“Communism has poven track record of working”
More like a proven record of not working. How many communist countries are still around today? How many of those are places you would want to live? If they are communist they are also heavily authoritarian. At the end of the day communism “works” if you only believe what the state propaganda tells you. The reality is that forcing people into jobs and trying to eliminate competition ends up hurting diversity of thought. It is no surprise every communist revolution is a violent one. Add that to the fact that the farms completely fell apart and were not producing much output and you have a disaster that has to be covered up.
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Yeah, you can use Cuba. The embargoes are stupid.
But Vietnam and Laos have recovered from the wars. Vietnam has one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Laos is more difficult due to its size, but it has free markets with Thailand and China, and the Laos government is even beginning to open up more expressive freedoms for people due to the presence of Thai trade.
also you’ll find communist nations also putting sanctions on the US. It’s not much of an argument though, since their sanctions are obviously weaker.
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But they are working. They’re poor, standards are low, as are rights and freedoms, but they do work. You can become a citizen and experience communism exactly as it was described.
What is the intervention of Laos and Vietnam at the moment? I couldn’t find anything. The closest I could find is a defence deal, and that’s about it.
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I never said they needed to be globally competitive. If possible, I think every nation should transition to being self-serving, renewable, and entirely self-sufficient with their resources.
Communist nations can exist unconnected to the rest of the world’s trade. Look at North Korea and Cuba as examples. Not particularly nice places to live. Both nations have very little international trade, but they still exist.
My primary point is that all of these nations are functioning communist states; although poor when compared to the rest of the world, they are still functioning. You can still get citizenship and live out your communist desires to the fullest extent of their laws. You will hate it, but you can live it.
See, that’s my problem with tankies. They’re all fabulously rich. I know this since I’m in their circles and have talked to many on a personal level–yet–None of these rich kiddies actually give a shit about advancing communsim. They can give all of their vast riches and higher education to these communist states, give them that mighty dollar, that western brain, but they don’t, they just refuse. Instead, they prefer to live out their days aimlessly fantasising about how nice it would be to see everything fall apart (who doesn’t?) instead of putting boots to the ground and getting shit done. Most of the time they even go against their own ideals, like supporting the proxy wars of arab oil barons or hypercapitalistic Russia. For their arguments over materialism, there sure is a lack of it.
I beg you to include some comprehension when replying–evidently lacking as you blissfully ignore my mentions of these nations’ modern trade and supply, pity.
For a second I thought you were a tankie
i believe there is an important distinction between communist and tankie
From a economics perspective there is none. A communist may not necessarily endorse genocide but there is very little evidence to show that communism works in practice. It pretty much is exclusive to authoritarianism. Again that is simply history.
that is a good point
It isn’t really my own. You can find paper from PhD level experts who have studied economic systems extensively
Though, real talk. I do think communism will become standard in the future, but not in our lifetimes, of course.
Frankly there is very little evidence to support that theory. The problem with communism is two fold. First, it removes the drive to improve processes. Second, it is highly vulnerable to people to game the system. People will always find a way to get more for themselves and because there is little incentives compared a regular market they will not work harder at there job.
The workplace is ruff and it is definitely is very unpleasant at times. You have to work to find a job and sometimes the job is just miserable. However, it forces the best performance out of everyone which is something communism fails to do.
Well, I believe in the future EVERYTHING will be automated. Economically, how would you compete against a machine that makes a machine that makes a machine that makes a machine (-infinitely-)?
I think humanity will move on from material desire and become hyperspiritualised as it’s the one thing the machine cannot do and cannot be given. Wall-E or the Matrix basically, pick your poison.
Ironic for a group that currently obsesses over anti-genocide to be pro-genocide;
"Even if every absurd fabrication that the anti-communist propagandists like to parrot about the millions supposedly killed by Stalin, Mao, etc. was true, those numbers would pale in comparison to the number of lives they saved, "
also
Creating gender equality
Until Stalin reversed it all lol (there are also no high-ranking women in the Chinese government – ever)
What we really need is a female let totalitarian dictatorship.
Source: The Onion
See, out of a somewhat displaced curiosity, I’d actually like to see that. Would it turn out the “same” as previous mainly patriarchic autocracies? Would it collapse? Any interesting policies?
be the change you want to see
im not even going to touch their disdain towards imperialism while also praising modern-day china. i’d drown in the irony. Quick, someone, throw me a buoy!
