Never change, lemmy.ml

Not everything outside the Overton Window is equally bad

Red scare

I'm pretty sure "eat the rich" is not comparable to "kill 5 million Ukrainians."

And I'm also pretty sure 'rich person' is neither an ethnicity nor a nationality.

every time communism has been tried, it involved massive genocide

This argument is so frustrating, because it totally ignores the fact that the common thread, both for communist countries and capitalist countries, and both for intentional genocide and crises through incompetence, is the consolidation of power in a small set of individuals or group that prioritises their own self interest over the common good.

The big issue with "trying" communism is that it historically has only really occurred through violent revolution. The political instability in these situations gives a perfect opportunity for the seizing of power by exactly those kinds of people.

Never mind the fact that genocide is absolutely not limited to communist countries, and that genocide goes against the actual fundamental principles of a communist system, which is centred on equality.

Yes, the USSR committed genocide - so did Britain and America, and so are modern capitalist Russia and China right now.

There's loads of good reasons both for and against every economic system, communism included. But "communism=genocide lalalala" is just a cheap excuse to totally avoid considering the merits of a different economic system. Doing that denies yourself the opportunity to genuinely consider how a different economic approach, whether that's communism or just using concepts from the ideology, could improve the lives of citizens in a healthy democracy.

Wait til you find out how many people were killed by capitalist governments

Every time capitalism has been tried, it also involved massive genocide.

Funny, but it turns out that every economic system invented by humans has massive genocide in its history.

Wild, its almost like the genocide was a power grab tactic, and not something inherent to these economic systems.

So “eat the rich” is just edgy humor or what?

Yes. Most people don't want to eat other people. I would expect the explicit cannibalism to clue you in to a level of irony there.

Weird, because somehow, every time that every time communism has been tried, it involved massive genocide, though perhaps one could argue that the majority of it was the result of incompetency, because the majority of the victims starved to death as a result of disastrous agricultural policies.

Genocide has to be at least a bit deliberate, and generally they just fucked up their economy bad enough agriculture was negatively effected. In the USSR's case at least, the starvation affected the republics pretty equally, too. As Ukrainians were starving so were Khazaks. For political reasons, some parties have tried to make it sound like a targeted ethnic thing, but it just wasn't, and it certainly wasn't on purpose.

but you have to admit that even when taking to low estimates, communism’s death toll is far higher than that of the Nazis. OP is correct, they’re all evil ideologies.

This is the part where the communists come out with capitalism's death toll. Dumb ideology, maybe, evil ideology no, at least not on it's own.

Edit: Also, I take issue with not counting all of WWII as part of the Nazi death count, since they very deliberately made it happen. Consider this was in the space of just a few years, vs. an entire human lifetime for the Soviets.

Rich people are not a race. So "genocide" doesn't really make sense there. "Eat the rich" does not mean "kill the rich", necessarily, either. A lot of people just use it as a metaphor for ending the massive wealth inequality through economic reform.

I report every "guillotine" comment I ever see but don't care enough to look at the modlog to see if any action was taken

Here on lemmy there is an active campaign to stir up fervor against communism. It's an age old right wing tatic.

In order to collectively own everything, you must have a mechanism to decide the use of the means of production. Some things can be produced, but should not be, and leaving it up to local decision making will produce imbalances, as things that are easier or more fun to produce are produced more often than required.

You need a central nexus of control, and a person or group of people to be the final arbiter of decisions. Every time it's been done in history, either the leaders of the revolution, or the people violent and powerful enough to stab them in the back and take control have landed in this position. Mysteriously, a small group of people controlling all production has only ever lead to tyranny.

Any communism that begins in revolution will devolve into tyranny, and there's no words a dictionary can string together that will change that. Voluntary communes also seem to have problems, but it's more often splintering, which is significantly less harmful.

There are many on Lemmy who do associate Communism with the USSR and China and also think it is a good thing.

There's no need to make that argument - history has made it time and time again, and if you succeed at a communist revolution, history will again show that it was a bad idea.

The problem isn't the motives or empathy of the communist and socialist idealists. The problem is the willingness to face hard truths.

It's definitely better to seek a better way to run society. But it's definitely not better to claim you are doing so while executing an old, rehashed playbook of societal failure, claiming It Just Wasn't Done Right Before™️.

We need a better system. Communism is not it. Any system you build must be one that resolvea the ideals of communism with the pragmatism of capitalism. When that system is found, it will address the weaknesses of both.

I think that system is culturally-rooted sovereignty - that each person takes responsibility for their own life and for the sovereignty of others, because it is in their own best interest to do so. It is how I live.

The nice ring about it is that I don't have to convince anyone else to live that way - I get the benefits of it just by living it. The difficult thing about it is that I don't get the psychological convenience of thinking others should think as I do - everyone has their own reasons to live as they do. Until they cross a sovereignty boundary, and I'm involved somehow, I get no say.

That's the rub though. Many of us do support democratic socialism and social democracy, and are excluded, mocked, and banned because those forms of leftist ideology aren't edgy enough.

I've tried to calmly explain the academic basis for democratic socialism on lemmy a number of times, and it inevitably results in me getting banned, mostly for being critical of the shockingly violent rhetoric favored my ML purists.

Its unavoidable considering the creator of lemmy is a nazi, and Lemmy ml is his personal instance.

Well fuck your thread.

/s

Admin/Mod whatever. This is the message I got after reporting a troll and telling them off.

This isn’t meant to be a shit on lemm.ee comment. They operate the instance to be PG, that’s fine. It’s just not for me.

Can =/= are though, these words are describing with precision.

Its radical, not extremist.

The comment literally reads "they would hardly be any different". What's your point? That sweeping change is "kind of extreme"? Is this satire?

"One for Communists is hardly any different as far as I'm concerned."

Bruh.

It's not fine, no I bet you it's cia funded or something to have such a big presence online. Tankies are surprisingly uncommon IRL in my experience. Maybe increasingly so, but it's still hard to deny it as a threat to real leftism. Raddle.me seems much more levelheaded if anybody's looking for a explicitly anti-authoritarian alternative