this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Define communism.
It's true that this should not be about communism, but about soviet state, which was an authoritharian state dominated by russian nationalism, but under banner of communism. Their kind of messed up the banner of communism for everybody. If used, it should be discussed with care.
no one can, not even those who advocate for it. (aside from "not that thing that was repeatedly tried and failed")
from Principles of Communism by Friedrich Engels.
And what would be those conditions?
common ownership and control of the means of production in a classless moneyless stateless society governed via collective mutual determination or similar horizontal system of power.
oh, i see, makes sense then why it was never tried. how are we going to have a society without a state to govern it? (i mean not to concern troll here, if a solution can be created for this that would be genuinely interesting, but for example that council the soviets created a century ago was clearly a state)
I love how you just keep flaunting your ignorance here. Communists aren't imbeciles who think that you can simply snap your fingers and abolish the state, they recognize the need for a transitional socialist period from the current system to a communist one.
and how do you wish to avoid that the leaders of said transitional socialist period just cling to power?
as someone who has to live in the aftermath of one of those "transitional socialist periods" that predictably went nowhere and just broke the country's spirit completely, i'm really damn curious. we are not talking about hypotheticals here.
I grew up in USSR and I certainly preferred it to what followed after the collapse. Claiming that it went nowhere is just brain dead. The fact is that USSR had to compete with the US empire after the war, and US being across the ocean was completely unscathed while USSR had to rebuild under duress. Of course, if you just ignore all that then you can make intellectually dishonest statements of the sort you do.
If you lived in Russia then sure. If you lived in any of the annexed countries and preferred the priviledge of not being able to travel, secret police checking your every fart and people dying while trying to, for some inexplicable reason, escape to the evil west, then you're a traitor to your own people.
meanwhile in the real world
Yes, in the real world, some people have a very short and selective memories.
Fortunately statistics are quite clear in proving otherwise.
www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/26/this-is-the-golden-age-eastern-europes-extraordinary-30-year-revival
In reality, the "revival" wasn't evenly distributed. Lots of people became destitute and exploited in the process, while a small minority of parasites started to enjoy lavish lifestyles built on their backs.
Yes, that is true and those obscenely rich people shouldn't exist.
But, for me, anything is better than being at the mercy of a tyrannical regime hell bent on controlling all aspect of your life, turning people against each other and removing them for their opinions.
The USSR era was the worst thing in the modern history of Europe (yet) and anyone who idealizes it is, at best, scum.
🖕
nice copium, but over here in hungary, one of the countries your glorious ussr managed to colonize that's not really the picture we got. the ten years following the collapse of the soviet system were by far the best ten years of this country in living memory, until the dust settled and an amalgamation of the old elite and the supposed revolutionaries took back control and re-instituted the same oligopoly, albeit with somewhat less oppression this time.
the whole point of having a transitional period between market capitalism and true communism is to reach that communism. that never happened. instead, the people were robbed of everything of value by an elite who claimed to represent the proletariat but was anything but that, and then it was re-privatized at the end of this period into the hands of a new elite. to give credit where it's due, this is in fact a redistribution of wealth, it just goes the other way than what's often heralded, and only made the rich richer and the average person more powerless.
Enjoy your fascism, clearly that's your preferred political system in Hungary.
i voted against it every single time and i'll gtfo as soon as i can because i lost hope that we can turn this ship back to democracy. but yes, i'd gladly take this over the soviet system that prevented us from leaving. the crazy attempts to cross the border to austria is a massive part of our culture thanks to the occupation in those 45 years of a "transitional period"
Well good to know you're on record preferring fascism. I've got nothing else to say to you.
idk what you're gonna do with me being on record on preferring a somewhat less authoritarian system to your more authoritarian system that comes with a promise of snake oil but go off i guess. (while, mind you, i already dislike the less authoritarian system enough to actively work on leaving the country)
it's amazing how much you hate fascists despite openly advocating for a system that's exactly like it in all but an but a lie about what it will eventually, hopefully, pinky promise transform into, exactly as it always did when it was attempted. like are you naive enough to believe that this time it will work, still completely ignoring how the general idea of keys to power functions, or are you just waving the opposing flag and larping that your ideas are good because they're bad and you oppose them so it must be so?
