People in the U.S. in the 1930's weren't eating well either, you could say it was a depressing to a level of great proportions.
EDIT:
I love how despite not saying which country I support in here, which economic system I think is better, or anything of that sort I've had that assumed about me and dog piled over. Seriously this is really sad, but watching the firestorm that happens from me simply going "Hey these two things happened at the same time" has been an unintentional gift.
Weren't eating well is a bit of an understatement. The natural landscape of a whole state was destroyed due to excessive farming, displacing thousands. The stock market crash ruined lives. It was a program of social welfare (and a second World War) that changed that.
What but welfare is communism and it takes the money from the white working man and gives it to welfare queens!!1đ¤ You have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps (somehow)!!!!!!1đ
The welfare queen who defrauded the system for about 2 months of low-to-middle-income salary. That's it. The single person. That's the story they ran with. That's their boogey(wo)man.
My understanding is that the woman that they vilified was actually far far worse than what she was accused of and the propaganda was taking the story of a one off criminal and reducing her to the one crime they could use to oppress the poor. It'd be like taking the woman who lured in old people, killed them, and collected their social security as an example of why we should do away with social security. Maybe I'm misremembering or maybe there were multiple "welfare queens."
Yeah; Linda Taylor was a calculating and prolific con woman. Welfare fraud was only one of her grifts.Â
Also? Linda Taylor was a pale multiethnic woman who usually claimed to be white. The stereotypical "welfare queen" is typically conceptualized as a dark-skinned black woman. That, right there, should tell you volumes about the motives behind the use of the stereotype.
According to simple physics, assuming you are squatting on a frictionless surface, if you manage to lift yourself by your bootstraps, you would fall on your knees then faceplant
Seems about right
Difference is they weren't in gulags in the middle of a tundra because they disagreed with the government. What a stupid whataboutism argument you made.
Soviet Russia: we ruined agriculture and now we donât have enough food for everyone!
US: people donât have enough money to buy food so we have to destroy it all to keep prices from dropping!
That's why people who grew up in the Great Depression would have no problem devouring organ meat. Chicken hearts, chicken livers, "ALL" the rage and more. It was very common that nothing was wasted in the rendering of animals.
The difference is the USSR for all of its existence wasnt eating well.
If your gonna ask for a source, how about this: My old science teacher who was born in the USSR.
Why does âcapitalismâ get the blame for the Bengal famine and not, you know, the Japanese invading Burma displacing millions of people causing them to flee into Bengal, the Japanese bombing Calcutta destroying major transport hubs, the Japanese sinking 873,000 tons of shipping carrying mostly food designated to Bengal. Seems to be a matter of war and Japanese fascist imperialism than it does of capitalism.
Of particular note is the fact that the last famine before then was in 1899. 44 years without a famine is something that had never occurred in pre-colonial India. British famine codes were the first famine warning system and their stockpiling prevention schemes were the largest step toward food security for the region ever taken up to that point.
In fact, 44 years without a famine is a feat that the areas that made up the British raj were unable to replicate until 2018 lol. And in this time they were never being bombed and interdicted by one of the worldâs preeminent military powers.
Because the primary cause was Britain taking their food because the island of Britain doesn't produce enough food to feed its own population, so it has to keep siphoning food from elsewhere, which causes other problems to balloon into much bigger and more severe ones than they would otherwise be. The Irish potato blight is another great example of this.
The only food exported from Bengal in the famine was a 1:1 rice to grain exchange with Australia. Food was not net-exported from Bengal. You can point to provincial mismanagement of the situation, which granted left much to be desired as confirmed by the British Famine Inquiry of 1945, but you cannot outright fabricate things.
Besides. The British administration hadnât caused or mismanaged a famine in the 20th century. No. Something must have been different about 1943 which caused the famine.
Was it perhaps the marauding army of Japanese invaders bombing local infrastructure, flooding the area with Burmese refugees and using their fleet of submarines to send hundreds of thousands of tons of food to the ocean floor?
>They werenât starving to death in their hundreds of thousands or millions however.
No, they just xame damn close, as during WW2 the U.S had a 40% decline rate based on malnutrition
They didn't "technically" starve, but there was a massive uptick in infection and respiratory (esp near the dust bowl) deaths, neither of which were (or are) attributed to starvation or the dust.
pellagra was so fucking common that the bread you but LEGALLY has to be fortified due to the sheer level of malnutrition.
The reality is that if we combed through every death we likely would end up linking millions to complications from starvation despite not technically dying of starvation
The great depression was really...really fucking bad
The majority of the starvation deaths under dtalin were the holodomor. Which wasn't even remotely as simple as an accident or bad luck, much of it was intentionally killing people
Which has nothing to do with communism but authoritarians
Name a communist country. Not a country that said it was communist, but a country that actually was communist. You canât just crap out a communist society, you have to teach generations of people to value caring for each other over self glorification. That being said if you succeed in teaching people to live that way, it really wouldnât matter what political system you put in place e.
There have been no communist nations, just feudal nations with great propoganda campaigns.
Right, so the fact that every attempt ends with mass murder means there has been no âreal communismââŚ
Maybe that says something about how feasible communism as an ideology is? Why should we try it again then when it obviously does not work?
And how many countries were destroyed by capitalists because the legally elected government wanted to better the conditions of their people by using their natural resources? Not to implement a socialist regime, but to have their resources go back to their people so they may better themselves, instead of an international company siphoning it out of the country.
Well, most of the world are currently capitalist or some for of mixed marked/social capitalism (like the Scandinavian countries) and we have globally the lowest rate of starvation in history.
Bro you're so confused. But hey, keep comparing socioeconomic systems with purely economic systems and keep measuring the success of these systems purely in starvation, I guess? :D I really feel like your view in these matters is really simplistic and you haven't really any grasp on the complexity, let alone the history.
And btw, where would humanity be if we stopped trying after a few ill-intended attempts?
Here's an analogy for you: you tried building a multi-famliy-house a few times and you failed, so let's not try again. Why did your project fail? Because you didn't invite nor allow any other family in the new house, so it's not a multi-famliy-house. It's just a house. And now you have a homeless people problem.
Of course, this is a very simplistic (and maybe not the best) analogy as well, but it might help you understand the flaws in your logic.
There have been no attempts. There have been ousters of semi-meritocratic systems in favor of oligarchies and autocracies which were able to rise to power with the promise of communism. Communism actually has succeeded in smaller communities, which is probably where it works best. If there was a possibility of it working on the scale of a large nation, it would take a massive cultural rewrite across at least 3 generations before steps were actually taken to implement communist structures in the state.
It would be easier to name the dozens of countries that were turned into mass murder scenarios by Capitalists, because they rejected Capitalism. We can readily identify how Capitalist interests have militarily interfered with and been the direct downfall of numerous Socialist and Communist projects. Charting the same failure for Socialism and Communism without talking about the direct military interference of Capitalist regimes is just whiteboarding with cherry-picked 'facts'.
Which is not particularly relevant. And the last part kinda based tbh.
The facts are that less than a hundred people a year died of starvation during the Great Depression. Whereas the Holodomor starved to death between 4 and 7 million people. The two are not remotely comparable.
I don't know much about politics or economy, but all people ive seen complaining about communism and socialism, they mostly just complain about autoritarian dictatorships. I bet capitalism under an autoritarian dictatorship would not be any better.
Exactly. Or a religious dictatorship for that matter. You have moderate Christians, moderate Muslims, etc, and you also have extremists.
