she/her - hammer/sickle - state/revolution
Migrating to lemm.ee
Who gives a fuck? The car isn’t decorated for you it’s decorated for its owner. Same goes with how a person chooses to dress or decorate their body.
Ultimately just another form of “your body exists for my enjoyment”.
This is not true. Anyone that clicks anything remotely socialist immediately gets fed with the completely opposite, gommunism no food and 100gorillionbillion deaths propaganda. It immediately tries to lead people to the opposite.
The capitalists will even sell you the rope that hangs them.
AC unit you grew up with
Lmao grew up with? Most of us have never used AC at all in europe. Here in the UK no homes have AC. The issue is that people are installing it now because of climate change and the result is massively higher energy use.
This isn’t just mildly interesting. We should be considering methods of air cooling that do not use any carbon in order to avoid aircon usage becoming a contributor to the climate problem as things get hotter and hotter.
Ahh yes the famous american communist propaganda outlet Gallup which certainly isn’t widely regarded worldwide.
This comment is dripping with sarcasm, in case you didn’t notice.
Every single left wing party in ukraine was banned, and my friends in the country were arrested for being socialists. Speech in the country can not be considered free and opinion can not be measured accurately at the current moment in time. It would also be sort of foolish to attempt this with the country split into 4 regions between Ukraine proper, Crimea and the two Donbas republics. Ideally you would include all of them in that data, and if we went back in time and looked pre-2014 (when the civil war started) we’d see a lot of support in those regions. But now? Everything is a mess and I wouldn’t trust either states at war to give us reliable data.
I of course don’t consider the factions pursuing a restoration of the Russian empire to have anything to do with socialism either. For the record.
Now, I’ll stop patronizing you. I’ll throw my argument out there so you can tear it to pieces. Back to labels - what socialism looks like to you depends on who you are. You say it’s when “the old institutions are thrown out and the new institutions are introduced”. I’ll take that to mean some form of government is in possession of the means of production across the board? My hesitancy towards socialism is mostly centered on my knowledge of history and the repeated trends of powerful institutions decaying into corruption and greed. I think socialism could genuinely work really well as long as the people in charge were kept honest.
Nah man this is nonsense and it comes from people who exist on the fringe of politics who don’t actually participate and have never actually had a political education or tried to give themselves one.
Socialism is exceptionally well defined as an ideology. You take Marx’s historical materialism and come to the conclusion that all of human history is driven by class struggle and revolution. You then reach the understanding that there is a possible ending of all class struggle through the abolishment of class (communism). After that you accept that communism can not be jumped to straight from capitalism because it would simply be crushed by capitalist states through being unable to defend itself. This leads you to the belief that a transition exists between capitalism and communism - socialism. What is the socialist state? A state in which the proletarian class of society overthrew the bourgeoisie(capitalist class of society) and built a dictatorship of the proletariat. This of course is not a dictatorship of an individual but a dictatorship of class, the opposite of capitalism where the bourgeoisie have designed a system and institutions that always comes to the outcomes that benefit them the most, instead it is a society where the proletariat designed their institutions to always come to proletarian outcomes. Economics and everything else within this socialist state differ from country to country, because conditions differ and what is possible differs. The important aspect is that the proletariat control the power.
This is a basic 101. The fact that you see liberals misusing the word socialism does not change the fact that this is definitionally what socialism is. We’ll argue about whether market economies or single party or multi party or completely centralised planning or something in between are best, but all socialists will agree on the above. It is the core definition of socialism and is more or less what Engels and Marx laid out 200+ years ago. It is materialist and it is non-utopian because it accepts that these states will have their flaws, socialism isn’t a magically perfect society, it has problems and struggles, the difference is that it comes to better outcomes for its populations than capitalist societies when compared at an equal level of development. (This is a very important point with regards to the difference that proletarian rule vs bourgeoise rule has.)
