “tankiness”.
I don’t agree with that crowd at all politically, but I don’t agree with everyone on all Web forums out there, all subreddits, all Usenet groups, or such either. We can share an Internet without it being a problem, I think. Just means that I tend to avoid a couple of instances and communities.
l’d be more worried about influence attempts, astroturfing, than people who openly take a position. Having a hexbear or lemmygrad home instance is being pretty open about one’s positions.
Came here to make this point.
The CCP’s version of “communism” is almost a textbook example to me of how an interesting system that can work beautifully on the local level can be completely betrayed and turned in to something much more like an oligarchy.I don’t understand how someone of reasonable knowledge and judgement could possibly be a tankie in 2024.
Eh, if by tankie you only mean literal communist tankies, that’s just a single aspect of human nature.
There’s absolutists, extremists, and (frankly) sociopaths in every political/ideological grouping. The more you get towards an extreme, the more you run into militant examples of the group. Tankies are just the communist bloc of the crazies.
But, there’s folks like me that are all for revolution, but draw the line at unlimited killing to achieve it, or the eradication of groups in the name of the cause. I’m an extremist by most peoples’ standards, but they’ve never been exposed to the real crazies of any extremist bloc.
You run into the bonkers adherents of communism, anarchism, nationalism, or religious extremists, and they’re essentially the same mentality because it’s a human failing that some of us are willing to kill indiscriminately for a belief. We’re just lucky that that degree of extremism is split up, keeping them from being a serious, constant threat rather than the intermittent threat that they are.
Seriously, if you ever spend time around people that are working towards a goal like a change towards socialist thought, you’ll run into the batshit ones on the edges. You hang around the wrong places, you’ll run into right wing militants as well. They, none of them, are avoid knowledge, judgement, or reason. They’re zealots, and they’d be the same no matter what ism infected them because it’s about the fire, the anger, not the actual thing they’re using as their obsession.
Fuck, I’ve met a couple of people involved in pacifist movements seriously express the idea that “we” should just rise up and kill until all the warmongers are gone. People, humans, are always going to have zealots like that, no matter what.
Because they’re paid shills using communism as a facade to spread Kremlin and CCP propaganda.
Even if you adopt hardline Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as an ideology, the modern state of China has applied so much pro-capitalist revisionism to it that it’s a shell of its former self. Today, Maoist parties are suppressed in China.
I’m not a Maoist by a long shot, but I can at least appreciate the fact that the ones shouting “revisionism!” the most are the ones who have most bastardized their own texts.
it’s a shell of its former self.
And from my reading, its former self was little more than a dictatorship with ‘communist trappings,’ anyway. Mao was a monster, and nobody to be emulated from what I’ve learned.
He killed more people than almost anyone else in history. Maybe the most.
Those places are basically just The_Donald for people who think they’re more clever than to fall for the typical bullshit that was found in The_Donald.
They’re not.
My problem with communist views is they’re unproven and have only lead to authoritarian governments when put into play.
Capitalism has regularly gone off the rails … but not to the degree communism has. Capitalism has been defending democracy for the last few centuries, not communism.
These are the nations that identify as communist:
- China (PRC)
- Cuba
- Laos
- North Korea (DPRK)
- Vietnam
These countries were previously communist and (of that has that) have pretty much only improved since transitioning to democracy with capitalist economic systems:
- Afghanistan
- Albania
- Angola
- Benin
- Bulgaria
- Congo
- Czechoslovakia
- Ethiopia
- Germany (GDR)
- Grenada
- Hungary
- Kampuchea
- Mongolia
- Mozambique
- Poland
- Romania
- Somalia
- Soviet Union
- Tuva
- Yemen (PDRY)
- Yugoslavia
That’s not to say that capitalism doesn’t have its problems, people here aren’t angry with it over nothing. However, if you really look at the problems it’s had, they all come down to voter manipulation and/or apathy “things are going good, why do I need to worry about politics?”.
We didn’t just wake up with weakened labor unions, weakened voter rights, weakened infrastructure, etc; we got their because of generations of apathy and frankly electing the wrong people. People that cut taxes, asked “are you better off today than you were four years ago?” (short term gain), allowed our unions to be broken up, allowed jobs to be exported over seas to communist China (which is now one of the greatest international threats), bought the cheapest products (from mom and dad at the store to the executives running major corporations) without asking why they’re cheap, etc.
