also many, many, many of communist supporters in modern western countries do not actually have any kind of education on what that entails, they just see problems with capitalism and want an alternative. not saying they're not valid problems, but most of these people have not given any thought to what would happen after a Revolution, much less how you would go about actually starting one in a liberal democracy.
Ironically that's exactly how Marxist saw it: as a potential solution to address the issues of capitalism. It was a post capitalist post industrial reform, not something you skip to.
In many ways where legislative reform occurred, and not violent revolution, it resulted in improved society.
The problem I think is that people assume all communists are idealists who don’t see the flaws.
When if you actually talk to communists they are the most critical of communism, reanalysing and reassessing.
People who are communists are people who believe an idealist communist society is the fairest for humanity. But there are infinite variations on how possible they think it is to achieve, the justification of the means to get there, and the contradictions that will arise.
Replying to No-Mammoth1688... But isn’t that every philosophy? Marxism, Leninism, communism, capitalism, socialism all strive to achieve something good. But each of these philosophies falls short in practice because humans are ultimately flawed and greedy. When you’ve grown up all your live in a communist or capitalistic country, it’s easy to see past the flaws compared to a system that is completely different from your own.
I have a quibble with your assessment, if I may. Though I agree with most of what you wrote, I disagree that
>humans are ultimately flawed and greedy.
Yes, we are all imperfect in sometimes damaging and dangerous ways, but I don't think that's the cause of the problem. Most of us are doing our best to be good people, even when we fail.
In my view, the problem isn't humanity as a whole. The problem, as far as I can tell, is that humanity has yet to discover a system of rules for living together that doesn't inevitably promote sociopaths to positions of power.
>Humans are corrupt and selfish.
This kind of claim would get you laughed at down the block by practically any social scientist and philosopher.
Humans aren't innately any specific social traits, we're effectively conditioned to action by social forces. Imagine going up to a hunter-gatherer tribe and telling them to not share the hunt and berries, but instead have each person keep the fruit of their labor and leave the orphaned and elderly to die--they'd beat you to an inch of your life if you're lucky. Not because they're "inherently good natured," but rather that kind of thinking simply hurts the tribe as a social unit.
If I told you to jump in order to survive, you'd jump. If I told you to sit to survive, you'd sit. The only inherent traits in man is meeting his needs. So if you raised him in a society that requires him to jump through hoops to survive, don't be surprised to see him jumping through hoops. Any trait you attach to him like "greedy," "selfish," or "corrupt," after the fact is simply a reflection on the organizational structure of society, so you'd be putting the cart before the horse in solely blaming him.
I can say as a first generation immigrant of one of those countries whose regimes fell, from the sound of it there was every kind of corruption and trap if you didn't support the Communist regime outright. In the same way that a mafia or cartel might kill those who kept to themselves even because they could potentially be a threat.
Only at a government level they'd seek a reason for jailing or killing, such as if you accepted surplus materials at a plant or business because it was owned by said government and so such was technically wrong.
Those regimes often ended in leaders getting dragged out into the street cowboy/mob-justice style, **maybe** a formal trial which often ended in execution by hanging.
At its worst, I'll never forget hearing 'In those times if you saw someone with an orange that meant that they were a well-connected government official.'
Edit: some poor grammar
I get it though. A utopia sounds nice. But to me, we humans are corruptible by nature and if you give almost anyone unchecked power without moderation or consequence they'll hold onto their newfound comfort they've built for themselves and loved ones sometimes even if it destroys society.
I'd imagine one reason why such destruction of societal well-being wouldn't bother a seemingly normal person or rather how one corrupts themselves is due to distance between themselves and those doing the work thus never quite having to face what they've done.
Communism on paper looks kinda ok. Communism in real life is a total disaster.
The idea of communism is that everyone is working together for the good of everyone. It reality there are too many selfish/lazy/evil humans that only care about themselves and abuse the system
But how is that any different from say capitalism. Capitalism is supposed to provide economic freedom, equality, promote innovation and self regulation.
Capitalism is a society based on consumption. And one that is destructive to the environment. It leaves people who aren’t able to be productive behind (if you have a disability). In late stage capitalism, consolidation begins as corporations continue to buy out small businesses and competitors until only one provider is left (monopoly). Thus these providers can begin charging whatever they want for their products or services. It also promotes a culture where workers aren’t paid fairly because there will always be somebody who would do it for less.
On paper most philosophies look great. But I don’t think the goal should be to stick to only one philosophy. A blend of socialism, capitalism, communism, for example would be much more effective at balancing the pros and cons of each philosophy.
> Capitalism is supposed to provide economic freedom, equality, promote innovation and self regulation.
And it’s been largely successful so far. The capitalist world has become more free, equal, and innovative in the last century. The standard of living in capitalist nations today is the best in history, not the norm. It’s not perfect, but it’s a whole hell of a lot better than any other system.
Nobody’s advocating for laissez faire pseudo-anarchism, capitalism works best with a degree of governmental regulation.
And this “late-stage capitalism” shtick, Marx thought that we were entering it in 1870. Communists are never humble enough to admit that the free-market economy is more complex, and resilient, than they can fathom.
The success of capitalism for *some* is built on the brutal exploitation of many millions of other people. Let’s not forget slavery, the rubber genocides, the ongoing exploitation of workers in “non-Western” countries for their cheap labor, etc. Capitalism has a history just as ugly as the Soviet attempt at communism, it’s just that much of the harm done by capitalism is simply exported to the “third world” instead of occurring at home.
In practice the countries that are labeled as communist tend to be dictatorships or oligarchies, which is completely counter to the workers owning the means of production. I can’t think of a practical implementation of actual communism on a national scale.
Not to say pure communism would work, but seems like the issues immigrants have with communism countries is that they’re not democratic and they’re authoritarian, which are not necessary prerequisites for shared ownership of infrastructure.
Hit it exactly on the head. There has never been a true communist nation; it quickly devolves into authoritarianism. The economic system doesn't matter much if the boot is still on your neck.
THIS is the part that NOBODY talks about. Communist states are never truly communist: they are autocratic at best and dictatorial at worst. Capitalist or communist doesn’t matter in a dictatorship.
What's communist?
I've heard Universal Healthcare called communist, but you can find plenty of people from countries with it who love it.
At the same time, others will tell me universal healthcare in any system with private property is just capitalism that wants to keep the proletariat healthy to work.
Anyone who thinks that universal healthcare is “communism” doesn’t have a clue what communism actually is, and probably thinks the fact that the roads aren’t privately owned is also communism.
There’s videos of people after seatbelts became mandatory saying this was a communist takeover.
There’s videos of people after drinking while driving became mandatory saying this was a communist takeover.
Communism *is* literally anything they don’t like.
Ironically I think that sort of thing is why communism polls somewhat high among the youth: their main exposure to the idea of “communism“ is conservative boomers calling public-welfare policies *which are absolutely not communism* “communism.”
If you didn’t know better you think “Caring about the public good rather than selfishly about whatever benefits yourself is communism? Count me in!”
I was going to reply to your other comment with this point.
The same is true of "socialism." The right has beat the term to death fear mongering to the point that a new generation now associates the word with basic government services, any effort to address poverty or any sort of concern for equity.
When the debate is framed as "ruthless sociopath" vs "socialist/communist," you get a lot of people signing up for the latter.
Right.
And personally, I don’t have as big of a problem with socialism, since there are sizable non-authoritarian versions of it, like Democratic Socialism. Still, Democratic Socialists want to use democratic means to be elected into power and then transfer all private industries to state control. Which, as you say, means that calling a capitalist country with a nationalized healthcare system “socialist” is laughable.
I’m an idiot who shouldn’t be consulted on such questions. But speaking from personal experience I was drawn to the idea of communism as a teenager because the stories I saw on the news on homelessness, corporate greed, the war for oil, and so on gave rise to a negative opinion about capitalism. As I got older I formed a different opinion after seeing how tyranny always proceeds an attempt to establish communism. And since, in my opinion, inevitable greed in a capitalist society is not as bad as inevitable tyranny in a communist one I came to accept capitalism.
To me there exists many different kinds of capitalism. Laissez-faire capitalism was proven to be ineffective and very unstable during the 19th and early 20th century. It just doesn't work, tragedy if the commons and all that, and humans aren't evolved to be greedy, but only part greedy and part empathetic, and with this we have spread around the globe. It is an effective revolutionary advantage.
A well regulated competive market capitalism is most stable in those markets where competition is possible. This is most things areas except for infrastructure and Healthcare. For infrastructure, you can't run multiple roads in parallel or have different water suppliers, so we often appoint the government it maintain a monopolistic market space, or heavily regulate a private monopoly. Heavily regulate it. This is how power transmission is operated in some markets, for example.
Capitalism truly needs checks and balances itself. No reason why Jeff Bezos made $7.9 million/hr in 2023, increasing his total net worth by $65bn but only pays a 23% federal income tax rate. Lowest income American families pay 11% on income taxes, with the upper limit being 37% if your income exceeds ~$670,000 USD/yr
So why is Bezos paying taxes below the median? Because he has “Fuck you” money
This is a great take, I just thought I’d add, greed absolutely still exists in a communist society. It’s also notable that not many people remember that Marx’s communist manifesto was predicated on a healthy capitalist society, without wealth to plunder and redistribute, communism can’t exist.
I think this is the thing that people often miss when they espouse the virtues of communism. It doesn't solve greed. It doesn't solve corruption. Communism requires concentrating resources at the national scale in order to ensure equal distribution, which actually increases the opportunity for corruption. It only really works if the people with their hands on the levers are playing fair. Which is kind of the whole problem in the first place.
People are garbage everywhere.
But pure communism caused many Soviet citizens to starve post-WWII even though it contained Ukraine, one of the largest grain and sunflower seed/oil producers in the world.
I think "plunder and redistribute" is an aggressively uncharitable reading of Marx. It's not about wealth, Marx didn't think all the diamonds and gold in the world would have been sufficient to enable the transition to communism. It's about the means of production being well enough developed to sufficiently provide for the population. He wasn't suggesting we just loot rich people's homes and give everyone a cut, but redirect the productive forces of the rich people's factories towards meeting the needs of the masses instead of maximizing profit.
“Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice. Socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.” - Mikhail Bakunin.
He meant this as an argument for anarchisocialism, but personally I’d take privilege and injustice over slavery and brutality any day.
You think what we live in is capitalism?!?? How adorable. Capitalism is about competition creating fair markets. You live in a country that has 3 credit card companies that own the payment systems for everything you buy. 4 shit phone companies. 5 companies own 80% of all the food you buy. When is the last time you seen competitive gas prices? Housing prices are fixed. Rent prices are fixed. Monopolies are the rule. WHat you are living in is not capitalism.
Young people don’t like communism they like socialism. And that’s not even the majority. Most just see the problems with capitalism enough to criticize it.
This was my thought. Socialism perhaps, but certainly not communism. And when you look at countries with socialist institutions, like the Nordics or Canada, you find that people are very happy with their socialism.
The height of communism in the West was during the early Cold War when it was seen as an element of the counter culture and people weren’t as familiar with its problems.
Since when are we socialist here in Scandinavia? We've had social democratic governments for most of our modern history, but we've never gone socialism or democratic socialism. We have a couple of smaller socialist parties in government, though. Here in Sweden the Left party, who are socialists, get around 8-10% of votes, but nobody wants to work with them and always excludes them when forming the government.
They're like the left's Sweden democrats, a party nobody really wants to work with but goes to for some political deals just to be able to form a government.
From a US perspective any kind of sharing is "socialist". Just the fact that there can be mainstream parties with "social(ist)" in their name shows a much higher level of tolerance of the idea.
Nordic countries and Canada have a well fare state they are not socialist countries by any reason. Source: Someone born and raised in a socialist country and someone who read a lot of socialist and communist bibliography.
Ninja edit: I don't believe in any of that shit.
Reddit has people calling themselves communist.
"Socialism" is a meaningless term in spaces that include both Americans and non-Americans because it means something radically different to the majority of Americans than it has traditionally meant.
This is true, but socialism is also commonly used to refer to things like democratic workplaces/coops and other types of avenues to put more economic power in the hands of those currently at the bottom of economic strata (the laborer/worker). Richard Wolff runs into this a lot when describing socialism and I think so many different groups using these terms has muddied the water a bit.
The definition you are describing I would argue as being a more recent shift in how people view what socialism means at least online. The focus on social programs or social welfare is definitely a more recent development historically speaking. The original definition I provided aimed at non private ownership can't exist in the modern capitalist framework because capitalism, by definition, requires private ownership of businesses. This means that one version of socialism can more easily coexist with capitalism than the other definition which is part of what causes the confusion I mentioned before.
Yes, OP seems to be doing exactly that. Funny enough, the people who live in social democracies LOVE social democracy, which entirely contradicts OP’s position. The youth want socialism of a sort, not communism.
To be fair to OP, a lot of young people who actually want socialism/social democracies accidentally conflate them with communism too. It’s much more prevalent on instagram/tik tok than it is on reddit though.
None if the countries who call themselves communists are actually communist. No country has succeeded or “achieved” communism, as it is defined in communist theory.
Because no one really cares about being "full pure capitalist"
There isn't some manafesto capitalist are dead set on trying to achieve.
I'm sure a majority of capitalism supporters arnt too upset about the free public library in their town.
>I'm sure a majority of capitalism supporters arnt too upset about the free public library in their town.
Lmao you'd be surprised. People keep trying to get mine torn down because it teaches kids to be gay and homeless people go inside sometimes.
I believe you, but I'm just willing to bet those people fall into a minority.
Moreover it sounds like their reasons against it aren't in the "name of pure capitalism"
I would argue that every so called "communist" state has actually been closer to capitalist than communist.
Most countries are effectively capitalist in every way that matters. If you want to own a company, you need capital, rich people exist, etc.
No so called "communist" country has ever been even remotely communist in the ways that actually matter, such as "to each according to his needs and from each according to his ability" or even just profit-sharing like a worker owned co-op.
In reality every so called "communist" regime has simply been a one party totalitarian state and allowing varying levels of capitalism.
Stop repeating this bullshit.
Every single country that applies Marxist theory ends up in the exact same authoritarian dictatorship, murders a large portion of its population, and destroys its ability to produce goods and services forever, you can't say "that's not REAL communism", because it's the inevitable result of every fucking application of communism.
>No country has succeeded or “achieved” communism, as it is defined in communist theory.
Which offers yet another reasons communism should be rejected. That every attempt to get the proverbial pie-in-the-sky form results in Holodomor/Purge, Great Leap Forward, Killing Fields, etc.
Does every colonialist expansion genocide and slave trade get blamed on capitalism? No, it gets blamed on the people perpetuating it.
Does sex trafficking and the drug war get blamed on capitalism? The Iraq war, the Bengal famine, the extermination of indigenous people around the world by Europeans?
No. Even though these are all products of the quest for profit.
Capitalism and communism have humans within those systems perpetuating evil. It doesn’t make the systems themselves evil.
Things like imperialism and genocide and slavery existed long before capitalism, and capitalism doesn’t claim to be the solution to them.
You can’t say the same for communism, it *does* claim to be the solution for various modern social ills, but then in practice it doesn’t solve them or just creates worse problems.
Maybe. I’d much rather live in Cuba than Haiti. Or Vietnam than Laos or Cambodia.
For poorer comparable countries that weren’t the benefactors of colonial expansion, it can work better than capitalism. Not always. But there’s no one size fits all.
Communism is the political perpetoum mobile. All evidence suggests that socialist regimes devolve into corruption, tyrrany and collapse, yet people pretend that there must be another way.
They have made sincere and earnest efforts at the first phases of a communist revolution and failed repeatedly because it is antithetical to human nature.
“No one has even been able to implement it” really isn’t the defense that communists want it to be.
They can never quite explain why this time will be different, why these people promising communism are somehow different from all these people promising it before.
It’s nothing but main character syndrome. “Sure, everybody else whose tried it failed miserably, but we will succeed because I’m doing it this time.”
Something to keep in mind. The US used covert and economic warfare for decades to brutally stomp out democratic leftist movements, often violently, and backed right-wing dictators, to make *absolutely sure* that communism never got it's fair shake.
Read the book "The Jakarta Method" to learn more, though I warn you it's disturbing and will leave you disillusioned
Often in much more brutal ways? More brutal than the Korean War? Cambodia? Cuba? Plus, the soviets aren't a thing anymore. Western capitalism and imperialism is still an ongoing threat.
“Democratic leftist movements” and “communism” are not the same thing. Communist states have one-party rule, there’s nothing democratic about that.
But I agree that overthrowing democratically-elected leftist governments was a travesty.
“Communist state” is an oxymoron.
If you look at the Mensheviks and Russian social democrats, they were perfectly ready to form a coalition government with the other factions and establish a democratic parliament. Communism has always been democratic and republican in its means. The Bolsheviks simply killed anyone who disagreed with Lenin’s “vanguard party” rule. Democratic socialism (the real socialism, the one that Karl Marx advocated for and wrote about) was never given a chance. The Soviets killed it at every turn and instated their puppet regimes same as America did.
The only reason we call them communist or socialist today is because the two world powers of the time benefited from that framing.
The Bolsheviks were aiming at creating a communist state though, were they not? And they were supported by millions of communists all around the world. When most people say “communist” they just mean “aiming at communism,” they’re not talking about the socialist end state predicted by Marx.
Communists know perfectly well what non-communists mean when they say “communist state;” saying that those states weren’t actually communist is just playing word games and dodging the argument.
Citation needed.
A growing amount of Americans like the idea of corporations occasionally paying some taxes if it isn't too much of a bother, and conseratives stream "COMMUNIST!!!!" without actually knowing what it means. Not sure OP knows what it means either.
Because they are young, optimistic and believe that humans are way less selfish than they actually are. It takes a few years of actually trying to work with diverse groups before they truly understand that humans are much more selfish than they realized.
I had one - a young struggling artist - block me after we had what I thought to be a civil discussion. Apparently challenging somebody to provide a historic example of a society more complex than Marx's neologic "primitive communists" who didn't have their lower classes working for a wage of some sort is rude when that someone is clearly just trying to have the last word.
So instead of pursuing a system that tries to encounter individual selfishness we should keep a system that promotes and rewards selfishness and does not restrict that selfishness for the most part? (The literal idea of capitalism is to let selfishness run free essentially).
Nobody is saying that humans are not selfish. But there can be systems that take away the need to be selfish to survive for the common people and protect them from the selfishness of others
It doesn’t have to be one extreme or the other. People are allowed to see flaws in communism and also agree that at least some of individual wealth should be put towards social issues
I mean capitalism doesn't work/if it works as intended 99% of the people suffer intentionally and in the end the excessively rich control politics and the world.
If capitalism wouldn't crush any attempt for alternatives worldwide throughout history, we could indeed have alternative examples
As are the kids in Flint michigan who are part lead by now, or the people in rural Virginian areas whose food and water supplies are polluted by coal extraction, and there are thousands of examples everywhere
Dude, this.
I'm so fucking sick of people saying, "humans are greedy and selfish, which are bad traits, so the best thing to do is enforce a system that actively encourages people to act that way"
Like, people used to rape and murder willy nilly for thousands of years. Seems pretty inherent to us, so why aren't we just enforcing systems that encourage it??
If it can never be fully stopped, then we should be embracing it and encouraging it, is these people's conclusions. It's just so asinine, really shows that they're just parroting what they've heard and haven't actually stopped to think about political and economic systems as a whole and how they can influence individual persons.
Is this true? Young Americans are increasingly distrustful of unbridled capitalism and more open to socialism. I am not aware of people thinking communism is a good idea.
The whole 'people from communist countries hate it' thing also makes no sense, because generally when you're speaking to people who had to, or chose to, flee their country, of course they're going to hate it
Hating a country you fled from is definitely not unique to communism
As someone with a degree in political science, I can tell you that there has never been a truly communist system in our world - not the way Marx envisioned it. Soviet Union forced it, and it was run by the middle and upper classes. True communism is meant to be something that occurs organically when the working class revolts. This results in bloodshed, yes, but eventually to a stable system (theoretically). What was done in Southeast Asia, the Soviet Union, and China, was a forced "revolution" spirited by fascist leaders.
