8 ms·

Yes, believing that workers should own the means of production is the same as believing that Jews should be gassed to death.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
It is when you dehumanize and violently kill those who you think have the means of production or are otherwise opposed to you: See Pol Pot and Chinese Cultural Revolution.
- random314 4y ago
  If you tell me that you believe in democracy, does it make sense for me to accuse you of supporting the horrors perpetrated by USA in Vietnam, all of latin America and the middle east? Soviet union and CCP were never communist, they used the term communism for propaganda purposes. Communism stands for workers owning the means of production. Your local labor union is more communist than the CCP. The collectively owned Amul dairy(India)[1] is more communist than the Soviet union. Communism at a state level has never existed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul
  - harpiaharpyja 4y ago
    Look, whatever it is you believe, just as a practical matter you really should find a new way to identify yourself to others, because that name has been tarnished.
  - mickdeek86 4y ago
    From my reading of your link, Amul is a agricultural cooperative. Strictly speaking, this is not communism, which calls for State (supposedly 'the People') ownership of the means. Amul is more like Distributism, the doctrine of locality of ownership and political representation and the economic doctrine of the Catholic Church. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
    - random314 4y ago
      I have already stated that state communism does not exist anywhere. In any case, a communist state is supposed to be a utopian state that MIGHT eventually emerge. The defining feature of a communist collective is that workers own the means of production. This was achieved successfully for milk production in India with legal protections to prevent financialization such as IPOs for Amul India. This is the largest example (I could find) of a collective organization successfully implementing the concept of workers owning the means of production, so successful that India went from a milk deficit state to the largest milk producer in the world leapfrogging the United states by 3X. You can nit pick on semantics, on how much the state should be involved and how this example is not valid but the "great leap forward " is etc. but the defining feature of communism is workers owning the means of production. This is well understood and is in the first line of its wikipedia definition. You can stretch the essence of the definition to include various other clauses or Soviets etc, so that you might have an angle of attack against the concept of communism. I leave you to that, but I think I have made my point. Distributism and communism seems to have considerable overlap. If you are averse to the term communism, go ahead and call it distributism. I won't be a pedant and argue that Amul is not distributism in action because no Pope/church is involved. Another example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shri_Mahila_Griha_Udyog_Lijjat_Papad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shri_Mahila_Griha_Udyog_Lijjat...
      - mickdeek86 4y ago
        The defining feature of Communism is the State owns everything in a classless society. I invite you to consult any reference. The difference is not semantic; it is a completely different system. What you are talking about is not Communism by any definition, including Marx's. You may as well have said 'coprophagia'. Distributism is a concept - not a system of government - which has been expressed for a long time through agricultural cooperatives, owned jointly by it's member farmers and workers and not 'the People' (ie the State), such as Amul, or the corn growers cooperatives in my native Midwest. It isn't specifically Catholic, it just happens to be largely Catholic workers who have participated. See the afore-cited Mondragon Corporation, larger even than Amul, or the Argentine factory workers declaring ownership of the factories in which they worked, during their financial crisis a couple of decades ago.
- soperj 4y ago
  > or are otherwise opposed to you Wasn't that exactly what happened w/ McCarthyism and the Red Scare?
  - gedy 4y ago
    Are you comparing McCarthy with Pol Pot killing fields and the Red Guards? I'm no McCarthy fan but come on.
    - soperj 4y ago
      Comparing things isn't saying that they're the same, in fact many times it's to say they are different.
some_random 4y ago
at_a_remove 4y ago
Belief is irrelevant. What they've actually done, that's what matters. Belief can only show you how far they have fallen from the mission statement. Check those death counts. Communists make the Nazis look like bumbling amateurs.
- random314 4y ago
  If you tell me that you believe in democracy, does it make sense for me to accuse you of supporting the horrors perpetrated by USA in Vietnam, all of latin America and the middle east? Soviet union and CCP were never communist, they used the term communism for propaganda purposes. Communism stands for workers owning the means of production. This was never true in Russia or China. Your local labor union is more communist than the CCP. The collectively owned Amul dairy(India)[1] is more communist than the Soviet union. Communism at a state level has never existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul
  - at_a_remove 4y ago
    No True communist ...
    - random314 4y ago
      This is a very weak argument and you know it. This really amounts to thought policing- if someone just happens to think that worker ownership should be more than it currently is - the FBI must be tipped off. I will leave the 1984 analogies and the horrors of the CIA in Latin America and Asia up to you.
  - soperj 4y ago
    You don't really have to go out of the country, black slavery, japanese interment camps, treatment of Native Americans, etc etc.
VictorPath 4y ago
> workers should own the means of production Or even believing a worker performing work and creating wealth should not have his surplus labor time expropriated by some idle class heir. The hunter-gatherer bands roaming the Amazon are communist, and free of such exploitation (if they avoid mining companies trying to kill them) - I suppose these hunter gatherers are equivalents to the Nazis.
- random314 4y ago
  This is the magic of American propaganda that workers will lash out against you if you hint that, perhaps maybe, workers deserve a slightly bigger portion of the pie. Americans today have no idea why they celebrate labor day. It comes and goes with the media and government glossing over it as a "long weekend". My original comment is at -1 now, downvoted by employees of corporations because I argued for them.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > Americans today have no idea why they celebrate labor day. It comes and goes with the media and government glossing over it as a "long weekend". It's worse. Americans have no idea that May Day is a holiday that originated in America. Instead, our government changed May 1 into "Law Day," the holiday when we celebrate obeying the law, and created a fake-ass state "Labor Day."
    - random314 4y ago
      I Completely missed that. TIL. "There was disagreement among labor unions at this time about when a holiday celebrating workers should be, with some advocating for continued emphasis of the September march-and-picnic date while others sought the designation of the more politically charged date of May 1. Conservative Democratic President Grover Cleveland was one of those concerned that a labor holiday on May 1 would tend to become a commemoration of the Haymarket affair and would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements that backed the May 1 commemoration around the globe.[19] In 1887, he publicly supported the September Labor Day holiday as a less inflammatory alternative,[20] formally adopting the date as a United States federal holiday through a law that he signed in 1894.[9]"
tarakat 4y ago
You are comparing the mildest version of the stated beliefs of one ideology, to the actions of another (actions that, by the way, were kept hidden from the German people, who for most of the war believed the Jews were merely being, or going to be, expelled. There would be no need for a coverup if gassing was a widely-shared, open belief). Try: "Believing that the economically well-off and those professing contrary politics should be starved to death imprisoned in their own country or in Siberia is the same as believing the German people should prosper in their ancestral lands and be free of foreign exploitation." Present-day communists still proudly proclaim "eat the rich", so the hate is not limited to some distant time and place. And please spare me the excuses of how "eat" doesn't mean "eat", but a peaceful and gradual economic transition where resources are more fairly reallocated. Such charitable interpretations are never extended to disfavored movements.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

