Cuba. Cuba has the most educated population in North America, more doctors per capita then almost any other nation. The only reason they’re struggling is because America’s embargo. They want stuff too.
There is a Brazilian right-winger moron that said this golden statement: “there is only three things that works in Cuba: Security, Education and Healthcare”.
Mostly this, although Vietnam is doing quite well, especially considering their circumstances.
Cuba is also really interesting…not thriving, to be sure, but you have to end the US blockade before you blame them for their own hardships. And in spite of everything, they have democracy like we’ve never seen in the west.
The US dropped more napalm, and bombs, and agent orange on vietnam (a comparatively small country) than it did during all of WW2. Lots of its people are still suffering from this atrocity.
Sadly true. And most people aren’t aware that they did pretty much the same thing to Laos, who they weren’t even at war with. They just carpet bombed the whole country, “just in case.”
Fuck the USA. They’re literally the evil empire from star wars.
It’s so funny that george lucas was like: “the rebels are the vietnamese communists, and the empire is the USA (its soldiers the storm troopers)” and somehow a lot of modern star wars fans are extremely pro-US, and never connect the dots.
IMO the biggest critique of star wars, its that lucas didn’t focus at all on the lives of the stormtruppen, and force its audience in the imperial core to look in the mirror, at their values, their chauvinist culture, their pro-war ideology and news media.
Still gotta keep blaming the rebels for all the world’s problems.
That’s true, the storm troopers and stuff are basically presented as automatons. I guess some audiences like not having to think, but it would have been much more impactful to show them as people with their own beliefs and motivations and stuff.
There’s a lot of short stories about that in various books, though they tend to overuse both the tropes of banality of evil and the cackling evil maniacs.
Oh interesting, I’ve never really delved past the movies.
They did also choose to humanize a storm trooper with Finn in the new films, but I don’t remember him going through any “deprogramming” or anything, he just kinda realizes he’s a nice guy one day.
It would have been much more interesting to see him struggle with his changing worldview.
Yeah but all forms of government are constantly attacked. You’re like a multicellular organism crying foul because bacteria and other pathogens are trying to invade it.
One of the reasons capitalism wins is it produces enough wealth to win wars. Consistently. The same wealth that leads to ever-lower levels of poverty also wins wars.
WWI was an inter-imperialist war. WWII was two wars: on the Western front it was an inter-imperialist war and on the Eastern front it was largely a war to crush socialism. Most of the wars since then have been imperialist wars of aggression against imperialized states, many of them by the United States, the global imperialist hegemon that has over 750 overseas military bases.
The same wealth that leads to ever-lower levels of poverty
Our current attempt at democracy—the methods we’re using to elect our leaders—are fundamentally irrational.
They are rational, and they work as intended, it’s just that they’re not popular democracies, they’re bourgeois democracies, designed by & for the capitalist class and against the working class. They’re not meant to represent us.
Take the US, which has has been ruled by the bourgeoisie since the 1776 bourgeois revolution. The wealthy, white, male land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers intentionally constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority.” It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (who aren’t disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
Veritasium is legit, they cite their sources and explain concepts exceptionally well.
However, I don’t think the conclusion of the video is “Democracy is mathematically impossible”, but rather “perfect representation in a democracy” is mathematically impossible (but can still be much much better than FPTP).
The video basically goes through all the top voting systems and explains their pros and cons and the history of the mathematicians who invented the systems.
but rather “perfect representation in a democracy” is mathematically impossible (but can still be much much better than FPTP).
It’s not even that. The more accurate title would be “Ranked voting types cannot mathematically meet all of the requirements of democracy this one guy made”
The whole video I wanted to yell out “so switch to approval voting”.
The dude makes some pretty legit videos. He has a PhD in physics education research. Using YouTube is just a sign of the time we live in. Imagine if your professor quit their job to become a YouTuber because they thought it’d be a more effective medium for education than a whiteboard.
Mathematics is, in a sense, about abstraction and generalization, and the video covers an ideal, or set of axioms, you’d want from a voting system. This perfect system was proven to be impossible and the researcher was granted the Nobel prize in economics. In short, there can be no perfect voting system, and we must accept a compromise (much like an engineer). You can also say mathematics is about proofs, and, no matter how unintuitive something might seem, it leaves no room for doubt. It doesn’t hardly matter if the source comes from a YouTube video.
Edit: I don’t agree with the context the video was posted, but I was bothered by this response to it.
Might be worth reading up on history to put some facts behind those feelings. Either you’ll find out you’re right or you’ll update your beliefs to be more correct.
Democratically instituted communisim? For all the uppity yall get when someone suggests democratic socialist policies, you sure can’t seem to find the line you blurred.
My country was on the path of the democratically instituted socialism thing. Well, it tried but the United States instigated, funded and armed a military coup and the military dictatorship that followed.
Guess it’s better to have torture camps than gobbunism
Here you go, and before you say China is not really communist. That’s true that China is in a socialist stage of development led by the Communist party. However, it’s very clear that it is developing very differently from capitalist countries.
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.
Furthermore, people in China see their country working in their interest and hence view it as being far more democratic than people do living under the dictatorship of capital
Meanwhile, if you want a historical example then look no further than USSR.
Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960’s, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67 and the average (not median) retiree household in the USA could expect $48k/yr which comes out to 65% of the 74k average (not median) household income in 2016:
The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US:
Adult mortality increased enormously in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union when the Soviet system collapsed 30 years ago. https://archive.ph/9Z12u
Figure 1 shows that China had very low inequality levels in the late 1970s, but it is now approaching the US, where income concentration remains the highest among the countries shown
I live in Canada, my family moved here back when I was still in school. I’d like to move to China one day, but it’s unlikely that I’d be able to do that in the foreseeable future. My parents are old and I’m not just going to abandon them to move half way across the world. That’s the main thing holding me back. In general, it’s not easy to just uproot your whole life and move to a different country to start anew. For example, I find even the language to be a challenge, I’ve been learning Mandarin for the past two years and I’m still not fluent in it. Getting a job in my field without knowing a language would be unlikely.
Very interesting thank you for sharing, so I gather that if you could make it work you would but it isn’t in the cards right now. I wonder how hard it would be to immigrate there.
