this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Agree with you in general, but I think a lot if people here are not really informed what differences there are materialistic ideologies.
Yes, Stalin bad.
But Guevara is not Stalin.
Marx is not che
Engels is not Marx
China is not communist.
Marxism is not materialism
Socialism is not communism
Also the amount of people bringing the "the 3 times people tried socialism were bad, so the whole ideology must be bad" argument are way to high IMHO.
How many times was capitalism tried? How many times it worked out? Is the USA a "functioning" state with all the oppression, racism, greed, invading other countries out of monetarian interest and environment destruction?
While I agree with you, that oppression is bad, no matter what the oppressor calls himself, we should talk about policies without resorting to dogmas and generalising people in favor of fear the hegemonic class is propagating to stay in power.
Yeah, that's not the tankies here; these are "North Korea is a great country, actually" tankies.
Also, "anything negative about a communist country is US propaganda"
or "russia is correctly in invading ukraine"
Should probably listen to Blowback Season 3.
Not to say they're a perfect country but to pretend that anyone in the West can critique them when their material conditions are dictated by the actions of the West is just comical.
If you aren't a materialist, what are you even doing? As if history happens in the realm of pure thought.....
The material conditions forcing North Korea to make work camps
Bugger off, tankie
Something something worlds largest prison population?
Again, it's not like North Korea is some shining example or anything, but to pretend that the west has the moral high ground here is laughable.
Again, listen to Blowback Season 3, recognize that their country was basically bombed to the stone age Curtis le may style and then maybe reevaluate, just a little, the chauvinist attitude.
DPRK is not a great country but it's not as if they were ever given a chance either.
Yeah, the US prison system is absolutely abhorrent and counterethical to all the principles it's supposed to hold.
First, the US is basically the only western country like that:tm:, second, more than one thing can be bad. "'North Korea is a great country' is a dumb position", the only (implied) assertion I made about it in my original comment, is still true, even if they got dealt a shit hand (which, so did most of the east after WW2; South Korea was in a pretty similar state (it was actually worse than NK shortly after the Korean war), yet they're doing... much better than NK at least).
Being "basically bombed to the stone age" doesn't mean a dictatorship is inevitable, nor that their government is suddenly blameless; being victimized doesn't mean you can victimize others.
Genuinely, if you take "the west" as a whole and compare it to North Korea... yeah, I do think they have a high ground. No, I'm not saying the west is perfect, far from it. No, I'm not saying communism is automatically bad, I'm totally cool with communists.
Basically my base position is "a functional democracy is the governance system that works the best". Most western states are much closer to that than North Korea (yes, I know what the Electoral College is and why it's bad), so I do think their political system is better.
I still wonder why you're so obsessed with North Korea. It's not like the South wasn't also a dictatorship until very recently. I wonder what the difference in economic outcomes was. Surely not the political system but instead the different material conditions between south and north i.e. embargo and isolation.
Again, I don't think that NK is the best example of AES, in fact their country is probably the worst. But I don't think the people who have produced the economic emisseration of the country and have worked to undermine its regime at every term get to scold them about their political choices.
Why should democracy be privileged when the choices of that democracy, at least internationally, are immoral. Should we praise democracy when it produces an evil outcome? Why are you so wedded to a system? After all democracy produces trans and drag bans in the south. Is that good? This isn't to say dictatorship is superior, I don't think it necessarily is, but to pretend the virtue is in the system rather than the outcome is pretty lib. If democracy produces fascism is it still good? If we throw our trans friends or homeless into the wood chipper because voters say it's good with 51% of the vote, does that legitimate it?
The country that holds the record for number and percentage of people in prison is the US. In the US the percentage of black people in prison was higher than the percentage of black people in prison in South Africa during apartheid.
No other western/industrialized (at some stage) nation has had so many political exilees and people whose citizenship was revoked based on "anti-american" views than the US. At some point the general secretary of RCP was in exile in France with his citizenship revoked. So, not all states are equal, and their historic development as modern capitalist states should be studied within context.
When a liberal says "tankie" they mean anything remotely communist-looking. When a leftist says "tankie", they mean authoritarians who like red flags and self-proclaimed communists who nonetheless support hierarchies and have no plan or intention to bring them down. I think the vast majority of people here knows this already.
