2y ago

Not sure how the girl's skin tone is relevant, but apart from that...

96 comments

Basing your opinions on socialism on how Russia implemented it makes about as much sense as basing an opinion on Democracy on how Putin has implemented it.
- Legit question, what country is a better real world example?
  
  1936 Catalonia.
  But it is actually really hard to name examples. This video explains it quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D4l_l1MedQ
  
  Communism, like capitalism, is an extreme that has certain, very difficult to achieve, requirements. Capitalism needs everyone to be morally decent in order for companies to focus on winning customers through innovation instead of propganda and lobbying, and to accept losses instead of whining. Even the transition into communism is incredibly complicated and technically what where the USSR was stuck, and once there you have to hope that the rest of the world went along with it because it’ll work either on increbily small scales(individual companies, for example) or on a global scale but not really on a mid-sized scale. Plus in both you have basic greed and people who are literally just born narcissitic or legitimately psychotic.
  Extreme ideologies are great thought experiments but rarely have any kind of well-developed protections built and are pretty fragile.
  If you want a better answer, look at the quality of life in countries with stronger regulations and more communism-according-to-North America systems. In the heavily privatised U.S. there are a lot of people who live absolutely shit lives due to an abyssmal lack of protections. Even in Canada, which is far too close to the U.S. here, at least a homeless person can recieve some level of medical assistance including major surgeries and Covid stimulus was more than a cheap joke.
  Extreme
  
  If your looking for modern day examples, the zapatistas are a pretty good example.
  For historical examples you can look to the Paris commune, civil war Barcelona, the original zapatista movement.
- This entire thread is based on this. If comments are truthful.
14 year old white girl
Bravo they managed to also cram ageism and misogyny in the old "champagne socialism" meme. All in the single sentence.
- GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
  ANTI
  WHITE
  RACSIM!!!
This is more accurate: Online discussion about capitalism
People living in a third world capitalist country
14-year-old white boy living in a Western country: I know more than you
Considering that the USSR only claimed to be socialist and used propaganda (in accord with the US) to convince the people that state control is the same as worker's control over the means of production (it isn't), the girl is probably correct.
- Sir we are not doing reasons here, this is a meme sub.
  
  Memes can still be incoherent.
2 things:
The victors write history
After Lenin the USSR was not really communist anymore but more really a totalitarian state that didn't believe in the values of communism. Just like China.
Everything would probably have been better if Lenin didn't die so fast and then Trotsky would have ruled.
- The victors write history
  Flashback to stories of Rus conquests written by the Rus that said the people asked to be conquered
- Trotsky would have ruled.
  Mask off trot lmao
  
  To be clear, the alternative here is Stalin. There are like only five people who would be worse choices
- “History is written by the victors” is a tired cliché that doesn’t always hold up super well if you spend a moment to consider it.
  Who conquered Rome? Surely, it was a people remembered for their great military prowess, right? Nope, still commonly remembered as barbarians thousands of year later.
  The Mongols had one of the largest empires in history, and yet in much of the lands they conquered, they’re remembered as being monstrously ugly brutes, which is where words like “mongoloid” and “mongrel” come from.
- Just like China.
  And Cuba. And North Korea.
  One of those funny coincidences that keeps happening.
  To be perfectly clear: I'm not strongly opposed to what any "14-year-old white girl" means when she promotes communism. I understand leftist goals as distinct from what these countries actually did. But the fact these countries had those goals, and then did this shit instead, demands a better explanation than 'that doesn't count.' Especially when leftist philosophy has a lot to say about liberals and capitalism inevitably producing terrible outcomes.
- Stalin believed in the values of communism, he just also believed everyone was out to get him. Economically he followed Lenin's plan of nationalization and collectivization even more zealously then Lenin would have. Lenin wasn't as paranoid as Stalin and probably wouldn't have killed and gulaged millions of "suspicious" people but he was still very much a dictator and was willing to use any means necessary to achieve his goals, same with Trotsky.
  With any of them the super structure of the state and how it's organized may vary a bit, but it would have all been built off a nationalized and collectivized base. Whether you want to call that base communism is up to you, but you can't say one is and one isn't.
- Until the next tyrant came along. It's a system that is always bound to fail.
  
