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Even worse is when the right one also has Putin, the leader of the Iranian regime, etc. (cough cough Dessalines)
Gulag 4 U!
Oh I’m gay, I’d be sent there already anyway.
Gulag 2
Double gulag!
Cuba has LGBT+ rights enshrined in their constitution.
And the Soviets sent us to the gulags.
China likewise treats us like shit.
But cool, one small player gives a shit. That’s about as much as the libs do 🥲 I will be fair though of all the “AES”, Cuba is probably the only somewhat tolerable one.
It’s a bit weird to compare the USSR to the west at a time when the west literally imprisoned and/or sterilized gay people.
As far as the LGBT+ struggle in China goes, conditions simply aren’t the sort that create radicals; you don’t get stonewall and eventually LGBT+ protections if cops aren’t actively harassing LGBT+ people. Oppression takes different vectors and they have a different path forward.
If the USSR was only as good as the West today, it’s not worth simping over.
If socialism takes redfash cops harassing LGBT+ people before they take revolutionary action against the state, it’s not worth simping over.
Abolish the state outright and embrace Anarchy.
Interesting take. In my mind, any project that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and given them self-determination despite near-constant existential attacks from capitalists is laudable. Like, obviously no communist state was/is perfect, but almost all of them were/are better than the contemporary capitalist states.
And to me that’s dishonest, because you have to add the “attacks from capitalists” clause or else you would also have to laud mercantilism/capitalism as well for lifting the standard of living from straw huts under kings and feudalism.
What’s the laudable part, lifting standards of living or doing it while under attack. Because as far as I see it, the concern should be with the material conditions not the degree of difficulty.
What’s even more laudable to me, is doing so without an overbearing brutal state oppressing the people on top of that. We know it can work as we have seen how people flourish both materially and socially under direct community rule whenever it has been tried.
The USSR and China each brought hundreds of millions from barely subsisting to lifestyles comparable to the west within a single lifetime and made great progress on LGBT+ rights. Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the US despite the blockade and constant attempts at destabilization.
You shouldn’t compare the USSR to a fantasy utopia, you should compare it to the actual alternatives we’ve seen in reality, Tsarist and modern Russia.
Anarchist projects have yet to manage step 0: Resist capitalist encirclement for more than like 5 minutes so we don’t have any actually existing examples to study.
Let’s compare the USSR to itself, an authoritarian shithole that sent gay men to do hard labour.
The Zapatista have been going strong for 30 years.
Revolutionary Ukraine fell to Communist backstabbing.
Historically the biggest threat to anarchist revolution hasn’t been capitalism, it’s been red fash communists.
Wow yeah moders Russia! So modern! Soon modern toilet, indoor!!
And being trans is considered a mental illness there, but you gotta simp for your fav dictator I guess.
The USSR was a horrible aithoritatian dictatorship murdering millions of people, every western country got a better life than that hell hole lol. They even teamed up with the Nazis and started WW2, can’t make that shit up lol. So progressive.
This rationale holds for many nations under capitalism over the same time period.
It in no way justifies the superiority of the model of transition from fuedalism to state-controlled centralized economies to state-controlled capitalism present in the USSR / China
It’s a bit weird to compare the USSR to the west at a time when the west literally imprisoned and/or sterilized gay people
You mean the whole fucking decade when it was not a crime? Between 1920 to 1930? Because after it was Article 121, straight to prison or asylum.
Because in the same decade gays could have sex without going to prison in France, Italy, Poland, Spain, Belgium (and provably more, but I’m too lazy to check).
Still gays had yo flee Cuba, I wonder why…
In the 50s? Those were gusanos fleeing because their slaves revolted.
In the 90s? They were fleeing because there was a famine after the USSR collapsed and the US continued their embargo.
Between the 50s and 90s? It’d be kinda funny to flee to a place that had worse anti-gay laws.
