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Wow, communism is fucking awesome. /s
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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I didn’t realize communism was when you’re an authoritarian state capitalist system. It’s so interesting that international corporations can exist within a communist system. You’d think there’d be local control of resources and production and minimal social hierarchies, given that those are the core defining traits of the ideology.
So cool to see how you understand the concepts you’re talking about, plenty of people just go by whatever strawman they get raised with.
You’re not wrong that China is state capitalist but they still are run by the same communist party founded by Mao even if their economic policy has shifted. There is something to be said for the fact that every communist country I can think of has ended up becoming extremely authoritarian regardless of how closely they stick to an actual communist economy. I could see a case for Vietnam or Cuba but I still see a lot of repression of freedom of expression and speech as counter revolutionary in both. If communism is the best economic system it should be able to withstand criticism without repression.
Also the way they suppress workers demonstrations and worker rights despite claiming that they represent the workers and the proletariat is peak political hypocrisy in the case of "communist" regimes. The "communism" was hijacked from its very beginning
Ask the average Hong Konger if they prefer the capitalistic system they were in before or the communistic system they’re headed towards. Most I know prefer the former.
Wait! I forgot they don’t have free speech anymore.
The point is their both capitalist
If your average HKer doesn’t know that just like you don’t know it then that doesn’t make it true
The change is democracy to autocracy
TIL China is not communist.
China is communism. It might not live up to the all the rainbow unicorn fantasy dreams of a system where workers owns the means of the production and all the yada yada, but it’s communism.
Look, this thing might not be literally the one definition what I'm saying it is has, but it is what I say it is anyway because I say so.
Please list all communist governments that did not turn to be authoritarian
Here's a full list of all "communist governments" that weren't misusing the term "communist" from the start:
Name a communist government
The Cree did pretty well prior to European intervention
list all communist governments
You might as well list all spheres with edges, languages without grammar and all people arguing on random articles about communism that know the definition of communism.
Communism is a system where the means of production are owned by the state. And is the exact opposite of capitalism. China is not communist.
Communism isn't a synonym for a bad government.
Owned by the people not the state
Communism doesn’t really have government because that would put people above others
That's an over-simplification. Marx's stateless society was a prediction of the natural outcome of a post-capitalist world and is probably the most utopian aspiration of the philosophy.
Communism does not mean "no government". You need a government. Or rather, whatever system of decision-making and distribution emerges is the government. Any form of cooperation and collective agreement is government. Don't tell the anarchists, they won't get it.
It doesn't have to be heirarchal in the same way but ultimately if you live in a society then at some point someone is going to tell you what to do.
You have people with expertise come up and say x would be best
But no one is bound to it
And then three people say to the fourth, "stop driving your car through this garden" and there aren't laws or courts to handle the dispute so instead they use violence or intimidation.
People cannot self-police on a societal scale.
The state can’t police on a societal scale either because it will be more concerned with protecting itself than it’s people
It’s why we call it late-stage capitalism instead of capitalism
It’s why the flaws of late stage are the same flaws that it tried to fix in the Mercantilist systems
It’s the same flaws Moses tried to ban
It’s not a feature of Communism and your argument that it has to be because people can never tried Communism doesn’t work. It just means that communism doesn’t work because people can never implement it
If I'm honest, your point is being let down by your grammar.
The state polices on a societal scale to the benefit of the public all the time. Environmental and safety regulations on businesses is one of the most obvious and successful. We can see historically and currently that, without the credible threat of legal consquence, people will just leave their trash wherever or over-harvest fish and game or accidentally set fire to a forest. Like, it happens anyway all the time but on a smaller scale.
Late-capitalism mostly describes how everything is commodified and owned by a handful of multinational megacorps. It's got nothing to do with the specifics of Bronze Age mercantilism, nor much to do with the definition of government nor heirarchal systems within society. Regulatory capture is a big problem but that's not unique to the current system. Without the current governments these corporations would just be cyberpunk Corporate States at best or warlords at worst.
Anarchist communism, in my opinion, doesn't scale well beyond the neighborhood and is rubbish at the kinds of efficiencies needed to sustain billions of people.
Environmental and safety regulations on businesses is one of the most obvious and successful.
That’s not Capitalism
Also in practice it just offshores the damage
You're saying that we shouldn't have environmental regulations because all it accomplishes is polluting somewhere else? As if industry doesn't exist in places where they aren't allowed to dump all their waste in the nearest river?
No.
That’s closer to socialism.
Communism is a stateless, hierarchy-less system where the people are in charge.
The state owning anything or existing is antithetical to communism.
China is without a doubt not communist, it’s purely capitalist with a strong dose of authoritarianism on top.
It's alright that you didn't realize what communism is. We all have our weaknesses, and yours is not understanding that communism is an inherrently shitty system that killed millions.
Do you think ignoring obvious sarcasm makes you look smarter?
Every system of governance has millions of deaths attributable to them. Capitalists destabilize third world countries so they can take advantage of the corruption. If you look at every authoritarian government propped up by western capitalist governments you’ll see the body count hit the billions. I’d say a system that props up a guy who threw thousands of political dissidents out of helicopters is far more “inherently shitty” than one whose core ideology was undermined by strongmen.
Every starving person that exists in a place where excess food is destroyed is another body waiting to be added to the count.
Attack the actual tenants of an ideology, not the bastardized version spoon fed to you by people with an incentive to present it dishonestly.