It is when you dehumanize and violently kill those who you think have the means of production or are otherwise opposed to you: See Pol Pot and Chinese Cultural Revolution.

random314 4y ago
If you tell me that you believe in democracy, does it make sense for me to accuse you of supporting the horrors perpetrated by USA in Vietnam, all of latin America and the middle east? Soviet union and CCP were never communist, they used the term communism for propaganda purposes. Communism stands for workers owning the means of production. Your local labor union is more communist than the CCP. The collectively owned Amul dairy(India)[1] is more communist than the Soviet union. Communism at a state level has never existed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul
- harpiaharpyja 4y ago
  Look, whatever it is you believe, just as a practical matter you really should find a new way to identify yourself to others, because that name has been tarnished.
- mickdeek86 4y ago
  From my reading of your link, Amul is a agricultural cooperative. Strictly speaking, this is not communism, which calls for State (supposedly 'the People') ownership of the means. Amul is more like Distributism, the doctrine of locality of ownership and political representation and the economic doctrine of the Catholic Church. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
  - random314 4y ago
    I have already stated that state communism does not exist anywhere. In any case, a communist state is supposed to be a utopian state that MIGHT eventually emerge. The defining feature of a communist collective is that workers own the means of production. This was achieved successfully for milk production in India with legal protections to prevent financialization such as IPOs for Amul India. This is the largest example (I could find) of a collective organization successfully implementing the concept of workers owning the means of production, so successful that India went from a milk deficit state to the largest milk producer in the world leapfrogging the United states by 3X. You can nit pick on semantics, on how much the state should be involved and how this example is not valid but the "great leap forward " is etc. but the defining feature of communism is workers owning the means of production. This is well understood and is in the first line of its wikipedia definition. You can stretch the essence of the definition to include various other clauses or Soviets etc, so that you might have an angle of attack against the concept of communism. I leave you to that, but I think I have made my point. Distributism and communism seems to have considerable overlap. If you are averse to the term communism, go ahead and call it distributism. I won't be a pedant and argue that Amul is not distributism in action because no Pope/church is involved. Another example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shri_Mahila_Griha_Udyog_Lijjat_Papad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shri_Mahila_Griha_Udyog_Lijjat...
    - mickdeek86 4y ago
      The defining feature of Communism is the State owns everything in a classless society. I invite you to consult any reference. The difference is not semantic; it is a completely different system. What you are talking about is not Communism by any definition, including Marx's. You may as well have said 'coprophagia'. Distributism is a concept - not a system of government - which has been expressed for a long time through agricultural cooperatives, owned jointly by it's member farmers and workers and not 'the People' (ie the State), such as Amul, or the corn growers cooperatives in my native Midwest. It isn't specifically Catholic, it just happens to be largely Catholic workers who have participated. See the afore-cited Mondragon Corporation, larger even than Amul, or the Argentine factory workers declaring ownership of the factories in which they worked, during their financial crisis a couple of decades ago.
soperj 4y ago
> or are otherwise opposed to you Wasn't that exactly what happened w/ McCarthyism and the Red Scare?
- gedy 4y ago
  Are you comparing McCarthy with Pol Pot killing fields and the Red Guards? I'm no McCarthy fan but come on.
  - soperj 4y ago
    Comparing things isn't saying that they're the same, in fact many times it's to say they are different.

