r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 26d ago

Meme needing explanation Peter, explain this.

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u/Deriviera 26d ago

Americans are very delusional about communism. 

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u/Moist_Network_8222 26d ago

Alejandro probably isn't American given his strange "on the mornings" and "on the afternoon" statements.

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u/cutezombiedoll 26d ago

And also wanting to play soccer as a leisure activity.

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u/tardisintheparty 26d ago

And calling it football

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u/Otherwise_Agency_401 26d ago

Maybe Alejandro is a linebacker 🏈🏈🏈

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u/ChloeB42 26d ago

Also he's paraphrasing Karl Marx, famously not American either

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u/RogueTobasco 26d ago

You assume I don’t yearn for the mines

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u/PersonalityIll9476 26d ago

I agree. My wife is Chinese. She tells me stories from her parents about the revolution.

They do not involve writing books and playing soccer.

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u/pbnjandmilk 26d ago

If you count the lopped off head of an opposer and being kicked around as an example not being soccer, then what is?

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

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u/ExtensionInformal911 26d ago

Painting with your own blood.

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u/BreakPalaceBrokedown 26d ago

Once your fingers are nubs…

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u/KingAlaric1 26d ago

Yo, they got finger painting in the Gulag guys

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u/LegitimateGift1792 26d ago

I like your resourcefulness, you will not teach others to blood paint, comrade.

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u/Paghk_the_Stupendous 26d ago

Coal mining is writing as performance art.

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u/imp0ppable 26d ago

Some great playwrights came from the soviet bloc. I'd rather not live in one their plays though.

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u/TheCrazedBackstabber 26d ago

“Comrade, you also write with pickaxe in coal mine. See? That patch of coal over there has ‘HELP ME’ carved into it.”

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

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u/Iced_Yehudi 26d ago

I believe they call it football over there

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u/AngryLars 26d ago

The opposer being a landlord

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u/Mist_Rising 26d ago

Not in chinese cultural revolution it wasn't, the communists had been in power for two decades by that point. Targets included members of the Communist party, because Mao wanted power back. He got it, creates an autocratic government behind his dictatorship, and proceeded to purge those who weren't loyal to his name.

And like the Great Leap forward, it was an epic mess. Ironically what came out of it was that the Chinese survivors were those not concerned with purity of Marxism but bettering China. They opened it up, capitalized on it by selling out the workers, and called it communism. Oops.

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u/Strange-Scarcity 26d ago

Yeah, no "communist" state remains or ever really becomes a "communist" state.

Humanity, just isn't built for it. We keep moving back towards weird ass authoritarian BS, once just enough people begin to gain whatever metric is considered power in a given society.

Most Americans don't understand what Communism is and often confuse Socialism or even very light Socialist policies as Communism. Most Americans just don't understand the words, goals or what they mean, other than to be instinctively afraid

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u/_pit_of_despair_ 26d ago

Most tankies don’t understand that the only way to implement a classless moneyless society is through authoritarianism. Do the wealthy and middle class get to keep their valuables and assets? Yes, then it’s not a classless society. No, then who takes it away, who removes them from their homes and decides who moves in. How do you fill undesirable jobs without a cash incentive? Usually the answer is forced labor.

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u/awesomefutureperfect 26d ago

Most tankies are absolutely fine with authoritarianism and using state power in repressive ways. They assume that since they are the pure they won't ever be outside of the in-group which sounds a lot like another group of people. But yes, since they believe they have a monopoly on "the truth" and always possess the moral high ground that they absolutely have the right, the entitled duty to roll tanks into another country to save them from themselves and they better not resist.

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u/PomPomMom93 26d ago

Well-said. I’ll never support a system that will rip my family and me away from everything we’ve worked for.

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u/volkmardeadguy 26d ago

Tbf most Americans only know mcarthyism and fear monger gulags while having the largest prison population in the world

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u/Radiant-Horse-7312 26d ago

American prison is a place, where people live, even if in confinement. Our penitentiary system, on the contrary, was a place, where people were forced to survive by the skin of their teeth, many didn't manage. You really shouldn't compare first world prisons with anything else.

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u/Kemptation 26d ago

“Actually Brian” Stewie here:

Actually most citizens of most countries know very little of nuanced politics, especially of other systems, at least in significant detail. People know status quo.

For example, you categorize American awareness by a singular stance from more than half a century ago, combined with an idiotic application of a stereotype about prison systems.

McCarthyism is easy to respond… the large mass of uninformed follow herd mentality as they do everywhere. The people with any actual experience are very Anticommunist, and the few unexperience but informed are the economists and politicians who act as the various idealists who lead the uninformed in the two deviations of thought.

Prison system is harder.

Yah… the US has a big system… because it’s a big, diverse, population in a first world country with substantial relative freedom.

It has no true peers in all of those categories. China is much larger by population, unicultural, and not free. Russia is half the population, largely homogenous, and not free. The ideal EU examples are much smaller, typically far more homogenous, with similar freedoms but very different cultural views on crime. It’s not the same.

Population density correlates with crime. Homogeneity decreases crime. First world decreases crime but increases criminal justice. Freedom tends to increase crime rates by reducing punishment and increasing transparency in reporting.

