The Radical Centrist that goes to war with every other corner of the political spectrum and ends up turning on itself. Ur-Liberalism. The snake eating its own tail of political thought.
Again, pivoting from an anti-fascist meme to add an anti-Communist message is deeply silly, especially considering it was the Red Army that saved the world from the Nazis by doing 80% of the entire combat in Europe in WWII against the Nazis.
The USSR was Socialist, as is Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, etc. These countries were and are built and run by Marxists, it’s safe to consider these hundreds of millions to be Communists. What “Comminists” are you thinking of that are “true Communists” that disqualifies the hundreds of millions who work to build Socialism in real life?
It was also an authoritarian dictatorship with about as many scruples as the Nazi regime. People seem to forget that saying simply ‘socialism’ ignores the other half of the equation altogether.
Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.
A lot of the cold war propaganda about the USSR turned out to be bullshit, as contemporary Western academic historians will tell you, including Domenico Losurdo.
No, not even close. The theory of Nazism and Communism as “twin evils” originates with Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization and Nazi apologia. The USSR was a dictatorship of the proletariat, those oppressed were the Bourgeoisie, Tsarists, and the Nazis. It isn’t a matter of simply saying “socialism,” it’s taking an honest look at history. In reality, there is no comparison to Nazism, which invented industrialized murder and sought to colonize Europe and the world just as Britian, France, Germany herself, and other Western countries had done to the Global South.
Marx didn’t think those that agreed with him were “nutties,” he didn’t like that people were adopting the mantle of “Marxist.” Secondly, Communism can only be achieved through revolution. It is Captialism that prepares the conditions for revolution, but without revolution the Proletariat never wrests control of Capital, as they sink further and further into destitution as the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall reaches its limits.
The AES states, where the Proletariat has managed to take control, are building towards a collectively owned and planned economy. This is not yet Communism, as Communism is necessarily global, but it is Socialist and those countries like Cuba that are working on that understanding are the Marxists and Communists building Communism in the real world. Further, wealth disparity massively shrank in AES countries and their economies are more democratic than in Capitalist nations.
I really don’t think it makes any sense to consider tech billionaires automating labor as “real Marxists” but those studying Marxism and building Socialism as “fake.”
You’re right in that I said something wrong. There will be a revolution, but one that will only happen when human labor has no value. Until them, communism is not possible and it will simply become oligarchy with rampant poverty and technological stagnation while massive government inefficiency and corruption are rampant. There is very little wealth inequality if everyone except dear leader and his generals are rich, everyone else is equally poor. There might be huge wealth disparities in the US right now but the average homeless person has a higher quality of life than almost every other country in the world, this is only possible because capitalism has allowed for the quality of life of everyone to improve as it generates wealth.
The Chinese are the only ones that actually “get it” I think, or so it would seem, even if they are still somewhat adhering to tankie tendencies.
I really don’t think it makes any sense to consider tech billionaires automating labor as “real Marxists” but those studying Marxism and building Socialism as “fake.”
And yet they and their employees are the only ones capable of creating the conditions for communism to be real and viable. I will reinstate my point and urge you to meditate on it: Communism will not be viable until human labor has no value.
There are a number of issues with this comment, so I think a list format for addressing them will be more clear.
Human labor-power will always have value, if you’re ascribing to Marxist notions of value. What will increasingly reach no value are the commodities we produce. A fully, completely automated, self-repairing economy is not only likely fantasy, but not at all what Marx was talking about with Communism.
In AES states, poverty was dramatically reduced while technological process boomed. Using the USSR as an example, they took many “firsts” in the Space Race, such as the first man in space, first woman in space, first sattelite, and more. For poverty, it went drastically down, along with disparity, while maintaining constant and stable growth:
In the USSR, wealth disparity between the top and the bottom was around 10 times. In Tsarist Russia and the modern Russian Federation, that number reaches the hundreds to thousands. If the Soviet Officials were doing it to get individually rich, they sucked at it.
The United States is not an industrialized economy, but an Imperialist one. It uses its vast millitary power to exert pressure on the Global South in order to export Capital, it produces cheaply by super-exploiting workers in the Global South for domestic Super-Profits. Moreover, safety nets are clinging by threads, most other countries take better care of their homeless population and have much lower rates of homelessness.
The PRC is a Socialist Market Economy. They “get it” because they are applying Marxism to their present level of productive forces and rapdily building up industry. It is still heavily state owned and planned.
