I’ve been seeing a worrying number of these people on Lemmy lately, sharing enlightened takes including but not limited to “voting for Biden is tantamount to fascism” and “the concept of an assigned gender, or even an assigned name, at birth is transphobic” and none of them seem to be interested in reading more than the first sentence of any of my comments before writing a reply.
More often than not they reply with a concern I addressed in the comment they’re replying to, without any explanation of why my argument was invalid. Some of them cannot even state their own position, instead simply repeatedly calling mine oppressive in some way.
It occurred to me just now that these interactions reminded me of nothing so much as an evangelical Christian I got into an argument with on Matrix a while ago, in which I met him 95% of the way, conceded that God might well be real and that being trans was sinful and tried to convince him not to tell that to every trans person he passed, and failed. I am 100% convinced he was trolling – in retrospect I’m pretty sure I could’ve built a municipal transport system by letting people ride on top of his goalposts (that’s what I get for picking a fight with a Christian at 2AM) – and the only reason I’m not convinced these leftists on Lemmy are trolls is the sheer fucking number of them.
I made this post and what felt like half the responses fell into this category. Am I going insane?
You’re the one shifting goals here. The guy originally said “successful communist revolutions” not “successfully changed the Mode of Production” or whatever arbitrary line you decided to draw. You came out with that phrase, and are moving the goalposts by presuming what someone else meant.
I don’t think you are being honest at all.
Yes because that’s not the only issue I care about. The question was about a successful revolution, not only about the “Mode of Production”. Stop moving goalposts and then having the absolute gall to accuse the other person of doing that
I suspect you might be right about some of these, though without more research I can’t definitively say. I would be careful about China though given what they are doing with certain minorities in their country as well as protesters.
No, you’re moving the goal posts, lol, and trying to deflect blame is pointless here. “Successful Communist Revolutions” was vague in the first place, and the original point was that reform is extremely difficult to outright impossible, while Revolutions have succeeded.
If you can go back in time and redefine the original question, go for it.
China is indisputably better off than it was under the fascist Kuomintang. This isn’t even a point to argue, China under Mao doubled their life expectency, then under Deng managed to become the industrial hub of the world, and now under Xi has taken China finally to the level of superpower.
China absolutely has numerous issues to this very day. Corruption is high, treatment of minorities is at minimum suspicious, and protesting gets met harshly. However, if you compare China under the KMT to China today, it isn’t even a question.
So yes, you may need to take a look at what these countries were actually like before Revolution and compare with post.
Fair enough I didn’t know what the history of China was like before the revolution. I am sure fascist leadership is terrible. I knew some of these counties has issues with their previous regimes, so it would make sense post-revolution was an improvement.
What I don’t want is a society that’s the better of two bad options (in this case Fascism vs current Chinese society). I want a society that actually functions well. It seems the options you are offering are: fascism, USA-style ultra capitalism, or “socialist” states that suppress their own people. None of these sound like great options to me unfortunately. Can’t we work out how to build something else? Something better? Am I being unrealistic? Probably.
I am not asking for a hybrid economy either, as I know those still have capitalism related problems and could just dissolve into capitalism if there is a recession.
Seems like Socialism is the best option, and to work towards eventual Communism.
Except that ML has mostly ended in despotism. I think we need something else. Maybe Communism isn’t the anwser, or maybe this isn’t the way to get there.
So we have established that ML has drastically improved over previous conditions, and based on vibes alone you’ve washed away material reality entirely?
What are you actually advocating for? This is just idealism, coupled with a fair shake of red-scare vibes.
Quit beating around the bush, it’s clear that you have a point you want to get across, but you haven’t revealed it. If you’re just going to continue to play coy with it then we can just stop here, this is a waste of time.
The material reality is that ML regimes normally end up in despotism that’s as bad as modern capitalism, or just revert to capitalism in the end.
It’s not idealism. Reality bears me out here. Believing in Marxism-Leninism and that this time the revolution will fix everything and not back fire is idealism.
My point is we need to move away from ML ideas to something better like anarcho-communism, Anarcho-syndicalism, socialist market economy, lesalism, heck even libertarian marxism and so on. If we know something doesn’t work why don’t we try something else?
That logic doesn’t follow.
First, you are just calling all AES countries “just as bad as Capitalism,” when that’s a complete whitewashing of history. Unless, of course, you want to say that Cuba is now worse off, same with China, same with Vietnam under French colonialism, same with Laos. All of these countries overthrew fascist or Capitalist regimes and have seen a moderate to a vast increase in metrics regarding quality of life and material conditions.
Secondly, you have to do a lot of legwork to explain why China isn’t in the Socialist stage. 70% of their top 500 companies are state-owned, including 24/25 of the top revenue companies. It isn’t a Communist state, but just reading Critique of the Gotha Programme and The Communist Manifesto should be straightforward enough to inform you that eradicating Capitalism takes time and requires gradual improvements.
On to your point, Anarcho-Communism failed miserably in Revolutionary Catalonia, and even then still had some form of a state for administration and police, Syndicalism hasn’t yet seen success, China, Vietnam, and Laos are currently close to Socialist Market Economies anyways, and neither Lesailism nor Libertarian Marxism (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) have seen success either.
The closest to working out a Libertarian Socialist society has ever been is the Chiapas region. Even then, they exist as an anti-colonial pseudostate resisting Mexico, and as such it cannot be reasonably assumed that their strategy can apply elsewhere.
Without speaking in vibes, idealism, or whitewashing history, why do you believe an Anarchic strategy would see more success than a Marxist one? What part of Marxism do you specifically reject, without calling to idealism? Ie, revolution necessarily means despotism, which is false as proven previously.
I was not comparing against their previous regime before, I was comparing them against other contemporary nations. If you want to make that comparison between now and then the ML regimes still haven’t done any better than capitalist hybrid economies. If anything they have done worse. Germany used to be run under fascists too, as did Spain and Italy, yet both have done well under hybrid economies, in fact better than places like Cuba since they don’t have constant shortages.
Actually I don’t have to do hardly any legwork. Socialism requires democracy, and China are not democratic. Cuba is not completely democratic either. Therefore neither are truly socialist even if they have socialist-like elements. Plenty of Marxists including the Trotskyists organization I used to be a part of don’t support China. You don’t have to support that regime to be a Marxist so I don’t know why you are making excuses for them.
I don’t necessarily reject Marxism either. As I said Libertarian Marxism is fine. There are probably variations of classical Marxism that could be made to work if you ignore anything written by Lenin, Mao, Stalin, etc. It seems that’s primarily where it went wrong, starting with Lenin. If my understanding of Marxism is correct, it doesn’t suggest a singular way to organize socialist societies, it only highlights the problems with capitalist and other societal models. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. The problem with with the later additions like Marxism-Leninism or Maoism.
The reason I don’t have a problem with Anarchism is that they have never attempted to form or justify dictatorships and other non-democratic regimes like you keep trying to. Like dude/dudette stop supporting China, it’s not that hard. That’s the least you can do. Like the bare minimum.
What you are saying doesn’t add up logically, it’s not just about vibes. Though frankly you don’t pass the vibe check either which is far more important than you give it credit for. I can justify eugenics using logic if I have to. It doesn’t pass the vibe check so to speak. When dealing with humans you have to consider the human aspect of the situation.