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The Dangers of Socialism they warned us about... (europe.pub)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/workreform@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 2 months ago* (5 children)

The fun thing is that none of those things have ever been a symptom of communism/socialism. The authoritarian states, that refer/referred to themselves by those names despite having nothing to do with them in reality, wished to maintain unitary control of the people and implemented those things and bled the people dry in spite of the egalitarian nature of their supposed communism/socialism. But those things absolutely are symptoms of capitalism, where unitary control and draining every dime you can from anyone you can is part of the system.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    If you are honest it’s undeniable that half that list can be linked to every country ever attempting communism.

    Problem is Americans don’t understand there is something in between their insane system and North Korea. Its called democratic socialism

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (1 child)

    I'm aware. But none of them have ever actually met the definition of communism. At minimum, all of them still had central unitary state powers. That is, by definition, not communism. The flaw with the theory of economic transition to communism is not necessarily the communism, but the transition. It requires a unitary party to seize the means of production, and then voluntarily distribute those means to the people and dissolve the central government structure. You'll notice that that last step has never happened on a national scale in history.

    I'm also not a communist, for what it's worth.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago

    But none of them have ever actually met the definition of communism.

    I really dislike this kind of thinking. People citing that we've never had a communist country tend to think:

    1. Only true Communism counts as communism. (So no failures of any real nation can ever be attributed to it.)

    2. Any country with any degree of market economy counts as capitalist. (So the sins of any nation can be attributed to capitalism.)

    They use an extremely tight definition for communism and an extremely loose definition for capitalism. I'm a leftist myself, but I can recognize the intellectual inconsistency.

    By the same logic, I could argue that the Catholic Church never covered up sex abuses by priests:

    True Catholicism has never existed, as there's never been a time it's been truly universal. (The word "Catholic" means "universal.") Obviously we can only ever talk about the failures of Catholicism once we've actually achieved true Catholicism. Until literally every single living human being is a devout Catholic, any discussion of the merits of Catholicism is purely theoretical and shouldn't serve to guide our decisions.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    For certain kinds of communism/socialism, authoritarianism does seem pretty much inevitable. It's not inevitable for more distributed community-oriented forms. But for any socialist/communist government organized at the national level, authoritarianism seems inevitable to me.

    In order to seize the means of production, you have to do just that - seize it. You have to send scores of armed men out with guns to physically take control over all the productive assets in a country. And those assets are then available for the state to use, for whatever reasons it wants. Sure, the people in power will promise to use those resources for the greater good, but who is going to stop them if they don't?

    If we've seen anything in the last 20 years in the US, it's that power and wealth are interchangeable. Wealth is power. Power is wealth. It's why I oppose the very existence of billionaires - no individual should have that much power. If that weren't true, I wouldn't care so much about them. I really don't care if a billionaire builds an obnoxiously large yacht. I do care if they start throwing their money around and controlling national policy. And whenever a government seizes control of the entire economy, it now owns the entire wealth of a nation. And if you have all the assets, have complete authority to decide who works what job, have complete say on where people get to live? Well that government now has total power over everyone's lives.

    Any government that powerful immediately falls to authoritarianism. Why? Because there is one and only one locus of power in that country now. Ambitious people can't start a business or seek power through some other level of government. All resources are controlled by the central state. If you want to have any influence at all over that society, you need to get in power of that central government. The government is all-powerful. The stakes are total. Power is completely centralized. You as a leader either control everything or nothing.

    It's rather impossible not to end up with authoritarianism when a form of government requires, as a first step, to gather all power and wealth under the control of a single authority.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Right, the problem isn't necessarily the communism it's the transition point where the means of production are seized to what is meant to be the central government dissolving itself after distributing the seized property and wealth to the people. That last part has never happened and would take a truly perfect idealistic central party to ever do so. It hasn't and will not happen. This is why every "communist" county has resulted in an authoritarian unitary state under a dictator.

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