It depends a lot on whether you can get a job. If you can, then you can get a work visa and you’re fine. A friend of mine lived in China for a decade, and he liked it. We both work in IT, there are a lot of jobs in that area, but also pretty competitive. From what I’ve read, China’s been recently relaxing immigration laws as well and they’re looking at creating a program similar to the green card in US. https://www.semafor.com/article/07/23/2024/china-is-considering-a-green-card-scheme-to-attract-more-foreign-scientists
It’s hard for me to look at % increases or “X out of poverty” or “This person makes 1+ what they did before!”. I get fed the same stuff about how great America is doing because of our “numbers”. Without being there it’s hard to grasp if what you’re saying is anything better, worse, or just par for the course of a developing nation with such a high output with manufacturing.
Seeing this statement and reading the link, they have absolutely nothing to do with each other and you make it seem like it’s a “quote” from the article (I’m guessing it’s from the 93 page research paper I’m reading through). They would’ve just been better off publishing whatever data they talked about researchers definitely having, the whole thing read like an Elon Musk press conference…
“To sustain poverty reduction gains, China will focus more on achieving endogenous development in areas that have been lifted out of poverty and introduce vigorous measures to support rural revitalization. Our goal is to achieve common prosperity and high-quality development including through the rural revitalization strategy with a focus in five key areas: industry development, human capital, culture, ecological environment and local governance.”
It’s interesting and kinda disconcerting reading through the policies and how no real figures are presented for what the policy should be, such as the “common prosperity” they hope to achieve be 2030 (link page 15)
China has set a new goal of achieving significant progress toward common prosperity by 2035.1 While no particular income target or poverty threshold is attached to this goal, it can help keep the policy focus on the vulnerable population over the coming decade.
It makes me wonder if setting an elusive “goal” of a policy is better to get members on board and then slap them with the real numbers after they have already signed on and can’t openly complain about (bad for corrupt sectors of government though). There’s also just not enough information as stated in the paper to actually understand what is going on,
Finally, this review of China’s poverty reduction experience leaves a number of questions open for further research…
the interplay between poverty reduction and growth deserves further analysis to understand the extent that poverty reduction measures may, in turn, help less-developed areas grow faster
a deeper analysis of China’s use of policy experimentation at the local level combined with high-powered performance incentives may contribute to our understanding of models of decentralization and public service delivery
an evaluation of China’s targeted poverty alleviation experience in recent years would benefit from further analysis of individual policy interventions and their interactions to better understand not just the effectiveness but also the efficiency and sustainability of the program.
An analysis of the costs and benefits of policy intervention would also be warranted in a broader sense, helping to systematically account (suan da zhang in the Chinese term) for factors such as the impact of infrastructure investments on poverty reduction or the merits of the hukou system and man- aged urbanization policies. In all these areas, active exchanges between researchers within and outside of China, and between academics and policy makers, should be encouraged, and the data needed for high-quality empirical work should be made more widely available. These actions will help ensure that China’s poverty reduction achievements get the attention and understanding that they deserve.
Just now seeing and trying to wrap my head around the Hukou system. I’m not here arguing good/bad communism, I just like the information and think that many forms of government can work out with protections in place (regulations, corruption detection, etc). I just wanted to point out your article mention and link didn’t really fit together with how you presented it. I did enjoy the reading and will continue today, but I take it all with a grain of salt. I don’t really 100% trust any source these days, which in this technological era should really be the default for everyone. Definitely let it sink in and contemplate the realities of others, but you only have your own reality to work within for any type of effective action.
oh wow, ok. Thought you posted links for actual discussion and would’ve been interested in someone reading through wanting to talk about it lol. This just a copy/paste warrior kinda thing you’re doing? Weird way to try to insult back after everything you posted, thanks for letting me know not to continue the conversation!
It’s pretty clear you’re not interested in any actual discussion given that you just dismiss everything by saying you don’t trust anything. You never explain the reason for this distrust or provide any sources that contradict anything said there. I’m pretty sure that no matter how much evidence you’re provided with, you’ll just keep moving goal posts and repeating how you don’t trust the sources. It’s not very original.
There was a reality TV show about communes and stuff. Granted it’s reality TV but aside from the bad ones media doesn’t cover them very much. Long story short, it really didn’t do a good job of saying communism-good.
I think the best examples might be like Cuba having universal health care or something but ny experience was with a michael moore doc so it’s kinda sketch to begin.
Communes have almost nothing to do with communism. When you are living in a capitalist world and beholden to a capitalist economy, you are not suddenly experiencing communism just because you live on a collective farm. A commune is not “doing communism,” not because they are doing something wrong or anything, but because it simply doesn’t work like that. In a simple definition of communism, the workers own the means of production. The people living on a commune within capitalism still do not own the means of production, they still exist almost entirely at the whims of the broader capitalist economic structure.
Also, it’s just ridiculous to expect a tiny microcosm of any system to represent how sound that system is if it were to be scaled up. Especially when that microcosm is inside of another structure that will actively stamp it out of existence if it threatens to grow. Trying to build a commune within a capitalist country is like trying to build a town at the bottom of the ocean. Everything beyond the limits of your project is hostile to its existence simply as a matter of the surrounding natural forces. But just because it’s extremely hard to build a town at the bottom of the ocean, and when it was tried it ended in failure, doesn’t mean that towns in general are destined to fail. In an appropriate environment they can and do thrive.
But it’s a natural state of existence to exist within a broader, hostile context.
No it’s not. A commune within a communist society would not at all exist within a hostile context but in one that nurtures it. Likewise a billionaire’s corporation like Bezos’ amazon dot com does not exist in a naturally hostile context under capitalism, it exists in a context that literally would not allow it to fail, propping it up at all costs. The banks that should have gone under and been utterly annihilated in 2008 were instead propped up and rewarded for their complete failure and sheer incompetence to the extent that mass amounts of wealth were siphoned away from working class to keep them afloat.
Civilization, at all levels, has always been that. Competition is everywhere.
Civilization at all levels has always required profound amounts of cooperation to come into being, to continue to exist, and to thrive. Civilization exists only because of cooperation, not because of competition. Competition has always existed too, but has been more of a hindrance than a benefit to civilization and certainly not a requirement like cooperation is. The cult-like worship of competition is something that the capitalists have fostered and spread for the obvious reason that widespread belief in this lie is beneficial to them. I would urge you not to fall for a very obvious and simple-minded ploy.
