Ceausescu was a very low bar, probably only undercut by Stalin, Hoxha and Pol Pot.

My family lived under the GDR (which also had a lot of flaws) but looking back now they’d have liked the economy to stay more on the communist side but with more freedoms, like freedom of expression and movement. They say that during Communism people were nicer to and more looking after each other than they are now under the more competitive Capitalism. Also the GDR was leading in terms of equal payment and women advancing on the career ladder. It also had a good network of public kindergardens and schools all reasons why a lot of East Germans in hindsight have mixed feelings about the unification and transition towards Capitalism (especially the neoliberalist Capitalism that meant the privatisation of i.e. the railways and hospitals).

Of course that came with the backside of it there being an inbalance (and de facto a two class system) between high ranking party members and the public, movement restrictions, harsh border controls (not just to the West but in general, I have been told if you looked funny at the border guard they would disassemble your car “to look for illegal stuff” and you had to reassemble it"), and ofc it being a spy state. But that was never intended by Marx so I wouldn’t blame that on communism but on their flavor of it.

Coming back to your comment tho I agree with the “nothing is black and white” section ultimately politics and economics always has to adjust to the current situation and if it fails to do so it’ll turn into a crisis.

Also I think that everyone is entitled to their opinion as long as this opinion doesn’t limit other people’s personal freedom. So I am sorry for what happened to your family as long as they didn’t intend to hurt others (which I assume they did not).

Personally I would love that land would be owned by the districs / communes (not on the state level but also not on the private level). What individuals should be able to do is lease land and structures on it from the local commune (with even lifetime leases possible and securities for the the person who leases the land.) On top of that basic services such as water, electricity, food, education, infrastructure, etc should also be owned by the public. The rest is debatable but in general I l’d say centralize where common grounds are needed (for i.e. standardisation) decentralise where possible and politics should be as open and transparent as possible in order to be accountable.

I agree with the middle section of your comment, and I think it’s very reasonable. It’s nearly impossible, and in fact, seems to not be the case, that any system currently available would be the answer to all problems of the present and future.

However, the opening feels manipulative.

First of all, maybe I missed something, but when was there communism in Romania? Communism, as in the definition - no classes, no currency, etc., not just a ruling party called ‘communist’. Last I checked that never took place in Romania.

Second, capitalism has killed and continues to kill anywhere between 100x more and 10000x more people than ‘communism’. But for some reason this is only ever used as a point against communism, and never against capitalism.

A lot more people around the world can easily say the same about capitalism. Their entire families are dead because of it. But you don’t seem to care, or notice. Which, and why is that, exactly? Because you don’t know them? Because they’re far away? I’d love to know.

And, I’m sorry to say, but the ending is just plain pathetic and selfish. If you don’t want to engage with people on a forum, then stop posting. Maybe start a blog and disable comments.

The exact same points you’re making could be easily made by the capitalist class. And if you cried about it, they might very well respond with:

Go ahead and downvote. You’ll never win an election anyway. I don’t even care.

What’d be your answer to that, I wonder. Although that may very much be hypothetical, because I get the feeling you come from a specific background that can afford a moderate stance on the socialism vs capitalism issue. Feel free to correct if wrong.

I recently learned a thing about the Great Leap Forward, the massive famine in China due to a mismanaged command economy.

Mao pushed for everyone, down to the last peasant farmer, to produce steel, which some accomplished by melting down their cookware. They did ask for grain, but only to be sent to the state. Mao expected the people would know to still engage in sustenance work to stay alive, but no, they patriotically sent their materials to the state, expecting that they’d get sustenance back. That didn’t happen, and there was mass famine.

In feudal times, this was called squeezing the peasants which liege lords sometimes did to quickly develop a war chest. These taxes were collected in kind (of raw materials, not coin or gold). The serfs’ regular work would not get done. There’d be food shortages, and significantly fewer serfs after the winter, but the lord would get his war. (Typically it wasn’t even his war, but that of his lord, or further up the chain. Lower-ranking nobles like barons and counts were obligated to provide fighting forces for dukes and kings. Something, something high lords playing their games of thrones… )

Back to Mao’s China, there were dissenters, but there was also a strong anti-intellectualism movement, the same thing we’re seeing in the states today. Administrators don’t believe in expertise and figure they can work economies, manage health and conduct wars based on vibes (and nowadays, memes). On the international stage, this results in getting totally played (and left behind) by the rest of the global community, the ones who do believe in experts.

