To the people downvoting this: please ask yourselves whether you’ve read anything Lenin wrote, or read any non-anticommunist article or book on the Russian Revolution and Lenin

Tankie Detected.

He was imprisoned for what he wrote about. His actions tell me that he was not a socialist, and that’s what matters. He held an election, immediately enacted violence to change the outcome, immediately dismantled the socialist power structures that were in place, purged people who didn’t agree with him, and acted as an autocrat.

Anyone who thinks Lenin was a socialist is ignorant of history.

any of his writings

Both Napoleon and Hitler wrote had other people write of them that they had the best intentions for true respective populaces. However in practice it turned out they used them as cannon fodder.

I am saying if they were all completely and utterly purged from society than the world would be a better place, however.

I am not proposing that, it’s an exercise in futility. You can’t deprogram a cult member easily and even if you killed them all, more would replace them. You have to accept these idiots as a natural part of society, like skunks and porcupines, like an eclipse or a tsunami, and respond accordingly.

We just need to elect politicians who provide large amounts of UBI. The problem in doing this is we would need to also limit the amount people could reproduce so that food doesn’t run out in 20 years after people start fucking like rabbits. Doing this would be hard and probably require constitutional amendments since the wealthy have made procreation a constitutional right and the poor are too stupid to realize unlimited reproduction leads to a tragedy of the common in which those that endure the most unhappiness in the rat race are most easily able to reproduce. There would have to be Chinese-style awareness of populations and some penalties for not adhering to reproduction limits if the population grew too fast, and these penalties would have to be sufficient to deter people. Market capitalism and mild green (hampered a bit by UBI) along with huge taxes on environmental externalities is a much better way to allocate resources than just having a government committee benevolently decide things resulting in starvation later because people who are chosen for committees often say what is political rather than the truth of nature.

Because decay is a natural state of the universe.

The exploitation will continue until people stop believing that the sky god will reward them later for abstaining from anal and toiling all day in the fields.

In a democracy people could just stop voting in Republican politicians who say “don’t do anal so you go to heaven” while they fuck the poor and stop voting in big spending Democrats who want to make the government as large, inefficient, and wasteful as possible.

If people are too stupid to vote in representatives because jesus doesn’t approve of anal and Democrats need to expand the size of government, then how the fuck would they be smart enough to coordinate a proletariat revolution, much less enact rules that won’t completely fuck themselves over once in power due to an ignorance of the laws of nature?

These are people who are upset trans people take hormones because it will upset the imaginary skygod, who only created man and woman, since intersex people also literally don’t exist in their idiot pea brains. Do you understand the extreme pea-brain stupidity of the average religious person? They believe jesus lives on a cloud, some of them think the world is flat, the level of moronitude is next-level.

It’s a good point in a dictatorship, but not when a large part of the populace is delusional gullible and stupid.

it’s not a bad point. you would just think with information free because of the internet, the lower classes would vote their economic interests instead of “these rich people ALSO think trans people are from satan, let me vote for them on this wedge issue and fuck myself economically”

That’s Anarcho-Communism, not Marxism.

Communism in Marxism still has a government, just not what Marx called “the State.” The State, for Marx, is made up of the elements of government that uphold class society, ie Private Property Rights. Central Planning is a core concept of Marxism, and Marxists see administration, elections, councils, and so forth as necessary functions of society.

I recommend reading Critique of the Gotha Programme

Ugh… Who wrote that… “Communism is when you have a communal toothbrush”…

“All property is communally owned”, said literally no socialist ever in history. It’s always funny to show the home ownership rate by country to people who claim “you don’t own anything in socialism”.

Marx specifically refers to the elements of government that uphold class society as the “state.” Communism, in the Marxist sense, has a government, central planning, and administration. The “state” whithers away via replacing elements of Capitalism with Socialism, removing aspects like Private Property Rights.

