Read/watch these in order:
Edit: I love the instantaneous downvote, fast enough that I know they didn't properly go through a single resource.
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2022
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Based on only the titles, the 3rd and 4th are the only ones that actually approach the given question. I think that's why the comment isn't well-received. Are the others really necessary, or optional additional reading/watching? The first just makes a horrible clickbait impression from the dumb mocking thumbnail and bragging title, it feels like self-assurance rather than convincing an audience. I don't think it's an effective way to introduce skeptical people.
The reason I'm saying only the titles is, quite frankly, I'm not motivated to go through that list if I'm the OP asking a question. I have limited time.
Are the others really necessary, or optional additional reading/watching?
The main question was why is Marxism still a thing. I don't see why posting information about why socialism/Marxism is preferred by many is unnecessary. You also need to know the cause of social problems under capitalism and how socialism would address them before tackling real world examples. Otherwise it's like explaining why food that sit too long in the pan burns to someone that doesn't know how heat works.
The first just makes a horrible clickbait impression from the dumb mocking thumbnail and bragging title, it feels like self-assurance rather than convincing an audience.
If you actually watched it, it's a detailed overview and defense of a published and peer reviewed paper. Therefore, scientific.
The reason I’m saying only the titles is, quite frankly, I’m not motivated to go through that list if I’m the OP asking a question. I have limited time.
Surprise surprise, the issue of capitalism vs socialism is extremely vast. It affects every single part of human life and society. People spend their entire lives researching it. So even the most basic explanation is bound to be kind of long.
If you're serious about getting an answer to your questions, you need to spend time doing research. There is absolutely no way to trim down an answer to "why Marxism" into anything resembling bite sized. In the same sense of you can't teach the theory of relativity in five minutes, you can't teach the political theory of capitalism vs socialism in five minutes either.
Finally, a short answer leaves little to no room for supporting evidence or citations. I feel that if I had posted something like that, you'd be (rightfully) complaining that I just made claims and none of them are backed up.
If you actually watched it,
And that's the problem: I didn't want to watch it. And I agree with it.
There's more to rhetoric and convincing people than merely being correct and well-cited. Those are important, and I love those, but understanding your audience is critical if you want them to even begin reading, let alone continue.
I personally believe that a good approach is to post the shorter material that directly answers their written arguments in the body of the post (like the "USSR failed" and "mass murderer" points) and then say the rest, like "to understand the other reasons why people support Marxism, see these:".
There is absolutely no way to trim down an answer to “why Marxism” into anything resembling bite sized.
The image you posted in https://lemmy.ml/post/218208/comment/150132 gives an excellent counter-argument to this claim.
It doesn't go into depth, it leaves that for later now that you have their interest. You've provided the introduction at the beginning of the book, a quick snippet of the benefits the USSR brought to its people and the impacts of taking it away. They didn't need to read Capital Vol. 1-3 to understand that 0% unemployment was achieved. And now that they see that, you have their interest, and your links come into play with a more in-depth explanation of why Marxism was responsible for this and able to help achieve it.
And that’s the problem: I didn’t want to watch it. And I agree with it.
I do get what you mean, so point taken there, even though I still believe in consuming a piece of media in its entirety before coming to a conclusion.
A huge part of this problem I think is also the culture surrounding informative pieces in general. I highly doubt "a review and defense of X paper on the economic effectiveness of socialism" will get even a fraction of the views. It's so bad that even actual academic papers are making things like "visual abstracts" (infographics) and stuff because otherwise people, including other researchers don't get interested in reading it. Apparently reading a one-paragraph text-only abstract is too much to ask now.
The image you posted in https://lemmy.ml/post/218208/comment/150132 gives an excellent counter-argument to this claim.
That post was also downvoted to hell, even more than the "link dump". I suspect because people just assumed that it's all BS even though sources are found at the bottom. I mention this because I see this happen every time, particularly on places like Reddit. Something like this:
[Thesis of claim that goes against the grain] [excellent expansion of the comment with reputable citations]
-100 points
Okay paid shill.
10000000 points
This is why I'm hesitant to use this format.
Yeah, it's a terrible thing how marketing techniques have found their way into research, especially when they should be the most motivated to tolerate dryiness.
That post was also downvoted to hell
+12 / -4 isn't really down, but yes you're right that the 'link dump' is being better received. Point taken, I was a bit quick to bite.
