xtal posted:

You should reject anyone who wants power, they're the least deserving of it

Ferrinus posted:

you sound like the latest adam curtis documentary. "power" this and "power" that, not a whiff of "class" or "capital"

my bony fealty posted:

lmao infantile baby talk

xtal posted:

It's a quote mate

xtal posted:

It's a quote mate

xtal posted:

That's the best part. Wiki says a "communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless and stateless, implying the end of the exploitation of labour."

So as far as being stateless, communists and anarchists agree. The issue is with the vanguard party and how power tends to corrupt anyone who touches it. There hasn't been a fully realized communist state yet because they all end up indulging in power once they have it.

You should reject anyone who wants power, they're the least deserving of it

xtal posted:

Well you were acting like a baby lol

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

sitting in the lotus position on a golden palanquin perched on the peak of the Kunlun, completely enlightened, my third eye fully open and the vibratory frequency of my chi perfectly in sync with the universe: dictatorship of the proletariat? no thank's its got dictatorship right in the name!!

quote:

Lenin wrote that the use of the term dictatorship "does not refer to the Classical Roman concept of the dictatura (the governance of a state by a small group with no democratic process), but instead to the Marxist concept of dictatorship (that an entire societal class holds political and economic control, within a democratic system).

AnimeIsTrash posted:

AnimeIsTrash posted:

https://twitter.com/anarchopac/status/1416094377244569605

https://twitter.com/anarchopac/status/1416096767179907076

AnimeIsTrash posted:

https://twitter.com/anarchopac/status/1416094377244569605

https://twitter.com/anarchopac/status/1416096767179907076

Ferrinus posted:

it varies by the country

the ussr never had a real capitalist economy after the days of the NEP in the 20s - the state always ultimately controlled firms, prices, net social products, etc and allocated those products on the basis of democratically-decided plans of production. towards the last ten or so years the USSR liberalized to an extent by allowing firms to set their own prices and compete a bit, but you could never get rich and start a business or something like that

after its revolution china also had a classical socialist planned economy, and towards the end of mao's life undertook the cultural revolution (with mixed results) to try to sweep away a lot of old vestiges of authority, tradition, property ownership, etc. however despite china's attempts in the great leap forward it wasn't able to undertake technical development on par with the rest of the world under its own power, so after mao's death deng xiaoping's cpc enacted "reform and opening up" which liberalized the chinese economy and allowed for private ownership and foreign investment, albeit with baffles like foreign investors being absolutely mandated to share their technological secrets with chinese companies, all companies needing to have communist party members on their boards, etc. this allowed for lots of exploitation and the creation of a lot of billionaires and especially in the 90s/early 2000s looked really dire for the prospect of chinese socialism, but a lot of recent developments have proven that chinese capital is still under cpc control

cuba also has basically a planned economy that's sort of liberalized a bit around the corners, so while they've got economic problems as far as i know individual administrators and bureaucrats getting too rich and powerful is not one of them. they do have worries like, the racial wealth gap is growing because white cubans are much more likely to have expat relatives who can send money back home than black cubans

most venezuelan socialists would tell you that venezuela is a capitalist country, just one that - thanks to being ruled by the PSUV, a socialist party - is attempting to construct socialism. so there are rich industrialists exploiting their workers in venezuela that have a big influence over/lots of friction with the PSUV, but at the same time the PSUV has allocated a lot of land and resources to the development of semi-independent venezuelan communes which are meant to be the seeds of a new socialist society. this is reported directly by a delegation from the DSA's international committee which got to visit venezuela and even meet maduro last month

vietnam was a planned economy able to depend on the USSR to stay afloat until the USSR collapsed, at which point it had to liberalize as a condition of taking in IMF loans for its own development, so it's also got rich businessmen, exploitation, etc. that said the communist party is still in charge and working to advance progressively towards socialism despite capitalism being the country's main economic engine, and they've been seeing steady improvements in vital statistics, economic equality, etc over the past few decades. luna oi's youtube videos are good sources here

Ferrinus posted:

the big takeaway from this stuff for me is that the big challenge actually facing communism is defeating the west. insofar as your bureaucracy and technical intelligentsia are able to metastasize into a capitalist class that's out of your control, that's a symptom of you getting couped or losing a trade war or something. if you can keep hold of your own economy then there's still obviously going to be corruption, graft, whatever, but those things are just regular-rear end symptoms of living in a society, and able to be managed by that selfsame society, rather than existential threats to worker power

mila kunis posted:

First, in communist countries there was less economic inequality than under capitalism. The perks enjoyed by party and government elites were modest by corporate CEO standards in the West, as were their personal incomes and life styles. Soviet leaders like Yu ri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev lived not in lavishly appointed man­sions like the White House, but in relatively large apartments in a housing project near the Kremlin set aside for government leaders. They had limousines at their disposal (like most other heads of state) and access to large dachas where they entertained visiting dignitaries. But they had none of the immense personal wealth that most U.S. leaders possess.