But my skepticism is towards the long term sustainability of such a system. Time and again we see institutions decay and fall prey to humanity’s worst impulses. The fall of the Roman Republic (and the regular chaos of the Roman Empire for that matter) is my classic go-to for this, but there are plenty of non-western examples as well. The best cases I’ve seen in my studies of various histories seem to be centered around cultures that dispersed their power into many smaller institutions. My problem with socialism is that it inherently says “we’re going to get rid of business corruption and government corruption by combining the two”. I think creating an even smaller, more focused center of power in society is a dangerous proposal - it becomes all the more easy for the wealthy elites to worm their way into that power and take control. Essentially you’re taking all of those wealthy capitalist greedy dirtbags and then moving them into the government.
This is contrary to what socialist institutional design actually is. You don’t get smaller numbers involved, you get much bigger numbers involved. The basic socialist democratic system implemented in the single party states is one where you start with a small group of people, 150 or so, called a worker’s council, these people select a representative and are intended to physically know their representative. This person then represents them at the local workers council. Then every representative on this council selects from among their reps someone to represent that council at the next tier. And the next and the next. 12 tiers up until the national congress, where the final tier selects leaders councils and various committees etc. This design removes popularity contests from the leadership and builds a democratic meritocracy where anyone at the top has also worked their way up through the entire system demonstrating actual ability to improve the lives of the people to their peers at every single level. The design of this differs slightly from country to country of course but these fundamentals remain the same. My point here is that you don’t have less leaders, or bigger centralisation of power, you actually have a larger spread of power across more people. Even the highest councils like the politburo don’t typically have a leader with special powers above anyone else on the council, even if we go to controversial figures like Stalin, he didn’t have special powers, he had exactly the same powers that the other 5 members of the Politburo had. But let’s stay off controversy. There’s a neat video of Cuba’s system here that I strongly recommend
Capitalism, on the other hand, removes business from government which allows, in theory, for the government to act as a counter-weight to business.
This is not really true is it? Capitalism is designed from the ground up to ensure that the people in power are the bourgeoisie - the financial elite. Assuming you’re american (correct me if not) who runs your country? The people on Wall Street do that’s who. No not the people. No not the government. The people on Wall Street run the country through the think tanks they fund dictating policy, through the media they own deciding who wins and who loses, through the political parties and representatives that they fund with hundreds of millions of dollars. This system is designed from the ground up to ensure that it does not produce proletarian outcomes, in fact there are several quotes I could give you where founders explicitly state such.
It’s throwing fuel on the fire by cutting out the one supposed protection we do have, which is a separation of government interests and business interests. Ostensibly, when capitalism is working the way it should, the government is acting as a counterweight to business greed. I think there are better ways to strengthen that counterweight that don’t necessarily fall under the label of “socialism”.
Under capitalism you have a system that is designed to chase profit. Everything about it is built around that central point. A very good way to chase profit is to hold the levers of power in order to wield them in a way to chase more profit. You can not counterweight this in a society where the people chasing the profit have all the money, own all the media, own all the politicians, own all the policy tanks, etc etc etc. This is the way bourgeoise-democracy is designed to come to outcomes that benefit the bourgeoisie. It is a dictatorship of class built for them.
The proletarian democracy on the other hand is a dictatorship of class built for the people. And it does a lot of shit things, because it’s a state and states do shit stuff. It does all the shit stuff that the capitalist states do in fact (and oh boy they’ve done a lot of shit things we could reel off). But what it also does is come to outcomes that are proletarian, and thus benefit a massively larger number of the population than the bourgeoise-democracy does.
You talk about needing government to mitigate business and I AGREE. But the reason government does not mitigate business in the bourgeoise-democracy is because the bourgeoisie run the government, so they obviously do what benefits their class. When you put the proletarians in power on the other hand you get a government that DOES mitigate the power of business, oppressively so in fact (oh boy they love to remind us of that). In exactly the same ways that the bourgeoise state oppresses the proletariat, the proletarian state oppresses the bourgeoisie. This is your government that mitigates the worst aspects of business. Properly.
Educated people in general have to say on politics the same things that I said earlier, but they are very nostalgic over less criminalized popular culture, better technical education and rules being followed. So am I to some extent actually.
