- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmygrad.ml
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Lol. Have fun searching the cosmos for a world where conscious beings only take what they need.
BRB going to take all of the napkins, fire sauce, and salt packets next time I go to Taco Bell because “human nature”
I mean that’s literally why you have to ask for those things from behind the counter now. That literally proves my point.
No, it doesn’t lol. There are still open sauce packets and napkins. People don’t have endless greed for that which they don’t need, especially if their needs are already met by strong safety nets.
Anybody have any meme community recommendations that are funny and not just communist propaganda
Sorry, only fun communist memes here.
How do you force people to give according to their ability? What if they don’t want to?
That’s not what people mean by saying “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” There’s no Robin Hood figure robbing people at gunpoint. What it means is that all of production and distribution is collectivized and run according to a common plan in order to satisfy everyone’s needs.
This question comes from the “what if everyone just wants to do nothing” to justify the existence of a system in which if you are not able to work you die.
Everyone is guaranteed a job, so if they don’t want to then they will just have less money to go around, or maybe they wouldn’t even need to if what they did is automated. However, regardless of whether they work or not, they are guaranteed food and housing. So they just get to do whatever they want. In a communist system someone livelihood is not tied to a job.
What happens when someone doesn’t pay taxes today?
They get elected President.
i could rant about this forever, i dont care how it is called, i just want everybody to work together, sharing the resources, to make a better world for everyone.
while capitalism is just everybody fighting for themself, trying to greedly obtain as much stuff as possible, trying to make their own lives better as first, constantly looking for the next grift to get more.
everybody has been scammed by some lie that competition is needed. Or that rich people are needed.
Pretty sure people hate tankies because they defend dictators like Putin and Jinping, not because they want socialism.
When you start denying genocide, it doesn’t matter how good your economic policy is.
Anyway, Slava Ukraini.
Anyway, are you unaware of the fascist origins of “Slava Ukraini,“ or are you using it despite knowing better?
Communists critically support Russia insofar as they oppose western imperialism and ally with socialist countries and the global south. Communists support popular leaders like Xi Jinping, and the PRC in general, because of the tremendous strides they’ve made in uplifting the working classes in their countries. Not sure what you’re referring to here by saying “genocide denial.”
The PRC has a dictator that has written himself into the country’s constitution and has a profound level of abject poverty, with 20% of the population living on less than $7/day. It is better than it was in the 70s, though, back when they were actually communist. Now they have a massive private sector. Weird that the two changes line up, right?
The Uyghurs, btw.
The Uyghurs, btw.
Its so crazy to see liberals insist that Uyghur Genocide is a big problem that requires US military intervention but the Israeli Very Legal And Good Police Action Against Hamas For October 7th is going great and actually Palestinians should be thanking the IDF for all their hard work.
Like, what even is your definition of genocide anymore? I’ve seen liberals insist that the Uyghurs are being brutalized by a Chinese government building schools that teach Mandarian in the rural corners of Xinjiang. I’ve seen liberals insist a Taiwanese BDSM porn was proof that China’s police state was in violation of a dozen different treaties and conventions. I’ve seen Tibetian life expectancy double over the last 40 years and then received an earful about how the Tibetian ethnic government was doing terrorism by importing modern Chinese TVs, Radios, and Computers with Mandarian language broadcasts into the region.
Meanwhile, you’ve got liberals insisting Greta Thunberg is the antichrist when she tries to deliver baby formula to the Gaza shoreline.
Absolute obliteration of the western understanding of the term. Israelis tortured an orthopedic surgeon to death and there’s absolutely no news coverage of it. Bolsonaro butchers native people in Brazil so he can clear cut their rainforests and the liberals still back him. The Philippines is just an endless string of police actions against union organizers and nobody cares. But Kenya gets a new hospital and that’s Chinese genocide in West Africa.
- I’m not a liberal, I’m a democratic socialist
- I didn’t say we needed to invade China, but good to see your response to genocide is whataboutism, that good old Russian misinformation tactic seems to be alive and well
- fuck Israel, fuck Hamas, fuck the Arab league, and fuck the IDF.
I’m not a liberal, I’m a democratic socialist
fuck Israel, fuck Hamas, fuck the Arab league
Okay, but how can I be racist if I hate everyone in the Middle East, huh? Huh?!
I don’t hate everyone in the middle east, I hate warmongers all over the globe.
Are you saying everyone in the middle east is part of these organizations dedicated to genocide? Pretty fuckin’ racist, man.