I am totally for a real communist system if one could ever actually come about. Likely not at this stage given the way it's been forced and the overwhelming resources that the rich and powerful have, which was not as big a gap in Marx's day. But I'm opposed to, obviously, the fascist and forced form of Communism as seen in the last century.
Not to mention the fact that there are dozens upon dozens of many steps a country like the U.S. could take to approach a more socially beneficial political system like communism without actually getting there. Democratic Socialism is an example. We could be doing so much more with our social systems than we are and we wouldn't be anywhere close to Marx or Soviet Union style communism.
Edit: Some typos
Communism doesn’t work without a strong authoritarian regime. Someone has to force people to plow the fields and run the factories.
Capitalism doesn’t have this problem because of economic incentives to produce.
You do realize that capitalists also force people to “plow the fields and run the factories”?
Did you not remember in recent memory how Reagan reacted to PATCO?
I mean, Leninism is hardly Marxian to begin with. Lenin had far more in common with Chernaschevsky, who wanted a totalitarian state to keep the people’s in line until the revolution could be completed. Marx had nothing in common with this idea. I see no reason to believe that communism as an idea is just inherently secret authoritarianism.
There are fundamental misconceptions on either side, unfortunately.
1. Among Americans, the dire misconception that 'Ownership' is a fundamental function of reality, and therefore worker joint 'ownership' of the means of production would be ironclad and largely resolve the world's inequities;
2. Among ex-Eastern Bloc individuals and Cuban immigrants, the misconception that Soviet-style governance is the *only* possible approximation of communism, and ***must*** come with all the problems they experienced.
It’s easier to be a communist in a free country than be a free individual in a communist country.
White liberal kids have too much free time and never experienced going to bed hungry in a communist country
Growing up in a household that felt totalitarian, I often went to bed hungry, even in a country that prides itself on freedom. Hence, your argument seems irrelevant.
Your anecdotal experience doesn't change the fact that his statement is correct.
Not to mention, it's a bit different when you're being punished by your parents because you didn't want to eat your greens or just being defiant and choosing not to eat, from there literally not being food for the whole neighborhood to eat for at least the next couple of days because the chickens caught a disease and the flour went bad.
You comparing the two shows a significant level of entitlement. Unless you were actually abused and starved with the intention of causing you serious harm. In that case, I'm extremely sorry and I wish you the best.
plenty of people from former communist areas/countries say things were better under communism. there could be any number of reasons for this and many people are saying the opposite too, but let's not make sweeping generalizations
Because a growing amount of young Americans are incapable of reading Solzhenitsyn, are financially illiterate, and are incapable of critical thinking. Communism has a great PR team - idea of everyone working together harmoniously and what not. The communists have built a mythology of the romantic rebel leader standing up against a giant, evil opponent. They dismiss any critique of communist nations as "communism hasn't actually been tried". It's super easy to have the perfect economic system when every time it goes wrong, it's just because it wasn't properly implemented.
Here's the single biggest problem with communism - it assumes and *requires* that people act self-sacrificially for strangers. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is how Marx phrased it. The problem is, time and time and time again, from Cuba to Venezuela to Russia to Iran to North Korea to China to Vietnam to Cambodia and everywhere else someone has "tried" communism, it is proven that people do not act self sacrificially on a scale necessary to support a communist nation. This is the premise underpinning the entire philosophy - if people do not act communally, then communism cannot succeed. Every nation and empire in all of history has demonstrated again and again that people do not act communally at that scale.
So what happens? Well, you start forcing people to be communal. So already, they have no morale, no incentive, other than fear of further suffering/death. Essentially, slavery (cause what were the gulags and reeducation camps other than a system where the government said someone wasn't being communal enough and were sent to labor against their will) is the end result of communism.
Capitalism on the other hand presupposes everyone acts in a self-interested manner. This appeals to those escaping from communist countries because it says, you can choose to apply your labor however you see fit. Drive a cab, run a 7/11, become a doctor, whatever you want - then you get to keep the fruits of that labor and do whatever you want (within the law) with it. Sure, capitalism allows for some people to have exorbitant wealth, but it also allows for the poor (who previously would have been forced into slavery, serfdom, low social castes) to rise up and have a degree of comfort and pass that wealth onto their children.
Well, first off its important to disconnect communism THE IDEA from communism, the political ideology practiced in soviet russia. Most people who have experience with soviet russia will tell you that it sucked, because it did. THAT SAID, have you asked anyone from china or cuba what they think of the ideology?
Anyway, many young americans see capitalism as failing, which is reasonable. Its actively destroying the world while only lining the pockets of the rich. People dont see the fruits of their labor, and they can feel it. you cant afford a one bedroom on minimum wage anywhere anymore, and for a lot of people thats all thats on offer. they will never be able to afford a house. Clearly something is wrong
So in that context, doesnt it make sense to look towards a worldview that is all about reconnecting man and the fruits of his labor?
I have many Chinese coworkers. Some are in the US and some are in China. None I have talked to like the idea of communism.
Those in the US are happy to be here. They make great money and love what is available to them.
Those in China also make more than most in China and like it that way.
Btw, all are engineers. My American coworkers are also. We don’t see capitalism as a problem. We do feel we are paid fairly for our labor. We can afford a house.
My family is from Vietnam but we also have other family in China as do many other Vietnamese people.
Neither side likes communism, and it is why I reside in the US now. If I even speak about it for an instance to any of the elders in my family they shut me down very quick and are traumatized by it.
There are bad examples of it, sure. But ask what people in the 3rd world think of capitalism, and how its bled them dry.
It's also worth noting that the US has had a swift hand in actively demolishing any actual communist countries. You must know what the US did to vietnam, right? how is that not a traumatic topic?
I do know, however my family was personally assisted by US military during this time. I know not everyone was, but what my family witnessed the Vietnamese government do was far more disturbing than anything remotely close to what the US did.
It is very easy to observe a conflict from the history books, but people on the ground and citizens that witnessed it hands on will tell you otherwise.
Thats fair - the vietnam war is a whole topic that is largely unrelated to the theory of communism. My larger point is that any political ideology is capable of committing horrific crimes, that fact existing doesn't invalidate that political ideology inherently.
If that was the case, you could make the same argument about democracy and capitalism being inherently evil, as there is certainly no shortage of evil committed by those ideologies. While soviet russia definitely had a "work camp" problem, it didn't have full on chattel slavery like the US did
as some one who grew up and fled the combloc .because they are stupid and dont know better.
alot of it is because its being pushed in colleges. i had professors preach about how great it is and how bad capitalism is. i made a argument against one, and she flew off the handle calling me a idiot saying i don't know what im talking about even some students that are her followers started in. i took my shirt off showing all the scars from what a communist government did d to a minor for hiding food cause i was sick of boiled leather.
human nature. people will work their ass off to have the best for them self's. you also have people who will live off welfare and have nothing so they don't have to do any thing. very few go out of their way to be selfless... communism / socialism is forced equity. the people who will work their ass off will give up when they see no matter how hard they try they are no better off then those who dont. . things get worse and worse.
They're not doing well under capitalism, so they delude themselves into thinking that there is an actual viable alternative (there isn't; communism has failed every time it was *actually* ~~implemented~~ attempted).
EDIT: Commenters correctly pointed out Communism was never implemented, as the incentive model inevitably leads to degradation into authoritarian control operating on capitalist economic principles.
That actually makes a lot of sense. I never thought of it as that being the reason, to me I thought it was solely a trend.
My family came to America from Vietnam during the war and they tell me horror stories of how life was there under it so it has always confused me.
(Edit; I love being downvoted for having a personal experience with communism. I guess since I witnessed it when I was young I can’t talk badly about it)
I used to work with an older Vietnamese guy. Well not really old, but quite a bit older than me. Great guy.
He always got annoyed at the "america bad" types because his experience growing up in Vietnam was horrible.
There are viable alternatives to what we have, most of what people call communism is barely socialism lol. Literally nothing says we need to exist in the conditions we do other than greed and a desire to maintain the status quo
Plenty of tribes did just fine with communal living, where each contributes to their ability and receives care regardless of their ability.
It just doesn't work on a large scale. Greed takes over when you don't know the person you are keeping things from and can't be guilted into partaking in the system or exiled for failing to uphold the standard.
If communism was never attempted by Communist Parties in countries like the Soviet Union, those parties sure fooled millions of genuine communists into supporting them.
Personally I think it’s a poor excuse. Communism took an authoritarian turn very early in its history. Genuine communists today seem to make no effort to rectify this, instead they either act as apologists for those authoritarian communist regimes, or they paradoxically claim those regimes “weren’t really communist” without addressing the systemic and ideological problems that caused so many communist movements to end up as authoritarian “state capitalist” states.
And this is my big problem with communism: there is not *any* attempt to take a sober look at communism’s history and try to reform it, instead there just seems to be excuses and apologism.
It's been tried on a small community scale and it usually disbands within one-two decades when not enough people want to work enough to keep it going. On a national scale it's pretty much impossible to organize without the initial socialist vanguard state, which historically has never been voluntarily ended by any country attempting communism.
Kinda impossible to do without authoritarians. Without state intervention people have proven time and again to willingly form capitalistic economies of their own volition.
Well then, you really sum up communist ideology when you say it is impossible to do without authoritarianism.
No thanks, I’ll take even unreformed capitalist democracy over that.
Fair point, but as illustrated by the other comment, most proponents for "real" communism consider any binding requirements for participation to be disqualifying.
My best friend from HS spent the first 15 years of his life in Cuba. I think he had an uncle who was a political prisoner. He beat some guy for speaking favorably about "real Communism".
I was recently thinking about this and I think it has to do with the ‘American Dream’. In America, there isn’t much of a rescue in case you loose your job or have no health insurance and have a medical emergency. The idea of capitalism where everyone fends for themselves works for those who have a stable income, but not for those not so lucky. Millions of Americans live in poverty without much support from the government (if any at all). For those Americans, the idea of communism where everyone has each other covered (in theory) instead of a survival royale where individual succes is at the core makes sense. If the American Dream doesn’t come true and stays a dream instead of reality, it makes sense those individuals think of alternatives like communism which, in theory, should solve poverty and spread the wealth.