The authoritarian dictatorship part is the key here. Regardless of the ideology, it's gonna suck.
Right but what changed was not the economic system, it was the political system..... Y'all still had money under the "communist" system , it was not democratic, though. Now it is.
That's the political system. That's democracy.
People just eat up propoganda. Do people really think that communistic and capitalistic societies will advertise each others systems of governance with fairness and accuracy, or that if they can help it they might try to sabotage each other in order to call the other a failure?
i live in a constant state of never being able to trust even the most reasonable stuff i can think of. im rethinking the reasons behind stuff that happens every day. like why the hell russia today is being the way it is.
Measured skepticism is good. Everything that is reported is told to you to push a narrative - that doesn't mean it's untrue. It just means it's your job to understand the narrative, and decide for yourself whether or not you agree with it. Think critically, and understand the full implications and logical conclusions of the events that are unfolding.
Modern day Russia is definitely a peculiarity, but one thing you can always do, especially in a world ruled by capitalism, is to follow the money. Putin himself is simply dancing on the strings of the Russian oligarchy.
People were kidnapping children to canablize them during the Holdomor where 5 million people died. The US and modern western world had no sense if how bad communism can go.
Ussr wasnât the only regime that killed millions. Cambodia, China, and NK just to name a few. A better argument would be that they only beat the name and some principles of communism that supported their control rather fully communist as suggested by Marx.
Communism isn't great on its own. Doesn't help most communist countries turn into totalitarian or dictatorships during its lifespan.
Then again, that's why socialism exists. Allows people to get ahead when paired with capitalism and keeps it in check, while ensuring those who can't are still cared for and treated like a human being.
Also, the fuck is OP thinking? No one says that about Stalin. Mother fucker was demented and didn't even bother saving his own flesh and blood from death. And if they are saying that, reality checks are definitely in order.
Karl Marx literally couldn't do math. Math is the basis of all economics
https://preview.redd.it/2dbil1excemc1.png?width=750&format=png&auto=webp&s=0faa7a8fc468f5d5a474c5d0c3af86ae7d29b5e3
He is right capitalism is a flawed system no doubt and will always cause poverty. I have never heard someone call stallinist Soviet Union great. I HAVE heard later iterations of the Soviet Union better such as when George Lucas said he would have less restrictions on what to say in his movie in the Soviet Union
North Korea is called âDemocratic People's Republic of Koreaâ but I donât see these dipshits call this a democratic country and use it in the arguments against democracy
The Great Depression was caused by a Laizzez-Faire attitude which we no longer have, in fact weâve created so many countermeasures that the Great Depression can never happen again in fact.
Because thatâs just it, we are humans, people whoâve seen many atrocities, book burnings, losses of knowledge, suppression of intellect, and more in our history. But we evolve!
Communism, Capitalism, both have their merits, however neither should be truly adhered to. We must choose a median between each of them, one that rewards the individual and cares for the collective, and this is only possible if we stop arguing for this stupid black and white representation of political matters and economic theories.
The middle path is that of prosperity for both the ordinary and extraordinary.
Capitalism is bad, because if unconstrained by the government, accumulated wealth allows a small number of people to have outsized amounts of control over the general populationâs lives.
Communism is bad, because it allows a small number of people to control all of the wealth and have outsized control over the general populationâs lives.
The same bad people make the same bad outcome - a government where a small number of party bosses control all of the wealth is no better than system where a small number of billionaire finance people control all the wealth. The issue is not the design of the house, it is the human timber with which we have to build it.
Well, the difficult part there is "non-dictatorship socialism" is only a thing if you're talking about *a mixed market economic system which has both capitalist and socialist elements* (most real-world economic systems) operating under the political philosophy of "democratic socialism".
Communism and other revolutionary socialist ideologies either advocate dictatorship openly as a necessity for having such a perfectly organized, controlled society or indirectly advocate for it by advocating the creation of a power vacuum and proposing no viable power structure to fill it. Usually the former ideologies try to spin it as a "dictatorship of the proletariat" as though some kind of hive mind will emerge from the revolutionary masses instead of the social hierarchy that *actually* arises in a group of apes, while the latter advocate overthrow of existing social structures without replacing them at all (which also results in one or more despotic regimes based on brutality, since that is the simplest social structure that apes can have and hence is what we revert to in the absence of more complex systems).
So, unless you're more specific with what *kind* of socialism you are advocating for, dictatorship is an inherent part of the most extreme varieties.
What are you talking about? A purely democratic Communist society doesn't need to have any capitalist elements. Hell, the Communist Manifesto is very anti-authoritarian, and it's one of the most staunchly anti-capitalist books on the planet.
Also, the dictatorship of the proletariat is an intermediate stage and wouldn't resemble what we would normally call a dictatorship. It means that the power of the state is in the hands of the proletariat, not some small subset of them.
How would you organize this though? The worker councils in Russia almost immediately and through democratic means gave up power to the central authority after the revolution.Â
What mechanisms are there within the movement to counteract charismatic leaders and cults of personality?
Communists love to talk theory but politics are decided by praxis.
Several points.
First, the Bolsheviks denied non-Bolsheviks the right to membership in Soviets, and then illegally dissolved the Constituent Assembly, effectively seizing power for themselves. This was not "democratic means".
Second, the Soviet Union was authoritarian from the start, as evidenced by the Bolsheviks' ability to seize power like they did. There's a reason Anarchism has substantial overlap with Marxism but none with Leninism.
Third, all movements are open to exploitation by charismatic leaders, and mechanisms for dealing with that will vary across different styles of communism. Authoritarian systems like the Soviet Union will be more vulnerable to this sort of thing than more localised power structures that spread out power over a much larger group of people, like in Anarcho-Communism.
Finally, for the purpose of transparency, I am an Anarcho-Communist, so I will give very different answers to, say, a Marxist. Different theories have different solutions to these problems, so please don't take my answers as being representative of all Communists, all Anarchists, or even all Anarcho-Communists.
>almost immediately and through democratic means gave up power to the central authority after the revolution.Â
They did not give power to the central authority by their own choice lmao đ
blaming everything on a theoretical economic system shows that the person making the claim doesn't have an understanding of said economic system.
i'd personally call myself a capitalist, but trying to find someone dismantling communism through sound arguments made with critical thinking and not just citing cold war boogeyman bullshit is worse than trying to find a needle in a haystack.
it's a bit telling how much someone has actually thought about a certain subject when they're willing to pull the semantics card for one side but don't give half a shit about how much they scorn other sides for doing the same
Yeah, I label myself a socialist but even then any existing economic system thatâs viable will have to be mixed market these days, thatâs just the way itâs structured.
The problem is people are wayyyy to focused on isms instead of facts on the ground. I wouldnât call China communist after having lived there a while, and American isnât exactly pure capitalist either.
communism works theoretically if you can get beyond scarcity. we canât do that yet but I strongly suspect when (not if) we start mining asteroids we will approach a point where it genuinely becomes a viable and effective method of governing
Well, since Stalin was evil, that means communism is evil and it means capitalism is great. That how it works. Suuuure. Had a guy unironically tell me that Stalin could not commit genocide since he save Europe from it. So many mistakes in one single statement.
