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Both sides are the same
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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"... to meet everyone's basic needs"
"..."
"To meet everyone's basic needs, right?"
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Literally yes. Housing, employment, education, healthcare and pensions are guaranteed in Cuba, and were guaranteed in the USSR, both in theory and in practice. What are you exactly talking about?
Communism is just impossible to implement. It only takes one human's greed to destroy the system. Center-left is far more plausible where the economy is capitalist with lots of checks and balances to counter extreme capitalists' greed and the state having control over essential industries and important parts of the economy (energy, water supply, transportation, education, healthcare and stuff) while abolishing religious systems to nil the discrimination on that end.
The entire concept of life itself is very capitalist — You have to exploit all resources available to you so you can survive and thrive. Only some species share resources — that too if they are in abundance for them.
Capitalism literally encourages human greed to accumulate wealth and destroy the societal system. Even if you tax and regulate them that's still what's encouraged, as its literally the entire point of the system
And regarding "only some species share resources.." Yes. Us. That's literally what society is. How do you think humans grew to become the most successful species on earth? If you win I do not lose. It's not a zero-sum game. Cooperation is literally a win-win. Do you think technology and science would thrive and prosper in a cutthroat society where people kill and steal from each other over any tiny advantage they can get?
I am not saying capitalism is great.
You guys ignore the very fact that socialism and communism is a failed system because they are so extreme in its nature. You have to make people believe that the opposite is worse. Capitalism is failing today because it is going towards an extreme, both are the 2 sides of the same coin. Having the best of both worlds is what will create balance. The capitalism from 50 years ago and capitalism today are vastly different. Because earlier we were either centre-right or centre-left.
It definitely didn't thrive under socialism.
I mean, do you know what socialism is? Do you know what capitalism is? It's not really extreme in the objective sense, what is extreme is that someone can own a thing that they don't even use, and hire other people to use for them, and then them profit just because they own it. Or own land and make others pay to use or live on that land, just because they own it. I mean, I find that to be absurd in the grand scheme of things, but that is what capitalism is.
Capitalism just feels like a very anti-social economic system
This is an incredibly inaccurate way to describe nature and you feed into narratives that capitalism is "natural" that stop us from thinking critically both about nature and humanity when you frame things in this way.
Apart from that every multicellular lifeform is a collective. True, those multicellular organisms prey on each other and fight to keep their species thriving. They don't knowingly harm their own fucking species like capitalism does.
Did I ever say capitalism is good? I am saying extreme ends of both economic systems are impossible if you want a free and thriving society.
What you have accomplished is to introduce a completely arbitrary and reductive continuum and stated both ends are bad... so what?
I don't care either way what you think about capitalism, I am telling you to stop comparing capitalism to nature because it exposes that you clearly don't know anything about nature.
Great job editing your comment after I post my reply.
I know more about nature than you clearly do. I was a professional wildlife photographer for a long time and have travelled to various places, studied a lot of animal behaviour and have been around people who are professionals in this field. So yeah… I won’t be taking shit from a person banging a keyboard in their mother’s basement.
I gave you a plethora of actual evidence of human rights in an actually existing socialist country, and you went with the "gommunism impossible because hooman greed".
But please elaborate: why is the nationalization and collectivization of means of production so vulnerable to greed? A system in which power is distributed among all workers is actually less prone to greed issues than one in which a single human is in control of the whole company. The whole "human greed" argument is a hollow sophism without any actual analysis of everything.
How is it more sustainable to maintain an elite of wealthy company owners with interests opposed to those of the workers than to maintain a worker controlled state? You are witnessing with your own eyes the disintegration of the western capitalist system, the fascists entering power in USA, Italy, Finland, and probably soon Germany and France and Spain will follow, likely UK too. All the "center-left checks and balances" with strong union membership in the 1960s-1980s disappeared overnight when the threat of global communism disappeared in the 1990s and capitalism didn't need to appear to be better anymore.
Yeah, Cuba. Where everyone is poor w/o any major scientific and cultural influence in the world.
And yeah, USSR. They did try to influence the world but its internal economy was so shit that it couldn't even exist for 100 years and was a one party authoritarian regime. In the end it started to shift towards to capitalism. Also they supported the Nazis during Poland's invasion. The population who was so frustrated with their country that they toppled the Berlin Wall when USSR was collapsing.