I don’t hate everyone in the middle east
Name one good Arab.
Are you saying everyone in the middle east is part of these organizations
I’m saying you know virtually nothing about the region, you’re just regurgitating the bigotry you’ve been force fed since kindergarten.
You’re repeating liberal narratives and attacking socialist democracies, so it’s understandable that you’re being identified as a liberal.
China and Russia aren’t socialist, if they were socialist then the workers would own the means of production.
They’re both just capitalist oligarchies with dictators who disappear their enemies and fake elections.
China is socialist, public ownership is the principle aspect of its economy and controls the commanding heights of industry. Even if you’re (wrongly) defining socialism as cooperative ownership, the PRC has one of the largest cooperative sectors in the world, though it’s subservient to their public sector. Huawei is an example of a cooperative. They have real elections and real democracy.
Russia is a capitalist country, yes. It’s supported insofar as they align themselved with socialist countries and the global south, as well as having increasing numbers of those supportive of returning to socialism.
if they were socialist then the workers would own the means of production
Google “China Negative List Foreign Investment”. You might learn something about how Chinese federal laws guarantee domestic ownership of property and titles and understand why so much of the wealth generated within China remains within the Chinese working class.
They’re both just capitalist oligarchies with dictators
Is there a country in exist that you believe is Actually Existing Socialism, or are you going to shove your fingers in your ears and insist SEOs aren’t real, state central planning isn’t happening, democratic elections don’t count, and Marx didn’t say anything about the socialist transition in his writings.
Xi Jinping is a popularly supported and democratically elected leader. China has eliminated absolute poverty, and year over year is making rapid strides in improving living conditions across the board thanks to their socialist system. They never stopped being a socialist country led by communists, they pivoted strategy.
In the People’s Republic of China, under Mao and later the Gang of Four, growth was overall positive but was unstable. The centrally planned economy had brought great benefits in many areas, but because the productive forces themselves were underdeveloped, economic growth wasn’t steady. There began to be discussion and division in the party, until Deng Xiapoing’s faction pushing for Reform and Opening Up won out, and growth was stabilized:
Deng’s plan was to introduce market reforms, localized around Special Economic Zones, while maintaining full control over the principle aspects of the economy. Limited private capital would be introduced, especially by luring in foreign investors, such as the US, pivoting from more isolationist positions into one fully immersed in the global marketplace. As the small and medium firms grow into large firms, the state exerts more control and subsumes them more into the public sector. This was a gamble, but unlike what happened to the USSR, this was done in a controlled manner that ended up not undermining the socialist system overall.
China’s rapidly improving productive forces and cheap labor ended up being an irresistable match for US financial capital, even though the CPC maintained full sovereignty. This is in stark contrast to how the global north traditionally acts imperialistically, because it relies on financial and millitant dominance of the global south. This is why there is a “love/hate” relationship between the US Empire and PRC, the US wants more freedom for capital movement while the CPC is maintaining dominance.
Fast-forward to today, and the benefits of the CPC’s gamble are paying off. The US Empire is de-industrializing, while China is a productive super-power. The CPC has managed to maintain full control, and while there are neoliberals in China pushing for more liberalization now, the path to exerting more socialization is also open, and the economy is still socialist. It is the job of the CPC to continue building up the productive forces, while gradually winning back more of the benefits the working class enjoyed under the previous era, developing to higher and higher stages of socialism.
And no, China is not commiting genocide. The best and most comprehensive resource I have seen so far is Qiao Collective’s Xinjiang: A Resource and Report Compilation. Qiao Collective is explicitly pro-PRC, but this is an extremely comprehensive write-up of the entire background of the events, the timeline of reports, and real and fake claims.
I also recommend reading the UN report and China’s response to it. These are the most relevant accusations and responses without delving into straight up fantasy like Adrian Zenz, professional propagandist for the Victims of Communism Foundation, does.
Tourists do go to Xinjiang all the time as well. You can watch videos like this one on YouTube, though it obviously isn’t going to be a comprehensive view of a complex situation like this. Even with all of the real complexities, though, nothing material measures up to claims of genocide.
Xi Jinping is a popularly supported and democratically elected leader
Lol
Anyway, that’s a lot of words to say they lifted urban populations out of poverty by embracing market economics while ignoring the existence of rural populations.
I literally linked The Metamphosis of Yuangudui, a formerly extremely poor rural village. The Poverty Eradication Program was focused on the rural areas. They use controlled markets to govern the medium and small firms while relying on massive state owned enterprises to form the backbone of their economy, which has allowed them to directly uplift those in rural areas left behind by the rapid advances of urban industrialization.
