Quote:
If your first instinct as a westerner is to criticize and lecture 3rd world communist movements, instead of learning from their successes, then you have internalized the patronizing arrogance of the colonial system you claim to oppose.
oh I wonder why this is near the top of the active feed even though there’s only 6 commentsclicks the Federation button to see the post on its home page
I’m so glad I don’t let lemmy.nazi federate to my server lol
i’ve been blocking (and getting banned from) plenty of .world politics and “history” comms.
its really that terrible. red scare propaganda and anticommunism dressed up as “leftism”.
i had someone imply to me they admire marx engels and lenin and condemn socialist “authoritarianism” in the very same post recently.
I’m glad I’m on db0 and can still see posts from .ml, hexbear, and .world.
I can get a gauge of what people from all servers are saying, and I’m finding the gist that what you’re saying is correct.
the amount of defederation infighting and sectarism going on here is stupid, ngl. we should definetly grow up to be at least more united.
lenin
Would have been bad enough to specifically name Engels, but Lenin? hahaha oh wow
The current McCarthyite tactic is to use “tankie” and “authoritarian” as the code-words for anyone who dares to oppose US / NATO hegemony and align themselves with the anti-colonial projects. Only the US-aligned countries are allowed to be “authentic marxists”, and everyone else is labeled a tankie.
These people have no concept that everyone from Paul Robeson to even MLK was called a “dirty commie”, or that the US is drone bombing like 8 countries in the middle east and north africa as we speak.
Fuck dronies.
Leftism is when you vote for the democrats unquestioningly with out applying any sort of pressure or having primaries.
A recent question I’ve been asking my democrat friends in real life, now that trump is hiring 20k more ICE gestapo, lets say Democrats win the midterms and then win the next presidency; do you think they will fire them all? Do you think they’re going to “look soft on crime” and “defund the police” when they refused to last time during massive nation wide protest? The answer is pretty obviously no. The DHS and the USA-PATRIOT act are not even on the table.
i feel democrat equivalent parties all over the world are like this now. the pretense is literally the only thing left in them, and its paper thin at this point.
“real” socdems would at least fucking try somewhat.
to most modern “leftists” olof palme would be a tankie.
This l find a general attitude among the Westerners.
Dang I didn’t know there were successful communist nations in developing countries.
Dang I didn’t know there were successful communist nations in developing countries.
Funnily enough, two started off as developing and ended up as world superpowers.
I’m assuming your talking about Russia and China I think it very fare to criticise them, considering they are both totalitarian nations which don’t respect the needs of there citizens.
The USSR (Soviet Union) and the PRC (China). The USSR is not Russia, and it doesn’t exist anymore.
And of course it’s fair, and in fact important to criticize them. We have the benefit of hindsight and can see how some of their decisions were serious mistakes. On the other hand, it’s also important to analyze what they did good and learn from that too. Neither was perfect, both were improvements, and the terrible fates of Russia and Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union is proof of how much good the SU was for its citizens.
which don’t respect the needs of there citizens.
They both inherited countries plagued with regular famine and have both eliminated it. In fact, in 1983 the CIA documented the SU as having a better typical diet than the USA. Clearly they respected the food security of their citizens.
The SU managed to rapidly build low-cost housing after repelling a HUGE invasion of extermination from Nazi Germany. The “commieblocks” were critical in housing people after war. China has also made huge strides in home ownership and elimination of poverty. Meanwhile, poverty and homelessness is increasing under capitalist countries, with them doing little to resolve their housing crises. Clearly they respected the need for shelter of their citizens.
Keep in mind, that both these countries were devastated by world wars and civil wars. Their countries started off in serious crisis and had already had revolutions. If they didn’t respect the needs of their citizens, they would have ended up failed states overthrown by their desperate population or quickly collapsing to invasions.
As for China, the government, despite censorship and political repression, still remains popular among its citizens, according to censorship-resistant US studies[1]. It’s largely avoided war, hugely reduced poverty, and has become a world leader in technology.
There are many valid reasons to criticize these countries and it’s important we do that. But they clearly respected the basic needs of their citizens. There are few other countries which have done more to reduce poverty and homelessness than them.
