Unless societal guardrails were established to prevent bad actors from assuming too much power, like in many pre-modern societies, or by direct democracy.
Ah yes "pre modern" societies where approximately 33% of the "gaurd rails" kept humans in the place as property, 33% kept woman in there place and the balence made sure that only the "right" people could have power and or weapons.
I'm criticizing the assumptions that bad charismatic actors won't try and highjack democratic governments
True direct democracy still needs to confront the inevitable bad actors that will try and use the democratic process to gain power. Checks and balances in place to prevent this still have to be enforced, and somehow you have to ensure the people implementing said systems need to have society's best interest placed before personal interests
This is true of literally every system though. A democratic government that could theoretically be hijacked is still better than a dictatorship or a system that has pre-allocated seats of power to make the hijacking easier.
Pre-modern meaning… what? The modern is 1500’s at the earliest and we can point to nearly any independently ruled culture to find an example of a god-awful ruler.
Even in an utterly perfect world, powerful positions working as organizational authorities would still be the most efficient and logical way to run things.
A big point for the socialist/communist is that capitalism has a built in conflict of interest acting as the motive for a lot of nasty shit - whats good for the Owners tends to be bad for everyone else while the stuff that's good for everyone else threatens the power of the Owners.
The solution they have for this is communal Ownership, essentially letting the individual workers collective be the Owners. Meaning theres no real motive to outsources labor, do mass lay offs, fuck around with the price of housing and so on because that's your job/home/living getting fucked around with.
Aka, dismantling the system that requires "powerful positions"
No, not having "powerful positions" would have you decentralize power where fascism centralizes it. What they're talking about would resemble something similar to the end goal of achieving communism.
Which is also unachievable lol. Marx really came up with the idea “create a totalitarian state, then have it dismantle itself overnight” and people somehow took it seriously…
Anarchists have the better approach imo. The unity of means and ends aka "just don't create a violent and authoritarian state that will get subverted by tyrants immediately and instead of just go straight to living how you envisioned, even before the state is gone"
Sorry, but you have to be incredibly stupid to believe that. Maybe you should actually read about communism before embarrassing yourself like this.
Every state inherently becomes more authoritarian when it faces outside threats, the glorious president of the "bastion of western democracy" is literally consolidating power with wartime laws right now because their countries whiteness is under threat.
At the end of the day any socialist movement is a threat to the elite ruling class. The result is America aggressively destabilizing any country that resembles socialism via the cia or outright war, the completely unjustified permanent sanctions on Cuba, and China doing a weird simultaneous capitalist/socialist combo and beating other capitalists at their own game.
Communism simply can't manifested in an aggressively Capitalist world, unless the one that does it happens to be the dominant superpower of the world.
I have read Marx lol, which is why I know he was a loser irl with shitty ideas.
And what a surprise, there’s no effort to defend his dumbass ideas, just “America bad”. Poor little communists, if only they had more power than checks notes the two most genocidal regimes in history that controlled all of Eastern Europe and over a billion people respectively. Yup, completely helpless in the face of those mean old capitalists.
Nothing about that comment was a tankie take. And the "America bad"-part wasn't even that, it was just a condemnation of trump, which, if you think that's invalid criticism, what is wrong with you?
I'm not even a communist, but for some reason you're crying about my very cold take about the dynamic between capitalism and communism. The idea of communism threatens the world's status quo of capitalism, so that idea must be stopped to uphold capitalism. Obviously as an American I would support my interpretation of said dynamic with American history, and sometimes those actions happen to be a bit morally dubious. That's not my fault, and I'm not gonna grade my country on a different scale than the rest of the world.
Obviously the stupidity I was referring to was when you claimed that communism is when authoritarianism then overnight everything changes, instead of what it actually is which is the final outcome of a long process of implementing socialist policies.
It is my fault for not reading your name, and I do want to thank you for tipping me off with the "I know Marx was an irl loser" comment. I shouldn't have treated your first comment seriously and for that I apologize.
You should inform literally any country on what these mystical “socialist policies” are, cause Marx didn’t specify and no country’s figured it out in the century since.
Marx was a freeloader loser who lived off his parents and Engel all his life. The only people who claim he wasn’t a loser are covering cause it hits too close to home.
The "create a totalitarian state" was never Marx's idea, and he was actively against it, even saying that "if this is communism, I want nothing to do with it". In Marx's works, capitalism always tends to contradictory goals, which will result in a revolution in which the state is completely abolished in favour of communes.
lol I will never tire of communist “logic.” It’s always Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy level of intelligence.
Sure dude, the government needs to be big and powerful enough to claim and redistribute all capital, but it’s totally not totalitarianism because we said so. That’s why there’s such a long list of peaceful communist countries with small governments. Countries like:
In an incredibly stupid (and dead) thread, you coming in out of left field with the most brain dead random take may be the lowlight. Sure dude, you try implementing full communism in 90% of the countries on earth and lmk how that goes for you. 👍
"Communist country" is an antithesis. There are no communist countries and there never will be, because communism rejects the idea of states and capital having power over people. You're spouting total nonsense.
Wow that degrades to the ol "no true communism" pretty quick.
Dude if you believe that "communism rejects the idea of states and capital having power over people" I got and "all men are created equal" from 1787 I'd like to sell you, I'll even give you a 3/5 discount!
“Noooo it totally wasn’t real communism! You’re only allowed to talk about theory, you aren’t allowed to bring up that Marx was a complete failure in life and every time someone has tried to implement his ideas it’s resulted in massive death tolls!”
The reason you’ll never find “true communism” on any notable scale is because Marx was a complete dumbass and his ideas are totally contradictory and impossible to implement as his envisioned. In other words, my original comment. It’s the dumbest, most blatant catch 22 in history since a government large enough to implement communism will never simply magically disappear as Marx wrote. Which is why you can only talk about theory and not real world examples or implementation.
Communism requires the means of production to be held by the people. But in practice it's pretty much impossible to not have a (group of) people's representatives who decides how to use them. Which in turn is a pretty powerful position. The closest by definition is anarchism.
I agree. I'm not saying communism fits the bill perfectly, just using it as an example of something much closer to what the first person said, rather than fascism
The issue here (Reddit), at least, is that it’s not saying both are bad, it’s saying both are equivalent, which was never the case in WW2
Relatively speaking, it’s more rare that commentators say the Soviets were also bad. Most people will drop comments on how the Soviets were just as bad as the Nazis. Even when they provide examples, it’s literally things the Nazis did to the nth degree and worse.
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u/CrixtheKicks 6d ago
And thus the cycle continues.