You may want to read Critique of the Gotha Programme, where Marx describes the transition from Capitalism to lower-stage Communism (Socialism in modern lingo), to upper-stage Communism.

It sounds great on paper but it seems to rely too much on hoping everyone from the ground up isn’t going to get greedy and skim or give themselves and friends a special deal.

What on Earth are you referring to? How would one “skim?” What structures do you think exist in Communism that would allow this?

I think humans in general are more equipped to have empathy for a smaller tribe compared a whole Nation, let alone to billions of people world wide. It’s easier to share what you have with your neighbor rather than someone you have never met.

impossible not to have greedy people with high drive, they have always existed and will always existed. And given that greed and high drive is a very explosive combination they will always wreck these systems.

I think it is generally because of our deeply capitalist society and upbringing that we are told to believe people are greedy and selfish, therefore we must be greedy and selfish ourselves in order to not get taken advantage of, or replaced.

Words I can agree to.

But why is reform not happening?

Well, it just goes back to the root of the word. Ancient Greece, where the word democracy comes from, was far from what we would call a democracy nowadays.

Not only did they own slaves (who obviously could not vote) but the only people that could vote, as far as I remember, were landed men. If you were not a man, or did not own land, you could not vote.

But yeah, I agree with your point.

This is Market Socialism, not Marxism. Marxism is what is depicted in the above graphic.

The graphic with the big caption “SOCIALISM”. But fair point on me not addressing the specific implementation suggested with the presence of the Marx and Lenin characters.

If your aim is to get into the weeds about what is considered Capital, edge cases can be decided by committees.

Well yea, the devil is in the detail so it can’t just be waved away. The “commodity production process” still implies physical goods made from physical resources and that it’s the production facilities and resources that should be seized. (Side note: this assumes all the underlying resources are present within the area controlled by the proletariat.) Not seen any ideas proposed beyond that, but perhaps I’m not hanging around in the right places… Hopefully the committees will have people available that can figure it out after the fact?

Requirements can be decided by the people. These committees are held accountable via election, and a recall election can be held at any time. There are multiple rungs of planning, from society wide to regional to facility levels, with committees for each. They can serve planning and execution, as workers participate.

Yea, you’ve clearly never worked in a “design by committee” or “management by consensus” situation. Nothing ever gets done, and when some decision is finally made on anything it tends to be the shittiest common denominator option that thinly and evenly spreads the collective responsibility. Not the best option, but the one that everyone can kind of agree on and thus be collectively accountable for. The exception might be when a very small number of people that are agreed on an end goal and share the same vision for reaching it work together. But I assure you, that does not scale - even if people are in full agreement on the end goal.

Why would producing more tractors in collective 631 benefit that collective if the goal is to satisfy the whole from the whole?

Because human beings.

Managers are not a class, they are an extension of the workers.

Fair point. I guess I was a bit caught in the popular narrative where managers are the enemy of the workers.

Yes, across numerous studies worker participation in steering companies has resulted in higher satisfaction and stability.

Of course, and I’m a fan. I’m not disputing that places where extensive consultation happens with the people responsible for delivering are nice places to work at. But that consultation process is usually very closely managed and the ideas to take forward are cherry picked to give enough “they listen to me” feel good vibes, while also not interfering too much with the business’ priorities. Really taking the inputs of large employee groups seriously on the things that matter cannot happen outside of an adversarial setting, because the interests of the worker and those who benefit most from their labour are fundamentally in conflict. The point I’m rambling towards is that I doubt there are studies that looked at situations where employee inputs in decision making (beyond window dressing) was sustained over very long periods of time at a scale relevant to what you envision. (There are exceptions, but only in small groups of highly-aligned people in a horizontal structure that are deeply vested in the success of the venture.)

You’re arguing against a chimera of random mish-mashed ideas from several different strains of Socialism that argue for different forms as though they are one and the same.

