Hrmmmmm

You don't see any state run bread lines do you?

That's because they'd rather you starve, but the mafia has soup lines waiting for you.

You don’t see any state run bread lines do you?
I remember getting extremely screamed at on Reddit when I posted "Bread Lines" and the picture of a line around the block at a grocery store on the eve of a hurricane.
Apparently, that's not a "real" bread line because idfk free markets or some shit.
You don't see any state run bread lines do you?
You do, they're called food pantry lines, and they tend to be run by churches in my experience
There are still plenty of local government run food pantries too, since I have to spell this part out in crayon for some people.....
- 23 downvotes
  People in the West absolutely can't stand when you point out all the same instructions of poverty exist on their home turf.
  It's a sin to acknowledge poverty exists. Nevermind to suggest that westerners might be worse at alleviating it than their foreign peers.
- Your teachers handed your tests back face-down didnt they?

The reason of the confusion is clear.

The US propaganda has always equated Communism and totalitarianism.

It is bonkers that people in the USA cannot distinguish between an economic system and a political system.

Those two are distinct things. True communism is very democratic. But reading the Communist manifesto is heretic in the US and you are left with what your leaders tell you.

The Russian Revolution was communist but the USSR was never communist.

Right wing totalitarian dictators also use starvation of their own people as means of control.

What you are experiencing in the US is totalitarianism and while it hasn't gotten to USSR levels, it is going on that direction.

Food for thought: study the political system in China, you'd be surprised how it's actually more democratic than the current USA. Yes, the CCP controls the nominations. Now, tell me if there is true plurality in the US, two right wing parties selecting their candidates without any real popular input.

Really you've been bamboozled to think there is real democracy in the US.