Trying to create an equivalence between fascism and communism further underscores just how utterly morally bankrupt you are. You're a truly contemptible individual.
no, i'm trying to create an equivalence between fascism and socialism, or whatever you call that transitional dictatorship that's hopefully benevolent. because that's the notion by which fascism works too, it just doesn't make an impossible promise about a system it will transform into.
your hilarious "if you are not with me you are my enemy (and also a nazi)" bullshit probably works on someone who also drunk the kool-aid on "this system will totally lead us to communism, we know that was a lie the previous 40 times but we totally fixed it now, trust me bro", but the errors in it and the sweaty attacks on character to mask them should be obvious to anyone not already indoctrinated into your particular idea of a "good" dictator.
I'm lightly amused by the interpretation that socialism necessarily means dictatorship, as if other democratic forms of government are somehow incompatible with socialist economic structures and policies.
well, i can actually support democratic socialist governments, and i actually have voted for a party trying to build that out on every single occasion so far while i had a vote. i'm also all for integrating socialist principles into a capitalist society -- i do actually believe capitalism is a great tool for the luxuries in life, but the necessities must be provided to all for it to actually work. like supply and demand both need to be variable for it to work, if everyone needs a home you can't have the market "just figure it out" on the pricing of hosing, it's going to result in rampant exploitation, but a market for upgraded housing compared to a baseline would very much work.
mostly i was just directly responding to the notion communicated to me in this conversation, which is that the path to communism is a state that takes power away from people for their own good, builds a society for them, and then gives back that power, or at the very least allows the people to take back that power with force. that promise is bogus and has been the previous 40 times a nation has been sold on it. as someone who has to live in the aftermath of one of those attempts, i'm not going to not blame it for its lies and its oppression. especially when the system it's trying to reach, as described in this very thread, has been technologically impossible to reach on the scale of even just hungary, let alone the whole soviet bloc
Congratulations on your contribution to the communist cause!
assuming you're being honest here, you're welcome. but if that is indeed the passive-aggressive mockery it sounds like then that might explain why people can't take you seriously outside of echo chambers.
If you read mockery in my response, then maybe it's because there are some mixed and contradictory positions in your responses.
i don't see anything contradictory in there, i'm just not an extremist. not a centrist either, but the world doesn't just consist of commies and fascists and people who haven't picked a side yet. in fact, those aren't even the two ends of the spectrum, and it's actually rather insulting to most people to suggest so.
fascists can burn in hell as far as i'm concerned, but so can most of the authleft part of the spectrum. in general, it's authies i'm the most opposed to. the economic right is stupid but a failing libright system tends to suck less than a failing authleft one. although neither suck as much as a failing authright one, that one i do agree with
(and imo even the two-axis political compass is super reductive but at least it gets the point across that i stand with neither fascists nor communists)
"Socialism is a transitional dictatorship" -> "I oppose dictatorships" -> "I vote for socialist politics"
If you're relying on political compass memes to understand politics, then that might explain your misunderstanding.
i have no problem with socialist economic policies but i do have a problem with using authoritarianism and the facade of a "benevolent dictatorship" to achieve them.
the misunderstanding stems from the constant twisting of terms. like is communism what happened in the soviet bloc, or is it an as yet unachieved (and still probably technologically unachievable) dreamland that has never been tried? is socialism what the soviets had? or is that just a specific set of economic policies that the soviets did in fact have but completely divorced from its oppressive system? what did the soviets and its colonized countries actually have?
there is a certain system that the soviets have tried and it failed miserably. i would never support that system after seeing what it does to a country. but the way it comes off to me through this discussion is that socialism both is and isn't that system, until observed, where the waveform collapses to whatever is more beneficial for the socialist's argument here.
and yeah, i do think the political compass is also extremely reductive, but at some point we gotta figure out how to communicate whatever the hell we're talking about.
