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So many people here trying to argue dictionary definitions and hide behind technicalities to make their little slice of authoritarianism better than that other slice of authoritarianism.
edit
Good lord, look at the replies to this post. Even being called out on the behavior, they still cant resist slapfighting over silly technicalities and dictionary definitions.
Communism isn't inherently authoritarian, it holds no relation to authoritarianism or democracy, just like capitalism, and can exist within any political formation. Conflating communism with authoritarianism and capitalism with democracy will likely result in completely justified dictionary arguments, as this misconception is actually very important ideologically.
Associating communism with things like USSR or, in an even more cursed way, China and claiming communism is authoritarian is actively harmful, especially considering that neither of them ever had communism to begin with - they had socialism and claimed to be directed towards communism some time in the future.
Such shortcuts, like communism=authoritarianism=evil prevent you from actually familiarizing yourself with the concepts and puts you in a position when you oppose a strawman.
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.
In order to own anything at all, you need a mechanism to protect that property with violence. When you have to protect your own property with violence through hired guards, it's feudalism. A necessary quality of capitalism is that the government protects your property with violence. Capitalism cannot exist without governments that defend property with violence or the threat of it.
All modern states are the final arbiters of decisions, just like the USSR and similar governments. If business contracts are signed in America, it's the governments that force people to follow them. If you have a property dispute, the government decides who wins through laws. The government ensures that individual rights are protected through violence, from basic rights like the right to life, to the right to have private property. Laws are backed up by violence, as laws only matter when enforced.
The issue with attempts to establish communism in the past is that their democratic mechanism either failed, or never existed to begin with. When democratic workers councils disagreed with what Stalin wanted, he just ignored them. What could they do about it? When member states of the Soviet Union got upset with federal decisions, tanks were sent in to silence any dissent. These states enforced systems that centralized power and allowed small groups, or even a single person to make unilateral decisions and never have their power challenged.
Stalin made some erroneous philosophical assumptions, and thought it meant he could violate sovereignty. Boy, was he wrong.
Capitalism works more on capitulation, which gives it a but more staying power. Only a bit, though, because capitulation only goes so far.
What we need is a system that people buy into and sustain of their own free will - not from having been coerced or convinced, but because they value it.
The problems start before Stalin. I also don't know what you mean by capitulation or how the USSR worked less by it than capitalism.
As far as a system that everyone buys into out of their own free will, it's probably not possible. Even in a system that perfectly ensures equality for all people, a couple of assholes will not like the system because they want to dominate others. Even anarchy would require a mechanism to uphold anarchy through violence. The best we can do is to create a system where everyone is equal and it is most prudent to uphold it from a rational point of view.
Indeed, Stalin's not the only failed communist/socialist, but at least he had some valid philosophy backing him (right until he glazed over individual rights).
It was somewhat of a tongue-in-cheek usage of the word 'capitulation'. But I meant it as roughly somewhere between coercion and choice, and leaning more towards choice than coercion does.
Equality for all won't work, structually or socially, except in some narrow (but critical) bands of focus. And anarchy has precisely the flaws you specify.
While 'perfect' equality and anarchy can't effectively exist, a society could be based around concepts of sovereignty. Not abandoning capitalism, but acknowledging the energy flow cash represents, and the need to use it both ethically and effectively. Not abandoning communal collectivity, but acknowledging that respect for sovereignty is the cornerstone to a solid collective.
The issues in any society are distributed throughout its members, and manifest in the psychological and emotional landscape of its people. The sad thing about this is that, as a societal structure hits it's limits, you see people exercising the principles of that society as fully as they can, and it still doesn't cut it. For capitalism, that's working endlessly, getting guilty for not working more/effectively enough, or getting all the things you were supposed to want and entering a general malaise because they're all meaningless.
But the thing is, top to bottom, people caught in the capitalist mindset are all looking for a good deal - and a 'good deal' is defined as one asymmetrically in my benefit. But there's no intuitive and natural, sustainable enjoyment of the results. It's like gambling once the urge has taken over someone, and they don't even pay attention to win or loss. Oh, sure, they like winning and don't like losing, but they're never going to take their winnings and go home, our really make back what they've lost. They're just going to continue.
Anyways - that same distributed nature is what the concept of sovereignty depends on. Capitalism is not something that needs to be fought - it works well with equitable exchange and prudent action. But the mentality that it trends towards must be fought. The urges to follow the advertisement, to take the simplistic way out, and to choose the cheaper (in all senses of the word) option. To trick others into getting the worse end of the deal, or to just be 'good hearted' and look the other way while you get screwed.
