[META] Never change, lemmy.ml

Here on lemmy there is an active campaign to stir up fervor against communism. It's an age old right wing tatic.

Where?

Obvious troll is obvious

I'm pretty sure "eat the rich" is not comparable to "kill 5 million Ukrainians."

And I'm also pretty sure 'rich person' is neither an ethnicity nor a nationality.

every time communism has been tried, it involved massive genocide

This argument is so frustrating, because it totally ignores the fact that the common thread, both for communist countries and capitalist countries, and both for intentional genocide and crises through incompetence, is the consolidation of power in a small set of individuals or group that prioritises their own self interest over the common good.

The big issue with "trying" communism is that it historically has only really occurred through violent revolution. The political instability in these situations gives a perfect opportunity for the seizing of power by exactly those kinds of people.

Never mind the fact that genocide is absolutely not limited to communist countries, and that genocide goes against the actual fundamental principles of a communist system, which is centred on equality.

Yes, the USSR committed genocide - so did Britain and America, and so are modern capitalist Russia and China right now.

There's loads of good reasons both for and against every economic system, communism included. But "communism=genocide lalalala" is just a cheap excuse to totally avoid considering the merits of a different economic system. Doing that denies yourself the opportunity to genuinely consider how a different economic approach, whether that's communism or just using concepts from the ideology, could improve the lives of citizens in a healthy democracy.

Wait til you find out how many people were killed by capitalist governments

Every time capitalism has been tried, it also involved massive genocide.

Funny, but it turns out that every economic system invented by humans has massive genocide in its history.

Wild, its almost like the genocide was a power grab tactic, and not something inherent to these economic systems.

So “eat the rich” is just edgy humor or what?

Yes. Most people don't want to eat other people. I would expect the explicit cannibalism to clue you in to a level of irony there.

Weird, because somehow, every time that every time communism has been tried, it involved massive genocide, though perhaps one could argue that the majority of it was the result of incompetency, because the majority of the victims starved to death as a result of disastrous agricultural policies.

Genocide has to be at least a bit deliberate, and generally they just fucked up their economy bad enough agriculture was negatively effected. In the USSR's case at least, the starvation affected the republics pretty equally, too. As Ukrainians were starving so were Khazaks. For political reasons, some parties have tried to make it sound like a targeted ethnic thing, but it just wasn't, and it certainly wasn't on purpose.

but you have to admit that even when taking to low estimates, communism’s death toll is far higher than that of the Nazis. OP is correct, they’re all evil ideologies.

This is the part where the communists come out with capitalism's death toll. Dumb ideology, maybe, evil ideology no, at least not on it's own.

Edit: Also, I take issue with not counting all of WWII as part of the Nazi death count, since they very deliberately made it happen. Consider this was in the space of just a few years, vs. an entire human lifetime for the Soviets.

Rich people are not a race. So "genocide" doesn't really make sense there. "Eat the rich" does not mean "kill the rich", necessarily, either. A lot of people just use it as a metaphor for ending the massive wealth inequality through economic reform.

I report every "guillotine" comment I ever see but don't care enough to look at the modlog to see if any action was taken

Not everything outside the Overton Window is equally bad

Red scare

gets down voted

Communism died and hopeful it stays dead

Admin/Mod whatever. This is the message I got after reporting a troll and telling them off.

This isn’t meant to be a shit on lemm.ee comment. They operate the instance to be PG, that’s fine. It’s just not for me.

Well fuck your thread.

/s

Sure, the weak of heart need solace in these dark times, where anyone might have a different opinion than their own.

But, seriously, you're right that 'crap I don't want to hear' should totally be handled by individuals making that choice, rather than mods banning people.

I think its the option of most of the world

In order to collectively own everything, you must have a mechanism to decide the use of the means of production. Some things can be produced, but should not be, and leaving it up to local decision making will produce imbalances, as things that are easier or more fun to produce are produced more often than required.

You need a central nexus of control, and a person or group of people to be the final arbiter of decisions. Every time it's been done in history, either the leaders of the revolution, or the people violent and powerful enough to stab them in the back and take control have landed in this position. Mysteriously, a small group of people controlling all production has only ever lead to tyranny.

Any communism that begins in revolution will devolve into tyranny, and there's no words a dictionary can string together that will change that. Voluntary communes also seem to have problems, but it's more often splintering, which is significantly less harmful.

The problem is that the orthodox MLs you find on lemmy do un ironically defend autocracy in the USSR and China, dismissing criticism of these states as western propaganda.

Trust me, id love a leftist space on the internet which doesn't make folk heroes out of tyrants. Lemmy is not that place.

Context matters in this discussion.

The moderators of the lemmy instance OP got banned from have Russian and Chinese iconography in their profiles - its explicitly authoritarian and arguably communist in name only in order to attract naive idealists who otherwise would be against authoritarianism.

There are many on Lemmy who do associate Communism with the USSR and China and also think it is a good thing.

Yes, exactly like that is what i was talking about.

Communism IS 100% authoritarian. Any ideology which puts social constructs above individual rights and freedoms is authoritarian, be it monarchy, fascism or communism.

That's the rub though. Many of us do support democratic socialism and social democracy, and are excluded, mocked, and banned because those forms of leftist ideology aren't edgy enough.