I think this is a big one.
It feels like social support systems/programs and full blown communism have been tied together when one can exist without the other.
This. IMO welfare-state capitalism (the Nordic model) has reliably produced the best outcomes in terms of quality of life.
It is entirely possible to have a capitalist democracy with strong worker protections and social safety nets. But I think a big part of making it possible is reining in political corruption from corporations spending money to influence the government.
From experience,
- I didn't know how much people suck until after high school. I thought every poor person was poor because they were unlucky. There are in fact a lot of poor people that are poor because they suck.
- I didn't realize how hard it is to adult.
- It felt good to think I knew something other people didn't
- It felt good to think all problems were from evil people who could be defeated instead of just realities of being alive.
the people from communist countries actually know what communism is. the upper middle class kids of the west just want a sense of belonging, and communists are just one of those groups that accept anybody in.
It's because half of Americans are under age 38 and don't remember the regular news reports and footage of the grinding poverty, oppression, corruption and misery of life in communist countries. People getting shot for trying to escape, throwing themselves over barbed wire fences, the occasional few being allowed out of their country but immediately defecting. However many problems Capitalism had, communism had them 10x worse.
Any place that won't let you vote with your feet is not a good place to live. There's plenty of terrible places that won't stop you from leaving, but at least you can leave.
Because they've got little life experience, and it's easy to tell other people how they ought to be living when your life is subsidized by people who actually work. Things change as soon as they're no longer listed as a dependant on their parents' taxes.
The people who romanticize communism are like people who romanticize living in Regency England. They imagine a sanitized version in which they're never the servants. Communism is a failed experiment and it's been tried (always with good intentions) many times. It always ends the same way: people so desperate to leave it they'll risk their lives for the chance.
Because recent events have convinced some people that capitalism is so evil, they’d like to try something else. Imo, communism is often portrayed inaccurately as the permanent solution to the problems that capitalism has. This portrayal was made by Karl Marx himself and remains a key argument for communists.
Communism promises a lot of things, so it’s easy to see why people find it attractive. Many of the problems with capitalism Marx identifies are simply true, yet his conclusions are extreme. The combination of rational criticisms of capitalism combined with the promise of a workers’ paradise are tantalizing.
If I found Marx’s proposed solutions to capitalism rational, I would gladly support his assertions. As it stands, I view Marxism as just another trick to give absolute power to one guy or a few. Many such tricks exist, but communism spins a nice story
Because communism fails spectacularly, which people who have lived under communist regimes have suffered through, so obviously they don't like it. Young people tend to be both poorer and more idealogical, both of which make communism sound more attractive than it actually is.
I worked with an old guy from communist Poland. Young people need to talk to people like him. He absolutely HATES communism because he lived it and see's what is starting to happen here and doesn't like it because it reminds him of what he left 50 years ago.
I’ll say that one of the most unappealing parts of communism is the number of internet Leftists who seem to really, really want blood running in the streets.
I disagree. I believe that young Americans are more inclined to like socialist ideas, than communism.
As far as why, the grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence.
Young Americans or young people in general are easily indoctrinated into communism because on paper many of its ideas may sound fair. However with experience or education in history we see how it is far from fair and how easily abused its concepts are. When indoctrinating youth into communism it is highly doubtful that those spreading that ideology will be explaining how it deprives people of basic human rights or property.
The grass is always green'r on the other side.
Communism from an outside view seemed to fix homelessness and capitalist greed.
Then we watched those same communist countries die of starvation and lack of ingenuity/development.
Fall of Soviet Union and current China are both examples of this. The great leap in China is a prime example, if you want to research that as well
Americans who want communism are just uneducated and going on a whim, which gives a fast fix for current problems but may lead to bigger problems
Society isn't perfect. It never will be. But communism is a major extreme. But that's just my take
The communist espoused by young people at the bottom rung of a capitalist society is not the same communism that survivors under such brutal regimes practiced. In fact anytime a communist revolution was undertaken through force, it resulted in a despot. Anytime a communist regime was undertaken through careful legislative reform, it was effective and responsible for the "enlightened" socialized democracies in Europe. However the US did help with fascist violent regime changes in a few places, but those too become despots. It took a lot of effort for South Korea to become what it is, and they did it themselves.
>Anytime a communist regime was undertaken through careful legislative reform it was effective and responsible for the "enlightened" socialized democracies in Europe.
This has never happened. The sort of social democracy you’re talking about isn’t communist and its proponents have never called themselves such.
Unfettered capitalism is bad. Centralized, command-economy communism is also bad.
People who've suffered under either will look for alternatives, and some of them will decide that if X is bad, then the complete opposite of X must be the best.
It's harder to get people to consider the idea that maybe extremes are bad in general, and the ideal might be somewhere in between.
For one option (but certainly not the only one), consider the [Nordic model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model). "A comprehensive welfare state and multi-level collective bargaining based on the economic foundations of social corporatism, and a commitment to private ownership within a market-based mixed economy."
Cause American Youth daydream that without having to work harder or more, it would lift them up & give them the same things that People they envy have. While people in or from Communist countries KNOW it would drag them down to even lower levels of poverty.
Because bots post horseshit into their media channels to destabilize the stranglehold America has in global economic and military supremacy.
Same thing happens to righties in their channels, but with nationalistic, racist, phobic.shit.
People in general don't think critically, and are easily herded into discussions that give false dichotomies.
I was on the border of east and west Germany in 1987 and 1988 in the US Army. I saw what it was like on the communist side of the fence. I saw how many people tried to sneak across to west even knowing what would happen if they got caught. The difference between capitalism and communism is that, in a capitalist society, you have a chance at making something of yourself. In a communist society, you are what you are told to be. You don't have the opportunity to rise to the top unless you are part of the social elite. You will be a cog in the wheel of the machine. And the very freedoms you enjoy that allow you to voice your opinions about capitalism will no longer be available. Be careful what you wish for.
a growing number of americans like the appeal of free stuff but don't realize that they have nothing to contribute in such a society.
the people from those societies got tired of the contribution not being adequately rewarded.
That's not why people hated communism. That's not communism. There's more free stuff for poor people in America (let along countries like Sweden) right now than there were in China in the 1960s.
The social welfare state is not communism. People who live in countries with robust social welfare states have longer life expectancy and generally prefer their way of life.
People don't like communism because it results in authoritarian leadership who stop people from having freedom of thought, religion, press, etc. and because communist countries end up causing famines and people prefer being fed to being dead.
Communism and socialism is the exact opposite of free stuff. We work together to make the stuff for us all.
Capitalism is "free stuff". I own the money so you work for me and I pay you less than the money I can sell the things you make for. Free for me, not for you.
people from "communist" nations associate dictatorships who claim to be communists with the end all be all of communism. despite the fact that places like the USSR and China actively go against most Communist ideals.
cus for the people who lived there, dictatorships and communism are forever linked. in their experience, communism is bad cus it failed.
but in western Europe and the US, places where corporations control the government, the ideals of Communism and Socialism strike a cord with people. they dont see the USSR as the end all be all of Communism, just cus it failed doesn't mean it will always fail.
for Americans, capitalism isnt bad cus it failed, its bad cus it worked, all this inequality and suffering is part of capitalism, there can be no rich with out there being poor, for the 1% to live as they do, the 99% must suffer.
Reminds me I found this native American indigenous discord server thinking it was for aboriginals and it turned out to be a cover for marxists and communists. It was the wildist shit I've ever accidentally stumbled upon
Because many are people advocating for the introduction of socialist policies and practices most other advanced nations have and people ridicule them and mislabel them as communists.
Cause theory is not the same as practice.
also many, many, many of communist supporters in modern western countries do not actually have any kind of education on what that entails, they just see problems with capitalism and want an alternative. not saying they're not valid problems, but most of these people have not given any thought to what would happen after a Revolution, much less how you would go about actually starting one in a liberal democracy.
Ironically that's exactly how Marxist saw it: as a potential solution to address the issues of capitalism. It was a post capitalist post industrial reform, not something you skip to. In many ways where legislative reform occurred, and not violent revolution, it resulted in improved society.
> In many ways where legislative reform occurred, and not violent revolution For example, where?
Parts of it are good. But the main component is still just as flawed as capitalism. Humans are corrupt and selfish.
The problem I think is that people assume all communists are idealists who don’t see the flaws. When if you actually talk to communists they are the most critical of communism, reanalysing and reassessing. People who are communists are people who believe an idealist communist society is the fairest for humanity. But there are infinite variations on how possible they think it is to achieve, the justification of the means to get there, and the contradictions that will arise.
(You have been banned from /r/LateStageCapitalism)
lol. Also that the terminally online “communists” are… that.
Replying to No-Mammoth1688... But isn’t that every philosophy? Marxism, Leninism, communism, capitalism, socialism all strive to achieve something good. But each of these philosophies falls short in practice because humans are ultimately flawed and greedy. When you’ve grown up all your live in a communist or capitalistic country, it’s easy to see past the flaws compared to a system that is completely different from your own.
I have a quibble with your assessment, if I may. Though I agree with most of what you wrote, I disagree that >humans are ultimately flawed and greedy. Yes, we are all imperfect in sometimes damaging and dangerous ways, but I don't think that's the cause of the problem. Most of us are doing our best to be good people, even when we fail. In my view, the problem isn't humanity as a whole. The problem, as far as I can tell, is that humanity has yet to discover a system of rules for living together that doesn't inevitably promote sociopaths to positions of power.
