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Capitalism is the root of evil
Capitalism is the root of evil
430 comments
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Not quite. Dont get me wrong capitalism sucks and we should get rid of it, but for example colonialism is older than capitalism and part of its cause. So is colonialsim the root cause of evil? not quite again before colonialism there where still a lot of repressive and very hierarchical societies so again to frame capitalism as the root of all evil is ignoring a whole bunch of other repressive systems that are older but are certainly strengthend by it.
So if you want to simplisticly frame something as the root cause of evil then it would be "opressive hierarchies are the root cause of evil". but maybe im biased here since im an anarchist
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Workers of the world unite!
Edit: not that I'm into that sort of thing... I've taken history classes, I've read about, I've watched documentaries, I understand that communism is not to be desired or
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Communism is to be desired, though it's understandable that you'd be opposed if your major exposure is through western education and western documentaries.
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Haha
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@[email protected] i feel like you're dancing around the issue of authoritarian abuse and centralization of power.
you can't seriously defend the DPRK Il regime as being good for the workers.
do you think it's good that Xi has made himself president for life? Is that the mark of a functioning democratic system of the people?
my biggest issue with Leftists is their seeming need to defend totalitarians instead of just writing them off and admitting, "ok, yeah, they suck, but communism could still work!"
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Leftist are not a homogenous group, and there is a lot of criticism from people on the radical left of those authoritarian systems.
There is also a few people who dont and that glorify authoratarian aspects of communism There is also a lot of nuanced positions you cant just simplify as The Leftist as if the loose association of movements and idiologies are all a homogenoud mass
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It’s not really about defending the bad stuff. It’s about trying to get some more nuance on perhaps the most propagandized topic of the 20th century.
There are all sorts of interesting discussions to have about the various failings of these countries amongst other leftists who have the relevant context as a starting point for a reasonable discussion.
But when talking to libs/conservatives, they’re coming into the conversation with an already extremely warped, un-nuanced perspective. “These are all evil dictatorships that were also super incompetent and that shows why communism is bad.”
Some of the stuff they base this on is either exaggerated or just straight up wrong. Some of it is completely valid criticism, but without the context to understand the issue or provide a useful critique.
How do you have any meaningful conversation about these countries without acknowledging things like:
- All of these countries were previously agrarian, un-democratic societies.
- Most of them were formerly exploited colonies who had to fight fairly brutal wars for their independence.
- Even after leaving, the imperialists kept messing with them through economic and diplomatic isolation and espionage including supporting right wing coups.
We don’t have the counterfactual where we see what these countries would have turned out like without these challenges, but it’s an incomplete analysis to not at least consider the ways which they impacted both their economic success and their political developments. Maybe you could argue there were better ways to respond to all of this, but hindsight is 20-20.
No actual leftists want to have to argue “authoritarianism was good actually.” But it’s hard for the conversation not to appear that way when we’re arguing with people who’ve been conditioned to think they’re somehow as bad or worse than Nazis and ending the thought there.
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I think what they think is that citizens have bad judgement, so it ends in Maoist policies that sound good but ignore negative externalities. The tragedy of the commons is inevitable is their view.
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i hear what you're saying.
what i'm saying is, for myself, and at least a few "Left-curious" neo/libs/progs, we don't want to trade one shit tyranny for another. and it's obvious, documented history of some pretty glaring failures in AES. if you like, think of ppl like us as trauma victims. it's probably true anyway.
it can go a long way to offer the olive branch and reassurance that, yes, you don't want to just "red-wash" that all away, or that you aren't just enamoured with Red aesthetic and lip-service while being YET ANOTHER group of mastubatory elitists who will trample the out-group-du-jour given the opportunity.
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I'm not dancing around anything, if you want to discuss, then please, do so.
The DPRK is far from a paradise, but at the same time, much of its issues are externally driven.
Xi is not president for life. Term limits are removed, but he can also be removed. He's overwhelmingly popular among the party and people.
For your last point, I recommend you read Marketing Socialism. I defend what is misrepresented or demonized unjustly, because these are problems every Socialist project recieves, to varying degrees.
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Authoritarianism and imperialism, concentration of power are the root cause, money is just a symbol of power, under stalinist russia this nefarious corrupting power had another symbol, shape but this society was just as helpless toward this tendency of power, you can see the end point of passive demobilisation and assassination of the few how dare oppose it today in Russia.
