Communism entails the collective ownership and administration of all means of production and the absence of social classes, while socialism advocates for worker control over means of production within a democratic society, allowing for some individual ownership and social stratification.
In addition, there are different levels of socialism. “Some” individual ownership turns people off. “The State owns the house I worked so hard to pay off?”
You can have full private ownership of your things AND have single-payer health care, top-tier public education, reining in predatory banks, etc.
We want to be Norway, not Venezuela.
Your government is directly responsible for Venezuela’s instability. Your government’s entire foreign policy is destabilizing different parts of the world to float the Dollar as the main currency and you the citizens benefit the most from it, this is why I cringe inwardly when Americans complain of Capitalism’s adverse effects, if you enjoyed it while it was good, you must enjoy it while it gets bad.
As a venezuelan, no. What happened and still happens here was the sole responsibility of the socialist party’s government and the ultimate reason why I don’t trust leftists as they don’t own up their failures and just disregard them as “not true socialism”
The government of Venezuela isn’t blameless but to think that American sanctions didn’t affect the Venezuelan economy are the words of a true partisan. Your kind set up piano wire and beheaded civilians on motor bikes in Venezuela and I find that despicable.
I agree with what you’ve said. That’s how I saw it too.
Communism is the last stage, while Socialism is a transition period, as a Communist friend once told me.
P.S. WTF am I getting downvoted for asking a question?
Communists believe in abolition of capitalism through communist revolution and eventually want to reach a Communist society. Given that such vision has not actually happened yet, Communists often support Actually Existing Socialism (AES).
Socialism is some varying degree in between that and capitalism. On the one hand, there are democratic socialists like Bernie. On the other, there’s also AES countries (e.g. USSR, China).
(P.S. If any other communists see any problems, feel free to correct my mistakes.)
While democratic socialism is a variety of socialism, Bernie isn’t really a democratic socialist, but a social democrat. Social democracy is the left of capitalism, which is right of socialism in any form.
Before some moron turns up, Nazism is not socialism.
In general, I find the term “democratic socialism” to be pretty cringe. It’s like saying right up front “I’m not like those OTHER socialists!” Socialism is a liberatory project. Socialism is the auto-emancipation of the working class. THAT is what democracy looks like. Rule of the people.
Liberation comes hand in hand with revolution though. Socialism will certainly NOT be very democratic for the people who own vast amounts of real estate, productive machinery, and propaganda media empires. Those people will certainly need to end up on the wrong side of a gun for the project to succeed. The wise ones among them won’t force us to pull the trigger.
It will be a hostile take-over. It will be a break from the constitutional order. It will be a break from the “rule of law.” When the ruling class starts losing the game, they will flip over the table. All your precious civil liberties will be torn to shreds. Fascism is simply capitalism under crisis.
The Liberals commit themselves to playing by the rules even when the fascists never would. Salvador Allende (the world’s first elected Marxist head of state) tried to do this, and in three years it ended in his death and a fascist military dictatorship. There is no room for idealism in revolution. The stakes are very real. You need to crush your enemies by any means necessary. Maybe you don’t give Rupert Murdoch the freedom of speech. Maybe you don’t respect Jeff Bezos’s property rights. Maybe you stuff all the Groypers into a mineshaft.
A lot of people whine about authoritarianism in the English speaking left, but the English-speaking left has no power to speak of. Just a bunch of very online sectarians bickering. We run around trying to cancel internet forums which amount to little more than fucking book clubs, as if they were the embodiment of high Stalinism.
Wow, I disagree with every single word of this. You seem to be saying that it’s worth sacrificing liberal rights to attack the right (which you are falsely claiming to be fascists - fascism is a specific ideology, not just an insult for anyone on the right). But in doing so, you become worse than the right.
As a social democrat, I am willing to support and ally with democratic socialists. While we have some differences, we’re both pulling in the same direction. Your revolutionary leftism, on the other hand, is further beyond the pale for me than any liberal ideology.
If this is what your project requires to succeed, then may your project fail.
A theoretical question: How do you think social democratic politics could be implemented in a peripheral or semi-peripheral country? In the core countries, it’s evident that successful social democracies are built not only on national resources but also on the exploitation of the periphery and semi-periphery, through which corporations and capitalists generate profits which are then taxed back into the country. So, what would make a social democratic world fairer than other forms of capitalism? There have been attempts to implement social democratic economies in peripheral regions, for instance, the often-mentioned Venezuela and Bolivia are much closer to the Norwegian economic model than to Cuba.
What could a peripheral social democratic government do at all if, after winning an election, the capitalists would simply withdraw their capital from the country and/or sabotage the government, while using their media to portray every measure taken by the government in a negative light?
