“Communism doesn’t work”
“Communism doesn’t work”
Love the downvotes on this. Perfect propaganda so well funded. But now it's not commies it's 'tankies'
51Communism is okay, as long as its the purely theoretical version of it that suburban Westerners invent in their mind
62[Cuba has been prohibited from entering the chat]
32A Trotskyist has since entered the comments to prove your point
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I downvoted because it's a bad meme, not a bad message
7Agree to disagree on that. But when it comes to slowdive, as per your comment history, we are in complete alignment. Saw them at Fuji Rock last month and it was the best show I've seen in ages. They totally killed it.
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My partner family lived in communist Romania. They almost starved when the communists stole their fields to collectivize them and then they misused them. Not only that but the "securitate" (Romanian KGB) created real fear between everyone. This was the real problem of communist Romania, not the foreign intervention. Eventually people got tired of leaving in a state of terror and they overthrew the government.
There's a Spanish book about Communism and the Spanish civil war. In Spanish is "Dime quien soy" something like "Tell me who I am". It talks a lot about people that really believed in the communist idea but that got killed because of Stalin being a dictator.
Edit: To all of you downvoting me. None of you have addressed the trust issues that the "securitate" created in the Romanian society. Many pro-comunists were killed by Stalin's delusion. I'm not saying that communism is completely evil but Romania was far from a paradise.
-19And I'm from Poland. The government reversed the decision to collectivize agricultural land in 1956, lowering the amount of state owned farms from 10000 to 1500 after Bierut died.
By 1996, when the last one was privatized, there were roughly 2000 of them at the start of the campaign in 1992 with a total of about 3750 thousands of hectares of a (current) total of 14630 - a quarter of farmland in the country.
Yet Poland, with its mostly private agriculture, was known for the worst supply situation in the Eastern Bloc. Gotta love the hand of the market, especially since the west imposed high interest rates on loans taken in the 70s (as countries do between each other). The government of the 90s, deciding that it was going to get richer faster with the market rather than a planned economy it was barely wanting to have it (as the "communists" of the PZPR were largely just nationalists), went through market reforms and what happened? Prices shot up, poverty increased to dramatic amounts, unemployment was over 20% for a part of the 90s (not even including those who had given up on looking for a job), organized crime started roaming the streets and doing stuff like killing mom's childhood friends... and of course the farmlands themselves, since this is the topic, became desolate towns with antisemitic graffiti, a 60+ year old average age and nothing going on for them to this day.
But you probably think this is cool and good. After all, the people there can work their asses off at more than 40h/week at a workplace they have even less say in than in the west, to pay German prices for goods of a quality you'd find in the bargain bin here, a food that will kill you over time, and come back home to froth at the mouth about how the "LGBT Lobby" is trying to turn their kids gay while then going on rants against the oh so free government and opposition because they're "all thieves" anyway... and against foreigners. After all, they're only following the logic of the market and doing what the west wants of them (i.e. keep the wages low and profits high).
39I think I'll take statistics over your propagandistic anecdote
A 2010 poll conducted by the Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy provided similar results. Of the 1,460 respondents, 54 percent claimed that they had better living standards during communism, while 16 percent said that they were worse. Moreover, 49 percent claimed that Ceausescu was a good leader, 30 percent believed he was neither good nor bad, while 15 said he was bad. The survey has a 2.7 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
According to a recent poll, many Romanians remain nostalgic for communism, over two decades after dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown. The INSCOP Research poll revealed that 44.4 percent of the respondents believed that living conditions were better under communism, 15.6 said that they had stayed the same, while only 33.6 claimed that life was worse back then. When asked about dictator Ceausescu, 47.5 of the respondents claimed that he had a relatively positive role in Romania’s recent history, while 46.9 said that his role was rather negative. The recent poll was conducted between November 7 and 14, 2014, on a sample of 1,055 participants, with a 3 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/communist-nostalgia-in-romania/
35Kulak!
25Remind me, who was Romania allies with during ww2? And what did they do to Jewish people in the areas outside of Romania that they helped the nazis invade and occupy?
22“I regret the demise of Communism—not for me, but when I see how much my children and grandchildren struggle. We had safe jobs and decent salaries under Communism. We had enough to eat and we had yearly vacations with our children”.
- 68-year-old retired Romanian mechanic, quoted in George Jahn, “In Romania, Turmoil Fuels Nostalgia for Communism,” Washington Post, January 11, 2011.
21You’re a kulak
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Turned an imperialist monarchy where the majority of the population were illiterate into being the first nation of humans in space and defeating the Nazis within a few decades?