Thank you for telling me that. I never really thought that communist nations have done good things in the past, I suppose I already knew that about china. But I did not know that about the USSR. There is no education about any good thing communist nations have done well, at least in the curriculum I grew up with. And communism is therefore ingrained in people essentially as a synonym for bad.
Glad I could help :) My curriculum was similar, mine didn’t really talk about communist countries at all, and since a lot of our media like movies come from the US during the Cold War, when their government’s biggest enemies were the Soviet Union and the worker labor movement fighting for more worker rights, those movies often chose communist countries or communists as an easy choice for villains, so there’s a shallow but very widespread and normal idea that those countries are just simply evil, and ours is good. On top of that, most newspapers and television channels are owned by the richest people (mega-millionaires and billionaires, not just middle-class money), rich enough to own or invest in them, and funded by large companies advertising, and usually the people with that much money love how capitalism is working and are threatened by socialism or communism, so they have a self-interest in highlighting all the mistakes of those countries and all the wins of their own. I was amazed that a few years before, the US government was putting out posters like these during World War II, where Russian and Chinese soldiers are celebrated as allies alongside Canadians and English!
On a related point, it’s also important to remember that many people instinctively compare these countries to rich, developed countries like Britain, the USA, and others, instead of comparing them to how they were before and after. I used to do this too, but countries are so different, with different histories, resources and neighbors that it’s usually unfair to simply compare them like that. This short 3 minute clip from a Michael Parenti lecture gives some good examples of this, focusing on their experience talking to Cubans.
What do you call Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, the former Burkina Fasso under Sankara, or the former USSR? Do you sincerely believe those countries had a better standard of living for all people, especially workers and peasants, under capitalism? Isn’t the great fall from grace of the USSR proof that the benefits their people had received were indeed the fruits of socialism and not the “rising tide” of global capitalist development (which was actually exacerbating poverty in the global South outside of the socialist countries)?
Maybe it’s just capitalist propaganda but from what I’ve heard, China is a mass surveillance state which doesn’t protect any of the citizens rights for privacy and has lacklustre working environments which is why everything is so cheap to be made there. Cuba is stuck with a poor economy, but I guess that’s all developing nations so i don’t know much other than that. For Vietnam my source is a friend who’s family mostly live in Vietnam, he says people in Vietnam dislike communism but can’t say it out loud. And I don’t know much about Laos or Burkina fasso.
To be clear I do consider myself a leftist and anti capitalist but I don’t believe there have been many properly successful socialist nations outside of Europe really.
China is a mass surveillance state which doesn’t protect any of the citizens rights for privacy and has lacklustre working environments
It is a mass surveillance state, but it’s definitely not any more mass surveillance than any developed country. Maybe one important difference is that in China the government has fewer restrictions for how they will spy on you, but in the US for example the NSA will do blatantly illegal things that aren’t even allowed under the Patriot Act and no one can do anything about it, so the extent to which surveillance is legal or not is irrelevant IMO. I would understand your criticism if China was actually a very repressive country where dissent wasn’t allowed and a huge portion of the population was jailed, but I think the quick response to the anti-lockdown protests and the fact they jail far fewer people than the US (while having 4x the population) means that it’s not a very reasonable criticism. Especially not when you consider the Western countries built up their stability while exploiting others, and China had to go through a hard process of occupation, civil war, and then many mistakes during the Cultural Revolution which still breed resentment at the state, even if things have gotten better.
As for the working environments, you’ll always see the worst of the worst in negative coverage of China (the suicide nets in Foxconn factories, for example, which to my knowledge have been debunked). Still, it is undeniable that China has had pretty bad working conditions. I think the key element to understand why working conditions are poor, yet more than 80% of Chinese people approve of their government, is that Chinese people understand that their government is committed to improving things and they consistently see those improvements. They also have a much more responsive political system that listens to their individual concerns very well, so whatever problems they have are more likely to be dealt with than if they had a situation in a western liberal democracy, where you write a letter to your representative and your representative has been paid off by 3 different lobby groups to ignore your concerns.
Cuba is stuck with a poor economy, but I guess that’s all developing nations so i don’t know much other than that.
