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It's strange that people look at the millions dead from starvation from communism, and the quite recent destruction of Venezuela, and still think communism can
by boxed 4mo ago
It's strange that people look at the millions dead from starvation from communism, and the quite recent destruction of Venezuela, and still think communism can somehow work this time.
- wmwragg 4mo agoThere is a significant difference between socialism and communism, Americans seem to purposely conflate the two, they are not the same.
- throwaway290 4mo agoSmells like "no true scotsman" fallacy because they are nearly synonyms. Nobody in USSR could tell the exact difference or at least there was no consensus, and you are expecting modern Americans to do better huh? This basically sums it up: > According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Exactly how communism differs from socialism has long been a matter of debate, but the distinction rests largely on the communists' adherence to the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism#Communism_and_socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism#Communism_and_social...) (To make it more fun Marxism is also its own thing)
- krige 4mo agoThat's entirely orthogonal to the fact that Americans thend to label literally anything and everything they don't like as communist. Especially any sort of social(ist) policy good for the people and bad for the 1%.
- boxed 4mo agoIt doesn't help that a lot of the suggested policies are mind numbingly stupid. Like "wealth tax" for people who own controlling equity in companies. Someone else values your company more and now you are forced by law to sell it and lose control, probably destroying the company.
- bigfudge 4mo agoBut this is to privilege 100+ year old origins of these terms over their actual application and development in most of Western Europe. It’s anachronistic and misleading.
- throwaway290 4mo agoNo, this was true in USSR so like even 40 years ago, I grew up exposed to that a lot and believe me no one can say for sure which is which. To keep things fun, USSR was not communist either for most of the time, it was sort of socialist I guess. There are a lot of jokes reflecting the confusion between socialism and communism and how we always go to communism but never reach it Today there are examples of socialist but not communist countries in Europe. But if you compare them to Venezuela or Brazil you would be crazy. Maybe we need better terminology
- bigfudge 4mo agoI think we’re actually agreeing the terms are confusing. The point is that Western European socialism is not the same as the thing that was essentially synonymous with communism in the USSR in the early 20th century. In the UK at least, the distinction was important because calling oneself a socialist was acceptable, whereas being a communist during the Cold War was not.
- bell-cot 4mo agoThe USSR was economically socialist, ideologically communist, and politically somewhere on the autocracy-dictatorship spectrum. (That last varied over time, as is normal for such governments. Underlings always want autocracy, which means more power for them. The top guy almost always wants an absolute dictatorship.) There were plenty of communists who didn't like that last part - but they were brutally purged by the autocratic-dictatorial faction. Famously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky I'd blame the angry, simplistic Western denunciations of anything vaguely resembling communism (including socialism) on the Western monied classes. Whether Old Money, Plutocrats, Wall Streeters, wanna-be's, sycophants, or whatever - those folks generally hate any idea which might mean less for them, and more for the 99%.
- applicative 4mo agoThe German Social Democratic Party is the literal actual identical party of Marx and Engels. That we assign to the Bolsheviks the mantle of one or another 19th c epithet is a kind of secret pact between the two sides of the Cold War. It is itself doctrinal Leninism even if the State Department spreads it. Its func
- gambiting 4mo agoIt's strange that someone mentions socialism and then another person replies saying communism doesn't work. Are these two the same for you?
- seszett 4mo agoFor Americans it is. Meanwhile, in Europe (I don't know Latin America well enough, although I know a few well-known right-wing leaders that didn't have stellar records) socialist governments consistently have a better record on basically everything from press freedom to economy to public health compared to economically liberal ("centrist") governments. But they're socialist so it doesn't count.
- ane 4mo agoI would call them market economies instead of socialist governments
- arowthway 4mo agoWell, they share the same core componnent of disregard for property rights and freedom of contract.
- gambiting 4mo agoThat doesn't answer my question.
- solid_fuel 4mo ago> disregard for property rights and freedom of contract Are you complaining about taxation and regulation? Both are cornerstones of every successful state in human history.
- loremium 4mo agoAny form of centralized power is bad for the vast majority of civilization. always has been
- geysersam 4mo agoThere are lots of socialist countries in the world that are doing fine.
- petesergeant 4mo agoIs this where we pretend a bunch of rich market-capitalist European countries are “socialist” or are you talking about China and Vietnam?
- ben_w 4mo agoFor some people, even the government interventions by those specific rich market-capitalist European countries are "too socialist" and get the exact same "didn't you realise Stalin killed millions?" kinds of responses.
- NoGravitas 4mo agoIt's just a motte-and-bailey argument. You say you're okay with social democratic policies when you're opposing anything stronger, but oppose social democratic policies when anyone is trying to actually implement them.
- ben_w 4mo agoThat's the point I was making, yes.
- throwaway290 4mo agoPRC is way more capitalist than Norway or some other European countries. Approximately, one is capitalist dictatorship and the other socialist democracy. Yes PRC government was originally propped by USSR but that's it. If you look at labor protection laws, social security, etc it's nowhere near.