Communism (as imagined by Marx and Engles) is broad and theoretical, and written in the revolutionary glow of the 19th century. "Leftist" discourse is still broad and theoretical, even 130 years after the final volume of Kapital was published. The people insisting on a single "socialist" model are often the people attempting to reduce it to a single (admittedly quite fascinating) period of history. All the reasons that period between 1914 and 1991 capture our collective imagination so frequently are the same reasons why it would be quite naieve to attempt to attribute any one ideology to the failure and collapse of any of the political projects of the time (of which there were a number, including the Soviet Union). The collapse of the Soviet Union was drawn out and complicated by international politics and post-war reconstruction; attempting to define socialism through the lens of that failure can really only be done in bad faith, or else is done while being willfully blind to the actual qualities of socialism and the actual conditions of the soviet collapse.
It's not enough to say "I don't want the soviet union again" unless you have an understanding of what it is, exactly, you are opposing. Will you simply sit around until a Lennin comes back around? If the Soviet Union was ever being remade in 2023, it wouldn't look anything like it did when it was formed almost 100 years ago. If you're opposed to authoritarianism, then oppose authoritarianism. Stand for democracy. If you believe in the socialist ideals, then stand for them, too. You don't have to call yourself a socialist, but it sure as hell doesn't help you if you willfully misinterpret people with shared interests because you've naively accepted a definition of socialism that is conveniently constructed around the failure of a single political project of the 20th century and is otherwise blind to any of its details.
It honestly just sounds like you're confused, or otherwise quite determined to collapse a complicated and nuanced political and economic theory into a single failed entity (which you strongly oppose, I gather). I'm not really interested in playing this game of definitions or political compass navigation with you; if you're interested in where your political values might overlap with socialist theory then I recommend you read a fucking book (pardon my french).
If you're not interested in debating this, fine. Neither am I, tbh.
I'm just generally aggravated by this pattern where people posit that anyone who criticizes communism/socialism/any adjacent ideology just doesn't understand what they're talking about, and then when you actually make an attempt to figure out what the hell everyone supposedly doesn't understand you get this mess of conflicting definitions expressed very confidently, where the only real pattern is that if you agree with communism/socialism/whatever that's good, if you don't that's bad, now go figure out why. It kind of feels like talking to christians, actually.
You were given a very clear definition, multiple times, and you were dissatisfied, multiple times, because you were trying very hard to draw a line from that definition to that thing you don't like. You fishing for an explanation is very clearly just an attempt to bait tankies into defending stalinism.
The amusing part is (still) that you seem to be a closeted socialist yourself.
Everybody here can see your comments, so I'll let them speak for themselves.
not everyone is on an instance ran by tankies though, like you are. so yeah, that's probably a good idea. just know your audience.
how? abolish the standing beaurocratic heirarchy which perpetuates and expends its own power and the interest of the ruling class by inflicting violence on the working class. what that looks like depends on how the people who make up a community choose to govern themselves.
realistically I don't expect a revolution of the proletariat to take place, so I promote the institution of robust mutual aid networks, radical solidarity (organized labor, intersectional liberatory philosophy), and resilient autonomous communities, to compete with the prevailing system of power.
attempts at anarchist-adjacent organizing have existed, and continue to in some communities, though of course execution varies, as does identity.
the USSR was not an attempt towards a stateless society, being a state-capitalist imperialist kleptocracy.
Nah, people who advocate for communism are actually educated and can define it very easily. Communism is a political economic system where the working class holds power in society and the means of production are under a combination of public and cooperative ownership. Thinking that communism is difficult to define is the height of ignorance.