If a system requires nothing else to be competing with it, in order to work, then it’s not viable.
It seems that all you’ve ever been exposed to in your life is the propaganda of the capitalist class, and that’s exactly how they want it and why they spend billions in propaganda every year to achieve it. It’s why the US has red scare purges and why congress still votes on nonsense like this.
This is so fractally confused. When “people” do it, that becomes a new government.
Without a government to enforce public ownership of the means of production, there can’t be communism,
just as without a government enforcing private ownership of the means of production, there can’t be capitalism.
To be fair publisherploitation(AKA copyright) in general is enforced by goverment.
It’s when the government starts doing it that it bothers me.
What is difference between paying membership fee in non-profit and paying taxes? What if difference between voting on members meeting and on referendum? What is difference between board elections and goverment elections? What is difference between paying members to not starve to death while achieving goal of non-profit and funding healthcare for citizens to not die while living?
Large-scale, actual communism with no authoritarianism? Not that I’m aware of. It’s hard to implement true communism effectively on a large scale because most people have to care enough about others to willingly contribute for it to work.
Authoritarianism is a meaningless term that people with lack of capacity for rational thought regurgitate. Every single government holds authority by virtue of having the monopoly on legal violence. The only question is whose interest the authority is exercised in.
Authoritarianism is the opposite of libertarianism, roughly speaking. It’s a sliding scale, but those would be the two opposites in play.
For example, a more authoritarian approach to road safety would be: “Manufacturers are not allowed to make cars that go over 50 mph”
A more libertarian approach to road safety would be: “We’re publishing the average fatality rate of this road. You can choose to engage with it as you deem appropriate”
Our actual approach with licenses and speed limits and some regulations on car safety and soft but escalating consequences for breaking the road rules is somewhere in between.
Also they have to not want to trade. If someone starts trading, then the communism is over.
Trading is not capitalism.
Markets are not capitalism.
Money is not capitalism.
Those things have existed for millenia before capitalism came to exist, around 600 years ago, eventually, over the span of several hundred years, replacing previous socio-politico-economic systems, feudalism in particular.
Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.
Notice that both definitionally concern who owns the means of production.
Communism is a mode of production characterized by common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes. The term is also used to refer to the movement whose ultimate goal is the establishment of this mode of production.
Communism is a movement toward socialism, with the ultimate goal of the erasing social class hierarchies.
Edit to add: I think I see what you meant now. Yes, you could also say “socialism is a movement toward communism,” in the sense that socialism is a step in the path to communism.
I don’t think so. Communism can’t be reached in one fell swoop. The reason why communist states didn’t and don’t have communism in their names is because—by their own admission—they aren’t yet communist, they’re socialist.
First comes a transformation from a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to a dictatorship of the proletariat, where the working class has control of the state and the means of production. In other words, socialism. The end-goal of communism is to be rid of classes altogether, but it’s not possible jump straight to it. You can’t go to bed one day under capitalism and magically wake up the next under communism.
Marxists define the state as a system by which the ruling class maintains its dominance other classes. So when we talk about the end-goal of a “classless, stateless society,” we mean that classlessness definitionally also means statelessness.
Which is why it’s a utopian movement. They do their best to enslave your thoughts and control your actions, and when that fails (and it always does) they slaughter anyone and everyone that won’t play along.
No person is perfect, so when you demand perfection, you’re going to have to get rid of anyone but those who are perfect at playing perfect.
Seriously, please answer those of us asking what you’re talking about. I am asking in good faith, what blog? The people you are talking to are as far from alt-right as it is possible to get and probably advocate for the elimination of alt-right ideology in a much more definitive way than you do (assuming you are a liberal).
No, with social pressure and fear. Lots of people with shut the fuck up if they think speaking out will get them shunned or fired. A hell of a lot more people will shut the fuck up if they think speaking out will get them killed.
Oh, you mean like how in the US, famously even, it was literally made illegal to be a communist and you were blacklisted by every institution for having even attended a meeting, while known communist revolutionaries were assassinated at every opportunity, some even openly murdered in their beds by cops? Yes, it is disgusting how capitalism mercilessly crushes those who seek human liberation and how in a sick capitalist society it is taboo to even identify as someone who seeks the well-being of all.
Regardless of what Marx and Lenin declared about their stance with regard to utopianism, communism is utopian in the sense that it doesn’t exist, and can only exist in a world that is fundamentally different than this one.
While it accomplishes lot of basics right, like housing, food and education generally, further it goes, it starts carving into personal freedom and makes everything worse.
Can you explain what you mean by this, and why you believe it despite direct evidence to the contrary, such as in Cuba?
Well, I’ll give you that, I was expecting you to come up with a reason why my source was wrong, not to just ignore it and say “nah”. Thanks for making this shorter.
Just because it is (and always was) a complete lie that capitalism would lead to prosperity for working people, that doesn’t mean that capitalists aren’t doing capitalism. Capitalism hasn’t been corrupted from some ideal system into something else, this is what capitalism is and it’s been known as such for over a century and a half.
Since the beginning but not because that’s what capitalism is, it’s because the mercantilist lords wanted a rebrand when peasants started killing them
If a country decided to switch to communism, that elite rebrand would still happen. Animal Farm paints this, China having more inequality than Japan or South Korea also paints this it’s what allows people to say true capitalism has never been tested and the elite can exploit that to increase inequality
Since the beginning but not because that’s what capitalism is, it’s because the mercantilist lords wanted a rebrand when peasants started killing them
That’s not what happened. It was the burghers themselves who revolted against the feudal lords. The peasants didn’t revolt against the burghers: some were uninvolved and I assume some aided the burghers against the feudal lords who owned the land they tilled. These were bourgeois revolutions.
And capitalism is not a mere “rebranding,” it is a very different socio-politico-economic system from feudalism, though yes, it is still one based on class hierarchy. The ultimate goal of communism is to eliminate hierarchies: a classless society.
China having more inequality than Japan or South Korea also paints this
If a country decided to switch to communism, that elite rebrand would still happen.
