I cheerfully install kitchen cabinets made by cheerful Vietnamese communists and then I tell the homeowners that they have helped to support a Marxist regime that was once oppressed by capitalist Americans.
It’s no wonder they suck at “converting” people, they know nothing about how socialism works. Nevermind the fact that they see it as “converting” rather than just having an open discussion, I can almost guarantee these people will immediately swing around the “no actually soviet union was based” or “nono you dont understand, china was mega based they needed to starve out the population” in a discussion once they lose their patience. If you ever get a chance to talk to these people irl, try to have a convo about a stateless society. I can speak from personal experience, when you bring that up, their mind goes blank, and they will start to sound less like a communist and more like a right-winger.
These are the people that give socialism a bad rep.
For them “socialism” is binary. Either it’s rampant authoritarian dystopia or modern capitalism.
They reject nuance and the varying levels of social policy that can be applied even to capitalist styles of governing.
“Direct” “Raised in America”
do you have an alt?
Weird username
Nah, I get it.
The thing is that it’s not even really “socialism” that the Chinese guy is is complaining about here. He’s complaining about the authoritarian aspects of the Mainland Chinese government, which is not the same as socialism. And the fact that the tankie can’t understand that is just… I don’t even know what to do with it at this point.
The CCP’s authoritarianism stems in part from their attempt to implement the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The concept itself is pretty weird.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat
But it was never that, from the instant Mao gained any real hold on power in China. He subsumed the entire movement, and fundamentally corrupted it, in much the same way that Stalin did.
you gotta understand something about tankies: they think that’s a good thing
Oh, I know. It’s why I tilt at their windmills: to provide the counterpoint, in hopes that more susceptible people will see more than just the dogmatic Socialist Alternative hardliner viewpoint. Genuinely, I think those types do far more damage than they understand, especially in well-educated-median populaces such as Boston, when they bring their fucking Mao + Stalin silk screened Soviet flags to literally any fucking rally. If it pisses me off, as a person who’s very socialist and leaning even more so by the second, then I’m sure it’s alienating FAR more people than it’s calling to the banner.
for sure! that shit pisses me off. for a lot of people those symbols of their oppressors. all those say to them are “pick a genocidal freak and get in line” when what most of us are communicating is “what if we didn’t with genocidal freaks all the time?”
You put it way more succinctly than I did lol
How can someone corrupt what was made to be corrupt lol? Lenin and Engle’s empowerment of the state against the proletariat could have never ended any other way. It’s the same brain rot that right wing Libertarians espouse, just from the other side.
Out of control government, out of control businesses. It’s the same picture.
I don’t know much about the Chinese revolution/civil war, but it wasn’t Stalin that turned Soviet Russia authoritarian; it was like that from the start. Stalin simply consolidated power within the already authoritarian framework of one-party rule. It could’ve been Zinoviev or Trotsky that came out on top and Soviet Russia would still have been an authoritarian hellhole. It might’ve been a better authoritarian hellhole or a worse authoritarian hellhole, but none of these guys were advocating for abolishing the Cheka (later the GRU) or holding new elections.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is just democracy. It’s just the people getting to govern themselves instead of a select Elite few. There’s really nothing weird about it, the weird thing is thinking that a small closed-knit group of authoritarian Elites can ever implement the dictatorship of the proletariat because by definition they are not the proletariat.
It’s not “just democracy” when it explicitly prescribes a one party state.
mandates the implementation of direct elections on behalf of and within the confines of the ruling proletarian state party
The democratic part is only within the ruling party, the one that claims to represent the proletariat.
Notably, the dictatorship of the proletariat isn’t meant to be an actual dictatorship. Marx saw feudalism as the dictatorship of the aristocracy, capitalism as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, so by analogy socialism (or the prelude to it, at least) would be the dictatorship of the proletariat—rule by the people for the people. It’s not meant to be a dictatorship in the way we use that term today.
True, but it prescribes rule by one party (the party of the proletariat) alone. In any possible practice this rule can only be held by a party that claims to represent the proletariat, a claim that may or may not be true at any given time.