That’s a huge understatement. Cuba faces a horrible, economy-stifling blockade from the US that essentially shuts them off from the entire global economy because they can’t access the global banking system or buy a huge number of basic goods. Despite that, they’re a global leader in medicine, have a far better education system than the US at all levels, have sent revolutionaries to assist in decolonizing countries in Africa, and were leaders of the NAM.
And I don’t know much about Laos or Burkina fasso.
Laos is honestly quite similar to Vietnam.
Burkina Fasso had a very successful few years of developing infrastructure and improving living conditions for the people under Sankara. It’s a very tragic story because he was assassinated and replaced by a regime that reversed much of the good he had accomplished. Nowadays, Ibrahim Traore is essentially just playing it back with many of the same ideas Sankara had, and he has been massively popular and successful for it (look no further than the fact his security team have had to stop many assassination attempts already, much like Castro).
To be clear I do consider myself a leftist and anti capitalist but I don’t believe there have been many properly successful socialist nations outside of Europe really.
What has been successful in Europe? Yugoslavia and the Warsaw Pact countries were great, but could only exist because of the pressure of the USSR on the capitalist bloc. All the social democracies are only social democracies, they have never put the workers in charge of their own destiny and are therefore not socialist at all.
Ok, first of all you clearly know a lot about this than I do and I would love to learn more, where do you find information related to socialism and socialist nations? Obviously I cannot expect to learn all of this from you.
What has been successful in Europe? First of all many European nations such as Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands have a progressive multi party system which prioritize good urban planning and privacy laws (the latter I am not 100% sure about but believe to be true) And the European union as a whole regularly enforce regulations ensuring fare practices among big companies such as recently they enforced apple to require side loading and meta to remove the consent or pay advertising model. As well as when apple was required to use usb-c on there iphones. This is just my limited knowledge so feel free to prove me wrong and two examples may not be enough evidence.
Also I read your other arguments but I simply don’t have enough knowledge to have anything to say about them, but I very much go by the quote “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and therefore find it difficult to believe that any dictator can be better than a democracy.
Ok, first of all you clearly know a lot about this than I do and I would love to learn more, where do you find information related to socialism and socialist nations? Obviously I cannot expect to learn all of this from you.
I learned a lot of the history from Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds and Vijay Prashad’s Darker Nations. You don’t have to read the entire books, they have lots of lectures on YouTube. Here’s Parenti’s Yellow Lecture.
You can also could read China Has Billionaires, it’s a good essay that explains why China is the way it is and why socialists should understand it.
First of all many European nations such as Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands have a progressive multi party system which prioritize good urban planning and privacy laws (the latter I am not 100% sure about but believe to be true) And the European union as a whole regularly enforce regulations ensuring fare practices among big companies such as recently they enforced apple to require side loading and meta to remove the consent or pay advertising model. As well as when apple was required to use usb-c on there iphones. This is just my limited knowledge so feel free to prove me wrong and two examples may not be enough evidence.
Those are good things, but they’re really just regulations. The urban planning is clearly miles ahead of NA, but it’s still comparable to Japan and we could probably all agree Japan is not a socialist country.
The main difference between those countries and a socialist country like Cuba or China is that in Europe, owners of industry, financiers, real estate moguls, and other capitalists have a lot of influence and political power as a function of the capital they own. They move the capital around to where it will make them more money. They will move capital across borders to colonies and neocolonies where labor and resources are cheap. The state responds to their needs.
Meanwhile, in socialist countries, the state takes the capital under its democratic control. In China, for example, the state is growing its control of private companies and steadily implementing more measures to reduce the power of their capitalists. Even when Deng liberalized their economy a great deal, they never stopped regulating the flow of capital, still having strict controls on investments.
“absolute power corrupts absolutely” and therefore find it difficult to believe that any dictator can be better than a democracy.
I think there’s 2 levels to this quote. First, how could power be held non-absolutely? Through a constitutional republic with a balance of powers where each branch of government keeps the others in check? What Marx shows us is that, make the political system how you will, if the state remains a bourgeois state the ruling class will keep using political power to protect the interests of capital. There is no way around that, all regulations will be stripped away as the rate of profit falls and the capitalists go hungry. They’ll descend into fascism if their profits are threatened enough. So ask yourself, doesn’t capital already hold absolute power?