Do you see CPC members boating around the world on megayachts? The “elite” in China—if you want to call the democratically elected representatives “elite”—are not fabulously wealthy, despite the fact that, if they wanted to, they could literally print as many Yuan as they pleased and pocket it. The billionaires are capitalists, in the constrained amount of capitalism the Chinese state currently allows.
USSR Angola Cuba China DPRK Ethiopia Mongolia Vietnam GDR. I cant understand how people can look at a country that dramatically improved its peoples standard of living brought democracy and freedom, and not see it as a good thing.
The war sure explains why they have a reason to be antagonist towards South Korea and USA – in a similar way as WW2 explains why Finland is very wary of Russia still in 2000s.
But it doesn’t explain why they insist on keeping their system in the same horrible broken state. Germany and Japan were ravaged by a war and they didn’t go permanently crazy at state level.
The DPRK is by no means perfect, but it’s also not some hermit kingdom where the peasants push trains to make them move.
If you have 20 minutes, I recommend you watch We Went to North Korea to Get a Haircut, it’s humanizing and helps dispel a lot of modern myths about the DPRK. Again, it’s by no means perfect, but the West has absolutely mythologized its existence to lunacy.
Some school districts in Japan already do this to kids tbh. There was a kerfuffle a while back and some schools dropped some limitations after lawsuits. Like if your kid has naturally curly or blonde hair you’d need to prove it. (Haven’t gone deep on fact checking, take it with a grain of salt)
I’d say it’s not unreasonable that if you have a manufactured preconceived (racist) notion about a place that you would believe it.
South Korea and RoC actually did the mandatory haircuts on occasions (though in case of RoC it was justified and was more like one particular haircut was forbidden). It’s always projection.
whats wrong with the DPRK? I have family that has been there and they thought it was a fine place certainly doing a lot better than the median capitalist country.
Its a current enemy for not being destroyed (like the US tried to do), so a bunch of western-supremacist-brained people believe literally anything negative said about it, as it confirms their racist biases.
having a market does not make a country capitalist. And yeah there is corruption as there is in every 3rd world country (and most 1st world countries just in different less noticeable ways), they are certainly doing more about it than most capitalist countries, and all indicators of standard of living are far better than is the vast majority of capitalist countries so i wouldnt call it a shit show, i mean its hard to recover from having just about every fucking building in ur country destroyed and ur forests and farms poisoned and millions murdered and even more displaced only 50 years ago especially when the country that did all that continues to actively try to fuck u over. They are doing well great even.
The example was colonialist. It has only existed in a colonialist form. You were tasked with providing an example of Socialism working, which by extension implies you believe colonialism to be compatible with Socialism. This is nonsense.
Any
currentreal-life examples of “communism good”?It’s been democratically instituted many times. And every time America marches in and “liberates” them.
It’s difficult to provide good examples when they’re all actively destroyed.
Cuba. Cuba has the most educated population in North America, more doctors per capita then almost any other nation. The only reason they’re struggling is because America’s embargo. They want stuff too.
Yellow Parenti on the power of literacy, in Cuba where he visited specifically.
There is a Brazilian right-winger moron that said this golden statement: “there is only three things that works in Cuba: Security, Education and Healthcare”.
For him that’s a bad thing btw.
Mostly this, although Vietnam is doing quite well, especially considering their circumstances.
Cuba is also really interesting…not thriving, to be sure, but you have to end the US blockade before you blame them for their own hardships. And in spite of everything, they have democracy like we’ve never seen in the west.
Edit: also what beejboytyson said about Cuba.
The US dropped more napalm, and bombs, and agent orange on vietnam (a comparatively small country) than it did during all of WW2. Lots of its people are still suffering from this atrocity.
Sadly true. And most people aren’t aware that they did pretty much the same thing to Laos, who they weren’t even at war with. They just carpet bombed the whole country, “just in case.”
Fuck the USA. They’re literally the evil empire from star wars.
It’s so funny that george lucas was like: “the rebels are the vietnamese communists, and the empire is the USA (its soldiers the storm troopers)” and somehow a lot of modern star wars fans are extremely pro-US, and never connect the dots.
IMO the biggest critique of star wars, its that lucas didn’t focus at all on the lives of the stormtruppen, and force its audience in the imperial core to look in the mirror, at their values, their chauvinist culture, their pro-war ideology and news media.
Still gotta keep blaming the rebels for all the world’s problems.
That’s true, the storm troopers and stuff are basically presented as automatons. I guess some audiences like not having to think, but it would have been much more impactful to show them as people with their own beliefs and motivations and stuff.
There’s a lot of short stories about that in various books, though they tend to overuse both the tropes of banality of evil and the cackling evil maniacs.
Oh interesting, I’ve never really delved past the movies.
They did also choose to humanize a storm trooper with Finn in the new films, but I don’t remember him going through any “deprogramming” or anything, he just kinda realizes he’s a nice guy one day.
It would have been much more interesting to see him struggle with his changing worldview.
Fuck Kissinger.
May he have pineapples shoved up his arse in hell, right next to old hitler.
Yeah but all forms of government are constantly attacked. You’re like a multicellular organism crying foul because bacteria and other pathogens are trying to invade it.
One of the reasons capitalism wins is it produces enough wealth to win wars. Consistently. The same wealth that leads to ever-lower levels of poverty also wins wars.
Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism causes wars.
WWI was an inter-imperialist war. WWII was two wars: on the Western front it was an inter-imperialist war and on the Eastern front it was largely a war to crush socialism. Most of the wars since then have been imperialist wars of aggression against imperialized states, many of them by the United States, the global imperialist hegemon that has over 750 overseas military bases.
Where have you been during the last 40 years of neoliberalism and neocolonialism?
And explain this: United Nations, 2019: Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding
I have bad news for you about the rate of poverty…
Democracy is mathematically impossible
They are rational, and they work as intended, it’s just that they’re not popular democracies, they’re bourgeois democracies, designed by & for the capitalist class and against the working class. They’re not meant to represent us.
Take the US, which has has been ruled by the bourgeoisie since the 1776 bourgeois revolution. The wealthy, white, male land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers intentionally constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority.” It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (who aren’t disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
Ah yes my favorite authoritative source on the mathematics of democracy: a YouTube video.
Fuck off
Veritasium is legit, they cite their sources and explain concepts exceptionally well.
