Ukraine famine? Red August? Note this isn’t in “support” of capitalism, especially since the US did do those things and it’s a late stage capitalist nightmare but the claim of this pic just rings false. Unless the Soviet Union or CCP circa early-mid 1900s aren’t/weren’t communist.
They were leninists, not communists. As nazis weren’t really socialists. Communism seeks to abolish private property, means of production ownership and social classes. The soviet union government was the most dominant class ever, they owned every single mean of production and they had the property of absolute all the land. They were the absolute opposite of communism. Same with North Korea (they are “The Democractic Republic of The People of Korea”, and they are not democratic, not republicans, and people have nothing). Names most of the time are just propaganda.
While I accept that may have some degree of merit RE the Soviet Union at least; so the post may as well be meaningless. Multiple countries and their variation of economics fall under capitalism. Seemingly none fall under communism. So the picture is essentially claiming “communism, a supposedly purely hypothetical system of governing/economics has never done anything bad” which ok so? By the same logic it’s never done anything good either, because it’s allegedly never really been implemented. It’s comparing real life to ideals/fiction.
the picture is essentially claiming “communism, a supposedly purely hypothetical system of governing/economics has never done anything bad” which ok so? By the same logic it’s never done anything good either, because it’s allegedly never really been implemented. It’s comparing real life to ideals/fiction.
You’re ALMOST getting it.
The point isn’t that communism is great. It’s that the communist threat that capitalist demagogues love to bandy about is purely hypothetical, unlike the very real and present harms of capitalism.
To add to this I’m pretty sure the early capitalist thinkers like Locke didn’t aim for the late stage capitalism society that America had become. If we are comparing ideology that’s what we should compare with but if we are comparing actual real life scenarios communism is stuck with Soviet, China and Cuba.
And Catalonia and Australia
Oh, I can point to a historical example of communism. Australia. Australia has 60,000 years of classless, stateless, moneyless history. And it was great!
There is, after all, no true communist.
They were leninists, not communists.
Claiming Leninists aren’t communist is a bit like claiming Jeffersonians aren’t capitalist. “No no! He purchased Louisiana with state money! Adam Smith explicitly said you shouldn’t do this!”
Leninist created a government with a extremwly powerful class, that owned all means of production. Please explain us how’s that communism
Leninist created a government with a extremwly powerful class, that owned all means of production.
The… proletariat class? Are you suggesting a working class in Russia didn’t exist prior to 1917?
The workers didn’t own the means of production!
Like a wind tunnel.
Ukraine famine?
Which one? There were so many. Thank god the communists took over and saw to it that once it happened under their reign it would be the last one.
You’re right there was a long history of famines like everywhere else on earth, but Ukraine’s famine was unambiguously caused by the Soviets. It’s well documented that essentially all of the grain was being shipped out for export to fund the state’s expenses, and Ukrainians weren’t left enough calories to survive. You would get shot for “stealing grain” by picking spilled kernels off of the ground. It was manufactured just like the Irish famine being manufactured by the British.
Thank god the British took over Ireland and saw to it that no famines happened under their control after 1879.
Ukrainians and Irish are obviously too stupid to handle their own agriculture and desperately needed guidance from Moscow or London.
Huh? The ukrainians weren’t in control of their land or grain prior to the communists setting them up with their own socialist republic. Their food was extracted like it was during the man-made famines in ireland prior to the communists freeing them.
Dropped your /s there buddy
Ukrainians and Irish are obviously too stupid to handle their own agriculture
There’s a huge difference between the drought-induced famine in the wake of a horrible civil war and a systematic regime of mass starvation implemented by landlords against an ethnic underclass. The East European Plain Drought wasn’t unique to Ukraine nor was it the product of Soviet policies. Countries as far removed as the UK were experiencing droughts and food shortages during the same years (1932 - 1935). These were the same years as the US Dust Bowl.