The “common people” cast the votes that ultimately lead to corporations being people. The “middle class” cost votes that ultimately lead to the middle class shrinking.
I think it’s naive that communism somehow automatically makes those problems go away/means we’ll never end up with similar problems. Especially when communist countries are consistently doing worse/falling into authoritarian rule.
We need to expand our social programs, reign in our billionaires, and reign in our corporations and we’d be a lot better off. Capitalism works so long as you don’t let anyone or anything get “too big to fail.” Capitalism doesn’t have to be capitalism without limits. The reigns of power will always be challenged no matter what system we find ourselves under, only an educated vigilant population can stop that.
Capitalism “going off the rails” completely understates it. The history of the last 500 years is soaked in the blood of the capitalism. Voter apathy has nothing to do with it. Enthusiastic voters gave us genocide of indigenous peoples of North America, the nuclear bombing of Japan, and currently a 75 year genocide of Palestinians. Not to mention things that voters do not have even the semblance of a choice, such as CIA activities in the 20th century which led to bloody coups in Indonesia, Chile, and Iran, just to name 3.
You need to incorporate class analysis or else nothing makes sense. Why do American voters get shitty choices that reduce their power to the advantage of the wealthy oligarch class? Why are there oligarchs if capitalism doesn’t tend to monopoly? Does voting actually do anything? Why does the electoral college still exist? Why did Americans support the Iraq War? What role did the media serve?
I think it’s naive that communism somehow automatically makes those problems go away/means we’ll never end up with similar problems. Especially when communist countries are consistently doing worse/falling into authoritarian rule.
Communism doesn’t automatically make anything go away. The point is that the ruling class of capitalists are an obstacle to making things go away. I’m not sure what is your criteria for authoritarian rule. Capitalist countries are authoritarian too, it’s basically a meaningless signifier coming out of cold war propaganda that said communism = dictatorship and capitalism = muh freedom. The democratic processes in China and Cuba of example are lightyears ahead of what you can find in the US or European parliamentary so-called democracies.
The history of the last 500 years is soaked in the blood of the capitalism.
That’s a pretty hot take to blame all the conflict that’s happened in the last 500 years on capitalism. I think it’s likely a significant oversimplification at best. For instance, you can argue many things caused (just) WW2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II
Voter apathy has nothing to do with it. Enthusiastic voters gave us genocide of indigenous peoples of North America, the nuclear bombing of Japan, and currently a 75 year genocide of Palestinians.
That’s provably wrong. The voter turn out as a percentage of population is abysmal historically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections#/media/File:USA_Presidential_Elections_Turnout_by_Share_of_Population.png
I also find some of your examples, e.g., the Native Americans similarly a red herring. The plight of the Native American peoples is far more complicated than “blame capitalism.”
Not to mention things that voters do not have even the semblance of a choice, such as CIA activities in the 20th century which led to bloody coups in Indonesia, Chile, and Iran, just to name 3.
Voters control who is elected. Those that are elected control whether or not the CIA exists. The CIA would disappear tomorrow if only folks that believed the CIA shouldn’t exist were in congress.
You need to incorporate class analysis or else nothing makes sense.
No you don’t, it makes plenty of sense without “class analysis.”
Why do American voters get shitty choices that reduce their power to the advantage of the wealthy oligarch class?
Because of the people who vote a fraction of them bother with primaries and because it’s hard to find good people to run for office that want to do the job (for a myriad of reasons)?
Why are there oligarchs if capitalism doesn’t tend to monopoly?
It’s not an objective thing that “there are oligarchs.”
Does voting actually do anything?
Yes, voting matters. See policies under Trump vs policies under Biden. See Net Neutrality. See Climate Change Policy. See EPA Policy.
It’s frankly anti-intellectual to claim that “voting doesn’t do anything” or even imply as much.
Why does the electoral college still exist?
Because people vote for representatives that don’t want to get rid of it?
Why did Americans support the Iraq War?
Because people vote for representatives that supported it? Because the general population was not adequately educated and engaged in politics to understand the facts of the situation and was mislead?
What role did the media serve?
What role didn’t the media serve? What role should it have served?
You’re asking leading questions to argue your point similar to a flat-earth or giant-ism conspiracy theorist. Like, these questions do have answers and those answers go far beyond people’s economic classes and dive into a number of cultural, period, regional, and global factors. There isn’t one answer, and the one answer certainly isn’t “because the rich people made us do it.”