I’m gonna leave out utopian communism because it’s not what we’re talking about and isn’t really relevant.
Communists are working toward a classless, stateless society. Viewing the world through the lens of class struggle, they see the state as a tool of class repression and seek to use it to get to that stateless classless society. Its important here to recognize that communists want to use the tools of capitalism to develop the productive forces on the way.
Socialism is worker control of the means of production.
Social democracy is a set of policies enacted by bourgeois societies to keep people from revolting.
Most Americans definitely do not want socialism. People simply want things to be affordable, and be able to live with the social services we need readily available, and to have the freedom to do what they want. That’s not socialism, that’s a well functioning democracy with a strong economy.
A lot of Americans “definitely do not want” Obamacare either, but they sure don’t want to give up the improvements that came with the Affordable Care Act.
In other words, Americans hate the label, but not the policies.
(By the way, regarding your other comment: FDR doesn’t get to decide what words mean. It doesn’t matter whether he called himself a socialist or not; what matters is whether he acted like one.)
I’m having an easier time arguing with tankies then I did with right wingers. Right wingers don’t even believe themselves, so they shift the goal posts around to suit their needs.
Oh, I saw the futility of talking to them lonnnnnnnnng ago. You might as well try to convince a christian that they’re wrong. You know why that is? Because they’re both cults.
Where’s the nuance in simping for an authoritarian state-capitalist regime? It’s like the people who unironically think the DPRK is more democratic than the US.
Fuck China, and fuck the United States I live in. The nations of the Nordic region and a few other developed nations have my respect because they respect and value their citizenry. Their economy is a tool that is used to facilitate the distribution of goods and services for the benefit of their society and its citizens, what an economy is supposed to be, instead of doing it ass backwards as we do, hurting citizens to protect the beloved fucking economy and the growth/metastasis expectations of the owner class.
China/The US/Russia are the world leaders in exporting the notion that their citizens should be exploited to stoke the growth of the economy for the benefit of their respective elites. Whoever wins, their people lose.
Why should I go rah rah America when most stakeholders in our society are not meaningful institutional shareholders in the value society produces?
It shouldn’t be about saying simon says or coming out of a rich vagina or if not making perfect economic decisions and kissing ass from age 18, begging to be included and killing yourself for masters who were born into wealth for a small chance of being included in the prosperity of the prosperous nation you’re supposedly a member of.
And don’t you just love the class traitors here that come out to celebrate the failures of citizens who tried? oh you took out student loans in a subject that in hindsight didn’t pay dividends, haha loser. Oh you just started working and didnt get an education and are stuck in the underclass, haha loser. That’s what it means to be an American, rooting against one another as the owner class laughs.
To me, the definition of a 3rd world country is about how the poor are living there.
You can live a nice life in literally any country, if you have enough money. But how do those live, who don’t have anything? That’s what differentiates between a decent country and a 3rd world country.
I’m someone still recovering from republican/libertarian capitalist brainwashing. Would you know of a good book or two on this subject? It’s fascinating to me.
I would recommend David Graeber or however it’s spelled writing. Any time you read anyone’s opinion take it with a grain of salt but Debt and Bullshit Jobs address many things, some of which can be taken as criticism of capitalism.
James C Scott is another anthropolgist and his most accessible book is probably seeing like a state. It’s relatively even handed in it’s critques of capitalism as it focuses on states including the USSR. It highlights quite well how markets and states can crush humanity because they have wildly different goals to people.
You probably don’t want to jump right into hardcore theory so this might be a gentler intro into asking why society is the way it is and how it might be different without expressly pushing a particular political theory.
It’s one thing to be a communist; it’s another to be an apologist for the CCP.
Americans want socialism. This is spun as “communism” to distract and distort the argument.
And what really is the difference between Socialism and Communism?
Communism entails the collective ownership and administration of all means of production and the absence of social classes, while socialism advocates for worker control over means of production within a democratic society, allowing for some individual ownership and social stratification.
In addition, there are different levels of socialism. “Some” individual ownership turns people off. “The State owns the house I worked so hard to pay off?” You can have full private ownership of your things AND have single-payer health care, top-tier public education, reining in predatory banks, etc. We want to be Norway, not Venezuela.
Your government is directly responsible for Venezuela’s instability. Your government’s entire foreign policy is destabilizing different parts of the world to float the Dollar as the main currency and you the citizens benefit the most from it, this is why I cringe inwardly when Americans complain of Capitalism’s adverse effects, if you enjoyed it while it was good, you must enjoy it while it gets bad.
