Socialism
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic and constructive discussion from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
A certain knowledge of socialism is expected, if you are new to/interested in socialism, please visit c/Socialism101 before participating here. Socialism101 will gladly help you by answering questions, providing resources etc.
Memes go in c/Lefty Memes
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, upvoting good contributions and downvoting those of low-quality!
Rules
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith discussion is enforced here.
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such,
as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavour.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Xenial Xerus" when answering question 2)
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Rape or assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
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I just don't see any so-called communist countries without literally the exact same problems, so I can't believe that capitalism is the cause. I think centralizing everything in a communism would be equivalent to monopolies and oligopolies in a capitalism.
Rather than promote communism we're better off promoting more direct and fair democracy.
Not to support communism as a plausible solution, but all "communist" countries were what we call "state capitalist". Communism is "worker control of the means of production" not "state control of the means of production". Communism ideologically doesn't have the "centralised" ownership of everything that you are referring to. But all "Actually Existing Socialist" countries like Soviet Russia, Cuba, China, etc... did have that centralisation.
All I'm saying is that when you see people advocating for leftist, progressive, social democratic, or "communist" ideas none of them are talking about state ownership of all industry.
There's lots of interpretation of communism though ...
I think there not being any true communisms despite the attempts supports my point. An Anarcho-Communism fails because it stops being an anarchy the moment one person grabs enough resources and gains enough authority to enforce their will on the rest. An organized democratic communism might work, as I already mentioned in my first comment, but that's absolutely not what the sort of people in these threads are advocating for. Just scroll through and you'll see people advocating for destruction of the state entirely, sometimes you'll even see them mask off and say specifically destruction of western nations.
Hey man maybe don't compare situations we aren't in and face the fact that capitalism has failed once again. Think way back when you played monopoly as a kid, how did every game end? Even a boot smoocher like you should be able to comprehend this simple equation.
So you're allowed to use practical examples but I'm not. You also skipped over my critique of the ideology and not the example, ironically supporting my point on accident when you criticized monopoly because in the previous comment I compared the centralized economy of communism to an oligopoly and a monopoly.
I can smell the leather through my screen.
Maybe you should stop licking boots, then.
Maybe if you weren't so good at capitalism you could share? I know it's scary to think about a world where one day you won't get to wear the boots, but that's your future son. Also you should revisit what the word "through" means.
Alternatively, learn the meaning of words.
This comic refers to wealth inequality and appropriation of wealth by an owner class. This is not what happened in communist countries despite what CIA propaganda would have us believe. The top 1% in the USSR only had about 4% of the total income, compared to 20%ish for modern, capitalist Russia and similar figures for USA and such. Also the top earners were not corrupt bureaucrat politicians, but highly trained professionals like university professors, prominent artists, and other members of the intelligentsia. Similar figures are true for communist Cuba, Maoist China, etc.
Communism can be the most democratic system. For example, Vietnam is right now starting a process of dismantling a lot of bureaucracy and state power and to give power to local communes to have budgetary decisions, administrative power, etc. Luna Oi, a member of the Vietnamese communist party and a youtuber, has a very recent video talking about it.
This post has the word Capitalism™ written at the top. The USSR had a massive prison industrial complex which still holds the record for highest percentage of population imprisoned on earth, the CCP and Cuba are dystopian nightmares.
Lmfao thanks for not arguing against inequality, which was the point of the post, and moving the goalposts to "vague authoritarianism during WW2" because I literally proved you wrong with real-world data.
Simply not true. The USSR GULAG system was essentially dismantled during the 1950s, when the Nazi threat was eliminated, and the imprisonment rates dropped dramatically afterwards. Mass imprisonment was a temporary measure imposed from the threat of Nazi sabotage of the country, and it was a dark chapter of the Soviet Union that lasted less than two decades, whereas the socialist experiment lasted 70+ years. This is in opposition to an actual ever-growing prison industrial complex like that of the USA, which is systematic because it generates immense wealth for some corporations.
Poor Cubans, enjoying higher life expectancy than the USA, highest number of doctors per capita IN THE WORLD, and recently passing a Democratic referendum to reform the constitution in order to enshrine LGBTQ rights. Poor Chinese, seeing increases of 5% of consumer power yearly with an average inflation of 0%, truly harrowing.
Stop spreading false CIA propaganda, the community is called "actual socialism", not "USA propagandized left-punching faux-socialism".
China is not very communist if i may say
I explicitly said Maoist China. China's wealth inequality has risen since the market reforms.
Regardless: the Communist Party of China controls 60% of the stock market and has powerful direction over the economy; it's the largest producer of Electric Vehicles and batteries, and produces 93% of the world's Solar Photovoltaic modules, has an extensive high speed electric railway network, promotes reforestation projects in China and abroad, builds civil infrastructure in the global south, and hasn't carried out wars, sabotages, economic blockades or invasions of any country in the past 40 years. Also, the Chinese people enjoy the highest degree of satisfaction with their government of any country in the world. Sure, they're not my ideal form of government, in that private companies exist, inequality is still comparatively high, and healthcare and education aren't completely free as was the case in the Soviet Union, and importantly they're not helping emancipatory anticolonial projects to the degree that the Soviet Union did.
However, the Chinese model of government is still orders of magnitude than what we have in the west, not just inward but especially outward. Call it by the words you wanna call it, but Socialism with Chinese characteristics is still much better than what we have in the west.
Nothing has effectively changed since Mao, the same exact CCP is in charge of China, in fact real estate rentals continued even after Mao's famous execution spree.
Proving that you don't know what you're talking about. Market economy had been essentially abolished under Mao, and the Deng Xiaoping reforms brought back a market economy. This is a huge change, hardly "nothing changed since Mao"
I think the so-called communist countries in the 20th century (like the soviet union) failed mostly because they didn't motivate enough people to work hard enough.
The 20th century was a time of much innovation, where lots of growth was required to keep pace with the ideas people had. So, for growth you need hard-working people to do it. Capitalism had that because harder working people got higher wages. In communism "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us".
Nowadays, the situation would be very different because we don't have so much growth anymore, so there's less demand for human workers. So even if we can't motivate that many people to work hard, it would mostly be fine because we don't need so many people to work in the first place ...
They failed because they were dictatorships. A bunch of greedy people grabbed power when the previos state fell and their citizenship were forced to endure starvation, hard labor, and class divides.