I’m not sure what is your criteria for authoritarian rule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism
Literally, the criteria for authoritarian rule.
Capitalist countries are authoritarian too
No, they are not. Some may be, but the vast majority of western capitalistic societies are nowhere near authoritarian rule. The US is creeping towards it and (as elections do matter) may creep closer this year; time will tell.
it’s basically a meaningless signifier coming out of cold war propaganda that said communism = dictatorship and capitalism = muh freedom
That is provably false. Look at the governance models of the countries above. They were not “communism = dictatorship” they were “communism and authoritarianism.” For some reason people can’t explain away, those two things go hand and hand.
My personal take is that when you take away ownership, ownership doesn’t disappear, it just means the state is the owner. So you go from “the rich people and the government officials own the means of production” to “the government officials (that are the rich people) own the means of production” (which is exactly what happened in China).
The democratic processes in China and Cuba of example are lightyears ahead of what you can find in the US or European parliamentary so-called democracies.
That’s straight up bull shit. A mono-party rule is not under any circumstance democratic.
Can you explain one thing about how the Chinese or Cuban elections work without looking it up?
Would it change any of your opinion if I did?
But yes, I can (for China), I can explain the important part … which is that the CCP required to rubber stamp any nomination to run for office. There is no democracy when your rule can not be meaningfully challenged.
This is furthered by the infringement of rights that is the great firewall.
EDIT: For anyone who actually is reading this and wants a source instead of “he (I) said, the other person said” here’s some information fairly well compiled: https://decodingchina.eu/democracy/
I mean, I don’t have much problem with people disagreeing with me. But I’m pretty openly pro-capitalist, though I’m not a dumbass libertarian.
I recognize the need for the “capitalist edge cases” (externalities, monopolies, etc. etc.) that must be regulated and fixed for the system to work. I also recognize that we’ve failed to regulate externalities (ex: CO2 emissions), and failed to regulate monopolies / anticompetitive behavior (see Google).
So I’m a “capitalism works, but only if we work to make it work” kind of person. I think at the moment, Reddit and many other social networks are falling into the well known and well studied failures of raw capitalism, but somehow today’s society has forgotten all the 1910s era solutions that we did (ex: Jungle, etc. etc.) where we regulated the hell out of the shitty behavior and fixed the most blatant problems, for the better of America.
We just gotta do the same thing today.
Overall, I accept that the commies / tankies were here first, and the history of Lemmy makes it clear why that happened.
So I’m a “capitalism works, but only if we work to make it work” kind of person. I think at the moment, Reddit and many other social networks are falling into the well known and well studied failures of raw capitalism, but somehow today’s society has forgotten all the 1910s era solutions that we did (ex: Jungle, etc. etc.) where we regulated the hell out of the shitty behavior and fixed the most blatant problems, for the better of America.
Right there with you.
We just gotta do the same thing today.
We also HAVE to teach the kids how to protect it better than people did 100 years ago. Most of our problems today stem from people voting to remove “useless red tape” (that was put there for damn good reasons).
The Marxist answer to why the red tape is removed is not because people directly vote for it, but that the State serves the bourgeoisie.
A leftist world view is the correct world view in my book. What I can’t stand are people who defend Russia and China.
In my experience in lemmy these same people have a very big problem with you not sharing their communist views
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Dunno about communist unless you count the tankies which I don’t see on the main instances.
Lots of socialist stuff though.
Socialism — the dictatorship of the working-class — is the transitional mode of production between capitalism — the dictatorship of the capitalist class — and the stateless, classless mode of production that is communism. You can’t really separate the two.
Thats the communist definition of socialism. Socialism originally just referred to the leftist movement as a whole (including anarchists and dem-socs, which i guess he refers to). And is also used to refer to the concept of workers owning the means of production
The first line in Wikipedia “Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems[1] characterised by social ownership of the means of production”.
To be clear, this definition goes back to 1832, where the original inventor of the word used to define a society “based on the shared ownership of resources”. So it is not just “the communist definition” it really is the definition, it did not “originally” refer to anything else.
But that definition from Wikipedia doesn’t contain the contested part of the definition, that it is a “transitional system”
why not? if you’d like a more capitalist experience you can always go to reddit. don’t forget to download their shitty app that no longer has competitors.