In Moscow? You’re not being fair. Educated people in the soviet union from Moscow lived extremely well and have very positive views. Engineers, scientists, etc will all say positive things. You know as well as I do that hundreds of video interviews will confirm this. Be fairer, claiming that everyone that supports the ussr among the over 60s is just uneducated is definitely untrue. This particular video series is in Moscow and this lady is exactly what I am talking about.
You can’t live in Moscow and say this is untrue. You’re being unfair.
No recollection at all, I’m 1996, but since transition from USSR to modern Russia didn’t happen in an instance, in various institutions and organizations you can still see in some ways how it was. More in my childhood than now, but still.
Brought up in shock therapy then.
if you weren’t in denial.
I’m not in denial. I’m asking you to be fairer. The data does not support your position. You know as well as I do that 75% of the country consider the soviet era to be when the country was at its greatest (and that this is easily verifiable from many sources), and you know damn well that 75% of the country aren’t all uneducated people. You are not being fair.
Just wait until climate collapse hits and the food supply goes through cascading failures creating famines affecting 6 billion people. Then we’ll see when shit really hits the fan.
The nordic countries aren’t socialism ffs. They are social democracy, capitalist states with welfare policies and a ruling class of bourgeoisie. This is political illiteracy. Adding welfare to capitalism does not make socialism, it makes ““friendly”” capitalism (backed by imperialism of the global south). Read Imperialism in the 21st Century, it is suicide fuel for socdems.
A real example of democratic socialism to discuss would be any of the states created by the Bolivarian revolutions. Venezuela under Chavez. Bolivia under MAS. Etc. Socialist states with a proletarian ruling class.
I live in Russia and you do not.
Which area of Russia do you live in and what do the local people over 60 that actually lived in the USSR have to say? I already know of course and could post video interviews of such, but perhaps you could tell the thread what those people say.
Forgive me for assuming but I’m willing to bet you’re in your teens or twenties, making you at best 10 years old when it ended, meaning you have little to no actual recollection of what living and working was like. I could be wrong of course.
Spiegel? Propaganda? It’s literally the largest German news website mate. Trying to attack the authority of the source here is nonsense. And gallup is one of the most internationally recognised polling companies in the world largely for its refusal to do polls funded by any political party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Spiegel_(online) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallup,_Inc.
This is getting too semantic for my liking we would argue all day about whether Tito’s efforts were a market economy or not. You acknowledge that market economies and multiple parties do exist in socialist countries though correct?
Of course nobody wants the same shit, I don’t want the same shit either, I know for sure that the hard left of mszp sit around where I am. Things can be so much better.
And? Socialism does not mean not having a multiparty system. I get that you’re trying to imply that approving of a multiparty system or a market economy is somehow evidence of being against socialism but both of those things exist under socialism. Yugoslavia was a market economy in eastern europe under socialism.
I’m sorry do you have any other way for scientists to measure opinion?
According to the absolute majority of respondents (54%), the majority of Hungarians had a better life under the Kádár regime (pre-1990) than today
The Kádár regime was the communist government.
there were even more respondents (61%) who said that the conditions for individual financial prosperity were more favorable under the Kádár regime.
lol
It is also worth noting that almost two-thirds of Hungarians (63%) said that there was predictable order and social peace under the Kádár regime
lmao
I like this research. Thanks for sharing.
EDIT:
The older an age group, the higher the proportion was of those who agreed that the majority lived better before the regime change. A significant correlation can be observed when looking at the educational background: citizens with lower education tend to believe that most Hungarians lived better under Kádár. Among the lowest qualified citizens, 62 and 27 percent are the share of the two sides, but even according to the relative majority of graduates (45%), most Hungarians lived better before 1990 than today.
So the older the Hungarian the more likely they are to believe that things were better under communism. So the people that actually lived in communism support it even more. Oh and the more educated people are the more likely they are to support that position too. I think the age thing will explain why the stat is slipping over time, the people that actually lived in communism are the people that support it more, and as they are dying they are being removed from the data.
These polls are really out of date. These numbers have since improved substantially in capitalism’s favour.
Feel free to give citations that are better than 2010-2016 lmao.
You’re skipping the 11 other parties that are banned. Very free.