this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Well we're not praising fascism and corruption.
The main issue is that they communism is economic policy, NOT social policy. While they do go hand in hand people often conflate the two. Many dictatorships use communism as a way to control the people but that doesn't mean that communism leads directly to dictatorships.
Communism is an economic fairy tale, not policy.
It would be nice if it were possible but with the current state of the world, it is not.
Social democracy is a reasonable compromise.
If they're using "communism" to control the people, then they're not really using communism
Is true Communism even possible if it's being attempted by flawed humans? Seems like it doesn't matter the economic system so much as the fact that people will ruin anything given enough time.
It’s about incentives. Worker oppression in Monarchy requires a bad King, in Feudalism bad lords, in Capitalism bad shareholders, and in Socialism self-hating workers. If you shared your workplace, would you push to remove your rights? Or to screw over your customers? And then argue for that against everyone else you share power with? The incentives are plainly better in a worker owned economy.
I guess the main issue is with the government having absolute control over the economy. I would not want the most prominent politicians in my country having control of the economy. No matter how much I dislike capitalism.
Just put the people who work for a company in charge of the company. Have them elect who calls the shots. Also have them directly benefit from the company doing well. I guess that is like end-stage unions or smth. All power to the workers. Should be doable within capitalism, maybe, probably.
"All power to the workers" is a communist principle, though. It's the main political slogan of the communist manifest by Marx and Engels.
You can’t have a communist economic policy without being authoritarian. It’s human nature - once money is removed as a motivator, society breaks down unless you motivate people some other way (not being sent to the gulag).
The only thing that motivates you in life is money? How do you feel about that?
Eeehhhh there are plenty of Tankies around here that unironically simp for Stalin and Mao, (never Pol Pot for some reason though), and those regimes were frought with corruption and are often called "red fascism," so I wouldn't be so quick to say "we" here. "You" maybe, "me" definitely, but "we" is too strong of a word when there are plenty of people doing just that on lemmygrad right now, and lemmy.ml being a marxist instance some there as well (though the refugees mostly drowned them out now).
Mao and Stalin (though to a noticably lesser extent) actually had insightful things to say though. Mao's essays on epistemology are genuinely really fantastic. And that can be true alongside all of the show trials and sparrow murder which was genuinely really fucking bad.
Pol Pot meanwhile admitted to never having really ever read Marx, and his faction of the Communist Party of Cambodia was more concerned about Khmer ultranationalism and anti-Vietmamese sentiment that had been brewing over the course of French colonialism, then with anything to do with building socialism.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that we ought to take a nuanced, grounded view of historic socialisms that accounts for their success and failures, and doesn't fall into either mindless exoneration of awful shit, nor reflexively screeching "TANKIE TANKIE!!!" Every time anything vaguely socialist oriented comes up in discussion.
Stalin botched Marxism into an authoritarian system that suited him. It was successful and he sponsored other authoritarians that liked his ideas. Those are all about the concentration of power and have fuck all to do with Marxs ideas.