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As Marx predicted a hundred years ago
They don’t want reddit but want its liberal echo chamber lmao
Lol you just provided the simplest counter to the most common capitalist argument.
“You don’t understand capitalism, bro. The problem isn’t capitalism, it’s the regulation on capitalism. Under a true capitalist system, there can’t be monopolies because capitalism rewards competition.”
Ok so what happened to all the reddit apps
Edit: I really like the reddit app example because it’s simple: no regulation or anti-capitalist force made them to that, it was literally just a capitalist decision.
But regulatory capture is an important part of capitalism, and no matter how many ancap bullshit artists say otherwise, government is absolutely part of the capitalist plan. Giving the workers a “say” (or the illusion of one) keeps them a bit quieter, but more importantly, having a government outsources a lot of crap they would otherwise have to pay for, like infrastructure, which would be a huge strain on profits.
In fact, the ancap bullshit idea that unregulated markets would improve things is an artificial limitation on capitalist power. Total lack of regulation is a restriction on capitalism.
My guess is that it’s because the average age of lemmy is somewhere around 15-17. It’s the only thing that makes sense. People are into that shit in their mid-late teens. Then they grow out of it.
It happens in every generation.
I didnt even know the actual definition of communism till my mid-30s in 2008.
Almost 50 here, and I’m pretty thoroughly socialist… and my dad is leaning farther left the older he gets too.
When I was 15 me and my friends made fun of communists and joked they were probably posting from their parent’s computers. Now that I’m middle aged I’m a socialist, although wouldn’t quite say communist. I haven’t read Marx, but I do believe the point of a government is to help people, and our governments aren’t doing enough in that regard. I believe privately held corporations are designed to make their owners money, and if that interferes with the common good then they should be stopped.
The problem is that people think that shit would work here. It won’t. It’s barely worked elsewhere. And if you don’t believe this, look up how happy the people of Bulgaria are.
Capitalism sucks. But it’s at least predictable and somewhat malleable. Socialism/communism is at best a unproven theoretical ideology.
There are definitely failed communist states. Everyone always talks about bad examples and not successes like say, Nordic countries. And I realize I’m not saying something new here, but if we can agree those countries are doing well, but argue they’re not socialist, then why don’t we go ahead and implement the programs they have?
I don’t particularly care what the label is, I care about the outcome. I want people to get treated for illness without going bankrupt. I want everyone to have access to education. Every person should have somewhere to sleep. Every person should have enough to eat.
If this was the middle ages we could argue that it’s the law of the jungle, and the strong survive while the weak fall to the side. Today we have abundance to the point that we absolutely have enough for everyone. It’s the system that distributes goods and assigns tasks which isn’t up to the job.
Call it what you want, but I believe we should improve our system to address those problems, and I believe it’s possible to address them.
Right, but Nordic countries aren’t exactly communist or socialist. There’s this if you’d like to understand it better.
I’m fairly familiar with the Nordic countries and I think it’s important to have a market. Still, they’re known for “socialist” policies like universal healthcare, strong welfare benefits and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. They also manage to have strong democracies (including proportional representation) without turning into dictatorships like people accuse communist/socialist countries of doing.
What I was getting at is would you agree the countries are doing well? If so, who cares about the label, why don’t we do some of that stuff?
Those aren’t Socialism though, lol
You don’t think universal healthcare is socialist? Free higher education?
Again, I don’t care as much about the label, but when these things are suggested in America it’s socialist. When you point out anything good about the Nordics or just Europe generally the answer is they’re not socialist, and it’s not because of socialism. But we can’t do those things in America because it’s socialist.
What you just described is what America already has.
That’s not true. America doesn’t have universal healthcare, or free higher education. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund owns 1.5% of the world’s listed countries, for the benefit of Norwegians.
Since when are the Nordic countries communist?
Well as I said I’d call myself a socialist more than communist, and for many that’s splitting hairs, but I think it’s reasonable to call them socialist. But my whole point was if we skip the labeling, they have elements in their governments that I’d like to see emulated. It’s possible to have a democratically controlled nation that works more for the benefit of its people.
This remains a myth unsubstantiated by any data or evidence.
I hope you replied this same thing to every comment posted answering OP’s question. Because that’s all anyone has to offer.
Sorry, I should’ve been clearer, the myth you spouted isn’t just baseless, it’s actually been disproved. Different generations change their political leaning in different ways as they age.