They brag about all the theory they’ve read. Even as they expose how bad their reading comprehension is. And they think it’s a flex.
It’s amazing that so many people who claim to be socialists miss that despite Marx stating it pretty clearly in one of his shortest and most accessible (and widely read) works.
can we read that quote here?
We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.
knowing tankies some probably take that as destroying democracy
Well, not quite - we don’t consider it a dictatorship because the proletariat is the largest class by population, but we would recognize it as such if the proletariat were the minority (e.g. in some kind of near-future highly-but-not-fully automated society.)
The tankie would easily be able to convince their friend if they said China is never going to convert to communism, but communism was tried by lots of indigenous tribes and it worked great.
Tankie is not an anarchist…
Well there’s the problem!
An actually communist society where everybody has equal influence would be a direct democracy.
Authoritarianism is the enemy of the communist utopia the creators of the ideology dreamed about.
Communism has the same problems as the Free Market.
It doesn’t prevent selfish people from fucking it up completely for everyone else.
Ok grandpa let’s get you your pills.
The commies are gone, we won the red sca~ i mean marketplace of ideas
Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaah direct democracy is pretty awful too. The problem there is that most of the people have no understanding of what they’re voting on. You don’t want every single person voting on every single issue, unless you want a society that’s bogged down in details and backwards. What you want is to find experts that actually understand a subject, and appoint those experts to deal with the issue. Which, in theory, was what we had with various gov’t agencies, before the systematic defunding of them. E.g., you can’t rationally expect the average person to understand all the ins and outs of climate science/collapse, or what policies/steps are required to prevent it (minimize it at this point).
But the problem with that is that you can easily end up with a bureaucracy that doesn’t answer to anyone at all. Which, if they’re actually all experts in their given area, and genuinely working for the best public outcomes, isn’t bad, but can seem bad. And if they’re not experts, then it’s actually bad.
What exactly is the basis for your argument? Sounds like US defaultism
My basis is: read what i fucking said.
No single person can rationally have a thorough understanding of every single issue facing a country of 1M+ people. An engineer with expertise in electrical systems shouldn’t be expected to have a reasonable understanding of public health policy, and expecting people with no understanding of a <<thing>> to make good decisions about it is folly.
How do you feel about democratically elected parliaments and ministers?
Generally okay, but they shouldn’t necessarily do the will of the people, when the will of the people is wrong. (Which is, BTW, an objectively slippery slope as well.) We can look at history and see that Bernie Sanders in the US has consistently been working for the LGBTQ+ people to have the same rights as cis- and het- people, even when it was wildly, deeply unpopular. (Which I’m old enough to remember; there used to be strong public sentiment against allowing people that were LGBTQ+ to be teachers.)
A good leader, IMO, is someone that is intellectually curious and honest, willing to change their beliefs when given new information, is able to incorporate new information appropriately into their worldview, and knows people that has the expertise they lack in order to get good direction. E.g., I don’t expect all leaders to be experts in every bit of policy, but I do expect them to find people that understand the things being legislated, and can evaluate options as objectively as is reasonably possible.
But.
No system is infallible. Every system can be broken and abused, or function outside the intended parameters. The goal, IMO, should be to create systems that are highly resistant to being broken or abused, while still trying to serve the people as a whole effectively.
Bernie is also very consistent with his views
Take a moment and realize that “tyrrany of the majority” is literal propaganda to make stupid people throw away their freedoms and embrace a tyrannical minority.
You shouldn’t repeat Capitalist propaganda, it has no substance
Human beings are perfectly capable of being their own masters.
That’s an incredibly stupid take, esp. since RIGHT FUCKING NOW the majority of people in the US and UK are opposed to transgender people having equal rights, and it wasn’t until less than 10 years ago that the majority thought that gay people should have the right to marry the person they chose. If you polled in Sweden, Denmark, et al., you’d probably find that the majority of people are opposed to Muslims immigrating to their country as well.
The tyranny of the majority is absolutely alive and well; what you’re talking about is a utopia, which is literally ‘no place’.
Lol where do I start?
The “majority” you think exists is the result of bias polling.