Because the very nature of life I explained to you earlier. Life evolved in such a way that it is the survival of fittest, which requires hogging up all the resources as much as you can. Greed is ingrained in every living being's DNA.
Even you are greedy to want to divide all the wealth equally because for you it might be the only way to get richer than you currently are. It is not a matter of if being greedy is right or wrong, it is a matter of if your greed is so high that it destroys other people's lives and where to draw that line as a civilized society.
They never existed in practice in the U.S after the collapse of the USSR because communism failed and thus the perception swayed towards the extreme capitalist way. Later the extreme lobbying by the wealthy and anti-left got rid of the whatever regulations of systems that didn't allow them to be absurdly rich. It is called lobbying in the west while we call it corruption.
Before that when the governments didn't used to only work for the wealthy, the system was performing better than any other one. Europe's War Torn economy was improving, The US was in its golden economic age and all this while people overall had more rights and freedom than any socialist and communist regime. It started to go haywire when the extreme capitalists started to take over and the government stopped working for all the people but only for the rich.
There is no point in living in an extreme capitalist and a fascist country nor there is a point living in a poor socialist or communist country.
Source: émigré gusanos living in Madrid, Spain. Life expectancy is higher in Cuba than in the USA, and that's despite the island country suffering the most comprehensive and long lasting economic blockade in human history. The blockade itself, according to the Office of the Historian of the USA, was put in place, and I quote: "to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government". Seeing you're so concerned with poverty caused by economic blockades, you may be interested to know that according to recent medical research US and EU sanctions murder above half a million humans per year since 1971.
...so shit that it took backwards feudal Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, etc. where 85% of the population were destitute peasants with a life expectancy of 27 years in 1929, and by 1970 turned into the second world power, rose life expectancy to close to 70, and did all this without exploiting the global south.
Totally terrible economy, much worse than anything before or after, right?
Wrong, wrong and more wrong. I've answered to that in a separate comment because of how wrong that is, feel free to read it and give me a well-informed opinión afterwards on my comment. "Le evil Soviets invaded poor wittle Poland" is pure historic revisionism that you're regurgitating from some other Lemmy comment you've seen.
As for the rest of your comment I won't bother because it's just more "hooman greed" nonsense.
Praising few successes shouldn’t mean ignoring the other side i.e repression, shortages, lack of political freedom, stagnation, mass emigration and the fact that the USSR collapsed under its own economic structure.
We don’t have to choose between “uncritical communism” and “unchecked capitalism.” I’m centre left. I believe in a regulated market, social safety nets, labour rights, universal healthcare/education and checks on corporate power without abolishing private enterprise, scientific development or democracy. Capitalism with strong regulation has lifted millions from poverty too.
I’d rather live in a system that mixes market efficiency with social protection not one that sacrifices freedom and innovation for state control.
That's my final comment and I won't be reading anything further. Thanks.
Few successes like the lack of exploitation of the Global South? You're just a racist who doesn't give a shit about the billions suffering under capitalism.
What political freedom do we have in capitalism? I'm a European, and for the past 20 years we've been able to choose between either austerity policy (socialdemocrats) and harsh austerity policy (conservative/neoliberals). This applies to every country in the EU without exception, to the point that Greece tried something different with Syriza during the 2010s and elected a party more akin to your ideas and their political power got essentially couped by the EU's Troika and central bank when they threatened that if Greece were to revise its sovereign debt, the central bank would stop working for Greece. Now in France a majority of people voted for something akin to your ideals with La France Insumise and Macron is preventing them from reaching government, furthering the advance of fascism. I'm Spanish and we had a left party called Podemos in the 2010s which got demolished in the elections after accusations of funding by Venezuela and Iran. Turns out the ministry of interior had fabricated false evidence and given it to the media to circulate it. In the USA, they can choose between orange fascist supporting genocide in Gaza, or female state prosecutor supporting genocide in Gaza. What an array of Democratic options we have in capitalism, mate. Meanwhile, China, with its single party government, enjoys the highest rates of satisfaction with the central government in the world.
You just spew and repeat bullshit anticommunist propaganda. I showed you the insane and continuous GDP growth of the USSR and you keep falsely talking of stagnation (I'm Spanish and under capitalism the living standards of 2025 are worse than those of 2005, in Germany, quality of life just dropped to the lowest level in 40 years). You aren't even making coherent arguments because I can literally show you numeric evidence that you're wrong, but your cognitive dissonance is too strong to listen and you keep repeating the same shit despite being literally proven wrong two comments above.
