1
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)
Communism
9342 readers
34 users here now
Discussion Community for fellow Marxist-Leninists and other Marxists.
Rules for /c/communism
Rules that visitors must follow to participate. May be used as reasons to report or ban.
- No non-marxists
This subreddit is here to facilitate discussion between marxists.
There are other communities aimed at helping along new communists. This community isn't here to convert naysayers to marxism.
If you are a member of the police, armed forces, or any other part of the repressive state apparatus of capitalist nations, you will be banned.
- No oppressive language
Do not attempt to justify your use of oppressive language.
Doing this will almost assuredly result in a ban. Accept the criticism in a principled manner, edit your post or comment accordingly, and move on, learning from your mistake.
We believe that speech, like everything else, has a class character, and that some speech can be oppressive. This is why speech that is patriarchal, white supremacist, cissupremacist, homophobic, ableist, or otherwise oppressive is banned.
TERF is not a slur.
- No low quality or off-topic posts
Posts that are low-effort or otherwise irrelevant will be removed.
This is not a place to engage in meta-drama or discuss random reactionaries on lemmy or anywhere else.
This includes memes and circlejerking.
This includes most images, such as random books or memorabilia you found.
We ask that amerikan posters refrain from posting about US bourgeois politics. The rest of the world really doesn’t care that much.
- No basic questions about marxism
Posts asking entry-level questions will be removed.
Questions like “What is Maoism?” or “Why do Stalinists believe what they do?” will be removed, as they are not the focus on this forum.
- No sectarianism
Marxists of all tendencies are welcome here.
Refrain from sectarianism, defined here as unprincipled criticism. Posts trash-talking a certain tendency or marxist figure will be removed. Circlejerking, throwing insults around, and other pettiness is unacceptable.
If criticisms must be made, make them in a principled manner, applying Marxist analysis.
The goal of this subreddit is the accretion of theory and knowledge and the promotion of quality discussion and criticism.
Check out ProleWiki for a communist wikipedia.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Fascist Authoritarianism is a form of government and communism is an economic system, communism has been used as a carrot dangle by corrupt fascist authoritarian governments many times but has nothing to do with communism itself, and even so fascist capitalism has caused way more far reaching harm than fascist communism has
It's the authoritarianism that makes these governments bad, not the type of economic system.
You need to ensure a good democracy, regardless of economic policy.
The opposite of democratic. It's a gradient. The people of a nation either has equal influence on how the nation is run, you have something in between or a very small minority has all the power.
The extreme where everyone have equal influence (impossible in reality) is perfect democracy. The extreme where a single person has all the influence, is an perfect authoritarian. Then you draw rough lines at points where the democracy is as good as you can possibly get, a flawed democracy, authoritarianism light, etc, depending on how unequal the influence is between people.
Also, I am not the one who you originally replied to.
You are trying to be way too specific in your counter questions for it to ever be meaningful. A better question would be, why isn't it possible to get a perfect democracy.
The answer is simple, if you have any influence over another person, it's already not perfect. As in a well spoken person at any workplace can voice their support for certain policies and create a higher influence for some stated ideas than a person being silent.
Your final question does not make sense. The point is to try to find more and more democratic systems regardless of initial conditions. Forced transparency for people in power for example increases democracy, nice, then we do it.
I have not stated any specifics on what constitutes what to what degree, I only defined the entire solution space. So it's no wonder it's not clear.
I can't avoid defending my position? I havent stated my position... How can you attack something I havent even stated. I just stated the only possible solutionspace which is valid regardless of position. Go watch Rules for Rulers by CGPgrey, it gives a better description than what I can.
What are you talking about? I have absolutly no idea what "Marxism-leninism" is, so this label means nothing to me. The possible combinations of political policies is WAY larger than the total combinations of a list of political philosophists.. So trying to collapse it any position into these few labels is just crude.
You state "but it’s very common for “anti-authoritarians” to support a wide range of things that are very authoritarian" and then point at my "The point is to try to find more and more democratic systems regardless of initial conditions". You are literally saying that trying to make society more democratic is authoritarian. There is absolutly no logic to this and you need to really clear up your ideas, cause and effect, because that does not compute in any universe.
So I agree, using a math metaphore, if we are discussion any solution, but you have made up your own axioms, then you can never get a good understanding, because your priors are incompatible with eachother.
Holy shit, bro actually linked CPG Grey as a source. The dude notorious for making videos based on a single book/source, and deliberately ignoring criticism of that book when making his videos. The video in question splits "rulers" into "democratic rulers" and "authoritarians" and makes no attempt to actually define these terms. Essentially, it argues that a ruler has a certain number of "keys" that they need to keep happy in order to stay in power (the people, the military etc.) and that democracies are democracies and authoritarian dictatorships are authoritarian dictatorships and one cannot be halfway between them lest it collapse or something. Dude is the epitome of the smug reddit intellectual who reads a single source and believes themselves to be an expert on a topic they didn't know existed 5 minutes ago. Only difference is Grey makes videos rather than reddit posts.
If that isn't enough, he also said that the Monarchy in the UK shouldn't be abolished because of "tourism." Yeah.
It's not very long, so it wouldn't be a huge waste of time, but it does the standard "lib theory" thing of simplifying everything into binaries to the point of meaninglessness, then trying to retrofit reality onto their binary. It's worth a watch if only to see how this stuff looks when it is presented in a "slick" sort of way, and is superficially convincing, but only to those that agree with the core premise that societies can be split into "dictatorships" and "democracies."