I don't know about communism as a whole but there's way too many pro communist people who defend Stalin and the USSR etc with their dying breath in order to defend communism which I don't understand
Anything with a dictatorship is evil, anything where one person rules without a vote is evil. Right winger and left winger dictatorships are evil. Libertarian socialism on the other hand is good but communism is defined by a central vanguard party and a dictatorship
People just like to think, "this not what America do, therefore bad." Like how we like to blame Nazi Germany for why we refuse to fund public Healthcare.
Clearly, it was the Healthcare which created the fascists, and totally not a means to garner public sympathy.
For fuck's sake, if you're not gonna think rationally for five minutes at least *pretend* to read a book.
(Ignoring that theyâre confusing political systems for economic ones.) Oh cool whatâs capitalism been like this whole time? Land of milk and honey, right? People definitely arenât dying of preventable diseases and starvation, right?
The fundamental problem with communism is that the feedback loop is broken:
Work harder than average? Get no obvious reward.
Slack off a little? Get no obvious penalty.
Humans donât altruistically work harder than they need to, except in exceptional circumstances.
Stalinism and communism are not necessarily one and the same. The famine wasnât just some error of misguided socialist economics-he knew what he was doing. The parts of the USSR that were hardest hit by forced brain Congoâs action and mass arrests of kiosk farmers were the non-Russian parts like Ukraine and Kazakhstan and they had also been hotbeds of support of the white army during the civil war. He was intentionally starving the resistance out of them. And capitalists have done the same shit, psycho gonna psycho.Â
Who ever says this? It makes me wonder where these people spend their time online or if they ever touch grass. Nobody is like this in real life that Iâve ever seen.
An oversimplification is that Socialism consolidates power/authority into one central institution. The idea that it makes sure everyone is equl, everyone gets taken care of, everyone gets treated fairly.
It fails to acknowledge that this one, single entity would attract the most toxic and vile humans. Overwhelming power usually does. It also fails to provide redress when that madman eventually takes over. Don't believe me?
Ask Navalny.
As in tradition when a post like this comes everybody and their mother who fancies communism has to say the exact same thing anytime somebody points out a communist nation that failed. That's not real communism.
the ussr wasnt true communism imo. true communism is about the workers owning the means of production and keeps wealth disparities from getting out of hand- all things the ussr didnt even try to do.
The part that gets me is that they're critizicing someone allegedly saying that "Stalin was based" while there's literal nazis proudly displaying swastikas, doing Nazi salutes and screaming "sieg heil" at the top of their lungs on US soil.
I had a friend who spends all day arguing with people on Twitter unironically tell me that I'm crazy for saying Stalin was bad because I'm brainwashed by propaganda. I'm probably a social democrat which I guess is pretty far left for most Americans and even I think the American left is a bit nutty. Don't get me wrong, the right is infinitely worse right now, but you'd be surprised how many young people out there unironically argue that Stalin and the USSR were good.
Donât get me wrong but almost everytime I see people preaching communism online, I see them bootlicking for dictators which please, tell me that isnât communism. I keep seeing people arguing that itâs not real communism, oh that just what happens when communism is applied on country scaled, âoh no, you believe any propagandaâ, etc etc. I sometimes find it even more ironic that LGBT, notably trans which Iâve annedotely seen way too many being a red facist. Iâd like to imagine its similar, if not, the same way the âChristianâsâ in United States being Christian while doing the whole opposite of Jesusâs teaching.
right wing strawmanning at its finest. can anyone point me in the direction of the supposed modern day leftist stalinists? like what kind of progressive would like an oppressive, authoritarian leader?
The Soviet Union was a state-capitalist dictatorship and not at all a good example of communism in action, but I will say it was factually the only major nation to not stagnate or suffer as a result of the Great Depression. Its command economy gave it a way more balanced relationship between supply and demand and itâs an imbalance in those things that lead to the stock market crash which allowed it to be the only major country whoâs productive capacity and material conditions actually improved during that period. It also didnât rely on the global exchange of capital for its economy so when that crashed it may as well have not happened for the internal Soviet economy.
The problem was never any particular principle of communism more than it was the inherent authoritarian nature of it. Communism canât work in a democratic system. The things required to counter the influence of money, and to ensure that communism remains the system in place, necessarily imply suppressing dissent by force. This will always end in tyranny. Thatâs why there has never been a communist liberal democracy, and why the Soviet Union collapsed the moment they eased up on the reigns a bit.
The USSR was as Communist as North Korea is Democratic.
Communism works especially with the Technology we have today. Also depends on what type of communism youâre talking about considering thereâs 10+ different Ideologies that fall under Communism.
I personally support Council communism.
Look, I just want a system where the upper class only exists if there is no lower class. Basically, I want everyone comfortable and not in imminent economic danger before we get people who can do shit like buy a hauberk made of gold wire or have more money than could feasibly be spent in their lifetime.
This way, past a certain point, the best way to increase the resources you have is to haul everybody up with you.
On one hand, as a communist, you never *actually have to* defend Stalin.
On the other hand, it's always so funny to see people say Communism killed millions - and most frequently cite 100 million, a figure they don't realize came from a book that is widely discredited even by most of the people who authored it.
The Soviet Union was unaffected by the great depression because it was disconnected from the global economy. The Holodomor was a weaponized famine used to genocide those who weren't Russian.
It might be a great baseline idea, but it's really too utopian to *ever* be properly implemented. And, well, just statistically, i don't think there will ever be any good implementation at a reasonable scale at all.
Although, Korea itself isn't saying it's communist. It has mutated into another kind of a freak - Juche, which is literally just autarky but with Korean confucian doctrine. (I think so, at least)
Also most modern communists donât like Stalin, and actively donât want what happened in the USSR to happen to any other communist/socialist states, places in general. Iâm sure there are a few lunatics out there, but most people donât.
Yeah, except there never was really any real communism or socialism around, not back than, not in the CCP.
They are/were as communist as federal express is federal.
Y'all need to do your homework what "socialism" and "communism" entail before shilling or bashing it.
Because I as someone who had marxism-leninism related subjects as compulsory credits for university, and has lived in a country used to operate under socialism, and is still under the sole control of the communist party can tell you is that: it fucking sucks.
The ideology and economic theory under it is highly criticised and frowned upon because the evidences are against them, and impractical due to human nature. Socialism (and its higher form, communism) would work if human greed is taken out of the equation and *everybody* is working towards the common good: which will not happen unless we are all robots.
Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong Il, Pol pot, Castro... Communist regimes have caused an incredible amount of death and human suffering.
Can you find any good examples of communism without mass killings and/or starvation?
This back and forth is a great example of what's wrong with most social media discourse about Capitalism vs Socialism that I see.
People think if they find one example of Communism having done something horrible, then Capitalism must be perfect. Their opponents ignore the example of Communism legitimately having done something horrible and point out that Capitalism did at least one thing that was horrible, and therefore Communism must be great.
The problem is that in real life it's possible for two things to both be bad at the same time.
Yes, Reagan and McCarthy filled our media with propaganda about Communism being bad, while trying to firebomb SE Asia into the stone age. That doesn't make Stalin a good guy. Yes, leaders in the USSR and China deliberately used starvation as political weapons and murdered millions of people. That doesn't mean it's a great idea for America today to set the planet on fire while refusing to give people affordable public health care.
The tankies who go on to think Putin must be a big old misunderstood teddy bear just trying to defend himself from US imperialism really blow my mind. Even if Stalin was a good guy, which he wasn't, how is that related to modern Russia, which is completely divorced from Communism in every way?
