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  • I can't believe they choose North Korea out of all places

    • They love authoritarianism, they're bootlickers, so they latch onto Russia, China and North Korea. They completely ignore real communist countries like Cuba or Vietnam.

      • They love authoritarianism

        The reddit lemmy situation shows that people don't make the right choices on their own, at least not without the right education.

        Which other options do communists have to change society?

      • Cuba and Vietnam aren't exactly shining beacons of democracy

      • Cuba is also quite authoritarian afaik. Just not the warmongering kind.

        • So is Vietnam. It's an authoritarian one-party state with no political freedoms, no free press etc.

        • yeah, but that's actual communism, so tankies don't want to talk about them.

          • Is it though? I don’t think so. Authoritarian communism is an oxymoron, despite what most people think.

            • How is it?

              • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_society

                A communist society needs to be stateless. Therefore authoritarian communism is an oxymoron. Is that what you were asking?

                Now, whether this type of society envisioned by Marx is even possible is a whole separate question but that has no bearing on the fact that no so-called “communists” have ever achieved it.

                • So what are the Soviet Union, Mao China, Vietnam and Cuba?

                  • Hello, communist here, No. Those places are NOT communist.

                    In fact, even they admit that they have not achieved communism, and communism is (from a marxist perspective, although there's much feuding about this) meant to be a gradual process after a revolution. These places haven't even achieved socialism.

                    The general idea is that there have been modes of production throughout history, first hunter gatherer, then agricultural feudalism, then capitalism, what communists believe is that the next step will be socialism. The reason they believe socialism will be next is because capitalism is defined by a class struggle between those who sell their labour and those who use others sold labour to profit. The next step is therefore to not have a class struggle between these two, the various ideas for what that might be like are socialist and communist.

                    Socialism is specifically when the workers own the means of production, communism is to take it yet another step further and abolish the state, currency, all forms of class division, etc.

                    Those are states claiming to be BUILDING communism... whether or not you believe them is a whole different story. I personally don't, I think it's POSSIBLE china actually might someday although probably against their governments will, but that's a story for another day.

                    As for why Communists support these countries?

                    They believe that these authoritarian policies are a necessary evil meant for building communism, they do not believe that the evil things these countries are doing are communism, they don't support the evil things these countries are doing, they just believe that they have no alternative in a world that is trying to crush communism, from their perspective all of the people with power, the bourgeois, are trying to prevent communism from taking hold, and these are VERY powerful people.

                    I personally believe it's incredibly silly to assume that a government has your best interests at heart just because they say so, which is why i'm not a tankie. I hope this helps your understanding of what they believe.

                    • Sounds like your entire argument is based on nothing but semantic and personal opinion as to what true communism is.

                      Good luck trying to change society if you claim 'But that's not real communism!' every each time

                      • Sounds like your entire argument is based on nothing but semantic and personal opinion as to what true communism is.

                        Would you like me to cite marx...? These are not my opinions. These are the opinions of marxist scholars... who... defined marxism and communism in the first place?

                        these aren't arguments they're statements of fact about what communists believe...

                        also of course they're semantic, all conversations about the meaning of words are semantic??

                        "semantic /sĭ-măn′tĭk/

                        adjective

                        Of or relating to meaning, especially meaning in language."

                        Good luck trying to change society if you claim ‘But that’s not real communism!’ every each time

                        What? No, the claim is that they're trying to build it, never that they just magically will achieve it. This argument doesn't make sense unless you don't even understand the claim being made.

                        Communism is quite clearly defined as a stateless, currencyless society without class division... we aren't denying that without reason? We're denying it because it definitionally doesn't match it, and can't hope to... because of the natural progression of history.

                        Please watch this video:

                        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrBRV3WK2x4

                        Or learn about what "dialectical materialism" means so that you can actually understand what you're arguing against well enough to actually make an argument against it.

                  • They’re just undemocratic totalitarian states where the government has unrestrained control over basically every aspect of society. Overall, they’re in the same broad category as other dictatorships. There’s nothing particularly special about them other than good propaganda. Some of them did have stronger welfare states but I don’t think this makes them categorically different.

                    • Are Hexbear, Lemmygrad and lemmy.ml communist?

                      • Yes, but only because they truly believe these places are building communism and that the evils they are committing are necessary evils towards that goal, and that in the long-term that goal is worker ownership over the means of production in a currencyless classless society.

                        Whether or not they're actually supporting communist governments, whole different story...

                      • Well, not by the above definition, but that can’t apply to individuals since it describes qualities unique to groups of people and their relations.

                        So we get into a bit of a semantic dilemma here. Conventionally, communist can have two distinct meanings. One, describing an economic and political system, is the one I cited above. This is the most appropriate definition when speaking of nations or other large, autonomous societies. We could, in theory, assess whether these instances operate as communist societies in miniature, but it seems fairly clear they do not. And it’s not clear they really could, given their reliance on broader social systems. Indeed, many have argued that communism is only possible as a global system. If true, this could explain the failure of any existing or historical nation to reach this standard.

                        However, “communist” has also frequently been used as a term to describe people who advocate for or seek to build the above society—or at least claim to. So in that sense, users on those instances could be reasonably described this way. But this gets very messy. On the one hand, we could simply accept their statements on the matter. However, that would mean accepting that some dishonest people would be labeled communists despite not really matching the above definition at all. On the other hand, any standard to separate out such charlatans would require us to know their true intentions and perhaps even the reasonableness and effectiveness of their political actions and strategies.

                        Is an abolitionist who in every concrete action supports the institution of slavery really an abolitionist? Many so-called communists behave similarly with respect to the state. They claim their end goal is a stateless society, but at every opportunity they defend and expand state power, violence, and impunity. I don’t see how this will ever lead to a stateless society. So these questions are very difficult to answer, and some may even be fundamentally unknowable.

                        So TL;DR would be I don’t know, maybe, some probably yes, others probably no.

          • Some of em absolutely love to talk about Vietnam, particularly Luna oi.

    • If they can fool someone thinking NK is good, they can scam them easily.

156 comments