There’s a reason that the US, for once, took educatiod very seriously (STEM, critical thinking, liberal arts, etc.) right after Sputnik. We saw we were falling behind and decided we needed to get into gear. The US would then freak out about the common folk questioning authority and trying to think for themselves, which they’re supposed to do in a democracy. But then, thinking citizens cannot be controlled.

I don’t think you necessarily hate communism. I think you hate incompetence. And as we’re seeing in the (very, very, capitalist-identifying) United States, incompetence is a plague that crosses all ideologies.

(And that’s a thing too. Ideologies might present a model for how things might work, but they shouldn’t be the goal, and when an ideology doesn’t achieve its mission, it should be reconsidered, revised and maybe abandoned. Supply side economics, for example, is an ideology. Collective prosperity is its goal. Allegedly.)

Was it a state? If yes, it was not communist

I am sorry for your family. Marxism-leninism has polluted communism

You can’t have your government owning everything and you can’t have the private sector owning everything.

There is a third way: cooperatives. Houses are owned by the people who live in them. Factories are owned by the people who work in them. Municipal infrastructure (water, electricity, internet, etc) is owned by the citizens who use them.

This removes the current need to maximize profit and ignore all other metrics. Nobody is going to vote for maximizing profits if that means the service they are using every day is getting worse.

There is no centralized government who controls everything. You still have market forces. But the people in control are not regulators or investors on the other side of the world, they are very close to the product and therefore have much better insight and more vested interests in the product succeeding aside from profit maximization.

Marxism-Leninism*

Might wanna spruce up on anarchist and council communism, those are anti-authoritarian

communism ≠ socialism

don’t let .ml hear you say that or the screeching sound they make will be ear splitting

Keynesian economics helped bring capitalism to the late stage. The central premise is to cause inflation so that workers are encouraged to invest in businesses, growing the overall economy. Which it did! The economy has grown drastically… but we don’t own it.

Keynes suggested that we spend the inflation money on public works, not guaranteed returns for people with so much money that they can lock it away in bonds. It’s an idea that requires a functioning democracy while constantly funneling money away from workers. We’re creating all these bubbles because people want to save for the future but everything is a scam. Keynes didn’t realize that what he was asking for was free information that we don’t have.

Keugman and other modern Keynesians generally mean well. But they’re incredibly dangerously wrong, and we never should have listened to them.

Well stated.

Anarchist add that the state works in concert with capital to protect property rights which are state enforced theft. Socialism can only be acheived by dismantling domination heirarchies i.e. capital and the state. Anything less will result in “aristocrats will succeed to contain the rest of the workforce, and work us to death like slaves at a sugar plantation”.

Could be finish.

Yayyy 2 of my favorite communisms mentioned (anarcho and council)

Ancoms unite! Non-hierarchically!

It can be forgiven when people overlook anarchist-communism - the anarchist-communism community is so busy setting up competing wikis that explain the difference between them and libertarians, them and anarchist-socialism and them and other anarchist-communists that they have no time to do any actual outreach.

Speaking of which, anyone want to help moderate my lastest wiki? This time it’s federated, which I think is really a reflection of the greater beliefs which we should all […]

And impossibilism etc.

Or finns, or poles, etc etc etc.

The geopolitical realities of the time were… well, let’s put it this way: everyone in Europe that was interested in maintaining stability and discouraging war fully shit the bed.

There was no credible alliance or mutual defense pact that the Finns were able to rely on to defend against the Soviets trying to, you know, fully annex them - the UK made supportive noises, but ultimately couldn’t get their shit together to make any difference whatsoever in the Winter War. Thus, when Germany, basically the preeminent land force in Europe at the time, ultimately offered an alliance to them to deter the Soviets, it was the only offer in the table; faced with such existential threats and only one choice that wasn’t effectively an eventual full capitulation to the USSR… they chose the pragmatic option. Honestly, I see the alliance of Finland and Nazi Germany around WW2 as a very direct result of the abject failure of the League of Nations, and more pointedly, the severe lack of credibility of French and British foreign policy, political will, and military strength at the time.

That’s not to say it was a good choice; it was simply the least bad choice Finns had in front of them.

a false equivalence almost on the level of nazi apologia

If by strategy you mean lots of amphetamines

More importantly they started the Continuation War in a full alliance with the Nazis after the Holocaust was ongoing and Germany had asked them to turn over Jewish people for extermination.

As Marx points out in Das Kapital, the capitalists will always capture government, defang the regulatory bodies, and then use financial shenanigans (fraud) for rent-seeking to make themselves insanely rich, but bringing their own economy crashing down.

This has happened across history multiple times.

