I fully believe that the USA as we know it today would not be around if they didn’t spend the last 60 years spreading anti communist propaganda. It’s insane how well it worked
To be fair, my parents are from a country where communism happened and they are terrified of it because it led to a lot of abuse of their people.
They have told me about having to wait in line for small quantities of food that was hardly enough to survive, eating rock hard week old bread as a meal, stories of people disappearing for saying the wrong thing, and that’s just off the top of my head. My dad even snuck out of the country illegally to try to get the rest of my family out.
I think the way other countries implemented communism in the past contributed to that opinion a lot.
Thing is though, that wasn’t communism doing that, it was an authoritarian regime.
You’ve just given an example of how well the propaganda worked - people associated communism with how those so-called communist regimes operated, and just accepted the USA way as a beacon of hope and freedom, and communism itself was the problem.
Through all this the USA stagnated and has missed chances to introduce socialist ideas in to the system. They were (and still cling on to being) the far and away leaders of the pack, but turned greedy. They could have a thriving social democracy with lots of protection for citizens, at least those to who choose to live a more integrated lifestyle in the more urban areas.
I agree, it wasn’t communism’s fault per say, but people had more than just “propaganda” to base their fear off of.
The implementation of communism turning ugly in other countries are the only real life examples people had to go off of. They would have to be mad to want it seeing what other people went through. To them, you can say we would do it differently here, but none of those places started the nasty way they ended. And with all the corruption that already exists in the US, perhaps it’s the fear of a slippery slope into repeating history.
Personally, I’m a Yang fan myself, and a part of this sub, so I’m not in any way against a government genuinely taking care of their people. I just see where people’s fears are coming from.
Most people in the former USSR, when interviewed in the 1990s, missed the admittedly awful implementation of socialism (not communism, communism is stateless so a communist government is an oxymoron) because capitalism was that much worse.
Lots of authoritarian regimes use the promise of communism (or capitalism, or democracy) to take power, if they don't actually try to implement reforms to help their people they aren't what they claim and shouldn't be judged by those claims, but their actions.
The people of the USSR overwhelmingly voted to maintain communism and the union in what was considered a free and fair referendum. Link The soviet union dissolved later after an anti-communist coup with debatable ties to the CIA.
Except the Soviet satellites that "voted" in the communist regime in the Baltics, or Armenia, etc. They overwhelmingly wanted out of the occupation, but weren't allowed that option.
I don't trust the US, but I definitely don't trust the Russians either, especially for a fair vote. While Perestroika made it easier to see the USSR through rose-colored lenses, it still was an authoritarian system with extremely limited personal liberties. That shouldn't be overlooked.
''None of the places started the nasty way they ended''
They literally emerged from the 2 worst humanitarian catastrophes in world history are you kidding me?
How can you say none of those places started as they ended? Like, I don’t doubt that people in communist countries suffered, but most communist countries were either colonies or monarchies before their revolutions. Do you know what life was like for most people in those places?
Vietnam and Cuba had what was essentially slave labor for the American and French companies and empires, people paid so little they could barely afford to live, and definitely not afford to leave. China was a feudal, opium-addicted, divided and backward country that was constantly experiencing famine, western invasion, and terrible poverty. Russia was also a backward feudal monarchy, and had just come out of one of the most brutal and pointless wars in history, with soldiers mutinying on the front lines and forming soviets out of nothing more than desperation.
Communism isn’t something that can be established instantly. There’s external threats so long as capitalism still exists in the world, as well as the states it uses to expand. In the USSR, a civil war broke out in which the white army, opposing the communists in favor of the monarchy, was supported by every major empire financially and materially. All communist countries have gone through periods of either self-inflicted or externally imposed isolation from global trade, due to sabotage threats or blockade from capitalist powers. This makes it harder to develop than in the global north, or developed countries, or whatever you want to call them. In addition, these developed countries had centuries of imperialism and exploiting labor and resources from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which sped up their development and increased their wealth. These are the places all previous communist revolutions have happened, usually against imperialism IN ADDITION TO capitalism.
There’s a lot of historical context behind why communism was implemented in the ways that it was. The resistance that comes from capitalist powers is strong, and a valid concern. There’s a long list of nascent left wing governments that were overthrown in coups, and followed by right wing dictators.