I think there needs to be constant pressure of deterritoroalisation, of putting decision and responsibility in the hands of the people, always at the smallest scale that it can be realistically pushed down.
And that's not the individual if that's not an individual matter. The level at which decisionnal responsibility is dependant on the context of tgat decision rather than agglomerated bodies of decision when power naturallies tries to concentrate.
It should always be easy for lower echelons of power and locality to repatriate a delegated aspect of their life.
(Then I stuffed this line of thinking into chatgpt to take it further)
https://chatgpt.com/share/6803f4ba-eebc-8005-919f-3b896dce2e0f
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"Far from paradise" seems pretty generous for what i perceive as a dystopian nightmare state. they are cut off from outside information. there is retribution on families if ppl try to leave. also, you can't leave. this is insanity. outside forces don't make them behave that way.
Xi: whether that popularity is real or not is a question, though, when he can push for the suppression of dissent or critique in the social sphere. one CAN'T challenge him. that doesn't seem legitimately representative.
i'm looking over your reading list. we can add that to the list. but there's a reason i block hexbear and lemmygrad but not .ml. tankies fucking suck and i Socialism will never be taken seriously as long as it's important to ppl to defend fucking Stalin.
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i want memes, not politics
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You're on the wrong instance then. The lemmy.ml instance is very heavily political, even in political communities.
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Found the capitalist!
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find something better to do than name calling. besides dont capitalists own the factories or whatever? you dont even know what ur saying
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uhh, anarchism clears lol
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Socialism allows for both public and private ownership, individual freedoms, and democratic decision-making, while still aiming for social equality. Communism, in contrast, tends to involve total state control and often limits personal freedoms.
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Both Capitalism and Socialism have room for public and private ownership, the difference is which sector controls the state, large firms, and key industries. The Nordic Countries are dominated by Private Capital, ie it is Capitalist, while the PRC is dominated by Public Ownership, ie it is Socialist.
Communism limits the personal freedoms of the bourgeoisie. All Communism is, is a more developed and global form of Socialism, where the small firms that once were private have all grown into the public sector or collapsed.
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Tell me you've never read anything about communism that wasn't written by anti-communists without telling me you've never read anything about communism that wasn't written by anti-communists.
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Jesus what a mess of a sentence. You really tried to hamfist that one in there.
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All this things sound great, we just need humanity to not be shitty to each other.
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Luigi's hand doesn't look anything like that. Someone fix this meme
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You're not going to overthrow fascism, white supremacy or capitalism with random acts of adventurism. If you're not more organized than your enemy they will crush you.
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I leave that to the plumber's union.
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Maaaaaaybe the USSR isn't the best example of a better society we want to be building.
I'm watching the whole ideological-purge thing happen in the US and it kinda sucks.
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Both extremes on display those examples, seems like they both end up in the same place in the end. Maybe it would be reasonable to use any system that is a mix of things, instead of focusing on pure capitalism or communism.
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There's really no such thing as a pure system, any mix is still going to have either the public sector as principle or private, ie which controls the state, large firms, and key industries. There's no way to keep them "balanced," one will have power over the other, and its best for it to be the public sector.
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Either build something better or shutup, I say. Unless you're a big fan of Tsarist Russia
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Communism is a shitty alternative.
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In what way?
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Ever seen Communism working as intended? There'll always be power hungry assholes ruining these things for everyone.
Edit: oooooh, this is lemmy.ml. That explains a lot, lol.
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Sure but fuck Russia too lmao
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What does this have to do with Russia
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what does this have to do with this post
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Yeah communism isn't any better so the both can fuck off
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Did you make this account just so you could spam this image over and over?
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Greed is the evil.
- is the evil
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it's their driving force.
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I agree, capitalism is just one way greed manifests itself. Greedy opportunists figure out how to exploit any system. The people douchevoting you are binary meme-brains who think you're saying capitalism is the greatest thing since Betty White because you didn't explicitly say the opposite.
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I thought memes were supposed to be funny... this just looks like a propaganda poster
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Since when are memes just about humor?
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Memes aren't just about humour. But this is no humour at all
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That's the .ml experience
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Thank god I'm not the only one.