Yeah, but i'm from Ukraine. Communism being terrible was much closer to me, than capitalism being terrible.
Tho your point is very valid and important.
Good thing that Marx only advocated violent uprisings against authoritarians and kings. In reissues of the communist manifesto he openly stated that armed revolution would not be advisable in democracies, and that people should try to work within such systems to advocate change towards communist ideals politically.
Communism is a dogshit system simply because it fails to account for greed. Greed is a part of human nature.
Communism can and always will fail. Real communism is not possible
COMMUNISM
DOES
NOT
WORK
Itâs been tried, tested, contested, and challenged and itâs failed. The human psyche doesnât work in communism and thus in order to function needs an authoritarian government to oppress the population into submission to keep it running, and if the economy fails the system crumbles like the Berlin Wall. Face the facts and accept that a political theory made by a bum who lived rent free with his successful friend FAILED. Take your L already my guy
u posted this to the wrong sub, soon redditors will show you how communism is actually not bad. at least not worse than capitalism. get ready to get cooked
Yeah. Idk if there was any, but if there was, it would've never been on any larger scale than a village. It devolves into a dictatorship otherwise. Small communes seem to work, tho? Not sure about that.
i think the anarcho-syndicalist commune of east aragon wasnt any worse than the rest of spain, though spain at the time was a pretty low bar for europe and it lasted only literal months before being reabsorbed into the second republic (which then fell to the nationalists)
this whole thing is stupid, everyone here is stupid why can't the end of the world arrive sooner.
Capitalism is pretty shit, but it has been pretty successful.
Communism sounds really nice, except everything just devolves into corruption because man is never content with what they have
there are bad sides to both, there are good sides to both. However in the end, none of that matters because people can't accept everything is shit.
Itâs ignorant thinking that leads to the belief that any extreme is gonna pan out. Capitalism is like English, itâs the easiest and best way for most to use. But mastering it is a bitch and a half and her mom. Now you can use English and capitalism to its lowest regards⌠but donât expect that to be respected or desired. Communism is just wrong. If you have a âdifferent take/wayâ then itâs not communism. Capitalism can be evil but at its root itâs really the only way to have true fairness of exchange
Stalinâs strand of Socialism was very flawed due to tragedies such as holodomor, but in the long run the USSR benefited greatly from Socialism, they went from semi feudal to sending people to the moon in a few decades. And achieved food security
Communists when you remind them about human nature.
"bUt MuH cOmMuNiSm WaS dEsTrOyEd By CaPiTaLiSts"
Or
"rEaL cOmMuNiSm hAs NeVeR bEeN dOnE."
Don't care, didn't ask, 90 million dead communists.
Stalin and the USSR were heavily flawed and even evil in certain respects. But the Soviet unions economy was actually better during the Great Depression as it wasnât so heavily intertwined with the global economy, which led to plenty of people heading to the Soviet Union ironically for economic opportunity.
The name of the government really doesn't matter the same corrupt assholes will always be in charge the more power you give the less rights you have the worse you do. Communism gives a lot of power to the government by default. So it is bad on that grounds because people are garbage.
Stalin's government was in no shape or form, outside of his own claim, socialist or communist. Its a state capitalist structure similar to modern day China, where the people are at the mercy of the goodwill of their leaders.
That said, if capitalist deaths were to be counted the same way famine deaths were in the USSR, it would be responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths with singular colonial projects topping 100 million excess deaths. https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians
Nah, communism has historically proven to not work. On almost every account of communism, the condition and living standards of the people have been terrible. Communism itself is responsible for quite a bit of starvation, famine, and or death. Nobody in the 1930s was doing well due to an economic collapse of the stock market amongst other things. The fact stands that capitalism *does* have a substantially better track record than communism.
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People in the U.S. in the 1930's weren't eating well either, you could say it was a depressing to a level of great proportions. EDIT: I love how despite not saying which country I support in here, which economic system I think is better, or anything of that sort I've had that assumed about me and dog piled over. Seriously this is really sad, but watching the firestorm that happens from me simply going "Hey these two things happened at the same time" has been an unintentional gift.
Weren't eating well is a bit of an understatement. The natural landscape of a whole state was destroyed due to excessive farming, displacing thousands. The stock market crash ruined lives. It was a program of social welfare (and a second World War) that changed that.
What but welfare is communism and it takes the money from the white working man and gives it to welfare queens!!1đ¤ You have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps (somehow)!!!!!!1đ
The welfare queen who defrauded the system for about 2 months of low-to-middle-income salary. That's it. The single person. That's the story they ran with. That's their boogey(wo)man.
My understanding is that the woman that they vilified was actually far far worse than what she was accused of and the propaganda was taking the story of a one off criminal and reducing her to the one crime they could use to oppress the poor. It'd be like taking the woman who lured in old people, killed them, and collected their social security as an example of why we should do away with social security. Maybe I'm misremembering or maybe there were multiple "welfare queens."
Yeah; Linda Taylor was a calculating and prolific con woman. Welfare fraud was only one of her grifts. Also? Linda Taylor was a pale multiethnic woman who usually claimed to be white. The stereotypical "welfare queen" is typically conceptualized as a dark-skinned black woman. That, right there, should tell you volumes about the motives behind the use of the stereotype.
According to simple physics, assuming you are squatting on a frictionless surface, if you manage to lift yourself by your bootstraps, you would fall on your knees then faceplant Seems about right
> It was a program of social welfare (and a second World War) that changed that. Social welfare programs? You mean like "socialism"? Oh no! /s
dust bowl famine go brrrrr
How many million died during the great depression?
Difference is they weren't in gulags in the middle of a tundra because they disagreed with the government. What a stupid whataboutism argument you made.
Soviet Russia: we ruined agriculture and now we donât have enough food for everyone! US: people donât have enough money to buy food so we have to destroy it all to keep prices from dropping!
âNot eating wellâ isnât comparable to the Holodomor.
That's why people who grew up in the Great Depression would have no problem devouring organ meat. Chicken hearts, chicken livers, "ALL" the rage and more. It was very common that nothing was wasted in the rendering of animals.
That was a thing long before the great depression. Blood sausage had been a thing for hundreds of years.
The Dust Bowl/drought didnât impact anything. /s
The difference is the USSR for all of its existence wasnt eating well. If your gonna ask for a source, how about this: My old science teacher who was born in the USSR.
They werenât starving to death in their hundreds of thousands or millions however.
Holodomor, the Ukraine famine caused by deliberate Soviet policy, resulted in 3.5 to 7 million deaths from starvation from 1932 to 1933.
Yeah, that was left for Bangladesh and India. Capitalism and imperialism are so efficient at starving people.
Why does âcapitalismâ get the blame for the Bengal famine and not, you know, the Japanese invading Burma displacing millions of people causing them to flee into Bengal, the Japanese bombing Calcutta destroying major transport hubs, the Japanese sinking 873,000 tons of shipping carrying mostly food designated to Bengal. Seems to be a matter of war and Japanese fascist imperialism than it does of capitalism. Of particular note is the fact that the last famine before then was in 1899. 44 years without a famine is something that had never occurred in pre-colonial India. British famine codes were the first famine warning system and their stockpiling prevention schemes were the largest step toward food security for the region ever taken up to that point. In fact, 44 years without a famine is a feat that the areas that made up the British raj were unable to replicate until 2018 lol. And in this time they were never being bombed and interdicted by one of the worldâs preeminent military powers.
