- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- socialism@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- socialism@lemmy.ml
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09/11 Chile vibes
And it’s a holiday in Cambodia
Where you’ll what you’re told
Holiday in Cambodia
Where the slum’s got so much soul
Removed by mod
When people ask me what communist country was successful I usually say all of them until cia decided to go there and spread freedom 🇺🇸🦅
Luckily the US is dismantling the CIA so that’s good news for communism!!!
you know, i tell you what. i’m fed up with all this gringo self-righteousness when you talk about “oh communism was bad, oh people where killed, oh people had no food, oh people had no liberty, oh people could not buy ataris, oh our countries are so democratic”. your countries were democratic during the cold war in the first place because you had people to sort things out for you here in the global south. for each person complaining about how the food rations in eastern europe were not tasty enough, there were 10 dying of hunger or malnourishment here in the global south. for every person complaining they had to wait 5 years in a queue to buy a trabant or an oka, there were 10 who got no school in a range of 50 km. for every person complaining that their 8 hour shifts in state owned factories were overwhelming, there were 10 who were indentured workers. for every person complaining about how the stasi, kgb or the stb had bugged their apartment, there were 10 suffering the most horrific tortures inside black sites of the military of u.s. allies here in the “third world”. for every person complaining about dull standard apartment blocks in mikrorayons, there were 10 who lived in mud shacks and slums, and those are just who were lucky enough to have a roof over their heads. finally, for everyone complaining about chinese sweatshops, which are indeed a problem, there are 10 americans who work and yet cannot afford proper housing.
you wanna complain about how communism was bad? go ahead. you wanna complain how your parents lived under communism and could not drink coke? do so if you wish. but there are still millions of people down here who would give an arm and a leg to have a polish ration, an apartment in a russian gray building, or a yugoslav job. and while the chinese maoist red guard was bad, surely it won’t be an inch closer to the harassement people endured on a daily basis by our police forces.
again: you wanna complain? be my guest. but for me that’s an encyclopedic example of white privilege.
Death to America
whoops, brazil. we had a budding workers movement that was absolutely crushed by the traitorous brazilian military, in the name of the US of course.
that hasnt stopped syndicalism to take root here and improve our lives a bit, but the communist organizations responsible were all crushed and we see our rights being taken away ever since because no one is left to defend them. we are scrambling rn to see if we can stop fascism.
I wonder if anyone ever said “Democracy would never work, just look at what happened to Athens”.
Socialism and communism are relatively new ideas. While I don’t believe communism is an effective form of government, it’s still kind of silly to write it off so quickly.
Seeing some of the zingers in the comments here, now seems like a great time to plug my “Read Theory, Darn it!” introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list. Read up, comrades!
The struggle depicted perfectly lol
For those that don’t like to read, you don’t have to read theory. In fact, most theory is old. There are newer and better takes on these ideas. Find a good YouTube channel that goes over the ideas. I like Vaush.
If you like to read theory, go for it. But I think there are faster and easier ways to get the concepts.
For all the people talking about Vaush and Hasan and their controversies, realize that there are other folks out there where you can learn about theory without the Twitch brainrot. The Revolutionary Left podcast is my personal favorite.
Choosing not to read theory is choosing to always be ignorant.
Why? Information is information. Why does it matter if it comes from books or videos?
Firstly, “Results from the study confirmed the substantial equivalence of all conditions in immediate comprehension. Conversely, results confirmed the disadvantage of subtitled videos for deep learning outcomes.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360131520302323
Secondly, there are no videos ever made that explain the depth and volume that many books do. They simply don’t exist
Thirdly, you can easily refer back to other areas of books that are more difficult in videos.
Fourthly, you can read sentence over again when you don’t understand but you have to stop to rewind which makes it more difficult to place in context.
Fifthly, videos just don’t exist for this. There are no videos that exist that explain things in the structured format that actual theory provides.
You cannot become educated on this matter with videos and it will just leave you over-confident and ignorant
Vaush’s whole thing is controversy bait. He purposely crosses lines to get people mad at him while maintaining some form of “plausible deniability” to where his fans can always find a way to defend and excuse his actions by talking about “you don’t understand the context” or whatever, it’s a very common and tiresome tactic. Like, if you’re trying to promote a shitty video game that can’t stand on it’s own merits, just do something to antagonize either the left or the right (doesn’t matter which) and then go to the other group and be like, “Look, the guys you hate hate us, you should check us out.” Controversy generates clicks. A big reason for Trump’s success is that he cracked the code on how to apply this formula to a political campaign. If you know how to recognize it, it’s very obvious that Vaush does this.