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Don't got to political Memes then. Some of the worst propaganda slop there
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Sad to say, but humans are the root of evil. Atrocities have been done in the name of all sorts of things, but it's always humans carrying it out.
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The desire to dominate and the willingness to act on it has existed in a fraction of the population since before humans were human. This is the root of all evil, capitalism is a specific manifestation of this impulse that has only existed for some 400 years. If your analysis starts and ends at "capitalism bad" you miss the vast majority of oppression that has existed or will exist.
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What's your evidence for your the root of evil is that some people just have an "evil" gene theory?
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I never mentioned genetics, strange that you would bring it up. Sex isn't even fully determined by genetics, something as complex and fragile as your personal values certainly can never be reduced to genetics.
Humans brains are stochastic and the values we eventually settle on depend both on our environment and on somewhat random walks through possible values. Some people will land on violent domination as a social strategy just through randomness. I believe an environment where everyone is cared for and has the ability to flourish will minimize the people who randomly end up on violent domination, but it is not possible through environmental changes to completely prevent this. Thus we cannot allow any positions of power, since those will attract and eventually be captured by people who have chosen domination as their preferred strategy.
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I don’t get why every Reddit alternative needs to be filled with these weird political ideas. Communism, Fascism and every other form of extremism only leads to misery.
I’m sure capitalism is flawed, but you can make it work better. Any of the Nordic countries works as a great example. And no they aren’t perfect but nothing ever will be.
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Capitalism is a form of extremism
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Reddit is state controlled media. You're seeing weird ideas outside of it because you're allowed to now
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For your first question, Lemmy is developed by Communists, and is an answer to the Capitalist failings of Reddit. Simple as that.
For the Capitalism bit, you're waving away the fact thay the Nordic countries are Imperialist. They shift all of the suffering and worst exploitation to the Global South. At the same time, worker's rights and safety nets are being eroded, because Capital controls the state, not the people.
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Please explain the way in which the Nordic countries are imperialist and exploitative and which country you personally look for moral guidance? And if there is none what makes you think we are capable of building a system that wouldn’t be exploitative by your grandiose unrealistic standards? Workers rights and safety nets are far beyond any other country in the world and in fact they’ve essentially never been better. The only change is that populists like you have given up on building and improving the system which in fact does require everyone to commit to improving society together, not just whining in a basement about some socialist utopia that is never going to happen.
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Communism is no more extreme than capitalism. They just stand in opposition of one another. The red scare is back I guess.
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I would say we have seen both extremes and we like neither and some people think a third alternative is "killing everyone else" can we not?
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What are you on about with “red scare”? You can simply look at the poor attempts made in the name of communism to see how well that idea succeeds in practice. Simple solutions to complex issues never work. Communism is an extreme ideology based on the oversimplification of complex like every other form of populism.
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I call bullshit on this one
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Its actually pretty smart if you think about it. Some flowers bloom at the end of their lifecycle. Nazism is at the end of capitalism's lifecycle. But if you only hack off the visible parts of the flower, it will come back next year. So the flower is capitalism and the soviet union only managed to hack off the upper part, nazi germany, while the lower part, the capitalist empire was still there. Now 80 years later, the flower blooms again, this time as usa, and the picture suggests we rip it out at the root by destroying the whole system, instead of just hacking it off by, like, occupying washington or something.
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Every -ism is bad when bad people are in charge.
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Comunism is trash.
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Nope!
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To paraphrase Bernard Shaw, Communism might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.
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(Hierarchical) Power in general is the root cause, not Capitalism in particular
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What gives us these 80 year cycles in the west where everything turns to shit?
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Seems to me that about once a generation people allow the states they live in (and corporations they work for) to concentrate power to a point where it cannot be overlooked anymore? Kinda feel like you already have an answer you want tho (apologies if that's not the case).
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Human nature. We need living people to tell us what happened the last time something happened society-wide, else we forget and repeat the same mistakes. It's the whole hard times make strong men thing. It's on about an 80 year cycle. The good news is that we're right at the point in the cycle where real changes are easy to make.
Read the book The Fourth Turning for many examples of the pattern repeating.
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This would go harder without the hammer and sickle. Communism didnt fail; the ussr did.
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Ah yes, get rid of extremism with different extremism. I think we've been there already. Spoiler: Didnt work.
