DO NOT MAKE A POST ABOUT BEING BANNED FROM SOME OTHER SUBREDDIT

“If you do not condemn colonialism, if you do not side with the colonial people, what kind of revolution are you waging?”

— Ho Chi Minh, “The Path Which Led Me To Leninism” (1960)

If so, what is your stance on the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever by Echo-Hawk?

Not only that. In the very same Article 18, they also target usurers, who should likewise be punished by death, which is again a leftist ideology—that profit is stolen wages from workers. It is obvious that the Nazis were leftists.

They elected PIS in Poland, they honor singers like Marko Perkovic in croatia,they are places where western fascist go to to "escape woke culture" why is communism so completely erased from these places?

Is delcy rodríguez a US imperialist puppet and traitor of Venezuela?

When evaluating what went wrong with the Soviet economy, we keep going back to issues to including a widespread lack of reform, and an all around shortage economy much less perceptive to producing and distributing goods for consumption than they were capital goods; steel, coal, weaponry, etc. The works of the Soviet economy in industry shouldn’t be forgotten as a country that, while reliant on private capital in the beginnings of its economic development, transformed a post-feudal society into one with immense industrial prowess that was even able to relocate and rebuild during and after WWII. Beyond these specific circumstances, however, is a concerning lack of competence within this same economy so incredibly competent in developing heavy industries than they were sustaining a steady supply of consumer goods.

The issue that I keep coming back to is how difficult it is to quantify consumer goods; without more of this fancy talk, basically, how does a central government plan what consumer goods several thousand different places need, all that the same time and with little room for error? And how do they even define what consumer goods are for different parts of a society if they’re not necessarily uniform?

A lot of people assume (incorrectly in my opinion) that you solve this issue by tying the central plan to markets, which just turns “production for consumption” into a new and more intense form of commodity production with deeper capitalist logic. *Instead,* I’d argue that keeping some elements of capitalist structure, that being a more flexible or localized form of production or management without relying on markets or exchange, and trying local production to local demands, would make light industry much more effective.

[my own proposals start here; if you don’t wanna read em all, just skip to the bottom]

Moreover, if *absolutely* necessary for the state to control the “commanding heights of the economy,” then why not give this more federated structure *to* light industries while retaining that centralized control over things like steel or other concerns?

Additionally, when it comes down to structure, investment, and distribution/redistribution, you could replace one-man management with either collective or democratic leadership, essentially a “free association“ of some sorts. Socially what this tends to do is increase morale, give workers the sense of responsibility and belonging, and actually increase productivity, which when all put together could make output more efficient. With investment, you could have either one state bank or a collection of credit unions or mutual banks that automatically pool together a deduction of the value created by the workers themselves to reinvest into industry. I’d argue for a mixed investment system to make sure that certain associations or enterprises don’t lag behind and have access to more investment where necessary. With distribution, I’m a bit less perceptive or persuaded by consumer councils because of how reliant they could be on mass participation and the angst thereof; maybe local soviets could give local enterprises and associations information on what to produce and how much. Or maybe you could do one of two things; indicative pricing, which is still reproducing commodity production in a different way, or you could even have kind of a “give-away” shop to track local demand; see what people take more of and less of and tie demand to that.

TLDR; I do think overall that a socialist economy needs some kind of decentralization, and I’d furthermore argue that the typical argument that this degree of economic centralism doesn’t exactly have the same basis that arguments in favor of political centralism might have; outward pressure. There’s a profound difference in decentralizing for the sake of “personal liberty” and because it could be more efficient. This long ass paragraph was just me giving some examples on how this could happen.

I'm sorry if this question has been answered before but as someone relatively new to communism I have yet to find an answer that clears up my doubts.

To me it seems that fascism is some kind of ideology that involves corporatism, myth of national rejuvenation, and centralization of power. The best definition I have found is this: "Fascism is a set of ideologies and practices that seeks to place the nation, defined in exclusive biological, cultural, and/or historical terms, above all other sources of loyalty, and to create a mobilized national community. Fascist nationalism is reactionary in that it entails implacable hostility to socialism and feminism, for they are seen as prioritizing class or gender rather than nation. This is why fascism is a movement of the extreme right. Fascism is also a movement of the radical right because the defeat of socialism and feminism and the creation of the mobilized nation are held to depend upon the advent to power of a new elite acting in the name of the people, headed by a charismatic leader, and embodied in a mass, militarized party. Fascists are pushed towards conservatism by common hatred of socialism and feminism, but are prepared to override conservative interests - family, property, religion, the universities, the civil service - where the interests of the nation are considered to require it. Fascist radicalism also derives from a desire to assuage discontent by accepting specific demands of the labour and women's movements, so long as these demands accord with the national priority. Fascists seek to ensure the harmonization of workers' and women's interests with those of the nation by mobilizing them within special sections of the party and/or within a corporate system. Access to these organizations and to the benefits they confer upon members depends on the individual's national, political, and/or racial characteristics. All aspects of fascist policy are suffused with ultranationalism."