With sovereignty, first and foremost, the issues in the world that you care to change are your own to change. They may not be your fault, but they are your situation and cultural background. They are the hand you are dealt. They are your responsibility. And the first place to change them is within yourself - to recognize how you are connected to those things, and how and why what you do results in or feeds those things - and to make change in your own life, first and foremost, before you make claims on what others should do. Enforcement action against others is limited to circumstances where sovereignty has been (or is being) violated.
Until this mentality is prevalent enough to represent fundamental cultural change, it is irrelevant what government is chosen, other than to pragmatically choose what is already in place (or whatever works). Once this mentality is prevalent enough to represent fundamental cultural change, it is irrelevant what government is chosen, because the way out it is used will be effective enough and just enough - and it will be worked towards the ends of sovereignty, both individual and collective.
Having a mentality of sovereignty won't change much, if only because it doesn't fix many of the inherent problems with a global human society. A big downside to capitalism and free markets are mortal limitations. We can't predict the future or understand the full effects of our actions. We estimate based what information we have, but we can often be wrong even if we have good intentions. The externalities of our actions are basically impossible to calculate, and even when we discover them, we possess the ability to suspend our empathy and ignore potential harms.
I'm also not a fan of the assumption that we can't tell others what to do until we put our own lives in order. Sometimes getting others to do things is essential to changing your own life and improving your own situation. On a personal level, you can set boundaries with toxic people in your life or convince others to leave you alone. On a large scale, you can overthrow an oppressive system or change laws that prevent you from living well. Telling others what they should do is not mutually exclusive to making changes in your own life.
Sovereignty is great and all, but even if widely respected by most, some will not, and those that do must step in to protect it. The way I view it, laws don't exist for ethically behaving people, they exist because there will always be unethical people, and there's no way to ensure that any ethical person will always be ethical.
The fundamental reality is that someone who wants to do good can participate in an evil system. Unregulated global capitalism uses child slaves and keeps people in poverty, all while pumping substances into the environment that harm everyone. You might respect the sovereignty of everyone you meet, but anything you buy can be made by manufacturers who don't respect the sovereignty of people you'll never meet.
Capitalism is too big for its problems to be solved by individual behaviors without changing our current system. We must change it to actually make a system that respect everyone's anything, be it sovereignty, human rights, or the ability to live.
Not too big. You just have to have effective individual behaviors. They spread, because they work. Capitalism is currently a leading way of life because it is effective both for individuals and for collectives, at least from a raw, short-term power standpoint.
But that standpoint is a valid and important one. There's no need to get rid of capitalism, there's a need to adopt better ideologies, live by them, and gain by them. ..which is what I do.
The point of sovereignty isn't 'you can't stop other people from being bad.' It's that that kind of thinking (though necessary in a pinch) keeps you from addressing the ways you're relinquishing power to the existing system on an ongoing basis.
In the end, though, I'm just making conversation, and we'll both live as we wish. In some senses, we all live by sovereignty anyways. It's just more effective when you realize it.
Effective individual behaviors rely on empathy and denying short term gratification for long term prudence. Empathy breaks down on large scales for most people, and denying short term exploitation to build a better world is not something even the best of us can reliably do. Good vibes aren't useless, but they are not enough to make necessary changes.
As far as relinquishing power goes, my eyes are wide open. It's necessary in theory, but I don't respect laws that prevent people from living well. I respect the enforcement, but only because I must work to avoid it. I recognize that the only way to stop some bad things is violence, and that all rights must be protected by someone. It's undeniable that violence, although often avoidable, is necessary to exist. Human made laws and concepts without enforcement will be trampled on and basically don't matter.
Oh, I'm not saying violence isn't necessary at times.
But violence is the outflow of the underlying conflict - and that conflict can often be resolved, or won at an earlier stage.
I'm also not saying something stupid like 'if only people worked together, things would just be better!' You can never rely on someone, particularly not the world at large, to never do the bad thing (whatever that is).
But the entire issue of empathy breaking down on larger scales is an individual abd collective psychologocal issue, and is precisely the area I'm leveraging.