The Uyghurs, btw.
btw, previously:
The US tried to foment division in China by funding and organizing Salafi terrorist into Xinjiang, and once its efforts failed, it made lemonade out of its lemon by concocting and promoting a genocide narrative.
The only countries pushing this narrative are the “always the same map” imperial core countries, which just so happen to be largely the same ones supporting Israel’s genocide.
Almost no predominantly-Muslim country buys the Uyghur genocide narrative, because they know it’s bullshit, because they talked to the Uyghurs themselves.
https://twitter.com/un_hrc/status/1578003299827171330 #HRC51 | Draft resolution A/HRC/51/L.6 on holding a debate on the situation of human rights in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of #China, was REJECTED.
- The Uyghur Human Rights Project is a product of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the American government’s main regime change NGO.
- A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
- The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified
- Uyghur genocide allegations
- American Debunks All Major Western Propaganda on Uyghurs and Xinjiang
- US-Funded Uyghur Activists Train as Soldiers of Empire
- The blueprint of regime change operations How regime change happens in the 21st century with your consent
When you start denying genocide, it doesn’t matter how good your economic policy is.
Perfect example of propagandized individuals hating communists because of propaganda.
I deny lots of genocides. For example, when Elon Musk talks about the “white genocide” I deny that. But somehow libs have gotten it in their heads that claims of genocide get to bypass all standards of evidence and fact-checking, because if you don’t immediately accept it without evidence, it means you’re a genocide denier, a bad person, basically a fascist who shouldn’t even be engaged with (conveniently averting the need to provide evidence). The state is more than happy to exploit this nonsense by putting out claims of genocide with zero credible evidence, because they know you’ll do this.
Evidence suggesting a Uyghur genocide in China’s Xinjiang region comes from several documented sources and is frequently characterized as crimes against humanity by international bodies and governments. The evidence includes: Mass Detention: Reports of over one million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims arbitrarily detained in a vast network of internment camps and prisons since 2017. Survivor Testimony: Former detainees report being subjected to abuse, torture, sexual violence (including alleged rape and gang rape), indoctrination, and harsh conditions. Forced Population Control: Evidence of a systemic campaign to drastically reduce birth rates among Uyghurs. This includes reports of forced sterilizations, forced contraception, and forced abortions. Statistics show a steep decline in birth rates in predominantly Uyghur regions. Forced Labor: Accounts detail the forced transfer of detainees from camps into factory work, a system that extends throughout Xinjiang and into other provinces. Cultural and Religious Persecution: Systematic efforts to destroy Uyghur cultural heritage. This involves the destruction or damage of mosques and religious sites, and the forced separation of hundreds of thousands of Uyghur children from their families into state-run boarding schools. Mass Surveillance: The Chinese government uses sophisticated technology and in-person monitoring (like mandatory “homestays” by Han Chinese citizens) to control and monitor the Uyghur population. Official Documents and Satellite Imagery: Leaked Chinese government documents, known as the “Xinjiang Police Files,” and satellite imagery of detention facilities and destroyed cultural sites are used to corroborate survivor and researcher reports. International Classification Genocide: The United States and the parliaments of several countries (including Canada, the UK, France, and others) have formally recognized the situation as genocide and/or crimes against humanity. The core legal argument is the “measures intended to prevent births within the group” and other acts committed with the alleged intent to destroy the group, in whole or in part. Crimes Against Humanity: A 2022 assessment by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights concluded that the “serious human rights violations” in Xinjiang “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” Amnesty International has also made a similar finding. The Chinese government vehemently denies all accusations, asserting that the facilities are vocational training centers and that their policies are necessary for counter-terrorism and poverty alleviation. Would you like to know more about the legal definition of genocide under international law?
No, I would like actual sources.
Since you asked for concise information, here are the key sources that provide evidence for the situation in Xinjiang:
- Intergovernmental & Governmental Reports
- UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Assessment (2022): OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China. This report concluded that the violations “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”
- U.S. Department of State Reports: Annual reports on human rights and religious freedom, which have formally declared China’s actions as genocide and crimes against humanity since 2021.
- Parliaments and Government Bodies: Formal declarations or non-binding motions passed by the parliaments of several countries (including the UK, Canada, France, and others) recognizing the situation as genocide or a serious risk of genocide.
- Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)
- Amnesty International: Major reports, such as “Like We Were Enemies in a War”: China’s Mass Internment, Torture, and Persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang (2021), based on first-hand survivor testimonies, satellite imagery, and data analysis.
