What about the good that has happened?

Do you think gay marriage would have been protected?

Access to birth control secured?

Anti-sodomy laws getting struck down?

The Affordable Care Act passing?

Disability rights?

Do you think any of those things would have happened if Republicans been able to seize power and hold it unopposed over the last 50 years? No. None of those things would have happened. Those things happened because people further left than them got elected, the lesser of 2 evils won some elections.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of better.

Ummm because nuance is a thing that exists. Global conditions, etc. I mean the guy in power during the pandemic saying we should inject bleach or nuke incoming hurricanes sure as shit helped things be worse.

Because Republicans? We’ve not had plenty of blues elected. We’ve seen abysmal showings from the left and republicans being elected across the nation who are setting out to destroy people’s rights.

And how much worse would it be right now if Dems never won elections due to people saying “this dem isn’t far enough left therefore I won’t vote”?

How far right would things have flown?

Voting for the lesser of 2 evils reduces harm now. And when the lesser of 2 evils isn’t pushed that things are allowed to shift further to shit.

And the right is currently openly talking about raising the voting age because younger people tend to vote more progressive.

Sure sounds like voting works and has republicans scared.

Then why all the lies and standing by them?

But no. I’ve been reminded hundreds of times that you intend to bring communism by putting guns to the heads of the majority of your fellow proles like myself who don’t want what you do. I know I’m going up against the wall, along with over 90% of my country, if you ever win.

But that’s why I know you won’t win. You can’t execute 400M people, and you can’t turn their hearts by threatening to.

They still don’t know how communists gain control after all these years

You should block all instances where your bullshit is called out and you have nothing left you can parrot back at them

No, I assure you incredible confidence in your own unfounded beliefs and complete ignorance of the depths of your ignorance is extremely human, as is retreating in to cliches and retrenching when you’re confronted with evidence that contradicts your ideological beliefs.

??? You literally didn’t know what Title 42 was, and you were spreading poorly researched misinformation about an important issue, also “less than human to you” ??? bro we’re debating on an Internet forum chill out

I’m less than human to you and yours.

Dude, you’re commenting on a thread about the liberal tendency to write off communist human beings as literal robots, the irony of you being so bad at taking corrections that you immediately jumping weepily onto the cross and play the victim just to avoid having to type out “damn, I didnt know that” is powerful and embarassing.

Buddy you were proven wrong on various points and now you’re pissing and shidding your pants saying we don’t treat you as human?

Axiom 2: one must first make a ppb comment in order for someone to reply with ppb.

We were all libs once. Except me. I’m the one true socialist.

It was a joke actually, I’m not that invested in this thread lol

If you ever had any doubt that there are brain dead, LLM commie bots vomiting nonsense on Lemmy, just read the previous comment again. Slowly.

Look, you started hot in this thread but tired after a few comments. They adjusted, you didn’t, and you got rocked; it happens. Hit the showers and we’ll get after it early tomorrow with some film.

Snowden, Assange, manning, dozens of maimed protestors and the largest prison system in the world would like a word with you after seeing what you just posted here.

I mean, I should have known you’d regurgitate the propaganda, but it’s always a disappointment anyway. Such a stupid response, too. That’s basically a non-sequitur. For one, there being two evils does not necessitate siding with the lesser. You can acknowledge there are no good guys, and instead pick the position most likely to lead to the least amount of suffering over all. That is and will always be peace, but you blood thirsty natoids just can’t imagine that. Your response is also dumb as hell given that modern Russia is a capitalist state, not the USSR lmao. Bringing up Gulags is a bit like bringing up slave plantations in the USA… except the USSR is actually completely dissolved so its even less relevant. For the record, the US still legally permits slavery in the instance of criminal conviction. Say, sure would be wild if the US disproportionately policed and convicted black and brown people, wouldn’t it? That’d seem like a loophole legitimizing slavery over time! But that’s just whatabouttism so feel free to ignore it like a good little natoid. You’re grossly ignorant regarding tiananmen square as well, but I won’t bother citing anything since you’ll just dismiss it out of hand.