Secondly, if I take it at face value that the way a state is organized makes a big difference and it matters how much control any given individual has (which I think is true, even though it kinda contradicts the previous point that all power is class power) that’s still not a reason to say European and North American democracies are less dictatorial than any socialist democracy. Check the link I put in my first comment to see how China’s system works. The USSR had a similar system with soviets making up the democratic structure, with democratic power over each workplace and each community, which would go up in levels up to the CCCP. People think that these countries aren’t democratic because they’re one party states, but the truth is that they just make their limitations on what ideologies are not allowed to take control explicit, instead of implicit like they are in the liberal democracies.
don’t believe there have been many properly successful socialist nations outside of Europe
???
trying to remember the whiteboard in that show
I don’t know why they even left Reddit. Were they really that mad about app development?
Reddit is not even “liberal” anymore. The people on the conservative sub will say that it is but its been shifting rightward for years. There are a lot of people getting permad over things that in the past would have had broad agreement.
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It’s shifting from center “left” to libertarian right to match up with the ceo, and pretty soon will just be as bad as Twitter
Ex Can’t be critical of musk or any of his terrible products, that earns a ban
reddit already censored all the times I said “elongated muskrat”
Depends which wave of newcomers. Some in more recent migrations just got banned for criticizing musk or endorsing Luigism, which is pretty milquetoast stuff any old lib can do.
Most of us have started from the default programming. I didn’t get a lot of what I get today when I moved from Reddit. I know it can feel shitty to keep repeating the same things and make the same arguments over and over again but that’s the process of teaching.
I know it can feel shitty to keep repeating the same things and make the same arguments over and over again but that’s the process of teaching.
For what it’s worth, it’s important to have ways to do this efficiently, like linking to other resources or having copypastas. Otherwise the infinite influx of ignorant noobs will eventually cause burnout or just waste too much time.
Yep, seems over time stances do change.
I am not only on .world (actually started out there and moved over here), but yeah, for me that was the last straw. That official app is just an affront.
Lemmy libs in this thread showing they have an aversion to reading
there are libs on Lemmy?
Check on some .world comms and let us know what you find. Hint: it’s libs as far as the thumb can scroll.
Almost every community on every instance of Lemmy is a liberal circlejerk lol
Wait lol you’re a MAGA account but you accidentally came to the right conclusion? JDPON Don does it again.
it’s always hilarious when conservatives are right on accident and they don’t even know why
Man I’m just here for the memes :(
The lemmy.world version of this community has politcs banned
I remember watching a documentary about North Korea and one of the guides was talking about how people in NK and Asia more broadly don’t necessarily want to live under the same liberal-democratic capitalist system that the west tries to impress on them.
How arrogant are we to act like we have it all figured out and that countries outside of Europe and North America are backwards shitholes?
There is absolutely a discussion to be had here.
Of course people should be allowed to have their own government setups and authorities. It would be wrong to assume that we in the west have it all figured out.
However there are still questions of fundamental human rights. In many places of the world a woman can legally be raped, it’s the woman’s responsibility to always have a male relative with them. If we were to ask women what they thought about it they would probably say that there is no problem with it, that’s just how it works. These women have been so indoctrinated by it that they don’t question it.
We could also use slavery in America as an example. Many slaves probably accepted the argument that they had a better living standard as slaves, or some other argument that made them accept the status quo. Should Europe just have accepted that that is the way life goes over there?
Where does the line go between fundamental human rights and respecting other ways of life go? Western fundamental rights such as equal rights, right to a trial, right to life, etc. are just that, western.
Liberals desperately need to read Losurdo - Liberalism, a counter-history.
Even the liberal equality before the law, (ie, the illegality for the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges and beg for food) was denied to colonized peoples and peoples of colonial origin.
Every one of your liberal ideologues was extremely racist, and didn’t think colonized peoples deserved any of the rights they proclaimed for the white community. John Locke, and the first 5 or so US presidents owned slaves. Tocqueville pushed for the decimation of civilians in Algeria at the hands of the french imperialists, and wrote a book on the US that ignored slavery, lynchings, and native eviction. There are too many more cases to cover.
i’m not sure there’s any metric by which the soviet union could be called a success but go off king
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I just had to explain this to someone the other day lol. Figure ur gonna get lots of hate from libs about this post so wanted to just come in and say hi. 你是很好老师同志。Your posts in response are nicely done. I hope people take the time to read them.