As a venezuelan, no. What happened and still happens here was the sole responsibility of the socialist party’s government and the ultimate reason why I don’t trust leftists as they don’t own up their failures and just disregard them as “not true socialism”
The government of Venezuela isn’t blameless but to think that American sanctions didn’t affect the Venezuelan economy are the words of a true partisan. Your kind set up piano wire and beheaded civilians on motor bikes in Venezuela and I find that despicable.
My kind? Thanks for the uncalled xenophobic racism.
Venezuela has been going to shit since the 2000 with Chavez.
Sanctions were stablished from 2015 and only to 7 individuals from the venezuelan government.
Keep your lies up. Maybe you will start believing them.
The things is the path to one of the other begins the same, of course, paved with good intentions
As opposed to being paved with bad intentions up front?
Honesty or lie. Mmm a hard bargain
I agree with what you’ve said. That’s how I saw it too. Communism is the last stage, while Socialism is a transition period, as a Communist friend once told me. P.S. WTF am I getting downvoted for asking a question?
Don’t worry, votes don’t mean anything here. Feel free to speak your mind :)
Communist and socialist terms have been conflated for a long time.
See https://existentialcomics.com/comic/123 for an illustration.
Communists believe in abolition of capitalism through communist revolution and eventually want to reach a Communist society. Given that such vision has not actually happened yet, Communists often support Actually Existing Socialism (AES).
Socialism is some varying degree in between that and capitalism. On the one hand, there are democratic socialists like Bernie. On the other, there’s also AES countries (e.g. USSR, China).
(P.S. If any other communists see any problems, feel free to correct my mistakes.)
While democratic socialism is a variety of socialism, Bernie isn’t really a democratic socialist, but a social democrat. Social democracy is the left of capitalism, which is right of socialism in any form.
Before some moron turns up, Nazism is not socialism.
In general, I find the term “democratic socialism” to be pretty cringe. It’s like saying right up front “I’m not like those OTHER socialists!” Socialism is a liberatory project. Socialism is the auto-emancipation of the working class. THAT is what democracy looks like. Rule of the people.
Liberation comes hand in hand with revolution though. Socialism will certainly NOT be very democratic for the people who own vast amounts of real estate, productive machinery, and
propagandamedia empires. Those people will certainly need to end up on the wrong side of a gun for the project to succeed. The wise ones among them won’t force us to pull the trigger.It will be a hostile take-over. It will be a break from the constitutional order. It will be a break from the “rule of law.” When the ruling class starts losing the game, they will flip over the table. All your precious civil liberties will be torn to shreds. Fascism is simply capitalism under crisis.
The Liberals commit themselves to playing by the rules even when the fascists never would. Salvador Allende (the world’s first elected Marxist head of state) tried to do this, and in three years it ended in his death and a fascist military dictatorship. There is no room for idealism in revolution. The stakes are very real. You need to crush your enemies by any means necessary. Maybe you don’t give Rupert Murdoch the freedom of speech. Maybe you don’t respect Jeff Bezos’s property rights. Maybe you stuff all the Groypers into a mineshaft.
A lot of people whine about authoritarianism in the English speaking left, but the English-speaking left has no power to speak of. Just a bunch of very online sectarians bickering. We run around trying to cancel internet forums which amount to little more than fucking book clubs, as if they were the embodiment of high Stalinism.
Wow, I disagree with every single word of this. You seem to be saying that it’s worth sacrificing liberal rights to attack the right (which you are falsely claiming to be fascists - fascism is a specific ideology, not just an insult for anyone on the right). But in doing so, you become worse than the right.
As a social democrat, I am willing to support and ally with democratic socialists. While we have some differences, we’re both pulling in the same direction. Your revolutionary leftism, on the other hand, is further beyond the pale for me than any liberal ideology.
If this is what your project requires to succeed, then may your project fail.
A theoretical question: How do you think social democratic politics could be implemented in a peripheral or semi-peripheral country? In the core countries, it’s evident that successful social democracies are built not only on national resources but also on the exploitation of the periphery and semi-periphery, through which corporations and capitalists generate profits which are then taxed back into the country. So, what would make a social democratic world fairer than other forms of capitalism? There have been attempts to implement social democratic economies in peripheral regions, for instance, the often-mentioned Venezuela and Bolivia are much closer to the Norwegian economic model than to Cuba.
What could a peripheral social democratic government do at all if, after winning an election, the capitalists would simply withdraw their capital from the country and/or sabotage the government, while using their media to portray every measure taken by the government in a negative light?
Fair enough — got the two confused
I’m gonna leave out utopian communism because it’s not what we’re talking about and isn’t really relevant.
Communists are working toward a classless, stateless society. Viewing the world through the lens of class struggle, they see the state as a tool of class repression and seek to use it to get to that stateless classless society. Its important here to recognize that communists want to use the tools of capitalism to develop the productive forces on the way.