Instead, I’ll ask what are your thoughts on the repression of Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, Ireland Independence, French Yellow Vests/Public Benefits/Police Racism, and so on and so forth in “Free” and “Democratic” countries? What about the United States having the highest incarceration rate in the world, largely filled with black and brown people subjected to forced labor while in prison? What would happen if your “protest” did more than carry signs in publicly designated and permitted areas? Wouldn’t you be beaten, arrested, and convicted under the fullest extent of the law? So sorry that you’re so cucked you can’t imagine doing more than asking your leaders nicely for change and politely going home when they say no, but real protest is certainly illegal in “Free” Western countries, and if you ever actually engaged in it you’d see exactly how brutal those governments can be.

Principled communists aren’t unapologetic supporters of every single thing socialist countries do/have done, but we take issue with the nakedly hypocritical framing from Western powers. The atomic unit of propaganda is emphasis. You ignorantly reduce entire foreign countries to a single word/event while myopically ignoring the conditions before and after, but hem and haw and whine about nuance and procedure and the necessity of the barbarity around us every day… When you’re not ignoring it outright that is. That’s what makes you a useful idiot to our own system of oppression. It’s an embarrassment.

Yeah there’s some risk associated with protesting in the US but at least I don’t have to worry about the going to the gulag

Good thing protestors in the US and UK don’t get arrested on flimsy charges or crippled or murdered by cops

📽

You claim to know something about Marx, ok let’s test that knowledge of yours with the simplest possible question

According to Marx what are the sources of capitalist profit?

But anthropology doesn’t have the nice graphics and the math that doesn’t really have any empirical data behind it, anthropology isn’t a real science unlike neoclassical economics!

It literally has handed power down from father to son twice.

It has had sons win elections and then hold the office twice. We can call it dynastic in a sense similar to US political dynasties, but that’s different from being literally hereditary.

As the citizens cannot advocate for a change in leaders, a change in direction of the party or an entirely new political system

Citation needed

You’re still not getting it lol. Neoclassical economics is theoretically standing out way over a cliff and simply refusing to look down like Wiley coyote. Your appeal to mathematics is unintentionally hilarious, because it was physics envy and the chasing of mathematical models over real life evidence/coherent theory that led the field astray to begin with lmao. You can come up with all kinds of fancy models and as much mathematics as you like, but none of it matters if you’re basing it on incorrect axioms.

“Functioning in the real world” - oh yeah for sure. Burning the environment down and cooking the biosphere while forever chemicals and microplastics permanently saturate the ecosystem. Liberal societies are “Functioning” in so far as they’re not actively failed states this very moment, but that is accomplished on the back of neo-imperialism, unequal exchange with the global south, and unresolvable contradictions inherent to neo-liberalism/capitalism. A car driving 80 mph towards a cliff is working, sure, but is that a desirable state of affairs?

Also take a quick look around my guy. We’re not in a laboratory. I’m calling you an idiot on the internet. Not every conversation is the platonic ideal of scientific pursuit you nerd.

Why are you presuming liberals are dumb? Liberal societies are functioning in the real world while the most successful attempts at socialism are those that moved towards hybrid economies (Vietnam and China).

The case of Vietnam and China is well-explained in Chinese Marxist economic study and experience (not that you would know this), as Primary Stage Socialism. To explain this, it’s necessary to look at the history of these two countries. Before Vietnam emerged under modern socialist-orientation it was being pillaged by French then Japanese then French (again) colonialism; the French were overthrown by the Vietnamese, with France receiving support for some time from America until the U.S. decided they wanted the territory for themselves, where they bombed the country emerging just out of colonialism into oblivion, killing 1M+ for their resources until they were forced out, then employing sanctions and IMF pressure afterwards. This is clearly not an orthodox path of economic development and not conducive to a balanced test of economic competition that you’re implying. You of course know of China’s underdevelopment under semi-feudalism and semi-colonialism prior to socialist-orientation (with U.S. support for the KMT as the communists won the civil war).