Restating your flawed understanding of Communism and Marx’s Law of Value doesn’t make it true or “authentic.”
The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.
The term has extended to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the actions of communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. In recent times, the term has been used across the political spectrum and in a geopolitical context to describe those who have a bias in favour of anti-Western states, authoritarian states, or states with a socialist legacy, such as Belarus, Cuba, China, Syria, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela.
The word “tankie” is usually used against anyone that expresses at minimum a moderate level of support for AES countries, so yes, it’s purely for anticommunism. I’ve even seen self-described Anarchists and liberals called tankies, it’s a term that has no real meaning other than “Communism bad.”
Supporting AES does not mean blindly upholding every action taken by every leader of every AES country. The “tankies” that do so are made of straw in the minds of liberals. Rather, it is usually those that denounce “tankies” that make a dogmatic error of reducing AES countries purely to their leaders, and not the hundreds of millions of Marxists and Communists that work and run the AES countries.
Even the CPC’s official stance on Stalin and Mao is “70% good, 30% bad” each.
When someone does tankie things, it is valid to call them a tankie. Quacks like a duck and all that…
Also, I had to google ‘AES communism’ to figure out wtf you were talking about. American Education Service? Advanced Encryption Standard? AES the energy company? Define your acronyms and abbreviations, everybody. AES stands for ‘actually existing socialism’ in this context.
I don’t know what “does tankie things” means. The people that think Stalin, Mao, etc have done nothing wrong whatsoever are practically non-existent. The closest to genuinely evil “communists” would be the Gonzaloists that defend the Peruvian Shining Path, and frequently Pol Pot as well, but even suggesting that it’s a great thing that the USSR provided free and high quality healthcare and education gets you labeled a tankie instantly.
AES refers to Actually Existing Socialism, yes, it’s an acronym used for states like Cuba that have Socialism in the real world. Marxists use it frequently when talking about existing examples of Marxist application, without having to list every country that has some form of Socialism in place.
Look, the USSR had its merits, as you mentioned and I’m sure there are various AES systems working well in the current world. I know because I live in one. But there is prevalent tankie behavior throughout Lemmy, concentrated mostly in your instance and Hexbear, where people do actually defend dictators, simply because they called themselves communists (or in the case of Putin because… USA bad therefore Russia good?). They defend them, cognizant of the harm they have caused. Tankies are.the epitome of ‘the ends justify the means’. But when people defend authoritarian regimes, we need to call them out and fight them, regardless of professed ideology.
If by AES you’re talking about Western European countries, that’s not what I mean. Marxists do not consider those Socialist, as they are driven by Capitalism and fund their safety nets through expropriating wealth from the Global South, such as through outsourcing and debt trapping with IMF loans. Marxists call that process “Imperialism,” and the biggest Imperialist country is no doubt the United States currently.
Secondly, I need to know what you mean by “defending dictators.” There’s a difference between pointing out myths about AES countries and blindly upholding them simply due to the fact that they considered themselves to be Socialist. Reducing the logic of defending AES countries to purely nominal analysis is condescending. As an example, one can read Is the Red Flag Flying? Political Economy of the Soviet Union and come to the conclusion that the victories in AES stated were real working class victories achieved through Socialism, and the struggled faced by those building Socialism are often universal and must be learned from, and that requires accurately analyzing them.
As for Putin, I can certify that nobody on Hexbear or Lemmy.ml likes him, only the fact that Russia currently stands against the US Empire, which Marxists see as the current greatest evil. If the US Empire ever toppled and Russia no longer played an antagonistic role towards US Imperialism, you’d see immediately condemnation of the Russian Federation at a universal level, and not just due to their horribly decayed Capitalist system.
So, no, Marxists that uphold AES through a critical lens, rather than accepting mainstream western views, are not the epitome of “the ends justify the means.” Rather, they believe the version of ends and means that is commonly accepted as truth in the west isn’t particularly historically accurate. Ask any of them what they genuinely want, such as what democratic structures, how they wish to achieve Socialism, etc and you’ll likely agree with them.
Pivoting from an anti-fascist meme to anti-Communist, very silly
We’re converging towards Lemmy doing the Matt Christman 2016 election night “Kill yourself and everyone around you!” line, but entirely unironically.
It’s very silly, for sure.
Removed by mod
Do you normally shoot everyone you dislike?
Yes, yes. We know who you are.