  It is a system that never gets transitioned to fully. It doesn't fail because it has basically never existed. If I invade your house, kill your father, and make you call me the milk man, that doesn't make me a milk man.
- Did you still use money to buy goods and services? Was your father able to do speak up at work? Change jobs? Go on vacations?
  Just because something called itself communism didn't make it communism. The state owning everything is the opposite of communism. In extreme communism, there isn't even a damn state as we know it.
  The people in the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea do not live in a democracy nor a republic.
  
  The ussr may not have been communist, but it was definitely the initial goal. The idea of a revolution that leads to a dictatorship of the proletariat is inherently flawed. You just end up replacing a corrupt government with another corrupt government.
  
  So communism = god?
  A fictional impossibility
- Erm pushes up glasses that wasn’t real communism because real communism works.
  
  Well it's the same for the free market really. On paper it's a nice idea, but in practice it makes the world miserable because people are, in general, fucking selfish assholes.
  
  Lol ya right?!
  The NSDAP was a real socialist party.
  The Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea is actually democratic and governed by the people.
- This certainly never happens with liberalism. Africa has never seen war since democracy and liberalism freed it obviously. And putin is the prime example of a communist I guess.
This meme doesn’t work, because in the scene the image comes from, we have every reason to believe Ron Swanson actually does know more than the employee at the hardware store.
- TBF I wouldn't be surprised if survivors of a collapsed dictatorship didn't know much about the definition, theories, or philosophies of Communism. Stalin isn't "the working people" and therefor his seizure of the means of production was not communism.
Ah yes, "communism". Op show me 1 country with communism. Dictatorship with 'communism' in their name don't count.
- Wait are you telling me the Democratic Republic of North Korea is neither Democratic or a Republic?? Like they'd just lie?
  
  You can't do that???
- I can name several countries that tried to do a communism, and wound up being what communists insist doesn't count.
  
  Such as?
- Tell that to anarchocommunists.
  I'm sure it will be news to them that they will want to hear.
  
  I thought that dictatorship masked themself as Communism
  
  Tell that to communes.
  
  Every single IWW member is reading this comment and going "NO!!!"
- Rule of thumb: If the US is sanctioning or at war with them, they're communist.
  
  Yeah, like Iran
- I can show many democracies in Africa like that! :D
What people who lived in the Soviet union and other socialist states have to say:
A remarkable 72% of Hungarians say that most people in their country are actually worse off today economically than they were under communism. Only 8% say most people in Hungary are better off, and 16% say things are about the same. In no other Central or Eastern European country surveyed did so many believe that economic life is worse now than during the communist era. This is the result of almost universal displeasure with the economy. Fully 94% describe the country's economy as bad, the highest level of economic discontent in the hard hit region of Central and Eastern Europe. Just 46% of Hungarians approve of their country's switch from a state-controlled economy to a market economy; 42% disapprove of the move away from communism. The public is even more negative toward Hungary's integration into Europe; 71% say their country has been weakened by the process.
The most incredible result was registered in a July 2010 IRES (Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy) poll, according to which 41% of the respondents would have voted for Ceausescu, had he run for the position of president. And 63% of the survey participants said their life was better during communism, while only 23% attested that their life was worse then. Some 68% declared that communism was a good idea, just one that had been poorly applied.
Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an "illegitimate state." In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.
A poll shows that as many as 81 per cent of Serbians believe they lived best in the former Yugoslavia -"during the time of socialism". The survey focused on the respondents' views on the transition "from socialism to capitalism", and a clear majority said they trusted social institutions the most during the rule of Yugoslav communist president Josip Broz Tito. The standard of living during Tito's rule from the Second World War to the 1980s was also assessed as best, whereas the Milosevic decade of the 1990s, and the subsequent decade since the fall of his regime are seen as "more or less the same". 45 percent said they trusted social institutions most under communism with 23 percent choosing the 2001-2003 period when Zoran Djinđic was prime minister. Only 19 per cent selected present-day institutions.
75% of Russians have expressed increasingly positive opinions about the Soviet Union over the years. Only a small portion of those surveyed said they had negative associations with the Soviet Union. The economic deficit, long lines and coupons were named by 4% of respondents each, while the Iron Curtain, economic stagnation and political repressions were named by 1% each, the Levada Center said.
Adult mortality increased enormously in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union when the Soviet system collapsed 30 years ago. https://archive.ph/9Z12u
Former Soviet Countries See More Harm From Breakup https://news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
https://academic.oup.com/cje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cje/beac072/7081084?guestAccessKey=01c8dd9f-af1c-48b3-b271-eb5d3a45017c&login=false
- The trajectory Hungary took after transition to capitalism mirrors what happened in most post USSR states. This just further supports the point that the communist system was better.
  