- Human Rights Watch (HRW): Numerous reports and updates documenting violations, including arbitrary detention and cultural persecution.
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Reports: Reports like “To Make Us Slowly Disappear”: The Chinese Government’s Assault on the Uyghurs analyzing evidence against the legal standard for crimes against humanity.
- Academic & Investigative Research
- Dr. Adrian Zenz’s Work: Extensive research and publications, often based on leaked Chinese government documents, population statistics, and policy papers, which detail the forced sterilization and birth control campaign.
- Associated Press (AP) Investigations: Reports based on government statistics and interviews with ex-detainees and family members, particularly covering forced birth control and sterilization.
- Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI): Reports based on satellite imagery and open-source intelligence that have mapped the extensive network of detention and re-education facilities, as well as forced labor transfers.
- Primary Evidence
- Survivor/Witness Testimony: Accounts from former detainees, camp instructors, and Uyghurs in exile detailing torture, rape, political indoctrination, and forced separation from families.
- Leaked Official Documents: Includes files known as the “China Cables,” the “Karakax List,” and the “Xinjiang Police Files,” which provide internal policy directives and detailed mechanisms of the mass detention system.
- Satellite Imagery: Used to corroborate the existence, size, and expansion of the detention and re-education facilities. Would you like a link to a specific report, such as the UN OHCHR assessment?
Can I also get a recipe for chicken noodle soup?
You just asked an AI to assemble a list of sources, which you haven’t actually read or examined. Now I’m expected to go through each of them, putting in substantially more work in order to refute them. Work which you will most likely disregard anyway. You didn’t even bother to provide links, so apparently I’m supposed to hunt these documents down myself.
Give me two to three sources, that you have actually read, that specifically call it a genocide, that don’t come from the US government (or other Western governments), and also don’t rely on far-right crackpot Adrian Zenz.
I gave you the effort I thought you deserved 👍
if you don’t immediately accept it without evidence, it means you’re a genocide denier, a bad person, basically a fascist who shouldn’t even be engaged with (conveniently averting the need to provide evidence).
As usual, by failing to accept a claim made without evidence, I have proven that I don’t “deserve” real evidence. Funny how that works, isn’t it? I mean, if you think about it, if you were wrong, you’d never find out, since you never seriously look at the evidence.
Some of us actually practice something called, “critical thinking.”
Did you ask an AI? You’re prominently featuring Adrian Zenz, a paid propagandist for the Victims of Communism foundation that has been caught fabricating evidencd and lying numerous times. He claims China is the antichrist and that he was sent by God to stop them. This is a farce.
I gave you the effort you were worth 🤷
I am so shocked you claim the person saying the thing you don’t like is a capitalist pig-dog liar
Here’s his page on the Victims of Communism website. The Victims of Communism Foundation is a US State Department created propaganda outlet, and Adrian Zenz in particular has been caught lying and fabricating evidence numerous times. You’re upholding a US State Department funded, far-right Christian nationalist, anti-communist propagandist. It’s time to turn off Fox News.
I’m so shocked that you’re completely dismissing the possibility that Zenz is a capitalist pig-dog liar, when it’s very obvious to anyone who knows anything about him that he is.
people hate tankies because they defend dictators
Broke: Defending Dictators
Woke: Regime Change
Around here we don’t fuck with Tankies. We only take you seriously if you’re on an aircraft carrier that just finished carpet bombing the Middle East.
Me when I get so mad that someone doesn’t like Xi Jinping that I prolapse
When your country is shit, that’s all you can really think about.
Tankies are just authoritarians wearing a leftist outfit. It doesn’t matter what labels or symbols they claim, I wouldn’t consider them part of the left, and they shouldn’t be tolerated in leftist spaces either IMHO.
Marxists are absolutely leftists, and are in charge of history’s most significant and largest leftist systems.
So all marxists are tankies? Marxism is incompatible with anti-authoritarianism?
Kinda? Tankie is just a pejorative for Marxist or anti-imperialist, generally. It’s a strawman with exaggerated characteristics that anti-communists fling at people to avoid actually listening to what they have to say.
As far as “authoritarianism” is concerned, all Marxists support the working class wielding its authority against capitalists, fascists, etc.