some_random 4y ago

at_a_remove 4y ago

Belief is irrelevant. What they've actually done, that's what matters. Belief can only show you how far they have fallen from the mission statement. Check those death counts. Communists make the Nazis look like bumbling amateurs.

random314 4y ago
If you tell me that you believe in democracy, does it make sense for me to accuse you of supporting the horrors perpetrated by USA in Vietnam, all of latin America and the middle east? Soviet union and CCP were never communist, they used the term communism for propaganda purposes. Communism stands for workers owning the means of production. This was never true in Russia or China. Your local labor union is more communist than the CCP. The collectively owned Amul dairy(India)[1] is more communist than the Soviet union. Communism at a state level has never existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul
- at_a_remove 4y ago
  No True communist ...
  - random314 4y ago
    This is a very weak argument and you know it. This really amounts to thought policing- if someone just happens to think that worker ownership should be more than it currently is - the FBI must be tipped off. I will leave the 1984 analogies and the horrors of the CIA in Latin America and Asia up to you.
- soperj 4y ago
  You don't really have to go out of the country, black slavery, japanese interment camps, treatment of Native Americans, etc etc.

VictorPath 4y ago

> workers should own the means of production Or even believing a worker performing work and creating wealth should not have his surplus labor time expropriated by some idle class heir. The hunter-gatherer bands roaming the Amazon are communist, and free of such exploitation (if they avoid mining companies trying to kill them) - I suppose these hunter gatherers are equivalents to the Nazis.

random314 4y ago
This is the magic of American propaganda that workers will lash out against you if you hint that, perhaps maybe, workers deserve a slightly bigger portion of the pie. Americans today have no idea why they celebrate labor day. It comes and goes with the media and government glossing over it as a "long weekend". My original comment is at -1 now, downvoted by employees of corporations because I argued for them.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > Americans today have no idea why they celebrate labor day. It comes and goes with the media and government glossing over it as a "long weekend". It's worse. Americans have no idea that May Day is a holiday that originated in America. Instead, our government changed May 1 into "Law Day," the holiday when we celebrate obeying the law, and created a fake-ass state "Labor Day."
  - random314 4y ago
    I Completely missed that. TIL. "There was disagreement among labor unions at this time about when a holiday celebrating workers should be, with some advocating for continued emphasis of the September march-and-picnic date while others sought the designation of the more politically charged date of May 1. Conservative Democratic President Grover Cleveland was one of those concerned that a labor holiday on May 1 would tend to become a commemoration of the Haymarket affair and would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements that backed the May 1 commemoration around the globe.[19] In 1887, he publicly supported the September Labor Day holiday as a less inflammatory alternative,[20] formally adopting the date as a United States federal holiday through a law that he signed in 1894.[9]"

tarakat 4y ago

You are comparing the mildest version of the stated beliefs of one ideology, to the actions of another (actions that, by the way, were kept hidden from the German people, who for most of the war believed the Jews were merely being, or going to be, expelled. There would be no need for a coverup if gassing was a widely-shared, open belief). Try: "Believing that the economically well-off and those professing contrary politics should be starved to death imprisoned in their own country or in Siberia is the same as believing the German people should prosper in their ancestral lands and be free of foreign exploitation." Present-day communists still proudly proclaim "eat the rich", so the hate is not limited to some distant time and place. And please spare me the excuses of how "eat" doesn't mean "eat", but a peaceful and gradual economic transition where resources are more fairly reallocated. Such charitable interpretations are never extended to disfavored movements.