However, I don’t think the conclusion of the video is “Democracy is mathematically impossible”, but rather “perfect representation in a democracy” is mathematically impossible (but can still be much much better than FPTP).
The video basically goes through all the top voting systems and explains their pros and cons and the history of the mathematicians who invented the systems.
It’s not even that. The more accurate title would be “Ranked voting types cannot mathematically meet all of the requirements of democracy this one guy made”
The whole video I wanted to yell out “so switch to approval voting”.
The dude makes some pretty legit videos. He has a PhD in physics education research. Using YouTube is just a sign of the time we live in. Imagine if your professor quit their job to become a YouTuber because they thought it’d be a more effective medium for education than a whiteboard.
Mathematics is, in a sense, about abstraction and generalization, and the video covers an ideal, or set of axioms, you’d want from a voting system. This perfect system was proven to be impossible and the researcher was granted the Nobel prize in economics. In short, there can be no perfect voting system, and we must accept a compromise (much like an engineer). You can also say mathematics is about proofs, and, no matter how unintuitive something might seem, it leaves no room for doubt. It doesn’t hardly matter if the source comes from a YouTube video.
Edit: I don’t agree with the context the video was posted, but I was bothered by this response to it.
The title of that video is wildly misleading click bait. We should just switch to approval voting and be done with it.
You could’ve just typed “No”.
All the other things you’ve typed is nonsense anyways.
How so?
In the “I disagree but can’t articulate a cogent reason for it” sense of the word “nonsense”, of course. 🙄
Might be worth reading up on history to put some facts behind those feelings. Either you’ll find out you’re right or you’ll update your beliefs to be more correct.
Democratically instituted communisim? For all the uppity yall get when someone suggests democratic socialist policies, you sure can’t seem to find the line you blurred.
My country was on the path of the democratically instituted socialism thing. Well, it tried but the United States instigated, funded and armed a military coup and the military dictatorship that followed.
Guess it’s better to have torture camps than gobbunism
Democratic Socialism is alive and well in many countries without any U.S. intervention. You must be referring to the fascist kind.
Ah, yes, the United States famously only interferes in fascist countries and not for benefit of plutocrats.
Also, which demsoc countries are you talking about where the means of production are controlled by the working class?
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What is “Democratic Socialism” in your eyes?
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Here you go, and before you say China is not really communist. That’s true that China is in a socialist stage of development led by the Communist party. However, it’s very clear that it is developing very differently from capitalist countries.
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&locations=CN&start=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
Then there are the massive poverty alleviation programs in China that have no comparison in the US https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
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. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/07/5-myths-about-global-poverty
China also massively invests in infrastructure. They used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2014/12/05/china-used-more-concrete-in-3-years-than-the-u-s-used-in-the-entire-20th-century-infographic/
China also built 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade https://www.railjournal.com/passenger/high-speed/ten-years-27000km-china-celebrates-a-decade-of-high-speed/
Such massive infrastructure projects directly improve the standard of living for the people of the country.
Social mobility happens to be really high as well https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html
Furthermore, people in China see their country working in their interest and hence view it as being far more democratic than people do living under the dictatorship of capital
Meanwhile, if you want a historical example then look no further than USSR.
Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:
USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%:
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960’s, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
USSR moved from 58.5-hour work weeks to 41.6 hour work weeks (-0.36 h/yr) between 1913 and 1960:
USSR averaged 22 days of paid leave in 1986 while USA averaged 7.6 in 1996:
In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67 and the average (not median) retiree household in the USA could expect $48k/yr which comes out to 65% of the 74k average (not median) household income in 2016:
GDP took off after socialism was established and then collapsed with the reintroduction of capitalism:
The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0735675784900482 (sci-hub for access)
USSR defeated a smallpox epidemic in a matter of 19 days https://www.rbth.com/history/331857-how-ussr-defeated-black-smallpox
The Social Consequences of Soviet Immunization Policies https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1997-812-03g-Hoch.pdf
So, how do people who lived under communism feel now that they got a taste of capitalism?
Adult mortality increased enormously in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union when the Soviet system collapsed 30 years ago. https://archive.ph/9Z12u
Former Soviet Countries See More Harm From Breakup https://news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx
The Free market paradise goes East chapters in Blackshirts and Reds details some more results of the transition to capitalism.
*crickets*, as usual.
tried actually having a conversation with the person, they’re just unresponsive to actual discussion.
From your first source
sure, and that’s happening while the standard of living for the poor people continues to rise dramatically with each and every year
Do you live in china?
sadly no
May I ask why not? And if I’m not being too intrusive I’d be interested to know which country you do live in (I’m in the us)
Also really weird I never got a notification from your reply
I live in Canada, my family moved here back when I was still in school. I’d like to move to China one day, but it’s unlikely that I’d be able to do that in the foreseeable future. My parents are old and I’m not just going to abandon them to move half way across the world. That’s the main thing holding me back. In general, it’s not easy to just uproot your whole life and move to a different country to start anew. For example, I find even the language to be a challenge, I’ve been learning Mandarin for the past two years and I’m still not fluent in it. Getting a job in my field without knowing a language would be unlikely.
Very interesting thank you for sharing, so I gather that if you could make it work you would but it isn’t in the cards right now. I wonder how hard it would be to immigrate there.
It depends a lot on whether you can get a job. If you can, then you can get a work visa and you’re fine. A friend of mine lived in China for a decade, and he liked it. We both work in IT, there are a lot of jobs in that area, but also pretty competitive. From what I’ve read, China’s been recently relaxing immigration laws as well and they’re looking at creating a program similar to the green card in US. https://www.semafor.com/article/07/23/2024/china-is-considering-a-green-card-scheme-to-attract-more-foreign-scientists
Yo random question but have you ever had hotpot?
It’s hard for me to look at % increases or “X out of poverty” or “This person makes 1+ what they did before!”. I get fed the same stuff about how great America is doing because of our “numbers”. Without being there it’s hard to grasp if what you’re saying is anything better, worse, or just par for the course of a developing nation with such a high output with manufacturing.