The transition from capitalism to socialism will nearly always be through revolution. It simply isn’t feasible to ask the ruling class to give up the very system that entitles them to their plunder, elections are carefully controlled so as to not allow genuine socialist or communist victory. Even when communists like Allende won in countries like Chile, they are couped, just like the US is attempting against Maduro. Revolution is authoritarian, it’s the forceful will of the majority against the minority. As Engels put it:
Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is. It is the act by which one part of the population imposes its will on the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannons — by the most authoritarian means possible; and the victors, if they do not want to have fought in vain, must maintain this rule by means of the terror which their arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if the communards had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach them for not having used it enough?
Historically, revolution has unfolded the same way, as the majority enforcing its will upon the minority. The French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, Korean, etc have all been such examples. They have been enormously liberating for the working classes, and terribly authoritarian towards capitalists, landlords, fascists, colonizers, etc. I’m not going to erase that that violence happened, but I’m not going to minimize that these were and are popular movements supported by the broad majority either. None of these countries are utopias, but all are real, with real working class victories.
Socialism is a mode of production, characterized by public ownership being the principle aspect of the economy. The western European countries don’t have socialism, they have social safety nets within the boundaries of capitalism. They fund these safety nets with the spoils of imperialism, ie international plunder of the global south, not through their own labor. The USSR, PRC, Vietnam, etc are socialist, not western Europe, and moreover do not depend on imperialism for their safety nets. Western Europe is not moving onto communism because it isn’t even socialist yet, and is under the dictatorship of capitalists.
Communism is a mode of production where all of production and distribution has been collectivized and run according to a common plan. It’s stateless, classless, and moneyless. It is post-socialist in that socialism is where production and distribution are gradually collectivized, erasing the basis for class, and the basis of the state as a consequence. Personal property remains, ie you can keep your toothbrush, but production and distribution are collectivized.
If you want a good introduction to Marxist theory, I wrote an intro Marxist-Leninist reading list. Feel free to check it out!
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inb4 libs come to smugly tell us we are murderous fascists.
last week, i was queer tankie for interjecting on anti-chinese pink washing propaganda
fortunately, i’ve learned what to expect from the diet-reddit instance of the lemmyverse and it so bizarre that pink washing works for china, but not isreal when it comes to palestine.
Real.
Pretty much yeah
The problem is not the communist utopia, is how the means to build it will always end up in a totlitarian police state. Because we can’t have nice things.
looks around in the usa
This is just a red scare caricature of socialist societies from the perspective of capitalists. For the working classes, socialism has brought dramatic increases in freedom and democratization.
So I will admit that I am ignorant of a method of attaining Communism that isn’t at the end of a rifle, and thus authoritarian by nature (and fully accept that, to a degree, Capitalism is also at the end of a gun, but typically less overt, or often directed without instead of within). The only nations I’ve seen flying the red flag have appeared highly authoritarian (and I’m not going to get drawn into a “USSR and PRC aren’t/weren’t authoritarian, and DPRK is actually a utopia!” discussion, so if that’s the direction this is going, let me know and I’ll politely see my way out).
I’ve seen in the lower comments that Socialism would be used as a gateway to Communism, but I am unclear about the transition from “everybody’s basic needs are met via taxation and distribution” to “personal property is abolished” (as I understand Communism to mean, please correct me if I’m wrong). Plenty of European countries have had (for the west), strong seemingly socialist systems, but they don’t seem to be deliberately angling toward Communism, for example.
So I’m curious what this peaceful Capitalist to Communist timeline would look like.
The transition from capitalism to socialism will nearly always be through revolution. It simply isn’t feasible to ask the ruling class to give up the very system that entitles them to their plunder, elections are carefully controlled so as to not allow genuine socialist or communist victory. Even when communists like Allende won in countries like Chile, they are couped, just like the US is attempting against Maduro. Revolution is authoritarian, it’s the forceful will of the majority against the minority. As Engels put it:
Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is. It is the act by which one part of the population imposes its will on the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannons — by the most authoritarian means possible; and the victors, if they do not want to have fought in vain, must maintain this rule by means of the terror which their arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if the communards had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach them for not having used it enough?
Historically, revolution has unfolded the same way, as the majority enforcing its will upon the minority. The French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, Korean, etc have all been such examples. They have been enormously liberating for the working classes, and terribly authoritarian towards capitalists, landlords, fascists, colonizers, etc. I’m not going to erase that that violence happened, but I’m not going to minimize that these were and are popular movements supported by the broad majority either. None of these countries are utopias, but all are real, with real working class victories.
