L take, communism and socialism don’t work and never will. There’s a reason every communist or socialist country has failed or fallen back into capitalism for the masses and authoritarianism for the top.
“During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.” Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
How dare teenagers not become Neoliberals while growing up in a late capitalist hellscape where climate change can’t be taken seriously because it isn’t a profitable problem to solve.
Honestly though, how many of us would know about how the government completely screwed the people in New Mexico living near the Trinity blast site, without movies like Oppenheimer and Sunshine?
Got a friend that works at AmBev. Was telling me their profits went up because most the people outraged over the whole Bud Light thing just switched to other, more expensive AmBev brands. Yknow, because they're fucking idiots too angry to even check who owns the brand they drink.
I mean, I suppose maybe if you went all the way back to Eisenhower, who had his own whole of issues to boot anyway, you could say they were still respectable and had values, but like Nixon started the whole “Well, when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal.” shit.
…and you’d still have to be ignoring how absolutely bigoted most average people in the US were most of it’s history. Like what about the Disco Demolition Night riot in 1979, a fevered rejection of an art form that was primarily made by minorities by young white men? It wasn’t just the leaders who didn’t have good values.
Rolling Stone critic Dave Marsh described Disco Demolition Night as “your most paranoid fantasy about where the ethnic cleansing of the rock radio could ultimately lead”. Marsh was one who, at the time, deemed the event an expression of bigotry, writing in a year-end 1979 feature that “white males, eighteen to thirty-four are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins, and therefore they’re the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. It goes almost without saying that such appeals are racist and sexist, but broadcasting has never been an especially civil-libertarian medium.”
It’s really incredible just how quickly the needle has moved on racial and sexual acceptance. If you go back and look at edgy comedy that has a racial component from the early 90s you can see just how far things have come.
The classic example, Blazing Saddles of course has the plot of the new sheriff in the old wild west town being black, and while a lot of the jokes and exact verbaige wouldn’t fly today, you can tell that it didnt come from a place of prejudice but simply racial acceptance has improved so much these days. But the part that absolutely aged the worst was at the end there’s a fourth wall breaking gag where all of the cowboys accidentally leave the Western film set at the studio and find themselves on the set of a musical, and there’s a series of very off-color gags about queer folk in theatre including (straight) male actors overplaying “gay” and feminine traits as part of the joke. This scene quite clearly did not come from a place of tolerance and hits very differently now because of it. Gay men are 100% the butt of the joke in that scene, and not the audience.
You can also tell how recent sexual acceptance is with how certain milestones are so recent. Legend of Korra which aired in 2014 ends with the main character entering into a relationship with another woman, something that was absolutely groundbreaking in childrens television, and that was less than 10 years ago!
A lot of LGBTQ+ people despair unnecessarily at the state of discourse around LGBTQ+ rights. Looking at the arc of history, we’ve gained rights at an astounding rate. The Stonewall Riots are usually counted as start of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, so just a touch over fifty years. Many other minority groups have spent centuries under the thumb of oppressors with only painstaking movement. Instead, every few years delivers something new. Yes, there are setbacks, but overall things are showing strong improvement.
Estonian here. Soviet period was very problematic, and if you claim here that criticism of communism is fascism, then you are greatly mistaken. The crimes of communism during the Soviet period are well documented. E.g. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_crimes To point out that many Russians are longing for communism is quite possible, but these are the same Russians who are currently “liberating” Ukraine.
Making this meme took longer than opening a book to understand what communism actually is.
What everyone points to as “communism” shares more in common with capitalism than anything else. They had authoritarian rulers and a small wealthy class that lords over the rest of the populace.
There is nothing “worker owned” about these examples and it only serves to spread FUD about moving away from capitalism towards a more human centric economy
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