This sort of opportunism is very detrimental to actually understanding the world or promoting ideas or building a movement. It’s essentially brain-poisoning and a cognitohazard. You’re much better off reading actual books than just following whoever’s best at attracting attention on the internet. If you are going to shun books for videos, you should at least go with someone more educational, like Shaun.
I don’t know where you are getting the idea that he purposefully generates controversies. He lost subs during most of his controversies, not gained. And it has down stream negative impacts on his channel other than just sub count.
He is just very careless.
No way it’s just carelessness, nobody forces him to say edgy shit. It’s the classic “no such thing as bad publicity,” or, “but you have heard of me” thing. I’d have never heard of him without the controversies (of which there are many), and despite making a conscious effort to avoid him, even I’ve seen clips of him. When you get people talking about something, people will get curious and want to see it straight from the horses mouth, then some percentage of the people who show up “to get the full story” will like what they see and stick around, and even if they don’t, a hate click is still “engagement,” it doesn’t matter why you click, if you click, it boosts him in the algorithm.
Going into examples will naturally only play into this effect, but I recall him once talking about performing eugenics to eradicate trans people from existence, under the idea of detecting gender dysphoria in the womb and aborting the fetus. This is an example of walking right up to the line and getting people mad on purpose, that’s not something someone just “organically” says out of “carelessness,” it’s specifically formulated to generate outrage, while, as always, leaving him an out that he can fall back on.
There is 100% such a thing as bad publicity. Your post here is a literal example of this, you actively avoid him and there are many people who feel the same way as you.
Hes not forced to say edgy shit, he just doesn’t put much effort into not saying edgy shit and he naturally wants to. He doesn’t police his own words, for instance, his frequent use of the word “retarded” and his joking about hating women. He also constantly blurts out shit and then his audience points out he misspoke and he gets annoyed and says “You fucks know what I meant”. He has no anxiety or shame about his wording of things. There is no worry on his end about saying something shameful, he’s literally said that he thinks shame is a worthless emotion.
He doesn’t “mask” essentially. He is not careful. Maybe to some degree that helps his internet career because of reputation of authenticity or something but it also frequently pisses off his own audience. The controversies have lost him subs, they’ve severely damaged his ability to engage with other creators because he has either alienated or outright insulted them, which means he doesn’t debate anyone anymore, left or right.
Its not on purpose. Hes not playing 12D chess to boost his youtube career. He wouldn’t be a leftwing creator in that case, he’d be a rightwing grifter instead. A lot more money in that.
Your post here is a literal example of this, you actively avoid him and there are many people who feel the same way as you.
And yet, I’ve given him clicks. And I’m talking about him. That’s what he wants, that’s why he does what he does. Were it not for the controversies, I wouldn’t watch him either because I wouldn’t have heard of him, and also because I’m not his target audience.
Hopefully my criticism calls out the pattern directly enough that people take away that they should just ignore him, as opposed to playing into his specific controversies that are calculated to make use of criticism and outrage.
Hes not forced to say edgy shit, he just doesn’t put much effort into not saying edgy shit and he naturally wants to.
All I can see is that I see a pretty clear method to the madness. There’s always an out, it’s always “you don’t understand the context.” It’s the same tactic Trump uses, and the same tactic used in countless ad campaigns. I can’t really prove it because it’s just a matter of pattern recognition, but suffice to say, I don’t fuck with what he does. Even if your interpretation were correct, associating with someone so careless about messaging and so prone to controversies is more of a liability to the left than an asset. But also, your interpretation is not correct.
The first time I see someone holding a bloody knife over a dead body, I might be willing to listen to their explanation and their side of the story. The 17th time I see the same person in the same situation, something’s going on. How many times am I expected to give him the benefit of the doubt? Because whatever that number is, he’s exceeded it, because he’s doing this constantly, and you can pretend that it isn’t a clear pattern of behavior all you want, but I’m not going to.
He wouldn’t be a leftwing creator in that case, he’d be a rightwing grifter instead. A lot more money in that.