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As if intensity is what makes ideologies bad. 🙄
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First, a societal organization outside the Western norm has no bearing on if it will be successful or not. The "middle" has no superior intrinsic characteristics.
Second, we know Socialism works, the PRC is now becoming the de facto world power as the US falls, all while providing dramatic improvements for its people and increasing levels of satisfaction.
What, specifically, doesn't work?
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Well, first, as far as i know China is known to miss report its economical report. But even if that would not be the case.
Human rights dont work there. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/china
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What's extremism?
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Extremism is "the quality or state of being extreme" or "the advocacy of extreme measures or views".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremism
Or as i know it with these regimes both left or right: those that oppose and do not belive in our thing must be gotten rid of. I would say that is the extreme here to me. Thats what both communists and nazis did in Europe, in my country, in my city. And i want none of it to come back. Iam honestly terrified where is this world headding again.
But if you want to take a deeper look, this seems interesting if you have access:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-83336-7_2
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-political-extremist-1857297
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I'd say 1 person owning most of the money made at the company is the problem
To solve it everyone just needs to form or join a private unionized cooperative that doesn't go on stock market for sustainable growth and so everyone at the company is making a lot of money too
Then collectively you all grow the pot that is available for all of you. Better to all be making 1,000,000 each and then grow it together to become 10,000,000-100,000,000+ for each of you
That is the root issue. Not enough of that
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This doesn't solve the systemic pressures within Capitalism, nor does it describe how to get from A to B. Your idea still depends on your one firm outcompeting other firms, which is difficult in saturated markets.
I recommend you look into Marxist theory, I have some recommendations I can make.
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"capitalism is evil"
so what's not evil?
"a totalitarian socialist shithole, where you got no freedom or human rights"
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A river floods every year. If someone builds a house next to it and the river takes it, is the river evil, or is the person suffering the consequences of their own ignorance? The consequences of capitalism are predictable and inevitable. The behaviour of a dollar is almost as predictable as that of an electron. Why do people pretend like we don't know what is going to happen?
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The caricature in your head of Socialism in practice does not exist. I recommend you read Anticommunism & Wonderland, which despite its title does show a nuanced view of the Soviet Union.
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Capitalism is a system and just that, it has no moral, therefore cannot be evil. The red hand without the ussr symbol would make this image more unified.
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That's like saying
"Nazism is a system and just that, it has no moral, therefore cannot be evil."
or
"The Transatlantic slave trade is a system and just that, it has no moral, therefore cannot be evil."
What are you talking about? Systems are created by people; they don't just pop into existence.
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You said it yourself the systems are created by people, the people can be evil. They are the root of the evil aka anyone upholding capitalism because they profit even tho they know exactly how bad it is for the world and people, just like the people creating fascism the fascist are the root of evil.
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It is the symptom, not the cause. Greed is the cause and it has been around a LOT longer than Capitalism.
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Power not Greed. People don't hoard wealth just to look at a pile of coins, they do it to control other people
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Amazing! (commenting so there aren't 88 comments 😤)
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🫡
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Keep pulling until you get hierarchy out.
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Last I checked the USSR didn't do so well financially, and Russia is basically a criminal empire.
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The USSR did fairly well until liberalizing part of its economy, as well as struggling to recover from the immense cost it paid to win the Eastern Front and beat the Nazis while under the oppression of the Cold War.
The Marxist-Leninist tradition is still carried forward by many states, including the PRC, which is on its way to surpass the US as world superpower.
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Yeah great, because what we need now is soviet propaganda. This needs to die
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I'm going to take a wild guess that posters and downvoters in this thread don't live in actual communist countries. Endorsing hammer and sickle is just as bad as endorsing swastikas...
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The portrayal of the Communists and Nazis as "twin evils" exaggerates the sins of the Communists in quantity and quality, while minimizing the sins of the Nazis in quantity and quality, in order to show them as relatively equal problems. In other words, its Nazi apologia, and historical revisionism. Read Blackshirts and Reds.
The Nazis executed the Communists, Socialists, gay people, trans people, disabled people, Jewish people, Slavic people, and many, many more. It wasn't simple opposition, it was a racially supremacist ideology.
The Communists executed Tsarists, fascists, and terrorists to the state. They did not create a systematic industrialized murder machine like the Nazis did in order to keep up with how many people they needed to kill.
