ok, so why are there so many people trying to escape these communist paradises you people praise so much? and why so many people want to live in the capitalist hell holes you complain about?
As a disclaimer, I understand the logic in most cases, it shouldn’t imply that I agree with it.
In an ideal communism, everyone would have their basic needs taken care of, regardless of who they are, what they do, how “valuable” they are, or what they know is, etc.
In reality, almost all attempts at communism are authoritarian at their core, and whomever is in a position of authority, due to them being human and inherently selfish, they value their own comfort and contribution more than they value the contribution of others. This will almost always devolve into a mass exploitation of the populous to serve those who are in control.
The ideals of communism, in and of themselves are not bad or evil. The practical result of the authority that arises from a communist country or society will very often result in human suffering on a massive scale.
So to put it simply, people generally romanticize the ideals of communism; at a high level, speaking very ideally, they’re not wrong. Communism has some ideas that should be taken into very serious consideration. When applied on a large scale in communist countries like China (as an easy example) it’s very easy for the majority to be living well below what most would consider “the poverty line” with little to no consideration from the governing authority regarding that situation.
Thus, while the communist ideal of a solution to this problem is preferable to the homeless and destitute results of capitalism, there isn’t any country in the world that lives up to providing a good living situation to those who are in need. Sure, in a communist country, you may get a roof over your head, given to you by the government, but you may or may not get adequate amounts of food on the table to not starve, or required medical care, or any of a plethora of other things that are beneficial to your continued existence. You just get to die in a bed, in an apartment, via starvation or treatable medical ailments, rather than dying from exposure with enough food in your stomach, and in otherwise okay physical health, because you had no place warm to sleep.
All options are equal levels of terrible.
IMO, the point of these kinds of posts isn’t to say that we would be better off with communism, but rather, that the typical capitalist “solutions” to problems are less desirable, and we, as a society, should consider other options and solutions in order to help our countrymen, rather than punish them for being poor.
And I agree that social investment in capitalist societies builds better quality of life. Where I disagree with you is on the intention of these posts. Its clearly communist propaganda painting communism as a perfect solution for everything, as if we could not remember history or see with our own eyes that nobody wants to immigrate to North Korea for a reason.
That’s fair. I don’t want to immigrate to North Korea either. I’m more socialist leaning, but there has to be some significant checks and balances to make sure the system doesn’t get biased towards those in power.
The rich/powerful already have the majority of the money and an easy life as far as I’m concerned. The communism I’m in favor of is stuff like universal healthcare and UBI and such. Giving people the tools and resources to live a respectable life, regardless of their station. I don’t believe that McDonald’s workers should be given the same as doctors or anything, but both should be able to afford rent/food, and have all their basic needs met. They should be able to get the medical care that they may require, whenever they need it would being in debt for the rest of their lives.
I believe that a system that allows for this, can exist, and should exist. The thing I’m most against is any system of authoritarianism. If one person or a small, like-minded group can decide the actions and restrictions of the population, that’s not good. It can be argued that even in a capitalist and democratic country like the USA, this situation is already in place, as nobody but the people who are already rich seem to be able or willing to run for any government position, and they make laws that benefit them and what they want. It’s near absolute control by a small group of similar people (at the very least), which also isn’t good.
I don’t know what the right answer is, and I won’t pretend to. I just know that this isn’t it.
This has to be one of the most horrible tower I have ever seen. Well, every big tower like those are horrible. What, you want big towers like that ? You think that’s how we fix the housing crisis ? Not really…
What is good ubanism then ? 4 to 5 story building max, mixed use, no cars, 5minutes walk to everything you need, great architecture so it’s nice to walk in the neighborhood. That’s what we need. We want human scale, not some horrible bullshit like this. That’s not a city, it’s a nightmare. That’s not beautiful, that’s depressing. That’s not great architecture, that’s just some concrete box stacked on top of each other. If this is what you want, read about ubanism. If you think this is beautiful, you probably have horrible taste. And if you think that’s needed, well, that would be like applying a bandaid on someone that lost his legs. We need a fucking surgery to fix our cities, not that bullshit “let’s build horrible concrete tower that will ruin the land for decades.l, because housing crisis”.
You’ve never been homeless have you? I’ve been homeless. Literally this year. A place to sleep and shit with a lock on the door is way better than a bunch of lying employers and real estate agents sucking me dry while I’m sleeping in the weather and working full time.