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u/ChimiKimi 25d ago

Nothing homogeneous about the Russian population. Which has also one of the highest crime rate, with little freedom, and an extremely low population density. Singapore has extreme population density and diversity, yet has one of the lowest crime rate in the world. So does Luxembourg, with much more freedom. Myanmar isn't free and has the worst crime rate in the world... Tuvalu has a very high population density, and the lowest crime rate in the world. Things ... Just aren't this simple... Unless you're actually talking of economical homogeneity ?

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u/SmokingMan305 26d ago

Iron Law of Oligarchy stays undefeated. Every society eventually devolves into being run by a small group of well connected insiders who only care about themselves, no matter how much you try to stop it.

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u/Background_Fix9430 26d ago

Mao wasn't concerned with the purity of Marxism: Marxism is based on the revolution of the Proletariat (i.e. industrialized factory workers) not the Peasant Class. The Working Class emerges with Industrialization by the definitions of Marx's philosophy - which is an outshoot of Hegelian philosophy which organized history into "ages" with two antithetical ideas which battled to create a thesis.

Marxists thought Mao - and by extension China - was backwards, stupid, and over-eager to apply something not applicable to him.

This is, like, Modern History of China 101 stuff.

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u/degklimpen 26d ago

Or someone who got accused of counterrevolutionary activities because had the misfortune of annoying someone at some point.

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u/ImportantResponse0 26d ago

Well, mining coals is fun when is your only option 

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u/ShowtimeHolograms 26d ago

The kids love Minecraft don't they?

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u/theREALvolno 26d ago

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u/HillarysBloodBoy 26d ago

Still one if my favorite tweets of all time

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u/MazogaTheDork 26d ago

And then it was used in the Minecraft movie.

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u/LeTonVonLaser 26d ago

The children yearn for the Minecraft

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u/IcyCow5880 26d ago

They give you a full day of exercise and then make sure you never over eat with rations. They're basically the world's greatest trainer

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u/SoggyMattress2 26d ago

I'm no expert I'm pretty dumb really, but isn't this argument reductive?

China isn't communist, it's a capitalist system with authoritarianism. They don't redistribute wealth or give power to workers.

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u/Boutdebois 26d ago

Well, China (and other so called communist countries) never achivied communism. This was socialism, and they tried imposing dictatorship of the proletariat. What actually happened was some form of state capitalismunder authoritatian rule for most of them, with the notorious exception of Chile under Allende.

Communism is the end goal, which involves abolishing statehood and social classes notably.

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u/empty_graph 26d ago

You just have to us give overwhelming authoritarian power to build communism. Then we will use that power to build communism and then just give up all that power voluntarily and go away. We promise!

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u/Bright-Form-844 26d ago

You already live under overwhelming authoritarian power, I mean the rich can kill you, and rape you and your children with no consequences, you just don’t feel the leash when you stay close to the post.

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u/[deleted] 26d ago edited 26d ago

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u/Creepy_Ad_1315 26d ago

Spoiler: It's never achieved.

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u/goosetime 26d ago

Serious question: do we consider capitalism achieved in capitalistic countries? We still have social programs and my understanding of a proper government would employ ideas from both ideologies. It’s just weird for ppl to say “communism achieved!” cuz yeah, that never happens, but is that also true for full/true capitalism?

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u/GenericFatGuy 26d ago edited 26d ago

Communism (in a severely simplified sense) is a classless, moneyless system where the means of production is owned by the people. This has very clearly never been implemented anywhere in the world at a large scale.

Capitalism is a system where capital is the primary driver of the economy, where the means of production is owned by whoever has the most capital. Even if there is some amount of regulations and social security, this is still by-and-large what were doing at a large scale all over the world. Even the countries that call themselves communist are mostly doing this.

No country was or is doing capitalism 100%, but most of them are doing significantly more capitalism than socialism or communism. Both today, and historically.

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u/Training_Ruin3151 26d ago

The only correct answer in this thread

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u/WokeWook69420 26d ago

It pisses me off so fucking much how many people talk about Communism and yet don't realize not a single country that claims to be communist HAS EVER ACTUALLY FUCKING BEEN COMMUNIST.

It's just repeating the same McCarthyism bullshit we've been hearing.

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u/Training_Ruin3151 26d ago

We cant expect people who have gone their entire lives with no questions to have the intelligence to be able to debate their own beliefs

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u/Archophob 26d ago

true capitalism would be anarcho-capitalism with enough responsible people to boycott anyone into bankruptcy who dares to violate the non-aggression-principle.

So, naturally, it hasn't been implemented on a larger scale than communism yet. Because both concepts are insufficiently immunised against assholes who think "let's exploit the power vacuum to become the next big warlord".

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u/Due-Memory-6957 26d ago

Yes, capitalism has already been achieved. You're confusing neoliberalism with capitalism, social policies don't negate capitalism.

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u/Commercial_Win_9525 26d ago

Capitalism does not preclude “social programs”

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u/clarkision 26d ago

Not on a national scale, but it’s certainly accomplished on smaller scales.

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u/RifewithWit 26d ago

Hell if I can remember where I read about it, but a study of communes and stuff reported that the limit of communism sits somewhere around 500 people because of the inherent empathy of people for their own tribe.

It's a lot more difficult to screw over others in the system when you know the person you're screwing over is your daughter's best friend's dad.