Your “representatives” decided for you that trans people arent real. So great representative democracy you got there.
You’re now sitting there taking it instead of participating in reality. You now have to fight for the influence that would be guaranteed to you under a direct democracy.
Authoritarianism is the enemy of the communist utopia the creators of the ideology dreamed about.
Can you give an example of this? I’m curious
The inspiration of Communism came from the idea of Utopian Socialism, which is the free, equal, classless, moneyless utopian society that is the end goal of Communism.
An authoritarian state controlled by a dictator, like the ones .ml tankes worship, can never be classless, free, or equal.
Yeah China produced more billionaires than the USA since the pandemic. Tankies go mum when this is brought up. This is hardly “classless and equal”.
tankies seem wildly unaware of deng xiaoping’s purge of maoism and leftism in China
Tankies on China are very much ‘just trust me bro’
China is a state capitalist country. Russia is a capitalist country.
Do you tankies actually say this? Because the last time I looked on their channel they did not do that. They might be relative about how horrible America is, since we are a hegemon and we are imperialist in nature. Everybody knows China is a state capitalist country. Even tankies.
Communists believe in state capitalism, but billionaires existing under communism is oxymoron. USSR imprisoned and/or killed farmers who were deemed kulaks, or slightly rich, for simply owning two more animals or few extra inches of land. Mainland communist China is the complete opposite.
direct democracy
That’s one way it could be done. It could also be a republic or a parliamentary system.
Direct democracies suck.
Has there ever even been a direct democracy?
We could easily do it today with an app, but historically i don’t think it’s been done.
There have been very close contenders. I like Australia’s democracy.
I think it’s much too susceptible to populist authoritarians. One of the nice benefits of representative democracies is that representatives don’t want to give too much power to the head of government, because that removes their power and let’s the next party have more power.
Ok so no, we have no idea how a direct democracy would work becauase we’ve never tried giving that much influence to individuals.
Take a moment and realize that “tyrrany of the majority” is literal propaganda to make stupid people throw away their freedoms and embrace a tyrannical minority.
You shouldn’t repeat Capitalist propaganda, it has no substance
Human beings are perfectly capable of being their own masters.
It was a thing in ancient Athens, and they tended to elect populist leaders who had a lot of power. Populism has given us people like Hitler and Trump, so I really don’t think that’d a road we want to go down, because a sufficiently popular tyrant can just dismiss democracy.
My ideal is a small, representative government with strict constitutional limitations on power so people can just go about their lives and be their own masters, as you put it. Oh, and with a certain amount of wealth redistribution baked in to care for the poor.
What do you mean leader?
Direct democracies don’t have representatives
A direct democracy can certainly have an executive, they just don’t have a legislature, because they are the legislature.
Communism doesn’t “work” with anything but totalitarianism
Lazy propaganda
Totalitarian planned economies exist today, they’re called “Walmart” and “Amazon”. You think they’d stop functioning if people had more of a say and didn’t have to piss in bottles anymore?
Share the crack.
I wonder why extremists hate liberals so much. They all talk of liberals with such disdain.
Liberals are capitalists first and foremost. Profit over human rights every time.
Who isn’t profit over human rights every time?
Its actually quite simple. Fascism is not a bug of capitalism, but a feature. If theres an economic crisis capitalism tends to swing against marginalised groups in order to stop the working class from revolting against their true oppressors. If you finally want to defeat fascism you have to defeat capitalism.
cause all non capitalist, especially countries have been the best countries in the world to live in, with best freedom indexes, most civil rights, happiest people and no mass murders, tortures, deaths rapes etc at all.
Just dont look at any real facts or history. Only consume propaganda from authoritarians.
In the early 1900s the workers of the world were beginning to build the framework for the democratic collectivization of resources and labour. Elites considered this such a severe threat that they were organizing their own conferences on how to deal with it. This was stopped in most countries with one of two methods: concessions (like The New Deal) or fascism. Welfare or fear-mongering austerity politics.