  Hard agree. Our government will wreck the economy just to die on two hills: social conservatism (EU funding says hi) and russian reliance. Russian gas, russian atom (x2) because they want to build Paks II. They also gerrymandered the everliving fuck out of electoral districts so they can win their precious supermajority. I hope they fail on at least one of the aforementioned hills so they can drop the ball like the now-opposition did in 2006. As for communism, well, the 72% seems very wrong. Sure we had dictatorship-lite, but 1956 happened beforehand, to which we lost many of our schools for example. Plenty of (grand+)parents' tales paint communism like it was the worst thing that could possibly have happened. Also, if 72% of people preferred communism, then surely the dem. socialist party would Poll higher than 3%.
  Reminder that fidesz (the govt party) was originally anti-communist. (I am Hungarian if it wasn't obvious).
- Shhh we only believe facts that back up what we were told to think
※The person who lived in the USSR was born in December of 1991
- Kamelåså
... apart from that it's also most unlikely it's 14 year old girls who are the people writing this in online discussions.
LOL, I knew this sub was digging for old memes but bringing back actual red-baiting? chef's kiss
- We need to start at 0 before we can return to a strong radical left community
I know it's a meme but if your points are this reductive you might not be making an intelligent or rational argument.
We all know a 14 year old black girls know their shit about communism.
Personally I find it going this way:
some person, who at least knows what socialism is, even if they're not the most well-read in the subject,
some way better read one, but thinks state control of enterprises suffice and trusts the state way too much as long as it has hammers and sickles,
some capitalism fan, who thinks socialism is evil, and that constructon company CEOs are workers, but underpaid office workers are "elites".
Rarely you get a very well read one, who understands their stuff, or the old Soviet bloc ex-communist, who switched because the local far-right party started to be very concerned about "work morals", and also think the construction company CEO is a worker and "against the elite".
- The problem is the way that most of those communism perfect people inform themselves. They usually know a lot of stuff about a certain topic where they can argue anyone to deth who doesn't know as much about a topic. And because they know that much more than the other person they can use wrong statements that sound right in the mass of correct information. Then you get people who know everything about Kuba and are 100% sure it's a democracy.
On Lemmy it is more like 40 something year old neckbeards that haven't seen the light of day in 2 decades. They claim to struggle to make friends at parties but could easily run a country.
Here comes the perpetually online Tankies. TAKE COVER!!🪖
Heeeeere comes the hexbear brigade!
OP really be asking why the meme is being anti-white racist 💀
In fairness, she is probably better educated
- For all the things the Soviet Union did wrong, education wasn't one of them.
I think ops the teenager here.
Facts, I hate communism
- Communism as a concept is a brilliant thing. The problem is that in the past it never worked the way it was intended, but managed to cause a lot of harm.
  The problem is that the 14 year old white girl here still thinks with all her heart that countries like China are communist and in generall the perfect place to be, which is just not true.
  
  This is a silly argument because actual real world communism has to be compared to other real world alternative we have available which is capitalism. By every measure capitalism has created far more horrors than communism has.
This is such poor logic. Being around when something happens doesn't mean you somehow know a vast amount about that something. People later can study that something and known much more about it than people who were living during those times.
Ask the average American who was alive during the Cold War what the effects of it were on America and its population, they'll say some generic shit they heard mouthed to them by politicians. Ask any 21 year old college student who just finished a course on the Cold War and its effects on America, and they'll have much deeper understanding.
Being old and alive during something doesn't make you knowledgeable about that something than someone younger and educated. You'd know this if you weren't all idiots, but so many of you are dumbass motherfuckers.
For the USSRs faults I wouldn't bet on older people hating their time under it. They did their complaining about the Soviet system in the few years before it got replaced with half a dozen oligarchies.
Also Love how this meme is a prime example of misogyny in how I remember the original meme not mentioning the gender of the teenager, but now since Girls = stupid idealists someone rewrote the caption to explicitly mention the communist being female (so we know that communism = stupid too)
Quick plug for this guy's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UshankaShow
Not really political, just interesting first-hand accounts of life in the USSR (Ukraine specifically) with a bunch of period photos mixed in.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://www.youtube.com/@UshankaShow
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Never did any research, did you ?
More fragile than a Faberge egg

96 comments