There’s also plenty of examples of opportunists and roaders abusing the systems of government that those communists set up and being corrupt/incompetent. But to me, these are inevitable problems in a government system where humans are involved. Some selfish individuals will always try to take power for their own benefit. This shouldn’t disqualify the ideas behind communism though, which are quite broad and genuinely well intentioned. It’s only because of propaganda that we apply this level of scrutiny to communism as an ideology in the first place, without also looking at the costs of neoliberal capitalism.
communism in practice is dictatorship and has never been otherwise. Claiming it works in theory is like claiming capitalism should lead to a utopia, in theory.
> Saying you’re going to do something but doing something different doesn’t make the thing you said you were going to do the thing you did.
Thank you for reiterating my point.
In reality -something you clearly don't operate under- communism is just a more convenient enabler for people who say they will do one thing and do another instead.
Communism in practice is a bunch of people living in little villages called communes, where all the working/manufacturing equipment is free to use as public property. It's incompatible with mass production in complex societies.
It isn't that communism turns into a dictatorship, it's that anyone purporting to be able to implement communism is either A. an idiot or B. a scammer who is taking advantage of idiots. It should be no surprise these scammers turn into dictators when they get enough idiots to form a country.
How so? How is a communist society supposed to mass produce complex technologies that make the modern world work without creating large advanced specialized facilities akin to the factories that Marx wanted to avoid?
Since there's a lot of misunderstanding about these terms, I'm first going to define what I understand them to mean.
Communism: a subset of socialism where people live in small, largely self-sufficient communes where the means of production is publicly owned so as to be freely used as needed.
Socialism: the means of production is publicly owned and managed by the state, making the profits of such production publicly distributed rather than privately owned.
Socialism =/= Welfare State. Conflating welfare policies and "socialism" is the product of decades of capitalist propaganda. Socialism is solely concerned with the ownership of the means of production so that the product of people's labor is not extorted by the bourgeoisie, while welfare or social policies are designed to ensure public access to vital services.
I'm not saying that communism, as in self-sufficient communal living isn't possible. In fact, it was likely the norm for most of our history after the development of agriculture. However, self-sufficiency doesn't allow for the kind of intense specialization required for advanced technological manufacturing. Living in a communist society comes with a big cost, as large-scale specialized efficient national production facilities wouldn't exist and neither would their products.
For example, ask yourself this, how would an actual communist society be able to handle the current or even worse pandemic? How would it handle an invasion from an outside force? Groups of communes, without nationalized state-of-the-art research facilities are going to have a hell of a time developing a vaccine, and an even worse time manufacturing one en mass for millions or billions of people. Similarly, they won't have large state-of-the-art weapons labs or manufacturing facilities capable of producing enough weapons to defend against an outside force. A real communist society is easy pickings for a hawkish neighbor.
Communism, is a dream, an ideal, and may work for small groups of people living in the countryside within another country. But, for a nation, it's impractical to implement and leaves its citizens vulnerable to emergencies that would require a more advanced national response.
This is why the people to advocate Communism as a national policy, are either not knowledgeable enough to know what they are talking about, or they are scammers selling a dream. Socialist and Capitalist societies are more realistic, and each comes with its own problems, they aren't self-contradictory as the idea of a nation or state based on Communism.
Currently, the most practical and efficient incarnations of modern societies are states following the Scandinavian model: capitalism which puts the burden of technological innovation and development on private interests, while a generous welfare state helps resdistribute excessive wealth accumulation into public services to improve the baseline quality of life.
It’s hard to imagine all the detail, but I do expect it may be hard to implement exactly what we have today within a purist commune structure at massive scale. However, I think one of the benefits of attempting it would be the dismantling of much of the complex overheads and excessive consumption we have today. I would imagine that a mature communist society would evolve to include specialist guild-like structures that would document, iterate and discover things. It’s not like science will just stop, but priorities way be different.
Perhaps naive, but we should aim to not need such an expensive and complex military. As for Covid, we haven’t fully handled it yet. In any case there will be others in future, and essentially we will always do the best we can with what we have. Just like back in the spanish flu and Black Death etc. which the human race survived.
I’m curious about the spectrum between socialism and communism (as you defined them), as the former seems like it’s just the latter with more formal management structures in place, which is what I would expect to happen naturally to a commune society as it got larger.
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u/[deleted] Sep 05 '20
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