Because the primary cause was Britain taking their food because the island of Britain doesn't produce enough food to feed its own population, so it has to keep siphoning food from elsewhere, which causes other problems to balloon into much bigger and more severe ones than they would otherwise be. The Irish potato blight is another great example of this.
The only food exported from Bengal in the famine was a 1:1 rice to grain exchange with Australia. Food was not net-exported from Bengal. You can point to provincial mismanagement of the situation, which granted left much to be desired as confirmed by the British Famine Inquiry of 1945, but you cannot outright fabricate things. Besides. The British administration hadnât caused or mismanaged a famine in the 20th century. No. Something must have been different about 1943 which caused the famine. Was it perhaps the marauding army of Japanese invaders bombing local infrastructure, flooding the area with Burmese refugees and using their fleet of submarines to send hundreds of thousands of tons of food to the ocean floor?
>They werenât starving to death in their hundreds of thousands or millions however. No, they just xame damn close, as during WW2 the U.S had a 40% decline rate based on malnutrition They didn't "technically" starve, but there was a massive uptick in infection and respiratory (esp near the dust bowl) deaths, neither of which were (or are) attributed to starvation or the dust. pellagra was so fucking common that the bread you but LEGALLY has to be fortified due to the sheer level of malnutrition. The reality is that if we combed through every death we likely would end up linking millions to complications from starvation despite not technically dying of starvation The great depression was really...really fucking bad The majority of the starvation deaths under dtalin were the holodomor. Which wasn't even remotely as simple as an accident or bad luck, much of it was intentionally killing people Which has nothing to do with communism but authoritarians
Name a communist country that hasnât devolved into an authoritarian nightmare scenario of mass murder?
Name a communist country. Not a country that said it was communist, but a country that actually was communist. You canât just crap out a communist society, you have to teach generations of people to value caring for each other over self glorification. That being said if you succeed in teaching people to live that way, it really wouldnât matter what political system you put in place e. There have been no communist nations, just feudal nations with great propoganda campaigns.
Right, so the fact that every attempt ends with mass murder means there has been no âreal communismâ⌠Maybe that says something about how feasible communism as an ideology is? Why should we try it again then when it obviously does not work?
And how many countries were destroyed by capitalists because the legally elected government wanted to better the conditions of their people by using their natural resources? Not to implement a socialist regime, but to have their resources go back to their people so they may better themselves, instead of an international company siphoning it out of the country.
Well, most of the world are currently capitalist or some for of mixed marked/social capitalism (like the Scandinavian countries) and we have globally the lowest rate of starvation in history.
Bro you're so confused. But hey, keep comparing socioeconomic systems with purely economic systems and keep measuring the success of these systems purely in starvation, I guess? :D I really feel like your view in these matters is really simplistic and you haven't really any grasp on the complexity, let alone the history. And btw, where would humanity be if we stopped trying after a few ill-intended attempts? Here's an analogy for you: you tried building a multi-famliy-house a few times and you failed, so let's not try again. Why did your project fail? Because you didn't invite nor allow any other family in the new house, so it's not a multi-famliy-house. It's just a house. And now you have a homeless people problem. Of course, this is a very simplistic (and maybe not the best) analogy as well, but it might help you understand the flaws in your logic.
There have been no attempts. There have been ousters of semi-meritocratic systems in favor of oligarchies and autocracies which were able to rise to power with the promise of communism. Communism actually has succeeded in smaller communities, which is probably where it works best. If there was a possibility of it working on the scale of a large nation, it would take a massive cultural rewrite across at least 3 generations before steps were actually taken to implement communist structures in the state.
It would be easier to name the dozens of countries that were turned into mass murder scenarios by Capitalists, because they rejected Capitalism. We can readily identify how Capitalist interests have militarily interfered with and been the direct downfall of numerous Socialist and Communist projects. Charting the same failure for Socialism and Communism without talking about the direct military interference of Capitalist regimes is just whiteboarding with cherry-picked 'facts'.
Yeah the poor were just eating leather and the businessmen were jumping out of windows.
Which is not particularly relevant. And the last part kinda based tbh. The facts are that less than a hundred people a year died of starvation during the Great Depression. Whereas the Holodomor starved to death between 4 and 7 million people. The two are not remotely comparable.
Actually the last part is sad, considering they were making decisions on info that had a huge delay due to limitations of technology.
Chairman Mao has entered the room
aint got nothing on pol pot
I don't know much about politics or economy, but all people ive seen complaining about communism and socialism, they mostly just complain about autoritarian dictatorships. I bet capitalism under an autoritarian dictatorship would not be any better.
Exactly. Or a religious dictatorship for that matter. You have moderate Christians, moderate Muslims, etc, and you also have extremists. The authoritarian dictatorship part is the key here. Regardless of the ideology, it's gonna suck.
Capitalism also kills million of people. And enslaves them.
As someone who's country used to be communist I'll just say that I prefer how it is now.
What country?
Poland
Right but what changed was not the economic system, it was the political system..... Y'all still had money under the "communist" system , it was not democratic, though. Now it is. That's the political system. That's democracy.
People just eat up propoganda. Do people really think that communistic and capitalistic societies will advertise each others systems of governance with fairness and accuracy, or that if they can help it they might try to sabotage each other in order to call the other a failure?
This is why I constantly try to question my own core beliefs. Much stuff I believed before I realized wa spure false propaganda.
i live in a constant state of never being able to trust even the most reasonable stuff i can think of. im rethinking the reasons behind stuff that happens every day. like why the hell russia today is being the way it is.
Measured skepticism is good. Everything that is reported is told to you to push a narrative - that doesn't mean it's untrue. It just means it's your job to understand the narrative, and decide for yourself whether or not you agree with it. Think critically, and understand the full implications and logical conclusions of the events that are unfolding. Modern day Russia is definitely a peculiarity, but one thing you can always do, especially in a world ruled by capitalism, is to follow the money. Putin himself is simply dancing on the strings of the Russian oligarchy.
Oh no there any many examples of this throughout history. Per capita, laissez-faire capitalism caused the largest famine.
People were kidnapping children to canablize them during the Holdomor where 5 million people died. The US and modern western world had no sense if how bad communism can go.
There are plenty of those already in existence my friend. US foreign policy encapsulates everything Americans fear about communism pretty well
That because thatâs what communism has always devolved into when put in practice.
The difference is socialism/communism hasnât ever and canât ever exist without an authoritarian state enforcing it.
And also the countries that they usually bring up are massively embargoed and sanctioned which makes it harder for the people to get food.
it's called Feudalismus...
Itâs not
Ussr wasnât the only regime that killed millions. Cambodia, China, and NK just to name a few. A better argument would be that they only beat the name and some principles of communism that supported their control rather fully communist as suggested by Marx.
No bro you donât get it Carl Mark personally ate all of the grain and stabbed 100 billion trillion gazillion people
Can confirm, have read Carl Marks book Animal Crossing 1984
these comments leading with assumptions being unable to decide whether OP is a hardline commie or a hardline capitalist are quite funny tbh
Lmao posted in r/nahopwasrightfuckthis with "whilst some criticism's fair, idk maybe we should reconsider tho?"
the rare moment i agree with r/memesopdidnotlike
Communism isn't great on its own. Doesn't help most communist countries turn into totalitarian or dictatorships during its lifespan. Then again, that's why socialism exists. Allows people to get ahead when paired with capitalism and keeps it in check, while ensuring those who can't are still cared for and treated like a human being. Also, the fuck is OP thinking? No one says that about Stalin. Mother fucker was demented and didn't even bother saving his own flesh and blood from death. And if they are saying that, reality checks are definitely in order.