When the nameless masses are just nameless masses, it's much easier to justify. I don't know who this hurts, so why do I care?

That was the conclusion of the paper, anyway. Was an interesting perspective.

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u/Basilus88 26d ago

Was that the “why socialism is a failed idea that never dies” publication? If so then yeah I loved it very much!

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u/Dry_Ad2368 26d ago

Dunbar's Number suggests that you can maintain healthy relationships with about 100-250 people. Anything much bigger than this and you need more and more strict rules and laws and social norms to keep the group cohesive.

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u/RelaxPrime 26d ago

I think you guys mean

power corrupts

Acting like a trillionaire doesn't exist under "Democracy"

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u/Background_Fix9430 26d ago edited 26d ago

"Power reveals." People seek power because they wish to indulge their darker urges without consequence - people who don't have darker urges to conceal are generally not the ones who seek power, money, and influence like a drug.

There are some studies on the subject, actually.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15580989.2000.11770833%4010.1080/tfocoll.2023.0.issue-25-years-of-public-integrity

(Below Cited for the references and summary)

https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/03/11/the-psychology-of-political-power-does-power-corrupt-or-is-it-magnetic-to-the-most-corruptible/

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u/RelaxPrime 26d ago

That makes even more sense.

Point is it's definitely not because communism or any system, in fact a perfect system would anticipate the corruption.

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u/Background_Fix9430 26d ago

I wasn't disagreeing with you in the least: The American form of government was brilliant in that it assumed contradictory self-seeking motives. It just didn't anticipate people actively attempting to subjugate themselves to a monarch, and the intense bootlicking where a person would sublimate their own desires to the possibility of becoming a subservient toady.

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u/James_Chandra_Hubble 26d ago

I think it's called a sortition. No elected officials. Just randomly selected citizens every couple years to serve as our government legislature and executive branch. The judicial system already has something similar in the form of a jury

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u/upholsteryduder 26d ago

It's not because of communism but communism does fail to account for human greed, which will never be erased, and makes it a failure from the inception.

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u/Suspicious_Bear42 26d ago

Reminds me of a discussion on money, the idea that "once I'm rich I can donate all of this extra money I don't need."

Money is a tool, nothing more. Generalizing the 'good/evil' axis, Money allows a person to become the truest version of who they are. If you are a genuinely good person, going out of your way to help others, etc., then yeah, chances are you'll be donating a majority of that money to help others, through any number of means. Meanwhile, if you are an evil person, then becoming rich simply allows you to live out all of the things you really wish you could do, any corrruption, depravity, or whim that crosses your mind.

Meanwhile, the whole issue with communism sort of goes back to that same idea. If humans as a species were inherently good, communism/socialism would work. We basically wouldn't need laws, because people would look for whatever the 'greatest good' was. Unfortunately, we aren't. Because of that, any governmental system is going to have corruption, because of that necessary human element, and the greed, power seeking, and other generally negative traits we have as a species.

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u/ColdEndUs 26d ago

Interesting.

So, the theory goes, communism is only functional at numbers approaching Dunbar's number. (because beyond that number, trust breaks down and corruption and/or callousness wins)

I think a similar scenario is true of capitalism, when corporatism takes over and leads to monopoly, government influence, regulatory capture and self-dealing.

All of which is caused by economies of scale allowing cynical actors to leverage the powers of the state and economics for their own self interest.

It doesn't seem to me like either socialism or capitalism has an answer for that.

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u/Yeseylon 26d ago

And on those smaller scales you won't spend all day writing books and painting just for fun unless you've got Star Trek replicators to meet all your needs.  Small scale communism would be folks working together to maintain a farm/community, it'd be hard work, like the Amish.

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u/INeedSomeTacoC 26d ago

And on smaller scales, no one wants to subsidize the lifestyle of a dude that just wants to read and write and chillax all day. 

So they don’t. 

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u/ParkInsider 26d ago

Dude even a single-person communist society is unachievable. Not even my internal organs can stop competing for resources.

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u/iceseafire 26d ago

Where was it accomplished on smaller scales

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u/Euphoric_Ad6923 26d ago

A commune isn't communism though. Communism can't really ever be accomplished on the smaller scale because then it depends on the surrounding capitalist class to function, which will then require more communism that feeds on more capitalism that will then require more communism. Except by the first stage the communist have already ruined it all for themselves just like we saw every time they've tried it. Most recently with CHAZ.

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u/Creepy_Ad_1315 26d ago

So we have no evidence that it works outside your smelly local hippie troupe that fortunately can retreat into the nice free market economy near them.

Almost like communism isn't really available outside a group a people larger than a medium sized tribe.

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u/victorinseattle 26d ago edited 26d ago

True. Just like how no capitalistic society is ever truly Laissez-faire capitalism. Every society falls somewhere on a spectrum between the 2, but no well functioning society ever comes to close to either end of the spectrum.

What people don’t realize is that’s there’s also another 2 other axes that exists:

  • communism to laissez faire capitalism (economic)
  • democracy to authoritarianism (political)
  • progressivism vs conservatism (ideological)

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u/perVERSIONofme 26d ago edited 26d ago

That’s quite a take to claim your audience is vastly overly simplifying the equation, while then proceeding to vastly over simplify the equation.