Commie blocks are great at that, and certainly better than nothing. They served their purpose really well when they were built, for example, and we can definitely learn from them. But still, quality of life wise, they really aren’t the best. So with all the wealth we currently have, it should be easily possibly to create affordable/free housing that has all the benefits the original commenter demanded. I’d gladly take prefab mega buildings over people living on the streets, but when we get to choose and plan cities for the future, they shouldn’t be our first option.
This has to be fake, an accident would happen within days of installing it and then the city is liable. Ask you city government if they enjoy liability.
At least i know i would be terrified the whole time i’m sitting on it and wouldn’t actually be rested at all
The original design of that bench is an art piece protesting the commercialization of life (although it may have been implemented seriously in some place where they missed the point).
Ironically, I’d expect a person living on the street to have actual coins capable of operating the bench more often than most people.
I have also found this out, although it describes the general idea of capitalism very well. The actual architecture and street furniture solutions are not much better either, as can be seen in the other images.
I believe Canada passed medically assisted death for those with terminal illness and other reasons. There is safeguards in place and steps that need to be taken it isn’t one doctor visit and you are done.
See, they even have a better resolution image that doesn’t conveniently make it impossible to distinguish the Chinese characters the ad on the wall has:
You can tell the capitalist solution by the desire to avoid lawsuits from injuries by sticking to the least potentially hazardous solutions, such as the bench. In some states they also have metal spikes that are rounded to avoid impalement and scrapes, and the density tends to be less to decrease the risk.
The communist solution is always right, so you must be the one that’s wrong, ergo no need to worry about lawsuits. Just select the cheapest option that can justify the city’s budget to the central government, since there’s no real checks and balances on it because hey, communist government, ergo right and already represents the community, so how can you beat perfection? Plus the punishments from the central government to the city authorities are so severe, that how could that encourage a culture of deceit and suppression among them!?
They are both despicable solutions, but since OP and commenter decided to make the false comparison … Maybe I should link the videos of the collapsing buildings, since these have been built upon the same principle in China.
Same solutions are also in a lot of other countries, apart, yes, China is called Communist, but really it’s not, only one party and one leader, not selected by the people and more capitalist as other things. Hostile architecture is the solution by a failed government or system, to keep the streets ‘clean’ of the signs of its failure, simply this, and it is a global problem
It’s funny how you can tell how able citizens are able to hold the governments of those countries accountable and how much they value life by the degree of a potential health hazard their hostile architecture is. It really doesn’t indicate a failed government just having them, just one that has failing social nets for the homeless.
A failed social system is always the consequence of a lack of social policies, either due to ineptitude or disinterest, inherent to neo-liberalism, when percentages in the stock market are more important than the well-being of the population. This is where poor and homeless people are produced, instead of preventing them from reaching this condition. Having a fixed home is a vital and basic condition for social reintegration, since without an address it is impossible to get a job or to even have a bank account and with this it is also impossible to get a home. A vicious circle that you enter once you are on the street. But there are other possibilities as shown in Finland, how to reduce Homelesness and with an inversion initial, above saving money in social costs.
Well, yeah, it’s a failing social system, not necessarily a failed government. I don’t disagree with you, but the reason that there’s no housing available is because it isn’t just the government, which in Finland is also a representative democracy, nor the economy, which in Finland is as capitalist as any euro.
It’s due to things like societies, cultures, and banking systems that create and foster housing and property bubbles. It’s due to things like the power dynamics between the socioeconomic disparity and the difference between the wealth of the governments entities in charge of these social systems versus the influence from business, private, and banking interests from the outside. Then there’s the laws where actually trying to help can make you more liable if you don’t provide enough aid or are held responsible for the condition of those you are helping, a fear particularly present to many people in the US and China alike.
Finland has a small socioeconomic gap between its extreme while being one of the richest per capita in the EU, but it also has much more control over who can become citizens, prioritizing wealthy neighbors over the rest of its migrants and trying to reduce it to keep it from saturating its social systems. Not every country can adopt the same solution without massive reforms and geographical shifts. It doesn’t mean that spikes in benches and under bridges are the solution.
The whole western World have a Capitalist system, but there are differences in different countries, depending on whether the left or the right governs, which is directly expressed in social rights and social support.
European capitalism is not nearly the same as that of the United States, a country where homeless people are manufactured en masse due to the total lack of social investment and labor rights. This as a final result costs the state much more money than investments in social projects and laws.
It is clear that the construction of social housing is a large investment, but it is profitable as a result, apart from creating jobs and increasing people’s general purchasing power, new income in public coffers by people who have managed to rebuild their lives. with a home, impossible when they were on the street, depending entirely on state aid without being able to contribute anything in exchange.
