How about if I’m not bothering anybody then don’t even arrest me?
I misunderstood that comment above. My bad.
What do you mean? People get arrested for possession of weed for example that they plan to consume by themselves, not bothering anybody. Then they get locked up. You rather lock them away, than try to rehabilitate them? This applies to so many cases. Of course there are cases where the verdict says prison but at least try to keep people out of prison. But wait the prison system is a corporation trying to make money.
I actually doubt that phones are the major reason for a post like this. There are many reasons that you could fill in that only happen to some schools but phones happen to be the only one that applies to nearly every school. For example, at my school, our lunches have been cut down to shit 15 minutes at most, and if you buy lunch, it’s much less. We usually have them call 5 minutes left. Sometimes they will say the kitchen is closed, sometimes they can’t because people are still ordering.
Is startreck.website federated with hexbear? When sh.itjust.workes got federated by hexbear a few days ago, about a third of all was tankie memes and discussion from hexbear. They mostly stayed to their communities, but sometimes I would come across comments on memes from .ml.
No a third of posts were people complaining they saw someone that might have been a tankie and demanding to live in a neo lib echochamber, I barely saw any actual tankie talking points
I’d estimate maybe 10% of posts were responding to the 35% of posts. But that’s just rough estimates. The tankie taking points were in the comments, the memes were often just saying America bad in different ways.
You must not have been reading a lot of comments. It was getting borderline absurd for 2 days. They sound alright by description, but all they did was brigade the comment sections spewing crap at anyone a cm off of their ideology
I spend all my time in the comments, there were annoying pigpooping GIFs and some trash comments but also some well reasoned and interesting comments from perspectives not often expressed in popular media. It’s not like the comment sections never had trash comments and nonsence before.
I agree they were some well reasoned and interesting comments from perspectives not often expressed in popular media. But they were perspectives praising Russia’s and China’s horrible actions that I don’t really want to deal with. I gave some of them reasoned answers as well, but I would rather not see that junk daily. Thoughtful and well reasoned doesn’t mean it can’t also be horrible destructive tankie garbage.
I wonder if this is why I’ll see a post has a larger comment count than the comments I can read, too.
If you've blocked someone, that person's comments and all comments replying to theirs are hidden from your view. This is my only guess why you might be seeing this. The comment count you see on your instance should be accurate, since it only counts comments it knows about and it doesn't know about defederated ones.
There was a wave of tankie on Reddit and here during the reddexit. It was like, “where the fuck did stalin/mao/pol pot loving, atrocity denying weirdos come from en masse?” But you’re right the shock was bigger than the phenomenon.
Blehh yeah it feels a little astroturfy, all the push to conflating leftists with china-loving authoritarians. Makes a man wonder if libs actually stand for anything at all.
It doesn’t help that the tankies are trying to push the idea that “Tankie is a slur against all communists/leftists!” The word “tankie” was invented by communists as an insult against those specific “communists” the cheer on brutal oppression of civilians – particularly when those civilians are communists themselves.
The irony is tankies hate the “wrong kind of leftist” just as much as their other ideological enemies.
I’ve known many tankies (myself included) and I’ve never met a single one that thought it was a slur, but ok. Those civilians were fascists uprising BTW.
Yes, the famous “fascist uprisings” where students demanded things like a return to democracy with free elections, putting local communist politicians in power in the interim, end of occupation by a foreign power or state military, end to media censorship and oppression of dissidents, and the return to local rule.
Those are the things tankies defend. They self identify as communist, because anyone can call themself a communist. Tankies are the “communists” that blindly celebrate the instances of failure and oppression instead of denouncing or learning from them – that is what separates a tankie from normal, sane communists.
I have seen my fair share of tankies here, so there definitely is a presence of them here. But I also do think a lot of the complaints come from people who assume any leftist user or post is also a "tankie."
Like I do see a lot of leftist memes posted to [email protected], which might be where a lot of the complaints are coming from. Likewise there has been a lot of drama with hexbear federating with a lot of communities that were previously shielded from them.
I’m talking about hexbear as tankie specifically. I haven’t really seen any reasonable leftists on that instance. They use lib as an insult to give an idea.