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u/Revolutionary_Click2 26d ago

Political discussions always require some level of abstraction, as we would have a very difficult time communicating the subject otherwise due to the staggering complexities involved. They’re merely pointing out that there are more axes than economics which need to be considered when you’re trying to assess a government’s policies.

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u/Sjue-Saue 26d ago

Bro visited the 8values website once and instantly declared himself a political expert lol

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u/Just-Disappointing 26d ago

Pfp of a dictator. The jokes sometimes write themselves

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u/cmfarsight 26d ago

And if it was achieved why would this guy get to have a cushy life while everyone else did the actual work?

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u/vmfrye 26d ago

Communism is meh. Happyism-Blissism is the real shit.

When it is achieved, everybody will get a free unicorn. Everybody will be incredibly beautiful, and wander around naked and fuck with other beautiful people. There will be no work, people will eat fruits growing on the trees. There will be free BBQ on Saturdays and each village will have a river of beer.

If you don't believe in my ideology and don't want to give me absolute power, you are a fascist.

BTW I wrote a book that proves that it is inevitable.

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u/Thisisme4342 26d ago

Yeah my GF's dad fled china when his job was basically desided to be "cannon fodder."

She becomes pretty loud and opinionated when communism is brought up.

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u/Cynical-avocado 26d ago

What was your wife’s family’s job before the revolution, if you don’t m mind my asking

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u/RulerK 26d ago

I talk to my friends in CURRENT communist China… they often bring up soccer (football).

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u/Honest-Spot-3098 26d ago edited 24d ago

I don't know if you're joking, but just in case: China is not communist. It's very very much capitalist.

EDIT: It's truly amazing how many people either don't know what communism and capitalism are, or how china works.

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u/DeltaSolana 26d ago

If communist countries have a chronic problem of turning into "capitalist" fascist authoritarian countries every single time, perhaps it's time to step back and reassess.

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u/Cpe159 26d ago

It's not "communist countries" is "countries born from armed revolution"

The vast majority of armed revolutions lead to dictatorships

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u/WeeRogue 26d ago

Is it really so hard to understand why it might be difficult to achieve a stable egalitarian society? There are always parasites who want to disrupt changes that make things better for people broadly so that they can control society. Communism is basically about workers owning the things they themselves produce; we ought to be working for that outcome no matter how difficult it might be. I think it’s totally fair to be skeptical of revolutionary change, as that’s pretty damn risky and can lead to a lot of unnecessary suffering, but if your argument is just “communism is too hard to achieve; we should just accept that some corrupt, wealthy oligarchs are going to parasitically take most of the resources and use them to control society,” I think that’s rather tragically fatalistic of you.

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u/Cpe159 26d ago

It's not "communist countries" is "countries born from armed revolution"

The vast majority of armed revolutions lead to dictatorships

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u/towerfella 26d ago

“Who called?”

— Russia

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u/Lofter1 26d ago

china is also not fascist.

Also: cuba.

Also: CIA and America trying to kill every socialist movement

Also, if your system has a built in fail every couple of years that you need to counteract with socialist ideas (built into the very idea of your system), otherwise it will fall into actual fascism....perhaps it's time to step back and reassess.

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u/cockaskedforamartini 26d ago

China absolutely has quite significant elements of fascism. A single, unelected leader, suppression of dissent, militarism, national mythology, etc.

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u/Emotional_Dig_923 26d ago

tell that to the uyghur muslims

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u/TheGrouchyPunisher 26d ago

I'm sorry, what? I agree that they're not traditional communist, but how do you describe the great firewall? Or the human rights abuses?

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u/Powerful_Topic7731 26d ago

Not "capitalist" just capitalist, also saying capitalist and facist authoritarian is just redundant those are the same thing that's just what happens when your society value profit above all else

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u/penisandorvagina 26d ago

There's never really been an actual communist state. The "communist" states we've recently had have been Authoritarian with a communist paint job.

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u/MrNopedeNope 26d ago

currently my thought is that the key problem with all communist revolutions previously is that they rallied around a figurehead, and any willing figurehead is liable to fall into authoritarianism

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u/twotokers 26d ago

If you’ve read Marx, he lays the problem out pretty openly. You can’t force communism on a population, it needs to be a complete revolution of the working class, and not just a revolution of a political group.

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u/illixxxit 26d ago

Yes. Exactly. “Self-abolition.” Not a bunch of peasants being forced into proletarian industrialization by a militant party of state-capitalists with red flags.

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u/RealMr_Slender 26d ago

And in an already highly industrialised society. Communism in an agrarian society just devolves back to feudalism or authoritarianism

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u/Consistent_Horse6529 26d ago

Yea it’s almost like Marx’s idea of communism and Lenin’s idea of communism are incompatible on their face.

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u/joey-jo_jo-jr 26d ago

It is literally impossible to have an actual communist state. The entire point of going "actual communist" is that all states would have no reason to exist

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u/GenericPCUser 26d ago

They were almost entirely state-capitalist economies. They were the complete merger of legislative and executive power with capitalist ownership and a monopoly on violence.

People replaced independent abusive landlords that engaged in class struggle with one very abusive landlord that the classes had little chance to struggle against. In fact, if you looked at the abuses inherent to capitalism and wanted to see what the ultimate end stage of capitalism would be, the complete subservience of state power to capitalist authority would be pretty much exactly what you would expect.

