Maybe if people with your ideology only make things that harm you it's an opportunity to reflect.
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of "ML" (read: Dengist) influence. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
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0. Only post socialist memes
That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme. Please post agitprop here)
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0.5.1 Style tip about abbreviations and short forms
When writing stuff like "lol" and "iirc", it's a good idea to try and replace those with their all caps counterpart
Why? Because otherwise (AFAIK), screen readers will try to read them out as actually words instead of spelling them
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such
That means condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" (read: Dengists) (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
6. Don't irrationally idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
Yes you are so smart and above it all. Magic human nature is to blame for everything, people are not products of their material reality at all. We should all just be misanthropic dorks and never try to do anything to better anything while spouting off rightwing idealist nonsense that is observably false.
No, I'm just as human as the rest of you. I just don't believe people are capable of communism. Communism always ends with corrupt, power hungry dictators.
People are not capable of being better, if we were we would have done so by now. Humans have been around for 100,000 years or so, in various forms, so why in all our the known history, have we not been better yet? And why is it at all logical to assume we suddenly could be, despite this?
"Communism is bad because " Challenge still ongoing, perfect record.
Brother, you don't need a specific economic organization to enable authoritarianism. You just need people with determination. You're literally living through a capitalist dictatorship, doing genocide and robbing value from it's people right now, almost no matter where in the world you live.
Uhm, for like 95% of that time people have usually been better? There is little opportunity to become a dictator in a small group of hunter and gatherers and anthropological and archiological evidence points to many of these groups having been strongly egalitarian.
Homosapiens have been around for 300,000 years. Homos (lol) have been around for millions of years. Homo erectus was around for just shy of two million years alone.
And for the vast majority of that time we weren't engaged on a free market economy.
Thanks for the correction, I really should have looked that up before writing it down.
That 'free market economy' wasn't born of a vacuum with no prior human influence. We made it.
You're just reiterating your observably false nonsense. Humans have improved from actual barbarians to slavers to civilised groups. Also "if everyone would just..." is not at all a communist position.
Also unsure if you realise this or not but you have the same misanthropic ideology of a mass shooter.
And no offence but 'civillised groups'? Lmao, you're going to have to define this too because fuck me does it reek of collonialism.
Estimates of the number of currently enslaved people range from around 38 million to 49.6 million, depending on the method used to form the estimate and the definition of slavery being used.
How are you defining babary? Just so I know exactly how to disprove your statement, please.
Wow uneven development is not something Marxists have ever studied /s
I'm sorry but you don't even have the faintest idea of what you're talking about I don't think we can hold a productive conversation. I hope you can educate yourself and move beyond your edgy teenager mass shooter ideology phase.
I'm probably twice your age. Over 50 people in my family, that I know of, were killed in the gulags and I grew up hearing about just how great communism was from my Polish family, who lived under communism till 1989.
I too though had a Marxist phase as a teenager and I so strongly believed people were capable of being better if only they would read Marx and follow his ideas.
And then I grew the fuck up and stopped believing in magical opposite world realities suddenly coming into fruition.
Power corrupts and those with power over us will always be corrupted. There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator.
60+ and still an edgy teenager with a misanthropic mass shooter ideology who speaks with authority on subjects without any study or investigation very impressive. For someone who allegedly read Marx your ability to not understand a single point Marxists make and instead spout off right wing talking points and strawmen is equally impressive.
Holy ad hominems batman, lmao. For someone who also clames to know about logical fallacies, you really don't seem to be doing to well on that front either.
Well done spelling those big words though!
You're the one who tried to play the age card to dodge the fact that your worldview is misanthropic garbage based on nothing of substance while you entirely misunderstand Marx and Marxist points then fight those misunderstandings as if they are the points themselves. No Marxist advocates for "if everyone would just..." or benevolent dictators or any of the nonsense you're spewing. I really think we should leave this here.
I hope you don't commit to your misanthropy too hard and end up on the news.
But the whole reason this conversation with you started was because you didn't like that I said communism doesn't work because people aren't capable of it. And we haven't been capable of it yet anywhere either.
So if you're not arguing for 'if everybody would just' but also believe people are actually capable of communism... then what?
Work with me here, I'm really trying to understand you.
And ffs, with your attitude here, if anyone's likely to get on the news for something relating to this, it seems like you're closer to going all 'gulag for the non-believers', than I am to bothering to seek out any of you morons irl to be pissed at.
This person seems to be speaking from personal lived experience, which, to me, is more valuable than theory alone. Assuming they're telling the truth, of course.
There's a reason anecdotal evidence generally isn't worth much. Talking about your experience is great but using it to extrapolate to the sweeping remarks this person is making is dangerous and generally should be avoided.