This is something that I consistently see that people still haven’t gotten used to with Lemmy and other federated sites. People often complain about what they see on their feed or sometimes attack an OP for reposting. I assume people just aren’t thinking about it since we’re all still used to Reddit and using a centralized platform where everyone can see the same stuff. But with Lemmy, it seems that people forget that their feed will be completely different, based on which instance they are in.
One of my roommates in undergrad was from China, and whenever he went back to China to visit his family, we literally couldn’t contact him because all the messaging apps/services we use are blocked in China.
Another family friend of mine lived and taught in Macau as a professor for a while, and he explained how he had to get a VPN just to access the regular internet.
Any government that locks down access like that is not one worthy of admiration. It’s insane that people defend the CCP.
You have to understand that there are a lot of people that genuinely like the CCP because under them, there are a lot of people that went from the likes of farmers and factory workers to a serious middle class, with all the improvements to the quality of life that entails. You'd be surprised what people are willing to forgive in exchange for this.
The CCP monitoring program also extends far beyond the country borders as well, and while they would not dare do an extraordinary rendition for pissing off the CCP, many expats still have family within Chinese borders that are completely fair game for the CCP to do as they please with. So many expats won't risk it. The CCP are already known for fucking with families just because some of its members have expatriated. And they don't have a limit to how far they'll go. Concentration camps are nothing new there.
Its quite insane actually. I was the second child my mother gave birth to during the one child policy. They would’ve tried to force her to get an abortion if they knew. But she hid the pregnancy until she gave birth to me. They couldn’t justify killing a child that has already been born, so I lived, but they still made my parents pay tens of thousands of RMB (¥) to get legal documents like birth certificates.
My mother still have pro-ccp views. Like wtf. But everytime she start spewing shit like that, I’ll just tell her “If you support the communist party, do you agree that I shouldn’t have been born?” That usually shut her up.
Also, this community has one of those “Marxist-Leninist” as a moderator so I’ll make an archive of this.
It’s very first-world of you that access to garbage like Reddit or Twitter is apparently more important than the single greatest reduction of poverty in human history—and even more typical that you are either ignorant of or deliberately ignoring the hundred years of precedent that says China is utterly correct in believing the West would abuse the lowering of the Great Firewall to try and foment reactionary revolt.
The midjourney image is impressive, but not good enough to stand up to scrutiny. It gives off uncanny valley vibes. I’m not an artist, but I suspect it’s because the skin looks a bit too plastic/smooth.
Midjourney is awful at hands. But it can do incredibly convincing work with better prompts. You can see what people are making if you join their discord channel
“After getting out of prison for a crime I didn’t commit, I was going to live with my grandpa. But he died of cancer right as I arrived and I was forced to live on the streets. One day during a freezing rain, a kind woman offered me a free house and these two $20 bills. Just goes to show that life is okay sometimes, hang in there people!”
You obviously don’t know the lore behind this pic, i don’t blame you since it was on Reddit like a year ago, the guy is probably dead or in prison by now
OK, but in terms of privacy, I can degoogle my phone by installing one app which is even in Google’s play store (Netguard).
Edit: Maybe refute instead of downvote? Netguard lets you block all apps from sending data, including all system apps and Google Play Services.
I suspect the issue people have is that it is not possible for the average user to confirm that a block like that is working 100%. Seen as google control the OS they can just route their traffic around a block like that if they wish. Sending the data over 4g would mean you don’t even see it on your network traffic logs. There are a number of reviews suggesting it intermittently lets aupposedly blocked traffic through too, but the biggest issue maybe the way it works. As far as I can see, it acts as a VPN, but that means it won’t work well with other VPNs, which is another way the traffic can leak. Basically, installing an app like that doesn’t degoogle your phone at all, it just makes you feel like you’ve stopped your data leaking.
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to link to a filtered set of reviews on the play store, but If you go to the store, find the app, go to the reviews and filter by 1 star you’ll see them. Some of them just don’t understand how the app works, as you say, but there are a number that are harder to ignore. The thing ism if it is acting as a pseudo VPN, it could easily leak when the OS suspends it (for power saving, switching network modes or the like). Honestly, I haven’t tested it, it doesn’t do what I need (I’m on another VPN a lot of the time), and I wouldn’t trust it very far myself, but if it does what you need, that’s what matters.
