can communism survive in a single country was always a big question.
I think the original idea was to try a world revolution but that didn’t work out.
Us is the main holdout. Russia is basically socialist, EU is basically socialist. China is communist.
Us is the only serious holdout
Could a Communist Nation be considered viable if such a hostile force can take it down? Does it all come down to survival of the fittest (in the best use of the term)?
lemmy.ml moment
Luckily the US is dismantling the CIA so that’s good news for communism!!!
When people ask me what communist country was successful I usually say all of them until cia decided to go there and spread freedom 🇺🇸🦅
you know, i tell you what. i’m fed up with all this gringo self-righteousness when you talk about “oh communism was bad, oh people where killed, oh people had no food, oh people had no liberty, oh people could not buy ataris, oh our countries are so democratic”. your countries were democratic during the cold war in the first place because you had people to sort things out for you here in the global south. for each person complaining about how the food rations in eastern europe were not tasty enough, there were 10 dying of hunger or malnourishment here in the global south. for every person complaining they had to wait 5 years in a queue to buy a trabant or an oka, there were 10 who got no school in a range of 50 km. for every person complaining that their 8 hour shifts in state owned factories were overwhelming, there were 10 who were indentured workers. for every person complaining about how the stasi, kgb or the stb had bugged their apartment, there were 10 suffering the most horrific tortures inside black sites of the military of u.s. allies here in the “third world”. for every person complaining about dull standard apartment blocks in mikrorayons, there were 10 who lived in mud shacks and slums, and those are just who were lucky enough to have a roof over their heads. finally, for everyone complaining about chinese sweatshops, which are indeed a problem, there are 10 americans who work and yet cannot afford proper housing.
you wanna complain about how communism was bad? go ahead. you wanna complain how your parents lived under communism and could not drink coke? do so if you wish. but there are still millions of people down here who would give an arm and a leg to have a polish ration, an apartment in a russian gray building, or a yugoslav job. and while the chinese maoist red guard was bad, surely it won’t be an inch closer to the harassement people endured on a daily basis by our police forces.
again: you wanna complain? be my guest. but for me that’s an encyclopedic example of white privilege.
“Here in global south” is where exactly? Global south doesn’t exist. It’s like Narnia
Why would you not compare european communist countries woth european capitalist countries? Sure, africans and asians were poorer, but that goes without saying, honestly, what does that even have to do with this matter?
East Germany was poorer than west Germany. That tells us something. The fact that Ethiopia or whatever was poorer does not really tell us much about ehich economic system is better.
Human greed destroys all forms of government.
Any one party political system can either fail or be maintained through violent oppression. People need to have a say in who represents them and what their values are.
A more sustainable solution than soviet style communism is to have proportional representation and work on instilling socialist virtues such as kindness, social responsibility, and fairness in the population. over time, the people in government will start to reflect those values.
To be clear, the Soviets did that too. Look at the values instilled in Soviet cartoons for children, as an example. The reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union were far more complicated and nuanced, such as liberalizing the economy, spending a large portion of GDP on millitarization to keep parity with the US, and existing under constant threat from the outside.
I wonder if anyone ever said “Democracy would never work, just look at what happened to Athens”.
Socialism and communism are relatively new ideas. While I don’t believe communism is an effective form of government, it’s still kind of silly to write it off so quickly.
The problem is not that it will never work, but that the ideal end result is shit
Well the ideal end result depends on the person, doesn’t it?
I’m sure Karl Marx and Stalin had very different ideas of what the ideal end result of communism would be.
From my understanding; Marx envisioned a worker’s utopia, while Stalin instead used communism to garner as much power for himself as possible.
Neither is accurate. Stalin tried to resign several times, in fact, but was rejected, and Marx wasn’t a Utopian, but in favor of Scientific Socialism. Now, that doesn’t mean Stalin was a saint or that Marx didn’t have a beautiful vision for the future, but it does mean you should read up a bit more before making judgement calls. I have an introductory reading list for Marxism-Leninism you can check out for that, if you’re interested.
How, exactly?
There is a poem in Polish, it goes in fast and dirty translation: “Today you scare us with communists, just as years ago, you scared our fathers with the democrat name”.
0·15 hours agoSomeone between 1804 and 1830: Democracy doesn’t work, just look at France, it dissolves into an empire
Death to America
as an american, hell yeah!
As an Australian I now understand the contempt of the middle east for America.
Hey I’m European, I have loads of contempt for them too, and same for our sellout leaders.
Just listen to Blowback.
This is a good example of one of things people hate about lemmy.
Communism fan boying, implicit denial of genocides committed by communist powers, out in the open on the front page.
You’re going to find Communists on a website made by Communists. Don’t know what you mean by “genocide denial,” but in another comment you were unironically recommending the Black Book of Communism’s chief writer as a legitimate source, you’re doing the “Communism killed 100 million” meme.
And you cited a website that denies the Uyghur Genocide and the Holodomor.
You’re doing genocide denial.
Wow, I wonder went on there…
Uyghur’s aren’t being systematically murdered at scale. There are reeducation camps, but to call it “genocide” isn’t accurate. You should read the UN report.