However, this can't be leveraged in the direct sense (show more pictures of dead puppies, and say 'vote for me, I'll end puppy mills!' really only goes so far, with an empathically exhausted populace that can't scale up their presence because they've already been emotionally squeezed dry. The actual emotions themselves need to be felt and understood.
The point of power that people don't generally notice that they are ceding isn't material. It's more fundamentally based in their psychology and motives. By the time their consideration gets to a massive scale, they've emotionally checked out - and I don't blame them, there's a lot to consider, and groups that are linked together with the practical/emotional bond (i.e., that have a 'real' bond between the individual and culture) have historically also been very inflexible - though very embued with vitality.
That inflexibility isn't fundamentally necessary, even though it's even present in our current 'culture', where people are often bound to the culture at large by A) lying to themselves, 'and if enough people just got together...' blah blah blah, or B) accepting a lie and 'facing reality' saying you have to forego the empathic bond on a large scale.
That said, building a culture where there's a flexible, practical bond flush with emotive empathy and the energy that comes from that is difficult. But much of cultural knowledge is passed on not by empathy, but by the presence of empathy when a power conflict is won or lost.
At the very least, I have a tool that gives me a lot of control in my own life, and over others who would cause conflicts with me, often enough without direct conflict. But it's more than a tool to win, it's a way of re-linking the empathetic mind to others. I think I've got the seed of a new culture. ..but I'm ok with the fallback of 'I have a thing that benefits me and me alone,' though to me that's clearly the less valuable circumstance.
I suppose that if the world is right, then my mind will change. ..and if I am right, the world will change.
Oh - and to be clear, I'm not trying to stop the things that already exist in the world from existing. I generally like or need those things. But I am creating a way of life that makes the world worthwhile to me.
The problem is that the orthodox MLs you find on lemmy do un ironically defend autocracy in the USSR and China, dismissing criticism of these states as western propaganda.
Trust me, id love a leftist space on the internet which doesn't make folk heroes out of tyrants. Lemmy is not that place.
There are many on Lemmy who do associate Communism with the USSR and China and also think it is a good thing.
True, but that's another story. Being communist doesn't mean being a tankie. Some communists are, some aren't, and as such conflating the two is wrong.
Context matters in this discussion.
The moderators of the lemmy instance OP got banned from have Russian and Chinese iconography in their profiles - its explicitly authoritarian and arguably communist in name only in order to attract naive idealists who otherwise would be against authoritarianism.
Yes, exactly like that is what i was talking about.
Communism IS 100% authoritarian. Any ideology which puts social constructs above individual rights and freedoms is authoritarian, be it monarchy, fascism or communism.
Sorry, but the protection of rights requires that governments limit freedom. All societies and nations on earth do this. If given absolute freedom, some would kill and brutalize to gain power, forcing everyone who wants to avoid this to band together and enforce rules that prevent that behavior. This is the biggest reason to rationally want a government. Even if you believe rights aren't social constructs themselves, everyone knows they must be fought for.
Some tankies use the fact that governments inherently limit freedom to claim all governments are authoritarian, and therefore states like the PRC and the USSR are no better than liberal democracies. Your definition of authoritarianism supports the bullshit arguments tankies make.
Authoritarianism is a sliding scale, and not every limit on freedom is equivalent in contributing to a country being more authoritarian. Not having the freedom to kill others without consequence doesn't make a country very authoritarian. Not having the freedom to publicly disagree with the government is a large factor in a state being authoritarian.
Communism and socialism do not necessitate having no freedom of speech or bodily autonomy. Communism, as defined by Marx, was the final stage socialism and anarchistic in nature.
The idea that communism is always authoritarian uses the idea of communism popularized by Marxist-Leninist movements, where dissent is highly controlled and limited. In reality, these regimes were socialist at best, calling themselves communists to claim that only their version of socialism would deliver Marx's communism. Even to the authoritarian communists themselves, their states never achieved communism at any point.
You're deluded. A proper liberal and democratic government doesn't limit individual rights and freedoms, it only ensures that one's rights end where rights of others start, resulting in an equilibrium for everyone.
Communism is authoritarian as it destroys individual rights and freedoms. If the ideology is not liberal in nature, it's authoritarian. There's no way around it.
Anarchists are the antithesis to authoritarians, not liberals, which doesn't even mean they're right. Besides, liberal democracy can support and enforce non government entities that take rights away from others. Even if you ignore slavery, where the liberal government arrests human beings if they try to gain freedom illegally, companies and owners can legally take away things necessary for life. Are the homeless, starving, and dirt poor really free in any meaningful way?
