Don’t even get me started on the ones who try to argue that “North Korea is more free and democratic than the US”.
You’d think that them having an absolute monarchy would be enough to make even tankies think twice.
also the people that say socialism is fascism are the ones slowly taking our rights away.
You want to read what book? No we don’t like it. Who are you gonna have sex with? No we don’t like that…
Well, that or Marx purists. Marx believed that the transition between capitalism and socialism would include a period where the state was fulfilling capitalist roles and run as the infamous “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
He never quite seems to explain how democracy arises from said dictatorship, or the people’s recourse when it inevitably corrupts.
Ahh thanks for the great reminder for all the tankies about communism failing for China and all these nations so they had to incorporate capitalism and allowed privatization of industries.
USSR did it, China did it, Vietnam did it, Cuba is doing it.
hexbear users can’t see this comment, so it falls on my sleep-deprived ass to point out that socialist nations essentially have two options: 1) ban all capitalism and be banned from trade in turn, like Cuba and the USSR, or 2) permit some measure of capitalism, give the west its profits, and use that as leverage to gain access to trade, like China and Vietnam. You either play ball or get strangled to death.
There is a stage in the transition to communism called ‘the oppression of the proletariat’ aka ‘dictatorship’. Supposedly it should be a temporary stage before transitioning into a more decentralized type of government. As far as I am aware, not any communist revolution got beyond the dictatorship stage as absolute power corrupts.
Specifically “dictatorship of the proletariat”, which was basically an 1800s gothic way to say “direct democracy for workers”. Marx is somewhat infamous for the way he makes his ideas sound scarier than they are
And to clarify, most revolutions fail or adopt bureaucracy primarily to defend themselves from outside, capitalist influence, power corruption probably plays a part too but state power used by socialists is actually part of the plot
Very informative. I read the summarised work here that someone send me. And I have missed that nuance.
The vast majority of (Let’s use Vietnam as an example) is proletariat. So the vast majority of people are dictating terms to a small subset with different class interests. It’s nothing like the dictatorship in, let’s say the Netherlands, where a small group of capitalists dictate terms to the large body of proletariat, and the bourgeois political apparatus mediates in favour of bourgeoisie class interests. There’s no corruption taking place, just the necessities of market economics.
This dictatorship will naturally “dissolve” when there are no more other classes (bourgeoisie et all) to oppress, since it will no longer serve the proletariat’s interests.
Other than Fascists lying and claiming to be socialists. Because that’s something fascists do… they lie. All the time.
Or are you someone who thinks the “National Socialist Party” was socialists because the literal Nazis would never misrepresent themselves?
That hexbear instance is full of fascists claiming to be socialists LOL.
hexbear was unfederated for three years, are you saying they just sat around all that time pretending to be queer communists to each other with no audience? Would thousands of people really check in to a website daily or weekly for years just to do that?
I don’t think they are pretending to be those things. They truly believe themselves and their interpretation of Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, communism and socialist projects to be true and just.
The only issue is that they come from a specific strain of western leftist that got into the “uwu dank Soviet club” meme of the mid-10s and never evolved past that understanding of the people, projects, policies and states they stan like a fandom. They could take some lessons from the anarchists tbqh, but they’d rather post PPB and “liberals get the wall”. Very annoying.
Sure. Fellowship is an important part of maintaining a weird cult-like ideological stance.
Also we can’t ignore the fact that there’s some national interest juice behind this. China being a fascist country that’s claiming to be communist to maintain legitimacy (and maintain power for the elites in that country) means there’s significant resources that can be used to maintain the narrative that fascism branded as socialism is a good thing.
And dumb people love the idea that they’re the small group that is getting things right, it’s just the rest of the world that’s wrong. See flat earthers, qanon, etc. They get in their little community where (unlike the rest of the world) no one tells them they’re an idiot when they say their stupid bullshit. All they have to do is conform to the overall narrative the community is centered around and they don’t need to do any critical thinking, and gain a sense of acceptance despite being an idiot.