To put this another way: some capitalists conspired to promote and ultimately install fascist authoritarians to fight socialism because it was in their class interests to do so. The various banana republics and other economic colonies of imperialist nations? Installed by capitalists. The forever wars that no one even wants? Believe it or not, also capitalists. These are not the moves made by freedom-loving people lol.
So I guess I should ask you: where are you consuming your propaganda from?
okay commie mass genocide apoloigist.
lol this is the problem with liberals, they believe everyone else is reading propaganda except them.
You do know, that communism and authoritarianism are two completely different things? Communism by itself is neither authoriatarian, or democratic. A communist world aims at dissolving all borders to achieve global equality without any form of higher governance. This of course is something thats quite unlikely to ever happen. A totalitarian regieme is directly contradictary to the pure idea of communism, which is that everyone should have the freedom to support (or not support) society. Any form of violence (no matter what type of violence) to force people into a set system is therefore contradictory to these ideas. Just because we didnt see very good examples of communism (maybe cuba, but I dont know that much about it, so I cant really judge) this doesnt mean, that communism itself is an inherently dysunctional and bad system.
Also, we have seen much more violence being emitted from capitalistic states, even if they claim to care about human rights. Every year the EU pays quite a significant amount of money to Lybia, so that their coast guard stops refugees crossing the mediterranian sea, causing hundreds of deaths and trapping those who get “rescued” by the coast guard in a subhuman system, where rape and torture are normalised.
This does not mean to invalidate the harm done by self proclaimed communist regiemes, but to show that shitty practices are done by all kinds of different people.
If it fails every single fucking time it is not a working system. If capitalism leads to bad wages and terrible house prices, communism leads to mass murder.
We have perfectly fine working hybrids, that are proven but seems like commies need their mass murder mix.
The United States was literally founded on a capitalist genocide.
The US is the most capitalist and the greatest abject failure.
Do not confuse capitalism with commerce. Commerce improves lives; capitalism seeks to destroy them for personal gain.
Capitalism in crisis leads to right wing populist fascism and it is the liberals via the ratchet effect that give rise to authoritarian control for the capitalist class. Just wait. The liberals are too busy making investments in AI to bother with our silly rights. And you’ll see Trump will win a third term if he lives long enough. I mean, if you have framework, historical knowledge and you’ve paid attention long enough, you see the same reoccurring patterns. America is an imperialist nation and fascists are the useful idiots of empire. You know, we’ll see how this goes. Eventually, you know, it’ll get real enough for you to wake up and smell the coffee. If you’re comfortable, you won’t probably see it from… the tankies point of view. Oh, also. The United States supported Hitler during World War II. Tell me I’m wrong. https://ohdbks.overdrive.com/ohdbks-clermont/content/media/3778967Hitlers American friends
You’re absolutely right yet for some reason everyone here hates it.
That’s a long way to say “just read theory bro”
Thought-terminating cliche.
Lazy canned response.
It’s because they’ve written off the populists as worthless and instead focus on the PMC liberals who are prioritizing DEI over class. Liberals see themselves as being closer to the capitalists than the filthy poors.
The truth: populists are way easier to convert than liberals because their class interests are the same as yours. They’ve been told lefties have dumb priorities but if you come in saying “jobs and families matter more than bathroom drama” they’re going to give you a chance.
Bathroom drama is a thing that the right wing populists made up out of thin air.
I don’t give a fuck who made it up, I want democratic control of the economy. Anything else is secondary to that.
Liberalism is the old establishment. They want an extreme alternative to that. So of cause they do that.
the region where Hong Kong is
Can’t even just say Hong Kong? Does that make us sound too independent or what?
Mentioning Hong Kong means that China is weak
It is kind of sad since Hong Kong hasn’t really been independent for years
Maybe they meant Canton?
Wouldn’t they just say Shenzen then? That’s also a huge city many people know, and it’s on the mainland.
I don’t like how they go around trying to convert people. They are honestly a lot like evangelicals.
they are like linux users who are trying to convince people to join the evil.
basically consevatives, they sound alike, talk alike, and believe alike.
It seems like they both agreed that there is no middle ground/compromise so they’ve got that going for them.
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