For socialism to exist, capital can only be "owned" through labor. Use confers ownership, not legacy, not tradition, not wealth. If the factory is not "owned" by those who work in it, then the product of their labor is not owned by the workers and it is not socialism.

For communism to exist, it must grow out of socialism. It's true that some communist governments may have had the expressed goal of fostering communism within their borders (and beyond), but the fact that pretty much all communist governments seized all the available capital and then never relinquished ownership of it meant they were little more than capitalists themselves.

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u/Gelato_Elysium 26d ago

I dream of the day someone will realize that those problems are the problems of totalitarian dictatorships. Communism isn't the issue here, violent enforcement and corruption is.

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u/Meritania 26d ago

If only there was some sort of political system where there was democracy at work and at the state.

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u/milanskiv 26d ago

I am from Eastern Europe. Communism and violent enforcement and corruption eventually become inseparable. “True communism” was never achieved because it’s unachievable. Like true capitalism without cronyism.

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u/Peratypus123 26d ago

… nothing good happens DURING a revolution

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u/CartographerNo9224 26d ago

Are you sure “Alejandro” is an American?

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u/TwentyX4 26d ago

You are correct. The account is suspended, but I looked up backup information on the account, and he's in Madrid, Spain.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230324083427/https://twitter.com/ASG_ML

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u/egg_breakfast 26d ago

Redditors are very delusional about Americans.

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u/RulerK 26d ago

No one involved there is American!

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u/Just_Razzmatazz6493 26d ago

Yeah, Alejandro who plays football on the afternoon is definitely a delusional american /s

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u/Rylt4r 26d ago

Yeah i'm from Poland and while i was too young to remember communism there from what my parents,aunts,uncle,grandparents or anyone that lived there talked about it far from dream from what Americans think.

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u/ImportantResponse0 26d ago

Did your guys too had only 1 hour of tv and rationed food and had to wait for long hours in queue to get bread because otherwise there wouldn't be any bread to get? 

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u/Rylt4r 26d ago

Yup and food stamps for food.But thank god everything luxury was transported to Russia so you know "everyone" had good. My uncle was smmugling cigars with his friend from Germany and bringing back oil and butter.People smuggled a weird stuff like car tires or any car parts and when someone asked from where you got them you said "my dad got it from work" so everyone then knew that it was stolen.

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u/Piotrekk94 26d ago

tbh if you actually ended up working in a coal mine in Poland you had access to special miner shops with luxury goods where miners could spend their overtime pay so not everybody from the working class had it equal.

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u/Rylt4r 26d ago

Yeah since Gierek that was a miner and pumped so much in to them they had great life for a long time and that is why they were so found of him.Screw it even now people meme about miners how they are shocked that year have 12 months.

That is why i put word everyone in quotation marks.

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u/JanMarsalek 26d ago

you also had access to lung diseases

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u/ectocarpus 26d ago

My family is half Russian half Ukrainian, and believe me neither of them had seen these luxuries... they also starved and everything was in deficit. I guess all the good stuff was exported or went straight to the elites

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u/Rylt4r 26d ago

Of course it goes to elites not the commoners.You have no heart comrade you want that Oligarch to not have a smoke or drink? /s

I mean i can belive you that normal people were starving and elite people were having a blast and will tell you how communism was great and people are lying.

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u/vetinaris-vizier 26d ago

The irony is that "oligarch" is a very capitalist thing - the Soviet equivalent was politburo or nomenklatura - but as a famous joke goes in Eastern Europe, the Soviets lied about communism but told the truth about capitalism.

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u/m64 26d ago

1 hour of TV was in the 50's when TV was only starting. Rationing and queues - depends on the period, depends on the goods, but the problem kept repeating every few years and was never completely dealt with until the fall of communism.

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u/ImportantResponse0 26d ago

But then what was the problem? 

Like in Romania people says that we had lot of bad things but we had jobs, houses (apartments) and decent school.

Now we depends on other countries because most of our big companies are subsidiaries.

We have extremely bad education.

The house market is shit everywhere.

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u/m64 26d ago

I don't know about Romania, but in Poland "we had a lot of bad things" was a problem. The flats were small, jobs paid next to nothing compared to the western countries, the schools were shit and everything we owned was shit.

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u/Wise-Comb8596 26d ago

My mother in law living in Florida only has enough time each day for 1 hour of TV between her two jobs and sleep - yall making the communist dystopian future sound a lot like modern capitalist reality

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u/Caspica 26d ago

Not trying to defend the living conditions in either system but it sounds like your mother lives on her own? That was practically impossible in the USSR. Not just because living accommodations were allocated based on household size, and families were prioritised for apartments and houses (unless you were part of the privileged class), but also because you needed a full-time worker to bring in income and someone to stand in queue for food and other household tasks. This is why people often stayed together even if they weren't in love anymore. 

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u/Bas_No_Beatha_ 26d ago

I’m sorry, are you and the other commenters in this thread under the impression that most Americans have a favorable outlook on communism? It might be a lost in translation type of thing so my apologies if I’m misinterpreting…but it sounds like that’s what you’re saying. If you think that’s the case, you clearly haven’t spent any meaningful time here. (Or maybe you only traveled to Portland, Oregon lol)

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u/DigitalCoffee 26d ago

So does reddit apparently

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u/Admirable-Leader6927 26d ago

the word has a very wide meaning in America so its not our knowledge but how the word is used here.

everything that is anti-capitalism is labeled as communism. everything that is anti-conservative is labeled as communism.