The "lavish life" enjoyed by East Germany's party leaders, as widely publicized in the U.S. press, included a $725 yearly allowance in hard currency, and housing in an exclusive settlement on the out­skirts of Berlin that sported a sauna, an indoor pool, and a fitness center shared by all the residents. They also could shop in stores that carried Western goods such as bananas, jeans, and Japanese elec­tronics. The U.S. press never pointed out that ordinary East Germans had access to public pools and gyms and could buy jeans and elec­tronics (though usually not of the imported variety) . Nor was the "lavish" consumption enjoyed by East German leaders contrasted to the truly opulent life style enjoyed by the Western plutocracy. Second, in communist countries, productive forces were not orga­nized for capital gain and private enrichment; public ownership of the · means of production supplanted private ownership. Individuals could not hire other people and accumulate great personal wealth fro m their labor. Again, compared to Western standards, differences in earnings and savings among the populace were generally modest. The income spread between highest and lowest earners in the Soviet Union was about five to one. In the United States, the spread in yearly income between the top multibillionaires and the working poor is more like 10,000 to 1.

AnimeIsTrash posted:

https://twitter.com/anarchopac/status/1416094377244569605

https://twitter.com/anarchopac/status/1416096767179907076

Kaedric posted:

Sorry for the giant block quotes. Thank you for answering, this is helpful to me. I have been a pretty vociferous defender of leftist governments in the western hemisphere (communist or otherwise), but felt that strange disconnect when discussing China (and, though I don't want to cross that bridge just yet, North Korea). I think this is the final hurdle for me to accept communism. My feelings about it have pretty much been "yes, I wish it HAD worked out, but what we got instead was a corrupt government that just swung right back towards (state) capitalism when it got the chance/when the great leader died." The trajectory of China specifically in the last handful of decades put me in a mindset where I have been completely dismissive of either side (right or left) calling it communist, let alone socialist.

I have watched some of Luna Oi's content before, and felt similarly about Vietnam. It seems like there was always an excuse, like "well we are a communist country, but now we have to become capitalist for *reasons*", and to me it just feels like a terrible slippery slope, where those folks will get in power and then it will be near impossible to scrape off the barnacles.

I am heartened by your words above, while also admittedly still being skeptical that China will follow through, but I don't know how much of that is simply because hope has been crushed within me due to living in our lovely american hellscape. I feel like the power of capital is so overwhelming that there is almost nothing we can do to stop it. The recent wardrum beating over Cuba I just find insanely frustrating. Capital will suffer no one to oppose it, no matter how small.

I will add Blackshirts and Reds to my reading list. Am still taking suggestions for any further study. I still need to watch the videos linked previously, just haven't found time.

quote:

quote:

I really have lost any respect for the remaining western communists/socialists. They never run out of excuses for all the attempts to build the socialist paradise on earth (which always resulted in piles of dead bodies, mass starvation and police states), yet they always decide to continue living in capitalistic hellholes like the U.S., France or Germany (in not so rare cases even being paid by the state, which German socialists not long ago liked to call the "pig system"). Probably the only common sense reply is: Put the rest of yourself where your mouth is or shut the hell up. And thank goodness you stand no chance to come to power (again).

I could reply to this in a number of different ways, so I will choose all of them, and enumerate:

1. I certainly agree that Holocaust denial should be a crime.

2. It's always funny how ardently people will cleave to ideology, and doubly so on a forum like this one, where everyone takes great pride in being (or claiming to be), you know, an iconoclast autodidact, who sees through society's tricks and is smarter than your average pathetic consumer. Yet change the topic to literally anything else, as in this case, and your response is a non-argument "pfeh! propaganda! gahooey!" because it differs from prevailing ideology. I have deliberately avoided replying to gimp because I don't doubt that he has family members who experienced bad things in the Soviet Union, but I am not interested in either arguing against an anecdote or fighting with someone who is too emotionally close to the subject to escape the bias of a personal grudge. And for the record, there are far, far more people who have that sort of legitimate personal grudge against the United States than ever did against the Soviet Union.

On the other hand, those of us who have some emotional remove should be able to evaluate historical fact with cool heads. Nothing I've said is even controversial to people who "know anything" about the history of communism (at least, those who aren't bought-and-paid-for pro-Western ideologues). But even if you took Robert Conquest and The Black Book of Communism at face value (which you shouldn't, because they belong in the garbage can), it still wouldn't matter, because...

