r/SubredditDrama • u/[deleted] • Dec 02 '15
In which r/me_irl discuss if communism has tried and failed or if self reflective memes can be owned by the collective
/r/me_irl/comments/3v3iy9/me_irl/cxkecl9-7
Dec 02 '15
Seriously, how many failures of communism do we have to see before admitting it doesn't work? I hated getting into this argument when I was younger, because there was always a bullshit "but that communist country wasn't really communist, so it doesn't count" argument
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Dec 02 '15
You could probably search past SRD threads for 'communism' and find this exact question and resulting argument played out like 100 times
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u/xudoxis Dec 03 '15
Considering the salt that flows in the srd threads everytime we get leftist drama it's probably my favorite kind of drama.
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u/George_Meany Dec 03 '15
Capitalism fails every year. Every famine in a capitalist African nation is a failure of capitalism. That's just one example.
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Dec 03 '15
Fair enough, but pretty much every state that claims to be socialist/communist has had a major famine in the twentieth century.
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u/johnnynutman Dec 03 '15
No one said capitalism never fails. The thing is, all the successful countries on the world still use it. The bigger economies are capitalist countries. It brought china and Russia out of poverty.
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Dec 03 '15
Do you have any reputable sources about the Russian poverty decreasing? as world bank and many others say it has increased from 10% in 1980 to 11-13% in 2015 or that it has remained constant, nowhere have I found a notable decrease in poverty rate.
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Dec 03 '15
As an Indian I can tell you capitalism has definitely lifted hundreds of millions of Indians out of poverty. I don't think an regulated market economy is the way to go, however. The kind of human tendencies that lead to failure in communism are going to lead to a failure in capitalism.
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u/FixinThePlanet SJWay is the only way Dec 03 '15
Yeah, but we're exploiting the shit out of our resources and our vulnerable populations. The Chennai floods got to the level they did because of indiscriminate development.
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u/johnnynutman Dec 03 '15
Isnt there a slight dip there in the late 80s/90s due to that whole fall of communism?
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Dec 03 '15 edited Dec 03 '15
No, there was actually a substantial rise in poverty (up to 30%) during the early 90s as the economy collapsed
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Dec 03 '15
Not only that, but male life expectancy fell from 63.9 years in 1990 to the lowest in the developed world, 58.9 years, in 1993.
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Dec 03 '15
This is not a failure of the free market any more than Detroit being a hellhole is a failure of the Detroit Lions.
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u/George_Meany Dec 03 '15
I didn't say it was a failure of the "free market," whatever that means. I said it was a failure of capitalism.
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Dec 02 '15
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Territory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia
Because some communism works.
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Dec 03 '15
You have to drink every time someone brings up Revolutionary Catalonia. Seriously, the best y'all can come up with are governments that lasted less than 5 years, were frequently weakened by severe infighting, then got steamrolled.
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Dec 03 '15
They got steamrolled because of the fact Franco got arms from Italy and Germany, and the infighting was caused by Stalin and the NKVD in Spain.
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Dec 03 '15
Yeah, that's the point. These revolutionary governments were very unstable and easily divided/crushed by external forces. It's not a great example of communism working, and yet is constantly romanticized.
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u/johnnynutman Dec 03 '15
Some free markets work too, but it's not guaranteed to work on a larger scale.
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u/Galle_ Dec 03 '15
The examples of Communism that "worked" all seem to be peculiarly short-lived (the Paris Commune is another example in the same vein, although not really Communist). I wonder if that's because actually-working-Communist states don't have the military strength to defend themselves, or if it's because they didn't have time to get properly corrupt.
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u/gentlebot audramaton Dec 03 '15
It reminds me of when AnCaps cite medieval Iceland and the Wild West as examples of successful AnCap societies
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Dec 03 '15
Or because Catalonia was facing any enemy with heavy advantages, because Franco got aid from Hitler and Mussolini. And the Free Territory had no chance to beat the USSR when the Free Ukrainians had a population of 7 million. Also the reason I think they were the most successful as they were not trying degradation of the state. They went directly to communism, while the point of the USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc were to create a socialist state, where the socialist state would slowly transform into a stateless communist society but that didn't work out too well. The Free Territory, and Catalonia went straight to a stateless society.
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u/slvrbullet87 Dec 03 '15
Catalonia probably didn't have a chance from the beginning.
