Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)
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The multi millionaire linus torvalds is a communist?
Hahaha..
I don't think you actually know what communism is.
That tends to be the case for vast majority of anti-communists out there.
To be fair communist rhetoric online is a huge mess.
On one hand, you have the communists who are like, "human rights inclusive of all gender identity, basic needs met for all, no state and no class society!", very nice and cool, yay!!
On the other hand, there are communists who are like, "install a dictator who kills all political dissidence, support foreign invasions, let's go Soviet ultra-nationalism!", very gross and yuck.
That's just straw manning I'm afraid.
The same people who call for executions also tend to be narcissistic to the point of never being able to handle any kind of criticism, ever.
No, people just call out your made up criticisms made in bad faith.
Unfortunately I'm not making them up, because if I was, communism would be far more popular.
Instead of communists going, "well, maybe I could be better", they go, "it's all western propaganda that makes communism so unpopular, it could not possibly be me that ever does anything wrong".
87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the party has 95 million members. Seems like communism is plenty popular outside the westoid cesspool.
"Marxism" polls very popular in an authoritarian 1-party dictatorship that strictly controls the internet, media, and speech, polls unpopular where freedom of speech is allowed.
This is not the flex you want it to be, you're really just proving my point that communists are terrible at messaging.
🤡
(Also just a gentle reminder that dehumanizing an out-group is a red flag for fascism)
project much?
Point out precisely where in this conversation I dehumanized an outgroup like you did with "westoid cesspool", and I'll concede that I am as much of a fascist as you are.
this you? https://lemmy.ml/comment/4226229
If you're referring to this comment:
It's not "dehumanizing" to criticize a government. The people of China - for them I have a huge amount of empathy and sympathy. I believe they deserve freedom of speech, and LGBTQ rights, and all human rights. I go out of my way to pay more for fair-trade goods, and avoid companies that exploit Chinese laborers (hello Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon).
There is a distinctive difference between unhelpful slurs (westoid cesspool), and legitimate criticism (1-party dictatorship).
You're not criticizing the government, you're removing agency from people living in China and claiming that they're not capable of making their own decisions. Thinking that you know better than they do is peak chauvinism. The fact that you confuse your racism with legitimate criticism says a lot about you.
Not at all what I'm saying.
I'm saying the government controls all the flow of information, and I don't trust their numbers to reflect reality. I don't trust Apple's customer satisfaction surveys either.
I mean, should anybody be surprised that a communist organization newspaper would survey high support for Marxism? That's like the NRA releasing survey results that show high support for zero gun regulation.
If you want to be effective at messaging for communism, besides learning to take criticism, you also have to be aware of your own confirmation bias.
The fact that you don't even see just how absurd this line of argument is really shows just how far off the reservation you've wandered.
Every single survey that comes out of China done by domestically as well as by western organizations consistently shows that people in China overwhelmingly support their government and see it as democratic. The only people who say what you say are invariably westerners who have never been to China or talked to anyone actually living there.
Thinking that it's somehow controversial that people living in a communist country who overwhelmingly support their government identify as communists is laughably absurd.
You changed the subject, I was speaking of communism and socialism being much less popular than they should be.
A country with almost as much wealth disparity between the poor and wealth as the US?
Also, the US might have freedom of speech, but it's still an oligarchy with a government that serves the rich more than the majority.
I'm not "peak chauvinist against US citizens because I'm removing their agency", it's just objectively very difficult for the laboring class to fight back against the ruling & ownership class, and I have no difficulty in criticizing the US government for it.
Please explain communism for those who don't understand. I lived in a communist country so it's not for my benefit, but others might be curious.
You lived in a country that called itself communist, in the same way that North Koreans live in a country that calls itself democratic. There has never been a country that actually achieved communism, because communism requires there be no state. At best these countries would claim that communism was their goal, but honestly most were lying, or at the very least co-opted and turned against their ideals somewhere down the line.
I do agree that the ideal communist state has never existed, though I need to challenge the assertion that communism demands the existence of no state. Anti-state philosophies are generally characterized as "anarchism" -- it's certainly true that communists and anarchists have historically held common interests, but in general they do not view themselves as members of the same group.
It's a weird distinction, but the distinction exists for a reason. Communists do not reject the establishment of a governing apparatus, so it's actually very inaccurate to say that "communism requires there to be no state". You could instead adopt the anarchist argument that "communism is self-defeating because it leads to the creation of non-communist states", but keep in mind that this is in-and-of-itself a rejection of communism in favor of communal anarchism.
Fantastic! I thought that communism was impossible to achieve in a state, but if it is only achievable in 'no state', then we have to come up with a word more negative than 'impossible'.
Okay, maybe Lithuanian will explain better to an Estonian:
Once in the 19th century there was a rapid industrialization. Farmers and citizen guild-workers lost their economical value and had to turn into factory workers. At that time, there was massive unemployment, and factory owners were unregulated. Then a philosopher Karl Marx went in, and started to analyse. He concluded that, in history, it's always 'slaves vs landowners', then 'peasants vs seniors', and ultimately 'workers vs enterprise owners (bourgeoisie)'. He named this phenomenon 'class struggle', and hypothesised that, after workers will defeat bourgeoisie, then it would be possible to create a perfect egalitarian society with no exploitation, in which people have all the rights except the right to be rich. That was called 'Communism', a proposed ideal society.
His ideas attracted many followers, which were split into several political campus, for instance, Socialist democracy ('mild' socialism, rich people pay more taxes, etc.), Anarcho-Communism (no state, no regulations, lived only for a short period of time in Ukraine), and many more.
Then V. Lenin came in, and told there must be a 'peasants' revolution' that abolishes the existing state(s), kill all the enemies of that revolution, become a Socialist country (ie. State controls all the economy) and then slowly progress into Communism. His practices were furthermore refined by Stalin and were called 'Marxism-Leninism'. History of the USSR shows that the power of a Socialist state can be used to create a totalitarian prison.
So 'Communism' can mean either an egalitarian society or heading towards that direction, basically.
I appreciate your write up, but I think you replied to a different comment from some person in Estonia who might or might not have lived under that regime. Either way, Marxism-Leninism had been drilled into me for decades.
There are a variety of views from different authors and political experiences. But they're mostly rooted on not having privately owned means of production (a consensus exists for big corporations at least). This would mean big corporations cannot be privately owned, it must belong to the workers themselves. This implies the destination of profits should be decided between its workers, and not its owners. This might even make many more people rich than just some random dude (like Musk) for owning the whole thing.
In general, there is no contradiction between being rich and communism. In fact, the workers should get the profits for what they build.