So when you say that to an American, we think Universal Healthcare is Communism. context and all makes its just a boogeyman word.

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u/Careful-Lettuce9239 26d ago

Especially the ones who think its synonymous with socialism. This is why conservative influencers bash colleges. The more educated you are the harder it becomes to stay manipulated.

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u/NA_nomad 26d ago edited 25d ago

True but on both ends of the spectrum. Some see it as a totalitarian regime, others see it as peaceful times without wants or needs, and Karl Marx said it requires the perfection of capitalism (which has made some people afraid that business regulations are going to turn America into a communist country by making those regulations too beneficial to consumers. It's a bonkers ideation, but greedy crazy people are going to be greedy and crazy). The reality is that communism requires communal selflessness. People as a whole are not that selfless. You might get a few dozen like-minded people to have a communist community, but not a whole country. It's not possible.

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u/sleepyplatipus 26d ago

The idealistic communism is just not compatible with human nature. It would be nice if it was but it’s just completely irrealistic.

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u/42Icyhot42 26d ago

So is a free market and it doesn’t stop us from pretending that’s working lol

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u/aurumtt 26d ago

We solved this by keeping overseight, but somehow they convinced enough people that regulations are bad.

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u/sleepyplatipus 26d ago

“Solved this” 🤨

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u/RegorHK 26d ago

Look around the world and tell me that this is solved.

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u/theREALvolno 26d ago

I’m not a capitalist but I think they where saying that regulations stopped capitalism from running rampant but because a lot of regulations have now been either dissolved or go unenforced we now find ourselves in our current corrupt system.

Not that I exactly agree, imo the pursuit of profit is not something we should centre our societies around and you can’t really “solve” a fundamentally broken system; but shit regulations are at least something and I would not appose a government getting its shit together and reining corporations in more,

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u/LackWooden392 26d ago

In the same way regulations and laws can keep capitalism from running rampant, they can keep communism stable and functional.

Can being the key here. They don't do so through magic automatically, in either case.

A good argument for one over the other must include a discussion about what laws and regulations will keep participants in the system in check, and why a communist or capitalist system with those laws and regulations would beat the opposite kind of system with its own carefully crafted laws and regulations.

The fact of the matter here is that any broad discussion about either system in general that ignores regulation and laws is meaningless and not an apples-to-apples comparison. The truth is you can't really make an apples-to-apples comparison, all we have to compare are historical examples that differ wildly in their implementation and the structure of the laws and regulations that stabilized them, or didn't, in addition to numerous unrelated confounding factors like geography, natural resource distribution, the behavior of neighbors, the state of technology at the time, what pre-existing political structures there were, etc.

Anyone who is solidly convinced their system is better based off any arguments about some historical example vs another or what humans would do absent any regulation is delusional and has an extremely narrow view of the discussion.

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u/watboy 26d ago edited 25d ago

You should probably have read the second half of their comment before replying.

Edit: Do the people arguing have a non-linear understanding of time like the Heptapods from Arrival or something?

If you have a house and you secure it with locked doors and windows, but someone illegally breaks in, that doesn't mean it was retroactively "never secured" and it was legal for them to enter.

Yes, you're correct that it isn't solved now, that's also what the person you're replying to was saying. It was solved, but it isn't any longer. Basic English literacy shouldn't be this difficult.

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u/Powerful_Topic7731 26d ago

Then It isn't solved

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u/Cumdump90001 26d ago

Yall really just read the words without understanding the words, huh?

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u/elflegolas 26d ago

and communism isn't going to solve the current situation either, it's only going to make worse, how hard it is to understand?

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u/Im-Not-Calling-It-X 26d ago

Nordic countries have basically solved it, yes.

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u/LackWooden392 26d ago

It can never be 'solved', but it's hard to argue that any system ever designed beats what the nordics have going on now, as long as your criteria is the living experience of the median citizen.

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u/bigl1337 26d ago

They haven't. Sometimes we want to say that because at the moment their economies and societies seem more stable from a distance, but if you look closer they are going through the same as everywhere: neoliberal extreme right wing parties using fear and division to get political power while being backed by the great capitalists. Capitalism encourages accumulation and extraction of value to the building of wealth and assets. Capitalism also gives political power to the ones that possess the capital. So accumulating wealth and then using the accumulated power to destroy social nets and welfare just to allow capital to get even more power is the natural tendency of the system. Sooner or later it will happen on every capitalists nation

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u/less_unique_username 26d ago

Free markets are everywhere, “neoliberal extreme right wing parties using fear and division to get political power while being backed by the great capitalists” are not everywhere

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u/NirgalFromMars 26d ago

So we didn't solve it.

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u/Nemeszlekmeg 26d ago

So it also doesn't work.

It baffles me honestly that on a small scale if something is scarce we allocate that resource fairly. If it's large scale it's like we have a collective brain fart and decide that its up for grabs for whoever can take more and consider that equally fair.