The Irish Potato Famine was most notable because the English were harvesting a bumper crop of grain at the time. Grain prices crashed while the Irish were starving and grain rotted by the ton in warehouses that the Irish were locked out of. The Irish Famine was fully manufactured by English economic policies.
It’s not unlike the Bangladeshi famine following WW2, resulting from Churchill’s explicit strategy of diverting the bumper crop from Australia away from a territory he wanted to punish for its independence movement. Curiously, the Bengal Famine of 1943 only ended when the US under FDR intervened with its own aid. In the 1950s, the USSR also began contributing enormous surplus food aid to the subcontinental region, cultivating a large and popular leftist community of Russia-friendly South Asia Communists as a result.
What we’re seeing in the Middle East in the modern day - Israeli embargo of foodstuffs into the Palestinian Territories, US strategic bombing of Iranian agricultural transit and irrigation infrastructure - and in Latin America - the US energy embargo of Cuba, strategic strikes on major energy and water infrastructure in Venezuela - is similarly engineered to induce mass famine as a strategy of regime change.
Idk why I didn’t put together it was the same time as the US great depression, really funny to consider how often I’ve seen the communism = famine = bad argument without that little tidbit mentioned.
Something something free market
Crazy how it’s almost impossible to find an accurate death count during the Great Depression. We had an enormous famine. We had mass depopulation of urban centers. We had that famous Grapes of Wrath line.
What was the excess death during this period? Hey Google! What were the excess deaths during the Great Depression?
Historical research shows that the Great Depression of the 1930s did not produce a large overall increase in excess deaths across the U.S. population. In fact, some studies found improvements in population health during the worst years of the Depression.
No citation, incidentally. Just something the AI prompt wants you to know.
Dummy indeed.
Salty indeed. I can take the intended joke of a username and use it too.
Either way, minus the communism stuff, can’t disagree that capitalism in its current form, especially in the US, is a cancer. Though, I think that’s unfair to cancer, as it’s natural and its suffering an unintended byproduct.
The Ukrainian famine was primarily due to the blind adherence to the woefully incorrect agricultural ideas of one party leader, not anything inherent to communism.
If anything, that was the fault of blind authoritarianism and automatically deferring to the most powerful in the mistaken belief that they MUST have became powerful through merit, which capitalism has more than its share of too.
As for Red August, that’s just your standard brutal suppression of dissidents by a tyrannical government.
That’s part and parcel of all totalitarian governments and have been AT LEAST as frequent with fascist and otherwise far right governments as with communist or otherwise far left ones.
So again, the problem isn’t communism, it’s authoritarian tyranny. Which is a (usually hidden from public view by establishment institutions including media) inevitable component of capitalism, an ideology that venerates the accumulation of capital over everything else, including the rights of humans.
Note this isn’t in “support” of capitalism
Likewise, I’m not a fan of communism because it’s by definition way more authoritarian than ever ends well, regardless of intentions.
the claim of this pic just rings false. Unless the Soviet Union or CCP circa early-mid 1900s aren’t/weren’t communist.
They WERE communist, but that’s correlation rather than causation. See above.
If a government solely relies on competant politicians it’s a government that won’t last.
You mean that it’s bound to fail if it assumes that all the politicians are competent and acting in good faith?
I agree COMPLETELY. And the perfect example of THAT would be the antiquated constitution and kakistocratic government of the US.
Correct. Probably much more graceful way to put it. But this sentiment is why I’m an anarchist
This is why any communist system that relies on the concept that the leader/party is always right is instantaneously disqualified to be considered truly communist. But then again, many communist ideologues directly rejected the concept of democracy.
Communism isn’t the cure but capitalism is still the cancer.
Communism can be the cure, it just hasn’t been successful implemented without authoritarianism and well massive interference from the USA/capitalism.
Personally I’m leaning more towards socialism with state ownership and well a lot more.