The Russian Revolution was communist but the USSR was never communist.
Yes. But what does that mean? If I have a recipe for potion of immortality, but anyone that drinks the resulting potion dies instead, it's a bad recipe. It doesn't matter its promise of immortality sounds good.
Communism makes good promises. However, every time you have a communist revolution, it ends up being authoritarian instead. What does that say about the communist political system?
- More like every time there's been democratically elected socialists or communists, western powers intervene with staged coups, assassinations, or embargos.
- Every time a capitalist system is implemented the oligarchy grows and seizes power and some corrupt oligarchs usurp the power of the people. What does that say about capitalism? I think your generalized question is terribly bad faithed when every can point out the US system and straight capitalism is a failure also. Rather then generalized ideas and theory we look at all the systems and see what does work and how we can keep the power in the hands of people
  I think the issue is corruption, power, and control. To have a capitalist society you must allow businesses do what they want or they will seize power. In a communist society power is centralized when it is focused on the state as a communistic in which power and control when questioned or control loosened gets cracked down.
  Democratic Republicans are great but there is a few problems when they move so slow. One, what if the charter is never fixed when we add more rights. We just tack it on as precedent and never amend the charter.
  Second,if the population is growing is it still representing people properly. I think having a representative for every 1 million people is to huge. And the fact we have disparities as large as 1 to million but then some have as low as 1 in 250k. Is unequal.
  Third. I don't think as long as businesses hold power over an individuals life businesses should have political power. They hold to much currently. Also the fact through a business they can unlimitedly donate money but i as an individual can only spend $2,500(somewhere around there is the campaign cap)on a candidate is insane power wise.
  Fourth a mixed economic/ business system would be wonderful a more planned economy by what citizens need would be nice. Also economy and business shouldn't be running the country. The individual people should.
  Fifth States are stupid unless they can leave. The lines/borders are arbitrarily stupid and the fact the power federal is based on the lines fucks us up. If so chooses states should be able to break apart and make local states of the people so it is easier to have democratic control over your local area. Yes this means almost every state would become major cities and then the rural areas. Unless they want to partner with a city.
- Ill be the patsy: You can't make rules to eliminate human greed / lust for power?
  I'm very simplistic with this stuff and haven't studied it, but that seems to be the fundamental limitation with communism. Would work great with robots but we're more 'complex' with our subconscious bias, unexamined motives and insecurities driving our actions.
- I think it says more about how Lemmings and other westerners understand authoritarianism. Because capitalist countries are way more authoritarian than any communist country has ever been. Y’all have just been fed lie after lie until you start repeating them yourselves.
- More like you have a simple and easy to follow recipe for cake. You and a friend are following it dutifully. Just before the last step of the recipe your friend gets a call from their partner. Your friend then pushes you out of the kitchen and locks you out. The cake is served frosted in your friends freshly cut hair clippings.
True communism is very democratic.
At some point, you have to get passed "true whatever" and accept certain institutions already exist.
Also helps to recognize that communism as a movement has been anti-colonialist first and democratic only as it serves the former cause. Communists aren't receptive to a liberal democracy that allows half the people to sell out the other half.
Folks love to get lost in the sauce talking about what Marxism really truly means, as an ideology, without asking why people adopt it or how they apply it in practice.
- that allows half the people to sell out the other half.
  Do you actually think that's worse than the elite deciding who is going to starve and who's going to be disappeared to maintain their power?
  Why bother pretending to return the means of production to the worker only to rob them of their voice?
The Russian Revolution was communist but the USSR was never communist
Hard disagree. Universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, lowest wealth and income inequality in the history of the region, guaranteed housing and abolition of homelessness and unemployment, life expectancy skyrocketing from a meager 28 years to 70 in the span of 40 years, abolition of private business, redistribution of land to peasants, and saving Europe from Fascism really seem like communist traits to me. There were defects and policy failures during some of the hardest times in history, don't get me wrong, but simply by achieving all of those wonderful goals without ever having colonies or engaging in imperialism, that's very communist to me.
What you are experiencing in the US is totalitarianism and while it hasn't gotten to USSR levels, it is going on that direction
The US has had, for decades, the highest prison population in the world, both in absolute and relative terms. In absolute terms, the US has nearly as many prisoners as the USSR did during WW2, the historic highest for obvious reasons (25 million Soviet citizens were killed by Nazism). You have literal fascist police disappearing people based on the colour of the skin, and the US has literally bombed black people for their ideology in US soil.
You're damn high in American exceptionalism and anticommunist propaganda.
- without ever having colonies or engaging in imperialism
  That's only because the USSR lobbied hard in the UN so that colonialism is defined as having overseas colonies. The "near abroad" is/was a colonial empire.
  The USSR was definitely imperialistic, see Hungary 1956, where it crushed a revolution which was not against communism, the revolutionaries were in fact communists, they just wanted to be free of Soviet occupation.
  Not debating the accomplishments of the USSR though, it was definitely and improvement on the Russian Empire.
Call me naive if you want but I think we might want to aim for slightly more than another flavor of illusory democracy.
Although I have to say that the primary selection process in the US, while deeply flawed, is far more open for insurgent candidates than the Chinese system. See Mamdani for a recent example of how democratic elites don’t have total control of the outcomes.
The USSR never intentionally starved its citizens as the US is doing right now.
Downvote if you believe CIA/fascist propaganda.
The USA is a massive country of 330m+. Literally tens of millions of us have no delusions about this.

yeah, but that's different because this is BROWN PEOPLE, at least some of them. so it's completely different.

Well, in the USSR it was Ukrainians. Every authoritarian system find its outgroups.
The largest demographic group receiving SNAP benefits is white people, at 37%, so (tries to do math like a racist) 63% assorted brown people!
But what really sells it to the 37% of white people in mostly red states with poor public education are things like this article about some super genius trolling where the first 3 groups alone add up to like 124%. I expect that the 17% of people who do not report ethnic demographics are largely white in the first place, and have been gaslit for so long that they won't report out of fear of being some sort of "race traitor" or some other stupid racist BS thing that idiots do.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2282378855532810
Sorry for a facebook link, couldn't find another.

At this point, this joke is basically like kicking a dead horse.

Keep going an let's make MAGA glue

We’ve had communism for the wealthy as long as I can remember

You know, some people get really worked up about how some sodas are really good and others are horrible. Healthwise they're all really just sugar water with some flavor and color sprinkled on top.

The flavoring and coloring are the least nutritionally relevant parts of the beverages and yet are what everyone obsesses over when discussing which of them is best.