Cuban gays took the opportunity to leave Cuba during the 1980 Mariel boatlift. From the early stages of the massive exodus, the Government described homosexuals as part of the “scum” that needed to be discarded so the socialist society could be purified.[36] Some homosexuals were given the ultimatum of either imprisonment (or extended terms for those already imprisoned) or leaving the country, although Fidel Castro publicly denied that anyone was being forced to leave.[23]
And yet they did.
the exodus was triggered by a sharp downturn in the Cuban economy
Given that gay sex was decriminalized in 1979, this seems questionable given that Fidel has personally apologized and takes full responsibility. I haven’t looked up if he’s done anything to compensate the victims tho.
Fuck out of here. Cubans have a very conservative culture. Doesn’t matter if being gay was “legal”, there was still persecution.
It’s the same way they have “legal” abortions but there is so much red tape that girls have to fly to Miami for a hookup from planned parenthood.
I’m sure that was a great consolation for all the LGBTQ people persecuted by nominally communist regimes.
Correct? Do you think they don’t believe their struggle was worth it so nobody else has to face the same thing?
I’m sorry lumps, you get sent to secret gulag. it’s Super gay
Tbh, I think my anarchist friends here would find a lot to appreciate in Mao.
I once heard Maoism jokingly described as “Anarcho-Stalinism” and that comes from Mao’s insistence, via The Mass Line and the Cultural Revolution, that the party should always root itself in the masses, and that the masses, in turn, should act as a check on the party’s petty bourgeois elements.
He’s very interested in the dialectical relationship between top-down and bottom-up structures in revolution,and how they interact
And anarchists are more interested in destroying the top/bottom approach and focusing on the sideways interactions.
Just as capitalism will always exploit, so will the state. Systems where we must constantly battle to keep them under control while we offload our duties onto them are bound to fail over time.
So communism is when council communism (understandable), anarchism (huh?) and german idealism (wtf)?
Lenin also has no right to be on the same side as people who took and bastardized his work…
Anarchism is pretty compatible with Marxism. Marx defined communism as a classless stateless society, which is also the idea of anarchism.
Now I would argue that Lenin didn’t act in the interest of Marx. He formed his vanguard party, that surpressed and killed political dissidents (anarchists for example), but curiously never gave the power back to the people. So he wasn’t really a Marxist, he may have believed that, but in the end he was pretty much just a dictator in my opinion.
This is straight up nonsense, while anarchism and communism broadly share the same goals, they fundamentally oppose one another fundamentally (such as on DOTP, economy, power, etc.). There’s an entire page of Marx & Engels texts attacking anarchism (which should indicate their compatibility), and I’d at least recommend reading The Poverty of Philosophy on the matter. There’s also Lessons from the Counter-Revolution, Spain 1936 which isn’t a critique of anarchism as a whole but does show how non-stalinist communists view anarchists in practice.
The entire second paragraph, though, completely misunderstands marxist theory. Too lazy to respond in detail myself rn, but Revolution Summed Up, specifically the 1917 part shows how Lenin and Bolsheviks were fully consistent with Marxism, and later parts make good arguments as to why counter-revolution took over (hint: it’s not due to some anarchistic notion of “no power to the people”).
This is such a classic tankie response. “I basically have no real arguments, but just read these 10 books about theory, trust me bro they agree with me”.
That’s exactly how my conspiracy minded friend argued with me back in the day: “Just trust me, I can’t explain why you’re wrong, but you have to watch this 2 hour Youtube video with me and then you’ll understand why the earth is flat”.
If you can’t even give me real arguments that support your position you either haven’t properly understood the literature you’re talking about or are knowingly lying.
Ah piss off, you literally wrote an opinion that’s just straight up wrong and directly contradicts Marx’s own writings, and now you’re getting angry that I didn’t spend 100x more effort than you writing up some wall of text that nobody is going to read.
Sorry for the absolutely unreasonable suggestion to actually read and learn before acting like an expert on the topic.