I am sorry, I haven't been able to open lemmy for a long time. terrible things going on in real life. And thank you for all those resources, I haven't read them yet but I will. And no I didn't downvote you.
Why not point to Cuba? Despite 75 years of brutal sanctions, Cuba has a more equitable education and healthcare system than the USA.
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Didn’t the fall of USSR teach us anything?
Of course it teaches us things, but why do you think that the fall of the USSR implies a critical failure of Marxism altogether? Many capitalist countries have fallen, does that alone mean capitalism was a failure and shouldn't be a thing?
will they do anything different than the dictators of the soviet union?
They likely would not only choose to act differently based on lessons learned, but they would have to. Each country is in different conditions. The USSR was formed at the end of WWI from a monarchy and had its capital city invaded in WWII, lost approximately 20-25 million people in the war, and later faced decades of antagonism from Europe and the world nuclear superpower USA (who were almost untouched by WWII) through the Cold War, among a myriad of other rather unique factors.
My point being, the way they acted and decisions they made weren't some universally applicable comparison. They had a unique country, unique culture, a unique set of enemies and a unique set of leaders to approach a different set of challenges. There are lessons to be learnt that can be applied to other places. China's communist party has to act differently based on their challenges and developed their own application of Marxist ideas, North Korea's Juche ideology has a different interpretation based on their situation, etc..
Another point to mention is that the USSR, for much of its existence, adopted the ideology of Marxism-Leninism (which was actually developed by Stalin, not Lenin, based on his understanding of orthodox Marxism and of Leninism). So there are likely to be issues with Marxism-Leninism which aren't inherent in Marxism.
Also, some here seem to admire Stalin
Well, he did lead the country that crushed the Nazi invasion of Europe, helped bring a war-torn nation into a world superpower, and other benefits to much of the citizens there, considering what the country was like before.
I personally don't admire Stalin, there were lots of things he did that I think were horrible. However, his reign did bring many benefits that even former USSR citizens admire.
I would really have to try hard to find a community that would admire Hitler
I can find 10 in 2 minutes. They certainly exist, it's just that most mainstream platforms kick off the communities that admire him, because they tend to be edgelords, obnoxiously racist people who make other users uncomfortable, or merely a reputational risk that hurts a company's profits.
edit: grammar
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Citation needed? They can be found here as well as more context and info: https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/a404a8bb9dc0cb717c66e500a000c1ab26b39f51/capitalism_doesnt_work.md
My favorite trope is people getting upset when you present them with basic facts that don't fit the narrative they've become attached to.
I don't usually get worked up about downvotes, either here or on Reddit, but if someone is presenting researched, reasonable, cited points in a debate, either refute their claims head on or leave them alone! Downvoting while saying nothing is a sign that you either didn't read their points at all or have nothing to say against it.
"You're wrong", "you're stupid", and "you're a paid communist/Chinese/whatever shill" are not valid arguments. As they say in elementary school: "How do you know?" and "Show your work."
Completely agree, people aren't downvoting some opinion they disagree with. They just don't like the facts they're being presented.
That goes both ways. I'm getting downvotes instead of replies for some quite substantive comments.
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Honest question...did USSR fail because communism is bad...or did a very influential, wealthy and powerful country go out of it's way to make sure the USSR failed and then say..."look, it didn't work for them!" Or did it fail because the USSR lost its way, or, just maybe if failed due to a combination of both.
Food for thought.
I think it's more than just "a [...] country", it was most of Europe as well as the USA!
And it might be a good time to mention things like United States involvement in regime change (Wikpedia). It's not an isolated issue, it's a strategy.
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Frankly, this is an absurd line of argument. Communists in Russia tried doing something that's never ever been done before, and they didn't get it perfect the first time around. Saying that we shouldn't keep trying seems a little odd to me.
USSR collapse doesn't say anything about validity of Marxism. Capitalist states collapse all the time, and states with every type of government known to man have collapsed over time.
What needs to be asked is whether USSR worked for the people who lived there when it was around, and how that compares to the alternatives. USSR did quite well in that regard by ensuring everyone had food, housing, education, healthcare, and work. Plenty of research on USSR shows that it did a good job ensuring that needs of the majority were met. Some details here for those interested.
Today, China is a state governed by the Communist party where Marxism-Leninism is the official state ideology. 87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the party has 95 million members. Chinese government practically eliminated poverty, and in fact China is the only place in a world where any meaningful poverty reduction is happening. If we take China out of the equation poverty actually increased in real terms:
China does massive investments in infrastructure. They used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century and built 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade. 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it's the most populous country on the planet. Chinese system also results in high social mobility unlike western capitalist alternatives.