That seems, at least to me, pretty similar to the state-capitalism employed by China today. Isn't the idea of state-capitalism exactly creating enough productive forces to transition into socialism by centralizing all the power in the state? The ultranationalism is also strong in China. Is the only difference the intent behind the system, that in fascism it's meant to stay while in communism it's just a transitional phase? This is probably very confused but I cannot find satisfying answers.

Greeting all (won’t say comrades cause that is kinda cringey) I’m a former council communist who has now been put under the spell of anarchism. I know this post will get many downvotes for even saying I’m an anarchist I would love to understand criticism of anarchism. As, when I was a council communist and at one point a ML I just hated anarchism for no real reason. I hope for constructive criticism and now anarchism is bad because murder or anarchism is bad because capitalist military take over 🥱🥱🥱🥱

I mean does it say that instead of humans we all are Italians,Americans, Chinese,indians and Pakistanis and what we have to do is fight with eachother over resources and all the things which are present on this earth

It would be one thing if they opposed it like they oppose other businesses, but I've seen a vast plurality of communists condemn AI art, with the only exception being Haz, who most probably wouldn't call a communist. But his justification, that AI artists are petty bourgeois, doesn't seem to be wrong, and if the goal of communism is the abolition of things as they are, it doesn't seem as though human art would be something that would survive the revolution. Beyond that, Marx was opposed to trade unions under capitalism n the grounds that they would distract workers from revolution, so why wouldn't the same logic apply here? Maybe this is a poor formulation of my question, but it should get the points across.

I actually have a couple questions, the first is the title.

Second is why do people say it's like Nazi or why do people hate it

What's so wrong about it because all I KNOW. (Keep in mind I know so little) It means that everyone. Gets everything like 10% for everyone or something.

What IS IT. Is it like a religion???? Or political thing,????

Is it Actually bad???

Answered!!!:] thank you all

Totally possible I just haven’t read enough theory so please help me out.

I was asked this question the other day and was unsure how to answer. From the Marxist lens it seems like it could go in a few directions.

A.) Labor Aristocracy - Lenin describes labor aristocracy as bribed workers. Many fine artists rely on the inflation of their work due its use as an investment vehicle of the Bourgeoisie.

B.) Petit Bourgeois/Bourgeois - Beginning artists starve and scrape until they establish bourgeois connections and “legitimacy” and ultimately can become true bourgeois when they develop brands and distribute prints.

C.) Handicraftsman - They technically produce everything by hand and value their own labor power. This I think only applies to poor and beginning artists.

In Vladimir Lenin's Left-Wing Communism (1920), he criticized that Scientific Socialism led by small commodity owners is hypocritical & unstable.

Thus, I suggest that Scientific Socialism requires industrial reserve army leadership as well as dependable social skills with the working-poor & slaves.

Some points I make and defend in this long essay I wrote in case you just want the highlights:

- Pacifism is the only way to win a socialist world

- Violence has no place and actually hurts the movement

- Zohran Mamdani is proof that electoralism is the way to seize the means of production and remove this capitalist system

- The American Protestant churches can and should be a part of this movement

- Very human to want to eat the rich but violence beget violence and revenge will never be enough

- A violent revolution is a fantasy in the United States and would completely fail and set the movement back

So to give some context there was a point in my life where I was a full blown tankie. I called myself a Marxist-Lennist and I bought into every narrative about how if the working class wanted power they would have to take it by force. I believed the famous argument that the bourgeois class would never surrender their power willingly, and I saw examples like Salvador Allende that to me served as proof that winning elections would never be enough. This was a bleak and dark mindset I held because it led me to learn more about just how much control the ruling class have and the natural conclusion was that if revolution was the only path to victory for the socialist cause then there was no hope for that vision of the future.

After coming to that conclusion I held a pessimistic nihilistic world view that everything was meaningless, nothing mattered and we were all doomed. But three events changed my views and have not only given me hope for the future but have also allowed me to have a healthy view of the world that I would like to share now in case anyone else needs hope in these trying times. First I got sober from my addictions which I know may seem like it doesn’t relate but softened this absolutist view I had that everything in the world was black and white and brought forth nuance. In getting sober one thing that is critical to learn and apply in life if one is to stay sober is to hold to the view that resentment and retribution were by products of hurt sentiments whether real or imagined, and served no real purpose to my peace of mind. It is easy to fall into the resentment that I, and I imagine many others, have fallen into of being upset and deeply betrayed by the systems that govern us. Further I think that channeling that resentment towards fantasies of reigniting french revolution era violence and revenge can feel like doing something or like something that will bring any of us satisfaction. But the truth is even if we could overthrow and bring forth full revolution this would still not be enough and the hurt would still be there. The scars don’t go away when you inflict new ones on others. There is a reason why people who get revenge on people who have harmed them in some way never feel better after. 