I've tried to calmly explain the academic basis for democratic socialism on lemmy a number of times, and it inevitably results in me getting banned, mostly for being critical of the shockingly violent rhetoric favored my ML purists.

There's no need to make that argument - history has made it time and time again, and if you succeed at a communist revolution, history will again show that it was a bad idea.

The problem isn't the motives or empathy of the communist and socialist idealists. The problem is the willingness to face hard truths.

It's definitely better to seek a better way to run society. But it's definitely not better to claim you are doing so while executing an old, rehashed playbook of societal failure, claiming It Just Wasn't Done Right Before™️.

We need a better system. Communism is not it. Any system you build must be one that resolvea the ideals of communism with the pragmatism of capitalism. When that system is found, it will address the weaknesses of both.

I think that system is culturally-rooted sovereignty - that each person takes responsibility for their own life and for the sovereignty of others, because it is in their own best interest to do so. It is how I live.

The nice ring about it is that I don't have to convince anyone else to live that way - I get the benefits of it just by living it. The difficult thing about it is that I don't get the psychological convenience of thinking others should think as I do - everyone has their own reasons to live as they do. Until they cross a sovereignty boundary, and I'm involved somehow, I get no say.

Can we just not do either? I literally don't care to read about how you think the world is bad on a community about onions

Its unavoidable considering the creator of lemmy is a nazi, and Lemmy ml is his personal instance.

"One for Communists is hardly any different as far as I'm concerned."

Bruh.

Its radical, not extremist.

The comment literally reads "they would hardly be any different". What's your point? That sweeping change is "kind of extreme"? Is this satire?

Radical, yes. Extremist, no.

@meanwhileongrad

I'll just leave this here

Thanks. I tried to post the original link but it just says "No posts." Weird.

Well, this is a social media site and one for nerds at that, if you can't handle some real-world news or discourse you should probably block those instances and communities. Those features exist for a reason lol.

It's not fine, no I bet you it's cia funded or something to have such a big presence online. Tankies are surprisingly uncommon IRL in my experience. Maybe increasingly so, but it's still hard to deny it as a threat to real leftism. Raddle.me seems much more levelheaded if anybody's looking for a explicitly anti-authoritarian alternative

EDIT: Users were quicker

that is actually really funny

It's great. The more you get down voted the more you are proven to be right LOL

communism has somehow become synonymous with marxism-leninism, it's very sad

You are spot on on just about everything. The only thing I take issue with is saying that both werr corrupted by authoritarians. Fascism doesn't exist without authoritarians. It's just a shame that in America, especially as well as plenty of other places in the west, we are miseducated if we are educated at all on the subject.

If the model realized at scale repeatedly results in the same or similar effects, maybe there is something wrong with the model.

(Be those inherent mechanical flaws, flaws of ignoring parts of human nature, flaws of a model designed to work in a vacuum, or flaws of intricate and fragile necessary rules)

and it's the government model that is to blame?

Yes, because it leaves itself so prone to authoritarian takeover. As I’ve said before, this is a feature of communism, not a bug. A single, one-party “transitional” government is intended. You might as well just put up a sign that says “Dictator Wanted.” This is why there isn’t a single instance of communism on a nation-state scale that hasn’t quickly devolved into an authoritarian state. It’s not hard to understand this. Your government model has to account for the reality that people are going to disagree on things and faction out. Your model has to be able to manage that process. Communism insists everyone adhere to the same ideology, and those that don’t just get “re-educated.” It’s a horrible ideology, a horrible government model; naïve utopian fantasy at best, cynical authoritarian scheme at worst.

Communism scales horribly and practically begs for intolerant authoritarians to take over because the structure promotes compromise and compromising with intolerance ends up with intolerance. It works well when a small group voluntarily creates a small commune and everyone is on the same page. Everyone being able to see the overall community is pretty important for them to see how they fit in.

Capitalism also scales terribly, but when approached as a competition that requires regulation at least it can scale better because everyone can be watchful of bad actors. It still scales poorly because large companies can gain undo influence over government, but at least that influence tends to be about business and profit and not ethnic cleansing of the 'wrong people' that tends to be inherent to large scale communism. Yeah, that can also happen for profit with capitalism too, but again the acknowledgement of necessary regulations can mitigate that for the most part.

Everything tends to fall apart at a large enough scale though.

There's no difference between them. That's the thing. Two words for the same pile of shit.

I honestly don't see how the idea of everyone getting an equal share is an extremist idea in the same vein as a racist ideology. I'm also unsure why you're being downvoted for pointing out the obvious there.

Oh gee if only there was a single example of communists that actually acted on some of these purported principles instead of turning authoritarian the first chance they get

No, social democracies don’t count. They are what tankies SHOULD strive for, instead of sucking off… checks notes famous beacons of liberty Russia and China.

Perhaps it's us greedy humans that's the issue and the economic model only limits how completely we can fuck things up. Badly when it's capitalism and really badly with communism.

capitalism also leads to the deaths of millions

Citation needed.

Communism is always dictated by a few and causes harm to many. In order for communism to work you need to stop the flow of information as education makes people want to pursue there own goals at the expense of everyone else.

You talk of corrupting power but I've never heard of google wanting to kill.

It would do you a lot of good to actually read about communism and political theory in general instead of acting as a conduit of brain rot.