Just so you know his argument was a good faith one. He posed his opinion then backed it up with actual first party documentation on the specific topic. Do you have any idea how hard that is to actually do in philosophy? The person should receive a legitimate physical award to sit on a shelf for making the first cogent researched argument ever posted on the internet. And I am only being hyperbolic about that last bit.
Anarchist communism has been the most common kind of anarchist thought throughout the years.
Also Lenin was an opportunist who killed communists because they opposed his counter revolutionary state.
True. And its sad
You might be conflating anarcho socialists with communists there.
That is because honestly, communism is a shit system
Stop the writing, hear me out
Centralized plan economies never worked well and then there is that part where you kind of have to force everyone at gun point, become communist or we’ll send in the chekists to murder you and your family. Aahh, the good old little details you never hear about in pro Communism communities where they all call eachother comrade for some weirdo reason
Look, capitalism as we have it now sucks donkey balls too, I doubt there are many that would deny that. However, capitalism is basically allowing free trading, and it’s fucking powerful in generating Wealth. The problem is that that wealth always ends up in the hands of a tiny set of assholes
So how about this: we keep capitalism, and implement wealth caps. Say, 1 million. Nobody is allowed to have a networth of over 1M, the rest goes 100% to taxes. We still have the normal income tax, and taxes on bought goods, but the wealth cap ensured that nobody gets too rich
This has a huge amount of implications. Governments get a huge influx of funds that they can use to fund that giant socialist system that the communists want. That can fund free healthcare, free education, maybe (probably) even universal basic income.
Nobody would be too rich, nobody would be poor. Companies can refocus back on quality because cutting edges to get that extra short term billion dollars won’t do anything anymore because you can’t get any worth out of it over a million.
Want to own a billion dollar company? Well sure! Add at least 1000 shareholders that can invest a million. But they can’t, they also probably want to own something next to a company, I don’t know, a house? So likely you can only invest about 500K into a company so now you got 2000 owners for a company that can employ about 2000 employees. See where I’m going with this? It’s basically communism without thebad parts of communism
Income taxes? Add a bunch mor brackets, with the final one of course being 1M with 100% tax. Unemployed? 0% income tax and the government pays you an income. It won’t be super much but more than enough to survive and live comfortable. If you’re okay like that, then don’t work. We produce enough without requiring everyone to work 5 days a week. With automation skyrocketing, we can work less and less. Want to feel productive and work 5 days a week on your own little store? By all means, do as you like.
It’s a simple change to the existing world, a single rule from which the rest flows out
Nobody would be too rich anymore, nobody would be uber powerful to fuck others over.
I like this idea. Obviously. This is a world that I would live in happily. I’m sure there are loads of little details that need working out, I’m sure that the rather arbitrary 1M might have to be different, depent on inflation, etc, but smarter people than me can worn on that.
To those that come with “1M net worth is not enough I need to retire”, remember that the government can take care of that. Everybody gets their pension. Yes,we can even base it on how much you made. Yes, some people will be slightly richer than others, but only slightly, and I’m fine with that. You don’t need 100M stashed away in funds to be able to retire. A 1M net worth is a single, normal sized home, a car, a bunch of things like clothes on your back and you still got lots left. Big family? Well, both the parents can own part of the home, so now you can buy a home twice the size.
Talking about housing; everything and their mother seems to be overvalued these days. The value of a product should be the cost of making said product (usually comes down to how much humans worked on it) plus a little bit of profit on top of that. A small normal apartment already costing multi million dollars is insanity.
Add a few more simple rules: nobody can own over two homes, companies cannot own homes. With this we could let housing prices cool down to normal.
Add a rule where governments have to find independent press funding organisations that can pay news organizations to make actual independent and reliable news. The money for it will be there, use it. Now we can just wat h the news without the “PLEEAASE PAY US WERE DYING FROM HUNGER” or alternatively having to read pure propaganda
I don’t know, but to me it seems that the biggest problem that this works has right now is that we never bothered to put some caps in certain functions in our societies and that is just plain dumb. I may be thinking too simple here, but these simple caps and rules? I believe they could work, I believe in a world that could function like that.
