Not exactly, it’s increasingly disappearing in favor of monopoly.

Everything you know about these “shitty dictatorships” has been told to you by a media and a government that has a direct monetary (and by extension, power) interest in maintaining and legitimizing the current system you live under. They are free to lie to you as long as they make it believable enough. Not to mention how the ruling class would have profited immensely from assimilating the resources and labor of these “shitty dictatorships”. When that fails, they will profit by generating war and weapons contracts.

This is accomplished by lying and manipulating half truths in order to call them “shitty dictatorships” that need to be dealt with through military action (and destabilization via propaganda and collective punishment to make conditions favorable to accepting capitalism as their way of life). They must justify their actions to the American people in order to generate the least friction within their system, but when it does generate friction, they do it anyways, because their power ultimately lies in capital and not in the people’s opinion of them. This is often when things turn to fascism, but let’s be honest, it’s not “not fascism” just because it’s done in the light of polite society.

This is unique to imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, which “shitty dictatorships” like China do not practice. China takes advantage of western capitalist’s greed to fund their socialist project, but they are not themselves capitalist. They are in what they define as their first stage of socialism with Chinese characteristics, which has already lifted millions out of abject poverty. The presence of a market-based economy does not make a system capitalist, just as the presence of social welfare does not make a system socialist. Being openly vigilant (which likely means far less than you imagine it does) to intentionally subversive western propaganda does not mean they can’t be democratic in far more meaningful ways, without the burden of constantly re-hashing information that has already been proven faulty.

We are the last people that should be telling China how to run their country and media. Because, in contrast,

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. they know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism.’

Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions.

This is is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores.

An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete.

They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone too irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover).

One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services.

But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy.

Also *waves generally at the current state of things in the US*

The fact that it is attributed to a very few actors and not a literal, singular actor does not negate great man theory.

The issue is that this is arbitrarily flattening of the actual material conditions. You can point out that nearly all political systems, on a long enough timeline lead to some form of collapse (Joseph Tainter is a good reference on this). But all of these things are dependent, not independent, of the systems and conditions they find themselves in. The timescales and forms can vary drastically depending on the material conditions actors find themselves in.

Anarchists don’t want a fully publicly owned and planned global republic, Marxists do. Anarchists want networks of decentralized communes, Marxists do not.

The “state” for Marxists is the oppressive elements of society that make up class distinctions, such as private property rights and the current police structure, whereas for Anarchists its usually seen as a form of hierarchy entrenched with violence.

Chiefly, a decentralized network of communed does not get rid of class, but entrenches petite bourgeois class structures where each commune owns only what is within its commune, whereas Marxists want to abolish class by making all property equally owned by all in a highly developed and complex economy.

Kinda seems unfair that somebody’s aunt should have to purchase insulin she needs to survive, like she shouldn’t have to work harder to have the same lifestyle as someone without a disability. Maybe we should just give her the insulin she needs to survive, and compensate the people who make it out of some sort of common pool of resources everyone is required to contribute to, in order to distribute the costs more fairly.

That’s basically what happened before money was invented. Imagine being a shoe maker and wanting to get some food, can you convince the sellers to take new shoes for the food/groceries EVERY DAY?

Ok, I see where you are going with that. I don’t personally agree, but I see where you are coning from

“Totalitarianism” as a term was largely popularized in order to depict Communism and Nazism as “twin evils,” when the reality is that Socialist countries have had dramatic democratization of the economy.

I didn’t say they weren’t doing fine or that they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing.

So your position is that their system is “Fascist Corporatism,” but also… that’s fine, actually?

I just said that they’re not communists. This is not a bad thing! But lying about it is of course somewhat distasteful, especially for those people who think themselves as being communists.

Whether they’re “lying” is a matter of interpretation and ideological differences. Like, if I’m a hardcore, traditionalist Roman Catholic, maybe from my perspective, all Protestants are “lying” about being Christian because “true Christianity” means my interpretation of it. Likewise, if you’re a hardcore Maoist, then maybe you’d argue that China is governed by revisionists who are “lying” about being communists.

If we want to look at it from a relatively objective point of view, the largest number of self-identified communists in the world are Marxist-Leninists, who don’t view China as “lying about being communist” but rather agree with or at least critically support their approach. So, idk, if you want to join some fringe Christian sect that claims every other sect as being heretical and themselves as the sole defender of the faith, or if you want to join some fringe communist group that denounces every other communist group as revisionist and themselves as the only “real” communists, then idk, you do you ig. But not everyone who believes different things from you is “lying.”

Can you elaborate? They have a better respect for human rights than the vast majority of states.

American Capitalism? I invoked multiple genocides and political repressions that weren’t American. I am sure that 1840s Hungarians and Irish, 1930s Bengalis, and 1990s and 2000s Iraqis are glad to know that capitalism isn’t repressive or intentionally creating starvation because the people creating the repression and starvation said that they aren’t. Even though China gave up on most communist ambitions post-Dheng and Cuba has been strangled by American blockades, both have not been nearly as active in war mongering as “Western Nations”, nor as repressive, despite active propaganda about them. And Western repression is much more tied to their economic modes than other nations. You have to kill anti-war protesters (e.g. Kent State) because if not full colonialism, we need neo-colonialism, so pro-Vietnamese protests can’t be tolerated. And we need to support Israel, so “anti-Semitic” a.k.a. anti-Zionist protesters can’t be tolerated and have no rights, because of their ties to the military and arms industry. Such as Mahmoud Khalil, who needs to be disappeared and sent to an undisclosed location to try to push fascist anti-protest, anti-speech laws.

Communist policies played a part because Communists were in power while they happened, and the Communists ended the famine. I never made anything up.

Lemmy has Marxists, the lead devs are Marxist-Leninists and some of the biggest instances are Marxist-based.

Famines had been commonplace occurrences in feudal China and Russia, which the communist states brought an end to. And those final famines occurred under post-war conditions, and under disastrous crop seasons that affected neighboring states as well.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China
• https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000300150009-5

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I really didn’t expect lemmy to be already filled with russian trolls and tankies.

We’re not trolls, and many of us are socialists. Actual socialists, not “capitalism with a social safety net” like Bernie Sanders or the Nordic countries. I understand if it’s a bit of a shock to leave the echo chamber that is imperial core corporate social media and hear different perspectives for once. Lemmy is “already filled with” socialists because it was created by socialists. You are in our anti-capitalist space.

Someone who’s so ignorant of geopolitics that they don’t know about the fall of the USSR should not be so arrogant

We weren’t talking about the Russian Federation, but Soviet Union. The RF is Capitalist, sure, but the USSR was absolutely Socialist.

As for the PRC, it is Socialist, and does follow what Marx described. Are you getting this from actually reading Marx, or second-hand?

For starters, Marx described the economy of a post-revolutionary state to nationalize the large trusts and gradually fold the smaller firms once they get large enough. This is mentioned many times, from the Manifesto of the Communist Party, to my favorite concise explanation in Engels’ Principles of Communism:

Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?

No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society.

In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.

The PRC mirrors this. The vast majority of large firks are under public control, and the vast majority of the private sector is made up of self-employed people or small firms. If the CPC attempted to forcibly acquire them without letting them develop, they would be committing an error by Marxist standards, unless they truly had good reason.

Key industries like finance and steel are publicly owned as well, if you control the rubber factory you control the rubber ball factory without needing to own it directly.

What would you have the PRC do instead?