The flavor doesn't change the nature of all the sugar, despite how different they feel to the palate.

A very costly lesson many maya people and other enemies of the aztec empire learnt after the spanish came to the americas was that the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

A very costly lesson many maya people and other enemies of the aztec empire learnt after the spanish came to the americas was that the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.
See, I thought the lesson was more for the Aztecs. You can only commit so much human sacrifice before even a handful of foreigners with some novel propaganda can topple your empire from within.
- Lots of lessons to go around everywhere if you look with thw right eyes.

Also, in a famine, it is grossly unfair to put all blame on a single leader/government. In USSR's case, during global famine, the US insisted debt be paid in food, and the government had to react to extortionist farmer class (Kulak) pricing. It is entirely political to create narrative of opponents fault for everything, when they are faced with hard decisions that your country imposed on them.

In this case, it is especially eggregious to not only force starvation by executive decision in times of relative abundance, but to further provide IRS directives that would collect less (minimum corporate tax rules) from oligarchs, so that budget/revenue is further reduced, and excuse to continue starving people becomes a manufactured crisis.

USSR leadership absolutely used forced requisition (sometimes leaving nothing to the farmers) as a tool of power and control and to punish the farmers. The leadership in USSR was pretty vitriolic towards the agrarian population and treated them like shit at least until later in the Union's life.
- AFAIU, there were 2 farmer classes in USSR at the time. Collectives getting fixed price for their crops, and Kulak private farmers getting market prices. Famine makes those prices extortionist, and USSR chose to fight extortion.
- USSR leadership absolutely used forced requisition
  True
  as a tool of power and control and to punish the farmers
  Bullshit.
  The rapid collectivization of 1929-1934 was a very difficult endeavour, and is the FIRST IN HISTORY successful collectivization of agriculture. There have been many attempts since before the Roman Empire, but never had it been carried our successfully before. Grain requisitions were carried out because the effort of rapid collectivization was kickstarted in order to rapidly industrialize the nation. By introducing tractors into farms and collectivizing them in larger plots, fewer peasants were needed, and people could move to cities to build up an industrial sector. Moving people to cities meant feeding people in cities, and grain requisitions were carried out initially in order to force wealthy exploiter peasants (kulaks) to sell their grain at state mandated prices. Had it not been for the rapid collectivization and industrialization of the 1930s, the Soviets would have been crushed by Nazism, and tens of millions of people more would have been exterminated as it happened in Poland, Belarus or Ukraine. Rapid collectivization wasn't an ideological decision, it was a pragmatic decision that averted the extermination of Eastern Europe at the hands of Nazism.
  agrarian population and treated them like shit at least until later in the Union's life
  This is again bullshit. The region has never before or after seen the level of expenditure in infrastructure, education or healthcare that took place in rural USSR. Since the disappearing of the USSR, many massive rural exodus have taken place all over the eastern block.

A greedy sociopathic leader with lack of empathy will always cause starvation, be it capitalism or communism or any other system anywhere. Shitty kings, dictators, and colonialists have always caused this since the beginning of time. It ain't about the system.

The trick is to lock in a sustainable situation where power is spread out more than it is centralized. Democratic republics achieve this but, if your goal is simple “efficiency” (e.g. your personal political faction not restrained by rule of law) and you ignore the benefits of freedom of expression and movement that democracy gives you, then centralized autocratic control is tempting.
- Yes, idea is to spread power and not allow greed to take over. A Democratic Republic, i.e. a representative democracy is a good start but not good enough - we already have that in America & most countries worldwide, but that didn't do much. What we need is widespread democratic socialism, i.e. market socialism i.e. co-ops, credit unions, open source etc.
- Defensive Democracy, but with added Socialism entrenched into the constitution.
A greedy sociopathic leader with lack of empathy will always cause starvation, be it capitalism or communism or any other system anywhere
Empirically false. At equal levels of development, communism provides better life metrics such as life expectancy, infant mortality or nutritional values, and socialism also has been the only way for previously colonized nations to develop. China and India were similarly developed 100 years ago, yet now China has a higher life expectancy than the USA whereas India still sees tremendous amounts of death from treatable disease and malnutrition. This example alone accounts for hundreds of millions of lives saved. Similarly, in the Tsarist empire, life expectancy was 28 years of age. By the death of "le evil dictator Stalin", it was 60 years of age.