I vote to sacrifice all sociopaths to the cenote. They are usually identifiable before 12, so not too many resources spent
>Humans are corrupt and selfish. This kind of claim would get you laughed at down the block by practically any social scientist and philosopher. Humans aren't innately any specific social traits, we're effectively conditioned to action by social forces. Imagine going up to a hunter-gatherer tribe and telling them to not share the hunt and berries, but instead have each person keep the fruit of their labor and leave the orphaned and elderly to die--they'd beat you to an inch of your life if you're lucky. Not because they're "inherently good natured," but rather that kind of thinking simply hurts the tribe as a social unit. If I told you to jump in order to survive, you'd jump. If I told you to sit to survive, you'd sit. The only inherent traits in man is meeting his needs. So if you raised him in a society that requires him to jump through hoops to survive, don't be surprised to see him jumping through hoops. Any trait you attach to him like "greedy," "selfish," or "corrupt," after the fact is simply a reflection on the organizational structure of society, so you'd be putting the cart before the horse in solely blaming him.
You got downvoted but you're right. People should study more Anthropology and Prehistory.
My favorite proverb regarding this goes something like, capitalism is the worst societal structure inflicted on mankind; except for all the others.
“Have you even tried communism…? But like, with *nice guys…?*” 19 year old American leftists in the US
Have you tried capitalism without a leftist push? You have the Guilded Age
We are in the second gilded age. We need a second FDR.
Unfortunately that probably requires a second great depression or some sort of world war.
They only see it on paper, not boots on the ground, living in it. Being held down
I can say as a first generation immigrant of one of those countries whose regimes fell, from the sound of it there was every kind of corruption and trap if you didn't support the Communist regime outright. In the same way that a mafia or cartel might kill those who kept to themselves even because they could potentially be a threat. Only at a government level they'd seek a reason for jailing or killing, such as if you accepted surplus materials at a plant or business because it was owned by said government and so such was technically wrong. Those regimes often ended in leaders getting dragged out into the street cowboy/mob-justice style, **maybe** a formal trial which often ended in execution by hanging. At its worst, I'll never forget hearing 'In those times if you saw someone with an orange that meant that they were a well-connected government official.' Edit: some poor grammar I get it though. A utopia sounds nice. But to me, we humans are corruptible by nature and if you give almost anyone unchecked power without moderation or consequence they'll hold onto their newfound comfort they've built for themselves and loved ones sometimes even if it destroys society. I'd imagine one reason why such destruction of societal well-being wouldn't bother a seemingly normal person or rather how one corrupts themselves is due to distance between themselves and those doing the work thus never quite having to face what they've done.
Communism on paper looks kinda ok. Communism in real life is a total disaster. The idea of communism is that everyone is working together for the good of everyone. It reality there are too many selfish/lazy/evil humans that only care about themselves and abuse the system
But how is that any different from say capitalism. Capitalism is supposed to provide economic freedom, equality, promote innovation and self regulation. Capitalism is a society based on consumption. And one that is destructive to the environment. It leaves people who aren’t able to be productive behind (if you have a disability). In late stage capitalism, consolidation begins as corporations continue to buy out small businesses and competitors until only one provider is left (monopoly). Thus these providers can begin charging whatever they want for their products or services. It also promotes a culture where workers aren’t paid fairly because there will always be somebody who would do it for less. On paper most philosophies look great. But I don’t think the goal should be to stick to only one philosophy. A blend of socialism, capitalism, communism, for example would be much more effective at balancing the pros and cons of each philosophy.
The Nordic Countries are a good example of a blend that should be examined
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> Capitalism is supposed to provide economic freedom, equality, promote innovation and self regulation. And it’s been largely successful so far. The capitalist world has become more free, equal, and innovative in the last century. The standard of living in capitalist nations today is the best in history, not the norm. It’s not perfect, but it’s a whole hell of a lot better than any other system. Nobody’s advocating for laissez faire pseudo-anarchism, capitalism works best with a degree of governmental regulation. And this “late-stage capitalism” shtick, Marx thought that we were entering it in 1870. Communists are never humble enough to admit that the free-market economy is more complex, and resilient, than they can fathom.
The success of capitalism for *some* is built on the brutal exploitation of many millions of other people. Let’s not forget slavery, the rubber genocides, the ongoing exploitation of workers in “non-Western” countries for their cheap labor, etc. Capitalism has a history just as ugly as the Soviet attempt at communism, it’s just that much of the harm done by capitalism is simply exported to the “third world” instead of occurring at home.
In practice the countries that are labeled as communist tend to be dictatorships or oligarchies, which is completely counter to the workers owning the means of production. I can’t think of a practical implementation of actual communism on a national scale. Not to say pure communism would work, but seems like the issues immigrants have with communism countries is that they’re not democratic and they’re authoritarian, which are not necessary prerequisites for shared ownership of infrastructure.
Hit it exactly on the head. There has never been a true communist nation; it quickly devolves into authoritarianism. The economic system doesn't matter much if the boot is still on your neck.
THIS is the part that NOBODY talks about. Communist states are never truly communist: they are autocratic at best and dictatorial at worst. Capitalist or communist doesn’t matter in a dictatorship.
Yeah. In an ideal world where everybody's an amazing person and altruistic, communism would obviously be the best idea, but this isn't a perfect world
What's communist? I've heard Universal Healthcare called communist, but you can find plenty of people from countries with it who love it. At the same time, others will tell me universal healthcare in any system with private property is just capitalism that wants to keep the proletariat healthy to work.
Anyone who thinks that universal healthcare is “communism” doesn’t have a clue what communism actually is, and probably thinks the fact that the roads aren’t privately owned is also communism.
There’s videos of people after seatbelts became mandatory saying this was a communist takeover. There’s videos of people after drinking while driving became mandatory saying this was a communist takeover. Communism *is* literally anything they don’t like.
Ironically I think that sort of thing is why communism polls somewhat high among the youth: their main exposure to the idea of “communism“ is conservative boomers calling public-welfare policies *which are absolutely not communism* “communism.” If you didn’t know better you think “Caring about the public good rather than selfishly about whatever benefits yourself is communism? Count me in!”
I was going to reply to your other comment with this point. The same is true of "socialism." The right has beat the term to death fear mongering to the point that a new generation now associates the word with basic government services, any effort to address poverty or any sort of concern for equity. When the debate is framed as "ruthless sociopath" vs "socialist/communist," you get a lot of people signing up for the latter.
Right. And personally, I don’t have as big of a problem with socialism, since there are sizable non-authoritarian versions of it, like Democratic Socialism. Still, Democratic Socialists want to use democratic means to be elected into power and then transfer all private industries to state control. Which, as you say, means that calling a capitalist country with a nationalized healthcare system “socialist” is laughable.
I’m an idiot who shouldn’t be consulted on such questions. But speaking from personal experience I was drawn to the idea of communism as a teenager because the stories I saw on the news on homelessness, corporate greed, the war for oil, and so on gave rise to a negative opinion about capitalism. As I got older I formed a different opinion after seeing how tyranny always proceeds an attempt to establish communism. And since, in my opinion, inevitable greed in a capitalist society is not as bad as inevitable tyranny in a communist one I came to accept capitalism.
To me there exists many different kinds of capitalism. Laissez-faire capitalism was proven to be ineffective and very unstable during the 19th and early 20th century. It just doesn't work, tragedy if the commons and all that, and humans aren't evolved to be greedy, but only part greedy and part empathetic, and with this we have spread around the globe. It is an effective revolutionary advantage. A well regulated competive market capitalism is most stable in those markets where competition is possible. This is most things areas except for infrastructure and Healthcare. For infrastructure, you can't run multiple roads in parallel or have different water suppliers, so we often appoint the government it maintain a monopolistic market space, or heavily regulate a private monopoly. Heavily regulate it. This is how power transmission is operated in some markets, for example.
Game theory seems baked into our evolution, favoring cooperation but also emphasizing short term gain when the cost isn't high
The fundamental problem is the Billionaires who arise in a capitalist system don't want to be regulated. They want the system to benefit them.
Capitalism truly needs checks and balances itself. No reason why Jeff Bezos made $7.9 million/hr in 2023, increasing his total net worth by $65bn but only pays a 23% federal income tax rate. Lowest income American families pay 11% on income taxes, with the upper limit being 37% if your income exceeds ~$670,000 USD/yr So why is Bezos paying taxes below the median? Because he has “Fuck you” money
This is a great take, I just thought I’d add, greed absolutely still exists in a communist society. It’s also notable that not many people remember that Marx’s communist manifesto was predicated on a healthy capitalist society, without wealth to plunder and redistribute, communism can’t exist.
I think this is the thing that people often miss when they espouse the virtues of communism. It doesn't solve greed. It doesn't solve corruption. Communism requires concentrating resources at the national scale in order to ensure equal distribution, which actually increases the opportunity for corruption. It only really works if the people with their hands on the levers are playing fair. Which is kind of the whole problem in the first place.
People are garbage everywhere. But pure communism caused many Soviet citizens to starve post-WWII even though it contained Ukraine, one of the largest grain and sunflower seed/oil producers in the world.
I think "plunder and redistribute" is an aggressively uncharitable reading of Marx. It's not about wealth, Marx didn't think all the diamonds and gold in the world would have been sufficient to enable the transition to communism. It's about the means of production being well enough developed to sufficiently provide for the population. He wasn't suggesting we just loot rich people's homes and give everyone a cut, but redirect the productive forces of the rich people's factories towards meeting the needs of the masses instead of maximizing profit.
“Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice. Socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.” - Mikhail Bakunin. He meant this as an argument for anarchisocialism, but personally I’d take privilege and injustice over slavery and brutality any day.
You think what we live in is capitalism?!?? How adorable. Capitalism is about competition creating fair markets. You live in a country that has 3 credit card companies that own the payment systems for everything you buy. 4 shit phone companies. 5 companies own 80% of all the food you buy. When is the last time you seen competitive gas prices? Housing prices are fixed. Rent prices are fixed. Monopolies are the rule. WHat you are living in is not capitalism.
Unrestrained capitalism would be even worse as to monopolies.
Well articulated.
Young people don’t like communism they like socialism. And that’s not even the majority. Most just see the problems with capitalism enough to criticize it.
This was my thought. Socialism perhaps, but certainly not communism. And when you look at countries with socialist institutions, like the Nordics or Canada, you find that people are very happy with their socialism. The height of communism in the West was during the early Cold War when it was seen as an element of the counter culture and people weren’t as familiar with its problems.