I personally think we can build on liberal democracy and the concept of private property, but serious adjustments need to be made to actually have a free society. We need, at the bare minimum, a welfare state that ensures everyone has the necessities, and access to the tools for self improvement. A society that doesn't give people fair chances is not a free society.
I'm in favor of limiting the private accumulation of wealth and power, as people shouldn't have the unilateral power wielded by the current ultra rich. This wouldn't be communism, but it would maximize freedom and minimize class conflict. It would democratize economic power as much as possible. Another key change would be making it as easy as possible to check the power of those who wield violence. Police must have democratic accountability.
The most controversial thing I think we need is a federation for peace, who's sole purpose is limiting and resolving interstate conflict. It would work to destroy or neutralize weapons of mass destruction, while also binding member states to enforce agreements made by the federation. It would be fundamentally decentralized, relying on the shared self interest of humanity to squash the selfish interests of humanity. The goal would be to prevent a single player from holding too many cards, even the federation itself. I don't expect it to happen until people recognize that we need it, but it is a part of the puzzle that cannot be overlooked: the quest to ensure liberty must be global, as the mechanisms that take away the most liberty, mostly global capitalism and imperialism, have no borders.
Capitalism IS 100% authoritarian. Any ideology which puts profit margins above individual rights and freedoms is authoritarian, be it monarchy, fascism or capitalism. /s
Capitalism is not an ideology. Get back to school, kiddo.
Neither if you are wrong. Sovereignty is key.
How does Communism put social constructs above individual rights and freedoms, especially moreso than Capitalism?
Communism puts society above an individual.
It does not. It puts individuals over the bourgeoisie.
No.
Regardless, there is an important distinction.
You can argue all you like that political systems like communism and socialism may have lead to things like corruption, famine, wars and genocide but ultimately, the people who support those systems are seeking a fairer way to run society for all people and believe in it despite its history.
Head over to the far-right and the genocide is the point. They want "undesirables" to be killed, enslaved or completely repressed.
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.
Then either make your comment and eat the downvotes or just don't make the comment at all. You're functionally complaining that a Facebook anti-vax group isn't listening to your science.
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.
The problem with socialist revolutions is that they reject liberalism, which is foundational to the curation of bona fide political agency. If people are not free to engage organically with political questions, then how can you possibly say their will is manifest as government? "Protecting the revolution" is not a justification for denying people agency. And honest readers of history will find much irony in Lenin's obsession with justifying his own Bolshevik coup as such.
This is an extremely simple idea, but Orthodox Marxist are so blinded by their hatred for all things western (because they are campists relitigating the cold war) that they miss the forest for the trees. For socialism to be the true expression of the people, the people must first be free.
Solid take.
Can we just not do either? I literally don't care to read about how you think the world is bad on a community about onions
Welcome to lemmy.
Its unavoidable considering the creator of lemmy is a nazi, and Lemmy ml is his personal instance.
The creators are tankies, not Nazis. Just as hateful and stupid, but not the same
I really don't give a flying fuck what label it is or what their prefered uniform is, or what their favorite color is.
They're all the same pieces of shit that want to ruin society, the world, and the species, for their own personal flavor of power.
This is fundamentally untrue.
The foundations of Nazism are purely focused on superiority of an interior group over exterior groups, and is centered on Conquest.
The foundations of Communism are centered on creating a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society, and abolishing hierarchy.
To say that Communists are equivalent to Nazis is Nazi apologia, as it implies they have everyone's best interests at heart rather than pure malice.
yes yes, you are super upset and offended that your authoritarian team has been compared to another authoritarian team and want to argue on a dictionary technicality that your authoritarianism is better than theirs, so everyone ignores the actual history and practice of it that makes your teams mass slaughter just as bad as that other teams mass slaughter.
What team do you think I'm on?
When I say tankie, I don't mean the average communist, I mean the type of idiots who worship the Soviet Union and the CCP and share their authoritarian views. They're not communists, they're authoritarians, and are no better than Neo-Nazis with a red/gold coat of paint.
I'm pretty sure he's on the other side of the spectrum. He's a communist in the extreme
Rightwingers don't deserve oxygen.
Bring out the death camps! We need to murder our political opponents.
Seriously though, we are all human. The world needs more love.
If we were all human and capable of love, this authoritarian shit wouldnt exist.
Amen