Seeing this statement and reading the link, they have absolutely nothing to do with each other and you make it seem like it’s a “quote” from the article (I’m guessing it’s from the 93 page research paper I’m reading through). They would’ve just been better off publishing whatever data they talked about researchers definitely having, the whole thing read like an Elon Musk press conference…
It’s interesting and kinda disconcerting reading through the policies and how no real figures are presented for what the policy should be, such as the “common prosperity” they hope to achieve be 2030 (link page 15)
It makes me wonder if setting an elusive “goal” of a policy is better to get members on board and then slap them with the real numbers after they have already signed on and can’t openly complain about (bad for corrupt sectors of government though). There’s also just not enough information as stated in the paper to actually understand what is going on,
Just now seeing and trying to wrap my head around the Hukou system. I’m not here arguing good/bad communism, I just like the information and think that many forms of government can work out with protections in place (regulations, corruption detection, etc). I just wanted to point out your article mention and link didn’t really fit together with how you presented it. I did enjoy the reading and will continue today, but I take it all with a grain of salt. I don’t really 100% trust any source these days, which in this technological era should really be the default for everyone. Definitely let it sink in and contemplate the realities of others, but you only have your own reality to work within for any type of effective action.
you put a lot of work into that word salad
oh wow, ok. Thought you posted links for actual discussion and would’ve been interested in someone reading through wanting to talk about it lol. This just a copy/paste warrior kinda thing you’re doing? Weird way to try to insult back after everything you posted, thanks for letting me know not to continue the conversation!
It’s pretty clear you’re not interested in any actual discussion given that you just dismiss everything by saying you don’t trust anything. You never explain the reason for this distrust or provide any sources that contradict anything said there. I’m pretty sure that no matter how much evidence you’re provided with, you’ll just keep moving goal posts and repeating how you don’t trust the sources. It’s not very original.
Dawg, it is a direct quote from the Forbes article. Read it again I guess?
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Fell for this one before, Mr. Manson.
There was a reality TV show about communes and stuff. Granted it’s reality TV but aside from the bad ones media doesn’t cover them very much. Long story short, it really didn’t do a good job of saying communism-good.
I think the best examples might be like Cuba having universal health care or something but ny experience was with a michael moore doc so it’s kinda sketch to begin.
Communes have almost nothing to do with communism. When you are living in a capitalist world and beholden to a capitalist economy, you are not suddenly experiencing communism just because you live on a collective farm. A commune is not “doing communism,” not because they are doing something wrong or anything, but because it simply doesn’t work like that. In a simple definition of communism, the workers own the means of production. The people living on a commune within capitalism still do not own the means of production, they still exist almost entirely at the whims of the broader capitalist economic structure.
Also, it’s just ridiculous to expect a tiny microcosm of any system to represent how sound that system is if it were to be scaled up. Especially when that microcosm is inside of another structure that will actively stamp it out of existence if it threatens to grow. Trying to build a commune within a capitalist country is like trying to build a town at the bottom of the ocean. Everything beyond the limits of your project is hostile to its existence simply as a matter of the surrounding natural forces. But just because it’s extremely hard to build a town at the bottom of the ocean, and when it was tried it ended in failure, doesn’t mean that towns in general are destined to fail. In an appropriate environment they can and do thrive.
Excellent post. To add, Engels does a great refutation of these utopian socialist / commune projects, in Socialism, utopian and scientific.
But it’s a natural state of existence to exist within a broader, hostile context.
Civilization, at all levels, has always been that. Competition is everywhere.
If a system requires nothing else to be competing with it, in order to work, then it’s not viable.
No it’s not. A commune within a communist society would not at all exist within a hostile context but in one that nurtures it. Likewise a billionaire’s corporation like Bezos’ amazon dot com does not exist in a naturally hostile context under capitalism, it exists in a context that literally would not allow it to fail, propping it up at all costs. The banks that should have gone under and been utterly annihilated in 2008 were instead propped up and rewarded for their complete failure and sheer incompetence to the extent that mass amounts of wealth were siphoned away from working class to keep them afloat.
Civilization at all levels has always required profound amounts of cooperation to come into being, to continue to exist, and to thrive. Civilization exists only because of cooperation, not because of competition. Competition has always existed too, but has been more of a hindrance than a benefit to civilization and certainly not a requirement like cooperation is. The cult-like worship of competition is something that the capitalists have fostered and spread for the obvious reason that widespread belief in this lie is beneficial to them. I would urge you not to fall for a very obvious and simple-minded ploy.
Gibberish.
I’ve already brought up capitalism realism elsewhere in this post.
It seems that all you’ve ever been exposed to in your life is the propaganda of the capitalist class, and that’s exactly how they want it and why they spend billions in propaganda every year to achieve it. It’s why the US has red scare purges and why congress still votes on nonsense like this.
So what’s your broader hostile context? Or are you living an unnatural life?
Is it the landlord or corporate owner putting the boot to your neck because you need a roof over your head and food in your belly?
If so do you think your life would lose meaning if the boot was lifted from your neck?
Do you really think it’s unnatural to have all your needs met?
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Open source software is like communism. Held in commons, free to use, contribute to, and benefit from.
And not in any way implemented by the government.
I’m a conservative, and I have zero problem with communism when it’s performed spontaneously by people.
It’s when the government starts doing it that it bothers me.
This is so fractally confused. When “people” do it, that becomes a new government.
Without a government to enforce public ownership of the means of production, there can’t be communism,
just as without a government enforcing private ownership of the means of production, there can’t be capitalism.
Have you ever heard of GPL?
To be fair publisherploitation(AKA copyright) in general is enforced by goverment.
What is difference between paying membership fee in non-profit and paying taxes? What if difference between voting on members meeting and on referendum? What is difference between board elections and goverment elections? What is difference between paying members to not starve to death while achieving goal of non-profit and funding healthcare for citizens to not die while living?
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Large-scale, actual communism with no authoritarianism? Not that I’m aware of. It’s hard to implement true communism effectively on a large scale because most people have to care enough about others to willingly contribute for it to work.
Authoritarianism is a meaningless term that people with lack of capacity for rational thought regurgitate. Every single government holds authority by virtue of having the monopoly on legal violence. The only question is whose interest the authority is exercised in.
That’s just bullshit. Authoritarianism has a clear-cut definition that goes beyond “the government has authority on legal violence” and you know it.
This isn’t reddit, please be respectful when disagreeing. You’re not going to win any converts by alienating people.
