A co-operative ?

Communism is more about centralization, Anarchism is the one about decentralization as a rule.

And likewise, oligarchy calling itself communism smells just as rancid.

Sure bro lemme teach my aunt to make her insulin, her own needles, her own glucose test strips and all that cheers

How about both? I'm always down for access to education.

Something something darwin

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.

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.

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.

Its a Galbreth quote.

Hawaii will likely want independence.

That's when contempt turns to outright hatred I'd think.

Where can I find audiobooks you talked about? My app probably doesn't show your userpage right.

I am pretty familiar with Vaush's arguments on Marxist theory. What are your points of contention?

As far as I know, all the criticisms of Vaush watching child porn has been misinformation.

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.

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.

All 3, including audiobook links, are on my list in the parent comment for this thread! Great suggestions, too.

Or even better, reading books. With respect to a small minority, podcasts are not a great source to learn about anything.

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.

Find me an old person anywhere that isn't nostalgic for their youth.

Communism is just socialism-flavored fascism.

China has a Socialist Market Economy. Large firms and key sectors like steel and banking are nearly entirely under public control, while there are a large number of self-employed people. They actually have a falling number of billionaires in the last couple years.

As for worker conditions, Europe is Imperialist and many European countries act like landlords, and China is still a developing country, though rapidly developing.

What do they do in China, exactly? It looks like single-party fascist corporatism.

The funny thing about discussions about China's economy is that you can use pretty much any term to describe it as long as it's bad. If "socialist" or "communist" is understood to be a bad thing to those in the conversation, you can use those terms without objection, but you can also say stuff like "Feudalism" or "Fascist Corporatism" or "Colonialism" or "Capitalist" or "State Capitalist" or whatever tf else, it's all just vibes-based and the only requirement is that the vibes be bad.

China has a mixed economy with a combination of state ownership and private investment, with the state maintaining a controlling share in certain key industries, and preventing (at least so far) economic elites from infiltrating the government for the purpose of widespread regulatory capture and deregulation. Billionaires exist but sometimes face real consequences for illegal activity, and the balance between public and private ownership tips more heavily towards public when compared to other countries such as those in Europe.

The partial liberalization of the economy is meant to encourage economic development post-industrialization, and prevent the challenges the USSR faced with economic stagnation post-industrialization. Central planning works great if you're just trying to meet people's basic needs like food or shelter, but the demand for consumer goods is more fluid. This policy is also adapted to the global situation, China has benefitted greatly from industry moving there and by becoming a major trade partner of the US and other countries (while also holding the bulk of manufacturing output), that makes it difficult for outside forces to go to war or level sanctions/tariffs on them.

It is not a "communist" country in the sense of having achieved communism (in this sense, a "communist country" is an inherent contradiction). It could be called a communist/socialist country in the sense that it is governed by (self-identified) communists. Socialism, or I should specify Marxism and Marxism-Leninism, aren't a set of specific policies but rather a materialist and class-based mode of analysis to be applied and adapted differently depending on material conditions.

Some hardcore Maoists would argue that China's current system is a deviation from the correct socialist ideas, as espoused by Mao. However, there's also this odd branch of Westerners that don't like China's liberalized system because "it has billionaires," but also don't like what they had before under Mao when they didn't have billionaires, but also claim to dislike full-on capitalism - so as far as I can tell, they just dislike China regardless of what they do or don't do. I've yet to find any such person who's actually willing and capable to engage in a discussion of "what should they do/have done economically" as opposed to just bashing them. And in fact, when asked what kind of economic system they support, they'll often describe a mixed system similar to what China has, but then be like, "but not like that."

Trying to design a Utopia by fiat has historically failed, just look at the Owenites. The great advancement with Marx was studying societal development and mastering it, so that we can work it into our favor, not by designing systems in a lab that may have no bearing in reality.

Yo, how do you have lumberjack in the same tier as astronauts ? One goes to space, and other is a guy in flannel swinging ax in the woods lol

Varies dramatically depending on where you live, because China is an extremely rapidly developing country that was as poor as Haiti is today 100 years ago. Quality of life overall is good, and rising rapidly.