You are way optimistic.
Mostly True, while (at least in my part of the world) there are a lot of people who like red flags but fight against hierarchies.
I hope you realize that this is an incredibly privileged take. The US is rife with issues, but the hardships experienced by the average western citizen doesn't even compare to the suffering that you would find in, say, Pol Pot's Cambodia, or (to a less extreme extent) Maduro's Venezuela. To compare what a US citizen deals with on a daily basis due to capitalism to what a citizen of any of those countries had to go through is very reductive and may be perceived as disrespectful to many who had to live those experiences.
The United States, for all it's faults, is the pretty side of capitalism.you don't even need to look to the most poor countries to see a standard of living that makes even directly post ww2 soviet union look like a great place.
I have some fellas from Detroit that would disagree.
My dude you need to stop right now before you end up saying that genocide isn't that bad. Because that's what Pol Pot did.
Genocide and pol pot is terrible. So is the USA.
Killing millions and being dysfunctional are in a different realm of terrible. I'm sorry, but how did you come to the conclusion that they are even comparable?
hm i wonder if theres any capitalist countries with a history of committing genocide..
Every genocide can be bad at all the same time. You know?
yea i know. genocide is never a good thing. no matter who does it. whats ur point?
I'm not sure about your specific views, but my point is that the genocides carried out by the USSR and by China and by other 'Communist' states are bad, and that they don't become any less bad as a consequence of Capitalism also having carried out genocides.
i fully agree and im sorry if it came across differently.
No you're good, just trying to answer.
edit: Oh and I see where we went wrong, you replied to someone doing a USA whataboutism. I was hunting for tankies in the comments. Should be careful where I point my ATMG - Anti-Tankie Meme Generation.
lol oki. i decided to stop arguing with the tankies here. i dont wanna legitimize it as a valid position to discuss about.
dont waste too much time on these fuckers, look after urself too :3
Yeah, thanks :) I'm not trying to appeal to them directly so much as make sure their claims don't linger unchallenged.
For the person dying of hunger is the same. But yeah, killing millions is bad and is something America NEVER did, right?
Implying the us is better than Cambodia because Cambodia committed genocide is very weird, considering that the US did so too
You can't be serious...
Im not from USA, and from my point of view its mich worse than most other countries (no healthcare, no independend courts, murder sprees in schools nearly every day, opression of half of the world (a half of them just to get more oil to destroy the planet faster), one of 3 of the biggest war-pushers in whole earth, polutes and destroys earth mode than every other country per citizens, etc. PP.)
capitalism mostly opresses and profits from people out of the country to Funktion. if its Bad in Venezuela or Cuba or Afghanistan, or even early russia, thats at least partly fault of US.
Venezuela is not communism, China isnt, russia isnt. Most of them have failed, at least partly because caputalist societys atack them and stop a as soon as they are born and they can't form a stable democracy. Before reading Marx, your bashing of communism isnt worth anything, as you clearly don't understand what you are talking about. We never had communism, and some would say not even socialism. You sound like you don't even know the difference, since you keep talking about communism, which is a utopian society after humanity has stopped a lot of bad habits and has learned to live without working against each other in competition and working together instead, which arises maybe after generations of workig socialism, which we clearly didn't have.
4.you exactly prove my point. I dont agree with tankies either, but the number of people around here blindly copying capitalist propaganda while understanding nothing they bash about is too damm high.
You have a warped view of USA that doesn't reflect reality. You're seeing it through the lens of sensationalist news media and hyperventilating social media posts.
The actual reality for Americans is that it's a vast, beautiful land with an amazing spectrum of various experience. Violent crime is rare overall, and most Americans have never seen or heard any gun violence in person. Health care is available to pretty much everyone, even if you don't have money. We have state-run healthcare facilities that the poor can make use of like county health departments.
My life in the USA is great, because I don't live in a big city. I live on my own land, in a nice house that I own, and I'm just middle class income level. It's pretty easy to accomplish if you choose a low cost of living area rather than a big metropolis or suburb thereof.