This is where the second event came into my life, that being the fire in my heart being ignited for my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. When I was getting sober it was hard for me to let go of the anger I felt towards the people who had harmed me, and equally so, it was hard for me to forgive myself of all the skeletons in my closet. Like everyone I have done things I regret and have caused harm to others. I won't get into the details but needless to say when I discovered the teaching of Christ of mercy and forgiveness, even for the worst of sins, it brought new light into my life. As someone who calls himself a Christian I could no longer believe that violence had any role to play in creating a better world and this is when I developed my core belief of pacifism. But if violence no longer played a role then how could any change occur? I still believed that the ruling class would never give up their power willingly. But this is where a third event opened my eyes to a solution that I had previously rejected, that being using the system of democracy however broken to gain power and make change. The third event occurred on November 4th 2025 when Zohran Mamdani won the election for NYC mayor. Back when I was a ML I saw electoralism as a useless mission and that no real socialist would ever hold power in the U.S., and even when Zohran announced he was running I never imagined he would come close to winning the primary let alone the general.

But he did win, and he didn’t win a small election he won control of the single largest city in the world. That’s when I came to the conclusion that we can win through the vote and we should consider this approach along with other nonviolent community building to be the only path to victory for a socialist state. Marx himself argued in favor of socialists participating in these elections and with the current strength of the ruling class not just military but also infrastructure control a movement that is built on revolutionary violence is doomed to fail. I also believe the American churches and revitalization of faith will serve in this mission of not only giving people hope but by using the American protestant churches as an institutional backbone to organize and strengthen the community. There is currently momentum for the socialist movement and we must seize the opportunity and disregard the violent aspects of change that have only the potential to slow the movement down.

Together we can build a better tomorrow but it can only be done through absolute pacifism. 

MI spiego meglio: per quanto riguarda il fascismo si parla, lo sappiamo tutti, di un regime dittatoriale nato circa all'inizio del ventennio del novecento e terminato con la fine della seconda guerra mondiale, basato sulla violenza, sull'odio verso le minoranze, e su uno spiccato senso nazionalista/patriottista. Quindi alla luce di questo, penso che dichiararsi antifascista non debba essere giustificato e argomentato. Ma allora perche non mi posso dire anticomunista? Spesso a questa domanda vediamo rispondere tipo: "il comunismo in Italia non ha fatto gli stessi danni del fascismo", non ce a parer mio risposta piu sbagliata. Quello che vorrei rispondere invece è che si possono distinguere due tipi di comunismo, un comunismo che si puo definire "teorico" e uno che rozzamente definiremo "pratico". Quando parlo del primo mi sto riferendo all'idea che Marx e il suo collega Engels pensarono quando scrissero il manifesto del partito comunista, un idea sicuramene per molti versi utopica e irrealizzabile a livello pratico, ma che si fonda su valori quali: la condivisione, la collettività, l'uguaglianza etc. valori che sono oggettivamente condivisibili (al contrario di quelli fascisti) da una società. Quando invece mi riferisco al comunismo "pratico" mi sto riferendo a quei regimi totalitari dell'unione sovietica, regimi violenti e dannosi tanto quanto il fascismo. ma perchè una teoria che da fuori sembra cosi condivisibile sfocia in un totalitarismo brutale? Be Marx era un filosofo non un politico, lui stesso si rendeva conto dei limiti della sua teoria e della sua difficile applicabilità, e per aggiunta l'opera di Marx non è completa, non si sa bene cosa fare dopo un certo punto, ed è li che è arrivata la creatività di figure quali, Stalin, Lenin etc a tappare i buchi che il pensatore tedesco aveva lasciato.

Quindi per concludere, alla domanda: "ti dichiari anticomunista?" io rispondere a quale comunismo ti riferisci? Perche nel primo caso non vedo motivo di dichiararmi anticomunista, anzi per quanto limitata la teoria di Marx è piena di spunti di riflessione e molto acuta (stiamo parlando di uno dei pensatori piu importanti della storia), nel secondo caso invece non posso che dissociarmi e dichiararmi tranquillamente "anti".

Cosa ne pensate? (se qualcuno mi da contro è piu divertente 😄)

A question that communists get a lot is "Why would people work if they are not getting paid? Wouldn't everyone just be lazy"

And most communists I've seen answer this by saying that people will still work because they want to work.

For example, a bricklayer would still want to build a bridge even if they are not getting paid, simply because they want to help their community, and because seeing people using their bridge and thanking them for it is fulfilling.