I know this doesn't say actual statistics and stats, but watching videos that actually show China can help de-mystify it.

Why not? It's rapidly overtaking everyone else, and has made massive strides for workers. What would you call it?

The developers are Communists, and a lot of us are here instead of Reddit due to issues with the Capitalist nature of Reddit. There are some Lemmy instances that are more anticommunist, but there are also a good amount of Communist-aligned instances as well.

Neither is accurate. Stalin tried to resign several times, in fact, but was rejected, and Marx wasn't a Utopian, but in favor of Scientific Socialism. Now, that doesn't mean Stalin was a saint or that Marx didn't have a beautiful vision for the future, but it does mean you should read up a bit more before making judgement calls. I have an introductory reading list for Marxism-Leninism you can check out for that, if you're interested.

Yeah, and it's failing miserably

My comment was a mirror of another user which got removed. And so it doesn't make sense now. Thanks to the great modding team here. He didn't say anything harmful, why censor it??????????

I mirrored your comment, because I think it works backwards. From the way it sounds to me, you started with your conclusion/opinion and searched for proof of why it is right. Real socialism and the Soviet unions were deeply, deeply flawed systems from the start, but only because some implementations failed, due to essentially the same problems as capitalism, does not mean the idea as a whole is rubbish. If you read the communist manifesto and "the capital" from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, you will read a brilliant critique of our modern contemporary system. There are some very fine ideas in there, and I think it's dangerous to discard another perspective because some implementations have failed. The USA are the living proof of how two radically different systems can suffer from the same problems and collapse because of them. Why is it such a culture war against some genuinely very fine points that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels have made over a hundred years ago, which are relevant to this day?

Edit: typo. I apologise for forgetting about Friedrich Engels.

America had a mostly centrally planned economy during WWII, you couldn't even get more rations without giving your previous packaging back to be recycled.

this is part of why america became so wealthy, along with imperialism.

Competition does the exact opposite of centralization. That’s why I can buy most goods from completely different vendors that differ in price and quality.

Competitions have winners, and in this case it means the competition goes out of business and dies, leaving you with a near monopoly or outright monopoly.

That power then gets used to

• lobby (bribe) the government to raise barriers to entry to prevent new competitors
• buy out new competitors
• intentionally price everything lower than competitors, at a loss, to kill competitors in a war of attrition that they can't possibly outlast

And that's even assuming there's any competition at all, which often isn't the case with certain things like healthcare, internet, electricity, etc.

The USSR, PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, etc are more democratic than theie previous systems.

Communism still works, just because the Soviet Union isn't here doesn't mean everything is a failure.

Competition forces centralization and monopolies over time due to increasinly complex production practices that raise the barrier to entry. It's unavoidable.

Pol Pot denounced Marxism and focused on an odd agrarian system, and was backed by the CIA.

Tribal societies existed without classes or trade, they largely pooled together resources.

Im sure they love making iphones until they jump off a roof

By debunked you mean the leader accused of genocide denied it and then denied journalists and observers access! Your propaganda is too stupid to believe.

The tibetens were beaten into submission and shown that they will be disapeared for even suggesting that god-king Xi might be wrong.

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 wait

Lol I meant to reply to the main thread, but you could pretend im being sarcastic and it kinda works

The reforms didn't just allow for "political dissent," they worked against the Socialist system, that was based on central planning. Rather than running in a more efficient manner, it ran against itself.

Further, nobody says the Soviet Union was a "worker's paradise." It had tremendous strides for workers, but it wasn't perfect by any means.

The Soviet Union wasn't a dictatorship. Read Soviet Democracy. It lasted as long as it did because it had tremendous GDP growth while lowering wealth disparity, free and high quality education and healthcare, doubled health expectancies, full employment, and over tripled literacy rates to 99.9%.

Read Blackshirts and Reds.

The US played a part, I outright stated that it was a complicated situation made more complicated by having the world's largest Empire, the US, permanently hostile and putting nukes on their doorstep.