- bigfudge 4mo agoYou can’t have it both ways though. The policies enacted in Northern Europe would definitely be agreed on as communist/socialist by the majority of mainstream American politicians, Democrats included.
- reeredfdfdf 4mo agoNordic style social democracy works quite well though. Communism sucks, but too much unregulated Capitalism isn't great either, as we can see in USA and many other countries that suffer from extreme inequality.
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoNordic style social democracy only works well (I think) if the country has reliable sources of income separate from corporations; Norway has a trillion dollar investment fund from oil and gas revenue that is still being added to. The Netherlands earned billions from a gas field in Groningen which they used to fund the social securities systems (subsidies, benefits, etc). But with the closing of those gas fields (they were causing earthquakes, plus environmental concerns) that source of income is gone, and with that + baby boomers retiring + NL being a tax haven so we don't earn much from the huge sums passing through + skyrocketing cost of living, these systems are being broken down one by one.
- NoGravitas 4mo agoSocial democracy is a class-collaboration system where both the owning class and the working class compromise on their own interests (minimizing vs maximizing real wages) for the sake of stability or national interest. Class-collaboration systems -- however desirable they might be --are inherently unstable because the conflict between the owning class and working class is built into the basic structure of the economy. It's also the case that the state, which administers the conditions of this collaboration, is not a neutral party, but a tool of the owning class. Since the 70s, and especially since the 90s, that's resulted in the rollback of social democratic measures put in place after the Great Depression when the bulk of the owning class recognized them as necessary for stability. State oil revenues are a material factor that has slowed that rollback in e.g. the Nordic countries relative to the Anglosphere, but the underlying dialectic isn't any different.
- boxed 4mo agoI'm from Sweden. These "social democracy" systems are really market economies to 90% at least. It's kinda funny to call them socialist. Like calling a modern human a Neandertal because some of their genes are from that species.
- cess11 4mo agoDeliberate starvation is more of a capitalist thing. It's not like China or communist parts of India have a big famine problem, while the US and their partners are causing famines in e.g. West Asia right now. Left wing policies actually work pretty well, this is why the US has spent so much resources undermining movements and states trying to implement them, and this is why the Soviet needed nuclear weapons to survive for as long as it did.
- ben_w 4mo agoA better example of capitalism doing actual famine would be the Irish Potato Famine, which was concurrent with the writing of the actual Communist Manifesto. Communism has also had famine, famously both the Holodomor in the USSR and the Great Leap Forward in China. The only thing that really seems to end famine, is a deliberate policy of subsidising the overproduction of food.
- g8oz 4mo agoSome more examples are covered in "Late Victorian Holocausts" by Mike Judge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts
- boxed 4mo ago> Communism has also had famine The most enormous understatement. They had the biggest famines ever seen. > The only thing that really seems to end famine, is a deliberate policy of subsidising the overproduction of food. That's nonsense. There is no money that can "subsidize" anything if people are already starving because the country screwed up the agricultural system. Starvation is more powerful than monetary systems.
- cess11 4mo agoHow is it better? It's kind of weird to attribute those famines, or e.g. the Kazakh famine contemporary with the holodomor which was arguably worse but is less well known, to communism. Quick industrialisation would be a much better, though partial, explanation. If it was a property of communist or socialist projects, why'd you need to reach almost a century back to find examples? We're massively overproducing food now, and still have famines. Egalitarian distributive policies are key to ending hunger.
- keybored 4mo agoIs this supposed to be an example of propaganda? The line that socialism killed millions uses the unfair standard of attributing wide categories of end-of-life to socialism but not to capitalism or Tsarism.
- _3u10 4mo agoThere’s a bit of a difference in people dying of starvation vs obesity. Unless there is some kind of capitalist force feeding going on. Especially when the year before the agricultural reforms there was minimal starvation.
- keybored 4mo agoBlaming specific events like starvation on Communism can be fair.
- cultofmetatron 4mo agomillions died due to exploitative labor practices by colonialist invaders exploiting the resources and cheap labor potential of the people in it yet I don't see you aknowledge that. communism wasn't behind american slavery or the Belgian occupation of the congo. Not a fan of communism but I dont' think unfettered capitalism is much better. both systems benefit a minority of people at the expense of the majority largely because they allow power to be concentrated in the hands of a few. At this point, anyone spouting vitriole about communism and socialism like they are the same thing just come off as lacking basic capacity to understand nuance at best and mentally ill at worst.
- applicative 4mo agoUnfettered capitalism postdates 'colonialist invaders' by two or three centuries. Spain and Portugal didn't notice capitalism ... so they turned into backwaters.
- asdff 4mo agoHaiti pulls that off under capitalism too. Wider context is a bigger part of that than who owns the means of production.
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoWhat works better, in your opinion? Or, what system is not responsible for human atrocities?
- boxed 4mo agoThe modern market economy + democracy + regulation + social programs. The atrocities normally attributed to such systems like the Korean war, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Vietnam war, Iraq war, etc actually turns out to not really be atrocities when you look just a little bit closer, or at least are trading a small atrocity for a much larger one.