I guess you’re right on that, yes. The thing is that I’ve been thinking about details like these (and many more) for at least 25 years (beyond “edgy teenager” or “social media fad” or “my parents are fascists” stages), since I would prefer that the fruits of my labour (to at least some degree) benefit other people rather than feed a system that heavily incentivises the shittiest parts of human beings and is also inherently cruel. Over the years I’ve also read pretty widely on this topic - from the purist theoretical ideologies to the practical compromises to the counterpoints to the criticisms. (Hell, I even lived in what was basically a workers’ collective for almost a year, but it only worked because it was a small community of ~100 people with close social and familial ties.) So in my mind the lines between specific flavours of socialism are pretty blurry these days, while the common fundamental challenges keep standing out.

What truly frustrates me is the constant arguments about which is the best flavour, while ignoring how to actually realistically practically progress towards something better. Spending the day fighting about which flavour of ice cream to buy instead of figuring out how to get to the ice cream shop on the other side of the city in the first place.

That, and I am yet to see something proposed that doesn’t completely ignore predictable human reactions or result in some degree of authoritarianism. (Nordic-flavour Market Socialism is perhaps the closest to something that might work, but it also heavily relies on a fairly homogenous society with a culture that sees value in the interests of that society over total individualism.)

You’re not liberating literal serfs that never knew personal agency from a literal monarch. You’re trying to get people that are exploited by a system while also benefitting from it to willingly abandon that system for something that might be better (if it worked) or might not be - the plans for the “something” are fuzzy at best so who knows. The details matter, and interrogating the details is not reactionary behaviour.

One of the ideals of being a cooperative is “cooperation among cooperatives” as dictated by the Rochdale Principles. So by definition worker co-ops shouldn’t be competing with each other. Instead consolidation of corporations to force a sort of cooperation to increase profit we’ll ideally have worker cooperatives working with producer co-ops for example.

Not entirely sure the implications of supply and demand market forces but I imagine its a step up from our current system. We’ll have democratically controlled work places where workers dictact the direction of supply and not necessarily for the sole purpose of increasing profits. In any case what I think we need is a new systematic way of measuring the growth of an economy in conjunction with worker co-ops.

If people who make things own them, who manages the “big picture” ideas? CEO pay tells me that requires the power of thousands of peasants workers.

This comic makes a ton of logical leaps, by which i mean that it assumes that the reader is already familiar with certain information and leaves it implied. More broadly, it seems to assume that the audience already agrees that communism is the best. I’m particularly annoyed at the second pannel describing a command economy in a very short and unconvincing way, as if the audience already knows and agrees.

I have a rudimentary knowledge of political taxonomy and this is very very confusing.

But you know what, at least it’s written in plain language. A mistake that communists often make is using their vocabulary (alienation, ideology, bourgeoisie) as if everyone knows what it means, i’m glad this isn’t the case here

which is an inevitability

What makes you say that?

A curious diversion but doesn’t really contribute to the issue at hand.

your argument

I haven’t made an argument, I made a personal observation.

Engels already did an essay on the difference between …

I don’t understand any of this.

Lenin was the man who presided over the suppression and destruction of existing worker power and socialist modes of production.

All he did was create a centralised state capitalism and perpetuated existing class conflict, with his party taking the role of the bourgeoisie.

Ever heard about red terror? And guess who was responsible for that?

Whom did he genocide according to you?

Among many others, industrial workers who failed to meet production quotas, non-bolshevik socialists and anarchists.

No, Lenin was not a genocidal dictator.

You could dispute the genocidal bit but you cannot in good faith argue that the communist party wasn’t dictatorial.

Additionally, whether you agree with his contributions to Marxism or not, he remains the most influential Marxist of the 20th century, every major Marxist org since Lenin has been influenced by his analysis of Imperialism

And I believe the OPs point is that that’s a bad thing.

We shouldn’t be basing our politics and imagery today off the guy who fucked socialism for a century.

Lenin was not a genocidal dictator

He wasn’t, but the fact that his system was so easily taken over by someone who was should be reason enough to distrust ML.