To be fair, a lot of communist revolution did result in mass starvation.

As a precursor, sure. The OG 1918 October Revolution was fueled by a string of famines, exacerbated by the World War.
The American Bonus Marchers of 1932 were also propelled by food shortages of The Dust Bowl.
But these events get vanishingly little coverage in western history textbooks
Which communist revolution? Russia was having famines before the soviet revolution. Its more reasonable to say communism solved the famines in russia and created them in china.
- Eh the Soviets had plenty of their own man made famine (Holodomor, among others)
To be fair, fat cat capitalist hoarding wealth have caused exponentially more. Counted the homeless in your community lately. Year in, year out. They might be invisible to you ... but they are there. Millions of them -- year in, and year out. Starving. Homeless.

In my country, one evil of communism I always heard was "not being able to buy Adidas shoes and Levis jeans". But if capitalism makes it a de facto luxury product through devaluing your work, then it's tough luck.

As a note, communism involves some ideas that are impossible or nearly so.

Imagine a society in which every person has exactly the same sociopolitical power as every other person; representatives and officials do not have additional power; that's a property of a truly communist society. We don't believe that can be done IRL.

Imagine a society in which everyone's needs are met for an extreme body of needs (say as defined by the UN Universal Declaration of Human RIghts). The only transients that exist either are in a short line to be issued a dwelling, or don't want one. Everyone is fed. Everyone has their own stuff. This isn't impossible, but is difficult as heck to reach.

Communism is a goal that a society tries to reach similar to a zero homicide rate We don't expect to get there, but we do want our society to ever get closer, as we discover new means to approach that limit.

We reach for the ideal of a communist society. We never expect to actually get there.

Imagine a society in which every person has exactly the same sociopolitical power as every other person; representatives and officials do not have additional power; that's a property of a truly communist society.
Aren't you sort of describing democracy, and not socialism? I'm a Communist myself and I've never heard anyone claim that every person will have the exact same sociopolitical power, reading Marx or Lenin I've never encountered anything as such. Obviously people more engaged with politics should have more political power, in the sense that contributing to politics is both a privilege and a responsibility. Organizers of a local worker council will obviously have more political power than people who choose not to participate on that.
Imagine a society in which everyone's needs are met for an extreme body of needs (say as defined by the UN Universal Declaration of Human RIghts). The only transients that exist either are in a short line to be issued a dwelling, or don't want one. Everyone is fed. Everyone has their own stuff. This isn't impossible, but is difficult as heck to reach.
It's not impossible, or even difficult to reach. 1970s USSR literally had all of this. Access to a job, to housing, to universal healthcare, to free education to the highest level, to quality urban planning and public transit, to affordable basic foodstuffs and clothes, and very cheap energy, were all available. Again, I'm talking about 1970s technology and progress in a self-sufficient country isolated from world markets, without engaging in colonialism and extraction of resources from the global south, in a country that 40 years prior had been a feudal backwater in which 80% of the population were peasants, most of them not owning any land and being essentially serfs to landlords. Cuba, today, manages to get most of this, despite being in the most comprehensive economic embargo in history. It's not remotely hard to achieve this, the main obstacle to this is western imperialism doing everything in its hand to destroy any attempt, from regime destabilization, to outright threat of nuclear war, including bombing of your country to the ground (Vietnam, Korea) or support of fascists (Chile).
As for people having their own stuff:
I wonder if there's anything in common in those countries...
- I remember there was an end-goal of a communist state to ultimately disband bureaus. Marx explained how to get things started, less the ultimate goals, so I might be thinking of a dubdivision of communist theory. Soviet communism (lower case, like soviet -- referring to committees) still had public officials in its provisional state that had more power than the common citizen, at least within the purview of their office, but officials trusted with power is regarded as a necessary evil.
  Participatory democracy (in which everyone votes on every little thing -- at least every thing to which they're a stakeholder) is another model that works similarly, but again, without some amazing databasing tools and personal platform customization, it's not possible to do this effectively even if we master internet voting: We'd need to find a balance between reducing constituent administrative burden and providing enough time and means so that everyone is sufficiently participating in their civic duties, and voting as suits their personal best interests (and not on any superfluous issues that don't concern them).
  Communism and democracy are multiple models aiming for the same outcome, but again, we expect to get closer without ever reaching absolute perfection of even distribution of power... Well, we expect to get closer when a society actually strives towards doing so, contrasting allowing a select few elites secure political power for themselves.

i love uma

Whoma is dat?

