Commiunism

For some reason my dumb ass read united front as popular front back when i wrote it from work, mb mb

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Reminds me of Romania right now where the centrist candidate that won the presidential elections (and tons of people on here celebrated because it wasn’t a reactionary right-winger) refused to ban and straight up endorsed legionary and fascist organizations to “fight communism”

Article in Romanian, though using machine translation will get the general idea across

I’d say it’s not really that bizzare - logically yes, it doesn’t make sense if one is some liberal always preaching about “le nation” (with anti-immigration basically crippling economic growth), but it’s a good move when we’re talking about opportunism. A lot of people nowadays are reactionary, you can sway a lot of them to vote for you or continue supporting them if you commit to xenophobia, fearmongering and so on.

“Immigrants are taking YOUR JOBS and will make you UNEMPLOYED, so vote for me to get them all out and give the jobs to national volk!” “Immigrants are all CRIMINALS, look at this one crime they committed so vote for me to get the vile scum out!”

Right isn’t as unified as you might think. There’s plenty of right on right violence, especially when a channel that operates under the veneer of enlightenment or “smarts” does something that goes against it, like recent JP Jubilee appearance.

Left is also a very wide umbrella, not some team, so when someone is being idiotic, giving flack and “infighting” is good.

Thought it was obvious given how “every person in the world” and “practical” was in the same comment lol

Ok but have you considered that if literally every person on the planet did this, climate change would immediately be fixed??

You’re just a HATER of practical solutions… /s

Capital is very important, but it’s also a massive undertaking, it literally takes years to finish if one engages with it properly, taking notes. I’m still getting through it myself slowly myself and it did debunk a ton of “leftist assumptions” I had.

Though when it comes to wages, how they work and how they are exploitative, instead of Capital I’d recommend Wage Labour and Capital. It’s only around 1 hour read, and gets to this exact point much sooner as a result.

What you’re describing is essentially Keynesian economics which we had till the 70’s or 80’s, and it did fall out of favor, replaced by neoliberalism that we know now.

The reason why was essentially capitalism - historical conditions why high rate of profit that allowed keynesiasm disappeared (such as war which tends to lead to massive profits via destruction of capital, still expanding global markets and US hegemony over the economy), so the rate of profit fell. People lost jobs, wages couldn’t be raised and state couldn’t really do much about it without pumping a ton of money via intervention, so instead what we got was attacks on labor organization, privatization and deregulation.

The only chance to return to that kind of economy (and by that I mean if everyone collectively forgot about neoliberalism too) would be through another world war and its unprecedented destruction of capital. Even then it’d be temporary again until rate of profit declines, as it does with capitalism regardless of economic system.

How the hell do you have 4k comments in 2 months

We had liberal politicians fight fascism in the past, and it was great!

Not only did they welcome fascists who opportunistically saw where things were going with open arms, but also forced workers to accept monarchists and reactionaries who repressed and brutalized them constantly as comrades in arms and 2 days after Fascism fell in Italy, Fiat for instance had ordered guards to fire into insubordinate workers if they didn’t start working in 5 minutes.

Workers got so fucked that you could upload the retelling of the events on PornHub

Congratulations, you’ve written probably the most hitlerite comment I’ve seen on Lemmy so far, and I’m genuinely concerned.

Instead of investigating what makes people act this way in terms of material conditions, incentives and values that are promoted, maybe the way power is organized and how it leads to inevitable opportunism or this being an inevitability of a class dictatorship that we have now, you instead go for the “undesirables” angle.

People didn’t vote for the candidate you wanted because they were irredeemably evil. What do we do, kill all MAGA voters now for having the wrong human archetype? Prohibit them from voting? That only seems the natural conclusion from everything you wrote.

Communism is changing the state of things entirely, not merely changing or redistributing as your conception says - what you describe is closer to social democratic welfare state which is still fully capitalist.

The world is complicated, when it comes to economics you can go into the minutia all day and night but to summarize what communism actually is and how it differs from capitalism in simple terms, it’d be:

• The transformation of the mode of production. Instead of right now where you produce commodities to be sold on the market and that essentially dictating what to produce, goods would be specifically produced to fulfill needs, basically what is socially necessary for a society and its people to thrive, and all this would be coordinated via economic planning. The current system is incredibly inefficient, we overproduce a lot, workers can’t physically buy all the goods on the market leading to waste or companies competing with its own unsold goods which decreases profit and leads to crisis where industry no longer becomes profitable, leading to unemployment. No more profit, no more things to buy, just make what people need.

• The abolition of money and private property. Not to be confused with personal property such as your home or car or toothbrush, access to wealth accumulation and private ownership of factories or land inevitably leads to monopolization, exploitation of labor (with factory ownership) or just parasitism where a person contributes nothing to a labor process, yet has the full right to everything produced by said labor.

• Kind of implicit in previous point, but abolition of classes entirely. If there’s no way to privately own means of production or land, or accumulate a mountain of money that you can invest to get another mountain of money and snowball to oblivion, that would eliminate the aforementioned capitalists, landowners - no person would be superior to another due to their economic caste. Of course, a level of hierarchy would remain like foremen managing workers, but economically they’d be in the same position of having their needs met.