Socialism is worker control of the means of production.
Social democracy is a set of policies enacted by bourgeois societies to keep people from revolting.
Isn’t this the comic where Marx is playing Monopoly, starts losing and Flips the fuck out the table?
I think that’s https://existentialcomics.com/comic/19
I find it funny they portray Marx always doing communist revolutions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq0EYo_ZQVU
/s
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=Sq0EYo_ZQVU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Most Americans definitely do not want socialism. People simply want things to be affordable, and be able to live with the social services we need readily available, and to have the freedom to do what they want. That’s not socialism, that’s a well functioning democracy with a strong economy.
A lot of Americans “definitely do not want” Obamacare either, but they sure don’t want to give up the improvements that came with the Affordable Care Act.
In other words, Americans hate the label, but not the policies.
(By the way, regarding your other comment: FDR doesn’t get to decide what words mean. It doesn’t matter whether he called himself a socialist or not; what matters is whether he acted like one.)
Tell me a time in history when this existed without FDR’s socialism.
FDR said he was not a Socialist.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/16/democrats-socialism-fdr-roosevelt-227622/
I’m having an easier time arguing with tankies then I did with right wingers. Right wingers don’t even believe themselves, so they shift the goal posts around to suit their needs.
Oh, I saw the futility of talking to them lonnnnnnnnng ago. You might as well try to convince a christian that they’re wrong. You know why that is? Because they’re both cults.
Liberals try to understand political nuance challenge: Impossible!
Where’s the nuance in simping for an authoritarian state-capitalist regime? It’s like the people who unironically think the DPRK is more democratic than the US.
I’m going to let you re-read the comments and think harder about how to re-interpret them.
I believe in you. Unless you’re a liberal, then you proved my point.
sometimes its painful to watch them. =(
True.
Fuck China, and fuck the United States I live in. The nations of the Nordic region and a few other developed nations have my respect because they respect and value their citizenry. Their economy is a tool that is used to facilitate the distribution of goods and services for the benefit of their society and its citizens, what an economy is supposed to be, instead of doing it ass backwards as we do, hurting citizens to protect the beloved fucking economy and the growth/metastasis expectations of the owner class.
China/The US/Russia are the world leaders in exporting the notion that their citizens should be exploited to stoke the growth of the economy for the benefit of their respective elites. Whoever wins, their people lose.
Why should I go rah rah America when most stakeholders in our society are not meaningful institutional shareholders in the value society produces?
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.html
It shouldn’t be about saying simon says or coming out of a rich vagina or if not making perfect economic decisions and kissing ass from age 18, begging to be included and killing yourself for masters who were born into wealth for a small chance of being included in the prosperity of the prosperous nation you’re supposedly a member of.
And don’t you just love the class traitors here that come out to celebrate the failures of citizens who tried? oh you took out student loans in a subject that in hindsight didn’t pay dividends, haha loser. Oh you just started working and didnt get an education and are stuck in the underclass, haha loser. That’s what it means to be an American, rooting against one another as the owner class laughs.
Those nordic countries are suported by a global network of unequal exchange
To me, the definition of a 3rd world country is about how the poor are living there.
You can live a nice life in literally any country, if you have enough money. But how do those live, who don’t have anything? That’s what differentiates between a decent country and a 3rd world country.
I’m someone still recovering from republican/libertarian capitalist brainwashing. Would you know of a good book or two on this subject? It’s fascinating to me.
Books:
Texts:
Videos:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=vyl2DeKT-Vs
https://piped.video/watch?v=oYodY6o172A
https://piped.video/watch?v=fpKsygbNLT4
https://piped.video/watch?v=hactcmhVS1w
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Thanks! I’m currently unemployed so I’ll be looking at all this over the next couple days.
Edited my comment again.
Like on which topic? Capitalist critiques, options for a better society, inequality?
I would recommend David Graeber or however it’s spelled writing. Any time you read anyone’s opinion take it with a grain of salt but Debt and Bullshit Jobs address many things, some of which can be taken as criticism of capitalism.
James C Scott is another anthropolgist and his most accessible book is probably seeing like a state. It’s relatively even handed in it’s critques of capitalism as it focuses on states including the USSR. It highlights quite well how markets and states can crush humanity because they have wildly different goals to people.
You probably don’t want to jump right into hardcore theory so this might be a gentler intro into asking why society is the way it is and how it might be different without expressly pushing a particular political theory.
Capitalist critiques mainly.
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (easy) A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey (medium)
Thank you! I’ll read one of these next.
On a slightly broader note: just people going out of their way to justify bad behavior.
Some days it’s hard to tell the difference…
As a communist who hates the CCP I see this as a win.