No, there’s lot’s of little niches that one can carve out, regardless of being left or right. There’s plenty of opportunists with supposedly left-leaning brands. The right-wing grifts and personality cults are more profitable, but it’s also a fairly saturated market with a lot of competition. There’s plenty of room for people like Destiny, Jimmy Dore, and Vaush to carve out their respective “left-leaning” niches.
Also, btw, I have never heard about any actual insight that watching Vaush gives. His content isn’t educational or edifying, the way someone like Shaun’s is. It’s all about aesthetics and personality. The best thing anyone can really claim about Vaush is that criticism towards him is invalid, or that he makes people they don’t like mad, nobody actually seems to learn anything from watching him.
And yet, I’ve given him clicks.
I thought you said you only watched clips of him? I assumed you meant by other creators.
All I can see is that I see a pretty clear method to the madness. There’s always an out, it’s always “you don’t understand the context.” It’s the same tactic Trump uses, and the same tactic used in countless ad campaigns.
Trump supporters don’t actually care about context though. They say that shit for propaganda purposes. Vaush supporters bring up context because he literally gets clipped out of context for oppositional propaganda purposes.
Also, there isn’t always an “out”. Some of the things Vaush has said/done are bad even with context. Like when he told his followers to go harass Contrapoints on Twitter once because he was upset with her and wanted to “Force her to see reason” or whatever. When he was unnecessarily nasty to TJ Kirk during some debate. Or when he flashed on screen AI generated and drawn porn of a canonically 16 year old character and bestiality.
There are a few other things I’m probably forgetting.
No, there’s lot’s of little niches that one can carve out, regardless of being left or right. There’s plenty of opportunists with supposedly left-leaning brands. The right-wing grifts and personality cults are more profitable, but it’s also a fairly saturated market with a lot of competition. There’s plenty of room for people like Destiny, Jimmy Dore, and Vaush to carve out their respective “left-leaning” niches.
Jimmy Dore is 100% vapid grift. Destiny is a terrible human being but he is also almost certainly not a grifter. He says what he means and means what he says.
Vaush is someone who is significantly egotistical, narcissistic, impulsive, and short sighted. But he is not a controversy-monger, on that front he is just a dumbass.
I do get that vibe from Vaush occasionally. Unfortunately the attention economy is a real thing and I would be impressed with anyone with the same reach as Vaush wouldn’t be doing similar things. I am not sure I would be as far left as I am without his content.
Doesn’t Hasan have a larger audience without doing that sort of thing?
Hasan has drama/beef with H3H3 & Lonerbox.
No idea, I have only watch him one or two times. Seemed good to me.
A big difference between Hasan and Vaush is that Hasan generally wastes very little of his time with sectarian nonsense or left-punching, while Vaush makes that one of his core focuses. Hasan networks with the Deprogram crew, Chapo, and other more Marxist aligned groups without screaming about “tankies,” while Vaush leans heavily into that.
Hasan is also generally much better with foreign policy, even though I don’t always agree.
The biggest thing is that Hasan serves as a great gateway to Leftist radicalization, while Vaush ends up preventing further Leftist movement, kinda like a more Libertarian Socialist-coded Destiny.
My fiancé and I will still watch Hasan even when we may disagree with him on some issues because he is generally entertaining and generally more correct than not, but would never watch Vaush.
Hasan avoids arguing with leftists because hes a cowardly clout monger and can’t debate for shit because he isn’t really that smart and is captured to some degree by his audience.
I don’t hate Hasan, I do agree with a lot of his takes but hes fundamentally a less ideologically honest person than Vaush. Vaush doesn’t give much of a shit about pissing off his audience, he does it constantly.
You DO have to read theory. Just because it is old doesn’t mean it’s wrong or outdated.
Also I’m not opposed to watching YouTube videos, but it shouldn’t be your only source for it, and recommending Vaush is a huge problem, don’t do that.
If anyone wants some actual good recommendations:
In english: Second Thought, Hakim, Yugopnik, Luna Oi, revolutionary_thot, azurescapegoat. There’s also Hasan, but he does commentary and not theory teaching or analisys or anything like that.
In portuguese: Ian Neves/História Pública, Laura Sabino, Jones Manoel, Tempero Drag/Rita von Hunty, João Carvalho.
There’s of course others, I’m just going by the ones I remember right now.
How can you have a problem with Vaush when he is so ideologically similar to Hasan? Unless you have have disagreements with Hasan.