Hopefully that makes it easier to conceptualize that a different kind of system can theoretically exist that isn’t capitalism - after all, we went from antiquity to feudalism to capitalism, all production modes of whom are drastically different, so why not communism?

Granted, we’re yet to have communism given how it must be global, or at least on a very large scale. Capitalism itself is a global system, it relies on global trade and countries that decide not to participate (e.g. go autarky) suffer heavily, and communism which is primarily a “meet the needs” type of system cannot interact with global capitalist trade given how it produces and values goods in a much different way. Also, a single country cannot really have access to all the necessary resources to meet the needs with, so global cooperation is required, and this cooperation would ensure safety too given how prone Capitalism is towards imperialist wars.

As for other questions like “how would government look like” and stuff - that’s mostly relevant for the transition towards it post-revolution given how this kind of society is simply unachievable in a capitalist dictatorships, liberal or otherwise, that we have today. While communism and its ideas are quite frankly weakest that they’ve ever been in terms of support, there’s still multiple parties around the world, each having a different plan for the government.

Sorry for the wall of text, and do keep in mind that this is an oversimplification. Transition towards communism is equally as important, but I didn’t want to go full hog explaining it given how it’d make it even more unreadable.

It’s easy to blame Russia and China, but it’s not really that. It’s clear that this is a symptom that something is wrong, and that is stagnating or worsening living conditions, unhappiness with how society operates and people hearing that turn to reaction.

Left doesn’t have an answer given how marginalized they are, all you get are center-lib parties that pretend everything is okay or that focus on liberal middle class issues. It’s no surprise

Nobody asked for one, but I got a pretty good explanation for why this is what why this is happening.

ML’s on lemmy are predominantly of the “deprogram” variety (in reference to the deprogram podcast and r/thedeprogram being quite large on reddit), and generally they’re a laughing stock given the narratives they parrot that are so de-attached from the material reality and their various mannerisms when it comes to arguing. One of the larger narratives is that the west and western imperialism is horrible (which is true), and that whoever is opposed to it must be a force for good or something, which manifests as uncritical support for China, Russia, Iran even though they’re both imperialist bourgeoisie states too.

I see some people claim that they’re some paid Russian shills, which is wrong. They do it for free, with a genuine belief because that’s what their community says and does.

To be fair, most leftists also don’t know what socialism is lmao

A system where:

• Goods are produced to fulfill human needs via the help of central planning as opposed to commodity production where the “invisible hand of the market” dictates what to produce

• Goods get distributed to fulfill needs rather than “rationed” through universal commodities like money

• Private ownership gets abolished which gets rid of the parasitic class that extracts value out of land/labor

A system where the entire mode of production changes, and the present state of things gets abolished aka communism/communist mode of production though most of these core points that I outlined (it’s not everything) can also apply to anarchism.

It’s easy to write these ideas off as “having provably failed” given the history, but failures at building communism have nothing to do with these economic aspects or “human nature” or whatever, but rather political and material situations. USSR didn’t achieve communism because of majority of its population being peasants as opposed to urban proletariat, and you can’t really fulfill the needs of people if you haven’t developed the productive forces to produce said needs, and if you stay on capitalism long enough, you’ll start getting opportunists who want personal power and wealth.

Other post-Stalin regimes that called themselves communist (such as Vietnam, Cuba) only did so to gain protection from the Capitalist west given their ex-colony status, so they adopted Marxist-Leninist aesthetics to gain the protection of USSR - materially, they weren’t communist at all though given their repression of the workers and independent labor unions, mode of production remaining capitalist and class divisions still going strong.

People are shaped largely by material conditions of our world, and liberalism does encourage horrible qualities that we can see doing active harm today such as individualism, competitivism, selfishness, greed, dogmatism, etc. A great proof of this is looking at today’s tribes that still exist and see how they behave much differently than us in the civilized world - they put more emphasis on community, mutual survival rather than individual property ownership.

Therefore, the goal is not to refuse change because “human nature” or whatever, but change material conditions of our world to change our behaviors and values as well. Kind of a catch 22 situation, but given how we transformed our “nature” over the tens of thousands of years constantly it is possible.

This wouldn’t solve anything though, apart from slightly improving the amount of surplus value workers get back from their labor. Call that which you propose in any way you want, but it’s still capitalism - the mode of for-profit production remains the same, goods are produced as commodities to be sold on the market, wage labor remains fully intact (which implies labor exploitation) and so does capital accumulation meaning you’ll still have capital concentration, and given how it’s still capitalism, all of its contradictions remain such as overproduction that cause regular crises.

The kind of reform such as this one wouldn’t even have the advantage of being “easily, peacefully implemented” given how it would take away the ownership from the current capitalists, who currently hold the class dictatorship reigns. A revolution would be needed, but at that point it’d be better to change the present state of things entirely.

Yup, though I lowkey prefer it because EU posts tend to attract more Hitlerite takes and comments. There’s just something about other Europeans that make them have an elevated level of nationalism