In Spain there are projects in this direction with the left gov, but not so much in the rest of Europe, mostly with governments on the right. The only thing missing for this is political will, nothing else.
Taking away people’s businesses is a good thing actually, and free speech doesn’t exist in capitalist cultures either, anything threatening the regime will be dealt with. Capitalism just has a wider range of things you can say that aren’t threatening because it has a more stable hegemony for now due to its historical position.
Nah it’s not, taking away people believe they can built something made most people dull factory workers and those who were extra regime supportive were put in the post to build something but they often didn’t have the abilities . It’s hard to put it into words but you couldn’t have just make startup with nee awesome idea because people in the posts would not let you unless it meant increasing quota.
, taking away people believe they can built something made most people dull factory workers
Workers do not see the full fruits of their labor under capitalism, that is right! When worker self management in Catalonia started, factory output increased by 30 percent over the course of a month. :)
It is a historical fact that communist countries typically go through one last famine on their way to ending periodic famines in the country forever, and sometimes they’re worse than normal due to the kinks being ironed out and social unrest.
How is that not a valid critique? I despise Apple as a company. As a result I refuse to purchase any of their products or use any of their services. To this day I have never purchased a single Apple product. I do this because I have conviction and standards.
1st world communists like to denigrate capitalism, yet live comfortable lives because of it. That shows zero conviction or standards.
If any bad thing that happens under a nominally communist system is the fault of communism, then any bad thing that happens in a nominally capitalist system must be the fault of capitalism, right? Capitalism has an awful lot of slavery, genocide, apartheid, coloialism, wars of choice, and other evils to answer for, then.
This is not a valid argument ecause everything surrounding us is designed and facilitated by capitalism, and certainly all our electronics, there’s no such thing as computers independent from capitalism. There weren’t even in the soviet union. So it’s not possible for this anon to actually live what they preach unless they went full anarcho-primitivism.
Not that it would matter anyway, because you’re allowed to criticize a system that you participate in.
Nothing here is portraying capitalism as pure evil, it’s highlighting a problem that we currently have as a society. I find it really weird how eager you are to argue while not really having a point to make.
Completely false. The implication of this post (and most posts here) is capitalism=bad and communism=good. Capitalism certainly has its faults, but comparing it to communism and portraying communism as the shining beacon on the hill is just laughable. Someone else here said it better than I ever could, “Communism’s solution to homelessness is mass starvation”. I just find it ridiculous that the very system which allows people the resources to sit around wasting time online is the system they constantly rail against.
Answer me this, if this post ISN’T portraying capitalism as pure evil, but is instead simply highlighting a problem we have as a society, then why do I never see similar posts highlighting problems communist societies face? I only ever see communism being defended and/or held up as THE standard by which we should all strive.
The internet wasn’t designed by Capitalism. It was a government funded program. It would be a lot easier for me to take you seriously of you didn’t make shit up to prop up an ideology.
So the undersea cables, radio towers, satellites that are the very lifeblood of the Internet were the result of communism? Cause last I checked telecommunication networks and infrastructure are one of the most glaring examples of capitalism doing what it does best. The resources and will were all motivated by capitalism. If not for capitalism the Internet would have stayed a niche government program and not gained worldwide adoption.
First off, just because something is developed in the public sector does not make it Communist. If you don’t know what words mean, don’t use them please. I don’t have time to go over definitions.
Secondly, the ground work for undersea cables, radio towers and satellites were indeed a direct result of work and funding from the public sector. The private sector wanted nothing to do with the internet until the mid 90’s when enough work had been done that it was deemed “profitable”.
A better example of what Capitalism does best would be adding advertisements to the internet, or the fact that Americans pay more per megabit than any European country on average.
I’d say that I’m rather anti communistic but one thing that has never happened in used-to-be communist country i have experience with is starvation.
Actually they solved starvation, built fcking appartments for everyone to live in and gave them to people for free. They also made sure every forgotten village had drinakble water, electricity , gas, shop, train station and bus stop.
Reason why people overthrown them was humans rights repression like taking away people’s businesses to make them state companies. It was not poor the living conditions (for the time).
And also just homelessness. It’s pretty amusing that people believe there are no homeless people in Russia or China. China in particular is amusing because they have massive empty apartment blocks, but they still have homeless people because the hukou caste system means they aren’t allowed to live outside their birth city.
