this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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Socialism/Communism/Anarchism. Barely anyone who actually understands them and the theory supporting them hates them, but tons of people have been fed Red Scare propaganda on the matter.
Well, those who most benefit from the status quo also understand those concepts quite well, but oppose them.
If only there wasn’t a wealthy, parasitic, world-dominating country which would violently overthrow (or at least try) any country which didn’t kowtow to capitalism, and the Parasite Class.
Maybe because most real life examples of those systems haven't worked out great.
I think most real-life examples have been plagued by corruption to the point that they fall into a different category altogether.
Historical examples, like Revolutionary Catalonia for Anarchism, and the USSR, Cuba, Maoist China, Vietnam, etc. for Marxism-Leninism, absolutely count as Socialist and should be learned from, both the good and bad.
If you dismiss them as "not real Socialism," you fail to learn from what did work in those instances, like literacy rates and life expectancy skyrocketing. If you dismiss the bad, you make the equal mistake of not accounting for the flaws in systems like Soviet Democracy, which resulted in a corrupt Politburo with outsized power.
Study them in detail and find what to take and what to leave behind.
communism is a classless stateless moneyless society. is that how you'd describe any of those societies? i wouldn't. because it's not true. but there are certainly anarchist and communist societies that have existed.
I think we should learn from that. Maybe all forms of power solely resting within the governing function invites corruption.
I haven't given up yet on it because capitalism is definitely not working right now but there is a form of communism that you can have an informed and rational fear of.
Generally, if you have a system where more powerful people are more influential, you invite yourself to corruption.
In Capitalism, this expresses itself in Capitalists buying politicians.
In Marxism-Leninism, this is expressed in the upper Soviets becoming more entrenched and corrupt.
The solution for Socialism is to make the upper rungs directly accountable to the masses. The solution for Capitalism is to abolish Capitalism.
The solution to corruption is to stop being human. There, I said it.
Nah, just make systems that are resistant to it and more accountable to the masses. Simple.
Like ancient Athens! It failed obviously.
Or like Ancient Rome! It failed, obviously.
Or like any modern democracy! It failed, obviously.
The problem is that “masses” are truly a reflection of their government and vice versa, more so in a democracy. You take for a given “the mass” takes good decisions but this, again, works only in the ideal world.
And if you think things are better than the past, think again: internet and social media spread so much crap and allowed people to talk too freely, so now you get Joe the Farmer believing he is some sort of genius cause he knows that there is big plot and the corps are covering it up; you get Dalila the economist believe she knows anything about software development; you get Dario the cheese eater believe he is a medievalist just because he read (and ate) “the cheese and the worms”. And all of this people wouldn’t give shit about the “so-called” experts, cause they studied it on eatashit.altervista.org so they must know better than the college-cuck
The problem with democracy isn't democracy, but allowing people with entrenched power to control the flow of information in their favor, vs the masses. Democracy is a good system.
I don't disagree with you but how do you prevent misinformation, manipulation and polarisation?
Remove power structures that are inherently unjustly hierarchical, and remove the profit motive in general.
People profit from misinformation and entrenched power, if they don't have that then democracy works better.
That goes for anything, every system ever made by humans. Even the first forms of democracy, including direct democracy, falls under this umbrella. After all in the theory-world, where everything is ideal, humans do behave good so communism (but any form of good government is possible, even anarchy or a good autocracy).
In the real world, though, humans behave like humans so you get corruption and weird power play. So even if you got a nice working system where every human support society, it will inevitably fail under corruption after the first generations of those who put in place such a system die; which is exactly what happens throughout history each time, even in Athens.
Tldr: theoretical perfect system cannot exist in practice since we are flawed creatures
Why?
yes, they have
Name one that didn't end with a dictator or mistreat/scare its citizens into submission.
the swamp maroons
Cuba, a poor blockaded small island nation, has a higher life expectancy than the global hegemon and richest nation ever
The USSR went from a monarchist backwater to a industrial society, defeating the nazis and sending the first satellite into space, in the span of 40 years.
China, under socialism, is now on track to shatter US hegemony through the power of socialist economic management and mutually beneficial cooperation.
Historians studying them don't hate, true, but we also don't hate plague or dog shit on the road.
That's a bit of a non-answer, isn't it? I'm clearly referring to implementing leftist structures today, not historically.
Never tried for real, I see.
Why would one hate right ideas then, of the libertarian kind.
Read my other comment, it absolutely has been tried. If your point is that the relatively few historical examples are a sufficient sampling of data to determine that people sharing tools can never work, then I'm afraid you don't understand numbers, nor historical analysis.
You can learn from what has and has not worked, and analyze structures. It's possible! You just have to do it.
You know, of course, that the answer to that "if" is usually "no", and this is called a strawman argument.
No reason to be afraid! Sing and dance and hug your family, friends and house animals.
People have been sharing tools since eating less fortunate breeds of people, the optimal architecture of that is the point of contention.
More dodging, great! What's your point?
I've literally finished my comment with it.
You pretended you had a point, but left it open.
Leaving it open is a valid political position of making efficiency more important than ideology.
I don't know which architectures may be invented in the future to work, I'm not against them coming from leftist premises, but I've met fewer leftists interested in even imagining them than libertarians or even conservatives.
When most leftists are too busy with hating on groups of people and thinking about what others own, it's really hard to talk to them about anything real.
Efficiency is more important than ideology, correct. That's why I'm a leftist.
Don't worry, leftists aren't hating on groups of people (except fascists), just inefficient and failing systems. It's the right that hates on groups of people.
Leftist ideologies include dogmatic statements. Just like all other ideologies. Otherwise we wouldn't use the word "ideology" at all.
If this were true, you'd say that left ideas are the closest to your expectation of what's best and that'd be fine, and not call yourself leftist. Now it's as if you are putting ideology above practice.
Which would be the same as me always feeling as if I were lying while, say, saying that I'm a libertarian or a distributist, because I have no permanent attachment to any ideology, just these seem sane now. So I rarely say that and feel bad when I do.
Which efficient and not failing systems does your kind of leftists propose?
That's entirely stupid. Ideologies aren't about dogmatism, but about coherent groups of conclusions based on underlying analysis.
It's pretty telling that you out yourself as a Libertarian though, lmao.
I propose worker ownership of the Means of Production.
This sentence translates to choosing a model and then trying to hammer the reality to fit under it. Which is obviously dogmatism.
The funniest part is that leftist pseudointellectualism, where there is no actual discussion happening, but a leftist thinks there is because of the tone they use. Also hints at them acting this way in other situations, that is, being used to dogmatism.
Without dogmatism people change models like tools, each one for its own job. They don't call themselves any kind of -ist.
Literally the opposite of what I've said, lmao. Reading comprehension skills on par with your self-identification.