The Radical Centrist that goes to war with every other corner of the political spectrum and ends up turning on itself. Ur-Liberalism. The snake eating its own tail of political thought.
Again, pivoting from an anti-fascist meme to add an anti-Communist message is deeply silly, especially considering it was the Red Army that saved the world from the Nazis by doing 80% of the entire combat in Europe in WWII against the Nazis.
I don’t have anything against communists. Stalinist tankies are not communists.
The USSR was Socialist, as is Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, etc. These countries were and are built and run by Marxists, it’s safe to consider these hundreds of millions to be Communists. What “Comminists” are you thinking of that are “true Communists” that disqualifies the hundreds of millions who work to build Socialism in real life?
It was also an authoritarian dictatorship with about as many scruples as the Nazi regime. People seem to forget that saying simply ‘socialism’ ignores the other half of the equation altogether.
Declassified CIA report:
A lot of the cold war propaganda about the USSR turned out to be bullshit, as contemporary Western academic historians will tell you, including Domenico Losurdo.
No, not even close. The theory of Nazism and Communism as “twin evils” originates with Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization and Nazi apologia. The USSR was a dictatorship of the proletariat, those oppressed were the Bourgeoisie, Tsarists, and the Nazis. It isn’t a matter of simply saying “socialism,” it’s taking an honest look at history. In reality, there is no comparison to Nazism, which invented industrialized murder and sought to colonize Europe and the world just as Britian, France, Germany herself, and other Western countries had done to the Global South.
I suggest you read Blackshirts and Reds.
Removed by mod
Marx didn’t think those that agreed with him were “nutties,” he didn’t like that people were adopting the mantle of “Marxist.” Secondly, Communism can only be achieved through revolution. It is Captialism that prepares the conditions for revolution, but without revolution the Proletariat never wrests control of Capital, as they sink further and further into destitution as the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall reaches its limits.
The AES states, where the Proletariat has managed to take control, are building towards a collectively owned and planned economy. This is not yet Communism, as Communism is necessarily global, but it is Socialist and those countries like Cuba that are working on that understanding are the Marxists and Communists building Communism in the real world. Further, wealth disparity massively shrank in AES countries and their economies are more democratic than in Capitalist nations.
I really don’t think it makes any sense to consider tech billionaires automating labor as “real Marxists” but those studying Marxism and building Socialism as “fake.”
You’re right in that I said something wrong. There will be a revolution, but one that will only happen when human labor has no value. Until them, communism is not possible and it will simply become oligarchy with rampant poverty and technological stagnation while massive government inefficiency and corruption are rampant. There is very little wealth inequality if everyone except dear leader and his generals are rich, everyone else is equally poor. There might be huge wealth disparities in the US right now but the average homeless person has a higher quality of life than almost every other country in the world, this is only possible because capitalism has allowed for the quality of life of everyone to improve as it generates wealth.
The Chinese are the only ones that actually “get it” I think, or so it would seem, even if they are still somewhat adhering to tankie tendencies.
And yet they and their employees are the only ones capable of creating the conditions for communism to be real and viable. I will reinstate my point and urge you to meditate on it: Communism will not be viable until human labor has no value.
There are a number of issues with this comment, so I think a list format for addressing them will be more clear.
Human labor-power will always have value, if you’re ascribing to Marxist notions of value. What will increasingly reach no value are the commodities we produce. A fully, completely automated, self-repairing economy is not only likely fantasy, but not at all what Marx was talking about with Communism.
In AES states, poverty was dramatically reduced while technological process boomed. Using the USSR as an example, they took many “firsts” in the Space Race, such as the first man in space, first woman in space, first sattelite, and more. For poverty, it went drastically down, along with disparity, while maintaining constant and stable growth:
In the USSR, wealth disparity between the top and the bottom was around 10 times. In Tsarist Russia and the modern Russian Federation, that number reaches the hundreds to thousands. If the Soviet Officials were doing it to get individually rich, they sucked at it.
The United States is not an industrialized economy, but an Imperialist one. It uses its vast millitary power to exert pressure on the Global South in order to export Capital, it produces cheaply by super-exploiting workers in the Global South for domestic Super-Profits. Moreover, safety nets are clinging by threads, most other countries take better care of their homeless population and have much lower rates of homelessness.
The PRC is a Socialist Market Economy. They “get it” because they are applying Marxism to their present level of productive forces and rapdily building up industry. It is still heavily state owned and planned.