Its pretty amusing that people still believe Russia and China are communist. Next your going to tell me the Nazi’s were socialist and North Korea is a Democratic Republic, just because it’s in their name.
Typing it all in caps doesn’t make it not true. Words have meanings, Russia and China both have private corporations run for profit. They do have some socialist policies, but they certainly do not have economic systems characterized by the collective ownership of property and by the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members.
If you keep having people tell you “those aren’t real communists”, then just maybe you should reevaluate your definition of Communism.
Saying “maybe you should reevaluate” =/= “must be true”. People did reevaluate if Trump won the 2020 election (a bit too many times frankly), and every time it came up to be a false claim. As is the case with your definition of Communism.
Furthermore, I did not try to setup a Utopia, nor did I call Russia, China, or Communism in general a Utopia. So I’m kinda confused about why you even brought that up… Regardless, even if Russia and China did add market economies, that wouldn’t change the definition of Communism, just the type of economies those countries have.
I think what you meant to say was “If countries that have tried to implement Communism consistently add Market Economics, then perhaps Communism is not a self-sufficient system, and as such it is not a comprehensive solution to the ills of Capitalism”. Which again wouldn’t change the definition of Communism, but would at least be a coherent argument.
Perhaps you need to change your definition of re-evaluate, and of… definition.
P.S. Just curious, do you ever get tired of misrepresenting the positions you are arguing against?
That was an intentional genocide. Do you think that is somehow exclusive to capitalism?
Nearly all famines are cause by war, natural disasters, or intentional ethnic cleansing.
There are only a handful of examples in which famine was caused by poor economic decisions and nearly all of the modern examples were by communist governments trying to dictate the price of food.
I’m not even advocating for capitalism. But I’m also not going to sit here and ignore history. China, even today, is dependent on food imports from capitalist countries.
I live in north-east Germany in one of these Blocks (it was firmly renovated tho). It’s actually not bad. Most of them are build in Horseshoe shape so you have small parks inside. But it’s nearly impossible to hang anything to the wall without proper power tools. EDIT: typos
Yes, but since the wall isn’t paper you can hang really heavy stuff on your walls. I have a massive ghettoblaster sitting on a wooden board over my desk 🥰
Huh? I just wanted to say these blocks are not bad to live in. I belive in social market economy. Capitalism is a consuming flame, let’s put it in a furnace made out of rules and regulations and put it to work.
These discussions on communism vs capitalism that devolve into comparing the US with the USSR are like discussing feudalism vs liberalism in 1825, when the only perceptible legacies of the French Revolution were the Reign of Terror and Napoleon’s degeneration into monarchy.
If you’re sensibly anticapitalist, for the love of Marx do not argue in favor of states that rejected all pretension of wanting to let the economy be democratically managed, ultimately turning into party-controlled hierarchies rather than socialism. If you’re a liberal in 1825 and rather than arguing in favor of ending serfdom and enfranchising everyone you keep going on about how Robespierre wasn’t really that bad, you’re politically useless.
I think a lot of Marxists take sympathy with Lenin, and Lenin’s vision, they don’t necessarily like what the USSR became under Stalin. The principles of Soviet Democracy, for example, are appealing to many Lefitsts. “All power to the Soviets!”
That being said, ultimately the USSR serves as a great example of why Vanguardism can be good in overthrowing a bad system, but must be held far more accountable, or even dissolve after revolution. I know many MLs would probably shit on me for saying that, citing the CIA paper saying Stalin wasn’t a dictator, but I still think ultimately the form of government under Stalin and those who came after him is very dependent on who is in power. A more decentralized system would have checks against such issues.
My 2 cents as a leftist that isn’t an ML, but has spent time reading about the various leftist tendencies.
I’ll conclude it by saying I would have loved it if Lenin continued to live and stay in power, I wonder what the USSR would have looked like, maybe even today.
Lenin’s State and Revolution is great and set the foundations for the Bolshevik discourse that led to them being capable of leading a movement large enough to gain power over Russia, the problem is that not even Lenin himself was consistent with the principles he proposed. The idea that you can legitimately sustain some sort of pretension of achieving worker democracy when the Bolsheviks consistently ended up repressing all other leftist factions wasn’t coherent, to the point that Stalin wasn’t a sad degeneration of Leninist practice, but a necessary consequence.
We unfortunately see the same result in almost all countries that followed the ML model, where a party elite ends up monopolizing power and divorcing itself from the rest of society, ultimately instituting themselves as a separate class that sees no ideological issue with bringing back capitalism, as they find it to be more consistent with the really existent power dynamics in the country.