As for the idea of an “intentional famine,” this is disputed at best. In reality, there was a famine in the 1930s that didn’t have any racial motivations. Nobody denies the famine’s existence.
So no, I’m not doing genocide denial, and I’m correct, you want to appear morally righteous regardless of the real facts.
The UN hasn’t explicitly called it genocide, but if you assume China’s motivation is to reduce their population, it seems hard to argue its actions wouldn’t qualify. Widespread arbitrary imprisonment and certainly forced sterilization would meet at least condition 4 of their requirement. The Genocide Convention’s definition is below, emphasis mine:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
You could argue they don’t actually intend to reduce the Uyghur population, but it’s hard to accept that a surge in the Xinjiang region’s sterilization rate and the birth rate being cut in half over the course of three years are just anti-terrorism measures.
whoops, brazil. we had a budding workers movement that was absolutely crushed by the traitorous brazilian military, in the name of the US of course.
that hasnt stopped syndicalism to take root here and improve our lives a bit, but the communist organizations responsible were all crushed and we see our rights being taken away ever since because no one is left to defend them. we are scrambling rn to see if we can stop fascism.
Yeah.
The CIA is why the Soviets fell. Not corruption or incompetence.
It was complicated. Krushev, and later Gorbachev’s reforms really weakened the Socialist system because they didn’t properly retain strong control of the larger firms and heavy industry (a lesson the CPC took to heart), however the CIA and really the US absolutely worked tirelessly to weaken it. The Soviets also had to spend a much larger portion of their production on the millitary in order to keep parity with the US, meaning that development rates began to slow.
Oh, so US is guilty in the collapse of USSR bc US were just that good that USSR need to overexert itself to keep parity with them.
The US played a part, I outright stated that it was a complicated situation made more complicated by having the world’s largest Empire, the US, permanently hostile and putting nukes on their doorstep.
What is complicated about it?
The reforms you refer to allowed for political dissent. If the Soviet Union was some worker’s paradise, then allowing people complain wouldn’t change anything.
The simple reality is that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship that only survived as long as it did because it was a dictatorship. Once people had the option of opposing Communist rule, they did. And that is what killed the Soviet Union. Not some conspiracy by the United States or the kulaks.
The reforms didn’t just allow for “political dissent,” they worked against the Socialist system, that was based on central planning. Rather than running in a more efficient manner, it ran against itself.
Further, nobody says the Soviet Union was a “worker’s paradise.” It had tremendous strides for workers, but it wasn’t perfect by any means.
The Soviet Union wasn’t a dictatorship. Read Soviet Democracy. It lasted as long as it did because it had tremendous GDP growth while lowering wealth disparity, free and high quality education and healthcare, doubled health expectancies, full employment, and over tripled literacy rates to 99.9%.
I wonder what Novocherkassk workers think about Soviet democracy
Bit of a non-sequitor, I could bring up Kent State and use that to say the US isn’t a democracy. The US has a far worse track record than the Soviets.
Soviets have civil war with 6 million losses in their track record lol. I’d like to see what USA has to compete with that.
Numerous mass killings and/or genocides in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, East Timor, Cambodia, and much, much more.
Do you really believe that we could have retained power and have had the backing of the vast masses for 14 years by methods of intimidation and terrorization? No, that is impossible. The tsarist government excelled all others in knowing how to intimidate. It had long and vast experience in that sphere. The European bourgeoisie, particularly the French, gave tsarism every assistance in this matter and taught it to terrorize the people. Yet, in spite of that experience and in spite of the help of the European bourgeoisie, the policy of intimidation led to the downfall of Tsarism.
Exactly, and this didn’t last for 14 years, but nearly the entire 20th century, and is succeeded by other AES countries like the PRC.
Yeah, not 14 years, but 70 or so. Still pathetic.
Not at all, plus they are succeeded, like I said, by other AES states like the PRC.
The Soviet Union was, if not a traditional dictatorship, absolutely a totalitarian autocracy. Stalin was a brutal dictator and his successors were chosen by the communist party. Elections in the USSR were for show.
Life was miserable almost from the start of the Bolshevik revolution for most people. The USSR’s implementation of communism was so bad, it’s become cliche.
Allow me to repeat myself:
The Soviet Union wasn’t a dictatorship. Read Soviet Democracy. It lasted as long as it did because it had tremendous GDP growth while lowering wealth disparity, free and high quality education and healthcare, doubled health expectancies, full employment, and over tripled literacy rates to 99.9%.
It was one party democracy lol.
Yep. Democracy doesn’t mean “choose between parties,” it’s about the actual impact you can have on policy. More people in China feel that they have a voice in politics than people in the US, despite the US having 2 parties.
“Life was miserable almost from the start of the Bolshevik revolution for most people”, said the romanovs.
Were they wrong?
That’s what dissent is.
Nothing you said disputes it being a dictatorship. The people could not choose their leaders, there were no limits on the power of their leaders, er go it was a dictatorship. None of your “pros” matter. And that’s before we get into the lack of freedom of speech and press and total absence of transparency, meaning that I have no reason to trust those supposed accomplishments.
None of your “pros” matter
Healthcare? Doesn’t matter.