But I can’t outright reject communism, but I can acknowledge the historically flawed application
The problem is that for several communist ideologues, the authoritarianism is not a bug, it’s a feature. Force the people to be free, against their will. It’s a paradox. On the one hand, communism is when capitalism… holds true still. Much of the horrors of the hypothetical communism are realities of capitalism. On the other hand, the horrors of the real communism are also very real and caused massive suffering “for the greater good”. Which always leads to “no real communism” fallacy.
Then you have tankies that take “you’ll be communist or die” to the level of cultist apologetics.
The point is, humans and human relations are messy, way more messy than any ideology will ever be capable of dissecting and analyzing. So anyways, imagine a spherical head of state in the void…
I’d say communism does not equal Moaism/Stalinism
These are just perversions of the base idea.
Not the most well-articulated argument; However, they are right in saying it’s the capitalists who’ve made the US a place where people can’t live anymore. Homelessness has exploded in the last two years, and instead of addressing the problem, the Democrats and Republicans are systematically criminalizing it and strengthening the pipeline to the prison industrial complex.
And yes.
It’s the capitalists shooting innocent people in the face. They really want us to be scared of socialists when it’s the two capitalist ruling parties who’ve made it so full time work doesn’t equate to a standard of living. Absurd stuff.
Oh that’s what they’re trying to do.
The problem with dumbing down arguments is that you get dumb arguments. Should have at least geolocated with “American socialists”
And yeah, you want to use the word socialist, not communist.
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Yeah! Mass starvation and shooting protesters in the face has never been a communist staple! Anyone saying otherwise is a CIA plant using CIA sources!
They’ve also terrible things. I not rooting for either side.
Wanna bet?
Communism is the will to abolish capitalism, and capitalism has never ended (it’s a global system). A real communist system wouldn’t have social classes, private property or ownership of means of production… and no country in the world has ever had such a system.
I might argue that anti-colonialism is the will to abolish foreign-based merchantalism. And a lot of the Communist/Capitalist debate is window dressing for a much more material Home Rule versus Foreign Imperialism conflict.
What you get in practice, both in self-proclaimed Communist and Capitalist states, is some gradient of Mixed Economy. Every state intervenes in its economy to some extent (often more aggressively in self-proclaimed Capitalist states when the state leadership needs to prove their ideology works). Every state hosts wholesale and retail markets, be they state-managed or merely regulated or fully privatized or simply underground.
The real dividing line is in who controls the capital - native people aligned with the local popular political movements or foreigners with a puppet government propped up by outside investment/military intervention. What we’re seeing in AES states is an effort to localize control of valuable capital projects. What we’re seeing in aggressively capitalist states is to outsource the ownership to international business and stateless autocrats.
Can you mention 1 “communist state”?
Cuba, if I’m looking for something in my own backyard
One time a communist farded and when I called them out they said “we all dealt it, comrade”
It’s not a communist joke unless everyone gets it.
Meanwhile, in every communist regime ever…
bUt iTs tHe faUlT oF tHe UsA !!!
Removed by mod
well…
the ussr did the massacre of kyiv, the 1922 invasion of poland, the ukraine famine, the gulags, mass “sybir” deportation, ribbentrop-molotov pact, 1939 invasion of finland, the katyń massacre, ww2 destruction battalions, NKVD prisoner massacres, creation of the eastern bloc and controlling half of europe for 50 years
You could have just said you were a dumbass that doesnt know shit in less words
Well not far off though
Well not far off though
Do you have any credible sources to back up your observation?
Like with all authoritarian systems, the Soviet Union for example, usually ends up with an enriched elite, a “stable” middle class and a poor underclass.
Authoritarian regimes have the same tools available so it’s not surprising that their solutions and behavior are alike.
Yeah, over there in the gulag.
I’m sending you there because you have not purged (shot dead) enough people this month.
The Black Book of Communism says that Communism killed 100 Zillion poeple. I assume some of them qualified as the above.
Communists don’t own a government.
Oh you mean the kleptocrats that run a thinly veiled capitalist society? Okay sure
No they just did other horrible things