You claim communism is impossible to implement yet you have no issue in attempting to implement a democracy that capitalism won't be able to pervert, despite one never having existed before and it being impossible for one to exist.
It sounds less like genuine rationality and more like rationalising a status quo bias. Even worse when people are claiming capitalism to be the natural order of life, despite existing for less than 0.0000001% of it and humans being egalitarian for far longer than they were capitalist.
Peak homoeconomus experiencing "capitalist realism." They even colonised your dreams.
Yes, capitalism as a formal economic system is recent but the behaviours it’s built on aren’t. Competition, territorial control, hoarding for security, unequal outcomes all of these exist across nature (including humans). Lions fight for dominance, trees compete for sunlight, squirrels hoard food. Resource competition is older than any ideology.
Communism, on the other hand, assumes sustained large scale human cooperation without hierarchy, which has never existed stably either outside small tribes where scarcity was low and populations small. Scaling that to millions is where it collapses.
I’m not defending status quo. I support regulated capitalism with social welfare (centre-left). Capitalism needs checks, not abolition. Meanwhile Communism needs human behaviour to fundamentally change.
One system builds on instinct and incentives and the other demands we override them entirely.
That’s the difference in feasibility.
I agree with what you say except the last part about the entire concept of life being capitalist. It is not. All life in the natural world is in equilibrium. There is give and take but all work in tandem. Parasites are the capitalists, taking until there is nothing left to give and ultimately killing their host.
Ever wonder why there are fights over territories, mates, food, water? Even trees fight other trees for the groundwater. Even when pet dogs have abundant food supply, they still hoard as much as they can when they are given something to eat and not hungry. It is just unsaid in nature because obv there are no agreements, MoUs, or money involved. When a Tiger has control over a territory, most other Tigers agree to it until some other challenges it.
It is the ecosystem that works in tandem when you zoom out from an individual living being level.
First level headed comment i think ive ever read on lemmy. People need to get out of black and white thinking. It has to be a blend.
We need libraries and fire stations. We also need some competition and industry so we can live comfortably and buy shit; thats just how it is.
We dont need billionaires.
I gave up on the comments below. I saw a lot of them with myopic vision and simplification of ideas. Their general idea is “Billionaires bad — Capitalism bad”. “Communism good — No Billionaires” while completely ignoring the fact it results in poor qualify of life lack of technological advancements, lack of freedom, doesn’t allow democracy to exist, and is just a utopian vision.
A pure left or a pure right ideology cannot exist when there are differences in opinions and ideals. We will always get something in between.
Civilisation would be impossible to implement if we didn't criminalise destructive behaviour like murder.
Make greed (hording wealth) illegal.
In a naive attempt to "meet everyone’s basic needs" sure, but in practice it would almost certainly end up enriching and entrenching a new ruling class, or collapsing under external pressure even if there are some early wins.
Many things sound simple from the outset. But tearing down and rebuilding an entire society isn’t something you do without significant (and often lethal) force and with plenty of intended and unintended casualties along the way (and there’s still a very good chance we'd screw it up).
If it's not "the good guys" wielding overwhelming force, it’ll be "the bad guys" stepping in. Every political system ultimately rests on the realistic threat/application of force; the only question is who controls it and how accountable they are.
I'm not inclined to trust anyone waving guns in my face, nor encourage situations that make that more likely. So, things would have to get a lot worse for me (and I'd venture most people) to want violent overthrow of my current (far from perfect) political and social system. That said ... at some point, for many people in many countries, it may be too late. Apathy isn't appropriate either.
You guys are talking about basic capitalism, right? You all understand that, don't you?
Damn, seems like real-world data contradicts your preconceived notions. Now, as a responsible adult, you'll surely retract and reflect on why you've been misled to believe that communism perpetuates inequality, right?
Are you trying to say that communism leads to a failed authoritarian state resembling the US in terms of income inequality? Do you have the same stats for wealth inequality too?
I don't but they're irrelevant. The only possible way to get money in the USSR was through labor and income, since there was no capitalist accumulation or return rates on investment by design. The highest paid individuals in the USSR were actually highly trained professionals such as university professors, members of research institutions and high profile artists and media personalities.
