BartsBigBugBag @ BartsBigBugBag @lemmy.tf

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70

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716

Joined

2 yr. ago

Lmaoo a billionaire famous for working his employees so hard they literally had to put up nets to catch jumpers is running for president in Taiwan? Let’s hope the population has more sense than to elect this fool. There’s no such thing as a benevolent billionaire.

No, neither would be good, certainly. And yes, the US utilizes forced labor in nearly every prison in the country. Likely all of your license plates, and probably much of your office furniture, were made by prisoners. Involuntary servitude and slavery is prohibited, except as punishment for a crime.

The point is to point out that the belief that the USSR was some unbelievably oppressive society with instant gulags and that did nothing for its people is objectively wrong, and in fact it was at even its worst Significantly less oppressive both domestically and abroad than the current United States. It objectively lifted millions of people out of poverty, though. It objectively lifted the life expectancy in most of the allied SSRs. In fact, the majority of citizens in post soviet states today preferred life under socialism.

What specific satellite states are you referencing? I’d love to look up more.

Oh, I didn’t realize it was the will of the people to fail to meet their climate commitments. I was pretty sure the majority of people thought that governments should be doing more. Was it also the will of the people to raise the pension age in France? And the people of Canada support the slow privatization of their public health system? That’s kosher to them?

God no, Russia is a capitalist oligarchy hellhole run by a violent strong man. How tf could they take care of their people when the first order of business when they took over as the Russian Federation was literally to gut all public services and infrastructure and sell it on the capitalist markets for a profit. I bet it feels good to put imaginary boxes around people who say things you don’t like though.

I think it’s because they were more dangerous. There’s a reason the Nazis kept the socialism in their party name. Communism and socialism were immensely popular in Germany. Without that corruption, or with a more informed working class, it’s unlikely the Nazis would have been govern the opportunity they needed to consolidate power under their rule.

I’ve heard your theory, too, for sure. I’ve just never seen a book to back it up. Do you have one? I’m always looking for more books about German pre-WWII history, it’s one of my favorite topics.

Agreed on your second sentence haha

Very nearly, yes. Unironically, look up life expectancy for citizens of the Russian Czardom pre-revolution. It literally more than doubled under Soviet rule. The Soviets had many problems, at least 40 big ones, but they succeeded in turning a peasant and slave society into an industrial society, doubled life expectancy, provided homes to everyone, provided vacations to everyone, and more.

They had issues, certainly. The criticisms that apply to them often apply to the US also though, and other liberal democracies. For example, the USSR couldn’t have dreamed of having a surveillance state even half as effective or powerful as the one in the United States. The gulag system at its peak, wasn’t even close to the current American prison system, either in terms of per capita or total numbers. And 40% of the population was freed every year. Most of the things we’ve been taught to fear about the Soviets we experience far more viscerally than they did. We have secret police, we just call them “undercover” or “plainclothes”. Hell, in 2020 people were literally being grabbed off the streets by un-uniformed police and stuffed into unmarked black cars. I could literally go on for hours, and provide hundreds of pages of books with data verifying, just the ways that the US is definitively more totalitarian and more violent than the Soviet Union at even its height of oppressive action.

We couldn’t strive to replicate the errors of the Soviets, but that doesn’t mean we should neglect the successes, either.

Is this your thoughts or a part of a larger quote? I appreciate it, even if I don’t necessarily agree with it.

I think the difference is, you’re saying the communists were infighting. The communists were United, they had their internal conflicts, (direct action vs parliamentarianism) but they were together. It was the CAPITALIST Social Democratic Party that murdered them. CAPITALISTS murdered them. Not other communists. Bernie Sanders isn’t a communist. AOC isn’t a communist. Neither was the SPD.

What are you even advocating for here? You seem hung up on some weird definition you have in your brain, and ignore what I said.

If it’s controlled by a small group of people, while there is a larger group of people who a disaffected and incapable of direct participation in governance, then it’s not a Democracy, as simple as that.