Literally most of the work people cite from Lenin is just him defending his own hypocrisy. It really says a lot that people will be all “dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t mean dictatorship” and then go on to cite Lenin glibly saying that civil war is good because it teaches the peasants how to shoot. It’s simply not a well thought out framework for statecraft.
And all of this is summarized quite nicely in Animal Farm
The plot reads like a sunday school scare piece to warn children about the dangers of satanism. It’s so vague and allegorical that you can’t really critique it. The message is basically “if you revolt against the capitalists, a scary bad man will take over and hurt you.” Also pretty disgusting that it portrays workers as farm animals and capitalists as humans. It’s a very “American schools during the Cold War would make kids read that” kind of book.
It’s not surprising that Orwell was a bigoted snitch who ratted leftists out to British intelligence, and was especially keen on turning in jews, black people, homosexuals, and anyone he deemed “anti-white.”
Anyone who has actually studied political science has nothing but contempt for what Lenin did with his opportunity. At this point if you are ignoring all the hindsight of the 20th century, you are campist, not a communist. Which is what describes most of the lemmy communists.
I’m always confused at how people think communism and democracy are opposites. The indoctrination is crazy. They’re not even the same category of thing. Communism is an economic model where democracy is just about how leadership is decided. They can exist in the same country at the same time.
Communist theory explicitly tries to dispel the idea that political and economic structures are separate things. As such, communists intend to create democratic structures that can distribute resources in place of undemocratic market relationships which empower owners of capital.
Liberalism on the other hand believe that market relationships are inherently democratic. Therefore they may think that any attempt to replace them with a planned economy are undemocratic regardless of how such planning would be decided upon.
Ahhh right, but that’s not to say that the types of underlying structures aren’t interchangeable. Are you saying that communism is necessarily democratic?
Yes, most communists and especially Marxists believe communism must necessarily be fully democratic. It’s certainly true though that there is much debate about what types of democratic structures to use. Although most communists would probably agree that it would require a lot of trial and error to find an ideal system.
That said, communists generally seek to disenfranchise owners of capital from the decision making process up until the point they no longer exist as a class. Therefore in the transition to communism, full democracy may not be realized. This is the given reason for why Marxist Leninist countries generally suppress opposition parties but may allow for political affinity organizations around identity groups that suffer under capitalism, ie worker, youth, women’s organizations, etc.
Well Marx used the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” to describe how a transition would work in opposition to what he saw as the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”.
However, if you’re talking about people like Stalin or Mao, you’ll find self proclaimed communists with a wide variety of opinions on the subject. That’s in part because gets difficult to sort propaganda from the truth of the matter. I also mean both western and communist propaganda. To have a guy going by “Joe Steel” as the leader of your republic of socialist workers councils isn’t exactly a subtle attempt to get buy in from working class people.
The USSR and CCP were/are Marxist states. Saying they weren’t is just a cope from American socialists who feel the need to defend leftism anywhere, presumably because dumbasses think all socialists need to answer for every flaw while capitalism always has “context.”
Regardless, they, and various social democracies, did do something America refuses to, solve homelessness and hunger (after some… Initial difficulties).
I don’t particularly like the concept of the welfare state but it’s better than nothing and union busting.
I find that most people talking about the “extremes” tend to not be able to define what, exactly, they find so terrible about the idea that the workers should be the primary beneficiaries of their work.
Because that’s all left/right is. If you want to talk about the pitfalls of Marxist-themed authoritarianism I’m all ears but it isn’t “extreme socialism” anymore than fascism or an absolute monarchy is “extreme capitalism.”
And, just for the record, the wealth gap is growing faster in Scandinavia than America. The ruling classes might deign to take care of the most vulnerable but the model doesn’t actually solve the underlying problems, it just treats the most severe symptoms.
Which is better than nothing, I’ll take a ruling class that believes in noblesse oblige over one that does not, but the cancer remains. The system funnels wealth to the owner class, it can not do anything else without breaking.
Both communist and capitalistic systems have different expressions of socialist programs. It’s too bad that the transition from capitalist to communist economies stops at the authoritarian stage.
Socialism is the workers owning the means of production. It is not welfare programs. It is not a “socialist” program to give a starving person bread, it is a state run charity, and they make damn well sure it’s both hard to get and try to shame you for needing it.
When society was largely feudal, was it “socialism” when the king hosted a public feast to celebrate selling his daughter to a rival warlord? Or was it him giving some of the peasant’s taxes back to them and expecting gratitude?
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