“Tankie is when you bring up that Nazi anti-communist propaganda about rapist soviets isn’t scientific”

“Blaming NATO for the invasion of Ukraine is when you say NATO isn’t good and there should be a European military alliance instead while you condemn primarily the Russian Government for the invasion”

“Genocide denial is when you compare the treatment of minorities in the US and in China”

Grow up

Wow, so the released KGB archives show the tapes. I wonder what would happen if the Americans or the English did that too!

Hatred of Russians by eastern Europeans is due to 30+ years of anti-communist propaganda. The fact that poles hate the USSR which liberated more than the very Nazis who genocided millions of them, shows this. And it wasn’t the case 40 years ago.

Polls in France after WW2 showed 70%+ of people saying it was the USSR who saved them from Nazism. Nowadays, it’s 70% Americans. That’s what Hollywood and propaganda do.

So we both agree that the Stalinist Sovietunion and the KPD, which allied themselves with them arent left?

One country ended up with Nazis. The other ended up defeating the Nazis. I’d say the Bolsheviks did a better job, didn’t they? The fact that there was oppression against Mensheviks and SRs in the context of a civil war, doesn’t mean they’re anticommunists, they didn’t quite literally enable the Nazis in order to murder the ones who were more communist than them, but defeat them instead.

Want to find the blame for Nazism in Germany? The fault is primarily of Nazis, and then of Nazi enablers, and then of anti-communist leftists.

profit margins will continue to get thinner and thinner as competition increases

Competition doesn’t increase under capitalism, it decreases as a consequence of economy of scale, consolidation of markets, corruption and many other reasons. Tell me how competition fosters when Amazon, Google, Walmart, Apple, Uber and the rest of big firms control all their respective markets.

Your second paragraph is a senseless utopian dream not based on reality, I won’t even bother arguing against it.

I’m fully aware, I never said workers are free under capitalism

As I said, I know they willfully joined, I’m saying they shouldn’t be allowed to join a military alliance with NATO, the same way I would want China not to create a military alliance and then incorporate Mexico and Canada, even if Mexico and Canada wanted to. Joining a military alliance isn’t a human right.

As did everyone. There’s no study showing that the amount of rapes per soldier by the soviets is higher than that of other nations.

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Accepting the existence of class mobility doesn’t imply freedom. Freedom to exploit your fellow workers and become a class traitor isn’t freedom. It’s just a fact that social mobility has increased significantly

Primarily the Russian government’s fault, but of course NATO is partly at fault. Belonging to NATO isn’t a human right, and the expansion of NATO further east than Germany shouldn’t have taken place. If European countries wanted a military alliance, they should have made their own. I don’t believe I need to preface every comment saying “I wholeheartedly condemn the actions of the fascist Russian government in Ukraine”, which I do, as much as I don’t preface my comment saying “I wholeheartedly condemn the actions of NATO in Iraq”, which I also do.

China doesn’t have an active genocide against Uyghur unless you’re willing to argue that the US has an active genocide against black people, if you want to compare any metric.

China isn’t threatening Taiwan, Taiwan is recognized as a part of China by the US and basically all of the international community since decades ago. What Taiwan has are US bases. Imagine if China had military bases in Cuba and routinely had navy maneuvers between the island and Florida.

The US has no more semblance of democracy than China again by any metric, the decisions made by the US government don’t correlate with the will of the overwhelming majority, and quite literally yesterday the supreme court ruled absolute immunity for the president in all official acts. The farce of the two-party system isn’t convincing anyone anymore, and it may very well stop existing altogether if one of the two parties wins the elections.

China has no comparable history of violence, oppression, colonization and destabilization as the US does, and saying otherwise is purely and simply American exceptionalism. The examples are endless. Afghanistan, Iran, Vietnam, Korea, Bolivia, Chile, Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq, Guatemala, Philippines, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela… China simply doesn’t even come close to the level of destabilization, dictarorship, misery and death imposed by the US in third countries.

Trump is a Gaddafi? Trump wants to nationalize the main sources of wealth of the country, to redirect the profits towards the majority of the population, towards education and healthcare and infrastructure? Trump is a weird form of socialist who believes in something analogous in America to the Pana-Africanism and Pan-Arabism that Gaddafi promoted?

What the hell is that comparison?

The problem with the left everywhere is they don’t have the balls to actually take action

Wait, I thought the problem is that the communists are oppressive tankies. What’s the conclusion then, the left goes too far or it doesn’t go far enough?

They all talk about tolerance and how dialogue should make people change and be the politicians language. No. Certain things shouldn’t be tolerated. Fascism and nazism are two of those

Please tell me, which ideology do the famous and vilified “antifa”, the ones who actually go and punch Nazis, espouse? Are they lukewarm Dems, are they republicans? Or are they actual leftists, both anarchists and communists?