No probs comrade, thx!
I have a better one:
About all politics. No exceptions.
Signed: Brazilian.
My only complaint is that the Baltics aren’t included in the Shut The Fuck Up Zone.
Is that a whale
The “Shut the Fuck Up Gringo” whale.
I like how the circle also looks like America and Hawaii and parts of Canada are not included lol
Hawaii should be free anyway. Send all the USians home and give the people of Hawaii their nation back.
The capitalism can not spread where the ice flows and the coconuts reign.
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If you are offended by this, you might be incapable of self-reflection
Imagine getting offended by this instead of just being anti-colonialist
Why do white crackers have to be so set in their ways?
Simply put: maintaining the status quo is prerequisite to their comfortable living.
What are some succesful 3rd world communist movements? Asking for a friend
China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, DPRK
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According to some theories, China.
The obvious one is China. But if you wanna learn a little something, read about Sankara. If you want a whole book of histories of the third world national liberation and socialist movements, read The Darker Nations by Vijay Prashad.
Name one successful communist movement.
Vietnam, Cuba, PRC, DPRK, USSR (for 80 years at least). All of them defeated either US, Japanese, French, and German imperialists, and uplifted their people despite the US never letting up.
The PRC’s acheivements:
- Uplifted more people out of poverty than any country in history, so much so that if we remove the PRC from rankings, world poverty would be increasing.
- Eliminated Urban Poverty. On track to eliminate all poverty within a decade.
- CGTN documentary - China’s war on poverty
Some of the USSR’s acheivements:
- USSR had a more nutritious diet than the US, according to the CIA. Calories consumed surpassed the US. source. Ended famines.
- Productive forces were not organized for capital gain and private enrichment; public ownership of the means of production supplanted private ownership. It was illegal to hire others and accumulate personal wealth from their labor.
- Had the 2nd fastest growing economy of the 20th century after Japan. The USSR started out at the same level of economic development and population as Brazil in 1920, which makes comparisons to the US, an already industrialized country by the 1920s, even more spectacular.
- Free Universal Health care, and most doctors per capita in the world. 42 doctors per 10k population, vs 24 in Denmark and Sweden, 19 in US.
- Had near zero unemployment, continuous economic growth for 70 straight years. The “continuous” part should make sense – the USSR was a planned, non-market economy, so market crashes á la capitalism were pretty much impossible.
- USSR moved from 58.5-hour workweeks to 41.6 hour workweeks (-0.36 h/yr) between 1913 and 1960
- USSR averaged 22 days of paid leave in 1986 while USA averaged 7.6 in 1996., 2
- In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67.
- All education, including university level, free. 2
- 99% literacy.
- Saved the world from Fascism, Taking on the majority of Nazi divisions, and killing 90% of Nazi soldiers. Bore the enormous cost of blood and pain in WW2 (25M dead), with the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare.. An estimated 70% of Soviet housing was destroyed by Nazi invasion. Nazis were in retreat after the battle of Stalingrad in 1942, a full 2 years before the US landed troops in normandy.
- Doubled life expectancy. Eliminated poverty.
- Combatted sex inequality. Equal wages for men and women mandated by law, but sex inequality, although not as pronounced as under capitalism, was perpetuated in social roles. Very important lesson to learn.
- Combatted Racial inequality.
- Feudalism to space travel in 40 years. First satellite, rocket, space walk, woman, man, animal, space station, moon and mars probes.
- Soviet power production per capita in 1990 was more than the EU, Great Britain, or China’s in 2014.
- Housing was socialized by localized community organizations, and there was virtually no homelessness. Houses were often shared by two families throughout the 20s and 30s – so unlike capitalism, there were no empty houses, but the houses were very full. In the 40s there was the war, and in the 50s there were a number of orphans from the war. The mass housing projects began in the 60s, they were completed in the 70s, and by the 70s, there were homeless people, but they often had genuine issues with mental health.