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And communism doesn't work because we're selfish
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If we accepted the arguments that humans are selfish, then it's an argument for communism and not against it. We should be creating social systems that encourage socially positive behavior and inhibit socially destructive behavior. Capitalism is like taking a drunk to a happy hour at the bar. The fact that people keep repeating this trope shows complete and utter lack of critical thinking on their part.
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If someone is selfish and global working class and class conscious, they'll work towards communism for their own selfish gain.
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I think it can work because of the same
I know that selfishness will make atleast some try to do any evil for a profit.
Capitalism is highly risky then.Better to highly regulate it or try to develop out of it, right?
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if we have learnt one thing from the past it is that hammer and sickle countries are in dire need of agriculture products.
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Meanwhile in the real world:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
Romania, the inustrialization of an agrarian economy under socialist planning
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Greed, not capitalism is the root of evil. Fight me.
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capitalism is the system whereby greed is raised above all other human impulses though. in most other systems, sure, people can be greedy, but they aren't rewarded for it, and people who aren't naturally greedy don't get pushed and trained to be greedy as the highest aspiration.
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Capitalism rewards greed, thus perpetuating it and entrenching it. So capitalism is the root of our greed epidemic
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Human aspects like greed are not intrinsic to humanity, but created by the material conditions and mechanisms surrounding them, and are thus malleable and expressed in lower or greater degrees in different systems. Capitalism in particular expresses greed as its entire foundation is the relentless accumulation of profit and exansion of markets and commodification for the purposes of private wealth.
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lol, so stupid
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Technically correct because greed is the cause of capitalism. But don't be fooled into thinking there's a long term, greed restrained capitalism that is going to work out for us; wealth is power. With sufficient wealth, a man can raise an army.
As soon as you allow him to accumulate it, you raise the possibility that he will buy your politicians and corrupt your citizens through amplifying his messages to make society ever greedier in his image. He will hire people to make unlawful works, and pay the fines and dodge the court room.
When you resist this corruption, they respond with fascism.
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Greed is not the cause of capitalism. Capitalism exists to create value for society. My grandfather, an immigrant, opened a bakery 50 years ago to serve his community and raise his family. I, an immigrant, opened a grocery store 10 years ago to serve my community and raise my family. Capitalism can be honest & hard work. In both cases, community over profits was a core principle.
Greed comes with accumulation and has to be restrained.
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Yeah, there's nothing worse than a bunch of billionaire shitheads, using the media they control to keep the lower classes fighting with each other while they . . . the rich . . . run off with all the farking money. Oh wait, that's what's going on Russia, too.
There are no "good guys" here. Just billionaire assholes exploiting everybody.
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The Russian Federation ceased being Socialist in the early 90s, the Hammer and Sickle is a symbol of Marxism. Not sure what your point is.
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Capitalism breeds fascism. As long as we have capitalism we will fight fascism. Communism is not the answer though nor is any extreme ideology. Social direct democracy or even sociocracy would be better systems.
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capitalism breeds fascism. I support capitalism
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Social democracy is an extreme ideology
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Social Democracy retains Private Ownership as the principle aspect of its economy, ergo its still Capitalist. Fascism isn't distinct from Capitalism, but Capitalism in certain circumstances, ie when it needs to put on a mask and brutally protect itself from its own decay, before taking off the mask and pretending it's something else, ie it keeps Capitalism's record "clean."
Further, being radical does not equal being wrong. Distance from the status quo does not mean it is not correct, we need to judge legitimately the merits of Socialism/Communism and not just say they are too radical.
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nor is any extreme ideology. Social direct democracy
Whoah hold it right there, that's democratic extremism! You're taking away all the representatives of bribery and extortion. Best to leave a few weak points, for balance.
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Of course something simillar to Switzerland's model.
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Anonymous bank accounts for rich criminals from other countries?
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"X is good, Y is bad." It rarely is that simple.
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Cool agitprop posters like what OP posted rarely give you a particularly nuanced perspective due to their limited space. The intended effect is to spark conversation, not to beam Marxism into the heads of anyone who sees it.
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It reminds me of how people hated on “defund the police” messaging. I got into an argument with someone that focused on the phrase alone and was completely uninterested in a genuine discussion about what it means. Like what do they expect? An entire novel written on a poster or a tweet to appease them? The point is to kick the conversation off, not spoon-feed you.
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