Yes, I’m sure there will be cheaters, there always will be. However, a cheater would have a net worth of 2M and would be caught and jailed. Nobody gets to have a 700 billion dollar net worth anynore, nobody gets to be ultra powerful
“Communism is when centrally planned economy” is quite the premise to build upon.
Capitalism is unsustainable, wealth caps and other quick fixes will never last.
Capitalism requires growth, and growth must be extracted from the bottom and flow to the top, thus it will always result in inequality and inequality breeds power.
That power will lead to the repeal of said caps and other measures over time.
Capitalism is not the answer, nor are centralised planned economies. Thus the answer is to look beyond both and at direct mutual aid. Gone are the inequality machine or the state that knows what you need best and in its wake are cooperating with others to meet your need for wellbeing. This has largely been the default for all of human existence, local groups produce their goods those goods are given to others in exchange for things needed and they flow along. Except now we have more advanced manufacturing capabilities and understandings to produce even more.
Each community would be able to choose its own methodology that suits the needs of itself and be adaptable to meet its neighbours . Economics is fundamentally the allocation of resources, and this could look like anarcho-communism, mutualism, market anarchism, gift economy or many other forms.
“Planned economies are bad” okay… Looks at China hmmm.
I know China has a free market portion to their economy, which I think is cool. I also think making the important parts of the economy (you know the parts that everyone relies on daily to live) a part of the government a good thing.
Planned economies are bad okay… Looks at China hmmm.
Technically they are doing targeted investements, grants and tax incentives in their 5 year plans. And they show the direction instead of planning everything down to a carrot.
Micro managing is not equal to communism or socialism
Putting Gonzalo under Castro, and Pol Pot above Trotsky, Kim Jong Il as the connector between Pol Pot and Mao
This is bait
Those are no “connectors”, those are images. There is no deep meaning in their placement.
And this isn’t bait, it’s an anarchist meme. Hard to bait people who aren’t allowed here.
You don’t allow any kind of communism?
Look at the left side of the image or the sidebar. We allow all communism outside of Marxist-Leninism and its derivative (Maoism, Juche, etc)
i’m just disappointed you didn’t put lenin on both sides. i think. i really can only recognize like 2 of the people on here i’m almost faceblind
Looks like the left side were all defeated by capitalist states, too.
How is this more bad than capitalism we already have?
How is authority more bad than authority? It’s not, it’s all authority.
Capitalism is one problem with authoritarian systems, it is not the only problem.
The problem with communism is greed. And people are used to greed. They’ve lived with greed. Grown up with greed. They’ll use greed to be more greedy. So you need a couple generations of people growing up with communism to accomplish communism, and how do you get to that point? It’s a hard situation. It’s difficult.
You can leave the country if you don’t like capitalism. You won’t get shot in back for it. Your family won’t be executed.
You can say fuck Biden, or fuck trump, and you won’t get sent to gulag for it (yet).
There’s levels of bad and communist dictatorships are quite the pinnacle.
I’m sure you can say fuck Biden or fuck Trump in communism too?
I love that joke!
You can say fuck Biden, or fuck trump, and you won’t get sent to gulag for it (yet).
Until 2020 you could get up to 5 years of prison in the Netherlands (same for our head of state). Now you can still can get up to 6 months. Or a nice visit by the police. (Friend said some not nice things on Instagram about Netanyahu. Just that he is a fascist and asshole(and he is). They spend a night in jail.)
Is it as bad as a gulag? Probably not. But in Theory I can now go to prison. So no living in a capitalist country doesn’t mean I can say whatever I want about people. Including trump or Biden
So you see the difference, I’m glad.
Capitalism has more iPhone burgers.
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