Thanks for the reply. I’ve now read through all 1 star reviews on the play store and am pretty confident that all of them have no idea what they’re talking about. Various popup messages during installation and use of the app explain in simple terms how to avoid all the issues these users were facing.
I personally observe with my own eyes many many times where Android turns off Adguard’s VPN for a split second when doing various Google things like receiving messages in Google Messages.
I haven’t been able to pinpoint it but my observation is that the disconnect/reconnect happens when a connection is trying to be made (ex. RCS message incoming), and I suspect Android is dropping the VPN to make its own connection. Sounds paranoid, but I’ve been carefully watching it happen for a long while.
I’m not sure if you’re dense or just pretending. You talk about a piece of software and I refer to their faq. I’m sure you have researched your claims and read up on this software….
OK I’m now assuming you talk about Netguard’s FAQ, not some others from Google, Android or Apple (all of which would have been equally likely in the context of this thread). Yes, I’ve read them. I’ve also read all the 1 star reviews of the app. I know about the apps limitations and am still confident it blocks Google from spying on me. Now what?
I don’t get it and I’m much more comfortable asking for clarification here than anywhere else.
Explain?
Edit: I appreciate all the answers. I’ve been calling myself “liberal” just to differentiate myself from “conservative” and I think that’s not quite right. I need like a test or something to help me find the right words
The point is that liberalism and facism are intrinsically linked. Liberalism does not seek to change the world and stems from philosophies instead seeking to explain it. Accordingly, liberalism is a philosophical justification for the capitalist status quo. As such, when contradictions in capitalism accentuate with time, such as those between classes, liberalism turns to fascism. Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds, because the liberal is a closet fascist when times are good; when class struggle poses a threat, it clamps down. You can see this throughout history.
That a poor, simplified explanation, but I hope it helps.
In all fairness, liberalism did change the world already. It replaced the old status quo of absolutist monarchism and was literally revolutionary in its time. It’s simply a matter of 250 years of civilizational advancement leaving it behind at some point.
The point is not about impact but intention. Evidently liberalism, for all its flaws, certainly has had a significant impact. The progressive forces 250 years ago where for the most part already proto socialists. Fundamentally liberalism has been reactionary, even in the case of feudalism and monarchy, liberalism has tended to air for maintaining monarchy; such as constitutional monarchies where one can find leberals having preference for this rather than republics. This can be observed in historical cases such as France where many liberals wished to maintain the monarchy, but the contradictions and progressive forces where too great. Rather than a progressive force, I would contend that liberalism tends to be reactionary to development and progressive forces. Today this can be seen in the liberal leaders of developing countries handicapping themselves and their sovereignty by maintaining economic relations to the benefit of the imperial core. See ECOWAS and ‘preserving democracy’ as of late.
This is not exclusive to liberalism, the radicalization and individualism in tough times is part of human nature. When your family’s livelihood is at stake, you’ll stop caring about society and only care about yourself.
And there will always be people who’ll pose as the saviours of the homeland and champions of the people, just to gain power and enrich themselves, while fucking over everyone else. This is how Mussolini got to power, how Hitler got to power and how many other dictators did too, including communist ones.
Btw, the dictatorship of the proletariat, aka communist dictatorships are just fascist states in disguise, concentration camps and totalitarian bullshit included.
I love how people use this kind of metaphysical argument, invoking human nature and such, and then have the nerve to call Marxism idealistic.
Marxist logic is literally about eschewing idealistic metaphysical arguments and focusing on the material conditions that influence history. Go read the Misery of Philosophy, people ffs.
Guys, you can keep jerking off each other all you want, but pseudo-scientific arguments are simply not sufficient to prove your point.
Science persists over millennia, builds compasses and then ships and then rockets and now computers. Science makes whole societies vanish or survive. Over the course of too many years.
Now let’s look at communism. It’s not science, it’s a socioreligious sect, of the kind that Lucian of Samosata was ironic about, as those were plentiful in his time.
Individuals in struggling societies don’t always atomize, many revolutions occurred due to degradation in conditions. When the cost of fighting for change is less than doing nothing you will fight, and you will fight with others, or else you will quickly fail and be forgotten.
