Awoo

Do you believe Democracy was "Upgraded" in those places?

100% yes. If you do not then you simply have no idea what the democratic structure was and how that resulted in more democratic outcomes. You have a singleminded attitude that the design of liberal democracy - a multi party system where the people that promise to implement the policies that the largest donors want end up in power, where they do exactly what those people want - is the only thing that should be called "democracy".

The soviet system was democratic. But this democracy has a different structure to the liberal democracy.

Instead of voting for leaders and then locals. The whole structure is built on smaller locals. Typically you will personally know the candidate. The people elect via agreement with the candidate or not. Then the members of the local soviet(council) vote on who will represent that council at the next tier up, and then those the tier up, and so on and so forth all the way up to the national supreme congress which then elects the politburo and so on. This is democratic.

You can't claim you like Cuba but that you dislike the electoral system in these other places. They're literally the same. All of them were based on the soviet system.

You ask me do I think they're more democratic and I ask you why 95% of the Chinese population is happy with and supports their government while less than 40% is happy with their government in most liberal democracies. Which of these systems is producing happier people? Which of them is producing a more democratic outcome in the eyes of its people? You can not use the racist claim this is propaganda, or brainwashing, because the study I'm citing for it specifically states that is NOT what drives the Chinese people's support for their government, conducted by Harvard, as a 30 year independent study.

I literally liked to Lenin's interpretation. Lenin literally followed that interpretation. How is it not Lenin's interpretation?

Re-read what I said to you.

Because they don't over time. The conclusion of WW2 gave us the ability to observe the development of nations over time split into two with one half being Communist and the other being Capitalist. West/East Germany, North/South Korea, pretty clear record there.

I've literally shown you a study that says the opposite read the fucking things you're being sent or you won't get another response because you are not participating in good faith, it is a waste of my time and you're a fucking dickbag for being so rude and disrespectful.

Bringing Korea into this is fucking absurd. The US performed a genocide there killing 20% of the entire population and razed the country to the ground, 95% of all buildings were turned to rubble, and the south was then occupied with a dictatorship regime that carried out mass killings. The south has been under US military occupation ever since. Their country is on its FIFTH republic because the occupation state has collapsed so many times and been couped EVERY time by US backed dickbags. The population of Korea wants to unite, but the north and south can not, because every attempt at doing so the US demands a seat at the table where they then scupper the talks. As for East Germany, it had no industrial base and was the least developed and most damaged in the war? You're not comparing anything on an equal footing at all. You want an equal comparison? China and India were both equal, roughly the same population size and level of development at the end of ww2. Which system has developed the country better and provided for the people?

Let me leave you with this. Do you without the benefit of hindsight in the 1920s would you have been a Czarist/Cossack or a Soviet?

100% a soviet???? Are you out of your fucking mind? Have you actually ever looked at what the state of feudal russia was under the tsars? Lenin and the soviet revolution are some of the most unambiguous heroes of history and only a complete and totally incorrect understanding of what Russia was before and after could lead you to think otherwise. You want to support an average lifespan of 30 years old and not the improvement to 70 the soviets brought? You're fucking stupid mate. Dumb as a bag of rocks.

Would you have fled to Taiwan or stayed in China in 1945?

Once again you're out of your fucking mind. The average lifespan in China was 33 years old when the CPC launched the revolution. The average lifespan improved DURING the revolution, civil war and invasion by the Japanese because the liberation communists were bringing to the population was better than the life they had before.

How the fuck do you think revolutions happen? How the fuck do you think communists get popular support? Magic? Through people just believing that things will eventually in the future be better? Are you fucking mad? People in these conditions support what will bring an IMMEDIATE improvement to their conditions. And that's exactly what revolution brought.

Your grasp of history is tenuous and you are completely and totally propagandised. You have never engaged with these topics in any critical fashion and it shows.

I think you may have meant to use a different adjective there.

Nope. If you don't understand what vulgar means in the political context you're demonstrating further lack of political literacy, particularly as "vulgar marxism" is a term any communist (as you claimed to have been once) should be quite familiar with. But I think at this point in the conversation you're realising just how obviously bullshit that claim is to any actual communists.

"Dictatorship" doesn't mean the same thing when Marx uses it vs what you understand the word to mean. Marx is talking about a dictatorship of CLASS. IE a large group of people within society. In liberal democracy the "ruling class" are the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, the billionaires and millionaires. They are the ruling class because when they led the revolutions to overthrow feudalism they designed the new system so that they would be the ruling class. That's how it works. A dictatorship of CLASS.

Marx calls for exactly the same thing. A revolution that overthrows the current ruling class and installs a new ruling class. When the bourgeoisie overthrew the monarchs and their aristocracy they installed themselves as the ruling class, Marx calls for overthrowing the bourgeoisie and installing the proletariat as the new ruling class.

This isn't a downgrade to democracy it is an UPGRADE to democracy. The current system only produces the results that the bourgeoisie wants. Socialism on the other hand with the proletariat in charge produces the results that the proletariat want.

My interpretation of it is essentially Lenin and Mao's interpretation of it, just with the benefits of historical hindsight.

No it isn't because your description above is fucking wrong. I'm telling you what Lenin and Mao's interpretation is literally right now. This is basic as fuck stuff.