Turning a country fresh from a century of humiliation in to the world's largest economy by purchasing power parity and virtually eliminating poverty?
Seems like it works to me
50You hexbears and gradists are so bent on this autocratic 'dictatorship of the prolitariat' idea that you could almost replace all energy needs by just hooking up a dynamo to Marx turning around in his grave.
-28Loling at the idea that "99.9 percent of the population should be able to participate in democracy but the class that's been oppressing us shouldn't for a decade or two during the transition" is "autocracy"
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I wanted to cross-post this to lemmy.ml's memes community, but you did that already. The libs are coming in, beautiful lmao.
27the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
26Let's forget that the USSR was considered a superpower at some point
18It's the West's fault that Mao and Stalin, et al killed millions.
7Don't make me tap the sign
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While communism hasn't got a fair try. Either because of external forces or internal corruption.
Let's not act like it's some utopia. Every attempt has immediately turned into a full on dictatorship with the worst intentions.
Why is that? Because it seems completely incapable of dealing with the greed, violence, and general evil that makes up much of human nature.
Let's face it, if humans were "good" any government would work.
-5Pretty much every single time a revolutionary socialist movement has taken power it has improved literacy, child mortality, wealth inequality, nutrition, and just about any other quality-of-life metric you can name. Get the fuck out of here with your "human nature" bullshit. Communism always works.
3How does capitalism deal
with the greed, violence, and general evil that makes up much of human nature[?]
1Omg an actual "human nature" argument in the wild.
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On one hand, sanctions seem to only hurt the citizens of the countries they're aimed at. Oftentimes this results in more deaths or food scarcity.
On the other, what is someone to do when something like the Russian invasion happens if you'd like to harm the offending nation and prevent further aggression/abuse? I legitimately do not know, and would love a take on some alternatives for punishing those kinds of things. I don't think America does it right, especially when it takes very little to see who's offenses we turn a blind eye to and who we demonize.
-30This is me acknowledging upfront that I'm typing back to some sort of chatgpt-like AI bot. Aintnoway this is a person. I'm drawing this conclusion based off the complete fucking irrelevancy of this question in the context of the OP meme.
Here's a spicy meatball for you: America is basically always the fucking "bad guy" historically, minus literally two times both of which it took waaaaaaayyyy too long to finally intervene. 100 years in the case of the union army finally ending chattel slavery in the US and years + a provoking attack in the case of fighting world-wide fascism. Every other war or military action the US has done, broadly without exception, has been evil shit, bad, solely for the interests of US capital (first) and/or allied nations such as the UK, France, etc. and their capital and imperial interests.
So, the obvious question then is: who the fuck does the US think it is to be the great arbiter of truth?
The country that bombed an entire northern half of a nation so heavily that no buildings existed basically? And for what? Wanting a democracy more aligned with the USSR and/or China? (DPRK or North Korea if this isn't obvious).
Or the country that dropped two unnecessary atomic bombs on Japan basically with the intention of scaring the shit out of the USSR? And why did the USSR need scaring? Why did all those Japanese civilians need to be vaporized? Because, again, the USSR was explicitly opposed to US capital interests and this was simply unacceptable. The US gov would (and still does) happily vaporize millions of people if trade networks and access to resources can be maintained.
Hey here's a relevant one to ponder considering the Russia/Ukraine conflict: you mean the country that funded a group of mostly psychopaths and religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan and the general region in the 1970-1980s who ran across that country murdering, raping, doing truly unspeakable shit, basically forced Soviet intervention in an attempt to maintain some semblance of a government. And then several decades later led basically directly to the 9/11 events and two more decades of the US ruthlessly bombing and murdering and supporting the same warlords... you're telling me this country that would befriend and support people like bin Laden gets to say who's the "bad guy" in the world?
So, off the bat, the US's opinion is less than dogshit in value. Even dogshit would be disgusted at stepping in the US's opinion.
If there ever to be any sort of intervention for some sort of righteous cause it absolutely has to start with the US sitting the fuck out of any negotiations, talks, votes, whatever. The US has proven too many times for 100 years+ that it absolutely cannot be trusted to do ANYTHING good. It will poison any discussion- something becoming very clear and apparent to world leaders who are now often seeking to bypass the US and use countries like China as an intermediary.
But you have open discussions, UN votes and such, you find the facts of the situation, and you figure out what the most "just" end to a conflict is.