Have you not heard, first they came for the communists? They were literally the first people taken out, specifically because they violently opposed both the traitorous social democrats who sent thousands of working class men to die in a rich man’s war, and the later developed Nazi party. It was social democrats, which are by definition capitalist and not communists, who murdered their Allies and sided with the nationalists.

There are examples of countries that prioritize the desires and needs of their population above the desires of capital, they’re heavily demonized in the west though. If you actually go to them, you might find out most of what you learned is literally completely bullshit, because it is.

The people controlling the society collectively, rather than private individuals maintaining ownership and control of society. Production is part of society. It is one of the most important and powerful parts of society. It influences every other aspect of society, in a way no other part does. Such an integral part of our society being privately and anti-democratically controlled is how we end up where we are, where the world is literally boiling and we’re still expanding emissions, where the majority of people are living paycheck to paycheck, and not even our “pro-labor” party tries to help them…. Etc..

Lmao. They murdered their political opponents that were fighting for the working class, and collaborated with the ones who were destroying it. Hmm.. sounds kinda familiar. Which party put more money into policing than any other in history when they were most recently elected?

Which party released a memo (that thankfully leaked or we wouldn’t know) telling journalists and officials not to call for Israel to stop their genocide?

It’s almost as if they both serve capital and use us as pawns while they make money and kill people both domestically and abroad.

And under which ideology was that democracy index created? Why would liberal Democratic countries have a material interest in convincing their populations that they are Democratic in nature, while functioning entirely and scientifically proven as an oligarchy?

The people directly controlling the society collectively, rather than private ownership of said societies social wealth.

True democracy requires democracy at all levels of society. Workplace democracy, state democracy, community democracy, etc. Democratizing the electoral system but maintaining private ownership of production merely results in exactly the situation we are in now, with an illusion of democracy, where we choose from a pool of candidates selected by the elites in control of production in order to maintain control of their production.

There are different elites, and they have differing goals, but one thing they all have in common is they believe in the subjugation of the working class and the hoarding of the products of the labor of the working class. That’s why imperialism is non-partisan in the US. It serves capital.

That’s why there’s no meaningful changes to the status quo for the working class unless on the back of a social movement. They don’t serve us, they keep us placated while they serve the people who pay them.

True capitalism is what we live in. Competition has winners, those winners gain outsized advantages. They use those advantages to purchase regulatory frameworks which benefit them. This is inevitable, and has happened in every single capitalist society in the history of the ideology. Monopoly is the natural end state of capitalism. (Actually, fascism is, but monopoly happens along the way also)

Data says no what? That capitalism and democracy are incompatible? Or are you seriously applying the inherently flawed view that the US is a functional democracy? A country where it has been definitively been proven that the citizens support or lack of support for any policy has literally no effect on whether or not it will pass…. A country where literally 99% of our daily lives exists in dictatorships and oligarchies called corporations, who privately determine the use of all public goods and materials, and who have prioritized personal wealth generation over sustainability and the welfare of the population…

Where 70% of the population has no savings, 30% can’t read beyond a middle school level, almost a million people live on the streets… all while literally more food than is needed to feed all of Americas children every day three times a day is thrown away purely to ensure profit margins by corporations.

Anyone calling the US a Democracy is mistaken at best, deluded more likely.

The SPD voted for WWI, betraying the communists. The government, with the support of the SPD, then dismissed the chief of police and had the GKSD murder dissidents and communists, including Rosa Luxemburg, among other Spartacist members, in cold blood.

The murder had been ordered by Waldemar Pabst, first general staff officer of the GKSD, who claimed responsibility for the killings in a series of notorious 1960s interviews, stating that “times of civil war have their own laws” and that the Germans should thank both him and Gustav Noske, the SPD defence minister, “on their knees for it, build monuments to us and name streets and public squares after us!”

The SPD betrayed the people, sided with the bourgeoisie, and then led Germany straight into the material conditions that produced the Nazis while still playing at reformism in the face of literal fascism.

Sort of like how Social-Democrats like Bernie and AOC are playing at reform in the face of literal fascism today. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.