Restating your flawed understanding of Communism and Marx’s Law of Value doesn’t make it true or “authentic.”
Calling someone a tankie != anticommunist.
The fact that you interpreted it as such speaks a lot about you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.
The term has extended to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the actions of communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. In recent times, the term has been used across the political spectrum and in a geopolitical context to describe those who have a bias in favour of anti-Western states, authoritarian states, or states with a socialist legacy, such as Belarus, Cuba, China, Syria, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela.
Tankies aren’t pro-communist.
The word “tankie” is usually used against anyone that expresses at minimum a moderate level of support for AES countries, so yes, it’s purely for anticommunism. I’ve even seen self-described Anarchists and liberals called tankies, it’s a term that has no real meaning other than “Communism bad.”
Yeah that’s BS. Tankies are supporters of authoritarians, specifically ‘communist’ authoritarians (Stalin, Mao, Xi)
Supporting AES does not mean blindly upholding every action taken by every leader of every AES country. The “tankies” that do so are made of straw in the minds of liberals. Rather, it is usually those that denounce “tankies” that make a dogmatic error of reducing AES countries purely to their leaders, and not the hundreds of millions of Marxists and Communists that work and run the AES countries.
Even the CPC’s official stance on Stalin and Mao is “70% good, 30% bad” each.
I must be god because my mind can manifest comments on the Internet.
Show some.
When someone does tankie things, it is valid to call them a tankie. Quacks like a duck and all that…
Also, I had to google ‘AES communism’ to figure out wtf you were talking about. American Education Service? Advanced Encryption Standard? AES the energy company? Define your acronyms and abbreviations, everybody. AES stands for ‘actually existing socialism’ in this context.
I don’t know what “does tankie things” means. The people that think Stalin, Mao, etc have done nothing wrong whatsoever are practically non-existent. The closest to genuinely evil “communists” would be the Gonzaloists that defend the Peruvian Shining Path, and frequently Pol Pot as well, but even suggesting that it’s a great thing that the USSR provided free and high quality healthcare and education gets you labeled a tankie instantly.
AES refers to Actually Existing Socialism, yes, it’s an acronym used for states like Cuba that have Socialism in the real world. Marxists use it frequently when talking about existing examples of Marxist application, without having to list every country that has some form of Socialism in place.
Look, the USSR had its merits, as you mentioned and I’m sure there are various AES systems working well in the current world. I know because I live in one. But there is prevalent tankie behavior throughout Lemmy, concentrated mostly in your instance and Hexbear, where people do actually defend dictators, simply because they called themselves communists (or in the case of Putin because… USA bad therefore Russia good?). They defend them, cognizant of the harm they have caused. Tankies are.the epitome of ‘the ends justify the means’. But when people defend authoritarian regimes, we need to call them out and fight them, regardless of professed ideology.
If by AES you’re talking about Western European countries, that’s not what I mean. Marxists do not consider those Socialist, as they are driven by Capitalism and fund their safety nets through expropriating wealth from the Global South, such as through outsourcing and debt trapping with IMF loans. Marxists call that process “Imperialism,” and the biggest Imperialist country is no doubt the United States currently.
Secondly, I need to know what you mean by “defending dictators.” There’s a difference between pointing out myths about AES countries and blindly upholding them simply due to the fact that they considered themselves to be Socialist. Reducing the logic of defending AES countries to purely nominal analysis is condescending. As an example, one can read Is the Red Flag Flying? Political Economy of the Soviet Union and come to the conclusion that the victories in AES stated were real working class victories achieved through Socialism, and the struggled faced by those building Socialism are often universal and must be learned from, and that requires accurately analyzing them.
As for Putin, I can certify that nobody on Hexbear or Lemmy.ml likes him, only the fact that Russia currently stands against the US Empire, which Marxists see as the current greatest evil. If the US Empire ever toppled and Russia no longer played an antagonistic role towards US Imperialism, you’d see immediately condemnation of the Russian Federation at a universal level, and not just due to their horribly decayed Capitalist system.
So, no, Marxists that uphold AES through a critical lens, rather than accepting mainstream western views, are not the epitome of “the ends justify the means.” Rather, they believe the version of ends and means that is commonly accepted as truth in the west isn’t particularly historically accurate. Ask any of them what they genuinely want, such as what democratic structures, how they wish to achieve Socialism, etc and you’ll likely agree with them.