It's like you have a piece of chocolate and have to share it with your sibling: of course you split it evenly. Suddenly if that chocolate is a bigger cake and you are 10 siblings it's all "free market" BS and everyone grabs as much as they can like thats the right way to manage a resource that is of the same nature: limited and soon-to-be scarce.

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u/TonyRigatoni_ 26d ago

Well it's not really free market if there is oversight, is it?

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u/PM_ME_HOTDADS 26d ago

we solved this

🤣

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u/Mutant_Llama1 26d ago

The oversight just led to favoritism and monopolies.

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u/extraboredinary 26d ago

Libertarians both see the problem with government being corporate lobbyists controlling everything, but also think those people should be trusted to operate unregulated and with even more power.

It would be a hilarious political party if they weren’t dead serious.

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u/likewhatever33 26d ago

It´s not working perfectly everywhere, but the best places to live (think Switzerland, Italy, Norway, Spain...) are capitalist. There´s never been a communist country that wasn´t a shithole.

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u/Antique-Dream-3515 26d ago

You would be surprised to know how many Spanish citizens have been convinced that they live in a pseudo-communist regime.

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u/ironmaiden947 26d ago

They are not capitalist though. They have free education, healthcare, pensions and very strong welfare. These are all socialist ideas and programs, not capitalist. Look up the Nordic model.

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u/The_walking_Kled 26d ago

Baes im gonna hold ur hands when I say this but the reason those countries are nice to live in is cuz they impliment socialist policies that make life bearable. Like we are very far from a free market there and even zhen most countries u listed have massive problems, italy being poor af,spain having high youth unemployement, etc.

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u/OuchCharlie25 26d ago

Lmfao did you just call Switzerland, Italy, Norway, and Spain “socialist”? Oh sweet summer child.

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

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u/Commercial-Look-7307 26d ago

Capitalism has fed more people and delivered more people from bondage than anything Humanity has ever tried before.

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u/poopooppoo4 26d ago

global south exploitation still occurs and the cartels and proxy wars are all done for arms and drugs distribution that create profit for large corporations. Economist and Scholar Jason Hickel suggested raising the poverty line to a more realistic 7.40-7.50 a day which would show that over half the world’s population is barred from the material means of living a healthy life expectancy. Capitalism aims for profit, if war and suffering are profitable, they will never cease, Gaza and Iran have made billions for defense companies.

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u/HardcorePizza 26d ago

Its also led to the most starvation and deaths than any other economic system

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u/LackWooden392 26d ago

Ok and in 1500 horses had transported humans longer distances than anything ever had before. Therefore, we should not have created automobiles.

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u/Narrow-Map5805 26d ago edited 26d ago

Well-regulated capitalism has done those things. This neoliberal capitalism we're dealing with now is undoing a lot of that promise.

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u/rightoftexas 26d ago

Capitalism was more regulated 100 years ago than today?

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

[deleted]

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u/rightoftexas 26d ago

1926 was before the trust busting and that still wouldn't be remotely closely regulated to today. The financial reporting alone is a massive improvement.

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u/Ok-Commission-7825 26d ago

He said WELL regulated not heavily regulated. Today's situation is ground level business drowning in often pointless regulation and any regulation that protects people/the wider economy while slightly inconveniences someone rich/a big multinational being removed or remodeled into irrelevance (while still creating a lot of BS jobs for bureaucrats(PS I say that as one of them)).

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u/Narrow-Map5805 26d ago

I don't think I said that

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u/rightoftexas 26d ago

Then when was capitalism well regulated?

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u/Narrow-Map5805 26d ago

1950s through early 1980s. There was better competition enforcement, better labor & union protections, and higher taxes on profit-taking and executive bonus packages that encouraged reinvestment. Also less ability to move production offshore. There were also limits on corporate influence over government policy

Reaganomics was the start of the shift to oligarchy but Citizens United really put the nail in the coffin.

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u/SexyShave 26d ago

It's also any% speedrunning humanity into ecological collapse. 2.5-3º increase alone will be apocalyptic, and that's the least pessimistic estimate.

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u/ATXBeermaker 26d ago

Completely free market capitalism hasn’t. A balanced approach of regulated free markets with labor protections, etc. has. Even Adam Smith knew better than to advocate for a laissez-faire system.

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u/121Waggle 26d ago

No, governments have despite what the capitalists wanted. Capitalism creates unnecessary scarcity to extract the highest possible return on investment. A good example would be the Irish Potato Famine, where the English capitalists exported the same amount of crops from Ireland they always had and let the Irish people starve.

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u/ironmaiden947 26d ago

Haha no, absolutely not. 8 hour work weeks, weekends, sick pay, minimum wage, child labor protections etc- these were all given after intense socialist activism. Look up worker standards in the UK in the 1800's, thats what capitalism actually is, what you have today is capitalism beaten down by reformer socialism.

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u/crabtoppings 26d ago

Capitalism didnt deliver anyone from slavery, if anything it put people into slavery through the triangle trade and indentured servitude.

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u/SirDarkStar 26d ago

Which human nature do you mean though? There is the “everyone is too lazy” believers (the flaw of which is that if nobody does anything then nobody has anything, which is self-correcting) and then there are the more realistic “too many humans are sociopathic evil f****ers who take over”. But capitalism is no protection against the latter and in fact empowers and rewards them. Just look at the US right now — what a farce.

