Communism in theory vs in practice

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- Yeah, capitalist Britain, France, and America were terrible in their use of famines and genocides. The problem with capitalism is that eventually you run out of other people's land and food.
  
  Almost as if every economic system is capable of causing famines and genocides.
  
  Almost as if every person is capable of shitting their pants, and I will baselessly assume, does so regularly like me. As always, there are differences in degrees and causes. Outside of capitalism, famine actually correlates to not having food to feed people, rather than markets saying that food has to be wasted while people starve because it is not profitable to feed them (e.g. the Dust Bowl and Great Depression for American examples). Also ignoring how it was intentional in colonial powers.
  
  It's almost as if the material conditions of a determinate place do not change overnight.
  
  Yeah, as someone with Lakota, Irish, Bengali, Kurdish, and Iraqi friends and opiate and meth addicted family, I am not sure whether to laugh or cry at children of your kind. I am sure the 1990s and the introduction of capitalism was a great and prosperous time.
  
  American Capitalism? I invoked multiple genocides and political repressions that weren't American. I am sure that 1840s Hungarians and Irish, 1930s Bengalis, and 1990s and 2000s Iraqis are glad to know that capitalism isn't repressive or intentionally creating starvation because the people creating the repression and starvation said that they aren't. Even though China gave up on most communist ambitions post-Dheng and Cuba has been strangled by American blockades, both have not been nearly as active in war mongering as "Western Nations", nor as repressive, despite active propaganda about them. And Western repression is much more tied to their economic modes than other nations. You have to kill anti-war protesters (e.g. Kent State) because if not full colonialism, we need neo-colonialism, so pro-Vietnamese protests can't be tolerated. And we need to support Israel, so "anti-Semitic" a.k.a. anti-Zionist protesters can't be tolerated and have no rights, because of their ties to the military and arms industry. Such as Mahmoud Khalil, who needs to be disappeared and sent to an undisclosed location to try to push fascist anti-protest, anti-speech laws.
  
  Even though China gave up on most communist ambitions post-Dheng
  No they haven't.
  
  China did not abandon Communism, they pivoted from their Left-deviationism that was based in idealism, not materialism. The Gang of Four tried to achieve Communism through Fiat, despite the Productive Forces being far below the level for that to be feasible. They rejected markets out of a miral fetishization of Poverty in an entirely publicly owned economy, rather than for Materialist reasons, so they course corrected to Marxian economics.
  
  It was right-deviationism of using markets and foreign capital investment to build up productive forces.
  
  It was an adherance to more traditional Marxist economics than under the Gang of Four. Marxists don't believe you can develop the productive forces to the level where public ownership is better through fiat, or by decree. If you go back and read Marx and Engels, and even Lenin, they make it clear that they believed even in developed Capitalist economies, only the large firms should be nationalized, while the small firms should be allowed to naturally develop, perhaps with a bit of a push.
  
  What is the "civilised world"?
  
  What communist country did you personally live under, lemmy user in 2025?
  I'll also point out that tons of people all over the world are ignorant of how their own countries operate.
- Oppressing the former oppressors is necessary, and famine was ended, not caused, by Socialism.
  
  The 1930s famine was the last major famine out of wartime in the Soviet Union, same with the Great Chinese Famine, in countries where famine was common and regular before. Life expectancy doubled under Socialism in both the USSR and PRC as a consequence in the first few decades.
  
  Famines had been commonplace occurrences in feudal China and Russia, which the communist states brought an end to. And those final famines occurred under post-war conditions, and under disastrous crop seasons that affected neighboring states as well.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China
  https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000300150009-5
  
  I really didn’t expect lemmy to be already filled with russian trolls and tankies.
  We’re not trolls, and many of us are socialists. Actual socialists, not “capitalism with a social safety net” like Bernie Sanders or the Nordic countries. I understand if it’s a bit of a shock to leave the echo chamber that is imperial core corporate social media and hear different perspectives for once. Lemmy is “already filled with” socialists because it was created by socialists. You are in our anti-capitalist space.
  
  Lemmy is a free software, GNU (A)GPL makes no distinction between ideologies. Your "anti-capitalist space" is only in your head or at maximum on a few server instances.
  Also Lemmy creator last time I looked was no socialist but die-hard tankie, listing Stalin and Castro as his recommended reading.
  
  Okay, horseshoe theorist. I also would recommend Stalin and Castro[1][2][3], as would others in this conversation.
  
  Marxism-Leninism is the guiding ideology of every existing Socialist state. The leaders of some of these states have unique viewpoints that should be studied critically.
  Moreover, anti-Capitalism dominates Lemmy, even if Marxism-Leninism isn't the only manifestation of that.
  
  Communist policies played a part because Communists were in power while they happened, and the Communists ended the famine. I never made anything up.
  Lemmy has Marxists, the lead devs are Marxist-Leninists and some of the biggest instances are Marxist-based.

531 comments