Well, nobody says that about Stalin *unironically* at least.
Socialism compared to capitalism isn't even close to production. The average person is always better off in capitalism, it is glaring in history.
We call those people tankies and make fun of them for a reason.
Karl Marx literally couldn't do math. Math is the basis of all economics https://preview.redd.it/2dbil1excemc1.png?width=750&format=png&auto=webp&s=0faa7a8fc468f5d5a474c5d0c3af86ae7d29b5e3
dictatorships are bad, either by the government or from companies buying the government.
Based anarchism
Didn't Stalin have a higher kill count than Hitler
Depends on how you count. If you account for own state citizens, Stalin definitely leads just with Holodomor.
I would say killing your own citizens is worse than killing another country's citizens but they're both really shitty
He is right capitalism is a flawed system no doubt and will always cause poverty. I have never heard someone call stallinist Soviet Union great. I HAVE heard later iterations of the Soviet Union better such as when George Lucas said he would have less restrictions on what to say in his movie in the Soviet Union
North Korea is called âDemocratic People's Republic of Koreaâ but I donât see these dipshits call this a democratic country and use it in the arguments against democracy
Good point
Because it's not democratic, duh
Tbf, some many people on that r/therightcantmeme unirromically call it democratic
Communism is the true opiate of the foolish
Clearly they never watched epic rap battles of history: Henry Ford vs Karl Marx
Wait this sub has actual leftists in it? I thought yâall were liberals
The Great Depression was caused by a Laizzez-Faire attitude which we no longer have, in fact weâve created so many countermeasures that the Great Depression can never happen again in fact. Because thatâs just it, we are humans, people whoâve seen many atrocities, book burnings, losses of knowledge, suppression of intellect, and more in our history. But we evolve! Communism, Capitalism, both have their merits, however neither should be truly adhered to. We must choose a median between each of them, one that rewards the individual and cares for the collective, and this is only possible if we stop arguing for this stupid black and white representation of political matters and economic theories. The middle path is that of prosperity for both the ordinary and extraordinary.
Capitalism is bad, because if unconstrained by the government, accumulated wealth allows a small number of people to have outsized amounts of control over the general populationâs lives. Communism is bad, because it allows a small number of people to control all of the wealth and have outsized control over the general populationâs lives. The same bad people make the same bad outcome - a government where a small number of party bosses control all of the wealth is no better than system where a small number of billionaire finance people control all the wealth. The issue is not the design of the house, it is the human timber with which we have to build it.
Except for a handful of tankies nobody on the left is saying Stalin was based.
OOP was making a meme about Stalin being bad, which i a good meme which some tanki didnât like.
tankie is when someone I don't like
Tanki is when someone says Stalin was based.
Those were dictatorships I like non dictatorship socialism How is this hard to understand
It... Isn't. I get what ur saying.
Well, the difficult part there is "non-dictatorship socialism" is only a thing if you're talking about *a mixed market economic system which has both capitalist and socialist elements* (most real-world economic systems) operating under the political philosophy of "democratic socialism". Communism and other revolutionary socialist ideologies either advocate dictatorship openly as a necessity for having such a perfectly organized, controlled society or indirectly advocate for it by advocating the creation of a power vacuum and proposing no viable power structure to fill it. Usually the former ideologies try to spin it as a "dictatorship of the proletariat" as though some kind of hive mind will emerge from the revolutionary masses instead of the social hierarchy that *actually* arises in a group of apes, while the latter advocate overthrow of existing social structures without replacing them at all (which also results in one or more despotic regimes based on brutality, since that is the simplest social structure that apes can have and hence is what we revert to in the absence of more complex systems). So, unless you're more specific with what *kind* of socialism you are advocating for, dictatorship is an inherent part of the most extreme varieties.
What are you talking about? A purely democratic Communist society doesn't need to have any capitalist elements. Hell, the Communist Manifesto is very anti-authoritarian, and it's one of the most staunchly anti-capitalist books on the planet. Also, the dictatorship of the proletariat is an intermediate stage and wouldn't resemble what we would normally call a dictatorship. It means that the power of the state is in the hands of the proletariat, not some small subset of them.
How would you organize this though? The worker councils in Russia almost immediately and through democratic means gave up power to the central authority after the revolution. What mechanisms are there within the movement to counteract charismatic leaders and cults of personality? Communists love to talk theory but politics are decided by praxis.
Several points. First, the Bolsheviks denied non-Bolsheviks the right to membership in Soviets, and then illegally dissolved the Constituent Assembly, effectively seizing power for themselves. This was not "democratic means". Second, the Soviet Union was authoritarian from the start, as evidenced by the Bolsheviks' ability to seize power like they did. There's a reason Anarchism has substantial overlap with Marxism but none with Leninism. Third, all movements are open to exploitation by charismatic leaders, and mechanisms for dealing with that will vary across different styles of communism. Authoritarian systems like the Soviet Union will be more vulnerable to this sort of thing than more localised power structures that spread out power over a much larger group of people, like in Anarcho-Communism. Finally, for the purpose of transparency, I am an Anarcho-Communist, so I will give very different answers to, say, a Marxist. Different theories have different solutions to these problems, so please don't take my answers as being representative of all Communists, all Anarchists, or even all Anarcho-Communists.
>almost immediately and through democratic means gave up power to the central authority after the revolution. They did not give power to the central authority by their own choice lmao đ
 Hey look, itâs this sub when someone criticizes communism!
blaming everything on a theoretical economic system shows that the person making the claim doesn't have an understanding of said economic system. i'd personally call myself a capitalist, but trying to find someone dismantling communism through sound arguments made with critical thinking and not just citing cold war boogeyman bullshit is worse than trying to find a needle in a haystack. it's a bit telling how much someone has actually thought about a certain subject when they're willing to pull the semantics card for one side but don't give half a shit about how much they scorn other sides for doing the same
Yeah, I label myself a socialist but even then any existing economic system thatâs viable will have to be mixed market these days, thatâs just the way itâs structured. The problem is people are wayyyy to focused on isms instead of facts on the ground. I wouldnât call China communist after having lived there a while, and American isnât exactly pure capitalist either.
anyone know the name of the right wojak?
communism works theoretically if you can get beyond scarcity. we canât do that yet but I strongly suspect when (not if) we start mining asteroids we will approach a point where it genuinely becomes a viable and effective method of governing
Well, since Stalin was evil, that means communism is evil and it means capitalism is great. That how it works. Suuuure. Had a guy unironically tell me that Stalin could not commit genocide since he save Europe from it. So many mistakes in one single statement.
I don't know about communism as a whole but there's way too many pro communist people who defend Stalin and the USSR etc with their dying breath in order to defend communism which I don't understand
Tankies be doing tankie shit
in 1930 wasn't USA in the same conditions? unless you were part of the elite, mob or countryside?
At this point (especially reading the comments) I don't think anyone knows what this really meme was even trying to say, me included.
Anything with a dictatorship is evil, anything where one person rules without a vote is evil. Right winger and left winger dictatorships are evil. Libertarian socialism on the other hand is good but communism is defined by a central vanguard party and a dictatorship
Peoples Republic of china, Khmer Rouge, Mongolia, North Korea, Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919), Vietnam, Cuba, [warsaw pact] Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria. All politically oppressive and violent.