I'd argue that lived experience (material reality) is the only thing that actually matters, and that theory can be confabulated by anyone. edit: again assuming that this person is a real person, not saying that their history is the only one that matters, just that real world lived experience is more important than theory
Here's another anecdote then. My polish family got saved from the Nazis by the russian army taking Poland, got a university education, the women got to be independent and have their own housing and material security.
Their religion was suppressed and they were unhappy about that but Polish Catholicism was extremely misogynistic and repressive.
Oh they also got vaccines and healthcare and shit.
It was no utopia but they were treated well enough that they regretted moving away for a long time.
This is difficult to respond to, but I'm going to try anyway.
I don't think your family's limited prosperity was worth the extermination of the other guy's family. Killing the Nazis is a very low bar for goodness. Americans also killed Nazis, and now look what's happening in the US.
If you have a bad situation, seeing someone else in a bad situation doesn't make your bad situation better, it just means that there are now two bad situations.
It wasn't just my family though, women were massively liberated in the USSR relative to basically everywhere in Eurasia at the time. Loads of people die in prison, maybe their family was Nazi collaborators, maybe mine was KGB agents, maybe we're both lying.
We should stick to verifiable facts when discussing history.
I don't think exterminating 50 families is worth it even if 50 other unrelated families get uplifted. At least, I don't think you can call it good or better. And I don't think any one specific theory or ideology is necessary for women's liberation. Women have historically liberated themselves using a myraid of different ideologies.
I don't think you can count theory alone as a "verifiable fact." The verifiable facts are the historically accurate first-person accounts of history which have been measured against corroborating witnesses and physical evidence. Marx wrote a book about his own thoughts and predictions. Some of these thoughts can be measured against reality and some of them cannot. Anybody can write down their thoughts, and the more intelligent you are, the more you can twist your words to make them sound good. Material reality and the lived experiences of real people matter more to me than what an intelligent person can make up or predict.
I find it hard to believe that every single person who died in a gulag was a Nazi collaborator, because not all of them were. Although we can't do it on Lemmy, it is possible to verify familial histories and first-person accounts. You're right about the fact that a lot of people lie on the internet so this whole discussion is kind of silly.
Feel free to believe that but social sciences are a science and there's a reason anecdotal evidence is not valued highly.
Should we discard all of quantum mechanics because of your lived experience with gravity? Obviously not.
This is a wildly false comparison, social science theories can't be compared to physics. Now you're just being very silly on purpose.
I cannot have a lived experience with gravity which is contrary to the existence of gravity. It is literally impossible. Why am I wasting my time explaining this? You know how silly this is.
They definitely can social science is just as much a science as "hard" sciences and extrapolating anecdotes to make general statements is equally garbage in both fields.
How much do you know about quantum mechanics and how gravity works differently at that scale and thus the need for an entire new field called quantum gravity?
Your lived experience of gravity as an attractive force of on earth roughly 9.8m/s^2 would be in direct opposition to quantum gravity
I'm sorry, this is too silly. Have a nice day.
It's silly to hold evidentiary standards?
And just so we're clear, because at this point my expectations for the people reading this are fairly low, 'great' in this context, is sarcasm.
As in, they did not actually find living under communism to be 'great'.
We're plagued by those that'd rather let the invicible hand help carry the trickle up to the top rungs of the economic ladder.
300,000* years, and a lot of that history is lost, but there's probably a lot more you just don't know about. There's a book called the dawn of everything: a new history of humanity by anthropologist David graeber and archeologist David wengrow that challenges the traditional view of human history. They provide evidence that early societies were much more complex than we've been led to believe.
Why do you seem to think a system beginning in the 16th century and developed in the 18th century would be better than something we could come up with today?
That book changed so much in my thinking, and made me realize how programmed I've been by post-enlightenment western philosophy. I'd internalized so much of the "progress equals inequality and hierarchies" way of thinking. That book showed me that indeed: "another world is possible". We are not greedy, selfish and violent by nature, we are just the products of the environment we live in and the education we receive. We can be, and have been throughout human history, far better people than we currently are.
If I lived with your level of cynicism and bleak ass outlook every day I would kill myself, but you've shown us all today that people are capable of going beyond expectations
That's the funniest dismissal I've ever seen online. Cold!
Wow, what a ray of sunshine you are!
And who knew that lemmy communists were such an intelligent, thoughtful and all together pleasant bunch?
If you don't like it here, kindly fuck off instead of shitting up the place
Lol I'm not even a communist
When you confuse capitalism for communism.
What if head government positions in general are attractive to corrupt, power hungry dictators?
The Weimar Republic wasn't communist, and it got a corrupt, power hungry dictator.
The United States isn't communist, and it's dealing with a corrupt, power hungry dictator.
Israel isn't communist, and it's dealing with a corrupt, power hungry dictator.
I wonder if maybe there are other factors in play that you aren't considering.
Always? Are you sure? Let's say there's a corrupt, power hungry person looking for a government spot. How would communism make it easier for the person to get into power, than in a capitalist system?