But it’s their fault for being poor. - Republicans

No no NO! It's only starvation when the russians do it.
However when the orange kiddie fiddling reality TV 'star' failed businessman convicted criminal/rapist forces it on to his people then it is called sparkling mandatory dieting.

With a centrally controlled food supply, a misstep can lead to there literally not being enough food. You know this is different and this post is disingenuous.

More people die from obesity than starvation. There are tons of options for free food. Nobody is going to starve to death.

Because capitalist authoritarians never try to use starvation as weapon.
With a centrally controlled food supply, a misstep can lead to there literally not being enough food
Agreed, let's abolish Walmart then and advocate for collectively owned, decentrally planned agriculture. Love to see fellow comrades!
More people die from obesity than starvation. There are tons of options for free food. Nobody is going to starve to death
Ignoring the reality of the literal millions of people receiving food assistance with food stamp programs and charity kitchens isn't as intelligent as you think it is. Some people can be obese while others in the same country experience food insecurity.

its what dictators use to be exact.

tankie gonna say it was due to mismanagement or some shit like that

Not to be a tankie or a lib or a capitalists, but sometimes famines do happen, in the USSR was mostly due to one shitty botanist who played the politics game, we SHOULD learn from those mistakes, sometimes it is because natural or unexpected consequences. Like I wonder if there were biologists in China saying that killing the sparrows would cause a famine. But capitalists famines are such an different beast. They are always obviously preventable but doing so would decrease someone's profits. The Irish famine was a straight up genocide, dust bowl was rich people recklessly gambling with the nation, and this one? straight up billionaires shoving the nation's wealth into their pockets, like before but even more mercilessly.
- Lysenko the shitty botanist happened a bit later and his ideas had repercussions way into 1970s. Lysenko was still on the come-up back in early 1930s but he really started getting political weight a bit later in 1935-36 when the purges happened and his bullshit started really messing things up after WW2 into the 1950s.
  Meanwhile, Holodomor was way more diabolical and spiteful act. Ever since the soviets took over Ukraine - they had paranoia about nationalist uprising taking them out. For a while, a workable solution was to provide national representation. The whole Ukrainization policy. Eventually, their own policy got them scared so much they started the russification policy to undo "the damage". They started taking out various Ukrainian political and cultural figures under false allegations.
  At the same time shambolic economic reforms and collectivization attempts led to people questioning government competence and demand proper political representation instead of whatever soviets tried to do. The government solution was to call business owners and rich upper class peasants the enemy and go full feudal - purge the politically active people (call it the continuing class struggle) and turn peasants into collectivized serfs under kolkhoz system with no representation or rights. They couldn't even travel without their superior permission and had no documents. And to seal the deal - start village blockades - attrition into submission and assimilation.
Umm ackshuslly it's because of america! Because, ummm, sanctions. Without American trade, the economy crumbled. The soviet union was a victim of economic terrorism!
- Adam Curtis' Pandora's Box series has a funny bit about Aleksei Gastev and his scientific management theories - dude wasn't even political, he just liked figuring out how to get shit done efficiently. His ideas were essentially what is today known as innovation-driven project management - so naturally he was gulaged and commie cronies used feudalism instead.

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What game is this?

Based on the ears I’m guessing Umamusume
- Oh, horse girls.
- Is it one of the gacha games?

I know this is a shitpost, but anime is a disease.

- Found the weeb

Make it trend for a month.

Two things can be true.

But they're not by any metric you want to use. Study after study show that, at similar levels of development, socialism creates better outcomes in quality of life than capitalism.