Since when are we socialist here in Scandinavia? We've had social democratic governments for most of our modern history, but we've never gone socialism or democratic socialism. We have a couple of smaller socialist parties in government, though. Here in Sweden the Left party, who are socialists, get around 8-10% of votes, but nobody wants to work with them and always excludes them when forming the government. They're like the left's Sweden democrats, a party nobody really wants to work with but goes to for some political deals just to be able to form a government.
America is so far right that socialism means social democracy
From a US perspective any kind of sharing is "socialist". Just the fact that there can be mainstream parties with "social(ist)" in their name shows a much higher level of tolerance of the idea.
The Nordic countries aren’t socialist
Nordic countries and Canada have a well fare state they are not socialist countries by any reason. Source: Someone born and raised in a socialist country and someone who read a lot of socialist and communist bibliography. Ninja edit: I don't believe in any of that shit.
Reddit has people calling themselves communist. "Socialism" is a meaningless term in spaces that include both Americans and non-Americans because it means something radically different to the majority of Americans than it has traditionally meant.
Socialism usually means "I think my government should have more social programs than it currently does." Or something like that.
This is true, but socialism is also commonly used to refer to things like democratic workplaces/coops and other types of avenues to put more economic power in the hands of those currently at the bottom of economic strata (the laborer/worker). Richard Wolff runs into this a lot when describing socialism and I think so many different groups using these terms has muddied the water a bit. The definition you are describing I would argue as being a more recent shift in how people view what socialism means at least online. The focus on social programs or social welfare is definitely a more recent development historically speaking. The original definition I provided aimed at non private ownership can't exist in the modern capitalist framework because capitalism, by definition, requires private ownership of businesses. This means that one version of socialism can more easily coexist with capitalism than the other definition which is part of what causes the confusion I mentioned before.
Evidence? Are you conflating communism, socialism and social democracy?
Yes, OP seems to be doing exactly that. Funny enough, the people who live in social democracies LOVE social democracy, which entirely contradicts OP’s position. The youth want socialism of a sort, not communism.
These are the same kinda of people who think democrats are left wing and that the terms Liberal and Leftist are synonyms.
To be fair to OP, a lot of young people who actually want socialism/social democracies accidentally conflate them with communism too. It’s much more prevalent on instagram/tik tok than it is on reddit though.
I think a lot of the people espousing the merits of communism they are talking about are the ones conflating the three.
That’s exactly what they’re doing.
None if the countries who call themselves communists are actually communist. No country has succeeded or “achieved” communism, as it is defined in communist theory.
But no country has succeeded or "achieved" capitalism in the purest sense, either.
Because no one really cares about being "full pure capitalist" There isn't some manafesto capitalist are dead set on trying to achieve. I'm sure a majority of capitalism supporters arnt too upset about the free public library in their town.
>I'm sure a majority of capitalism supporters arnt too upset about the free public library in their town. Lmao you'd be surprised. People keep trying to get mine torn down because it teaches kids to be gay and homeless people go inside sometimes.
I believe you, but I'm just willing to bet those people fall into a minority. Moreover it sounds like their reasons against it aren't in the "name of pure capitalism"
I would argue that every so called "communist" state has actually been closer to capitalist than communist. Most countries are effectively capitalist in every way that matters. If you want to own a company, you need capital, rich people exist, etc. No so called "communist" country has ever been even remotely communist in the ways that actually matter, such as "to each according to his needs and from each according to his ability" or even just profit-sharing like a worker owned co-op. In reality every so called "communist" regime has simply been a one party totalitarian state and allowing varying levels of capitalism.
This is usually what communists tell themselves when they want to ignore it's a failed model.
Stop repeating this bullshit. Every single country that applies Marxist theory ends up in the exact same authoritarian dictatorship, murders a large portion of its population, and destroys its ability to produce goods and services forever, you can't say "that's not REAL communism", because it's the inevitable result of every fucking application of communism.
>No country has succeeded or “achieved” communism, as it is defined in communist theory. Which offers yet another reasons communism should be rejected. That every attempt to get the proverbial pie-in-the-sky form results in Holodomor/Purge, Great Leap Forward, Killing Fields, etc.
Does every colonialist expansion genocide and slave trade get blamed on capitalism? No, it gets blamed on the people perpetuating it. Does sex trafficking and the drug war get blamed on capitalism? The Iraq war, the Bengal famine, the extermination of indigenous people around the world by Europeans? No. Even though these are all products of the quest for profit. Capitalism and communism have humans within those systems perpetuating evil. It doesn’t make the systems themselves evil.
Things like imperialism and genocide and slavery existed long before capitalism, and capitalism doesn’t claim to be the solution to them. You can’t say the same for communism, it *does* claim to be the solution for various modern social ills, but then in practice it doesn’t solve them or just creates worse problems.
Maybe. I’d much rather live in Cuba than Haiti. Or Vietnam than Laos or Cambodia. For poorer comparable countries that weren’t the benefactors of colonial expansion, it can work better than capitalism. Not always. But there’s no one size fits all.
Just because something has never been done, doesn't mean it is impossible or evil.
Communism is the political perpetoum mobile. All evidence suggests that socialist regimes devolve into corruption, tyrrany and collapse, yet people pretend that there must be another way.
Hard to achieve something that was disproven in Marxs lifetime but ok.
They have made sincere and earnest efforts at the first phases of a communist revolution and failed repeatedly because it is antithetical to human nature. “No one has even been able to implement it” really isn’t the defense that communists want it to be.
They can never quite explain why this time will be different, why these people promising communism are somehow different from all these people promising it before. It’s nothing but main character syndrome. “Sure, everybody else whose tried it failed miserably, but we will succeed because I’m doing it this time.”
Something to keep in mind. The US used covert and economic warfare for decades to brutally stomp out democratic leftist movements, often violently, and backed right-wing dictators, to make *absolutely sure* that communism never got it's fair shake. Read the book "The Jakarta Method" to learn more, though I warn you it's disturbing and will leave you disillusioned
As did the USSR, often in much more brutal ways
Often in much more brutal ways? More brutal than the Korean War? Cambodia? Cuba? Plus, the soviets aren't a thing anymore. Western capitalism and imperialism is still an ongoing threat.
“Democratic leftist movements” and “communism” are not the same thing. Communist states have one-party rule, there’s nothing democratic about that. But I agree that overthrowing democratically-elected leftist governments was a travesty.
“Communist state” is an oxymoron. If you look at the Mensheviks and Russian social democrats, they were perfectly ready to form a coalition government with the other factions and establish a democratic parliament. Communism has always been democratic and republican in its means. The Bolsheviks simply killed anyone who disagreed with Lenin’s “vanguard party” rule. Democratic socialism (the real socialism, the one that Karl Marx advocated for and wrote about) was never given a chance. The Soviets killed it at every turn and instated their puppet regimes same as America did. The only reason we call them communist or socialist today is because the two world powers of the time benefited from that framing.
The Bolsheviks were aiming at creating a communist state though, were they not? And they were supported by millions of communists all around the world. When most people say “communist” they just mean “aiming at communism,” they’re not talking about the socialist end state predicted by Marx. Communists know perfectly well what non-communists mean when they say “communist state;” saying that those states weren’t actually communist is just playing word games and dodging the argument.
Citation needed. A growing amount of Americans like the idea of corporations occasionally paying some taxes if it isn't too much of a bother, and conseratives stream "COMMUNIST!!!!" without actually knowing what it means. Not sure OP knows what it means either.
Because they are young, optimistic and believe that humans are way less selfish than they actually are. It takes a few years of actually trying to work with diverse groups before they truly understand that humans are much more selfish than they realized.
Communism isn’t at all about “sharing” or “being selfless.” It’s not “the sharing ideology.”
The optimists would like to think that but it's not true, without it corruption becomes overwhelming.
I had one - a young struggling artist - block me after we had what I thought to be a civil discussion. Apparently challenging somebody to provide a historic example of a society more complex than Marx's neologic "primitive communists" who didn't have their lower classes working for a wage of some sort is rude when that someone is clearly just trying to have the last word.
So instead of pursuing a system that tries to encounter individual selfishness we should keep a system that promotes and rewards selfishness and does not restrict that selfishness for the most part? (The literal idea of capitalism is to let selfishness run free essentially). Nobody is saying that humans are not selfish. But there can be systems that take away the need to be selfish to survive for the common people and protect them from the selfishness of others
It doesn’t have to be one extreme or the other. People are allowed to see flaws in communism and also agree that at least some of individual wealth should be put towards social issues
only problem is the millions of deaths and human misery that have been caused by trying the extreme version of it
Unlike the extreme version of capitalism that is currently killing millions every year world wide.....
Yes. But aside from the famines and gulags and the secret police, what has communism ever done wrong? Checkmate, capitalist!
If you can make it work, more power to you.
I mean capitalism doesn't work/if it works as intended 99% of the people suffer intentionally and in the end the excessively rich control politics and the world. If capitalism wouldn't crush any attempt for alternatives worldwide throughout history, we could indeed have alternative examples
Weird how the people "suffering" under capitalism usually still have a better standard of living than the average people living under communist rule
Clarifying point: in our modern global market, the slave children making sneakers in the east are part of the people "suffering" under capitalism.
Somehow, those capitalist countries, which make up the global majority, never seem to count as capitalist to these people.
As are the kids in Flint michigan who are part lead by now, or the people in rural Virginian areas whose food and water supplies are polluted by coal extraction, and there are thousands of examples everywhere
Dude, this. I'm so fucking sick of people saying, "humans are greedy and selfish, which are bad traits, so the best thing to do is enforce a system that actively encourages people to act that way" Like, people used to rape and murder willy nilly for thousands of years. Seems pretty inherent to us, so why aren't we just enforcing systems that encourage it?? If it can never be fully stopped, then we should be embracing it and encouraging it, is these people's conclusions. It's just so asinine, really shows that they're just parroting what they've heard and haven't actually stopped to think about political and economic systems as a whole and how they can influence individual persons.
I am BEGGING people in this thread to learn about non-authoritarian forms of socialism.
Is this true? Young Americans are increasingly distrustful of unbridled capitalism and more open to socialism. I am not aware of people thinking communism is a good idea.
