[yellow, angry]
I don’t like communism because every time we tried it, power corrupted people

[yellow, smiling and shrugging]
This is why I prefer capitalism, in which power corrupts people

[yellow, t-posing and drooling]
I am very smart and understand ideologies very well than you for coming to my TED talk

https://thebad.website/comic/elite_reasoning

    • The D Quuuuuill@slrpnk.netEnglish
      12·
      3 days ago

      my people still remember how we had a successful union movement going until Lenin said “All Power to the Soviet”, demanded that we quit striking all the time so that the urban factory settings could industrialize faster, and then the ML Union Bosses of the Stalin era became just as corrupt as the mine operators with both the mine bosses and the union bosses telling us to shut the fuck up and get back to work and stop worrying about whatever the hell “black lung” is.

      okay. that’s enough thinking out of me. i’m going back to recovering from RSV.

      as always, fuck every extractive economy no matter what color their fascist movement purports to be

    • Schmoo@slrpnk.netEnglish
      10·
      3 days ago

      Getting people to decouple political systems and economic systems from one another is extremely difficult, especially for MLs because the thought leaders they’re in love with wrote grand unifying theories that present them as one and the same. They’re linked, but not so strictly as people tend to think.

  • MousePotatoDoesStuff@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    3 days ago

    Power doesn’t just corrupt.

    It mostly attracts corrupt people disproportionately - those who see it as a gift rather than a burden of responsibility.

    • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      5·
      3 days ago

      That’s why democracy is less worse than the other systems, you get to kick the bad guy out before he entrenches himself.

      I’d love some mix of anarchy, maybe communism but based on democracy. Lol I guess.

      • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
        6·
        3 days ago

        Anarchism+Communism is basically extreme democracy on steroids, since power is then concentrated at the bottom at a community level instead of at the top, and local decisions can be decided via consensus, and then delegated out to a wider federated society :D

        • The D Quuuuuill@slrpnk.netEnglish
          3·
          3 days ago

          What we, societally, call “democracy” is often a small amount of influence or even manufactured consent within an otherwise fascist hierarchical structure. True democracy is an entire process encompassing ways of being and living. Anarchism is democratic, but not necessarily all democracy is anarchic. For example, the Haudenosaunee famously participated in an anti-authoritarian power structure that does not qualify as anarchy, however, I would definitely qualify it as one of the most democratic structures ever established on the North American continent.

          In fact, I’d even argue that the entire point of “lefist unity” should be that political movements are, and must be, hyper local. It’s the #1 thing I think Zapatismo gets right about political theory. Urban centers tend to find ML works and processes the most useful for achieving their liberation whereas rural and pre-industrial economies such as mining communities tend to find the most value in Anarchist, Trotskyist, and Council-Communist lines of thought. It’s just that “leftist unity” has a tendency to not work out that way

  • Cattail@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    3 days ago

    According to anthropologist every society has had growing inequality outside of 2 scenarios, being war and famine, funny when capitalist say communism or socialism has these problems.

    Really it’s capitalist doing whatever to protect the statue quo

    • NaibofTabrEnglish
      12·
      3 days ago

      Er, wait, do you think Mao was a capitalist?

        • NaibofTabrEnglish
          22·
          3 days ago

          Sure, but in the context of:

          Really it’s capitalist doing whatever to protect the statue quo

          What Mao did to China had nothing to do with capitalism. Socialism and communism also struggle with the strong-man populist authoritarianism problem, and blaming capitalists for that makes no sense at all.

            • NaibofTabrEnglish
              15·
              3 days ago

              Cattail’s comment implies that the historical failures of socialist and communist societies is due to capitalists working to prevent them from reaching their true Utopian goals.

              My point is that socialism and communism fail entirely on their own. Mao is obviously an extreme example, but far from the only such example.

              For proponents of communist or socialist systems to blame capitalists as the reason they can’t have their perfect societies is pure deflection, a refusal to address their own internal problems in an honest way. It is hypocrisy and self-delusion.