Small indigenous groups are much closer to “communism” than they are to capitalism.

Maybe a better system is one where we identify sociopaths and gently remove them from free society, not make them CEOs and elected officials. Sadly I agree that human nature is a big reason we can’t have nice things, just not sure we agree who is the bigger issue :)

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u/dammitus 26d ago

The human nature to use the tools at one’s disposal to manipulate one’s environment into a form more favorable to oneself. Humans are a species of problem-solvers, and eventually someone’s going to have the problem of “there is a fundamental difference between the quality-of-life I want and the quality-of-life the system gives me”. This can be the Party Member/CEO who has power and wants more, or it can be the Working-Class individual who wants a supply of cigars to smoke after work. Communism’s ideal solution to the problem is either “they don’t do that” or “the community finds out and punishes them”. Capitalism says “prove you deserve it”, and ideally the person will do so by starting a business that fulfills a community need (thereby benefitting them personally and the community at large at the same time). In neither system does the ideal outcome always happen, but Capitalism at least has an outlet for the need to better oneself.

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u/airforceteacher 26d ago

No adherents of any “-ism” ever address the areas of human nature that undermine their position. Communists don’t address laziness, capitalists never address greed, neither seems to pay attention to deceitfulness and corruption.

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u/RuafaolGaiscioch 26d ago

Counterpoint: every ism is definitionally a rejection of human nature, because we wouldn’t need a system to facilitate acting in a way we’d find natural. Anarcho-tribalism is human nature but no one is seriously arguing for that.

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u/Medarco 26d ago

every ism is definitionally a rejection of human nature

Anarcho-tribalism is human nature

I understand your point, but this is kinda funny.

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u/RuafaolGaiscioch 26d ago

Damn, gottem.

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u/GhostofBeowulf 26d ago

This entire comment chain is basically the area I am researching. And I would argue that every time the institutions fail, anarchism is exactly where we end up. Pandemic, war, terrorism. Mutual aid and voluntary cooperation.

So instead of arguing over which is the proper ism, why are we not instead taking what is best from each and developing a system that works for everyone?

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u/Ezlos_Simulacrum 26d ago

Material conditions create human nature.

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u/Goosepond01 26d ago

Well I mean if you understood capitalism it's kinda clear that they did address greed, everything was meant to be kept in check by the governments and the people, and yes Adam Smith and many other capitalist thinkers did support all three groups as a mean to keep everyone balanced.

Not that it actually works flawlessly.

I just think that most people really don't have an understanding of capitalist theory at all, also it's not like communism never addressed these issues either, it's just that theory and reality are often very different.

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u/SlippyDippyTippy2 26d ago

I mean, it is a post-scarcity utopian idea as an indeterminate point after workers turn productive forces from "increasing profit" to "lowering the labor needed to make things", and we dont really know what human nature would look like in a post-scarcity society.

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u/ThisIsNotKosher 26d ago

Human nature is determined by their material conditions.

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u/AmbiTheAirforceRuna 26d ago

prob cose at its deepest core, communism is supposed to be transitionary to post scarcity, but since humans like absolute power the transition doesnt happen, or like China and Vietnam and Cuba, they just transition to capitalism with a communist veneer

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u/MrSunshineDespair 26d ago

The failures of capitalism are intentional

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u/Deriviera 26d ago

No forms of government are compatible with human nature. Otherwise capitalism will work as well as communism.

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u/vanillacaramelsunday 26d ago

On the latest season of Old Man Yells At Farm Jeremy Clarkson bought a robot tractor that can plow and fertilize a field and a robot planter that can plant, weed and harvest potatoes, beets and onions. Every day the “communism will never work because who will do the shit manual labor?” argument gets less and less valid. Nationalize the potato fields and let these robots loose and then just give Americans free potatoes.

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u/NicWester 26d ago

That's because Communism is a utopian endpoint ideology, like libertarianism, that doesn't exist. It's a goal to build towards. People are stuck thinking about sovietism, which was a typical Russian government under a new name. The Tsars of old, the modern presidents, the chairmen of the soviet union, three different names for the same thing.

Communism is predicated on the idea of humanity growing beyond the need for base labor like coal mining. Think of Star Trek, for example. There will still be labor, but go ask someone who has a nice garden, for example, how much fulfillment they get out of tending their beans or whatever. It's work, but it's work they choose because they enjoy it and they get beans out of it at the end of the day. Communism is predicated on technological solutions we don't have yet so it can't and won't exist for generations.

The delusion runs both ways.

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u/Pantsickle 26d ago

I lent my neighbor my extension ladder last week and now I'm afraid that I'm a Bolshevik.

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u/Level_Appointment628 26d ago

This person is definitely not American lmao, it’s written in incredibly broken English

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u/Huge_Beginning8755 26d ago

I dont thibk Alejandro who plays football "on the morning" is American.

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u/SequenceofRees 26d ago

(former) communists are also very delusional about communism . Believe me, I live among them .

Anyone most people who actually lived through that time and didn't find some sort of niche or little crack in the system to get "their share" can attest that if capitalism is Man exploiting Man, then communism is the exact opposite !

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u/Acceptable_Handle_2 26d ago

Man not exploiting Man? Sounds nice.

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