Alright, then let me explain: There is no such thing as a communist state. Communism, as defined by Marx is a stateless classless society.

It was also not socialist, because the workers did not have any meaningful control over the state, which controlled the means of production. Ergo, the workers didn't control the means of production and the Soviet Union can much better be described as state capitalism. It was also fascist.

Championing the Soviet Union as a "bull-work of communism" is also falling for American propaganda, because the US loves to portray the cold war as a struggle between capitalism and communism, which capitalism won.

To be truly empowered as leftist, we need to reject their false definitions and actually try to figure out the truth.

There are no true societies.
There's no such thing as a capitalist society

Please elaborate?? If you make claims, that stray far from the understanding of these terms by most people, it would be really useful to know, why you see it that way.

That doesn't mean descriptions are not useful.

Descriptions are only useful when they tell you anything useful about the things, they are describing. The Soviet Union was neither communist nor socialist, because the workers didn't control the means of production. The state did. This is fundamental to both of these systems. Sometimes, false labels can also be harmful, because they give the other person a false idea of what you are talking about. For example, it would be wrong and also really bad, if you were to describe the Nazis as socialists, just because they were called the "national socialists".

It was also fascist.

LOL
you certainly didn't fall for American propaganda.
IDK what the people using the idiotic term 'leftists' to describe themselves mean by it, but they usually aren't left.
I think you're far from figuring out the truth.

You are not even gonna engage with the rest of the argument? I think that was the much more important part.

There are plenty of ML's who would gladly and thoroughly debunk your other claims with plenty sources and evidence (as I hope they do).
As it's a good thing to educate people.
But I just pointed to the most staggeringly ridiculous one showing you're pretty far gone.
You need a lot of work and studying.
Too early in the day and too hot, I have other work to do.

Socialism without democracy isn't socialism, in my opinion.

Watch the tankies lose their minds over this...

It's always China this Soviets that with the fucken examples. No one ever fucken talks about the Yugoslav mixed system, Communalist towns, Black Ukraine, or even when Syndicalists took over neighborhoods. Just as capitalism can range from late merchantslism, social democracy, and laze fare so can socialism or communism.

🙆‍♂️

Because the successor states are not soviet? Does it also include China, Cuba, the DPRK, and Vietnam? Come to think of it, the units don't make sense either.

Oh, and those fields work themselves under capitalism? That's the problem with capitalists: they all expect to be the 1% and not the poor guy working the fields.

Although capitalism has a solution for the fields, right? Prison labor and illegal aliens getting less than minimum wage. A great solution - as long as you aren't the one on the field.

Although with high unemployment and mass deportations who knows how long Americans can deligate these jobs to these people.

Why would it contain them? The others you name are nominally still ruled by communist parties, and more importantly did not do the massive privatization the USSR did.

You see the same pattern in Yugoslavia, which also did the same privatization of previous state controlled industry . . .

I disagree with many points of Bolshevik and particularly USSR communism.

That said, it was ruled by the Communist Party. So it's a fine example - and claims that even the flawed state socialist system of the USSR wasn't more beneficial to the average person is ignoring exactly the natural experiment that Russia was.

It was also fascist.

No, it wasn't.

You don't have to like the USSR, but fascism has a particular meaning - and the difference between even the Soviets and fascism was well defined by Mussolini, among others.

Maybe tankies will, but they dont need to attack democracy. We did that for them. Democracy is only as good as your median civics and economics education level, it seems.

Its not the poors getting a better outcome that they are against, its the fact the 1% will no longer exist.

What is communism?

Laissez-faire not laze fare.

It means to let be in French.

100% agree with you.

Explain what Elon Musk(and all the other billionaires are for that matter) is if there is no such thing as capitalistic society.

You havent brought anything of substance to this discussion, so good riddance and dont let the door hit you on the way out.

US government: we can't allow a socialist government to succeed, because it proves that we're just greedy assholes. Go overthrow their government.

CIA: we're gonna get so much fucking richer, Ican't wait!

When did workers control the means of production in the USSR? When was the state abolished? When was money abolished? When was class abolished?

Communism never existed in the USSR it was run under state capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat never ended.

This is Brand New Sentence. The brand new sentence goes in the title.

english not your strong point?

not discussing economics in this place anymore

anymore implies that i did at one point then stopped because of the aforementioned reasons

so you saying i don’t bring anything of substance to this particular discussion is self defeating, i already pointed out why before you pointlessly made your comment

poor guy

Except that all of their needs would be met, so not really poor huh?

Because none of those never amounted to anything of significance. Because it doesnt scale.

I mean, don't it? The CIA did a lot to squash anything resembling a little bit too much like an experiment on the matter- foreign or domestic, ally or foe.

The US government would not spend so much effort stamping out communism and murdering communists if it wasn’t an effective threat to capitalism.

And yes, China is not truly communist because they are socialist, the intermediate stage between capitalism and communism. And if you think they aren’t socialist, then you haven’t done enough research into how China actually functions.