The problem is barbed-wire. Barbed-wire is an early technology that allows large numbers of people to be controlled and contained by small numbers of people. We’re developing all sorts of other tech intent towards the same goal. You’ve seen some already, with the mass surveillance state, ALPR and the recent move to take down Flock cameras.

China and EU are also buying big into mass surveillance technology, as a means for the capitalists to keep the working class from organizing.

That is to say, so long as we allow for a plutocratic class, and don’t actively prevent it, it will pose a threat to democratic, rules based society. And eventually they’ll win permanently, right before civilization collapses, they retire to their apocalypse shelters and humanity dies off.

Capitalism is non-viable. We may struggle to find something else that cannot be corrupted, but the consolidation of wealth and political power is baked into capitalism.

We need something else.

a communist state doesnt exist. Marxism-leninism ≠ communism

The workers didn’t really own the means of production so far but they often had strongly improved lives during socialism. Look at the healthcare system of cuba or the rapid improvement of living conditions in the ussr after lenin took over.

A lot of the concepts capitalism is based on are deeply flawed which is why a weakened version of it will still lead to some of the same problems.

I agree, communism is a nice idea, but it doesn’t work because it didn’t factor in the greediness of people, so the system isn’t protected against people abusing it.

Greediness of people isn’t something inate to the human condition but one created and fostered by capitalism and systems of private property. Most of human history before agriculture was lived under a system of primitive communism where resources were shared by the tribe with little to no hierarchy.

Individualistic selfishness was a behavior created by the sectioning of private property for agriculture and the accumulation of surplus. It is a learned behavior, which means it can be unlearned. Unlearning it will require a drastic change in culture and ideals, but it is not impossible.

There are times in history where the people have freed themselves from domination like Barcelona in the Spanish civil war or the paris commune, only to have it snuffed out by authoritarians. The system can work, there’s just a group of people with a lot of resources who will do anything to stop it from doing so.

i’ll never understand this take. Socialism doesn’t work because of corruption and greediness so the best thing we can do is capitalism, which literally is based on corruption and greediness.

What about laws against corruption and greediness on top of a democratic system designed around production for human needs instead of the profit motive?

I mean on the one hand you have a system that breaks and ruins lives for most people if people work against it and corrupt it and on the other hand you have a system that benefits only a few and fucks over everyone else when it works as intended.

Saying socialism doesn’t work because of a few failed attempts is like the coyote dismissing every single of his ideas immediately after the first try and directly going to the next one except in this case the “solution” is to keep the system that has been shown for hundreds of years to work so badly that it is literally driving humanity towards extinction.

I meam you are not wrong in principle. What you mean with “capitalism with a shit ton of socialism” IS socialism. there is no capitalism with socialism because those two contradict each other. It is all about who controls the means of production. It is either a few rich assholes control production or the production is democratically controlled by society as a whole. The latter is socialism.

If you want markets and commodities etc on top of that, thats cool, can still be pure socialism though.

edit: outed myself as german “usw” == “and so on” 🤦

and of course 100% agree regarding fuck borders fuck states fuck fascism … that is communism btw 😁

Strong enforcement of Anti-trust laws. Higher tax for the rich. Start-up friendly environment.

Country without borders - Only someone who can’t be invaded would say that buddy.

Sure but the only people fighting them in WWII were the Nazis edit fair

I looked over your account since you mentioned it. I agree with most of what you say. The only weird thing is absolutely zero hate for Republicans. This is very suspicious. Perhaps you can clarify?

You know that people in the Sovier Union also faced consequences if they didn’t work, and did in fact get paid wages, right?

What makes people put in effort is a complicated mix of material, social and psychological incentives, and I don’t think sweeping generalizations like that are very helpful to understand anything.

Yeah that’s why the soviets were able to turned an agrarian backwater into one of the largest industrial economies in the world after like 40 years despite being decimated by multiple invasions. They just weren’t productive smh

There were plenty of issues with the Soviet Republic, just like with any other government at that scale. Production capacity itself wasn’t’t really one of those issues.

That sounds like conjecture rather than evidenced fact. Now I’m not gonna claim that communism is undoubtedly better (idk), but history has shown the USSR and China go from poor 3rd world countries with poor quality of life to 1st world superpowers with world-class production and vastly improve quality of life. At the same time, we can find examples of capitalist countries that have poor productivity, innovation, and living quality. So clearly it can be comparable.

This really just seems like the classic thought-terminating cliche of saying people are inherently best motivated by money, which is just demonstrably false. People do tons of unpaid work, even under capitalism, like helping their community or partaking in hobbies.