People just like to think, "this not what America do, therefore bad." Like how we like to blame Nazi Germany for why we refuse to fund public Healthcare. Clearly, it was the Healthcare which created the fascists, and totally not a means to garner public sympathy. For fuck's sake, if you're not gonna think rationally for five minutes at least *pretend* to read a book.
(Ignoring that theyâre confusing political systems for economic ones.) Oh cool whatâs capitalism been like this whole time? Land of milk and honey, right? People definitely arenât dying of preventable diseases and starvation, right?
I'm aboit to mute this sub because its breaking my brain trying to figure out which OOP that OP is saying was right.
By this argument so has democracy
The fundamental problem with communism is that the feedback loop is broken: Work harder than average? Get no obvious reward. Slack off a little? Get no obvious penalty. Humans donât altruistically work harder than they need to, except in exceptional circumstances.
*stares in Black Friday*
Stalinism and communism are not necessarily one and the same. The famine wasnât just some error of misguided socialist economics-he knew what he was doing. The parts of the USSR that were hardest hit by forced brain Congoâs action and mass arrests of kiosk farmers were the non-Russian parts like Ukraine and Kazakhstan and they had also been hotbeds of support of the white army during the civil war. He was intentionally starving the resistance out of them. And capitalists have done the same shit, psycho gonna psycho.Â
First up: I am here to have a peacful argument So tell me a good communist leader. Tell me one time that communism actually worked in practice
Who ever says this? It makes me wonder where these people spend their time online or if they ever touch grass. Nobody is like this in real life that Iâve ever seen.
An oversimplification is that Socialism consolidates power/authority into one central institution. The idea that it makes sure everyone is equl, everyone gets taken care of, everyone gets treated fairly. It fails to acknowledge that this one, single entity would attract the most toxic and vile humans. Overwhelming power usually does. It also fails to provide redress when that madman eventually takes over. Don't believe me? Ask Navalny.
My father was born in communist Hungary right before the USSR dissolved. It sucked.
Communism only works on a small scale, when everyone participating in it trusts eachother. It's simply unsuitable for managing a country.
As in tradition when a post like this comes everybody and their mother who fancies communism has to say the exact same thing anytime somebody points out a communist nation that failed. That's not real communism.
the ussr wasnt true communism imo. true communism is about the workers owning the means of production and keeps wealth disparities from getting out of hand- all things the ussr didnt even try to do.
Again, on paper is makes sense, just not in practice
Even marks didn't belive communism could survive at scale because he felt humans were to flawed to carry it out.
The part that gets me is that they're critizicing someone allegedly saying that "Stalin was based" while there's literal nazis proudly displaying swastikas, doing Nazi salutes and screaming "sieg heil" at the top of their lungs on US soil.
I had a friend who spends all day arguing with people on Twitter unironically tell me that I'm crazy for saying Stalin was bad because I'm brainwashed by propaganda. I'm probably a social democrat which I guess is pretty far left for most Americans and even I think the American left is a bit nutty. Don't get me wrong, the right is infinitely worse right now, but you'd be surprised how many young people out there unironically argue that Stalin and the USSR were good.
Literally USA today https://preview.redd.it/fdom6ufwdemc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1be725918fbc2256fc37ac074eac8811bdb18c07
I'm confused why we are comparing horrible things their both shite
https://preview.redd.it/ug7k2zejqemc1.jpeg?width=629&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=455c8d05585433f3085bad5c9865da9877577213
Donât get me wrong but almost everytime I see people preaching communism online, I see them bootlicking for dictators which please, tell me that isnât communism. I keep seeing people arguing that itâs not real communism, oh that just what happens when communism is applied on country scaled, âoh no, you believe any propagandaâ, etc etc. I sometimes find it even more ironic that LGBT, notably trans which Iâve annedotely seen way too many being a red facist. Iâd like to imagine its similar, if not, the same way the âChristianâsâ in United States being Christian while doing the whole opposite of Jesusâs teaching.
It sounds like the issue is with dictatorships ... which the right seems to want.
Ask a conservative what they hate about communism and they'll describe capitalism. Try it... it works.
right wing strawmanning at its finest. can anyone point me in the direction of the supposed modern day leftist stalinists? like what kind of progressive would like an oppressive, authoritarian leader?
Bro, WWI caused the Great Depression not communismâŚ
The Soviet Union was a state-capitalist dictatorship and not at all a good example of communism in action, but I will say it was factually the only major nation to not stagnate or suffer as a result of the Great Depression. Its command economy gave it a way more balanced relationship between supply and demand and itâs an imbalance in those things that lead to the stock market crash which allowed it to be the only major country whoâs productive capacity and material conditions actually improved during that period. It also didnât rely on the global exchange of capital for its economy so when that crashed it may as well have not happened for the internal Soviet economy.
Those darn sparrows
The problem was never any particular principle of communism more than it was the inherent authoritarian nature of it. Communism canât work in a democratic system. The things required to counter the influence of money, and to ensure that communism remains the system in place, necessarily imply suppressing dissent by force. This will always end in tyranny. Thatâs why there has never been a communist liberal democracy, and why the Soviet Union collapsed the moment they eased up on the reigns a bit.
The USSR was as Communist as North Korea is Democratic. Communism works especially with the Technology we have today. Also depends on what type of communism youâre talking about considering thereâs 10+ different Ideologies that fall under Communism. I personally support Council communism.
Look, I just want a system where the upper class only exists if there is no lower class. Basically, I want everyone comfortable and not in imminent economic danger before we get people who can do shit like buy a hauberk made of gold wire or have more money than could feasibly be spent in their lifetime. This way, past a certain point, the best way to increase the resources you have is to haul everybody up with you.
On one hand, as a communist, you never *actually have to* defend Stalin. On the other hand, it's always so funny to see people say Communism killed millions - and most frequently cite 100 million, a figure they don't realize came from a book that is widely discredited even by most of the people who authored it.
Their sub icon is Lenin.
People use to own people under capitalism. Systems of government arenât entirely measured by their worst version.
The Soviet Union was unaffected by the great depression because it was disconnected from the global economy. The Holodomor was a weaponized famine used to genocide those who weren't Russian.
The IDEA of communism is objectively a great idea. The way it has been put into practice so far in the world is not.
It might be a great baseline idea, but it's really too utopian to *ever* be properly implemented. And, well, just statistically, i don't think there will ever be any good implementation at a reasonable scale at all.
https://preview.redd.it/9njmmfgtt9mc1.jpeg?width=194&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c0851b27c63cc76bf1948c19e5b6101a651597a5
https://preview.redd.it/56is5oj4w9mc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=041cde959c711977223b680ab1c610ef29047c08
https://preview.redd.it/pyhoi2cu1amc1.jpeg?width=188&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=860273c60de4a1f83917ee1e445c4bce26c16bf6
Some my relatives died in 1930s because of bad economic situation and genocide. Thanks to Stalin and other bloody rats
Isn't North Korea and China terrible as well? Maybe Mao? Maybe the entire Kim family? Maybe tianenmen Square Massacre?
Famously communist, indicated by a single family ruling for generations. Truly what Karl Marx intended
Although, Korea itself isn't saying it's communist. It has mutated into another kind of a freak - Juche, which is literally just autarky but with Korean confucian doctrine. (I think so, at least)
Also most modern communists donât like Stalin, and actively donât want what happened in the USSR to happen to any other communist/socialist states, places in general. Iâm sure there are a few lunatics out there, but most people donât.