Who controls that dictatorship has all the effective powers of a dictatorship and has the ability to make life for the people they rule hell.

You're acting like socialist countries don't objectively provide a better quality of life than capitalist countries when compared at an equal level of development lmao. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2430906/

Your understanding of any of these topics is incredibly vulgar. A warped and contorted understanding that you've only learned through extremely passive engagement with the topic.

Yeah so you're avoiding everything I said and injecting a completely different topic that you also don't understand.

Marx's critique isn't with democracy it's with bourgeoise-democracy. You would understand this if you understood even the basic bare minimum about marxist theory. All you are doing here is demonstrating that you do not understand the difference between what marxists refer to as a bourgeoise-democracy and what marxists refer to as a proletarian-democracy. Or if you prefer, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie vs the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marx's "opposition to democracy" that you are utilising for bullshit propaganda here is opposition to using the mechanisms of bourgeoise-democracy to achieve socialism (because they're designed for the bourgeoisie and to produce outcomes the bourgeoisie want) and instead advocates for revolution to destroy that dictatorship-of-class and install a new democracy of the workers, a new dictatorship of class but one instead run by the working class (the vast majority) instead of the former ruling class (the bourgeoisie, the vast minority).

These are incredibly basic 101 concepts that, if you were a communist as you claim, you would already be aware of and understand. You were not a communist. You haven't even read a pamphlet like the manifesto, let alone the Critique Gotha Programme that you're linking to. I have though. And to anyone that actually HAS read these things that you're pretending to have read you look like and absolute clown who is winging it.

I'm saying I don't believe you've ever engaged with communism. I don't believe you've read a single book. I don't believe you've even read a single pamphlet. I don't think you could give me a simplified breakdown of what historical materialism is and I don't believe you could tell me what the 5 basic classes are that marxists define, along with a simple 1 sentence description of their scientific definition. I don't think you were a communist and I don't think you know anything about the "historical record of communism" beyond what you have passively consumed from the far right wing fuckwads that you've surrounded yourself with and allowed to rot your brain. I'm saying that the confident manner in which you bullshit about these things is a severe personal failing.

All of these are 101 things that anyone who has actually engaged with the topic of socialism for more than like 1 single week would be able to answer instantly and easily.

I'm saying that your political opinions and knowledge of history is based on vibes that you have attained from the massive quantity of propaganda you uncritically consume and not from any actual meaningful knowledge.

Clear enough?

This is what happens when everything you know is based on vibes instead of actually reading any theory or history from primary source historians instead of third.

"Take me seriously" says man in absurd robes, silly hat and one of a kind noddy car.

Because the US has been embargoing it for 50 years to prevent it from getting everything it needs.

The UN regularly votes on the US embargo of Cuba, and only the US and its lapdog Israel support it.

Norway isn't socialism.

A few weeks?

Mate please check my profile. I have been here for 3 fucking years. Lemmy did not magically appear in a few weeks that is incredibly offensive to the sheer amount of work my comrades have put in to make it.

And calling their work "the invisible hand of the market" is also nonsensical. Because the forces driving its creation, and the rest of us communists that support it, are the destruction of the markets. There is not one single jot of profit motive involved in Lemmy. You seem to recognise some of the problems of capitalism but consistently come to incorrect conclusions about everything because you have spent no time whatsoever getting a real political education and understanding the forces at work.

And you fail to ask yourself what happens to your "market forces" alternative to reddit. In any scenario where the market is responsible for replacing reddit the market will also bring it back to exactly the same point of self-destruction through pursuit of capital. You will hurt yourself all over again.

You left reddit because of capitalism. What is an IPO? It is the launch of a business onto the public capital markets to release equity and to enrich its existing owners. What do all businesses on the markets operate on? Short term growth for the next financial quarter optimised to enrich their investors (shareholders) in the shortest amount of time possible.

Capitalism consistently destroys everything you enjoy and yet you defend it relentlessly while asking for long term thinking, which is not a feature of capitalism. When you wake up to this reality you might actually start to question "maybe the socialists are right about a few things" and spend some time with us learning what we actually believe.

That's not a socialist state. It's a capitalist state with welfare. If the political structure of the state itself has not been reworked to put the workers in power what you're describing is just a state where the bourgeoisie (who control power) have decided to do welfare, usually for their own benefit such as reducing revolutionary energy by providing the workers with concessions (the welfare state). That is social democracy.

You do not have socialism without overthrowing the hierarchy that places the bourgeoisie as the ruling class:

Capitalism = Capitalists in power. Proles repressed.

Socialism = Proletariat in power. Capitalists repressed.

Communism = No more classes, only 1 class because the bourgeoisie have been completely phased out.

Viewing it entirely in economics is incorrect. All of the above can be done under capitalism. The key difference is not what form of economics are employed but which class controls power and puts the resources of the state to use.

The capitalist state is a state where capital owners hold power and use that power to exploit more capital.

The socialist state is a transitionary state in which the workers have seized power and use the state to repress the bourgeoisie and put resources to their own use.

The communist state is what occurs when capitalism is entirely defeated, all nations are socialist, conflict is eliminated and material abundance is achieved, at which point states start to stop existing as the resources within them that are put towards repressing the bourgeoisie through violence are put towards other things when there is only 1 class in society.