Every major country that has ever gone down the communist road has ended up a dictatorship.

Up until not too long ago, every democracy relied on slavery, disenfranchised large parts of the population, and eventually ended up a dictatorship. If you asked someone in like 1810 whether democracy could work, it'd be completely understandable if they pointed out all the horrible aspects of Greek and Roman "democracy", American planations, colonialism and the Reign of Terror, and if they assumed all of these to be inherent to democracy.

"Sure, the king isn't perfect, but he's surely better than Robespierre (who was inevitably succeded by Napoleon). And besides, great thinkers like Plato argued for a philosopher king – and that guy lived in a democracy, who would know better about all of it's evils?"

Yes, communism has failed in many respects so far.* The reasons for that are complex, include active sabotage by anti-communist states, but anyone who doesn't genuinely and critically reflect it's failures is (probably) doomed to repeat those mistakes.

Assuming those are inherent and inevitable based on less than a hundred years of history is imho short sighted.

*Some very early societies were probably kinda close to what we conceptualise as communism™ today, but applying the term is anachronistic.

I think this is semantic(definitions) confusion. Please let me explain. For example communism by definition is a stateless society. Meaning a state cannot be communist. The countries you are thinking of have all called themselves socialist not communist. Socialism does not necessitate dictatorship or democracy. It's simply economical. Socialism is an economic system that abolishes private property which marx defined as different from personal property. Personal property includes your place of living your tv your clothes all your personal shit. Private property refers to owning the means of production. So under socialism you could own your house but not a factory or Google ect.

The countries that are exploited the worst have sometimes had socialist revolts in the past. These countries are typically not functioning democracies beforehand. The USSR had a tsar. China's last emperor ended up joining the socialists once he was overthrown. Cuba had a U.S. backed dictator before Castro's popular revolution. These countries were not made into dictator ships because of socialism. You have the idea in your head because of capitalist propaganda.

Democratic socialism is just capitalism with a nice welfare state built on it. Despite the name it doesn't necessitate having democracy or socialism. Infact it's incompatible with socialism. These states are nicer then usual capitalist states but often backslide. For example Britain moving closer and closer to privatizing their healthcare.

I hope that makes some sense.

The goal of democratic socialism, like all socialism, is communism. My guess is you either meant social democracy instead of democratic socialism (easy confusion to make) or you've been made to think communism means stalinism (also prone to happen if you've lived under McCarthyist propaganda your entire life).

It’s obvious you have read no theory. Read the Communist Manifesto, Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds. For anarchism read David Graeber or Rosa Luxembourg.

If you still feel the same after reading, fine. But read first. Instead you wallow in ignorance and declare your opinion informed. It’s not.

Every major country that has ever gone down the communist road ended up a dictatorship

While I don't think full-on Marxism is necessary and am in agreement on the democratic socialism, I think the reason for this is really more towards the political end of it than the economic.

If a country practicing a communist economy had a more representative/democratic political system from the start, I'd like to see how the results panned out. And I'd also like to see which came first, the dictatorship, or the communism. The former being first makes more sense than the latter.

Cuba's a dictatorship?

They don't last long. Behind the scenes lemmy servers are active at booting trolls.

They're all over, here it's called hexbear.

That and MAGA.

Been a long time but I can still hear total ownage's voice

And here we've all been doing it for free all along!

The article hypothesizes a network of bot accounts that spam targets across social media with invective. So its got nothing to do with TikTok (a company run out of Hong Kong and Singapore, with an American subnet that's physically cut off from its Chinese-mainland counterpart). Even then, if you look at the actual details of the article...

When trolls disrupted an anti-communism Zoom event organized by New York-based activist Chen Pokong in January 2021, he had little doubt who was responsible. The trolls mocked participants and threatened that one victim would “die miserably.” Their conduct reminded Chen of repression by the government of China, where he spent nearly five years in prison for pro-democracy work.

He's a major contributor to US propaganda networks across the South Pacific who attracted a bunch of harassing call-ins during a Zoom meeting. He then attempted to tie the calls back to a wave of FBI arrests of Chinese residents, accused of subversive activities aimed at American institutions.

There's a certain irony in this story, because Chen Pokong himself spent two years in prison for championing anti-CCP protests in Guangzhou, following the Tienanmen protests in '89. So a guy who was once a passionate advocate for dissident expression and protest as an economics professor at Sun Yat-sen University is now a professor at Columbia University participating in mass arrests and imprisonments of US residents for dissident expression and protest.

Freedom of speech should not extend to foreign adversaries.

Hot take incoming...

Actually, I would argue the opposite.

Now that we have global access to each other, we should be speaking to each other, and finding common ground. We all share the same planet.

And when speaking to adversaries, we should consider what they're saying for truthfulness or if it's just an attack, before deciding to ignore/block it or not.

From the article:

Private researchers have tracked the network since its discovery more than four years ago, but only in recent months have federal prosecutors and Facebook’s parent company Meta publicly concluded that the operation has ties to Chinese police.

Meta announced in August it had taken down a cluster of nearly 8,000 accounts attributed to this group in the second quarter of 2023 alone. Google, which owns YouTube, told CNN it had shut down more than 100,000 associated accounts in recent years, while X, formerly known as Twitter, has blocked hundreds of thousands of China “state-backed” or “state-linked” accounts, according to company blogs.

A lot, likely most, of the trolling we seem to take as a necesserary consquence of social media seems to be influence operations from Russia and China (as the largest players, of course there are others).

That's what strikes people the most when they go from X to Mastodon. 90% less followers, but more actual engagement and practically none of the harassment.

It seems most people simply don't troll.