Comrade Cowbee already listed the issues with Vaush that I’ll not repeat here.
That being said, I can’t really say much about Vaush’s ideological stance since I don’t watch him. What I can say is that I doubt he’s anywhere close to Hasan ideologically if going by how his fans act. Most of the times what I have seen is a pretty clear anticommunist stance from them that I cannot comprehend, specially when they love to laud Vaush as such a great leftist youtuber.
Unless you have have disagreements with Hasan
I do have some issues with Hasan actually, which I’ll use this comment to inform anyone that reads it after my recommendation. I don’t watch a lot of Hasan, I usually see bits and pieces of him here and there when youtube recommends him to me, and I mostly disagree with some of his instances on China, from the little I seen he’s mostly pro China, but I have seen some iffy stuff on his knowledge about the Uyghurs. I also don’t think his format of reaction/commentary to be that great either, specially since he likes to leave mid video a lot while it is still playing for his audience. I think his content could benefit a lot more if he actually paused on key points of the videos he reacts to to explain, debunk and or give context to the stuff said while also giving his opinion and stance on that as a Marxist. If you want an example of what that would be like, the brasilian youtuber João Carvalho I mentioned before does this, a lot, like to the point of even being a bit tiring sometimes, lol, but makes the content usually pretty transformative instead of just content theft.
That being said, Hasan is a very important figure in radicalizing and propagandizing for the left in the english speaking internet since he’s at the top of the left pipeline on youtube at least. I recommend this video by Yugopnik to learn more about this.
Thank you for your reply.
Lmfao
Big yikes
Support for chasers and sex-pests like Vaush is pretty awful, not to mentions his awful politics and constant butchering of Marxist theory for an audience that usually can’t tell the difference.
Theory is important. Much of my list is newer, some is older when it holds up, some is newer when it meaningfully adds to the discussion. However, as someone who had your approach, reading theory directly genuinely is much faster than rolling the dice.
I have audiobooks linked as well that people can listen to if they prefer, and importantly they won’t be distorted by a sex-pest who complains about Marxists constantly while misrepresenting them.
Where can I find audiobooks you talked about? My app probably doesn’t show your userpage right.
I have audiobook links after (almost) each listed work.
I am pretty familiar with Vaush’s arguments on Marxist theory. What are your points of contention?
The vast majority of them, to be honest. He has no grasp of Dialectical and Historical Materialism, has no knowledge of AES, and horrendously distorts Lenin.
He’s a liberal that cosplays an Anarchist and pretends to have beyond a Wikipedia understanding of Marxism.
That’s, of course, ignoring that he’s a chaser, pedophile, sex offender.
He has no grasp of Dialectical and Historical Materialism
Can you list a specific example? I think he has a good understanding of this.
One of the worst issues is when he depicts AES as “not real Socialism” because they contain contradictions, when Dialectical Materialism shows that all systems contain contradictions and must resolve them, that doesn’t mean they aren’t that system. Ie, Capitalist states contain public ownership, which is a contradiction but does not define the system.
One of the recent and larger-scale issues was when he tried to explain Lenin advocated voting Socialism into existence.
I don’t make it a point to hate-watch sex offenders that do the work of the US state department.
Yeah, I am not surprised that you have disagreements behind Lenin and AES. The two are pretty related and hard to pull apart. I was just surprised that you would disagree with any of his Marxist takes. I think you both agree what the problems are from a Marxist perspective.
As for the sex offenders/sex pest stuff. I don’t think he is those things, but I understand I am just one person. From the stuff I have seen it is mostly people that disagree with him that label him as such as a way to get around the fact they don’t really have a leg to stand on; Fascists and the like. Not saying that is you of course.
Thanks for taking the time to talk this though by the way. I figure you get hit with a lot of stuff.
I like Vaush
Lmaoooo, ye I always follow the political opinions of some dude who watches child porn … oh wait, not child porn, it’s “shortstack goblins”
As far as I know, all the criticisms of Vaush watching child porn has been misinformation.
Then you clearly don’t know much. Maybe you should actually learn about the people you recommend
I watch Vaush a lot and I haven’t seen what you are talking about.
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Capitalism only works on a small scale. The second society gets bigger, you require a state with militaristic presence to keep corporations in line. To this very day, the Thatcher/Reagan ideal of “market liberalisation and privatisation” has ALWAYS resulted in the centralised accumulation of capital that became a massive societal divider.