Finally, plenty of people in the west admire Churchill who is responsible for genocide on a scale of the holocaust in India. So, not sure how people admiring Stalin is any different from that. US is also responsible for far greater atrocities than Stalin. The country is literally built on genocide with US settlers doing to the native population of North America precisely what Hitler aimed to do. In fact, nazis were directly inspired by US race laws, but even they found them to be too extreme initially:
Also, many b*lgians still admire leopold 2. him and churchill dont get the same weight as hitler cuz the majority of people that were tortured/enslaved/given disease/killed were not white.
Yup, and we're seeing this today as well in the way the west treats refugees from the Middle East compared to refugees from Ukraine, and how everyone in the west slept through the horrors NATO has been perpetrating around the globe but all of a sudden woke up when a country full of white people was invaded.
First of all. Do you know anything of Marxism, like, read any actual theory or something explained by Marxists beyond your liberal surroundings where a huge propagandistic war has been happening against anything that threats plutocracy since before WWII?
Do you know the history about how and why did the USSR was dismantled, by whom and how many people was against its dissolution?
Do you also are conscious that the USSR weren't the only socialist countries, and that we still have Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, China, etc?
Considering the events in Ukraine, were people are cheering Azov Batalion and the pre-/WWII figure of Bandera without any remorse nor shame... Do you really think that it's the case were Hitler is worse seen than Stalin?
And regarding Stalin. Don't you know about what Operation Mockingbird and Cointelpro is? And that the data of Stalin killing millions started directly with the hands of Goebbles?
This are just small tips. I don't want you to simply say something, but to you to practice honesty, without any fear, with your own critical thinking, for different markplaces so you can maybe understand why a group of "almost" history-fanatics are into an apparent "bad" ideology.
Also, there's the Lemmygrad forum of "communism101" if you want to aks directly, tho.
But I think that what I say is enough to start.
If you want, I can give you a link towards those alleged atrocities made by socialists.
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I was wondering why Marxism was still a thing
Capitalism is still a thing, and continues to hurt people. Marx had insightful critiques of Capitalism.
this placed seemed to be filled with Marxists. So, why?
The site was built by communists
Do today’s Marxists think that USSR did something wrong?
Most do, but some are insane and will defend literally anything in the name of communism.
I would really have to try hard to find a community that would admire Hitler but apparently admiring Stalin, another mass murder seems to be perfectly fine!
Yes, it is abhorrent, but in reality there are plenty of people who admire Hitler too. You might just not be familiar with those communities.
To answer your question broadly, Marxism is mainly a critique of capitalism, and Marx wrote very little about the specifics of how its replacement should function. So I don't think it is reasonable to blame the horrors of Stalin on Marxism. Marx was pro-democracy and pro-freedom, not pro-totalitarianism.
A more accurate term for what you are describing might be Marxism-Leninism, which was the ideology of the USSR. People abbreviate it to ML.
Stalin was imperfect and made mistakes, but I agree with Deng that he was 70% right and 30% wrong which is worlds better than any liberal democratic leaders in the entire history of the imperial core.
Very good question! It's important to understand that materialist analysis (although it's evolved over time since being formalized by Marx) is still very important for social struggles: marxian economy is what's being taught to economists for them to understand how to maximize "surplus value" (i.e. better exploit workers). There's also been serious analysis of non-reproductive work (house chores, conversational work, etc) from feminist circles.
Also, marxism is not a unified doctrine. Marxism-leninism, maoism and stalinism (among others) are authoritarian ideologies which don't accept dissent. But Marx himself had some anti-authoritarian critiques later in his life, and many people who identify as marxists don't side (especially not uncritically) with authoritarian regimes.
Didn’t the fall of USSR teach us anything? Do today’s Marxists think that USSR did something wrong?
hell yes. especially since the collapse of the USSR, anti-authoritarian marxism (libertarian communism) is on the rise, and except on niche internet forums like Lemmy it's hard to find Lenin/Stalin apologists in real-world struggles.
Don't hesitate if you have more detailed questions. I could also ask some marxist comrades for some good resources if you like.
"authoritarian" please. Can you read Engels "About authoritarianism"?
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Literally all major communist movements in the third world are marxist leninist and are positive about stalin
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Because we have yet to kill off the idea that
“my group is the best and perfect because I’m in it”
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