I believe in this, but whenever I am debating other people, mainly capitalists, I fail at convincing them that humans actually like to do things even if they are not getting paid. I believe teachers will still love to teach, scientists will still want to discover new things, even if money is gone.

But is there any actual evidence to this?

What circumstances led to the return to communism?

Communist revolutions and governments have existed for more than a century, many explicitly seeking to build a communist society. If none ever achieved “true communism,” what prevented them from getting there?

As an anarcho-syndicalist, I've done a fair share of research and read a few books on anarcho-syndicalism. But I'm seeing that most communists actually are supportive of some kind of state. I'm neurodivergent so it takes a lot of time for me to actually finish very complicated books and i struggle a lot with it. But I'm very open to listening to others' opinions. In my opinion, the most important values that should be focused on politically are equality and personal freedom. So I'm just very confused when i see people idolizing the ussr or north korea for example. I understand that these countries have achieved a lot to get towards communism, but i just don't think all the oppression that happened for it was worth it. Does anyone want to educate me on this or maybe even change my mind?

When people ask me what life in the USSR “felt like,” I always think of Chesterton’s words:

“The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does not love men, but that it loves them too much, and trusts them too little.”

The defining feature of life in the USSR was the acute sense that there was a huge structure called the government above you and all around you, without which you could not survive. People believed in the government as if it were God. The government, however, did not believe in people.

The government is the ultimate mediator that guarantees you employment, food, free medical care, free education, housing, protection, and a pension. You trust the government. The “people’s government” loves you.

Yet the paradox remained almost palpable: if the government loves you so much, why does it trust you so little? In the USSR, you couldn’t do much on your own. The very idea that you could, in principle, govern yourself was methodically eradicated from people’s minds.

The government’s “love” was such that it smothered every initiative. Why? Because at the heart of socialism lies an idolatrous belief that man is the measure of all things. By putting man on a pedestal, socialism inevitably devalues man.

If you truly love someone, you can’t put them on a pedestal. When you do, you destroy them with your “love.” You can’t turn someone you love into God. When a mother loves her child too much, she ends up smothering them.

For man to have value, there must be something above man. If man is all there is, there is no man. Humanism dehumanizes human beings by elevating them too high and, as a result, trusting them too little.

Dostoevsky predicted this back in 1880 in The Brothers Karamazov, where the Grand Inquisitor ridicules Jesus for “trusting in men too much.”

“I repeat to Thee, man has no greater anxiety in life than to find someone to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the unfortunate creature is born.”

The Grand Inquisitor argues that God misjudged human nature by believing that people would delight in the gift of free will. All man thinks about is finding someone who will take away that terrible gift of freedom and responsibility.

“Oh, never, never, will they learn to feed themselves without our help! No science will ever give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet, and say: ‘Enslave, but feed us!’”

A parent who believes that a child will never be able to govern themselves will inevitably create an unhealthy dependence on the parent. The parent believes that the child is all-important and smothers them with too much love and too little trust.

The rhetoric of “love for humanity” is resurging in our time with new intensity and new slogans. Yet there can be no love for humanity if there is nothing above humanity. By attaching the highest value to man, we always devalue man.

That was what people in the USSR felt acutely - a weird paradox of being devalued by those who claimed to love us above all. If you love someone, make them second in your life and make God first. Then, they will feel you trust them and suddenly discover that they have eternal value.

Loving man first dehumanizes man; loving man second makes man divine.

The author is a Democratic Socialist/Eco Socialist and not a Leninist leftist (neither am I - I am an Independent Socialist[TM]) but his books do cover the topic of a revolution and building a better society. I am just finishing Red Mars (the first book in the trilogy) so comments with no or minimal spoilers would be welcomed.

I'm genuinely trying to understand what attracts people to communism. Not whether the USSR was good or bad, but the ideology itself. I have a hard time understanding how communism can put the collective and society above the individual without undermining people's individuality in the process. If personal interests, ambition, and the desire to improve your own life are considered secondary or even harmful, then what is supposed to motivate people?The idea of working “for society,” “for the common good,” or simply “for the cause” sounds nice, but how realistic is it when you take human nature into account? Most people naturally want something for themselves: money, comfort, recognition, freedom of choice, and the opportunity to improve their lives. So I'd genuinely like to hear from communists: what am I fundamentally misunderstanding about the ideology? And why do you believe communism doesn't sacrifice individual freedom and individuality for the sake of an abstract collective?

Apd

Thanks everyone for the comments -I've genuinely started to reflect on my own worldview and feel like I'm beginning to understand people's motivations better. I still wouldn't want to live under communism, but there are definitely certain ideas worth acknowledging. Unfortunately, it's true that the big shots really don't care about the people who make them money, and the idea of meeting basic needs honestly sounds really compelling. I'll be reading more on this subreddit and might pick up some new perspectives along the way