Now I didn’t think I’d have to explain this, but the Marxist analysis isn’t “state ownership is good at all times and private ownership is bad at all times”; first there’s the question of class orientation of the state, tearing apart this ridiculous “mixed economy” nonsense, which is really just a method of obscuring this fact and simplifying economics into a ratio of (private/”public”, with both metrics gaining new context under different orientations of the class dictatorship, especially the latter). You cannot simply fully nationalize a drastically underdeveloped economy (nor is this the traditional socialist/Marxist prescription, with Engels stating for instance in 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.”

Scientific socialism is specifically the approach that states that different scales of production demand different and mirrored relations of production which then determine the social relations of that society. Separate forms and scales of production demand the supremacy of separate emerging and progressive classes (just as feudalism nurtured and birthed the early bourgeoise to overthrow it, so that same bourgeoisie will eventually nurture its own successor, the proletariat, by virtue of the socialization of production and the decay of the capitalist mode of production). Primary Stage Socialism is specifically a new concept created by Deng Xiaoping to flesh out an understanding of the development of socialism on an underdeveloped platform. The basic explanation is that in developed countries there will be large-scale capitalist production, then revolution, then advanced socialism, whereas in artificially underdeveloped countries there will be revolution, then the development of large-scale capitalist production, then advanced socialism. The common enemy of imperialism nullifies the singular revolutionary character of the national bourgeoisie and, with the masses gaining new understanding from this experience, the dictatorship of the proletariat (typically headed by the proletariat with a mass base of the peasantry, as in China’s PDD). The objective under this new governance is to “modernize” the forces of production (by utilizing foreign investment, the patriotic national bourgeoisie, and market relations) so that they may correspond to this progressive class leadership and under this progressive class leadership as well as build the framework for socialist relations of production (directly state owned economy is still dominant in China). This isn’t some smashing rebuttal of socialism, nor is this “total/vs. mixed economy” nonsense anything other than a false dichotomy. These nations assumed this theory and practice because it is the correct approach (and not in the revisionist sense of abandoning Marxism-Leninism), and this notion of failure of socialism is a complete misunderstanding.

As for liberalism, it works for the bourgeoisie, is the ultimate ideology of the bourgeoisie undercutting all obstacles of outdated social (and economic thought to an extent) thought that hinders the bourgeoisie while uplifting this group and maintaining their select privileges. The vast majority of those ascribing to “liberalism” as an ideology do not belong to the select privileged group for which the ideology is oriented, and are defending demonstrably incorrect incorrect ideas with relation to the “second” and third world and upholding the pretexts of the dominant class not as a matter of sly infiltration but genuine mistaken belief (and the person you were replying to never stated that all people who uphold liberalism are genuinely confused or dumb, but that they had been arguing with those who are (talking incorrectly and against their ultimate interests). The misnomer of liberal societies “functioning” lies in the fact that “functioning” is seen as a blind metric (success/failure) rather than a relative idea (with certain modes functioning for certain groups, usually for those by which they were designed and carried out). China has been growing at a much faster rate than “liberal societies”, and is doing so without engaging in imperialism and massacring millions of people for regional influence and natural resources. Your entire critique is useless.

Why are you presuming liberals are dumb?

There are several incredible replies to you in this thread that have completely gone unappreciated or over your head or both.

I’m a biologist, but my college offered a few humanities courses, so I took an introductory course in economics.

The maths was fine; it was mostly linear equations and differentiation. But the priors seemed to defy all logic and common sense. It was like a physicist assuming that there was no friction. The impression I got was that economists put too much effort into mathematical rigour and too little into empirical verification.

Now there are biologists who study animal societies and their ‘economic systems’. But they care more for experiments than for theory, and this seems to me to be the more reasonable approach.

Fun fact: Everyone has an ideology. Just yelling “I abandon my ideology” doesn’t change that. Go ask an anthropologist they’ll explain it too you.

You really need to look into the concept of cultural hegemony. Your ignorance is embarrassing but it isnt an innate quality you have and can be corrected.