Curious what your definition of facism is. With a few exceptions, communist inclined states have always lead to unprecedented economic development, education, improvement of quality of life, etc. If you take all cold war propaganda at face value, you can not deny the development seen in such states; when balanced by alleged atrocities, you see a stark contrast to colnialist nations that too committed atrocities but with little to show for it.
I find the surface level historical criticisms of communist states, even if applied at an equaly superficial level, is applied to capitalist states, you would find a staggering contradiction. Maybe you should read more. Add to your socioeconomic calculus the fact that no communist state benefited from the same starting point as colonizer countries, and try to be critical of this. Consider that none of these communist states had the benifits of colonization, and when compared to other developing countries did remarkably better.
There is no contradiction. Both kinds of states are bad. Economic growth is not a “level of country goodness” meter. If it happens through horrible and harmful means I don’t care about it.
Economic growth itself is just a number, development is what matters. In addition and as a part of development I also specifically mentioned education and improvement of quality of life. You could add literacy, housing, levels of nourishment, and much, much more.
I won’t argue about history or its interpretations with you now. Just consider the path to development wealthy capitalist countries took, which involved slavery, colonialism, genocide, brutal worker suppression, and perhaps the worse working conditions in history during industrialisation.
You may attribute many horible things to communist countries. I might argue much of this is exaggerated by the media of the anti-comunist country you live in. Even if it is all true, developed capitalist countries did the same to themselves, and other peoples around the globe.
Then consider the development communist countries have had compared to undeveloped capitalist countries. People can have better lives, that is what matters.
I don’t really understand what kind of point you’re making, though. There are plenty of economic and political systems that can reach all the development and improvement to quality of life and literacy you want, yet they do it through horrible, brutal and harmful means. You yourself would be opposed to attaining these things you’re talking about through colonialism or slavery, or even through capitalism as I’m sure you’re also against social democracy like I am. My argument is that the means communist countries used to get to these ends are bad enough that I don’t care about the ends they reached. Just like I would never care about the ends reached by colonialist means.
I am not denying capitalist countries didn’t suffer from the same problems or didn’t commit the same or even more attrocities. This doesn’t excuse anything though. I am opposed to these things by principle, no matter who does them. And I’m not going to pick between two systems that do the things I’m against all the same, but one leads to prosperity quicker. I’m not playing that game.
I would rather not say for privacy. But my country of origin is irrelevant to my points. I do not support it in any way and I try to rely on it as little as possible, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s also not a colonial power at all.
There are plenty of economic and political systems that can reach all the development and improvement to quality of life and literacy you want, yet they do it through horrible, brutal and harmful means
I also want my entrance into this convo to be respectful but I don’t know how else to ask this question; can you give examples of such systems?
I would say the biggest example is social democracy. There is no denying it brings great improvements to quality of life and general happiness. They are obviously not enough to us radicals, but they do exist. Greater healthcare, greater education, greater prison systems, less homelessness, etc etc etc. But we of course know the dark side of all of that. The colonialism and “soft power” behind it. We know that, because it is still ultimately capitalism, it doesn’t eradicate the misery, it just hides it away. It makes other people have it instead of them. And we also know all of those nice things are merely concessions given by the ruling class that can easily be taken away at any time. Thus, if such a system brings improvements through means like those, I don’t care how great the improvements are, I don’t support that system.
We can also use what I’m saying to refute the fascists who say “oh, at least the trains came on time” “oh, at least everyone had a house” “oh, at least there was less crime”. Rather than going into the long and most probably ultimately pointless task of proving none of those things were historically true to the person saying them, I prefer to simply say “I don’t care. Even if that was true, if it was achieved with fascism I don’t want it.”
Btw, the dictatorship of the proletariat, aka communist dictatorships are just fascist states in disguise, concentration camps and totalitarian bullshit included.
You clearly are not educated in communist ideology and philosophy. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” does not mean a literal dictatorship of a singular person or even a small group.
The dictatorship of the proletariat means that the entire working class, as a people, collectively own and run the entire state. As opposed to what we have in the world today, which is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie–either outright dictators, monarchs, or increasingly the tiniest fraction of the ultra rich controlling everything.
One person controlling a state with an iron fist, like Stalin, is not a dictatorship of the proletariat. The working class controlling the state is. It is called a “dictatorship” not because a singular person controls it, but a singular class. The largest class. The class of almost everybody but a fraction of a percent of outliers.