Socialism is a mode of production, characterized by public ownership being the principle aspect of the economy. The western European countries don’t have socialism, they have social safety nets within the boundaries of capitalism. They fund these safety nets with the spoils of imperialism, ie international plunder of the global south, not through their own labor. The USSR, PRC, Vietnam, etc are socialist, not western Europe, and moreover do not depend on imperialism for their safety nets. Western Europe is not moving onto communism because it isn’t even socialist yet, and is under the dictatorship of capitalists.
Communism is a mode of production where all of production and distribution has been collectivized and run according to a common plan. It’s stateless, classless, and moneyless. It is post-socialist in that socialism is where production and distribution are gradually collectivized, erasing the basis for class, and the basis of the state as a consequence. Personal property remains, ie you can keep your toothbrush, but production and distribution are collectivized.
If you want a good introduction to Marxist theory, I wrote an intro Marxist-Leninist reading list. Feel free to check it out!
I appreciate the write-up, thank you! I feel like a lot of this is semantic differences. I’ve always thought of socialism as any public funds used specifically to help citizens (e.g. social security, medicare, unemployment, UBI, etc) and Communism to be the public owning and running the means of production, and distributing goods thereof, and the stateless, classless, moneyless society to be the ideal utopia it aspired to (similar to Star Trek). From your comment, I see that what I call Communism, you call Socialism (which explains a lot of confusion from discussions in the past with self-described Communists I’ve known), and the nameless Star Trek post-scarcity system you would call Communism.
Do you think it is possible to slow-roll the transition peacefully, though? If, for example, instead of the government bailing out industries, they bought out industries on the cheap, slowly growing and monopolizing like Google or Amazon have? Or do you think the rich would simply block that from happening?
No problem!
To answer your question, Marxists analyze the state as an extension of a given ruling class in society. In capitalism, that means the state is under the control of the capitalists. Capitalists would never allow their sole sources of plunder be gradually taken from them unless the state had supremacy over them and was under the control of the working class.
The PRC actually kinda does what you’re talking about, but they can only do this because they implemented a socialist system following a revolution. The commanding heights of the economy are overwhelmingly publicly owned, and the state exerts strong control over the medium firms as well. As these firms develop, they become easier to fold into the public sector, and thus are absorbed or more directly controlled.
10·23 hours agoThe problem here is your understanding of socialism. European countries such as Denmark, Sweden, and Norway (etc.) have not had socialism. They have had social democracy, capitalism with social safety nets.
Socialism, probably yeah. But here it’s communism thats displayed
All countries headed by communist parties have all been, at most, socialist. Communism is a post-socialist society devoid of classes and a state, where production and distribution is fully collectivized and oriented towards satisfying needs. All communists understand that socialism is the process necessary to build socialism, and that therefore communism has yet to be achieved while socialism has been.
Not true communism™
They were and are truly attempts at building communism. They were “true communism” in that sense. At the same time, they have yet to reach the stateless, classless, moneyless society stage where production and distribution is fully collectivized and oriented towards satisfying needs that communists call “communism” as a mode of production.
The “not true communism” argument more refers to those that incorrectly deny the USSR, PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, etc as validly socialist states working towards communism, not those that acknowledge them as genuine.
You literally said:
Socialism, probably yeah. But here it’s communism thats displayed
That person explained why that’s a flawed way of understanding previous socialist experiments and that the distinction you’re making doesn’t make much sense, and instead of listening and admitting you don’t know much about the topic you decided to accuse that person of a logical fallacy that doesn’t even apply.
(Looks like the comment I replied to got deleted, so mind the context was in response to “Not true communism TM”)
This is an ignorant way to respond, although I can appreciate these terms have several meanings that can be difficult to follow.
Communist parties of the 20th century knew and openly stated that what they had built was a socialist system and communism was the endgame. The goal of 20th century socialists was to gradually progress to that point that scarcity is abolished and distribution follows the principle of need. At which point they might declare communism achieved, so long as other things have happened like completing the (gradual) dissolution of the state.
It is not an attempt to distance from a bad word - we/Marxists/Communists don’t see it as a bad word.
And the 20th century movements & their states were “real communism” in that they were a genuine expression of the movement for communism, and furnish us with both positive and negative examples.
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Not even two comments in and it’s already full on white supremacist “barbaric hordes” talking points
The USSR and PRC are some of the most successful socialist states in history, and have done far better than western countries in creating equitable, worker-focused societies. Not having a western “enlightenment” didn’t stop them.
Least chauvinistic liberal
Thats moving the goal post. You’re saying communism yields benefits everyone, I tell you it hasn’t , and you’re saying those places don’t count.