No matter which country you pick, large ones like the USA or Russia, all of them have developed into a divided oligarchy of “haves” and “have nots”. […]
I know you like to cope with “Oh no, the evil minority of bad apples in the owner class again. >:(” but in the end capitalism is a failed ideology that will never work on a large scale without completely surpressing the market and brutally regulating any sign of market dominance of a few corporations.
Edit: typo. And to the cunt who removed Realitaetsverlust’s comment: you can suck a cock and die, I wanted to have a normal discussion with them.
This is generally wrong, though. Communist countries have dramatically democratized society, it works better at large scale if we are speaking of Marxian Communism because that’s the Marxist reason for Communism to begin with. Competition centralizes, so in the future it must be publicly owned and planned. This is the basis of Scientific Socialism, primitive Communism is not the same as the post-Socialist Communism, which must be large-scale as production increases in complexity.
Pol Pot wasn’t even a Communist.
Independently of who I side with, I am blocking this community because of the stifling of Realitaetsverlust’s comments.
edit: was baffled by the stifling and just researched and learned about Lemmy.ml
it all makes sense now. It is a Socialist Communist instance that censors those not aligned with them. Political leanings don’t bother me, but the censorship does so I will be avoiding anything Lemmy.ml in the future. They of course have a right to run their instance how they wish. peace out
Im sure the uyghurs and tibetans see it differently
EDIT: \s
The Schrödinger’s sarcasm edit 🙄
uyghurs
The US propaganda machine’s “Uyghur genocide” psyop has been debunked six ways to Sunday already. [1] [2]
.
tibetans
I’m pretty sure virtually all of the Tibetan people are happy to no longer be suffering under theocratic feudalism. Happy to no longer be illiterate serfs and slaves, suffering depredation under a god-king. I doubt many of them are sad that CIA asset Dalai “suck my tongue” Lama is in exile. [1] [2]
LOL
The horrible feodal system with serfs/slaves the Tibetans has was sooo much better.
Some CIA poking didn’t work to bring that back.
And there was a small minority radicalised terrorists by Turkey and OC again the CIA to cause trouble, which they did.
blew up a plane with civilians, multiple other attacks on busses, trainstations, etc…
The majority never liked them and are glad it’s over.
But nice try.Not sure what you’re trying to say. Uyghurs are systematically eradicated and tibet is controlled by china since their invasion in the 1950s. Not exactly speaking in favor of communism.
So, if you’d like to expand on your point, I might be able to discuss this further.
eradicated LOL, their population is growing, despite the many some US backed terrorist killed.
And Tibet doesn’t have slaves anymore who literally had chains around their necks suffering under the religious buddhist monks terror.
Yawn, can you bring up Tiananmen square again to not be original? I’ll waiteradicated LOL, their population is growing
According to who? The chinese government? Lmao. Ye I would DEFINITELY trust the ones that are performing the killings on reporting accurate numbers.
And Tibet doesn’t have slaves anymore who literally had chains around their necks suffering under the religious buddhist monks terror.
Imperialism good when country does bad things?
Yawn, can you bring up Tiananmen square again to not be original? I’ll wait
I could, but if you want some originality, I can also bring up one of the other atrocities directly ordered by communist regimes, like the Prague Spring, Hungarian Revolution or the mass executions by the Khmer in Cambodia.
oh, the khmer rouge, that one that the u.s. supported along with britain, china (not so dirty back then, right) and who were toppled by the socialist regime of vietnam?
Lol I meant to reply to the main thread, but you could pretend im being sarcastic and it kinda works
Makes sense, I just was kinda confused and wasn’t sure.
It doesn’t matter what ideology. If the people running it are rotten, any system can be corrupted.
So then the solution is to decentralize so everyone is running it.
And have a way for it to be trustless as well
Communism by any other name would smell as sweet
Communism is more about centralization, Anarchism is the one about decentralization as a rule.
A co-operative ?
And likewise, oligarchy calling itself communism smells just as rancid.
It’s simple: teach everyone to make everything they need for themselves, so they can’t be expoited
ah yes let me just manufacture my own toilet paper on my 50m2 apartment
Sure bro lemme teach my aunt to make her insulin, her own needles, her own glucose test strips and all that cheers
There is a group actively working to open source Insulin manufacturing to make it practical to self produce.