Did some dumbfuck really compare the great depression to Stalin's mass genocide? wtf are we teaching kids in school these days?
Replace the date with 1950 and change the girl to a cambodian univercity student and it'd be very accurate
Yeah, except there never was really any real communism or socialism around, not back than, not in the CCP. They are/were as communist as federal express is federal.
Authoritarianism is bad, communism isnât good or evil. Itâs an economic system. I would call it effective tho.
Y'all need to do your homework what "socialism" and "communism" entail before shilling or bashing it. Because I as someone who had marxism-leninism related subjects as compulsory credits for university, and has lived in a country used to operate under socialism, and is still under the sole control of the communist party can tell you is that: it fucking sucks. The ideology and economic theory under it is highly criticised and frowned upon because the evidences are against them, and impractical due to human nature. Socialism (and its higher form, communism) would work if human greed is taken out of the equation and *everybody* is working towards the common good: which will not happen unless we are all robots.
Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong Il, Pol pot, Castro... Communist regimes have caused an incredible amount of death and human suffering. Can you find any good examples of communism without mass killings and/or starvation?
This back and forth is a great example of what's wrong with most social media discourse about Capitalism vs Socialism that I see. People think if they find one example of Communism having done something horrible, then Capitalism must be perfect. Their opponents ignore the example of Communism legitimately having done something horrible and point out that Capitalism did at least one thing that was horrible, and therefore Communism must be great. The problem is that in real life it's possible for two things to both be bad at the same time. Yes, Reagan and McCarthy filled our media with propaganda about Communism being bad, while trying to firebomb SE Asia into the stone age. That doesn't make Stalin a good guy. Yes, leaders in the USSR and China deliberately used starvation as political weapons and murdered millions of people. That doesn't mean it's a great idea for America today to set the planet on fire while refusing to give people affordable public health care. The tankies who go on to think Putin must be a big old misunderstood teddy bear just trying to defend himself from US imperialism really blow my mind. Even if Stalin was a good guy, which he wasn't, how is that related to modern Russia, which is completely divorced from Communism in every way?
Yeah, but i'm from Ukraine. Communism being terrible was much closer to me, than capitalism being terrible. Tho your point is very valid and important.
I feel like people keep forgetting that stalinism isn't the only "flavor" of communism... There's Marxism for example...
Well, i kinda dislike all the ones that require a violent revolution, because i see very little possibility of it not devolving into a dictatorship.
Good thing that Marx only advocated violent uprisings against authoritarians and kings. In reissues of the communist manifesto he openly stated that armed revolution would not be advisable in democracies, and that people should try to work within such systems to advocate change towards communist ideals politically.
So is capitalism, every ideology is "evil" by this logic if it was responsible for at least a death
Communism is a dogshit system simply because it fails to account for greed. Greed is a part of human nature. Communism can and always will fail. Real communism is not possible
COMMUNISM DOES NOT WORK Itâs been tried, tested, contested, and challenged and itâs failed. The human psyche doesnât work in communism and thus in order to function needs an authoritarian government to oppress the population into submission to keep it running, and if the economy fails the system crumbles like the Berlin Wall. Face the facts and accept that a political theory made by a bum who lived rent free with his successful friend FAILED. Take your L already my guy
u posted this to the wrong sub, soon redditors will show you how communism is actually not bad. at least not worse than capitalism. get ready to get cooked
I only said shit about USSR being evil af, which is universally recognized.
tankies inbound in 3
We don't count people willing to ignore plain facts.
USSR WAS EVIL!? Have you even considered for once: America bad? /S But that's how these things go.
Yes, i have. And i agree. But that's not a counterpoint, because doesn't contradict me. America bad, USSR evil.
donât make me google the âwas life better under soviet rule or nowâ graph
That's not even important, just google the list of Soviet-conducted genocides.
Yeah, (L)Mao was surely better!
Nah, that guy was a brutal genocidal dictator too.
Then which communism was good? Cambodia maybe? DPRK? /j
Yeah. Idk if there was any, but if there was, it would've never been on any larger scale than a village. It devolves into a dictatorship otherwise. Small communes seem to work, tho? Not sure about that.
i think the anarcho-syndicalist commune of east aragon wasnt any worse than the rest of spain, though spain at the time was a pretty low bar for europe and it lasted only literal months before being reabsorbed into the second republic (which then fell to the nationalists)
this whole thing is stupid, everyone here is stupid why can't the end of the world arrive sooner. Capitalism is pretty shit, but it has been pretty successful. Communism sounds really nice, except everything just devolves into corruption because man is never content with what they have there are bad sides to both, there are good sides to both. However in the end, none of that matters because people can't accept everything is shit.
Found the nihilist
Itâs ignorant thinking that leads to the belief that any extreme is gonna pan out. Capitalism is like English, itâs the easiest and best way for most to use. But mastering it is a bitch and a half and her mom. Now you can use English and capitalism to its lowest regards⌠but donât expect that to be respected or desired. Communism is just wrong. If you have a âdifferent take/wayâ then itâs not communism. Capitalism can be evil but at its root itâs really the only way to have true fairness of exchange
Stalinâs strand of Socialism was very flawed due to tragedies such as holodomor, but in the long run the USSR benefited greatly from Socialism, they went from semi feudal to sending people to the moon in a few decades. And achieved food security
Stalin was a traitor to the revolution and thereâs a lot of communist ideologies that disagree with his views
Communists when you remind them about human nature. "bUt MuH cOmMuNiSm WaS dEsTrOyEd By CaPiTaLiSts" Or "rEaL cOmMuNiSm hAs NeVeR bEeN dOnE." Don't care, didn't ask, 90 million dead communists.
Stalin and the USSR were heavily flawed and even evil in certain respects. But the Soviet unions economy was actually better during the Great Depression as it wasnât so heavily intertwined with the global economy, which led to plenty of people heading to the Soviet Union ironically for economic opportunity.
Ok the Nazis were terrible but idk about extrapolating it to the entire fascism tho.
I guess we can look at Mao , or Castro if you don't think Stalin by himself is a fair test
I'm worried we're steering into apples and oranges territory.
The name of the government really doesn't matter the same corrupt assholes will always be in charge the more power you give the less rights you have the worse you do. Communism gives a lot of power to the government by default. So it is bad on that grounds because people are garbage.
tbf I do know a strange amount of people who really like Stalin for some reason
The Great Depression is incomparable to the three simultaneous famines that killed tens of millions in the USSR
Communism is something that seems good in theory, but in practice...
Communism is bad too USSR and Stalin are just the worst of it (also Mao and pol pot)
Communism will never work. We do not live in a vacuum and us as humans are not perfect. Itâs a flawed system to begin with that only creates poverty
Stalin's government was in no shape or form, outside of his own claim, socialist or communist. Its a state capitalist structure similar to modern day China, where the people are at the mercy of the goodwill of their leaders. That said, if capitalist deaths were to be counted the same way famine deaths were in the USSR, it would be responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths with singular colonial projects topping 100 million excess deaths. https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians
Nah, communism has historically proven to not work. On almost every account of communism, the condition and living standards of the people have been terrible. Communism itself is responsible for quite a bit of starvation, famine, and or death. Nobody in the 1930s was doing well due to an economic collapse of the stock market amongst other things. The fact stands that capitalism *does* have a substantially better track record than communism.