- 66% of Russians polled in 2015 want the USSR back. The story is the same for all the former eastern-bloc countries: 72% of Hungarians say their country is worse off now than under communism, 57% of East Germans, 63% of Romanians, 77% of Czechs, 81% of Serbs (for Yugoslavia), 70% of Ukrainians, 60% of Bulgarians.
You either never went.to cuba or you are bending reality to fit your narrative.
Also, are you uaing the USSR as EXAMPLE?! you need better undertanding of people’s lifes befora talking shit. I have many friends that lived in the USSR and NONE of them.feel it was good at all
Edit: Americans angry at other non americans because they live in a hellscape. Just vote better dudes. Comunism doesn’t work but having a country with socialist politics like Free healthcare, free universities, labour laws and retirement support is amazing (believe me I know, I live in one of those)
Be less angry and Be better my american dudes!
You’re a big fan of Cuba under Batista then?
Cubans are more satisfied with their political system than americans
According to a bunch of polls, in the majority of former eastern block countries most of the population (as high as 70% and no lower than 40%) think life under socialism was better. Also, you were literally given a big list of sources for the USSR example. But clearly didn’t bother reading any.
2 things can be true at the same time. Im not american i dont care. But saying ussr and cuba are amazing shows that you are very very young or very uninformed
Uninformed? Then where is your knowledge, evidence, data, links, anything? It seems to me you’re just talking the blue out of the sky.
Tim Pool ass comment
The DPRK defeated the US despite it killing 1 out of every 5 people, and having nearly half their country destroyed:
Vietnam suffered similar ruthless civilian bombing campaigns and massacres, and defeated the US.
Why are you arguing that their military movement is what made them successful? Vietnam is successful from their governance not because many died.
Vietnan won militar combat against 3 imperialist countries, if you havent heard about it
Yes, that’s literally what I responded to. Governance is their real success story is my obvious point
I don’t understand. Nearly every successful anti-colonial revolution in the 20th century was communist or Marxist influenced, Vietnam was no different. Vietnam was successful because their decades long struggle against french and US imperialism, guided by Marxist theory.
My clear point was a revolution is one thing but running the country so well ever since is their real success story :)
Ah my bad, yes I agree, both are success stories.
Militarily driving out the French and Burger imperialists was a prerequisite for their governmental success. After all, if they hadn’t done that, they wouldn’t be governing themselves in the first place.
unironically calling the DPRK a success
Typical arrogant chauvinism, that this very meme highlights.
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Yes
I’m willing to take the bait, but first re-read the meme and tell me what you missed?
I didn’t miss anything. I just see people throwing their opinions around without providing any supporting data.
I see that OP posted a long list of links in the comments to support their point of view. I haven’t read them yet, so I can’t say I agree or not, but now their opinion is not completely invalid.
I haven’t read them yet, so I can’t say I agree or not, but now their opinion is not completely invalid.
The state of liberal “intellectualism”.
Go read them
The PRC is quite obviously the easiest example, but I’d say every existing Socialist system has achieved remarkable success in the face of horrible opposition.
You can look at China right now, especially in the context of the US basically shitting the bed completely, and see success. It also depends on what you’re using to determine what “success” is. If the marker for comparison is a capitalist country… lol we see how well that’s playing out.
No system or place is perfect, but the US has trillions of dollars at its disposal and does zero for its people. Meanwhile, even folks with a meager income can live a comfortable life in China. I’ve heard this verbatim from Americans that have lived there—some of which for 15+ years.
It really depends on how you define “successful.” If your measure of success is based on how closely these societies resemble Western, liberal, capitalist societies, then, yeah, you’re probably not going to see a whole lot of “success,” but that’s not what these revolutionary movements were trying to achieve. I would say that first and foremost what essentially every communist movement was striving for was just autonomy and independence, and many have been successful in that regard. Vietnam is an independent nation, instead of a French colony. China, similarly, is no longer under the thumb of the British. You may not like what these nations do with their autonomy, but that is what they were striving for and they have achieved it.
… And a swing and a miss
…no? Pretty spot-on.
Why? What’s your wisdom you’d like to share with us socialists outside of the imperialist countries?