Which is exactly what I said, genius.
American says communism and means socialism
the hardest test for any American
define communism
define propaganda
use both in a sentence that applies to the agreed definitions
How would you define communism? I hear so many different definitions and find it hard to differentiate which one is accurate.
I was kidding around, and part of the joke is how pointless the definition is:
communism: that the assets held by a body are indivisible across the individuals of that body when the assets in question are required to engage in production.
Thereby any definition of “body”, “asset” and “production” can be used to define specific types and scopes of a communist ideology.
propaganda: a piece or collection of communications that has the primary purpose to persuade.
communist propaganda: a communication to persuade the reader to share the means of production across a collective.
The original definition is a community where private property is not a thing. Private property is when an individual can control the land, tools, and knowledge people need to survive. Private property is factories, not your toothbrush.
Most pro USSR, PRC, or Cuba leftists believe those countries governments controlling all or the vast majority of private property constitutes communism. Some think these countries are socialist and working their way to communism.
Many anti-communist people don’t really understand how these countries work specifically. All their ideas of what communism is are based on how they view the above communist countries.
Finally right wingers will describe California as communist because they have social programs and higher taxes than some states. Basically if the government is intervening in the market by supplying a service or good directly to a citizen that’s communism.
From what I’ve observed most people lie somewhere on this spectrum of definition.
No, there are outright communists on Lemmy. This is an accurate take.
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I’m saying it because places like Lemmygrad and Hexbear are outright Communist and they will take it as an insult if you call them socialist.
I’m not talking about the shades of different economic preferences, I’m talking about the extreme cases. In the extreme cases, there are multiple outright Communist communities on Lemmy.
they will take it as an insult if you call them socialist
What a dumb thing to say. Browse those instances and talk to communists/socialists there before you make weird claims about them. Or at least learn about socialism in general first.
they will take it as an insult if you call them socialist.
Do you have any
evidenceto support this testimony?I don’t get why you’re being downvoted. There’s a great comment by Cowbee (I think) that explains why this is a thing.
There are people who are explicitly self-proclaimed Communists on Lemmy.
This isn’t some “Healthcare is communism!!!1” thing.
It’s probably the idea that Communists take offense to being called Socialist. The opposite is true, as Communism is a maximally Socialist position.
If you are going by theory, sure. But if the word socialism gets used in conversation today, it will probably get interpreted as something like the Nordic model.
That’s what happens when the communists are purged and billions of propaganda dollars are spent over generations to erase their memory: you end up with Newspeak, where people don’t know their asses from their elbows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
I think it is because some people think that socialism is a kind of communism, when that take wouldn’t be accepted by a lot of communists here.
Communism is Socialist, there aren’t any Communists that would take offense to being called Socialist. There are Socialists that take offense to being called Communist, because for them, Socialism is the goal itself.
There are Socialists that take offense to being called Communist, because for them, Socialism is the goal itself
Very rare. Those who do dislike being called communists probably aren’t very serious about socialism at all, and probably only want the “social capitalism” of Scandanavian countries.
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It gets touted as a transition state between Capitalism and Communism, by Communists who want to get away from Capitalism, and Capitalists who fear anything that isn’t Capitalist.
But it is a genuine economic philosophy on its own that blends the best parts of Communism and Capitalism in one. At least to my opinion.
Communists believe that socialism is a transitional state from capitalism to communism, but 1) communists aren’t the only socialists and 2) a lot of Americans think milquetoast social safety net capitalist reformers like Bernie Sanders are socialists despite them never calling for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.
Are you American?
American says communism and means conservative democrat or Trump Republican, depending on who is saying it.
AES barely even registers, except for the occasional “Why don’t you move to Vuvuzela!”
Why isn’t anyone defending AEC countries?
Nobody actually wants to be Estonia anymore
I’ve always seen communism as a subclass of socialism, where socialism is the goal of classless, stateless society in which the public owns the means of production and distribute based on needs. Whereas communism is a way of attaining this goal, characterized by its materialistic focus and being revolutionary.
I know this differs from a lot of other uses for the terminology, but is there really a single definition of socialism that rules over the others (or communism for that matter, and does it even matter since they describe different important things)?
Are you American?
No, why do you ask?
You literally have it backwards. Communism in the context of a definition of society is the classless state. Socialism is the transitory stage (also known as a dictatorship of the proletariat).