Or give me a good pitch as to why North Korea is definitely a democratic republic. When the person claiming to be a Scotsman was born in Thailand and lived their whole life in Iraq it’s not a fallacy to say that they’re wrong.
Lmao what side are you on? Your entire rhetoric is equally critical of and applicable to communism. If communism is allowed to be viewed as an ideology that has been corrupted, then capitalism is exactly the same. You don't get to cherry pick and say "you have to look at A with rose-colored glasses and you only get to accept the idealized version of it, but you must only look at the bad things that have come from B and don't get to accept its ideals!"
Also you literally went full "no true scotsman" at the end, literally verbatim lmao. You actually just tried to say that one of the most well known fallacies is not a fallacy hahaha wtf is wrong with you
I’m just dropping in to recommend you take a chill pill and not be so irritable and fragile, lest you make yourself unnecessarily mad on the internet.
I think you may have read the wrong comment, because nothing you have said makes any sense in response to my comment. I'm not irritated in the slightest and nothing I have said even suggests that lmao
But please go ahead and project more
They don’t seem especially mad or fragile to me, just sharing their opinion.
Do I need to pick a side? Can I not think both have flaws that should be addressed? The criticisms aimed at capitalism by Marx are incredibly valid, his solution clearly not so much based on real world attempts.
I think if anyone is viewing this through a tinted lens it’s you. Your position is very black and white with no actual care for honestly comparing the two ideologies. You’ve made statements that show a fundamental lack of understanding of both systems and the faults you lay at these governments aren’t inherent to them being communist as I explained earlier.
Capitalism hasn’t been corrupted because the underlying values and tenants of the ideology are functioning exactly as intended. Communism is a utopian pitch with a glaring flaw in implementation that allows strongmen to form authoritarian control. Capitalism by design rewards those that can operate profitably regardless of ethics, which ensures an inherently dystopian outcome. If it’s better for business that a mass murderer like Pinochet takes power then that’s the optimal decision from a capitalist model. US involvement the Middle East and Central/South America has almost always been to benefit a US based corporation that was exploiting and extracting the natural resources of those places. A system that allows and encourages the concentration of economic power is inherently corrupt and self serving towards the elite at the top.
That last part was me describing an instance where “no true Scotsman” literally isn’t a fallacy. Words have meanings, if I call you a duck you’re still a person. If something doesn’t fit the established definition then you can’t honestly say it does.
Capitalism is absolutely not functioning as intended and has 100% been corrupted... if capitalism worked as intended, then why have companies been "bailed out" from failing naturally under capitalism? Capitalism has failed just as much as everything else has failed, and has been corrupted by the people in charge just the same. Communism doesn't work, Capitalism doesn't work, nothing we have right now works.
And you literally still don't understand the concept of "no true scotsman" lmao. It is also known as the "appeal to purity". Let me be more clear:
If someone has Scottish ancestry, is born in Scotland, naturalises to Scotland, or is born and raised within largely Scottish culture, they are Scottish. It doesn't matter where that person was born or where they live. To say that someone cannot be Scottish unless they fit your specific definition and criteria is the exact fallacy being referenced, and you actually just doubled down on that thinking that it somehow makes you not guilty of that fallacy? Wild.
They get bailed out because corporations have the funds to capture government, which isn’t at odds with capitalism. Not sure why you think that’s betraying capitalism, the system is about controlling means of production and siphoning funds off the top, buying government is the natural result to maximize profits.
Communism as an ideology rejects unjust hierarchies so when an authoritarian takes over its directly at odds with the ideology. Capitalism embraces any hierarchy that emerges as long as it’s profitable so when capitalists corrupt governments to make it easier to make more money it’s not a betrayal of the ideology, it’s working as designed.
And since you’re too stupid to understand what I’m saying:
If you’re born in Thailand, never set foot in Scotland and never even start any process to gain citizenship then you aren’t fucking Scottish no matter how much you claim you are. I made this very clear the first time when I said the person in this example was born somewhere that’s NOT Scotland and also said they spent their entire life NOT in Scotland. So clearly they weren’t born there, have no ancestry, and aren’t trying to move there, still think they’re right when they claim to be a Scotsman?
For all your condescending snark you clearly can’t read.
Lmao you are actually incapable of good faith, probably because of how obviously angry you are hahaha
You are still trying to argue that your idealized theoretical version of communism is what needs to be accepted, but that a corrupted and condemned version of capitalism is what capitalism is inherently at its core. By your own standard, communism is equally abhorrent because of how it has been actually implemented in the past.
A company getting bailed out is not capitalism. It is socialism. A capitalist society implementing corporate socialism is a corruption of the core ideology of capitalism. I will agree that it is the end goal of corporatism, but corporatism is a corruption of capitalism.
And wow you really still don't get the "no true scotsman" thing... I mean you probably do but once again, you are only putting bad faith forward. Since you clearly need it spelled out in detail, let me just copy this excerpt from the Wikipedia article on "No true Scotsman":
The "no true Scotsman" fallacy is committed when the arguer satisfies the following conditions:[7][3][4]
not publicly retreating from the initial, falsified assertion
offering a modified assertion that definitionally excludes a targeted unwanted counterexample
using rhetoric to hide the modification
Oops, you accidentally did all those things. You never retracted your assertion, you modified the assertion with further qualifiers, and tried to downplay that further qualification. You actually pulled a "no true scotsman" on a statement about someone being a scotsman. It's so on the nose that you MUST be a troll lmao