The problem is that the left is afraid of being seen as “authoritarian” so when a fascist comes and openly says they want to fuck democracy until it becomes a dictatorship, leftists just say “hey now, let’s sit down and talk”.

This is true in some cases, not in others. You can argue this is true for Salvador Allende in Chile, you can maybe even argue for pre-spanish civil war Second Republic, but you can’t argue this about Maoists or Marxist-Leninists. Those are as far to the left as it gets, isn’t it?

Maybe the problem isn’t with “the left not being active enough”, but with democrats in the US and socialdemocrats in Europe co-opting the left thanks to the power of mass media? Maybe the problem is the century of anti-communist propaganda that we’ve suffered?

the communist still considered the SPD to be the bigger threat and refused to march with them

…which was confirmed when they agreed with the Nazis… And when they collaborated with the Freikorps to crush, torture, and murder the communists.

And the SPD of the 1930 were by no means “liberals”. They were further to the left than any democrat has ever been.

Go ask Rosa Luxembourg, leader of communists in Germany and murdered at 47 at the order of SPD, how progressive and left the SPD was. “Left is when you agree to murder and torture communists”. Fucking revisionists man

If you don’t open or shift the overton window, no change is possible.

the point of capitalism is to make it so that there’s no longer a reason to have profit.

That’s gotta be the stupidest take I’ve seen in the whole 28 days I’ve been in Lemmy, congratulations. The whole point of capitalism is the revalorization of capital, i.e., a capitalist owner having $1mn, and investing it into a company or finance or housing to turn it into more than $1mn. In what universe is the objective of capitalism to eliminate profit??? It’s the polar opposite…

I want to abolish private property, as in “private ownership of the means of production”. I don’t want to abolish personal property such as your house or your toothbrush, neither does anyone, which is proven by the home ownership rates in communist or post-communist countries hovering or being above 90%, compared to the sad 50% of Germany and slightly higher values in the US or UK.

I don’t consider Capitalism as having anything to do with governance

Then you don’t know what capitalism is because you haven’t cared to educate yourself about it.

Capitalism is a market system

No, it’s not, it’s a social system which defines class relations, and markets are only part of it. There were markets in late feudalism but there was no capitalism. Markets are a necessary condition for capitalism, but not the only one.

Capitalism is the system where the means of production are owned by private individuals called bourgeoisie or capitalists, and they’re worked on exchange for a wage worth less than what they produce by other private individuals called workers or proletariat. The class relations are by means of legal and theoretically voluntary contracts enforced by a government, as opposed to, for example, the god-given right of a king to put his peasants to work during feudalism.

that uses competition to drive efficiency of creation of satisfaction of needs and luxuries both

It doesn’t “use” competition, competition is sometimes a condition, but capitalism works actively against competition. Free markets and competition initially mean that some companies will fare better than others, and of those which fare better, some will invest more in increasing their productive capabilities and their efficiency, through technological means and through economy of scale. The foundation of capitalism is that capital has to revalorize itself, which is equivalent to saying bigger companies will necessarily either become bigger or die. This ends up in monopolies, oligopolies, trusts and cartels, as we see in the case of Google, Amazon, Walmart, car manufacturing, computing, or basically every single sector of the economy at this point.

If your democratic system of laws is being leveraged by highly efficient non-state entities

It is, because they can lobby politicians and corrupt them, and because the media are owned by these powerful owners of capital.

then you should really fix that shit, but fixing it doesn’t require abolishing private property

Ok, any other historical solutions that have worked? Progressive democratic movements such as Salvador Allende in Chile, or the Spanish second republic, or the Iranian secular progressive government of Mosaddegh (I could go on for 500 lines citing examples but you get the point), were historically ended by fascism when the owners of the means of production see that their profits are going to diminish in favour of the majority. More recent examples are the lawfare cases against Lula da Silva in Brazil, or against Podemos in Spain, or the coup in Bolivia against Evo Morales. Can you propose a realistic and historically proven method of preventing this from happening other than workers organizing (as socialists defend) and leftists taking control of the institutions?

nor would that end corruption.

Nobody claims it would end corruption, the fight against corruption is permanent, and the best ways to deal with it are the highest possible degrees of transparency and democracy. Private companies aren’t democratic by their nature, and aren’t required to be transparent. In fact corruption in most cases isn’t even defined in private companies. Nepotism isn’t a crime, it’s my company I’ll hire whomever I want. I need a renovation in my building, I’ll pay my friend to do it even if it’s more expensive because I owe him a favour, it’s my company. So yeah, can’t have corruption when it’s legal right?

You can always move to Senegal and enjoy capitalism!

The only thing stopping people from ending the system is lacking the knowledge that they should end it, and lacking the knowledge that they can collectively end it. Pushing for hope towards the end of the system is positive