Reminder that this is specifically when talking about state/society. If you are mentioning ideology then a communist person or a socialist might have significant diversion of views/goals. Yes, it can be confusing.
Excerpt from Wikipedia:
As one of the many types of socialism, communism became the dominant political tendency, along with social democracy, within the international socialist movement by the early 1920s.[34]
Excerpt from ProleWiki:
Its modern usage is almost always traced back to Karl Marx’s usage of the term where he introduced the concept of scientific socialism alongside Friedrich Engels. The theory of scientific socialism described communism not as an idealistic, perfect society but rather as a stage of development taking place after a long, political process of class struggle. Marx, however, used the terms socialism and communism interchangeably and he drew no distinction between the two. Lenin was the first person to give distinct meanings to the terms socialism and communism. The socialism/communism of Marx was now known simply as communism, and Marx’s “transitional phase” was to be known as socialism.
I knew about this. I just do not really think anyone claiming superiority based on “define socialism and communism” as someone to be taken seriously, given that terminology is dependant on context and definitions on a base level are arbitrary if taking an axiomatic approach to theory.
Ah yes, that’s perfectly valid, the terms will be different on context (which is why I specified the state context).
Why do you hate communism?
Nobody has ever actually done real communism on a national scale. The closest is probably the USSR, but that was a disaster because it was an authoritarian dictatorship that funneled money and power to the top. People only got token representation, the people were not actually in charge of anything, they got no real say in their leadership. Doesn’t matter that it was structured like communism says it should be, the reality of it was anything but communism.
Real communism would probably be pretty decent. There wouldn’t be too much to hate about it other than what you’d dislike in any government.
The problem is the humans running it. It’s a constant battle against power-hungry and self-serving people being in charge, just like any government, and no nation espousing communism has ever managed to prevent authoritarianism and basic kleptocratic people from settling in and running the show.
- I am not for communism or here to espouse any virtues it might have. The concept of communism certainly has appeal and presents many benefits, however the reality of implementation and human nature virtually guarantee it will never achieve its intended form.
Be careful where you tread here. You must be careful to separate “communists” (people who believe in economic reorganization away from the power of capital) and “tankies” (those who support corrupt regimes that project the illusion of communism).
There are indeed quite a few communists and various other alt-camp political spectrum believers on here. They do have quite liberal beliefs but don’t typically cause much of a fuss, because rational people can coexist with differing beliefs… and i dont mind them one bit. But the tankes, like lemmygrad, hexbear, etc, do stir up an anti-west "commie propaganda"fuss every chance they get, without being related to actual communism, especially if one mentions a hot button like Israel or Ukraine. And if you get into an argument with a tankie, they will just sling mud on you and call you a Nazi.
The cool part is, you can filter a lot of the chaff by just blocking the ugly instances from your user settings page (since Lemmy supports that now), blocking frequent flyers, and trimming/moving your subscribed community list to other, often smaller instances. A minimal amount of effort VASTLY increases the quality of content you’ll see on lemmy.
There are very few real communists left. On here, it’s going to be pretty much all tankies.
Yeah, unfortunate but true…
I’d definitely describe myself as a communist, but I do realize we never had a proper communist state on this planet, just authoritarian states that acted like communists to win over the workers. Capitalism needs to be regulated as fuck to create a fair society, so for now, I strive for socialism, because I understand going straight to communism probably won’t work.
Sorry if this was uncalled for, I just wanted to show there are sensible communists who don’t excuse Russia and China for the shit they’re pulling. But neither do I excuse the west for a lot of shit we are pulling.
There is a clear contradiction in this comment.
Capitalism needs to be regulated as fuck to create a fair society, so for now, I strive for socialism, because I understand going straight to communism probably won’t work.
Isn’t this the exact reasoning behind China’s market reforms, beginning under Deng Xiaoping?
If we take this poster at their word, then their disagreement with modern China is not ideological in nature!
Does that mean their disagreement is about the practical implementation? Of course not! That would contradict a key piece of evidence: This World Bank report!
According to the report, 800 million Chinese people have been lifted out of poverty - accounting for three quarters of worldwide poverty reduction! No reasonable person could called that a failed implementation!
If this poster really supports a transitional phase of regulated markets, then why would they be condemning China for successfully implementing the very approach they advocate for?