Education? Literacy? Reading is how the communist get you, remain illiterate.
Full employment? You don’t need to feed your family.
Life expectancy? Why prolong the suffering?We weren’t debating the quality of the Soviet Union. We were debating whether or not it was a dictatorship.
Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.
A lot of the cold war propaganda about the USSR turned out to be bullshit, now that US & Soviet archives have been released, as contemporary Western academic historians will tell you, like Domenico Losurdo and Grover Furr.
No, that isn’t what dissent is, it was a fundamental liberalization of the economy that favored private property over public.
Secondly, they absolutely chose their leaders.
Finally, you say life expectancy, literacy rates, and worker rights “don’t matter?” That strong, sustained economic growth doesn’t matter? You must be trolling.
As for distrusting the sources, you can look into them yourselves, they are well-respected.
So, you’re denying that glasnost allowed for political dissent?
Second, no they didn’t.
Finally, it does not matter because we were debating whether or not the Soviet Union was a dictatorship, which the literacy rate has nothing to do with.
Well-respected by Tankies, not by actual historians.
Glasnost allowed for liberalism to expand as an ideology, sure, alongside other reforms that weakened the economy and erased its foundations. You can’t cherry-pick the reforms to make it seem like the system worked poorly and only was dissolved because the “people had a choice.” In fact, most post-Soviet citizens regret the fall of Socialism and prefer it over Capitalism.
Read Soviet Democracy.
We were debating a great many things, one of which being the economy and the well-being of the people, because that helps explain why it was democratic.
Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan is quite literally used as a reference on the Wikipedia article for Soviet Democracy. You are incapable of being honest or looking at facts that disprove you because you care more about appearing morally righteous than being correct.
What if the answer to all of our worldwide problems is finding a balance between decentralized and centralized structures, balancing technology and the environment, finding a balance between currency and a moneyless society, and achieving balance between authority and liberty (with the goal of individual and societal sovereignty), and so forth?
In this thread, I see Anarcho-Communists (or final stage Communists/ideological purists) taking bat at Marxist-Leninists (who espouse mostly outdated theory, but not always) and Liberals who fail to understand really any ideology that differs from their own because of how thick the propaganda is (and who espouse ideals like Democratic Socialism while failing to realize that their social support is still enabled by modern slavery - such as the exploitation of third world countries).
I think a direct democracy, with authoritative and libertarian elements (such as enforcing liberty/a universal bill of rights for individuals) would be ideal.
It could have an economic system with built-in social supports (each according to their need) that emulates cash and all the best parts of blockchain (that isn’t hoardable or worth hoarding, that also doesn’t enable slavery/other forms of parasitism, and is generally private at the transactional stage - yet is auditable at a larger-scale), with centralized control of natural resources that still respects decentralized development and balance with the environment. And also does not have debt or parasitism of any form, instead encouraging diplomacy - such as contracts/agreements taking the place of debt to better the planet and encourage societal responsibility and stewardship (e.g. contracts that result in the stabilization of the society incurring the would-be debt).
Instead of total anarchy or various forms of authoritative control/dictatorship, we could simply combine direct democracy and hierarchy by electing leaders based solely on merit in the areas that are most needed, with strong controls so we get the best out of leadership and hierarchy and the resultant clarity and direction, without letting leaders and other experts become drunk on power. While also preventing the corruption of the individuals in power and the various forms of stagnation that result from entrenched power not conceding to new developments or advances.
I know I’m an idealist, but I’d like everybody to turn the chapter and realize that we are in 2025, not the 1900s. Technology and science have advanced every area of our society. We are so beyond scarcity that we are producing well beyond our needs with conditions and methods that are not even close to ideal (with ideal and emergent solutions and methods ready to take the place of those unsustainable methods).
We also have a global communication network - we can understand foreign languages without any human intervention in some cases, we can bridge cultural gaps, we can seek understanding and truth with our fingertips, and also we can push past the propaganda we are served on a platter, etc.
We can achieve something better than anything that has ever been conceived of previously, and it starts by crumpling up all of the things that no longer serve us. Concepts like racism, nationalism, really all of the isms that promote superiority over others. Bridging gaps, joining hands, while also countering disinformation (not misunderstanding) and bad faith.
We truly are not facing the same limitations that we did in the 1900s, although we may be facing new challenges like the rise of AI and the misuse of it by those currently in power.
There really is no more room in society for mucking about and fighting others while everything is in such disrepair, with so much needless suffering happening.
I just think it’s funny when you call ML’s outdated despite not really disagreeing with them, and then calling Anarchists “final stage Communists” when Anarchists want decentralization and “final stage Communism” is fully centralized. It more reads that you haven’t actually engaged with theory, especially considering the PRC is Marxist-Leninist and is outpacing everyone else at the moment.
You can think it’s funny all you like. Perhaps I wasn’t clear, but you misunderstood my grammar. I was detailing two distinct types of people, with different views. The latter (after the or) are more on the side of purity testing other Communists because they see what would unfold after many, many years of Communism as de-facto Communism and proof that others are not true Communists (hence the slash ideological purists).
Damn CIA created Maoism