It gets sketchy from there because I'm basically never going to justify bombing countries. It's not happening. I could potentially see justification for a UN sanctioned removal (assassination) of especially toxic leaders... but the problem there, of course, is complicated by so many questions: "do we have access to all the relevant facts? What is the CIA (or to be totally fair: Russia or Chinese intelligence) hiding from us? How did the person/political group gain power? Trace it allllllll the way back. Who benefits from their downfall or continued time in power? Who loses? Is this just more US bullshit (always the first and main question from me)?"
Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi in Libya, bin Laden, Pol Pot, my list can continue, are all specific reasons that I find it very very very hard to believe the ANY US state dept condemnation and "justification for war." Even fucking Putin is the direct fucking result of US interference and meddling that eventually caused the dissolution of the Soviet Union (in part anyway) and the resulting catastrophic, what I'd call a genocide, mass privatization and selling off of public property for pennies on the dollar of its actual value in former Soviet states which resulted in a shitload of suicides, material conditions plummeting, and, eventually, "strong men" like Putin rising up and seizing it from the puppets the US put in power.
So when it comes to the Ukraine/Russia stuff, all I can do, with all the historical context, is say "well, this was expected." I really do feel bad for normal people caught up in the bullshit. I just think many Americans fail to grasp a very plain and simple truth: the American government is the reason for the shit in Ukraine. Whether you think Putin has a point or that he's doing infinite genocide, it doesn't matter, he's there, those countries exist, because of meddling from the fucking United States. My main concern is less-so over a border conflict (which honestly I do not give a half fuck about- help evacuate Ukrainians who don't want to be Russian and then cede the eastern parts to Russia. Why do Europeans care again? Oh yeah, orcs, bad guys, etc. never mind!) but more focused on Americans learning fucking something after the same thing happening a hundred times. Stop fucking meddling and stop creating reasons for war! And stop fucking falling for the state department lines like "well, maybe we did do some bad stuff! But Putin is doing it NOW! So we gotta stop him!" No. No, we never have to do anything. It's a false dichotomy. It's bullshit sold to tug on your poor American exceptionalism feefees and make you go "yeah, we blundered around. That was bad. But we meant well! Putin is just an evil orc-man!" I know it's hard as fuck for Americans to accept that we are the bad guys, we did and do the bad shit, and that more meddling will never undo or fix OR EVEN HAS THE TRUE INTENTION OF "FIXING" situations once they boil over. That's hard to accept, it sucks knowing that people before you put dominos in place and the least-bad option for you is mostly to stand back and let shit happen. If you try to put more dominos in or stop some from toppling, I can promise you based on all available history, those dominos are millions of people's lives and you're just setting up more to die no matter any sort of intentions you may have (which are probably wrong and misguided anyway).
16America has invaded soooo many countries. They have no right to sanction anyone for anything.
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5Hello friend,
So sanctions not only apparently have an effect of primarily hurting civilians, they do and this is part of why the U.S. loves using them so much. Their tried-and-tested geopolitical strategy when dealing with countries who disobey them is a several front war. One aspect of their warfare is pushing the citizens of the country not only to die to weaken it economically and hurt morale and stability, but to push them to oust their own government. This is of course in tandem with propaganda, usually to suggest that the economic hardship brought on by the sanctions is the fault of their own government's system, the "regime," etc.
The Russian invasion is a poor example because this is a justified invasion in response to U.S. provocation, and because the U.S. wants to destroy Russia whether or not its civilians suffer. If we can see how, for example, how the collective anti-imperialist forces of the world have dealt with the belligerently murderous U.S., the strategy has been to try and deprive them of siphons they use to rob countries and fuel their war machine. China/Russia has done this simply by offering viable trade alternatives to dealing with the West, as one example. Military action is another route, as we have seen Niger and Ghana oust their Western puppet governments militarily. The war in Ukraine is also an example; NATO kept creeping forward, and fascists in Ukraine kept escalating violent attacks in the Donbas, so as much as Russia tried diplomacy for 8 years they eventually had to do something.
One good thing about truly aggressive/abusive countries, as history shows, is that they destroy themselves as much as they are destroyed by external retaliation. Part of the strategy to corral the U.S. is to not overplay their hands, do what is necessary (cut the siphons and stop new ones from forming), and let the rabid dog froth it out til it consumes itself.
4Of course, in a just world order it would also make sense to punish the leaders who orchestrate such conflicts, but until the UN and the Hague are actual representations of world democracy and justice and not by and large just ways that the U.S. consolidates and legitimizes its power and punishes its enemies, this will be impossible.
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