OP is literally just equating anything not fully capitalist with communism
Don’t you know? Not murdering homeless people in the street is Communism now
The whole 'people from communist countries hate it' thing also makes no sense, because generally when you're speaking to people who had to, or chose to, flee their country, of course they're going to hate it Hating a country you fled from is definitely not unique to communism
As someone with a degree in political science, I can tell you that there has never been a truly communist system in our world - not the way Marx envisioned it. Soviet Union forced it, and it was run by the middle and upper classes. True communism is meant to be something that occurs organically when the working class revolts. This results in bloodshed, yes, but eventually to a stable system (theoretically). What was done in Southeast Asia, the Soviet Union, and China, was a forced "revolution" spirited by fascist leaders. I am totally for a real communist system if one could ever actually come about. Likely not at this stage given the way it's been forced and the overwhelming resources that the rich and powerful have, which was not as big a gap in Marx's day. But I'm opposed to, obviously, the fascist and forced form of Communism as seen in the last century. Not to mention the fact that there are dozens upon dozens of many steps a country like the U.S. could take to approach a more socially beneficial political system like communism without actually getting there. Democratic Socialism is an example. We could be doing so much more with our social systems than we are and we wouldn't be anywhere close to Marx or Soviet Union style communism. Edit: Some typos
Communism doesn’t work without a strong authoritarian regime. Someone has to force people to plow the fields and run the factories. Capitalism doesn’t have this problem because of economic incentives to produce.
You do realize that capitalists also force people to “plow the fields and run the factories”? Did you not remember in recent memory how Reagan reacted to PATCO?
Because it sounds good but those governments often turn very authoritarian…idealism is a helluva thing 😴
Often? More like “always.” Any form of communism following in the dominant Marxist-Leninist tradition is going to be authoritarian.
I mean, Leninism is hardly Marxian to begin with. Lenin had far more in common with Chernaschevsky, who wanted a totalitarian state to keep the people’s in line until the revolution could be completed. Marx had nothing in common with this idea. I see no reason to believe that communism as an idea is just inherently secret authoritarianism.
Correct, I was being nice 🫠
Yeah sure whatever, I would rather gamble on idealism rather than keep this shit ass system. Edit: I see we got a lot of boot lickers in this sub.
You'd be making a gamble with shit odds and not even knowing the bet.
Putin and Kim Jong Fuck Face had a tea party today, you sure about that? America has issues but trust me we got it damn good here…
What do Putin and Kim have to do with communism?
Experience is the answer to both questions.
Young people are embracing socialism, not communism.
There are fundamental misconceptions on either side, unfortunately. 1. Among Americans, the dire misconception that 'Ownership' is a fundamental function of reality, and therefore worker joint 'ownership' of the means of production would be ironclad and largely resolve the world's inequities; 2. Among ex-Eastern Bloc individuals and Cuban immigrants, the misconception that Soviet-style governance is the *only* possible approximation of communism, and ***must*** come with all the problems they experienced.
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It’s easier to be a communist in a free country than be a free individual in a communist country. White liberal kids have too much free time and never experienced going to bed hungry in a communist country
Actual communists *hate* liberals though.
Growing up in a household that felt totalitarian, I often went to bed hungry, even in a country that prides itself on freedom. Hence, your argument seems irrelevant.
Your anecdotal experience doesn't change the fact that his statement is correct. Not to mention, it's a bit different when you're being punished by your parents because you didn't want to eat your greens or just being defiant and choosing not to eat, from there literally not being food for the whole neighborhood to eat for at least the next couple of days because the chickens caught a disease and the flour went bad. You comparing the two shows a significant level of entitlement. Unless you were actually abused and starved with the intention of causing you serious harm. In that case, I'm extremely sorry and I wish you the best.
plenty of people from former communist areas/countries say things were better under communism. there could be any number of reasons for this and many people are saying the opposite too, but let's not make sweeping generalizations
Probably depends if you are a worker bee or a drone
Because a growing amount of young Americans are incapable of reading Solzhenitsyn, are financially illiterate, and are incapable of critical thinking. Communism has a great PR team - idea of everyone working together harmoniously and what not. The communists have built a mythology of the romantic rebel leader standing up against a giant, evil opponent. They dismiss any critique of communist nations as "communism hasn't actually been tried". It's super easy to have the perfect economic system when every time it goes wrong, it's just because it wasn't properly implemented. Here's the single biggest problem with communism - it assumes and *requires* that people act self-sacrificially for strangers. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is how Marx phrased it. The problem is, time and time and time again, from Cuba to Venezuela to Russia to Iran to North Korea to China to Vietnam to Cambodia and everywhere else someone has "tried" communism, it is proven that people do not act self sacrificially on a scale necessary to support a communist nation. This is the premise underpinning the entire philosophy - if people do not act communally, then communism cannot succeed. Every nation and empire in all of history has demonstrated again and again that people do not act communally at that scale. So what happens? Well, you start forcing people to be communal. So already, they have no morale, no incentive, other than fear of further suffering/death. Essentially, slavery (cause what were the gulags and reeducation camps other than a system where the government said someone wasn't being communal enough and were sent to labor against their will) is the end result of communism. Capitalism on the other hand presupposes everyone acts in a self-interested manner. This appeals to those escaping from communist countries because it says, you can choose to apply your labor however you see fit. Drive a cab, run a 7/11, become a doctor, whatever you want - then you get to keep the fruits of that labor and do whatever you want (within the law) with it. Sure, capitalism allows for some people to have exorbitant wealth, but it also allows for the poor (who previously would have been forced into slavery, serfdom, low social castes) to rise up and have a degree of comfort and pass that wealth onto their children.
Well, first off its important to disconnect communism THE IDEA from communism, the political ideology practiced in soviet russia. Most people who have experience with soviet russia will tell you that it sucked, because it did. THAT SAID, have you asked anyone from china or cuba what they think of the ideology? Anyway, many young americans see capitalism as failing, which is reasonable. Its actively destroying the world while only lining the pockets of the rich. People dont see the fruits of their labor, and they can feel it. you cant afford a one bedroom on minimum wage anywhere anymore, and for a lot of people thats all thats on offer. they will never be able to afford a house. Clearly something is wrong So in that context, doesnt it make sense to look towards a worldview that is all about reconnecting man and the fruits of his labor?
I have many Chinese coworkers. Some are in the US and some are in China. None I have talked to like the idea of communism. Those in the US are happy to be here. They make great money and love what is available to them. Those in China also make more than most in China and like it that way. Btw, all are engineers. My American coworkers are also. We don’t see capitalism as a problem. We do feel we are paid fairly for our labor. We can afford a house.
And what exactly is “the idea of Communism” being referred to here? Because China isn’t even remotely Communist.
My family is from Vietnam but we also have other family in China as do many other Vietnamese people. Neither side likes communism, and it is why I reside in the US now. If I even speak about it for an instance to any of the elders in my family they shut me down very quick and are traumatized by it.
There are bad examples of it, sure. But ask what people in the 3rd world think of capitalism, and how its bled them dry. It's also worth noting that the US has had a swift hand in actively demolishing any actual communist countries. You must know what the US did to vietnam, right? how is that not a traumatic topic?
I do know, however my family was personally assisted by US military during this time. I know not everyone was, but what my family witnessed the Vietnamese government do was far more disturbing than anything remotely close to what the US did. It is very easy to observe a conflict from the history books, but people on the ground and citizens that witnessed it hands on will tell you otherwise.
Thats fair - the vietnam war is a whole topic that is largely unrelated to the theory of communism. My larger point is that any political ideology is capable of committing horrific crimes, that fact existing doesn't invalidate that political ideology inherently. If that was the case, you could make the same argument about democracy and capitalism being inherently evil, as there is certainly no shortage of evil committed by those ideologies. While soviet russia definitely had a "work camp" problem, it didn't have full on chattel slavery like the US did
as some one who grew up and fled the combloc .because they are stupid and dont know better. alot of it is because its being pushed in colleges. i had professors preach about how great it is and how bad capitalism is. i made a argument against one, and she flew off the handle calling me a idiot saying i don't know what im talking about even some students that are her followers started in. i took my shirt off showing all the scars from what a communist government did d to a minor for hiding food cause i was sick of boiled leather. human nature. people will work their ass off to have the best for them self's. you also have people who will live off welfare and have nothing so they don't have to do any thing. very few go out of their way to be selfless... communism / socialism is forced equity. the people who will work their ass off will give up when they see no matter how hard they try they are no better off then those who dont. . things get worse and worse.
They're not doing well under capitalism, so they delude themselves into thinking that there is an actual viable alternative (there isn't; communism has failed every time it was *actually* ~~implemented~~ attempted). EDIT: Commenters correctly pointed out Communism was never implemented, as the incentive model inevitably leads to degradation into authoritarian control operating on capitalist economic principles.
That actually makes a lot of sense. I never thought of it as that being the reason, to me I thought it was solely a trend. My family came to America from Vietnam during the war and they tell me horror stories of how life was there under it so it has always confused me. (Edit; I love being downvoted for having a personal experience with communism. I guess since I witnessed it when I was young I can’t talk badly about it)
>(Edit; I love being downvoted for having a personal experience Welcome to Reddit, friend!
I used to work with an older Vietnamese guy. Well not really old, but quite a bit older than me. Great guy. He always got annoyed at the "america bad" types because his experience growing up in Vietnam was horrible.
There are viable alternatives to what we have, most of what people call communism is barely socialism lol. Literally nothing says we need to exist in the conditions we do other than greed and a desire to maintain the status quo
Any system that is unable to overcome the incentive structure of an incumbent system during implementation **is not** viable.
Plenty of tribes did just fine with communal living, where each contributes to their ability and receives care regardless of their ability. It just doesn't work on a large scale. Greed takes over when you don't know the person you are keeping things from and can't be guilted into partaking in the system or exiled for failing to uphold the standard.
Was communism ever actually attempted or was it merely an excuse authoritarians use to gather authority?