That’s good work for a lot of reasons, but there’s a world of difference between “open source and theoretically DIY” and it being anywhere near realistic for everyone to actually do it themselves.
It’s good that I have access to advanced technology without having to have learned how to build it from the ground up. That’s the whole point of civilization – doing more together than we could do apart.
Maybe we should all specialize, and pay each other with our own goods, or better yet, a sort of representation of goods we all agree is valuable, so you can get one persons goods with anothers.
Kinda seems unfair that somebody’s aunt should have to purchase insulin she needs to survive, like she shouldn’t have to work harder to have the same lifestyle as someone without a disability. Maybe we should just give her the insulin she needs to survive, and compensate the people who make it out of some sort of common pool of resources everyone is required to contribute to, in order to distribute the costs more fairly.
When I was younger, I tried to design an universal constructor.
Unfortunatelly, I was using Roblox studio to do this.
How’s that for insanity?
I also carved a log with a knife, hacking off pieces in an attempt to make a 3D printer
It’s not insane! 3D printing is making huge strides. You were just a little ahead of your time.
If we can run Doom on 16 billion crabs, then you can carve a 3D printer.
Like how people were gifted ability to have more knowledge at their hands than previous generations and rapid communication, and then came to the conclusion that the earth is flat, vaccines are poision, and facism is holy?
Humans are dumb fucks. They will inevitably fuck up even the most perfect utopia they arrive in short of some mass hive mind brain washing Equilibrium style. i don’t hold that high an opinion of human society.
Leave the world to the animals. Humans are a failed experiment and a virus to the world.
This is some eco-fascist ass rethoric. You’re not taking into account how all the issues you listed are only possible to exist in a capitalist society, where misinformation and anti-intelectualism is accepted and allowed to grow instead of directly addressed.
Environmental issues did in fact exist before capitalism. Human arrival coincided with mass extinction in the Americas and in Australia. That’s certainly not to say these issues are unavoidable or that socialism isn’t the solution (because it 100% is) but we should see environmental issues as transcending others so I disagree that I would place this in an eco-fascist lens. Rejection of science certainly occurred in feudal societies as well
You’re right, I should have been more specific in saying that current anti-intelectualism is deeply linked to capitalism and not that it is something that happens only in capitalism, my bad.
Also, I wasn’t referring to that as the eco-fascist rethoric, but rather to the commenters last phrase about how humans are a “failed experiment and a virus to the world”.
Start from yourself
Something something darwin
What does Darwin have to do with enslavement of the human species?
Deeply anti-materialist take.
Can you explain how you disagree? Is it about incentives to be corrupt (or against) depending on the system?
If you believe in great man theory™ and think that all political developments happen because one person can magically steer entire countries and the world, in geo-political terms, or idealists in thinking that if you have the correct ideas, you can magically steer the entire rest of the world to whatever you think, by having the correct thoughts. Then your theories of political developments are non-materialist, like this comment is objecting to. The system sets the conditions of who is going to be empowered or rewarded for their actions and positions.
People in this context appears to be plural, thus I don’t see how Montreal_Metro’s take is Great Man Theory.
The system sets the conditions of who is going to be empowered or rewarded for their actions and positions.
Ultimately, any system is operated by mere mortals who will arbitrarily reward and punish people based on their own bias, morals and desires. Systems only work so long as the people manning them follow the rules. Systems only last if the people running it punish rule breakers.
According to all of history, corruption, apathy, and pure human greed and ingenuity will gradually eat away any system, economic and political, until it collapses. Only for the failing system to be replaced by a “better” system, which begins the cycle again.
The fact that it is attributed to a very few actors and not a literal, singular actor does not negate great man theory.
The issue is that this is arbitrarily flattening of the actual material conditions. You can point out that nearly all political systems, on a long enough timeline lead to some form of collapse (Joseph Tainter is a good reference on this). But all of these things are dependent, not independent, of the systems and conditions they find themselves in. The timescales and forms can vary drastically depending on the material conditions actors find themselves in.
What came first? The chicken or the egg?
Did the system that created the conditions people find themselves in come first. Or did the people running the system create the conditions that they find themselves in?