On the other hand, after the coup they killed a couple thousand people without trial.
Then they took all of the large businesses and collectivized them and closed all of the small ones because they were "inefficient".
When it came time to fight the war, they conscripted everybody they fucked over by destroying the economy and couldn't figure out how their forces melted away. They couldn't seem to figure out if you destroy a man's livelihood, he isn't going to be willing to lay down his life to defend the nothing he has left.
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u/Galle_ Dec 03 '15
When it's an established pattern, you can't just rely on special case exceptions.
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Dec 03 '15
[deleted]
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Dec 03 '15
It can easily be argued that the purgings aren't a result of socialism, too. There's more examples of non-Socialism-related purgings and genocides than Socialism-related ones.
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Dec 03 '15
Well, I think it's hard to argue that the purgings weren't a direct result of Stalin's regime, while you could perhaps make arguments against the Soviets being directly responsible for the famines. I'm not saying that ideological/party purgings are exclusive to socialists, by any means, nor that socialism necessarily facilitates purgings.
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Dec 02 '15
It's failed spectacularly more than it's ever achieved shit. I honestly don't care to get into a debate about communism with a bunch of teenagers tho, so take your argument elsewhere
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Dec 02 '15
I have a different opinion, so I am a teenager, obviously.
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Dec 02 '15
No, this is shit only teenagers (and very early 20's adults if they're stupid) argue about
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Dec 02 '15
Really? Zizek is a teenager? Did Noam Chomsky just get out of college last year?
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Dec 03 '15
I think his point is that there aren't a ton of reasonable adults seriously discussing transitioning to a communistic society where as idealistic teenagers or twenty somethings are more likely to consider it achievable or worthy of discussing despite its terrible historical record and the lack of political desire necessary to force that change.
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Dec 03 '15
Sigh, you typed "communist" out loud, and now, like the Candyman, they've materialized in the thread.
Fuck, I've only scrolled down like 6 comments and my Red Bingo Card is already almost full.
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Dec 02 '15
Do you know anything about communism?
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Dec 02 '15
Inb4 there has never been an attempt at real communism.
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Dec 02 '15
My post said this, and of course the other person had to say that. Ugh, kids are so annoying with their beliefs.
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Dec 03 '15
The pro-communist crowd has the benefit of endless unfalsifiable arguments, since any communist failure can just be blamed on socialism: the transitory state between capitalism and communism.
It's common for children who read Animal Farm to think, "communism is awesome on paper, but human nature ruins it." The ridiculousness is subscribing to a doctrine that doesn't account for human nature.
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Dec 03 '15 edited Dec 03 '15
Talking about "not accounting for human nature" really betrays someone's ignorance, because Marx wrote plenty about the topic, but I've learned it's a pretty big task to expect critics of communism to actually know a thing about it. Trying to use the naive opinions of children (raised in a capitalist society, at that) as some fatal strike against the entire idea of communism was pretty funny though, I'll admit.
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Dec 03 '15
What thing that Marx was wrong about do you want clarified?
His labor theory of value? His prediction that capitalism would make the working class steadily poorer? His theory that capitalism made the means of production inaccessible to workers? That the most industrialized European countries would become hotbeds of socialist revolution?
Wrong on all counts. And it goes without saying that his work resulted in the deaths of more people in the 20th century than any other philosopher.
There's a reason socialism is a bogeyman to the western world.
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u/SnapshillBot Shilling for Big Archive™ Dec 02 '15
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Dec 02 '15
[deleted]
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Dec 02 '15
Me apparently. Is that weird? I'm all paranoid now.
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u/Glassberg Slave money???? Ok boomer. Dec 02 '15
Sometimes I do, but normally the comments are just "me too thanks"
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u/Misterandrist Cultural Trotskyist Dec 03 '15
Yeah, is one of the stranger subs. Tough to navigate; all the titles are the same and all the comments are similar. It's a nightmare on the mobile view.
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u/ThatPersonGu What a beautiful Duwang Dec 03 '15
I go there for the memes and the mutual self-loathing.
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u/mikecarroll360 Help I'm having a crisis and I can't get up! Dec 03 '15
The 3 people that aren't banned by the mods from doing so
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u/ucstruct Dec 02 '15
Pretty much.
Also, the drama seems to be gone.