You missed the point entirely. You can't with one side of your tongue say there are no true communist societies while saying there are true capitalist countries with the other. Every country exists through a combination of both free market and government intervention in the economy. Yet, for some reason, only the platonic ideal true communism counts as communism, but the applied version counts as capitalism. I'm a leftist myself, I just think the double standard is fucking idiotic.

hmm, fair

The goal of capitalism should be to create competition to generate general maximum efficiency. Once that is reached and natural monopolies start to form, they should be socialized into non-profit utilities.

When the only goal left is enshittification and profiteering, it's time to gobble them up.

We don't have to have a race to the bottom, we can get the government to freeze things at the peak and keep them there.

We just need a mechanism to break that up again if it stagnates.

people will never say it but understand perfectly

I think you're vastly overestimating what people understand.

I think it's Lace fear, the fear of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps

The school-selected candidate went on to sell all of the class's supplies to buy the principal a golf club

fr though, coal mining could be really cool if it didn't kill you, ruined your body and salaries were appropriate. Operating and maintaining giant shearing machines and excavators, drones, explosives.

It's a real shame it kinda sucks in general.

Socializing them would be a boon sure, but I can't name a single major monopoly that is at any sort of "peak" that couldn't be re-implemented better if we started from scratch.

Our country has been stagnating in many areas for decades now and the competition that occurred in the past did not push us to realize "general maximum efficiency" - it pushed us to realize a corporate hellscape, with billionaires drinking our human rights like they would a fine wine.

There should be an actual textbook communist and socialist running in major elections alongside Democrats and fascists republicans. This way you can actually see the policies side-by-side.

Much like some average schmuck should compete in the first round of the Olympics just to give perspective

China is not truly communist because they are socialist

Is a one party dictatorship part of socialism?

Let's be honest. It's both.

Let me ask a very simple question:

What, exactly, is wrong with socialism?

QUICKLY.

It's not about it being the "best" version. It is the version that exists in real life.

Trying to have a battle over which fictional utopia is better is pointless.

The goal of capitalism should be to create competition to generate general maximum efficiency.

You can do that under socialism as well. The problem with capitalism isn't the competition to generate maximum efficiency, it's the monopolization of that efficiency for profit rather than actual good. Why should we rely on the private sector to do what is best for society when publicly traded socialist companies can do the same without the dragon hoarding?

Dictatorship doesn’t really have any meaning. The US is supposedly a democracy, yet for its entire existence the government has acted solely in the interests of the wealthy. The US is effectively a dictatorship of the bourgeois. China in the other hand is a dictatorship of the proletariat, ie, it acts in the interests of the vast majority of its people. This is why the CPC has a 90%+ satisfaction rating in China. The people recognize that the government actually works for them, and not for the capitalists.

What, exactly, is wrong with socialism?

It's... it's... it's SOCIALISM!!!

Groups generally do not generate the initial idea, don't execute the initial vision, and are less agile to do so. There should be some incentive for individuals to drive their ideas for a time, and to benefit from that disproportionately, again for a time.
Businesses need to go through a few stages: startup regulation to establish a fair profit window, evaluation of an ongoing competitive window, and lastly a review of consolidation and convergence and conversion to a public utility.
The idea that some system can be setup such that everyone benefits all the time from some individual's IP is pie in the sky, but we can certainly greatly improve the hoarding issue. The absolute most important part of that is to decouple big business ownership and power from an individual back into the government, since that's where the excess influence ends up anyway.

You don't start it from scratch, you take away the profit motive by folding it into the political machine as a utility. People still work there, it's still run in a similar fashion, but you take away the stocks and speculation and decision making and regulate it back to the people either via wages or 100% profit tax rate.

😂

Something like this happened in my school. We had surplus budget so we all got to write in suggestions on how to use it and vote on them. EVERYONE wanted the skatepark to be upgraded, like across social groups and ages, we all loved the skate park even though it was a shitty little corner of the parking lot with a tiny ramp and concrete blocks. We just wanted like, one ramp and a grind bar.

When it came time to vote, a lot of the suggestions were obviously not from students and skate park upgrades weren't on the list, so we conspired and wrote it in as an extra option anyway.

Guess what won? Fancy new concrete garbage cans. We broke them out of spite.

That's nice.

Except the post is about the communist party, not communism - and which did run the USSR.

You don’t start it from scratch

We need high speed rail for freight and transit. We need actual chip/etc. manufacturing in the US, especially for individuals and (non-monopoly scale) commercial applications. We need facilities to process various materials e.g. rare earths and we need to focus on extracting these resources ourselves without slavery or child slavery, or raping the earth. We need to manufacture our own consumer goods sustainably, instead of exploiting people in other countries. We need to invest into battery technology, so individuals can enjoy safe and cheap energy storage - as well as strengthening and building up our grid. We need to invest into making safer, more performant EVs and we definitely need to invest heavily in public transit. We need to improve our agricultural system and look at our water (mis)use in a general sense, immediately.

I don't see how we wouldn't have to start from scratch. Our major companies aren't focusing especially hard on solving any of the issues humanity faces - unless one believes AI will solve everything for us magically.

They've never loved free speech and have to be reminded that minors still have civil/constitutional rights from time to time.