Why didn’t you apply that critique to this:
Did you simply not notice the alienating language there, because you agreed with the sentiment?
It’s telling that you failed to provide any actual definition for the term.
I’m not gonna waste my time. Any definition I would provide you would dismiss as “western propaganda” anyway.
I suppose actually having to define things would take your valuable time away from trolling here.
What do you count as “Authoritatianism?”
Why do you think Communism requires people to care about others to function, and why would they not work otherwise?
I think you have some serious misunderstandings about what Communism entails.
Authoritarianism is the opposite of libertarianism, roughly speaking. It’s a sliding scale, but those would be the two opposites in play.
For example, a more authoritarian approach to road safety would be: “Manufacturers are not allowed to make cars that go over 50 mph”
A more libertarian approach to road safety would be: “We’re publishing the average fatality rate of this road. You can choose to engage with it as you deem appropriate”
Our actual approach with licenses and speed limits and some regulations on car safety and soft but escalating consequences for breaking the road rules is somewhere in between.
So it’s vibes-based and not actually tied to anything material.
Also they have to not want to trade. If someone starts trading, then the communism is over.
Turns out when people are free to make economic arrangements as they please, capitalism happens.
Trading is not capitalism.
Markets are not capitalism.
Money is not capitalism.
Those things have existed for millenia before capitalism came to exist, around 600 years ago, eventually, over the span of several hundred years, replacing previous socio-politico-economic systems, feudalism in particular.
The first sentence from Wikipedia: Capitalism
The first sentence from Wikipedia: Socialism
Notice that both definitionally concern who owns the means of production.
Communism:
Communism is a movement toward socialism, with the ultimate goal of the erasing social class hierarchies.
The last line has communism and socialism switched
Edit to add: I think I see what you meant now. Yes, you could also say “socialism is a movement toward communism,” in the sense that socialism is a step in the path to communism.
I don’t think so. Communism can’t be reached in one fell swoop. The reason why communist states didn’t and don’t have communism in their names is because—by their own admission—they aren’t yet communist, they’re socialist.
First comes a transformation from a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to a dictatorship of the proletariat, where the working class has control of the state and the means of production. In other words, socialism. The end-goal of communism is to be rid of classes altogether, but it’s not possible jump straight to it. You can’t go to bed one day under capitalism and magically wake up the next under communism.
Marxists define the state as a system by which the ruling class maintains its dominance other classes. So when we talk about the end-goal of a “classless, stateless society,” we mean that classlessness definitionally also means statelessness.
Right, you were using communism as a movement, not the higher stage, in which case it makes more sense.
Which is why it’s a utopian movement. They do their best to enslave your thoughts and control your actions, and when that fails (and it always does) they slaughter anyone and everyone that won’t play along.
No person is perfect, so when you demand perfection, you’re going to have to get rid of anyone but those who are perfect at playing perfect.
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific - Frederick Engels
It must be so liberating to just be able to spew bullshit unconnected to anything in the material world and have zero shame about it
This is exactly how brainwashed liberals are.
“bRaInWaShEd” bleats the moron who gets his opinions from some alt-right glorified blog
Who are you even talking about?
Which blog is this?
😂 We’re so far left that we’re alt-right; that’s just basic horsepoo theory[1].
Seriously, please answer those of us asking what you’re talking about. I am asking in good faith, what blog? The people you are talking to are as far from alt-right as it is possible to get and probably advocate for the elimination of alt-right ideology in a much more definitive way than you do (assuming you are a liberal).
Do they do this with their 5G Manchurian Candidate radio waves?
No, with social pressure and fear. Lots of people with shut the fuck up if they think speaking out will get them shunned or fired. A hell of a lot more people will shut the fuck up if they think speaking out will get them killed.
Oh, you mean like how in the US, famously even, it was literally made illegal to be a communist and you were blacklisted by every institution for having even attended a meeting, while known communist revolutionaries were assassinated at every opportunity, some even openly murdered in their beds by cops? Yes, it is disgusting how capitalism mercilessly crushes those who seek human liberation and how in a sick capitalist society it is taboo to even identify as someone who seeks the well-being of all.
Well that, and also being fired from companies for speaking against equity drives and the like.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Marxism-Leninism is fundamentally opposed to utopianism, and idealism in general.
Regardless of what Marx and Lenin declared about their stance with regard to utopianism, communism is utopian in the sense that it doesn’t exist, and can only exist in a world that is fundamentally different than this one.
You’re saying communism can’t exist while not having even a Wikipedia-level understanding of capitalism or communism, so you’ll excuse me if I disregard your opinion.
Can you find a legitimate example of “communism bad?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps
^ this is a bad faith engagement
“[citation needed]” is bad faith now? I guess Wikipedia should pack it in, then.
Inshallah
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Can you take the negative energy you’re spewing elsewhere? It would be nice to not have this place turn into another reddit cesspool. Thanks.
“Sir you’re being entirely too hostile towards my genocidal arguments and beliefs”
The tone policing liberal
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Why would you bother replying if the only thing you have to contribute is absolutely vapid pearl clutching?
Oh no I am defeated by the internet rando putting their full back into camera mugging
Lemmy.ml is a Marxist instance, you’re free to stay on Lemmy.world if you are anti-Marxist. That’s the beauty of federation.
You say, from a Lemmy.world account, very much intentionally trying to create a Reddit 2
No true Scotsman
That’s not a No True Scotsman fallacy, they legitimately are recreating Reddit intentionally.
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Can you explain what you mean by this, and why you believe it despite direct evidence to the contrary, such as in Cuba?
The country in which 86% of the population live in poverty? But at least there’s doctors and literacy so that’s great. Classic communism win.
What definition are you using for “poverty?”
The western propaganda one, I guess
That’s not a definition of poverty.
Well, I’ll give you that, I was expecting you to come up with a reason why my source was wrong, not to just ignore it and say “nah”. Thanks for making this shorter.
I was expecting you to answer my question, not restate your claim
The NFL
Just like Capitalism you aren’t going to find any examples of the system in the world today
When people actually lived in communes it was cool though
About to have my brain turned into soup by asking this question:
Are you implying that there are no examples of capitalism in the world today?
I’m genuinely curious about this, as well.
Yeah, what country rewards jobs based on hours worked rather than assets owned?