No country on Earth today has a dictatorship of the proletariat, because only the monied elite get to control the government. Whether it be through bribery (lobbying), captured government, literal monarchies (even if “symbolic”, they still have massive sway given their expansive wealth), literal dictatorships, theonomic regimes, elite and rich leaders of military juntas, etc.
There’s a reason that only the rich attend summits like Davos. There’s a reason nearly every country has golden passport/golden visa schemes which let the rich effectively buy citizenship.
The ultra rich, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, have strong class solidarity. That is why the world is the way it is.
Well, I’ve always seen the dictatorship of the proletariat argument to defend the fact that every communist country ends up devolving in a dictatorship.
If you remove that excuse, then I might start thinking that the issue is with communism in itself and we might need to look around for a new theory.
Then you clearly have not understood the argument.
Btw even the CIA stated that the idea of Stalin being some megalomaniac dictator is nonsense. Turns out your entire premise is based on you not getting the topic in the first place.
Or maybe you haven’t? If no communist country has the dictatorship of the proletariat, a democracy or even a decentralized government like a communion of soviets, then what does it leave? Just a normal, shitty dictatorship (or pseudo-monarchy in case of NK).
Still, I don’t understand the cheering for brutal dictators. Why the fuck would you what that? Saying Stalin wasn’t “actually that bad” is akin to saying that about Hitler or Mussolini or Pinochet or any other brutal selfish dictator. Fuck that.
These countries never claimed to be communist. They called and call themselves socialist.
All of them Were and are Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Which can be noticed by billionaires getting sentenced to death for real evil shit, instead of going free like in out Dictatorships of the Bourgoisie. I recommend Lenins “State and Revolution” as a easy introduction.
Communist Party of China. The vanguard party of the chinese proletariat, made up of scientific, revolutionary socialists (commuinists).
That person was a ultraleftist. In other words a person who treats communist theory as religion, not science. Their opinion goes against the one of over 90 million communists of the CPC alone.
It’s an expression that nods to the tendency of liberals to empower, enable and ultimately align with fascists against socialists, communists and the labour movement generally. There are a great many historical examples of this phenomenon, but among the most prominent are:-
The German SDP aligning with the remnants of the German Imperial Army and supporting the proto-fascistic Freikorps as it savagely suppressed the rising of communist revolutionaries at the end of WW1 in order to preserve German bourgeois rule
The reintegration of the defeated Nazi and Imperial Japanese leadership into anti-communist organisations and state organs in the new west German and Japanese nations by the triumphant capitalist powers at the end of WW2, including leadership of NATO by a senior commander of the Nazi Wehrmacht and leadership of the rebuilt Japanese state by one of the most brutal colonial oppressors from Japan’s old regime.
Unapologetic support for Augusto Pinochet’s murderous takeover of Chile by a wide range of liberal powers and voices, most ardently by figures such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the former of whom considered offering him political asylum in the 80s and the latter of whom publicly expressed outrage when Pinochet was arrested and subsequently subjected to justice in the international criminal court for the crimes he committed against his own people.
It’s not that you are completely wrong in anything, but:
at the end of WW1 in order to preserve German bourgeois rule
I’ll just inform you here that German aristocracy and “bourgeoisie” are usually used as antonyms, not synonyms.
Also Germany was starving, the logic was that they can’t afford more chaos, even if it means conservatives.
Soviets did the similar thing with GDR and Hungary and what not in the Eastern block. Though of course they preferred their existing communist buddies who somehow survived the 30s and 40s.
USA wouldn’t have such still already existent friendly factions, so they tried to grow some new ones, initially from people who’d be moderates in former regimes.
I would like to add that liberal well of people and large land owners which also labeled themselves as somewhat liberal in Italy before the Fascists came to power were quick in allying with the Fascists and enact violence against socialist and communist groups and structures they supported, for example unions. The liberals did use violence to shut off that political and economic enemy, yet they didn’t then to fight the fascists and also didn’t ally with socialists to stand against the fascists.
You can find very extensive studies about that which use voting shares before the take over and alike.