It is not that there isn’t some flow both ways, but that the material conditions is much more dominant than people coming up with ideas and mechanations moving things in ways contradicting the conditions. The system setting the conditions is in fact dominant. The way corruption and self-dealing manifests is different between where you can just create a private corporation and lobby for a government contract to justify being given a 500 million dollars of tax payer money, versus trying to massage Gosplan to syphon off several million Rubles of excess spending, versus tricking a sovereign wealth fund to hand over several billion dollars for some supposed innovative building company to create innovations for Neom.
I am not that person, but I guess you wouldn’t like the ambassadors of fascism to be efficient and competent.
They didn’t seem to express an argument or value judgment in their comment regardless of their actual opinion.
Don’t feed the troll.
Could a Communist Nation be considered viable if such a hostile force can take it down? Does it all come down to survival of the fittest (in the best use of the term)?
Yeah, I remember how my grandfather and everyone he knew fought tooth and nail just to stop America from dismantling communism in eastern Europe!
Oh, wait, he didn’t. Everyone celebrated when it fell.
And then 7 million people died, and most people feel they were better off under Socialism and wished it continued.
It’s easy to say if one has never lived under communism rule. Stalinism caused the Holodomor in Ukraine and starved to death 2-7 million people. Mass deportations of people in Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and many other countries in Eastern Europe. Federated platforms? Forget about it. Everything is controlled by the state. Do you want to say something that the government doesn’t like? You can, but then you are off in a concentration camp (gulag) or sent to Siberia. Almost every family has a history of one of its family members being sent or imprisoned because they said something bad about communists / had a farm and could feed themselves with the products from their farm or land. On the contrary I would recommend to read the Animal Farm by George Orwell. - “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.
The famine in the 30s was caused by natural causes and spiraled to greater heights because of collectivization, but this ended famines.
The Soviet system was similar to federated platforms. It was government controlled, in a somewhat federated manner. Read Soviet Democracy.
The GULAG administration was a prison system, not concentration camps. Read Russian Justice.
Orwell was a fan of Hitler, hated workers, and in Animal Farm specifically his biggest critique was that Russian Workers are stupid and destined to be taken advantage of. Read On Orwell and A Critical Read of Animal Farm.
Oh yes, my friend, I knew someone would repeat me this soviet narrative. I urge you to read about Mr. Jones or watch a film about these events. Regarding gulags, it’s the same as telling me about concentration camps built by the Nazis. They also claimed it was just for labor, you know. I see you are well prepared with communist materials, it’s the same as entering communist class in the Soviet Union and expecting they will share the truth.
Regarding gulags, it’s the same as telling me about concentration camps built by the Nazis.
From a researcher who actually examined Soviet archives after the fall of the USSR in the 90s (PDF link, see pg. 1041):
Even in the terrible year of 1937, 44.4 percent of the GULAG labor camp population on January 1 was freed during the course of the year.
These weren’t death camps, these were prisons. You can read elsewhere in the same article about how most of the people in them had been convicted of non-political crimes every country in the world prosecutes. Just like in many other countries, people would serve their sentence and be released.
The article also notes how the vast majority of mortality in the Soviet prison system was attributable to the hardships imposed by WWII (also from pg. 1041):
More than half of all GULAG deaths in the entire 1934-1953 period occurred in 1941-1943, mostly from malnutrition.
Comparing this to the Nazi system that was directly designed to exterminate people is no more than roundabout Nazi apologia.
I urge you to read about Mr. Jones
There have been millions of Mr. Joneses so you’ll need to be more specific. In the meantime,
- Domenico Losurdo, 2008, Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend
- Grover Furr, 2014, Blood Lies: The Evidence that Every Accusation against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands Is False
.
Regarding gulags, it’s the same as telling me about concentration camps built by the Nazis.
I see you are well prepared with communist materials, it’s the same as entering communist class in the Soviet Union and expecting they will share the truth.
Those aren’t arguments, they’re vague, empty rhetoric.
No, now you’re doing holocaust minimization by supporting Double Genocide Theory. Read Blackshirts and Reds.
Read Blackshirts and Reds.
Yeah, good luck convincing one anticommunist to read any of Michael Parenti’s books. You’ll have an easier time pulling teeth.
To be fair, I have done it at least twice on Lemmy. Maybe I should go into dentistry instead, though, lol
Because no one who experienced it thought hmm is briliant, yeh nah, socialist policies are needed but not any form of totalitarian communism
Most people actually preferred Socialism over modern Capitalism in post-Soviet states. Socialism works better than Capitalism, and was more democratic.