What people refer to as “late-stage capitalism” is no different than the system capitalism was supposed to replace
Just because it is (and always was) a complete lie that capitalism would lead to prosperity for working people, that doesn’t mean that capitalists aren’t doing capitalism. Capitalism hasn’t been corrupted from some ideal system into something else, this is what capitalism is and it’s been known as such for over a century and a half.
Since the beginning but not because that’s what capitalism is, it’s because the mercantilist lords wanted a rebrand when peasants started killing them
If a country decided to switch to communism, that elite rebrand would still happen. Animal Farm paints this, China having more inequality than Japan or South Korea also paints this it’s what allows people to say true capitalism has never been tested and the elite can exploit that to increase inequality
Animal Farm is garbage and Orwell was a racist, antisemitic, homophobic, backstabbing snitch: Orwell’s list.
Animal Farm was Cold War agitprop, which the CIA airdropped on eastern Europe and made it into an animated film that you may have seen. The CIA funded the film adaptation of 1984 as well.
You’re even aware you don’t have an argument so you went after the author’s character which is irrelevant then started talking about the cia
As per the original point: you’re inability to understand that the rich are greedy doesn’t mean they aren’t
That’s not what happened. It was the burghers themselves who revolted against the feudal lords. The peasants didn’t revolt against the burghers: some were uninvolved and I assume some aided the burghers against the feudal lords who owned the land they tilled. These were bourgeois revolutions.
And capitalism is not a mere “rebranding,” it is a very different socio-politico-economic system from feudalism, though yes, it is still one based on class hierarchy. The ultimate goal of communism is to eliminate hierarchies: a classless society.
It is true that China has billionaires. It is also true that China has raised 800 million people out of poverty, “the greatest such effort in history.”
Do you see CPC members boating around the world on megayachts? The “elite” in China—if you want to call the democratically elected representatives “elite”—are not fabulously wealthy, despite the fact that, if they wanted to, they could literally print as many Yuan as they pleased and pocket it. The billionaires are capitalists, in the constrained amount of capitalism the Chinese state currently allows.
USSR Angola Cuba China DPRK Ethiopia Mongolia Vietnam GDR. I cant understand how people can look at a country that dramatically improved its peoples standard of living brought democracy and freedom, and not see it as a good thing.
Hey that’s not accurate. France bombed them too.
Those were freedom bombs, duh.
Ok, I guess you could argue the point that these countries
What the absolute fuck are you talking about.
The war sure explains why they have a reason to be antagonist towards South Korea and USA – in a similar way as WW2 explains why Finland is very wary of Russia still in 2000s.
But it doesn’t explain why they insist on keeping their system in the same horrible broken state. Germany and Japan were ravaged by a war and they didn’t go permanently crazy at state level.
Why don’t you tell the audience who got the OK from Stalin to start this war?
The side that didn’t collaborate with fascist Japan in WW2 and then go on to commit the bodo league massacre.
The DPRK is by no means perfect, but it’s also not some hermit kingdom where the peasants push trains to make them move.
If you have 20 minutes, I recommend you watch We Went to North Korea to Get a Haircut, it’s humanizing and helps dispel a lot of modern myths about the DPRK. Again, it’s by no means perfect, but the West has absolutely mythologized its existence to lunacy.
On this subject more than any other the western brain is completely destroyed by propaganda.
The crazy shit you will and have believed about Korea without any evidence is stunning and can only be explained by racism.
You actually believed when they said the whole country had to get the same haircut?
Some school districts in Japan already do this to kids tbh. There was a kerfuffle a while back and some schools dropped some limitations after lawsuits. Like if your kid has naturally curly or blonde hair you’d need to prove it. (Haven’t gone deep on fact checking, take it with a grain of salt)
I’d say it’s not unreasonable that if you have a manufactured preconceived (racist) notion about a place that you would believe it.
South Korea and RoC actually did the mandatory haircuts on occasions (though in case of RoC it was justified and was more like one particular haircut was forbidden). It’s always projection.
whats wrong with the DPRK? I have family that has been there and they thought it was a fine place certainly doing a lot better than the median capitalist country.
Its a current enemy for not being destroyed (like the US tried to do), so a bunch of western-supremacist-brained people believe literally anything negative said about it, as it confirms their racist biases.
check their post history.
You could probs add Burkina Faso to that list too.
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u can listen to the propaganda or u can look at reality.
No u
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having a market does not make a country capitalist. And yeah there is corruption as there is in every 3rd world country (and most 1st world countries just in different less noticeable ways), they are certainly doing more about it than most capitalist countries, and all indicators of standard of living are far better than is the vast majority of capitalist countries so i wouldnt call it a shit show, i mean its hard to recover from having just about every fucking building in ur country destroyed and ur forests and farms poisoned and millions murdered and even more displaced only 50 years ago especially when the country that did all that continues to actively try to fuck u over. They are doing well great even.
It is not capitalist. There has been corruption and those corrupt official have been executed, as they should.
Obesity isn’t a problem in North Korea. They’ve met their BMI goals.
🍆✊
In North Korea parents cannot feed their children. We give them mud because children is so hungry. And when you eat mud, you die in 10 days; you cannot go to the bathroom. Even though you know your children are dying, you still giving them the mud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz
Colonialism and indigenous eviction masquerading as “socialist”.
I would argue that the Colonialism and indigenous eviction evils can be separated from the socialist successes.
If the Colonialism is what supported the system, it was not Socialist.
Colonialism certainly helped establish some settlements, but is colonialism essential for the survival of the kibbutz system? I don’t think so.
For example, if a kibbutz was initiated (legally and paid for) in Australia, then colonialism would not be an ingredient.
But you nonetheless used a Colonialist system as an example.
I disagree. The ideology of a kibbutz is not Colonialist.
The example was colonialist. It has only existed in a colonialist form. You were tasked with providing an example of Socialism working, which by extension implies you believe colonialism to be compatible with Socialism. This is nonsense.
How it started: The kibbutzim were founded by members of the Bilu movement who emigrated to Palestine.
How it’s going: Gaza toll could exceed 186,000, Lancet study says
Yes, some kibbutz founders were part of Zionist settlement land grabs. And there is no way I’m going to defend current Israeli actions.
But this doesn’t really relate to the kibbutz being a good example of communism.