To put it bluntly while liberals espouse liberal values when the situation is rough they - or be it people with means, economic, political, parliamentary or party mandates - regularly did chose to fight socialists, anarchists and communist to not rock the boat and to not be uncivil.
It makes for a snappy one liner to try and equate common non-communist ideologies. It effectively reduces extraordinary different ideologies with extremely different views on just about everything that isn’t private property to the same thing.
It’s as ridiculous as saying “potatoes are practically tree bark, because they’re both plants that rely on photosynthesis” when you’re discussing what to eat for dinner.
Lol that is so spot-on I can’t believe the parallels never occurred to me. One exception though, I really had good burgers in such a place in Haarlem / NL.
run by four interchangeable lumbersexual white guys in their mid 20s who are having the time of their lives and one white chick in her late 20s who is just so over it.
One side hates him because he tried to kill their god.
Another side hates him because he missed.
And another side hates him for attempting it in the first place because all it does is make an already very unstable political situation even worse no matter the outcome.
I mean, define “popular politician” / " unpopular politician." Does the fact that the media constantly shoves all these yahoos in our faces make these political figures popular? Unpopular? It’s all corrupt and I hate every mention of ANY politician’s names, while some people choose politicians to cheer for like it’s a fekkin sports team.
152 is the sum of the + and -1 votes 82 % were + So 18% were - So 18% of + were canceled from the - So what we see is the remaining 64% positive, which means that 100 % are 237 votes (42 downvotes, 195 upvotes)
Interesting. My app allows me to have them separate, so I see all the up separate from all the down, and always have. I refused early on to use anything that combines them because I want the full picture of engagement.
If you use an app, check through the settings and see if it’s supported (all the iOS apps I tested have it). Idk about web, might be something to look into tho since the data is all there, so it’s just be a matter of handling.
That’s actually pretty easy once capitalist USA is abolished and thus no longer violently interfering with the internal affairs of socialist countries.
I am not so knowledgeable so forgive my ignorance, but why do most communist States have this knack for massive intelligence gathering on its own citizens? Are the concepts of personal privacy with freedom and working towards collective good so mutually exclusive?
Again this is not sarcastic, I genuinely wish to know.
PS I also hate capitalism from the core of my guts.
Are the concepts of freedom and working towards collective good so mutually exclusive?
Not necessarily, and I also disagree with the commenter above that without the USA suddenly the world would be singing kumbaya.
The problem was dictators seizing power in turbulent times. In Russia, Stalin abolished the soviets (A.K.A worker’s councils, kinda like mega unions) in the Soviet union. I think that says a lot.
In Romania (I’m a bit better equipped to talk about this one), things were a bit different.
The original communist government (1945) was essentially a Russian puppet state that drained the wealth of Romania via war reparations. Stalinist purges happened often during this period.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Romania got a degree of independence and things were actually looking up. Society in general (infant mortality, gender equality, literacy, standard of living, etc) were all improving rapidly without Russia draining us and making decisions for us, and we didn’t have a surveilance state of the scale that would come later. This was a period marked by political battles between the liberal communists and the Stalinist communists for control, with Stalinists commiting some pretty horrible atrocities (if you want nightmare fuel for some reason, look up the Pitesti experiment).
Then, 1965, Ceacescu took power. During his early years, he actually looked like a liberal (EDIT: Just to be clear: I mean a liberal communist. This means more individual freedom for citizens in a communist economy). He allowed some emigration, some free speech, and even spoke out about the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. This, at the start, did not look like a typical authoritarian communist state. Unfortunately, Inspired by the “amazing” society of North Korea in 1971, he started to make changes in the structure of society to be more like it, which included an expanded Securitate. 2 years later, harsh austerity policies to repay foreign loans led to a massive drop in living conditions, which led to riots, which led to crackdowns. Things rapidly spiralled, and the Securitate were given more and more power to keep control.
This then became the police state that everybody thinks of when they think of communism. A combination of too much power in 1 person’s hands, an authoritarian imperialist overlord (Russia), and rising backlash against dropping living conditions.
“we didn’t have a surveilance state of the scale that would come later”
For all of you that preach communism please make an imagination exercise just for a minute and imagine what kind of Authoritarianism you ask for when you will have a neverseen kind of Technological Communism, using current available surveillance technology (in place) like your smartphone for example (which I know a lot of people don’t know what is its real use…)
In Russia, Stalin abolished the soviets (A.K.A worker’s councils, kinda like mega unions) in the Soviet union.