It might have worked in that regard but at what cost? An authoritarian state that commits genocide inside it’s own borders, so yes it clearly failed in the regard that it does not treat everyone equally, a core principle of real communism.
An authoritarian state that commits genocide inside it’s own borders
Hold it!
Do you have evidence to support this testimony?
It doesn’t matter whether it actually fits the definition of genocide. Human rights get abused there, which is well documented and agreed upon by several sources. That means there is no equality and thus no communism in China.
Your genocide assertion I won’t touch because it’s untouchable on lemmy.world.
Look man, whether its a genocide or not doesn’t matter. The human rights abuse is well documented and agreed upon by many independent parties. The point is, there is no equality there. So it can’t be actual communism, despite them claiming that it is.
There is not well-documented evidence. There is garbage, Cold War II propaganda “evidence” from Adrian Zenz and from US-backed regime change non-governmental organizations.
A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
Those states would agree that they have not achieved communism, and they would agree that they are authoritarian, namely the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin, 1917, The State and Revolution
Let’s just skip the euphemisms and use ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’
There is a euphemism for dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and it is bourgeois democracy.
Bourgeois democracy is a separate term. It can describe something like European nations voting between which bourgeoisie will rule the proletariat. The more you know.
The more you know.
Even NATOPedia thinks they’re synonyms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_bourgeoisie
The only time they’re not synonyms is when the capitalist class finds kayfabe democracy insufficient, at which point they deploy fascism. That’s what’s been developing in many Western capitalist states around the world in recent years. The working class is more and more agitated by their deteriorating conditions under neoliberalism. Even the petit bourgeois feel threatened. The far-right surge isn’t organic, though: the capitalist class fuels it to maintain their position.
Global news communities in instances like beehaw or lemmy.world seem to have predominantly communist and leftist posters. The nazbols congregate on their own famous three instances.
Show me a single comment on Hexbear or lemmy.ml or lemmygrad that promotes nazbols or patsocs or MAGA communists or LaRouchites like Dugin or Hinkle or Haz or Maupin.
Or Juche, Maoism, Leninism, Stalinism…
Given your false reports to the authorities, it seems you like authoritarianism after all.
Were the reports false or were the authoritarians false?
What does a decision to rely on ad hominem display… A deeper stalking would brittle it down tho
The phrase is whittle it down.
There are dozens of us!
“It wasn’t real socialism!!1!” lmao
This is the position you get when you understand capitalism is fucked but you still believe capitalist states’ propaganda about socialist revolutions that have actually managed to successfully overthrow the capitalist class, which gets worse the more those states have managed to rival and threaten capitalist rule globally.
Clowns think they can beat Mao and Stalin on genociding dissidents and undesirables.
Yes that is a good example of a communist regime
Leaves platform enshittified by capitalism
Complains about people being communists
Bruh
Yes, but it was not enshittified by capitalism, instead it was the evil corporation that wanted more money
What?? 😭 😭 😭
🤣
without capitalism this company wouldn’t have existed and you could only share you thoughts on one single website. without competition, imagine that
The internet is a government project. Without “Communism” you wouldn’t even have a single website, imagine that.
so your point is that we should not have a choice at all?
We already don’t, our choices are dictated to us by the executive boards that act as America’s unelected central planning committees.
Capitalism isn’t about competition or the free market or any of that. It’s about the idea that there is an ownership class that is entitled to control the flow of wealth because they had some meetings, moved some money around, and now own some buildings they didn’t build full of machines they didn’t make or move, that produce things they didn’t design, test, inspect, or assemble. But they get to decide who gets the benefit of that economic activity (it’s them, while those who actually make all that happen get peanuts).
A communist economy can reduce redundancies to increase efficiency, but that doesn’t mean it can only offer one option for any good or service. Art, variety, and uniqueness can still exist in communist economies, they just wouldn’t be gated by ability to afford things but instead by ability to produce things. Star Trek is a communist economy because the replicators can make whatever anyone wants. We don’t have the technology for that level of communism and, IMO communism doesn’t work very well unless you’re in a post-scarcity world, until then I believe it’s good to incentivise and reward workers. But even with scarcity, a communist system could make you choose between having a really nice computer vs a really nice bike, and offer less nice options to those that choose the nice other thing.
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I know getting upset means I’m losing, but you’re really good.
sorry for making you upset
You’re hilarious. Is this a bit? This has to be a bit.
