• NightDice@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    That’s correct, but I’m not sure what you understand those terms to mean, because neither really supports taking all ownership away from people. I’m just gonna leave this blorb here, because I feel like this is where it fits best.

    Communism in the style of Marx and Engels means that the workers own the means of production. They would have been completely in favor of a person owning their own farm (or jointly owning it if multiple people worked it). They didn’t really envision much of a state to interfere, much less own property.

    That the Soviet Union (and later the PRC, fuck them btw) claimed to be building the worker’s paradise under communism was mostly propaganda after Lenin died. There hasn’t been any state that has implemented actual communism as established by theory.

    Socialism (as I understand it, but I’m not well-read on it) means the state has social support networks, but largely works under capitalist rules, with bans of exploitative practices. There are some countries trying to implement a light version of this across Europe, to varying success (mostly failing where capitalism is left unchecked).

    The issue is that the US started propagandizing like mad during the cold war, and “communism” was just catchier to say than “supportive of a country that is really just a state-owned monopoly”. Soon everything that was critical of capitalism also became “communism”, which eventually turned into a label for everything McCarthy labelled “un-american”. This is also the time they started equating the terms communism and socialism. A significant portion of the US population hasn’t moved past that yet, because it fits well into the propaganda of the US being the best country in the world, the American Dream, all that bs. The boogeyman of “the state will take away the stuff you own” turned out pretty effective in a very materialistic society. Although I’m very glad to see more and more USAians get properly educated on the matter and standing up for their rights rather than letting themselves be exploited.

    • Nezgul@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      Your definition of socialism is more akin to a definition of social democracy, which is… maybe a form of socialism, depending on who you ask – it is historically contentious and generally accepted that social democrats aren’t socialists.

      Socialism can have all of the things that you described, but it is decidedly anti-capitalist. It reorients how workers relate to the means of production. Under capitalism, the means of production are owned by the bourgeois class, while under socialism, they are collectively owned by the workers.

    • icepuncher69@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Holy shit, this is exactly how the whole big picture of comunism is.

      Not even self proclaimed communist understeand this and seems that they think communism is the same thing America propagandises against, so they end up being apologists for tyranical regimes that are the contrary of what comunism and even socialism should be, and end up making an ass of themselves and fitting more with the tankie description. And yes fuck the CPSU/КПСС and the CCP.

      You are ultra mega based.

    • zephyreks@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Fuck the PRC because… They have state-owned enterprise instead of actual communism? Interesting take.

        • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          They literally have above 90 percent approval according to international studies from people as conservative as fucking Harvard University.

          You’re wrong about their institutions but regardless of what you think of their institutions they have a popular mandate, which is how democracies define themselves as legitimate.

        • zephyreks@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          Ah yes, because American democracy is going so well.

          Who’s interests are the Republicans representing? Who’s interests have the Democrats protected after being in power for 3 years?

          Democracy is meaningless if it doesn’t actually act to benefit the people. After all, the goal of government is to improve the lives of the people over which it governs. All of these experiments into different methods of governance should be evaluated based on how much the quality of lives of the population have improved and how happy the population is with their government.