No, that's what the end of communism leads to, to a return to capitalism. That was only possible because communism began in a 400-million pool of people in backwards and unindustrialized Eastern Europe, the cold war was uneven from the start.
You always have this problem if you have people with concentrated power aka a “ruling class”
Only way to prevent this is transparency and tools that the people of country can control the ruling class
Very important for such a setup is, that politics, media, law enforcement and courts are separated and controlling each other
And that private companies are not allowed to fuck with the system
I couldn't agree more. Although I'll add that education and basic health/social support is also needed for long term stability, or large swathes of the population will be manipulated by fear and dis/misinformation, and will likely end up voting against their own interests. Social cohesion is important, which is why it is used as a weapon by nation states and other political actors.
Absolutely agree 🙏🏻
The way I see it, between left and far left the direction is roughly the same, that's the means and end point that differ (i.e. revolution or not and how far we go into sharing resources). This is an important difference and they should thus not be mixed.
Also needs to be a clear distinction between democratic left and authoritarian left.
Except removing those rights is not required to meet everyone's basic needs
Talking like a slavery apologist from 200BCE
"...and to achive that, you will do the job we pick for you, you will work the hour we decided, you will be paid not in money but in basic needs, and any excess you have will be confiscated."
Let's not pretend we didn't have the example for far left.
Literally making this up. By the 1970s in the USSR, 1 in 10 positions in the economy were open, and people were completely free to change their jobs and move to others without having the threat of unemployment. The only restriction I've seen to that, is that university graduates, as a payment back to society (university, as of all education in the USSR, was free and actually included accommodation and upkeep), had to work for a few years on a state-mandated position in their field of study. I'm a Spaniard physicist and 9 in 10 of my friends are unhappy fucks who are either unemployed or hating their lives in consulting.
Tell me one socialist state that hasn't paid their workers in money. I can tell you that my girlfriend's mom, in a capitalist country, once got paid in juice boxes because the company didn't have money for her salary.
Again literally untrue. You're mistaking capital (private property used to produce goods and services in order to extract surplus value from workers) with personal property (the things you use on your own for your own shit, like your house or your toothbrush).
Have you ever actually talked with a Marxist, or are you just going off what you heard on FOX news?
I must admit i don't talk with Marxists nor do i know what is FOX news, and i do exaggerated my point, but lets not pretend Mao Zedong and North Korea didn't exists, whatever you mentioned above is no way closer to far left. Socialism is practiced everywhere, but that doesn't make them far left.
Literally the excess i'm talking about.
You don't know what Fox News is?
Should i?
The excess in your opinion is forbidding rich people from exploiting the poor. There were plenty of people making the same point against abolition of slavery in 200BCE that you're making right now.
Under Mao Zedong, China's life expectancy went from 23 years of age to almost 60, more than doubling. Apply this to 1 billion Chinese, and you get that communism in China saved hundreds of millions of people. China in the early 1900s was a western colony much like India, and it had similar levels of industrialization and economical progress. Comparing the development of India and China since communism, the only possible conclusion is that communism uplifted a billion people from destitute poverty, gave them healthcare, education, pensions, jobs and housing. Mistakes were made during Mao? For sure they were. The balance is still overwhelmingly positive by any metric you want to apply.
As for North Korea, maybe if the USA hadn't bombed the country using more explosives than in the entire Pacific theater of WW2, and destroyed literally 85% of the buildings in the entire country, North-Koreans wouldn't have had such an extreme policy of international isolation and self-defense.
The mistake is millions of death while Mao walks away without any repercussions.
And maybe if nk didn't self isolate for so long they would've recover. Just look at singapore. Did you know North Korea have an embassy in Malaysia? Did you know what happen next? They decided to assassinate Kim Jong Nam in Malaysia, then blame Malaysia for it, and cut all ties. NK might have been a victim of US, but their current situation is 100% their own doing.
Well that conclude my reason of not speaking with Marxist, you guys are nut lol.
Let's look at how many "millions of deaths by Mao" (1949-1979):
India's life expectancy in 1950: 34 years of age
India's life expectancy in 1979: 49 years of age
China's life expectancy in 1950: 40 years of age
China's life expectancy in 2010: 62 years of age
Whoops, turns out that China gained 22 years of life expectancy where India gained 15, that's 50% more and applied to the entire population of a country with a billion people, results in hundreds of millions of lives saved! Turns out you were wrong again because your arguments don't come from real data but from anticommunist discourse vibes.