Are you referring to the constitution of 1936, which established 4 layers of representative councils (local, regional, national, union) as Stalin dissolving the Soviets?
why do you think that is worse
why do you blame it on Stalin? Seems like a thing that was written and implemented pretty democratically.
No, I’m not talking about the 1936 constitution. I meant specifically the disempowerment of local and union soviets.
I’m no expert on Russian history, so I may be misinformed about this, but as far as I understand it he put in place a series of reforms that stripped power from the local level and empowered the central committee.
This is partially true. Issues arose from trying to marry central planning with localized production, so there were a series of reforms that shifted the balance of control. This didn’t end worker representation, it was a major shift that changed its form as the USSR industrialized and grew beyond where it once was.
Was it perfect and entirely democratic? No. Was it far more democratic than Capitalism? Absolutely, without question.
Shifted power in the sense of the local branches were federated within the same structure now, but honestly that seems more accountable and democratic?
Because once the dictatorship of the proletariat is installed it needs to defend itself from counter revolutionaries who want to reinstate class inequality. Actually similarly to how the US and other capitalist states are heavily surveilling and infiltrating communist and other anti capitalist groups in- and outside of their own countries.
It’s less that Communist States have massive intelligence networks on their own populace because they are Communist, and more that states kinda just do that. American privacy violations are horrifying.
The “difference” largely comes from bourgeois media overplaying the bad elements and underplaying the good elements of Communist projects, while downplaying the bad elements and overplaying the good elements of Capitalist projects.
Combine this with the widespread fact that the US intentionally infiltrates and destabilizes states that even flirt with Socialism in the Global South, with hundreds of assassination attempts on figures like Castro, and it starts to seem more reasonable.
Media nah leave it, advertising I’d absolutely be down for. Advertising and Marketing are essentially the science of tricking our brains, and when that lever is exposed to capital you get enshittification and misery.
Basically when you do a socialist revolution your national bourgeoisie and international bourgeoisie are willing to crush it through any means necessary. You unfortunately have to use the machinery of the state to protect from bourgeois subversion, or you get shit like Indonesia, Chile, overthrow of the USSR through executive coup, etc.
Thank you all for the valuable insight. I can’t reply to everybody individually so I am replying as a collective. From what I can surmise, basically, the state becomes the sort of mega Corp that capitalism inevitably breeds and data mining becomes legal as you are the law and data mining is necessary to hold power and prevent further revolutions.
It makes me wonder, how do new economic models come to be? Does it always have to be Einsteinian, that one man is a genius, or can economics do collective progress like modern science. Obviously economics has more artificial hurdles to overcome, but we should have something better by now when we know that both systems suck. I don’t know, I am just a random guy on the internet
BTW, correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that the root cause of these problems is one human having enough power to decide life and death of another human. Like maybe due to our origin by subjugation of other species, but people holding power over other people is creating a huge crap fest. Plus there is the worst inequality of all… Inequality of BIRTH.
Honestly,i dont know, most dystopias come about because of some persons dream of utopia.
That’s an interesting take, wanna tell me more? (I’m sick right now and my brain cells don’t function well enough to think for myself but that’s unironically an interesting take)
well I meant that most business tools have a free/affordable tier or competitor, there’s little structure holding back a profit-sharing model in terms of infrastructure
Shit, we have examples or socialized markets that run whole economies. We don’t need to go far… Shit enforcing the current rules equally would change the world…
Because communism requires everyone to be willing to work for the betterment of society, not money. But unless everyone (or at least almost everyone) does that, it doesn’t work.
Don’t use mushroom ID apps and don’t trust random guidebooks from Amazon, they’re probably AI-generated crap.
The deadly mycotoxin orellanine, which is present in Cortinarius rubellus, the deadly webcap, may not cause symptoms in those who ingested the mushroom until one or two weeks have passed – after detectable traces of the toxin are already gone, and late-stage kidney failure has already begun. Connecting the sickness with certainty to a misidentified wild mushroom that was eaten weeks earlier with no obvious ill effects is not always possible.
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