3. Even if Stalin did "kill" 20 million people and Mao did "kill" 65 million people, those are rounding errors compared to the number of lives that they saved. The advances in public health that took place under communist governments have no historical parallel. In Russia between the 1920s and 1950s, and in China between the 1940s and the 1970s, life expectancy doubled or nearly doubled. No other country has ever done that. While Mao was in power in China, life expectancy increased by more than one year per year. The first objection to these miraculous achievements is that "life expectancy would have gone up anyway," which may be true, but it is very unlikely that it would have risen nearly as far or as quickly. In the Chinese case, we actually have a ready-made historical experiment, because India won independence at nearly the same moment China was liberated, and had similar vital statistics, but did not benefit from communist central planning. As a consequence:

(dead image, but it's a graph of average lifespan across the 1900s and in it you can see the chinese lifespan curve up to almost reach the american lifespan while the indian lifespan grows much more slowly)

Go ahead; take the integral of those curves and run the numbers on how many additional billions of life-years Chinese have enjoyed as compared to their Indian counterparts. Even by the insane and misleading history of wild-eyed anti-communism, if you consider communist policy in totality, Joseph Stalin was still the second-greatest humanitarian to have ever lived, right after Comrade Chairman Mao Zedong.

4. For all the weepy tears that are shed for the victims of famine in communist countries, and the extremely dubious connections to policy errors that maybe-could-have-been malicious if you look at them really squinty and hold your breath for 90 seconds, it's very curious that nobody seems to "give a crap" about massive famines that were unambiguously engineered and unambiguously callously exploited for the benefit of capitalism. This was true of the Irish famine as well as famines that occurred in India and China in the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries. They are detailed very well in the book Late Victorian Holocausts.

5. You made the remark about where I live snidely, but I take it seriously. From a purely selfish perspective, it would be very foolish for me to leave the United States, because not only am I a citizen of the first world (to which the ill-gotten gains of global labor exploitation and resource theft accrue), but I'm also white, and male, and extremely overpaid. In other words, I am a direct beneficiary of the whole rotten system. I don't like it, but I also have bills to pay and a family that needs health insurance. I don't speak Spanish or Korean (not that the North Koreans are particularly welcoming to would-be defectors, and understandably so). I do speak Chinese, and I would gladly follow in the footsteps of heroes like Norman Bethune and Joan Hinton, but China abandoned the communist project nearly a decade before I was born. The truth is that imperialist capitalism has won so thoroughly in the post-Soviet era that it is not possible to opt out. Everyone is either a capitalist or a victim of capitalism; everyone here (myself included) aspires to own sufficient property that we can be sustained in whole or part by capital returns -- the labor of others! How perverse! But the other alternative, mandatory full employment, with reasonable working hours and egalitarian living conditions, no longer exists, either because it was destroyed by the imperialists, or because it was wrecked from within by a capitalist-roader comprador bourgeoisie.

6. It is not communists you should fear coming to power; it is the inevitable alternative. A long time ago, Rosa Luxemburg wrote that "The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization." She was writing about World War I, but it is not less true now and it is not a figure of speech. Not so long ago, there was a stable, secular, multicultural, tolerant, well-educated society in Iraq, which had a Sunni government in the socialist Ba'ath party. The Western, capitalist, imperialist countries (all words for the same thing) destroyed it. In its place, as a direct consequence, we now have the Islamic State caliphate. Again, this is not figurative. The exact same individuals who once supported the secular Hussein government, including his own daughter, are now on the side of IS. Caliph Ibrahim's deputies in charge of the Syrian and Iraqi portions of IS are both former military officers from the Hussein era. The people have not changed. Material reality has; because it is impossible to defeat the United States as a secular socialist government, they must do it as mujahideen. The old dichotomy Engels described between "socialism and barbarism" remains true. The more capitalists prevail, the more the world will look like Islamic State, because imperialists always lose, and socialism has been so thoroughly defeated that jihad is the most successful recourse for anti-imperialist resistance. The United States is presently at war in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libyia, Afghanistan, and Northwest Pakistan. Do you think we will win? What do you think will happen when capitalist imperialism loses? The problem, of course, is that imperialists never think.

xtal posted:

Medicine would actually be more developed under anarchism because the statist licensing process enforces redlining.

Communists are pretty much people who understood class war but stopped short of intersectionality.

xtal posted:

Medicine would actually be more developed under anarchism because the statist licensing process enforces redlining.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

the state didn't wither away in AES countries because they've been engaged in ongoing global class conflict, not because they held on to the One Ring for too long

xtal posted:

Medicine would actually be more developed under anarchism because the statist licensing process enforces redlining.

Communists are pretty much people who understood class war but stopped short of intersectionality.

AnimeIsTrash posted:

https://twitter.com/anarchopac/status/1416094377244569605

https://twitter.com/anarchopac/status/1416096767179907076