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15590383/
Yep, no domestic violence or sexist culture here, none whatsoever, China is a glorious wonderland of sexual and gender equality /s.
(there are also no high-ranking women in the Chinese government – ever)
Huh. I hadn’t noticed. Which says nothing good about China, obviously, but it also highlights how a sausage-fest government does not stand out to us.
Correlation ≠ Causation
Perhaps it just so happened that Mao took control around the same time medical sciences obtained a break through in some field.
If we did universal healthcare and killed ten percent of left-handed people, then statistically, that’s a net plus. Statistics are not soft and friendly things.
Relatively speaking that graph does show Asia having closed the gap between the global average. But it’s a wee bit hard to isolate ‘China’ from ‘Asia’.
When you add western nations, they’re far above both the global average and China.
Communist nations may have killed millions. But capitalist nations have killed more by orders of magnitude.
It’s almost like humans resort to violence when they think they can get away with it
How do you even quantify that?
“You died by capitalism” – How?
It’s impossible to quantify how many people were killed by an economic system because it’s never direct. You would have to arbitrarily decide how many layers of abstraction are too many for the death to be attributable to the economic system under which it occurred, and the more layers there are the more unclear it is. That’s why the “victims of communism” numbers and lists that get thrown around are all bullshit, it’s entirely subjective. If you want to be objective you have to be specific about the cause of death and whose actions directly resulted in it.
For example, imagine an alcoholic homeless man dies of exposure after being evicted from a building he was squatting in. Who’s responsible? There are lots of answers you could give; the cops who were sent to evict him, the owner of the building who sent the cops, the community who didn’t help him, the person or company that sold him the alcohol, the alcohol itself, or even just himself. I can’t objectively say that this man “died by capitalism,” but I can say that it might have been prevented under a different economic system, that this is a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution.
That’s why the “victims of communism” numbers and lists that get thrown around are all bullshit, it’s entirely subjective. If you want to be objective you have to be specific about the cause of death and whose actions directly resulted in it.
But killing and revolution is an intrinsic part of a communist state, no? The whole uproot the rich and kill them? Historically, this seems to be the case at least, particularly China and the Soviet Union.
Killing and revolution is an intrinsic part of transforming society, whether that’s from feudalism to capitalism or capitalism to communism. Listen, as an anarchist I’m not personally a fan of China and the Soviet Union either, but the demonization of communism as if it’s this brutal and violent ideology is just silly. Violence and brutality are the tools of the state, no matter its’ economic system. The actions of China or the Soviet Union are attributable only to China or the Soviet Union, not communism.
If you want to attribute a death to the economic system of communism you have to explain how the economic system resulted in that death. I attribute the deaths of homeless people to capitalism because there is a clear line of causality to follow, but like I said before there are many layers of abstraction and the determination is a subjective and philosophical one. When a cop kills someone capitalism is often a factor, but I don’t blame capitalism, I blame the state.
Violence and brutality are the tools of the state, no matter its’ economic system. The actions of China or the Soviet Union are attributable only to China or the Soviet Union, not communism.
Yes, but it is communism that gave rise to these states, and they do these actions in the name of being a communist state as well. Like purges were common.
Homelessness in the soviet union is very interesting, though. It wasn’t reported often due to cultural reasons, falling under ‘social waste’ and work ethic, so we don’t have much to work with other than some personal experiences and modern exploration. It existed, but the government didn’t report it for fear of looking weak.
regardless, these states did engage in genocide against dissidents and minorities, which you cannot deny. That’s the main focus of this post.
regardless, these states[emphasis mine] did engage in genocide against dissidents and minorities, which you cannot deny.
I don’t deny it, I just disagree that those actions are attributable to the economic system. The economic system of communism is fine, it’s the marxist conception of the intelligentsia seizing the state and establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that leads to problems. The responsible party for genocide is the state that carried it out, not communism. If not in the name of communism, they would have done so in the name of some other belief system.
Except they did do it for the sake of communism; it’s in their own wording.
I’m not disagreeing with you but capitalism has been around a lot longer