Redditsucks88 said communism has never been successful so I pointed out 2 times it was successful

They are adhering to Marxism, I am curious why you say they aren't, and if you are getting that from Marx, or second-hand interpretations of Marx. I don't want to get into the rest of your comment until we get past the part where you think there's such thing as a "true communism" that, say, the PRC is not genuinely working towards.

So no, you haven't.

Wow, I wonder what went on there…

Uyghurs aren't being systematically murdered at scale. There are reeducation camps, but to call it "genocide" isn't accurate. You should read the UN report.

As for the idea of an "intentional famine," this is disputed at best. In reality, there was a famine in the 1930s that didn't have any racial motivations. Nobody denies the famine's existence.

So no, I'm not doing genocide denial, and I'm correct, you want to appear morally righteous regardless of the real facts.

Almost as if every person is capable of shitting their pants, and I will baselessly assume, does so regularly like me. As always, there are differences in degrees and causes. Outside of capitalism, famine actually correlates to not having food to feed people, rather than markets saying that food has to be wasted while people starve because it is not profitable to feed them (e.g. the Dust Bowl and Great Depression for American examples). Also ignoring how it was intentional in colonial powers.

Yeah, as someone with Lakota, Irish, Bengali, Kurdish, and Iraqi friends and opiate and meth addicted family, I am not sure whether to laugh or cry at children of your kind. I am sure the 1990s and the introduction of capitalism was a great and prosperous time.

The 1930s famine was the last major famine out of wartime in the Soviet Union, same with the Great Chinese Famine, in countries where famine was common and regular before. Life expectancy doubled under Socialism in both the USSR and PRC as a consequence in the first few decades.

Socialism is a Mode of Production determined by having public property as primary. In China, large firms and key industries are firmly under public ownership and control, and they actually have a falling number of billionaires in the last couple years.

I'm a Communist, so as a Marxist I reject Utopianism, as that has never worked. You cannot make a system through fiat.

Very frequently, but it is exactly just as likely it would have moved on to Socialism and eventually Communism, or retained feudalism, it all depends on when in development.

Far less often than we end up with communalist hunter gatherers and early agrarian communes and evidently for a much shorter time. Does that mean feudalism can never work? Capitalism is never at any point of productive development possible?

Edit: deleted a section that assumed you were the same guy who said communism was against human nature. Apologies.

So many it would be hard to count, at least 4 or 5. But numbers don't really go much higher than that. Any caveman could tell you that.

this rather shows the untestability of the hypothesis. this is no test at all.

im sorry Carl Marcos is too advanced.

they keep saying 'In one word; ' and then writing a whole paragraph. and why do they keep making economics all political?

The comment your replying to (or meant to) has to be being purposely dense. There is obviously a difference between being a communist, having a communist party take power, and "achieving" communism. No one with a brain would think the OOP was talking about the last use of the word in that sentence.

It's a common "dumb guy that thinks they're being smart" take because they haven't actually ever read a book in their life. They just read the definition of communism once.

I hope this comes across as a genuine question, despite the thread itself getting a little jacked up. Like many of us, I'd like to find better systems of governance / better solutions to the problem of needed / beneficial coordination.

How does a communist society as you've described defend itself against opportunistic, hierarchical forces that would subsume and control it? What is the (de-coordinated? If you'll accept my term?) answer to such a problem, pragmatically?

To be clear, primitive Communism and Marxian Communism are just about polar opposites, one is the smallest unit of society and the other the largest and most vast, one full decentralization the other full centralization.

It's pretty clear that you haven't read Marx, and think Communism means "immediately implement a far-future, highly developed society devoid of any remaining class antagonisms" through fiat, by pushing a button, but this would make Marx howl with laughter.

A Socialist system is one where public ownership of property is primary in society, and in all of those societies this is true. Having money, wages, even classes is indeed contradictory to late-stage Communism, but they never claimed to be. Socialism is the long, drawn-out process of erasing those contradictions, which cannot be waved away but must be erased through building up the productive forces and erasing their foundations, and the method of doing as such is to hold all large industry in the control of the public, and increase this control over areas that develop into large industry.

I recommend checking out my Marxist-Leninist reading list, at least the first couple of sections, before trying to take an authoritative stance on Marxism.

No, it's called a ration stamp