this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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well, i can actually support democratic socialist governments, and i actually have voted for a party trying to build that out on every single occasion so far while i had a vote. i'm also all for integrating socialist principles into a capitalist society -- i do actually believe capitalism is a great tool for the luxuries in life, but the necessities must be provided to all for it to actually work. like supply and demand both need to be variable for it to work, if everyone needs a home you can't have the market "just figure it out" on the pricing of hosing, it's going to result in rampant exploitation, but a market for upgraded housing compared to a baseline would very much work.
mostly i was just directly responding to the notion communicated to me in this conversation, which is that the path to communism is a state that takes power away from people for their own good, builds a society for them, and then gives back that power, or at the very least allows the people to take back that power with force. that promise is bogus and has been the previous 40 times a nation has been sold on it. as someone who has to live in the aftermath of one of those attempts, i'm not going to not blame it for its lies and its oppression. especially when the system it's trying to reach, as described in this very thread, has been technologically impossible to reach on the scale of even just hungary, let alone the whole soviet bloc
Congratulations on your contribution to the communist cause!
assuming you're being honest here, you're welcome. but if that is indeed the passive-aggressive mockery it sounds like then that might explain why people can't take you seriously outside of echo chambers.
If you read mockery in my response, then maybe it's because there are some mixed and contradictory positions in your responses.
i don't see anything contradictory in there, i'm just not an extremist. not a centrist either, but the world doesn't just consist of commies and fascists and people who haven't picked a side yet. in fact, those aren't even the two ends of the spectrum, and it's actually rather insulting to most people to suggest so.
fascists can burn in hell as far as i'm concerned, but so can most of the authleft part of the spectrum. in general, it's authies i'm the most opposed to. the economic right is stupid but a failing libright system tends to suck less than a failing authleft one. although neither suck as much as a failing authright one, that one i do agree with
(and imo even the two-axis political compass is super reductive but at least it gets the point across that i stand with neither fascists not communists)
"Socialism is a transitional dictatorship" -> "I oppose dictatorships" -> "I vote for socialist politics"
If you're relying on political compass memes to understand politics, then that might explain your misunderstanding.
i have no problem with socialist economic policies but i do have a problem with using authoritarianism and the facade of a "benevolent dictatorship" to achieve them.
the misunderstanding stems from the constant twisting of terms. like is communism what happened in the soviet bloc, or is it an as yet unachieved (and still probably technologically unachievable) dreamland that has never been tried? is socialism what the soviets had? or is that just a specific set of economic policies that the soviets did in fact have but completely divorced from its oppressive system? what did the soviets and its colonized countries actually have?
there is a certain system that the soviets have tried and it failed miserably. i would never support that system after seeing what it does to a country. but the way it comes off to me through this discussion is that socialism both is and isn't that system, until observed, where the waveform collapses to whatever is more beneficial for the socialist's argument here.
and yeah, i do think the political compass is also extremely reductive, but at some point we gotta figure out how to communicate whatever the hell we're talking about.
Communism (as imagined by Marx and Engles) is broad and theoretical, and written in the revolutionary glow of the 19th century. "Leftist" discourse is still broad and theoretical, even 130 years after the final volume of Kapital was published. The people insisting on a single "socialist" model are often the people attempting to reduce it to a single (admittedly quite fascinating) period of history. All the reasons that period between 1914 and 1991 capture our collective imagination so frequently are the same reasons why it would be quite naieve to attempt to attribute any one ideology to the failure and collapse of any of the political projects of the time (of which there were a number, including the Soviet Union). The collapse of the Soviet Union was drawn out and complicated by international politics and post-war reconstruction; attempting to define socialism through the lens of that failure can really only be done in bad faith, or else is done while being willfully blind to the actual qualities of socialism and the actual conditions of the soviet collapse.
It's not enough to say "I don't want the soviet union again" unless you have an understanding of what it is, exactly, you are opposing. Will you simply sit around until a Lennin comes back around? If the Soviet Union was ever being remade in 2023, it wouldn't look anything like it did when it was formed almost 100 years ago. If you're opposed to authoritarianism, then oppose authoritarianism. Stand for democracy. If you believe in the socialist ideals, then stand for them, too. You don't have to call yourself a socialist, but it sure as hell doesn't help you if you willfully misinterpret people with shared interests because you've naively accepted a definition of socialism that is conveniently constructed around the failure of a single political project of the 20th century and is otherwise blind to any of its details.
It honestly just sounds like you're confused, or otherwise quite determined to collapse a complicated and nuanced political and economic theory into a single failed entity (which you strongly oppose, I gather). I'm not really interested in playing this game of definitions or political compass navigation with you; if you're interested in where your political values might overlap with socialist theory then I recommend you read a fucking book (pardon my french).
If you're not interested in debating this, fine. Neither am I, tbh.
I'm just generally aggravated by this pattern where people posit that anyone who criticizes communism/socialism/any adjacent ideology just doesn't understand what they're talking about, and then when you actually make an attempt to figure out what the hell everyone supposedly doesn't understand you get this mess of conflicting definitions expressed very confidently, where the only real pattern is that if you agree with communism/socialism/whatever that's good, if you don't that's bad, now go figure out why. It kind of feels like talking to christians, actually.
You were given a very clear definition, multiple times, and you were dissatisfied, multiple times, because you were trying very hard to draw a line from that definition to that thing you don't like. You fishing for an explanation is very clearly just an attempt to bait tankies into defending stalinism.
The amusing part is (still) that you seem to be a closeted socialist yourself.