I suppose this is a tankie trying to hide under the blanket of “a cool socialism” and later to sell some authoritarian shit ideology with red aesthetics.

The 5 year plans were part of what made it so bad, too.

I’m not saying completely free markets are the solution, but a totally planned economy is set to fail because it’s impossible to plan for everything.

Hey now, if the people over at lemmy.ml could read they’d be very upset!

Was Stalin the dictator elected leader at the time of the betrayal and destruction of the Black Army of Ukraine? Was Stalin the one in power right after the revolution when they started killing and arresting anarchists?

Fuck Lenin.

No, Stalin was not the only genocidal dictator of the USSR.

My concern is that I cannot see a democratically planned economy implemented in a way which doesn’t sacrifice individualism of people .

Democracy isn’t strictly “freedom” on its own, but it is a powerful tool to protect our “individual freedoms” by ensuring our leaders act in our best interests.

But unless everyone has the exact same mind set that means that the majority will always drown out the minority and so the minority voices will be forced to conform to what the majority want.

We are mostly like-minded in things like what should be crimes/punishment/rights/etc(but note this wasn’t always the case): but everyone has individual preferences, like colour of shirt, a specific brand of food, video games, etc which means they need an economy where products can be created by individuals rather than decided by the majority.

If 51% of people think wearing a t-shirt with a cute dog on it is a stupid waste of time then that t-shirt doesn’t get made, and so the 49% people that did like the shirt lose out.

Also if 99% of people wanted the garbage collected, but no one wanted to work there, what happens then? Is someone forced to work there? That would be extreme, instead maybe there is more incentive to work there with more pay, but then what if lots of people wanted to work there due to this incentive who would decide who works there and therefore who owns the company?

Hyperbolic examples I know but i hope you see the point I’m trying to make.

Capitalism despite all it’s flaws can allow a single person the chance seek funding to provide a good or service and if deemed profitable (either through high demand or cheap production) then the product gets made. People can also seek the obscure products they want rather than what’s popular.

The potential for regulatory capture and corruption, as well as the inherent inefficiency of having a limited number of decision makers. I wouldn’t trust the 2028 Trump Administration to thoughtfully determine which businesses are allowed to exist for 4 years.

It’s more democratic to let anyone start a business, rather than having a gatekeeper. But more importantly I think it makes more sense to let the capitalists take the losses if their business idea sucks, and then socializing the gains once we know it works.

What’s your issue with Central Planning, other than vibes?

billions dead of starvation every time its been attempted

What’s your issue with Central Planning, other than vibes?

I’m not a theorist obviously, but it seems like it’s inherently going to be a limited number of decision makers who can’t possibly know everything, and they become a bottleneck to business creation at best, a corruption machine at worst. I know I wouldn’t trust the government of half (or more but my point is, Republicans) the current US states to decide what business are allowed to exist.

I know the retort is of course that we have corruption now, but I’d think if we’re theorizing, there’s a better way to reduce extant corruption than introducing a new vector for even more corruption. And there’s a way to harness the power of people starting small businesses freely without letting those businesses become unregulated behemoths.

Like just set the criteria you would be telling the Central Planning Authority to prioritize, and do that with regulation. Set an ownership tax so that as a business gets bigger the ownership moves away from the founder and into the public trust.

If you want to maintain a market system under socialism you need to separate it from public production. We would need to democratically decide what is a public good (e.g. housing, food, medicine, etc.) and what is a market good (essentially luxury goods). The private market would also have to be heavily regulated to prevent capital accumulation and associated power concentration. It’s a really difficult problem.

One of the reasons the Soviet economy failed is because computers were not advanced enough in the 1950s-80s to automate the kind of consumer goods production that a command economy would require to be able to compete with a market system. I think if we tried this again today we would have an easier time of it, and if you look at a large vertically integrated corporation like Walmart, they’ve more or less figured it out already.