this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Didn't the USSR just do state capitalism, and not actual communism or socialism? And weren't they also totalitarian & also not a democracy? Are people actually asking for what was happening in astern Europe or something else?
Yup. Also shot the anarchists, that worked with them and wanted democracy, in the back of the head during a meeting, The USSR then also did imperialism in their neighboring countries, deported a ton of people from those countries to death camps in siberia and allied with the nazies dividing Europe in their treaty
Anarchists are the first victims of authoritarian regimes. The dictator goes for them first, even before their sworn enemies, e.g. fascists or, if it's a fascist dictatorship, communists.
The story of ukrainian anarchist communist, Machno, is interesting in this resect. Bolsheviks treated his so well. Russian revolution, although started occasionally with good ideas, quickly revealed itself as authorithian russian nationist imperialism.
That's kind of the point of horseshoe economics, "the people own the economy" is impossible to implement without an intermediate agency to actually oversee the day to day of said economy.
What's that entity? The government. Any conceptual type of non-state entity would just be governance in nature regardless of title, and therefore still essentially operate as "a state" if not the same state that the federal government exists as.
Though as someone who works in modern IT I foresee the future of robotics and AGI allowing for the kind of economic automation that would make communism inevitable eventually as jobs are reduced over time in the course of the next hundred or two hundred years.
Yeah, I thought that too, but now that we're getting some rudimentary functional AI and robotics, what we're seeing is companies using it to save them money - basically automating work that would be done by highly paid specialists, contractors, or outside companies. And they are not investimg in it to automate low paid rote work because the human labor is cheap enough that a big automation investment only yields gains long term - and businesses have been focused on short term gains for the last few decades. So, automation, in the short term at least, is really just limiting our opportunities for more satisfying work.
What's more likely to happen in the short term is that the pressure to adopt new tools will fall on the worker. AI and robotics won't take your job, but someone using them will.
You talked about the long term, hundreds of years, and it's difficult to speculate how our society would work then. But... work and money is a form of social control. There will be significant pressure as jobs disappear to ensure the populous is still working to earn something that the ruling class has more of. Nothing short of a looooonnnnnnng term political change or violent upheaval of power dynamics will change that. Now, is that possible in the time scale of hundreds on years? Maybe, but I find it hard to believe that those in power would easily give up the very thing that gives them their power.
The Soviet idea was that 1) if it's state-owned, then it's people-owned and not capitalism, 2) it's people-owned, because USSR is a union of soviet republics, where soviet is a democratic (initially) entity, 3) it's socialism, not communism, as we've not built that yet, 4) it's still socialism as we use money to buy things and not receive them as we need automatically, as the planning precision doesn't allow for this.
(A soviet is initially like an elected body, where every member on level zero is elected by constituency, like certain factory's workers or inhabitants of some street, as this thing was static in the USSR, or on every level above zero by an underlying level soviet ; the main difference between this and normal democracies is that those factory workers or that underlying soviet can vote anytime to recall and replace their representative, which turned out to make it more authoritarian all by itself ; well, also obviously these in fact decided nothing in the USSR anyway, the party structures did).
I love when people employ the Socratic method tactfully lol.
I guess that's the best way put it I saw in this post. I'd just add that after growing up in soviet and postsoviet state, and later coming to western Europe, my first impression was that they somehow almost managed to build here what "communist" soviet party tried to build so unsuccessfully.
Even Marx thought that path to communism is through capitalism, what soviet state did is something very different.
The USSR was definitely communist. They called themselves communist, were inspired by communists and implemented communist policies.
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is definitely a democratic republic.
No because they are not inspired by democratic republicans and they do not have democratic republican policies. Read me whole comment next time.
Critical thinking needs a bit of work there buddy. That's exactly my point: the USSR did not have communist policies, it wasn't even based on communism. It was an authoritarian state-capitalist regime which called itself socialist (not even communist), much like North Korea calls itself a democratic republic.
Go to the Wikipedia homepage: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union
State Capitalism a term used exclusively by a vocal minority of leftists to gaslight, revise and no-true-Scotsman historical events to fit their ideological world-view.
China also calls themselves Communist
Yes, because there's no other way to implement communism. They tried hard and it still didn't work
Despite the downvotes, you're correct.
In Germany the left leaning parties want that shit. It sucks. They side with Russia atm as well and a lot of them just have this odd nostalgia for the time
not to defend them, but capitalism is not doing very good recently, so that might give them points
Yes, I know. I'm not a fan of that myself.
But the idea that current day Russia has it better is insane. The Propaganda has survived through 30 years of non existence
There is a difference between Russia, communism and an authoritarian/totalitarian regime.
Communism is not necessarily authoritarian or totalitarian.
It always leads to absolute authoritarian hellholes. It never not has done that.
What's an existing current for. Of communism that hasn't gone Auth or totalit?
"Parents should never talk to their kids" ~ Marx
Sure, might take a while tho, I used that in my Bachelor work
Okay, what's one of them, though? Can you point to a country that currently has this going on? I'm not trying to do a gotcha here, I'm genuinely curious.
None but the clown company doesn't catch that or thinks China isn't a authoritarian hellhole.
The core problem with communism is humanity itself, it goes directly against the human nature. There is a 0% possibility of it working with humans.
The theory may sound appealing, but in the end its less sustainable than any other political system. One will always take advantage of the obvious flaws in the system.
Your points make little sense regarding human nature.
In a world of houndeds saving one is a necessary thing for the groups survival.
In a world of Billions, you just replace a lost one with the next, just like we replace broken parts in a Mashine, its a unfortunate truth that everyone is replaceable now, even if we hypothetically clean a entire country out of existence, it would barely impact the rest of humanity, shure it would be in the news a few days, but after that... I doubt you feel actually sorry when hearing or even seeing death to strangers, same with misery, you might think about it for a few weeks, but it goes away and your life goes on. Thats why communism is absolutely impossible.
What is possible is a social market economy, wich is a democratic system but with limitations on capitalistic problems to ensure that even the lowest of society aren't treated like human garbage. But even that is hard to implement in places like China or USA.
There is no perfection, especially in Politics, there will always be pros and cons to everything.
The Way we chose and will choose will always be paved with corpses and misery. It will never change unless we change the human itself.
Stay in your Pipe dream.
Arguing with you brings me no further in life and just costs my lifetime, you have the same mindset as a conspiracy theorist, i won't change that.
Okay, so this is a case of communism not going the way you claim it is currently going in other places. So can you please name one of those places?