If communism was never attempted by Communist Parties in countries like the Soviet Union, those parties sure fooled millions of genuine communists into supporting them. Personally I think it’s a poor excuse. Communism took an authoritarian turn very early in its history. Genuine communists today seem to make no effort to rectify this, instead they either act as apologists for those authoritarian communist regimes, or they paradoxically claim those regimes “weren’t really communist” without addressing the systemic and ideological problems that caused so many communist movements to end up as authoritarian “state capitalist” states. And this is my big problem with communism: there is not *any* attempt to take a sober look at communism’s history and try to reform it, instead there just seems to be excuses and apologism.
*Some* people involved were attempting it.
It's been tried on a small community scale and it usually disbands within one-two decades when not enough people want to work enough to keep it going. On a national scale it's pretty much impossible to organize without the initial socialist vanguard state, which historically has never been voluntarily ended by any country attempting communism.
But the "initial socialist vanguard state" is run by authoritarians, which undercuts the idea entirely.
Kinda impossible to do without authoritarians. Without state intervention people have proven time and again to willingly form capitalistic economies of their own volition.
Well then, you really sum up communist ideology when you say it is impossible to do without authoritarianism. No thanks, I’ll take even unreformed capitalist democracy over that.
There are successful examples that have endured for centuries, but they are select communities with dominant ideology. Look at the monastic orders.
It's a completely different ball game imposing it on everyone regardless of whether they want to take part in it or not.
Fair point, but as illustrated by the other comment, most proponents for "real" communism consider any binding requirements for participation to be disqualifying.
Anti western propagandists twist legitimate issues like inflation/healthcare into doomer nonense to program the not so bright to want communism
My best friend from HS spent the first 15 years of his life in Cuba. I think he had an uncle who was a political prisoner. He beat some guy for speaking favorably about "real Communism".
I was recently thinking about this and I think it has to do with the ‘American Dream’. In America, there isn’t much of a rescue in case you loose your job or have no health insurance and have a medical emergency. The idea of capitalism where everyone fends for themselves works for those who have a stable income, but not for those not so lucky. Millions of Americans live in poverty without much support from the government (if any at all). For those Americans, the idea of communism where everyone has each other covered (in theory) instead of a survival royale where individual succes is at the core makes sense. If the American Dream doesn’t come true and stays a dream instead of reality, it makes sense those individuals think of alternatives like communism which, in theory, should solve poverty and spread the wealth.
They don’t know what it is.
I think this is a big one. It feels like social support systems/programs and full blown communism have been tied together when one can exist without the other.
This. IMO welfare-state capitalism (the Nordic model) has reliably produced the best outcomes in terms of quality of life. It is entirely possible to have a capitalist democracy with strong worker protections and social safety nets. But I think a big part of making it possible is reining in political corruption from corporations spending money to influence the government.
Probably the same reason people who don't live in a Capitalist society think they want one.
From experience, - I didn't know how much people suck until after high school. I thought every poor person was poor because they were unlucky. There are in fact a lot of poor people that are poor because they suck. - I didn't realize how hard it is to adult. - It felt good to think I knew something other people didn't - It felt good to think all problems were from evil people who could be defeated instead of just realities of being alive.
the people from communist countries actually know what communism is. the upper middle class kids of the west just want a sense of belonging, and communists are just one of those groups that accept anybody in.
It's because half of Americans are under age 38 and don't remember the regular news reports and footage of the grinding poverty, oppression, corruption and misery of life in communist countries. People getting shot for trying to escape, throwing themselves over barbed wire fences, the occasional few being allowed out of their country but immediately defecting. However many problems Capitalism had, communism had them 10x worse.
Any place that won't let you vote with your feet is not a good place to live. There's plenty of terrible places that won't stop you from leaving, but at least you can leave.
Because they've got little life experience, and it's easy to tell other people how they ought to be living when your life is subsidized by people who actually work. Things change as soon as they're no longer listed as a dependant on their parents' taxes.
The people who romanticize communism are like people who romanticize living in Regency England. They imagine a sanitized version in which they're never the servants. Communism is a failed experiment and it's been tried (always with good intentions) many times. It always ends the same way: people so desperate to leave it they'll risk their lives for the chance.
Young people have no fucking idea what communism is.
Republicans calling state-funded healthcare “communism” aren’t helping.
Propaganda at its base level
Because recent events have convinced some people that capitalism is so evil, they’d like to try something else. Imo, communism is often portrayed inaccurately as the permanent solution to the problems that capitalism has. This portrayal was made by Karl Marx himself and remains a key argument for communists. Communism promises a lot of things, so it’s easy to see why people find it attractive. Many of the problems with capitalism Marx identifies are simply true, yet his conclusions are extreme. The combination of rational criticisms of capitalism combined with the promise of a workers’ paradise are tantalizing. If I found Marx’s proposed solutions to capitalism rational, I would gladly support his assertions. As it stands, I view Marxism as just another trick to give absolute power to one guy or a few. Many such tricks exist, but communism spins a nice story
Because communism fails spectacularly, which people who have lived under communist regimes have suffered through, so obviously they don't like it. Young people tend to be both poorer and more idealogical, both of which make communism sound more attractive than it actually is.
I worked with an old guy from communist Poland. Young people need to talk to people like him. He absolutely HATES communism because he lived it and see's what is starting to happen here and doesn't like it because it reminds him of what he left 50 years ago.
I’ll say that one of the most unappealing parts of communism is the number of internet Leftists who seem to really, really want blood running in the streets.
I disagree. I believe that young Americans are more inclined to like socialist ideas, than communism. As far as why, the grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence.
Young Americans or young people in general are easily indoctrinated into communism because on paper many of its ideas may sound fair. However with experience or education in history we see how it is far from fair and how easily abused its concepts are. When indoctrinating youth into communism it is highly doubtful that those spreading that ideology will be explaining how it deprives people of basic human rights or property.
Grass is always greener on the other side
The grass is always green'r on the other side. Communism from an outside view seemed to fix homelessness and capitalist greed. Then we watched those same communist countries die of starvation and lack of ingenuity/development. Fall of Soviet Union and current China are both examples of this. The great leap in China is a prime example, if you want to research that as well Americans who want communism are just uneducated and going on a whim, which gives a fast fix for current problems but may lead to bigger problems Society isn't perfect. It never will be. But communism is a major extreme. But that's just my take
The communist espoused by young people at the bottom rung of a capitalist society is not the same communism that survivors under such brutal regimes practiced. In fact anytime a communist revolution was undertaken through force, it resulted in a despot. Anytime a communist regime was undertaken through careful legislative reform, it was effective and responsible for the "enlightened" socialized democracies in Europe. However the US did help with fascist violent regime changes in a few places, but those too become despots. It took a lot of effort for South Korea to become what it is, and they did it themselves.
>Anytime a communist regime was undertaken through careful legislative reform it was effective and responsible for the "enlightened" socialized democracies in Europe. This has never happened. The sort of social democracy you’re talking about isn’t communist and its proponents have never called themselves such.
Unfettered capitalism is bad. Centralized, command-economy communism is also bad. People who've suffered under either will look for alternatives, and some of them will decide that if X is bad, then the complete opposite of X must be the best. It's harder to get people to consider the idea that maybe extremes are bad in general, and the ideal might be somewhere in between. For one option (but certainly not the only one), consider the [Nordic model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model). "A comprehensive welfare state and multi-level collective bargaining based on the economic foundations of social corporatism, and a commitment to private ownership within a market-based mixed economy."
Cause American Youth daydream that without having to work harder or more, it would lift them up & give them the same things that People they envy have. While people in or from Communist countries KNOW it would drag them down to even lower levels of poverty.
Because bots post horseshit into their media channels to destabilize the stranglehold America has in global economic and military supremacy. Same thing happens to righties in their channels, but with nationalistic, racist, phobic.shit. People in general don't think critically, and are easily herded into discussions that give false dichotomies.
I was on the border of east and west Germany in 1987 and 1988 in the US Army. I saw what it was like on the communist side of the fence. I saw how many people tried to sneak across to west even knowing what would happen if they got caught. The difference between capitalism and communism is that, in a capitalist society, you have a chance at making something of yourself. In a communist society, you are what you are told to be. You don't have the opportunity to rise to the top unless you are part of the social elite. You will be a cog in the wheel of the machine. And the very freedoms you enjoy that allow you to voice your opinions about capitalism will no longer be available. Be careful what you wish for.
a growing number of americans like the appeal of free stuff but don't realize that they have nothing to contribute in such a society. the people from those societies got tired of the contribution not being adequately rewarded.
That's not why people hated communism. That's not communism. There's more free stuff for poor people in America (let along countries like Sweden) right now than there were in China in the 1960s. The social welfare state is not communism. People who live in countries with robust social welfare states have longer life expectancy and generally prefer their way of life. People don't like communism because it results in authoritarian leadership who stop people from having freedom of thought, religion, press, etc. and because communist countries end up causing famines and people prefer being fed to being dead.
Communism and socialism is the exact opposite of free stuff. We work together to make the stuff for us all. Capitalism is "free stuff". I own the money so you work for me and I pay you less than the money I can sell the things you make for. Free for me, not for you.
people from "communist" nations associate dictatorships who claim to be communists with the end all be all of communism. despite the fact that places like the USSR and China actively go against most Communist ideals. cus for the people who lived there, dictatorships and communism are forever linked. in their experience, communism is bad cus it failed. but in western Europe and the US, places where corporations control the government, the ideals of Communism and Socialism strike a cord with people. they dont see the USSR as the end all be all of Communism, just cus it failed doesn't mean it will always fail. for Americans, capitalism isnt bad cus it failed, its bad cus it worked, all this inequality and suffering is part of capitalism, there can be no rich with out there being poor, for the 1% to live as they do, the 99% must suffer.
What communist country *didn’t* fail?
It’s typically socialism they yearn for, not communism. And the why is pretty obvious imo, capitalism is awful.
I was on on the
Reminds me I found this native American indigenous discord server thinking it was for aboriginals and it turned out to be a cover for marxists and communists. It was the wildist shit I've ever accidentally stumbled upon
Because being communist in a capitalist society still offers you an option to change if you want. Not so much when you have to live it full time.
Because many are people advocating for the introduction of socialist policies and practices most other advanced nations have and people ridicule them and mislabel them as communists.
A lot of people don't know the difference between communism and socialism.